A wave eight feet high looms above Smith, crouched in the bow. The wave stands there, waiting, does not move. (On the river, unlike the sea, the water moves; the waves remain in place.) The front end of the boat climbs the wave, pushed up by momentum and the weight behind. Smith hangs on to the lines. The tripartite boat almost folds back upon itself, then bends over the wave and slides down into the trough beyond, the middle and third parts following in like fashion. A wet and shining boulder stands dead ahead, directly in their course. The boat pauses before it. A ton of water, recoiling from the rock, crashes into the boat. Everyone is instantly soaked. The women scream with delight; even Doc Sarvis laughs. Smith hauls on his oar; the boat rolls off the boulder and careens like a roller coaster over the waves in the tail of the rapids, then slows in the steadier water below. Smith looks back. He has lost an oarsman. Where George Hayduke should have been the unmanned oar swings loosely in its lock.

There he comes. Hayduke in his orange life jacket bobs down the billows, grinning with ferocious determination, knees up under his chin, the fetal pose, using his feet and legs as shock absorbers, caroming off the rock. Instinctive and correct response. Has lost his hat. Makes no sound….

In the calmer water below the rapid they dragged him back aboard.

“Where you been?” Smith said.

Grinning, sputtering, Hayduke shook his head, popped the water from his ears and managed to look both fierce and sheepish. “Fucking river,” he muttered.

“You got to grab a line,” Smith said.

“I was holding onto the fucking oar. Jammed it on a rock and it hit me in the stomach.” Nervously he pawed his tangled mass of soaked hair. His hat, an old leather sombrero from Sonora, was floating on the waves, about to go down for the third time. They retrieved it with an oar.

The river bore them calmly on, through the plateau, into the Precambrian mantle of the earth, toward the lowlands, the delta and the Sea of Cortez, seven hundred miles away.

“Soap Crick Rapids next,” Smith said. And sure enough, they heard again the tumult of river and stone in conflict. Around the next bend.

“This is ridiculous,” Abbzug said privately to Doc. They sat hunched hard together with a wet poncho spread over their laps and legs. She was beaming with pleasure. Water dripped from the brim of her exaggerated hat. The doctor’s stogie burned bravely in the damp.

“Absolutely ridiculous,” he said. “How do you like our boatmen?”

“Weird; the tall one looks like Ichabod Ignatz; the short one looks like a bandit out of some old Mack Sennett movie.”

“Or Charon and Cerberus,” Doc said. “But try not to laugh; our lives rest in their uncertain hands.” And they laughed again.

All together now they plunged into another maelstrom, Grade 4 on the river runner’s chart. More gnashing river, heaving waves, the clash of elementals, the pure and brainless fury of tons of irresistible water crashing down upon tons of immovable limestone. They felt the shock, they heard the roar, saw foam and spray and rainbows floating on the mist as they rode through chaos into the clear. The adrenaline of adventure, without the time for dread, buoyed them high on the waves.