“SHOOTING” THE FIRST BIT OF LINING AT SURPRISE RAPIDS (above)THE CAMP WHERE THE ROAR OF THE RAPIDS DEAFENED US (centre)WHERE STEINHOF WAS DROWNED (below)
WHERE ANDY JUST MISSED DROWNING IN SURPRISE RAPIDS (above)LOOKING THROUGH THE PINES AT SURPRISE RAPIDS (centre)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 pushing it, and quite another for threemen 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 shifted out onto a flat-topped rock, and Roos and I were left to get this ashorewhile 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.
It was still early in the afternoon, but with a thick mist falling Blackmore thought best to stop where we were. The next available camping place was below the half-mile-long third cascade, and no old river man likes to go into a rapid when the visibility is poor. We pitched the tent in a hole cut out of the thick-growing woods on a low bench at the inner angle ofthe bend. Everything was soaking wet, but it was well back from the falls, and for the first time in two days we were able to talk to each other without shouting. Not that we did so, however; from sheer force of habit we continued roaring into each other’s ears for a week or more yet.
The great pile of logs on top of the flat-topped rock above the whirlpool had fascinated me from the first. Over a hundred feet square, forty feet high, and packed as though by a titanic hydraulic press, it must have contained thousands and thousands of cords of wood. On Blackmore’s positive assurance as a timberman that there was nothing in the pile of any value for lumber, even in the improbable contingency that a flood would ever carry it beyond the big drifts of Kinbasket Lake, I decided to make a bonfire of it. Never had I had such an opportunity, both on the score of the sheer quantity of combustible and the spectacular setting for illumination.
The whirlpool waswhouf-whoufinggreedily as it wolfed the whole cascade when I clambered up just before dark to touch off my beacon. It was fairly dry at the base, and a pile of crisp shavings off a slab from some distant up-river sawmill caught quickly. From a spark of red flickering dimly through the mist when we sat down to supper, this had grown to a roaring furnace by the time we had relaxed to pipes and cigarettes. An hour later the flames had eaten a clear chimney up through the jam and the red light from their leaping tips was beginning to drive back the encompassing darkness. Roos, who had read about India, thought it would have been fine if weonly had a few widows to cast themselves on the flaming pyre and commitsuttee. Andy and Blackmore, both sentimental bachelors, were a unit in maintaining that it would be a shame to waste good widows that way, especially on the practically widowless Big Bend. All three were arguing the point rather heatedly when they crawled into their blankets. For myself, with a vision of the wonder about to unroll impinging on my brain, I could not think of turning in for hours yet.
By ten o’clock the pile was well alight underneath, but it was not until nearly midnight, when the mist had turned to snow and a strong wind had sprung up, that it was blazing full strength. I hardly know what would have been the direction of the wind in the upper air, but, cupped in the embrasure of the bend, it was sucking round and round, like the big whirlpool, only more fitfully and with an upward rather than a downward pull. Now it would drag the leaping flame-column a hundred feet in the air, twisting it into lambent coils and fining the tip down to a sharp point, like that of the Avenging Angel’s Sword of Fire in the old Biblical prints, now sweep it out in a shivering sheet above the whirlpool, now swing it evenly round and round as though the flame, arrow-pointed and attenuated, were the radium-coated hand of a Gargantuan clock being swiftly revolved in the dark.
But the wonder of wonders was less the fire itself than the marvellous transformations wrought by the light it threw. And the staggering contrasts! The illuminated snow clouds drifting along the frosted-pink curtain of the tree-clad mountain walls made a roseate fairyland; even the foam covered sweep of the cascade, its roar drowned in the sharp crackle of the flames, was softened and smoothened until it seemed to billow like the sunset-flushed canvas of a ship becalmed: but the whirlpool, its sinister character only accentuated by the conflict of cross-shadows and reflections, was a veritable Pit of Damnation, choking and coughing as it swirled and rolled in streaky coils of ox-blood, in fire-stabbed welters of fluid coal-tar.
Wrapped in my hooded duffle coat, I paced the snow-covered moss and exulted in the awesome spectacle until long after midnight. I have never envied Nero very poignantly since. Given a fiddle and a few Christians, I would have had all that was his on the greatest night of his life—and then some. Father Tiber never had a whirlpool like mine, even on the day Horatius swam it “heavy with his armour and spent with changing blows.”
