CHAPTER VIII
III. RUNNING THE BEND
_Boat Encampment to Revelstoke_
We were now close to the historic Boat Encampment, where at last our course would join with that followed by the early _voyageurs_ and explorers. No point in the whole length of the Columbia, not even Astoria, has associations more calculated to stir the imagination than this tiny patch of silt-covered overflow flat which has been formed by the erosive action of three torrential rivers tearing at the hearts of three great mountain ranges. Sand and soil of the Rockies, Selkirks and the Gold Range, carried by the Columbia, Canoe and Wood rivers, meet and mingle to form the remarkable halting place, where the east and westbound pioneering traffic of a century stopped to gather breath for the next stage of its journey.
Before pushing off from the Ferry on the morning of October seventh I dug out from my luggage a copy of a report written in 1881 by Lieutenant Thomas W. Symons, U. S. A., on the navigation of the Upper Columbia. This was chiefly concerned with that part of the river between the International Boundary and the mouth of the Snake, but Lieutenant Symons had made a long and exhaustive study of the whole Columbia Basin, and his geographical description of the three rivers which unite at Boat Encampment is so succinct and yet so comprehensive that I am impelled to make a liberal quotation from it here. Of the great assistance I had from Lieutenant Symons' invaluable report when I came to the passage of that part of the river covered by his remarkable voyage of forty years ago I shall write later.
"Amid the universal gloom and midnight silence of the north, a little above the fifty-second parallel of latitude, seemingly surrounded on all sides by cloud-piercing snow-clad mountains, and nestled down among the lower and nearer cedar-mantled hills, there lies a narrow valley where three streams meet and blend their waters, one coming from the southeast, one from the northwest, and one from the east. The principal one of these streams is the one from the southeast ... and is the headwater stream, and bears the name of the Columbia.
"The northwestern stream is the extreme northern branch of the Columbia, rising beyond the fifty-third parallel of latitude, and is known among the traders and _voyageurs_ as Canoe River, from the excellence of the barks obtained on its banks for canoe building. This is a small river, forty yards wide at its mouth, flowing through a densely timbered valley in which the trees overhang the stream to such an extent as almost to shut it out from the light of heaven....
"Portage River, the third of the trio of streams, the smallest and the most remarkable of them, is the one which enters from the east. It has its source in the very heart of the Rocky Mountains and flows through a tremendous cleft in the main range between two of its loftiest peaks, Mounts Brown and Hooker. Just underneath these giant mountains, on the divide known as 'The Height of Land,' lie two small lakes, each about thirty yards in diameter, and which are only a few yards from each other. One has its outlet to the west, Portage River, flowing to the Columbia; the other has its outlet to the east, Whirlpool River, a branch of the Athabaska, which joins the Mackenzie and flows to the Arctic Ocean.
"The elevated valley in which these lakes are situated is called 'The Committee's Punchbowl,' and the nabobs of the fur trade always treated their companions to a bucket of punch when this point was reached, if they had the ingredients from which to make it, and they usually had.
"The pass across the mountains by the Portage River, 'The Committee's Punchbowl' and Whirlpool River, known as the Athabaska Pass, was for many years the route of the British fur traders in going from one side of the Rocky Mountains to the other. This route is far from being an easy one, and a description of the difficulties, dangers and discomforts of a trip over it will certainly deter any one from making the journey for pleasure. A great part of the way the traveller has to wade up to his middle in the icy waters of Portage River. The journey had to be made in the spring before the summer thaws and rains set in, or in the autumn after severe cold weather had locked up the mountain drainage. During the summer the stream becomes an impetuous impassable mountain torrent."
Considering that Lieutenant Symons had never traversed the Big Bend nor the Athabaska Pass, this description (which must have been written from his careful readings of the diaries of the old _voyageurs_) is a remarkable one. It is not only accurate topographically and geographically, but it has an "atmosphere" which one who _does_ know this region at first hand will be quick to appreciate. How and when the stream which he and the men before him called Portage River came to have its name changed to Wood, I have not been able to learn.
A mile below the Ferry Blackmore called my attention to a sharp wedge of brown-black mountain which appeared to form the left wall of the river a short way ahead. That lofty out-thrust of rock, he said, was the extreme northern end of the Selkirk Range. The Columbia, after receiving the waters of Wood and Canoe rivers, looped right round this cape and started flowing south, but with the _massif_ of the Selkirks still forming its left bank. But the Rockies, which had formed its right bank all the way from its source, were now left behind, and their place was taken by the almost equally lofty Gold Range, which drained east to the Columbia and west to the Thompson.
The Columbia doubles back from north to south at an astonishingly sharp angle,--as river bends go, that is. Picture mentally Madison Square, New York. Now suppose the Columbia to flow north on Broadway, bend round the Flatiron Building (which represents the Selkirks), and then flow south down Fifth Avenue. Then East Twenty-Third Street would represent Wood River, and North Broadway, Canoe River. Now forget all the other streets and imagine the buildings of Madison Square as ten to twelve thousand-feet-high mountains. And there you have a model of the apex of the Big Bend of the Columbia.
