Canoeing and duck shooting may be combined on the Deschutes
On a backwater of the Deschutes
The first stage of our outing was a stationary one, so far as the canoe was concerned, for a week was devoted to expeditioning here and there upon and around Crane Prairie. There was excellent fishing, and we saw just enough of the trails and the mountains to realize something of their possibilities.
Then one morning, before the sunlight had filtered over the hills and down through the pine boughs, we launched the Long Green, our canoe which had made the transcontinental trip from Oldtown, Maine, and started it upon a more venturesome, if less lengthy trip. Ours, by the way, was an equal suffrage outing. Its feminine better-half paddled as strenuously, cast a fly as optimistically, and "flipped" hot cakes as diligently as did the male member. Altogether, she demonstrated beyond a doubt that the enjoyment of an Oregon canoe trip need not depend upon one's sex or previous condition of servitude.
Comfortable canoeing is the most entirely satisfying method of travel extant. It is noiseless, it is easy, and there is enough uncertainty and risk about it to lend a special charm. Just as the best of fishing is the unknown possibility of the next cast—your biggest trout may rise to the fly!—so it is when you drift down stream in a canoe, for every turn discloses a fresh vista and behind every bend lurks some rare surprise. It may be an unsuspected rapid, requiring prompt action; perhaps a tree has fallen across the river, necessitating a flanking portage or a hazardous scurry beneath it; mayhap a particularly inviting pool will appear, when one must "put on the brakes" and "full speed astern" ever so hastily before a fatal shadow spoils the fishing chances. There are other possibilities without number, some of them realities for us, as when we came face to face with a deer, to our vast mutual astonishment, or, quietly drifting down upon a madam duck and her fluffy feathered family, gave them all violent hysterics. The little birds were unable to fly, and the mother, who would not desert them and lacked courage to hide along the bank, herded her family down stream for many miles with heartbreaking squawks and much splashing of wings.
A portage is either one of the interesting events of a canoe trip or its most despised hardship, according to the disposition of those concerned—not to mention the length, breadth, and thickness of the portage itself! Regarded in its most pessimistic light, a portage is a necessary evil, and, like a burned bannock, is swallowed with good grace by the initiated. In Eastern Canada, the land of patois French, a portage is a portage. In Maine, and elsewhere, it is apt to be a "carry." West of the Rockies, one neither "portages" nor "carries," but "packs" the canoe, for on the Pacific Slope everything borne by man or beast is "packed," just as it is "toted" south of the Mason and Dixon line. But portage, carry, or pack, the results are the same. Reduced to their lowest equation, it usually means a sore back and a prodigious appetite—there should be a superlative for prodigious, as all camping appetites are that; dare one say "prodigiouser"?
Our hundred miles of river included but two portages of consequence, both around falls. Fortunately in each instance the packing was across a comparatively level stretch, free from underbrush, as is almost all of this great belt of yellow pine that follows the eastern slopes of the Cascades from the Columbia to California. There were minor carries, once over a low bridge, where the bands of sheep cross to the mountain summer ranges of the forest reserves, and several times an easy haul, with canoe loaded, around the end of a fallen tree or crude forest ranger's bridge made of floating logs held together for the most part with baling wire.
Now and again the river was bordered by nature-made fields, knee-deep with flowers; there were purple lupin everywhere and vermilion Indian paint-brush, and a score of other gay blossoms. Often for the pleasure of tramping through this pretty outdoor garden, we would let the canoe follow its own sweet will at the end of a rope, while we walked down the bank, perhaps intimately investigating the households of beavers or casting a royal coachman along the shadowed water close beside the edge.