Are there many of them?'
'I should say so. I fancy we shan't run any of the river this trip as
you've ever seen it run before - so to speak. If the river begins to
rise again, we'll go up behind bars that you've always seen standing out
of the river, high and dry like the roof of a house; we'll cut across
low places that you've never noticed at all, right through the middle of
bars that cover three hundred acres of river; we'll creep through cracks
where you've always thought was solid land; we'll dart through the woods
and leave twenty-five miles of river off to one side; we'll see the
hind-side of every island between New Orleans and Cairo.'
'Then I've got to go to work and learn just as much more river as I
already know.'
'Just about twice as much more, as near as you can come at it.'
'Well, one lives to find out. I think I was a fool when I went into
this business.'
'Yes, that is true. And you are yet. But you'll not be when you've
learned it.'
'Ah, I never can learn it.'
'I will see that you DO.'
By and by I ventured again -
'Have I got to learn all this thing just as I know the rest of the
river - shapes and all - and so I can run it at night?'
'Yes. And you've got to have good fair marks from one end of the river
to the other, that will help the bank tell you when there is water
enough in each of these countless places - like that stump, you know.
When the river first begins to rise, you can run half a dozen of the
deepest of them; when it rises a foot more you can run another dozen;
the next foot will add a couple of dozen, and so on: so you see you have
to know your banks and marks to a dead moral certainty, and never get
them mixed; for when you start through one of those cracks, there's no
backing out again, as there is in the big river; you've got to go
through, or stay there six months if you get caught on a falling river.
There are about fifty of these cracks which you can't run at all except
when the river is brim full and over the banks.'
'This new lesson is a cheerful prospect.'
'Cheerful enough. And mind what I've just told you; when you start into
one of those places you've got to go through. They are too narrow to
turn around in, too crooked to back out of, and the shoal water is
always up at the head; never elsewhere. And the head of them is always
likely to be filling up, little by little, so that the marks you reckon
their depth by, this season, may not answer for next.'
'Learn a new set, then, every year?'
'Exactly.
