Courtesy of Byron Harmon, BanffMT. ASSINIBOINE, NEAR THE HEADWATERS OF THE COLUMBIA
TWIN FALLS (left)TAKAKAWA FALLS (right)TWO GREAT CATARACTS OF THE COLUMBIA WATERSHED
Captain Armstrong explained that he was about to close the sale of one of his mines on a tributary of the upper Columbia, and for that reason would be unable to join us for the Big Bend trip, as much as he would have enjoyed doing so. In the event that I decided to continue on down the Columbia after circling the Bend, it was just possible he would be clear to go along for a way. He spoke highly of Blackmore’s ability as a river man, and mentioned one or two others in Golden whom he thought might be secured. Ten dollars a day was the customary pay for a boatman going all the way round the Bend. That was about twice the ordinary wage prevailing at the time in the sawmills and lumber camps. The extra five was partly insurance, and partly because the work was hard and really good river men very scarce. It wasfair pay for an experienced hand. A poor boatman was worse than none at all, that is, in a pinch, while a good one might easily mean the difference between success and disaster. And of course I knew that disaster on the Bend—with perhaps fifty miles of trackless mountains between a wet man on the bank and the nearest human habitation—was spelt with a big D.
So far as I can remember, Captain Armstrong was the only one with whom I talked in Golden who did not try to dramatize the dangers and difficulties of the Big Bend. Seemingly taking it for granted that I knew all about them, or in any case would hear enough of them from the others, he turned his attention to forwarding practical plans for the trip. He even contributed a touch of romance to a venture that the rest seemed a unit in trying to make me believe was a sort of a cross between going over Niagara in barrel and a flight to one of the Poles.
“There was a deal of boot-legging on the river between Golden and Boat Encampment during the years the Grand Trunk was being built,” he said as we pored over an outspread map of the Big Bend, “for that was the first leg of the run into the western construction camps, where the sale of liquor was forbidden by law. Many and many a boatload of the stuff went wrong in the rapids. This would have been inevitable in any case, just in the ordinary course of working in such difficult water. But what made the losses worse was the fact that a good many of the bootleggers always started off with a load under their belts as well as in their boats. Few of the bodies were everfound, but with the casks of whisky it was different, doubtless because the latter would float longer and resist buffeting better. Cask after cask has kept turning up through the years, even down to the present, when B. C. is a comparative desert. They are found in the most unexpected places, and it’s very rare for a party to go all the way round the Bend without stumbling onto one. So bear well in mind you are not to go by anything that looks like a small barrel without looking to see if it has a head in both ends. If you have time, it will pay you to clamber for a few hours over the great patch of drift just below Middle River on Kinbasket Lake. That’s the one great catch-all for everything floatable that gets into the river below Golden. I’ve found just about everything there from a canary bird cage to a railway bridge. Failing there (which will only be because you don’t search long enough), dig sixteen paces northwest by compass from the foundation of the west tower of the abandoned cable ferry just above Boat Encampment.”
“How’s that again!” I exclaimed incredulously. “Sure you aren’t confusing the Big Bend with the Spanish Main?”
“If you follow my directions,” replied the Captain with a grin, “you’ll uncover more treasure for five minutes’ scratching than you’d be likely to find in turning over the Dry Tortugas for five years. You see, it was this way,” he went on, smiling the smile of a man who speaks of something which has strongly stirred his imagination. “It was only a few weeks after Walter Steinhoff was lost in Surprise Rapidsthat I made the trip round the Bend in a Peterboro to examine some silver-lead prospects I had word of. I had with me Pete Bergenham (a first-class river man; one you will do well to get yourself if you can) and another chap. This fellow was good enough with the paddle, but—though I didn’t know it when I engaged him—badly addicted to drink. That’s a fatal weakness for a man who is going to work in swift water, and especially such water as you strike at Surprise and the long run of Kinbasket Rapids. The wreckage of Steinhoff’s disaster (Blackmore will spin you the straightest yarn about that) was scattered all the way from the big whirlpool in Surprise Rapids down to Middle River, where they finally found his body. We might easily have picked up more than the one ten-gallon cask we bumped into, floating just submerged, in the shallows of the mud island at the head of Kinbasket Lake.
“I didn’t feel quite right about having so much whisky along; but the stuff had its value even in those days, and I would have felt still worse about leaving it to fall into the hands of some one who would be less moderate in its use than would I. I knew Pete Bergenham was all right, and counted on being able to keep an eye on the other man. That was just where I fell down. I should have taken the cask to bed with me instead of leaving it in the canoe.
“When the fellow got to the whisky I never knew, but it was probably well along toward morning. He was already up when I awoke, and displayed unwonted energy in getting breakfast and breaking camp. If I had known how heavily he had been tippling I would have given him another drink before pushing off to steady his nerve. That might have held him all right. As it was, reaction in mind and body set in just as we headed into that first sharp dip below the lake—the beginning of the twenty-one miles of Kinbasket Rapids. At the place where the bottom has dropped out from under and left the channel blocked by jagged rocks with no place to run through, he collapsed as if kicked in the stomach, and slithered down into the bottom of the canoe, blubbering like a baby. We just did manage to make our landing above the cascade. With a less skilful man than Bergenham at the stern paddle we would have failed, and that would have meant that we should probably not have stopped for good before we settled into the mud at the bottom of the Arrow Lakes.
“Even after that I could not find it in my heart to dish for good and all so much prime whisky. So I compromised by burying it that night, after we had come through the rapids without further mishap, at the spot I have told you of. That it was the best thing to do under the circumstances I am quite convinced. The mere thought that it was still in the world has cheered me in many a thirsty interval—yes, even out on the Tigris and the Nile, when there was no certainty I would ever come back to get it again.
“And now I’m going to tell you how to find it, for there’s no knowing if I shall ever have a chance to go for it myself. If you bring it out to Revelstoke safely, we’ll split it fifty-fifty, as they say on your side of the line. All I shall want to know is who your other boatmen are going to be. Blackmore is all right, but ifany one of the men whom he takes with him is a real drinker, you’d best forget the whole thing. If it’s an ‘all-sober’ crew, I’ll give you a map, marked so plainly that you can’t go wrong. It will be a grand haul, for it was Number One Scotch even when we planted it there, and since then it has been ageing in wood for something like ten years. I suppose you’ll be keen to smuggle your dividend right on down into the ‘The Great American Desert’?” he concluded with a grin.
“Trust me for that,” I replied with a knowing shake of my head. “I didn’t spend six months writing up opium smuggling on the China Coast for nothing.” Then I told him the story of the Eurasian lady who was fat in Amoy and thin in Hongkong, and who finally confessed to having smuggled forty pounds of opium, three times a week for five years, in oiled silk hip- and bust-pads.
