The River and I Part 7

The avoidance of that one awful possibility is enough to make any man feel lucky all his life. It's such fun to awaken in the morning with all your legs and arms and eyes and ears about you, waiting to be used again! So strong was this thought in me when we cast off, that even the memory of Bill's amateurish pancakes couldn't keep back the whistle.

The current of the Black Bluffs Rapids whisked us from the bank with a giddy speed, spun us about a right-angled bend, and landed us in a long quiet lake. Contrary to the average opinion, the Upper Missouri is merely a succession of lakes and rapids. In the low-water season, this statement should be italicised. When you are pushing down with the power of your arms alone the rapids show you how fast you want to go, and the lakes show you that you can't go that fast. For the teaching of patience, the arrangement is admirable. But when head winds blow, a three-mile reach means about a two-hour fight.

This being a very invigorating morning, however, the engine decided to take a const.i.tutional. It ran. Below the mouth of the Marias River, twenty minutes later, we grounded on Archer's Bar and shut down. After dragging her off the gravel, we discovered that the engine wished to sleep. No amount of cranking could arouse it. Now and then it would say "_squash_," feebly rolling its wheel a revolution or two--like a sleepy-head brushing off a fly with a languid hand.

A light breeze had sprung up out of the west. The stream ran east and northeast. We hastily rigged a tarp on a pair of oars spliced for a mast, and proceeded at a care-free pace. The light breeze ruffled the surface of the slow stream;

"----yet still the sail made on A pleasant noise till noon."

In the lazy heat of the mounting sun, tempered by the cool river draught, the yellow sandstone bluffs, whimsically decorated with spa.r.s.e patches of greenery, seemed to waver as though seen through shimmering silken gauze. And over it all was the hush of a dream, except when, in a spasmodic freshening of the breeze, the rude mast creaked and a sleepy watery murmur grew up for a moment at the wake.

Now and then at a break in the bluffs, where a little coulee entered the stream, the gray ma.s.ses of the bull-berry bushes lifted like smoke, and from them, flame-like, flashed the vivid scarlet of the berry-cl.u.s.ters, smiting the general dreaminess like a haughty cry in a silence.

A wilderness indeed! It seemed that waste land of which Tennyson sang, "where no man comes nor hath come since the making of the world." I thought of the steamboats and the mackinaws and the keel-boats and the thousands of men who had pushed through this dream-world and the thought was unconvincing. Fairies may have lived here, indeed; and in the youth of the world, a glad young race of G.o.ds might have dreamed gloriously among the yellow crags. But surely we were the first men who had ever pa.s.sed that way--and should be the last.

Suddenly the light breeze boomed up into a gale. The _Atom_, with bellying sail, leaped forward down the roughening water, swung about a bend, raced with a quartering wind down the next reach, shot across another bend--and lay drifting in a golden calm. Still above us the great wind buzzed in the crags like a swarm of giant bees, and the waters about us lay like a sheet of flawless gla.s.s.

With paddles we pushed on lazily for an hour. At the next bend, where the river turned into the west, the great gale that had been roaring above us, suddenly struck us full in front. Sucking up river between the wall rocks on either side, its force was terrific. You tried to talk while facing it, and it took your breath away. In a few minutes, in spite of our efforts with the paddles, we lay pounding on the shallows of the opposite sh.o.r.e.

We got out. Two went forward with the line and the third pushed at the stern. Progress was slow--no more than a mile an hour. The clear water of the upper river is always cold, and the great wind chilled the air.

Even under the August noon it took brisk work to keep one's teeth from chattering. The bank we were following became a precipice rising sheer from the river's edge, and the water deepened until we could no longer wade. We got in and poled on to the next shallows, often for many minutes at a time barely holding our own against the stiff gusts. For two hours we dragged the heavily laden boat, sometimes walking the bank, sometimes wading in mid-stream, sometimes poling, often swimming with the line from one shallow to another. And the struggle ended as suddenly as it began. Upon rounding the second bend the head wind became a stern wind, driving us on at a jolly clip until nightfall.

During the late afternoon, we came upon a place where the Great Northern Railroad touches the river for the last time in five hundred miles. Here we saw two Italian section hands whiling away their Sunday with fishing rods. I went ash.o.r.e, hoping to buy some fish. Neither of the two could speak English, and Italian sounds to me merely like an unintelligible singing. However, they gave me to understand that the fish were not for sale, and my proffered coin had no persuasive powers.

Still wanting those fish, I rolled a smoke, carelessly whistling the while a strain from an opera I had once heard. For some reason or other that strain had been in my head all day. I had gotten up in the morning with it; I had whistled it during the fight with the head wind. The Kid called it "that Dago tune." I think it was something from _Il Trovatore_.

Suddenly one of the little Italians dropped his rod, stood up to his full height, lifted his arms very much after the manner of an orchestra leader and joined in with me. I stopped--because I saw that he _could_ whistle. He carried it on with much expression to the last thin note with all the ache of the world in it. And then he grinned at me.

