Down the Columbia Part 8

Barely submerged rocks crowding the bank compelled us to wade in and lift the boat ahead even oftener than in Surprise Rapids. Andy always took the lead in this, but time after time my help was necessary to throw her clear. For the first time since I had boated in Alaska a good many years previously, I began to know the numbing effects of icy water.

The heavy exertion did a lot to keep the blood moving, but three or four minutes standing with the water up to mid-thigh sent the chill right in to the marrow of the bones, even when sweat was running off the face in streams. That started a sort of dull ache in the leg bones that kept creeping higher and higher the longer one remained in the water. That ache was the worst part of it; the flesh became dead to sensation very quickly, but that penetrating inward pain had more hurt in it every minute it was prolonged. It was bad enough in the legs, but when, submerged to the waist, as happened every now and then, the chill began to penetrate to the back-bone and stab the digestive organs, it became pretty trying. One realized then what really short shrift a man would have trying to swim for more than four or five minutes even in calm water of this temperature. That was about the limit for heart action to continue with the cold striking in and numbing the veins and arteries, a doctor had told Blackmore, and this seemed reasonable. Andy was repeatedly sick at the stomach after he had been wet for long above the waist. My own qualms were rather less severe (doubtless because I was exposed rather less), but I found myself very weak and unsteady after every immersion. A liberal use of rum would undoubtedly have been of some help for a while, but Blackmore was adamant against starting in on it as long as there was any bad water ahead. And as there was nothing but bad water ahead, this meant that--in one sense at least--we were a "dry ship."

I shall not endeavour to trace in detail our painful progress down "Twenty-One-Mile." Indeed, I could not do so even if I wanted, for the very good reason that my hands were so full helping with the boat all the way that I had no time to make notes, and even my mental record--usually fairly dependable--is hopelessly jumbled. Even Blackmore became considerably mixed at times. At the first four or five riffles below the lake he called the turn correctly, landing, lining, crossing and running just where he should have done so. Then his mind-map became less clear. Twice he lined riffles which it presently became plain we could have run, and then he all but failed to land above one where a well-masked "souse-hole" would have gulped the boat in one mouthful.

It was at this juncture that I asked him why he had never taken the trouble of making a rough chart of this portion of the river, so that he could be quite sure what was ahead. He said that the idea was a good one, and that it had often occurred to him. There were several reasons why he had never carried it out. One was, that he was always so mad when he was going down "Twenty-One-Mile" that he couldn't see straight, let alone write and draw straight. This meant that the chart would be of no use to him, even if some one else made it--unless, of course, he brought the maker along to interpret it. The main deterrent, however, had been the fact that he had always sworn each pa.s.sage should be his last, so that (according to his frame of mind of the moment) there would be no use for the chart even if he could have seen straight enough to make it, and to read it after it had been made.

The scenery--so far as I recall it--was grand beyond words to describe.

Cliff fronted cliff, with a jagged ribbon of violet-purple sky between.

Every few hundred yards creeks broke through the mountain walls and came cascading into the river over their spreading boulder "fans." Framed in the narrow notches from which they sprang appeared transient visions of sun-dazzled peaks and glaciers towering above wedge-shaped valleys swimming full of lilac mist. I saw these things, floating by like double strips of movie film, only when we were running in the current; when lining I was aware of little beyond the red line of the gunwale which I grasped, the imminent loom of Andy's grey-shirted shoulder next me, and the foam-flecked swirl of liquefied glacier enfolding my legs and swiftly converting them to stumpy icicles.

There was one comfort, though. The farther down river we worked away from the lake, the shorter became the stretches of lining and the longer the rapids that were runnable. That accelerated our progress materially, but even so Blackmore did not reckon that there was time to stop for pictures, or even for lunch. We were still well up to schedule, but he was anxious to work on a good margin in the event of the always-to-be-expected "unexpected." It was along toward three in the afternoon that, after completing a particularly nasty bit of lining a mile or two above the mouth of Yellow Creek, he came over and slapped me on the back. "That finishes it for the day, young man," he cried gaily.

"We can turn loose and run the rest of it now, and we'll do it h.e.l.l sizzling fast. It may also rejoice you to know that all the lining left for the whole trip is a couple of hundred yards at 'Rock Slide' and Death Rapids. All aboard for the Ferry!"

