These three great books are in constant contact with first nature. That’s one of the of the many things I like about them. Dangerous River teems with wildlife: moose, black bears, grizzlies, eagles, wolves, beaver, caribou, Dall sheep, wild geese, lynx, mallards, whisky-jacks, blue grouse, marten, partridge, wolverine.
Here, in one of the book’s most memorable scenes, is Patterson’s encounter with a cow moose and her calf:
As I bailed I heard a grunting noise from upstream: a cow moose and her calf were swimming the river; the calf was having a rough time of it in the fast water, and the cow was talking to it and encouraging it. She probably intended to land where I had beached the canoe, but she saw me and headed straight for the bank, landing about a hundred yards upstream. The calf, however, had been doing its utmost and had nothing in reserve: it was swept down river and into the eddy, from which it splashed ashore about fifteen yards below camp.
I was in the classic situation – in between mother and child; and mother weighed about eight hundred pounds, and a decidedly querulous note was creeping into her grunts. The calf let out a feeble bleat and the cow came a little closer, grunting angrily. I waded ashore and gently took down the rifle from the tree close to the canoe where it was hanging. Then I waded into the river to see if I could get around the calf and chase it back upstream to its mother: out of the corner of one eye I could see that the soup was boiling over; the tea pail also had a fine head of steam up, and no doubt the rice was burning – and I silently cursed the whole tribe of moose right back to its remote beginnings. Anything but a prehistoric-looking beast like that would have had sense enough to stay out of camp!
I was in the water now as deep as I could get, the rifle held high in one hand and the other busily engaged in unknotting the red silk scarf that was round my neck. The calf was watching me: heaven send the little fool wouldn’t lose his head and take off down the canyon and get himself drowned; if he did the cow would blame it all on me and come charging through camp and wreck everything – and stop a bullet, when all I wanted was peace. But the calf never moved, and I came dripping out of the river below him and walked up the bank. He seemed to be petrified: not so the cow, however. She was working herself into a fine frenzy and pawing at the sand – a bad sign. It was high time to get that calf on the move.
I came right up behind him, flapped the red scarf suddenly and let out one devil of a yell. I had intended to fire a shot over him as well, just to speed him on his way, but there was no need for that – he was already going faster than any mortal moose calf had ever gone before. And how perfectly it was all working out! He would pass between my bedroll and the fire; no damage would be done and there would still be time to salvage something of my supper from the ruins of what might have been ...
But how completely the picture changed, all in a fraction of a second! Just as the calf drew level with it a little breeze from the west flapped the shirt that was drying on the tree: he gave a blat of terror and shied sideways, stumbling over the long logs of the fire. Over went everything, but particularly the mulligan pot, which he sent flying ahead with his front feet. He then bucked over the fire and landed with one hind foot through the stout bail handle of the mulligan pot, which somehow stayed with him for about three jumps and then, as he freed himself from it with a vicious kick, sailed into the river, from which I rescued it. That was the end of the party, and judging by the row that came up from the beach, the guests were leaving in a hurry. Supper was a wreck, the partridge mulligan had gone down the river and the calf had pretty nearly squared the pot for me; I spent half the night hammering it round again with the back of an axe.
That was the end of the party – Patterson’s irony makes me smile. The partridge mulligan had gone down the river – his word combinations are inspired. And note that “red silk scarf.” Patterson was a Nahanni dandy.
There’s wildlife in Raban’s Old Glory, too: turtles, butterflies, carp, snakes. But nature is most present in his vivid descriptions of Mississippi water:
Here the water was a deep olive green, mottled all over with leaf shadows.
Until the river straightened out, I didn’t realize the strength of the south wind. It was blowing dead against the current, and the water was crumpling into it, ridged with lines of whitecaps running so close together that the boat just rattled across the top of this bumpy, corrugated river.
By time it reached me, it had accumulated a frightening height and weight: lines of chocolate combers ran straight up and down the channel. They took hold of the boat and rocked it over on its gunwales.
I had entered an absolutely seamless world. Everything in it tended to one color. Its browns and greens and blues had been mixed until they’d gone to the translucent gray of dirty gauze. I couldn’t tell what was shore, sky or river. The current, exhausted by the sheer space of Lake Pepin, had stopped altogether. In front of the boat, the water had the gleaming consistency of molasses; behind, it lay smashed and buckled by my wake. I slowed right down until the propeller left only a little string of corkscrew whorls, and even they were the marks of a vandal on an otherwise immaculate landscape.
I went through Lock 6 at Trempealeau and the river changed again, into another crazy terra-cotta of islands, lakes and creeks, with the buoyed channel running close under the bluff on the Minnesota shore. Here the water, sheltered from the wind, was as dark as boot polish.
Then the smooth humps of the boils began again, and the lurching, slithery motion of the boat as the motor did its best to keep a grip on the cross-currents of these greasy swirls of spinning water.
