We ran both pitches of Kootenay Rapids easily and smartly. Her bows slapped down pretty hard when she tumbled off the tops of some of the bigger rollers, but into not the softest of the souse-holes would she put her high-held head. We took in plenty of spray, but nothing green—nothing that couldn’t be bailed without stopping. It was a lot better performance than one was entitled to expect of a lake boat running her maiden rapid.
“She’ll do!” chuckled the Captain with a satisfied grin, resting on his paddle as we slid easily out of the final run of swirls; “you ought to take her right through without a lot of trouble.” “Imshallah!” I interjected piously, anxious not to offend the River God with a display of overmuch confidence. I began to call her “Imshallah” in my mind from that time on, and “Imshallah”—“God willing”—she remained until I tied her up for her well-earned rest in a Portland boat-house. It was in the course of the next day or two that I made a propitiatory offering to the River God in the form of the remnants of the jodpurs he had tried so hard to snatch from me at Rock Slide Rapids. I’ve always had a sneaking feeling offerings of that kind are “good medicine;” that the old Greeks knew what they were doing when they squared things with the Gods in advance on venturing forth into unknown waters.
Big and Little Tin Cup Rapids, which are due to the obstruction caused by boulders washed down by the torrential Kootenay River, gave us little trouble. There is a channel of good depth right down the middle of both, and we splashed through this without getting into much besides flying foam. Just below we pulled up to the left bank and landed for a look at one of the Doukobour villages.
The Doukobours are a strange Russian religious sect, with beliefs and observances quite at variance with those of the Greek Church. Indeed, it was the persecutions of the Orthodox Russians that were responsible for driving considerable numbers of them to Canada. They are best known in America, not for their indefatigable industry and many other good traits, but for their highly original form of protesting when they have fancied that certain of their rights were being restricted by Canadian law. On repeated occasions of this kind whole colonies of them—men, women and children—have thrown aside their every rag of clothing and started off marching about the country. Perhaps it is not strange that more has been written about these strange pilgrimages than of the fact that the Doukobours have cleared and brought to a high state of productivity many square miles of land that, but for their unflagging energy, would still be worthless. In spite of their somewhat unconventional habits, these simple people have been an incalculably valuable economic asset to western Canada.
On the off chance that there might be an incipient “protest” brewing, Roos took his movie outfit ashore with him. He met with no luck. Indeed, we found the women of the astonishingly clean little village of plastered and whitewashed cabins extremely shy of even our hand cameras. The Captain thought that this was probably due to the fact that they had been a good deal pestered by kodak fiends while Godivaing round the country on some of their protest marches. “The people were very indignant about it,” he said; “but I never heard of any one pulling down their blinds.” Coventry was really very “Victorian” in its attitude toward Lady Godiva’s “protest.”
There was good swift water all the way from Castlegar to Trail, and we averaged close to nine miles an hour during the time we were on the river. At China Bar the river was a good deal spread out, running in channels between low gravel islands. Any one of these was runnable for a small boat, and we did not need to keep to the main channel that had once been maintained for steamers. Sixteen miles below Castlegar, and about half a mile below the mouth of Sullivan Creek, there was a long black reef of basaltic rock stretching a third of the way across the river. We shot past it without difficulty by keeping near the left bank. The sulphurous fumes of the big smelter blotching the southern sky with saffron and coppery red clouds indicated that we were nearing Trail. The stacks, with the town below and beyond, came into view just as we hit the head of a fast-running riffle. We ran the last half mile at a swift clip, pulling up into about the only place that looked like an eddy on the Trail side of the river. That this proved to be the slack water behind the crumbling city dump could not be helped. He who rides the running road cannot be too particular about his landing places.
We reached Trail before noon, and, so far as time was concerned, could just as well have run right on across the American line to Northport that afternoon. However, October twenty-first turned out to be a date of considerable importance to British Columbians, for it was the day of the election to determine whether that province should continue dry or, as the proponents of wetness euphemized it, return to “moderation.” As there was a special provision by which voters absent from their place of registration could cast their ballots wherever they chanced to be, Captain Armstrong was anxious to stop over and do his bit for “moderation.” Indeed, I was a bit worried at first for fear, by way of compensating in a measure for the injury we had done him in failing to come through with the treasure from the Big Bend, he would expect Roos and me to put in a few absentee ballots for “moderation.” There was a rumour about that a vote for “moderation” would be later redeemable—in case “moderation” carried, of course—in the voter’s weight of the old familiar juice. I never got further than a pencilled computation on the “temperance” bar of the Crown Point Hotel that two hundred and thirty-five pounds (I was down to that by now) would work out to something like one hundred seventeen and a half quarts. This on the rule that “A pint’s a pound, the world round.” That was as far as I got, I say, for there seemed rather too much of a chance of international complications sooner or later. But I am still wondering just what is the law covering the case of a man who sells his vote in a foreign country—and for his weight in whisky that he would probably never have delivered to him. I doubt very much if there is any precedent to go by.
Between votes—or rather before Captain Armstrong voted—we took the occasion to go over the smelter of the Consolidated Mining and Smelting Company. It is one of the most modern plants of its kind in the world, and treats ore from all over western Canada. We were greatly interested in the recently installed zinc-leaching plant for the handling of an especially refractory ore from the company’s own mine in the Kootenays. This ore had resisted for years every attempt to extract its zinc at a profit, and the perfection of the intricate process through which it is now put at Trail has made a mine, which would otherwise have remained practically valueless, worth untold millions. The two thousand and more employés of the smelter are the main factor in the prosperity of this live and by no means unattractive little town.
We had two very emphatic warnings before leaving Trail the next morning—one was on no account to attempt to take any drinkables across the line by the river, and the other was to keep a weather eye lifting in running the rapids at the Rock Islands, two miles below town. As we reached the latter before we did the International Boundary Line, we started ’wareing the rapids first. This was by no means as empty a warning as many I was to have later. The islands proved to be two enormous granite rocks, between which the river rushed with great velocity. The Captain headed the boat into the deep, swift channel to the right, avoiding by a couple of yards a walloping whale of a whirlpool that came spinning right past the bow. I didn’t see it, of course, until it passed astern; but it looked to me then as though its whirling centre was depressed a good three feet below the surface of the river, and with a black, bottomless funnel opening out of that. I was just about to register “nonchalance” by getting off my “all-day-sucker” joke, when I suddenly felt the thwart beneath me begin to push upwards like the floor of a jerkily-started elevator, only with a rotary action. Fanning empty air with both oars, I was saved from falling backwards by the forty-five degree up-tilt of the boat. Way beneath me—down below the surface of the river—Armstrong, pop-eyed, was leaning sharply forward to keep from being dumped out over the stern. Roos, with a death-grip on either gunwale, was trying to keep from falling into the Captain’s lap. Round we went like a prancing horse, and just as the boat had completed the hundred and eighty degrees that headed her momentarily up-river, something seemed to drop away beneath her bottom, and as she sunk into the hole there came a great snorting “ku-whouf!” and about a barrel of water came pouring its solid green flood over the stern and, incidentally, the Captain. A couple of seconds later the boat had completed her round and settled back on a comparatively even keel as hard-plied oars and paddle wrenched her out of the grip of the Thing that had held her in its clutch. I saw it plainly as it did its dervish dance of disappointment as we drew away. It looked to me not over half as large as that first one which the Captain had so cleverly avoided.
“That was about the way we got caught in the Little Dalles,” observed Armstrong when we were in quieter water again. “Only it was a worse whirlpool than that one that did it. This square stern gives the water more of a grip than it can get on a canoe. We’ll have to watch out for it.”