CHAPTER VII

II. RUNNING THE BEND

_Kinbasket Lake and Rapids_

It continued slushing all night and most of the next day, keeping us pretty close to camp. Andy, like the good housewife he was, kept snugging up every time he got a chance, so that things assumed a homelier and cheerier aspect as the day wore on. I clambered for a couple of miles down the rocky eastern bank of the lake in the forenoon. The low-hanging clouds still obscured the mountains, but underfoot I found unending interest in the astonishing variety of drift corralled by this remarkable catch-all of the upper Columbia. The main accumulation of flotsam and jetsam was above our camp, but even among the rocks I chanced onto almost everything one can imagine, from a steel rail--with the ties that had served to float it down still spiked to it--to a fragment of a vacuum-cleaner. What Roos called "the human touch" was furnished by an enormous uprooted spruce, on which some amorous lumber-jack had been pouring out his love through the blade of his axe. This had taken the form of a two-feet-in-diameter "bleeding heart" pierced by an arrow. Inside the roughly hewn "pericardium" were the initials "K. N." and "P. R.," with the date "July 4, 1910." One couldn't be quite sure whether the arrow stood for a heart quake or a heart break. Andy, who was sentimental and inclined to put woman in the abstract on a pedestal, thought it was merely a heart quake; but Blackmore, who had been something of a gallant in his day, and therefore inclined to cynicism as he neared the sear and yellow leaf, was sure it was heart break--that the honest lumber-jack had hacked in the arrow and the drops of blood after he had been jilted by some jade. Roos wanted to make a movie of this simple fragment of rustic art, with me standing by and registering "pensive memories," or something of the kind; but I managed to discourage him by the highly technical argument that it would impair the "continuity" of the "sportsmanship" which was the prime _motif_ of the present picture.

Blackmore piloted me up to the main area of drift in the afternoon. It occupied a hundred acres or more of sand and mud flats which constituted the lower part of the extensive delta deposited on the edge of the lake by the waters of the good-sized stream of Middle River. At a first glance it seemed nothing more than a great wilderness of tree trunks--prostrate, upended, woven and packed together--extending for hundreds of yards below high-water-mark. It was between these logs that the smaller things had lodged. There were a number of boats, not greatly damaged, and fragments enough to have reconstructed a dozen more. I am convinced that a half day's search would have discovered the material for building and furnishing a house, though carpets and wall paper would hardly have been all one could desire. I even found a curling iron--closely clasped by the bent nail upon which it had been hung on the log of a cabin--and a corset. The latter seemed hardly worth salving, as it appeared--according to Blackmore--to be a "military model" of a decade or so back, and the steel-work was badly rusted.

However, it was not gewgaws or house-furnishing we were after. One could hardly be expected to slither about in soft slush for second-hand things of that kind. I gave a great glad whoop at my first sight of a silt-submerged cask, only to find the head missing and nothing but mud in it. So, too, my second and third. Then it was Blackmore who gave the "View Halloo," and my heart gave a mighty leap. _His_ treasure trove had the head intact, and even the bung _in situ_. But alas! the latter had become slightly started, and although the contents had both smell and colour they were so heavily impregnated with river mud that they would hardly have been deemed fit for consumption except in New York and California, and not worth the risk of smuggling even there. That cask was the high-water-mark of our luck. Several others had the old familiar smell, and that was all. But there is no doubt in the world that there is whisky in that drift pile--hundreds of gallons of it, and some very old. Blackmore swears to that, and I never knew him to lie--about serious matters, I mean. In hunting and trapping yarns a man is expected to draw a long bead. I pass on this undeniably valuable information to any one that cares to profit by it. There are no strings attached. But of course ... in the event of success ... Pasadena always finds me!...

