IN A FISHING COUNTRY 



'But you are alive today — not a ghost 1 

 How. . . ?' 



'I paddled for the centre of the fall as 

 never in my life. Where the water curves 

 the canoe shot straight out. It landed be- 

 low on an even keel and broke in two, but 

 it carried me just so far that I was not 

 sucked back and under. The river threw 

 me this way and that, and when an eddy 

 swung me near the shore I still had force 

 to clutch the branch of a tree. . .they found 

 me there.' 



'Yes, others have been caught; the water 

 is so smooth that it tricks you. But no one 

 ever had my good fortune.' 



. . .Death laying against the field. . .the 

 odds taken in this instant desperate resolve 

 . . .heart and nerve fail him not, nor. crack- 

 ing sinew. . . his paddle tears the dark 

 water into foam... the bark cleaves un- 

 swervingly for the glassy cur>ve — ever 

 forming — vanishing. . .flies the stark face 

 above it down to the thunder and the 

 mist. . . 



On that trip, or another, his party was 

 wind-bound on its way to the coast — mid- 

 way on the shore of a lake near a hundred 

 miles long which narrowed, for a little 

 distance, to ten miles where they came out 

 184 



