“You start Beaver Mouth,” said he, “all right, till you come on Surprise Rapids—all at once, right round bend. Surprise Rapids, him very bad. Much portage there. Very bad to get boat through even on line. Portage three mile there, maybe-so.
“Here was old man Brinkman, his rapid—not so bad, but bad enough for to scare old man Brinkman, so they name it on him, ‘Brinkman’s Terror.’
“Here is what Walt Steffen calls ‘Double Eddy’—bad place sometam in high water. Bime-by we come on Lake Timbasket, up there, maybe thirty mile, maybe-so.”
Leo made a tracing of the outline of the lake, then followed his scratch in the sand on around.
“Now begin Twenty-six Mile Rapid, all bad—Gordon Rapids here, Big Eddy here, Rock Cañon here. Now we come on Boat Encampment. This way Revelstruck. Death Rapids here; Priest Rapids down here; and then Revelstruck Cañon; him bad, very bad, plenty man drown there, too. That five miles from Revelstruck; we get out and walk there.
“Now here”—and he pointed on his sand map—“is Boat Encampment. Right around corner there is one of most bad places on whole river.”
“But you’ve been through, Uncle Dick. Tell us about it.”
“Yes, I came through once last year, and that’s enough for me,” said Uncle Dick. “That’s the Rock Cañon and the Grand Eddy. Leo has shown it all pretty plainly here. I don’t want to make that trip again, myself. But when we got to Lake Timbasket we didn’t any of us know how bad it was going to be—the old trapper who acted as our guide had never been through when the water was high. But when we got at the head of the Twenty-six Mile Rapids, below Lake Timbasket, it was like the bottom had dropped out of things, and we had to go through, for we couldn’t get back.
“Of course, we could line sometimes, and many of the chutes we did not attempt. The first day below Timbasket we made about ten miles, to a camp somewhere below the Cummins Creek chute. We could hear the water grinding—it sounded like breaking glass—all night long, right near the place where we slept, and it kept me awake all night. I suppose it is the gravel down at the bottom of the deep water. Then there were growlings and rumblings—the Indians say there are spirits in the river, and it sounded like it.
“There was one Swede that the trapper told us of, who started through the Cummins Rapids on a raft and was wrecked. He got ashore and walked back to the settlements. He had only money enough left to buy one sack of flour, then he started down the river again. From that day to this he has never been heard of, and no one knows when or where he was drowned.