“You must have a lot of prime ideas,” said the Captain admiringly. “You ought to make it easy, especially if you cross the line by boat. How would a false bottom ... but perhaps it would be safer to float it down submerged, with an old shingle-bolt for a buoy, and pick it up afterwards.”
“Or inside my pneumatic mattress,” I suggested. “But perhaps it would taste from the rubber.” By midnight we had evolved a plan which could not fail, and which was almost without risk. “The stuff’s as good as in California,” I told myself before I went to sleep—“and enough to pay all the expenses of my trip in case I should care to boot-leg it, which I won’t.”
Captain Armstrong’s mention of the Steinhoff disaster was not the first I had heard of it. The chapwith whom I had talked in Kamloops had shown me a photograph of a rude cross that he and his Indian companion had erected over Steinhoff’s grave, and in Revelstoke nearly every one who spoke of the Bend made some reference to the tragic affair. But here in Golden, which had been his home, the spectacularity of his passing seemed to have had an even more profound effect. As with everything else connected with the Big Bend, however, there was a very evident tendency to dramatize, to “play up,” the incident. I heard many different versions of the story, but there was one part, the tragic finale, in which they all were in practical agreement. When his canoe broke loose from its line, they said, and shot down toward the big whirlpool at the foot of the second cataract of Surprise Rapids, Steinhoff, realizing that there was no chance of the light craft surviving the maelstrom, coolly turned round, waved farewell to his companions on the bank, and, folding his arms, went down to his death. Canoe and man were sucked completely out of sight, never to be seen again until the fragments of the one and the battered body of the other were cast up, weeks later, many miles below.
It was an extremely effective story, especially as told by the local member in the B. C. Provincial Assembly, who had real histrionic talent. But somehow I couldn’t quite reconcile the Nirvanic resignation implied by the farewell wave and the folded arms with the never-say-die, cat-with-nine-lives spirit I had come to associate with your true swift-water boatman the world over. I was quite ready to grant that the big sockdolager of a whirlpool below the second pitchof Surprise Rapids was a real all-day and all-night sucker, but the old river hand who gave up to it like the Kentucky coons at the sight of Davy Crockett’s squirrel-gun wasn’t quite convincing. That, and the iterated statement that Steinhoff’s canoe-mate, who was thrown into the water at the same time, won his way to the bank by walking along the bottombeneaththe surface, had a decidedly steadying effect on the erratic flights to which my fancy had been launched by Big Bend yarns generally. There had been something strangely familiar in them all, and finally it came to me—Chinesefeng-shuigenerally, and particularly the legends of the sampan men of the portage villages along the Ichang gorges of the Yangtze. The things the giant dragon lurking in the whirlpools at the foot of the rapids would do to the luckless ones he got his back-curving teeth into were just a slightly different way of telling what the good folk of Golden claimed the Big Bend would do to the hapless wights who ventured down its darksome depths.
Now that I thought of it in this clarifying light, there had been “dragon stuff” bobbing up about almost every stretch of rough water I had boated. Mostly it was native superstition, but partly it was small town pride—pride in the things their “Dragon” had done, and would do. Human nature—yes, and river rapids, too—are very much the same the world over, whether on the Yangtze, Brahmaputra or upper Columbia.
That brought the Big Bend into its proper perspective. I realized that it was only water running down hill after all. Possibly it was faster than anything I had boated previously, and certainly—excepting the Yukon perhaps—colder. A great many men had been drowned in trying to run it; but so had men been drowned in duck-ponds. But many men had gone round without disaster, and that would I do,Imshallah. I always liked that pious Arab qualification when speaking of futurities. Later I applied the name—in fancy—to the skiff in which I made the voyage down the lower river.
Yes, undoubtedly the most of the yarns and the warnings were “dragon stuff” pure and simple, but Romance remained. A hundred miles of river with possible treasure lurking in every eddy, and one place where ithadto be! I felt as I did the first time I read “Treasure Island,” only more so. For that I had onlyread, and now I was going to search for myself—yes, and I was going to find, too. It was a golden sunset in more ways than one the evening before I was to leave for the upper river. Barred and spangled and fluted with liquid, lucent gold was the sky above hills that were themselves golden with the tints of early autumn. And in the Northwest there was a flush of rose, old rose that deepened and glowed in lambent crimson where a notch between the Selkirks and Rockies marked the approximate location of historic Boat Encampment. “Great things have happened at Boat Encampment,” I told myself, “and its history is not all written.” Then: “Sixteen paces northwest by compass from the foundation of the west tower of the abandoned cable ferry....” Several times during dinner that evening I had to check myself from humming an ancient song. “What’s thatabout, ‘Yo, ho, ho and a bottle of rum’?” queried the mackinaw drummer from Winnipeg who sat next me. “I thought you were from the States. I don’t quite see the point.”
“It’s just as well you don’t,” I replied, and was content to let it go at that.
When I started north from Los Angeles toward the end of August Chester, held up for the moment by business, was hoping to be able to shake free so as to arrive on the upper Columbia by the time I had arrangements for the Big Bend voyage complete. We would then go together to the Lake of the Hanging Glaciers before embarking on the Bend venture. Luck was not with him, however. The day I was ready to start on up river from Golden I received a wire stating that he was still indefinitely delayed, and that the best that there was now any chance of his doing would be to join me for the Bend. He had ordered his cameraman to Windermere, where full directions for the trip to the glaciers awaited him. He hoped I would see fit to go along and help with the picture, as some “central figure” besides the guides and packers would be needed to give the “story” continuity. I replied that I would be glad to do the best I could, and left for Lake Windermere by the next train. Few movie stars have ever been called to twinkle upon shorter notice.
One is usually told that the source of the Columbia is in Canal Flats, a hundred and fifty miles above Golden, and immediately south of a wonderfully lovely mountain-begirt lake that bears the same name as the river. This is true in a sense, although, strictly speaking, the real source of the river—the one rising at the point the greatest distance from its mouth—would be the longest of the many mountain creeks which converge upon Columbia Lake from the encompassing amphitheatre of the Rockies and Selkirks. This is probably Dutch Creek, which rises in the perpetual snow of the Selkirks and sends down a roaring torrent of grey-green glacier water into the western side of Columbia Lake. Scarcely less distant from the mouth of the Columbia are the heads of Toby and Horse Thief creeks, both of which bring splendid volumes of water to the mother river just below Lake Windermere.
