The Rapids by Alan Sullivan — Read

It fell on a morning that Clark, sitting at his desk, felt within him that strange stirring to which he had long since learned to give heed, it being his habit at such moments to leave the works and resign himself completely to these subtle processes. He now walked slowly across toward the river, and seated himself where, years before, he had watched the triumphant kingfisher. The place had a peculiar fascination for him, and had by his orders been kept in its pristine wildness. Half a mile away the pulp mill was grinding dully, on the upper reaches of the great bay circular saws were ripping into logs fresh from Baudette's operations on the Magwa River, and seventy miles up the river a large crew was shipping and excavating at the iron mine. These things and many others being on foot, Clark had experienced that intellectual restlessness which in him was the precursor of further effort.

Listening to the boom of the river he reflected that the water he had diverted to his own purposes was but a fraction of the whole mighty torrent racing in front of him. Into the scant half mile between shore and shore was forced the escaping flood of the mighty Superior, and such was the compression that, midway, the torrent heaped itself up into a low ridge of broken plunging crests. Just over the ridge he could see the opposite shore line. It did not occur to him, as it would to many, how puny were the greatest efforts of man beside this prodigious mass. The manner of his mind was, too objective. The sight of the United States so close at hand only suggested that in the country from which he came he had as yet made no physical mark. There was the town with the rapids close beside it, just as in Canada. More and more the inward stirring captured him. Why should he not create in his own land what he had already created in Canada?