John G. Neihardt - The River and I

J >> John G. Neihardt >> The River and I

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All the cargo had forged forward, and the persons of Bill and the Kid
were considerably tangled. We laughed loud and long. Then we gathered
ourselves up and wondered if she might be taking water under the cargo.
It developed that she wasn't. But one of our grub boxes, containing all
the bacon, was missing. So were the short oars that we used for paddles.
While we laughed, these had found some convenient hiding-place.

We had struck a smooth bowlder and leaped over it. A boat with the
ordinary launch construction would have opened at every seam. The light
springy tough construction of the _Atom_ had saved her. Whereat I
thought of the Information Bureau and was well pleased.

Altogether we looked upon the incident as a purple spot. But we were
many miles from available bacon, and when, upon trial, the engine
refused to make a revolution, we began to get exceedingly hungry for
meat.

Having a dead engine and no paddles, we drifted. We drifted very slowly.
The Kid asked if he might not go ashore and drive a stake in the bank.
For what purpose? Why, to ascertain whether we were going up or down
stream! While we drifted in the now blistering sun, we talked about
_meat_. With a devilish persistence we quite exhausted the subject. We
discussed the best methods for making a beefsteak delicious. It made us
very hungry for meat. The Kid announced that he could feel his backbone
sawing at the front of his shirt. But perhaps that was only the
hyperbole of youth. Bill confessed that he had once grumbled at his good
wife for serving the steak too rare. He now stated that at the first
telegraph station he would wire for forgiveness. I advised him to wire
for money instead and buy meat with it. Personally I felt a sort of
wistful tenderness for packing-houses.

That day passed somehow, and the next morning we were still hungry for
meat. We spent most of the morning talking about it. In the blistering
windless afternoon, we drifted lazily. Now and then we took turns
cranking the engine.

We were going stern foremost and I was cranking. We rounded a bend
where the wall rocks sloped back, leaving a narrow arid sagebrush strip
along both sides of the stream. I had straightened up to get the kink
out of my back and mop the sweat out of my eyes, when I saw something
that made my stomach turn a double somersault.

A good eight hundred yards down stream at the point of a gravel-bar,
something that looked like and yet unlike a small cluster of drifting,
leafless brush moved slowly into the water. Now it appeared quite
distinct, and now it seemed that a film of oil all but blotted it out. I
blinked my eyes and peered hard through the baffling yellow glare. Then
I reached for the rifle and climbed over the gunwhale. I smelled raw
meat.

Fortunately, we were drifting across a bar, and the slow water came only
to my shoulders. The thing eight hundred yards away was forging across
stream by this time--heading for the mouth of a coulee. I saw plainly
now that the brush grew out of a head. It was a buck with antlers.

Just below the coulee's mouth, the wall rocks began again. The buck
would be obliged to land above the wall rocks, and the drifting boat
would keep him going. I reached shore and headed for that coulee. The
sagebrush concealed me. At the critical moment, I intended to show
myself and start him up the steep slope. Thus he would be forced to
approach me while fleeing me. When I felt that enough time had passed, I
stood up. The buck, shaking himself like a dog, stood against the yellow
sandstone at the mouth of the gulch. He saw me, looked back at the
drifting boat, and appeared to be undecided.

I wondered what the range might be. Back home in the plowed field where
I frequently plug tin cans at various long ranges, I would have called
it six hundred yards--at first. Then suddenly it seemed three or four
hundred. Like a thing in a dream the buck seemed to waver back and forth
in the oily sunlight.

"Call it four hundred and fifty," I said to myself, and let drive. A
spurt of yellow stone-dust leaped from the cliff a foot or so above the
deer's back. Only four hundred? But the deer had made up his mind. He
had urgent business on the other side of that slope--he appeared to be
overdue.

[Illustration: FRESH MEAT.]

[Illustration: SUPPER!]

I pumped up another shell and drew fine at four hundred. That time
his rump quivered for a second as though a great weight had been dropped
on it. But he went on with increased speed. Once more I let him have it.
That time he lost an antler. He had now reached the summit, two hundred
feet up at the least.

He hesitated--seemed to be shivering. I have hunted with a full stomach
and brought down game. But there's a difference when you are empty. In
that moment before you kill, you became the sort of fellow your mother
wouldn't like. Perhaps the average man would feel a little ashamed to
tell the truth about that savage moment. I got down on my knee and put a
final soft-nosed ball where it would do the most good. The buck reared,
stiffened, and came down, tumbling over and over.