It was the presence of the almost totally unknown Lake of the Hanging Glaciers near the head of the Horse Thief Creek watershed that was responsible for Chester’s determination to carry his preliminary explorations up to the latter source of the Columbia rather than to one slightly more remote above the upper lake. We had assurance that a trail, upon which work had been in progress all summer, would be completed by the middle of September, so that it would then be possible for the first time to take pack-horses and a full moving-picture outfit to one of the rarest scenic gems on the North American continent, the Lake of the Hanging Glaciers. To get the first movies of what is claimed to be the only lake in the world outside of the polar regions that has icebergs perpetually floating upon its surface was the principal object of Chester in directing his outfit up Horse Thief Creek. My own object was to reach one of the several points where the Columbia took its rise in theglacial ice, there to do a right-about and start upon my long-dreamed-of journey from snowflake to brine.
It is a dozen years or more since one could travel the hundred miles of the Columbia between Golden and Lake Windermere by steamer. The comparatively sparse population in this rich but thinly settled region was not sufficient to support both rail and river transport, and with the coming of the former the latter could not long be maintained. Two or three rotting hulks on the mud by the old landing at Golden are all that remain of one of the most picturesque steamer services ever run, for those old stern-wheelers used to flounder up the Columbia to Windermere, on through Mud and Columbia Lakes to Canal Flats, through a log-built lock to the Kootenay watershed, and then down the winding canyons and tumbling rapids of that tempestuous stream to Jennings, Montana. Those were the bonanza days of the upper Columbia and Kootenay—such days as they have never seen since nor will ever see again. I was to hear much of them later from Captain Armstrong when we voyaged a stretch of the lower river together.
There is a train between Golden and Windermere only three times a week. It is an amiable, ambling “jerk-water,” whose conductor does everything from dandling babies to unloading lumber. At one station he held over for five minutes to let me run down to a point where I could get the best light on a “reflection” picture in the river, and at another he ran the whole train back to pick up a basket of eggs which had been overlooked in the rush of departure. TheCanadian Pacific has the happy faculty of being all things to all men. Its main line has always impressed me as being the best-run road I have ever travelled on in any part of the world, including the United States. One would hardly characterize its little country feeders in the same words, but even these latter, as the instances I have noted will bear out, come about as near to being run for the accommodation of the travelling public as anything one will ever find. There is not the least need of hurrying this Golden-Windermere express. It stops over night at Invermere anyway, before continuing its leisurely progress southward the next morning.
Chester’s cameraman met me with a car at the station, and we rode a mile to the hotel at Invermere, on the heights above the lake. His name was Roos, he said—Len H. Roos of N. Y. C. It was his misfortune to have been born in Canada, he explained, but he had always had a great admiration for Americans, and had taken out his first papers for citizenship. He could manage to get on with Canadians in a pinch, he averred further; but as for Britishers—no “Lime-juicers” for him, with their “G’bly’me’s” and afternoon teas. I saw that this was going to be a difficult companion, and took the occasion to point out that, since he was going to be in Canada for some weeks, it might be just as well to bottle up his rancour against the land of his birth until he was back on the other side of the line and had completed the honour he intended to do Uncle Sam by becoming an American citizen. Maybe I was right, he admitted thoughtfully; but it would be a hard thing for him to do, as hewas naturally very frank and outspoken and a great believer in saying just what he thought of people and things.
He was right about being outspoken. He had also rather a glittering line of dogma on the finer things of life. Jazz was the highest form of music (he ought to know, for had he not played both jazz and grand opera when he was head drummer of the Galt, Ontario, town band?); the Mack Sennett bathing comedy was hisbelle idealof kinematic art; and the newspapers of William Hearst were the supreme development of journalism. This latter he knew, because he had done camera work for a Hearst syndicate himself. I could manage to make a few degrees of allowance for jazz and the Mack Sennett knockabouts under the circumstances, but the deification of Hearst created an unbridgeable gulf. I foresaw that “director” and “star” were going to have bumpy sledding, but also perceived the possibility of comedy elements which promised to go a long way toward redeeming the enforced partnership from irksomeness, that is, if the latter were not too prolonged. That it could run to six or seven weeks and the passage of near to a thousand miles of the Columbia without turning both “director” and “star” into actual assassins, I would never have believed. Indeed, I am not able to figure out even now how it could have worked out that way. I can’t explain it. I merely state the fact.
Walter Nixon, the packer who was to take us “up Horse Thief,” had been engaged by wire a week previously. His outfit had been ready for several days,and he called at the hotel the evening of my arrival to go over the grub list and make definite plans. As there were only two of us, he reckoned that ten horses and two packers would be sufficient to see us through. The horses would cost us two dollars a day a head, and the packers five dollars apiece. The provisions he would buy himself and endeavour to board us at a dollar and a half apiece a man. This footed up to between thirty-five and forty dollars a day for the outfit, exclusive of the movie end. It seemed a bit stiff offhand, but was really very reasonable considering present costs of doing that kind of a thing and the thoroughly first-class service Nixon gave us from beginning to end.
Nixon himself I was extremely well impressed with. He was a fine up-standing fellow of six feet or more, black-haired, black-eyed, broad-shouldered and a swell of biceps and thigh that even his loose-fitting mackinaws could not entirely conceal. I liked particularly his simple rig-out, in its pleasing contrast to the cross-between-a-movie-cowboy-and-a-Tyrolean-yodeler garb that has come to be so much affected by the so-called guides at Banff and Lake Louise. Like the best of his kind, Nixon was quiet-spoken and leisurely of movement, but with a suggestion of powerful reserves of both vocabulary and activity. I felt sure at first sight that he was the sort of a man who could be depended upon to see a thing through whatever the difficulties, and I never had reason to change my opinion on that score.
It was arranged that night that Nixon should get away with the pack outfit by noon of the next day, andmake an easy stage of it to the Starbird Ranch, at the end of the wagon-road, nineteen miles out from Invermere. The following morning Roos and I would come out by motor and be ready to start by the time the horses were up and the packs on. That gave us an extra day for exploring Windermere and the more imminent sources of the Columbia.
Roos’ instructions from Chester called for a “Windermere Picture,” in which should be shown the scenic, camping, fishing and hunting life of that region. The scenic and camping shots he had already made; the fish and the game had eluded him. I arrived just in time to take part in the final scurry to complete the picture. The fish to be shown were trout, and the game mountain sheep and goat, or at least that was the way Roos planned it at breakfast time. When inquiry revealed that it would take a day to reach a trout stream, and three days to penetrate to the haunts of the sheep and goats, he modified the campaign somewhat to conform with the limited time at our disposal. Close at hand in the lake there was a fish called the squaw-fish, which, floundering at the end of a line, would photograph almost like a trout, or so the hotel proprietor thought. And the best of it was that any one could catch them. Indeed, at times one had to manœuvre to keep them from taking the bait that was meant for the more gamy and edible, but also far more elusive, ling or fresh-water cod. As for the game picture, said Roos, he would save time by having a deer rounded up and driven into the lake, where he would pursue it with a motor boat and shoot the required hunting pictures. He would liketo have me dress like a tourist and do the hunting and fishing. That would break me in to adopting an easy and pleasing manner before the camera, so that a minimum of film would be spoiled when he got down to our regular work on the Hanging Glacier picture. It wouldn’t take long. That was the advantage of “news” training for a cameraman. You could do things in a rush when you had to.
