CHAPTER VI

I. RUNNING THE BEND

_Through Surprise Rapids_

We pushed off from Beavermouth at three o'clock of the afternoon of September twenty-ninth. We had hoped for an early start, but the erratically running local freight, six or eight hours behind time, did not arrive with our boat until noon. The introductory shots had already been made. Made up momentarily as a gentleman--wearing an ankle length polished waterproof and a clean cap, that is,--I jumped the westbound Limited as it slowed down on entering the yard, dropping off presently at the platform with a "here-I-am" expression when Roos signalled that the focus was right. Then I shook hands with the waiting Blackmore, and together we strode to the door of the station and met the previously-rehearsed agent. (Roos had wanted me to shake hands with the agent as well as with Blackmore, but I overruled him by pointing out that I was a "gentleman-sportsman" not a "gentleman-politician," and served notice on him that pump-handling must henceforth be reduced to a minimum.) We tried to perfect the agent in a sweeping gesture that would say as plainly as words "The train with your boat is just around that next bend, sir," but somehow we couldn't prevent his trying to elevate his lowly part. His lips mumbled the words we had put on them all right, but the gesture was a grandiose thing such as a Chesterfieldian footman might have employed in announcing "My Lord, the carriage waits."

Roos, in all innocence, narrowly missed provoking a fight with a hot-tempered half-breed while he was setting up to shoot the incoming freight. He had an ingenious method of determining, without bending over his finder, just what his lens was going to "pick-up." This consisted of holding his arms at full length, with his thumbs placed tip to tip and the forefingers standing straight up. The right-angling digits then framed for his eye an approximation of his picture. To one not used to it this esoteric performance looked distinctly queer, especially if he chanced to be standing somewhere near the arch priest's line of vision. And that, as it happened, was exactly the place from which it was revealed to the choleric near-Shuswap section hand. I didn't need the breed's subsequent contrite explanation to know that, from where he had been standing, those twiddling thumbs and fingers, through the great fore-shortening of the arms, looked to be right on the end of the nose of the grimacing little man by the camera. Not even a self-respecting white man would have stood for what that twiddling connoted, let alone a man in whose veins flowed blood that must have been something like fifteen-sixteenths of the proudest of Canadian strains. Luckily, both Blackmore and his burly boatman were men of action. Even so, it was a near squeeze for both camera and cameraman. Roos emerged unscarred in anything but temperament. And, of course, as every one even on the fringes of the movies knows, the temperaments of both stars and directors are things that require frequent harrowing to keep them in good working order.

Roos' filming of the unloading of the boat was the best thing he did on the trip. Every available man in Beavermouth was requisitioned. This must have been something like twenty-five or thirty. A half dozen, with skids and rollers, could have taken the boat off without exerting themselves seriously, but could hardly have "made it snappy." And action was what the scene demanded. There was no time for a rehearsal. The agent simply told us where the car would be shunted to, Blackmore figured out the best line from there over the embankment and through the woods to the river, and Roos undertook to keep up with the procession with his camera. Blackmore was to superintend the technical operation and I was ordered to see that the men "acted natural." And thus we went to it. The big boat, which must have weighed close to half a ton, came off its flat car like a paper shallop, but the resounding thwack with which her bows hit a switch-frog awakened Blackmore's concern. "Easy! Easy! Don't bust her bottom," he began shouting; while I, on the other side, took up my refrain of "Don't look at the camera!--make it snappy." The consequence of these diametrically opposed orders was that the dozen or more men on my side did most of the work. But even so it was "snappy"--very.

Down the embankment we rushed like a speeding centipede, straight at the fine hog-proof wire fence of the C. P. R. right-of-way. That fence may have been hog-proof, but it was certainly not proof against the charge of a thirty-foot boat coming down a fifty per cent. grade pushed by twenty-five men. We had intended lifting over it, but our momentum was too great, especially after I had failed to desist from shouting "Make it snappy!" soon enough. The barrier gave way in two or three places, so that we were shedding trailing lengths of wire all the way to the river. On through the woods we juggernauted, Roos following in full cry. His city "news stuff" training was standing him in good stead, and he showed no less cleverness than agility in making successive "set-ups" without staying our progress. Only in the last fifty yards, where the going over the moss and pine needles was (comparatively speaking) lightning fast, did we distance him. Here, as there was plenty of time, he cut a hole in the trees and shot the launching through one of his favourite "sylvan frames." For the push-off shot he provided his customary heart throb by bringing down the station agent's three-year-old infant to wave farewell. That he didn't try to feature the mother prominently seemed to indicate that what I had said at Windermere on the subject had had some effect.

After the "farewell" had been filmed, we landed at the fire ranger's cabin to pick up Roos and his camera. The ranger told us that a couple of trappers who had been for some weeks engaged in portaging their winter supplies round Surprise Rapids would be waiting for us at the head of the first fall in the expectation of getting the job of packing our stuff down to the foot. "Nothing doing," Blackmore replied decisively; "going straight through." The ranger grinned and shook his grizzled head. "You're the man to do it," he said; "but jest the same, I'm glad it's you and not me that has the job."

The station agent came down with Roos, evidently with the cheering purpose of showing us the place where his predecessor and a couple of other men had been drowned in attempting to cross the river some months previously. "Only man in the boat to be picked up alive was a one-armed chap," he concluded impressively. "Too late now for operations on any of this crew," laughed Blackmore, pushing off with a pike-pole. "Besides, every man jack of us is going to have a two-arm job all the way." To the parting cheers of the mackinawed mob on the bank, he eased out into the current and headed her down the Bend.

Roos stationed himself in the bow, with camera set up on its shortened tripod, waiting to surprise any scenery caught lurking along the way. Blackmore steered from the stern with his seven-feet-long birch paddle. Andy Kitson and I, pulling starboard and port oars respectively, rubbed shoulders on the broad 'midship's thwart. Our outfit--a comparatively light load for so large a boat--was stowed pretty well aft. I saw Blackmore lean out to "con ship" as we got under way. "Good trim," he pronounced finally, with an approving nod. "Just load enough to steady her, and yet leave plenty of freeboard for the sloppy water. This ought to be a dryer run than some the old girl's had." I chuckled to myself over that "dryer." I hadn't told Blackmore yet what was hidden down Canoe River way. I had promised Captain Armstrong not to do so until I had ascertained that we had a teetotal crew--or one comparatively so.

