For some ten miles above the long, white, furrowed face of Brine’s Rip,
where Blue Forks Brook flows in, the main stream of the Ottanoonsis is a
succession of mad rapids and toothed ledges and treacherous,
channel-splitting shoals. These ten miles are a trial of nerve and
water-craft for the best canoeists on the river. In the spring, when the
river was in freshet and the freed logs were racing, battering, and
jamming, the whole reach was such a death-trap for the stream-drivers
that it had come to be known as Dead Man’s Run.
Now, in high summer, when the stream was shrunken in its channel and the
sunshine lay golden over the roaring, creamy chutes and the dancing
shallows, the place looked less perilous. But it was full of snares and
hidden teeth. It was no place for the canoeist, however expert with pole
and paddle, unless he knew how to read the water unerringly for many
yards ahead. It is this reading of the water, this instantaneous solving
of the hieroglyphics of foam and surge and swirl and glassy lunge, that
makes the skilled runner of the rapids.
A light birch-bark canoe, with a man in the stern and a small child in
the bow, was approaching the head of the rapids, which were hidden from
the paddler’s view by a high, densely-wooded bend of the shore. The
canoe leapt forward swiftly on the smooth, quiet current, under the
strong drive of the paddle.
The paddler was a tall, big-limbed man, with fair hair fringing out
under his tweed cap, and a face burnt red rather than tanned by the
weather. He was dressed roughly but well, and not as a woodsman, and he
had a subtle air of being foreign to the backwoods. He knew how to
handle his paddle, however, the prow of his craft keeping true though
his strokes were slow and powerful.
The child who sat facing him on a cushion in the bow was a little boy of
four or five years, in a short scarlet jacket and blue knickers. His
fat, bare legs were covered with fly-bites and scratches, his baby face
of the tenderest cream and pink, his round, interested eyes as blue as
periwinkle blossoms. But the most conspicuous thing about him was his
hair. He was bareheaded—his little cap lying in the bottom of the canoe
among the luggage—and the hair, as white as tow, stood out like a fleece
all over his head, enmeshing the sunlight in its silken tangle.
When the canoe shot round the bend, the roar of the rapids smote
suddenly upon the voyagers’ ears. The child turned his bright head
inquiringly, but from his low place could see nothing to explain the
noise. His father, however, sitting up on the hinder bar of the canoe,
could see a menacing white line of tossing crests, aflash in the
sunlight, stretching from shore to shore. Backing water vigorously to
check his headway, he stood up to get a better view and choose his way
through the surge.
The stranger was master of his paddle, but he had had no adequate
experience in running rapids. Such light and unobstructed rips as he had
gone through had merely sufficed to make him regard lightly the menace
confronting him. He had heard of the perils of Dead Man’s Run, but that,
of course, meant in time of freshet, when even the mildest streams are
liable to go mad and run amuck. This was the season of dead low water,
and it was hard for him to imagine there could be anything really to
fear from this lively but shrunken stream. He was strong, clear-eyed,
steady of nerve, and he anticipated no great trouble in getting through.
As the light craft dipped into the turmoil, jumping as if buffeted from
below, and the wave-tops slapped in on either side of the bow, the
little lad gave a cry of fear.
“Sit tight, boy. Don’t be afraid,” said the father, peering ahead with
intent, narrowed eyes and surging fiercely on his blade to avoid a
boiling rock just below the first chute. As he swept past in safety he
laughed in triumph, for the passage had been close and exciting, and the
conquest of a mad rapid is one of the thrilling things in life, and
worth going far for. His laugh reassured the child, who laughed also,
but cowered low in the canoe and stared over the gunwale with wide eyes
of awe.
But already the canoe was darting down toward a line of black rocks
smothered in foam. The man paddled desperately to gain the other shore,
where there seemed to be a clear passage. Slanting sharply across the
great current, surging with short, terrific strokes upon his sturdy
maple blade, his teeth set and his breath coming in grunts, he was swept
on downward, sideways toward the rocks, with appalling speed. But he
made the passage, swept the bow around, and raced through, shaving the
rock so narrowly that his heart paused and the sweat jumped out suddenly
cold on his forehead.
Immediately afterwards the current swept him to mid-stream. Just here
the channel was straight and clear of rocks, and though the rips were
heavy the man had a few minutes’ respite, with little to do but hold his
course.
With a stab at the heart he realized now into what peril he had brought
his baby. Eagerly he looked for a chance to land, but on neither side
could he make shore with any chance of escaping shipwreck. A woodsman,
expert with the canoe-pole, might have managed it, but the stranger had
neither pole nor skill to handle one. He was in the grip of the wild
current and could only race on, trusting to master each new emergency as
it should hurl itself upon him.
Presently the little one took alarm again at his father’s stern-set
mouth and preoccupied eyes. The man had just time to shout once more,
“Don’t be afraid, son. Dad’ll take care of you,” when the canoe was once
more in a yelling chaos of chutes and ledges. And now there was no
respite. Unable to read the signs of the water, he was full upon each
new peril before he recognized it, and only his great muscular strength
and instant decision saved them.