Mr. Clelland, secretary of the Windermere Company, courteously found us tackle and drove us down to the outlet of the lake to catch the squaw-fish. Three hours later he drove us back to the hotel for lunch without one single fragment of our succulent salt-pork bait having been nuzzled on its hook. I lost my “easy and pleasing manner” at the end of the first hour, and Roos—who was under rather greater tension in standing by to crank—somewhat sooner. He said many unkind things about fish in general and squaw-fish in particular before we gave up the fight at noon, and I didn’t improve matters at all by suggesting that I cut out the picture on a salmon can label, fasten it to my hook, and have him shoot me catching that. There was no sense whatever in the idea, he said. You had to have studio lighting to get away with that sort of thing. He couldn’t see how I could advance such a thing seriously. As I had some doubts on that score myself, I didn’t start an argument.
In the afternoon no better success attended our effort to make the hunting picture,—this because no one seemed to know where a deer could be rounded up and driven into the lake. Again I discovered a wayto save this situation. On the veranda of the country club there was a fine mounted specimen ofOvis Canadensis, the Canadian mountain sheep. By proper ballasting, I pointed out to Roos, this fine animal could be made to submerge to a natural swimming depth—say with the head and shoulders just above the water. Then a little Evinrude engine could be clamped to its hind quarters and set going. Forthwith the whole thing must start off ploughing across the lake just like a live mountain sheep. By a little manœuvring it ought to be possible to shoot at an angle that would interpose the body of the sheep between the eye and the pushing engine. If this proved to be impossible, perhaps it could be explained in a sub-title that the extraneous machinery was a fragment of mowing-machine or something of the kind that the sheep had collided with and picked up in his flight. Roos, while admitting that this showed a considerable advance over my salmon-label suggestion of the morning, said that there were a number of limiting considerations which would render it impracticable. I forget what all of these were, but one of them was that our quarry couldn’t be made to roll his eyes and register “consternation” and “mute reproach” in the close-ups. I began to see that there was a lot more to the movie game than I had ever dreamed. But what a stimulator of the imagination it was!
As there was nothing more to be done about the hunting and fishing shots for the present, we turned our attention to final preparations for what we had begun to call the “Hanging Glacier Picture.” Roossaid it would be necessary to sketch a rough sort of scenario in advance—nothing elaborate like “Broken Blossoms” or “The Perils of Pauline” (we hadn’t the company for that kind of thing), but just the thread of a story to make the “continuity” ripple continuously. It would be enough, he thought, if I would enact the rôle of a gentleman-sportsman and allow the guides and packers to be just their normal selves. Then with these circulating in the foreground, he would film the various scenic features of the trip as they unrolled. All the lot of us would have to do would be to act naturally and stand or lounge gracefully in those parts of the picture where the presence of human beings would be best calculated to balance effectively and harmoniously the composition. I agreed cheerfully to the sportsman part of my rôle, but demurred as to “gentleman.” I might manage it for a scene, but for a sustained effort it was out of the question. A compromise along this line was finally effected. I engaged to act as much like a gentleman as I could for the opening shot, after which I was to be allowed to lapse into the seeming of a simple sportsman who loved scenery-gazing more than the pursuit and slaying of goat, sheep and bear. Roos observed shrewdly that it would be better to have the sportsman be more interested in scenery than game because, judging from our experience at Windermere, we would find more of the former than the latter. He was also encouragingly sympathetic about my transient appearance as a gentleman. “I only want about fifty feet of that,” he said as he gave mea propitiating pat on the back; “besides, it’s all a matter of clothes anyhow.”
Before we turned in that night it transpired that Chester’s hope of being the first to show moving pictures of the Lake of the Hanging Glaciers to the world was probably doomed to disappointment, or, at the best, that this honour would have to be shared with an equally ambitious rival. Byron Harmon, of Banff, formerly official photographer for the Canadian Pacific, arrived at Invermere and announced that he was planning to go “up Horse Thief” and endeavour to film a number of the remarkable scenic features which he had hitherto tried to picture in vain. His schedule was temporarily upset by the fact that we had already engaged the best packtrain and guides available. Seasoned mountaineer that he was, however, this was of small moment. A few hours’ scurrying about had provided him with a light but ample outfit, consisting of four horses and two men, with which he planned to get away in the morning. He was not in the least perturbed by the fact that Roos had practically a day’s start of him. “There’s room for a hundred cameramen to work up there,” he told me genially; “and the more the world is shown of the wonders of the Rockies and the Selkirks, the more it will want to see. It will be good to have your company, and each of us ought to be of help to the other.”
I had some difficulty in bringing Roos to a similarly philosophical viewpoint. His “Hearst” training impelled him to brook no rivalry, to beat out the other man by any means that offered. He had the better packtrain, he said, to say nothing of a day’s start.Also, he had the only dynamite and caps available that side of Golden, so that he would have the inside track for starting avalanches and creating artificial icebergs in the Lake of the Hanging Glaciers. I would like to think that it was my argument that, since it was not a “news” picture he was after, the man who took the most time to his work would be the one to get the best results, was what brought him round finally. I greatly fear, however, it was the knowledge that the generous Harmon had a number of flares that did the trick. He had neglected to provide flares himself, and without them work in the ice caves—second only in interest to the Lake of the Hanging Glaciers itself—would be greatly circumscribed. At any rate, he finally agreed to a truce, and we took Harmon out to the end of the road in our car the following morning. Of the latter’s really notable work in picturing the mountains of western Canada I shall write later.
The horses were waiting, saddled and packed, as we drove up to the rendezvous. The packer was a powerfully built fellow, with his straight black hair and high cheek bones betokening a considerable mixture of Indian blood. His name was Buckman—Jim Buckman. He was the village blacksmith of Athalmere, Nixon explained. He was making plenty of money in his trade, but was willing to come along at a packer’s wage for the sake of the experience as an actor. The lure of the movies was also responsible for the presence of Nixon’s fourteen-year-old son, Gordon, who had threatened to run away from home if he wasn’t allowed to come along. He proved a useful acquisition—more than sufficiently so, it seemed tome, to compensate for what he did to the jam and honey.
Roos called us around him and gave instructions for the “business” of the opening shot. Nixon and Jim were to be “picked up” taking the last of the slack out of a “diamond hitch,” Gordon frolicking in the background with his dog. When the car drove up, Nixon was to take my saddle horse by the bridle, walk up and shake hands with me. Then, to make the transition from Civilization to the Primitive (movie people never miss a chance to use that word) with a click, I was to step directly from the car into my stirrups. “Get me!” admonished Roos; “straight from the running board to the saddle. Don’t touch the ground at all. Make it snappy, all of you. I don’t want any of you to grow into ‘foot-lice.’”
My saddle horse turned out to be a stockily-built grey of over 1200 pounds. He looked hard as nails and to have no end of endurance. But his shifty eye and back-laid ears indicated temperamentality, so that Nixon’s warning that he “warn’t exactly a lady’s hawss” was a bit superfluous. “When you told me you tipped the beam at two-forty,” he said, “I know’d ‘Grayback’ was the only hawss that’d carry you up these trails. So I brung him in, and stuffed him up with oats, and here he is. He may dance a leetle on his toes jest now, but he’ll gentle down a lot by the end of a week.”
Whether “Grayback” mastered all of the “business” of that shot or not is probably open to doubt, but that he took the “Make it snappy!” part to heart there was no question. He came alongside like alamb, but the instant I started to make my transition from “Civilization to the Primitive with a click” he started climbing into the car. The only click I heard was when my ear hit the ground. Roos couldn’t have spoiled any more film than I did cuticle, but, being a “Director,” he made a good deal more noise about it. After barking his hocks on the fender, “Grayback” refused to be enticed within mounting distance of the car again, so finally, with a comparatively un-clicky transition from Civilization to the Primitive, I got aboard by the usual route from the ground.
The next shot was a quarter of a mile farther up the trail. Here Roos found a natural sylvan frame through which to shoot the whole outfit as it came stringing along. Unfortunately, the “Director” failed to tell the actors not to look at the camera—that, once and for all, the clicking box must be reckoned as a thing non-existent—and it all had to be done over again. The next time it was better, but the actors still had a wooden expression on their faces. They didn’t look at the camera, but the expression on their faces showed that they were conscious of it. Roos then instructed me to talk to my companions, or sing, or do anything that would take their minds off the camera and make them appear relaxed and natural. That time we did it famously. As each, in turn, cantered by the sylvan bower with its clicking camera he was up to his neck “doing something.” Nixon was declaiming Lincoln’s Gettysburg speech as he had learned it from his phonograph, Gordon was calling his dog, Jim was larruping a straggling pinto and cursing it in fluent local idiom, and I was singing“Onward, Christian Soldiers!” We never had any trouble about “being natural” after that; but I hope no lip reader ever sees the pictures.
After picking up Roos and his camera we made our real start. One pack-horse was reserved for the camera and tripod, and to prevent him from ranging from the trail and bumping the valuable apparatus against trees or rocks, his halter was tied to the tail of Nixon’s saddle animal. Except that the latter’s spinal column must have suffered some pretty severe snakings when the camera-carrier went through corduroy bridges or lost his footings in fords, the arrangement worked most successfully. The delicate instrument was not in the least injured in all of the many miles it was jogged over some of the roughest trails I have ever travelled.
The sunshine by which the last of the trail shots was made proved the parting glimmer of what had been a month or more of practically unbroken fair weather. Indeed, the weather had been rather too fine, for, toward the end of the summer, lack of rain in western Canada invariably means forest fires. As these had been raging intermittently for several weeks all over British Columbia, the air had become thick with smoke, and at many places it was impossible to see for more than a mile or two in any direction. Both Roos and Harmon had been greatly hampered in their work about Banff and Lake Louise by the smoke, and both were, therefore, exceedingly anxious for early and copious rains to clear the air. Otherwise, they said, there was no hope of a picture of the Lake of the Hanging Glaciers that would be worththe film it was printed on. They must have rain. Their prayer was about to be answered, in full measure, pressed down and running over—and then some.
We had been encountering contending currents of hot and cold air all the way up the wagon-road from Invermere and the lower valley. Now, as we entered the mountains, these became more pronounced, taking the form of scurrying “dust-devils” that attacked from flank and van without method or premonitory signal. The narrowing gorge ahead was packed solid with a sullen phalanx of augmenting clouds, sombre-hued and sagging with moisture, and frequently illumined with forked lightning flashes discharged from their murky depths. Nixon, anxious to make camp before the storm broke, jogged the horses steadily all through the darkening afternoon. It was a point called “Sixteen-mile” he was driving for, the first place we would reach where there was room for the tent and feed for the horses. We were still four miles short of our destination when the first spatter of ranging drops opened up, and from there on the batteries of the storm concentrated on us all the way.
We made camp in a rain driving solidly enough to deflect the stroke of an axe. I shall not enlarge upon the acute discomfort of it. Those who have done it will understand; those who have not would never be able to. It was especially trying on the first day out, before the outfit had become shaken down and one had learned where to look for things. Nixon’s consummate woodcraftsmanship was put to a severe test, but emerged triumphant. So, too, Jim, who proved himself as impervious to rain as to ill-temper. Thefir boughs for the tent floor came in dripping, of course, but there were enough dry tarpaulins and blankets to blot up the heaviest of the moisture, and the glowing little sheet-iron stove licked up the rest. A piping hot dinner drove out the last of the chill, and we spent a snug, comfy evening listening to Nixon yarn about his mountaineering exploits and of the queer birds from New York and London whom he had nursed through strange and various intervals of moose and sheep-hunting in the Kootenays and Rockies. We slept dry but rather cold, especially Roos, who ended up by curling round the stove and stoking between shivers. Nixon and Jim drew generously on their own blanket rolls to help the both of us confine our ebbing animal heat, and yet appeared to find not the least difficulty in sleeping comfortably under half the weight of cover that left us shaking. It was all a matter of what one was used to, of course, and in a few days we began to harden.
