A “CLOSE-UP” OF IKE BUILDING HIS RAFT (left)
MY FIFTY POUND SALMON (right)
A fine motherly old girl called Mrs. Miller had put us up in her big, comfortable farm-house during our wait while Ike completed his ship-building operations. She must have known all of seven different ways of frying chicken, and maybe twice that number of putting up apple preserves. We had just about all of them for breakfast the morning we started. Jess, the ferry-man, treated us to vanilla extract cordials and told us the story of a raft that had struck and broken up just above his father’s ranch near Hawk Creek. Only guy they fished out was always nutty afterward. Cracked on the head with a length of cordwood while swimming. Good swimmer, too; but a guy had no chance in a swish-swashing bunch of broke-loose logs. Thus Jess, and thus—or in similar vein—about a dozen others who came down to see us off from the ferry landing. They all told stories of raft disasters, just as they would have enlarged on boat disasters if it had been a boat in which we were starting to run Hell Gate and Box Canyon.
I pulled across and landed Roos at the raft to make an introductory shot or two of Ike before picking up the thread of his “continuity” with my (pictorial) advent. A corner of the raft had been left unfinished for this purpose. Ike was discovered boring a log with a huge auger, after which he notched and laid a stringer, finishing the operation by pegging the latter down with a twisted hazel withe. The old river rat seemed to know instinctively just what was wanted of him, going through the action so snappily that Roos clapped him on the back and pronounced him “the cat’s ears” as an actor.
Ike showed real quality in the next scene; also the single-minded concentration that marks the true artist. Looking up from his boring, he sees a boat paddling toward him from up-river. The nearing craft was Imshallah, with the “farmer” at the oars, just as he had started (for the still unbuilt raft) when the “prospector” gave him the boat before disappearing up the bank to the “smelter” with his sack of “ore” over his shoulder. Thus “continuity” was served.
The “farmer” pulls smartly alongside, tosses Ike the painter and clambers aboard the raft. An animated colloquy ensues, in which the “farmer” asks about the river ahead, and Ike tells him, with dramatic gestures, that it will be death to tackle it in so frail a skiff. A raft is the only safe way to make the passage and—here Ike spreads out his hands with the manner of a butler announcing that “dinner is served!”—the raft is at the “farmer’s” disposal. That suits the “farmer” to a “T;” so the skiff is lifted aboard and they are ready to cast off.
Where Ike displayed the concentration of a true artist was in the skiff-lifting shot. Just as the green bow of Imshallah came over the side, a boy who had been stacking cordwood, in rushing forward to clear the fouled painter, stepped on an unsecured log and went through into the river. By this time, of course, I knew better than to spoil a shot by suspending or changing action in the middle of it, but that Ike should be thus esoterically sapient was rather too much to expect. Yet the sequel proved how much more consummate an artist of the two of us that untutored (even by Roos) old river rat was. When we had finished “Yo-heave-ho-ing” as the skiff settled into place, I (dropping my histrionics like a wet bathing suit) shouted to Ike to come and help me fish that kid out. “What kid?” he drawled in a sort of languid surprise. Then, after a kind of dazed once-over of the raft, fore-and-aft: “By cripes, the kid is gone!” Now has that ever been beaten for artistic concentration?
The lad, after bumping down along the bottom to the lower end of the raft, had come to the surface no whit the worse for his ducking. He was clambering up over the logs like a wet cat before either Ike or I, teetering across the crooked, wobbly cordwood, had stumbled half the distance to the “stern.” “It must be a right sma’t betta goin’ daun unda than up heah,” was Ike’s only comment.
The motor-boat which Ike had engaged to tow the raft was already on hand. It had been built by a Spokane mining magnate for use at his summer home on Lake Cœur d’Alene, and was one of the prettiest little craft of the kind I ever saw. With its lines streaming gracefully back from its sharp, beautifully-flared bow, it showed speed from every angle. Hardwood and brass were in bad shape, but the engines were resplendent; and the engines were the finest thing about it. They had been built to drive it twenty-five miles an hour when she was new, the chap running it said, and were probably good for all of twenty-two yet when he opened up. Except that its hull wasn’t rugged enough to stand the banging, it was an ideal river boat, though not necessarily for towing rafts. However, it was mighty handy even at that ignominious work.
I couldn’t quite make up my mind about the engineer of the motor boat—not until he settled down to work, that is. His eye was quite satisfactory, but his habit of hesitating before answering a question, and then usually saying “I dunno,” conveyed rather the impression of torpid mentality if not actual dulness. Nothing could have been further from the truth, as I realized instantly the moment he started swinging the raft into the current. He merely said “I dunno” because he really didn’t know, where an ordinary man would have felt impelled to make half an answer, or at least to say something about the weather or the stage of the river. Earl (I never learned his last name) was sparing with his tongue because he was unsparing with his brain. His mind was always ready to act—and to react. There were to arise several situations well calculated to test the mettle of him, and he was always “there.” I have never known so thoroughly useful and dependable a man for working a launch in swift water.
While Ike was completing his final “snugging down” operations, I chanced to observe a long steel-blue and slightly reddish-tinged body working up the bottom toward the stern of the raft. It looked like a salmon, except that it was larger than any member of that family I had ever seen. A blunt-pointed pike-pole is about the last thing one would use for a fish-spear, but, with nothing better ready to hand, I tried it. My first thrust was a bad miss, but, rather strangely, I thought—failed to deflect the loggily nosing monster more than a foot or two from his course. The next thrust went home, but where I was half expecting to have the pole torn from my hands by a wild rush, there was only a sluggish, unresentful sort of a wriggle. As there was no hook or barb to the pike, the best I could do was to worry my prize along the bottom to the bank, where a couple of Indians lifted it out for me. It was a salmon after all—a vicious looking “dog,” with a wicked mouthful of curving teeth—but of extraordinary size. It must have weighed between fifty and sixty pounds, for the pike-pole all but snapped when I tried to lift the monster with it. Indeed, its great bulk was undoubtedly responsible for the fact that it was already half-dead from battering on the rocks before I speared it. As the flesh was too soft even for the Indians, I gave it to a German farmer from a nearby clearing to feed to his hogs. Or rather, I traded it. The German had a dog which, for the sake of “human interest,” Roos very much wanted to borrow. (Why, seeing it was a dog, he should not have called it “canine interest,” I never quite understood; but it was the “heart touch” he wanted, at any rate). So Ike proposed to the “Dutchman” that we give him fifty pounds of dead “dog” for half that weight of live dog, the latter to be returned when we were through with him. That was Ike’s proposition. As soon as we were under way, however, he confided to me that he never was going to give that good collie back to a Dutchman. A people that had done what the “Dutchmen” did to Belgium had no right to have a collie anyhow. If they must have dogs, let them keep dachshunds—or pigs. And he forthwith began to alienate that particular collie’s affection by feeding him milk chocolate. Poor old Ike! Being only a fresh-water sailor, I fear he did not have a wife in every port, so that there was an empty place in his heart that craved affection.