That night we pitched camp under a lone scrubby tree at the mouth of an
arid gulch that led back into the utterly God-forsaken Bad Lands. It was
the wilderness indeed. Coyotes howled far away in the night, and diving
beaver boomed out in the black stream.

We built half a dozen fires and swung above them the choice portions of
our kill. And how we ate--with what glorious appetites!

It is good to sit with a glad-hearted company flinging words of joyful
banter across very tall steins. It is good to draw up to a country table
at Christmas time with turkey and pumpkin-pies and old-fashioned
puddings before you, and the ones you love about you. I have been deeply
happy with apples and cider before an open fireplace. I have been
present when the brilliant sword-play of wit flashed across a banquet
table--and it thrilled me. _But_----

There is no feast like the feast in the open--the feast in the flaring
light of a night fire--the feast of your own kill, with the tang of the
wild and the tang of the smoke in it!

CHAPTER VI

GETTING DOWN TO BUSINESS

It all came back there by the smoldering fires--the wonder and the
beauty and the awe of being alive. We had eaten hugely--a giant feast.
There had been no formalities about that meal. Lying on our blankets
under the smoke-drift, we had cut with our jack-knives the tender
morsels from a haunch as it roasted. When the haunch was at last cooked
to the bone, only the bone was left.

Heavy with the feast, I lay on my back watching the gray smoke brush my
stars that seemed so near. _My stars!_ Soft and gentle and mystical!
Like a dark-browed Yotun woman wooing the latent giant in me, the night
pressed down. I closed my eyes, and through me ran the sensuous surface
fires of her dream-wrought limbs. Upon my face the weird magnetic lure
of ever-nearing, never-kissing lips made soundless music. Like a sister,
like a mother she caressed me, lazy with the huge feast; and yet, a
drowsy, half-voluptuous joy shimmered and rippled in my veins.

Drowsing and dreaming under the drifting smoke-wrack, I felt the sense
of time and self drop away from me. No now, no to-morrow, no yesterday,
no I! Only eternity, one vast whole--sun-shot, star-sprent, love-filled,
changeless. And in it all, one spot of consciousness more acute than
other spots; and that was the something that had eaten hugely, and that
now felt the inward-flung glory of it all; the swooning, half-voluptuous
sense of awe and wonder, the rippling, shimmering, universal joy.

And then suddenly and without shock--like the shifting of the wood
smoke--the mood veered, and there was nothing but I. Space and eternity
were I--vast projections of myself, tingling with my consciousness to
the remotest fringe of the outward swinging atom-drift; through
immeasurable night, pierced capriciously with shafts of paradoxic day;
through and beyond the awful circle of yearless duration, my ego lived
and knew itself and thrilled with the glory of being. The slowly
revolving Milky Way was only a glory within me; the great woman-star
jeweling the summit of a cliff, was only an ecstasy within me; the
murmuring of the river out in the dark was only the singing of my heart;
and the deep, deep blue of the heavens was only the splendid color of my
soul.

Bill snored. Among the glowing fires moved the black bulk of the Kid,
turning the hunks of venison. And then the universe and I, curiously
mixed, swooned into nothing at all, and I was blinking at a golden glow,
and from the river came a shouting.

It was broad day. We leaped up, and rubbing the sleep from our eyes, saw
a light skiff drifting toward us. It contained two men--Frank and
Charley. We had met them at Benton, and during an acquaintance of three
weeks we had learned of their remarkable ability as cooks. Frank was a
little Canadian Frenchman, and Charley was English. Both, in the
parlance of the road, were "floaters"; that is to say, no locality ever
knew them long; the earth was their floor, the sky their ceiling--and
their god was Whim. Naturally our trip had appealed to them, and one
month in Benton had aggravated that hopelessly incurable
disease--_Wanderlust_.

So we had agreed that somewhere down river we would camp for a week and
wait for them. They would do the cooking, and we would take them in tow.
Two days after we dropped out of Benton, they had abruptly "jumped" an
unfinished job and put off after us in a skiff, rowing all day and most
of the night in order to overtake us.

Certainly they had arrived at the moment most psychologically favorable
for the beginning of an odd sort of tyranny that followed. Cooking is a
weird mystery to me. As for Bill and the Kid, courtesy forbids detailed
comment. The Kid had been uniformly successful in disguising the most
familiar articles of diet; and Bill was perhaps least unsuccessful in
the making of flapjacks. According to his naive statement, he had
discovered the trick of mixing the batter while manufacturing
photographer's mounting paste. His statement was never questioned. My
only criticism on his flapjacks was simply that he left too much to the
imagination. For these and kindred reasons, we gladly hailed the
newcomers.

