and lo and behold when the canoe rolled right side up, there were their clothes and blankets safe and sound.  These light things had floated in the canoe and were safe.  We now tried by joining hands to reach out far enough to recover some of the guns, but by feeling with their feet they found the bottom smooth as glass and the property all swept on below, no one knew where.  The current was so powerful that no one could stand in it where it came up above his knees.  The eddy which enabled us to save the first canoe with the bedding and clothes was caused by a great boulder as large as a house which had fallen from above and partly blocked the stream.  Everything that would sink was lost.

We all got into the two canoes and went down to Walton, where we camped and staid all night for Walton’s benefit.  While we were waiting I took my gun and tried to climb up high enough to see how much longer this horrible canon was going to last, but after many attempts, I could not get high enough to see in any direction.  The mountain was all bare rocks in terraces, but it was impossible to climb from one to the other, and the benches were all filled with broken rocks that had fallen from above.

By the time I got back to camp, Walton was dry and warm and could talk.  He said he felt better, and pretty good over his rescue.  When he was going under the water, it seemed sometimes as if he never would come to the top again, but he held on and eventually came out all right.  He never knew how he got to shore, he was so nearly dead when rescued.

The next morning Walton was so well we started on.  We were now very poorly armed.  My rifle and McMahon’s shotgun were all the arms we had for seven of us, and we could make but a poor defence if attacked by man or beast, to say nothing of providing ourselves with food.  The mountains on each side were very bare of timber, those on the east side particularly so, and very high and barren.  Toward night we were floating along in a piece of slack water, the river below made a short turn around a high and rocky point almost perpendicular from the water.  There was a terrace along the side of this point about fifty feet up, and the bench grew narrower as it approached the river.  As I was coming down quite close under this bank I saw three mountain sheep on the bench above, and, motioning to the boys, I ran on shore and, with my gun in hand, crept down toward them, keeping a small pine tree between myself and the sheep.  There were some cedar bushes on the point, and the pines grew about half way up the bank.  I got in as good a range as possible and fired at one of them which staggered around and fell down to the bottom of the cliff.  I loaded and took the next largest one which came down the same way.  The third one tried to escape by going down the bend and then creeping up a crevice, but it could not get away and turned back, cautiously, which gave me time to load again and put a ball through it.  I hit it a little