Down the Columbia Part 3

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 att.i.tude 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.

CHAPTER III

AT THE GLACIER

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 acc.u.mulate 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 clouds cut 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 c.u.mulonimbus) 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 princ.i.p.al 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 antic.i.p.ate.

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 s.p.a.ce the height and abruptness of the encompa.s.sing 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 of glacial 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 a.s.sumed 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 his flares 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.

[Ill.u.s.tration: Courtesy of Byron Harmon, Banff

LOOKING TOWARD THE ENTRANCE OF THE ICE CAVE]

[Ill.u.s.tration: Courtesy of Byron Harmon, Banff

WHERE THE HANGING GLACIER IS ABOUT TO FALL]

Then the packer registered "fresh meat hunger" ("cut-in" of a butcher shop to be made later), immediately after which the guide pointed to the cliffs above the camp where some wild goats were frisking. By the aid of his long-distance lens, Harmon had shot the goats as they would appear through the binoculars the guide and packers excitedly pa.s.sed back and forth between them. And now they were going forth to shoot the goats. Or rather they were going forth to "shoot" the goats, for these had already been shot with a rifle. In order to avoid loss of time in packing his c.u.mbersome apparatus about over the cliffs, Harmon had sent out Conrad, his Swiss guide, the previous afternoon, with orders to shoot a goat--as fine a specimen as possible--and leave it in some picturesque spot where a re-shooting could be "shot" with the camera when the clouds lifted. The keen-eyed Tyrolese had experienced little difficulty in bringing down two goats. One of these--a huge "Billy"--he had left at the brink of a cliff a couple of thousand feet above the big glacier, and the other--a half-grown kid--he had brought into camp to cut up for the "meat-guzzling" shots with which guide, packer and canine were to indulge in as a finale. It was a cleverly conceived "nature"

picture, one with a distinct "educational" value; or at least it was such when viewed from "behind the camera." Roos was plainly jealous over it, but, as he had no goats of his own, and as Harmon's goat was hardly likely to be "borrowable" after bouncing on rock pinnacles for a thousand feet, there was nothing to do about it. He would have to make up by putting it over Harmon on his "glacier stuff," he said philosophically. And he did; though it was only through the virtuosity of his chief actor.

Harmon had confined his glacier shots to one of his party riding up over the rocks, and another of it grouped at the entrance of the largest cave and looking in. Being an old mountaineer, he was disinclined to take any unnecessary chances in stirring up a racket under hanging ice.

Roos was new to the mountains, so didn't labour under any such handicap.

His idea was to bring the whole outfit right up the middle of the stream and on into the cave. The approach and the entrance into the mouth of the cave were to be shot first from the outside, and then, in silhouette, from the inside.

Nixon, pointing out that the roof of the cave had settled two or three feet since we were there yesterday and that the heat seemed to be honeycombing all the lower end of the glacier pretty badly, said that he didn't like the idea of taking horses inside, but would do so if it would make a better picture that way. He was quite willing to take chances if there was any reason for it. But what he did object to was trying to take the horses up the middle of the stream over big boulders when it would be perfectly plain to any one who saw the picture that there was comparatively smooth going on either side. "You can easy break a hawss' leg in one of them _geesly_ holes," he complained; "but the loss of a hawss isn't a patch to what I'd feel to have some guy that I've worked with see the pictur' and think I picked that sluiceway as the best way up."

Roos replied with a rush of technical argument in which there was much about "continuity" and "back-lighting," and something about using the "trick crank so that the action can be speeded up when it's run." Not knowing the answer to any of this, Nixon finally shrugged his shoulders helplessly and signalled for Jim to bring up the horses. There was no need of a "trick crank" to speed up the action in the stream, for that glacial torrent, a veritable cascade, had carried away everything in its course save boulders four or five feet high. Nixon, in a bit of a temper, hit the ditch as though he were riding a steeplechase. So did Jim and Gordon. All three of them floundered through without mishap.

"Grayback" tried to climb up on the tip of a submerged boulder, slipped with all four feet at once and went over sidewise. I kicked out my stirrups, but hit the water head first, getting considerably rolled and more than considerably wet. To Roos' great indignation, this occurred just outside the picture, but he had the delicacy not to ask me to do it over again.

Taking the horses inside the cave was a distinctly ticklish performance, though there could be no question of its effectiveness as a picture.

Roos set up a hundred feet in from the fifty-feet-wide, twenty-feet-high mouth and directed us to ride forward until a broad splashing jet of water from the roof blocked our way, and then swing round and beat it out. "Beat it out snappy!" he repeated. "Get me?" "Yep, _I_ got you,"

muttered Nixon; "you're in luck if nothin' else does."

