"By the magic of my coracle, one of you shall go back to your Chickasaw sorcerers. If the camps come toward the Great River it will drink them up. If they go back into the hills the waters will recede," was Anthony's ultimatum. The messenger inverted the coracle upon his head and waded away to launch it. The wily medicine-men who sent him out in rising water, with the surety that he could not swim back, would use his disappearance as a cause of war against the French. In the coracle he would reappear with the promise of falling waters and the positive command to retire if they wished to keep dry.
"That outwits our Chickasaw medicine-men for the present." He smiled at the other Chickasaw, who stood ankle-deep on what was supposed to be the shore. A wide river stretched before them. Behind them was the flooded plain. As far as they could see the ground was covered with rapidly deepening waves. Some place the bank had burst and Meact-Chassippi, old as it was, frolicked with abandon.
Once it had lived in a glacier and had come down over the plain, chiseling with knives of ice a gully through the limestone. Then in the middle of this immensely wide stone valley it had begun to make itself a soft bed of silt. From fertile hillsides and deep-loamed prairies its tributaries carried fine particles of earth in their water and dropped it as they went along the channel until there was a deposit of mud in the center of the valley much higher than the surrounding country. The old river has made itself a bed where it can overlook the valley. There it still turns and twists, with never-ending restlessness. All the banks of mud are soft. The swiftly flowing stream digs now here, now there, straightens one part of the channel, makes loops in another. It carries away whole acres from one place and, dropping them in another, changes the aspect of a neighborhood every season in the year.
As mud is piled upon the banks rank growth of grass, brush, and trees springs up to beautify and hold them. Thus they grow firmer year by year. In spring freshets, as the melting ice and heavy rains bring down high volumes of water, the southern channels are cut deeper and burrow under the banks, dig through them or rise up and tumble over them as over some big dam. Then it begins all over again to make a new bed for itself along the new channel thus formed. The old bed becomes a bayou. Nothing is certain about the Great River except the uncertainty of its next flood.
Anthony was quivering with laughter; it was so absurd to be paddling with unwebbed feet where only a duck belonged. The Indian showed no emotion of any kind. But when the jocose white man and the apathetic red one questioned what to do, both pairs of lips formed the one word, "Cajeu."
So they set to work splashing among the canes, breaking them off, laying them flat like a mat, and weaving them together with long leaves and grasses. One of these little rafts was set upon another, with the canes of the first running at right angles to canes of the other.
On this frail craft, half awash under their weight, they used their hands for oars and started for New Orleans. Their utter helplessness, like two insects on a floating leaf, did not in the least disturb them. They were doing in precarious simplicity what had often been done before. That they crossed safely was not a wonder. It was a custom. The first bridge over the Mississippi was that primitive boat, the cajeu.
In New Orleans the Chickasaw went to the authorities and told his mission. Anthony's report of a broken bank and the rising flood gave much concern. The whole town, in a drenching rain, examined the puny walls of earth wherewith they had tried, as the Chickasaw declared, "to imprison that mighty giant, Meact-Chassippi."
In selecting a site for the town it had been necessary to find some spot that would be easy to reach by the ships coming through the Delta and also through Lake Pontchartrain. The highest place was taken, but even that could not be very high in this low flood-plain.
When the energetic citizen Dubreuil took a shovel and threw up this levee, and then dug a ditch inside to carry away the drip, he did a sensible act. The water was standing two feet deep in the houses after every freshet. Yellow fever followed all inundations.