Laid Up with a Broken Rudder.Laid Up with a Broken Rudder.
Bucking the rapids, she split the fast water over her nose and sent it aft in two clean-cut masses, that hissed about her like angry skirts. A light, V-shaped wake spread after, scarcely agitatingthe surface. She dragged no water. There was no churning at her stern. Only the dull, sub-aqueous drone, felt rather than heard beneath the rapid banging of her exhaust, told me how the honest little screw thrust hard.
I pushed the spark-lever close to the reversing point, and opened her throttle wide. This acted like a bottle-fly on the flank of a spirited mare. She shook herself, quivering through all her light, pliable construction, lifted her prow another inch or two, and flung the rapids behind her.
Slim, fleet, clean-heeled, and hungry for distance, she raced toward the Benton landing two miles up.
In my anxiety to show her to the benevolent ones, I left the current and took a crosscut over a rocky ford. Pebbles flung from her pounding heels showered down upon me. I climbed forward and let her hammer away. She cleared the gravel bar, and as she plunged past the now silent information bureau on the landing, condescendingly I waved a hand at them and went on splitting water.
We shot under the bridge, forged into the crossing current, passed the big brick hotel, where a considerable number came out to salute us.They dubbed her the fastest boat that had ever climbed that current, I learned afterward. Alas! I was getting my triumph early and in one big chunk! I figure that that one huge breakfast of triumph, if properly distributed, would have fed me through the whole two thousand miles of back-strain and muscle-cramp. And yet, through all the days of snail-paced toil that followed, I remained truly thankful for that early breakfast.
The Kid and the Cornishman, busy in camp with the packing for the voyage, had shared in the gloom of my temporary defeat. But now, as I plunged past them, I could see them leaping into the air and cracking their heels together with delight. They had wet every plank of her with their sweat, and they were as proud as I. In the light of the following days, their delight dwindled into a pathetic thing.
I held her on her course up-stream, reached the bend a mile above, swung round and—discovered that she had only then begun to lift her heels! With the rapid current to aid, her speed was truly wonderful. She could have kept pace with any respectable freight train at least.
I indulged in a little feverish mental calculation. She could make, with the minimum current,eighteen miles per hour. Every day meant fifteen hours of light. Sioux City was two thousand miles away. We could reach Sioux City easily in ten days of actual running!
While I was covering that fast mile back to camp I saw theAtom Ipassing Sioux City with an air of high-nosed contempt. I developed a sort of unreasoning hunger for New Orleans—a kind of violent thirst for the Gulf of Mexico! Nothing short of these, it seemed to me, could be worthy of so fleet a craft. When I shoved her nose into the landing, I found that my companions thoroughly agreed with me.
All that night in my restless sleep I drove speed boats at a terrific pace through impossible channels and rock-toothed Scyllas; and the little Cornishman fought angry seas and heard a dream-wind shrieking in the cordage, and felt the salt spume on his face. "I wonder why I am always dreaming that," he said. "Atavism," I ventured; and he regarded me narrowly, as though I might be maligning his character in some way.
At dawn we had already eaten and were loading theAtomfor the voyage. With her cargo she drew eighteen inches of water. At full speed, she would squat four inches. It was the first ofAugust and the water, which had reached in the spring its highest point for twenty years, had been falling rapidly, and now promised to go far below the average low-water mark. We had ahead of us a long voyage, every mile of which was strange water.
Once again I went over that feverish calculation. This time I was more generous. I decided upon fifteen days. The cable ferry towed us out beyond the gravel bars that, during the last week, had been slowly lifting their bleached masses higher. In mid-stream we cut loose.
At the first turn the engine started. We were going at a good half-speed clip, when suddenly the engine changed its mind. "Squash!" it said wearily. Then it let off a gasoline sigh and went into a peaceful sleep. We had reached the brick hotel. We pulled in with the paddles and tied up. The information bureau was there, and at once went into consultation.
"I'm looking for an engine doctor," I said. "How about Mr. Blank? They tell me he knows the unknowable."
"Best man with an engine in town,"sadone.
"For gracious' sake, keep that man away fromyour engine if you don't want it ruined!" said others. A man who can arouse a diversity of opinions is at least a man of originality. I went after that man.
He came—with an air of mystery and a monkey wrench. He sat down in front of the patient (how that worddoesfit!) and after some time he said: "Hm!"
He unscrewed this—and whistled awhile; he unscrewed that—and whistled some more. Then he screwed up both this and that and cranked her.
"Phew-oo-oo-oo!" said the engine. Whereat the doctor smiled knowingly. It was plain that she was an open book to him.
"What is the trouble?" said I, with that tone of voice you use in a sick-room.
It appeared to be appendicitis.
"Spark-plug," muttered the doctor.
"Shall I get another?" I asked, half apologetically.
"Better," grunted the doctor.
I chased down an automobile owner, and a launch owner and a man who had a small pumping-engine. I was eloquent in my appeal for spark-plugs. I made a very fine collection of them1and hastened back to the doctor. He didn't seem to appreciate my efforts. He had the patient on the operating table. Everything was either unscrewed or pulled out. He was carefully scrutinizing the wreck—for more things to screw out!
"Locate the trouble?" I ventured.
"Buzzer's out of whack," replied the Man of Awe. "Have to get another spark-coil!" In times of sickness even the sternest man submits to medical tyranny. I ran down a man who once owned a power boat, and he had a spark coil. He finally agreed to forgo the pleasure of possessing it for a suitable reward. Considering the size of that reward, he had undoubtedly become greatly attached to his spark-coil!
I returned in triumph to the doctor. He was now screwing up all that he had previously unscrewed.
"Think she'll go now?" I pleaded.
He screwed up several dozen things, and whistled a while. Then the oracle gave voice:"'Fraid the batteries won't do; they're awful weak!"
With a bitter heart, I turned on my heel and went forth once more. Electrical supplies were not on sale at any of the stores. But I found a number of gentlemen who were evidently connoisseurs in the battery business. They had batteries of which they were extremely fond. They parted with some of superior quality upon the consideration of a friendly regard for me—and a slight emolument on my part. I was evidently very popular.
