"Why, how should he have started him?" I asked.
"Same way like my fadder start me." And then, in his jerky Canadian speech, he explained how this was.
Ouillette went back to his own young manhood, to the years when he, too, stood by his father's side and watched him take the big boats down. What a picture he drew in his queer, rugged phrases! I could see the old pilot braced at the six-foot wheel, with three men in oilskins standing by to help him put her over, Fred one of the three. And it was "Hip!" "Bas!" "Hip!" "Bas!" ("Up!" "Down!" "Up!" "Down!") until the increasing roar of the cataract drowned all words, and then it was a jerk of shoulders or head, this way or that, while the men strained at the spokes. Never once was the wheel at rest after they entered the rapids, but spinning, spinning always, while the boat shot like a snake through black rocks and churning chasms.
FRED OUILLETTE, THE YOUNG PILOT.
They used to take the boats—as Ouillette takes them still—at Cornwall, sixty miles up the river, and, before coming to Lachine, they would shoot the swift Coteau Rapids, where many a life has gone, then the terrifying Cedar Rapids, which seem the most dangerous of all, and finally, the Split-rock Rapids, which some say are the most dangerous. And each year, as the season opened, Fred would ask his father to let him take the wheel some day when the river was high and the rocks well covered, and the boat lightly laden, wishing thus to try the easiest rapids under easiest conditions. But his father would look at him and say: "Do you know the river, my son? Are you sure you know the river?" And Fred would answer: "Father, I think I do." For how could he be sure until he had stood the test?
So it went on from year to year, and Ouillette was almost despairing of a chance to show himself worthy of his father's teaching, when, suddenly, the chance came in a way never to be forgotten. It was late in the summer, and the rapids, being low, were at their very worst, since the rocks were nearer the surface. Besides that, on this particular day they were carrying a heavy load, and the wind was southeast, blowing hard—the very wind to make trouble at the bad places. They had shot through all the rapids but the last, and were well below the Lachine bridge when the elder Ouillette asked the boy, "My son, do you know the river?"
And Fred answered as usual, without any thought of what was coming next, "Father, I think I do."
They were just at the danger-point now, and all the straining waters were sucking them down to the first plunge.