Part 17 (2/2)

The river narrowed sharply above Rock Creek, and, standing on a thwart as the skiff drifted down, I saw that the rapid dropped away in a solid stretch of white foam tumbling between black basaltic walls. There was a good, stiff fall, but it was rea.s.suring that I could see right away to the end of the white water, which did not appear to continue around the ninety-degree bend at the foot. It was just the sort of water _Imshallah_ was at her best in running, so I decided it was simply a matter of choosing the clearest channel and letting her go. A white cross-barred post on the mountainside at the angle of the bend gave me the bearing for the channel a minute or two before I made out the dip of the ”intake.” Stowing everything well aft, as I had done at Umatilla, I took up my oars and put her straight over the jade-green tip of the ”V.”

That was rough-and-rowdy water, and no mistake. Every roller meant a slam, and every slam meant a shower-bath; but withal, it was mostly spray that came over her bows--nothing really to bother about. And so _Imshallah_ would have run it right through--had not a sharp dig I gave with my left oar jerked the latter out of that ”open-faced” Boat Encampment mascot lock and sent me keeling over backwards. The next moment she was wallowing, beam-on, into the troughs and over the crests of the combers, dipping green water at every roll.

Recovering my seat as quickly as possible, I tried to bring her head up again by backing with the right oar. She swung obediently enough, but I could not hold her bow down-stream once she was headed right.

Rather than chance that ”mascot” oar-lock again, I tumbled aft and did what I could with the paddle. Down as she was by the stern, that brought her head right out of the water and made it rather hopeless getting any way on her. She tumbled on through to the foot of the rapid without putting a gunwale under again, however, a circ.u.mstance for which I was highly thankful. She already had five or six inches of water in her, as I found as soon as I began to bail. It is just as well the trouble didn't occur at the head of the rapid. We were half way down when I ceased to function, and _Imshallah_ had about all she wanted to navigate the remainder. I was also duly thankful that there was nothing more than a few bad swirls at the foot of the rapid. Standing on her tail as she was after I plumped down in the stern with the paddle, a good strong whirlpool, such as must form at that sharp bend at high-water, would have made not more than one comfortable mouthful of her.

From the foot of Rock Creek Rapids to the head of Squally Hook Rapids is something less than four miles of not very swift water. It took me about all the time the boat was drifting that distance to get her bailed out enough to retrieve my lost oar-lock from under the bottom-boards.

Squally Hook, I could see, was much the same sort of a short, sharp, savage rapid as Rock Creek. There was the same restricted ”intake,” and the same abrupt bend just beyond the foot; only below Squally Hook the river turned to the left, where at Rock Creek it had turned to the right.

The sheer two-thousand-foot cliff on the inside of the bend that gives its name to the rapid is well called Squally Hook. What had been a gentle ten-miles-an-hour breeze on the river above began resolving itself into a succession of fitful gusts of twenty or thirty as I approached the rock-walled bend. Even a steady head-wind makes steering awkward in going into a rapid; a gusty one is a distinct nuisance. To avoid the necessity of any sharp change of course after I was once among the white-caps, I resolved to use every care in heading into the rapid at exactly the right place. That was why, when I became aware that two girls from a farm-house on a bench above the right bank were motioning me imperiously in that direction, I swerved sharply from the course I had decided upon in an endeavour to locate the channel into which I was sure they were trying to tell me to head. Just what those confounded half-breed Loreli were _really_ driving at I never did learn. Perhaps they had apples to sell, or some sweet cider; or perhaps they thought I had some cider that was not sweet. Perhaps it was pure sociability--the desire of a bit of a ”talky-talk” with the green-boated _voyageur_. At any rate, they were certainly _not_ trying to pilot me into a clear channel. That fact walloped me right between the eyes the instant I discovered that I had pulled beyond the entrance of a perfectly straight channel and that there was a barely submerged barrier of rock blocking the river all the way on to the right bank.

That, of course, left me no alternative but to pull back for all that was in me to wait the ”intake.” It was a very similar predicament to the one in which the mist had tricked me at the head of Umatilla; only there I had room to make the channel and here I didn't. The current, running now like a mill-race, carried me onto the reef sixty feet to the right of the smooth green chute of the ”fairway.”

