LOOKING ACROSS TO BOAT ENCAMPMENT (above)“WOOD SMOKE AT TWILIGHT” ABOVE TWELVE-MILE (below)
LINING DOWN ROCK SLIDE RAPIDS (above)WHEN THE COLUMBIA TOOK HALF OF MY RIDING BREECHES (below)
We dropped Roos at the head of the rumbling “intake,” and while Andy went down to help him setup 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 oflocoedApaches, 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?”
“Guessyouran 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 centuryago—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 catof 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 nursingthem. 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 ofidentification, 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 ashorewith 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, andknewthat 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 andwas 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 thelight; 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.
The voyage round the Big Bend, in spite of the atrocious weather, had gone so well that I had just about made up my mind to continue on down river by the time we reached Revelstoke. A letter which awaited me at the hotel there from Captain Armstrong, stating that he would be free to join me for my first week or ten days south from the foot of the lakes, was all that was needed to bring me to a decision. I wired him that I would pick him up in Nelson as soon as I had cleaned up a pile of correspondence which had pursued me in spite of all directions to the contrary, and in the meantime for him to endeavour to find a suitable boat. Nelson, as the metropolis of western British Columbia, appeared to be the only place where we would have a chance of finding what was needed in the boat line on short notice. While I wrote letters, Roos got his exposed film off to Los Angeles, laid in a new stock, and received additional instructions from Chester in connection with the new picture—the one for which the opening shots had already been made at Windermere, and which we called “The Farmer Who Would See the Sea.”
As there was no swift water whatever between Revelstoke and Kootenay Rapids, I had no hesitation indeciding to make the voyage down the Arrow Lakes by steamer. Both on the score of water-stage and weather, it was now a good month to six weeks later than the most favourable time for a through down-river voyage. Any time saved now, therefore, might be the means of avoiding so many days of winter further along. I was hoping that, with decreasing altitude and a less humid region ahead, I would at least be keeping ahead of the snows nearly if not quite all the way to Portland. I may mention here that, all in all, I played in very good luck on the score of weather. There were to be, however, a fewgeeslycold days on the river along about Wenatchee, and two or three mighty blustery blows in the Cascades.
The Arrow Lakes are merely enlargements of the Columbia, keeping throughout their lengths the same general north-to-south direction of this part of the river. The upper lake is thirty-three miles in length, and has an average width of about three miles. Sixteen miles of comparatively swift river runs from the upper to the lower lake. The latter, which is forty-two miles long and two and a half wide, is somewhat less precipitously walled than the upper lake, and there are considerable patches of cultivation here and there along its banks—mostly apple orchards. There is a steamer channel all the way up the Columbia to Revelstoke, but the present service, maintained by the Canadian Pacific at its usual high standard, starts at the head of the upper lake and finishes at West Robson, some miles down the Columbia from the foot of the lower lake. This is one of the very finest lake trips anywhere in the world; I found it an unendingsource of delight, even after a fortnight of the superlative scenery of the Big Bend.
There is a stock story they tell of the Arrow Lakes, and which appears intended to convey to the simple tourist a graphic idea of the precipitousness of their rocky walls. The skipper of my steamer told it while we were ploughing down the upper lake. Seeing a man struggling in the water near the bank one day, he ran some distance off his course to throw the chap a line. Disdaining all aid, the fellow kept right on swimming toward the shore. “Don’t worry about me,” he shouted back; “this is only the third time I’ve fallen off my ranch to-day.”
I told the Captain that the story sounded all right to me except in one particular—that even my glass failed to reveal any ranches for a man to fall off of. “Oh, that’s all right,” was the unperturbed reply; “therewasone when that yarn was started, but I guess it fell into the lake too. But mebbe Ihadought to keep it for the lower lake, though,” he added; “there is still some un-slid ranches down there.”
Nelson is a fine little city that hangs to a rocky mountainside right at the point where Kootenay Lake spills over and discharges its surplus water into a wild, white torrent that seems to be trying to atone at the last for its long delay in making up its mind to join the Columbia. Nelson was made by the rich silver-lead mines of the Kootenay district, but it was so well made that, even now with the first fine frenzy of the mining excitement over, it is still able to carry on strongly as a commercial distributing and fruit shipping centre. It is peopled by the same fine, out-door loving folk that one finds through all of western Canada, and is especially noted for its aquatic sports. I am only sorry that I was not able to see more of both Nelson and its people.
