“We passed one big boulder where the trapper said the name of another Swede was cut on the rock by his friends who were wrecked with him near by. I believe they were some miners trying to get out of this country in boats. That man’s body was never found, for the Columbia never gives up her dead. We saw Leo’s broken boat, as I told you; and on the shores of Lake Timbasket we found the wrecks of two other boats, washed down. You see, this wild country has no telegraph or newspaper in it. When a man starts down the Big Bend of the Columbia he leaves all sort of communication behind him. Many an unknown man had started down this stream and never been seen again and never missed—this river can hold its own mysteries.”
“Well, tell us about this rapid just above here, Uncle Dick,” went on Jesse. “Wasn’t it pretty bad?”
“The worst I ever saw, at least. When we stopped above the head of that cañon the trapper told me where the trail was down here to the Encampment, but of course I concluded to run on through if the others did. Before we got that far I was pretty well impressed with the Columbia, myself. When we landed at the head of Upper Death Cañon I don’t believe any of us were very sure that our boat would go through. No one was talking very much, I’ll promise you that.
“The worst part of that long stretch of bad water of the Rock Cañon can’t be more than four or five miles in all, and there isn’t a foot of good water in the whole distance, as I remember it. Of course, the worst is the Giant Eddy—it lies just over there, beyond the edge of the hill from us. In there the water runs three different ways all at once. There is no boat on earth can go up this river through the Giant Eddy, and lucky enough is the one which comes down through it.
“You see, once you get in there, you can’t get either up again or out on either side—the rock walls come square down to the river, which boils down through a narrow, crooked gorge. It is like a big letter Z, with all the flood of the Columbia pouring through the bent legs; no one knows how deep, but not half the width which we see here.
“That’s the worst water I ever saw myself—it runs so strong that there is a big ridge thrown up in the middle of the river, many feet higher than the water on either side. There is a crest of white water all down the sides of the top of that high ridge. The water looks as though it were hard, so that you couldn’t drive a nail through it, it’s flung through there at such tremendous pressure.
“You don’t have much time to look as you go through, and there is no place where you can see the Giant Eddy except from the Giant Eddy itself. All I can remember is that we were clawing to keep on top of that high rib of the water mid-stream. I can see it now, that place—with green water running up-stream on each side, and the ridge of white water in the middle, and the long bent slope, like a show-case glass, running on each side from us to the edges of the up-stream currents. It was a very wonderful and terrible sight, and seeing it once was quite enough for me.
“About half-way down that long, bad chute I saw a hole open up in the crown of that ridge and could look down into it, it seemed to me, fifteen feet—some freak in the current made it—no one can tell what. It seemed to chase us on down, and all our men paddled like mad. If our stern had got into that whirlpool a foot, no power on earth could have saved us. As luck would have it, we kept just outside the rim of the suckhole, and finally escaped it.
“Then we came to the place which lies first around the bend above us—a great deep saucer in the river, below a rock ledge of white water—it is like a shallow bicycle track, higher at the edges, a basin dished out in the river itself. I don’t know how we got into it, and have only a passing memory of the water running three ways, and the high ridge in the middle, and the suckhole that followed us, and then we slipped down into that basin at the last leg of the Z, and through it and across it, and so right around that bend yonder, and here to the Boat Encampment. You may believe me, we were glad enough.