The River and I Part 10

We lashed the boats together and put off into the slow current. A haggard, eerie fragment of moon slinked westward. Stars glinted in the flawless chilly blue. The surface of the river was like polished ebony--a dream-path wrought of gloom and gleam. The banks were lines of dusk, except where some lone cottonwood loomed skyward like a giant ghost clothed with a mantle that glistered and darkled in the chill star-sheen.

There was the feel of moving in eternity about it all. The very limitation of the dusk gave the feeling of immensity. There was no sense of motion, yet we moved. The sky seemed as much below as above. We seemed suspended in a hollow globe. Now and then the boom of a diving beaver's tail accented the clinging quiet; and by fits the drowsy muttering of waterfowl awoke in the adjacent swamps, and droned back into the universal hush.

Frank and I stood watch, the three others rolling up in their blankets among the luggage. It occurred to me for the first time that we had a phonograph under the cargo. I went down after it. At random I chose a record and set the machine going. It was a Chopin _Nocturne_ played on a 'cello--a vocal yearning, a wailing of frustrate aspirations, a brus.h.i.+ng of sick wings across the gates of heavens never to be entered; and then the finale--an insistent, feverish repet.i.tion of the human ache, ceasing as with utter exhaustion.

I looked about me drinking in the night. How little this music really expressed it! It seemed too humanly near-sighted, too egotistic, too petty to sound out under those far-seeing stars, in that divine quiet.

I slipped on another record. This time it was a beautiful little song, full of the sweet melancholy of love. I shut it down. The thing wouldn't do. In the evening--yes. But _now_! Truly there is something womanly about Night, something loverlike in a vast impersonal way; but too big--she is too terribly big to woo with human sentiment. Only a windlike chant would do--something with an undertone of human despair, outsoared by brave, savage flights of invincible soul-hope--great virile singing man-cries, winged as the starlight, weird as s.p.a.ce--Whitman sublimated, David's soul poured out in symphony.

I started another going. This time I did not stop it, for the Night was singing--through its nose perhaps, but still it was singing--out of that machine. It was Wagner's _Evening Star_ played by an orchestra. It filled the night, swept the glittering reaches, groped about in the glooms; and then, leaving the human theme behind, soul-like the upward yearning violins took flight, dissolving at last into starlight and immensity. Ages swept by me like a dream-wind. When I got back, the machine, all but run down, was scratching hideously.

Slowly we swung about in the scarcely perceptible current. Down among the luggage the three snored discordantly. Frank's cigarette glowed intermittently against the dim horizon, like a bonfire far off.

Somewhere out in the gloom coyotes chattered and yelped, and from far across the dusky valley others answered--a doleful tenson.

I dozed. Frank awoke us all with a shout. We leaped up and stared blinkingly into the north. That whole region of the sky was aflame from zenith to horizon with spectral fires. It was the aurora. Not the pale, ragged glow, sputtering like the ghost of a huge lamp-flame, which is familiar to every one, but a billowing of color, rainbows gone mad! In the northeast the long rolling columns formed--many-colored clouds of spectral light whipped up as by a whirlwind--flung from eastward to westward, devouring Polaris and the Wain--rapid sequent towers of smokeless fire!

It dazzled and whirled and mounted and fell like the illumined filmy skirts of some invisible t.i.tanic serpentine dancer, madly pirouetting across a carpet of stars. Then suddenly it all fell into a dull ember-glow and flashed out. The ragged moon dropped out of the southwestern sky. In the chill of the night, gray, dense fog wraiths crawled upon the hidden face of the waters.

Again I dozed and awakened with the sense of having stopped suddenly. A light wind had arisen and we were fast on a bar. Frank and I took our blankets out on the sand, rolled up and went to sleep.

The red of dawn awoke us as though some one had shouted. Frank and I sat up and stared about. A white-tail deer was drinking at the river's edge three hundred yards away. So far as we were concerned, it was a dream-deer. We blinked complacently at it until it disappeared in the brush. Then we thought of the rifle.

We were all stiff and chilled. The boats were motionless in shallow water. We all got out in the stream that felt icy to us, and waded the crafts into the channel. Incidentally we remembered Texas and his wisdom.

