The Harrison river is a large stream that cuts its way through high, rugged mountains, and the water has a pronounced milky tinge imparted by the glaciers from which its feeders come, away back in the Cascades. It is a famous salmon stream, and thousands of these noble fishes, of mammoth size, that had lately gone up the river and into the small creeks to spawn, having died from disease, or having been killed in the terrible rapids they had to encounter, were lying dead on every sand bar, lodged against every stick of driftwood, or were slowly floating in the current. Their carcasses lined the shore all along the lower portion of the river, and the hogs, of which the Indians have large numbers, were feasting on the putrid masses as voraciously as if they had been ears of new, sweet corn. The stench emitted by these festering bodies was nauseating in the extreme; and the water, ordinarily so pure and palatable, was now totally unfit for use. I counted over one hundred of these dead fishes on a single sand bar of less than half an acre in extent. Cruising amid such surroundings was anything but pleasant, and I was glad the current was slow here so that, though going up stream, we were able to make good progress, and soon got away from this nauseating sight.
About a mile above the village we rounded a bend in the river, where it spread out to nearly a quarter of a mile in width, and on a sand bar in the middle of the stream, sat a flock of geese. I picked up my rifle and took a shot at them, but the ball cut a ditch in the water nearly fifty yards this side, and went singing over their heads into the woods beyond. They did not seem lo enjoy such music, and taking wing started for some safer feeding-ground, carrying on a lively conversation in goose Latin, probably about any fool who would try to kill geese at that distance. I turned loose on them again, and in about a second after pulling the trigger one of them seemed to explode, as if hit by a dynamite bomb. For a few seconds the air was full of fragments of goose, which rained down into the water like a shower of autumn leaves. My red companions enjoyed the result of this shot hugely, and a canoe load of Indians from up river, who were passing at the time, set up a regular war whoop. We pulled over and got what was left of the goose, and found that my express bullet had carried away all his stern rigging, his rudder, one of his paddles, and a considerable portion of his hull. The water was covered with fragments of sail, provisions of various kinds, and sundry bits of cargo and hull. Charlie picked up so much of the wreck as hung together, and said in his broken, laconic English: