In running down to this point the raft had splashed through a slashing bit of riffle, which I afterwards learned was called Middle Rapid locally. There was a short stretch of good rough white water. Offhand, it looked to me rather sloppier than anything we had put the skiff into so far; but, as it appeared there would be no difficulty in steering a course in fairly smooth water to the left of the rollers, I was not greatly concerned over it. Presently Ike came pulling round the bend at a great rate, and the next thing I knew Imshallah was floundering right down the middle of the frosty-headed combers. Twice or thrice I saw the “V” of her bow shoot skyward, silhouetting like a black wedge against a fan of sun-shot spray. Then she began riding more evenly, and shortly was in smoother water. It was distinctly the kind of thing she did best, and she had come through with flying colours. Roos was grinning when he climbed aboard, but still showed a tinge of green about the gills. “Why didn’t you head her into that smooth stretch on the left?” I asked. “You had the steering paddle.” “I tried to hard enough,” he replied, still grinning, “but Ike wouldn’t have it. Said he kinda suspected she’d go through that white stuff all right, and wanted to see if his suspicions were correct.” And that was old Ike Emerson to a “T.”
We wallowed on through French Rapids and Hawk Creek Rapids in the next hour, and past the little village of Peach, nestling on a broad bench in the autumnal red and gold of its clustering orchards. Ike, pacing the “bridge” with me, said that they used to make prime peach brandy at Peach, and reckoned that p’raps.... “No,” I cut in decisively; “I have no desire to return to Kettle Falls.” I had jumped at the chance to draw Ike on that remarkable up-river journey of his after the disaster in Hell Gate, but he sheered off at once. I have grave doubts as to whether that strange phenomenon ever will be explained.
We were now threading a great canyon, the rocky walls of which reared higher and higher in fantastic pinnacles, spires and weird castellations the deeper we penetrated its glooming depths. There had been painters at work, too, and with colourings brighter and more varied than any I had believed to exist outside of the canyons of the Colorado and the Yellowstone. Saffron melting to fawn and dun was there, and vivid streaks that were almost scarlet where fractures were fresh, but had changed to maroon and terra cotta under the action of the weather. A fluted cliff-face, touched by the air-brush of the declining sun, flushed a pink so delicate that one seemed to be looking at it through a rosy mist. There were intenser blocks and masses of colours showing in vivid lumps on a buttressed cliff ahead, but they were quenched before we reached them in a flood of indigo and mauve shadows that drenched the chasm as the sun dropped out of sight. From the heights it must have been a brilliant sunset, flaming with intense reds and yellows as desert sunsets always are; but looking out through the purple mists of the great gorge there was only a flutter of bright pennons—crimson, gold, polished bronze and dusky olive green—streaming across an ever widening and narrowing notch of jagged rock, black and opaque like splintered ebony. For a quarter of an hour we seemed to be steering for those shimmering pennons as for a harbor beacon; then a sudden up-thrust of black wall cut them off like a sliding door. By the time we were headed west again the dark pall of fallen night had smothered all life out of the flame-drenched sky, leaving it a pure transparent black, pricked with the twinkle of kindling stars. Only by the absence of stars below could one trace the blank opacity of the blacker black of the towering cliffs.
No one had said anything to me about an all-day-and-all-night schedule for the raft, and, as a matter of fact, running in the night had not entered into the original itinerary at all. The reason we were bumping along in the dark now was that Ike, who had no more idea of time than an Oriental, had pushed off from Gerome an hour late, wasted another unnecessary hour in Lincoln yarning across the sugar barrel at the general store, and, as a consequence, had been overtaken by night ten miles above the point he wanted to make. As there was no fast water intervening, and as Earl had shown no signs of dissent, Ike had simply gone right on ahead regardless. When I asked him if it wasn’t a bit risky, he said he thought not very; adding comfortingly that he had floated down on rafts a lot of times before, and hadn’t “allus bumped.” If he could see to tighten up stringer pegs, he reckoned Earl ought to be able to see rocks, “’cose rocks was a sight bigger’n pegs.”
It was not long after Ike had nullified the effect of his reassuring philosophy by smearing the end of his thumb with a mallet that Earl’s night-owl eyes played him false to the extent of overlooking a rock. It may well have been a very small rock, and it was doubtless submerged a foot or more; so there was no use expecting a man to see the ripple above it when there wasn’t light enough to indicate the passage of his hand before his eyes. It was no fault of Earl’s at all, and even the optimistic Ike had claimed no more than that he hadn’t “allus bumped.” Nor was it a very serious matter at the worst. The raft merely hesitated a few seconds, swung part way round, slipped free again and, her head brought back at the pull of the launch, resumed her way. The jar of striking was not enough to throw a well-braced man off his feet. (The only reason Roos fell and pulped his ear was because he had failed to set himself at the right angle when the shock came.) The worst thing that happened was the loss of a dozen or so cords of wood which, being unsecurely stacked, toppled over when she struck. Luckily, the boat was parked on the opposite side, as was also Roos. It would have been hard to pick up either before morning, and Roos would hardly have lasted. The wood was a total loss to Ike, of course; but he was less concerned about that than he was over the fact that it reduced her “freeboard” on that quarter by three feet, so that she wouldn’t make so much of a “showin’ in the picters.” He did raise a howl the next morning, though. That was when he found that his old denim jacket had gone over with the cordwood. It wasn’t the “wamus” itself he minded so much, he said, but the fact that in one of that garment’s pockets had been stored the milk chocolate which he was using to alienate the affections of the Dutchman’s collie. “It’s all in gettin’ a jump on a pup’s feelin’s at the fust offsta’t,” he philosophied bitterly; “an’ naow I’ll be losin’ mah jump.” Rather keen on the psychology of alienation, that observation of old Ike, it struck me.