As soon as I saw Captain Armstrong I made a clean breast to him about my failure to unearth the treasure at the Bend. He was a good sport and bore up better than one would expect a man to under the circumstances. “I wish that matter of K—— and his D. T.’s had come up before you left,” was his only comment.
“Why?” I asked. “I can’t see what difference that would have made. We didn’t waste a lot of time digging.”
“That’s just it,” said the Captain with a wry grin. “Wouldn’t you have gone right on digging if you had known that the spell of jim-jams that finished K—— came from some stuff he got from a section-hand at Beavermouth? Now I suppose I’ll have to watch my chance and run down and salvage that keg of old Scotch myself.” It shows the stuff that Armstrong was made of when I say that, even after the way I had betrayed the trust he had reposed in me, he was still game to go on with the Columbia trip. That’s the sort of man he was.
Boats of anywhere near the design we would need for the river were scarce, the Captain reported, but there was one which he thought might do. This proved to be a sixteen-foot, clinker-built skiff that had been constructed especially to carry an out-board motor. She had ample beam, a fair freeboard and a considerable sheer. The principal thing against herwas the square stern, and that was of less moment running down river than if we had been working up. Itdidseem just a bit like asking for trouble, tackling the Columbia in a boat built entirely for lake use; but Captain Armstrong’s approval of her was quite good enough for me. Save for her amiable weakness of yielding somewhat overreadily to the seductive embraces of whirlpools—a trait common to all square-sterned craft of inconsiderable length—she proved more than equal to the task set for her. We paid fifty-five dollars for her—about half what she had cost—and there was a charge of ten dollars for expressing her to West Robson, on the Columbia.
We left Nelson by train for Castlegar, on the Columbia just below West Robson, the afternoon of October nineteenth. The track runs in sight of the Kootenay practically all of the way. There is a drop of three hundred and fifty feet in the twenty-eight miles of river between the outlet of the lake and the Columbia, with no considerable stretch that it would be safe to run with a boat. A large part of the drop occurs in two fine cataracts called Bonnington Falls, where there is an important hydro-electric plant, serving Nelson and Trail with power; but most of the rest of the way the river is one continuous series of foam-white cascades with short quiet stretches between. The last two or three miles to the river the railway runs through the remarkable colony of Russian Doukobours, with a station at Brilliant, where their big co-operative jam factory and administrative offices are located. We had a more intimate glimpseof this interesting colony from the river the following day.
We found the express car with the boat on the siding at West Robson, and the three of us—Armstrong, Roos and myself—had little difficulty in sliding her down the quay and launching her in the Columbia. Pulling a mile down the quiet current, we tied her up for the night at the Castlegar Ferry. Then we cut across the bend through the woods for a look at Kootenay Rapids, the first stretch of fast water we were to encounter. After the rough-and-rowdy rapids of the Big Bend, this quarter-mile of white riffle looked like comparatively easy running. It was a very different sort of a craft we had now, however, and Armstrong took the occasion to give the channel a careful study. There were a lot of big black rocks cropping up all the way across, but he thought that, by keeping well in toward the right bank, we could make it without much trouble.
On the way back to the hotel at Castlegar, the Captain was hailed from the doorway of a cabin set in the midst of a fresh bit of clearing. It turned out to be a boatman who had accompanied him and Mr. Forde, of the Canadian Department of Public Works, on a part of their voyage down the Columbia in 1915. They reminisced for half an hour in the gathering twilight, talking mostly of the occasion when a whirlpool had stood their Peterboro on end in the Little Dalles. I found this just a bit disturbing, for Armstrong had already confided to me that he intended running the Little Dalles.
