‘Oh, don’t say any more, please! Have I got to learn the shape of the river according to all these five hundred thousand different ways? If I tried to carry all that cargo in my head it would make me stoop-shouldered.’
‘NO! you only learn THE shape of the river, and you learn it with such absolute certainty that you can always steer by the shape that’s IN YOUR HEAD, and never mind the one that’s before your eyes.’
‘Very well, I’ll try it; but after I have learned it can I depend on it. Will it keep the same form and not go fooling around?’
Before Mr. Bixby could answer, Mr. W — — came in to take the watch, and he said —
‘Bixby, you’ll have to look out for President’s Island and all that country clear away up above the Old Hen and Chickens. The banks are caving and the shape of the shores changing like everything. Why, you wouldn’t know the point above 40. You can go up inside the old sycamore-snag, now.{footnote [1. It may not be necessary, but still it can do no harm to explain that ‘inside’ means between the snag and the shore. — M.T.]}
So that question was answered. Here were leagues of shore changing shape. My spirits were down in the mud again. Two things seemed pretty apparent to me. One was, that in order to be a pilot a man had got to learn more than any one man ought to be allowed to know; and the other was, that he must learn it all over again in a different way every twenty-four hours.
That night we had the watch until twelve. Now it was an ancient river custom for the two pilots to chat a bit when the watch changed. While the relieving pilot put on his gloves and lit his cigar, his partner, the retiring pilot, would say something like this —
‘I judge the upper bar is making down a little at Hale’s Point; had quarter twain with the lower lead and mark twain {footnote [Two fathoms. ‘Quarter twain’ is two-and-a-quarter fathoms, thirteen-and-a-half feet. ‘Mark three’ is three fathoms.]} with the other.’
‘Yes, I thought it was making down a little, last trip. Meet any boats?’
‘Met one abreast the head of 21, but she was away over hugging the bar, and I couldn’t make her out entirely. I took her for the “Sunny South” — hadn’t any skylights forward of the chimneys.’
And so on. And as the relieving pilot took the wheel his partner {footnote [‘Partner’ is a technical term for ‘the other pilot’.]} would mention that we were in such-and-such a bend, and say we were abreast of such-and-such a man’s woodyard or plantation. This was courtesy; I supposed it was necessity. But Mr. W — — came on watch full twelve minutes late on this particular night, — a tremendous breach of etiquette; in fact, it is the unpardonable sin among pilots. So Mr. Bixby gave him no greeting whatever, but simply surrendered the wheel and marched out of the pilothouse without a word. I was appalled; it was a villainous night for blackness, we were in a particularly wide and blind part of the river, where there was no shape or substance to anything, and it seemed incredible that Mr. Bixby should have left that poor fellow to kill the boat trying to find out where he was. But I resolved that I would stand by him any way. He should find that he was not wholly friendless. So I stood around, and waited to be asked where we were. But Mr. W — — plunged on serenely through the solid firmament of black cats that stood for an atmosphere, and never opened his mouth. Here is a proud devil, thought I; here is a limb of Satan that would rather send us all to destruction than put himself under obligations to me, because I am not yet one of the salt of the earth and privileged to snub captains and lord it over everything dead and alive in a steamboat. I presently climbed up on the bench; I did not think it was safe to go to sleep while this lunatic was on watch.
However, I must have gone to sleep in the course of time, because the next thing I was aware of was the fact that day was breaking, Mr. W — — gone, and Mr. Bixby at the wheel again. So it was four o’clock and all well — but me; I felt like a skinful of dry bones and all of them trying to ache at once.
Mr. Bixby asked me what I had stayed up there for. I confessed that it was to do Mr. W — — a benevolence, — tell him where he was. It took five minutes for the entire preposterousness of the thing to filter into Mr. Bixby’s system, and then I judge it filled him nearly up to the chin; because he paid me a compliment — and not much of a one either. He said,
‘Well, taking you by-and-large, you do seem to be more different kinds of an ass than any creature I ever saw before. What did you suppose he wanted to know for?’
I said I thought it might be a convenience to him.
‘Convenience Dnation! Didn’t I tell you that a man’s got to know the river in the night the same as he’d know his own front hall?’
‘Well, I can follow the front hall in the dark if I know it IS the front hall; but suppose you set me down in the middle of it in the dark and not tell me which hall it is; how am I to know?’
‘Well you’ve GOT to, on the river!’
‘All right. Then I’m glad I never said anything to Mr. W — — ’
‘I should say so. Why, he’d have slammed you through the window and utterly ruined a hundred dollars’ worth of window-sash and stuff.’
I was glad this damage had been saved, for it would have made me unpopular with the owners. They always hated anybody who had the name of being careless, and injuring things.
I went to work now to learn the shape of the river; and of all the eluding and ungraspable objects that ever I tried to get mind or hands on, that was the chief. I would fasten my eyes upon a sharp, wooded point that projected far into the river some miles ahead of me, and go to laboriously photographing its shape upon my brain; and just as I was beginning to succeed to my satisfaction, we would draw up toward it and the exasperating thing would begin to melt away and fold back into the bank! If there had been a conspicuous dead tree standing upon the very point of the cape, I would find that tree inconspicuously merged into the general forest, and occupying the middle of a straight shore, when I got abreast of it! No prominent hill would stick to its shape long enough for me to make up my mind what its form really was, but it was as dissolving and changeful as if it had been a mountain of butter in the hottest corner of the tropics. Nothing ever had the same shape when I was coming downstream that it had borne when I went up. I mentioned these little difficulties to Mr. Bixby. He said —
‘That’s the very main virtue of the thing. If the shapes didn’t change every three seconds they wouldn’t be of any use. Take this place where we are now, for instance. As long as that hill over yonder is only one hill, I can boom right along the way I’m going; but the moment it splits at the top and forms a V, I know I’ve got to scratch to starboard in a hurry, or I’ll bang this boat’s brains out against a rock; and then the moment one of the prongs of the V swings behind the other, I’ve got to waltz to larboard again, or I’ll have a misunderstanding with a snag that would snatch the keelson out of this steamboat as neatly as if it were a sliver in your hand. If that hill didn’t change its shape on bad nights there would be an awful steamboat graveyard around here inside of a year.’
It was plain that I had got to learn the