Old Pebble stood on the deck with his neck stiffened in a manner of a river-guild pilot, his arms raised and motionless, his form utterly rigid but for the wide sleeves of his gown beating like the wings of an eagle.

—

AT THAT season of the year the second and third rapids of Hsintan were severe but not dangerous, and within an hour our junk, inching along close to the shore, had reached the stretch of whirling eddies above the middle race. Su-ling and I left the restaurant and went, along with quite a number of the villagers, who had apparently heard about the headstrong owner ascending without a pilot, out to the bank beside the tracking bund near where the pilots had already gathered to watch the ascent of the bad uppermost rapids.

The cook, taking the head tracker’s place ashore, was supervising the laying out of the tracking lines. At the spit below the rapids early in the morning, the owner had made arrangements with the rapids-heaving concessionaire for three hundred local trackers to be taken onto the towlines at the Head Rapid, in addition to the junk’s own forty-odd. This gang was now gathering.

Long lines were laid out fanwise on the wide uphill slope of the tracking bund, and, as the cook, who was perhaps still mildly drunk from his sacrificial breakfast, stamped and shouted and laughed, running here and there on his fat short legs giving instructions with such good humor that it seemed almost a travesty of pleasantness, the trackers, an even more pathetic collection of tatterdemalions than our porters of the morning, began to attach themselves resignedly to the lines. They had such sad faces!

There I observed closely for the first time the mechanism of the trackers’ halters. I particularly remember this because I had occasion to think again of the fallible device of these harnesses in Wind-Box Gorge. This piece of gear consisted of a looped strap of white cotton cloth, which the tracker passed over one shoulder and across his body, and which was joined at both ends to a short length of square sennit, which in turn ran through a big stubby button of bone or wood and ended beyond in a wall knot. Each tracker owned his own harness and over his filthy rags it was his only badge of pride and honor; some of the most hope-starved beggars of all, I saw, kept their harnesses in handsome condition, with clean white straps, and with beautiful double crowns on the wall knots holding the buttons, and the buttons delicately carved. The tracker would take a half-hitch with his sennit around the bamboo towline, and when there was strain on the sennit it bore against the button and held a firm grip on the towline, but directly tension relaxed it loosened—a safety device whereby the tracker could release himself in most but, as I was in sadness to see, not all emergencies.