In the Roar of the Rapids
A little before noon, when the midsummer heat of the outside world came
filtering faintly down even into the cool vistas of the forest, and here
and there a pale-blue butterfly danced with his mate across the clear
shadow, and the aromatic wood smells came out more abundantly than was
their wont, at the lure of the persuasive warmth, the travellers halted
for noonmeat. Sitting on a fallen hemlock trunk beside a small but noisy
brook, it was a frugal meal they made on the cheese and dark bread which
Kirstie had put in Dave’s satchel. Their halt was brief; and as they set
out again, Dave said:—
“’Tain’t a mile from here to the Big Fork. Gabe’s canoe’s hid in the
bushes just where this here brook falls in. Noisy, ain’t it?”
“I love the sound,” exclaimed Miranda, stepping quickly and gaily, as if
the light, musical clamour of the stream had got into her blood.
“Well, the Big Fork’s a sight noisier,” continued Dave. “It’s heavy
water, an’ just rapids on rapids all the ways down to Gabe’s clearing.
Ye won’t be skeered, Mirandy?”
The girl gave one of her rare laughs, very high-pitched, but brief,
musical, and curiously elusive. She was excited at the prospect.
“I reckon you know how to handle a canoe, Dave,” was all she said. The
trust in her voice made Dave feel measurably nearer his purpose. He
durst not speak, lest his elation should betray itself.
In a little while there came another sound, not drowning or even
obscuring the clear prattle of the brook, but serving as a heavy
background to its brightness. It was a large, yet soft, pulsating
thunder, and seemed to come from all sides at once; as if far-off herds,
at march over hollow lands, were closing in upon them. Dave looked at
Miranda. She gave him a shining glance of comprehension.
“It’s the rapids!” she cried. “Do we go through those?”
Dave laughed.
“Not those! Not by a long chalk! That’s the ‘Big Soo’ ye hear, an’ it’s
more a fall than a rapid. Ther’s an eddy an’ a still water jest below,
an’ that’s where we take to the canoe.”
As they went on, the great swelling noise seemed to Miranda to fill her
soul, and worked a deep yet still excitement within her. Nevertheless,
rapidly as its volume increased, the light chatter of the brook was
upborne distinctly upon the flood of it. Then, suddenly, as the forest
thinned ahead, and the white daylight confronted them, the voice of the
brook was in an instant overwhelmed, utterly effaced. The softly
pervasive thunder burst all at once into a trembling roar, vehement,
conflicting, explosive; and they came out full in face of a long,
distorted slope of cataract. White, yellow, tawny green, the waves
bounded and wallowed down the loud steep; and here and there the black
bulks of rock shouldered upward, opposing them eternally.
Spellbound at the sight, Miranda stood gazing, while Dave fetched from
the bushes a ruddy-yellow canoe of birch bark, and launched it in a
quiet but foam-flecked back-water at their feet. In the bow he placed a
compact bundle of bracken for Miranda to sit upon, with another flat
bundle at her back, that the cross-bar might not gall her.
“Best fer ye to sit low, Mirandy, ’stead o’ kneelin’,” he explained,
“coz I’ll be standin’ up, with the pole, goin’ through some o’ the rips,
an’ ye’ll be steadier sittin’ than kneelin’.”
“But I paddle better kneeling,” protested Miranda.
“Ye won’t need to paddle,” said Dave, a little grimly. “Ye’ll jest maybe
fend a rock now an’ agin, that’s all. The current an’ me’ll do the
rest.”
The fall of the “Big Soo” ended in a basin very wide and deep, whose
spacious caverns absorbed the fury of the waters and allowed them to
flow off sullenly. Dave knelt in the stern, paddle in hand, and the long
pole of white spruce sticking out behind the canoe, where he could lay
his grasp upon it in an instant. A couple of strokes sent the little
craft out into the smooth, purplish-amber swirls of the deep current,
whereon the froth clusters wheeled slowly. A few minutes more and a
green fringed overhang of rock was rounded, the last energy of the
current spent itself in a deep and roomy channel, the uproar of the
cataract mellowed suddenly to that pulsating thunder which they had
heard at first, and the canoe, under Dave’s noiseless propulsion, shot
forward over a surface as of dark brown glass. There was a mile of this
still water, along which Miranda insisted upon paddling. The rocks rose
straight from the channel, and the trees hung down from their rim, and
the June sun, warmly flooding the trough of rock and water, made its
grimness greatly beautiful. Then the rocks diminished, and the steep,
richly green slopes of the hillsides came down to the water’s edge, and
a rushing clamour began to swell in the distance. The currents awakened
under the canoe, which darted forward more swiftly. The shouting of the
“rips” seemed to rush up stream to meet them. The surface of the river
began to slant away before them, not breaking yet, but furrowing into
long, thready streaks. Then, far down the slant, a tossing white line of
short breakers, drawn right across the channel, clambered toward them
ravenously.