The boat trimmed well when we came to stow the load the next morning, but when the three of us took our places she was rather lower in the water than we had expected she was going to be. She seemed very small after Blackmore’s big thirty-footer, and the water uncomfortably close at hand. She was buoyant enough out in the current, however, and responded very smartly to paddle and oars when Armstrong and I tried a few practice manœuvres. The Captain sat on his bedding roll in the stern, plying his long paddle, and I pulled a pair of oars from the forward thwart. Roos sat on the after thwart, facing Armstrong, with his tripod, camera and most of the luggage stowed between them. She was loaded to ride high by the head, as it was white water rather than whirlpools that was in immediate prospect. With a small boat and a consequent comparatively small margin of safety, one has to make his trim a sort of a compromise. For rough, sloppy rapids it is well to have the bows just about as high in the air as you can get them. On the other hand, it is likely to be fatal to get into a bad whirlpool with her too much down by the stern. As the one succeeds the other as a general rule, about the best you can do is to strike a comfortable mean based on what you know of the water ahead.
BONNINGTON FALLS OF THE KOOTENAY (above)PLASTERED LOG CABIN IN THE DOUKHOBOR VILLAGE (below)
TRUCKING THE SKIFF THROUGH KETTLE FALLS (left)TWILIGHT IN THE GORGE AT KETTLE FALLS (right)
I found it very awkward for a while pulling with two oars after having worked for so long with one, and this difficulty—especially in bad water—I never quite overcame. In a really rough rapid one oar is all a man can handle properly, and he does well if he manages that. Your stroke is largely determined bythe sort of stuff the blade is going into, and—as on the verge of an eddy—with the water to port running in one direction, and that to starboard running another, it is obviously impossible for a man handling two oars to do full justice to the situation. He simply has to do the best he can and leave the rest to the man with the paddle in the stern. When the latter is an expert with the experience of Captain Armstrong there is little likelihood of serious trouble.
The matter of keeping a lookout is also much more difficult in a small boat. In a craft with only a few inches of freeboard it is obviously out of the question for a steersman to keep his feet through a rapid, as he may do without risk in abatteauor canoe large enough to give him a chance to brace his knees against the sides. Armstrong effected the best compromise possible by standing and getting a good “look-see” while he could, and then settling back into a securer position when the boat struck the rough water. The three or four feet less of vantage from which to con the channel imposes a good deal of a handicap, but there is no help for it.
We ran both pitches of Kootenay Rapids easily and smartly. Her bows slapped down pretty hard when she tumbled off the tops of some of the bigger rollers, but into not the softest of the souse-holes would she put her high-held head. We took in plenty of spray, but nothing green—nothing that couldn’t be bailed without stopping. It was a lot better performance than one was entitled to expect of a lake boat running her maiden rapid.
“She’ll do!” chuckled the Captain with a satisfiedgrin, resting on his paddle as we slid easily out of the final run of swirls; “you ought to take her right through without a lot of trouble.” “Imshallah!” I interjected piously, anxious not to offend the River God with a display of overmuch confidence. I began to call her “Imshallah” in my mind from that time on, and “Imshallah”—“God willing”—she remained until I tied her up for her well-earned rest in a Portland boat-house. It was in the course of the next day or two that I made a propitiatory offering to the River God in the form of the remnants of thejodpurshe had tried so hard to snatch from me at Rock Slide Rapids. I’ve always had a sneaking feeling offerings of that kind are “good medicine;” that the old Greeks knew what they were doing when they squared things with the Gods in advance on venturing forth into unknown waters.
Big and Little Tin Cup Rapids, which are due to the obstruction caused by boulders washed down by the torrential Kootenay River, gave us little trouble. There is a channel of good depth right down the middle of both, and we splashed through this without getting into much besides flying foam. Just below we pulled up to the left bank and landed for a look at one of the Doukobour villages.
The Doukobours are a strange Russian religious sect, with beliefs and observances quite at variance with those of the Greek Church. Indeed, it was the persecutions of the Orthodox Russians that were responsible for driving considerable numbers of them to Canada. They are best known in America, not for their indefatigable industry and many other goodtraits, but for their highly original form of protesting when they have fancied that certain of their rights were being restricted by Canadian law. On repeated occasions of this kind whole colonies of them—men, women and children—have thrown aside their every rag of clothing and started off marching about the country. Perhaps it is not strange that more has been written about these strange pilgrimages than of the fact that the Doukobours have cleared and brought to a high state of productivity many square miles of land that, but for their unflagging energy, would still be worthless. In spite of their somewhat unconventional habits, these simple people have been an incalculably valuable economic asset to western Canada.
