Down the Yellowstone Part 9

With the main channel streaming white a few hundred yards ahead I settled to the oars for the sharp initiatory test I knew awaited us there. We had closed up to within fifty feet of Joe by now, and saw for the first time the remarkable precautionary measures he had taken to insure the safety of himself and his canoe. For himself he had a blown-up football tied to the back of his belt, an arrangement very similar to the block of wood Chinese houseboat dwellers tie to their boy, though not to their comparatively worthless girl, children. Along both gunwales of the canoe were further air installations--these in the form of long lengths of inflated inner tubes. The practical worth of the latter contrivances was to be proved inside of half a minute. Of the efficacy of a football tied to the back of the belt as a life-preserver I had some doubts. It seemed to me, however, that the elevation of that particular section of the anatomy could only be secured at the cost of putting the head under water. Not being quite sure, I deemed it best not to shake Joe's confidence by telling him of my doubts.

The Yellowstone divides a half mile or so above the Main Street bridge, not far from the point where Jim Cutler was knocked from his raft. The northerly channel, flowing by Livingston has perhaps a third of the volume of the southerly one. The two unite not far below the H Street bridge. In doing a bit of advance scouting down stream a day or two previously I made particular mental note of a point, just below the confluence, at which the current drove with great force close to the left bank. Here, either snags or slightly submerged boulders made a messy stretch of water that I saw at a glance it would not do to get a boat into. However, a good sharp pull across the current from the point the main channel was entered would be enough to avoid trouble--if nothing went wrong.

The currents of the respective channels came together almost at right angles, that of the main one flowing at perhaps eight miles an hour.

Ordinarily I would have eased into this by running parallel to it and conforming my course to the direction of the stronger current. In my anxiety to get quick way on across the current, however, I did not take the time to do this. On the contrary, indeed, pulling as hard as I could, I drove the light skiff almost head-on into the swiftly speeding green bolt of the main current. The effect, naturally, was something like that of a man's walking into the side of a moving street car. The boat did precisely what a man walking into a car would do--went reeling and staggering sideways in an effort to keep from rolling over and over.

She spun round twice before I got her under control, and of course s.h.i.+pped a lot of green water--all of it in Holt's section. It wasn't enough to bother much, though, and I had no trouble in pulling clear of the danger point with yards to spare. Holt went quietly to bailing. I was conscious of a mild thrill of elation at the thought of the sousing I was giving him in spite of the "doughnut," but he didn't seem to be worrying about it quite as much as I would have liked.

There was less excuse for Joe's having trouble at this point, because it was almost in his back yard--one of his favourite fis.h.i.+ng riffles, in fact. It may be that the fact that I was crowding him closely from behind made him nose into the main channel faster than he would have done had he been on his own. I was too busy with my own troubles to see what happened to him, so could only judge from the tremolo of his high-keyed cursing. Holt, however, who had a grandstand seat for the twin performances, said that the canvas canoe was thrown just about on its beams' ends, and that nothing but the newly installed water-line air-chambers, prevented a complete swamping.

The bend below the Northern Pacific bridge was one of the two or three places of which I seemed to have retained much of a mental picture from my previous run. Twenty years before the main channel was cutting heavily into a low bluff on the left, bringing down an enormous quant.i.ty of big round boulders. The short, savage riffle formed by these had given us our first severe mauling on that earlier ride. Now I found the river had broadened greatly, pouring a shallow current through a channel two or three hundred yards wide. But it was still swift, very swift--altogether relentless in its onward urge. It is the almost complete absence of slack-water stretches that differentiates the five hundred miles of the Yellowstone between Gardiner and Glendive from any other great river I can recall. It is this that makes it so nearly ideal for boating.

[Ill.u.s.tration: JOE EVANS WHO PILOTED ME THE FIRST HALF DAY]

[Ill.u.s.tration: PETE HOLT AND JOE EVANS WITH THEIR INFLATED LIFE PRESERVERS]

[Ill.u.s.tration: "CHICKENS, CHILDREN AND HOGS"]

It didn't take us long to discover that as a pilot Joe was not an a.s.set.

Personally he was a source of never-ending delight; also artistically.

