airly smooth descent, and
saw what it means to stand at the wheel through that treacherous
channel, I found my wonder growing. I thought of the lion-tamer, whose
skill is shown not so much by what happens while he is in the cage as by
what does not happen. A hundred ways there are of doing the wrong thing
with one of these boats, and only a single way of doing the right
thing. For four miles the pilot must race along a squirming, twisting,
plunging thread of water, that leaps ahead like a greyhound, and changes
its crookedness somewhat from day to day with wind and tide. In that
thread alone is safety; elsewhere is ruin and wreck. Instantly he must
read the message of a boiling eddy or the menace of a beckoning reef,
and take it this way or that instantly, for there are the hungry rocks
on either hand. He must know things without seeing them; must feel the
pulse of the rapids, as it were, so that when a mist clouds his view, or
the shine of a low-hung rainbow dazzles him, he may still go right. It
is a fact that with all the pilots in this pilot-land, and all the hardy
watermen born and brought up on the St. Lawrence, there are not
ten--perhaps not six--men in Canada to-day, French or English or Indian,
who would dare this peril. For all other rapids of the route, the
Gallop Rapids, the Split-rock Rapids, the Cascades, and the rest, there
are pilots in plenty; but not for those of Lachine. And, to use the same
simile again, I saw that the shooting of these Lachine Rapids is like
the taming of a particularly fierce lion; it is a business by itself
that few men care to undertake.

So it came that I sought out one of these few, Fred Ouillette, pilot and
son of a pilot, an idol in the company's eyes, a hero to the boys of
Montreal, a figure to be stared at always by anxious passengers as he
peers through the window atop the forward deck, a man whom people point
to as he passes: "There's the fellow that took us through the rapids.
That's Ouillette." This unsought notoriety has made him shy. He does not
like to talk about his work or tell you how it feels to do this thing. A
dash of Indian blood is in him, with some of the silent, stoic, Indian
nature. Yet certain facts he vouchsafed, when I went to his home, that
help one to an understanding of the pilot's life.

He emphasized this, for instance, as essential in a man who would face
that fury of waters, he must not be afraid. One would say that the
rapids feel where the mas