Down the Great Unknown by Edward Dolnick Read Free Book Online Page B

were under way by six in the morning and made it until about nine-thirty before running into trouble. Then Powell ran aground on a sandbar and, before he had time to signal, so did the next boat and the one behind that. Bradley, trailing the others, just managed to steer to the right and sneak by. Two of the men jumped out of their boats and pushed everyone free.
    They continued downstream for another hour. The rain continued to pelt down, and the men pulled ashore to try to wait it out. By this point, everyone was “wet, chilled, and tired to exhaustion,” Powell wrote, but with the help of a roaring fire and many cups of coffee they were soon “refreshed and quite merry.” (They also cooked up some “villainous bacon,” as Sumner put it, but that was less satisfactory.) When the sky looked as if it might clear, they set out again. After five or six miles, they saw some bighorn sheep on a cliffside and stopped to give chase. Two or three hours later, the hunters straggled home empty-handed. Only Hawkins had not struck out completely. He had found a sleeping lamb, which he had caught by the heels and thrown off the cliff, toward camp. The hunters consoled themselves for their failure by teasing Hawkins—they pretended to believe that the lamb was dead when he found it—but they all agreed it made a fine lunch.
    It was now about four in the afternoon, time to move on. All the boats except Kitty Clyde’s Sister soon ran aground on another sandbar and found themselves unable to budge. Bradley and Walter Powell managed to plant the Maid so firmly they had to pry her off with oars. It took “a great deal of tall lifting and tugging” to get free, Bradley wrote, which was especially irksome because Powell had given a danger signal and Bradley had decided to ignore it.
    Their third day was another fairly easy one, noteworthy only for an entry in Bradley’s journal. They had encountered, he wrote, “the largest and most difficult rapid yet seen.” From here on, Bradley’s diary would be dotted with similar observations, as if to convince himself that this time they must have taken the river’s worst blow. Sumner, no more inclined to bluster than the hard-to-faze Bradley, was just as impressed by the rapid. “It cannot be navigated by any boat with safety, in the main channel,” he wrote, though it was possible to hug the bank and scoot by safely.
    Three of the boats made it through in fine fashion, but Hawkins and Hall, in the Sister (the shortened name they used for their boat) found themselves pinned on a rock. Hawkins climbed overboard and managed to pry the boat free. “No injury done except one man took a bath ,” Bradley noted unsympathetically. The rain, which had continued throughout the day, kept up at night, but no one paid it much heed. The hunters, for once, had something to show for their efforts, and everyone tucked happily into an excellent dinner of duck and goose.
    There was no great significance to running aground. Heavy boats moving fast on low water might almost be expected to beach themselves. But in pinning the Sister to a rock, even if only briefly, the river had provided a far more telling warning of the havoc it could unleash at any moment. It happens in an instant—one minute a boat is racing along and then, suddenly, it is sideways to the current, wrapped against a rock or another obstacle, and helpless. The river holds the boat in place with overwhelming force, like a sumo wrestler smothering a kitten. Worse still, it perpetually replaces itself as it flows, so that there is no wriggling out from under. A kitten might claw or bite a wrestler and sneak away in the ensuing confusion, but a river never “shifts its weight.” It simply persists in its assault, unceasingly and unforgivingly, until the obstacle in its way is an obstacle no longer.
    â€œWrapping is, in the estimation of many, the worst fate that can