Survivor: The Autobiography (34 page)

Two days later we reached the little seaport of Banana and at dusk our strange fleet, which had set out almost four months before in the centre of Africa, sailed into the setting sun. Basil, in cassock and surplice, held an improvised cross and beneath the flags of the nations represented in our team, he conducted a simple service. Under our hulls the water heaved gently. Strangely, it no longer tugged and pulled at us; there was no current, for we were now in the Atlantic.

With the outboards repaired and Bryn looking happier, we set out from Russian Mission [Alaska] on a blustery morning. I noticed with surprise that no boats were out or about, nor was there any other sign of life. This was especially strange since it was the middle of the salmon run, the short annual period when a healthy income could be made on the river.

I received some nasty little shocks during the morning and took quite a bit of water in the aluminium boat. The inflatables could happily fill to the brim with water and carry on floating high, but any water in my dinghy had to be removed at once. Draining was only possible when moving fast enough to tip the bows up, then a clumsy wooden bung could be removed from a hole near the base of the transom. Unless the plug was replaced after draining, this hole could cause the boat to leak rapidly as soon as she slowed down and returned to a level plane. Lose the bung and things could get tricky.

Until noon the confused state of the river made me cautious but not alarmed. I noticed a pall of dust in the sky further upriver but when we reached the area where I thought I had seen it, there was nothing there. Just a trick of the light it seemed.

But some fifteen miles short of Holy Cross we entered a long narrow valley heavily forested on either side where the dust cloud effect was again evident. At the entrance to the valley an Eskimo fishing village nestled on one bank, its river boats drawn well up above the shingle bank. Two men watched us pass. I waved. There was no response but a slight shaking of the head from the older of the two.

The water began to careen about, striking with miniature breakers against the rock walls on the rim of each minor curve. But still I felt no undue threat beyond the normal swell and undulation of the great river’s forces. As I nosed further out into the northerly-bearing valley, an unseen surge moved against the right side of my boat and almost tipped me off my plank seat by the tiller.

With little warning, waves unlike any I had seen except in sizeable rapids seemed to grow out of the water like boils erupting from the riverbed. Breaking into a sweat, for I have a healthy fear of rough water, I steered quickly for the nearest bank. This was unfortunately the ‘cut’ bank, indicating that side of the river where the faster current runs. ‘Lee’ banks are very often low and dressed with gentle sand slopes for there the water is quiet. Where the river flows down a straight stretch, cut and lee banks may alternate on either side depending on the configuration of the riverbed.

Dust clouds emanated from the cut bank as I made to escape the central turmoil. It was as though a dragon breathed there. As I closed with the bank, a pine tree toppled over and crashed into the river. Then another and, with it, a whole section of the bank itself collapsed. The roar of my outboard drowned all other sounds and the forces of destruction which gnawed at the river’s banks operated in silence as far as I was concerned. This added to the sinister, almost slow-motion appearance of the phenomenon, for such it was to me. I could not at the time grasp what was happening. I had, after all, boated up or down thousands of miles of wild rivers in North America and never once experienced this. Also, my private, long-nurtured idea of the Yukon was of a slow wide river as gentle as the Thames.

Above the collapsed bank I saw that the forest, from undergrowth to the very tops of the giant pines, was bent over and alive with movement. A great wind was at work, although in my hooded suit on the boat I could feel nothing.

For a moment I hovered in indecision. The waves in the middle of the river, some 600 yards wide at this point, were totally uninviting yet any minute my boat was liable to disappear under a falling pine, should I remain close in. There was no question of landing. No question of trying to turn broadside on and then head back downstream. My boat climbed and fell like a wild thing; shook as though in a mastiff’s jaws, then veered towards the crumbling cut bank in response to unseen suction.

Ahead the river narrowed into a bottleneck, the banks grew steeper and the chaotic waves of the river’s spine here extended almost clear across our front. Between standing waves and crumbling bank, I glimpsed a sag in the water. It was fleetingly possible to see the river actually mounting in height the further away it was from the bank. I had often heard that the centre of a river can be several feet higher than at the edges given sufficient flow and force, but never before had I clearly viewed the effect. It was distinctly off-putting.

I pushed with both hands on the tiller and the boat, reluctantly, edged away from the cut bank and began to head obliquely across the river. Perhaps things were better on the far side. But to get there I had to pass through the middle of the river, where the turbulence was greatest and the hydraulic waves so close together that my boat no sooner fell down the face of one than the next raced curling above me. It needed just one brief error on the tiller and I would add critically to the ten inches of silt-laden water already swilling around my feet. I would sink within seconds.

From the corner of my eye I noticed Bryn had seen my dilemma and moved his inflatable as close as the turmoil allowed. When I sink, I thought, Bryn’s boat will be my only chance. ‘As big as houses’ I remembered the state trooper’s warning. I could see why such an exaggeration might come about. These waves were no more than four or five feet high yet their configuration, violence and closeness would make any local riverboat a death trap for its inmates.