It was September tenth that we had started from Invermere, hoping at the time to be able to accomplish what we had set out to do in from four to six days. The rain which had come to break the long dry spell put a very different face on things, however. The eleventh, twelfth and thirteenth we were held in our first camp by an almost continuous downpour, which turned the mountain streams into torrents and raised Horse Thief till it lapped over the rim of the flat upon which our tent was pitched. The night of the thirteenth, with a sharp drop of the temperature, the rain turned to snow, and we crawled out on the fourteenth to find the valley under a light blanket ofwhite. Then the clouds broke away and the sunshine and shadows began playing tag over the scarps and buttresses of the encompassing amphitheatre of mountains. For the first time there was a chance for a glimpse of the new world into which we had come. The transition from the cultivation and the gentle wooded slopes of Windermere was startling. Under the mask of the storm clouds we had penetrated from a smooth, rounded, pleasant country to one that was cliffy and pinnacled and bare—a country that was all on end, a land whose bones showed through. A towering Matterhorn reared its head six or eight thousand feet above us, and so near that slabs of rock cracked away from its scarred summit were lying just across the trail from the tent. The peaks walling in Horse Thief to the north were not so high but no less precipitous and barren, while to the west a jumble of splintered pinnacles whose bases barred the way were still lost in the witch-dance of the clouds. A tourist folder would have called it a “Land of Titans,” but Jim, leaning on his axe after nicking off a fresh back-log for the camp fire, merely opined it was “some skookum goat country. But not a patch,” he added, “to what we’ll be hittin’ to-night if we get themgeeslyhawsses rounded up in time fer a start ’fore noon.”
It appeared that the horses, with their grazing spoiled by the snow, had become restless, broken through the barrier Nixon had erected at a bridge just below camp, and started on the back trail for Invermere. As their tracks showed that they had broken into a trot immediately beyond the bridge, it lookedlike a long stern-chase, and Nixon did not reckon on being able to hit the trail for several hours. Roos grasped the occasion to make a couple of “camp life” shots his fertile brain had conceived the idea of during the long storm-bound days of enforced inaction. In one of these the “sportsman” was to go to bed in silhouette by candlelight. Ostensibly this was to be the shadow of a man crawling into his blanketsinsideof the tent, and taken from the outside. In reality, however, Roos set up his camerainsideof the tent and shot the antics of the shadow the sunlight threw on the canvas when I went through the motions of turning in close against theoutsideof the wall. This went off smartly and snappily; but I would have given much for a translation of the voluble comments of a passing Indian who pulled up to watch the agile action of the retiring “sportsman.”
It was while Roos was rehearsing me for this shot that Gordon must have heard him iterating his invariable injunction that I should not be a “foot-hog,” meaning, I shall hardly need to explain, that I should be quick in my movements so as not to force him to use an undue footage of film. A little later I overheard the boy asking Jim what a “foot-hog” was. “I don’t quitekumtruxmyself,” the sturdy blacksmith-packer replied, scratching his head. “It sounds as if it might be suthin like pig’s feet, but they want actin’ as if they wuz ready to eat anythin’, ’less it was each other.” Now that I think of it, I can see how the clash of the artistic temperaments of “Director” and “Star” over just about every one of the shots they made might have given Jim that impression.
THE “TURNING-IN” SCENE SHOT IN SILHOUETTE (above)“REVERSE” OF THE “GOING-TO-BED” SHOT (below)
ON THE HORSE THIEF TRAIL(left)A DEAD-FALL ON THE TRAIL(right)
The other shot we made that morning was one which Roos had labelled as “Berry Picking and Eating” in his tentative scenario. The “sportsman” was to fare forth, gather a bowlful of raspberries, bring them back to camp, put sugar and condensed milk on them, and finally eat them, all before the camera. I objected to appearing in this for two reasons: for one, because berry-picking was not a recognized out-door sport, and, for another, because I didn’t like raspberries. Roos admitted that berry-picking was not a sport, but insisted he had to have the scene to preserve his continuity. “Gathering and eating these products of Nature,” he explained, “shows how far the gentleman you were in the first scene has descended toward the Primitive. You will be getting more and more Primitive right along, but we must register each step on the film, see?” As for my distaste for raspberries, Roos was quite willing that, after displaying the berries heaped in the bowl in a close-up, I should do the real eating with strawberry jam. It was that last which overcame my spell of “temperament.” Both Roos and Gordon already had me several pots down in the matter of jam consumption, and I was glad of the chance to climb back a notch.
We found raspberry bushes by the acre but, thanks to the late storm, almost no berries. This didn’t matter seriously in the picking shot, for which I managed to convey a very realistic effect in pantomime, but for the heaped-high close-up of the bowl it was another matter. One scant handful was the best that the four of us, foraging for half an hour, could bring in. ButI soon figured a way to make these do. Opening a couple of tins of strawberry jam into the bowl, I rounded over smoothly the bright succulent mass and then made a close-set raspberry mosaic of one side of it. That did famously for the close-up. As I settled back for the berry-eating shot Roos cut in sharply with his usual: “Snappy now! Don’t be a foot-hog!” Gordon, who had been digging his toe into the mud for some minutes, evidently under considerable mental stress, lifted his head at the word. “Hadn’t you better say ‘jam-hog’, Mr. Roos?” he queried plaintively.
“I’m afraid it wouldn’t be any use,” was the dejected reply. Roos was right. At the word “Action!” I dug in with my spoon on the unpaved side of the bowl of jam, and several turns before the crank ceased revolving there was nothing left but a few daubed raspberries and several broad red smears radiating from my mouth. Roos tossed the two empty jam tins into the murky torrent of Horse Thief Creek and watched them bob away down stream. “You’re getting too darn primitive,” he said peevishly.
It was nearly eleven o’clock before Nixon came with the horses; but we had camp struck and the packs made, so there was little delay in taking the trail. The bottom of the valley continued fairly open for a few miles, with the swollen stream serpentining across it, turned hither and thither by huge logjams and fortress-like rock islands. Where the North Fork came tumbling into the main creek in a fine run of cascades there was a flat several acres in extent and good camping ground. Immediately above the valley narrowed to a steep-sided canyon, and continuedso all the way up to the snow and glacier-line. The trail from now on was badly torn and washed and frequently blocked with dead-falls. Or rather it had been so blocked up to a day or two previously. Now I understood the reason for Nixon’s complaisance when Harmon’s outfit, travelling in the rain, had passed our camp a couple of days before. “Don’t worry, sonny,” he had said in comforting the impetuous Roos; “we won’t lose any time, and we will save a lot of chopping.” And so it had worked out. Harmon’s men had cut the dead-falls out of the whole twelve miles of trail between North Fork and the Dragon-Tail Glacier.
Even so it was a beastly stretch of trail. The stream, completely filling the bottom of the gorge, kept the path always far up the side of the mountain. There were few dangerous precipices, but one had always to be on the lookout to keep his head from banging on dead-falls just high enough to clear a pack, and which, therefore, no one would take the trouble to cut away. The close-growing shrubbery was dripping with moisture, and even riding second to Nixon, who must have got all the worst of it, I found myself drenched at the end of the first half mile. Riding through wet underbrush can wet a man as no rain ever could. No waterproof ever devised offers the least protection against it; nothing less than a safe deposit vault on wheels could do so.
