When Easton came to his senses, he found himself warming by the fire.
It is wonderful how quickly a half-frozen man will revive. As soon as
we were thoroughly thawed out we stripped to our underclothing and
hung our things up to dry, permitting our underclothing to dry on us
as we stood near the blaze. We were little the worse for our dip,
escaping with slightly frosted fingers and toes. I discovered in my
pockets a half plug of black tobacco such as we use in the North, put
it on the end of a stick and dried it out, and then we had a smoke.
We agreed that we had never in our life before had so satisfactory a
smoke as that. The stimulant was needed and it put new life into us.

Easton was very pessimistic. He was generally inclined to look upon
the dark side of things anyway, and now he believed our fate was
sealed, especially if we could not find our paddles, and he began to
talk about returning to our cache and thence to the Indians. But I
had been in much worse predicaments than this, and paddles or no
paddles, determined to go on, for we could work our way down the river
somehow with poles and the bag of pemmican would keep us alive until
we reached the Post--unless the freeze-up caught us.

When we had dried ourselves we went to the canoe to make an inventory
of our remaining goods and chattels, and with a vague hope that a
paddle might be found on the shore. What, then, was our surprise and
our joy to find not only the paddles but our dunnage bags and my
instrument bag amongst the rocks, where an eddy below the rapid
swirled the water in. Thus our blankets and clothing were safe, we
had fifty pounds of pemmican, our tent and tent stove, and in the
small bag that I have mentioned as having remained in the canoe with
the other things was all our tea and five or six pounds of caribou