The next morning, though too heavily overcast for pictures, was still clear enough to travel. The head riffles of the third fall of Surprise Rapids began a little below our camp, so that we started lining almost immediately. Three or four times we pulled across the river, running short stretches and lining now down one side and now the other. There was not so great a rate of drop as at the first and second falls, but the whole stream was choked with barely submerged rocks and lining was difficult on account of the frequent cliffs.
It was about half way down that I all but messed things up by failing to get into action quickly enoughat a crossing. The fault, in a way, was Blackmore’s, because of his failure to tell me in advance what was expected, and then—when the order had to be passed instantly—for standing rather too much on ceremony in the manner of passing it. We were about to pull to the opposite side to line down past a riffle which Blackmore reckoned too rough to risk running. There was about a ten-mile current, and it would have required the smartest kind of a get-away and the hardest kind of pulling to make the other bank without being carried down onto the riffle. The boat was headed up-stream, and, as Blackmore had not told me he intended to cross, I took it for granted he was going to run. So, when Roos shoved off and jumped in, I rested on my oar in order that Andy could bring the boat sharply round and head it down stream. Blackmore’s excited yell was the first intimation I had that anything was wrong. “Pull like hell! You!... Mister Freeman!”
That “Mister,” and his momentary pause before uttering it, defeated the purpose of the order. I pulled all right, and so hard that my oar-blade picked up a very sizable hunk of river and flung it in Blackmore’s face. That upset my balance, and I could not recover quickly enough to keep the boat’s head to the current. With characteristic presence of mind, Blackmore changed tactics instantly. “Got to chance it now!” he shouted, and threw such a pull onto his steering paddle that the handle bent to more than half a right angle where he laid it over the gunwale. There was one jutting rock at the head of the riffle thathadto be missed; the rest was all a matter ofwhether or not the next couple of hundred yards of submerged boulders were deeply enough covered to let us passoverthem. There was no way of avoiding them, no chance to lay a coursebetweenthem.
Blackmore was a bit wilder about the eyes than I had seen him before; but he had stopped swearing and his mouth was set in a hard, determined line. Andy, with chesty grunts, was fairly flailing the water with swift, short-arm strokes. I did not need to be told to refrain from pulling in order that the others could swing her head as far toward the west bank as possible before the rock was reached. Instead, I held ready for the one quick backing stroke that would be called for in the event a collision seemed imminent at the last moment. It was the wave thrown off by the rock itself that helped us most when the showdown came. Shooting by the jagged barrier so close that Andy could have fended with his hand, the boat plunged over a short, sharp pitch and hit the white water with a bang.
That was by long odds the roughest stuff we had been into so far. The waves were curling up well above our heads, and every one we hit left a foot or two of its top with us—solid green water, most of it, that began accumulating rather alarmingly in the bottom of the boat. There was no regularity in the way they ran, either. One would come mushrooming fairly over the bows, another would flop aboard over the beam, and every now and then a wild side-winder, missing its spring at the forward part of the boat, would dash a shower of spray over the quarter. From the bank she must have been pretty well out of sightmost of the time, for I often saw spray thrown ten or fifteen feet to either side and twice as far astern. All hands were drenched from the moment we struck the first comber, of course, which was doubtless why a wail from Roos that the water was going down his neck seemed to strike Blackmore as a bit superfluous. “Inside or outside your neck?” he roared back, adding that if it was the former the flow could be checked by the simple and natural expedient of keeping the mouth shut. Very properly, our “skipper” had the feeling that, in a really tight place, all the talking necessary for navigation should be done from the “bridge,” and that “extraneous” comment should be held over to smooth water.
Before we had run a hundred yards the anxious look on Blackmore’s face had given way to one of relief and exultation. “There’s more water over the rocks than I reckoned,” he shouted. “Going to run right through.” And run we did, all of the last mile or more of Surprise Rapids and right on through the still swift but comparatively quiet water below. Here we drifted with the current for a ways, while all hands turned to and bailed. I took this, the first occasion that had offered, to assure Blackmore that he needn’t go to the length of calling me “Mister” in the future when he had urgent orders to give, and incidentally apologized for getting off on the wrong foot at the head of the first rapid. “Since that worked out to save us half a mile of darn dirty lining and two or three hours of time,” he replied with a grin, “I guess we won’t worry about it this crack, Mister—I mean, Freeman. Mebbe I better get used to sayingit that way ’gainst when I’ll need to spit it out quick.”