On the off chance that there might be an incipient “protest” brewing, Roos took his movie outfit ashore with him. He met with no luck. Indeed, we found the women of the astonishingly clean little village of plastered and whitewashed cabins extremely shy of even our hand cameras. The Captain thought that this was probably due to the fact that they had been a good deal pestered by kodak fiends while Godivaing round the country on some of their protest marches. “The people were very indignant about it,” he said; “but I never heard of any one pulling down their blinds.” Coventry was really very “Victorian” in its attitude toward Lady Godiva’s “protest.”
There was good swift water all the way from Castlegar to Trail, and we averaged close to nine miles an hour during the time we were on the river. At ChinaBar the river was a good deal spread out, running in channels between low gravel islands. Any one of these was runnable for a small boat, and we did not need to keep to the main channel that had once been maintained for steamers. Sixteen miles below Castlegar, and about half a mile below the mouth of Sullivan Creek, there was a long black reef of basaltic rock stretching a third of the way across the river. We shot past it without difficulty by keeping near the left bank. The sulphurous fumes of the big smelter blotching the southern sky with saffron and coppery red clouds indicated that we were nearing Trail. The stacks, with the town below and beyond, came into view just as we hit the head of a fast-running riffle. We ran the last half mile at a swift clip, pulling up into about the only place that looked like an eddy on the Trail side of the river. That this proved to be the slack water behind the crumbling city dump could not be helped. He who rides the running road cannot be too particular about his landing places.
We reached Trail before noon, and, so far as time was concerned, could just as well have run right on across the American line to Northport that afternoon. However, October twenty-first turned out to be a date of considerable importance to British Columbians, for it was the day of the election to determine whether that province should continue dry or, as the proponents of wetness euphemized it, return to “moderation.” As there was a special provision by which voters absent from their place of registration could cast their ballots wherever they chanced to be, Captain Armstrong was anxious to stop over and dohis bit for “moderation.” Indeed, I was a bit worried at first for fear, by way of compensating in a measure for the injury we had done him in failing to come through with the treasure from the Big Bend, he would expect Roos and me to put in a few absentee ballots for “moderation.” There was a rumour about that a vote for “moderation” would be later redeemable—in case “moderation” carried, of course—in the voter’s weight of the old familiar juice. I never got further than a pencilled computation on the “temperance” bar of the Crown Point Hotel that two hundred and thirty-five pounds (I was down to that by now) would work out to something like one hundred seventeen and a half quarts. This on the rule that “A pint’s a pound, the world round.” That was as far as I got, I say, for there seemed rather too much of a chance of international complications sooner or later. But I am still wondering just whatisthe law covering the case of a man who sells his vote in a foreign country—and for his weight in whisky that he would probably never have delivered to him. I doubt very much if there is any precedent to go by.
Between votes—or rather before Captain Armstrong voted—we took the occasion to go over the smelter of the Consolidated Mining and Smelting Company. It is one of the most modern plants of its kind in the world, and treats ore from all over western Canada. We were greatly interested in the recently installed zinc-leaching plant for the handling of an especially refractory ore from the company’s own mine in the Kootenays. This ore had resisted for years every attempt to extract its zinc at a profit,and the perfection of the intricate process through which it is now put at Trail has made a mine, which would otherwise have remained practically valueless, worth untold millions. The two thousand and more employés of the smelter are the main factor in the prosperity of this live and by no means unattractive little town.