At a breathless speed I returned to—notto the doctor. He had vanished. Rumor had it that he had gone home to lunch, for the sun was now high. So far as I know, he is still at lunch.
Several things were yet unscrewed. I fell to work. Wherever anything seemed to make a snug fit, I screwed it in. Other remaining things I drove into convenient holes. All the while I begged blind fate to guide me. Then I connected the batteries, supplied the new spark-coil, selected a new spark-plug at random, and screwed it in.
Having done various things, I carefully surveyed my environs for a lady. There were no ladies present, so I spoke out freely. "And now,"said I, having exhausted my vocabulary, "I shall crank!"
Bill and the Kid sat on a pile of rocks looking very sullen. For some reason or other they seemed to doubt that engine. I don't know how long I cranked. I know only that the impossible happened. The boat started for the hotel piazza!
I didn't shut her down this time. I leaped out and took her by the nose. Putting our shoulders against the power of the screw, we walked her out into the current, headed her down stream, and scrambled in, wet to the ears.
My logbook speaks for that day as follows: "Left Benton at 2:30p.m.Gypsied along under half gasoline for several hours, safely crossing the Shonkin and Grocondunez bars. Struck a rock in Fontenelle Rapids at 4:30, taking off rudder. Landed with difficulty on a gravel-bar and repaired damages. At 5:30 engine bucked. A heavy wind from the west beat us against a ragged shore for an hour and a half. Impossible to proceed without power, except by cordelling—which we did, walking waist-deep in the water much of the time. Paddles useless in such a head wind. The wind falling at sunset, we drifted, again losing our rudder while shooting Brule Rapids.Tied up at the head of Black Bluff Rapids at dusk, having made twenty miles out of two thousand for the first day's run. Have to extend that fifteen days! Just the same, that information bureau saw us leave under power!"
1Dear Reader: Should you undertake the Missouri River trip, don't lay anything out on spark-plugs. I sowed them all along up there. Take a drag-net. You will scoop up several hundred dry batteries, but don't mind them; they are probably spoiled.
WE awoke with light hearts on the second morning of the voyage. All about us was the sacred silence of the wilderness dawn. The coming sun had smitten the chill night air into a ghostly fog that lay upon the valley like a fairy lake.
We were at the rim of the Bad Lands and there were no birds to sing; but crows, wheeling about a sandstone summit, flung doleful voices downward into the morning hush—the spirit of the place grown vocal.
Cloaked with the fog, our breakfast fire of driftwood glowed ruddily. What is there about the tang of wood-smoke in a lonesome place that fills one with glories that seem half memory and half dream? Crouched on my haunches, shivering just enough to feel the beauty there is in fire, I needed only to close my eyes, smarting with the smoke, to feel myself the first man huddledclose to the first flame, blooming like a mystic flower in the chill dawn of the world!
Perhaps that is what an outing is for—to strip one down to the lean essentials, press in upon one the glorious privilege of being one's self, unique in all the universe of innumerable unique things. Crouched close to your wilderness campfire, the great Vision comes easily out of the smoke. Once again you feel the bigness of your world, the tremendous significance of everything in it—including yourself—and a far-seeing sadness grips you. Living in the flesh seems so transient, almost a pitiful thing in the last analysis. But somehow you feel that there is something bigger—not beyond it, but all about it continually. And you wonder that you ever hated anyone. You know, somehow, there in the smoky silence, why men are noble or ignoble; why they lie or die for a principle; why they kill, or suffer martyrdom; why they love and hate and fight; why women smile under burdens, sin splendidly or sordidly—and why hearts sometimes break.
And expanded by the bigness of the empty silent spaces about you, like a spirit independent of it and outside of it all, you love the great red straining Heart of Man more than you couldever love it at your desk in town. And you want to get up and move—push on through purple distances—whither? Oh, anywhere will do! What you seek is at the end of the rainbow; it is in the azure of distance; it is just behind the glow of the sunset, and close under the dawn. And the glorious thing about it is that you know you'll never find it until you reach that lone, ghostly land where the North Star sets, perhaps. You're merely glad to know that you're not a vegetable—and that the trail never really ends anywhere.
Just now, however, the longing for the abstract had the semblance of a longing for the concrete. It always has that semblance, for that matter. You never really want what you think you are seeking. Touch the substance—and away you go after the shadow!
"Atom" Sailing Up-Stream in a Head Wind."Atom" Sailing Up-Stream in a Head Wind.
Typical Rapids on Upper Missouri.Typical Rapids on Upper Missouri.
Around the bend lay Sioux City. Around what bend? What matter? Somewhere down stream the last bend lay, and in between lay the playing of the game. Any bend will do to sail around! There's a lot of fun in merely being able to move about and do things. For this reason I am overwhelmed with gratitude whenever I think that, through some slight error in the cosmic process,the life forces that glow in me might have been flung into a turnip—but weren't! The thought is truly appalling—isn't it? The avoidance of that one awful possibility is enough to make any man feel lucky all his life. It's such fun to awaken in the morning with all your legs and arms and eyes and ears about you, waiting to be used again! So strong was this thought in me when we cast off, that even the memory of Bill's amateurish pancakes couldn't keep back the whistle.
The current of the Black Bluffs Rapids whisked us from the bank with a giddy speed, spun us about a right-angled bend, and landed us in a long quiet lake. Contrary to the average opinion, the Upper Missouri is merely a succession of lakes and rapids. In the low-water season, this statement should be italicised. When you are pushing down with the power of your arms alone the rapids show you how fast you want to go, and the lakes show you that you can't go that fast. For the teaching of patience, the arrangement is admirable. But when head winds blow, a three-mile reach means about a two-hour fight.
This being a very invigorating morning, however, the engine decided to take a constitutional. It ran. Below the mouth of the Marias River,twenty minutes later, we grounded on Archer's Bar and shut down. After dragging her off the gravel, we discovered that the engine wished to sleep. No amount of cranking could arouse it. Now and then it would say "squash," feebly rolling its wheel a revolution or two—like a sleepy-head brushing off a fly with a languid hand.
A light breeze had sprung up out of the west. The stream ran east and northeast. We hastily rigged a tarp on a pair of oars spliced for a mast, and proceeded at a care-free pace. The light breeze ruffled the surface of the slow stream;
"——yet still the sail made onA pleasant noise till noon."