All of a sudden life had become a blessed thing again. For the first time I became aware that there were birds singing in the trees, flowers blooming in the protected shelves above high-water-mark, and maiden-hair ferns festooning the dripping grottoes of the cliffs. Dumping the water from our boots, Andy and I resumed our oars and swung the boat right out into the middle of the current. The first rapid we hit was a vicious side-winder, shaped like a letter "S," with overhanging cliffs playing battledore-and-shuttlec.o.c.k with the river at the bends. Blackmore said he would have lined it if the water had been two feet lower; as it was now we would get wetter trying to worry a boat round the cliffs than in slashing through. We got quite wet enough as it was. The rocks were not hard to avoid, but banging almost side-on into the great back-curving combers thrown off by the cliffs was just a bit terrifying. Slammed back and forth at express-train speed, with nothing but those roaring open-faced waves buffeting against the cliffs, was somewhat suggestive of the sensation you get from a quick double-bank in a big biplane. Only it was wetter--much wetter. It took Blackmore ten minutes of hard bailing to get rid of the splas.h.a.ge.

The succeeding rapids, though no less swift, were straighter, and easier--and dryer. Roos, perched up in the bow, announced that all was over but the digging, and started to sing "Old Green River." Andy and I joined in l.u.s.tily, and even Blackmore (though a lip-reader would have sworn he was mumbling over a rosary) claimed to be singing. Exultant as we all were over the prize so nearly within our grasp, we must have put a world of feeling into that heart-stirring chorus.

"I was drifting down the old Green River On the good ship _Rock-and-Rye_-- I drifted too far; I got stuck on the bar; I was out there alone, Wishing that I were home--

The Captain was lost, with all of the crew, So that there was nothing left to do; And I had to drink the whole Green River dry-igh To get back ho-ohm to you-oo-ou!"

Smoother and smoother became the going, and then--rather unexpectedly, it seemed to me--the water began to slacken its dizzy speed. Blackmore appeared considerably puzzled over it, I thought. Roos, turning sentimental, had started singing a song that he had learned from a phonograph, and in which, therefore, appeared numerous hiati.

"Now I know da-da-da-da-da-- Now I know the reason why-- Da-da-da-da----da-da-da-daah-- Now I know, yes, now I know!

Da-da-da, my heart...."

Blackmore frowned more deeply as the treble wail floated back to him, and then broke into the next "da-da" with a sudden growl. "I say, young feller," he roared, slapping sharply into the quieting water with his paddle blade; "if you know so _geesly_ much, I'm wondering if you'd mind loosening up on one or two things that have got _me_ buffaloed. First place, do I look like a man that had took a shot of hop?" "Not at all, sir," quavered Roos, who seemed rather fearful of an impending call-down. "I don't, huh?" went on the growl. "Then please tell me why what I knows is a ten-mile-an-hour current looks to me like slack water, and why I think I hear a roar coming round the next bend." "But the water _is_ slack," protested Roos, "and I've heard that roar for five minutes _myself_. Just another rapid, isn't it? The water always...."

"Rot!" roared the veteran. "There ain't no fall with a rip-raring thunder like that 'tween Yellow Creek and Death Rapids. Rot, I tell you!

I must ha' been doped after all."

Nevertheless, when that ground-shaking rumble a.s.sailed us in a raw, rough wave of savage sound as we pulled round the bend, Blackmore was not sufficiently confident of his "dope theory" to care to get any nearer to it without a preliminary reconnaissance. Landing a hundred yards above where a white "eyelash" of up-flipped water showed above a line of big rocks, we clambered down along the right bank on foot.

Presently all that had occurred was written clear for one who knew the way of a slide with a river, and the way of a river with a slide, to read as on the page of a book.

"A new rapid, and a whale at that!" gasped Blackmore in astonishment; "the first one that's ever formed on the Columbia in my time!"

The amazing thing that had happened was this: Sometime in the spring, a landslide of enormous size, doubtless started by an avalanche of snow far up in the Selkirks, had ripped the whole side of a mountain out and come down all the way across the river. As the pines were hurled _backward_ for a couple of hundred feet above the river on the right or Rocky Mountain bank, it seemed reasonable to believe that the dam formed had averaged considerably more than that in height. As this would have backed up the river for at least ten or twelve miles, it is probable that the lake formed must have been rising for a number of days before it flowed over the top of the barrier and began to sluice it away. On an incalculably larger scale, it was just the sort of thing we had heard and seen happening on Trident Creek, opposite our Kinbasket Lake camp.

Not the least remarkable thing in connection with the stupendous convulsion was the fact that a large creek was flowing directly down the great gash torn out by the slide and emptying right into the rapid which was left when the dam had been washed away. Blackmore was quite positive that there had been no creek at this point the last time he was there.

It seemed reasonable to suppose, therefore, that the slide, in removing a considerable section of mountain wall, had opened a new line of drainage for some little valley in the high Selkirks.