Andy Kitson was a big husky North-of-Irelander, who had spent twenty years trapping, packing, hunting, lumbering and boating in western Canada. Like the best of his kind, he was deliberate and sparing of speech most of the time, but with a fine reserve vocabulary for emergency use. He was careful and cautious, as all good river boatmen should be, but decidedly "all there" in a pinch. He pulled a good round-armed thumping stroke with his big oar, and took to the water (as has to be done so frequently on a bad stretch of "lining down") like a beaver. Best of all, he had a temper which nothing from a leak in the tent dribbling down his neck to a half hour up to his waist in ice-cold water seemed equal to ruffling. I liked Andy the moment I set eyes on his shining red gill, and I liked him better and better every day I worked and camped with him.

As it was three-thirty when we finally pushed off, Blackmore announced that he would not try to make farther than "Eight-Mile" that afternoon. With comparatively good water all the way to the head of Surprise Rapids, we could have run right on through, he said; but that would force us to make camp after dark, and he disliked doing that unless he had to. In a current varying from three to eight miles an hour, we slid along down stream between banks golden-gay with the turning leaves of poplar, cottonwood and birch, the bright colours of which were strikingly accentuated by the sombre background of thick-growing spruce, hemlock, balsam and fir. Yellow, in a score of shades, was the prevailing colour, but here and there was a splash of glowing crimson from a patch of _chin-chinick_ or Indian tobacco, or a mass of dull maroon where a wild rose clambered over the thicket. Closely confined between the Rockies to the right and the Selkirks to the west, the river held undeviatingly to its general northwesterly course, with only the patchiest of flats on either side. And this was the openest part of the Bend, Blackmore volunteered; from the head of Surprise Rapids to the foot of Priest Rapids the Columbia was so steeply walled that we would not find room for a clearing large enough to support a single cow. "It's a dismal hole, and no mistake," he said.

We took about an hour to run to "Eight Mile," Andy and I pulling steadily all the way in the deep, smoothly-running current. We tied up in a quiet lagoon opening out to the west--evidently the mouth of a high-water channel. There was a magnificent stand of fir and spruce on a low bench running back from the river, not of great size on account of growing so thickly, but amazing lofty and straight. We camped in the shelter of the timber without pitching a tent, Andy and Blackmore sleeping in the open and Roos and I in a tumble-down trapper's cabin. Or rather we spread our blankets in the infernal hole. As the place was both damp and rat-infested, we did not sleep. Roos spent the night chopping wood and feeding the rust-eaten--and therefore smoky--sheet-iron stove. I divided my time between growling at Roos for enticing me into keeping him company in the cabin against Blackmore's advice, and throwing things at the prowling rodents. It did not make for increased cheerfulness when I hit him on the ear with a hob-nailed boot that I had intended for a pair of eyes gleaming vitreously on a line about six inches back of his gloomily bowed head. He argued--and with some reason I must admit--that I had no call to draw so fine a bead until I was surer of my aim. Largely as a point of repartee, I told him not to be too certain I was not sure of my aim. But I really had been trying to hit the rat....

I took the temperature of the air and the river water in the morning, finding the former to register thirty-eight degrees and the latter forty-one. There was a heavy mist resting on the river for a couple of hours after daybreak, but it was lifting by the time we were ready to push off. In running swift water good visibility is even more imperative than at sea, but as there was nothing immediately ahead to bother Blackmore did not wait for it to clear completely. The sun was shining brightly by nine-thirty, and Roos made several shots from the boat and one or two from the bank. One of the most remarkable sights unfolded to us was that of "Snag Town." Just what was responsible for this queer maze of upended trees it would be hard to say. It seems probable, however, that a series of heavy spring floods undermined a considerable flat at the bend of the river, carrying away the earth and leaving the trees still partially rooted. The broadening of the channel must have slowed down the current a good deal, and it appears never to have been strong enough to scour out below the tenaciously clinging roots. The former lords of the forest are all dead, of course, but still they keep their places, inclining down-stream perhaps twenty-degrees from their former proud perpendicular, and firmly anchored. It takes careful steering to thread the maze even in a small boat, but the current is hardly fast enough to make a collision of serious moment.

The current quickened for a while beyond "Snag Town" and then began slowing again, the river broadening and deepening meanwhile. I thought I read the signs aright and asked Blackmore. "Yes," he replied with a confirmatory nod; "it's the river backing up for its big jump. Stop pulling a minute and you can probably hear the rapid growling even here." Andy and I lay on our oars and listened. There it was surely enough, deep and distant but unmistakable--the old familiar drum-roll of a big river beating for the charge. It was tremendous music--heavy, air-quivering, earth-shaking; more the diapason of a great cataract than an ordinary rapid, it seemed to me. I was right. Surprise is anything but an ordinary rapid.

We pulled for a half hour or more down a broad stretch of slackening water that was more like a lake than a river. Out of the looming shadows of the banks for a space, mountain heights that had been cut off leaped boldly into view, and to left and right lifted a lofty sky-line notched with snowy peaks rising from corrugated fields of bottle-green glacier ice. Mt. Sanford, loftiest of the Selkirks, closed the end of the bosky perspective of Gold Creek, and the coldly chiselled pyramids of Lyell, Bryce and Columbia pricked out the high points on the Continental Divide of the Rockies. We held the vivid double panorama--or quadruple, really, for both ranges were reflected in the quiet water--for as long as it took us to pull to a beach at the narrowing lower end of the long lake-like stretch above the rapids, finally to lose it as suddenly as it had been opened to us behind the imminently-rearing river walls.

The two trappers of whom the fire-ranger at Beavermouth had spoken were waiting for us on the bank. They had permits for trapping on a couple of the creeks below Kinbasket Lake, and were getting down early in order to lay out their lines by the time the season opened a month or so hence. They had been packing their stuff over the three-mile portage to the foot of the rapids during the last three weeks, and now, with nothing left to go but their canoes, were free to give us a hand if we wanted them. Blackmore replied that he could save time and labour by running and lining the rapids. "Besides," he added with a grin, "I take it these movie people have come out to get pictures of a river trip, not an overland journey." The trappers took the dig in good part, but one of them riposted neatly. Since he was out for furs, he said, and was not taking pictures or boot-legging, time was not much of an object. The main thing with him was to reach his destination with his winter's outfit. If all the river was like Surprise Rapids he would be quite content to go overland all the way. Neither of them made any comments on the stage of the water or offered any suggestions in connection with the job we had ahead. That was one comfort of travelling with Blackmore. In all matters pertaining to river work his judgment appeared to be beyond criticism. If he was tackling a stunt with a considerable element of risk in it, that was his own business. No one else knew the dangers, and how to avoid them, so well as he.