His funny little craft with its inner-tube bilge keels, no less than the bobbing of that football life-preserver, lent touches to the picture that could have been blocked in by no other media. But what made Joe's piloting fail to qualify was the fact that instead of trying to find the channel he was trying to find floaters--to earn one or both of those twenty-five-dollar rewards that were offered for the finding of the bodies of the people drowned the previous week. I wanted all the deep, clear, un.o.bstructed channel there was to be had; the very nature of Joe's quest kept him edging in toward snags and bars and shallows. These little incidentals didn't bother him a bit. The instant he saw the water shoaling dangerously he simply jumped overboard, grabbed his feather-weight craft by the nose and trotted right out on dry land.

Now this wouldn't have troubled seriously if--save the mark!--I had also been using an unladen canvas canoe. But with my outfit, a pa.s.senger, and a boat whose ability to withstand collisions with rocks and snags had still to be proved, Joe's little jump-out, pick-up and trot-off man[oe]uvre was a difficult one to follow. Twice, because there was no alternative either time, I did the best I could to go through his motions. All I succeeded in doing--besides getting pulled down and rolled--was proving that the bottom of my boat would bang for fifty feet over shallowly submerged rocks without holing. While that latter was rea.s.suring, I couldn't see any reason for going on and proving it over and over again. If the constant drop of water wears away the hardest stone it seemed perfectly reasonable to believe that the constant biff of boulders might batter through the hardest bottom. And I wanted that bottom to do me for from twenty-five to thirty-five hundred miles yet.

That was the reason why when, entangled in a maze of shoaling channels, Joe picked up his canoe and trotted up on a bar for the third time, I had the corner of a wild-weather eye lifting for a possible gateway of escape. A short, sharp chute cascading off to the right seemed to fill the bill, but by a narrow squeeze. A rough tumble of green-white water drove full at a caving gravel bank, reared up and fell over on its back in a curling wave, serpentined between the out-reaching claws formed by the roots of two prostrate cottonwood trees, and then recovered from its tantrum in a diminuendo of whirlpools in the embrasure of a brown cliff.

It was the kind of a place which you knew you could run if all went right, but which you usually didn't try for fear that one of a half dozen things might go wrong. I should hardly have tackled it in cold blood, even in a boat I was thoroughly used to; but I had just enough dander up over the prospect of another b.u.mping on Joe's bar to be just a bit careless of consequences. It was that sort of "Might-as-well-be-hanged-for-a-sheep-as-a-lamb" feeling that a man ought to eliminate from his system as a first step in fitting himself for work in rough water. It had always troubled me a bit, but I had it sufficiently in check to keep it from a.s.serting itself unless I was very tired or slightly huffed. This time, I fear, there was just a bare ruffle of huffiness easing the brake of my wonted restraint.

I was over the dip at the head of that chute before I knew it--likewise, out into the swirls at the foot of it. I was conscious only of a sudden dive, the loom of the back-curling wave--which the skiff, heeling half over, was taking as a racing car round a steeply-banked turn,--a tangle of roots to left and right, and then the serpentining through the whirlpools. She had hardly s.h.i.+pped a bucket of solid water--most of it over her bows as she tipped off the curling wave.

Joe was quite handsome above having his pilotage flaunted. The first thing he did after catching up with us was to apologize again for having warned about running the upper river. The good chap seemed really to think that some skill had been displayed in running that chute. As a matter of fact, I simply headed in and let the current do the rest.

Pete said I backed water sharply to keep from ramming the gravel bank, and that we both fended with oars against the clutch of the cottonwood snags. Pete also said I was pop-eyed all the way through. I _know_ that he was. I was glad of it, too. Outside of a straight spill, I felt that there wasn't going to be much more that I could do to shake those confoundedly cool scout-trained nerves of his.

This little incident clarified the air on the pilotage question. I let Joe keep the lead as far as I could, but a.s.sumed the responsibility of picking my own channel while he concentrated on his quest.

