THEY LEFT PENDLETON EARLY THE NEXT DAY, passed through Bucks Corner and Umatilla and came at last face-to-face with the Columbia River at the town of Boardman. They climbed out to admire the great river, even here the widest and most powerful stream Emaline had ever seen. Somehow, the river made her hopeful. If they had reached the Columbia, the Pacific could not be far away, their endless trek across the western half of America taken as far as it could go without a ship. When they reached Celilo Falls the following day, they were dazzled by the great slabs of black basalt rock on either side where the river narrowed, the roar of water over the falls so loud they could hear it inside the Dodge even with the windows rolled up. Flocks of ducks and geese wheeled above the Columbia, clouds of spray and mist rose where native dip-net fishermen had erected elaborate scaffolding. The fishermen leaned over the black eddies in the turbulent waters with their dip nets on long poles, risking their lives to haul in forty-pound salmon from the Chinook run. Jake pulled the Dodge over to the side of the road. They got out to watch the salmon hurtling themselves out of the water and the agile fishermen yanking them from the air as children and old women with no one to fish for them waited to share in the catch. An old man, his face a spiderweb of lines from his years working the dip nets, told them that bands of Indians from all over the Pacific Northwest had fished here for ten thousand years, perhaps more. He was from the Umatilla tribe, but Celilo Falls was also a fishing ground for the Yakima, Nez Perce, Wasco-Wishram, and a dozen other bands. The falls had always been a marketplace where the tribes came together to trade their wares. There was talk the white man might destroy it all by building a great dam downriver near a place they called The Dalles, but he didn’t believe that even white men could be that foolish. He let them try bites of salmon from his leather satchel. It tasted of smoke and fresh water.

Emaline would have liked to stay longer at Celilo Falls, but Jake was anxious to go. They pushed on and stayed for the night close enough to Portland to see the lights of the city winking in the darkness. The next morning, they wound their way up through Scappoose and Columbia City to Millwood, the company town that would be their home. It was a depressing little burg compared with some of the Oregon towns through which they had passed, with rows of identical little houses packed too close together. They drove on until Jake spotted Clay Tatro’s address, the only one painted yellow in a row of white frame houses. It had taken them almost a month to travel thirteen hundred miles.