C Ihe Ladies c cu. V'VVAN - History and Classics, Department of

Down the Porcupine 147and to eat hearty meals of pork and doughnuts and that we had to watch out fortroubled water and for snags.Realising that we had to depend on our own exertions had steadied my nerves.Whenever there were frequent bends in the river, one of us would always be onthe lookout for snags and boulders while the other paddled. Sometimes therewere rough patches of water to negotiate, swift or swirling currents, and sometimes,when we saw sand-bars ahead, one of us would land and scan theobstructions through field glasses and plot our forward course. Once when I waspaddling, we passed under a bank hollowed out by fallen lumps of frozen soil andwere suddenly confronted with a dead tree branch sticking up in the deep water."Backwater," shouted Gwen and I failed to respond, for it seemed to me that wewere back-watering all the time, with our single paddle stroke, and my mind didnot work quickly enough. However, we went swirling down and missed the tree byinches. "Landlubber!" was all that Gwen said and indeed I was surprised that shesaid nothing worse until I remembered that, to her seafaring mind, there couldbe nothing worse than a landlubber.Soon after that incident the river straightened out and everything around usseemed to have become immeasurably vast. The forest stretched away to theNorth Pole, the hills were interfolded endlessly and the straight reaches of theriver must, in some places, have been six or eight miles long. Sometimes, whenlooking ahead down one of these reaches that were green in the morning, goldunder noonday sun and burnished gold in the evening, we felt that the currentmust be taking us down to bottomless gorges or to cataracts like Niagara. It waslike a dream in which everything had begun to swell, to extend and to deepen inall directions.It was very difficult to judge our speed when travelling downstream. Thecurrent seemed to be running at about two or three miles an hour and often wejust steered and drifted instead of paddling. We had short hours of travel, weslept long nights, we lingered over meals and sometimes went ashore betweenmeals for Gwen to sketch while I prowled about and collected flowers. Often thatglassy water seemed so still that we did not appear to be moving, and only when welooked at the banks did we realise that the current was alive. So we went down,down, on that green or golden river into unknown country. Sometimes therewere echoes. A swan would go honking overhead and the trees would echo thesound back again. Or a northern raven would fly croaking into the forest and