A milky grey-green flood--straight glacier water if there ever was such--staining the clear stream of the Columbia marked the mouth of Wood River, and we pulled in for a brief glimpse in passing of what had once been Boat Encampment. I had broken my thermometer at Kinbasket Lake, so I could not take the temperatures here; but Wood River was beyond all doubt the coldest stream I had ever dabbled a finger-tip in. What the ascent to Athabaska Pass must have been may be judged from this description by Alexander Ross--one of the original Astoria party--written over a hundred years ago.
"Picture in the mind a dark, narrow defile, skirted on one side by a chain of inaccessible mountains rising to a great height, covered with snow, and slippery with ice from their tops down to the water's edge; and on the other a beach comparatively low, but studded in an irregular manner with standing and fallen trees, rocks and ice, and full of driftwood, over which the torrent everywhere rushes with such irresistible impetuosity that very few would dare to adventure themselves in the stream. Let him again imagine a rapid river descending from some great height, filling up the whole channel between the rocky precipices on the south, and the no less dangerous barrier on the north; and, lastly, let him suppose that we were obliged to make our way on foot against such a torrent, by crossing and recrossing it in all its turns and windings, from morning till night, up to the middle in water, and he will understand the difficulties to be overcome in crossing the Rocky Mountains."
I have been able to learn nothing of records which would indicate that any of the early explorers or _voyageurs_ traversed that portion of the Columbia down which we had just come. David Thompson, who is credited with being the first man to travel the Columbia to the sea, although he spent one winter at the foot of Lake Windermere, appears to have made his down-river push-off from Boat Encampment. Mr. Basil G. Hamilton, of Invermere, sends me an authoritative note on this point, based on Thompson's own journal. From this it appears that the great astronomer-explorer crossed the Rockies by Athabaska Pass and came down to what has since been known by the name of Boat Encampment in March, 1811. Having built himself a hut, he made preparation for a trip down the Columbia, by which he hoped to reach the mouth in advance of either of the Astor parties, and thus be able to lay claim to the whole region traversed in the name of the Northwest Company. He writes: "We first tried to get birch rind wherewith to make our trip to the Pacific Ocean, but without finding any even thick enough to make a dish. So we split out thin boards of cedar wood, about six inches in breadth, and built a canoe twenty-five feet in length and fifty inches in breadth, of the same form as a common canoe. As we had no nails we sewed the boards to each other round the timbers, making use of the fine roots of the pine which we split."
This ingeniously constructed but precarious craft was finished on the sixteenth of April, and Thompson's party embarked in it on the seventeenth. Mr. Hamilton doubts if this was the same craft in which they finally reached Astoria. From my own knowledge of what lies between I am very much inclined to agree with him. Certainly no boat of the construction described could have lasted even to the Arrow Lakes without much patching, and if a boat seeming on the lines of the original really reached the Pacific, it must have been many times renewed in the course of the voyage. I shall hardly need to add that Thompson's remarkable journey, so far as its original object was concerned, was a failure. He reached the mouth of the Columbia well in advance of Astor's land party, but only to find the New Yorker fur-trader's expedition by way of Cape Horn and Hawaii already in occupation.
Boat Encampment of to-day is neither picturesque nor interesting; indeed, there are several camp-sites at the Bend that one would choose in preference to that rather damp patch of brush-covered, treeless clearing. All that I found in the way of relics of the past were some huge cedar stumps, almost covered with silt, and the remains of a demolished _batteau_. I salved a crude oar-lock from the latter to carry as a mascot for my down-river trip. As a mascot it served me very well, everything considered; though it _did_ get me in rather bad once when I tried to use it for an oar-lock.
Before the sparkling jade-green stream of the Columbia had entirely quenched the milky flow of Wood River, the chocolate-brown torrent of Canoe River came pouring in to mess things up anew. The swift northern affluent, greatly swelled by the recent rains, was in flood, and at the moment appeared to be discharging a flow almost if not quite equal to that of the main river. For a considerable distance the waters of the right side of the augmented river retained their rich cinnamon tint, and it was not until a brisk stretch of rapid a mile below the Bend got in its cocktail-shaker action that the two streams became thoroughly blended. Then the former crystalline clearness of the Columbia was a thing of the past. It was still far from being a muddy river. There was still more of green than of brown in its waters, but they were dully translucent where they had been brilliantly transparent. Not until the hundred-mile-long settling-basin of the Arrow Lakes allowed the sediment to deposit did the old emerald-bright sparkle come back again.
A couple of quick rifle shots from the left bank set the echoes ringing just after we had passed Canoe River, and Blackmore turned in to where a man and dog were standing in front of an extremely picturesquely located log cabin. It proved to be a French-Canadian half-breed trapper called Alphonse Edmunds. His interest in us was purely social, and after a five minutes' yarn we pulled on. Blackmore said the chap lived in Golden, and that to avoid the dreaded run down through Surprise and Kinbasket rapids, he was in the habit of going a couple of hundred miles by the C. P. R. to Kamloops, thence north for a hundred miles or more by the Canadian Northern, thence by packtrain a considerable distance over the divide to the head of Canoe River, and finally down the latter by boat to the Bend, where he did his winter trapping. This was about four times the distance as by the direct route down the Columbia, and probably at least quadrupled time and expense. It threw an illuminative side-light on the way some of the natives regarded the upper half of the Big Bend.