Blackmore looked to the trim of the boat carefully before shoving off, putting her down a bit more by the stern it seemed to me. He cautioned me on only one point as we pulled across the quarter of mile to where the banks ran close together and the quiet water ended. "Don't never dip deep in the white water, and 'specially in the swirls," he said, stressing each word. "If you do, a whirlpool is more'n likely to carry your oar-blade under the boat and tear out half the side 'fore you can clear your oar-lock. That's the way that patched gunnel next you came to get smashed." As we were about at the point where it is well to confine all the talking done in the boat to one man, I refrained from replying that I had been told the same thing in a dozen or so languages, on four different continents, and by "skippers" with black, yellow and copper as well as white skins, at fairly frequent intervals during the last fifteen years. There were enough slips I might make, but that of dipping deep in rough water was hardly likely to be one of them.

The rumble of the rapid grew heavier as we proceeded, but only a single flickering white "eyelash" revealed the imminent ambush lurking beyond the black rocks. The current accelerated rapidly as the walls closed in, but ran easily, effortlessly, unripplingly, and with an almost uncanny absence of swirls and eddies. "Have plenty way on her 'fore she hits the suds," cautioned Blackmore, and Andy and I grunted in unison as we leaned a few more pounds of beef onto our bending spruces. That started our inside elbows to bumping, but without a word each of us sidled along an inch or two toward his gunwale to get well set while yet there was time.

With an easy bob--quick like a rowboat rides the bow wave of a steamer, but smoother, easier in its lift--we ran into the head of the rapid. There was a swift V-shaped chute of smooth jade-green water; then we slapped right into the "suds." High-headed waves slammed against the bows and threw spray all over the boat and far astern of it. But they lacked jolt. They had too much froth and not enough green water to make them really formidable. We were in rough but not really bad water. I tried to grin at Blackmore to show him I understood the situation and was enjoying it highly; but his eyes, pin-points of concentration under bent brows, were directed over my head and far in advance. Plainly, he was thinking as well as looking well ahead.

Reassured by the smart way we were slashing through that first riffle, I ventured to steal a look over my shoulder. In the immediate foreground Roos, with his waterproof buttoned close around his neck, was shaking the spray out of his hair and watching for a chance to snap with his kodak. Ahead there was perhaps another hundred yards of about the same sort of water as that in which we were running; then a yeasty welter of white where the river disappeared round a black cliff into what seemed a narrow gorge. Opposite the cliff the river wall sloped slightly and was thickly covered with a dense growth of evergreen. The heavy roar we had been hearing for hours was still muffled. Evidently the main disturbance was somewhere beyond the bend at the cliff.

The thunder of falling water grew louder as we headed down toward the white smother in the embrasure of the bend, and it was from Blackmore's lips rather than from any words I heard that I gathered that he was calling for "More way!" Still keeping fairly good stroke, Andy and I quickly had her going enough faster than the current to give the big paddle all the steerage "grip" Blackmore could ask for. Swinging her sharply to the right, he headed her past the out-reaching rock claws at the foot of the cliff, and, with a sudden blaze of light and an ear-shattering rush of sound we were into the first and worst fall of Surprise Rapids.

That dual onslaught of light and sound had something of the paralyzing suddenness of that which occurs when a furnace door is thrown wide and eye and ear are assailed at the same instant with the glare and the roar from within. One moment we were running in a shadowed gorge with a heavy but deadened and apparently distant rumble sounding somewhere ahead; the next we were in the heart of a roar that fairly scoured our ear-drums, and blinking in a fluttering white light that seemed to sear the eyeballs. The one hurried glance that I threw behind me as I began floundering on the end of my kicking oar photographed an intensely vivid picture on my memory.

What had been merely a swiftly-flowing river with a streak of silver riffles down the middle had changed to a tumultuous tumble of cascades that gleamed in solid white from bank to bank like the churned snow of a freshly descended avalanche. There was no green water whatever; not even a streak that was tinged with green. All that relieved the coruscating, sun-silvered tumble of whiteness were the black tips of jutting bedrock, sticking up through the foam they had churned. The deeply shadowed western wall, hanging above the river like a dusky pall, served only to accentuate by contrast the intense white light that danced above the cascade. It was as though the golden yellow had been filtered out of the sunlight in the depths, and only the pure blue-white of calcium reflected back into the atmosphere.

Heavy as was the fall of the river over the stretch we had now entered, I could just make out a point perhaps a half mile farther down where it dropped out of sight entirely. That, I told myself, must be the place where there was an unbroken reef of bedrock all the way across the stream, and where there was an abrupt drop of eight or ten feet. A great throbbing rumble cutting into the slightly higher-keyed roar that already engulfed us also seemed to indicate that the steepest pitch had not yet been reached. I had, of course, seen worse water than this, but certainly had never (as appeared to be the case now) been irretrievably committed to running it. I had heard that it was quite unrunnable in any kind of a boat, it certainly looked unrunnable, and I seemed to have the impression that Blackmore had said he was not intending to run it. Yet here we were into it, and without (so far as I could see) anything to do but drive ahead. However, that was Blackmore's affair....

The rather smart team-work which Andy and I had maintained for a while dissolved like the morning mists as we banged in among the walloping rollers at the head of the real cascade. Both of us were in difficulties, but his round-armed thumping stroke seemed rather more true to form than the shattered remnants of my fine straight-armed slide-and-recover, with its dainty surface-skimming "feather." Nothing but the sharpest of dabs with the tip of an oar can get any hold in a current of fifteen to twenty miles an hour, and the short, wristy pull (which is all there is time for) doesn't impart a lot of impulse to a thirty-foot boat. That, and the staggering buffets on the bows, for it was solid, lumpy water that was coming over us now, quickly reduced our headway. (Headway _through_ the current, I mean; our headway floating _in_ the current was terrific.) This was, of course, a serious handicap to Blackmore, as it deprived him of much of the steerage-way upon which he was dependent for quick handling of the boat. The difficulty of maintaining steerage-way in rough water with oars makes a bow as well as a stern paddle very desirable in running bad rapids. The bow paddler can keep a very sharp lookout for rocks immediately ahead, and, in a pinch, can jerk the boat bodily to one side or the other, where oarsmen have to _swing_ it. However, Blackmore knew just what he was going up against, and had made the best disposition possible of his available crew.

I was too busy keeping myself from being bucked off the thwart by my floundering oar to steal more than that first hurried look over my shoulder. It was not my concern what was ahead anyway. All I had to do was to take a slap at the top of a wave every time I saw a chance, and be ready to back, or throw my weight into a heavy stroke, when Blackmore needed help to turn her this way or that. My signal--a jerk of the steersman's head to the left--came sooner than I expected. It looked a sheer impossibility to drive through the maze of rocks to the bank, yet that--after a long, anxious look ahead--was evidently what he had decided to attempt. As it was my oar he called on, I knew it was the right or east bank, a sharply sloping reach of black bedrock littered with water-scoured boulders.