We did have one find, though, that was so remarkable as to be worth all the trouble and disappointment of our otherwise futile search. This was a road-bridge, with _instinct_. The manner in which this had been displayed was so astonishing as to be almost beyond belief; indeed, I would hesitate about setting down the facts had I not a photograph to prove them. This bridge was perhaps sixty feet in length, and had doubtless been carried away by a freshet from some tributary of the upper river which it had spanned. This was probably somewhere between Golden and Windermere, so that it had run a hundred miles or more of swift water, including the falls of Surprise Rapids, without losing more than a few planks. This in itself was remarkable enough, but nothing at all to the fact that, when it finally decided it had come far enough, the sagacious structure had gone and planked itself down squarely across another stream. It was still a bridge in fact as well as in form. It had actually saved my feet from getting wet when I rushed to Blackmore's aid in up-ending the cask of mud-diluted whisky. My photograph plainly shows Blackmore standing on the bridge, with the water flowing directly beneath him. It would have been a more comprehensive and convincing picture if there had been light enough for a snapshot. As it was, I had to set up on a stump, and in a position which showed less of both stream and bridge than I might have had from a better place. I swear (and so does Blackmore) that we didn't place the bridge where it was. It was much too large for that. Roos wanted to shoot the whole three of us standing on it and registering "unbounded wonderment," but the light was never right for it up to the morning of our departure, and then there wasn't time.

It rained and snowed all that night and most of the following day. During the afternoon of the latter the clouds broke up twice or thrice, and through rifts in the drifting wracks we had transient glimpses of the peaks and glaciers of the Selkirks gleaming above the precipitous western walls of the lake. The most conspicuous feature of the sky-line was the three-peaked "Trident," rising almost perpendicularly from a glittering field of glacial ice and impaling great masses of pendant _cumulo-nimbi_ on its splintered prongs. Strings of lofty glacier-set summits marked the line of the back-bone of the Selkirks to southeast and northwest, each of them sending down rain-swollen torrents to tumble into the lake in cataracts and cascades. Behind, or east of us, we knew the Rockies reared a similar barrier of snow and ice, but this was cut off from our vision by the more imminent lake-wall under which we were camped. If Kinbasket Lake is ever made accessible to the tourist its fame will reach to the end of the earth. This is a consummation which may be effected in the event the Canadian Pacific wipes out Surprise Rapids with its hydro-electric project dam and backs up a lake to Beavermouth. The journey to this spot of incomparable beauty could then be made soft enough to suit all but the most effete.

A torrential rain, following a warm southerly breeze which sprang up in the middle of the afternoon, lowered the dense cloud-curtain again, and shortly, from somewhere behind the scenes, came the raucous rumble and roar of a great avalanche. Blackmore's practised ear led him to pronounce it a slide of both earth and snow, and to locate it somewhere on Trident Creek, straight across the lake from our camp. He proved to be right on both counts. When the clouds lifted again at sunset, a long yellow scar gashed the shoulder of the mountain half way up Trident Creek to the glacier, and the clear stream from the latter had completely disappeared. Blackmore said it had been dammed up by the slide, and that there would be all hell popping when it broke through.

Scouting around for more boughs to soften his bed, Roos, just before supper, chanced upon Steinhoff's grave. It was under a small pine, not fifty feet from our tent, but so hidden by the dense undergrowth that it had escaped our notice for two days. It was marked only by a fragment split from the stern of a white-painted boat nailed horizontally on the pine trunk and with the single word "STEINHOFF" carved in rude capitals. At one corner, in pencil, was an inscription stating that the board had been put up in May, 1920, by Joe French and Leo Tennis. With the golden sunset light streaming through the trees, Roos, always strong for "pathetic human touches" to serve as a sombre background for his Mack Sennett stuff, could not resist the opportunity for a picture. Andy and Blackmore and I were to come climbing up to the grave from the lake, read the inscription, and then look at each other and shake our heads ominously, as though it was simply a matter of time until we, too, should fall prey to the implacable river. I refused straightaway, on the ground that I had signed up to act the part of a light comedy sportsman and not a heavy mourner. Blackmore and Andy were more amenable. In rehearsal, however, the expressions on their honest faces were so wooden and embarrassed that Roos finally called me up to stand out of range and "say something to make 'em look natural." I refrain from recording what I said; but I still maintain that shot was an interruption of the "continuity" of my "gentleman-sportsman" picture. I have not yet heard if it survived the studio surgery.

