With a weary sigh we dropped our boats to the head of the rapid and prepared to make the portage.  Our previous work was as nothing to this.  Rounded limestone boulders, hard as flint and covered with a thin slime of mud from the recent rise, caused us to slip and fall many times.  Then we dragged ourselves and loads up the sloping walls.  They were cut with gullies from the recent rains; low scraggy cedars caught at our loads, or tore our clothes, as we staggered along; the muddy earth stuck to our shoes, or caused our feet to slip from under us as we climbed, first two or three hundred feet above the water, then close to the river’s edge.  Three-fourths of a mile of such work brought us a level place below the rapid.  It took nine loads to empty one boat.

Darkness came on before our boats were emptied, so they were securely tied in quiet water at the head of the rapid, and left for the morning.

The next day found Emery and me at work on the boats, while Jimmy was stationed on the shore with the motion-picture camera.  This wild scene, with its score of shooting currents, was too good a view to miss.  With life-preservers inflated and adjusted, Emery sat in the boat at the oars, pulling against the current, lessening the velocity with which the boat was carried down toward the main barrier, while I followed on the shore, holding a rope, and dropped him down, a little at a time, until the water became too rough and the rocks too numerous.  All directions were given with signals; the human voice was of little avail in the turmoil.  We kept the boats in the water as long as it was safe to do so, for it greatly lessened the hard work of a portage.  With one end of the boat floating on the water, an ordinary lift would take the other end over a rock with insufficient water above it to float the boat.  Then the boat was balanced on the rock, the opposite end was lifted, she was shoved forward and dropped in the water again and another threatening rock was passed.  Foot by foot we fought our way, now on the shore, now waist deep in the water below some protecting boulder, threatened every moment by the whirling water that struggled to drag us into the torrent.  The sand and water collecting in our clothes weighted us down; the chill of standing in the cold water numbed our limbs.  Finally the barrier was reached and the boats were run out close to the end, and tied in a quiet pool, while we devised some method of getting them past or over this obstruction.

Directly underneath and beyond the roots of the tree were large rounded boulders, covered with slippery mud.  Past this barrier the full force of the water raced, to hurl itself and divide its current against another rock.  It was useless to try to take a boat around the end of the rock.  The boat’s sides, three-eighths of an inch thick, would be crushed like a cardboard box.  If lifted into the V-shaped groove, the weight of the boats would wedge them and crush their sides.  Fortunately an upright log was found tightly wedged between these boulders.  A strong limb, with one end resting on a rock opposite, was nailed to this log; a triangle of stout sticks, with the point down, was placed opposite this first limb, on the same level, and was fastened to the upright log with still another piece; and another difficulty was overcome.