It was the great, rough fragments of cliff and native rock left after the earth had been sluiced out of the dam that remained to form the unexpected rapid which now confronted us. They had not yet been worn smooth like the rest of the river boulders, and it was this fact, doubtless, that gave the cascade tumbling through and over them such a raw, raucous roar.

The solution of the mystery of the appearance of the rapid was only an incident compared with the problem of how to pa.s.s it. There was a comparatively straight channel, but there was no possibility that the boat could live in the huge rollers that billowed down the middle of it.

Just to the right of the middle there was a smoother chute which looked better--provided the boat could be kept to it. Blackmore said that it looked like too much of a risk, and decided to try to line down the right bank--the one on which we had landed. As the river walls were too steep and broken to allow any of the outfit to be portaged, the boat would have to go through loaded.

A big uprooted pine tree, extending out fifty feet over the river and with its under limbs swept by the water, seemed likely to prove our worst difficulty, and I am inclined to believe it would have held us up in the end, even after we reached it. As things turned out, however, it troubled us not a whit, for the boat never got down that far. Right at the head of the rapid her bows jammed between two submerged boulders about ten feet from the bank, and there she stuck. As it was quickly evident that it was out of the question to lift her on through, it now became a problem of working her back up-stream out of the jaws that held her. But with the full force of the current driving her tighter between the rocks, she now refused to budge even in the direction from which she had come.

As I look back on it now, the fifteen minutes Andy and I, mid-waist deep in the icy water, spent trying to work that hulking red boat loose so that Blackmore could haul her back into quiet water for a fresh start takes pride of place as the most miserable interval of the whole trip.

After Andy's experience in Surprise Rapids, neither of us was inclined to throw his whole weight into a lift that might leave him overbalanced when the boat was swept out of his reach. And so we pulled and hauled and cursed (I should hate to have to record all we said about the ancestry of the river, the boat, and the two rocks that held the boat), while the tentacles of the cold clutched deeper with every pa.s.sing minute. Roos, sitting on a pine stump and whittling, furnished no help but some slight diversion. When he started singing "Old Green River"

just after I had slipped and soused my head in the current, I stopped tugging at the boat for long enough to wade out and shy a stone at him.

"Green River"[1] was all right in its place, but its place was swirling against the _inside_ of the ribs, not the _outside_. Roos had the cheek to pick the rock up out of his lap and heave it back at me--but with an aim less certain than my own. A few minutes later he called out to Blackmore to ask if this new rapid had a name, adding that if it had not, he would like to do his employer, Mr. Chester, the honour of naming it after him. Blackmore relaxed his strain on the line for a moment to roar back that no rapid was ever named after a man unless he had been "drownded" in it. "We'll name this one after you if you'll do the needful," he growled as an afterthought, throwing his weight again onto his line. That tickled Andy and me so mightily that we gave a prodigious heave in all recklessness of consequences, and off she came. Gaining the bank with little trouble, we joined Blackmore and helped him haul her up by line into slower water.

[1] For the benefit of those who have forgotten, or may never have known, I will state that "Green River" was the name of a brand of whisky consumed by ancient Americans with considerable gusto. L. R. F.

"No good lining," the "Skipper" announced decidedly, as we sat down to rest for a spell; "I'm going to drive her straight through." Chilled, weary and dead-beat generally, I was in a state of mind that would have welcomed jumping into the rapid with a stone tied to my neck rather than go back to the half-submerged wading and lifting. Roos said he hated to risk his camera, and so would try to crawl with it over the cliff and rejoin us below the rapid. Andy said he was quite game to pull his oar for a run if we had to, but that he would first like to try lining down the opposite bank. He thought we could make it _there_, and he had just a bit of a doubt about what might happen in mid-river. That was reasonable enough, and Blackmore readily consented to try the other side.

[Ill.u.s.tration: OUR WETTEST CAMP AT KINBASKET LAKE (_above_)]

[Ill.u.s.tration: THE OLD FERRY TOWER ABOVE CANOE RIVER (_below_)]

[Ill.u.s.tration: WHERE WE TIED UP AT KINBASKET LAKE (_above_)]

[Ill.u.s.tration: THE BRIDGE WHICH THE COLUMBIA CARRIED A HUNDRED MILES AND PLACED ACROSS ANOTHER STREAM (_center_)]

[Ill.u.s.tration: LINING DOWN TO THE HEAD OF DEATH RAPIDS (_below_)]