"——yet still the sail made onA pleasant noise till noon."
In the lazy heat of the mounting sun, tempered by the cool river draught, the yellow sandstone bluffs, whimsically decorated with sparse patches of greenery, seemed to waver as though seen through shimmering silken gauze. And over it all was the hush of a dream, except when, in a spasmodic freshening of the breeze, the rude mast creaked and a sleepy watery murmur grew up for a moment at the wake.
Now and then at a break in the bluffs, where a little coulee entered the stream, the gray massesof the bull-berry bushes lifted like smoke, and from them, flame-like, flashed the vivid scarlet of the berry-clusters, smiting the general dreaminess like a haughty cry in a silence.
A wilderness indeed! It seemed that waste land of which Tennyson sang, "where no man comes nor hath come since the making of the world." I thought of the steamboats and the mackinaws and the keel-boats and the thousands of men who had pushed through this dream-world and the thought was unconvincing. Fairies may have lived here, indeed; and in the youth of the world, a glad young race of gods might have dreamed gloriously among the yellow crags. But surely we were the first men who had ever passed that way—and should be the last.
Suddenly the light breeze boomed up into a gale. TheAtom, with bellying sail, leaped forward down the roughening water, swung about a bend, raced with a quartering wind down the next reach, shot across another bend—and lay drifting in a golden calm. Still above us the great wind buzzed in the crags like a swarm of giant bees, and the waters about us lay like a sheet of flawless glass.
With paddles we pushed on lazily for an hour.At the next bend, where the river turned into the west, the great gale that had been roaring above us, suddenly struck us full in front. Sucking up river between the wall rocks on either side, its force was terrific. You tried to talk while facing it, and it took your breath away. In a few minutes, in spite of our efforts with the paddles, we lay pounding on the shallows of the opposite shore.
We got out. Two went forward with the line and the third pushed at the stern. Progress was slow—no more than a mile an hour. The clear water of the upper river is always cold, and the great wind chilled the air. Even under the August noon it took brisk work to keep one's teeth from chattering. The bank we were following became a precipice rising sheer from the river's edge, and the water deepened until we could no longer wade. We got in and poled on to the next shallows, often for many minutes at a time barely holding our own against the stiff gusts. For two hours we dragged the heavily laden boat, sometimes walking the bank, sometimes wading in mid-stream, sometimes poling, often swimming with the line from one shallow to another. And the struggle ended as suddenly as it began. Upon roundingthe second bend the head wind became a stern wind, driving us on at a jolly clip until nightfall.
During the late afternoon, we came upon a place where the Great Northern Railroad touches the river for the last time in five hundred miles. Here we saw two Italian section hands whiling away their Sunday with fishing rods. I went ashore, hoping to buy some fish. Neither of the two could speak English, and Italian sounds to me merely like an unintelligible singing. However, they gave me to understand that the fish were not for sale, and my proffered coin had no persuasive powers.
Still wanting those fish, I rolled a smoke, carelessly whistling the while a strain from an opera I had once heard. For some reason or other that strain had been in my head all day. I had gotten up in the morning with it; I had whistled it during the fight with the head wind. The Kid called it "that Dago tune." I think it was something fromIl Trovatore.
Suddenly one of the little Italians dropped his rod, stood up to his full height, lifted his arms very much after the manner of an orchestra leader and joined in with me. I stopped—because I saw that hecouldwhistle. He carried it onwith much expression to the last thin note with all the ache of the world in it. And then he grinned at me.
"Verdi!" he said sweetly.
I applauded. Whereat the little Italian produced a bag of tobacco. We sat down on the rocks and smoked together, holding a wordless but perfectlyintelligbleconversation of pleasant grins.
That night we had fish for supper! I got them for a song—or, rather, for a whistle. I was fed with more than fish. And I went to sleep that night with a glorious thought for a pillow: Truth expressed as Art is the universal language. One immortal strain from Verdi, poorly whistled in a wilderness, had made a Dago and a Dutchman brothers!
Scarcely had the crackling of the ruddy log lulled us to sleep, when the night had flitted over like a shadow, and we were cooking breakfast. A lone, gray wolf, sitting on his haunches a hundred paces away, regarded us curiously. Doubtless we were new to his generation; for in the evening dusk we had drifted well into the Bad Lands.
Bad Lands? Rather the Land of Awe!
A light stern wind came up with the sun. During the previous evening we had rigged a cat-sail, and noiselessly we glided down the glinting trail of crystal into the "Region of Weir."
On either hand the sandstone cliffs reared their yellow masses against the cloudless sky. Worn by the ebbing floods of a prehistoric sea, carved by the winds and rains of ages, they presented a panorama of wonders.
Rows of huge colonial mansions with pillared porticoes looked from their dizzy terraces across the stream to where soaring mosques and mystic domes of worship caught the sun. It was all like the visible dream of a master architect gone mad. Gaunt, sinister ruins of medieval castles sprawled down the slopes of unassailable summits. Grim brown towers, haughtily crenellated, scowled defiance on the unappearing foe. Titanic stools of stone dotted barren garden slopes, where surely gods had once strolled in that far time when the stars sang and the moon was young. Dark red walls of regularly laid stone—huge as that the Chinese flung before the advance of the Northern hordes—held imaginary empires asunder. Poised on a dizzy peak, Jove's eagle stared into the eye of the sun, and raised his wings for the flightdeferred these many centuries. Kneeling face to face upon a lonesome summit, their hands clasped before them, their backs bent as with the burdens of the race, two women prayed the old, old woman prayer. The snow-white ruins of a vast cathedral lay along the water's edge, and all about it was a hush of worship. And near it, arose the pointed pipes of a colossal organ—with the summer silence for music.
With a lazy sail we drifted through this place of awe; and for once I had no regrets about that engine. The popping of the exhaust would have seemed sacrilegious in this holy quiet.
Seldom do men pass that way. It is out of the path of the tourist. No excursion steamers ply those awesome river reaches. Across the sacred whiteness of that cathedral's imposing mass, no sign has ever been painted telling you the merits of the best five-cent cigar in the world! Few besides the hawks and the crows would see it, if it were there.