Shortly before dark, Andy, going down to look at his set-line, found a three-foot ling or fresh-water cod floundering on the end of it. Roos persuaded him to keep it over night so that the elusive "fishing picture" might be made the following morning in case the light was good. As there were five or six inches of water in the bottom of the boat, Andy threw the ling in there for the night in preference to picketing him out on a line. There was plenty of water to have given the husky shovel-nose ample room to circulate with comfort if only he had been content to take it easy and not wax temperamental. Doubtless it was his imminent movie engagement that brought on his attack of flightiness. At any rate, he tried to burrow under a collapsible sheet-iron stove (which, preferring to do with a camp-fire, we had left in the boat) and got stuck. The forward five pounds of him had water enough to keep alive in, but in the night--when it cleared off and turned cold--his tail, which was bent up sharply under a thwart, froze stiff at almost right angles. But I am getting ahead of my story.

The next morning, the sixth of October, broke brilliantly clear, with the sun gilding the prongs of the "Trident" and throwing the whole snowy line of the Selkirks in dazzling relief against a deep turquoise sky. Blackmore, keen for an early start, so as not to be rushed in working down through the dreaded "Twenty-One-Mile" Rapids to Canoe River, rooted us out at daybreak and began breaking camp before breakfast. He had reckoned without the "fishing picture," however. Roos wanted bright sunlight for it, claiming he was under special instructions to make something sparkling and snappy. All through breakfast he coached me on the intricate details of the action. "Make him put up a stiff fight," he admonished through a mouthful of flapjack. "Of course he won't fight, 'cause he ain't that kind; but if you jerk and wiggle your pole just right it'll make it look like he was. That's what a real actor's for--making things look like they is when they ain't. Got me?" Then we went down and discovered that poor half-frozen fish with the eight-point alteration of the continuity of his back-bone.

The ling or fresh-water cod has an underhung, somewhat shark-like mouth, not unsuggestive of the new moon with its points turned downward. Roos' mouth took on a similarly dejected droop when he found the condition the principal animal actor in his fish picture was in. But it was too late to give up now. Never might we have so husky a fighting fish ready to hand, and with a bright sun shining on it. Roos tried osteopathy, applied chiropractics and Christian Science without much effect. Our "lead" continued as rigid and unrelaxing as the bushman's boomerang, whose shape he so nearly approximated. Then Andy wrought the miracle with a simple "laying on of hands." What he really did was to thaw out the frozen rear end of the fish by holding it between his big, warm red Celtic paws; but the effect was as magical as a cure at Lourdes. The big ling was shortly flopping vigorously, and when Andy dropped him into a bit of a boulder-locked pool he went charging back and forth at the rocky barriers like a bull at a gate. Roos almost wept in his thankfulness, and forthwith promised the restorer an extra rum ration that night. Andy grinned his thanks, but reminded him that we ought to be at the old ferry by night, where something even better than "thirty per over-proof" rum would be on tap. It was indeed the morning of our great day. Stimulated by that inspiring thought, I prepared to outdo myself in the "fish picture," the "set" for which was now ready.

Standing on the stern of the beached boat, I made a long cast, registering "concentrated eagerness." Then Roos stopped cranking, and Andy brought the ling out and fastened it to the end of my line with a snug but comfortable hitch through the gills. (We were careful not to hurt him, for Chester's directions had admonished especially against "showing brutality".) When I had nursed him out to about where my opening cast had landed, Roos called "Action!" and started cranking again. Back and forth in wide sweeps he dashed, while I registered blended "eagerness" and "determination," with frequent interpolations of "consternation" as carefully timed tugs (by myself) bent my shivering pole down to the water. When Roos had enough footage of "fighting," I brought my catch in close to the boat and leered down at him, registering "near triumph." Then I towed him ashore and Andy and Blackmore rushed in to help me land him. After much struggling (by ourselves) we brought him out on the beach. At this juncture I was supposed to grab the ling by the gills and hold him proudly aloft, registering "full triumph" the while. Andy and Blackmore were to crowd in, pat me on the back and beam congratulations. Blackmore was then to assume an expression intended to convey the impression that this was the hardest fighting ling he had ever seen caught. All three of us were action perfect in our parts; but that miserable turn-tail of a ling--who had nothing to do but flop and register "indignant protest"--spoiled it all at the last. As I flung my prize on high, a shrill scream of "Rotten!" from Roos froze the action where it was. Then I noticed that what was supposed to be a gamy denizen of the swift-flowing Columbia was hanging from my hand as rigid as a coupling-pin--a bent coupling-pin at that, for he had resumed his former cold-storage curl.