Ten minutes after the skiff touched shore, the camp consisted of two
cooks and three scullions. The Kid was a hewer and packer of wood, I was
a peeler and slicer of things, and Bill, sweetly oblivious of his
bewhiskered dignity, danced about in the humblest of moods, handing this
and that to the grub-lords.

"You outfitted like greenhorns!" announced the usurpers. "What you want
is raw material. Run down to the boat, please, and bring me this! Oh,
yes, and bring me that! And you'll find the other in the bottom of the
skiff's forward locker! Put a little more wood on the fire, Kid; and
say, Bill, hand me that, won't you? Who's going to get a pail of water?"

All three of us were going to get a pail of water, of course! It was the
one thing in the world we wanted to do very much--get a pail of water!

But the raw materials--how they played on them! I regarded their
performance as a species of duet; and the raw materials, ranged in the
sand about the fire, were the keys. Frank touched this, Charley touched
that, and over the fire the music grew--perfectly stomach-ravishing!

We had bought with much care all, or nearly all the ordinary
cooking-utensils. These the usurpers scorned. Three or four gasoline
cans, transformed by a jack-knife into skillets, ovens, platters, etc.,
sufficed for these masters of their craft. The downright Greek
simplicity of their methods won me completely.

"This is indeed Art," thought I; "first, the elimination of the
non-essential, and then the virile, unerring directness, the seemingly
easy accomplishment resulting from effort long forgotten; and, above
all, the final, convincing delivery of the goods."

Out of the chaos of the raw material, beneath the touch of Charley's
wise hands, emerged a wondrous cosmos of biscuits, light as the heart of
a boy. And Frank, singing a French ditty, created wheat cakes. His
method struck me as poetic. He scorned the ordinary uninspired cook's
manner of turning the half-baked cake. One side being done, he waited
until the ditty reached a certain lilting upward leap in the refrain,
when, with a dexterous movement of the frying-pan, he tossed the cake
into the air, making it execute a joyful somersault, and catching it
with a sizzling _splat_ in the pan, just as the lilting measure ceased
abruptly.

Why, I could taste that song in the pancakes!

I wonder why domestic economy has so persistently overlooked the value
of song as an adjunct to cookery. _Gateaux a la chansonnette!_ Who
wouldn't eat them for breakfast?

At six in the evening we put off, Charley, the Kid and I manning the
power boat, Bill and Frank the skiff, which was towed by a thirty-foot
line. I had, during the day, transformed my unquestioned slavery into a
distinct advantage, having carefully impressed upon the Englishman the
honor I would do him by allowing him to become chief engineer of the
_Atom_. I carefully avoided the subject of cranking. I was tired
cranking. I felt that I had exhausted the possibilities of enjoyment in
that particular form of physical exercise. It had developed during the
day that Charley had once run a gasoline engine. I was careful to
emphasize my ridiculous lack of mechanical ability. Charley took the
bait beautifully.

But just now the engine ran merrily. Above its barking I sang the
praises of the Englishman, with a comfortable feeling that, at least in
this, the tail would wag the dog.

Through the clear quiet waters, between soaring canyon walls, we raced
eastward into the creeping twilight. Here and there the banks widened
out into valleys of wondrous beauty, flanked by jagged miniature
mountains transfigured in the slant evening light. It seemed the "faerie
land forlorn" of which Keats dreamed, where year after year come only
the winds and the rains and the snow and the sunlight and the star-sheen
and the moon-glow.

In the deepening evening our widening V-shaped wake glowed with
opalescent witch-fires. Watching the oily ripples, I steered wild and
lost the channel. We all got out and, wading in different directions,
went hunting for the Missouri River. It had flattened out into a lake
three or four hundred yards wide and eight inches deep. Slipping poles
under the power boat, we carried it several hundred yards to a point
where the stream deepened. It was now quite dark, and the engine quit
work for the day. The skiff towed us another mile or so to a camping
place.

Having moored the boats, we lined up on the shore and had a song. It was
a quintet, consisting of a Frenchman, an Englishman, an Irishman, a
Cornishman, and a German. A very strong quintet it was; that is to say,
strong on volume. As to quality--we weren't thrusting ourselves upon an
audience. The river and the sky didn't seem to mind, and the cliffs sang
after us, lagging a beat or two.