And yet, for all the quiet in this land of wonder, somehow you cannot feel that the place is unpeopled. Surely, you think, invisible knights clash in tourney under those frowning towers. Surely a lovelorn maiden spins at that castle window, weaving her heartache into the magic figures of her loom. Stately dames must move behind the shut doors of those pillared mansions; devotees mutter Oriental prayers beneath those sun-smitten domes. And amid the awful inner silence of that cathedral, white-robed priests lift wan faces to their God.
Under the beat of the high sun the light stern wind fell. The slack sail drooped like a sick-hearted thing. Idly drifting on the slow glassy flood, we seemed only an incidental portion of this dream in which the deepest passions of man were bodied forth in eternal fixity. Towers of battle, domes of prayer, fanes of worship, and then—the kneeling women! Somehow one couldn't whistle there. Bill and the Kid, little given to sentiment, sat quietly and stared.
Late in the afternoon we found ourselves out of this "Region of Weir." Great wall rocks soared above us. Consulting our map, we found that we were nearing Eagle Rapids, the first of a turbulent series. I had fondly anticipated shooting them all under power. So once more I decided to go over that engine. We landed at the wooded mouth of a little ravine, having made a trifle over twenty miles that day.
With those tools of the engine doctor—an air of mystery and a monkey-wrench—I unscrewed everything that appeared to have a thread on it, and pulled out the other things. The odds, I figured, were in my favor. A sick engine is useless, and I felt assured of either killing or curing. I did something—I don't know what; but having achieved the complete screwing up and driving in of things—it went!
So on the morning of the fourth day, we were up early, eager for the shooting of rapids. We had understood from the conversation of the seemingly wise, that Eagle Rapids was the first of a series that made the other rapids we had passed through look like mere ripples on the surface. In some of those we had gone at a very good clip, and several times we had lost our rudder.
I remembered how the steamboats used to be obliged to throw out cables and slowly wind themselves up with the power of the "steam nigger." I also remembered the words of Father de Smet: "There are many rapids, ten of which are very difficult to ascend and very dangerous to go down."
We had intended from the very first to getwrecked in one or all of these rapids. For this reason we had distributed forward, aft, and amidships, eight five-gallon cans, soldered air-tight. The frail craft would, we figured, be punctured. The cans would displace nearly three hundred and fifty pounds of water, and the boat and engine, submerged, would lose a certain weight. I had made the gruesome calculation with fond attention to detail. I decided that she should be wrecked quite arithmetically. We should be able, the figures said, to recover the engine and patch the boat. We had provided three life-preservers, but one had been stolen; so I had fancied what a bully fight one might have if he should be thrown out into the mad waters without a life-preserver.
I have never been able to explain it satisfactorily; it is one of the paradoxes; but human nature seems to take a weird delight in placing in jeopardy that which is dearest. Even a coward with his fingers clenched desperately on the ragged edge of hazard, feels an inexplicable thrill of glory. Having several times been decently scared, I know.
One likes to take a sly peep behind the curtain of the big play, hoping perhaps to get a slighthint as to what machinery hoists the moon, and what sort of contrivance flings the thunder and lightning, and many other things that are none of his business. Only, to be sure, he intends to get away safely with his information. When you think you see your finish bowing to receive you, something happens in your head. It's like a sultry sheet of rapid fire lapping up for a moment the thunder-shaken night—and discovering a strange land to you. And it's really good for you.
Under half speed we cruised through the windless golden morning; and the lonesome canyon echoed and re-echoed with the joyful chortle of the resurrected engine. We had covered about ten miles, when a strange sighing sound grew up about us. It seemed to emanate from the soaring walls of rock. It seemed faint, yet it arose above the din of the explosions, drowned out the droning of the screw.
Steadily the sound increased. Like the ghost of a great wind it moaned and sighed about us. Little by little a new note crept in—a sibilant, metallic note as of a tense sheet of silk drawn rapidly over a thin steel edge.
Wolf Point, the First Town in 500 Miles.Wolf Point, the First Town in 500 Miles.
Entrance to the Bad Lands.Entrance to the Bad Lands.
We knew it to be the mourning voice of the Eagle Rapids; but far as we could see, the riverwas quiet as a lake. We jogged on for a mile, with the invisible moaning presence about us. It was somewhat like the intangible something you feel about a powerful but sinister personality. The golden morning was saturated with it.
Suddenly, turning a sharp bend about the wall of rock that flanked the channel, a wind of noise struck us. It was like the hissing of innumerable snakes against a tonal background of muffled continuous thunder. A hundred yards before us was Eagle Rapids—a forbidding patch of writhing, whitening water, pricked with the upward thrust of toothlike rocks.
The first sight of it turned the inside of me mist-gray. Temporarily, wrecks and the arithmetic of them had little charm for me. I seized the spark-lever, intending to shut down. Instead, I threw it wide open. With the resulting leap of the craft, all the gray went out of me.
I grasped the rudder ropes and aimed at a point where the sinuous current sucked through a passage in the rocks like a lean flame through a windy flue. Did you ever hear music that made you see purple? It was that sort of purple I saw (or did I hear it like music?) when we plunged under full speed into the first suck of the rapids.We seemed a conscious arrow hurled through a gray, writhing world, the light of which was noise. And then, suddenly, the quiet, golden morning flashed back; and we were ripping the placid waters of a lake.
The Kid broke out into boisterous laughter that irritated me strangely: "Where the devil do you suppose our life-preservers are?" he bawled. "They're clear down under all the cargo!"
A world of wonderful beauty was forging past us. In the golden calm, the scintillant sheet of water seemed to be rushing backward, splitting itself over the prow, like a fabric woven of gold and silver drawn rapidly against a keen stationary blade.
The sheer cliffs had fallen away into pine-clad slopes, and vari-colored rocks flung notes of scarlet and gold through the sombre green of the pines—like the riotous treble cries of an organ pricking the sullen murmur of the bass. So still were the clean waters that we seemed midway between two skies.
We skirted the base of a conical rock that towered three hundred feet above us—a Titan sentinel. It was the famous Sentinel Rock of the old steamboat days. I shut the engine down toquarter speed, for somehow from the dizzy summit a sad dream fell upon me and bade me linger.
