Tying _Imshallah_ up to a boulder to prevent her amiable weakness for rushing to the embraces of whirlpools getting the better of her, I climbed up a steeply-sloping pitch of bedrock and looked down to the head of a long narrow arm of quiet water. The gay little waterfall breaking forth from the rock beneath my feet was leaping directly into the main stream of the Columbia--and below the cascade. A stiff thirty or forty-foot portage, and we were through. We might have to wait for the pump-man to help us lift the boat up that first pitch, but he ought to be along almost any time now.
Taking a short-cut back across the water-washed rock, I found Roos just completing his shots of the cascade. The sun was on the latter now, and its dazzling whiteness threw it into striking relief against the sinister walls between which it tumbled. Save the first two falls of Surprise Rapids, there is not a savager rush of water on the upper Columbia than this final three hundred yards of the left-hand channel of Rock Island. Roos was delighted with the way it showed up in his finder, and even more pleased when he learned that we were not going to have to line the boat down it. Then he had one of his confounded inspirations. That portage over the reef of bedrock, with the little waterfall in the background, would photograph like a million dollars, he declared; but to get the full effect of it, and to preserve "continuity," the "farmer" ought to do it alone. It wouldn't do to include the pump-man in the picture, now that the "farmer" was supposed to be travelling alone. If I _had_ to have his help, all right; only it wouldn't do to shoot while the other man was in the picture. But it _would_ really be the "Cat's ears" if the "farmer" could make it on his own. He wouldn't have to make that big pull-up without stopping; he could jerk the boat along a foot or two at a time, and then get his breath like the pursued villain did in the processional finales of knockabout comedies. Then he showed me how, by resuming the same grip on the boat and the same facial expression at each renewed attack, the action could be made to appear practically continuous.
Well, I fell for it. Tom Sawyer was not more adroit in getting out of white-washing his fence than was Roos in getting out of that portage job. He wanted to preserve "continuity" by starting back at the head of the cascade, but we compromised by making it the "pot-hole." Emerging to the lakelet, I registered "extreme dejection" at finding my progress blocked, and "dull gloom" as I landed and climbed up for a look-see. But when I reached the top of the reef and discovered the quiet water below, like sunlight breaking through a cloud, I assumed as nearly as I knew how an exact imitation of an expression I had seen on the face of Balboa in a picture called "First Sight of the Pacific." "That's the 'Cat's ears,'" encouraged Roos; "now snake the boat over--and make it snappy!"