The ice that arched above the entrance looked to me like the salt-eaten packing round an ice-cream can as we pushed up and under it. The horses could hardly have noticed this, and it must have been their instincts--their good sound horse-sense--that warned them that a dark hole full of hollow crackings and groanings and the roar of falling water was no place for self-respecting equines to venture. It took a deal of spurring and swearing to force them inside, and most of the linear distance gained was covered in circles on their hind legs. It was old "Grayback" whose nerves gave way first; he that started the stampede back to light and sunshine. There was no question but what we "beat it snappy."

Roos came out rubbing his hands gleefully. "That photographed like a million dollars," he cried with enthusiasm. "Now just one thing more...." And forthwith he revealed what had been in his heart ever since he chanced onto that "natural shower bath" in the cave the previous afternoon. No one could deny that it was a natural shower bath.

And since it _was_ a natural shower bath, what could be more natural than for some one to take a shower under it? How would Nixon feel about trying it? Or Jim? He admitted that it might be something of a shock, but he was willing to make that all right. Would ten dollars be fair? Or say twenty? Or why not twenty-five? He knew Mr. Chester didn't reckon cost when it was a question of getting a high cla.s.s, he might say a unique, picture. Now which should it be? Nixon, a bit snappily, said his rheumatism put him out of the running, and Jim was equally decided.

Money wouldn't tempt him to go even into the Columbia at Windermere, let alone a liquid icicle under a glacier.

And right then and there I did a thing which Roos maintained to the end of our partnership repaid him for all the grief and worry I had caused him to date, and much that was still to accrue. "Since I've got to take a bath and dry these wet togs out sooner or later," I said with a great a.s.sumption of nonchalance, "perhaps the ice cave will do as well as anywhere else. Just promise me you won't spring a flare on the scene, and build a fire to dry my clothes by...." Roos was gathering wood for a fire before I finished speaking. As for the flares, Harmon had not given him any yet. It was only a silhouette he wanted--but that would show up like a million dollars in the spray and ice. There never had been such a picture; perhaps would never be again. I wasn't joking, was I? And primitive....

"Go on and set up," I cut in with. "I'll be there by the time you're ready to shoot. And don't ever let me hear you say primitive again. Oh, yes--and you needn't remind me to 'Be snappy!' There won't be any trouble on that score. Just make sure your lens is fast enough to catch the action."

I've had many a plunge overboard off the California coast that shocked me more than that "natural shower bath" did, but never a one with so exhilarant a reaction. Stripping off my wet clothes by the fire, I slipped into my big hooded "lammy" coat and hippity-hopped into the cave. Roos, set up ten yards inside the splashing jet from the roof, was already standing by to shoot. At his call of "Action!" I jumped out of my coat and into the black, unsparkling column of water. There was a sharp sting to the impact, but it imparted nothing of the numbing ache that accompanies immersion in water a number of degrees less cold than this--a feeling which I came later to know only too well on the Columbia. Nixon had warned me against tempting Providence again by making any unnecessary racket in the cave, but it was no use. No one could have the fun that I was having and not holler. It was against nature. Whooping like a Comanche, I continued my hydro-terpsich.o.r.ean revel until a m.u.f.fled "Nuff" from Roos called a halt. He had come to the end of his roll. I have been in more of a shiver coming out of the Adriatic at the Lido in August than I was when I ambled back to dry off by the fire and the sunshine. Glowing with warmth, I even loafed along with my dressing, as one does at Waikiki.

"You'd make a fortune pulling the rough stuff in the movies," Roos exclaimed, patting me on the back. "You've got everything the real gripping cave-man _has_ to have--size, beef, a suggestion of brutal, elemental force, primitive...." I chucked a burning brand at him and went over to borrow Nixon's gla.s.s. A shot from far up the cliffs told that Harmon's "goat-hunt" was in full cry. The real thrill of the day was about to come off; rather more of a thrill, indeed, than any one was prepared for, Harmon included.

[Ill.u.s.tration: MY SHOWER BATH IN AN ICE CAVE]

[Ill.u.s.tration: WARMING UP AFTER MY GLACIAL SHOWER BATH]

[Ill.u.s.tration: ROSS AND HARMON. DRAGON MORAINE IN DISTANCE (_above_)]

[Ill.u.s.tration: THE HORSES IN THE MOUTH OF THE ICE CAVE (_below_)]

While we had been filming our "cave stuff" Harmon had finished setting the stage for his picture. He had two shots to make--one of his packers firing at the goat at the top of the cliff, and the other of the body of the goat falling to the glacier. Conrad, the Tyrolean, climbing like a fly, had scaled the face of the cliff and was standing by for the signal to start the goat "falling." The shot which had attracted my attention had been the packer discharging his rifle at the goat, which had been propped up in a life-like position, as though peering down onto the glacier. Harmon was still cranking when I got him in focus, while the packer had jumped to his feet and was executing a _pas seul_ evidently intended to convey the impression he had made a hit. A curl of blue smoke from his rifle was still floating in the air. They had contrived that effective little touch by dribbling a bit of melted b.u.t.ter down the barrel before firing. Smokeless powder is hardly "tell-tale" enough for movie work.