Wharves, cranes and smokestacks were going past in a blur of black type. I caught a momentary glimpse of the Gateway Arch, its scaly steel turning to gold in the sunset, but it was an irrelevance beside the whirling surface of the river. The water here was thicker and darker than I’d seen it before; all muscle, clenching and unclenching, taking logs as big as trees and roiling them around just for the hell of the thing.
There were sharp rips and creases in the current now, as if the Mississippi were trying to tear itself apart; but the most scary change was the succession of great waxy boils. I could see them coming from a long way off. Most of the river was lightly puckered by the wind, but there were patches of what looked like dead-calm water: circular in shape, a hundred yards or so across. I took them for quiet millponds, good places to light a pipe or unscrew the cap of a thermos flask. Delighted to find that the Mississippi now afforded such convenient picnic spots, I drove straight for one. I hit its edge, the boat slewed sideways and I was caught on the rim of a spinning centrifuge. I had mistaken it for calm water because its motion was so violent that no wind could disturb it. I could see the cap of the boil far away in the middle, a clear eighteen inches higher than the rest of the river. From this raised point, the water was spilling around and down the convex face, disappearing deep into the crack in which my boat was caught. Running the engine at full speed, I yanked myself out easily enough, but I had felt the river trying to suck me under, boat and all, and I was tense with fright.
The junction of the Mississippi and the Ohio was a confluence of thick machine oil and rosewater.
The Mississippi was just making waves for the hell of it; give it the temptation of a shoal and it would run in dark, serrated combers, three and four feet high, showing off its muscles.
As dawn came up, the river went to a dim, gauzy gray. We were leaving a trail of ragged creases in the water behind us. Both shores were unbroken cypress swamps. We passed between sandbars as cold and bare as bits of Mongolian desert.
I edged out of the Yazoo into the mainstream, where the glistering water was tooled with arabesques like an inlay of polished silver on oak.
I crept into it as slowly and as quietly as I could, trying to let the boat do no more than stroke the water as it went. It was strange water, too. Ahead, lit my misty sunshine, it was milky, streaky green like polished soapstone. There was no wind and no current. It looked so stable an element that one might have carved ashtrays and telephone stands out of it. Behind the boat, though, where the motor was stirring it, it was thick and peaty like black syrup.
Raban is a virtuoso water-describer: see also his brilliant Passage to Juneau (1999), reviewed in my series “3 for the Sea.”
In Tim Butcher’s Blood River, nature is sticky equatorial heat, heavy bush, glutinous mud, high-canopy trees. It’s river and rainforest. It’s ants, mosquitoes, and cockroaches. And on the river, it’s the ubiquitous “lilac blooms of the water hyacinth on their mattresses of matted tuber and leaf.”
Here’s Butcher’s description of trees:
Within moments of leaving Ubundu we entered full rainforest. There were trees so high I could not make out any detail of the leaf canopy tens of metres over my head. Some of the trunks were pleated into great sinews that plunged into the earth, as massive and solid as flying buttresses on a Gothic cathedral. And high above my head, but beneath the gloomy leaf canopy, I could make out boughs as square and broad as steel girders.
Ants:
At one point an obstacle made us stop in a thicket of giant bamboo. Canes as thick as my leg sprouted close together before splaying out as they grew longer and thinner. I spotted a long, thin black line that looked like a gunpowder trail from a western movie. Walking closer, I saw the line begin to move. At first it shifted as one, but as I got nearer it separated into millions of component parts – a column of ants.
“Get away, get away,” Michel shouted at me. I had heard stories of Congolese ant columns descending on villages and eating everything in their path. Infants, the elderly and the infirm will perish if left to be consumed by the column. A hunter told me that he would prepare the trophy from an antelope hunt by deliberately finding one of those ant columns and then throwing the dead animal’s skull into its path. When he came back the next day, the bone would be spotless, stripped of every last piece of flesh and gristle, tendon and tissue.
Stupidly ignoring Michel, I approached to what I took to be a safe distance and started taking photographs. Within seconds I had a bite on my knee, and then one on my thigh, then another on my back. As I ran back to the bikes, the ants were so thick on my trousers I brushed them off like soot. It took ten minutes to undress and rid every last ant from the creases in my clothes. The worst of the bites stung for days.
That “As I ran back to the bikes, the ants were so thick on my trousers I brushed them off like soot” is wonderfully vivid.
Butcher is excellent at conveying the intensity of Congo heat:
The climate gets crueler and crueler with the descent. As altitude is lost, with it goes any hope of a cooling breeze. I found by late morning, even on a hazy day, the steel panels on the decks would be throbbing with heat. They were studded with rice-grain-sized bulges for grip, and through the soles of my sandals I could feel each one radiating warmth.
Notice, in the above quotations, the beautiful figures of speech: “Wharves, cranes and smokestacks were going past in a blur of black type”; “The junction of the Mississippi and the Ohio was a confluence of thick machine oil and rosewater”; “I edged out of the Yazoo into the mainstream, where the glistering water was tooled with arabesques like an inlay of polished silver on oak.” Patterson, Raban, and Butcher create vivid figuration. That’s the subject of my next post in this series.
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