UP HORSE THIEF CREEK
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 the glacial 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. The Canadian 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
he was 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 his _belle ideal_ of 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, and make 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 manoeuvre 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 like to 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 way to
save this situation. On the veranda of the country club there was a fine
mounted specimen of _Ovis 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 manoeuvring 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." Roos said 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 role 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 role, 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 me a 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 to me, 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 a lamb, 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 worth the 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. The fir 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 of white. 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 them
_geesly_ hawsses 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 looked like 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 blankets _inside_ of the tent, and taken from the outside. In
reality, however, Roos set up his camera _inside_ of 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 the _outside_ of 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 quite _kumtrux_ myself," 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.
[Illustration: THE "TURNING-IN" SCENE SHOT IN SILHOUETTE (_above_)]
[Illustration: "REVERSE" OF THE "GOING-TO-BED" SHOT (_below_)]
[Illustration: ON THE HORSE THIEF TRAIL]
[Illustration: A DEAD-FALL ON THE TRAIL]
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. But I 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 continued so 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
horses was 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 the greater 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 sobbing _diminuendo_ of 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 a _geesly_ slither of wet side-hill, Nixon said, and badly
exposed to 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 the _geesly_ (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 these down 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.