A little farther I espied a great shaggy beast, not unlike a bear, coming out of the river with a big fish in his mouth. I fired at him, but the bullet probably hit him too obliquely to pierce his thick hide. That's my theory at least; the Indians were mean enough to suggest that I never hit him at all.
On the third morning we came to a huge beaver dam, bigger than any I'd seen in Canada, and as neatly put together as any dike in Holland. The fur-coated gentlemen were hard at work when we appeared, some gnawing at the trees, while others plastered the dam with mud, using their broad tails for trowels. But at our coming they all went splash, splash into the water, which was all alive for a moment with dancing ripples and flapping tails—a regular fac-simile of that scene in The Last of the Mohicans over which we used to laugh so.
Of course we had to make another "portage" with the canoe; and while we were dragging it along, up jumped a barefooted boy from among the bushes, and lent us a hand with it. A splendid young savage he was, who would have quite delighted my old friend Tom Hughes of Rugby. Straight as a pine, keen-eyed as an eagle, so supple and sinewy that one might almost have rolled him up and pocketed him like a ball of twine. He told me he was "after beaver," and had done pretty well this season, trapping and what not. I gave him some tobacco, which seemed to please him mightily, and he repaid me with what my New York friends would call "a tall yarn":
"Time when beaver hats was all the go (which don't I just wish they was now!) a feller went for a swim in a river one day, leavin' his hat and things on the bank. It happened to be pretty close to a beaver dam; and when he cum out agin, fust thing he seed was two young beavers a-weepin' over his hat, 'cause they knowed it for the skin o' their father."
Toward four that afternoon we began to hear a dull booming roar far away ahead. You should have seen the Indians' eyes flash when they heard it! They knew the sound of the rapids well enough. All at once the sloping banks seemed to grow high and steep, and the overhanging pines to go far away up into the air, and the channel to get dark and narrow, and the stream to go rushing along like a mill-race. Then suddenly we swung around a huge black rock, and were fairly in the thick of it.
After that I have only a confused recollection of being tossed and banged about in a whirl of boiling foam, and clinging like grim death to the sides of the canoe, while the river itself seemed somehow to be standing stock-still, and the great cliffs on each side to be flying past like an express train. The whole air was filled with a hoarse grinding roar that seemed to shake the very sky, and the spray came lashing into my face till I was glad to shut my eyes.
When I opened them again I almost thought I was dreaming. Instead of the foaming river and the frowning precipices, we were floating on a broad smooth lake, with a little toy town pasted on the green slope above us, and half a dozen big fellows in red shirts running down to welcome us in.
But I must break off, for I'm so sleepy, after hauling timber all day, that I can hardly sit upright. Remember me kindly to all your folks, and believe me
Yours to death (or till my next railway journey, which is much the same nowadays),
D. Ker.