Down the Yellowstone

by Lewis R. Freeman

I have always been a great believer in whistling to keep up ebbing courage; not necessarily a blowing of air through pursed lips, but any easy and spontaneous action to show nonchalance and sang froid in the face of danger. The particular practice which had always seemed to produce the best results was reciting stirring and appropriate poetry. "Spartacus to the Gladiators" and "Roll on thou deep and dark blue ocean, roll!" had steadied my faltering nerve in many crises. On this occasion it was when the boat broke loose from its moorings and started to roll over upon me that I began to feel the need of spiritual stiffening. I must have picked on Kipling because "The Song of the Red War Boat" had been running in my head for a day or two.

"Hearken, Thor of the Thunder! (I sputtered) We are not here for a jest."

But that was altogether too obvious. I broke off and began again:

"The thunders bellow and clamour The harm that they mean to do; There goes Thor's own Hammer Cracking the night in two! Close! But the blow has missed her...."

But that was premature. Far from missing her, the blow had at last got a shoulder under the bottom of my poor little skiff and over she came! By Thor's grace she hung there, instead of going on rolling; but those fifteen or twenty gallons of slightly liquefied hail seemed to drain straight from the base of the North Pole. I tried to continue registering nonchalance and sang froid, but accomplished an only too literal rendition of the latter. I was still spitting sand and quavering "There goes Thor's own Hammer" when the walls of my hail-hole began to brighten and recede—and presently it was a warm, soft summer afternoon again. That three-mile-wide Juggernaut of Primal Chaos was rolling away straight across those verdant irrigated farms of the Yellowstone Project and leaving desolation in its wake. I only hope that it chastened the mendacious ferryman at Riverview and made a sharp right-angle bend round the Patterson farm above Savage.

It was a considerably altered world that met the owl-like blink of my still somewhat sand-filled eyes. The big red barn and the silo still loomed against the sky-line above the bluff, and most of the other houses and barns were still standing. All of the windmills had slipped out of the picture, however, and many lesser wooden structures. Trees were broken off or uprooted in all directions. But the strangest effect was from the practical disappearance of the thousands of acres of standing crops—beaten into the earth by the hail. There, I knew, lay the real tragedy of Thor's little field-day. Quite likely no human beings had been killed—but how many human hopes? The American public like to think and talk in millions. Very well. There went a natural mill that was grinding up corn and alfalfa and clover and wheat at the rate of a million dollar's worth a minute. Who said the mills of the gods grind slowly? Much as I was longing for the cheering propinquity of fellow creatures just at that moment, I hated the thought of intruding upon the blank despair that I knew had preceded me as a guest in the farmhouse beyond the big red barn.

Laying out a change of dry clothes from one of my water-proof bags, I stripped off my wet ones and freshened up with a plunge into the warm, invigorating current of the river. Thanks to the lightness and simplicity of my outfit, salvage operations were easily and expeditiously effected. The skiff had dumped itself in blowing over and was ready for launching as soon as it was tipped back. Most of my clothes were dry; most of my grub wet. The worst loss in the latter was the sentimental one of the residue of my California home-dried apricots. I didn't care much for the darn things myself, but the people along the river had proved dead keen for the succulent amber slabs. Moreover, it had always lent a pretty touch at parting to hand my host or hostess something produced on my own ranch, with perhaps a few words about how it had been picked, pitted, sulphured, dried and packed by Mexican señoritas—all young and dark-eyed and beautiful. That last had been especially effective in lone cow-camps. Yes, I was sorry to be compelled to give the last of those apricots away all at once to prevent their spoiling from dampness. I resolved to buy some more to replace them—for making up intimate little packets of parting—at the first opportunity.

The river had become its own quiet self again within a few moments, and I pulled through a slow current to the foot of the bluff at the bend, which appeared to be the only place one could land and avoid the mud-flats. The long sand-bar on which I had ridden out the storm had been scoured almost beyond recognition by the blown river waters. In a dozen places channels had been scoured straight through it to the slough behind, and the latter, greatly augmented both from the river and from the drainage from the heights above, was pouring a muddy torrent back into the mother stream at the bend. I saw that I was luckier than I had at first appreciated in not having had the bar dissolve beneath my feet.

Fully resolved, if no alternative cover offered, to tunnel into the bluff to avoid exposure to another of Thor's Juggernautic joy-rides, I landed on a jutting ledge of water-soaked lignite at the bend. Stacking up my outfit, I clapped the skiff down upon it, threw a few lashings over the whole, and climbed out up the bluff. With the fields themselves deep in water and liquid mud, I had to zigzag cross-country toward the nearest house by following the embankments of the irrigating ditches. Not a blade of grass was left standing. All that remained of alfalfa, oats and corn was a tangled green mat half covered with slowly melting hail-stones. Half-grown corn had not only been beaten flat, but the very stalks were crushed and shredded as if pounded by hammers.

There was only one cheering thing about that whole sodden field of desolation—millions on millions of mosquitos had been battered to death by the hail. Great masses of them, literally pulped, had been strained out of the water and collected against heaps of débris in the ditches. One could scoop them up by the double handfuls. How often had I bemoaned the fact that every mosquito around some swampy Alaskan or Guinanan camp of mine had not a single head so that I could sever it with one fell swoop of and ax or machete! That was too much to hope for, of course; but right here was a tolerably fair approach to it. I squeezed three or four fistfuls of those pulped tormentors through my fingers and felt appreciably less depressed.