"Verdi!" he said sweetly.

I applauded. Whereat the little Italian produced a bag of tobacco. We sat down on the rocks and smoked together, holding a wordless but perfectly intelligble conversation of pleasant grins.

That night we had fish for supper! I got them for a song--or, rather, for a whistle. I was fed with more than fish. And I went to sleep that night with a glorious thought for a pillow: Truth expressed as Art is the universal language. One immortal strain from Verdi, poorly whistled in a wilderness, had made a Dago and a Dutchman brothers!

Scarcely had the crackling of the ruddy log lulled us to sleep, when the night had flitted over like a shadow, and we were cooking breakfast. A lone, gray wolf, sitting on his haunches a hundred paces away, regarded us curiously. Doubtless we were new to his generation; for in the evening dusk we had drifted well into the Bad Lands.

Bad Lands? Rather the Land of Awe!

A light stern wind came up with the sun. During the previous evening we had rigged a cat-sail, and noiselessly we glided down the glinting trail of crystal into the "Region of Weir."

On either hand the sandstone cliffs reared their yellow ma.s.ses against the cloudless sky. Worn by the ebbing floods of a prehistoric sea, carved by the winds and rains of ages, they presented a panorama of wonders.

Rows of huge colonial mansions with pillared porticoes looked from their dizzy terraces across the stream to where soaring mosques and mystic domes of worship caught the sun. It was all like the visible dream of a master architect gone mad. Gaunt, sinister ruins of medieval castles sprawled down the slopes of una.s.sailable summits. Grim brown towers, haughtily crenellated, scowled defiance on the unappearing foe. t.i.tanic stools of stone dotted barren garden slopes, where surely G.o.ds had once strolled in that far time when the stars sang and the moon was young.

Dark red walls of regularly laid stone--huge as that the Chinese flung before the advance of the Northern hordes--held imaginary empires asunder. Poised on a dizzy peak, Jove's eagle stared into the eye of the sun, and raised his wings for the flight deferred these many centuries.

Kneeling face to face upon a lonesome summit, their hands clasped before them, their backs bent as with the burdens of the race, two women prayed the old, old woman prayer. The snow-white ruins of a vast cathedral lay along the water's edge, and all about it was a hush of worship. And near it, arose the pointed pipes of a colossal organ--with the summer silence for music.

With a lazy sail we drifted through this place of awe; and for once I had no regrets about that engine. The popping of the exhaust would have seemed sacrilegious in this holy quiet.

Seldom do men pa.s.s that way. It is out of the path of the tourist. No excursion steamers ply those awesome river reaches. Across the sacred whiteness of that cathedral's imposing ma.s.s, no sign has ever been painted telling you the merits of the best five-cent cigar in the world!

Few besides the hawks and the crows would see it, if it were there.

And yet, for all the quiet in this land of wonder, somehow you cannot feel that the place is unpeopled. Surely, you think, invisible knights clash in tourney under those frowning towers. Surely a lovelorn maiden spins at that castle window, weaving her heartache into the magic figures of her loom. Stately dames must move behind the shut doors of those pillared mansions; devotees mutter Oriental prayers beneath those sun-smitten domes. And amid the awful inner silence of that cathedral, white-robed priests lift wan faces to their G.o.d.

Under the beat of the high sun the light stern wind fell. The slack sail drooped like a sick-hearted thing. Idly drifting on the slow gla.s.sy flood, we seemed only an incidental portion of this dream in which the deepest pa.s.sions of man were bodied forth in eternal fixity. Towers of battle, domes of prayer, fanes of worship, and then--the kneeling women!

Somehow one couldn't whistle there. Bill and the Kid, little given to sentiment, sat quietly and stared.

Late in the afternoon we found ourselves out of this "Region of Weir."

Great wall rocks soared above us. Consulting our map, we found that we were nearing Eagle Rapids, the first of a turbulent series. I had fondly antic.i.p.ated shooting them all under power. So once more I decided to go over that engine. We landed at the wooded mouth of a little ravine, having made a trifle over twenty miles that day.

With those tools of the engine doctor--an air of mystery and a monkey-wrench--I unscrewed everything that appeared to have a thread on it, and pulled out the other things. The odds, I figured, were in my favor. A sick engine is useless, and I felt a.s.sured of either killing or curing. I did something--I don't know what; but having achieved the complete s.c.r.e.w.i.n.g up and driving in of things--_it went_!

So on the morning of the fourth day, we were up early, eager for the shooting of rapids. We had understood from the conversation of the seemingly wise, that Eagle Rapids was the first of a series that made the other rapids we had pa.s.sed through look like mere ripples on the surface. In some of those we had gone at a very good clip, and several times we had lost our rudder.