The time was early August; but nevertheless there was a tang of frost in the air and the river seemed to flow not water but a thick frore fog. I smelled persimmons distinctly--it was that cold; brown spicy persimmons smashed on crisp autumn leaves down in old Missouri! The smell haunted me all morning like a bitter-sweet regret.

We breakfasted on flapjacks and, separating the boats, put off. The skiff left us easily and disappeared. A head wind arose with the sun and increased steadily. By eleven o'clock it blew so strongly that we could make no headway with the rude paddles, and the waves, rolling at least four feet from trough to crest, made it impossible to hold the boat in course. We quit paddling, and got out in the water with the line. Two pulled and one pushed. All day we waded, sometimes up to our necks; sometimes we swam a bit, and sometimes we clung to the boat and kicked it on to the next shallows. Our progress was ridiculously slow, but we kept moving. When we stopped for a few minutes to smoke under the lee of a bank, our legs cramped.

To lay up one day would be only to establish a precedent for day after day of inactivity. The prevailing winds would be head winds. We clung to the shoddy hope held out by that magic name--Milk River. We knew too well that Milk River was only a snare and a delusion; but one must fight toward something--it makes little difference what you call that something. A goal, in itself, is an empty thing; all the virtue lies in the moving toward the goal.

Often we sank deep in the mud; often at the bends we could scarcely forge against the blast that held us leaning to the pull. Noon came and still we had not overtaken the skiff. Dark came, and we had not yet sighted it. But with the sun, the wind fell, and we paddled on, lank and chilled. About ten o'clock we sighted the campfire.

We ate flapjacks once more--delicious, b.u.t.terless flapjacks!--and then once more we put off into the chill night. We made twelve miles that day, and every foot had been a fight. I wanted to raise it to twenty-five before sunrise. No one grumbled this time; but in the light of the campfire the faces looked cheerless--except the Kid's face.

We huddled up in our blankets and, naturally, all of us went to sleep. A great shock brought us to our feet. The moon had set and the sky was overcast. Thick night clung around us. We saw nothing, but by the rocking of the boats and the roaring of the river, we knew we were shooting rapids.

Still dazed with sleep, I had a curious sense of being whirled at a terrific speed into some subterranean suck of waters. There was nothing to do but wait. We struck rocks and went rolling, s.h.i.+pping buckets of water at every dip. Then there was a long sickening swoop through utter blackness. It ended abruptly with a thud that knocked us down.

We found that we were no longer moving. We got out, hanging to the gunwales. The boats were lodged on a reef of rock, and we were obliged to "walk" them for some distance, when suddenly the water deepened, and we all went up to our necks. And the night seemed bitterly cold. I never s.h.i.+vered more in January.

It was yet too dark to find a camping place; so we drifted on until the east paled. Then we built a great log fire and baked ourselves until sunrise.

Day after day my log-book begins with the words, "Heavy head winds," and ends with "Drifted most of the night." We covered about twenty-five miles every twenty-four hours. Every day the cooks grumbled more; and Bill had a way of staring wistfully into the distance and talking about home, that produced in me an odd mixture of anger and pity.

We had lost our map: we had no calendar. Time and distance, curiously confused, were merely a weariness in the shoulders.

CHAPTER VII

ON TO THE YELLOWSTONE

At last one evening (shall I confess it?) we had blue-crane soup for supper!

Now a flight of gray-blue cranes across a pearl-gray sky, shot with threads of evening scarlet, makes a masterly picture: indeed, an effect worthy of reproduction in Art. You see a j.a.panese screen done in heroic size; and it is a sight to make you long exquisitely for things that are not--like a poet. But----

Let us have no illusions about this matter! Crane soup is not satisfactory. It looks gray-blue and tastes gray-blue, and gives to your psychic inwardness a dull, gray-blue, melancholy tone. And when you nibble at the boiled gray-blue meat of an adult crane, you catch yourself wondering just what sort of _ragout_ could be made out of boots; you have a morbid longing to know just how bad such a _ragout_ would really be!

Hereafter on whatever trails I may follow, blue cranes shall be used chiefly for j.a.panese screen effects. Little by little (the latent philosopher in me emerges to remark) by experience we place not only ourselves but all things in their proper places in the universe. This process of fitting things properly in one's cosmos seems to be one of the chief aims of conscious life. Therefore I score one for myself--having placed blue cranes permanently in that cosmic nook given over to j.a.panese screen effects!

