I. RUNNING THE BEND
_Through Surprise Rapids_
We pushed off from Beavermouth at three o'clock of the afternoon of
September twenty-ninth. We had hoped for an early start, but the
erratically running local freight, six or eight hours behind time, did
not arrive with our boat until noon. The introductory shots had already
been made. Made up momentarily as a gentleman--wearing an ankle length
polished waterproof and a clean cap, that is,--I jumped the westbound
Limited as it slowed down on entering the yard, dropping off presently
at the platform with a "here-I-am" expression when Roos signalled that
the focus was right. Then I shook hands with the waiting Blackmore, and
together we strode to the door of the station and met the
previously-rehearsed agent. (Roos had wanted me to shake hands with the
agent as well as with Blackmore, but I overruled him by pointing out
that I was a "gentleman-sportsman" not a "gentleman-politician," and
served notice on him that pump-handling must henceforth be reduced to a
minimum.) We tried to perfect the agent in a sweeping gesture that would
say as plainly as words "The train with your boat is just around that
next bend, sir," but somehow we couldn't prevent his trying to elevate
his lowly part. His lips mumbled the words we had put on them all
right, but the gesture was a grandiose thing such as a Chesterfieldian
footman might have employed in announcing "My Lord, the carriage waits."
Roos, in all innocence, narrowly missed provoking a fight with a
hot-tempered half-breed while he was setting up to shoot the incoming
freight. He had an ingenious method of determining, without bending over
his finder, just what his lens was going to "pick-up." This consisted of
holding his arms at full length, with his thumbs placed tip to tip and
the forefingers standing straight up. The right-angling digits then
framed for his eye an approximation of his picture. To one not used to
it this esoteric performance looked distinctly queer, especially if he
chanced to be standing somewhere near the arch priest's line of vision.
And that, as it happened, was exactly the place from which it was
revealed to the choleric near-Shuswap section hand. I didn't need the
breed's subsequent contrite explanation to know that, from where he had
been standing, those twiddling thumbs and fingers, through the great
fore-shortening of the arms, looked to be right on the end of the nose
of the grimacing little man by the camera. Not even a self-respecting
white man would have stood for what that twiddling connoted, let alone a
man in whose veins flowed blood that must have been something like
fifteen-sixteenths of the proudest of Canadian strains. Luckily, both
Blackmore and his burly boatman were men of action. Even so, it was a
near squeeze for both camera and cameraman. Roos emerged unscarred in
anything but temperament. And, of course, as every one even on the
fringes of the movies knows, the temperaments of both stars and
directors are things that require frequent harrowing to keep them in
good working order.
Roos' filming of the unloading of the boat was the best thing he did on
the trip. Every available man in Beavermouth was requisitioned. This
must have been something like twenty-five or thirty. A half dozen, with
skids and rollers, could have taken the boat off without exerting
themselves seriously, but could hardly have "made it snappy." And action
was what the scene demanded. There was no time for a rehearsal. The
agent simply told us where the car would be shunted to, Blackmore
figured out the best line from there over the embankment and through the
woods to the river, and Roos undertook to keep up with the procession
with his camera. Blackmore was to superintend the technical operation
and I was ordered to see that the men "acted natural." And thus we went
to it. The big boat, which must have weighed close to half a ton, came
off its flat car like a paper shallop, but the resounding thwack with
which her bows hit a switch-frog awakened Blackmore's concern. "Easy!
Easy! Don't bust her bottom," he began shouting; while I, on the other
side, took up my refrain of "Don't look at the camera!--make it snappy."
The consequence of these diametrically opposed orders was that the dozen
or more men on my side did most of the work. But even so it was
"snappy"--very.
Down the embankment we rushed like a speeding centipede, straight at the
fine hog-proof wire fence of the C. P. R. right-of-way. That fence may
have been hog-proof, but it was certainly not proof against the charge
of a thirty-foot boat coming down a fifty per cent. grade pushed by
twenty-five men. We had intended lifting over it, but our momentum was
too great, especially after I had failed to desist from shouting "Make
it snappy!" soon enough. The barrier gave way in two or three places, so
that we were shedding trailing lengths of wire all the way to the river.
On through the woods we juggernauted, Roos following in full cry. His
city "news stuff" training was standing him in good stead, and he showed
no less cleverness than agility in making successive "set-ups" without
staying our progress. Only in the last fifty yards, where the going over
the moss and pine needles was (comparatively speaking) lightning fast,
did we distance him. Here, as there was plenty of time, he cut a hole in
the trees and shot the launching through one of his favourite "sylvan
frames." For the push-off shot he provided his customary heart throb by
bringing down the station agent's three-year-old infant to wave
farewell. That he didn't try to feature the mother prominently seemed to
indicate that what I had said at Windermere on the subject had had some
effect.
After the "farewell" had been filmed, we landed at the fire ranger's
cabin to pick up Roos and his camera. The ranger told us that a couple
of trappers who had been for some weeks engaged in portaging their
winter supplies round Surprise Rapids would be waiting for us at the
head of the first fall in the expectation of getting the job of packing
our stuff down to the foot. "Nothing doing," Blackmore replied
decisively; "going straight through." The ranger grinned and shook his
grizzled head. "You're the man to do it," he said; "but jest the same,
I'm glad it's you and not me that has the job."
The station agent came down with Roos, evidently with the cheering
purpose of showing us the place where his predecessor and a couple of
other men had been drowned in attempting to cross the river some months
previously. "Only man in the boat to be picked up alive was a one-armed
chap," he concluded impressively. "Too late now for operations on any of
this crew," laughed Blackmore, pushing off with a pike-pole. "Besides,
every man jack of us is going to have a two-arm job all the way." To the
parting cheers of the mackinawed mob on the bank, he eased out into the
current and headed her down the Bend.
[Illustration: ARRIVAL OF OUR BOAT AT BEAVERMOUTH (_above_)]
[Illustration: OUR FIRST CAMP AT BEAVERMOUTH (_centre_)]
[Illustration: THE REMAINS OF A SUNKEN FOREST (_below_)]
[Illustration: TRAPPER'S CABIN WHERE WE FOUND SHELTER FOR THE NIGHT
(_above_)]
[Illustration: WHERE WE LANDED ABOVE SURPRISE RAPIDS (_centre_)]
[Illustration: WHERE WE TIED UP AT "EIGHT MILE" (_below_)]
Roos stationed himself in the bow, with camera set up on its shortened
tripod, waiting to surprise any scenery caught lurking along the way.
Blackmore steered from the stern with his seven-feet-long birch paddle.
Andy Kitson and I, pulling starboard and port oars respectively, rubbed
shoulders on the broad 'midship's thwart. Our outfit--a comparatively
light load for so large a boat--was stowed pretty well aft. I saw
Blackmore lean out to "con ship" as we got under way. "Good trim," he
pronounced finally, with an approving nod. "Just load enough to steady
her, and yet leave plenty of freeboard for the sloppy water. This ought
to be a dryer run than some the old girl's had." I chuckled to myself
over that "dryer." I hadn't told Blackmore yet what was hidden down
Canoe River way. I had promised Captain Armstrong not to do so until I
had ascertained that we had a teetotal crew--or one comparatively so.
