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Quarter of an hour sufficed to bring us to the over-hanging cliff under whose black shadow our little canoe lay, with her bow in the water ready to be launched, and most of her cargo already stowed away. As the keel of our little boat grated on the sand, a hand was laid upon the bow, and a dim form was seen. "Ha!" said Peterkin in a whisper, as he stepped upon the beach, "is that you, Avatea?"
In another moment I was beneath it, and Chu Chu shot like a rocket into the air. I had barely time to withdraw my feet from the stirrups, to throw up one arm to protect my glazed sombrero and grasp an over-hanging branch with the other, before Chu Chu darted off.
I have tried to convey to you a notion of the falling impetus impressed on the surface of the Jan Mayen ice rivers; but in this case so unaccountable did it seem that the over-hanging mass of ice should not continue to thunder down upon its course, that one's natural impulse was to shrink from crossing the path along which a breath a sound might precipitate the suspended avalanche into the valley.
They had nibbled away at the lower part of these stacks until there was a sheltered place underneath. The Calves liked to stand on the sunshiny side with an over-hanging ledge of straw above their heads. The wind did not strike them here, and they could reach up and pull out wisps to eat when they had nothing else to do. Not that they were so fond of eating straw, but it was fun to pull it out.
Across the rubble-covered flats, up the dark canyon to Sheep Camp, past the over-hanging and ever-threatening glaciers to the Scales, and from the Scales up the steep pitches of ice-scoured rock where packers climbed with hands and feet, Old Tarwater camp-cooked and packed and sang. He blew across Chilcoot Pass, above timberline, in the first swirl of autumn snow.
An ash-pole was driven into the snow and the last few members sent down in a bowline at one end of the rope whilst we below eased them down with the other part. The two parts of the Alpine rope working round the pole cut deeply into the over-hanging snow and brought a shower of ice crystals pouring over the heads and shoulders of whoever was sitting in the bowline.
"Maybe they are not our company, at all, but some ranchers riding that way," suggested Eleanor, fearfully. "Ranchers seldom ride that trail, and never on Sundays. Now look!" said Polly. The three horses had stopped and soon, one rider was seen going along the trail to Oak Creek, while the other two turned in at the gulch trail and disappeared under the giant over-hanging rocks.
Sometimes the boat fought the mid-stream current, with a verdant world on either hand, and remote from both; sometimes she closed in under a point, where the dead water and the helping eddies were, and shaved the bank so closely that the decks were swept by the jungle of over-hanging willows and littered with a spoil of leaves; departing from these "points" she regularly crossed the river every five miles, avoiding the "bight" of the great binds and thus escaping the strong current; sometimes she went out and skirted a high "bluff" sand-bar in the middle of the stream, and occasionally followed it up a little too far and touched upon the shoal water at its head and then the intelligent craft refused to run herself aground, but "smelt" the bar, and straightway the foamy streak that streamed away from her bows vanished, a great foamless wave rolled forward and passed her under way, and in this instant she leaned far over on her side, shied from the bar and fled square away from the danger like a frightened thing and the pilot was lucky if he managed to "straighten her up" before she drove her nose into the opposite bank; sometimes she approached a solid wall of tall trees as if she meant to break through it, but all of a sudden a little crack would open just enough to admit her, and away she would go plowing through the "chute" with just barely room enough between the island on one side and the main land on the other; in this sluggish water she seemed to go like a racehorse; now and then small log cabins appeared in little clearings, with the never-failing frowsy women and girls in soiled and faded linsey-woolsey leaning in the doors or against woodpiles and rail fences, gazing sleepily at the passing show; sometimes she found shoal water, going out at the head of those "chutes" or crossing the river, and then a deck-hand stood on the bow and hove the lead, while the boat slowed down and moved cautiously; sometimes she stopped a moment at a landing and took on some freight or a passenger while a crowd of slouchy white men and negroes stood on the bank and looked sleepily on with their hands in their pantaloons pockets, of course for they never took them out except to stretch, and when they did this they squirmed about and reached their fists up into the air and lifted themselves on tip-toe in an ecstasy of enjoyment.
"It is not so easy getting near the guanaco. He is among the shyest game I have ever hunted, and his position is usually so far above that of the hunter, that he commands at all times a view of the movements of the latter. The over-hanging rocks, however, help one a little, and by diligent creeping he is sometimes approached.
It was a place to quicken the heart and tongue of any wooer. The breezes moved pensively and without a sound. On the middle surface of the water the sunshine lay in wide bands, liquid-bordered under over-hanging boughs by glimmering shadows that wove lace in their sleep.
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