We pa.s.sed several grim reminders of the tragedies of the past week. A few miles below Livingston we came upon Jim Cutler's raft stranded upon a midstream bar. Even a pa.s.sing glimpse revealed how well the double tiers of logs were laid--plainly the work of the real old river-rat "Buckskin Jim" must have been. Not far below the raft was the wreck of a Ford, with cus.h.i.+ons, wraps, and odds and ends of a camp outfit dotting the bars for the next mile or two. The car, occupied by a young Middle Westerner and his four-months' bride, had gone over the grade at a bend of the road not far above where we saw the wreck. Rolling to the flood-swollen river, it had been carried several hundred yards down stream before stranding. The man crawled clear and reached the bank; the body of his wife had not been recovered. The third recent river tragedy was that of a rancher, but I had not learned the details of it.

I was, of course, much elated over the way in which my little tin boat had behaved in running that side-winding chute. This very smart performance proved conclusively that, with anything like intelligent handling, she would be more than equal to any probable demands I would have to make on her. There might, of course, be places that I would have to avoid on account of her lack of freeboard, but that, at the worst, would mean no more than the loss of a bit of time. She was good for what she would have to do--that was the main thing. There was rea.s.surance, also, in the way her bottom and sides had withstood the b.u.mping from the rocks. There was no question in my mind now that that galvanized tin-like looking stuff was real steel. Nothing else would have stood the b.u.mps. I planned to spare her all that kind of thing I could, but it was good to know that she could stand the gaff if she had to. I was calling her pet names before we had gone twenty miles. It is an astonis.h.i.+ng thing the affection a man develops for a boat that is carrying him well on a long river journey.

The thing that I remembered best from my former run was the long, rough rapid that winds down and under the Springdale bridge. I did not recall, however, that the river divided into two channels a half mile above the bridge. Indeed, it is quite possible that it did not do so twenty years ago. Changes like that occur over night during the high-water season on the Yellowstone. Joe led the way down the left-hand side of the left-hand channel, but landed when it became apparent that neither of our boats could live in the wild tumble of rollers where the current drove hard against the side of the bluff above the bridge.

Lining back a quarter of a mile up-stream, we pulled across to the opposite side, down which there was rough but fairly open running.

My boat was behaving so well that I couldn't resist the temptation to give her a baptism in some really rough stuff at a point where salvage operations would be so comparatively simple in case of grief. Giving the little lady her head after the worst of the riffle had been pa.s.sed, I let the undercurrent draw her right over into the main string of rollers. Wild, wallowing water it was, solid white all the way, but with a straight run and no underhand look about it. She took it like a duck, except where two or three of the most broken combers let her down too sharply for her bows to rise to meet the next in turn. There were perhaps a half dozen buckets of water in the forward section when we beached and dumped her a hundred yards below the bridge. As I seem to remember it now, Syd Lamartine's skiff had a foot of water in it when we dumped at about the same point on that other run. On that occasion, however, I have a clear recollection of riding the middle of the riffle all the way down. I should want a _batteau_ and a full crew if I were going to try the same stunt today.

It must have been six or seven miles below the Springdale bridge that Holt, descrying an unusual object on the beach of a long, low island to our left, asked me to pull in closer for a better look. Joe, a hundred yards ahead of us, had already pa.s.sed it up as a log of driftwood, but the ex-scout's keen eye would not be deceived. At first we thought it was the body of a man--probably the drowned rancher,--but as we drew nearer it was revealed as that of a woman dressed in hiking garb, undoubtedly the bride of the auto wreck.

As we were now in Sweet Gra.s.s County, the body was under the jurisdiction of the Coroner at Big Timber. Holt decided it would be best if Joe tried to find some ranch from which he could get in touch with that official by phone, while we continued on down river to carry the word by an alternative route.

Joe was treated to a good deal of a shock while towing the body down stream to an eddy from which it could be landed on the left bank. No sooner had he put off from the beach than the corpse, floating deeply submerged at the end of a thirty-foot line, made straight for the roaring line of rollers on the right side of the channel. As it was a good deal too rough water for his boat to ride, Joe lost no time in bending to his stubby oars and pulling for dear life in the opposite direction. It was a tug-of-war all the way, with the grisly tow on the outer end gaining foot by foot. Holt and I had drifted too far ahead before we realized the seriousness of Joe's difficulty to be of any help. As an upset was inevitable in the event the canoe was dragged into the riffle stern first, the best that we could do was to pick him up at the foot of it and trust that his canoe would strand and anchor the corpse.