I stared down into the cold crystal waters at the base of the rock. Many-colored mosses, sickly green, pale, feverish red, yellow like fear, black like despair, purple like the lips of a strangled man, clung there. I remembered an old spring I used to haunt when I was just old enough to be awed by the fact of life and frightened at the possibility of death. Just such mosses grew in the depths of that spring. I used to stare into it for hours.
It fascinated me in a terrible way. I thought Death looked like that. Even now I am afraid I could not swim long in clear waters with those fearful colors under me. I am sure they found Ophelia floating like a ghastly lily in such a place.
Filled with a shadow of the old childish dread, I looked up to the austere summit of the Sentinel. Scarred and haggard with time it caught the sun. I thought of how long it had stood there just so, under the intermittent flashing of moon and sun and star, since first its flinty peak had pricked through the hot spume of prehistoric seas.
Fantastic reptiles, winged and finned andfanged, had basked upon it—grotesque, tentative vehicles of the Flame of Life! And then these flashed out, and the wild sea fell, and the land arose—hideous and naked, a steaming ooze fetid with gasping life. And all the while this scarred Sentinel stared unmoved. And then a riot of giant vegetation all about it—divinely extravagant, many-colored as fire. And this too flashed out—like the impossible dream of a god too young. And the Great Change came, and the paradox of frost was in the world, stripping life down to the lean essentials till only the sane, capable things might live. And still the Titan stared as in the beginning. And then, men were in the land—gaunt, terrible, wolf-like men, loving and hating. And La Verendrye forged past it; and Lewis and Clark toiled under it through these waters of awful quiet. And then the bull boats and the mackinaws and the packets. And all these flashed out; and still it stood unmoved. And I came—and I too would flash out, and all men after me and all life.
I viewed the colossal watcher with something like terror—the aspect of death about its base and that cynical glimmer of sunlight at its top. I flung the throttle open, and we leaped forwardthrough the river hush. I wanted to get away from this thing that had seen so much of life and cared so little. It depressed me strangely; it thrust bitter questions within the charmed circle of my ego. It gave me an almost morbid desire for speed, as though there were some place I should reach before the terrible question should be answered against me.
We fled down five or six miles of depressingly quiet waters. Once again the wall rocks closed about us. We seemed to be going at a tediously slow pace, yet the two thin streams of water rushed hissing from prow to stern. A strange mood was upon me. Once when I was a boy and far from home, I awoke in the night with a bed of railroad ties under me, and the chill black blanket of the darkness about me. I wanted to get up and run through that damned night—anywhere, just so I went fast enough—stopping only when exhaustion should drag me down. And yet I was afraid of nothing tangible; hunger and the stranger had sharpened whatever blue steel there was in my nature. I was afraid of being still! Were you ever a homesick boy, too proud to tell the truth about it?
I felt something of that boy's ache as we shotin among the wall rocks again. It was a psychic hunger for something that does not exist. Oh, to attain the terrible speed one experiences in a fever-dream, to get somewhere before it is too late, before the black curtain drops!
To some this may sound merely like the grating of overwrought nerves. But it is more than that. All religions grew out of that most human mood. And whenever one is deeply moved, he feels it. For even the most matter-of-fact person of us all has now and then a suspicion that this life is merely episodic—that curtain after curtain of darkness is to be pierced, world after world of consciousness and light to be passed through.
Once more the rocks took on grotesque shapes—utterly ultra-human in their suggestiveness. Those who have marveled at the Hudson's beauty should drop down this lonesome stretch.
We shot through the Elbow Rapids at the base of the great Hole-in-the-wall Rock. It was deep and safe—much like an exaggerated mill-race. It ran in heavy swells, yet the day was windless.
In the late afternoon we shot the Dead Man's Rapids, a very turbulent and rocky stretch ofwater. We went through at a freight-train speed, and began to develop a slight contempt for fast waters. That night we camped at the mouth of the Judith River on the site of the now forgotten Fort Chardon. We had made only ninety-eight miles in four days. It began to appear that we might be obliged to finish on skates!
We were up and off with the first gray of the morning. We knew Dauphin Rapids to be about seventeen miles below, and since this particular patch of water had by far the greatest reputation of all the rapids, we were eager to make its acquaintance.
The engine began to show unmistakable signs of getting tired of its job. Now and then it barked spitefully, had half a notion to stop, changed its mind, ran faster than it should, wheezed and slowed down—acting in an altogether unreasonable way. But it kept the screw humming nevertheless.
Fortunately it was going at a mad clip when we sighted the Dauphin. There was not that sibilance and thunder that had turned me a bit gray inside at first sight of the Eagle. The channel was narrow, and no rocks appeared above the surface. But speedwasthere; and the almostnoiseless rolling of the swift flood ahead had a more formidable appearance than that of the Eagle. Rocks above the surface are not much to be feared when you have power and a good rudder. But we drew about twenty-two inches of water, and I thought of the rocks under the surface.
I had, however, only a moment to think, for we were already traveling a good eighteen miles, and when the main swirl of the rapids seized us, we no doubt reached twenty-five. I was grasping the rudder ropes and we were all grinning a sort of idiotic satisfaction at the amazing spurt of speed,when——
Something was about to happen!
The Kid and I were sitting behind the engine in order to hold her screw down to solid water. Bill, decorated with a grin, sat amidships facing us. I caught a pink flash in the swirl just under our bow, and thenit happened!
The boat reared like a steeple-chaser taking a fence! The Kid shot forward over the engine and knocked the grin off Bill's face! Clinging desperately to the rudder ropes, I saw, for a brief moment, a good three-fourths of the frail craft thrust skyward at an angle of about forty-fivedegrees. Then she stuck her nose in the water and her screw came up, howling like seven devils in the air behind me! Instinctively, I struck the spark-lever; the howling stopped,—and we were floating in the slow waters below Dauphin Rapids.
All the cargo had forged forward, and the persons of Bill and the Kid were considerably tangled. We laughed loud and long. Then we gathered ourselves up and wondered if she might be taking water under the cargo. It developed that she wasn't. But one of our grub boxes, containing all the bacon, was missing. So were the short oars that we used for paddles. While we laughed, these had found some convenient hiding-place.