We had two very emphatic warnings before leaving Trail the next morning—one was on no account to attempt to take any drinkables across the line by the river, and the other was to keep a weather eye lifting in running the rapids at the Rock Islands, two miles below town. As we reached the latter before we did the International Boundary Line, we started ’wareing the rapids first. This was by no means as empty a warning as many I was to have later. The islands proved to be two enormous granite rocks, between which the river rushed with great velocity. The Captain headed the boat into the deep, swift channel to the right, avoiding by a couple of yards a walloping whale of a whirlpool that came spinning right past the bow. I didn’t see it, of course, until it passed astern; but it looked to me then as though its whirling centre was depressed a good three feet below the surface of the river, and with a black, bottomless funnel opening out of that. I was just about to register “nonchalance” by getting off my “all-day-sucker” joke, when I suddenly felt the thwart beneath me begin to push upwards like the floor of a jerkily-started elevator, only with a rotary action. Fanning empty air with both oars, I was saved from falling backwards by the forty-five degree up-tilt of the boat.Way beneath me—down below the surface of the river—Armstrong, pop-eyed, was leaning sharply forward to keep from being dumped out over the stern. Roos, with a death-grip on either gunwale, was trying to keep from falling into the Captain’s lap. Round we went like a prancing horse, and just as the boat had completed the hundred and eighty degrees that headed her momentarily up-river, something seemed to drop away beneath her bottom, and as she sunk into the hole there came a great snorting “ku-whouf!” and about a barrel of water came pouring its solid green flood over the stern and, incidentally, the Captain. A couple of seconds later the boat had completed her round and settled back on a comparatively even keel as hard-plied oars and paddle wrenched her out of the grip of the Thing that had held her in its clutch. I saw it plainly as it did its dervish dance of disappointment as we drew away. It looked to me not over half as large as that first one which the Captain had so cleverly avoided.
“That was about the way we got caught in the Little Dalles,” observed Armstrong when we were in quieter water again. “Only it was a worse whirlpool than that one that did it. This square stern gives the water more of a grip than it can get on a canoe. We’ll have to watch out for it.”
Save over a broad, shallow bar across the current at the mouth of the Salmon, there was deep, swift water all the way to Waneta, the Canadian Customs station. Here we landed Roos to await the morning train from Nelson to Spokane and go through to Northport to arrange the American Customs formalities. At a final conference we decided to heed the warning about not attempting to carry any drinkables openly into the United States. Stowing what little there was left where not the most lynx-eyed or ferret-nosed Customs Officer could ever get at it, we pushed off.
There is a fairly fast current all the way to Northport, but from the fact that we made the eleven miles in about three-quarters of an hour, it seems likely that, between paddle and oars, the boat was driven somewhat faster than the Columbia. Just below Waneta and immediately above the International Boundary Line, the Pend d’Oreille or Clark’s Fork flows, or rather falls into the Columbia. This really magnificent stream comes tumbling down a sheer-walled gorge in fall after fall, several of which can be seen in narrowing perspective from the Columbia itself. Its final leap is over a ten-feet-high ledge which extends all the way across its two-hundred-feet-wide mouth. Above this fine cataract it is the Pend d’Oreille, below it, the Columbia. I know of no place where two such rivers come together with such fine spectacular effect, in a way so fitting to the character of each.
The Pend d’Oreille is generally rated as the principal tributary of the upper Columbia. Although the Kootenay—because it flows through a region of considerably greater annual rainfall—carries rather the more water of the two, the Pend d’Oreille is longer and drains a far more extensive watershed—that lying between the main chain of the Rockies and the Bitter Root and Cœur d’Alene ranges. Great as is thecombined discharge of these two fine rivers, their effect on the Columbia is not apparent to the eye. If anything, the latter looks a bigger stream where it flows out of the lower Arrow Lake, above the Kootenay, than it does where it crosses the American Line below the Pend d’Oreille. As a matter of fact, its flow must be nearly doubled at the latter point, but the swifter current reduces its apparent volume. Nothing but the most careful computations, based on speed of current and area of cross-section, will give anything approximating the real discharge of a river.
I was a good deal interested in the Pend d’Oreille, because it was on one of its upper tributaries, the Flathead in Montana, that I had made my first timid effort at rapid-running a good many years previously. It hadn’t been a brilliant success—for two logs tied together with ropes hardly make the ideal of a raft; but the glamour of the hare-brained stunt had survived the wetting. I should dearly have loved to explore that wonderful black-walled canyon, with its unending succession of cataracts and cascades, but lack of time forbade. The drizzling rain made it impossible even to get a good photograph of the fine frenzy of that final mad leap into the Columbia.