If that riffle had been fifty yards longer nothing in the world could have prevented a spill that would have put Joe's football life-preserver to a real test. As far as the tug-of-war was concerned he was beaten completely--dragged over the line. Luckily it was only the smoothening tail of the riffle, and the buoyant little canoe rode the rounded rollers without capsizing. Another hundred yards, and the relentless drag from the other end of his line had eased enough to allow him to pull up and into the eddy. He was mighty white about the gills as Holt gave him a hand ash.o.r.e, and kept repeating over and over in an awed voice: "_Did you see her try to drown me? Did you see her try to drown me?_"

It was easy enough to understand what the trouble had been as soon as one gave it a moment's collected thought. Calm reflection, however, was a thing which I am inclined to think very few men would have been capable of in Joe's place. As a matter of fact, indeed, neither Holt nor I was in a sufficiently detached frame of mind to dope out the phenomenon until some minutes after Joe had landed. This was the reason for what happened:

In every swiftly flowing channel there is a strong draw toward the most rapidly moving part of the current, and this draw is usually more powerful below than at the surface. A boat paddled in comparatively smooth water beside a riffle will invariably be drawn into the latter within a few yards if allowed to drift. Only too often, in fact, it will be drawn in despite every effort to avoid the riffle. In this particular instance, the deeply floating corpse had given the inward-drawing current a double hold, and Joe's short oars had not been able to develop power enough to counteract it. Readily explicable as the uncanny incident was, there was no question of the grim seriousness of it.

Indeed, I have always thought of it as a battle with Death in more senses than one, for that football float of Joe's, attached as it was, would have been about as much use as a life-preserver, once he was dumped out into that riffle, as a millstone round his neck.

Holt and I made good time for the remainder of the run to Big Timber--about three hours for something like twenty-five miles. The way was a continuous succession of moderate rapids, with one very rough and savage cascade. The latter was not far above Big Timber, and was formed by a ledge of bedrock extending all the way across the river. A direct drop of two or three feet here was followed by a series of stiff riffles that extended out of sight round a sharp bend where the river was deflected at right-angles by an abrupt cliff. I never learned the name of the place, but it was a distinctly nasty one--just one d.a.m.n thing after another, as Pete put it. I have jumbled memories of messing up on the ledge, and then half swamping just below it, on my former run.

Not to take too many chances in the deepening twilight (though all we'd admit to each other at the time was that we were doing it to avoid wetting my outfit), we lined by the sharp pitch and on down almost to the bend. Even from there it was right sloppy going, partly through some rather clumsy handling the skiff had as a consequence of a sudden divergence of theory Pete and I developed on the subject of rapid running.

Rounding the sharp bend the skiff was drawn into the middle of a rough, foam-white riffle that extended ahead as far as I could see. The unrhythmically wallowing rollers were banging her bows unmercifully and throwing water aboard at a rate that I feared would swamp her very quickly if she continued to head into them. Seeing that the water toward the right bank was a bit less broken, I laid onto my oars for all that was in me in an effort to throw her in that direction. Holt was grunting mightily. Looking ahead over my shoulder, I could not see what he was doing, but a.s.sumed he was paddling his head off in seconding my effort to reach smoother water. But not a yard could I move her from the crest of that white-capped ridge of rollicking combers. Down the whole length of the riffle she slammed, dipping water at every plunge and finis.h.i.+ng with a good six inches swis.h.i.+ng about in both sections.

Just about at the last gasp from my frantic but futile pulling, I let my oars trail and my head sag down between my knees while my heart stopped hop-skip-and-a-jumping and my breath came back. Looking up a half minute later to see if there was anything ahead that would demand expert attention, I saw that Pete was just coming out of a collapse similar to my own. Also he was choking toward utterance.

"Took all I had in me,--but I did it," he gasped with a sickly grin.

"Did what?" I growled.

"Kept you from throwing her side-on and giving me that spill you promised," he chuckled. "Don't you think it's getting too late in the evening for that kind of jokes?"

Oh, well! The warehouses and the water-tanks of the Big Timber bluff were beginning to blot the evening sky ahead, and so I hardly thought it worth while to explain to Pete that his fancied self-defensive measures had probably brought him nearer to that promised spill than he had been at any time during the day. He wouldn't have believed me anyhow. Won't even do so when he reads it here in cold print.