The river was deeper now, but still plugged along at near to the ten-miles-an-hour it had averaged from the foot of Kinbasket Rapids. As the western slopes of the Selkirks were considerably more extensive than the eastern, the drainage to the Columbia from that side was proportionately greater. Cascades and cataracts came tumbling in every few hundred yards, and every mile or two, from one side or the other, a considerable creek would pour down over its spreading boulder "fan." We landed at twelve-thirty and cooked our lunch on the stove of a perfect beauty of a trapper's cabin near the mouth of Mica Creek. The trapper had already begun getting in his winter grub, but was away at the moment. The whole place was as clean as a Dutch kitchen. A recent shift of channel by the fickle-minded Mica Creek had undermined almost to the door of this snug little home, and Andy reckoned it would go down river on the next spring rise.
We ran the next eighteen miles in less than two hours, tying up for the night at a well-built Government cabin three miles below Big Mouth Creek. It was occupied for the winter by a Swede trapper named Johnston. He was out running his trap-lines when we arrived, but came back in time to be our guest for dinner. He made one rather important contribution to the menu--a "mulligan," the _pièce de résistance_ of which, so he claimed, was a mud-hen he had winged with his revolver that morning. There were six or seven ingredients in that confounded Irish stew already, and--much to the disgust of Roos and myself, who didn't fancy eating mud-hen--Andy dumped into it just about everything he had been cooking except the prunes. That's the proper caper with "mulligans," and they are very good, too, unless some one of the makings chances to be out of your line. And such most decidedly was mud-hen--fish-eating mud-hen! As we were sort of company, Roos and I put on the best faces we could and filled up on prunes and marmalade. It was only after the other three had cleaned out the "mulligan" can that Andy chanced to mention that "mud-hen" was the popularly accepted euphemism for grouse shot out of season!
Andy and Blackmore and Johnston talked "trapper stuff" all evening--tricks for tempting marten, how to prevent the pesky wolverine from robbing traps, "stink-baits," prices, and the prospects for beaver when it again became lawful to take them. Johnston was a typical Swede, with little apparent regard for his physical strength if money could be made by drawing upon it. The previous season he had had to sleep out in his blankets many nights while covering his lines, and he counted himself lucky that this year he had two or three rough cabins for shelter. He was a terrific worker and ate sparingly of the grub that cost him twenty cents a pound to bring in. He was already looking a bit drawn, and Blackmore said the next morning that he would be more or less of a physical wreck by spring, just as he had been the previous season. The hardships these trappers endure is something quite beyond the comprehension of any one who has not been with them. A city man, a farmer, even a sailor, knows nothing to compare with it.
We were a mile down stream the next morning before Blackmore discovered that his rifle had been left in Johnston's cabin, and it took him an hour of hard breaking through the wet underbrush to recover it. The river was still rising from the rains, and the current swift with occasional rapids. Blackmore approached the head of Gordon Rapids (named, of course, from a man of that name who had lost his life there) with considerable caution. He intended to run them, he said, but the convergence of currents threw a nasty cross-riffle that was not to be taken liberties with. He appeared considerably relieved when he found that the high water made it possible to avoid the main rapid by a swift but comparatively clear back-channel. We had a good view of the riffle from below when we swung back into the main channel. It was certainly a vicious tumble of wild white water, and even with our considerable freeboard it would have been a sloppy run. I should have been very reluctant to go into it all with a smaller boat.
Still deeply canyoned between lofty mountains, the scenery in this part of the Bend was quite equal to the finest through which we had passed above Canoe River. The steady drizzle which had now set in, however, made pictures out of the question. This did not deter Roos from looking for "location." He was under special instructions to make some effective camp shots, and had been on the lookout for a suitable place ever since we started. This day he found what he wanted. Shooting down a swift, rough rapid shortly after noon, we rounded a sharp bend and shot past the mouth of a deep black gorge with the white shimmer of a big waterfall just discernible in its dusky depths. Almost immediately opposite a rocky point jutted out into the eddy. It was thickly carpeted with moss and grass, and bright with the reds and yellows of patches of late flowers. At its base was an almost perfect circle of towering cedars and sugar pines, their dark green foliage standing out in fret-work against the pale purple mists filling the depths of a wedge-shaped bit of mountain valley behind. There were glaciers and peaks hanging giddily above, but these were obscured by the rain clouds.
In response to Roos' glad "Eureka!" Blackmore threw the boat's head sharply toward the left bank, and hard pulling just won us the edge of the eddy. Missing that, we would have run on into the rough-and-tumble of Twelve-Mile Rapids, where (as we found the next day) there was no landing for another half mile. The place looked even lovelier at close range than from the river, and Roos announced decisively that we were not going to stir from there until the sun came to give him light for his camp shots. Fortunately, this befell the next morning. After that, to the best of my recollection, we did not see the sun again until we crossed over to the U. S. A. many days later.