It was a pleasant run from the foot of Surprise Rapids down to Kinbasket Lake, or at least it was pleasant until the rain set in again. There is a fall of sixty-four feet in the sixteen miles—most of it in the first ten. It was a fine swift current, with a number of riffles but no bad water at any point. It was good to be free for a while from the tension which is never absent when working in really rough water, and I have no doubt that Blackmore felt better about it than any of the rest of us. Surprise was his especialbete noir, and he assured me that he had never come safely through it without swearing never to tackle it again. Roos, drying out in the bow like a tabby licking her wet coat smooth after being rained on, sang “Green River” all the way, and I tried to train Andy to pull in time to the rhythm and join in the chorus. As the chorus had much about drink in it, it seemed only fitting—considering what was waiting for us at Canoe River—that weshouldsing it. And we did. “Floating Down the Old Green River” became the “official song” of that particular part of the voyage. Later ... but why anticipate?
We landed for lunch about where the water began to slacken above the lake. The water of the little stream at the mouth of which we tied up the boat was of a bright transparent amber in colour. Andy, sapient of the woods, thought it must flow from a lake impounded behind a beaver-dam in the high mountains, and that the stain was that of rotting wood. Beaver signs were certainly much in evidence all overthe little bench where we lunched. Several large cottonwood trunks—one of them all of two feet in diameter—had been felled by the tireless little engineers, and we found a pile of tooth-torn chips large enough to kindle our fire with. While tea was boiling Blackmore pulled a couple of three-pound Dolly Varden out of the mouth of the creek, only to lose his hooks and line when a still larger one connected up with them. Roos, who was under orders to get an effective fishing picture, was unable to go into action with his camera on account of the poor light.
It had begun to rain hard by the time we had shoved back into the river after lunch. There were still five miles to go to reach the camping ground Blackmore had decided upon, half way down the east side of Kinbasket Lake, just below Middle River—slack water all the way. Andy and I pulled it in a slushy half-snow-half-rain that was a lot wetter and unpleasanter than the straight article of either variety. Of a lake which is one of the loveliest in all the world in the sunlight, nothing was to be seen save a stretch of grey-white, wind-whipped waters beating upon grey-brown rocky shores. That the wind and waves headed us did not make the pulling any lighter, for the boat’s considerable freeboard gave both a lot of surface to play upon. The exertion of rowing kept Andy and me warm, however, which gave us at least that advantage over Roos and Blackmore. The latter had to face it out at his paddle, but Roos, a bedraggled lump of sodden despair, finally gave up and crawled under the tarpaulin with the bags of beans and bacon, remaining there until we reached port.
All in all, I think that was the most miserable camp I ever helped to pitch. The snow, refusing persistently either to harden or to soften, adhered clingingly to everything it touched. We were two hours clearing a space for the tent, setting it up and collecting enough boughs to cushion the floor. By that time pretty nearly everything not hermetically sealed was wet, including the blankets and the “dry” clothes. No one but Andy could have started a camp-fire under such conditions, and no one but Blackmore could have cooked a piping hot dinner on it. I forget whether it was Roos or myself who contributed further to save the day. Anyhow, it was one of the two of us that suggested cooking a can of plum-pudding in about its own bulk of “thirty per over-proof” rum. That lent the saving touch. In spite of a leaking tent and wet blankets, the whole four of us turned in singing “End of a Perfect Day” and “Old Green River.” The latter was prophetic. A miniature one—coming through the roof of the tent—had the range of the back of my neck for most of the night.
Kinbasket Lake and Rapids
It continued slushing all night and most of the next day, keeping us pretty close to camp. Andy, like the good housewife he was, kept snugging up every time he got a chance, so that things assumed a homelier and cheerier aspect as the day wore on. I clambered for a couple of miles down the rocky eastern bank of the lake in the forenoon. The low-hanging clouds still obscured the mountains, but underfoot I found unending interest in the astonishing variety of drift corralled by this remarkable catch-all of the upper Columbia. The main accumulation of flotsam and jetsam was above our camp, but even among the rocks I chanced onto almost everything one can imagine, from a steel rail—with the ties that had served to float it down still spiked to it—to a fragment of a vacuum-cleaner. What Roos called “the human touch” was furnished by an enormous uprooted spruce, on which some amorous lumber-jack had been pouring out his love through the blade of his axe. This had taken the form of a two-feet-in-diameter “bleeding heart” pierced by an arrow. Inside the roughly hewn “pericardium” were the initials “K. N.” and “P. R.,” with the date “July 4, 1910.” One couldn’t be quite sure whether the arrow stood fora heart quake or a heart break. Andy, who was sentimental and inclined to put woman in the abstract on a pedestal, thought it was merely a heart quake; but Blackmore, who had been something of a gallant in his day, and therefore inclined to cynicism as he neared the sear and yellow leaf, was sure it was heart break—that the honest lumber-jack had hacked in the arrow and the drops of blood after he had been jilted by some jade. Roos wanted to make a movie of this simple fragment of rustic art, with me standing by and registering “pensive memories,” or something of the kind; but I managed to discourage him by the highly technical argument that it would impair the “continuity” of the “sportsmanship” which was the primemotifof the present picture.
