Down the Yellowstone

by Lewis R. Freeman

Pulling in a dead calm myself, I saw the river and air at the bend turn white almost between one stroke and the next. A tongue of wind seemed to have shot out from behind a point to the right and begun scooping up hunks of the river and throwing them across the flats. This blast was at right angles to my course down stream, but I came parallel to it as I swung and headed for the sand-bar on my left. The air was coiling and twisting upon itself as I landed, but that out-licking tongue of the storm was passing me by and circling the bluffs beyond the flat.

Without unloading the skiff, I dragged her as far in on the bar as I could, threw my stuff together in the forward section and snugged it down under a tarpaulin. Its weight might keep the boat from blowing away, I figured. Then I drove oars in the sand with an ax and ran lines to them from bow and stern—land-moorings, so to speak. The fore-front of the wind hard and solid as the side of a moving barn, caught me from behind as I made fast the bowline. I went forward to my knees, sprawled flat, wiggled round head-on and then, leaning far forward, slowly struggled to my feet. Hanging balanced at angle of forty-five degrees, I started slowly crabbing back to the boat. It wasn't so bad after all, I told myself. The skiff was not giving an inch to the blast, while leaning up against the wind that way was rather good fun. I recalled a stunt something like it that Little Tich used to pull in the London Halls—an eccentric dance with enormously elongated shoes. I decided that perhaps I was even enjoying the diversion a bit. In half-pretended nonchalance I turned my head and cast a side-glance over toward the farmhouses back of the bluffs. That was the last move of even assumed nonchalance I was guilty of for some time.

That side-glance photographed three things on my memory: a grove of willows flattened almost against the earth by the wind, two women, with wondrously billowing skirts, crawling along the side of a house toward a door, and a flimsy unpainted outbuilding resolving into its component parts and pelting across a corral full of horses. Doubtless there was more animated action to be observed had I been spared another hundredth of a second or so to get a line on it. The three things mentioned were as far as I got when the hail opened up.

With the viciousness of spattering shrapnel that first salvo of frozen pellets raked me across the right cheek. The tingle of pain was astonishingly sharp, like that from the blow of a back-snapped thorn branch on an overgrown trail, and I was a bit surprised when an explorative finger revealed no trace of blood. Hunching my neck brought my face under cover, but the batteries of the storm had got my range now and there was a decided sting to the impact of those baby icebergs, even through my slicker and shirt. People are very prone to exaggerate about the size of hail-stones, so I shall endeavour to make a special effort to be conservative about these. They felt a lot bigger when they hit, of course, but as I examined heaps of them afterward the average size seemed to be about that of shrapnel or large marbles. There may have been hail-stones the size of hens' eggs, but no one who was ever exposed to them in the open can have lived to tell the tale. Men looking out through the bars of jail may have seen them and survived to make affidavits; most other authentic reports of egg-sized hail-stones will doubtless be pretty well confined to the minutes of coroners' juries. Indeed, I am inclined to think that a considerable crimp would have been put in my down-river schedule by the comparatively diminutive pellets I faced on this occasion but for the shelter I presently found for my head under the side of the skiff.

As the hail-stones, flying before the wind, were hurtling along almost horizontally, huddling under the lee bow of the skiff protected just about all of me but my feet. Even that was not good enough, however, for the impact of the blows on the tops of my toes left an extraordinary ache behind it—something that I could not contemplate standing for an indefinite number of murderous minutes. Clawing over the side for a canvas or poncho to buffer the worst of the barrage, my hand came in contact with the roll of my sleeping pocket. That gave me an idea. The wind, getting inside the hollow bag, nearly tore it from my hands as I started to unroll it, but once I got it smothered under me the rest was easy. With my legs inside of the bag and the uninflated rubber mattress between my feet and the hail-stones, about all I had to bother about seemed to be a wind strong enough to carry the boat away and me with it.

From the way things developed for the next couple of minutes this appeared to be just about what was going to happen, however. I cannot recall ever having felt more panicky in my life than when I saw that that fore-running tongue of wind, which had originally come charging round the bend from east, had now circled southward along the bluffs below the farmhouses and was heading straight back into the east again. That meant that I was now occupying the almost mathematical centre of the vortex of a real "twister"—that I was about to be rocked on the bosom of a fairly husky young cyclone. Something pronounced in the way of an uplift movement was inevitably due the moment that back-curving tongue of air lapped round to the place it started from.

A whimsical comparison flashed across my mind in watching through the crook of my fending arm the witch-dance of that circling blast. In some town up-river I had seen a movie of the Custer Massacre, at the climacteric moment of which the howling hordes of Gall and Rain-in-the-Face and Crazy-Horse whirled in a wide circle round their doomed victims, the mental agonies of which latter were shown in successive cut-ins of close-ups. Now I was once assured by a world-famous movie star that he always actually felt in his heart—to the very depths of his being—the emotion he was called on to register, was it murderous lust, ineffable virtue, mother-love or what-not. Very well. Assuming this to be true of all great movie actors, I have very grave doubt if any of that silver-screen last-stand battalion of Custer's felt any more real a pricking of the scalp in watching the closing circle of dancing Redskins than did I in waiting for that spinning blast of wind to decide whether or not it was going to stage a "Pick-me-up" party.

It is not quite clear in my mind even now why things in my immediate vicinity did not start to aviate. Several loosely built structures on the bluff went flying off like autumn leaves, and wind enough to blow boards into tree-tops would have at least sent my boat rolling if not sky-ing. I am inclined to think, however, that the failure of any marked heliocoptic action to develop was due to a lack of pronounced opposition on the part of a bluffing turncoat of a southwesterly wind. The latter skirmished just long enough to turn in the vanguards of the main storm, but took to its heels the moment the thunderbolt phalanx was launched upon it. It was the advent of this Juggernaut that marked the end of my consecutive impressions. Primal Chaos simply clapped the lid down over me and kept it there for several aeons—fifteen minutes to be exact.

Although it was rapidly getting darker, I had still been able to see not a little of what was going on up to the moment the God of the Thunders uncorked his artillery; after that I simply heard and felt and grovelled in the sand. The big red silo was the last of the old workaday world I remember seeing before my horizon contracted from a quarter of a mile to a scant ten feet. (I don't recall that old Jim Bridger ever made anything shrink as fast and far as that, even with the astringent waters of Alum Creek.) The boat and I were lying in a grey-walled cocktailshaker and being churned up with flying sand, hail and jagged hunks of blown river water. At first the resultant mixture was milk-warm, but presently it became literally ice-cold, so that I shivered in it like a new-shorn lamb. (The warm water was that blown from the river. The subsequent chilling, as I figured out afterwards, was due to the hail banking up against the windward side of the skiff, finally filling the forward section of the latter and drifting right on over to congeal my cowering anatomy.)

The thunder did not come into action battery by battery after its wonted practice, but seemed to open up all of a sudden with a crashing barrage all along the line. Flashes and crashes were simultaneous. The light of the jagged bolts broadened the diameter of my bowl by not a foot. The solid grey walls simply glowed and dulled like a ground-glass bulb when its light is switched on and off. Not one clear-cut flash did I see in the whole bombardment.