Andy Kitson was a big husky North-of-Irelander, who had spent twenty
years trapping, packing, hunting, lumbering and boating in western
Canada. Like the best of his kind, he was deliberate and sparing of
speech most of the time, but with a fine reserve vocabulary for
emergency use. He was careful and cautious, as all good river boatmen
should be, but decidedly "all there" in a pinch. He pulled a good
round-armed thumping stroke with his big oar, and took to the water (as
has to be done so frequently on a bad stretch of "lining down") like a
beaver. Best of all, he had a temper which nothing from a leak in the
tent dribbling down his neck to a half hour up to his waist in ice-cold
water seemed equal to ruffling. I liked Andy the moment I set eyes on
his shining red gill, and I liked him better and better every day I
worked and camped with him.
As it was three-thirty when we finally pushed off, Blackmore announced
that he would not try to make farther than "Eight-Mile" that afternoon.
With comparatively good water all the way to the head of Surprise
Rapids, we could have run right on through, he said; but that would
force us to make camp after dark, and he disliked doing that unless he
had to. In a current varying from three to eight miles an hour, we slid
along down stream between banks golden-gay with the turning leaves of
poplar, cottonwood and birch, the bright colours of which were
strikingly accentuated by the sombre background of thick-growing
spruce, hemlock, balsam and fir. Yellow, in a score of shades, was the
prevailing colour, but here and there was a splash of glowing crimson
from a patch of _chin-chinick_ or Indian tobacco, or a mass of dull
maroon where a wild rose clambered over the thicket. Closely confined
between the Rockies to the right and the Selkirks to the west, the river
held undeviatingly to its general northwesterly course, with only the
patchiest of flats on either side. And this was the openest part of the
Bend, Blackmore volunteered; from the head of Surprise Rapids to the
foot of Priest Rapids the Columbia was so steeply walled that we would
not find room for a clearing large enough to support a single cow. "It's
a dismal hole, and no mistake," he said.
We took about an hour to run to "Eight Mile," Andy and I pulling
steadily all the way in the deep, smoothly-running current. We tied up
in a quiet lagoon opening out to the west--evidently the mouth of a
high-water channel. There was a magnificent stand of fir and spruce on a
low bench running back from the river, not of great size on account of
growing so thickly, but amazing lofty and straight. We camped in the
shelter of the timber without pitching a tent, Andy and Blackmore
sleeping in the open and Roos and I in a tumble-down trapper's cabin. Or
rather we spread our blankets in the infernal hole. As the place was
both damp and rat-infested, we did not sleep. Roos spent the night
chopping wood and feeding the rust-eaten--and therefore
smoky--sheet-iron stove. I divided my time between growling at Roos for
enticing me into keeping him company in the cabin against Blackmore's
advice, and throwing things at the prowling rodents. It did not make for
increased cheerfulness when I hit him on the ear with a hob-nailed boot
that I had intended for a pair of eyes gleaming vitreously on a line
about six inches back of his gloomily bowed head. He argued--and with
some reason I must admit--that I had no call to draw so fine a bead
until I was surer of my aim. Largely as a point of repartee, I told him
not to be too certain I was not sure of my aim. But I really had been
trying to hit the rat....
I took the temperature of the air and the river water in the morning,
finding the former to register thirty-eight degrees and the latter
forty-one. There was a heavy mist resting on the river for a couple of
hours after daybreak, but it was lifting by the time we were ready to
push off. In running swift water good visibility is even more imperative
than at sea, but as there was nothing immediately ahead to bother
Blackmore did not wait for it to clear completely. The sun was shining
brightly by nine-thirty, and Roos made several shots from the boat and
one or two from the bank. One of the most remarkable sights unfolded to
us was that of "Snag Town." Just what was responsible for this queer
maze of upended trees it would be hard to say. It seems probable,
however, that a series of heavy spring floods undermined a considerable
flat at the bend of the river, carrying away the earth and leaving the
trees still partially rooted. The broadening of the channel must have
slowed down the current a good deal, and it appears never to have been
strong enough to scour out below the tenaciously clinging roots. The
former lords of the forest are all dead, of course, but still they keep
their places, inclining down-stream perhaps twenty-degrees from their
former proud perpendicular, and firmly anchored. It takes careful
steering to thread the maze even in a small boat, but the current is
hardly fast enough to make a collision of serious moment.
The current quickened for a while beyond "Snag Town" and then began
slowing again, the river broadening and deepening meanwhile. I thought I
read the signs aright and asked Blackmore. "Yes," he replied with a
confirmatory nod; "it's the river backing up for its big jump. Stop
pulling a minute and you can probably hear the rapid growling even
here." Andy and I lay on our oars and listened. There it was surely
enough, deep and distant but unmistakable--the old familiar drum-roll of
a big river beating for the charge. It was tremendous music--heavy,
air-quivering, earth-shaking; more the diapason of a great cataract than
an ordinary rapid, it seemed to me. I was right. Surprise is anything
but an ordinary rapid.
We pulled for a half hour or more down a broad stretch of slackening
water that was more like a lake than a river. Out of the looming shadows
of the banks for a space, mountain heights that had been cut off leaped
boldly into view, and to left and right lifted a lofty sky-line notched
with snowy peaks rising from corrugated fields of bottle-green glacier
ice. Mt. Sanford, loftiest of the Selkirks, closed the end of the bosky
perspective of Gold Creek, and the coldly chiselled pyramids of Lyell,
Bryce and Columbia pricked out the high points on the Continental
Divide of the Rockies. We held the vivid double panorama--or quadruple,
really, for both ranges were reflected in the quiet water--for as long
as it took us to pull to a beach at the narrowing lower end of the long
lake-like stretch above the rapids, finally to lose it as suddenly as it
had been opened to us behind the imminently-rearing river walls.
The two trappers of whom the fire-ranger at Beavermouth had spoken were
waiting for us on the bank. They had permits for trapping on a couple of
the creeks below Kinbasket Lake, and were getting down early in order to
lay out their lines by the time the season opened a month or so hence.
They had been packing their stuff over the three-mile portage to the
foot of the rapids during the last three weeks, and now, with nothing
left to go but their canoes, were free to give us a hand if we wanted
them. Blackmore replied that he could save time and labour by running
and lining the rapids. "Besides," he added with a grin, "I take it these
movie people have come out to get pictures of a river trip, not an
overland journey." The trappers took the dig in good part, but one of
them riposted neatly. Since he was out for furs, he said, and was not
taking pictures or boot-legging, time was not much of an object. The
main thing with him was to reach his destination with his winter's
outfit. If all the river was like Surprise Rapids he would be quite
content to go overland all the way. Neither of them made any comments on
the stage of the water or offered any suggestions in connection with the
job we had ahead. That was one comfort of travelling with Blackmore. In
all matters pertaining to river work his judgment appeared to be beyond
criticism. If he was tackling a stunt with a considerable element of
risk in it, that was his own business. No one else knew the dangers, and
how to avoid them, so well as he.