By the way Blackmore was leaning onto his paddle I knew that he needed all the pull I could give him to bring her round. Swinging back hard, I threw every pound I had onto my oar. For an instant the lack of resistance as the blade tore through foam nearly sent me reeling backwards; then it bit into solid water, and, under impulse of oar and paddle, the boat pivoted through more than half a quadrant and shot straight for the bank. Right in where the black rock tips were scattered like the raisins in a pudding he headed her. There was no room to use the oars now, but she still carried more than enough way to send her to the bank. Or rather, it would have carried her through if the course had been clear. Missing two or three rocks by inches, she rasped half her length along another, and onto a fourth--lurking submerged by a foot--she jammed full tilt. It was her port bow that struck, and from the crash it seemed impossible that she could have escaped holing. Andy went over the side so suddenly that, until I saw him balancing on a rock and trying to keep the boat from backing off into the current, I thought he had been thrown overboard by the impact. Thumping her bow with his boot, he reported her leaking slightly but not much damaged. Then, swinging her round into an eddy, he jumped off into the waist-deep water and led her unresistingly up against the bank. It was astonishing to see so wild a creature so suddenly become tame.

We would have to "line down" from here to the foot of the first fall, Blackmore said. While Roos was setting up his camera the veteran explained that he could have run four or five hundred yards farther down, right to the brink of the "tip off," but that he preferred getting in out of the wet where he had a good landing. I agreed with him heartily--without putting it in words. But if that was his idea of a "good landing place," I hoped he would continue to avoid bad ones.

The basic principles of "lining down" are the same on all rivers. Where water is too rough to run, it is the last resort before portaging. As generally practised, one man, walking along the bank, lets the boat down with a line, while another--or as many others as are available--keeps it off the rocks with poles. "Lining" can be effected more rapidly and with much less effort if one man remains in the boat and fends off with his pole from there. This is much the better method where the fall is not too great and the water comparatively warm. On the upper Columbia, where the breaking away of a boat from a line means its almost inevitable loss with all on board, it is resorted to only when absolutely necessary, and when a man of great experience is handling the line. It takes a natural aptitude and years of experience for a man to master all the intricacies of "lining." I shall not endeavour to enumerate even the few that I am familiar with; but the one thing beyond all others to avoid is letting the bow of the boat swing outwards when the stern is held up by a rock. This brings the full current of the river against its up-stream side, exerting a force that a dozen men could not hold against, let alone one or two. As Blackmore was noted for his mastery of the "lining" game, however, we had no apprehension of trouble in this department.

Nothing of the outfit save the moving picture camera was removed from the boat at this juncture. Coiling his line--something over a hundred feet of half-inch Manila hemp--over his left arm, Blackmore signalled Andy to shove off. Paying out the line through his right hand, he let the eddy carry the boat out into the drag of the current. Armed with long pike-poles, Andy and I ran on ahead to keep it clear of the banks as it swung in. This was easy enough as long as we had only the bank to contend with. But almost immediately the trouble which makes Surprise Rapids one of the nastiest stretches on any river in the world to line began to develop. This came from the submerged rocks which crop up all along between the banks and the deeper water of mid-channel.

Pulling her up and releasing her with a hand that reminded me of that of a consummate natural horseman, Blackmore nursed the boat along and managed to avoid most of these obstructions. But every now and then she would wedge between a close-set pair of boulders and resist the force of the current to drive her on. At such times it was up to Andy and me to wade in and try to dislodge her with our poles. Failing this, we had to wade out still farther and lift her through. Andy always took the lead in this lifting business, claiming that it required a lot of experience to know just the instant to stop shoving at the boat as she began to move, and start bracing against the current to keep from getting carried away. I have no doubt he was right. In any event he would never let me come out until he had tugged and hauled for several minutes trying to budge her alone, and even then--notwithstanding his four or five inches less of height--he always took his station in the deepest hole. Two or three times, shaking himself like a Newfoundland, he came out wet to the armpits with the icy water. As the sun was beating hotly upon the rocks, however, neither of us felt the cold much that afternoon. A few days later it was another story.

We made something like eight or nine hundred yards before we stopped--right to the head of the roaring chute that ran down to the sheer drop-off. Roos--always at his best when there was plenty of unpremeditated action going on, so that "directorial" worries sat lightly on him--followed us closely all the way. It was hard enough keeping one's footing on those ice-slippery boulders at all; how he managed it with something like a hundred pounds of camera and tripod over his shoulder and a bulky case in one hand is more than I can figure. But he did it, keeping close enough so that he got just about everything without having to ask us to do it over again. This latter was a good deal of a comfort, especially in those waist-deep-in-the-Columbia lifting stunts. I had always hated "lining down," even in the tropics, and I already saw that what we had ahead wasn't going to modify my feelings for the better.

At the head of that rough-and-tumble cascade leading to the fall, Blackmore decided that we would have to unload the boat completely before trying to let her down. It was always bad business there at the best, he said, and the present stage of water made the rocks quite a bit worse than when either higher or lower. If we hustled, there ought to be time to get through before dark, and then a half mile run would take us to a good camping place near the head of the second fall. Here Roos intervened to point out that the sun was already behind the western wall, and asking if it wouldn't be possible to camp where we were. He wanted to keep the "continuity" of this particular piece of "lining" unbroken, and would need good light to finish it in. Blackmore said he could manage the camp if we thought our ear-drums would stand the roar.

So we unloaded the boat, and Blackmore leading her into the quietest pool he could find, moored her for the night. As there was a couple of feet of "lop" even there, this was rather a nice operation. With lines to stern and bow, and held off from the rocks on either side by lashed pike-poles, she looked for all the world like some fractious horse that had been secured to prevent its banging itself up against the sides of its stall. It was a beastly job, carrying the fifteen or twenty heavy parcels of the outfit a hundred yards over those huge polished boulders to the bit of sand-bar where camp was to be pitched. My old ankles--endlessly sprained during my football days--protested every step of my several round trips, and I congratulated myself that I had had the foresight to bring leather braces to stiffen them. Reeking with perspiration after I had thrown down my last load, I decided to use the river for a bath that I would have to take anyway on shifting from my wet clothes. The half-glacial water was not a lot above freezing, of course; but that is of small moment when one has plenty of animal heat stored up to react against it. My worst difficulty was from the bumpiness of my rocky bathing pool, which also had a rather troublesome undercurrent pulling out toward the racing chute of the main channel. Blackmore, pop-eyed with astonishment, came down to watch the show. It was the first time he had ever seen a man take a voluntary bath in Surprise Rapids, he said. And all the others--the involuntary bathers--they had picked up later in Kinbasket Lake.

