The boatmen stood, a silent group, at The Big Mallard. "She's a bad one, boys--and looking wicked as I've ever seen her." There was a furrow of anxiety between Bruce's heavy brows.
Every grave face was a shade paler and Porcupine Jim's eyes looked like two blue buttons sewed on white paper as he stared.
"I wish I was back in Meennyso-ta." The unimaginative Swede's voice was plaintive.
"We dare not risk the other channel, Saunders," said Bruce briefly, "the water's hardly up enough for that."
"I don't believe we could make it," Saunders answered; "it's too long a chance."
Smaltz was studying the rocks and current intently, as though to impress upon his mind every twist and turn. His face was serious but he made no comment and walked back in silence to the eddy above where the boats were tied.
It was the only rapid where they had stopped to "look out the trail ahead," but a peculiarity of the Big Mallard was that the channel changed with the varying stages of the water and it was too dangerous at any stage to trust to luck.
It was a stretch of water not easy to describe. Words seem colorless--inadequate to convey the picture it presented or the sense of awe it inspired. Looking at it from among the boulders on the shore it seemed the last degree of madness for human beings to pit their Lilliputian strength against that racing, thundering flood. Certain it was that The Big Mallard was the supreme test of courage and boatmanship.
The river, running like a mill-race, shot straight and smooth down grade until it reached a high, sharp, jutting ledge of granite, where it made a sharp turn. The main current made a close swirl and then fairly leaping took a sudden rush for a narrow passageway between two great boulders, one of which rose close to shore and the other nearer the centre of the river. The latter being covered thinly with a sheet of water which shot over it to drop into a dark hole like a well, rising again to strike another rock immediately below and curve back. For three hundred yards or more the river seethed and boiled, a stretch of roaring whiteness, as though its growing fury had culminated in this foaming fit of rage, and from it came uncanny sounds like children crying, women screaming.
Bruce's eyes were shining brilliantly with the excitement of the desperate game ahead when he put into the river, but nothing could exceed the carefulness, the caution with which he worked his boat out of the eddy so that when the current caught it it should catch it right. Watching the landmarks on either shore, measuring distances, calculating the consequences of each stroke, he placed the clumsy barge where he would have it, with all the accurate skill of a good billiard player making a shot.