“I will be sorry to see him go,” Su-ling said. It was one of the formulas over the game of “stones” that Su-ling should dully regret future losses when the Old Big confidently predicted them. Perhaps this time she had spoken her regret too feelingly; the owner looked at her sharply. She protected herself at once by seeming to be worried for the Old Big. “What will you do without him?” she asked.

The owner did not answer her but turned and spoke to me in a suddenly gentle tone. “There comes a time,” he said, “when every riverman has had enough. I, too, have been studying our Noise Suppressor on this trip. He sings badly. He wants to farm. He sings badly.”

Yet at that very moment we could hear the wonderful lusty towing chant of the head tracker, and the voice was clear, fierce, defiant, manly, and, it seemed to me, full of love of life and of work and of feelings of all kinds.

“I don’t know what I would do without him,” the Old Big said, and he gave up a sigh that was almost a groan.

Did all the other men on the junk share this fixed idea of “enough” on the Great River? Could this belief have helped to account for the terrifying indifference all around me during those moments later that day in Wind-Box Gorge?

—

I WENT forward. The cook greeted me as I sat down on a coil of bamboo hawser. He was scrubbing an iron bowl, using filthy cold river water.

I asked how long he thought it would take us to get through Wind-Box Gorge.

He replied that the upper gate of the gorge would be very bad. At Goose-Tail Rock it would be very bad.

I said he had a way of responding to questions but not answering them.

He said that if we were not out of the gorge by dusk we would never get out. How could he tell how bad it would be at the upper end of the gorge? He asked me that.

“Does our Noise Suppressor want to leave this boat?” I asked.

The cook put on his roguish expression and said, “I can say this: He wants certain people to leave the boat.”

Of course he meant me, and perhaps I should have rewarded him with a laugh. But I pursued my line: “Is he tired of the river?”

“Tired of the river? Does a tree get tired of growing?”

“The Old Big thinks he has had enough.”

“Maybe the Old Big has had enough.”