“Or inside my pneumatic mattress,” I suggested. “But perhaps it would taste from the rubber.” By midnight we had evolved a plan which could not fail, and which was almost without risk. “The stuff’s as good as in California,” I told myself before I went to sleep—“and enough to pay all the expenses of my trip in case I should care to boot-leg it, which I won’t.”
Captain Armstrong’s mention of the Steinhoff disaster was not the first I had heard of it. The chap with whom I had talked in Kamloops had shown me a photograph of a rude cross that he and his Indian companion had erected over Steinhoff’s grave, and in Revelstoke nearly every one who spoke of the Bend made some reference to the tragic affair. But here in Golden, which had been his home, the spectacularity of his passing seemed to have had an even more profound effect. As with everything else connected with the Big Bend, however, there was a very evident tendency to dramatize, to “play up,” the incident. I heard many different versions of the story, but there was one part, the tragic finale, in which they all were in practical agreement. When his canoe broke loose from its line, they said, and shot down toward the big whirlpool at the foot of the second cataract of Surprise Rapids, Steinhoff, realizing that there was no chance of the light craft surviving the maelstrom, coolly turned round, waved farewell to his companions on the bank, and, folding his arms, went down to his death. Canoe and man were sucked completely out of sight, never to be seen again until the fragments of the one and the battered body of the other were cast up, weeks later, many miles below.
It was an extremely effective story, especially as told by the local member in the B. C. Provincial Assembly, who had real histrionic talent. But somehow I couldn’t quite reconcile the Nirvanic resignation implied by the farewell wave and the folded arms with the never-say-die, cat-with-nine-lives spirit I had come to associate with your true swift-water boatman the world over. I was quite ready to grant that the big sockdolager of a whirlpool below the second pitch of Surprise Rapids was a real all-day and all-night sucker, but the old river hand who gave up to it like the Kentucky coons at the sight of Davy Crockett’s squirrel-gun wasn’t quite convincing. That, and the iterated statement that Steinhoff’s canoe-mate, who was thrown into the water at the same time, won his way to the bank by walking along the bottom beneath the surface, had a decidedly steadying effect on the erratic flights to which my fancy had been launched by Big Bend yarns generally. There had been something strangely familiar in them all, and finally it came to me—Chinese feng-shui generally, and particularly the legends of the sampan men of the portage villages along the Ichang gorges of the Yangtze. The things the giant dragon lurking in the whirlpools at the foot of the rapids would do to the luckless ones he got his back-curving teeth into were just a slightly different way of telling what the good folk of Golden claimed the Big Bend would do to the hapless wights who ventured down its darksome depths.
Now that I thought of it in this clarifying light, there had been “dragon stuff” bobbing up about almost every stretch of rough water I had boated. Mostly it was native superstition, but partly it was small town pride—pride in the things their “Dragon” had done, and would do. Human nature—yes, and river rapids, too—are very much the same the world over, whether on the Yangtze, Brahmaputra or upper Columbia.
That brought the Big Bend into its proper perspective. I realized that it was only water running down hill after all. Possibly it was faster than anything I had boated previously, and certainly—excepting the Yukon perhaps—colder. A great many men had been drowned in trying to run it; but so had men been drowned in duck-ponds. But many men had gone round without disaster, and that would I do, Imshallah. I always liked that pious Arab qualification when speaking of futurities. Later I applied the name—in fancy—to the skiff in which I made the voyage down the lower river.
Yes, undoubtedly the most of the yarns and the warnings were “dragon stuff” pure and simple, but Romance remained. A hundred miles of river with possible treasure lurking in every eddy, and one place where it had to be! I felt as I did the first time I read “Treasure Island,” only more so. For that I had only read, and now I was going to search for myself—yes, and I was going to find, too. It was a golden sunset in more ways than one the evening before I was to leave for the upper river. Barred and spangled and fluted with liquid, lucent gold was the sky above hills that were themselves golden with the tints of early autumn. And in the Northwest there was a flush of rose, old rose that deepened and glowed in lambent crimson where a notch between the Selkirks and Rockies marked the approximate location of historic Boat Encampment. “Great things have happened at Boat Encampment,” I told myself, “and its history is not all written.” Then: “Sixteen paces northwest by compass from the foundation of the west tower of the abandoned cable ferry....” Several times during dinner that evening I had to check myself from humming an ancient song. “What’s that about, ‘Yo, ho, ho and a bottle of rum’?” queried the mackinaw drummer from Winnipeg who sat next me. “I thought you were from the States. I don’t quite see the point.”
“It’s just as well you don’t,” I replied, and was content to let it go at that.