If it had taken half an hour instead of half a second to shoot out across the shoaling shelf of that froth-hidden reef there might have been time for a goodly bit of worrying anent the outcome. As it was, there was just the sudden thrill of seeing the bottom of the river leaping up to hit the bottom of the boat, the instant of suspense as she touched and dragged at the brink, and then the dizzy nose-dive of two or three feet down into deeper water. It was done so quickly that a stroke checked by the rock of the reef was finished in the up-boil below the little cascade. With an inch or two less of water she might have hung at the brink and swung beam-on to the current, which, of course, would have meant an instant capsize. The way it was, she made a straight clean jump of it, and only buried her nose in the souse-hole for the briefest part of a second when she struck. The rest was merely the matter of three hundred yards of rough running down a rock-clear channel.

The authors of my near-mess-up came capering down the bank in pursuit as I swung out into the smoothening swirls, but I only shook my fist at them and resumed my oars. Darn women, anyway!--when a man's running rapids, I mean.

Now one would have thought that those two performances were enough for one afternoon, especially as both were very largely due to my own carelessness; but I suppose the ”trilogy of trouble” had to be rounded out complete. From the foot of Squally Hook Rapids to the head of Indian Rapids is about three miles. The water became ominously slack as I neared what appeared to be a number of great rock islands almost completely barring the river. It was not until I was almost even with the first of them that a channel, very narrow and very straight, opened up along the left bank. Various other channels led off among the islands, but with nothing to indicate how or where they emerged. That flume-like chute down the left bank was plainly the way the steamers went, and certainly the quickest and most direct course on down the river. Peering through the rocky vista, I could see a rain storm racing up the Columbia, with the grey face of it just blotting out a wedge-shaped gorge through the southern cliffs which I knew must be the mouth of the John Day. That storm was another reason why I should choose the shortest and swiftest channel. There ought to be some kind of shelter where this important southern tributary met the Columbia.

Of course, I knew all about still water running deep (which was of no concern to me) and ”twisty” (which was of considerable concern). I should certainly have given more thought to the matter of tr.i.m.m.i.n.g for what was sure to be waiting to snap up _Imshallah_ at the foot of that speeding chute of green-black water had not an old friend of mine breezed along just then. He was the engineer of the way freight on the ”South-bank” line. We had been exchanging signals in pa.s.sing for three days now--twice on his down run and once on his up. This was the first opportunity I had had to show him how a rapid should be run, and I noted with gratification that he appeared to be slowing down so as to miss none of the fine points. On my part, dispensing with my wonted preliminary ”look-see,” I swung hard on the oars in an effort to get into the swiftest water before the spectators were out of sight.

As the engine drew up even with me, I balanced my oars with my right hand for a moment and waved the engineer greetings with my left; he, in turn, ran the locomotive with his left hand and waved with his right.

Then I saw that the fireman was also waving, and, farther back, the brakeman, from the top of a car, and the conductor from the ”lookout” of the caboose. The occupants of the ”dirigible grandstand” at the Poughkeepsie regattas had nothing on the crew of that way freight. And the latter, moreover, were treated to a burst of speed such as no man-propelled boat in still water ever came close to. I was not pulling over four or five miles an hour myself, but that smooth, steep, un.o.bstructed chute must have been spilling through its current at close to twenty. In a couple of hundred yards I pulled up three or four car-lengths on the comparatively slow-moving train, and I was still gaining when a sudden ”_toot-a-too-toot!_” made me stop rowing and look around. I had recognized instantly the familiar danger signal, and was rather expecting to see a cow grazing with true bovine nonchalance on the weeds between the ties. Instead, it was the engineer's wildly gesticulating arm that caught my back-cast eye. He was pointing just ahead of me, and down--evidently at something in the water.

Then I saw it too--a big black funnel-shaped hole down which a wide ribbon of river seemed to be taking a sort of a spiral tumble. It was that entirely well-meant _toot-a-toot_, which was intended to prod me, not a cow, into activity, that was primarily responsible for what followed. Had I not ceased rowing on hearing it, it is probable that the skiff would have had enough way when she did strike that whirlpool to carry her right on through. As it was _Imshallah_ simply did an undulant glide into the watery tentacles of the lurking octopus, snuggled into his breast and prepared to spend the night reeling in a dervish dance with him. I must do the jade the justice of admitting that she had no intention of outraging the proprieties by going any further than a nocturnal terpsich.o.r.ean revel. Going home for the night with him never entered her mind; so that when he tried to pull the ”Cave-Man stuff” and drag her down to his under-water grottoes, she put up the most virtuous kind of resistance. The trouble was that I didn't want to go even as far as she did. Dancing was the last thing I cared for, with that rain-storm and night coming on. Yet--at least as far as my friends on the way freight ever knew--an all-night _Danse d'Apache_ looked very much like what we were up against; for I recall distinctly that when the train was disappearing round the next bend _Imshallah_, her head thrown ecstatically skyward, was still spinning in circles, while I continued to fan the air with my oars like an animated Dutch windmill.

