style="font-size:15px;"> “Who’s Pepper March?” Mr. Cook asked.
Sandy scowled. “Somebody I know back home,” he said.
Mr. Cook smiled. “You don’t seem to like him much.”
“Oh, he’s all right,” Sandy explained. “It’s just that he gets under my skin sometimes.”
“What would you do with a mountain-lion trophy?” Mr. Cook asked. “Do you have room for him at home?”
Sandy thought a moment. “I guess you’re right,” he said. “But I know what I could do.”
“What?”
“Start a trophy room at Valley View High. Jerry and I could build some cases, and Quiz—he’s our brainy friend—could write up descriptions of all the animals—like they have in natural-history museums.”
Mr. Cook nodded approvingly. “Good idea. A museum’s the perfect place for a lion. But over a fireplace, I’d rather have a six-point buck any day.”
“How do you rate big-game trophies, Dad?” Mike asked.
“That varies with the animal,” Mr. Cook replied. “An elk, for example, is measured for spread between antlers, and the number of points—or branches—growing out of each antler. If I remember rightly, the record elk had a spread of nearly seventy inches and about seventeen points.”
“Whew!” Sandy whistled. “He must have been built like a truck!”
“He was a real granddaddy, all right,” said Mr. Cook and smiled at the memory. “But to get back to your question about guns, Sandy. Here are the cannons we’ll be taking along.” Mr. Cook got up and moved over to the gun rack at the end of the room.
“For power shooting, we’ll use this Weatherby .300 Magnum. And I think you boys ought to get used to this one.” Mr. Cook reached up and took down a beautifully balanced bolt-action rifle. “That’s a Remington 721 in a .30/06 caliber. It’s lighter than the Weatherby but it packs quite a punch.”
“Enough to bring down a mountain lion?” Mike asked eagerly.
Mr. Cook looked at the two boys and allowed a slight smile to play at the corners of his mouth. “Since you both seem to have mountain lions on the brain, I’ll tell you something I was going to keep a secret ...”
But before he could finish, the sound of a telephone bell tinkled softly from the desk in the den.
“I’ll take it here, Julia!” Mr. Cook called as he reached for the receiver. “Hello,” he said. He listened for a moment, then broke into a beaming grin.
“Hank Dawson! You old son of a gun! Good to hear from you.” With the telephone still cradled to his ear, he maneuvered the cord across the desk and sat down in the chair behind it. “So you got my telegram.... Yes, we’ll be there. On the eighteenth. Oh, and Hank—bring along kits for four. That’s right. A friend of ours is coming along. A lad named Sandy Steele. Right. See you then. Goodbye.”
Mr. Cook put down the telephone with a chuckle and swiveled around to face the boys. “Well,” he said. “Speak of the devil ...”
“Who was that?” Mike demanded.
“That, Mike, was about the best professional guide and hunter in the Rockies. His name’s Hank Dawson and he has a honey of a hunting lodge up in the Lost River Range. The three of us have a date to meet Hank on the eighteenth. He’s meeting us with pack mules and horses at a place called Mormon Crossing on the Lost River. I think you’ll like Hank. He shares an enthusiasm of yours.”
“What’s that?”
“Mountain lions. His hobby is going after the big cats. He makes a good bit of money collecting the bounty on their hides. Hank says he wants to take us up in the hills for a cougar hunt.”
Mike jumped to his feet and gave a war whoop that rattled the windows. “Where exactly is this place we’re going to?” he asked excitedly. “What’s our first stop in Idaho?”
“Which question do you want me to answer?”
“Where are we going first?”
Mr. Cook spread the map over his desk. “Here,” he said, pointing the stem of his pipe at the juncture of three rivers in central Idaho. “Near the town of Salmon. We’ll stop there, hire some boats and a guide and get you two fellows used to a little white water.”
“White water?” Sandy’s expression was blank.
“Rapids. We’re going to have to run dozens on our trip downriver. They’re dangerous, too. We’ll portage our way around the worst ones, but we’ll go through most of them. By the way, do you know what portage is?”
“Not exactly, no,” replied Sandy.
“Well, it’s simple enough. When you get to a part of any stream that isn’t navigable for one reason or another, you pull in to land and tote everything, including the boat, to the next navigable part.”
“‘Simple,’ he calls it,” groaned Mike.
“It’s hard work, of course; but you’ll both come back in better shape than you’ve ever been in your life.”
Mike scrambled to his feet. “In that case,” he announced, “I’m going to have to start preparing myself. I think I remember a little cold chicken going back into the icebox, and that’s no way to treat chicken!” He started for the door.
“But you just finished dinner,” his father pointed out.
“I know,” Mike shot back over his shoulder. “But I didn’t do a very good job of it. Too busy thinking about the trip.”
Mr. Cook made a notation on the paper in front of him. “Item one on our list. Hire the Queen Mary as a provision ship so Mike will never have to go hungry.”
“The Queen Elizabeth’s bigger,” Mike called and disappeared into the kitchen.
CHAPTER TWO
White Water
Four days later, Sandy and Mike stood on the pine-cloaked southern bank of the Salmon River, looking down on a patch of foaming water that boiled and hissed over jagged rocks, gleaming wet with spray.
The boys stared at each other wordlessly. Sandy was the first to break the silence. “What did your father call this place?” he asked.
“Kindergarten Rapids,” Mike answered in an awed voice. “He said it was a nice easy run to start with.”
The boys turned back to the river. From where they watched, they could see a tiny flotilla of bright, orange-colored air rafts bobbing along in the quiet water above the rapids. At first the rafts seemed to float lazily downstream, but as they approached the rapids, they gradually picked up speed until they looked like miniature beetles racing along to certain destruction on the shoals ahead.
Within seconds the lead raft had entered the white water. At first contact, it veered