Streams, swollen by the now rapidly melting snow, came tumbling down—half cataract, half cascade—all along the way. At the worst crossings these had been roughly bridged, as little footing for men or horseswas afforded by the clean-swept rock. Only one crossing of the main stream was necessary. It was a good natural ford at low water, but quite out of the question to attempt at high. We found it about medium—a little more than belly deep and something like an eight-mile current. With a foot more water it would have commenced to get troublesome; with another two feet, really dangerous. That prospect, with the rapidly rising water, was reserved for our return trip.
Such a road was, of course, wonderfully picturesque and colourful, and Roos, with a quick eye for an effective composition, made the most of his opportunities for “trail shots.” A picture of this kind, simple enough to look at on the screen, often took half an hour or more to make. The finding of a picturesque spot on the trail was only the beginning. This was useless unless the light was right and a satisfactory place to set up the tripod was available. When this latter was found, more often than not a tree or two had to be felled to open up the view to the trail. Then—as the party photographed had to be complete each time, and with nothing to suggest the presence of the movie camera or its operator—Roos’ saddle horse and the animal carrying his outfit had to be shuttled along out of line and tied up where they would not get in the picture. This was always a ticklish operation on the narrow trails, and once or twice the sheer impossibility of segregating the superfluous animals caused Roos to forego extremely effective shots.
The mountains became higher and higher, and steeper and steeper, the farther we fared. And thegreater the inclines, the more and more precarious was the hold of the winter’s snow upon the mountainsides. At last we climbed into a veritable zone of avalanches—a stretch where, for a number of miles, the deep-gouged troughs of the snow-slides followed each other like the gullies in a rain-washed mudbank. Slide-time was in the Spring, of course, so the only trouble we encountered was in passing over the terribly violated mountainsides. If the trail came to the track of an avalanche far up on the mountainside, it meant descending a cut-bank to the scoured bedrock, click-clacking along over this with the shod hooves of the horses striking sparks at every step for a hundred yards or more, and then climbing out again. If the path of the destroyer was encountered low down, near the river, the way onward led over a fifty-feet-high pile of upended trees, boulders and sand. In nearly every instance one could see where the slides had dammed the stream a hundred feet high or more, and here and there were visible swaths cut in the timber of the further side, where the buffer of the opposite mountain had served to check the onrush.
The going for the horses was hard at all times, but worst perhaps where the dam of a slide had checked the natural drainage and formed a bottomless bog too large for the trail to avoid. Here the hard-blown animals floundered belly deep in mud and rotten wood, as did also their riders when they had to slide from the saddles to give their mounts a chance to reach a solid footing. The polished granite of the runways of the slide was almost as bad, for here the horses were repeatedly down from slipping. My air-treading, toe-dancing “Grayback” of the morning was gone in the back and legs long before we reached the end. My weight and the pace (Nixon was driving hard to reach a camping place before a fresh gathering of storm clouds were ready to break) had proved too much for him. The fighting light was gone from his eye, his head was between his legs, and his breath was expelled with a force that seemed to be scouring the lining from his bleeding nostrils. Dropping back to slacken his girths and breathe him a moment before leading him up the last long run of zigzags, I heard the sobbingdiminuendoof the packtrain die out in the sombre depths above. It was like the shudder of sounds that rise through a blow-hole where the sea waves are pounding hard on the mouth of a subterranean grotto.
I had developed a warm and inclusive sympathy for “Grayback” before I reached the crest of that final shoulder of mountain we had to surmount, but lost most of it on the slide back to the valley when, in lieu of anything else to hand as he found himself slipping, he started to canter up my spine. I found Nixon and Jim throwing off packs on a narrow strip of moss-covered bottom between the drop-curtain of the fir-covered mountainside and the bank of the creek. It was practically the only place for a camp anywhere in the closely-walled valley. Slide-wreckage claimed all the rest of it. An upward trickle of lilac smoke a half mile above told where Harmon’s outfit had effected some sort of lodgment, but it was on ageeslyslither of wet side-hill, Nixon said, and badly exposedto the wind that was always sucking down from the glacier.
The moss underfoot was saturated with water, but with an hour of daylight and pines close at hand this was a matter of small moment. We were well under cover by the time the snuffer of the darkness clapped sharply down, and with a good day’s supply of wood for stove and camp-fire piled up outside the tent. Not having stopped for lunch on the trail, we were all rather “peckish” (to use Nixon’s expression) by the time dinner was ready. After that there was nothing much to bother about. Nixon told goat hunting stories all evening, putting a fresh edge on his axe the while with a little round pocket whetstone. A Canadian guide is as cranky about his private and personal axe as a Chicago clothing drummer is about his razors. So it was only to be expected that Nixon took it a bit hard when Roos had employed his keenly whetted implement to crack open a hunk of quartz with. That was the reason, doubtless, why most of his stories had to do with the fool escapades of various of thegeesly(that was Nixon’s favourite term of contempt, and a very expressive one it was) tenderfeet he had guided. But one of his yarns (and I think a true one) was of a time that he was caught by a storm at ten thousand feet in the Rockies and had to spend the night on the rocks a mile above the timber-line. Lightly dressed and without a blanket, the only protection he had from a temperature many degrees below freezing was from the carcasses of the two freshly-shot goats that had lured him there. Splitting thesedown the middle with his hunting knife, he had covered himself with them, entrails and all, in the hope that the remaining animal heat would keep him alive till daylight. Man and goat were frozen to one stiff mass by morning, but the man had still enough vitality to crack himself loose and descend to his camp. The exposure and hardship some of these northwest mountaineers have survived is almost beyond belief.
I went to sleep with the sizzle of snowflakes on the dying embers of the camp-fire in my ears, and awoke to find the tent roof sagging down on my ear under the weight of a heavy night’s fall. The storm was over for the moment, but the clouds were still lurking ominously above the glacier, and there was little light for pictures. Harmon, crossing the several channels of the creek on fallen logs, came over later in the day. He had been storm-bound ever since his arrival, he said, and had done nothing at all in taking either stills or movies yet. But fires and smoke were finished for the year now, he added philosophically, and it was his intention to remain until he got what he was after. Before he left he told me something of his work. “Stills,” it appeared, were the main thing with him; his movie work was carried on merely as a side-line to pay the expenses of trips he could not otherwise afford. He had been photographing in the Selkirks and Rockies for a dozen years, and he would not be content to rest until the sets of negatives—as nearly perfect as they could be made—of every notable peak and valley of western Canada. Then he was going to hold a grand exhibition of mountain photographs at Banff and retire. The Lake of the Hanging Glaciers was one of the very few great scenic features he had never photographed, and he only hoped he would be able to do it justice. The fine reverence of Harmon’s attitude toward the mountains that he loved was completely beyond Roos’ ken. “I never worries about not doing ’em justice—not for a minute. What does worry me is whether or not these cracked up lakes and glaciers are going to turn out worth my coming in to do justice to. Get me?” “Yes, I think so,” replied the veteran with a very patient smile.
