‘But what I particularly want to know is, if I have got to keep up an
everlasting measuring of the banks of this river, twelve hundred miles,
month in and month out?’
‘Of course!’
My emotions were too deep for words for a while.
Presently I said–‘
And how about these chutes. Are there many of them?’
‘I should say so. I fancy we shan’t run any of the river this trip
as you’ve ever seen it run before–so to speak. If the river begins
to rise again, we’ll go up behind bars that you’ve always seen
standing out of the river, high and dry like the roof of a house;
we’ll cut across low places that you’ve never noticed at all,
right through the middle of bars that cover three hundred acres of river;
we’ll creep through cracks where you’ve always thought was solid land;
we’ll dart through the woods and leave twenty-five miles of river
off to one side; we’ll see the hind-side of every island between New
Orleans and Cairo.’
‘Then I’ve got to go to work and learn just as much more river
as I already know.’
‘Just about twice as much more, as near as you can come at it.’
‘Well, one lives to find out. I think I was a fool when I went
into this business.’
‘Yes, that is true. And you are yet. But you’ll not be
when you’ve learned it.’
‘Ah, I never can learn it.’
‘I will see that you DO.’
By and by I ventured again–
‘Have I got to learn all this thing just as I know the rest of the river–
shapes and all–and so I can run it at night?’
‘Yes. And you’ve got to have good fair marks from one end
of the river to the other, that will help the bank tell you
when there is water enough in each of these countless places–
like that stump, you know. When the river first begins
to rise, you can run half a dozen of the deepest of them;
when it rises a foot more you can run another dozen;
the next foot will add a couple of dozen, and so on:
so you see you have to know your banks and marks to a dead
moral certainty, and never get them mixed; for when you start
through one of those cracks, there’s no backing out again,
as there is in the big river; you’ve got to go through,
or stay there six months if you get caught on a falling river.
There are about fifty of these cracks which you can’t run at all
except when the river is brim full and over the banks.’
‘This new lesson is a cheerful prospect.’
‘Cheerful enough. And mind what I’ve just told you; when you
start into one of those places you’ve got to go through.
They are too narrow to turn around in, too crooked to back out of,
and the shoal water is always up at the head; never elsewhere.
And the head of them is always likely to be filling up, little by little,
so that the marks you reckon their depth by, this season, may not
answer for next.’
‘Learn a new set, then, every year?’
‘Exactly. Cramp her up to the bar! What are you standing up
through the middle of the river for?’
The next few months showed me strange things. On the same day that we held
the conversation above narrated, we met a great rise coming down the river.
The whole vast face of the stream was black with drifting dead logs,
broken boughs, and great trees that had caved in and been washed away.
It required the nicest steering to pick one’s way through this
rushing raft, even in the day-time, when crossing from point to point;
and at night the difficulty was mightily increased; every now and then
a huge log, lying deep in the water, would suddenly appear right
under our bows, coming head-on; no use to try to avoid it then;
we could only stop the engines, and one wheel would walk over that log
from one end to the other, keeping up a thundering racket and careening