It was funny the way that rain acted. For something like a month now there had been only two or three days of reasonably fair weather, and for the last fortnight the sun had hardly been glimpsed at all. Pulling up to Waneta in a clammy drizzle, Captain Armstrong remarked, as he drew the collar of his waterproof closer to decrease the drainage down the back of his neck, that he reckoned they wouldn’t standfor weather of that kind over in “God’s Country.” As there was nothing but sodden clouds to the southward, I didn’t feel like giving him any definite assurance on the point at the moment. However, when we crossed the Line an hour later the rain had ceased. A couple of miles farther down the clouds were breaking up, and at Northport the sun was shining. I did not have another rainy day, nor even one more than slightly overcast, until I was almost at the Cascades. I trust my good Canadian friend was as deeply impressed as he claimed to be.
Beyond a sharp riffle between jagged rock islands above Deadman’s Eddy, and one or two shallow boulder bars where the channels were a bit obscure, it was good open-and-above-board water all the way to Northport. The “Eddy” is a whirling back-sweep of water at a bend of the river, and is supposed to hold up for inspection everything floatable that the Columbia brings down from Canada. “Funny they never thought of calling it ‘Customs Eddy,’” Armstrong said. From the condition of its littered banks, it looked to be almost as prolific of “pickings” as the great drift pile of Kinbasket Lake. Being near a town, however, it is doubtless much more thoroughly gone over.
We tied up below the Ferry at Northport, which was the rendezvous to which Roos was to bring the Customs Inspector. The ferry-man, who had once seen Captain Armstrong run the rapids of the upper Kootenay with one of his steamers, was greatly elated over having such a notable walking the quarterdeck of his own humble craft. Armstrong, in turn, wasscarcely less excited over an automatic pumping contrivance which the ferry-man had rigged up to keep his pontoons dry. After waiting for an hour, we took our bags and walked up to the hotel on the main street at the top of the bluff. We found Roos in the office reading a last year’s haberdashery catalogue. He said he had not expected us for a couple of hours yet, and that he had arranged for inspection at three o’clock. That gave us time for a bath and lunch ourselves. As our bags were now well beyond the tentacles of the Customs, we did a little figuring on the table-cloth between courses. By this we proved that, had we had the nerve to disregard the warnings of well-meaning friends in Trail and filled our hand-bags with Scotch instead of personal effects, Armstrong would now have had fourteen quarts up in his room, and I eighteen quarts. Then the waitress gave us current local quotations, and we started to figure values. I shall never know whether or not there would have been room on the corner of that gravy and egg broidered napery for my stupendous total. Just as I was beginning to run over the edge, the Inspector came in and asked if we would mind letting him see those two suit-cases we had brought to the hotel with us! Many and various are the joys of virtue, but none of the others comparable to that one which sets you aglow as you say “Search me!” when, by the special intervention of the providence which watches over fools and drunks, you haven’t got goods.
The inspection, both at the hotel and at the ferry, wasfairlyperfunctory, though I did notice that the Customs man assumed a rather springy step when hetrod the light inner bottom of the skiff. Roos filmed the operation as a part of the picture, I acting as much as I could like I thought a farmer would act at his first Customs inspection. Roos, complaining that I didn’t “do it natural,” wanted to shoot over again. The Customs man was willing, but Armstrong and I, trudging purposefully off up the road, refused to return. Roos followed us to the hotel in considerable dudgeon. “Why wouldn’t you let me make that shot over?” he asked. “It was an ‘oil-can’—rotten!” “Because,” I replied evenly, looking him straight in the eye, “I was afraid the Inspector might try that jig-a-jig step of his on the false bottom in the bow if we put him through the show a second time. I don’t believe in tempting providence. We can get a street-car conductor and make that Inspection shot again in Portland. This isn’t....” “You’re right,” cut in Roos, with a dawning grin of comprehension. “I beg your pardon. You’re a deeper bird than I gave you credit for. Or perhaps it was the Captain....”