“Shit, it made sense!” someone called out. “You was the youngest, boy!”
“So we figgered you was the best’un to try that hellhole river run,” another added.
A new voice bellowed, “If’n you didn’t come back—weren’t no sad loss, you being the sprout of the brigade!”
With a shrug at all the abuse he was taking, Bridger continued, “Don’t make me no never-mind now that I didn’t know they figgered it to be a damn lark they was putting me up to … that trip sounded like it’d be just the chance to pull the tiger’s tail.”
One of the older, grizzle-bearded trappers declared, “Young’uns like Bridger allays wanna be first to pull on a tiger’s tail!”
“Better’n sitting in winter camp all day, ever’ day,” Jim continued. “So I told ’em I’d settle their li’l argeement.”
“Not one of these here gaping fools figgered Jim were serious,” Fitzpatrick added. “Till next morning when they rolled outta their bed-shucks and found Bridger building hisself a boat.”
“A b-boat?” Tuttle asked in surprise.
“T’weren’t no big shakes—nothing more’n some stout willow branches I chopped down, just the way I’d watched the Injun squaws do it.”
An apt and eager student, Bridger had relished this opportunity to try his own hand at building a bullboat. Driving the butt-ends of the willow into the ground around a four-to-five-foot circle, he bent the limbs over and tied all their narrow ends together to form something on the order of an upside-down basket.
“I tried to talk the fool out of it,” Fitzpatrick explained.
“And some of the rest of us too,” another claimed, “when we saw he’d got hisself serious ’bout going into that devil’s canyon.”
“You get that, boys? That morning while’st I was working on my boat, a handful of the ones what talked me into going come up to try talking me into not going,” Bridger explained. “ ‘What, you’re crazy as a March hare, young’un!’ said one of ’em to me. ‘Why, you don’t even know if’n you can find your way back here to us!’ said ’nother. ‘How ’bout waterfalls—likely you’ll drown like a rat!’ Then ’nother of ’em warned me, ‘How ’bout the Injuns? By God, you don’t know a damned thing about what Injuns is in that country!’ ”
Fitzpatrick added, “And I told Jim it didn’t matter a twit about which way the river goes anyhow.”
“Didn’t make me no never-mind,” Bridger said. “I kept my hands busy. Far better, I figgered, to be going somewhere. Not like the rest of them what were having their fun with me—all they was doing was sitting on their arses in camp.”
As the others laughed in agreement, Jim continued his story, telling how he had woven smaller willow limbs among the thicker ones, lashing each loop to make the framework as strong as he possibly could before he took a green buffalo hide and laid it over his small dome—hide to the inside. Then the detailed work began: sewing the buffalo skin to that willow framework, binding it all around the edge of that circular opening.
“By that next night I was ready to make her seaworthy,” Jim boasted proudly.
At a cookfire he heated up a large kettle of tallow rendered from a bear recently shot while he built himself a small fire over which he set the upside-down boat. When the hide grew hot to the touch, Bridger took a small wooden spoon and began to smear the melted tallow over every seam and stitch and hole in that buffalo hide. That done, it was time to let his craftsmanship cool and harden.
“At sunup the following morning, I cut me as long a pole as I could find,” Jim told the group. “Something to push along again’ the bottom with, or shove me away from the rocks in the canyon, if that need be.”
“I give him one last chance to stay back,” Fitzpatrick stated with a shrug. “But he was bound to go, no matter what. I figgered I’d seen the last of the lad.”
Bridger continued, “Got my rifle an’ pouch, strapped on tomahawk and knife, then throwed in a big sack of some dried buffler meat—an I pulled that boat on over to the river.”
Potts shook his head, saying, “We all thought we was seein’ the last of Jim Bridger.”
Finally in the river, he slipped away slowly at first. Jim waved to the men on the bank and settled into his boat, gripping his pole, pushing his way into the main current. The men on the bank waved and shouted their farewells, many taking off their hats and raising them into the air in salute to his courage. Then all too soon Bridger couldn’t see them any longer. And beyond the second bend in the narrowing canyon, the river seemed to crash in upon itself, the current picking up speed.
Breathlessly, Bridger told the silent group, “It were like nothing I ever done afore.”
The Bear picked up that tiny bullboat with its lone passenger and hurtled them along faster and faster between the rising walls of the river’s canyon as the serene water transformed into a frothing, crashing, boiling cauldron that whirled Bridger round and round, bouncing the boat first against one wall, then against the rocks on the other side of the narrow chute. Eventually the sound of water crashing against rock began to thunder about him, pounding on his ears so brutally that it drowned out his own thoughts.
“I been drunk an’ wild-headed afore,” Jim explained. “But my head ain’t never been that twisted round and round!”
It was a cold ride too. He had begun to shake—not just out of fear—but there in the early winter the river spray soaked him, the canyon wind chilled him … and before long he was shaking uncontrollably, frozen to the marrow. Yet somehow he maintained his death-grip on that long pole, struggling to push his boat this way, then that, doing his best to pitch through the center of the narrow gorge. And through it all he kept his rifle locked between his knees in the event he was pitched out by one of the many dizzying whirlpools, or by the series of frothy rapids he was flung over like driftwood, or hurled up against the boulders raising their heads in the middle of the channel—threatening to smash him and his tiny bullboat to splinters.
Then, despite his dulled reactions, Bridger realized the immense cold he was feeling was actually water. Looking down, he found his boat slowly filling with the dark, icy river. But try as he might in the next frantic minutes, Jim realized he wasn’t going to shove the boat to either shore: there simply was no bank—only canyon wails. On and on he hurtled, slowly taking on more water with every mile.
“I figgered I was damn well going under,” Bridger exclaimed calmly as he raised his face to the sky dramatically. “Began to think back to my time as a young’un in Missoura—I’d heard me many a story of the ol’ salts who talked about rivers out here what disappear right underground on a man.”
“Under … underground?” Titus asked with a gulp. Just like the rest of them, he was caught up in the young man’s story now.
“Yup—that’s what some of them ol’ fellers tolt me. Them rivers go right down a hole in the ground. So I figgered it was just ’bout any time I’d be sucked right into some hole with that mighty river—an’ I’d never see daylight, or the Rocky Mountains, or my friends ever again.”
It was no wonder Bridger felt such dire fate awaited him.
By that time the late-autumn sky was beginning to cloud over and the sun was all but blotted out as he careened on down the canyon, its walls growing steadily steeper—the sky became nothing but a narrow and darkening strip far overhead. Now there were times when his bullboat was suddenly thrust against an outcropping of rocks, where it was suddenly wedged—with the full force of the water thundering against it—until Jim could free himself, using every last reserve in his young body … only to shove his boat back into the swirling madness of the gorge.