That was about the most restricted space I can recall ever having camped in. The great boulders of the high-water channel extended right up to the foot of the mountain wall and neither the one nor the other afforded enough level space to set a doll's house. A four-by-six patch of sand was the most extensive area that seemed to offer, and, doubling this in size by cutting away a rotting spruce stump and a section of fallen birch, there was just enough room for the little shed-tent. It was a snug and comfortable camp, though, and highly picturesque, perched as it was almost in the spray of the cascade. The noise was the worst thing, and we would have had to stay there even longer than we did to become quite used to it. All of us were shouting in each other's ears for days afterwards, and even trying to converse in signs in the idyllic quietude of Kinbasket Lake.

The storm which Blackmore's seer-like vision had descried in the blue-green auroral flutters of a couple of nights previously arrived quite on schedule. Although the western sky had glowed for half an hour after sunset with that supposedly optimistic tinge of primrose and terra-cotta, it was pouring before midnight, and the next morning there was truly almost as much water in the air as in the river. Pictures were out of the question, so there was nothing to do but hang on until the weather cleared. Leaving Roos whittling and Andy struggling to divert a swelling young river that was trying to sluice away the sand on which the tent was pitched, Blackmore and I pulled on our waterproofs and clambered a mile through the woods to a camp of C. P. R. engineers. Blackmore wanted to get an extra axe; I to get some further data on the fall of the river. We found a crude cable-ferry thrown across just below the foot of the big fall, and a rough, boggy path from the eastern end of it took us to the camp of three or four comfortable cabins.

The Canadian Pacific, I learned--both on account of the high and increasing cost of its oil fuel and because of the trouble experienced in clearing their tunnels from smoke--was contemplating the electrification of all of its mountain divisions. There were numerous high falls along the line where power could be economically developed, but it was not considered desirable that the scenic beauty of these should be marred by diversion. Besides the Columbia, in a hundred miles of the Big Bend, offered the opportunity for developing more hydro-electric energy than all the west of Canada could use in the next twenty years. The Surprise Rapids project alone would provide far more power than the Canadian Pacific could use for traction, and it was expected that there would be a large surplus for municipal and industrial uses along the line. "All this, of course," the engineer at the camp explained, "in the event the company decides to go ahead with the development. Raising the money will probably be the greatest difficulty, and in the present state of the financial market it is hard to see how much can be done for two or three years. In the meantime we are measuring the flow of the river every day, and will have accurate data to go by when the time for construction comes."

I learned that the total length of Surprise Rapids was three and a third miles, in which distance there was a fall of nearly one hundred feet. The greatest drop was in that stretch which we were waiting to "line," where there was a fall of twenty-one feet in seven hundred and fifty. At the second cascade there was a fall of fifteen feet in twelve hundred, and at the third, twenty-five feet in twenty-five hundred. It was planned to build the dam across the very narrow canyon near the foot of the lower fall, making it of such a height that a lake would be backed up as far as Beavermouth, incidentally, of course, wiping out the whole of Surprise Rapids. "They can't wipe it out any too soon to suit me," Blackmore commented on hearing this. "It'd have saved me a lot of work and many a wetting if they'd wiped it out twenty year ago. And that's saying nothing of the men drownded there. It was that big whirlpool down through the trees there that did for Walter Steinhoff."

We had left the camp now and were picking our way down the narrow trail to the foot of the second fall. I had been waiting to hear Blackmore speak of Steinhoff for two reasons: first, because I was curious to know how much truth there was in those dramatic versions of his death I had heard in Golden, and also because the subject would lead up naturally to that of the buried whisky. This latter was rather too delicate a matter to broach offhand, and I had therefore been carefully watching for a favourable opening. Now that it had come, I was quick to take advantage of it.

"Tell me about Steinhoff," I said. "He was on some kind of a boot-legging stunt, wasn't he?" I was just a bit diffident about bringing up that drink-running business, for although I had been told that Blackmore was a smooth hand at the game himself, I had a sort of sneaking idea that it was the kind of a thing a man ought to be sensitive about, like having had smallpox or a sister in the movies. I need not have worried, however. "You bet he was boot-legging," Blackmore replied; "and so was I. Both outfits heading for _Tete Jaune Cache_ on the Grand Trunk, and racing to get there first. That was what got him into trouble--trying to catch up with me after I had passed him by running and lining the first fall (the one we are doing the same way now) while he had portaged. I reckon it was his first intention to portage all the way to the foot of the second fall, but when he saw me slip by in the water he put in his canoes at the foot of the first fall and came after me."

We had come out above the river now, and I saw a savage stretch of foam-white water falling in a roaring cascade to a mighty whirlpool that filled all of the bottom of the steeply-walled amphitheatre formed by a right-angling bend of the Columbia. Thirty feet or more above the present level of the whirlpool were the marks of its swirling scour at mid-summer high-water. Awesome enough now (and it was not any the less so to me since we still had to take the boat through it), I could see at once that, with the power of the floods driving it round and round at turbine speed, it must indeed be a veritable thing of terror. It was into this whirlpool, as well as others at Revelstoke Canyon and Death Rapids, that whole uprooted pines were said to be sucked in flood-time, to reappear only as battered logs many miles below. There seemed hardly enough water there at the present to make this possible; but the story was at least credible to me now, which was more than it had been previously.

"So this is your 'All Day Sucker,'" I remarked carelessly, in a studied attempt to keep Blackmore from noting how greatly the savage maelstrom had impressed me. Seeing through the bluff, he grinned indulgently and resumed his story of Steinhoff as soon as we had moved far enough round the whirlpool to make his voice comfortably heard above the roar of the cascade. A line had parted--sawed through in working round a rocky point a few hundred yards above--and Steinhoff's big Peterboro was swept out into the current. Striking a rock, it turned over and threw him into the water. He made a brave effort to swim out, keeping his head above water most of the way down the cascade. The whirlpool had been too much for him, however. He was fighting hard to keep up when he was carried into the vortex and sucked under. Blackmore took no stock in the story of the dramatic gesture of farewell. "A man don't pull that grand opry stuff with the cold of the Columbia biting into his spine," was the way he put it.