It was a mighty sizeable whirlpool, that black-mouthed maelstrom into which _Imshallah's_ susceptibility had betrayed both of us. I should say that it was twice the diameter of the one which had given us such a severe shaking just above the Canadian Boundary, and with a ”suck” in proportion. What helped the situation now, however, was the fact that the skiff carried rather less than half the weight she did then. At the rate she was taking water over the stern during that first attack, she could not have survived for more than half a minute; now she was riding so much more buoyantly that she was only dipping half a bucket or so once in every two or three rounds. When I saw that she could probably go on dancing for an hour or two without taking in enough water to put her under, something of the ludicrousness of the situation began to dawn on me. Missing the water completely with half of my strokes, and only dealing it futile slaps with the rest, I was making no more linear progress than if I had been riding a merry-go-round. I didn't dare to put the stern any lower by sliding down there and trying to paddle where there was water to be reached. Crowding her head down by working my weight forward finally struck me as the only thing to do.

With the forward thwart almost above my head this was not an easy consummation to effect, especially with an oar in either hand. Luckily, I was now using the ”ring” oar-locks, so that they came along on the oars when I uns.h.i.+pped the latter. Standing up was, of course, out of the question. I simply slid off backwards on to the bottom and wriggled forward in a sitting position until I felt my spine against the thwart.

That brought her nose out of the clouds, and she settled down still farther when, after getting my elbows over the seat behind me, I worked up into a rowing position.

The whirlpool was spinning from right to left, and one quick stroke with my left oar--against the current of the ”spin,” that is--was enough to shoot her clear. Bad swirls and two or three smaller ”twisters” made her course a devious one for the next hundred yards, but she never swung in a complete revolution again. I pulled into smooth water just as the first drops of the storm began to patter on the back of my neck.

The first riffle of John Day Rapids sent its warning growl on the up-river wind before I was a quarter of a mile below the whirlpool, and ahead loomed a barrier of rock islands, rising out of the white foam churned up as the Columbia raced between them. I had to run the first riffle--an easy one--to make the mouth of the John Day, but that was as far as I went. I reckoned there had been quite enough excitement for one afternoon without poking into any more rough water against a rain and head wind. Dropping below the gravel bar off the mouth of the Day, I pulled fifty yards up-stream in a quiet current and moored _Imshallah_ under the railway bridge. I camped for the night with a couple of motor tourists in a shack near the upper end of the bridge. My hosts were two genial souls, father and son, enjoying an indefinite spell of fis.h.i.+ng, hunting and trapping on a stake the former had made in the sale of one of his ”prospects” in southern Oregon. They were bluff, big-hearted, genuine chaps, both of them, and we had a highly delightful evening of yarning.

It was clear again the next morning, but with the barometer of my confidence jolted down several notches by what had occurred the previous afternoon. I pulled across the river and sought a quieter way through the second riffle of John Day Rapids than that promised by the boisterous steamer channel. By devious ways and sinuous, I wound this way and that among the black rock islands, until a shallow channel along the right bank let me out of the maze at the lower end. This waste of time and effort was largely due to funkiness on my part, and there was no necessity for it. The steamer channel is white and rough, with something of a whirlpool on the left side at the lower end, but nothing that there is any real excuse for avoiding. The third riffle was nothing to bother about; nor did Schofield's Rapids, two miles below, offer any difficulties. As a matter of fact, Adventure, having had its innings, was taking a day off, leaving me to follow the Golden Trail of Romance.

To-day was ”Ladies' Day” on the Columbia.

Romance first showed her bright eyes at a little farm on the right bank, three miles below Schofield's Rapids. Landing here to ask about the channel through a rather noisy rapid beginning to boom ahead, I found a delectable apple-cheeked miss of about twelve in charge, her father and mother having gone across to Biggs for the day. She was in sore trouble at the moment of my advent because her newly-born brindle bull calf--her really-truly very own--wouldn't take nourishment properly. Now as luck would have it, teaching a calf table-manners chanced to be one of the few things I knew about stock-farming. So I showed her how to start in by letting _Cultus_ (that was merely a temporary name, she said, because he was so bad) munch her own finger for a spell, from which, by slow degrees, the lacteal liaison with ”Old Mooley” was established. It took us half an hour to get _Cultus_ functioning on all fours, and rather longer than that to teach her collie, tabby cat, and the latter's three kittens to sit in a row and have their mouths milked into. It didn't take us long to exhaust ”Old Mooley's” milk supply at that game, and when I finally climbed over the barnyard fence on the way down to my boat, poor _Cultus_ was left b.u.t.ting captiously at an empty udder.