Blackmore looked to the trim of the boat carefully before shoving off,
putting her down a bit more by the stern it seemed to me. He cautioned
me on only one point as we pulled across the quarter of mile to where
the banks ran close together and the quiet water ended. "Don't never dip
deep in the white water, and 'specially in the swirls," he said,
stressing each word. "If you do, a whirlpool is more'n likely to carry
your oar-blade under the boat and tear out half the side 'fore you can
clear your oar-lock. That's the way that patched gunnel next you came to
get smashed." As we were about at the point where it is well to confine
all the talking done in the boat to one man, I refrained from replying
that I had been told the same thing in a dozen or so languages, on four
different continents, and by "skippers" with black, yellow and copper as
well as white skins, at fairly frequent intervals during the last
fifteen years. There were enough slips I might make, but that of dipping
deep in rough water was hardly likely to be one of them.
The rumble of the rapid grew heavier as we proceeded, but only a single
flickering white "eyelash" revealed the imminent ambush lurking beyond
the black rocks. The current accelerated rapidly as the walls closed in,
but ran easily, effortlessly, unripplingly, and with an almost uncanny
absence of swirls and eddies. "Have plenty way on her 'fore she hits
the suds," cautioned Blackmore, and Andy and I grunted in unison as we
leaned a few more pounds of beef onto our bending spruces. That started
our inside elbows to bumping, but without a word each of us sidled along
an inch or two toward his gunwale to get well set while yet there was
time.
With an easy bob--quick like a rowboat rides the bow wave of a steamer,
but smoother, easier in its lift--we ran into the head of the rapid.
There was a swift V-shaped chute of smooth jade-green water; then we
slapped right into the "suds." High-headed waves slammed against the
bows and threw spray all over the boat and far astern of it. But they
lacked jolt. They had too much froth and not enough green water to make
them really formidable. We were in rough but not really bad water. I
tried to grin at Blackmore to show him I understood the situation and
was enjoying it highly; but his eyes, pin-points of concentration under
bent brows, were directed over my head and far in advance. Plainly, he
was thinking as well as looking well ahead.
Reassured by the smart way we were slashing through that first riffle, I
ventured to steal a look over my shoulder. In the immediate foreground
Roos, with his waterproof buttoned close around his neck, was shaking
the spray out of his hair and watching for a chance to snap with his
kodak. Ahead there was perhaps another hundred yards of about the same
sort of water as that in which we were running; then a yeasty welter of
white where the river disappeared round a black cliff into what seemed a
narrow gorge. Opposite the cliff the river wall sloped slightly and was
thickly covered with a dense growth of evergreen. The heavy roar we had
been hearing for hours was still muffled. Evidently the main disturbance
was somewhere beyond the bend at the cliff.
The thunder of falling water grew louder as we headed down toward the
white smother in the embrasure of the bend, and it was from Blackmore's
lips rather than from any words I heard that I gathered that he was
calling for "More way!" Still keeping fairly good stroke, Andy and I
quickly had her going enough faster than the current to give the big
paddle all the steerage "grip" Blackmore could ask for. Swinging her
sharply to the right, he headed her past the out-reaching rock claws at
the foot of the cliff, and, with a sudden blaze of light and an
ear-shattering rush of sound we were into the first and worst fall of
Surprise Rapids.
That dual onslaught of light and sound had something of the paralyzing
suddenness of that which occurs when a furnace door is thrown wide and
eye and ear are assailed at the same instant with the glare and the roar
from within. One moment we were running in a shadowed gorge with a heavy
but deadened and apparently distant rumble sounding somewhere ahead; the
next we were in the heart of a roar that fairly scoured our ear-drums,
and blinking in a fluttering white light that seemed to sear the
eyeballs. The one hurried glance that I threw behind me as I began
floundering on the end of my kicking oar photographed an intensely vivid
picture on my memory.
What had been merely a swiftly-flowing river with a streak of silver
riffles down the middle had changed to a tumultuous tumble of cascades
that gleamed in solid white from bank to bank like the churned snow of a
freshly descended avalanche. There was no green water whatever; not even
a streak that was tinged with green. All that relieved the coruscating,
sun-silvered tumble of whiteness were the black tips of jutting
bedrock, sticking up through the foam they had churned. The deeply
shadowed western wall, hanging above the river like a dusky pall, served
only to accentuate by contrast the intense white light that danced above
the cascade. It was as though the golden yellow had been filtered out of
the sunlight in the depths, and only the pure blue-white of calcium
reflected back into the atmosphere.
Heavy as was the fall of the river over the stretch we had now entered,
I could just make out a point perhaps a half mile farther down where it
dropped out of sight entirely. That, I told myself, must be the place
where there was an unbroken reef of bedrock all the way across the
stream, and where there was an abrupt drop of eight or ten feet. A great
throbbing rumble cutting into the slightly higher-keyed roar that
already engulfed us also seemed to indicate that the steepest pitch had
not yet been reached. I had, of course, seen worse water than this, but
certainly had never (as appeared to be the case now) been irretrievably
committed to running it. I had heard that it was quite unrunnable in any
kind of a boat, it certainly looked unrunnable, and I seemed to have the
impression that Blackmore had said he was not intending to run it. Yet
here we were into it, and without (so far as I could see) anything to do
but drive ahead. However, that was Blackmore's affair....
The rather smart team-work which Andy and I had maintained for a while
dissolved like the morning mists as we banged in among the walloping
rollers at the head of the real cascade. Both of us were in
difficulties, but his round-armed thumping stroke seemed rather more
true to form than the shattered remnants of my fine straight-armed
slide-and-recover, with its dainty surface-skimming "feather." Nothing
but the sharpest of dabs with the tip of an oar can get any hold in a
current of fifteen to twenty miles an hour, and the short, wristy pull
(which is all there is time for) doesn't impart a lot of impulse to a
thirty-foot boat. That, and the staggering buffets on the bows, for it
was solid, lumpy water that was coming over us now, quickly reduced our
headway. (Headway _through_ the current, I mean; our headway floating
_in_ the current was terrific.) This was, of course, a serious handicap
to Blackmore, as it deprived him of much of the steerage-way upon which
he was dependent for quick handling of the boat. The difficulty of
maintaining steerage-way in rough water with oars makes a bow as well as
a stern paddle very desirable in running bad rapids. The bow paddler can
keep a very sharp lookout for rocks immediately ahead, and, in a pinch,
can jerk the boat bodily to one side or the other, where oarsmen have to
_swing_ it. However, Blackmore knew just what he was going up against,
and had made the best disposition possible of his available crew.
I was too busy keeping myself from being bucked off the thwart by my
floundering oar to steal more than that first hurried look over my
shoulder. It was not my concern what was ahead anyway. All I had to do
was to take a slap at the top of a wave every time I saw a chance, and
be ready to back, or throw my weight into a heavy stroke, when Blackmore
needed help to turn her this way or that. My signal--a jerk of the
steersman's head to the left--came sooner than I expected. It looked a
sheer impossibility to drive through the maze of rocks to the bank, yet
that--after a long, anxious look ahead--was evidently what he had
decided to attempt. As it was my oar he called on, I knew it was the
right or east bank, a sharply sloping reach of black bedrock littered
with water-scoured boulders.
