By ten o’clock the pile was well alight underneath, but it was not until nearly midnight, when the mist had turned to snow and a strong wind had sprung up, that it was blazing full strength. I hardly know what would have been the direction of the wind in the upper air, but, cupped in the embrasure of the bend, it was sucking round and round, like the big whirlpool, only more fitfully and with an upward rather than a downward pull. Now it would drag the leaping flame-column a hundred feet in the air, twisting it into lambent coils and fining the tip down to a sharp point, like that of the Avenging Angel’s Sword of Fire in the old Biblical prints, now sweep it out in a shivering sheet above the whirlpool, now swing it evenly round and round as though the flame, arrow-pointed and attenuated, were the radium-coated hand of a Gargantuan clock being swiftly revolved in the dark.
But the wonder of wonders was less the fire itself than the marvellous transformations wrought by the light it threw. And the staggering contrasts! The illuminated snow clouds drifting along the frosted-pink curtain of the tree-clad mountain walls made a roseate fairyland; even the foam covered sweep of the cascade, its roar drowned in the sharp crackle of the flames, was softened and smoothened until it seemed to billow like the sunset-flushed canvas of a ship becalmed: but the whirlpool, its sinister character only accentuated by the conflict of cross-shadows and reflections, was a veritable Pit of Damnation, choking and coughing as it swirled and rolled in streaky coils of ox-blood, in fire-stabbed welters of fluid coal-tar.
Wrapped in my hooded duffle coat, I paced the snow-covered moss and exulted in the awesome spectacle until long after midnight. I have never envied Nero very poignantly since. Given a fiddle and a few Christians, I would have had all that was his on the greatest night of his life—and then some. Father Tiber never had a whirlpool like mine, even on the day Horatius swam it “heavy with his armour and spent with changing blows.”
The next morning, though too heavily overcast for pictures, was still clear enough to travel. The head riffles of the third fall of Surprise Rapids began a little below our camp, so that we started lining almost immediately. Three or four times we pulled across the river, running short stretches and lining now down one side and now the other. There was not so great a rate of drop as at the first and second falls, but the whole stream was choked with barely submerged rocks and lining was difficult on account of the frequent cliffs.
It was about half way down that I all but messed things up by failing to get into action quickly enough at a crossing. The fault, in a way, was Blackmore’s, because of his failure to tell me in advance what was expected, and then—when the order had to be passed instantly—for standing rather too much on ceremony in the manner of passing it. We were about to pull to the opposite side to line down past a riffle which Blackmore reckoned too rough to risk running. There was about a ten-mile current, and it would have required the smartest kind of a get-away and the hardest kind of pulling to make the other bank without being carried down onto the riffle. The boat was headed up-stream, and, as Blackmore had not told me he intended to cross, I took it for granted he was going to run. So, when Roos shoved off and jumped in, I rested on my oar in order that Andy could bring the boat sharply round and head it down stream. Blackmore’s excited yell was the first intimation I had that anything was wrong. “Pull like hell! You!... Mister Freeman!”
That “Mister,” and his momentary pause before uttering it, defeated the purpose of the order. I pulled all right, and so hard that my oar-blade picked up a very sizable hunk of river and flung it in Blackmore’s face. That upset my balance, and I could not recover quickly enough to keep the boat’s head to the current. With characteristic presence of mind, Blackmore changed tactics instantly. “Got to chance it now!” he shouted, and threw such a pull onto his steering paddle that the handle bent to more than half a right angle where he laid it over the gunwale. There was one jutting rock at the head of the riffle that had to be missed; the rest was all a matter of whether or not the next couple of hundred yards of submerged boulders were deeply enough covered to let us pass over them. There was no way of avoiding them, no chance to lay a course between them.
Blackmore was a bit wilder about the eyes than I had seen him before; but he had stopped swearing and his mouth was set in a hard, determined line. Andy, with chesty grunts, was fairly flailing the water with swift, short-arm strokes. I did not need to be told to refrain from pulling in order that the others could swing her head as far toward the west bank as possible before the rock was reached. Instead, I held ready for the one quick backing stroke that would be called for in the event a collision seemed imminent at the last moment. It was the wave thrown off by the rock itself that helped us most when the showdown came. Shooting by the jagged barrier so close that Andy could have fended with his hand, the boat plunged over a short, sharp pitch and hit the white water with a bang.
That was by long odds the roughest stuff we had been into so far. The waves were curling up well above our heads, and every one we hit left a foot or two of its top with us—solid green water, most of it, that began accumulating rather alarmingly in the bottom of the boat. There was no regularity in the way they ran, either. One would come mushrooming fairly over the bows, another would flop aboard over the beam, and every now and then a wild side-winder, missing its spring at the forward part of the boat, would dash a shower of spray over the quarter. From the bank she must have been pretty well out of sight most of the time, for I often saw spray thrown ten or fifteen feet to either side and twice as far astern. All hands were drenched from the moment we struck the first comber, of course, which was doubtless why a wail from Roos that the water was going down his neck seemed to strike Blackmore as a bit superfluous. “Inside or outside your neck?” he roared back, adding that if it was the former the flow could be checked by the simple and natural expedient of keeping the mouth shut. Very properly, our “skipper” had the feeling that, in a really tight place, all the talking necessary for navigation should be done from the “bridge,” and that “extraneous” comment should be held over to smooth water.
Before we had run a hundred yards the anxious look on Blackmore’s face had given way to one of relief and exultation. “There’s more water over the rocks than I reckoned,” he shouted. “Going to run right through.” And run we did, all of the last mile or more of Surprise Rapids and right on through the still swift but comparatively quiet water below. Here we drifted with the current for a ways, while all hands turned to and bailed. I took this, the first occasion that had offered, to assure Blackmore that he needn’t go to the length of calling me “Mister” in the future when he had urgent orders to give, and incidentally apologized for getting off on the wrong foot at the head of the first rapid. “Since that worked out to save us half a mile of darn dirty lining and two or three hours of time,” he replied with a grin, “I guess we won’t worry about it this crack, Mister—I mean, Freeman. Mebbe I better get used to saying it that way ’gainst when I’ll need to spit it out quick.”
It was a pleasant run from the foot of Surprise Rapids down to Kinbasket Lake, or at least it was pleasant until the rain set in again. There is a fall of sixty-four feet in the sixteen miles—most of it in the first ten. It was a fine swift current, with a number of riffles but no bad water at any point. It was good to be free for a while from the tension which is never absent when working in really rough water, and I have no doubt that Blackmore felt better about it than any of the rest of us. Surprise was his especial bete noir, and he assured me that he had never come safely through it without swearing never to tackle it again. Roos, drying out in the bow like a tabby licking her wet coat smooth after being rained on, sang “Green River” all the way, and I tried to train Andy to pull in time to the rhythm and join in the chorus. As the chorus had much about drink in it, it seemed only fitting—considering what was waiting for us at Canoe River—that we should sing it. And we did. “Floating Down the Old Green River” became the “official song” of that particular part of the voyage. Later ... but why anticipate?