At any rate that was a passing thought and Rod put it by as youth so easily puts abstractions aside. His eyes rested critically on the flooding tide, the line of current that poured with accelerating speed through its narrow gate. Northward, up Cardero Channel, the level was beginning to rise. Southward, where the four-mile boomerang curve of the Euclataw Passage opened into the Gulf the tide was falling fast. Vancouver Island, spreading its sinuous length like a barrier against the Pacific, crowded the sea into the shape of an enormous hourglass. Queen Charlotte Sound formed one bulb, the Gulf of Georgia the other. An hourglass three hundred miles from north to south. The Euclataw Passage was the neck, and the rapids between Little Dent and Valdez was a constriction of this neck to a span six hundred feet across, through which at the full strength of the tidal flow the sea ran with hurrying feet and a loud, complaining voice, as a mountain river hastens roaring over its stony bed.
Rod turned to the girl.
"It's running pretty good," he remarked. "Let's go, Mary."
She smiled assent. They got off the mossy rock. The green-bodied dugout with its futuristic bow and stern rubbed against a shelf convenient for embarking. The girl sat amidships, Rod in the stern, squatting on their knees, paddles in hand. Forty feet out from shore the water dropped with a murmur over a sunken ledge. It stood like a low, green wall, curling over with a white-edged crest. In two hours that murmur would rise to a thunderous roar, the low green wall would be a man's height with hissing whirlpools below. Already the suction was strong. The indraught took the canoe backward the instant they let go the shore hold. They bent to the paddles, plying short, swift strokes, won clear to the slack water well above the rapids and pointed for the Valdez side.
Here the current, thirty fathoms deep, free of all obstruction, shot through the Euclataws in a clear, straight line, pitching down in a slant perceptible to the eye, a strip of smooth jade-green bordered to right and left by eddies, whirlpools, white-tipped waves where conflicting currents met and slashed up foam. The song of running water crooned gently between wooded banks,—that song which would presently fill the air with deep-toned antiphony to the whisper of the winds.
"Now," Rod commanded. "Stow your paddle till I shout."
It was like a path between precipices, that strip of smooth, swift-flowing water, after the first dizzy swoop at the overfall. A boat length on either hand spun whirlpools. A sudden sheer of their craft meant almost sure destruction. The guiding thrust of Rod's paddle held the dugout true. Their breath came quickly. Their eyes glowed. Their lips parted in a set smile, as if an alteration of feature might destroy their equilibrium.
"Right," young Norquay said curtly.
The girl's paddle dipped with a sure, vigorous thrust. In the stern Rod held his blade at an angle, like a rudder, and the dugout shaved a whirling hollow in the vortex of which a drift log stood upended, spinning like a top, going slowly down end-on in the suction.
"Steady."