Almost at once it appeared that we had landed in the same trouble as on the right bank. Directly off the mouth of the stream that came down from the slide the bow of the boat was caught and held between two submerged rocks, defying our every attempt to lift it over. Blackmore was becoming impatient again, and was just ready to give up and run, when Andy, with the aid of a young tree-trunk used as a lever, rolled one of the boulders aside and cleared the way. Five minutes later we had completed lining down and were pushing off for the final run to the Ferry. No more "mystery rapids" cropped up to disturb our voyage, and, pulling in deep, swift water, we made the next five miles in twenty-five minutes. A part of the distance was through the rocky-walled Red Canyon, one of the grandest scenic bits of the Bend. At one point Blackmore showed us a sheer-sided rock island, on which he said he had once found the graves of two white men, with an inscription so worn as to be indecipherable. He thought they were probably those of miners lost during the Cariboo gold-field excitement of the middle of the last century, or perhaps even those of Hudson Bay _voyageurs_ of a century or more back. There were many unidentified graves all the way round the Bend, he said.

The river walls fell back a bit on both sides as we neared our destination, and the low-hanging western sun had found a gap in the Selkirks through which it was pouring its level rays to flood with a rich amber light the low wooded benches at the abandoned crossing. The old Ferry-tower reared itself upward like the Statue of Liberty, bathing its head in the golden light of the expiring day. Steering for it as to a beacon, Blackmore beached the boat on a gravel bar flanking an eddy almost directly under the rusting cable. We would cross later to spend the night in a trapper's cabin on the opposite bank, he said; as there was sure to be a shovel or two in the old ferry shacks, he had come there at once so as to get down to business without delay.

Right then and there, before we left the boat, I did a thing which I have been greatly gratified that I did do--right then and there. I drew my companions close to me and a.s.sured them that I had made up my mind to divide the spoils with them. Blackmore and Andy should have a gallon apiece, and Roos a quart. (I scaled down the latter's share sharply, partly because he had thrown that stone back at me, and the nerve of it rankled, and partly--I must confess--out of "professional jealousy."

"Stars" and "Directors" never do hit off.) The rest I would retain and divide with Captain Armstrong as agreed. I did not tell them that I had high hopes that Armstrong would soften in the end and let me keep it all to take home. After all of them (including Roos) had wrung my hand with grat.i.tude, we set to work, each in his own way.

The spot was readily located the moment we took the compa.s.s bearing.

Pacing off was quite unnecessary. It was in the angle of a V-shaped outcrop of bedrock, where a man who knew about what was there could feel his way and claw up the treasure in the dark. It was an "inevitable"

hiding place, just as Gibraltar is an inevitable fortress and Manhattan an inevitable metropolis. Yes, we each went to work in our own way.

Blackmore and Andy found a couple of rusty shovels and went to digging; Roos climbed up into the old ferry basket to take a picture of them digging; I climbed up on the old shack to take a picture of Roos taking a picture of them digging. Nothing was omitted calculated to preserve historical accuracy. I had been in Baalbek just before the war when a German archaeological mission had inaugurated excavation for Phoenician antiquities, and so was sapient in all that an occasion of the kind required.

The picture cycle complete, I strolled over to where Andy and Blackmore were making the dirt fly like a pair of Airedales digging out a badger.

The ground was soft, they said, leaning on their shovels; it ought to be only the matter of minutes now. The "showings" were good. They had already unearthed a glove, a tin cup and a fragment of barrel iron.

"Gorgeous stroke of luck for us that chap, K----, hit the stuff so hard up at Kinbasket," I murmured ecstatically. Blackmore started and straightened up like a man hit with a steel bullet. "What was that name again?" he gasped. "K----," I replied wonderingly; "some kind of a Swede, I believe Armstrong said. But what difference does his name make as long as...."

Blackmore tossed his shovel out of the hole and climbed stiffly up after it before he replied. When he spoke it was in a voice thin and trailing, as though draggled by the Weariness of the Ages. "Difference, boy! All the difference between h.e.l.l and happiness. About two years ago K---- dropped out of sight from Revelstoke, and it was only known he had gone somewhere on the Bend. A week after he returned he died in the hospital of the 'D. T's.'"

Roos (perhaps because he had the least to lose by the disaster) was the only one who had the strength to speak. It seemed that he had studied Latin in the high school. "_Sic transit gloria spiritum frumenti_," was what he said. Never in all the voyage did he speak so much to the point.

Blackmore frowned at him gloomily as the mystic words were solemnly p.r.o.nounced. "Young feller," he growled, "I don't savvy what the last part of that drug-store lingo you're spitting means; but you're dead right about the first part. _Sick_ is sure the word."

We spent the night in an empty trapper's cabin across the river. Charity forbids that I lift the curtain of the house of mourning.

CHAPTER VIII

III. RUNNING THE BEND

_Boat Encampment to Revelstoke_