It had been my fortune to make a whole armada of rafts before. I built one in the days of youth to navigate a local duck-pond. I made another in more mature years for the easier fishing of red char in a certain lake of Northern Norway, and another in North Carolina as a lazy way of travelling down the French Broad River; and in the course of writing story-books for the young I must have turned out quite a respectable fleet of rafts--paper rafts--under every conceivable circumstance of theoretical difficulty, with glibness and ease.
But building that raft to cross the Repojoki was very different from all these previous excursions into carpentry. They had been amusement; this was a horrible nightmare. Because we wanted wood, no wood was near the river. The handiest tree lay at the farther side of the last swamp we had waded through, and quite half a mile from the bank. We had to wallow painfully back through this slough, haggle down our trees, lop them into portable lengths, and drag them back through the quaking ooze. We were hungry, we were weary, we were bitten half mad by the hateful insects, and our one utensil for cutting was a small American axe, more fitted to split kindling wood than to swing against a tree.
Two logs we laid upon the bank of the Repojoki, seven feet apart; five others we laid upon these; and then, putting two more parallel to the first two, we made withes from the shoots of Arctic willow, and bound the whole into place. And all the time that we worked, the sun beat upon us, and the mosquitoes covered us in dense, biting clouds. We were like men toiling in a delirium.
We hacked out something that would serve as a paddle, and slid the raft into the swift water. As a vehicle it did not look encouraging. It floated deep, and each log wobbled independently. But we were in no mood for niceness then. The packs were piled on and laboriously paddled over, following a diagonal course in the grip of the racing current. The raft was brought back again, and made the bank some two hundred yards farther down-stream. With a passenger on board besides the paddler, it sank very nearly out of sight, and between each trip it had to be docked for repairs. It was a moist method of making the passage, but it seemed effective.