We wished to sing ever so beautifully; and, after all, it would be much
better to have the whole world wishing to sing melodiously, than to have
just a few masters here and there who really can! Did you ever hear a
barefooted, freckle-faced plowboy singing powerfully and quite out of
tune, the stubble fields about him still glistening with the morning
dew, and the meadow larks joining in from the fence-posts? I have: and
soaring above the faulty execution, I heard the lark-heart of the
never-aging world wooing the far-off eternal dawn. True song is merely a
hopeful condition of the soul. And so I am sure we sang very wonderfully
that night.

And how the flapjacks disappeared as a result of that singing! We ate
until Charley refused to bake any more; then we rolled up in our
blankets by the fire and "swapped lies," dropping off one at a time into
sleep until the last speaker finished his story with only the drowsy
stars for an audience. At least I suppose it was so; I was not the last
speaker.

Alas! too seldom were we to hail the evening star with song. So far we
had made in a week little more than one hundred and fifty miles. With
the exception of a few hours of head winds, that week had been a week of
dream. We now awoke fully to the fact that in low water season the
Missouri is not swift. In our early plans we had fallen in with the
popular fallacy that one need only cut loose and let the current do the
rest; whereas, in low water, one would probably never reach the end of
his journey by that method. In addition to this, our gasoline was
running low. We had trusted to irrigation plants for replenishing our
supply from time to time. But the great flood of the spring had swept
the valley clean. Where the year before there were prosperous ranch
establishments with gasoline pumping plants, there was only desolation
now. It was as though we traveled in the path of a devastating army.
Perhaps the summer of 1908 was the most unfavorable season for such a
trip in the last fifty years. Steamboating on the upper river is only a
memory. There are now no wood-yards as formerly. We found ourselves with
no certainty of procuring grub and oil; our engine became more and more
untrustworthy; our paddles had been lost. What winds we had generally
blew against us, and the character of the banks was changing. The cliffs
gave way to broad alluvial valleys, over which, at times, the gales
swept with terrific force.

Our map told us of a number of river "towns." We had already been
partially disillusioned as to the character of those "towns." They were
pretty much in a class with Goodale, except that they lacked the switch
and the box-car and the sign. Just now Rocky Point lay ahead of us.
Rocky Point meant a new supply of food and oil. Stimulated by this
thought, Charley cranked heroically under the blistering sun and managed
to arouse the engine now and then into spasms of speed. He had not yet
begun to swear. Fearfully I awaited the first evidence of the new mood,
which I knew must come.

At least once a day we put the machinery on the operating table. Each
time we succeeded only in developing new symptoms.

At a point about fifty miles from the "town" so deeply longed for, a
lone cow-punch appeared on the bank.

"How far to Rocky Point?" I cried.

"Oh, something less than two hundred miles!" drawled the horseman. (How
carelessly they juggle with miles in that country!)

"It's just a little place, isn't it?" I continued.

"Little place!" answered the cow-puncher; "hell, no!"

"What!" I cried in glee; "Is it really a town of importance?" I had
visions of a budding metropolis, full of gasoline and grub.

"I guess it ain't a little place," explained the rider; "_w'y, they've
got nigh onto ten thousand cattle down there_!"

Ten minutes after that, Charley, after a desperate but unsuccessful fit
of cranking, straightened the kink out of his back, mopped the
perspiration from his face--_and swore_!

Almost immediately I felt, or at least thought I felt, a distinct change
in the temper of the crew--for the worse. We used the better part of two
days covering the last fifty miles into Rocky Point, only to find that
the place consisted of a log ranch-house, two women, an old man, and
"Texas." The cattle and the other men were scattered over a hundred
miles or so of range. The women either would not or could not supply us
with grub, explaining that the nearest railroad town was ninety miles
away. Gasoline was out of the question. We might be able to buy some at
the mouth of Milk River, _two hundred miles down stream_!

"Texas," who made me think of Gargantua, and who had a chest like a
bison bull's, and a drawling fog-horn voice, ran a saloon in an odd
little shanty boat brought down by the flood. He solved the problem for
us.

"You cain't get no gasoline short o' Milk River," he bellowed
drawlingly; "and you sure got to paddle, so you better buy whisky!"