Then I told him about the whisky--spoke to him as a son to his father. And he, meeting me point for point in all seriousness of spirit, answered as father to son. He thought there was little chance of finding anything along the river. He had not done so himself for a number of years--and he hadn't been overlooking any bets, either. There was, of course, still much good stuff buried in the drift below Middle River, but it would be like looking for a needle in a haystack trying to find it. But the cache above Canoe River--ah, that was another matter! Captain Armstrong could be absolutely depended upon in a matter of that kind, and the directions sounded right as rain. Yes, he quite understood that I should want to take it all to California with me. He would want to do the same thing if he were in my place. It would be easy as picking pippins getting it over the line. He could tell me three different ways, all of them dead sure. He would not think of taking any of it for himself. The rum we had would be ample for the trip, except in extreme emergency. That "thirty over-proof" went a long way. And I need not worry in the least about Andy. He wasn't a teetotaler exactly, but he never took too much under any provocation. Yes, I could depend upon the both of them to nose out that stuff at the old ferry. Put it there! We looked each other square in the eye, and shook hands solemnly there above the big whirlpool which was originally responsible for the good fortune that had come to us--or rather to me. Men have clasped hands and sworn to stand by each other in lesser things. At least that was the way it seemed to me at the moment. I could have embraced the fine old woodsman for his loyalty and generosity of spirit. I always called him Bob after that.

The rain thinned down and became a light Scotch mist as we picked our way back to camp. That struck me as being a good omen--it's being "Scotch," I mean. Later it cleared up entirely, and there was a glorious fairweather sunset of glowing saffron and flaming poppy red. To the northwest--Canoe River-ward--there poured a wonderful light of pale liquescent amber. I had never seen such a light on land or sea, I told myself; or anywhere else, for that matter--except when holding a glass of Scotch up against the sun. That was another good omen. Funny thing, but I can still recall the date offhand, so indelibly had the promise of that day impressed itself on my mind. It was the first of October.

Although it snowed an inch or two during the night, the following morning fulfilled the promise of the sunset by breaking bright and cloudless. We were to line the boat down empty for a couple of hundred yards, and then load up again and line about an equal distance of slightly better water. This would take us to the brink of the abrupt fall, where both outfit and boat had to be portaged over the rocks for a short distance. That would leave us clear for the short, swift run to the head of the second fall.

Cutting himself a "sylvan frame" through the pines on a point a hundred yards below the camp, Roos set up to shoot the first piece of lining. It was a mean looking job, for the river was tumbling in a half-cataract all the way, turning and squirming like a wounded dragon. I could see Blackmore was a bit worried over it, and, as the sequel proved, with good reason. I never quite understood his explanation of the cause of what happened, but I believe he claimed it was due to his obeying (against his better judgment) Roos' signal to keep the boat in fairly close to the bank so that she would not pass "out of the picture"--beyond the range of his lens, that is. At any rate, the boat had hardly started before she swung broadside to the current and, clapping like a limpet upon a big round boulder, hung there immovable. Heeled till her starboard side showed like the belly of a sharply sheering shark, her port gunwale dipped deep into the swirling current. In a wink she had taken all the water she would hold with the half-heel that was on her--enough, perhaps, to fill her half full when on an even keel.

It was a case for instant action--a case where the nearest available man had to follow his first hunch without thinking it over or counting the cost. A few seconds more on that rock, and one of two things must happen to the boat: either she would settle a few inches farther, fill completely and sink, or else the force of the current would tear her to pieces where she was. Blackmore was tugging at his line and shouting directions, but the roar stopped the words at his lips. Andy did not need to be told what was needed, however. For myself, I was not quite sure of what to do, and less so of how to do it. Also, I doubted my ability to keep my footing in the current. In short, I found myself thinking and weighing chances in one of those emergencies where a man to be worth his salt has no business to do either.

There was only one place where a man could get at the boat, and Andy beat me to it by a mile. (I would have seen to that even had he moved a lot slower than he did.) He was rather more than waist deep, but quite safe as long as the boat stuck where she was. Unfortunately, getting her off was the very thing he was there for. It was a good deal like a man's having to saw off the branch on which he sat. But Andy never hesitated--probably because there was not time to think and reckon the consequences. Setting his heavy shoulders under her bilge, he gave a mighty upward heave. She shuddered through her long red length, and then, as the kick of the current got under her submerged gunwale, shot up and off as though discharged from a catapult. The job had been well done, too, for she came off with her stern down stream, which made it comparatively easy for Blackmore to check her way with his line, even half-filled as she was.

Whether he failed to recover as the boat was swept away, or whether he lost his balance in avoiding entanglement in the line, Andy was not quite sure. His first recollection after releasing the boat, he said, was of floundering in the water and of finding that his first kick or two did not strike bottom. The thing that is always possible when a man has lifted off a boat in a swift current had happened: he had lost his footing, and in just about the one worst place in the whole Columbia.

Blackmore, dragged down the bank after his floundering boat, was not in a position where he could throw the end of his line to any purpose. I waded in and reached out my pike-pole, but Andy's back was to it the only time he came within grabbing distance. The only thing that saved him was luck--the fact that the current at the point he lost his footing did not swirl directly into the main chute, but did a little double-shuffle of its own along the side of an eddy before taking the big leap. Hooking into the solid green water of that eddy, Andy found himself a toehold, and presently clambered out. He had not swallowed any water, and did not seem much chilled or winded. A violent sickness of the stomach, where the cold had arrested digestive operations, was about the only ill effect. What seemed to annoy him most was the fact that all of his pockets were turned wrong-side-out, with all of their contents--save only his watch, which had been secured by a thong--missing. Blackmore nodded grimly to me as he came up after securing the boat. "_Now_ perhaps you'll believe what I told you about the old Columbia picking pockets," he said dryly.

Roos came down complaining that he had been too far away to pick up any details of the show even with his "six-inch" lens and cursing his luck for not having been set up closer at hand. Considering what he had missed, I thought he showed unwonted delicacy in not asking Blackmore and Andy to stage it over again for him.

Bailing out the boat, we found one oar missing, but this we subsequently recovered from an eddy below. That left our net loss for the mishap only the contents of Andy's pockets and the picture Roos did not get. Some might have figured in the extra ration of rum Andy drew to straighten out the kinks of his outraged stomach; but that seemed hardly the sporting way to look at it, especially with our prospects in the drink line being what they were.

The portage at the fall proved a mighty stiff bit of hard labour. It was one thing to skid the boat along on the pine needles at Beavermouth with a couple of dozen men pushing it, and quite another for three men to take it out of the water, lift it over forty or fifty feet of boulders, and put it back into the river again. By the free use of rollers--cut from young firs--we managed, however, Roos cranking his camera through all of the operation and telling us to "Make it snappy!" and not to be "foot-hogs." Almost worse than portaging the boat was the unspeakably toil-some task of packing the outfit over the boulders for a couple of hundred yards to where there was a quiet spot to load again. Every step had to be balanced for, and even then one was down on his knees half the time. With my numerous bad joints--there are but three from shoulder to heel that had not been sprained or dislocated from two to a dozen times--this boulder clambering work was the only thing in connection with the whole voyage that I failed to enjoy.

