“Look out you don’t run over any snags,” cautioned the Monkey. “There are some sharp stumps under the surface of the water and they’re ugly customers.”
“You don’t need to tell me about them,” replied 95 Anthony pertly, “I guess I know how to paddle as well as you do. You don’t always need to be handing me directions how to do things.” And he started off with a series of jerky dips, which set the canoe swaying from side to side so that Migwan had an effort to keep it straight in the line of the others.
“Steady there, you third bow paddler,” shouted Uncle Teddy, and Anthony subsided.
In the last canoe Katherine and Gladys were lustily shouting:
“Sing a song of paddling,
A canoe full of Slim,
Four and twenty haystacks
Ain’t as wide as him.
When the boat goes over
Won’t there be a splash?
All the fishes in the brook
Will turn into hash!”
The other canoes took up the song and shouted it until Slim, throwing handfuls of water in every direction, sprinkled the singers into silence.
The country through which they were passing was for the most part thick woods. Sometimes there was a narrow meadow on each side of the river with the trees in the distance, sometimes there was a swamp, but more often they were passing between high bluffs crowned with forests. At times it was 96 actually gloomy down there in the narrow passage, for the sun was behind the trees high above them; then again as the banks became low the hot sun shone unmercifully on their heads and made their eyes ache as it sparkled on the ripples.
Just as they had settled down to nice steady paddling and were making good progress upstream, Uncle Teddy called out that he was aground. The river bed seemed suddenly to rise up and strike the bottom of the canoes. A few feet back the water was swift and deep; here a sand bar stretched across their path and brought them to a stop.
“We’ll have to get out and carry the canoes around,” said Uncle Teddy, stepping over the side into the shallow water and pushing his canoe back where it would float.
Then they all had to step ashore and “paddle the canoes with their feet,” as the Bottomless Pitt called it. Slim began carefully lifting the “grub” supplies out of his canoe and piling them on the ground.