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On our way to God's Lake we had considerable sport in the way of shooting white-water. One morning we landed at the head of a portage, and, as the rapid was not a dangerous one, Oo-koo-hoo and Amik determined to run it, but first went ashore to examine the channel.
Here were the best of the Fighting Forty, men with a reputation as "white-water birlers" men afraid of nothing. Every morning the crews were divided into two sections under Kerlie and Jack Hyland. Each crew had charge of one side of the river, with the task of cleaning it thoroughly of all stranded and entangled logs. Scotty Parsons exercised a general supervisory eye over both crews.
His was nothing of the rugged candour of MacNair the bluff straightforwardness that overrides opposition; ignores criticism. MacNair fitted the North the big, brutal, insatiate North the North of storms, of cold and fighting things; of foaming, roaring white-water and seething, blinding blizzards.
Beside him sat Jeanne, apparently deeply engrossed in the embroidering of a buckskin hunting-shirt. After a long silence Bill knocked the dead ashes from his pipe, and his jaw squared as he looked out over the foaming white-water. He turned toward the girl and encountered the intense gaze of her dark eyes.
A shifting that indicated Vermilion was selecting the crew of his own scow with an eye to a purpose a purpose that had not altogether to do with the scow's safe conduct through white-water.
The dull roar changed to a mighty bellow where the high-tossed white-water leaped high among the submerged rocks of the rapid, and above its thunder sounded the heavy rumble of the shock and grind of thousands of wildly pitching logs. Only for a moment did he gaze out over the heaving forefront of the drive.
Stromberg had banked the bird's-eye to his own satisfaction, and Moncrossen selected his crew for the drive white-water men, whose boast it was that they never had walked a foot from the timber to the mills; bateau men, who laughed in the face of death as they swarmed over a jam; key-log men, who scorned dynamite; bend watchers, whose duty it is to stay awake through the long, warm days and prevent the formation of jams as the drive shoots by each selected with an eye to previous experience and physical fitness.
All its wide and lazy waters now issued with great force through a deep, narrow channel scarcely sixty yards wide, falling nearly twice that distance in less than a mile. The result was a horrific, white-water chute, now drawing them swiftly to itself. Kalus' harsh voice cut through the growing roar. 'Tie down the cub, he commanded, 'And then yourself.
And while he was at it, Orde kept his men busy and satisfied. Your white-water birler is not an easy citizen to handle. Yet never once did the boss appear hurried or flustered. Always he wandered about, his hands in his pockets, chewing a twig, his round, wind-reddened face puckered humorously, his blue eyes twinkling, his square, burly form lazily relaxed.
Far up the stream the surface seemed solid with logs, and here and there he could make out moving figures tiny and frail they looked, like strange, misshapen insects, as they leaped from log to rolling log the white-water men of the North. "It's the drive!" he cried excitedly. "My drive! Come, pole for your life we've got to work her across!"
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