Down the Columbia Part 6

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

With an easy bob--quick like a rowboat rides the bow wave of a steamer, but smoother, easier in its lift--we ran into the head of the rapid.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The basic principles of "lining down" are the same on all rivers. Where water is too rough to run, it is the last resort before portaging. As generally practised, one man, walking along the bank, lets the boat down with a line, while another--or as many others as are available--keeps it off the rocks with poles. "Lining" can be effected more rapidly and with much less effort if one man remains in the boat and fends off with his pole from there. This is much the better method where the fall is not too great and the water comparatively warm. On the upper Columbia, where the breaking away of a boat from a line means its almost inevitable loss with all on board, it is resorted to only when absolutely necessary, and when a man of great experience is handling the line. It takes a natural apt.i.tude and years of experience for a man to master all the intricacies of "lining." I shall not endeavour to enumerate even the few that I am familiar with; but the one thing beyond all others to avoid is letting the bow of the boat swing outwards when the stern is held up by a rock.

This brings the full current of the river against its up-stream side, exerting a force that a dozen men could not hold against, let alone one or two. As Blackmore was noted for his mastery of the "lining" game, however, we had no apprehension of trouble in this department.

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

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

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

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

unbroken, and would need good light to finish it in. Blackmore said he could manage the camp if we thought our ear-drums would stand the roar.

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

Blackmore, pop-eyed with astonishment, came down to watch the show. It was the first time he had ever seen a man take a voluntary bath in Surprise Rapids, he said. And all the others--the involuntary bathers--they had picked up later in Kinbasket Lake.

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

The storm which Blackmore's seer-like vision had descried in the blue-green auroral flutters of a couple of nights previously arrived quite on schedule. Although the western sky had glowed for half an hour after sunset with that supposedly optimistic tinge of primrose and terra-cotta, it was pouring before midnight, and the next morning there was truly almost as much water in the air as in the river. Pictures were out of the question, so there was nothing to do but hang on until the weather cleared. Leaving Roos whittling and Andy struggling to divert a swelling young river that was trying to sluice away the sand on which the tent was pitched, Blackmore and I pulled on our waterproofs and clambered a mile through the woods to a camp of C. P. R. engineers.

Blackmore wanted to get an extra axe; I to get some further data on the fall of the river. We found a crude cable-ferry thrown across just below the foot of the big fall, and a rough, boggy path from the eastern end of it took us to the camp of three or four comfortable cabins.

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

I learned that the total length of Surprise Rapids was three and a third miles, in which distance there was a fall of nearly one hundred feet.

The greatest drop was in that stretch which we were waiting to "line,"

where there was a fall of twenty-one feet in seven hundred and fifty. At the second cascade there was a fall of fifteen feet in twelve hundred, and at the third, twenty-five feet in twenty-five hundred. It was planned to build the dam across the very narrow canyon near the foot of the lower fall, making it of such a height that a lake would be backed up as far as Beavermouth, incidentally, of course, wiping out the whole of Surprise Rapids. "They can't wipe it out any too soon to suit me,"

Blackmore commented on hearing this. "It'd have saved me a lot of work and many a wetting if they'd wiped it out twenty year ago. And that's saying nothing of the men drownded there. It was that big whirlpool down through the trees there that did for Walter Steinhoff."

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

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

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

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

Then I told him about the whisky--spoke to him as a son to his father.

And he, meeting me point for point in all seriousness of spirit, answered as father to son. He thought there was little chance of finding anything along the river. He had not done so himself for a number of years--and he hadn't been overlooking any bets, either. There was, of course, still much good stuff buried in the drift below Middle River, but it would be like looking for a needle in a haystack trying to find it. But the cache above Canoe River--ah, that was another matter!

Captain Armstrong could be absolutely depended upon in a matter of that kind, and the directions sounded right as rain. Yes, he quite understood that I should want to take it all to California with me. He would want to do the same thing if he were in my place. It would be easy as picking pippins getting it over the line. He could tell me three different ways, all of them dead sure. He would not think of taking any of it for himself. The rum we had would be ample for the trip, except in extreme emergency. That "thirty over-proof" went a long way. And I need not worry in the least about Andy. He wasn't a teetotaler exactly, but he never took too much under any provocation. Yes, I could depend upon the both of them to nose out that stuff at the old ferry. Put it there! We looked each other square in the eye, and shook hands solemnly there above the big whirlpool which was originally responsible for the good fortune that had come to us--or rather to me. Men have clasped hands and sworn to stand by each other in lesser things. At least that was the way it seemed to me at the moment. I could have embraced the fine old woodsman for his loyalty and generosity of spirit. I always called him Bob after that.

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

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

Cutting himself a "sylvan frame" through the pines on a point a hundred yards below the camp, Roos set up to shoot the first piece of lining. It was a mean looking job, for the river was tumbling in a half-cataract all the way, turning and squirming like a wounded dragon. I could see Blackmore was a bit worried over it, and, as the sequel proved, with good reason. I never quite understood his explanation of the cause of what happened, but I believe he claimed it was due to his obeying (against his better judgment) Roos' signal to keep the boat in fairly close to the bank so that she would not pa.s.s "out of the picture"--beyond the range of his lens, that is. At any rate, the boat had hardly started before she swung broadside to the current and, clapping like a limpet upon a big round boulder, hung there immovable.

Heeled till her starboard side showed like the belly of a sharply sheering shark, her port gunwale dipped deep into the swirling current.

In a wink she had taken all the water she would hold with the half-heel that was on her--enough, perhaps, to fill her half full when on an even keel.

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

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

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

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

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

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

[Ill.u.s.tration: "SHOOTING" THE FIRST BIT OF LINING AT SURPRISE RAPIDS (_above_)]

[Ill.u.s.tration: THE CAMP WHERE THE ROAR OF THE RAPIDS DEAFENED US (_centre_)]

[Ill.u.s.tration: WHERE STEINHOF WAS DROWNED (_below_)]

[Ill.u.s.tration: WHERE ANDY JUST MISSED DROWNING IN SURPRISE RAPIDS (_above_)]

[Ill.u.s.tration: LOOKING THROUGH THE PINES AT SURPRISE RAPIDS (_centre_)]

[Ill.u.s.tration: HEAD OF SECOND FALL OF SURPRISE RAPIDS (_below_)]

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

A half mile run with an eight-mile current took us to the head of the second fall, all but the first hundred yards of which had to be lined.

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