There is a stock story they tell of the Arrow Lakes, and which appears intended to convey to the simple tourist a graphic idea of the precipitousness of their rocky walls. The skipper of my steamer told it while we were ploughing down the upper lake. Seeing a man struggling in the water near the bank one day, he ran some distance off his course to throw the chap a line. Disdaining all aid, the fellow kept right on swimming toward the shore. “Don’t worry about me,” he shouted back; “this is only the third time I’ve fallen off my ranch to-day.”
I told the Captain that the story sounded all right to me except in one particular—that even my glass failed to reveal any ranches for a man to fall off of. “Oh, that’s all right,” was the unperturbed reply; “there was one when that yarn was started, but I guess it fell into the lake too. But mebbe I had ought to keep it for the lower lake, though,” he added; “there is still some un-slid ranches down there.”
Nelson is a fine little city that hangs to a rocky mountainside right at the point where Kootenay Lake spills over and discharges its surplus water into a wild, white torrent that seems to be trying to atone at the last for its long delay in making up its mind to join the Columbia. Nelson was made by the rich silver-lead mines of the Kootenay district, but it was so well made that, even now with the first fine frenzy of the mining excitement over, it is still able to carry on strongly as a commercial distributing and fruit shipping centre. It is peopled by the same fine, out-door loving folk that one finds through all of western Canada, and is especially noted for its aquatic sports. I am only sorry that I was not able to see more of both Nelson and its people.
As soon as I saw Captain Armstrong I made a clean breast to him about my failure to unearth the treasure at the Bend. He was a good sport and bore up better than one would expect a man to under the circumstances. “I wish that matter of K—— and his D. T.’s had come up before you left,” was his only comment.
“Why?” I asked. “I can’t see what difference that would have made. We didn’t waste a lot of time digging.”
“That’s just it,” said the Captain with a wry grin. “Wouldn’t you have gone right on digging if you had known that the spell of jim-jams that finished K—— came from some stuff he got from a section-hand at Beavermouth? Now I suppose I’ll have to watch my chance and run down and salvage that keg of old Scotch myself.” It shows the stuff that Armstrong was made of when I say that, even after the way I had betrayed the trust he had reposed in me, he was still game to go on with the Columbia trip. That’s the sort of man he was.
Boats of anywhere near the design we would need for the river were scarce, the Captain reported, but there was one which he thought might do. This proved to be a sixteen-foot, clinker-built skiff that had been constructed especially to carry an out-board motor. She had ample beam, a fair freeboard and a considerable sheer. The principal thing against her was the square stern, and that was of less moment running down river than if we had been working up. It did seem just a bit like asking for trouble, tackling the Columbia in a boat built entirely for lake use; but Captain Armstrong’s approval of her was quite good enough for me. Save for her amiable weakness of yielding somewhat overreadily to the seductive embraces of whirlpools—a trait common to all square-sterned craft of inconsiderable length—she proved more than equal to the task set for her. We paid fifty-five dollars for her—about half what she had cost—and there was a charge of ten dollars for expressing her to West Robson, on the Columbia.
We left Nelson by train for Castlegar, on the Columbia just below West Robson, the afternoon of October nineteenth. The track runs in sight of the Kootenay practically all of the way. There is a drop of three hundred and fifty feet in the twenty-eight miles of river between the outlet of the lake and the Columbia, with no considerable stretch that it would be safe to run with a boat. A large part of the drop occurs in two fine cataracts called Bonnington Falls, where there is an important hydro-electric plant, serving Nelson and Trail with power; but most of the rest of the way the river is one continuous series of foam-white cascades with short quiet stretches between. The last two or three miles to the river the railway runs through the remarkable colony of Russian Doukobours, with a station at Brilliant, where their big co-operative jam factory and administrative offices are located. We had a more intimate glimpse of this interesting colony from the river the following day.
We found the express car with the boat on the siding at West Robson, and the three of us—Armstrong, Roos and myself—had little difficulty in sliding her down the quay and launching her in the Columbia. Pulling a mile down the quiet current, we tied her up for the night at the Castlegar Ferry. Then we cut across the bend through the woods for a look at Kootenay Rapids, the first stretch of fast water we were to encounter. After the rough-and-rowdy rapids of the Big Bend, this quarter-mile of white riffle looked like comparatively easy running. It was a very different sort of a craft we had now, however, and Armstrong took the occasion to give the channel a careful study. There were a lot of big black rocks cropping up all the way across, but he thought that, by keeping well in toward the right bank, we could make it without much trouble.
On the way back to the hotel at Castlegar, the Captain was hailed from the doorway of a cabin set in the midst of a fresh bit of clearing. It turned out to be a boatman who had accompanied him and Mr. Forde, of the Canadian Department of Public Works, on a part of their voyage down the Columbia in 1915. They reminisced for half an hour in the gathering twilight, talking mostly of the occasion when a whirlpool had stood their Peterboro on end in the Little Dalles. I found this just a bit disturbing, for Armstrong had already confided to me that he intended running the Little Dalles.