“I saw Alex again last week. He said when he put on his shirt the vermin were gone, but he forgot to shake it first and the ants were still there! You know the kind, boys! The little red ones! And they sure did bite like hell before he could strip again!”
Tale XXIII: A Greenhorn in a Rapid
Every spring, a lot of greenhorns go North, either in hope of making their living, or in a spirit of adventure. A few struggle through and succeed. A lot meet with accidents. All of them run appalling risks.
Some years ago—before the War—there was a mild stampede on the Chamuchuan River in the Province of Quebec. Gold was reported to have been found. As soon as the ice had gone, several hundred men started North, plunging into the wilderness in quest of fortune.
A few weeks later we were poling up that same river on our way to Mistassini Lake. We reached a long straight rapid and were unloading our canoe before portaging. One of the Indians noticed, two miles away at the head of the rapid, right in the middle of the foaming river, a dark speck on a flat rock. One man said it was a bear because it moved.
What a black bear could be doing in such a spot was a problem in itself, but we let it go at that and started packing our loads. I happened to be the first one over the portage. Throwing down my load, I looked instinctively at the river. There was a man squatting dismally on a small flat rock right in the middle of the current, fifty yards or so below where the portage stopped and the rapid began.
So that was the black bear seen an hour ago! When the stranger saw us, he scrambled to his feet and started gesticulating wildly. We could not understand how he got there. He had no canoe. The rock was about three foot square. On both sides of it the river rushed down in a blind torrent of foam.
We considered a way to rescue him. The idea of running down in a canoe was out of the question. Even if we succeeded in getting him on board—we would have to go on and there was a ten foot fall a few hundred yards further down which meant immediate disaster.
We hit on the following plan. We found a good sized log, tied to it all the ropes we had in one single line, paddled as far down near the head of the rapid as we dared, anchored our canoe with a huge stone taken from shore and then paid out the rope, the log floating ahead of it towards the man on the rock.