We had struck a smooth bowlder and leaped over it. A boat with the ordinary launch construction would have opened at every seam. The light springy tough construction of theAtomhad saved her. Whereat I thought of the Information Bureau and was well pleased.
Altogether we looked upon the incident as a purple spot. But we were many miles from available bacon, and when, upon trial, the engine refused to make a revolution, we began to get exceedingly hungry for meat.
Having a dead engine and no paddles, we drifted. We drifted very slowly. The Kid asked if he might not go ashore and drive a stake in the bank. For what purpose? Why, to ascertain whether we were going up or down stream! While we drifted in the now blistering sun, we talked aboutmeat. With a devilish persistence we quite exhausted the subject. We discussed the best methods for making a beefsteak delicious. It made us very hungry for meat. The Kid announced that he could feel his backbone sawing at the front of his shirt. But perhaps that was only the hyperbole of youth. Bill confessed that he had once grumbled at his good wife for serving the steak too rare. He now stated that at the first telegraph station he would wire for forgiveness. I advised him to wire for money instead and buy meat with it. Personally I felt a sort of wistful tenderness for packing-houses.
That day passed somehow, and the next morning we were still hungry for meat. We spent most of the morning talking about it. In the blistering windless afternoon, we drifted lazily. Now and then we took turns cranking the engine.
We were going stern foremost and I wascranking. We rounded a bend where the wall rocks sloped back, leaving a narrow arid sagebrush strip along both sides of the stream. I had straightened up to get the kink out of my back and mop the sweat out of my eyes, when I saw something that made my stomach turn a double somersault.
A good eight hundred yards down stream at the point of a gravel-bar, something that looked like and yet unlike a small cluster of drifting, leafless brush moved slowly into the water. Now it appeared quite distinct, and now it seemed that a film of oil all but blotted it out. I blinked my eyes and peered hard through the baffling yellow glare. Then I reached for the rifle and climbed over thegunwhale. I smelled raw meat.
Fortunately, we were drifting across a bar, and the slow water came only to my shoulders. The thing eight hundred yards away was forging across stream by this time—heading for the mouth of a coulee. I saw plainly now that the brush grew out of a head. It was a buck with antlers.
Just below the coulee's mouth, the wall rocks began again. The buck would be obliged to land above the wall rocks, and the drifting boatwould keep him going. I reached shore and headed for that coulee. The sagebrush concealed me. At the critical moment, I intended to show myself and start him up the steep slope. Thus he would be forced to approach me while fleeing me. When I felt that enough time had passed, I stood up. The buck, shaking himself like a dog, stood against the yellow sandstone at the mouth of the gulch. He saw me, looked back at the drifting boat, and appeared to be undecided.
I wondered what the range might be. Back home in the plowed field where I frequently plug tin cans at various long ranges, I would have called it six hundred yards—at first. Then suddenly it seemed three or four hundred. Like a thing in a dream the buck seemed to waver back and forth in the oily sunlight.
"Call it four hundred and fifty," I said to myself, and let drive. A spurt of yellow stone-dust leaped from the cliff a foot or so above the deer's back. Only four hundred? But the deer had made up his mind. He had urgent business on the other side of that slope—he appeared to be overdue.
Fresh Meat.Fresh Meat.
Supper!Supper!
I pumped up another shell and drew fine atfour hundred. That time his rump quivered for a second as though a great weight had been dropped on it. But he went on with increased speed. Once more I let him have it. That time he lost an antler. He had now reached the summit, two hundred feet up at the least.
He hesitated—seemed to be shivering. I have hunted with a full stomach and brought down game. But there's a difference when you are empty. In that moment before you kill, you became the sort of fellow your mother wouldn't like. Perhaps the average man would feel a little ashamed to tell the truth about that savage moment. I got down on my knee and put a final soft-nosed ball where it would do the most good. The buck reared, stiffened, and came down, tumbling over and over.
That night we pitched camp under a lone scrubby tree at the mouth of an arid gulch that led back into the utterly God-forsaken Bad Lands. It was the wilderness indeed. Coyotes howled far away in the night, and diving beaver boomed out in the black stream.
We built half a dozen fires and swung above them the choice portions of our kill. And how we ate—with what glorious appetites!
It is good to sit with a glad-hearted company flinging words of joyful banter across very tall steins. It is good to draw up to a country table at Christmas time with turkey and pumpkin-pies and old-fashioned puddings before you, and the ones you love about you. I have been deeply happy with apples and cider before an open fireplace. I have been present when the brilliant sword-play of wit flashed across a banquet table—and it thrilled me.But——
There is no feast like the feast in the open—the feast in the flaring light of a night fire—the feast of your own kill, with the tang of the wild and the tang of the smoke in it!
IT all came back there by the smoldering fires—the wonder and the beauty and the awe of being alive. We had eaten hugely—a giant feast. There had been no formalities about that meal. Lying on our blankets under the smoke-drift, we had cut with our jack-knives the tender morsels from a haunch as it roasted. When the haunch was at last cooked to the bone, only the bone was left.
Heavy with the feast, I lay on my back watching the gray smoke brush my stars that seemed so near.My stars!Soft and gentle and mystical! Like a dark-browed Yotun woman wooing the latent giant in me, the night pressed down. I closed my eyes, and through me ran the sensuous surface fires of her dream-wrought limbs. Upon my face the weird magnetic lure of ever-nearing, never-kissing lips made soundless music. Like a sister, like a mother she caressed me, lazywith the huge feast; and yet, a drowsy, half-voluptuous joy shimmered and rippled in my veins.
Drowsing and dreaming under the drifting smoke-wrack, I felt the sense of time and self drop away from me. No now, no to-morrow, no yesterday, no I! Only eternity, one vast whole—sun-shot, star-sprent, love-filled, changeless. And in it all, one spot of consciousness more acute than other spots; and that was the something that had eaten hugely, and that now felt the inward-flung glory of it all; the swooning, half-voluptuous sense of awe and wonder, the rippling, shimmering, universal joy.
