Down the Columbia Part 4

It was now neck-or-nothing with the Lake of the Hanging Glaciers picture. Having already been out much longer than we had expected to be, there were left only provisions for two days. Nixon had suggested making a hurried trip out and bringing in fresh supplies, but as the time set by Chester for his arrival for the Big Bend trip was already past, I did not feel warranted in prolonging the present jaunt any further. If the morrow was fair all would be well; if not, the main object of our trip would be defeated.

By great good luck the clear weather held. There was not a cloud hovering above the mountains at daybreak the following morning, and we got away for an early start to make the most of our opportunity. Nixon himself had run and cut out the trail to the Lake earlier in the summer, but horses had never been taken over it. Though it was extremely steep in pitches, our maiden pa.s.sage was marked with few difficulties. Much to Nixon's surprise and satisfaction, only one big dead-fall had been thrown down to block the way, and our enforced halt here gave Roos the opportunity for a very effective "trail shot." He also got some striking "back-lighting stuff" at spots along the interminable cascade that was tumbling and bounding beside the trail. The elevation of our camp on the creek was something like six thousand feet, and that of the Lake of the Hanging Glaciers a bit under eight thousand. The trail is between three and four miles long, and we were rather over two hours in making the climb. There were several halts out of this; steady plugging would do it much quicker.

Timber-line was pa.s.sed half a mile below the lake, the last of the trees being left behind in a wonderful little mountain park studded with gnarled pines and still bright with late wild flowers. The autumn colouring here was a marvellous chromatic revel in dull golds and soft, subdued browns--the shedding tamaracks and the dying meadow gra.s.ses.

Clambering on foot up a steep-sided hillock that appeared to be an ancient glacial moraine augmented by many slides, we suddenly found ourselves on the edge of the high-water level of the lake. The transition from the flower-strewn meadow to a region of almost Arctic frigidity was practically instantaneous--the matter of a half dozen steps. One moment we were climbing in a cliff-walled valley, with rocky b.u.t.tresses and pinnacles soaring for thousands of feet on either side, and with brown-black gravel and thinning brown-grey bunch gra.s.s under foot and ahead; the next, as we gained the crest of the old terminal moraine, the landscape opened up with a blinding flash and we were gazing at a sparkling emerald lake clipped in the embrace of an amphitheatre of glaciers and eternal snow, and floating full of icebergs and marble-mottled shadows. The "Hanging Glacier"--perhaps a mile wide across its face, and rearing a solid wall of ice a couple of hundred feet in the sheer--closed the further or southeastern end of the lake.

Behind the glacier was a cliff of two thousand feet or more in height.

It appeared to be almost solid ice and snow, but must have been heavily underlaid with native rock to maintain its abruptness as it did. Higher still a snow-cap, bright and smooth as polished marble, extended to the crest of the range and formed a glittering line against the cobalt of the sky. Of all the scenic gems of the North American continent, I recall none which is so well ent.i.tled to the characterization of "unique" as this white-flaming little jewel of the high Selkirks.

The lake was now rapidly receding to its winter low-water level, and to reach its brink we had to press on across three hundred yards of black boulders which were evidently covered in the time of the late spring floods. Ordinarily one would have expected the worst kind of rough and slippery walking here, but, to my great surprise, the great rocks were set as solid and as level as a pavement of mosaic. The reason for this became plain when we approached the water, where a flotilla of small icebergs, rising and falling to the waves kicked up by the brisk breeze drawing down the lake, were steadily thump-thumping the bottom with dull heavy blows which could be felt underfoot a hundred yards away. This natural tamping, going on incessantly during the months of high-water, was responsible for the surprising smoothness of the rocky waste uncovered by the winter recession. The great boulders had literally been hammered flat.

The icebergs, which were formed by the cracking off of the face of the great glacier filled half of the lake. They varied in size from almost totally submerged chunks a few feet in diameter to huge floating islands of several hundred. They were of the most fantastic shapes, especially those which had been longest adrift and therefore most exposed to the capricious action of the sun. By and large, the effect was that of a Gargantuan bowl sprinkled with puffy white popcorn. But if one took his time and searched carefully enough there were very few things of heaven or earth that were not represented in the amazing collection. One berg, floating on another, had been reduced by the sun to the seeming of a gigantic view camera--box, bellows and lens. A number of famous groups of statuary were there, but of course very much in the rough. "The Thinker" was perhaps the best of these, but even Rodin would have wanted to do a bit more "finis.h.i.+ng" on the glacial cave-man humped up on his icy green pedestal. Roos, who had never heard of Rodin, said it reminded him of me drying out after my shower-bath in the ice-cave. His facile imagination also discovered something else. He had once seen a picture of "Lohengrin's Farewell" in a Victrola record price-list, and there was a much sun-licked hunk of ice, very near the sh.o.r.e, which suggested the barge to him, swans and all. I saw the barge all right, but the Pegasus of my imagination had to have some spurring before he would take the "swan" hurdle.

