TRAPPER’S CABIN WHERE WE FOUND SHELTER FOR THE NIGHT (above)
WHERE WE LANDED ABOVE SURPRISE RAPIDS (centre)
WHERE WE TIED UP AT “EIGHT MILE” (below)
Roos stationed himself in the bow, with camera set up on its shortened tripod, waiting to surprise any scenery caught lurking along the way. Blackmore steered from the stern with his seven-feet-long birch paddle. Andy Kitson and I, pulling starboard and port oars respectively, rubbed shoulders on the broad ’midship’s thwart. Our outfit—a comparatively light load for so large a boat—was stowed pretty well aft. I saw Blackmore lean out to “con ship” as we got under way. “Good trim,” he pronounced finally, with an approving nod. “Just load enough to steady her, and yet leave plenty of freeboard for the sloppy water. This ought to be a dryer run than some the old girl’s had.” I chuckled to myself over that “dryer.” I hadn’t told Blackmore yet what was hidden down Canoe River way. I had promised Captain Armstrong not to do so until I had ascertained that we had a teetotal crew—or one comparatively so.
Andy Kitson was a big husky North-of-Irelander, who had spent twenty years trapping, packing, hunting, lumbering and boating in western Canada. Like the best of his kind, he was deliberate and sparing of speech most of the time, but with a fine reserve vocabulary for emergency use. He was careful and cautious, as all good river boatmen should be, but decidedly “all there” in a pinch. He pulled a good round-armed thumping stroke with his big oar, and took to the water (as has to be done so frequently on a bad stretch of “lining down”) like a beaver. Best of all, he had a temper which nothing from a leak in the tent dribbling down his neck to a half hour up to his waist in ice-cold water seemed equal to ruffling. I liked Andy the moment I set eyes on his shining red gill, and I liked him better and better every day I worked and camped with him.
As it was three-thirty when we finally pushed off, Blackmore announced that he would not try to make farther than “Eight-Mile” that afternoon. With comparatively good water all the way to the head of Surprise Rapids, we could have run right on through, he said; but that would force us to make camp after dark, and he disliked doing that unless he had to. In a current varying from three to eight miles an hour, we slid along down stream between banks golden-gay with the turning leaves of poplar, cottonwood and birch, the bright colours of which were strikingly accentuated by the sombre background of thick-growing spruce, hemlock, balsam and fir. Yellow, in a score of shades, was the prevailing colour, but here and there was a splash of glowing crimson from a patch of chin-chinick or Indian tobacco, or a mass of dull maroon where a wild rose clambered over the thicket. Closely confined between the Rockies to the right and the Selkirks to the west, the river held undeviatingly to its general northwesterly course, with only the patchiest of flats on either side. And this was the openest part of the Bend, Blackmore volunteered; from the head of Surprise Rapids to the foot of Priest Rapids the Columbia was so steeply walled that we would not find room for a clearing large enough to support a single cow. “It’s a dismal hole, and no mistake,” he said.
We took about an hour to run to “Eight Mile,” Andy and I pulling steadily all the way in the deep, smoothly-running current. We tied up in a quiet lagoon opening out to the west—evidently the mouth of a high-water channel. There was a magnificent stand of fir and spruce on a low bench running back from the river, not of great size on account of growing so thickly, but amazing lofty and straight. We camped in the shelter of the timber without pitching a tent, Andy and Blackmore sleeping in the open and Roos and I in a tumble-down trapper’s cabin. Or rather we spread our blankets in the infernal hole. As the place was both damp and rat-infested, we did not sleep. Roos spent the night chopping wood and feeding the rust-eaten—and therefore smoky—sheet-iron stove. I divided my time between growling at Roos for enticing me into keeping him company in the cabin against Blackmore’s advice, and throwing things at the prowling rodents. It did not make for increased cheerfulness when I hit him on the ear with a hob-nailed boot that I had intended for a pair of eyes gleaming vitreously on a line about six inches back of his gloomily bowed head. He argued—and with some reason I must admit—that I had no call to draw so fine a bead until I was surer of my aim. Largely as a point of repartee, I told him not to be too certain I was not sure of my aim. But I really had been trying to hit the rat....
I took the temperature of the air and the river water in the morning, finding the former to register thirty-eight degrees and the latter forty-one. There was a heavy mist resting on the river for a couple of hours after daybreak, but it was lifting by the time we were ready to push off. In running swift water good visibility is even more imperative than at sea, but as there was nothing immediately ahead to bother Blackmore did not wait for it to clear completely. The sun was shining brightly by nine-thirty, and Roos made several shots from the boat and one or two from the bank. One of the most remarkable sights unfolded to us was that of “Snag Town.” Just what was responsible for this queer maze of upended trees it would be hard to say. It seems probable, however, that a series of heavy spring floods undermined a considerable flat at the bend of the river, carrying away the earth and leaving the trees still partially rooted. The broadening of the channel must have slowed down the current a good deal, and it appears never to have been strong enough to scour out below the tenaciously clinging roots. The former lords of the forest are all dead, of course, but still they keep their places, inclining down-stream perhaps twenty-degrees from their former proud perpendicular, and firmly anchored. It takes careful steering to thread the maze even in a small boat, but the current is hardly fast enough to make a collision of serious moment.
The current quickened for a while beyond “Snag Town” and then began slowing again, the river broadening and deepening meanwhile. I thought I read the signs aright and asked Blackmore. “Yes,” he replied with a confirmatory nod; “it’s the river backing up for its big jump. Stop pulling a minute and you can probably hear the rapid growling even here.” Andy and I lay on our oars and listened. There it was surely enough, deep and distant but unmistakable—the old familiar drum-roll of a big river beating for the charge. It was tremendous music—heavy, air-quivering, earth-shaking; more the diapason of a great cataract than an ordinary rapid, it seemed to me. I was right. Surprise is anything but an ordinary rapid.