“Ye’d better not paddle now, Mirandy,” said Dave, in a quiet voice,
standing up for a moment to survey the channel, while the canoe slipped
swiftly down toward the turmoil. “There’s rapids now all the way down to
Gabe’s clearing. An’ we won’t be long goin’, neither.”
[Illustration: ‘Stroke on the right!’ came Dave’s sharp order]
A moment more, and to Miranda it seemed that the leafy shores ran by
her, that the gnashing phalanx of the waves sprang up at her. She had
never run a rapid before. Her experience of canoeing had all been gained
on the lake. She caught her breath, but did not flinch as the tumbling
waters seethed and yammered around her. Then her blood ran hot with the
excitement of it; her nerves tingled. She wanted to cry out, to paddle
wildly and fiercely. But she held herself under curb. She never moved.
Only the grip of her hands on the paddle, which lay idle before her,
tightened till the knuckles went white. There was no word from Dave; no
sign of his presence save that the canoe shot straight as an arrow, and
bit firmly upon the big surges, so that she knew his wrist of steel was
in control. Suddenly, just ahead, sprang a square black rock, against
which the mad rush of water upreared and fell back broken to either
side. The canoe leaped straight at it, and Miranda held her breath.
“Stroke on the right!” came Dave’s sharp order. She dipped her paddle
strenuously, twice—thrice—and, swerving at the last moment, while the
currents seethed up along her bulwarks, the canoe darted safely past.
Miranda stopped paddling. There was a steeper slope in front, but a
clear channel, the waves not high but wallowing inward toward the
centre. Straight down this centre rushed the canoe, the surges clutching
at her on both sides, yellow green, with white foam-streaks veining
their very hearts. At the foot of the slope, singing sharply and shining
in the sun, curved a succession of three great “ripples,” stationary in
mid-channel, their back-curled crests thin and prismatic. Straight
through these Dave steered. The three thin crests, thus swiftly divided,
one after another, slapped Miranda coldly in the face, drenching her,
and leaving a good bucketful of water in the canoe.
“Oh!” gasped Miranda, at the shock, and shook her hair, laughing
excitedly.
There was gentler water now for a hundred yards or so, and Dave steered
cautiously for shore.
“We’ll hev to land an’ empty her out,” said he. “Ther’s no more big
‘ripples’ like them there on the whole river; an’ we won’t take in water
agin ’twixt here an’ Gabe’s.”
“I don’t care if we do!” exclaimed Miranda, fervently. “It was splendid,
Dave! And you did it just fine!”
This commendation took him aback somewhat, and he was unable to show his
appreciation of it except by a foolish grin, which remained on his face
while he turned the canoe over and while he launched it again. It was
still there when Miranda resumed her place in the bow; and, strangely
enough, she felt no disposition to criticise him for it.
The rest of the journey, lasting nearly an hour longer, was a ceaseless
succession of rapids, with scant and few spaces of quiet water between.
None were quite so long and violent as the first; but by the time the
canoe slowed up in the reach of still water that ran through the
interval meadow of Gabe’s clearing, Miranda felt fagged from the
long-sustained excitement. She felt as if it had been she, not Dave,
whose unerring eye and unfailing wrist had brought the canoe in triumph
through the menace of the roaring races.
They landed on the blossoming meadow strip, and Dave turned the canoe
over among the grasses, under the shade of an elm that would serve to
keep the afternoon sun from melting the rosin off the seams. Gabe’s
cabin stood a stone’s throw back from the meadow, high enough up the
slope to be clear of the spring freshets. It was a bare, uncared-for
place, with black stumps still dotting all the fields of buckwheat and
potatoes, a dishevelled-looking barn, and no vine or bush about the
house. It gave Miranda a pang of pity to look at it. Her own cabin was
lonely enough, but with a high, austere, clear loneliness that seemed to
hold communion with the stars. The loneliness of this place was a
shut-in, valley loneliness, without horizons and without hope. She felt
sorry almost to tears for the white and sad-eyed woman who appeared in
the cabin door to welcome them.
“Sary Ann, this is Mirandy I spoke to ye about.”
The two women shook hands somewhat shyly, and, after the silent fashion
of their race, said nothing.
“How’s Jimmy?” asked Dave.
“’Baout the same, thank ye, Dave,” replied the woman, wearily, leading
the way into the cabin.
In a low chair near the window, playing listlessly with a dingy
red-and-yellow rag doll, sat a thin-faced, pallid little boy with long,
pale curls down on his shoulders. He lifted sorrowful blue eyes to
Miranda’s face, as she, with a swift impulse of tenderness and
compassion, rushed forward and knelt down to embrace him. Her vitality
and the loving brightness of her look won the child at once. His wan
little face lightened. He lifted the baby mouth to be kissed. Miranda
pressed his fair head to her bosom gently, and had much ado to keep her
eyes from running over, so worked the love and pity and the mothering
hunger in her heart.
