Free Drifting Home by Pierre Berton Page B

and the White joining it, will lose the colour of its youth, and become wider, almost fleshy, the great islands and sandbars giving it texture. By the time it reaches Dawson it is in the first flush of its early maturity, a noble river, flowing confidently past the town, giving only passing notice to the little Klondike, which foams out of the hills to greet it. But it has a long way to go yet. On its huge arc through Alaska it must force a narrow passage through the Ramparts and then spread out, miles wide, over the Yukon flats. Here the Arctic beckons and the river noses north across the Circle, only to discover that its instincts are wrong and that it must retreat south and west, growing broader as others join it, until at Norton Sound it divides into numberless, nameless channels to mingle at last with the cold sea.
    It is a new sensation to drift with the current. After the cough and sputter of the engines, this soft and leisurely progress down the river is utterly relaxing. There is no sound except our voices and the hissing of the water. We can converse easily and call from boat to boat. In the wider parts of the river we can hear our echo against the high banks. As we drift, the boats describe great circles so that we see the river and the scenery from various angles.
    Craggy rocks, plumed with evergreens, rise from the water. Around the next corner, the river passes under clay banks, three hundred feet high. Mixed in with the dark spruces are the bleached trunks of birches and the olive greens of aspen poplars, many of them notched by the teeth of beaver. At times we seem to be plunging directly through the dark forest, the river no more than sixty feet wide and shaded by the trees; at others the channel broadens into flat meadows; then again, the high, eroded banks return, pocked by swallows’ nests and marked by mud slides. We will come upon these clay cliffs again and again as we drift north.
    Beneath our boats we can hear the water seething and hissing. Peggy Anne says that it looks like water boiling in a kettle. Somewhere below, the grayling are lurking but the boys, who have several rods out, have had no luck yet. Peter is casting expertly from Miss Bardahl and now he feels a tug on his line. Enormous excitement! A moment later he lands a fat, foot-long grayling, detaches it neatly from the hook and waves it aloft for the others to see.
    It is not surprising that Peter should catch the first fish for he understands and enjoys mechanical techniques. At home he has a workbench and a set of tools. Like my father, but unlike me, he can do anything with his hands. My father had once been a carpenter’s apprentice and I can remember him patiently trying to teach me how to make a mortice-and-tenon joint and how to dovetail drawers with a chisel but I was no good at that. If he was disappointed, he did not show it. He was forever building things. Once, when we camped at Rock Creek in the Klondike valley, he built a scale model of a Roman catapult, for my sister and me, explaining, of course, the history and uses of the weapon. After the D.A.A.A . theatre showed Douglas Fairbanks in The Three Musketeers , and every kid in town became a duellist, he made me a beautiful wooden sword with a guard fashioned from a Hills Brothers coffee tin. When we children grew too old to occupy cribs in our parents’ bedroom, he added an extra room to our house. I can still see him working away with plane and chisel and finishing off the porch railing with a little fretwork.
    The most magnificent and satisfying thing he built was a boat. It was a proper boat–not a scow of the kind constructed on the lakes in 1898, but a handsome twenty-six foot motor-boat, with a round bottom and a forward storage cuddy. He rented an abandoned hotel on Front Street and every weekend and most evenings for about a year he laboured in this makeshift workshop on his boat. We children would bring him down his lunch and sit around watching him