Blackmore piloted me up to the main area of drift in the afternoon. It occupied a hundred acres or more of sand and mud flats which constituted the lower part of the extensive delta deposited on the edge of the lake by the waters of the good-sized stream of Middle River. At a first glance it seemed nothing more than a great wilderness of tree trunks—prostrate, upended, woven and packed together—extending for hundreds of yards below high-water-mark. It was between these logs that the smaller things had lodged. There were a number of boats, not greatly damaged, and fragments enough to have reconstructed a dozen more. I am convinced that a half day’s search would have discovered the material for building and furnishing a house, though carpets and wall paper would hardly have been all one could desire. I even found a curling iron—closely clasped by the bent nail uponwhich it had been hung on the log of a cabin—and a corset. The latter seemed hardly worth salving, as it appeared—according to Blackmore—to be a “military model” of a decade or so back, and the steel-work was badly rusted.
However, it was not gewgaws or house-furnishing we were after. One could hardly be expected to slither about in soft slush for second-hand things of that kind. I gave a great glad whoop at my first sight of a silt-submerged cask, only to find the head missing and nothing but mud in it. So, too, my second and third. Then it was Blackmore who gave the “View Halloo,” and my heart gave a mighty leap.Histreasure trove had the head intact, and even the bungin situ. But alas! the latter had become slightly started, and although the contents had both smell and colour they were so heavily impregnated with river mud that they would hardly have been deemed fit for consumption except in New York and California, and not worth the risk of smuggling even there. That cask was the high-water-mark of our luck. Several others had the old familiar smell, and that was all. But there is no doubt in the world that there is whisky in that drift pile—hundreds of gallons of it, and some very old. Blackmore swears to that, and I never knew him to lie—about serious matters, I mean. In hunting and trapping yarns a man is expected to draw a long bead. I pass on this undeniably valuable information to any one that cares to profit by it. There are no strings attached. But of course ... in the event of success ... Pasadena always finds me!...
We did have one find, though, that was so remarkable as to be worth all the trouble and disappointment of our otherwise futile search. This was a road-bridge, withinstinct. The manner in which this had been displayed was so astonishing as to be almost beyond belief; indeed, I would hesitate about setting down the facts had I not a photograph to prove them. This bridge was perhaps sixty feet in length, and had doubtless been carried away by a freshet from some tributary of the upper river which it had spanned. This was probably somewhere between Golden and Windermere, so that it had run a hundred miles or more of swift water, including the falls of Surprise Rapids, without losing more than a few planks. This in itself was remarkable enough, but nothing at all to the fact that, when it finally decided it had come far enough, the sagacious structure had gone and planked itself down squarely across another stream. It was still a bridge in fact as well as in form. It had actually saved my feet from getting wet when I rushed to Blackmore’s aid in up-ending the cask of mud-diluted whisky. My photograph plainly shows Blackmore standing on the bridge, with the water flowing directly beneath him. It would have been a more comprehensive and convincing picture if there had been light enough for a snapshot. As it was, I had to set up on a stump, and in a position which showed less of both stream and bridge than I might have had from a better place. I swear (and so does Blackmore) that we didn’t place the bridge where it was. It was much too large for that. Roos wanted to shoot the whole three of us standing on it andregistering “unbounded wonderment,” but the light was never right for it up to the morning of our departure, and then there wasn’t time.
