The bend below the Northern Pacific bridge was one of the two or three places of which I seemed to have retained much of a mental picture from my previous run. Twenty years before the main channel was cutting heavily into a low bluff on the left, bringing down an enormous quantity of big round boulders. The short, savage riffle formed by these had given us our first severe mauling on that earlier ride. Now I found the river had broadened greatly, pouring a shallow current through a channel two or three hundred yards wide. But it was still swift, very swift--altogether relentless in its onward urge. It is the almost complete absence of slack-water stretches that differentiates the five hundred miles of the Yellowstone between Gardiner and Glendive from any other great river I can recall. It is this that makes it so nearly ideal for boating. [Illustration: JOE EVANS WHO PILOTED ME THE FIRST HALF DAY] [Illustration: PETE HOLT AND JOE EVANS WITH THEIR INFLATED LIFE PRESERVERS] [Illustration: "CHICKENS, CHILDREN AND HOGS"] It didn't take us long to discover that as a pilot Joe was not an asset. Personally he was a source of never-ending delight; also artistically. His funny little craft with its inner-tube bilge keels, no less than the bobbing of that football life-preserver, lent touches to the picture that could have been blocked in by no other media. But what made Joe's piloting fail to qualify was the fact that instead of trying to find the channel he was trying to find floaters--to earn one or both of those twenty-five-dollar rewards that were offered for the finding of the bodies of the people drowned the previous week. I wanted all the deep, clear, unobstructed channel there was to be had; the very nature of Joe's quest kept him edging in toward snags and bars and shallows. These little incidentals didn't bother him a bit. The instant he saw the water shoaling dangerously he simply jumped overboard, grabbed his feather-weight craft by the nose and trotted right out on dry land.