Roos took a lot of trouble with his camp picture, and I have since heard that it was most favourably reported upon from the studio. Setting up on the end of the point, he made his opening shot as the boat ran down the rapid (we had had to line back above for this, of course) and floundered through the swirls and whirlpools past the mouth of the gloomy gorge and its half-guessed waterfall. After landing and packing our outfit up the bank, trees were felled, boughs cut and spread and the tent set up. Finally, we fried bacon, tossed flapjacks and baked bannocks. I could tell by his expression that Roos dearly wanted to lend a Mack Sennett "custard-pie" touch by having some one smear some one else in the face with a mushy half-baked bannock, but discretion prevailed. Qualified "smearers" there were in plenty--Andy and Blackmore were wood-choppers and I was an ex-pitcher and shot-putter,--but the designation of a "smear-ee" was quite another matter. Roos did well to stop where he did.
Pushing off about noon, we dropped down to near the head of "Twelve-Mile," and put Roos ashore on the right bank for a shot as we ran through. We had expected to land to pick him up at the foot of the rapid, but Blackmore, in order to make the picture as spectacular as possible, threw the boat right into the midst of the white stuff. There was a good deal of soft fluff flying in the air, but nothing with much weight in it. We ran through easily, but got so far over toward the left bank that it was impossible to pull into the eddy we had hoped to make. Andy and I pulled our heads off for five minutes before we could reach slack water near the left bank, and by then we were a quarter of a mile below the foot of the rapid. Andy had to go back to help Roos down over the boulders with his machine and tripod. Another mile in fast water brought us to the head of Rock Slide Rapids, and we landed on the right bank for our last stretch of lining on the Big Bend.
The Rock Slide is the narrowest point on the whole Columbia between Lake Windermere and the Pacific. An almost perpendicular mountainside has been encroaching on the river here for many years, possibly damming it all the way across at times. From the Slide to the precipitous left bank there is an average channel seventy feet in width, through which the river rushes with tremendous velocity over and between enormous sharp-edged boulders. This pours into a cauldron-like eddy at a right-angled bend, and over the lower end of that swirling maelstrom the river spills into another narrow chute to form the _Dalles des Morts_ of accursed memory. I know of no place on the upper half of the Bend where the river is less than a hundred feet wide. The Little Dalles, just below the American line, are about a hundred and forty feet across in their narrowest part, and the Great Dalles below Celilo Falls are slightly wider. Kettle Falls, Hell-Gate and Rock Island Rapids have side channels of less than a hundred feet, but the main channels are much broader. Save only the _Dalles des Morts_ (which are really its continuation) the Rock Slide has no near rival anywhere on the river.
It has struck me as quite probable that the Rock Slide, and the consequent constriction of the river at that point, are of comparatively recent occurrence, almost certainly of the last hundred years. In the diaries of Ross, Cox and Franchiere, on which most of the earlier Columbian history is based, I can find no mention of anything of the kind at this point, a location readily identifiable because of its proximity to the _Dalles des Morts_, which they all mention. But in Ross' record I _do_ find this significant passage:
"A little after starting (_from the Dalles des Morts_) we backed our paddles and stood still for some minutes admiring a striking curiosity. The water of a cataract creek, after shooting over the brink of a bold precipice, falls in a white sheet onto a broad, flat rock, smooth as glass, which forms the first step; then upon a second, some ten feet lower down, and lastly, on a third, somewhat lower. It then enters a subterranean vault, formed at the mouth like a funnel, and after passing through this funnel it again issues forth with a noise like distant thunder. After falling over another step it meets the front of a bold rock, which repulses back the water with such violence as to keep it whirling around in a large basin. Opposite to this rises the wing of a shelving cliff, which overhangs the basin and forces back the rising spray, refracting in the sunshine all the colours of the rainbow. The creek then enters the Columbia."
On the left bank, immediately above the _Dalles des Morts_, an extremely beautiful little waterfall leaps into the river from the cliffs, but neither this (as will readily be seen from my photograph of it) nor any other similar fall I saw in the whole length of the Columbia, bears the least suggestion of a resemblance to the remarkable cataract Ross so strikingly describes. But I _did_ see a very sizable stream of water cascading right down the middle of the great rock slide, and at a point which might very well coincide with that at which Ross saw his "stairway-and-tunnel" phenomenon. Does it not seem quite possible that the latter should have undermined the cliff over and through which it was tumbling, precipitating it into the river and forming the Rock Slide of the present day?
The middle of the channel at Rock Slide was a rough, smashing cascade that looked quite capable of grinding a boat to kindling wood in a hundred feet; but to the right of it the water was considerably better. Blackmore said the chances would be all in favour of running it safely, _but_, if anything at all went wrong (such as the unshipping of an oar, for instance), it might make it hard to get into the eddy at the bend; and if we missed the eddy--Death Rapids! He didn't seem to think any further elucidation was necessary. It would be best to line the whole way down, he said.
On account of the considerable depth of water right up to the banks, the boat struck on the rocks rather less than usual; but the clamber over the jagged, fresh-fallen granite was the worst thing of the kind we encountered. I _did_ get a bit of a duck here, though, but it was not near to being anything serious, and the sequel was rather amusing. Losing my footing for a moment on the only occasion I had to give Andy a lift with the boat, I floundered for a few strokes, kicked into an eddy and climbed out.