It rained and snowed all that night and most of the following day. During the afternoon of the latter the clouds broke up twice or thrice, and through rifts in the drifting wracks we had transient glimpses of the peaks and glaciers of the Selkirks gleaming above the precipitous western walls of the lake. The most conspicuous feature of the sky-line was the three-peaked “Trident,” rising almost perpendicularly from a glittering field of glacial ice and impaling great masses of pendantcumulo-nimbion its splintered prongs. Strings of lofty glacier-set summits marked the line of the back-bone of the Selkirks to southeast and northwest, each of them sending down rain-swollen torrents to tumble into the lake in cataracts and cascades. Behind, or east of us, we knew the Rockies reared a similar barrier of snow and ice, but this was cut off from our vision by the more imminent lake-wall under which we were camped. If Kinbasket Lake is ever made accessible to the tourist its fame will reach to the end of the earth. This is a consummation which may be effected in the event the Canadian Pacific wipes out Surprise Rapids with its hydro-electric project dam and backs up a lake to Beavermouth. The journey to this spot of incomparable beauty could then be made soft enough to suit all but the most effete.
A torrential rain, following a warm southerly breeze which sprang up in the middle of the afternoon, lowered the dense cloud-curtain again, and shortly,from somewhere behind the scenes, came the raucous rumble and roar of a great avalanche. Blackmore’s practised ear led him to pronounce it a slide of both earth and snow, and to locate it somewhere on Trident Creek, straight across the lake from our camp. He proved to be right on both counts. When the clouds lifted again at sunset, a long yellow scar gashed the shoulder of the mountain half way up Trident Creek to the glacier, and the clear stream from the latter had completely disappeared. Blackmore said it had been dammed up by the slide, and that there would be all hell popping when it broke through.
Scouting around for more boughs to soften his bed, Roos, just before supper, chanced upon Steinhoff’s grave. It was under a small pine, not fifty feet from our tent, but so hidden by the dense undergrowth that it had escaped our notice for two days. It was marked only by a fragment split from the stern of a white-painted boat nailed horizontally on the pine trunk and with the single word “Steinhoff” carved in rude capitals. At one corner, in pencil, was an inscription stating that the board had been put up in May, 1920, by Joe French and Leo Tennis. With the golden sunset light streaming through the trees, Roos, always strong for “pathetic human touches” to serve as a sombre background for his Mack Sennett stuff, could not resist the opportunity for a picture. Andy and Blackmore and I were to come climbing up to the grave from the lake, read the inscription, and then look at each other and shake our heads ominously, as though it was simply a matter of time until we, too, should fall prey to the implacable river.I refused straightaway, on the ground that I had signed up to act the part of a light comedy sportsman and not a heavy mourner. Blackmore and Andy were more amenable. In rehearsal, however, the expressions on their honest faces were so wooden and embarrassed that Roos finally called me up to stand out of range and “say something to make ’em look natural.” I refrain from recording what I said; but I still maintain that shot was an interruption of the “continuity” of my “gentleman-sportsman” picture. I have not yet heard if it survived the studio surgery.
Shortly before dark, Andy, going down to look at his set-line, found a three-foot ling or fresh-water cod floundering on the end of it. Roos persuaded him to keep it over night so that the elusive “fishing picture” might be made the following morning in case the light was good. As there were five or six inches of water in the bottom of the boat, Andy threw the ling in there for the night in preference to picketing him out on a line. There was plenty of water to have given the husky shovel-nose ample room to circulate with comfort if only he had been content to take it easy and not wax temperamental. Doubtless it was his imminent movie engagement that brought on his attack of flightiness. At any rate, he tried to burrow under a collapsible sheet-iron stove (which, preferring to do with a camp-fire, we had left in the boat) and got stuck. The forward five pounds of him had water enough to keep alive in, but in the night—when it cleared off and turned cold—his tail, which was bent up sharply under a thwart, froze stiff at almost right angles. But I am getting ahead of my story.
The next morning, the sixth of October, broke brilliantly clear, with the sun gilding the prongs of the “Trident” and throwing the whole snowy line of the Selkirks in dazzling relief against a deep turquoise sky. Blackmore, keen for an early start, so as not to be rushed in working down through the dreaded “Twenty-One-Mile” Rapids to Canoe River, rooted us out at daybreak and began breaking camp before breakfast. He had reckoned without the “fishing picture,” however. Roos wanted bright sunlight for it, claiming he was under special instructions to make something sparkling and snappy. All through breakfast he coached me on the intricate details of the action. “Make him put up a stiff fight,” he admonished through a mouthful of flapjack. “Of course he won’t fight, ’cause he ain’t that kind; but if you jerk and wiggle your pole just right it’ll make it look like he was. That’s what a real actor’s for—making things look like they is when they ain’t. Got me?” Then we went down and discovered that poor half-frozen fish with the eight-point alteration of the continuity of his back-bone.