Next morning we pushed on. The taste of that crane soup clung to me all day like the memory of an old sorrow dulled by time.

Deer tracks were plentiful, but it has long been conceded that the tracks are by far the least edible things pertaining to an animal.

Cranes seemed to have multiplied rapidly. Impudently tame, they lined the gravel-bars, and regarded us curiously as we fought our way past them. Now and then a flock of wild ducks alighted several hundred yards from us. We had only a rifle. To shoot a moving duck out of a moving boat with a rifle is a feat attended with some difficulties. Once we wounded a wild goose, but it got away; which offended our sense of poetic justice. After crane soup one would seem to deserve roast goose.

I scanned the dreary monotonous valleys stretching away from the river.

We had for several days been living on scenery, tobacco, and flapjacks.

The scenery had flattened out, tobacco was running low; but the flapjacks bid fair to go on forever. I sought in my head for the exact adjective, the particular epithet with the inevitable feel about it, with which to describe that monotonous melancholy stretch. Every time I tried, I came back to the word "_baconless_." The word took on exquisite overtones of gray meaning, and I worked up those overtones until I had a perfectly wrought melancholy poem of one word--"_Baconless_." For, after all, a poem never existed upon paper, but lives subtly in the consciousness of the poet, and in the minds of those who understand the poet through the suggestiveness of his written symbols, and their own remembered experiences.

But during the next morning, poetic justice worked. A rider mounted on a piebald pony appeared on the bank and shouted for us to pull in.

I suddenly realized why a dog wags his tail at a stranger. But the feeling I had was bigger than that. This mounted man became at once for me the incarnation of the meaning of bacon!

When two parties meet and each wants what the other can give, it doesn't take long to get acquainted. The rider was a youth of about seventeen.

One glance at his face told you the story of his rearing. He was unmistakably city-bred, and his hands showed that his life had begun too easy for his own good.

"From the East?" he questioned joyously. "Say, you know little old New York, don't you? When were you there last?"

The lad was hungry, but not for bacon. Alas! Our hunger was the healthier one! We talked of New York. "Mother's in Paris," he volunteered, "and Dad's in New York meeting her bills. But the Old Man's got a grouch at me, and so he sent me 'way out here in this G.o.d-forsaken country! Say, what did they make this country for? Got any tailor-made cigarettes about you? How did Broadway look when you were there last?

Lights all there yet at night? I've been here two years--it seems like two hundred! Talk about Robinson Crusoe! Say, I've got him distanced!"

I helped him build up a momentary Broadway there in the wilderness--the lights, the din, the hurrying, jostling theater crowds, the cafes, faces, faces--anguished faces, eager faces, weary faces, painted faces, squalor, brilliance. For me the memory of it only made me feel the pity of it all. But the lad's eyes beamed. He was homesick for Broadway.

I changed the subject from prose to poetry; that is, from Broadway to bacon.

"Wait here till I come back," said the lad, mounting. He spurred up a gulch and disappeared. In an hour he reappeared with a half strip of the precious stuff. "Take money for it? Not on your life!" he insisted.

"You've been down there, and that goes for a meal ticket with me!"

Fried bacon! And flapjacks sopped in the grease of it! After all, a banquet is very much a state of mind.

When we pulled away, the ostracized New Yorker bade us farewell with a s.n.a.t.c.h of a song once more or less popular: "Give my regards to Broadway!"

We pushed on vigorously now. The head wind came up. _The head wind!_ It seemed one of the eternal things. We paddled and cordelled valiantly, discussing Milk River the while. We had grown very credulous on that subject. Somehow or other an unlimited supply of gasoline was all the engine needed for the complete restoration of its health; and Milk River stood for gasoline in liberal quant.i.ties. Hope is generally represented by the poets as a thing winged and ethereal; nevertheless it can be fed on bacon.

The next morning we arrived at the mouth of what we took to be h.e.l.l Creek, which flows (when it has any water in it!) out of the Bad Lands.

It didn't take much imagination to name that creek. The whole country from which it debouches looks like h.e.l.l--"with the lights out," as General Sully once remarked. A country of lifeless hills that had the appearance of an endless succession of huge black cinder heaps from prehistoric fires.