”Apple Cheek” rather wanted me to stay until her father came back, saying that he had gone to Biggs to get a 'breed for a hired man, and that, if he didn't get the 'breed, maybe I would do. She almost burst into tears with shame when I told her I was a moving picture actor seeking rest and local colour on the Columbia. ”You a actor, and I made you milk 'Old Mooley!'” she sobbed; and it took all my lunch ration of milk chocolate to bring back her smile. Then, like the Scotch bride at Windermere, she asked me if I was Bill Hart. Somehow, I wasn't quite base enough to tell her a concrete lie like that; so I compromised with a comparative abstraction. I was a rising star in the movie firmament, I said; an eclectic, taking the best of all the risen stars, of whom much would be heard later. She was still pondering ”_eclectic_” when I pushed off into the current. Bless your heart, little ”Apple Cheek,” I hope you didn't get a spanking for wasting all of _Cultus'_ dinner on the dogs and cats and the side of the barn! You were about the first person I met on the Columbia who didn't accuse me of being a boot-legger, and the only one who believed me hot off the bat when I said I was a movie star.

The rapid ahead became noisier as I drew nearer, and when I saw it came from a reef which reached four-fifths of the way across the river from the left bank, I pulled in and landed at Biggs to inquire about the channel. The first man I spoke to called a second, and the latter a third, and so on _ad infinitum_. Pretty near to half the town must have been gathered at the railway station giving me advice at the end of a quarter of an hour. Each of them had a different suggestion to make, ranging from dragging through a half-empty back channel just below the town to taking the boat out and running it down the track on a push-cart. As they all were agreed that the steamers used to go down the opposite side, I finally decided that would be the best way through. Not to run too much risk of being carried down onto the reef in pulling across, I lined and poled a half mile up-stream before pus.h.i.+ng off. Once over near the right bank, I found a channel broad and deep enough to have run at night.

A couple of miles below Biggs the Columbia is divided by a long narrow rocky island. The deep, direct channel is that to the right, and is called h.e.l.l Gate--the third gorge of that hackneyed name I had encountered since pus.h.i.+ng off from Beavermouth. Possibly it was because I was fed-up with the name and all it connoted that I avoided this channel; more likely it was because Romance was at the tow-line. At any rate, I headed into the broad shallow channel that flows by the mouth of the River Des Chutes. It was up this tumultuous stream that Fremont, after camping at the Dalles and making a short boat voyage below, started south over the mountains in search of the mythical river that was supposed to drain from the Utah basin to the Pacific in the vicinity of San Francisco--one of the indomitable ”Pathfinder's” hardest journeys.

Just beyond where the River of the Falls, true to name to the last, came cascading into the Columbia, Romance again raised her golden head--this time out of the steam rising above an Indian ”Turkish-bath.” The first time I had found her in the guise of a twelve-year-old; this time it was more like a hundred and twelve. One can't make certain within a year or two about a lady in a Turkish-bath; it wouldn't be seemly even to _try_ to do so. Pulling in close to the left bank to look at some queer mud-plastered Indian wickiups, a rush of steam suddenly burst from the side of the nearest one, and out of that spreading white cloud, rising like Aphrodite from the sea-foam, emerged the head and shoulders of an ancient squaw. She was horribly old--literally at the sans eyes, sans hair, sans teeth, sans everything (including clothes) stage. Cackling and gesticulating in the rolling steam, she was the _belle ideal_ of the witch of one's fancy, muttering incantations above her boiling cauldron.

Fremont, in somewhat humorous vein, tells of visiting an Indian camp in this vicinity on the Columbia, and of how one of the squaws who had rushed forth in complete _deshabille_ on hearing the voices of strangers, ”properized” herself at the last moment by using her papoose--as far as it would go--as a s.h.i.+eld. But this old ”Aphrodite” I had flushed from cover was so old that, if her youngest child had been ready to hand, and that latter had had one of her own children within reach, and this third one had had a child available, I am certain that still another generation or two would have had to be descended before a papoose sufficiently young enough to make ”properization” proper would have been found. I trust I make that clear. And when you _have_ visualized it, isn't it a funny pyramid?

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