The ling or fresh-water cod has an underhung, somewhat shark-like mouth, not unsuggestive of the new moon with its points turned downward. Roos’ mouth took on a similarly dejected droop when he found the condition the principal animal actor in his fish picture was in. But it was too late to give up now. Never might we have so husky a fighting fish ready to hand, and with a bright sun shining on it. Roos tried osteopathy, applied chiropractics and Christian Science without much effect. Our “lead”continued as rigid and unrelaxing as the bushman’s boomerang, whose shape he so nearly approximated. Then Andy wrought the miracle with a simple “laying on of hands.” What he really did was to thaw out the frozen rear end of the fish by holding it between his big, warm red Celtic paws; but the effect was as magical as a cure at Lourdes. The big ling was shortly flopping vigorously, and when Andy dropped him into a bit of a boulder-locked pool he went charging back and forth at the rocky barriers like a bull at a gate. Roos almost wept in his thankfulness, and forthwith promised the restorer an extra rum ration that night. Andy grinned his thanks, but reminded him that we ought to be at the old ferry by night, where something even better than “thirty per over-proof” rum would be on tap. It was indeed the morning of our great day. Stimulated by that inspiring thought, I prepared to outdo myself in the “fish picture,” the “set” for which was now ready.
BLACKMORE AND THE LING THAT REFUSED TO “REGISTER” (left)THE WRITER, WITH PIKE-POLE JUST BEFORE LINING DEATH RAPIDS (right)
ANDY AND I PULLING DOWN KINBASKET LAKE
Standing on the stern of the beached boat, I made a long cast, registering “concentrated eagerness.” Then Roos stopped cranking, and Andy brought the ling out and fastened it to the end of my line with a snug but comfortable hitch through the gills. (We were careful not to hurt him, for Chester’s directions had admonished especially against “showing brutality”.) When I had nursed him out to about where my opening cast had landed, Roos called “Action!” and started cranking again. Back and forth in wide sweeps he dashed, while I registered blended “eagerness” and “determination,” with frequent interpolations of “consternation” as carefully timed tugs (bymyself) bent my shivering pole down to the water. When Roos had enough footage of “fighting,” I brought my catch in close to the boat and leered down at him, registering “near triumph.” Then I towed him ashore and Andy and Blackmore rushed in to help me land him. After much struggling (by ourselves) we brought him out on the beach. At this juncture I was supposed to grab the ling by the gills and hold him proudly aloft, registering “full triumph” the while. Andy and Blackmore were to crowd in, pat me on the back and beam congratulations. Blackmore was then to assume an expression intended to convey the impression that this was the hardest fighting ling he had ever seen caught. All three of us were action perfect in our parts; but that miserable turn-tail of a ling—who had nothing to do but flop and register “indignant protest”—spoiled it all at the last. As I flung my prize on high, a shrill scream of “Rotten!” from Roos froze the action where it was. Then I noticed that what was supposed to be a gamy denizen of the swift-flowing Columbia was hanging from my hand as rigid as a coupling-pin—a bent coupling-pin at that, for he had resumed his former cold-storage curl.
“Rotten!” shrieked Roos in a frenzy; “do it again!” But that was not to be. For the “chief actor” the curtain had rung down for good. “You must have played him too fierce,” said Andy sympathetically. Blackmore was inclined to be frivolous. “P’raps he was trying to register ‘Big Bend,’” said he.
Just after we had pushed off there came a heavy and increasing roar from across the lake. Presentlythe cascade of Trident Creek sprang into life again, but now a squirt of yellow ochre where before it was a flutter of white satin. Rapidly augmenting, it spread from wall to wall of the rocky gorge, discharging to the bosky depths of the delta with a prodigious rumbling that reverberated up and down the lake like heavy thunder. A moment later the flood had reached the shore, and out across the lucent green waters of the lake spread a broadening fan of yellow-brown. “I told you hell would be popping after that big slide,” said Blackmore, resting on his paddle. “That’s the backed-up stream breaking through.”
Kinbasket Lake is a broadening and slackening of the Columbia, backed up behind the obstructions which cause the long series of rapids between its outlet and the mouth of Canoe River. It is six or seven miles long, according to the stage of water, and from one to two miles wide. Its downward set of current is slight but perceptible. The outlet, as we approached it after a three-mile pull from our camp at Middle River, appeared strikingly similar to the head of Surprise Rapids. Here, however, the transition from quiet to swift water was even more abrupt.
