tery is, whether with them or with the pilot,
and woe to him if pounding heart or wavering hand betray him. The rapids
will have no mercy. And there are pilots, it appears, who know the
Lachine Rapids, every foot of them, and could do Ouillette's work
perfectly if Ouillette were standing near, yet would fail utterly if
left alone. Every danger they can overcome but the one that lies in
themselves. They cannot brave their own fear. He cited the case of a
pilot's son who had worked in the Lachine Rapids for years, helping his
father, and learned the river as well as a man can know it. At the old
man's death, this son announced that he would take his father's place,
and shoot the rapids as they always had done; yet a season passed, then
a second season, and always he postponed beginning, and, with one excuse
or another, took his boats through the Lachine Canal, a safe but tame
short cut, not likely to draw tourists.
"Not start heem right, that fadder," said Ouillette. "Now too late. Now
nevair he can learn heem right."
"Why, how should he have started him?" I asked.
"Same way like my fadder start me." And then, in his jerky Canadian
speech, he explained how this was.
Ouillette went back to his own young manhood, to the years when he, too,
stood by his father's side and watched him take the big boats down. What
a picture he drew in his queer, rugged phrases! I could see the old
pilot braced at the six-foot wheel, with three men in oilskins standing
by to help him put her over, Fred one of the three. And it was "Hip!"
"Bas!" "Hip!" "Bas!" ("Up!" "Down!" "Up!" "Down!") until the increasing
roar of the cataract drowned all words, and then it was a jerk of
shoulders or head, this way or that, while the men strained at the
spokes. Never once was the wheel at rest after they entered the rapids,
but spinning, spinning always, while the boat shot like a snake through
black rocks and churning chasms.
[Illustration: FRED OUILLETTE, THE YOUNG PILOT.]
They used to take the boats--as Ouillette takes them still--at Cornwall,
sixty miles up the river, and, before coming to Lachine, they would
shoot the swift Coteau Rapids, where many a life has gone, then the
terrifying Cedar Rapids, which seem the most dangerous of all, and
finally, the Split-rock Rapids, which some say are the most dangerous.
And each year, as the season opened, Fred would ask his father to let
him take the wheel some day when the river was high and the rock
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