Smoother and smoother became the going, and then—rather unexpectedly, it seemed to me—the water began to slacken its dizzy speed. Blackmore appeared considerably puzzled over it, I thought. Roos, turning sentimental, had started singing a song that he had learned from a phonograph, and in which, therefore, appeared numerous hiati.
“Now I know da-da-da-da-da— Now I know the reason why— Da-da-da-da——da-da-da-daah— Now I know, yes, now I know! Da-da-da, my heart....”
Blackmore frowned more deeply as the treble wail floated back to him, and then broke into the next “da-da” with a sudden growl. “I say, young feller,” he roared, slapping sharply into the quieting water with his paddle blade; “if you know so geesly much, I’m wondering if you’d mind loosening up on one or two things that have got me buffaloed. First place, do I look like a man that had took a shot of hop?” “Not at all, sir,” quavered Roos, who seemed rather fearful of an impending call-down. “I don’t, huh?” went on the growl. “Then please tell me why what I knows is a ten-mile-an-hour current looks to me like slack water, and why I think I hear a roar coming round the next bend.” “But the water is slack,” protested Roos, “and I’ve heard that roar for five minutes myself. Just another rapid, isn’t it? The water always....”
“Rot!” roared the veteran. “There ain’t no fall with a rip-raring thunder like that ’tween Yellow Creek and Death Rapids. Rot, I tell you! I must ha’ been doped after all.”
Nevertheless, when that ground-shaking rumble assailed us in a raw, rough wave of savage sound as we pulled round the bend, Blackmore was not sufficiently confident of his “dope theory” to care to get any nearer to it without a preliminary reconnaissance. Landing a hundred yards above where a white “eyelash” of up-flipped water showed above a line of big rocks, we clambered down along the right bank on foot. Presently all that had occurred was written clear for one who knew the way of a slide with a river, and the way of a river with a slide, to read as on the page of a book.
“A new rapid, and a whale at that!” gasped Blackmore in astonishment; “the first one that’s ever formed on the Columbia in my time!”
The amazing thing that had happened was this: Sometime in the spring, a landslide of enormous size, doubtless started by an avalanche of snow far up in the Selkirks, had ripped the whole side of a mountain out and come down all the way across the river. As the pines were hurled backward for a couple of hundred feet above the river on the right or Rocky Mountain bank, it seemed reasonable to believe that the dam formed had averaged considerably more than that in height. As this would have backed up the river for at least ten or twelve miles, it is probable that the lake formed must have been rising for a number of days before it flowed over the top of the barrier and began to sluice it away. On an incalculably larger scale, it was just the sort of thing we had heard and seen happening on Trident Creek, opposite our Kinbasket Lake camp. Not the least remarkable thing in connection with the stupendous convulsion was the fact that a large creek was flowing directly down the great gash torn out by the slide and emptying right into the rapid which was left when the dam had been washed away. Blackmore was quite positive that there had been no creek at this point the last time he was there. It seemed reasonable to suppose, therefore, that the slide, in removing a considerable section of mountain wall, had opened a new line of drainage for some little valley in the high Selkirks.
It was the great, rough fragments of cliff and native rock left after the earth had been sluiced out of the dam that remained to form the unexpected rapid which now confronted us. They had not yet been worn smooth like the rest of the river boulders, and it was this fact, doubtless, that gave the cascade tumbling through and over them such a raw, raucous roar.
The solution of the mystery of the appearance of the rapid was only an incident compared with the problem of how to pass it. There was a comparatively straight channel, but there was no possibility that the boat could live in the huge rollers that billowed down the middle of it. Just to the right of the middle there was a smoother chute which looked better—provided the boat could be kept to it. Blackmore said that it looked like too much of a risk, and decided to try to line down the right bank—the one on which we had landed. As the river walls were too steep and broken to allow any of the outfit to be portaged, the boat would have to go through loaded.
A big uprooted pine tree, extending out fifty feet over the river and with its under limbs swept by the water, seemed likely to prove our worst difficulty, and I am inclined to believe it would have held us up in the end, even after we reached it. As things turned out, however, it troubled us not a whit, for the boat never got down that far. Right at the head of the rapid her bows jammed between two submerged boulders about ten feet from the bank, and there she stuck. As it was quickly evident that it was out of the question to lift her on through, it now became a problem of working her back up-stream out of the jaws that held her. But with the full force of the current driving her tighter between the rocks, she now refused to budge even in the direction from which she had come.