The whole occurrence was indescribably funny to the onlookers, and the polers were dancing up and down on their logs in high glee, shouting mock encouragement to the luckless men in the water—when a roar suddenly brought a check to their merriment. Glancing again down stream the boys saw the logs ahead of them begin to rise and plunge in the foaming water, and they realized that they were nearing the rapids.
Now was the time for putting forth all their strength. Unless they should be able to bring their logs to shore, they would be carried over into the boiling cauldron below. How puny was their strength matched against the grip of that mighty current. The banks seemed to be rushing by. Here and there jagged rocks rose above the surface as if to drag them down. Their small logs were dancing like corks. It was almost impossible to retain footing.
“It’s no use—were’s in for it,” shouted Rob above the roar of the water and crashing of the logs, as he threw the sharp point of his pole into Ed’s log and brought the two together. “Stick your pole into my log and hold on—we’ll go together.”
The boys never lost the picture of that awful moment at the brink of the rapids—the sharp rocks churning the river into milky foam; the logs leaping and, striking, going end over end; the indescribable roar and confusion—the coming of Death with the demand that he be looked squarely in the face. I am sure that both boys prayed—and then the blue sky, and the sun overhead, the rushing river, and the crashing logs—and themselves, ceased to exist.
How or by whom they were rescued from the river below, neither of the boys ever knew. But their apparently lifeless bodies had been carried to camp and there, after long exertion, they had been brought back to life and consciousness.
For that season, at least, Dead Man’s Hole had been robbed of its prey.
After the drive had come through the lowest dam and passed the rapids there came days so ideal that the rivermen could not believe they were the same fellows that so short a time ago would have almost welcomed death, if only they might have escaped their miseries.
Great, snow-white clouds lazily floated overhead in the deep blue; the sun filtered down upon the river in patches of golden warmth; the men, out of sight of the boss, stretched themselves luxuriously upon big logs, and floated with the current. Save for the occasional stoppage of a jam the days were, as Bally Tarbox put it, “one continual picnic with five hot meals a day throwed in.”
There were occasional days of shivering cold; days of lowering clouds and steady rain, when river and sky seemed to mingle, and beds of sodden earth brought no comfort at the close of sodden days. But each day’s run brought the drive further down into the deeper channel and higher banks of the lower river, where the labor was less severe, and a night of dry lodging and a meal of home cooking could occasionally be had from the home of some pioneer settler.
The days grew longer, the trees budded, and some varieties broke forth into tender leaf. From overhead shrill choruses of red-wing blackbirds greeted the slow-moving procession. Woodducks and mallards and teal, in all their courting finery, sailed along in the clear spaces between the floating logs, quick to make a distinction between the peaveys of the river men and the gun of the cook. Squirrels, red and grey and coal black, chattered and scolded as they scampered from bough to bough. Occasional glimpses were had of raccoons fishing for “crabs” on jutting sand bars, and the sliding plunge of an otter might be heard as one awakened in the night.