Each night after this a stake was set out and the rise measured. Each day the men sniffed for the smell of salt water and listened for the sound of the surf. Sa-ca-ja-we-a was very much excited; she had come especially to see the big water.
During the night of November 4 the rise from the tide was two feet; the next night’s rise was four feet. Ducks and geese were many. But it rained almost every day, and every morning a fog hung low.
On the morning of November 7 the camp rose and breakfasted in a wet mist so dense that it hung on all sides like a gray curtain.
“At this rate,” quoth Pat, as the canoes headed out into the silence, “we’re liable to get half way to Chiny afore we know we’re on the Paycific at all.”
“I do believe I smell salt, though,” asserted George Shannon, sniffing. “Sa-ca-ja-we-a’s been insisting, too, that she could hear a ‘boom-boom.’”
“Listen!” bade Pat—and they paused on their oars. Peter thought that he also could hear a “boom-boom,” low and dull, but he wasn’t certain. They went on.
The captains’ boat was being piloted by a Wah-kia-cum Indian, now: a squat ugly man who wore a queer round jacket that, according to the men, had come from a ship. The river was growing wider, the fog was thinning and lifting—on a sudden the crew of the captains’ boat waved their hats, pointed before, cheered wildly. The cheer passed from boat to boat. For the fog ahead had swirled into fragments, and below it was an expanse of tumbling gray water on which the sun was trying to shine. Occasionally sounded a muffled “boom,” like the faint growl of summer thunder.
The Pacific Ocean! But they did not reach it this day; the fog closed in again, and the rain. They did not reach it the next day, although the waves were so high in this, the mouth of the Columbia, that half the party were seasick; and the water was salty. They did not reach it the next day, nor the next. Wind and rain kept beating them back. Sa-ca-ja-we-a was frightened.
“The spirits are angry. They do not want us here,” she whimpered, crouching over little Toussaint, under a grass mat raised on a pole.
“The only way we’ll reach the sea is to be washed into it,” groaned Pat. “Sure, don’t the very stones an’ logs come a-rollin’ down the hills? Now for the first time I wish I hadn’t started, an’ here I am at the ind!”