The Nimpkish

It was up near the Nimpkish River that I whistled the little duck to bed. John must have been very small that summer, for I had rowed him out to the boat to put him to bed. Friends had come over from the lumber mill to spend the evening with us round our fire on the beach, and it was going to be too late for such a little fellow. John was full of tears and woe, and threats of what he was going to do if I left him alone out there.

To divert him, I pointed to a little duck that was floating around, all alone at dusk.

“Poor little duck—he hasn’t got any mummy to put him to bed.”

“I don’t care,” sniffed John.

“I’ll whistle to him, and tell him to come and sleep with you.”

I started a low monotonous whistle—two short, one long; two short, one long; over and over again. The lonely little duck started coming slowly over towards us. John sat up to watch.

“Don’t talk,” I whispered—my low monotonous whistle would have hypnotized anything. But how did the little duck know that it meant “Come to me, come to me?” He came on, right up to the boat. Still whistling, I slowly put my hand down and gently picked him up. He didn’t struggle—just kept murmuring his own little monotonous triplet.

I handed him to John, who wasn’t at all sure how to manage. He had never slept with a duck before—and the duck didn’t like being covered up. John finally sighed and passed him back to me.

“You better keep it,” he suggested, and put his thumb in his mouth—the crisis was evidently over.

I put the duck in my blazer pocket and rowed ashore. They had all been watching and everyone was convinced that I had strange powers. None of us was sure just what the little duck was. It was like a sea-​pigeon or guillemot, but I don’t remember red legs. The youngsters took turns holding it for the rest of the evening. Later they fixed it up in the rowboat for the night. In the morning, much to John’s sorrow, the little duck had gone. Jan and Peter drove me nearly crazy for the rest of the summer trying to whistle ducks to bed. I refused to try again—I thought I would rest on my one success.

It was a couple of nights later, coming down below the Nimpkish, that the cougar kept prowling around and howling all night. I don’t know just where we were and I didn’t know at the time. We were coming down Johnstone Strait in dense fog and with no compass. It had been lost overboard—a painful episode, and full of tears; we won’t go into it. The straits are only a mile wide. You would think that it would be easy to keep straight, for that short distance, and get across. I tried twice without success. Usually, by watching your wake, you can keep a reasonable course. But we couldn’t see our wake for more than a couple of boat lengths.

The last try, we started from a fixed light on a point—it was high and white and conspicuous, which gave us a good start. Jan and Peter watched the wake and called out directions, while I kept on some imaginary occult kind of a straight line. I was just trying to decide what effect the tide was having on us when Jan called out, “I see trees!” Trees were supposed to be ahead of us.

“I s-s-ssee a lighthouse!” stuttered Peter, trying to get it out before Jan did.

I kicked the boat out of gear, and stared at the light looming above us . . . same height, same cliff—there was no doubt about it, it was the same light.

So we had to give up trying to get across the strait, and stay on the side we had started from. Later in the day, we followed the curve of the shore into what I was afraid might be an unwanted channel. But it turned out to be a booming-​ground, with at least four big booms tied up to the piles. It seemed a good idea to stay right there until we could find out where we were.

Booms are very handy, and quite all right to tie up to for the night. But you must be willing to accept their disadvantages as well.

Children love booms—but mustn’t be allowed to play on them. The great sections of floating logs look compact and solid, but any one of the logs, if stepped on, might roll over and catch you in between. Or open out a gap and throw you into the water—then close over you again. A log up to five feet in diameter and fifty or eighty feet long is not a thing to fool with. Without a peavy and help of some kind you would be practically powerless to get a child out, if one had ever gone under the logs. Yet booms have an irresistible attraction for children.

Wasps love them too—these yellow-​and-​black-​striped, lethal creatures are wonderful paper makers. They take mouthfuls of wood off the logs and chew it up with their formic acid (I suppose, I haven’t looked it up in the “Encyclopædia Britannica,” yet). But anyway, the result is the thin grey paper material that they build their big hanging nests with. The queen wasp starts it off—she being the only one that survives the winter. The start is just a tiny grey paper thing, not any bigger than a bantam egg. She carefully makes a certain number of cells in the prescribed manner inside, and lays an egg in each one. Then sits down and waits, having done the only stint of actual labour she has to do in her whole life.

