Free More Adventures Of The Great Brain by John D. Fitzgerald

pork and beans out of cans and sourdough biscuits we baked in our Dutch oven.

        “The stream is all fished out,” Papa said as we finished eating. “That settles it. We will leave in the morning and find a place to fish and hunt where no white man has ever been.”

        

    The next morning we followed the logging road up the canyon for about four miles, where the road branched off to the left up Beaver Canyon, and there was another canyon to the right. I thought Papa had suddenly gone crazy when he turned the team to the right and started up a dry creek bed.

        Sweyn rode Dusty over to the side of the buckboard. “Where are you going?” he asked. “There isn’t even a road or a trail.”

        “Exactly,” Papa said smugly. “Where there is no road or trail, there are no people.”

        Even Tom with his great brain was impressed by Papa’s daring when he leaned back and looked up at the towering sides of the canyon.

    “Are you going to try and cross the mountain?” he asked.

        Papa at that moment must have fancied himself another Jedediah Smith, the Yankee Methodist minister who had explored most of the Utah Territory with a Bible in one hand and a rifle in the other.

        “We will find ourselves a virgin stream and valley on the other side,” Papa said confidently.

        Tom jumped down from the buckboard. “I think I’ll walk,” he said. “Make it easier on the team.”

        Papa started up the dry creek bed with Sweyn in the lead acting as a scout. I turned around to make sure Tom was following us. I was surprised to see him carving something on a tree where we’d turned off the road. I was even more surprised as I watched him gather up some rocks and lay them on the bank of the dry creek bed.

        We continued up the canyon with Tom lagging behind. The only time Tom caught up to us was when Papa stopped so we could roll boulders and logs out of the way of the buckboard. The big logs and boulders that were too heavy Sweyn roped with his lariat and with Dusty’s help pulled them out of the way.

        My curiosity got the better of me as I turned around several times and saw Tom using his jackknife on a tree or making piles of rocks. I jumped out of the buckboard and joined him.

    “What are you doing?” I asked.

    “Just carving my initials on a few trees,” Tom said.

    “Why?” I asked. “Nobody will ever see them.”

        “I wouldn’t say that,” Tom said. “Someday they might build a road up this canyon, and I can prove we were the first ones who ever went up it. Maybe it will make us famous as pioneers.”

        “That is a peach of an idea,” I had to admit. “But what are you doing with those rocks?”

    “Looking for gold,” he said.

        “But that is silly,” I said. “All these canyons have been covered by prospectors.”

        Tom looked a little ashamed of himself. “Maybe it is silly,” he said, “but it helps to pass the time. Don’t say anything to Papa. He might think it’s silly.”

        “All right,” I said, “but I’m not going to walk all the way to the top of this mountain.”

        We continued up the canyon with Tom, Sweyn, and me rolling boulders and logs out of the way for the rest of the day. Just before dusk we stopped, and believe me we had to stop. There was a cliff rising up from the dry creek bed stretching from one side of the canyon to the other that must have been thirty feet high. During a heavy rainstorm, when the dry creek bed became a stream, and the cliff a waterfall, it must have been something to see. But right now all it meant to me was that we had to turn around and go back.

       

        “We’ll camp here tonight,” Papa said, as if there wasn’t an impossible barrier in our way.

         We couldn’t find a spring so Sweyn rationed the water in the small water barrel tied on our buckboard. We ate mulligan stew made from sliced potatoes, onions,