Snow flurries kept us close to camp all that day. The next one, the sixteenth, was better, though still quite hopeless for movie work. After lunch we set out on foot for the big glacier, a mile above, from which the creek took its life. The clouds still hung too low to allow anything of the mountains to be seen, but one had the feeling of moving in a long narrow tunnel through which a cold jet of air was constantly being forced. A few hundred yards above our camp was a frightful zone of riven trees mixed with gravel and boulders. It was one of the strangest, one of the savagest spots I ever saw. It was the battle ground of two rival avalanches, Nixon explained, two great slides which, with the impetus of six or eight thousand feet of run driving uncounted millions of tons of snow and earth, met there every spring in primeval combat. No man had ever seen the fantastic onslaught (for no man could reach that point in the springtime), but it was certain that the remains of it made a mighty dam all the way across the valley. Then the creek would be backed up half way to the glacier, when it would accumulate enough power to sweep the obstruction away and scatter it down to the Columbia.
Straight down the respective paths of the rival slides, and almost exactly opposite each other, tumbled two splendid cascades. The hovering storm cloudscut off further view of them a few hundred feet above the valley, but Nixon said that they came plunging like that for thousands of feet, from far up into the belt of perpetual snow. The one to the east (which at the moment seemed to be leaping straight out of the heart of a sinister slaty-purple patch of cumulonimbus) drained the Lake of the Hanging Glaciers; that to the west a desolate rock and ice-walled valley which was rimmed by some of the highest summits in the Selkirks. Our road to the lake would be wet with the spray of the former for a good part of the distance.
We were scrambling through a land of snow-slides all the way to the glacier. For the first half mile patches of stunted fir survived here and there, due to being located in the lee of some cliff or other rocky outcrop which served to deflect the springtime onslaughts from above; then all vegetation ceased and nothing but snow-churned and ice-ground rock fragments remained. All along the last quarter of a mile the successive stages of the glacier’s retreat were marked by great heaps of pulverized rock, like the tailings at the mouth of a mine. Only the face of the glacier and the yawning ice caves were visible under the cloud-pall. The queerly humped uplift of the “dragon” moraine could be dimly guessed in the shifting mists that whirled and eddied in the icy draughts from the caves.
Our principal object in going up to the grottoes on so inclement a day was to experiment with our dynamite on the ice, with a view to turning our knowledge to practical use in making artificial icebergs for the movies in the Lake of the Hanging Glaciers. Selecting what looked like a favourable spot at the base of what seemed a “fracturable” pinnacle of grey-green ice, we dug a three-feet-deep hole with a long-handled chisel, pushed in two sticks of sixty per cent. dynamite, tamped it hard with snow after attaching a lengthy fuse, touched a match to the latter and retired to a safe distance. The result, to put it in Roos’ latest imported slang, was an “oil can,” which connotes about the same thing as fizzle, I took it. There’s a deal of kick in two sticks of “sixty per” set off in rock, but here it was simply an exuberant “whouf” after the manner of a blowing porpoise. A jet of soft snow and ice shot up some distance, but the pinnacle never trembled. And the hole opened up was smooth-sided and clean, as if melted out with hot water. Not the beginning of a crack radiated from it. Jim opined that a slower burning powder might crack ice, but there was certainly no hope of “sixty per” doing the trick. It was evident that we would have to find some other way of making artificial icebergs. We did. We made them of rock. But I won’t anticipate.
It snowed again in the night, snowed itself out for a while. The following morning it was warm and brilliantly clear, and for the first time there was a chance to see what sort of a place it was to which we had entered. For a space the height and abruptness of the encompassing walls seemed almost appalling; it was more like looking up out of an immeasurably vast crater than from a valley. All around there were thousands of feet of sheer rocky cliff upon which no snow could effect a lodgment; and above these more thousands of feet solid with the glittering green ofglacial ice and the polished marble of eternal snow. The jagged patch of sky was a vivid imperial blue, bright and solid-looking like a fragment of rich old porcelain. The morning sun, cutting through the sharp notches between the southeastern peaks, was dappling the snow fields of the western walls in gay splashes of flaming rose and saffron, interspersed with mottled shadows of indigo and deep purple. Reflected back to the still shadowed slopes of the eastern walls, these bolder colours became a blended iridescence of amethyst, lemon and pale misty lavender. The creek flowed steely cold, with fluffs of grey-wool on the riffles. The tree patches were black, dead funereal black, throwing back no ray of light from their down-swooping branches. The air was so clear that it seemed almost to have assumed a palpability of its own. One imagined things floating in it; even that it might tinkle to the snip of a finger nail, like a crystal rim.
In movies as in hay-making, one has to step lively while the sun shines. This was the first good shooting light we had had, and no time was lost in taking advantage of it. Long before the sun had reached the bottom of the valley we were picking our way up toward the foot of the glacier, this time on horseback. Early as we had started, the enterprising Harmon had been still earlier. He was finishing his shots of the face of the glacier and the mouth of the ice caves as we came up. He would now leave the field clear for Roos for an hour, he said, while he climbed to the cliffs above the glacier to make a goat-hunting picture. That finished, he would return and, by the light of hisflares both parties could shoot the interior of the ice caves. Before starting on his long climb, Harmon briefly outlined the scenario of his “goat” picture, part of which had already been shot. Two prospectors—impersonated by his guide and packer—having been in the mountains for many weeks without a change of diet, had become terribly sick of bacon. Finally, when one of them had disgustedly thrown his plate of it on the ground, even the camp dog, after a contemptuous sniff, had turned his back. He had had no trouble in getting the men to register “disgust,” Harmon explained, but that “contemptuous sniff” business with the dog was more difficult. After their voracious Airedale pup had wolfed three plates of bacon without paying the least heed to the director’s attempts to frighten him off at the psychological moment, they had tried thin strips of birch-bark, trimmed to represent curling rashers. Even these the hungry canine had persisted in licking, probably because they came from a greasy plate. Finally Harmon hit upon the expedient of anointing the birch-bark rashers with some of the iodine carried as an antiseptic in the event of cuts and scratches. “If the pup ate it, of course it would die,” he explained; “but that would be no more than he deserved in such a case.” But the plan worked perfectly. After his first eager lick, the outraged canine had “sniffed contemptuously” at the pungent fumes of the iodine, and then backed out of the picture with a wolfish snarl on his lifted lip.