Pulling up a slough that ran back from the head of the bluff, we found safe haven under the over-arching willows of a wonderfully cold and clear little creek. Pus.h.i.+ng out onto the bank above, we found ourselves in the back yard of the local postmaster. A highly gracious and comely young lady volunteered to mend my Gieve waistcoat, torn by Pete's frantic paddlings over and roundabout the inflated "doughnut." The Gieve is not made to paddle in.

Wolfing great porterhouse steaks and quaffing steaming mugs of coffee, Pete and I sat long at a lunch-counter table and talked of our ancient ski jaunt over the snows of the Yellowstone. He spoke much of coasting and jumping and spills--especially of spills that I took. Just why he did this didn't occur to me until after he had left for Livingston by the midnight train. I figured it out walking back to the hotel. It was merely the subtle chap's way of letting me know that he still reckoned I was a bit in his debt on the score of thrills and spills. Maybe so.

Maybe so. Twenty-year thrills more readily than forty-year, just as forty-year is more reluctant to take a chance at a spill.

CHAPTER IV

BIG TIMBER TO BILLINGS

A troop of round-up artists jingled into Big Timber the morning of July first, just as I was leaving the hotel to go down to my boat. They were in from the ranges on their way to compete at the annual cow-carnival at Miles City. Having read of my voyage in the paper, they came to me with the proposal that I book the lot of them as pa.s.sengers. They a.s.sumed that I would easily make the two hundred and fifty mile run in a day, and that my boat had unlimited cabin capacity. I replied by inviting them down to my moorings. The sight of the tiny tin shallop tied up under the willows brought them to a more reasonable view of the situation. They readily admitted that it would not carry anything like ten people, even without their saddles, but they were inclined to argue that it would carry at least four besides myself.

I a.s.sured them I was game to try it if they were, but suggested that the four elected should get in first. Now four light-footed sailors _might_ have stepped into that little boat and taken their seats without upsetting it. Four booted and spurred cow-punchers could not, or at least did not. In fact the third one precipitated the swamping when he stumbled and fell over the two who had preceded him. After we had raised, dumped and launched her again, I a.s.sured them that a single pa.s.senger was my outside limit, but that I would be highly honoured by the company of any one of them whom they would agree to nominate for the run to Billings. As I was planning to stop over a day or two there, my arrival by river in Miles would be too late for the opening of the Round-up.

After some debate they picked the "bulldogger" of the outfit.

"Bulld.o.g.g.i.ng" is a stock round-up stunt, and I shall hardly need to explain that the _modus operandi_ involves throwing a steer by seizing its nose in the teeth and upsetting its centre of gravity by a sudden twist of the neck. One sees it in every rodeo, but it is a feat withal that requires much nerve, strength and skill.

Jocularly remarking that he reckoned he would have to ride this tin broncho with a slick heel, the "dogger" unbuckled his spurs and stepped into the boat. I went up to fetch my remaining bags from the postmaster's house and was delayed ten minutes while the st.i.tching up of my Gieve was completed. When I returned I found a bewhiskered stranger recounting with facile gesture how he fished the floaters out of the eddy below his ranch down-river. He called it "Dead Man's Douse." Last floater he took out was a cow-puncher who had been so rolled in the big rapid above that his spurs were tangled in his hair and he came wheeling through the suds like a doughnut. It was a h.e.l.ls-bells-jingler of a rapid, that one above the "Douse." Water tossed about so fierce that the fishes' brains were spattered on the rocks!

That was about all I arrived in time to hear, but the "dogger" had been more fortunate. The good chap was deeply impressed, too, for his iron, bull-nose-biting jaw was sagging in a sickly grin and he was back on the bank offering a free pa.s.sage to Billings to any of his mates who cared to accept. No takers. The gamest of the lot appeared to be a lady broncho-buster called Lil. She actually stepped into the boat once, but finally decided to take the train because it had a roof on it. It looked like rain, she said, and it always made her broken shoulder ache to get wet. As if rain was the wettest part of riding the Yellowstone.

[Ill.u.s.tration: _L. A. Huffman_

ROUND-UP OUTFIT AT DINNER]