By the way Blackmore was leaning onto his paddle I knew that he needed
all the pull I could give him to bring her round. Swinging back hard, I
threw every pound I had onto my oar. For an instant the lack of
resistance as the blade tore through foam nearly sent me reeling
backwards; then it bit into solid water, and, under impulse of oar and
paddle, the boat pivoted through more than half a quadrant and shot
straight for the bank. Right in where the black rock tips were scattered
like the raisins in a pudding he headed her. There was no room to use
the oars now, but she still carried more than enough way to send her to
the bank. Or rather, it would have carried her through if the course
had been clear. Missing two or three rocks by inches, she rasped half
her length along another, and onto a fourth--lurking submerged by a
foot--she jammed full tilt. It was her port bow that struck, and from
the crash it seemed impossible that she could have escaped holing. Andy
went over the side so suddenly that, until I saw him balancing on a rock
and trying to keep the boat from backing off into the current, I thought
he had been thrown overboard by the impact. Thumping her bow with his
boot, he reported her leaking slightly but not much damaged. Then,
swinging her round into an eddy, he jumped off into the waist-deep water
and led her unresistingly up against the bank. It was astonishing to see
so wild a creature so suddenly become tame.
We would have to "line down" from here to the foot of the first fall,
Blackmore said. While Roos was setting up his camera the veteran
explained that he could have run four or five hundred yards farther
down, right to the brink of the "tip off," but that he preferred getting
in out of the wet where he had a good landing. I agreed with him
heartily--without putting it in words. But if that was his idea of a
"good landing place," I hoped he would continue to avoid bad ones.
The basic principles of "lining down" are the same on all rivers. Where
water is too rough to run, it is the last resort before portaging. As
generally practised, one man, walking along the bank, lets the boat down
with a line, while another--or as many others as are available--keeps it
off the rocks with poles. "Lining" can be effected more rapidly and with
much less effort if one man remains in the boat and fends off with his
pole from there. This is much the better method where the fall is not
too great and the water comparatively warm. On the upper Columbia, where
the breaking away of a boat from a line means its almost inevitable loss
with all on board, it is resorted to only when absolutely necessary, and
when a man of great experience is handling the line. It takes a natural
aptitude and years of experience for a man to master all the intricacies
of "lining." I shall not endeavour to enumerate even the few that I am
familiar with; but the one thing beyond all others to avoid is letting
the bow of the boat swing outwards when the stern is held up by a rock.
This brings the full current of the river against its up-stream side,
exerting a force that a dozen men could not hold against, let alone one
or two. As Blackmore was noted for his mastery of the "lining" game,
however, we had no apprehension of trouble in this department.
Nothing of the outfit save the moving picture camera was removed from
the boat at this juncture. Coiling his line--something over a hundred
feet of half-inch Manila hemp--over his left arm, Blackmore signalled
Andy to shove off. Paying out the line through his right hand, he let
the eddy carry the boat out into the drag of the current. Armed with
long pike-poles, Andy and I ran on ahead to keep it clear of the banks
as it swung in. This was easy enough as long as we had only the bank to
contend with. But almost immediately the trouble which makes Surprise
Rapids one of the nastiest stretches on any river in the world to line
began to develop. This came from the submerged rocks which crop up all
along between the banks and the deeper water of mid-channel.
Pulling her up and releasing her with a hand that reminded me of that of
a consummate natural horseman, Blackmore nursed the boat along and
managed to avoid most of these obstructions. But every now and then she
would wedge between a close-set pair of boulders and resist the force of
the current to drive her on. At such times it was up to Andy and me to
wade in and try to dislodge her with our poles. Failing this, we had to
wade out still farther and lift her through. Andy always took the lead
in this lifting business, claiming that it required a lot of experience
to know just the instant to stop shoving at the boat as she began to
move, and start bracing against the current to keep from getting carried
away. I have no doubt he was right. In any event he would never let me
come out until he had tugged and hauled for several minutes trying to
budge her alone, and even then--notwithstanding his four or five inches
less of height--he always took his station in the deepest hole. Two or
three times, shaking himself like a Newfoundland, he came out wet to the
armpits with the icy water. As the sun was beating hotly upon the rocks,
however, neither of us felt the cold much that afternoon. A few days
later it was another story.
We made something like eight or nine hundred yards before we
stopped--right to the head of the roaring chute that ran down to the
sheer drop-off. Roos--always at his best when there was plenty of
unpremeditated action going on, so that "directorial" worries sat
lightly on him--followed us closely all the way. It was hard enough
keeping one's footing on those ice-slippery boulders at all; how he
managed it with something like a hundred pounds of camera and tripod
over his shoulder and a bulky case in one hand is more than I can
figure. But he did it, keeping close enough so that he got just about
everything without having to ask us to do it over again. This latter was
a good deal of a comfort, especially in those waist-deep-in-the-Columbia
lifting stunts. I had always hated "lining down," even in the tropics,
and I already saw that what we had ahead wasn't going to modify my
feelings for the better.
At the head of that rough-and-tumble cascade leading to the fall,
Blackmore decided that we would have to unload the boat completely
before trying to let her down. It was always bad business there at the
best, he said, and the present stage of water made the rocks quite a bit
worse than when either higher or lower. If we hustled, there ought to be
time to get through before dark, and then a half mile run would take us
to a good camping place near the head of the second fall. Here Roos
intervened to point out that the sun was already behind the western
wall, and asking if it wouldn't be possible to camp where we were. He
wanted to keep the "continuity" of this particular piece of "lining"
unbroken, and would need good light to finish it in. Blackmore said he
could manage the camp if we thought our ear-drums would stand the roar.
So we unloaded the boat, and Blackmore leading her into the quietest
pool he could find, moored her for the night. As there was a couple of
feet of "lop" even there, this was rather a nice operation. With lines
to stern and bow, and held off from the rocks on either side by lashed
pike-poles, she looked for all the world like some fractious horse that
had been secured to prevent its banging itself up against the sides of
its stall. It was a beastly job, carrying the fifteen or twenty heavy
parcels of the outfit a hundred yards over those huge polished boulders
to the bit of sand-bar where camp was to be pitched. My old
ankles--endlessly sprained during my football days--protested every step
of my several round trips, and I congratulated myself that I had had the
foresight to bring leather braces to stiffen them. Reeking with
perspiration after I had thrown down my last load, I decided to use the
river for a bath that I would have to take anyway on shifting from my
wet clothes. The half-glacial water was not a lot above freezing, of
course; but that is of small moment when one has plenty of animal heat
stored up to react against it. My worst difficulty was from the
bumpiness of my rocky bathing pool, which also had a rather troublesome
undercurrent pulling out toward the racing chute of the main channel.
Blackmore, pop-eyed with astonishment, came down to watch the show. It
was the first time he had ever seen a man take a voluntary bath in
Surprise Rapids, he said. And all the others--the involuntary
bathers--they had picked up later in Kinbasket Lake.