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

LOOKING ACROSS THE LAKE OF THE HANGING GLACIERS]

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

THE LAKE OF THE HANGING GLACIERS, TAKEN FROM THE ICE WALLS, LOOKING NORTH]

It was Roos' idea that I should swim off, clamber over the side of the barge, la.s.soo the "near" swan with a piece of pack-rope to represent reins, and let him shoot me as "Lohengrin." It wouldn't exactly run into the "continuity" of the "sportsman" picture, he admitted; but he thought that Chester might use it, with a lot of other odds and ends, under some such t.i.tle as "Queer People in Queer Places." The idea appealed to me strongly. "Lohengrin's Farewell" had always moved me strangely; and here was a chance actually to appear in the cla.s.sic role!

"You bet I'll do it," I a.s.sented readily. "What shall I wear?" The "s.h.i.+ning Armour," which we both seemed to connect with "Lohengrin,"

happened to be one of the things not brought up in our saddle-bags that morning. We were in a hot discussion as to the best manner of improvising a helmet and cuira.s.s out of condensed milk and sardine tins, when Nixon, asking if we knew that the sun only shone about three hours a day in that "_geesly_ crack in the hills," dryly opined that we should take our pictures of the lake while there was plenty of light. That sounded sensible, and we started feverishly to hurry through with the routine grind so as to be free to do proper justice to "Lohengrin." As Fate would have it, however, that which was presently revealed to me of the ways of fresh-water icebergs quenched effectually my desire to swim off and take liberties with the capricious things at close quarters.

After making a number of scenic shots, Roos announced that he was ready to go ahead with the "falling iceberg" stuff. As it was quite out of the question making our way along the base of the cliffs on either side of the lake to the face of the glacier in the limited time at our disposal, and, moreover, as we had already demonstrated the impossibility of making artificial icebergs with "sixty per" dynamite, it became necessary to improvise something closer at hand. It was Roos' idea that a piece of cliff cracked off into the lake might produce the effect desired, especially if "cut" with discrimination. "Here's the way it goes," he explained. "The cracked off rock plunks down into the lake right into the middle of a bunch of floating icebergs. I starts cranking at the splash, and with the bergs all rolling about and b.u.mping into each other no one can tell but what it was one of them that really started it. Then I'll pick you up hopping up and down on the bank and registering 'surprise' and 'consternation'; and then follow with a close-up of you standing on that high rock, looking down on the quieting waves with folded arms. Now you register 'relief' and finally a sort of 'awed wonder.' Then you take a big breath and raise your eyes to the face of the glacier. You keep right on registering 'awed wonder' (only more intense) and as I fade you out you shake your head slowly as if the mighty mysteries of Nature were beyond your understanding. Get me? They ought to colour the film for that dark blue in the laboratory (I could tell 'em just the solution to make that ice look cold), and the sub-t.i.tle ought to be 'The Birth of an Iceberg,' and...."

"Jim's the midwife, is he?" I cut in. "Yes, I get you. Tell him to uncork some of that 'sixty per' 'Twilight Sleep' of his and I'll stand by for the christening."

After a careful technical examination of the terrain, Jim, chief "Powder Monkey," located what he thought was a favourable spot for operations and started to enlarge a thin crack in the cliff to make it take five sticks of dynamite. That was more than half of our remaining stock; but Roos was insisting on a big iceberg, and plenty of powder was the best way to insure success. It must have been the tamping that was at the bottom of the trouble, for moss and damp earth are hardly solid enough to deflect the kick of the dynamite in the desired direction. At any rate, although there was a roaring detonation, the mighty force released was expended outward rather than inward. The face of the cliff hardly s.h.i.+vered, and only an inconsiderable trickle of broken rocks and sand slid down into the lake. Too sore to take more than hostile notice of Nixon's somewhat rough and ready little _mot_ about the "'Birth o' the Iceberg' turning out a _geesly_ miscarriage," Roos clapped the cap over his lens, unscrewed the crank and began taking his camera off its tripod. That rather hasty action was responsible for his missing by a hair what I am certain was the greatest opportunity ever presented to a moving picture operator to film one of the most stupendous of Nature's manifestations.

The roar of the detonating dynamite reverberated for half a minute or more among the cliffs and peaks, and it was just after the last roll had died out that a renewed rumble caused me to direct a searching gaze to the great wall of ice and snow that towered above the farther end of the lake. For an instant I could not believe my eyes. It could not be possible that the whole mountainside was toppling over! And yet that was decidedly the effect at a first glance. From the rim of the snow-cap down to the back of the glacier--a mile wide and two thousand feet high--there was one solid, unbroken Niagara of glittering, coruscant ice and snow. Like a curtain strung with diamonds and pearls and opals it streamed, while the shower of flaming colours was reflected in the quivering waters of the lake in fluttering scarves of sun-shot scarlet, in tenuous ribbons of lavender, jade and primrose. It was only when the last shreds of this marvellous banner had ceased to stream (at the end of thirty or forty seconds perhaps) that I saw what it was that had caused it. The whole hair-poised brink of the great snow-cap--sharply jolted, doubtless, by the explosion of the dynamite--had cracked away and precipitated itself to the glacier level, nearly half a mile below.