A half mile run with an eight-mile current took us to the head of the second fall, all but the first hundred yards of which had to be lined. Landing this time on the west bank, we worked the boat down without much difficulty past the jutting point where the line of Steinhoff's boat had parted. Blackmore had hoped to line her all the way down without unloading, but the last fifty yards before the cascade tumbled into the big whirlpool were so thickly studded with rocks along the bank that he finally decided not to risk it. As there were thirty or forty feet of deep pools and eddies between the rocks on which she was stuck and the nearest stretch of unsubmerged boulders, unloading was a particularly awkward piece of work. Finally everything was shifted out onto a flat-topped rock, and Roos and I were left to get this ashore while Andy and Blackmore completed lining down. It was an especially nice job, taking the boat down that last steep pitch into the big whirlpool and then working her round a huge square-faced rock to a quiet eddy, and I should greatly like to have seen it. Unluckily, what with stumbling over hidden boulders and being down with my nose in the water half of the time, and the thin blue mist that hovered round me the rest of the time from what I said as a consequence of stumbling, I could only guess at the finesse and highly technical skill with which the difficult operation was accomplished. The worst part appeared to be getting her down the fall. Once clear of the submerged rocks, Blackmore seemed to make the whirlpool do his work for him. Poised on a projecting log of the jam packed on top of the jutting rock, he paid out a hundred feet of line and let the racing swirl of the spinning pool carry the boat far out beyond all obstructions. Then, gently and delicately as if playing a salmon on a trout rod, he nursed her into an eddy and simply coiled his line and let the back-setting current carry her in to the bit of sandy beach where he wanted to tie her up for the night. It takes a lifetime of swift-water experience to master the intricacies of an operation like that.

It was still early in the afternoon, but with a thick mist falling Blackmore thought best to stop where we were. The next available camping place was below the half-mile-long third cascade, and no old river man likes to go into a rapid when the visibility is poor. We pitched the tent in a hole cut out of the thick-growing woods on a low bench at the inner angle of the bend. Everything was soaking wet, but it was well back from the falls, and for the first time in two days we were able to talk to each other without shouting. Not that we did so, however; from sheer force of habit we continued roaring into each other's ears for a week or more yet.

The great pile of logs on top of the flat-topped rock above the whirlpool had fascinated me from the first. Over a hundred feet square, forty feet high, and packed as though by a titanic hydraulic press, it must have contained thousands and thousands of cords of wood. On Blackmore's positive assurance as a timberman that there was nothing in the pile of any value for lumber, even in the improbable contingency that a flood would ever carry it beyond the big drifts of Kinbasket Lake, I decided to make a bonfire of it. Never had I had such an opportunity, both on the score of the sheer quantity of combustible and the spectacular setting for illumination.

The whirlpool was _whouf-whoufing_ greedily as it wolfed the whole cascade when I clambered up just before dark to touch off my beacon. It was fairly dry at the base, and a pile of crisp shavings off a slab from some distant up-river sawmill caught quickly. From a spark of red flickering dimly through the mist when we sat down to supper, this had grown to a roaring furnace by the time we had relaxed to pipes and cigarettes. An hour later the flames had eaten a clear chimney up through the jam and the red light from their leaping tips was beginning to drive back the encompassing darkness. Roos, who had read about India, thought it would have been fine if we only had a few widows to cast themselves on the flaming pyre and commit _suttee_. Andy and Blackmore, both sentimental bachelors, were a unit in maintaining that it would be a shame to waste good widows that way, especially on the practically widowless Big Bend. All three were arguing the point rather heatedly when they crawled into their blankets. For myself, with a vision of the wonder about to unroll impinging on my brain, I could not think of turning in for hours yet.

By ten o'clock the pile was well alight underneath, but it was not until nearly midnight, when the mist had turned to snow and a strong wind had sprung up, that it was blazing full strength. I hardly know what would have been the direction of the wind in the upper air, but, cupped in the embrasure of the bend, it was sucking round and round, like the big whirlpool, only more fitfully and with an upward rather than a downward pull. Now it would drag the leaping flame-column a hundred feet in the air, twisting it into lambent coils and fining the tip down to a sharp point, like that of the Avenging Angel's Sword of Fire in the old Biblical prints, now sweep it out in a shivering sheet above the whirlpool, now swing it evenly round and round as though the flame, arrow-pointed and attenuated, were the radium-coated hand of a Gargantuan clock being swiftly revolved in the dark.

But the wonder of wonders was less the fire itself than the marvellous transformations wrought by the light it threw. And the staggering contrasts! The illuminated snow clouds drifting along the frosted-pink curtain of the tree-clad mountain walls made a roseate fairyland; even the foam covered sweep of the cascade, its roar drowned in the sharp crackle of the flames, was softened and smoothened until it seemed to billow like the sunset-flushed canvas of a ship becalmed: but the whirlpool, its sinister character only accentuated by the conflict of cross-shadows and reflections, was a veritable Pit of Damnation, choking and coughing as it swirled and rolled in streaky coils of ox-blood, in fire-stabbed welters of fluid coal-tar.

Wrapped in my hooded duffle coat, I paced the snow-covered moss and exulted in the awesome spectacle until long after midnight. I have never envied Nero very poignantly since. Given a fiddle and a few Christians, I would have had all that was his on the greatest night of his life--and then some. Father Tiber never had a whirlpool like mine, even on the day Horatius swam it "heavy with his armour and spent with changing blows."

The next morning, though too heavily overcast for pictures, was still clear enough to travel. The head riffles of the third fall of Surprise Rapids began a little below our camp, so that we started lining almost immediately. Three or four times we pulled across the river, running short stretches and lining now down one side and now the other. There was not so great a rate of drop as at the first and second falls, but the whole stream was choked with barely submerged rocks and lining was difficult on account of the frequent cliffs.

It was about half way down that I all but messed things up by failing to get into action quickly enough at a crossing. The fault, in a way, was Blackmore's, because of his failure to tell me in advance what was expected, and then--when the order had to be passed instantly--for standing rather too much on ceremony in the manner of passing it. We were about to pull to the opposite side to line down past a riffle which Blackmore reckoned too rough to risk running. There was about a ten-mile current, and it would have required the smartest kind of a get-away and the hardest kind of pulling to make the other bank without being carried down onto the riffle. The boat was headed up-stream, and, as Blackmore had not told me he intended to cross, I took it for granted he was going to run. So, when Roos shoved off and jumped in, I rested on my oar in order that Andy could bring the boat sharply round and head it down stream. Blackmore's excited yell was the first intimation I had that anything was wrong. "Pull like hell! You!... Mister Freeman!"

