A DOUBLE SURPRISE
The thing happened on a fine quiet summer afternoon. Ganawa and Ray
were enjoying the fine weather near the tepee. Bruce had taken the
canoe and the dog across the river and was sitting on a knoll from
which he had a fine view of a short stretch of the river. He was
thinking over the plan that Ganawa had proposed for the future. “We
must either travel up the river,” Ganawa had said, “or we must start
off for another part of the country, perhaps to some big lake.”
The whole plan seemed sort of bootless and headless to Bruce and he
felt decidedly blue about the whole outlook. “We might as well,” he
thought, “hunt for a certain pebble somewhere on the shore of Lake
Superior, as expect to find Jack Dutton or anybody else in this endless
wilderness of a million lakes and streams and rivers and rocky hills.
If anybody lived in this God-forsaken country, the black flies and
mosquitoes wouldn’t be so hungry. I think Jack and I were a couple of
big ...” and then the train of his thought was suddenly broken by
something he saw coming around the bend in the river. Bruce stood up to
make sure he was not mistaken. No, there it was. An Indian in a small
birch-bark canoe was paddling hard up-stream, and the fellow had a gun
leaning in the bow of the canoe. He was close to the other shore, and
would see Ganawa’s camp before Ganawa or Ray were likely to see him.
Bruce knew that Ganawa expected no friendly visitor, in fact, he
thought he recognized the Indian. Bruce was too far from camp to call
to Ganawa. For a moment he did not know what to do, and then he did a
desperate thing. He fired his gun and let out as wild a yell as he
could utter.
At the sound of the gun the Indian stopped, turned his canoe and
paddled down-stream as fast as he could go. Bruce and Tawny did their
best to follow along the bank, but as there was no trail on that side
of the stream they could not keep up with the fleeing canoe. It was
with some difficulty that Bruce restrained the dog from jumping into
the swift current. Several times Bruce almost kicked the dog back into
the brush. “Get back, you fool dog,” he called. “You will go over the
falls!” And while Bruce tried to keep the fleeing Indian in sight, he
wondered if Ganawa and Ray had heard his shot and his yell, and he felt
much provoked that they did not turn out to capture the fellow when he
had to land above the falls.
Only once the fleeing Indian looked around and Bruce yelled in
Chippewa: “Stop! Stop! Get him, Ganawa!” And again he had to restrain
the madly barking dog from jumping into the treacherous smooth current
just above the falls.
And then Bruce felt as if his heart was going to stop beating. That
Indian was losing control of his canoe. He was straining every muscle
to land on the left bank; but, as if pulled by invisible hands, that
canoe was drawn to the right and was approaching that terrible narrow
chute, which is the beginning of the roaring falls. For a brief half
minute Bruce watched the struggle between the man and the river. But
just as Bruce expected the man and the canoe to be drawn into the
chute, the Indian stood up, dropped his paddle and, with a mighty
effort, sprang to a rock at the very head of the chute. He barely clung
to the rock with hands and feet, but the recoil of his spring pushed
the canoe into the chute, where a second or two it seemed to stand on
its head, and then it disappeared. For a moment it looked as if the
Indian was hurt and would not be able to move; but he recovered
quickly, bounded over the rocks, and ran down the steep trail to the
Big Pool.
Bruce walked back swiftly to the place where he had left the canoe and
crossed over to the camp. “I bet,” he thought, “Ray and Ganawa are both
asleep in the tepee.” But he was mistaken; the two had gone fishing to
the mouth of a small creek. Bruce at once followed them and found them
about a mile up-stream. When Ganawa heard what had happened his eyes
flashed, he dropped his pole and said, “We must go and follow the man’s
trail.”
On the way to camp he asked a number of questions of Bruce. “How did
the Indian look? What did he wear? Did he have a gun?”
“He was short and squatty,” Bruce told. “He wore his hair sort of
half-long, not in a braid. I did not get a good look at his face, but
when he looked around I thought he looked like a bad man, but I thought
he also looked scared.
“I was surprised to see him jump out of the canoe. He missed the rock
with his feet, but clung to it with his hands. He wore moccasins,
leggings, and a hunting-shirt of buckskin.”
“Did he have a gun?” Ganawa repeated somewhat eagerly.
“Yes, he had a gun,” Bruce asserted. “It was leaning in the bow of the
boat, but he jumped for the rock without it, and the gun went over the
falls with the canoe.”
“We must follow him,” repeated Ganawa. “If he had been a friend, he
would not have run away. He was a man who had some evil in his heart.
You must take Ohnemoosh, but you must tie a rope to him so he cannot
run away from us and make a big noise with barking and tell the man
that we are coming.”
On the way down the steep trail to the Big Pool, Ganawa pointed to some
tracks and whispered, “Wet moccasins,” and when Tawny smelled at the
tracks his hair bristled and he tried hard to break away from Ray.
If the lads had expected to find the Indian at the Big Pool, they were
disappointed. Several pieces of the canoe were travelling round and
round in the pool, and Ray caught a cedar-wood paddle, but of the gun
they found no trace. They followed the trail past the two miles of the
rapids below the pool with the dog eagerly leading and straining at the
rope, but a few rods below the rapids where the water flows along
placidly, carrying patches of foam on its surface, the dog lost the
trail.
Ray led him back several times and then released him so he could range
as he pleased, but it was all in vain; the trail either ended suddenly
or, for some reason, the dog could not follow it any farther.
The three sat down to think it over. The dog also sat down and with a
puzzled whine looked at his human friends as if to say: “I don’t know
what this means. Can’t you tell me?”
And then Ganawa arose and said: “My sons, I can tell you why the dog
cannot follow the trail beyond this point. The man stopped here, jumped
into the river and swam across. It is good that he lost his gun, for we
know now that he cannot come back and harm us during the night. We
should not follow him across the stream. It may be that he will never
come back, for he knows that his gun is lost and that his canoe was
broken where the river leaps over the big steps of the rocks to the
whirling pool. And now we must return to our camp, for we have not
tasted food since this morning, and we are all very hungry.”