Because of the narrowing of the stream by the heap of rocks the current at that place was rather swift, and the trackers were having to work fairly hard to keep the junk moving—though this was not nearly the strain they were to feel a few days later during certain moments in Wind-Box Gorge about which I must sooner or later speak.

The instant Old Pebble heard the boy’s fearful cry, and long before the last reproachful echoes had faded away, he had slipped the sennit of his harness and was springing, with the most extraordinary elastic bounds and foot-clipping short jumps, like grotesque stage leaps and hops, back over the rocks alongside the fan of trackers toward the boy, who was near the ruck of the group. Before the head tracker could reach the boy, the advance of the other trackers had drawn the boy’s harness tight, and his body had begun to be dragged forward, with his foot still caught in the cleft, with a result that, under the stimulus of stretching and renewed pain, he had revived and was crying out in agony.

The drag of the boy’s harness on the towline meant that his sennit could not be slipped free.

The head tracker, leaping like a rock goat along the way, saw this, swerved somewhat in his course, and simply bowled over the two hard-pulling trackers immediately forward of the boy on the towline. The sudden loss of their exertion had the effect at once of causing the pull of the junk to overpower the remaining trackers, and they fell back a few steps, and with their uncertain footings on the rocks some of them staggered (the two who had been knocked down were loudly cursing the head tracker), and for an instant the towline sagged, and during it Old Pebble slipped the boy’s harness loose. Then swiftly he attached his own harness to the towline and started to tug, and the two abusive knockdowns got back to their feet, and with wonderful choral shouts, louder than usual, the recovered gang steadied the junk and began to tow it forward again. Once the trackers were progressing, Old Pebble cast himself off once more, went back and unwedged the weeping boy and picked him up and carried him to the water’s edge, where one of the foredeckmen embarked him in the sampan and took him out to the junk to a mess of evil poultices the cook had already begun to heat up.