CHAPTER X
RAFTING THROUGH HELL GATE
Ike had been working at high speed during our absence, but his imagination appeared rather to have run ahead of his powers of execution. The hundred-feet-long, thirty-feet-wide raft he had set himself to construct (so as to have something that would “stack up big in the movie”) took another two days to complete, and even then was not quite all that critical artist wanted to make it. After filling in the raft proper with solid logs of spruce and cedar, he began heaping cordwood upon it. He was trying to make something that would loom up above the water, he explained; “somethin’ tu make a showin’ in the pictur’.” He had three or four teams hauling, and as many men piling, for two days. We stopped him at fifty cords in order to get under way the second day after our return. There was some division of opinion among the ’long shore loafers as to whether or not this was the largest raft that had ever started down this part of the Columbia, but they were a unit in agreeing that it was the highest. Never was there a raft with so much “freeboard.” The trouble was that every foot of that “freeboard” was cordwood, and then some; for the huge stacks of four-foot firewood had weighted down the logs under them until those great lengths of spruce and cedar were completely submerged. When you walked about “on deck” you saw the river flowing right along through the loosely stacked cordwood beneath. Roos was exultant over the way that mighty mass of rough wood charging down a rock-walled canyon was going to photograph, and Ike was proud as a peacock over the Thing he had brought into being. But Roos was going to be cranking on the cliff when we went through Hell Gate, and Ike didn’t care a fig what happened to him anyhow. And I did care. There were a lot of things that could happen to a crazy contraption of that kind, if ever it hit anything solid; and I knew that the walls of Hell Gate and Box Canyon must be solid or they wouldn’t have stood as long as they had. And as for hitting ... that raft must be pretty nearly as long as Hell Gate was wide, and if ever it got to swinging.... It’s funny the things a man will think of the night before he is going to try out a fool stunt that he doesn’t know much about.
MAP OF THE UPPER COLUMBIA