That was about the most restricted space I can recall ever having camped
in. The great boulders of the high-water channel extended right up to
the foot of the mountain wall and neither the one nor the other afforded
enough level space to set a doll's house. A four-by-six patch of sand
was the most extensive area that seemed to offer, and, doubling this in
size by cutting away a rotting spruce stump and a section of fallen
birch, there was just enough room for the little shed-tent. It was a
snug and comfortable camp, though, and highly picturesque, perched as it
was almost in the spray of the cascade. The noise was the worst thing,
and we would have had to stay there even longer than we did to become
quite used to it. All of us were shouting in each other's ears for days
afterwards, and even trying to converse in signs in the idyllic quietude
of Kinbasket Lake.
The storm which Blackmore's seer-like vision had descried in the
blue-green auroral flutters of a couple of nights previously arrived
quite on schedule. Although the western sky had glowed for half an hour
after sunset with that supposedly optimistic tinge of primrose and
terra-cotta, it was pouring before midnight, and the next morning there
was truly almost as much water in the air as in the river. Pictures were
out of the question, so there was nothing to do but hang on until the
weather cleared. Leaving Roos whittling and Andy struggling to divert a
swelling young river that was trying to sluice away the sand on which
the tent was pitched, Blackmore and I pulled on our waterproofs and
clambered a mile through the woods to a camp of C. P. R. engineers.
Blackmore wanted to get an extra axe; I to get some further data on the
fall of the river. We found a crude cable-ferry thrown across just below
the foot of the big fall, and a rough, boggy path from the eastern end
of it took us to the camp of three or four comfortable cabins.
The Canadian Pacific, I learned--both on account of the high and
increasing cost of its oil fuel and because of the trouble experienced
in clearing their tunnels from smoke--was contemplating the
electrification of all of its mountain divisions. There were numerous
high falls along the line where power could be economically developed,
but it was not considered desirable that the scenic beauty of these
should be marred by diversion. Besides the Columbia, in a hundred miles
of the Big Bend, offered the opportunity for developing more
hydro-electric energy than all the west of Canada could use in the next
twenty years. The Surprise Rapids project alone would provide far more
power than the Canadian Pacific could use for traction, and it was
expected that there would be a large surplus for municipal and
industrial uses along the line. "All this, of course," the engineer at
the camp explained, "in the event the company decides to go ahead with
the development. Raising the money will probably be the greatest
difficulty, and in the present state of the financial market it is hard
to see how much can be done for two or three years. In the meantime we
are measuring the flow of the river every day, and will have accurate
data to go by when the time for construction comes."
I learned that the total length of Surprise Rapids was three and a third
miles, in which distance there was a fall of nearly one hundred feet.
The greatest drop was in that stretch which we were waiting to "line,"
where there was a fall of twenty-one feet in seven hundred and fifty. At
the second cascade there was a fall of fifteen feet in twelve hundred,
and at the third, twenty-five feet in twenty-five hundred. It was
planned to build the dam across the very narrow canyon near the foot of
the lower fall, making it of such a height that a lake would be backed
up as far as Beavermouth, incidentally, of course, wiping out the whole
of Surprise Rapids. "They can't wipe it out any too soon to suit me,"
Blackmore commented on hearing this. "It'd have saved me a lot of work
and many a wetting if they'd wiped it out twenty year ago. And that's
saying nothing of the men drownded there. It was that big whirlpool down
through the trees there that did for Walter Steinhoff."
We had left the camp now and were picking our way down the narrow trail
to the foot of the second fall. I had been waiting to hear Blackmore
speak of Steinhoff for two reasons: first, because I was curious to know
how much truth there was in those dramatic versions of his death I had
heard in Golden, and also because the subject would lead up naturally to
that of the buried whisky. This latter was rather too delicate a matter
to broach offhand, and I had therefore been carefully watching for a
favourable opening. Now that it had come, I was quick to take advantage
of it.
"Tell me about Steinhoff," I said. "He was on some kind of a
boot-legging stunt, wasn't he?" I was just a bit diffident about
bringing up that drink-running business, for although I had been told
that Blackmore was a smooth hand at the game himself, I had a sort of
sneaking idea that it was the kind of a thing a man ought to be
sensitive about, like having had smallpox or a sister in the movies. I
need not have worried, however. "You bet he was boot-legging," Blackmore
replied; "and so was I. Both outfits heading for _Tete Jaune Cache_ on
the Grand Trunk, and racing to get there first. That was what got him
into trouble--trying to catch up with me after I had passed him by
running and lining the first fall (the one we are doing the same way
now) while he had portaged. I reckon it was his first intention to
portage all the way to the foot of the second fall, but when he saw me
slip by in the water he put in his canoes at the foot of the first fall
and came after me."
We had come out above the river now, and I saw a savage stretch of
foam-white water falling in a roaring cascade to a mighty whirlpool that
filled all of the bottom of the steeply-walled amphitheatre formed by a
right-angling bend of the Columbia. Thirty feet or more above the
present level of the whirlpool were the marks of its swirling scour at
mid-summer high-water. Awesome enough now (and it was not any the less
so to me since we still had to take the boat through it), I could see at
once that, with the power of the floods driving it round and round at
turbine speed, it must indeed be a veritable thing of terror. It was
into this whirlpool, as well as others at Revelstoke Canyon and Death
Rapids, that whole uprooted pines were said to be sucked in flood-time,
to reappear only as battered logs many miles below. There seemed hardly
enough water there at the present to make this possible; but the story
was at least credible to me now, which was more than it had been
previously.
"So this is your 'All Day Sucker,'" I remarked carelessly, in a studied
attempt to keep Blackmore from noting how greatly the savage maelstrom
had impressed me. Seeing through the bluff, he grinned indulgently and
resumed his story of Steinhoff as soon as we had moved far enough round
the whirlpool to make his voice comfortably heard above the roar of the
cascade. A line had parted--sawed through in working round a rocky point
a few hundred yards above--and Steinhoff's big Peterboro was swept out
into the current. Striking a rock, it turned over and threw him into the
water. He made a brave effort to swim out, keeping his head above water
most of the way down the cascade. The whirlpool had been too much for
him, however. He was fighting hard to keep up when he was carried into
the vortex and sucked under. Blackmore took no stock in the story of the
dramatic gesture of farewell. "A man don't pull that grand opry stuff
with the cold of the Columbia biting into his spine," was the way he put
it.
Then I told him about the whisky--spoke to him as a son to his father.
And he, meeting me point for point in all seriousness of spirit,
answered as father to son. He thought there was little chance of finding
anything along the river. He had not done so himself for a number of
years--and he hadn't been overlooking any bets, either. There was, of
course, still much good stuff buried in the drift below Middle River,
but it would be like looking for a needle in a haystack trying to find
it. But the cache above Canoe River--ah, that was another matter!