Ever since Andy had his souse and came out with empty pockets, I had taken the precaution of buttoning mine securely down before starting in to line. The buttons had resisted the best efforts of the kleptomaniacal river current, and I came out with the contents of my pocket wet but intact. But there was a trifling casualty even thus. A leg of my riding breeches was missing from the knee down. It was an ancient pair of East Indian _jodpurs_ I was wearing (without leggings, of course), and age and rough usage had opened a slit at the knee. Possibly I caught this somewhere on the boat without noting it in my excitement; or it is even possible the current _did_ tear it off. There was nothing especially remarkable about it in any case. All the same, Blackmore and Andy always solemnly declared that the _geesly_ river, baulked by my buttons of its designs on the contents of my pockets, had tried to get away with my whole pair of pants! If that was so, it had its way in the end. Before I set out on the second leg of my voyage from the foot of the Arrow Lakes, I threw the river god all that was left of that bedraggled pair of _jodpurs_ as a propitiatory offering.
The deeper rumble of Death Rapids became audible above the higher-keyed grind of Rock Slide as we worked down toward the head of the intervening eddy. Of all the cataracts and cascades with sinister records on the Columbia this Dalles of the Dead has undoubtedly been the one to draw to itself the greatest share of execration. The terrific toll of lives they have claimed is unquestionably traceable to the fact that this swift, narrow chute of round-topped rollers is many times worse than it looks, especially to a comparatively inexperienced river man, and there have been many such numbered among its victims. There are two or three places in Surprise Rapids, and one or two even in Kinbasket, that the veriest greenhorn would know better than to try to run; Death Rapids it is conceivable that a novice might try, just as many of them have, and to their cost. However, it is probable that the greatest number that have died here were comparatively experienced men who were sucked into the death-chute in spite of themselves. Of such was made up the party whose tragic fate gave the rapid its sinister name. Ross Cox, of the original Astorians, tells the story, and the account of it I am setting down here is slightly abridged from his original narrative.
On the sixteenth of April, 1817, Ross Cox's party of twenty-three left Fort George (originally and subsequently Astoria) to ascend the Columbia and cross the Rockies by the Athabaska Pass, en route Montreal. On the twenty-seventh of May they arrived at Boat Encampment after the most severe labours in dragging their boats up the rapids and making their way along the rocky shores. Seven men of the party were so weak, sick and worn out that they were unable to proceed across the mountains, so they were given the best of the canoes and provisions, and were to attempt to return down river to Spokane House, a Hudson Bay post near the mouth of the river of that name. They reached the place which has since borne the name of _Dalles des Morts_ without trouble. There, in passing their canoe down over the rapids with a light cod line, it was caught in a whirlpool. The line snapped, and the canoe, with all the provisions and blankets, was lost.
The men found themselves utterly destitute, and at a time of year when it was impossible to procure any wild fruit or roots. The continual rising of the water completely inundated the beach, which compelled them to force their way through a dense forest, rendered almost impervious by a thick growth of prickly underbrush. Their only nourishment was water. On the third day a man named Macon died, and his surviving comrades, though unconscious of how soon they might be called on to follow him, divided his remains into equal parts, on which they subsisted for several days. From the sore and swollen state of their feet, their daily progress did not exceed two or three miles. A tailor named Holmes was the next to die, and the others subsisted for some days on his emaciated remains. In a little while, of the seven men, only two remained alive--Dubois and La Pierre. La Pierre was subsequently found on the upper Arrow Lake by two Indians who were coasting it in a canoe. They took him to Kettle Falls, from where he was carried to Spokane House.
He stated that after the death of the fifth man of the party, Dubois and he remained for some days at the spot, living on the remains. When they felt strong enough to continue, they loaded themselves with as much of the flesh as they could carry; that with this they succeeded in reaching the Upper Lake, around the shores of which they wandered for some time in search of Indians; that their food at length became exhausted, and they were again reduced to the prospects of starvation. On the second night after their last meal La Pierre observed something suspicious in the conduct of Dubois, which induced him to be on his guard; and that shortly after they had lain down for the night, and while he feigned sleep, he observed Dubois cautiously opening his clasp-knife, with which he sprang at La Pierre, inflicting on the hand the blow evidently intended for the neck. A silent and desperate conflict followed, in which, after severe struggling, La Pierre succeeded in wresting the knife from his antagonist, and, having no other resource left, was finally obliged to cut Dubois' throat. It was several days after this that he was discovered by the Indians.
This was one of the earliest, and certainly the most terrible, of all the tragedies originating at the _Dalles des Morts_. There are a number of graves in the vicinity, but more numerous still are the inscriptions on the cliffs in memory of the victims whose bodies were never recovered for burial.
Compared to what we had been having, lining down Death Rapids was comparatively simple. It was only when one got right down beside them that the terrible power of the great rolling waves became evident. From crest to trough they must have been from twelve to fifteen feet high, with the water--on account of the steep declivity and the lack of resistance from rocks--running at race-horse speed. We had become so used to expecting big boulders to underlie heavy waves that it was difficult to realize that there was all of a hundred feet of green water between these giant rollers and the great reefs of bedrock which were responsible for them.