The surface of the lake was a-dance with the ripples kicked up by the crisp morning breeze, and blindingly bright where the facets of the tiny wavelets reflected the sunlight like shaken diamonds. The shadowed depths of the narrow gorge ahead was Stygian by contrast. Blackmore called my attention to the way the crests of the pines rimming the river a few hundred yards inside the gorge appeared just about on the level with the surface of the lake. “Whenyou see the tree-tops fall away like that,” he said, standing up to take his final bearings for the opening run, “look out. It means there’s water running down hill right ahead faster’n any boat wants to put its nose in.” The roar rolling up to us was not quite so deep-toned or thunderous as the challenging bellow of the first fall of Surprise; but it was more “permeative,” as though the sources from which it came ran on without end. And that was just about the situation. We were sliding down to the intake of Kinbasket or “The Twenty-One-Mile” Rapids, one of the longest, if notthelongest, succession of practically unbroken riffles on any of the great rivers of the world.
From the outlet of Kinbasket Lake to the mouth of Canoe River is twenty-one miles. For the sixteen miles the tail of one rapid generally runs right into the head of the next, and there is a fall of two hundred and sixty feet, or more than sixteen feet to the mile. For the last five miles there is less white water, but the current runs from eight to twelve miles an hour, with many swirls and whirlpools. The river is closely canyoned all the way. This compels one to make the whole run through in a single day, as there is no camping place at any point. Cliffs and sharply-sloping boulder banks greatly complicate lining down and compel frequent crossings at points where a failure to land just right is pretty likely to leave things in a good deal of a mess.
Blackmore ran us down through a couple of hundred yards of slap-banging white water, before coming to bank above a steep pitch where the river tore itself to rags and tatters across a patch of rocks thatseemed to block the whole channel. From Captain Armstrong’s description, this was the exact point where the trouble with his tipsy bow-paddler had occurred, the little difficulty which had been the cause of his leaving the salvaged cask of Scotch at his next camp. Like pious pilgrims approaching the gateway of some long-laboured-toward shrine, therefore, we looked at the place with much interest, not to say reverence. Blackmore was perhaps the least sentimental of us. “I wouldn’t try to run that next fall for all the whisky ever lost in the old Columbia,” he said decisively, beginning to re-coil his long line. Then we turned to on lining down the most accursed stretch of river boulders I ever had to do with.
Barely submerged rocks crowding the bank compelled us to wade in and lift the boat ahead even oftener than in Surprise Rapids. Andy always took the lead in this, but time after time my help was necessary to throw her clear. For the first time since I had boated in Alaska a good many years previously, I began to know the numbing effects of icy water. The heavy exertion did a lot to keep the blood moving, but three or four minutes standing with the water up to mid-thigh sent the chill right in to the marrow of the bones, even when sweat was running off the face in streams. That started a sort of dull ache in the leg bones that kept creeping higher and higher the longer one remained in the water. That ache was the worst part of it; the flesh became dead to sensation very quickly, but that penetrating inward pain had more hurt in it every minute it was prolonged. It was bad enough in the legs, but when, submergedto the waist, as happened every now and then, the chill began to penetrate to the back-bone and stab the digestive organs, it became pretty trying. One realized then what really short shrift a man would have trying to swim for more than four or five minutes even in calm water of this temperature. That was about the limit for heart action to continue with the cold striking in and numbing the veins and arteries, a doctor had told Blackmore, and this seemed reasonable. Andy was repeatedly sick at the stomach after he had been wet for long above the waist. My own qualms were rather less severe (doubtless because I was exposed rather less), but I found myself very weak and unsteady after every immersion. A liberal use of rum would undoubtedly have been of some help for a while, but Blackmore was adamant against starting in on it as long as there was any bad water ahead. And as there was nothing but bad water ahead, this meant that—in one sense at least—we were a “dry ship.”
I shall not endeavour to trace in detail our painful progress down “Twenty-One-Mile.” Indeed, I could not do so even if I wanted, for the very good reason that my hands were so full helping with the boat all the way that I had no time to make notes, and even my mental record—usually fairly dependable—is hopelessly jumbled. Even Blackmore became considerably mixed at times. At the first four or five riffles below the lake he called the turn correctly, landing, lining, crossing and running just where he should have done so. Then his mind-map became less clear. Twice he lined riffles which it presentlybecame plain we could have run, and then he all but failed to land above one where a well-masked “souse-hole” would have gulped the boat in one mouthful.