Captain Armstrong could be absolutely depended upon in a matter of that
kind, and the directions sounded right as rain. Yes, he quite understood
that I should want to take it all to California with me. He would want
to do the same thing if he were in my place. It would be easy as picking
pippins getting it over the line. He could tell me three different ways,
all of them dead sure. He would not think of taking any of it for
himself. The rum we had would be ample for the trip, except in extreme
emergency. That "thirty over-proof" went a long way. And I need not
worry in the least about Andy. He wasn't a teetotaler exactly, but he
never took too much under any provocation. Yes, I could depend upon the
both of them to nose out that stuff at the old ferry. Put it there! We
looked each other square in the eye, and shook hands solemnly there
above the big whirlpool which was originally responsible for the good
fortune that had come to us--or rather to me. Men have clasped hands and
sworn to stand by each other in lesser things. At least that was the way
it seemed to me at the moment. I could have embraced the fine old
woodsman for his loyalty and generosity of spirit. I always called him
Bob after that.
The rain thinned down and became a light Scotch mist as we picked our
way back to camp. That struck me as being a good omen--it's being
"Scotch," I mean. Later it cleared up entirely, and there was a glorious
fairweather sunset of glowing saffron and flaming poppy red. To the
northwest--Canoe River-ward--there poured a wonderful light of pale
liquescent amber. I had never seen such a light on land or sea, I told
myself; or anywhere else, for that matter--except when holding a glass
of Scotch up against the sun. That was another good omen. Funny thing,
but I can still recall the date offhand, so indelibly had the promise of
that day impressed itself on my mind. It was the first of October.
Although it snowed an inch or two during the night, the following
morning fulfilled the promise of the sunset by breaking bright and
cloudless. We were to line the boat down empty for a couple of hundred
yards, and then load up again and line about an equal distance of
slightly better water. This would take us to the brink of the abrupt
fall, where both outfit and boat had to be portaged over the rocks for a
short distance. That would leave us clear for the short, swift run to
the head of the second fall.
Cutting himself a "sylvan frame" through the pines on a point a hundred
yards below the camp, Roos set up to shoot the first piece of lining. It
was a mean looking job, for the river was tumbling in a half-cataract
all the way, turning and squirming like a wounded dragon. I could see
Blackmore was a bit worried over it, and, as the sequel proved, with
good reason. I never quite understood his explanation of the cause of
what happened, but I believe he claimed it was due to his obeying
(against his better judgment) Roos' signal to keep the boat in fairly
close to the bank so that she would not pass "out of the
picture"--beyond the range of his lens, that is. At any rate, the boat
had hardly started before she swung broadside to the current and,
clapping like a limpet upon a big round boulder, hung there immovable.
Heeled till her starboard side showed like the belly of a sharply
sheering shark, her port gunwale dipped deep into the swirling current.
In a wink she had taken all the water she would hold with the half-heel
that was on her--enough, perhaps, to fill her half full when on an even
keel.
It was a case for instant action--a case where the nearest available man
had to follow his first hunch without thinking it over or counting the
cost. A few seconds more on that rock, and one of two things must happen
to the boat: either she would settle a few inches farther, fill
completely and sink, or else the force of the current would tear her to
pieces where she was. Blackmore was tugging at his line and shouting
directions, but the roar stopped the words at his lips. Andy did not
need to be told what was needed, however. For myself, I was not quite
sure of what to do, and less so of how to do it. Also, I doubted my
ability to keep my footing in the current. In short, I found myself
thinking and weighing chances in one of those emergencies where a man to
be worth his salt has no business to do either.
There was only one place where a man could get at the boat, and Andy
beat me to it by a mile. (I would have seen to that even had he moved a
lot slower than he did.) He was rather more than waist deep, but quite
safe as long as the boat stuck where she was. Unfortunately, getting her
off was the very thing he was there for. It was a good deal like a man's
having to saw off the branch on which he sat. But Andy never
hesitated--probably because there was not time to think and reckon the
consequences. Setting his heavy shoulders under her bilge, he gave a
mighty upward heave. She shuddered through her long red length, and
then, as the kick of the current got under her submerged gunwale, shot
up and off as though discharged from a catapult. The job had been well
done, too, for she came off with her stern down stream, which made it
comparatively easy for Blackmore to check her way with his line, even
half-filled as she was.
Whether he failed to recover as the boat was swept away, or whether he
lost his balance in avoiding entanglement in the line, Andy was not
quite sure. His first recollection after releasing the boat, he said,
was of floundering in the water and of finding that his first kick or
two did not strike bottom. The thing that is always possible when a man
has lifted off a boat in a swift current had happened: he had lost his
footing, and in just about the one worst place in the whole Columbia.
Blackmore, dragged down the bank after his floundering boat, was not in
a position where he could throw the end of his line to any purpose. I
waded in and reached out my pike-pole, but Andy's back was to it the
only time he came within grabbing distance. The only thing that saved
him was luck--the fact that the current at the point he lost his footing
did not swirl directly into the main chute, but did a little
double-shuffle of its own along the side of an eddy before taking the
big leap. Hooking into the solid green water of that eddy, Andy found
himself a toehold, and presently clambered out. He had not swallowed
any water, and did not seem much chilled or winded. A violent sickness
of the stomach, where the cold had arrested digestive operations, was
about the only ill effect. What seemed to annoy him most was the fact
that all of his pockets were turned wrong-side-out, with all of their
contents--save only his watch, which had been secured by a
thong--missing. Blackmore nodded grimly to me as he came up after
securing the boat. "_Now_ perhaps you'll believe what I told you about
the old Columbia picking pockets," he said dryly.
Roos came down complaining that he had been too far away to pick up any
details of the show even with his "six-inch" lens and cursing his luck
for not having been set up closer at hand. Considering what he had
missed, I thought he showed unwonted delicacy in not asking Blackmore
and Andy to stage it over again for him.
Bailing out the boat, we found one oar missing, but this we subsequently
recovered from an eddy below. That left our net loss for the mishap only
the contents of Andy's pockets and the picture Roos did not get. Some
might have figured in the extra ration of rum Andy drew to straighten
out the kinks of his outraged stomach; but that seemed hardly the
sporting way to look at it, especially with our prospects in the drink
line being what they were.
[Illustration: "SHOOTING" THE FIRST BIT OF LINING AT SURPRISE RAPIDS
(_above_)]
[Illustration: THE CAMP WHERE THE ROAR OF THE RAPIDS DEAFENED US
(_centre_)]
[Illustration: WHERE STEINHOF WAS DROWNED (_below_)]
[Illustration: WHERE ANDY JUST MISSED DROWNING IN SURPRISE RAPIDS
(_above_)]
[Illustration: LOOKING THROUGH THE PINES AT SURPRISE RAPIDS (_centre_)]
[Illustration: HEAD OF SECOND FALL OF SURPRISE RAPIDS (_below_)]
The portage at the fall proved a mighty stiff bit of hard labour. It was
one thing to skid the boat along on the pine needles at Beavermouth with
a couple of dozen men pushing it, and quite another for three men to
take it out of the water, lift it over forty or fifty feet of boulders,
and put it back into the river again. By the free use of rollers--cut
from young firs--we managed, however, Roos cranking his camera through
all of the operation and telling us to "Make it snappy!" and not to be
"foot-hogs." Almost worse than portaging the boat was the unspeakably
toil-some task of packing the outfit over the boulders for a couple of
hundred yards to where there was a quiet spot to load again. Every step
had to be balanced for, and even then one was down on his knees half the
time. With my numerous bad joints--there are but three from shoulder to
heel that had not been sprained or dislocated from two to a dozen
times--this boulder clambering work was the only thing in connection
with the whole voyage that I failed to enjoy.