Then from each cell comes forth a worker-​wasp, a ready-​made slave for the queen. She claps her hands, or her feet, and the workers run to groom and feed her. Then they start chewing more wood to make more cells for the queen to lay more eggs in. As the workers increase, the cells increase—round and round and round, and the wasps on the booms increase. They have to eat as well . . . and the simplest way is to come on board when they smell our food cooking and help themselves.

Capi and John out for a morning row.

Tugs love booms—they love to collect them in the middle of the night. You are awakened up by a searchlight and a shrill “Toot-​toot-​toot.” They are just as disgusted to see you as you are to see them. They have tied a tow-​rope onto a string of sections, each 80 feet wide by perhaps 160 feet long, and may want to take ten of them together.

There is nothing you can do, except climb out on the slippery logs and try to get your ropes off. You have suspended your boat half-​way between the ends of a section—the ends being the only place where there are coupling chains to tie on to. As long as you are beside the boat, you are all right—you can put one hand on the boat. But after that you just have to balance, and a boom-​log in the dark seems as narrow as a tight-​rope. You have safely made about fifteen feet of it, when the tugmen suddenly shine their searchlight on you—and you stand there teetering—completely blinded. After a few minutes they realize what they are doing—that it is not modesty that is making you wave your arms round in front of your face. The searchlight turns aside, and you make the last ten feet and grab the ring-​bolt—then untie your rope.

Once you manage to get back to the boat with the wet slimy rope, then you can pull the boat up to where you are tied at the other end. You just manage to get that untied when the tug toots again, signifying that it is tired of waiting. You spring and clamber back onto the deck and grab a pike pole to fend off with. They turn the spotlight on you again, and you wave to let them know you are all clear. The whole boom moves slowly . . . out past you . . . and you are left forsaken and drifting in the dark. With a boat full of sleeping children it is easier to tow the boat than start up the engine. The seat of the dinghy is very wet, and your feet are clamped tight on a coil of wet rope. You tow the boat slowly towards the next boom—if there is one, or perhaps a pile that your boom was held by.

That night, however, we had no boom troubles. We rowed into the beach before dark. There were several big streams and the beach was covered with smooth round stones—loosely piled, just as they had come down with the spring freshets. We should have liked to explore a bit, but the fog was turning to rain; and we soon crowded back into the boat to get dry.

It was some time during the darkest part of that dark night that we were all suddenly jolted out of deep sleep by the most blood­curdling yowls from the beach—like a cat, but magnified fifty times.

“Mummy! Mummy! What is it?” called terrified voices.

“Listen . . .” I shu-​ushed. You could hear the knock, knock of the round stones as some soft foot trod on them.

Then again the long drawn-​out yowl of a beast in sorrow . . . calling for something he couldn’t find. Again we all shivered in terror, and again the stones tipped and knocked.

“I’m sure it wouldn’t yowl like that if it were hunting,” I said, but it didn’t make us feel much happier.

From one end of the beach to the other it wandered—every now and then letting off a wail.

“Mummy! That one was closer!” called Jan from her bunk in the bow. It certainly was . . . I grabbed the flashlight and swung its beam across the boom. Two yellow eyes . . . definitely nearer than the shore. Then they disappeared, and once more the stones rattled. After that I kept turning on the flash whenever the yowls seemed closer.

I had just swung the light along the shore when two shots rang out—there was a strangled sort of snarl—then the sound of men’s voices. We sat for another half-​hour, listening; and then went back to sleep.

Next morning we saw two men working on the booms near the shore and rowed round to talk to them. It was they who had shot the cougar in the night. They had shot its mate two nights before, when it had killed their dog right on the porch of their cabin, which was on the high point at one end of the bay,

“We were glad you kept turning on your flash,” they said. “That gave us our chance to shoot.”