It was along toward nine o’clock, and shortly after the abrupt walls of the canyon began to fall away somewhat, that a light appeared on the left bank. Making a wide circle just above what had now become a glowing window-square, Earl brought the raft’s head up-stream and swung her in against the bank. The place was marked Creston on the maps, but appeared to be spoken of locally as Halberson’s Ferry. We spent the night with the hospitable Halbersons, who ran the ferry across to the Colville Reservation side and operated a small sawmill when logs were available. Earl slept at his ranch, a few miles away on the mesa.
The night was intensely cold, and I was not surprised to find icicles over a foot long on the flume behind the house in the morning. The frozen ground returned a metallic clank to the tread of my hob-nailed boots as I stepped outside the door. Then I gave a gasp of amazement, for what did I see but Ike running—with a light, springing step—right along the surface of the river? At my exclamation one of the Halbersons left off toweling and came over to join me. “What’s wrong?” he asked, swinging his arms to keep warm. “Wrong!” I ejaculated; “look at that! I know this isn’t Galilee; but you don’t mean to tell me the Columbia has frozen over during the night!” “Hardly that,” was the laughing answer. “Ike’s not running on either the ice or the water; he’s just riding a water-soaked log to save walking. It’s an old trick of his. Not many can do it like he can.” And that was all there was to it. Ike had spotted a drift-log stranded a short distance up-river, and was simply bringing it down the easiest way so as to lash it to the raft and take it to market. But I should have hated to have seen a thing like that “water-walking” effect in those long ago days on the Canadian Big Bend, when we used to prime our breakfast coffee with a couple of fingers of “thirty per over-proof.”
We cast off at nine-thirty, after Ike had laid in some more “component parts” of his mighty sweep at the little sawmill. Although less deeply encanyoned than through the stretch down which we passed the previous night, there were still enormously high cliffs on both sides of the river. Trees and brush were scarcer and scrubbier than above, and the general aspect was becoming more and more like the semi-arid parts of the Colorado Desert. The colouring was somewhat less vivid than the riot in the canyon above, but was almost equally varied. The colour-effect was diversified along this part of the river by the appearance of great patches of rock-growing lichen, shading through half a dozen reds and browns to the most delicate amethyst and sage-green. At places it was impossible to tell from the river where the mineral pigments left off and the vegetable coating began.
The river was broad and widening, with a comparatively slow current and only occasional stretches of white water. I took the occasion to launch the skiff and paddle about for an hour, trying to get some line on the speed at which the raft was towing. In smooth water I found I had the legs of her about three-to-one, and in rapids of about two-to-one. From this I figured that she did not derive more than from a mile and a half to two miles an hour of her speed from the launch. I only raced her through one bit of rapid, and she was such a poor sport about the course that I refused to repeat the stunt. Just as I began to spurt past her down through the jumping white caps she did a sort of a side-slip and crowded me out of the channel and into a rather messy souse-hole. The outraged Imshallah gulped a big mouthful, but floundered through right-side up, as she always seemed able to do in that sort of stuff. But I pulled into an eddy and let the hulking old wood-pile have the right-of-way, declining Earl’s tooted challenge for a brush in the riffle immediately following. A monster that could eat whirlpools alive wasn’t anything for a skiff to monkey with the business end of. I boarded her respectfully by the stern and pulled Imshallah up after me.
The great bald dome of White Rock, towering a thousand feet above the left bank of the river, signalled our approach to Hell Gate. Towing across a broad reach of quiet water, Earl laid the raft against the left bank about half a mile above where a pair of black rock jaws, froth-flecked and savage, seemed closing together in an attempt to bite the river in two. That was as close as it was safe to stop the raft, Earl explained as we made fast the mooring lines, for the current began to accelerate rapidly almost immediately below. There were some shacks and an ancient apple orchard on the bench above, and Ike came over to whisper that they used to make some mighty kicky cider there once upon a time, and perhaps.... I did not need the prompting of Earl’s admonitory head-shake. “Get a jump on you with the sweep,” I said, “while Earl and I go down and help Roos set up. There’ll be time enough to talk about cider below Hell Gate.” I saw a somewhat (to judge from a distance) Bacchantic ciderette picking her way down the bench bank to the raft as the launch sped off down stream, but if Ike realized dividends from the visit there was never anything to indicate it.