A half mile run with an eight-mile current took us to the head of the
second fall, all but the first hundred yards of which had to be lined.
Landing this time on the west bank, we worked the boat down without much
difficulty past the jutting point where the line of Steinhoff's boat had
parted. Blackmore had hoped to line her all the way down without
unloading, but the last fifty yards before the cascade tumbled into the
big whirlpool were so thickly studded with rocks along the bank that he
finally decided not to risk it. As there were thirty or forty feet of
deep pools and eddies between the rocks on which she was stuck and the
nearest stretch of unsubmerged boulders, unloading was a particularly
awkward piece of work. Finally everything was shifted out onto a
flat-topped rock, and Roos and I were left to get this ashore while
Andy and Blackmore completed lining down. It was an especially nice job,
taking the boat down that last steep pitch into the big whirlpool and
then working her round a huge square-faced rock to a quiet eddy, and I
should greatly like to have seen it. Unluckily, what with stumbling over
hidden boulders and being down with my nose in the water half of the
time, and the thin blue mist that hovered round me the rest of the time
from what I said as a consequence of stumbling, I could only guess at
the finesse and highly technical skill with which the difficult
operation was accomplished. The worst part appeared to be getting her
down the fall. Once clear of the submerged rocks, Blackmore seemed to
make the whirlpool do his work for him. Poised on a projecting log of
the jam packed on top of the jutting rock, he paid out a hundred feet of
line and let the racing swirl of the spinning pool carry the boat far
out beyond all obstructions. Then, gently and delicately as if playing a
salmon on a trout rod, he nursed her into an eddy and simply coiled his
line and let the back-setting current carry her in to the bit of sandy
beach where he wanted to tie her up for the night. It takes a lifetime
of swift-water experience to master the intricacies of an operation like
that.
It was still early in the afternoon, but with a thick mist falling
Blackmore thought best to stop where we were. The next available camping
place was below the half-mile-long third cascade, and no old river man
likes to go into a rapid when the visibility is poor. We pitched the
tent in a hole cut out of the thick-growing woods on a low bench at the
inner angle of the bend. Everything was soaking wet, but it was well
back from the falls, and for the first time in two days we were able to
talk to each other without shouting. Not that we did so, however; from
sheer force of habit we continued roaring into each other's ears for a
week or more yet.
The great pile of logs on top of the flat-topped rock above the
whirlpool had fascinated me from the first. Over a hundred feet square,
forty feet high, and packed as though by a titanic hydraulic press, it
must have contained thousands and thousands of cords of wood. On
Blackmore's positive assurance as a timberman that there was nothing in
the pile of any value for lumber, even in the improbable contingency
that a flood would ever carry it beyond the big drifts of Kinbasket
Lake, I decided to make a bonfire of it. Never had I had such an
opportunity, both on the score of the sheer quantity of combustible and
the spectacular setting for illumination.
The whirlpool was _whouf-whoufing_ greedily as it wolfed the whole
cascade when I clambered up just before dark to touch off my beacon. It
was fairly dry at the base, and a pile of crisp shavings off a slab from
some distant up-river sawmill caught quickly. From a spark of red
flickering dimly through the mist when we sat down to supper, this had
grown to a roaring furnace by the time we had relaxed to pipes and
cigarettes. An hour later the flames had eaten a clear chimney up
through the jam and the red light from their leaping tips was beginning
to drive back the encompassing darkness. Roos, who had read about India,
thought it would have been fine if we only had a few widows to cast
themselves on the flaming pyre and commit _suttee_. Andy and Blackmore,
both sentimental bachelors, were a unit in maintaining that it would be
a shame to waste good widows that way, especially on the practically
widowless Big Bend. All three were arguing the point rather heatedly
when they crawled into their blankets. For myself, with a vision of the
wonder about to unroll impinging on my brain, I could not think of
turning in for hours yet.
By ten o'clock the pile was well alight underneath, but it was not until
nearly midnight, when the mist had turned to snow and a strong wind had
sprung up, that it was blazing full strength. I hardly know what would
have been the direction of the wind in the upper air, but, cupped in the
embrasure of the bend, it was sucking round and round, like the big
whirlpool, only more fitfully and with an upward rather than a downward
pull. Now it would drag the leaping flame-column a hundred feet in the
air, twisting it into lambent coils and fining the tip down to a sharp
point, like that of the Avenging Angel's Sword of Fire in the old
Biblical prints, now sweep it out in a shivering sheet above the
whirlpool, now swing it evenly round and round as though the flame,
arrow-pointed and attenuated, were the radium-coated hand of a
Gargantuan clock being swiftly revolved in the dark.
But the wonder of wonders was less the fire itself than the marvellous
transformations wrought by the light it threw. And the staggering
contrasts! The illuminated snow clouds drifting along the frosted-pink
curtain of the tree-clad mountain walls made a roseate fairyland; even
the foam covered sweep of the cascade, its roar drowned in the sharp
crackle of the flames, was softened and smoothened until it seemed to
billow like the sunset-flushed canvas of a ship becalmed: but the
whirlpool, its sinister character only accentuated by the conflict of
cross-shadows and reflections, was a veritable Pit of Damnation, choking
and coughing as it swirled and rolled in streaky coils of ox-blood, in
fire-stabbed welters of fluid coal-tar.
Wrapped in my hooded duffle coat, I paced the snow-covered moss and
exulted in the awesome spectacle until long after midnight. I have never
envied Nero very poignantly since. Given a fiddle and a few Christians,
I would have had all that was his on the greatest night of his life--and
then some. Father Tiber never had a whirlpool like mine, even on the day
Horatius swam it "heavy with his armour and spent with changing blows."
The next morning, though too heavily overcast for pictures, was still
clear enough to travel. The head riffles of the third fall of Surprise
Rapids began a little below our camp, so that we started lining almost
immediately. Three or four times we pulled across the river, running
short stretches and lining now down one side and now the other. There
was not so great a rate of drop as at the first and second falls, but
the whole stream was choked with barely submerged rocks and lining was
difficult on account of the frequent cliffs.
It was about half way down that I all but messed things up by failing to
get into action quickly enough at a crossing. The fault, in a way, was
Blackmore's, because of his failure to tell me in advance what was
expected, and then--when the order had to be passed instantly--for
standing rather too much on ceremony in the manner of passing it. We
were about to pull to the opposite side to line down past a riffle which
Blackmore reckoned too rough to risk running. There was about a ten-mile
current, and it would have required the smartest kind of a get-away and
the hardest kind of pulling to make the other bank without being carried
down onto the riffle. The boat was headed up-stream, and, as Blackmore
had not told me he intended to cross, I took it for granted he was going
to run. So, when Roos shoved off and jumped in, I rested on my oar in
order that Andy could bring the boat sharply round and head it down
stream. Blackmore's excited yell was the first intimation I had that
anything was wrong. "Pull like hell! You!... Mister Freeman!"