For a quarter of a mile below where the rolling waves ceased to comb there was a green-white chaos of whirlpools and the great geyser-like up-boils where the sucked-down water was ejected again to the surface. This was another of the places where the river was said to "eat up" whole pine trees at high water, and it was not hard to believe. Even now the voracious vortices were wolfing very considerable pieces of driftwood, and one had to keep a very sharp lookout to see the spewed-forth fragments reappear at all. This was no water for a small boat or canoe. It would, for instance, have engulfed the sixteen-foot skiff which I used on the lower river as an elephant gulps a tossed peanut. But our big double-ended thirty-footer was more of a mouthful. Blackmore pushed off without hesitation as soon as we had lined below the rollers, but _not_ without reiterating the old warning about not dipping too deep, and being quick about throwing the oar free from its oar-lock if a whirlpool started to drag down the blade. We had a lively five minutes of it, what with the whirlpools trying to suck her stern under and the geysers trying to toss her bow on high; but they never had us in serious trouble. They did spin her all the way round, though, in spite of all the three of us could do to hold her, and as for our course--a chart of it would make the track of an earthquake on a seismograph look as if drawn with a straight-edge!
Another mile took us to the head of Priest Rapids, so named because two French-Canadian priests had been drowned there. This was to be our great rapid-running picture. Bad light had prevented our getting anything of the kind in Surprise and Kinbasket rapids, and "Twelve-Mile," though white and fast, was hardly the real thing. But Priest Rapids was reputed the fastest on the whole river--certainly over twenty miles an hour, Blackmore reckoned. It had almost as much of a pitch as the upper part of the first drop of Surprise Rapids down to the abrupt fall. But, being straight as a city street and with plenty of water over the rocks, running it was simply a matter of having a large enough boat and being willing to take the soaking. Blackmore had the boat, and, for the sake of a real rip-snorting picture, he said he was willing to take the soaking. So were Andy and I.
We dropped Roos at the head of the rumbling "intake," and while Andy went down to help him set up in a favourable position, Blackmore and I lined back up-stream a hundred yards so as to have a good jump on when we started. Andy joined us presently, to report that Roos appraised the "back-lighting" effect across the white caps as "cheap at a million dollars." He was going to make the shot of his life. Pushing off we laid on our oars, floating down until we caught Roos' signal to come on. Then Andy and I swung into it with all of the something like four hundred and fifty pounds of beef we scaled between us. Blackmore headed her straight down the "V" into the swiftest and roughest part of the rapid. It was a bit less tempestuous toward the right bank, but a quiet passage was not what he was looking for this trip.
The boat must have had half her length out of water when she hurdled off the top of that first wave. I couldn't see, of course, but I judged it must have been that way from the manner in which she slapped down and buried her nose under the next comber. That brought over the water in a solid green flood. Andy and I only caught it on our hunched backs, but Blackmore, on his feet and facing forward, had to withstand a full frontal attack. My one recollection of him during that mad run is that of a freshly emerged Neptune shaking his grizzly locks and trying to blink the water out of his eyes.
Our team-work, as usual, went to sixes-and-sevens the moment we hit the rough water, but neither Andy nor I stopped pulling on that account. Yelling like a couple of _locoed_ Apaches, we kept slapping out with our oar-blades into every hump of water within reach, and I have an idea that we managed to keep a considerable way even over the speeding current right to the finish. It was quite the wettest river run I ever made. A number of times during the war I was in a destroyer when something turned up to send it driving with all the speed it had--or all its plates would stand, rather--into a head sea. That meant that it made most of the run tunnelling under water. And that was the way it seemed going down Priest Rapids, only not so bad, of course. We were only about a quarter full of water when we finally pulled up to the bank in an eddy to wait for the movie man.
I could see that something had upset Roos by the droop of his shoulders, even when he was a long way off; the droop of his mouth confirmed the first impression on closer view. "You couldn't do that again, could you?" he asked Blackmore, with a furtive look in his eyes. The "Skipper" stopped bailing with a snort. "Sure I'll do it again," he growled sarcastically. "Just line the boat back where she was and I'll bring her down again--only not to-night. I'll want to get dried out first. But what's the matter anyhow? Didn't we run fast enough to suit you?"
"Guess _you_ ran fast enough," was the reply; "but the film didn't. Buckled in camera. Oil-can! Washout! Out of luck!" Engulfed in a deep purple aura of gloom, Roos climbed back into the boat and asked how far it was to camp and dinner.
For a couple of miles we had a fast current with us, but by the time we reached the mouth of Downie Creek--the centre of a great gold rush half a century ago--the river was broadening and deepening and slowing down. A half hour more of sharp pulling brought us to Keystone Creek and Boyd's Ranch, where we tied up for the night. This place had the distinction of being the only ranch on the Big Bend, but it was really little more than a clearing with a house and barn. Boyd had given his name to a rapid at the head of Revelstoke Canyon--drowned while trying to line by at high water, Blackmore said--and the present owner was an American Civil War Pensioner named Wilcox. He was wintering in California for his health, but Andy, being a friend of his, knew where to look for the key. Hardly had the frying bacon started its sizzling prelude than there came a joyous yowl at the door, and as it was opened an enormous tiger-striped tomcat bounded into the kitchen. Straight for Andy's shoulder he leaped, and the trapper's happy howl of recognition must have met him somewhere in the air. Andy hugged the ecstatically purring bundle to his breast as if it were a long-lost child, telling us between nuzzles into the arched furry back that this was "Tommy" (that was his name, of course), with whom he had spent two winters alone in his trapper's cabin. It was hard to tell which was the more delighted over this unexpected reunion, man or cat.