“He takes to ye, Mirandy,” said the woman, smiling upon her. And Dave,
his passion almost mastering him, blurted out proudly,—
“An’ who wouldn’t take to her, I’d like to know?”
He felt at this moment that Miranda was now all human, and could never
quite go back to her mystic and uncanny wildness, her preference for the
speechless, furry kin over her own warm, human kind. He produced the
medicine from his satchel; and from Miranda’s attentive hand Jimmy took
the stuff as if it had been nectar. Jimmy’s mother looked on with
undisguised approval of the girl. Had she thought Miranda was going to
stay any length of time, her mother-jealousy would have been aroused;
but as it was she was only exquisitely relieved at the thought of
Jimmy’s being in some one else’s care for a few hours. She whispered
audibly—a mere chaffing pretence of a whisper it was—to Dave:—
“It’s a right purty an’ a right smart little wife she’ll make fer ye,
Dave Titus, an’ she’ll know how to mind yer babies. Ye’re a lucky man,
an’ I hope ye understand how lucky ye air!”
Poor Dave! She might as well have thrown a bucket of cold water in his
face. For an instant he could have strangled the kindly, coarse-grained,
well-meaning, silly woman, who stood beaming her pale goodwill upon them
both. He cursed himself for not having warned her that Miranda could not
be chaffed like a common Settlement girl. He saw Miranda’s face go
scarlet to the ears, though she bent over Jimmy and pretended to have
heard nothing; and he knew that in that moment his good work was all
undone. For a few seconds he could say nothing, and the silence grew
trying. Then he stammered out:—
“I’m afeard ther’s no sich luck fer me, Sary Ann, though God knows I
want her. But Mirandy don’t like me very well.”
The woman stared at him incredulously.
“Lord sakes, Dave Titus, then what’s she doin’ here alone with you?” she
exclaimed, the weariness coming back into her voice at the last of the
phrase. “Oh, you go ’long! You don’t know nothin’ about women!”
This was quite too much for Dave, whose instincts, fined by long months
in the companionship of only the great trees, the great winds, and the
grave stars, had grown unerringly delicate. His own face flushed up now
for Miranda’s sake.
“I’d take it kindly of ye, Sary Ann, if ye’d quit the subject right
there,” he said quietly. But there was a firmness in his voice which the
woman understood.
“The both of ye must be nigh dead for somethin’ to eat,” she said. “I
must git ye supper right off.” And she turned to the fireplace and
filled the kettle.
Thereafter, through supper, and through the short evening, Miranda had
never a word for Dave. She talked a little, kindly and without showing
her resentment, to Mrs. White; but her attentions were entirely absorbed
in little Jimmy. Indeed, she had Jimmy very much to herself, for Mrs.
White got Dave to help with the chores and the milking. Afterward, about
the hearth-fire,—maintained for its cheer and not for warmth,—Mrs. White
confined her conversation largely to Dave. She was not angry at him on
account of his rebuke—but vaguely aggrieved at Miranda as the cause of
it. She began to feel that Miranda was different from other girls, from
what she herself had been as a girl. Miranda’s fineness and
sensitiveness were something of an offence to her, though she could not
define them at all. She characterized them vaguely by the phrase “stuck
up”; and became presently inclined to think that a fine fellow like Dave
was too good for her. Still, she was a fair-minded woman in her worn,
colourless way; and she could not but allow there must be a lot in
Miranda if little Jimmy took to her so—“For a child knows a good heart,”
she said to herself.
Next morning, soon after dawn, the travellers were off, Miranda tearing
herself with difficulty from little Jimmy’s embrace, and leaving him in
a desolation of tears. She was quite civil and ordinary with Dave now,
so much so that good, obtuse, weary Mrs. White concluded that all was at
rights again. But Dave felt the icy difference; and he was too proud, if
not for the time too hopeless, to try to thaw it. During all the long,
laborious journey upward through the rapids, by poling, he did wonders
of skill and strength, but in utter silence. His feats were not lost
upon Miranda, but she hardened her heart resolutely; for now a shame,
which she had never known before, gave tenacity to her anger. Through it
all, however, she couldn’t help thrilling to the strife with the loud
rapids, and exulting in the slow, inexorable conquest of them. The
return march through the woods was in the main a silent one, as before;
but how different a silence! Not electric with meaning, but cold, the
silence of a walled chamber. And, as if the spirits of the wood
maliciously enjoyed Dave’s discomfiture, they permitted no incident, no
diversion. They kept the wood-folk all away, they emptied of all life
and significance the forest spaces. And Dave grew sullen.
Arriving back at the clearing just before sundown, they paused at the
cabin door. Dave looked into Miranda’s eyes with something of reproach,
something of appeal. Kirstie’s voice, talking cheerfully to Kroof, came
from the raspberry brambles behind the house. Miranda stretched out her
hand with a cool frankness, and returned his look blankly.
“I’ve had a real good time, thank you, Dave,” she said. “You’ll find
mother yonder, picking raspberries.”