A black-clad pilot accosted our cook close to where Su-ling and I stood.

“What does your Noise Suppressor think he is?” the pilot contemptuously asked.

“He is an old good,” our cook loyally said.

“He is an old wad of turtle dung,” the pilot said.

“He has sharp eyes,” the cook said, pushing forward and puffing out his chest like an urchin offering to fight. “He has good eyes and he intends to find a new way through Head Rapid that you turtles have never found.”

Now I took this to be a double-edged sarcasm, directed, in the cook’s mind, as I read it, against both the pilot, who could see only one side of the matter, and against the owner, who hated so bitterly the quest for a “new way.”

“Ha!” the pilot cried. “He’ll find a new way for a rock to make love to a boat.”

“And the children of this love will be more pilots for the New Rapids—with rock heads and cypress bottoms.”

“What is your owner’s name?”

“He is old Yang from Wanhsien.”

“I’ll remember not to ship on his boat—I mean the new one he’ll have to get after his Noise Suppressor wrecks this one.”

Su-ling stepped forward into the conversation, saying in a positive tone, “The boat will not be wrecked. Our Noise Suppressor knows more than ten pilots.”

“He knows less than one turtle,” the pilot said, turning away.

Su-ling and the cook looked at each other and shrugged.

—

THE ROCKS between the sluices of the uppermost rapid were mostly covered. It was quite clear that the only way to ascend Head Rapid would be to climb one of the races through these gaps. There would be three parts to the task of getting through a sluice: first and worst, the junk would have to approach it through the madly choppy area where the waters from the various sluices met and mixed and fought; then it would have to go up a long, wedge-shaped tongue of swift clear slick water rushing through the gap; and at last it would have to heave over the round head of the sudden fall above this tongue and then be towed out into the apparently millpond stillness above the rapids. And all this, it was evident, was further complicated by the fact that there was no sluice close against the riverbank on our side, so that to get into one the junk would have to shear out on its towline into the stream; furthermore, it looked to me as if the second sluice, a good sixty or seventy feet from shore, was much wider and more negotiable than the first. Beyond the second sluice there was an outcropping of dry rocks.