He had little difficulty in accounting for "Tommy's" presence at Boyd's. He had given the cat to Wilcox a season or two back, and Wilcox, when he left for California, had given him to "Wild Bill," who had a cabin ten miles farther down the river. "Bill" already had a brother of "Tommy," but a cat of much less character. As "Bill" was much given to periodic sprees, Andy was satisfied that "Tommy," who was a great sizer-up of personality, had left him in disgust and returned to his former deserted home to shift for himself. As he would pull down rabbits as readily as an ordinary cat caught mice, this was an easy matter as long as the snow did not get too deep. Of what might happen after that Andy did not like to think. He would have to make some provision for his pet before full winter set in.
That evening we sat around the kitchen fire, telling all the cat stories we knew and quarrelling over whose turn it was to hold "Tommy" and put him through his tricks. The latter were of considerable variety. There was all the usual "sit-up," "jump-through" and "roll-over" stuff, but with such "variations" as only a trapper, snow-bound for days with nothing else to do, would have the time to conceive and perfect. For instance, if you only waved your hand in an airy spiral, "Tommy" would respond with no more than the conventional "once-over;" but a gentle tweak of the tail following the spiral, brought a roll to the left, while two tweaks directed him to the right. Similarly with his "front" and "back" somersaults, which took their inspiration from a slightly modified form of aerial spiral. Of course only Andy could get the fine work out of him, but the ordinary "jump-through" stuff he would do for any of us.
I am afraid the cat stories we told awakened, temporarily at least, a good deal of mutual distrust. Roos didn't figure greatly, but Andy and Blackmore and I were glowering back and forth at each other with "I-suppose-you-don't-believe-_that_" expressions all evening. The two woodsmen, "hunting in couples" for the occasion, displayed considerable team-work. One of their best was of a trapper of their acquaintance--name and present address mentioned with scrupulous particularity--who had broken his leg one winter on Maloney Creek, just as he was at the end of his provisions. Dragging himself to his cabin, he lay down to die of starvation. The next morning his cat jumped in through the window with a rabbit in his mouth. Then the trapper had his great idea. Leaving the cat just enough to keep him alive, he took the rest for himself. That made the cat go on hunting, and each morning he came back with a rabbit. And so it went on until springtime brought in his partner and relief. I asked them why, if the cat was so hungry, he didn't eat the rabbit up in the woods; but they said that wasn't the way of a cat, or at least of this particular cat.
Then I told them of a night, not long before the war, that I spent with the German archæologists excavating at Babylon. Hearing a scratching on my door, I got up and found a tabby cat there. Entering the room, she nosed about under my mosquito netting for a few moments with ingratiating mewings and purrings, finally to trot out through the open door with an "I'll-see-you-again-in-a-moment" air. Presently she returned with a new-born kitten in her mouth. Nuzzling under the net and coverlets, she deposited the mewing atom in my bed, and then trotted off after another. When the whole litter of five was there, she crawled in herself and started nursing them. I spent the night on the couch, and without a net.
According to the best of my judgment, that story of mine was the only true one told that night. And yet--confound them--they wouldn't believe it--any more than I would theirs!
Considerable feeling arose along toward bed-time as to who was going to have "Tommy" to sleep with. Roos--who hadn't cut much ice in the story-telling--came strong at this juncture by adopting cave-man tactics and simply picking "Tommy" up and walking off with him. Waiting until Roos was asleep, I crept over and, gently extricating the furry pillow from under his downy cheek, carried it off to snuggle against my own ear. Whether Andy adopted the same Sabine methods himself, I never quite made sure. Anyhow, it was out of his blankets that "Tommy" came crawling in the morning.
As we made ready to pack off, Andy was in considerable doubt as to whether it would be best to leave his pet where he was or to take him down to "Wild Bill" again. "Tommy" cut the Gordian Knot himself by following us down to the boat like a dog and leaping aboard. He was horribly upset for a while when he saw the bank slide away from him and felt the motion of the boat, but Roos, muffling the dismal yowls under his coat, kept him fairly quiet until "Wild Bill's" landing was reached. Here he became his old self again, following us with his quick little canine trot up to the cabin. Outside the door he met his twin brother, and the two, after a swift sniff of identification, slipped away across the clearing to stalk rabbits.
"Wild Bill," as Andy had anticipated, was still in bed, but got up and welcomed us warmly as soon as he found who it was. He was a small man--much to my surprise, and looked more like a French-Canadian gentleman in reduced circumstances than the most tumultuous booze-fighter on the upper Columbia. I had heard scores of stories of his escapades in the days when Golden and Revelstoke were wide-open frontier towns and life was really worth living. But most of them just miss being "drawing-room," however, and I refrain from setting them down. There was one comparatively polite one, though, of the time he started the biggest free-for-all fight Revelstoke ever knew by using the white, woolly, cheek-cuddling poodle of a dance-hall girl to wipe the mud off his boots with. And another--but no, that one wouldn't quite pass censor.