That "Mister," and his momentary pause before uttering it, defeated the
purpose of the order. I pulled all right, and so hard that my oar-blade
picked up a very sizable hunk of river and flung it in Blackmore's face.
That upset my balance, and I could not recover quickly enough to keep
the boat's head to the current. With characteristic presence of mind,
Blackmore changed tactics instantly. "Got to chance it now!" he shouted,
and threw such a pull onto his steering paddle that the handle bent to
more than half a right angle where he laid it over the gunwale. There
was one jutting rock at the head of the riffle that _had_ to be missed;
the rest was all a matter of whether or not the next couple of hundred
yards of submerged boulders were deeply enough covered to let us pass
_over_ them. There was no way of avoiding them, no chance to lay a
course _between_ them.
Blackmore was a bit wilder about the eyes than I had seen him before;
but he had stopped swearing and his mouth was set in a hard, determined
line. Andy, with chesty grunts, was fairly flailing the water with
swift, short-arm strokes. I did not need to be told to refrain from
pulling in order that the others could swing her head as far toward the
west bank as possible before the rock was reached. Instead, I held ready
for the one quick backing stroke that would be called for in the event a
collision seemed imminent at the last moment. It was the wave thrown off
by the rock itself that helped us most when the showdown came. Shooting
by the jagged barrier so close that Andy could have fended with his
hand, the boat plunged over a short, sharp pitch and hit the white water
with a bang.
That was by long odds the roughest stuff we had been into so far. The
waves were curling up well above our heads, and every one we hit left a
foot or two of its top with us--solid green water, most of it, that
began accumulating rather alarmingly in the bottom of the boat. There
was no regularity in the way they ran, either. One would come
mushrooming fairly over the bows, another would flop aboard over the
beam, and every now and then a wild side-winder, missing its spring at
the forward part of the boat, would dash a shower of spray over the
quarter. From the bank she must have been pretty well out of sight most
of the time, for I often saw spray thrown ten or fifteen feet to either
side and twice as far astern. All hands were drenched from the moment we
struck the first comber, of course, which was doubtless why a wail from
Roos that the water was going down his neck seemed to strike Blackmore
as a bit superfluous. "Inside or outside your neck?" he roared back,
adding that if it was the former the flow could be checked by the simple
and natural expedient of keeping the mouth shut. Very properly, our
"skipper" had the feeling that, in a really tight place, all the talking
necessary for navigation should be done from the "bridge," and that
"extraneous" comment should be held over to smooth water.
Before we had run a hundred yards the anxious look on Blackmore's face
had given way to one of relief and exultation. "There's more water over
the rocks than I reckoned," he shouted. "Going to run right through."
And run we did, all of the last mile or more of Surprise Rapids and
right on through the still swift but comparatively quiet water below.
Here we drifted with the current for a ways, while all hands turned to
and bailed. I took this, the first occasion that had offered, to assure
Blackmore that he needn't go to the length of calling me "Mister" in the
future when he had urgent orders to give, and incidentally apologized
for getting off on the wrong foot at the head of the first rapid. "Since
that worked out to save us half a mile of darn dirty lining and two or
three hours of time," he replied with a grin, "I guess we won't worry
about it this crack, Mister--I mean, Freeman. Mebbe I better get used to
saying it that way 'gainst when I'll need to spit it out quick."
It was a pleasant run from the foot of Surprise Rapids down to Kinbasket
Lake, or at least it was pleasant until the rain set in again. There is
a fall of sixty-four feet in the sixteen miles--most of it in the first
ten. It was a fine swift current, with a number of riffles but no bad
water at any point. It was good to be free for a while from the tension
which is never absent when working in really rough water, and I have no
doubt that Blackmore felt better about it than any of the rest of us.
Surprise was his especial _bete noir_, and he assured me that he had
never come safely through it without swearing never to tackle it again.
Roos, drying out in the bow like a tabby licking her wet coat smooth
after being rained on, sang "Green River" all the way, and I tried to
train Andy to pull in time to the rhythm and join in the chorus. As the
chorus had much about drink in it, it seemed only fitting--considering
what was waiting for us at Canoe River--that we _should_ sing it. And we
did. "Floating Down the Old Green River" became the "official song" of
that particular part of the voyage. Later ... but why anticipate?
We landed for lunch about where the water began to slacken above the
lake. The water of the little stream at the mouth of which we tied up
the boat was of a bright transparent amber in colour. Andy, sapient of
the woods, thought it must flow from a lake impounded behind a
beaver-dam in the high mountains, and that the stain was that of rotting
wood. Beaver signs were certainly much in evidence all over the little
bench where we lunched. Several large cottonwood trunks--one of them all
of two feet in diameter--had been felled by the tireless little
engineers, and we found a pile of tooth-torn chips large enough to
kindle our fire with. While tea was boiling Blackmore pulled a couple of
three-pound Dolly Varden out of the mouth of the creek, only to lose his
hooks and line when a still larger one connected up with them. Roos, who
was under orders to get an effective fishing picture, was unable to go
into action with his camera on account of the poor light.
It had begun to rain hard by the time we had shoved back into the river
after lunch. There were still five miles to go to reach the camping
ground Blackmore had decided upon, half way down the east side of
Kinbasket Lake, just below Middle River--slack water all the way. Andy
and I pulled it in a slushy half-snow-half-rain that was a lot wetter
and unpleasanter than the straight article of either variety. Of a lake
which is one of the loveliest in all the world in the sunlight, nothing
was to be seen save a stretch of grey-white, wind-whipped waters beating
upon grey-brown rocky shores. That the wind and waves headed us did not
make the pulling any lighter, for the boat's considerable freeboard gave
both a lot of surface to play upon. The exertion of rowing kept Andy and
me warm, however, which gave us at least that advantage over Roos and
Blackmore. The latter had to face it out at his paddle, but Roos, a
bedraggled lump of sodden despair, finally gave up and crawled under the
tarpaulin with the bags of beans and bacon, remaining there until we
reached port.
All in all, I think that was the most miserable camp I ever helped to
pitch. The snow, refusing persistently either to harden or to soften,
adhered clingingly to everything it touched. We were two hours clearing
a space for the tent, setting it up and collecting enough boughs to
cushion the floor. By that time pretty nearly everything not
hermetically sealed was wet, including the blankets and the "dry"
clothes. No one but Andy could have started a camp-fire under such
conditions, and no one but Blackmore could have cooked a piping hot
dinner on it. I forget whether it was Roos or myself who contributed
further to save the day. Anyhow, it was one of the two of us that
suggested cooking a can of plum-pudding in about its own bulk of "thirty
per over-proof" rum. That lent the saving touch. In spite of a leaking
tent and wet blankets, the whole four of us turned in singing "End of a
Perfect Day" and "Old Green River." The latter was prophetic. A
miniature one--coming through the roof of the tent--had the range of the
back of my neck for most of the night.