Down the Columbia Part 2

One is usually told that the source of the Columbia is in Ca.n.a.l 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 encompa.s.sing 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 a.s.surance 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 princ.i.p.al 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 spa.r.s.e 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 Ca.n.a.l 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 circ.u.mstances, but the deification of Hearst created an unbridgeable gulf. I foresaw that "director" and "star" were going to have b.u.mpy 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 pa.s.sage of near to a thousand miles of the Columbia without turning both "director" and "star" into actual a.s.sa.s.sins, 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-cla.s.s 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-t.i.tle 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 circ.u.mscribed. 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 b.u.mping 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 p.r.o.nounced, 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 b.u.t.tresses of the encompa.s.sing 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 t.i.tans,"

but Jim, leaning on his axe after nicking off a fresh back-log for the camp fire, merely opined it was "some skook.u.m 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 pa.s.sing 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 _k.u.mtrux_ myself," the st.u.r.dy 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.

[Ill.u.s.tration: THE "TURNING-IN" SCENE SHOT IN SILHOUETTE (_above_)]

[Ill.u.s.tration: "REVERSE" OF THE "GOING-TO-BED" SHOT (_below_)]

[Ill.u.s.tration: ON THE HORSE THIEF TRAIL]

[Ill.u.s.tration: 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 ma.s.s 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 pa.s.sed 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 pa.s.sing 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 carca.s.ses 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 ma.s.s 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.