I remembered how the steamboats used to be obliged to throw out cables and slowly wind themselves up with the power of the "steam n.i.g.g.e.r." I also remembered the words of Father de Smet: "There are many rapids, ten of which are very difficult to ascend and very dangerous to go down."

We had intended from the very first to get wrecked in one or all of these rapids. For this reason we had distributed forward, aft, and amidships, eight five-gallon cans, soldered air-tight. The frail craft would, we figured, be punctured. The cans would displace nearly three hundred and fifty pounds of water, and the boat and engine, submerged, would lose a certain weight. I had made the gruesome calculation with fond attention to detail. I decided that she should be wrecked quite arithmetically. We should be able, the figures said, to recover the engine and patch the boat. We had provided three life-preservers, but one had been stolen; so I had fancied what a bully fight one might have if he should be thrown out into the mad waters without a life-preserver.

I have never been able to explain it satisfactorily; it is one of the paradoxes; but human nature seems to take a weird delight in placing in jeopardy that which is dearest. Even a coward with his fingers clenched desperately on the ragged edge of hazard, feels an inexplicable thrill of glory. Having several times been decently scared, I know.

One likes to take a sly peep behind the curtain of the big play, hoping perhaps to get a slight hint as to what machinery hoists the moon, and what sort of contrivance flings the thunder and lightning, and many other things that are none of his business. Only, to be sure, he intends to get away safely with his information. When you think you see your finish bowing to receive you, something happens in your head. It's like a sultry sheet of rapid fire lapping up for a moment the thunder-shaken night--and discovering a strange land to you. And it's really good for you.

Under half speed we cruised through the windless golden morning; and the lonesome canyon echoed and re-echoed with the joyful chortle of the resurrected engine. We had covered about ten miles, when a strange sighing sound grew up about us. It seemed to emanate from the soaring walls of rock. It seemed faint, yet it arose above the din of the explosions, drowned out the droning of the screw.

Steadily the sound increased. Like the ghost of a great wind it moaned and sighed about us. Little by little a new note crept in--a sibilant, metallic note as of a tense sheet of silk drawn rapidly over a thin steel edge.

[Ill.u.s.tration: WOLF POINT, THE FIRST TOWN IN 500 MILES.]

[Ill.u.s.tration: ENTRANCE TO THE BAD LANDS.]

We knew it to be the mourning voice of the Eagle Rapids; but far as we could see, the river was quiet as a lake. We jogged on for a mile, with the invisible moaning presence about us. It was somewhat like the intangible something you feel about a powerful but sinister personality.

The golden morning was saturated with it.

Suddenly, turning a sharp bend about the wall of rock that flanked the channel, a wind of noise struck us. It was like the hissing of innumerable snakes against a tonal background of m.u.f.fled continuous thunder. A hundred yards before us was Eagle Rapids--a forbidding patch of writhing, whitening water, p.r.i.c.ked with the upward thrust of toothlike rocks.

The first sight of it turned the inside of me mist-gray. Temporarily, wrecks and the arithmetic of them had little charm for me. I seized the spark-lever, intending to shut down. Instead, I threw it wide open. With the resulting leap of the craft, all the gray went out of me.

I grasped the rudder ropes and aimed at a point where the sinuous current sucked through a pa.s.sage in the rocks like a lean flame through a windy flue. Did you ever hear music that made you see purple? It was that sort of purple I saw (or did I hear it like music?) when we plunged under full speed into the first suck of the rapids. We seemed a conscious arrow hurled through a gray, writhing world, the light of which was noise. And then, suddenly, the quiet, golden morning flashed back; and we were ripping the placid waters of a lake.

The Kid broke out into boisterous laughter that irritated me strangely: "Where the devil do you suppose our life-preservers are?" he bawled.

"They're clear down under all the cargo!"

A world of wonderful beauty was forging past us. In the golden calm, the scintillant sheet of water seemed to be rushing backward, splitting itself over the prow, like a fabric woven of gold and silver drawn rapidly against a keen stationary blade.

The sheer cliffs had fallen away into pine-clad slopes, and vari-colored rocks flung notes of scarlet and gold through the sombre green of the pines--like the riotous treble cries of an organ p.r.i.c.king the sullen murmur of the ba.s.s. So still were the clean waters that we seemed midway between two skies.

We skirted the base of a conical rock that towered three hundred feet above us--a t.i.tan sentinel. It was the famous Sentinel Rock of the old steamboat days. I shut the engine down to quarter speed, for somehow from the dizzy summit a sad dream fell upon me and bade me linger.

I stared down into the cold crystal waters at the base of the rock.

Many-colored mosses, sickly green, pale, feverish red, yellow like fear, black like despair, purple like the lips of a strangled man, clung there. I remembered an old spring I used to haunt when I was just old enough to be awed by the fact of life and frightened at the possibility of death. Just such mosses grew in the depths of that spring. I used to stare into it for hours.