Now, Charley, if you value my blessing and your own welfare, never get
into an Indian canoe. I ought to know something of uncomfortable
conveyances, having crossed Central Asia with camels, gone a hundred
miles into the Sahara in an Arab wagon, drifted over the Volga on a
block of ice, and shot an Icelandic torrent in a leaky boat. But all
these fall far, far short of the glorious uncomfortableness of my canoe.
Louis XI. would have given any money for such an invention when he
wanted to torture Cardinal Balue. I sat, and forthwith fell down on my
back; I knelt, and promptly fell forward on my nose. I even tried to
squat cross-legged, forgetting that Achmet Bey had spent three days in
vainly showing me how _not_ to do it when I was with him in Arabia; and
how I _did_ finally manage to stow myself I haven't found out yet. If
the Indians had scolded or laughed at my mishaps, or even noticed them
at all, it would not have been so bad, but their calm, silent,
statuesque disapproval of everything I did made me feel as small as the
first boy who breaks down at a spelling bee.
My first night was a very queer experience. Beyond the circle of light
cast by our camp fire the great black shadow of the forest looked
blacker and vaster than ever, and in its gloomy depths no sound was
heard but the ghostly rustle of the leaves, which seemed to be
whispering to each other some horrible secret. Then up rose the cold
moon, glinting spectrally through the trees upon the swirling foam, and
giving strange and goblin shapes to the huge trunks all around. In that
dreary silence the hoarse sough of the river sounded unnaturally loud,
and the wild faces of the Indians, seen and gone again by turns as the
fire-glow waxed and waned, looked quite unearthly. But the mosquitoes
soon gave me something else to think about, I can promise you.
For the next two days I enjoyed camp life in all its fullness--a
buffalo-robe for bedding, a jackknife for dinner service, a camp fire
for kitchen range, a freshly caught fish for breakfast, a water-fall for
shower-bath. The very sense of existence seemed a pleasure in that
glorious atmosphere, which made one feel always hungry, but never tired;
and to jump into a swollen river, clothes and all, to carry the canoe a
mile or more over broken ground, to start splitting wood at night-fall
after voyaging all day, to get out on a wet rock at midnight and begin
fishing, came quite natural. Once or twice I felt as if I must really
give vent to my superfluous vitality by shouting or singing at the top
of my voice, and was only deterred from striking up "I paddle my own
canoe" by the reflection that I hadn't paddled it a foot since we
started.
On the second day we passed several water-falls, and it was a rare sight
to see the floating trees plunge over them. Sometimes a big trunk would
stop short on the very brink, as if shrinking back, and then it would
give a kind of leap forward, and over it would go--a regular suicide in
dumb-show. A little below one of the falls the floating timber had
drifted together into such a mass that it fairly blocked the channel,
forming a barricade several hundred feet broad, and we had to get out
and drag the canoe bodily over it as best we might. If you've ever
walked over an acre of harrows piled on an acre of trucks, you'll know
what kind of footing we had, and it's a marvel to me that I've got a leg
left to stand on.
A little farther I espied a great shaggy beast, not unlike a bear,
coming out of the river with a big fish in his mouth. I fired at him,
but the bullet probably hit him too obliquely to pierce his thick hide.
That's _my_ theory at least; the Indians were mean enough to suggest
that I never hit him at all.
On the third morning we came to a huge beaver dam, bigger than any I'd
seen in Canada, and as neatly put together as any dike in Holland. The
fur-coated gentlemen were hard at work when we appeared, some gnawing at
the trees, while others plastered the dam with mud, using their broad
tails for trowels. But at our coming they all went splash, splash into
the water, which was all alive for a moment with dancing ripples and
flapping tails--a regular fac-simile of that scene in _The Last of the
Mohicans_ over which we used to laugh so.
Of course we had to make another "portage" with the canoe; and while we
were dragging it along, up jumped a barefooted boy from among the
bushes, and lent us a hand with it. A splendid young savage he was, who
would have quite delighted my old friend Tom Hughes of Rugby. Straight
as a pine, keen-eyed as an eagle, so supple and sinewy that one might
almost have rolled him up and pocketed him like a ball of twine. He told
me he was "after beaver," and had done pretty well this season, trapping
and what not. I gave him some tobacco, which seemed to please him
mightily, and he repaid me with what my New York friends would call "a
tall yarn":
"Time when beaver hats was all the go (which don't I just wish they was
_now_!) a feller went for a swim in a river one day, leavin' his hat and
things on the bank. It happened to be pretty close to a beaver dam; and
when he cum out agin, fust thing he seed was two young beavers a-weepin'
over his hat, 'cause they knowed it for the skin o' their father."
Toward four that afternoon we began to hear a dull booming roar far away
ahead. You should have seen the Indians' eyes flash when they heard it!
_They_ knew the sound of the rapids well enough. All at once the sloping
banks seemed to grow high and steep, and the overhanging pines to go far
away up into the air, and the channel to get dark and narrow, and the
stream to go rushing along like a mill-race. Then suddenly we swung
around a huge black rock, and were fairly in the thick of it.
After that I have only a confused recollection of being tossed and
banged about in a whirl of boiling foam, and clinging like grim death to
the sides of the canoe, while the river itself seemed somehow to be
standing stock-still, and the great cliffs on each side to be flying
past like an express train. The whole air was filled with a hoarse
grinding roar that seemed to shake the very sky, and the spray came
lashing into my face till I was glad to shut my eyes.
When I opened them again I almost thought I was dreaming. Instead of the
foaming river and the frowning precipices, we were floating on a broad
smooth lake, with a little toy town pasted on the green slope above us,
and half a dozen big fellows in red shirts running down to welcome us
in.
But I must break off, for I'm so sleepy, after hauling timber all day,
that I can hardly sit upright. Remember me kindly to all your folks, and
believe me
Yours to death (or till my next railway journey, which is much the same
nowadays),