Page:Cathlamet On the Columbia.djvu/33

 could easily be carried, and which required an expert to handle, to the large cruising canoe forty or fifty feet long and five or six feet wide, which could carry thirty or forty people and all their equipments. The straight up and down lines of the stern and the bewitching curve of the bow were very graceful, and the water lines of bow and stern have never been excelled. The building of one was the work of years. It was painfully hollowed out with fire and flint and beaver-tooth chisel, was steamed within with red-hot rocks and water, and was stretched to exactly the right proportion and kept in place by stretchers strongly sewed in. It was swift, beautiful and seaworthy. Its only weakness was in the places where the cedar wood was cut across the grain to give the lines of bow and stern. Here in a heavy seaway the canoe would