And then suddenly and without shock—like the shifting of the wood smoke—the mood veered, and there was nothing but I. Space and eternity were I—vast projections of myself, tingling with my consciousness to the remotest fringe of the outward swinging atom-drift; through immeasurable night, pierced capriciously with shafts of paradoxic day; through and beyond the awful circle of yearless duration, my ego lived and knew itself and thrilled with the glory of being. The slowly revolving Milky Way was only a glory within me; the great woman-star jeweling thesummit of a cliff, was only an ecstasy within me; the murmuring of the river out in the dark was only the singing of my heart; and the deep, deep blue of the heavens was only the splendid color of my soul.
Bill snored. Among the glowing fires moved the black bulk of the Kid, turning the hunks of venison. And then the universe and I, curiously mixed, swooned into nothing at all, and I was blinking at a golden glow, and from the river came a shouting.
It was broad day. We leaped up, and rubbing the sleep from our eyes, saw a light skiff drifting toward us. It contained two men—Frank and Charley. We had met them at Benton, and during an acquaintance of three weeks we had learned of their remarkable ability as cooks. Frank was a little Canadian Frenchman, and Charley was English. Both, in the parlance of the road, were "floaters"; that is to say, no locality ever knew them long; the earth was their floor, the sky their ceiling—and their god was Whim. Naturally our trip had appealed to them, and one month in Benton had aggravated that hopelessly incurable disease—Wanderlust.
So we had agreed that somewhere down riverwe would camp for a week and wait for them. They would do the cooking, and we would take them in tow. Two days after we dropped out of Benton, they had abruptly "jumped" an unfinished job and put off after us in a skiff, rowing all day and most of the night in order to overtake us.
Certainly they had arrived at the moment most psychologically favorable for the beginning of an odd sort of tyranny that followed. Cooking is a weird mystery to me. As for Bill and the Kid, courtesy forbids detailed comment. The Kid had been uniformly successful in disguising the most familiar articles of diet; and Bill was perhaps least unsuccessful in the making of flapjacks. According to his naïve statement, he had discovered the trick of mixing the batter while manufacturing photographer's mounting paste. His statement was never questioned. My only criticism on his flapjacks was simply that he left too much to the imagination. For these and kindred reasons, we gladly hailed the newcomers.
Ten minutes after the skiff touched shore, the camp consisted of two cooks and three scullions. The Kid was a hewer and packer of wood, I wasa peeler and slicer of things, and Bill, sweetly oblivious of his bewhiskered dignity, danced about in the humblest of moods, handing this and that to the grub-lords.
"You outfitted like greenhorns!" announced the usurpers. "What you want is raw material. Run down to the boat, please, and bring me this! Oh, yes, and bring me that! And you'll find the other in the bottom of the skiff's forward locker! Put a little more wood on the fire, Kid; and say, Bill, hand me that, won't you? Who's going to get a pail of water?"
All three of us were going to get a pail of water, of course! It was the one thing in the world we wanted to do very much—get a pail of water!
But the raw materials—how they played on them! I regarded their performance as a species of duet; and the raw materials, ranged in the sand about the fire, were the keys. Frank touched this, Charley touched that, and over the fire the music grew—perfectly stomach-ravishing!
We had bought with much care all, or nearly all the ordinary cooking-utensils. These the usurpers scorned. Three or four gasoline cans, transformed by a jack-knife into skillets, ovens,platters, etc., sufficed for these masters of their craft. The downright Greek simplicity of their methods won me completely.
"This is indeed Art," thought I; "first, the elimination of the non-essential, and then the virile, unerring directness, the seemingly easy accomplishment resulting from effort long forgotten; and, above all, the final, convincing delivery of the goods."
Out of the chaos of the raw material, beneath the touch of Charley's wise hands, emerged a wondrous cosmos of biscuits, light as the heart of a boy. And Frank, singing a French ditty, created wheat cakes. His method struck me as poetic. He scorned the ordinary uninspired cook's manner of turning the half-baked cake. One side being done, he waited until the ditty reached a certain lilting upward leap in the refrain, when, with a dexterous movement of the frying-pan, he tossed the cake into the air, making it execute a joyful somersault, and catching it with a sizzlingsplatin the pan, just as the lilting measure ceased abruptly.
Why, I could taste that song in the pancakes!
I wonder why domestic economy has so persistently overlooked the value of song as anadjunct to cookery.Gâteaux à la chansonnette!Who wouldn't eat them for breakfast?
At six in the evening we put off, Charley, the Kid and I manning the power boat, Bill and Frank the skiff, which was towed by a thirty-foot line. I had, during the day, transformed my unquestioned slavery into a distinct advantage, having carefully impressed upon the Englishman the honor I would do him by allowing him to become chief engineer of theAtom. I carefully avoided the subject of cranking. I wastired cranking. I felt that I had exhausted the possibilities of enjoyment in that particular form of physical exercise. It had developed during the day that Charley had once run a gasoline engine. I was careful to emphasize my ridiculous lack of mechanical ability. Charley took the bait beautifully.
But just now the engine ran merrily. Above its barking I sang the praises of the Englishman, with a comfortable feeling that, at least in this, the tail would wag the dog.
Through the clear quiet waters, between soaring canyon walls, we raced eastward into the creeping twilight. Here and there the banks widened out into valleys of wondrous beauty, flanked by jagged miniature mountains transfigured in theslant evening light. It seemed the "færie land forlorn" of which Keats dreamed, where year after year come only the winds and the rains and the snow and the sunlight and the star-sheen and the moon-glow.
In the deepening evening our widening V-shaped wake glowed with opalescent witch-fires. Watching the oily ripples, I steered wild and lost the channel. We all got out and, wading in different directions, went hunting for the Missouri River. It had flattened out into a lake three or four hundred yards wide and eight inches deep. Slipping poles under the power boat, we carried it several hundred yards to a point where the stream deepened. It was now quite dark, and the engine quit work for the day. The skiff towed us another mile or so to a camping place.
Having moored the boats, we lined up on the shore and had a song. It was a quintet, consisting of a Frenchman, an Englishman, an Irishman, a Cornishman, and a German. A very strong quintet it was; that is to say, strong on volume. As to quality—we weren't thrusting ourselves upon an audience. The river and the sky didn't seem to mind, and the cliffs sang after us, lagging a beat or two.