Again and again they barely by a hair’s-breadth, slipped through the
jaws of death, and it seemed to the man that the gnashing ledges raved
and yelled behind him at each miracle of escape. Then hissing
wave-crests cut themselves off and leapt over the racing gunwale, till
he feared the canoe would be swamped. Once they scraped so savagely that
he thought the bottom was surely ripped from the canoe. But still he won
onward, mile after roaring mile, his will fighting doggedly to keep his
eyesight from growing hopelessly confused with the hellish, sliding
dazzle and riot of waters.
But at last the fiend of the flood, having played with its prey long
enough, laid bare its claws and struck. The bow of the canoe, in
swerving from one foam-curtained rock, grounded heavily upon another. In
an instant the little craft was swung broadside on, and hung there. The
waves piled upon her in a yelling pack. She was smothered down, and
rolled over helplessly.
As they shot out into the torrent the man, with a terrible cry, sprang
toward the bow, striving to reach his son. He succeeded in catching the
little one, with one hand, by the back of the scarlet jacket. The next
moment he went under and the jacket came off over the child’s head. A
whimsical cross-current dragged the little boy twenty feet off to one
side, and shot him into a shallow side channel.
When the man came to the surface again his eyes were shut, his face
stark white, his legs and arms flung about aimlessly as weeds; but fast
in his unconscious grip he held the little red jacket. The canoe, its
side stove in, and full of water, was hurrying off down the rapid amid a
fleet of paddles, cushions, blankets, boxes, and bundles. The body of
the man, heavy and inert and sprawling, followed more slowly. The waves
rolled it over and trampled it down, shouldered it up again, and
snatched it away viciously whenever it showed an inclination to hang
itself up on some projecting ledge. It was long since they had had such
a victim on whom to glut their rancour.
The child, meanwhile, after being rolled through the laughing shallows
of the side channel and playfully buffeted into a half-drowned
unconsciousness, was stranded on a sand spit some eight or ten yards
from the right-hand shore. There he lay, half in the water, half out of
it, the silken white floss of his hair all plastered down to his head,
the rippled current tugging at his scratched and bitten legs.
The unclouded sun shone down warmly upon his face, slowly bringing back
the rose to his baby lips, and a small, paper-blue butterfly hovered
over his head for a few seconds, as if puzzled to make out what kind of
being he was.
The sand spit which had given the helpless little one refuge was close
to the shore, but separated from it by a deep and turbulent current. A
few minutes after the blue butterfly had flickered away across the foam,
a large black bear came noiselessly forth from the fir woods and down to
the water’s edge. He gazed searchingly up and down the river to see if
there were any other human creatures in sight, then stretched his savage
black muzzle out over the water toward the sand spit, eyeing and
sniffing at the little unconscious figure there in the sun. He could not
make out whether it was dead or only asleep. In either case he wanted
it. He stepped into the foaming edge of the sluice, and stood there
whimpering with disappointed appetite, daunted by the snaky vehemence of
the current.
Presently, as the warmth of the flooding sun crept into his veins, the
child stirred, and opened his blue eyes. He sat up, noticed he was
sitting in the water, crawled to a dry spot, and snuggled down into the
hot sand. For the moment he was too dazed to realize where he was. Then,
as the life pulsed back into his veins, he remembered how his father’s
hand had caught him by the jacket just as he went plunging into the
awful waves. Now, the jacket was gone. His father was gone, too.
“Daddy! Daddee-ee!” he wailed. And at the sound of that wailing cry, so
unmistakably the cry of a youngling for its parent, the bear drew back
discreetly behind a bush, and glanced uneasily up and down the stream to
see if the parent would come in answer to the appeal. He had a wholesome
respect for the grown-up man creature of either sex, and was ready to
retire on the approach of one.
But no one came. The child began to sob softly, in a lonesome,
frightened, suppressed way. In a minute or two, however, he stopped
this, and rose to his feet, and began repeating over and over the shrill
wail of “Daddy, Dad-dee-ee, Daddee-ee!” At the same time he peered about
him in every direction, almost hopefully, as if he thought his father
must be hiding somewhere near, to jump out presently for a game of
bo-peep with him.
His baby eyes were keen. They did not find his father, but they found
the bear, its great black head staring at him from behind a bush.
His cries stopped on the instant, in the middle of a syllable, frozen in
his throat with terror. He cowered down again upon the sand, and stared,
speechless, at the awful apparition. The bear, realizing that the little
one’s cries had brought no succour, came out from its hiding
confidently, and down to the shore, and straight out into the water till
the current began to drag too savagely at its legs. Here it stopped,
grumbling and baffled.
The little one, unable any longer to endure the dreadful sight, backed
to the extreme edge of the sand, covered his face with his hands, and
fell to whimpering piteously, an unceasing, hopeless, monotonous little
cry, as vague and inarticulate as the wind.
The bear, convinced at length that the sluice just here was too strong
for him to cross, drew back to the shore reluctantly. It moved slowly
up-stream some forty or fifty yards, looking for a feasible crossing.
Disappointed in this direction, it then explored the water’s edge for a
little distance down-stream, but with a like result. But it would not
give up. Up and down, up and down, it continued to patrol the shore with
hungry obstinacy. And the piteous whimpering of the little figure that
cowered, with hidden face upon the sand spit, gradually died away. That
white fleece of silken locks, dried in the sun and blown by the warm
breeze, stood out once more in its radiance on the lonely little
slumbering head.