"Bill" had shot a number of bear in the spring, and now asked Andy to take the unusually fine skins to Revelstoke and sell them for him. He also asked if we could let him have any spare provisions, as he was running very short. He was jubilant when I told him he could take everything we had left for what it had cost in Golden. That was like finding money, he said, for packing in his stuff cost him close to ten cents a pound. But it wasn't the few dollars he saved on the grub that etched a silver--nay, a roseate--lining on the sodden rain clouds for "Wild Bill" that day; rather it was the sequel to the consequences of a kindly thought I had when he came down to the boat to see us off.
"'Bill,'" I said, as he started to wring our hands in parting, "they tell me you've become a comparative teetotaler these last few years. But we have a little 'thirty per over-proof' left--just a swallow. Perhaps--for the sake of the old days...."
That quick, chesty cough, rumbling right from the diaphragm, was the one deepest sound of emotion I ever heard--and I've heard a fair amount of "emoting," too. "Don't mind--if I do," he mumbled brokenly, with a long intake of breath that was almost a sob. I handed him a mug--a hulking big half-pint coffee mug, it was--and uncorked the bottle. "Say when...."
"Thanks--won't trouble you," he muttered, snatching the bottle from me with a hand whose fingers crooked like claws. Then he inhaled another deep breath, took out his handkerchief, brushed off a place on one of the thwarts, sat down, and, pouring very deliberately, emptied the contents of the bottle to the last drop into the big mug. The bottle--a British Imperial quart--had been a little less than a quarter full; the mug was just short of brimming. "Earzow!" he mumbled, with a sweepingly comprehensive gesture with the mug. Then, crooking his elbow, he dumped the whole half pint down his throat. Diluted four-to-one, that liquid fire would have made an ordinary man wince; and "Wild Bill" downed it without a blink. Then he wiped his lips with his sleeve, set mug and bottle carefully down on the thwart, bowed low to each of us, and stepped ashore with dignified tread. Blackmore, checking Roos' hysterical giggle with a prod of his paddle handle, pushed off into the current. "Wait!" he admonished, eyeing the still figure on the bank with the fascinated glance of a man watching a short length of fuse sputter down toward the end of a stick of dynamite.
We had not long to wait. The detonation of the dynamite was almost instantaneous. The mounting fumes of that "thirty per" fired the slumbering volcano of the old trapper as a dash of kerosene fires a bed of dormant coals. And so "Wild Bill" went wild. Dancing and whooping like an Indian, he shouted for us to come back--that he would give us his furs, his cabin, the Columbia, the Selkirks, Canada.... What he was going to offer next we never learned, for just then a very sobering thing occurred--"Tommy" and his twin brother, attracted by the noise, came trotting down the path from the cabin to learn what it was all about.
Andy swore that he had told "Bill" that we had brought "Tommy" back, and that "Bill" had heard him, and replied that he hoped the cat would stay this time. But even if this was true, it no longer signified. "Bill" had forgotten all about it, and _knew_ that there ought to be only one tiger-striped tomcat about the place, whereas his eyes told him there were two. So he kept counting them, and stopping every now and then to hold up two fingers at us in pathetic puzzlement. Finally he began to chase them--or rather "it"--now one of "it" and now the other. The last we saw of him, as the current swept the boat round a point, he had caught "Tommy's" twin brother and was still trying to enumerate "Tommy." Very likely by that time there were two of him in fancy as well as in fact--possibly mauve and pink ones.
Blackmore took a last whiff at the neck of the rum bottle and then tossed it gloomily into the river. "The next time you ask a man to take a 'swallow,'" he said, "probably you'll know enough to find out how big his 'swallow' is in advance."
We pulled hard against a head wind all morning, and with not much help from the current. The latter began to speed up at Rocky Point Rapids, and from there the going was lively right on through Revelstoke Canyon. Sand Slide Rapid, a fast-rolling serpentine cascade near the head of the Canyon, gave us a good wetting as Blackmore slashed down the middle of it, and he was still bailing when we ran in between the sides of the great red-and-black-walled gorge. Between cliffs not over a hundred feet apart for a considerable distance, the river rushes with great velocity, throwing itself in a roaring wave now against one side, now against the other. As the depth is very great (Blackmore said he had failed to get bottom with a hundred-and-fifty-foot line), the only things to watch out for were the cliffs and the whirlpools. Neither was a serious menace to a boat of our size at that stage of water, but the swirls would have made the run very dangerous for a skiff or canoe at any time. Unfortunately, the drizzling rain and lowering clouds made pictures of what is one of the very finest scenic stretches of the Big Bend quite out of the question. If it had been the matter of a day or two, we would gladly have gone into camp and waited for the light; but Blackmore was inclined to think the spell of bad weather that had now set in was the beginning of an early winter, in which event we might stand-by for weeks without seeing the sky. It was just as well we did not wait. As I have already mentioned, we did not feel the touch of sunlight again until we were on the American side of the border.
From the foot of the Canyon to Blackmore's boat-house was four miles. Pulling down a broadening and slackening river flanked by ever receding mountains, we passed under the big C. P. R. bridge and tied up at four o'clock. In spite of taking it easy all the time, the last twenty miles had been run in quite a bit under two hours.