The lack of load-balancing functionality in most existing ad hoc routing protocols often causes congestion resulting in bad performance and short lifetime of participating nodes. We present an auxiliary scheme for reactive routing protocols to discover an unloaded route, thereby decreasing possibility of congestion. The scheme allows an intermediate node to determine whether to be a relaying node for a newly constructed route autonomously based on the occupancy of its queue. Thus the scheme does not require network-wide load information. Simulation results show that the proposed scheme distributes traffic load well.