Down the Columbia

by Lewis R. Freeman

Although it snowed an inch or two during the night, the following morning fulfilled the promise of the sunset by breaking bright and cloudless. We were to line the boat down empty for a couple of hundred yards, and then load up again and line about an equal distance of slightly better water. This would take us to the brink of the abrupt fall, where both outfit and boat had to be portaged over the rocks for a short distance. That would leave us clear for the short, swift run to the head of the second fall.

Cutting himself a “sylvan frame” through the pines on a point a hundred yards below the camp, Roos set up to shoot the first piece of lining. It was a mean looking job, for the river was tumbling in a half-cataract all the way, turning and squirming like a wounded dragon. I could see Blackmore was a bit worried over it, and, as the sequel proved, with good reason. I never quite understood his explanation of the cause of what happened, but I believe he claimed it was due to his obeying (against his better judgment) Roos’ signal to keep the boat in fairly close to the bank so that she would not pass “out of the picture”—beyond the range of his lens, that is. At any rate, the boat had hardly started before she swung broadside to the current and, clapping like a limpet upon a big round boulder, hung there immovable. Heeled till her starboard side showed like the belly of a sharply sheering shark, her port gunwale dipped deep into the swirling current. In a wink she had taken all the water she would hold with the half-heel that was on her—enough, perhaps, to fill her half full when on an even keel.

It was a case for instant action—a case where the nearest available man had to follow his first hunch without thinking it over or counting the cost. A few seconds more on that rock, and one of two things must happen to the boat: either she would settle a few inches farther, fill completely and sink, or else the force of the current would tear her to pieces where she was. Blackmore was tugging at his line and shouting directions, but the roar stopped the words at his lips. Andy did not need to be told what was needed, however. For myself, I was not quite sure of what to do, and less so of how to do it. Also, I doubted my ability to keep my footing in the current. In short, I found myself thinking and weighing chances in one of those emergencies where a man to be worth his salt has no business to do either.

There was only one place where a man could get at the boat, and Andy beat me to it by a mile. (I would have seen to that even had he moved a lot slower than he did.) He was rather more than waist deep, but quite safe as long as the boat stuck where she was. Unfortunately, getting her off was the very thing he was there for. It was a good deal like a man’s having to saw off the branch on which he sat. But Andy never hesitated—probably because there was not time to think and reckon the consequences. Setting his heavy shoulders under her bilge, he gave a mighty upward heave. She shuddered through her long red length, and then, as the kick of the current got under her submerged gunwale, shot up and off as though discharged from a catapult. The job had been well done, too, for she came off with her stern down stream, which made it comparatively easy for Blackmore to check her way with his line, even half-filled as she was.

Whether he failed to recover as the boat was swept away, or whether he lost his balance in avoiding entanglement in the line, Andy was not quite sure. His first recollection after releasing the boat, he said, was of floundering in the water and of finding that his first kick or two did not strike bottom. The thing that is always possible when a man has lifted off a boat in a swift current had happened: he had lost his footing, and in just about the one worst place in the whole Columbia.

Blackmore, dragged down the bank after his floundering boat, was not in a position where he could throw the end of his line to any purpose. I waded in and reached out my pike-pole, but Andy’s back was to it the only time he came within grabbing distance. The only thing that saved him was luck—the fact that the current at the point he lost his footing did not swirl directly into the main chute, but did a little double-shuffle of its own along the side of an eddy before taking the big leap. Hooking into the solid green water of that eddy, Andy found himself a toehold, and presently clambered out. He had not swallowed any water, and did not seem much chilled or winded. A violent sickness of the stomach, where the cold had arrested digestive operations, was about the only ill effect. What seemed to annoy him most was the fact that all of his pockets were turned wrong-side-out, with all of their contents—save only his watch, which had been secured by a thong—missing. Blackmore nodded grimly to me as he came up after securing the boat. “Now perhaps you’ll believe what I told you about the old Columbia picking pockets,” he said dryly.

Roos came down complaining that he had been too far away to pick up any details of the show even with his “six-inch” lens and cursing his luck for not having been set up closer at hand. Considering what he had missed, I thought he showed unwonted delicacy in not asking Blackmore and Andy to stage it over again for him.

Bailing out the boat, we found one oar missing, but this we subsequently recovered from an eddy below. That left our net loss for the mishap only the contents of Andy’s pockets and the picture Roos did not get. Some might have figured in the extra ration of rum Andy drew to straighten out the kinks of his outraged stomach; but that seemed hardly the sporting way to look at it, especially with our prospects in the drink line being what they were.