Before another wave could swamp my wallowing craft I turned broadside on to the hydraulics, applied full throttle and headed straight into the maelstrom in the centre of the river. Whether sheer luck or the shape of the waves saved me I do not know, but no more water came inboard. Much of the time it was like surfriding along the forward face of a breaker, then a violent incline and sideways surge as the old wave passed beneath and the next one thrust at the little tin hull.

An edge of exhilaration broke through the sticky fear which till then held me in thrall. For the first time since entering the turbulence I realised there was a chance of getting through and began to experience the old thrill of rapids riding from the days long past when we had tackled far greater waves from the comparative safety of unsinkable inflatables.

How long it took to cross the river was impossible to gauge but gradually the waves grew less fierce and less close and then there was quiet water but for the outwash from the rough stuff. Ahead I could see, between waves and lee bank, a lane of smooth water edged by sand. Bryn and then Charlie emerged from the waves like bucking broncos. Both were smiling for my narrow escape had not gone unnoticed.

There were other stretches where conditions were tricky but never a patch on that first windy valley. That night we stopped in Holy Cross and the keeper of the travellers’ lodge, Luke Demientieff, told us we were lucky to be alive. We had been travelling north in the first big southerly blow of the year in winds exceeding seventy knots.

‘Even paddle steamers,’ he said, ‘would not, in the old days, venture at such a time.’

We had covered the worst stretch of the river in the worst possible conditions and, as far as the riverside folk were concerned, we were quite mad. When I asked him how anyone should know or care that we had passed, Luke said: ‘It only needs one pair of eyes from one riverside shack to see you go by for the radio phones all along the river to start buzzing. When you passed the old huts at Paimuit and entered the slough by Great Paimuit Island the word was about you were goners.’ He paused and added with a chuckle, ‘Still we’re pleased you made it to the lodge after all. Business has been poor lately.’

The day was now declining apace, and the Indian had made his instrument to take the cayman. It was very simple. There were four pieces of tough hard wood, a foot long, and about as thick as your little finger, and barbed at both ends; they were tied round the end of the rope, in such a manner, that if you conceive the rope to be an arrow, these four sticks would form the arrow’s head; so that one end of the four united sticks answered to the point of the arrowhead, while the other ends of the sticks expanded at equal distances round the rope. Now it is evident that, if the cayman swallowed this (the other end of the rope, which was thirty yards long, being fastened to a tree), the more he pulled, the faster the barbs would stick into his stomach. This wooden hook, if you may so call it, was well baited with the flesh of the acouri, and the entrails were twisted round the rope for about a foot above it.

Nearly a mile from where we had our hammocks, the sandbank was steep and abrupt, and the river very still and deep; there the Indian pricked a stick into the sand. It was two feet long, and on its extremity was fixed the machine; it hung suspended about a foot from the water, and the end of the rope was made fast to a stake driven well into the sand.

The Indian then took the empty shell of a land tortoise and gave it some heavy blows with an axe. I asked him why he did that. He said it was to let the cayman hear that something was going on. In fact the Indian meant it as the cayman’s dinner-bell. Having done this, we went back to the hammocks, not intending to visit it again till morning. During the night, the jaguars roared and grumbled in the forest, as though the world was going wrong with them, and at intervals we could hear the distant cayman. The roaring of the jaguars was awful; but it was music to the dismal noise of these hideous and malicious reptiles.

About half past five in the morning the Indian stole off silently to take a look at the bait. On arriving at the place he set up a tremendous shout. We all jumped out of our hammocks and ran to him. The Indians got there before me, for they had no clothes to put on, and I lost two minutes in looking for my trousers and in slipping into them.

We found a cayman, ten feet and a half long, fast to the end of the rope. Nothing now remained to do but to get him out of the water without injuring his scales –
hoc opus, hic labor
. We mustered strong: there were three Indians from the creek; there were my own Indian Yan, Daddy Quashi, the negro from Mrs Peterson’s, James, Mr R. Edmonstone’s man, whom I was instructing to preserve birds, and, lastly, myself.

I informed the Indians that it was my intention to draw him quietly out of the water, and then secure him. They looked and stared at each other, and said I might do it myself, but they would have no hand in it; the cayman would worry some of us. On saying this,
consedere duces
, they squatted on their hams with the most perfect indifference.

The Indians of these wilds have never been subject to the least restraint, and I knew enough of them to be aware that if I tried to force them against their will they would take off, and leave me and my presents unheeded, and never return.

Daddy Quashi was for applying to our guns, as usual, considering them our best and safest friends. I immediately offered to knock him down for his cowardice, and he shrank back, begging that I would be cautious, and not get myself worried, and apologizing for his own want of resolution. My Indian was now in conversation with the others, and they asked if I would allow them to shoot a dozen arrows into the cayman, and thus disable him. This would have ruined all. I had come above three hundred miles on purpose to get a cayman uninjured, and not to carry back a mutilated specimen. I rejected their proposition with firmness, and darted a disdainful eye upon the Indians.