Perhaps I should not have been quite so abrupt, for that was what cramped the delightfully drummeresque ingenuousness with which he had begun. Muttering something about "breaking the monotony of a run through the Bad Lands," the good chap backed off and out of my life. I was sorry for that, sorry to have embarrassed him, and especially sorry I didn't have the _savoir faire_ to make it easy for him to finish as frankly as he opened up. I didn't blame him and his friends for wishing for that spill. I know perfectly well I would have hoped for it myself had our positions been reversed. Almost any good red-blooded human would get a kick out of watching, from a nice, dry car platform, another good red-blooded human bumping-the-bumps down a rocky riffle. But I would never have been honest enough to confess my hopes--to the man who might have figured in the spill, that is. That was where this chap with the notions line would always have me one down. And what a shame it was I couldn't hold him long enough to learn how he made himself that way. "Buffaloe Shoal" was the first of what one might call Clark's "Menagerie Series" of rapids. The next, twenty miles below, was named Bear Rapid, because they saw a bear standing there. The third, two miles below the mouth of the Powder, was christened Wolf Rapid, "from seeing a wolf there." Clark describes Bear Rapids as "a shoal, caused by a number of rocks strewed over the river; but though the waves are high, there is a very good channel to the left, which renders the passage secure." Wolf is dismissed as "a rapid of no great danger." A hundred spring floods have doubtless had the effect of worsening Wolf--a bedrock rapid--somewhat, and of scouring out the worst of the boulders in Bear. I found the latter only an inconsiderable riffle, but the Wolf still showed some mighty vicious fangs. They were easy enough to avoid in a light skiff, but the old steamboat skippers always reckoned there was more potential trouble lying in ambush in the cracks of these shallowly submerged reefs of black rock than at any other place on the navigated Yellowstone or Missouri. The Powder is the last of the great southerly tributaries of the Yellowstone. Sprawling over a shifting estuary in several runlets, it looked much as it must have appeared to Clark when he wrote: "The water is very muddy, and like its banks of a dark brown colour. Its current throws out great quantities of red stones; which circumstances, with the appearance of the distant hills, induced Captain Clark to call it the Redstone, which he afterward found to be the meaning of its Indian name, _Wahasah_." At his camp here Clark found the buffalo prowling so close during the night that "they excited much alarm, lest in crossing the river they should tread on the boats and split them to pieces."