"Rotten!" shrieked Roos in a frenzy; "do it again!" But that was not to be. For the "chief actor" the curtain had rung down for good. "You must have played him too fierce," said Andy sympathetically. Blackmore was inclined to be frivolous. "P'raps he was trying to register 'Big Bend,'" said he.

Just after we had pushed off there came a heavy and increasing roar from across the lake. Presently the cascade of Trident Creek sprang into life again, but now a squirt of yellow ochre where before it was a flutter of white satin. Rapidly augmenting, it spread from wall to wall of the rocky gorge, discharging to the bosky depths of the delta with a prodigious rumbling that reverberated up and down the lake like heavy thunder. A moment later the flood had reached the shore, and out across the lucent green waters of the lake spread a broadening fan of yellow-brown. "I told you hell would be popping after that big slide," said Blackmore, resting on his paddle. "That's the backed-up stream breaking through."

Kinbasket Lake is a broadening and slackening of the Columbia, backed up behind the obstructions which cause the long series of rapids between its outlet and the mouth of Canoe River. It is six or seven miles long, according to the stage of water, and from one to two miles wide. Its downward set of current is slight but perceptible. The outlet, as we approached it after a three-mile pull from our camp at Middle River, appeared strikingly similar to the head of Surprise Rapids. Here, however, the transition from quiet to swift water was even more abrupt.

The surface of the lake was a-dance with the ripples kicked up by the crisp morning breeze, and blindingly bright where the facets of the tiny wavelets reflected the sunlight like shaken diamonds. The shadowed depths of the narrow gorge ahead was Stygian by contrast. Blackmore called my attention to the way the crests of the pines rimming the river a few hundred yards inside the gorge appeared just about on the level with the surface of the lake. "When you see the tree-tops fall away like that," he said, standing up to take his final bearings for the opening run, "look out. It means there's water running down hill right ahead faster'n any boat wants to put its nose in." The roar rolling up to us was not quite so deep-toned or thunderous as the challenging bellow of the first fall of Surprise; but it was more "permeative," as though the sources from which it came ran on without end. And that was just about the situation. We were sliding down to the intake of Kinbasket or "The Twenty-One-Mile" Rapids, one of the longest, if not _the_ longest, succession of practically unbroken riffles on any of the great rivers of the world.

From the outlet of Kinbasket Lake to the mouth of Canoe River is twenty-one miles. For the sixteen miles the tail of one rapid generally runs right into the head of the next, and there is a fall of two hundred and sixty feet, or more than sixteen feet to the mile. For the last five miles there is less white water, but the current runs from eight to twelve miles an hour, with many swirls and whirlpools. The river is closely canyoned all the way. This compels one to make the whole run through in a single day, as there is no camping place at any point. Cliffs and sharply-sloping boulder banks greatly complicate lining down and compel frequent crossings at points where a failure to land just right is pretty likely to leave things in a good deal of a mess.

Blackmore ran us down through a couple of hundred yards of slap-banging white water, before coming to bank above a steep pitch where the river tore itself to rags and tatters across a patch of rocks that seemed to block the whole channel. From Captain Armstrong's description, this was the exact point where the trouble with his tipsy bow-paddler had occurred, the little difficulty which had been the cause of his leaving the salvaged cask of Scotch at his next camp. Like pious pilgrims approaching the gateway of some long-laboured-toward shrine, therefore, we looked at the place with much interest, not to say reverence. Blackmore was perhaps the least sentimental of us. "I wouldn't try to run that next fall for all the whisky ever lost in the old Columbia," he said decisively, beginning to re-coil his long line. Then we turned to on lining down the most accursed stretch of river boulders I ever had to do with.

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 passage 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 hell 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-shuttlecock 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 splashage.

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 lustily, 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 assailed 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 pass 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 passing 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.

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 assured 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 gratitude, we set to work, each in his own way.

The spot was readily located the moment we took the compass 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 archæological 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 hell 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 pronounced. "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.