It was at this juncture that I asked him why he had never taken the trouble of making a rough chart of this portion of the river, so that he could be quite sure what was ahead. He said that the idea was a good one, and that it had often occurred to him. There were several reasons why he had never carried it out. One was, that he was always so mad when he was going down “Twenty-One-Mile” that he couldn’t see straight, let alone write and draw straight. This meant that the chart would be of no use to him, even if some one else made it—unless, of course, he brought the maker along to interpret it. The main deterrent, however, had been the fact that he had always sworn each passage should be his last, so that (according to his frame of mind of the moment) there would be no use for the chart even if he could have seen straight enough to make it, and to read it after it had been made.
The scenery—so far as I recall it—was grand beyond words to describe. Cliff fronted cliff, with a jagged ribbon of violet-purple sky between. Every few hundred yards creeks broke through the mountain walls and came cascading into the river over their spreading boulder “fans.” Framed in the narrow notches from which they sprang appeared transient visions of sun-dazzled peaks and glaciers towering above wedge-shaped valleys swimming full of lilac mist. I saw these things, floating by like double strips of movie film, only when we were running inthe current; when lining I was aware of little beyond the red line of the gunwale which I grasped, the imminent loom of Andy’s grey-shirted shoulder next me, and the foam-flecked swirl of liquefied glacier enfolding my legs and swiftly converting them to stumpy icicles.
There was one comfort, though. The farther down river we worked away from the lake, the shorter became the stretches of lining and the longer the rapids that were runnable. That accelerated our progress materially, but even so Blackmore did not reckon that there was time to stop for pictures, or even for lunch. We were still well up to schedule, but he was anxious to work on a good margin in the event of the always-to-be-expected “unexpected.” It was along toward three in the afternoon that, after completing a particularly nasty bit of lining a mile or two above the mouth of Yellow Creek, he came over and slapped me on the back. “That finishes it for the day, young man,” he cried gaily. “We can turn loose and run the rest of it now, and we’ll do it hell sizzling fast. It may also rejoice you to know that all the lining left for the whole trip is a couple of hundred yards at ‘Rock Slide’ and Death Rapids. All aboard for the Ferry!”
All of a sudden life had become a blessed thing again. For the first time I became aware that there were birds singing in the trees, flowers blooming in the protected shelves above high-water-mark, and maiden-hair ferns festooning the dripping grottoes of the cliffs. Dumping the water from our boots, Andy and I resumed our oars and swung the boat right out into the middle of the current. The first rapid we hitwas a vicious side-winder, shaped like a letter “S,” with overhanging cliffs playing battledore-and-shuttlecock with the river at the bends. Blackmore said he would have lined it if the water had been two feet lower; as it was now we would get wetter trying to worry a boat round the cliffs than in slashing through. We got quite wet enough as it was. The rocks were not hard to avoid, but banging almost side-on into the great back-curving combers thrown off by the cliffs was just a bit terrifying. Slammed back and forth at express-train speed, with nothing but those roaring open-faced waves buffeting against the cliffs, was somewhat suggestive of the sensation you get from a quick double-bank in a big biplane. Only it was wetter—much wetter. It took Blackmore ten minutes of hard bailing to get rid of the splashage.
The succeeding rapids, though no less swift, were straighter, and easier—and dryer. Roos, perched up in the bow, announced that all was over but the digging, and started to sing “Old Green River.” Andy and I joined in lustily, and even Blackmore (though a lip-reader would have sworn he was mumbling over a rosary) claimed to be singing. Exultant as we all were over the prize so nearly within our grasp, we must have put a world of feeling into that heart-stirring chorus.
“I was drifting down the old Green RiverOn the good shipRock-and-Rye—I drifted too far;I got stuck on the bar;I was out there alone,Wishing that I were home—The Captain was lost, with all of the crew,So that there was nothing left to do;And I had to drink the whole Green River dry-ighTo get back ho-ohm to you-oo-ou!”
“I was drifting down the old Green RiverOn the good shipRock-and-Rye—I drifted too far;I got stuck on the bar;I was out there alone,Wishing that I were home—
The Captain was lost, with all of the crew,So that there was nothing left to do;And I had to drink the whole Green River dry-ighTo get back ho-ohm to you-oo-ou!”
Smoother and smoother became the going, and then—rather unexpectedly, it seemed to me—the water began to slacken its dizzy speed. Blackmore appeared considerably puzzled over it, I thought. Roos, turning sentimental, had started singing a song that he had learned from a phonograph, and in which, therefore, appeared numerous hiati.