Harmon now moved over and set up at the foot of the cliff, apparently to get as near as possible to the point where the goat was going to hit. As the sequel proves, he judged his position to a hair. Now he made his signal. I saw the flutter of his handkerchief. The goat gave a convulsive leap, and then shot straight out over the brink of the cliff.

From where we stood I could plainly see the useful Conrad "pulling the strings," but from where Harmon was set up this would hardly show. He was too careful to overlook a point like that in a "nature picture." The white body caromed sharply off a couple of projecting ledges, and then, gathering momentum, began to describe a great parabola which promised to carry it right to the foot of the cliff.

I had kept my eyes glued to the gla.s.s from the start, but it was Nixon's unaided vision which was first to catch the drift of what was impending.

"You couldn't drive a six-hawss team 'tween the side o' Mista Ha'mon's head and the trail in the air that _geesly_ goat's going to make pa.s.sing by," he said with a calculating drawl. "Not so su' you could squeeze a pack-hawss through." Then, a couple of seconds later: "No'

ev'n a big dawg." And almost immediately: "By Gawd, it's going to get him!"

And that surely was what it looked like, to every one at least but the calmly cranking Harmon. He went on humping his back above the finder, and I could see the even rise and fall of his elbow against the snow.

The dot of white had become a streak of grey, and it was the swift augmentation of this in his finder which finally (as he told me later) caused Harmon suddenly to duck. To me it looked as if the flying streak had pa.s.sed right through him, but he was still there at the foot of his tripod after the Bolt of Wrath, striking the surface of the glacier with a resounding impact, threw up a fountain of pulverized snow and laid still. He was never quite sure whether it was the almost solid cushion of air or a side-swipe from a hoof or horn that joggled the tripod out of true. It was a near squeeze, for the flying body, which must have weighed all of two hundred pounds, was frozen hard as a rock. Conrad came staggering down with the remnants of the battered trunk over his shoulders. Only the heart and liver were fit to eat. The rest was a sausage of churned meat and bone splinters. There was no question about its fall having limbered it up.

The illumination of the cave by the calcium flares was beautiful beyond words to describe, or at least so I was told. The first one was a failure, through the outward draught of air carrying the smoke back onto the cameras. I had set this off in a side gallery, about a hundred yards in from the mouth, with the idea of throwing a sort of concealed back light. Foolishly opening my eyes while the calcium was burning, I was completely blinded by the intense glare and did not regain my sight for several minutes. Harmon's packer, who held the next flare set off--this time to the leeward of the cameras--had still worse luck. A flake of the sputtering calcium kicked back up his sleeve and inflicted a raw, round burn with half the colours of the spectrum showing in its concentric rings of singed cuticle. The chap displayed astonishing nerve in refusing to relinquish his grip on the handle of the flare and thus ruin the picture. I most certainly would never have done so myself. Roos described the glittering ice walls as a "veritable Aladdin's Cave of jewels," and only regretted that he couldn't have had that lighting on my shower-bath.

That night we tried a camp-fire scene by flare. Roos set up on the further bank of the side channel of the creek which flowed past the tent. Between the door of the tent and the water a hole was dug in such a way that light from it would shine on a group in front of the tent but not on the lens of the camera. The glow from a flare burning in this hole represented the camp-fire. I was supposed to stroll up and tell a jovial story to Nixon, Jim and Gordon, who were to be "picked up"

already seated around the fire. I made my entrance very snappily, but, unluckily, the blanket roll upon which I sat down spread out and let me back against the corner of the glowing sheet-iron stove, which was set up just inside the tent opening. Seeing I had not rolled out of the picture, Roos shouted for me to carry on, as it was the last flare. So, with the reek of burning wool rising behind me, I did carry on, making plausible gestures intended to convey the idea that the bit of comedy was just a humorous piece of by-play of my own. I carried on for something over half a minute. The only circ.u.mstance that prevented my carrying on my back the print of the corner of the stove for the rest of my days was the fact that the combined thicknesses of my duffle coat, lumberman's shirt, sweater and heavy woollen undershirt were interposed to absorb the heat. The duffle coat was the worst sufferer, coming out with a bar-sinister branded most of the way through its half inch of pressed brown wool.

CHAPTER IV

THE LAKE OF THE HANGING GLACIERS