While we were deciding to accept the offered advice, "Texas" whittled a
stick and got off a few jokes of Rabelaisian directness. We laughed
heartily, and as a mark of his appreciation, he gave us five quarts for
a gallon. Which proved, in spite of his appearance, that "Texas" was
very human.

We gave the engine a final trial. It ran by spasms--backwards. Then,
finally, it refused to run at all. We tried to make ourselves believe
that the gasoline was too low in the tank, that the pressure of the oil
had something to do with it. At first we really knew better. But days of
drudgery at the paddles transformed the makeshift hope into something
almost like a certainty.

There was no lumber at Rocky Point. We rummaged through a pile of
driftwood and found some half-rotted two-by-sixes. These we hacked into
paddles. They weighed, when thoroughly soaked, at least fifteen pounds
apiece.

Sending Bill and Frank on ahead with the skiff and the small store of
provisions, Charley and I, the Kid at the steering rope, set out pushing
the power canoe with the paddles. The skiff was very soon out of sight.

The _Atom_, very fast under power, was, with paddles, the slowest boat
imaginable. There was no lift to her prow, no exhilarating leap as with
the typical light canoe driven by regulation paddles. And she was as
unwieldy as a log. A light wind blew up-stream, and the current was very
slow. After dark we caught up with Bill and Frank, who had supper
waiting. I had been tasting venison all day; but there was none for
supper. In spite of a night's smoking, all of it had spoiled. This left
us without meat. Our provisions now consisted mostly of flour. We had a
few potatoes and some toasted wind called "breakfast food." During six
or seven hours of hard work at the paddles, we had covered no more than
fifteen miles. These facts put together gave no promising result. In
addition to this, it was impossible to stir up a song. Even the liquor
wouldn't bring it out. And the flapjacks were not served _a la
chansonnette_ that night. I tried to explain why the trip was only
beginning to get interesting; but my words fell flat. And when the
irrepressible Kid essayed a joke, I alone laughed at it, though rather
out of gratitude than mirth.

[Illustration: "WALKING" BOATS OVER SHALLOWS.]

[Illustration: TYPICAL UPPER MISSOURI RIVER REACH.]

[Illustration: THE MOUTH OF THE JAMES.]

There are many men who live and die with the undisputed reputation of
being good fellows--your friends and mine--who, if put to the test,
would fail miserably. Fortunate is that man to whom it is not given to
test all of his friends. This is not cynicism; it is only human nature;
and I love human nature, being myself possessed of so much of it. I
admire it when it stands firmly upon its legs, and I love it when it
wabbles. But when it gains power with increasing odds, grows big with
obstacles, I worship it.

"To thrill with the joy of girded men,
To go on forever and fail, and go on again--
With the half of a broken hope for a pillow at night--"

Thus it should have been. But that night, staring into the face of three
of the four, I saw the yellow streak. The Kid was not one of the three.
The first railroad station would hold out no temptation to him. He was a
kid, but manhood has little to do with age. It must exist from the
first like a tang of iron in the blood. Age does not really create
anything--it only develops. Your wonderful and beautiful things often
come as paradoxes. I looked for a man and found him in a boy.

Bill talked about home and stared into the twilight. The "floaters" were
irritable, quarreling with the fire, the grub, the cooking-utensils, and
verbally sending the engine to the devil.

Seeing about eighteen hundred miles of paddle work ahead, knowing that
at that season of the year the prevailing winds would be head winds, and
having very little faith in the engine under any conditions, I decided
to travel day and night, for the water was falling steadily and already
the channels were at times hard to find. Charley and Frank grumbled. I
told them we would split the grub fairly, a fifth to a man, and that
they might travel as slowly as they liked, the skiff being their
property. They stayed with us.

We lashed the boats together and put off into the slow current. A
haggard, eerie fragment of moon slinked westward. Stars glinted in the
flawless chilly blue. The surface of the river was like polished
ebony--a dream-path wrought of gloom and gleam. The banks were lines of
dusk, except where some lone cottonwood loomed skyward like a giant
ghost clothed with a mantle that glistered and darkled in the chill
star-sheen.

There was the feel of moving in eternity about it all. The very
limitation of the dusk gave the feeling of immensity. There was no sense
of motion, yet we moved. The sky seemed as much below as above. We
seemed suspended in a hollow globe. Now and then the boom of a diving
beaver's tail accented the clinging quiet; and by fits the drowsy
muttering of waterfowl awoke in the adjacent swamps, and droned back
into the universal hush.

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