That "Mister," and his momentary pause before uttering it, defeated the purpose of the order. I pulled all right, and so hard that my oar-blade picked up a very sizable hunk of river and flung it in Blackmore's face. That upset my balance, and I could not recover quickly enough to keep the boat's head to the current. With characteristic presence of mind, Blackmore changed tactics instantly. "Got to chance it now!" he shouted, and threw such a pull onto his steering paddle that the handle bent to more than half a right angle where he laid it over the gunwale. There was one jutting rock at the head of the riffle that _had_ to be missed; the rest was all a matter of whether or not the next couple of hundred yards of submerged boulders were deeply enough covered to let us pass _over_ them. There was no way of avoiding them, no chance to lay a course _between_ them.

Blackmore was a bit wilder about the eyes than I had seen him before; but he had stopped swearing and his mouth was set in a hard, determined line. Andy, with chesty grunts, was fairly flailing the water with swift, short-arm strokes. I did not need to be told to refrain from pulling in order that the others could swing her head as far toward the west bank as possible before the rock was reached. Instead, I held ready for the one quick backing stroke that would be called for in the event a collision seemed imminent at the last moment. It was the wave thrown off by the rock itself that helped us most when the showdown came. Shooting by the jagged barrier so close that Andy could have fended with his hand, the boat plunged over a short, sharp pitch and hit the white water with a bang.

That was by long odds the roughest stuff we had been into so far. The waves were curling up well above our heads, and every one we hit left a foot or two of its top with us--solid green water, most of it, that began accumulating rather alarmingly in the bottom of the boat. There was no regularity in the way they ran, either. One would come mushrooming fairly over the bows, another would flop aboard over the beam, and every now and then a wild side-winder, missing its spring at the forward part of the boat, would dash a shower of spray over the quarter. From the bank she must have been pretty well out of sight most of the time, for I often saw spray thrown ten or fifteen feet to either side and twice as far astern. All hands were drenched from the moment we struck the first comber, of course, which was doubtless why a wail from Roos that the water was going down his neck seemed to strike Blackmore as a bit superfluous. "Inside or outside your neck?" he roared back, adding that if it was the former the flow could be checked by the simple and natural expedient of keeping the mouth shut. Very properly, our "skipper" had the feeling that, in a really tight place, all the talking necessary for navigation should be done from the "bridge," and that "extraneous" comment should be held over to smooth water.

Before we had run a hundred yards the anxious look on Blackmore's face had given way to one of relief and exultation. "There's more water over the rocks than I reckoned," he shouted. "Going to run right through." And run we did, all of the last mile or more of Surprise Rapids and right on through the still swift but comparatively quiet water below. Here we drifted with the current for a ways, while all hands turned to and bailed. I took this, the first occasion that had offered, to assure Blackmore that he needn't go to the length of calling me "Mister" in the future when he had urgent orders to give, and incidentally apologized for getting off on the wrong foot at the head of the first rapid. "Since that worked out to save us half a mile of darn dirty lining and two or three hours of time," he replied with a grin, "I guess we won't worry about it this crack, Mister--I mean, Freeman. Mebbe I better get used to saying it that way 'gainst when I'll need to spit it out quick."

It was a pleasant run from the foot of Surprise Rapids down to Kinbasket Lake, or at least it was pleasant until the rain set in again. There is a fall of sixty-four feet in the sixteen miles--most of it in the first ten. It was a fine swift current, with a number of riffles but no bad water at any point. It was good to be free for a while from the tension which is never absent when working in really rough water, and I have no doubt that Blackmore felt better about it than any of the rest of us. Surprise was his especial _bete noir_, and he assured me that he had never come safely through it without swearing never to tackle it again. Roos, drying out in the bow like a tabby licking her wet coat smooth after being rained on, sang "Green River" all the way, and I tried to train Andy to pull in time to the rhythm and join in the chorus. As the chorus had much about drink in it, it seemed only fitting--considering what was waiting for us at Canoe River--that we _should_ sing it. And we did. "Floating Down the Old Green River" became the "official song" of that particular part of the voyage. Later ... but why anticipate?

We landed for lunch about where the water began to slacken above the lake. The water of the little stream at the mouth of which we tied up the boat was of a bright transparent amber in colour. Andy, sapient of the woods, thought it must flow from a lake impounded behind a beaver-dam in the high mountains, and that the stain was that of rotting wood. Beaver signs were certainly much in evidence all over the little bench where we lunched. Several large cottonwood trunks--one of them all of two feet in diameter--had been felled by the tireless little engineers, and we found a pile of tooth-torn chips large enough to kindle our fire with. While tea was boiling Blackmore pulled a couple of three-pound Dolly Varden out of the mouth of the creek, only to lose his hooks and line when a still larger one connected up with them. Roos, who was under orders to get an effective fishing picture, was unable to go into action with his camera on account of the poor light.

It had begun to rain hard by the time we had shoved back into the river after lunch. There were still five miles to go to reach the camping ground Blackmore had decided upon, half way down the east side of Kinbasket Lake, just below Middle River--slack water all the way. Andy and I pulled it in a slushy half-snow-half-rain that was a lot wetter and unpleasanter than the straight article of either variety. Of a lake which is one of the loveliest in all the world in the sunlight, nothing was to be seen save a stretch of grey-white, wind-whipped waters beating upon grey-brown rocky shores. That the wind and waves headed us did not make the pulling any lighter, for the boat's considerable freeboard gave both a lot of surface to play upon. The exertion of rowing kept Andy and me warm, however, which gave us at least that advantage over Roos and Blackmore. The latter had to face it out at his paddle, but Roos, a bedraggled lump of sodden despair, finally gave up and crawled under the tarpaulin with the bags of beans and bacon, remaining there until we reached port.

All in all, I think that was the most miserable camp I ever helped to pitch. The snow, refusing persistently either to harden or to soften, adhered clingingly to everything it touched. We were two hours clearing a space for the tent, setting it up and collecting enough boughs to cushion the floor. By that time pretty nearly everything not hermetically sealed was wet, including the blankets and the "dry" clothes. No one but Andy could have started a camp-fire under such conditions, and no one but Blackmore could have cooked a piping hot dinner on it. I forget whether it was Roos or myself who contributed further to save the day. Anyhow, it was one of the two of us that suggested cooking a can of plum-pudding in about its own bulk of "thirty per over-proof" rum. That lent the saving touch. In spite of a leaking tent and wet blankets, the whole four of us turned in singing "End of a Perfect Day" and "Old Green River." The latter was prophetic. A miniature one--coming through the roof of the tent--had the range of the back of my neck for most of the night.