We wished to sing ever so beautifully; and, after all, it would be much better to have the whole world wishing to sing melodiously, than to have just a few masters here and there who really can! Did you ever hear a barefooted, freckle-faced plowboy singing powerfully and quite out of tune, the stubble fields about him still glistening with the morning dew, and the meadow larks joining in from the fence-posts? I have: and soaring above the faulty execution, I heard the lark-heart of the never-aging world wooing the far-off eternal dawn. True song is merely a hopeful condition of the soul. And so I am sure we sang very wonderfully that night.
And how the flapjacks disappeared as a result of that singing! We ate until Charley refused to bake any more; then we rolled up in our blankets by the fire and "swapped lies," dropping off one at a time into sleep until the last speaker finished his story with only the drowsy stars for an audience. At least I suppose it was so; I was not the last speaker.
Alas! too seldom were we to hail the evening star with song. So far we had made in a week little more than one hundred and fifty miles.With the exception of a few hours of head winds, that week had been a week of dream. We now awoke fully to the fact that in low water season the Missouri is not swift. In our early plans we had fallen in with the popular fallacy that one need only cut loose and let the current do the rest; whereas, in low water, one would probably never reach the end of his journey by that method. In addition to this, our gasoline was running low. We had trusted to irrigation plants for replenishing our supply from time to time. But the great flood of the spring had swept the valley clean. Where the year before there were prosperous ranch establishments with gasoline pumping plants, there was only desolation now. It was as though we traveled in the path of a devastating army. Perhaps the summer of 1908 was the most unfavorable season for such a trip in the last fifty years. Steamboating on the upper river is only a memory. There are now no wood-yards as formerly. We found ourselves with no certainty of procuring grub and oil; our engine became more and more untrustworthy; our paddles had been lost. What winds we had generally blew against us, and the character of the banks was changing. The cliffs gave way to broadalluvial valleys, over which, at times, the gales swept with terrific force.
Our map told us of a number of river "towns." We had already been partially disillusioned as to the character of those "towns." They were pretty much in a class with Goodale, except that they lacked the switch and the box-car and the sign. Just now Rocky Point lay ahead of us. Rocky Point meant a new supply of food and oil. Stimulated by this thought, Charley cranked heroically under the blistering sun and managed to arouse the engine now and then into spasms of speed. He had not yet begun to swear. Fearfully I awaited the first evidence of the new mood, which I knew must come.
At least once a day we put the machinery on the operating table. Each time we succeeded only in developing new symptoms.
At a point about fifty miles from the "town" so deeply longed for, a lone cow-punch appeared on the bank.
"How far to Rocky Point?" I cried.
"Oh, something less than two hundred miles!" drawled the horseman. (How carelessly they juggle with miles in that country!)
"It's just a little place, isn't it?" I continued.
"Little place!" answered the cow-puncher; "hell, no!"
"What!" I cried in glee; "Is it really a town of importance?" I had visions of a budding metropolis, full of gasoline and grub.
"I guess it ain't a little place," explained the rider; "w'y, they've got nigh onto ten thousand cattle down there!"
Ten minutes after that, Charley, after a desperate but unsuccessful fit of cranking, straightened the kink out of his back, mopped the perspiration from his face—and swore!
Almost immediately I felt, or at least thought I felt, a distinct change in the temper of the crew—for the worse. We used the better part of two days covering the last fifty miles into Rocky Point, only to find that the place consisted of a log ranch-house, two women, an old man, and "Texas." The cattle and the other men were scattered over a hundred miles or so of range. The women either would not or could not supply us with grub, explaining that the nearest railroad town was ninety miles away. Gasoline was out of the question. We might be able to buy some at the mouth of Milk River,two hundred miles down stream!
"Texas," who made me think of Gargantua, and who had a chest like a bison bull's, and a drawling fog-horn voice, ran a saloon in an odd little shanty boat brought down by the flood. He solved the problem for us.
"You cain't get no gasoline short o' Milk River," he bellowed drawlingly; "and you sure got to paddle, so you better buy whisky!"
While we were deciding to accept the offered advice, "Texas" whittled a stick and got off a few jokes of Rabelaisian directness. We laughed heartily, and as a mark of his appreciation, he gave us five quarts for a gallon. Which proved, in spite of his appearance, that "Texas" was very human.
We gave the engine a final trial. It ran by spasms—backwards. Then, finally, it refused to run at all. We tried to make ourselves believe that the gasoline was too low in the tank, that the pressure of the oil had something to do with it. At first we really knew better. But days of drudgery at the paddles transformed the makeshift hope into something almost like a certainty.
There was no lumber at Rocky Point. We rummaged through a pile of driftwood and found some half-rotted two-by-sixes. These we hackedinto paddles. They weighed, when thoroughly soaked, at least fifteen pounds apiece.
Sending Bill and Frank on ahead with the skiff and the small store of provisions, Charley and I, the Kid at the steering rope, set out pushing the power canoe with the paddles. The skiff was very soon out of sight.
TheAtom, very fast under power, was, with paddles, the slowest boat imaginable. There was no lift to her prow, no exhilarating leap as with the typical light canoe driven by regulation paddles. And she was as unwieldy as a log. A light wind blew up-stream, and the current was very slow. After dark we caught up with Bill and Frank, who had supper waiting. I had been tasting venison all day; but there was none for supper. In spite of a night's smoking, all of it had spoiled. This left us without meat. Our provisions now consisted mostly of flour. We had a few potatoes and some toasted wind called "breakfast food." During six or seven hours of hard work at the paddles, we had covered no more than fifteen miles. These facts put together gave no promising result. In addition to this, it was impossible to stir up a song. Even the liquor wouldn't bring it out. And the flapjackswere not servedà la chansonnettethat night. I tried to explain why the trip was only beginning to get interesting; but my words fell flat. And when the irrepressible Kid essayed a joke, I alone laughed at it, though rather out of gratitude than mirth.
"Walking" Boats over Shallows."Walking" Boats over Shallows.
Typical Upper Missouri River Reach.Typical Upper Missouri River Reach.