The shock to the latter appeared to have had the effect of jarring it sufficiently to crack down great blocks all along its face. The glacier had, in fact, been shocked into giving birth to a whole litter of real icebergs where, nearer at hand, we had failed dismally in our efforts to incubate even an artificial one. As glacial obstetricians it appeared that we still had much to learn.

Roos made a great effort to get his camera set up again in time to make it record something of the wonderful spectacle. He was just too late, however. Only a few thin trickles of snow were streaking the face of the cliff when he finally swung his powerful tele-photo lens upon it, and even these had ceased before he had found his focus. It was no end of a pity. I saw several of the great _valangas_ started by the Austrian and Italian artillery in the Dolomites, and, previous to that, what I had thought were very considerable slides on Aconcagua and Chimborazi, in the Andes, and on Kinchinjunga and among the hanging ice-fields above the Zoji-la in the Himalayas. But any half dozen of the greatest of these would have been lost in that mighty avalanche of ice and snow that we saw descend above the Lake of the Hanging Glaciers. Nixon, with a lifetime spent in the Selkirks and Rockies, said he had never seen anything to compare with it.

Jim, reporting that he still had three sticks of dynamite in hand, said he reckoned there might be a better chance of starting an "iceberg" on the southern side of the lake than on the northern one, where we had failed to accomplish anything. The southern slope was even more precipitous than the northern, he pointed out, and he had his eye on a rock which looked as if a charge might turn it over and start it rolling. "You never can tell what you may be startin' among a bunch o'

tiltin' rocks like them 'uns," he said hopefully. Nixon's muttered "That ain't no _geesly_ hooch dream" might have meant several things; but I took it that he intended to imply that there was too much "unstable equilibrium" along that southern sh.o.r.e to make it the sort of a place that a neurasthenic would seek out for a rest cure. I felt the same way about it, only more so; but Roos' disappointment over what he had already missed was so keen that neither of us had the heart to interpose any objections when he told Jim to go ahead and see what he could do. As two sticks of dynamite were already promised to Harmon, the trick, if it came off, would have to be pulled with one. Spitting tobacco juice on the taffy-like cylinder for luck, Jim clambered off up the cliff and planted it under his "likely rock," Roos meantime setting up in a favourable position below.

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

THE FACE OF THE HANGING GLACIER]

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

WHERE MY PARTY FOREGATHERED WITH HARMON'S ON THE Sh.o.r.e OF THE LAKE OF THE HANGING GLACIER]

Whether Jim's "tobacca.n.a.lian libation" had anything to do with it or not, this time luck was with us. The sharp blast kicked Jim's rock up on one ear, where it teetered for a second or two indecisively before rolling over sidewise and coming down kerplump on a huge twenty-ton cube of basalt that no one would have thought of moving with a barrel of giant. It wasn't so much what the little rock did as the way it did it.

The big block gave a sort of a quiver, much as a man awakening from a doze would stretch his arms and yawn, and when it quivered a lot of loose stuff slipped away from beneath and just let it go. It lumbered along at an easy roll for a bit, and then increased its speed and started jumping. Its first jump was no more than a nervous little hop that served to hurdle it clear of a length of flat ledge that reached out to stop its downward progress. A second later it had hit its stride, so that when it struck the water there had been nothing but rarefied air trying to stop it for two hundred feet. Down it went, pus.h.i.+ng a column of compressed _aqua pura_ ahead of it and sucking a big black hole along in its wake. It was when that column of compressed water spouted up again and tried to chase its tail down the hole it had come out of that things began to happen, for it found something like a dozen fat icebergs crowding in and trying to insinuate their translucent bulks into the same opening. And of course they made a tremendous fuss about it. When an iceberg found that it couldn't get in standing up, it forthwith lay down on its side, or even rolled over on its back; which didn't help it in the least after all, for the very good reason that all the other icebergs were adopting the same tactics. And so Roos, who was cranking steadily all the time, got his "Birth of an Iceberg" picture after all.

When the bergs ceased b.u.t.ting their heads off against each other Roos shot me in the scenes where I registered "consternation," "relief" and "awed wonder," and our hard-striven-for Lake of the Hanging Glaciers picture was complete. There was just a bit of a hitch at the "awed wonder" fade-out, though, but that was Roos' fault in trying to introduce a "human touch" by trying to make Gordon's dog perch up beside me on the crest of a hatchet-edged rock. The pup sat quietly wagging his tail until the moment came for me to lift up mine eyes unto the hills and increase the tenseness of my "awed wonder" registration. Then the alt.i.tude began to affect his nerves and he started doing figure "8's"

back and forth between my precariously planted feet. As a natural consequence, when Roos started in on his "fade-out" I was seesawing my arms wildly to maintain my balance, talking volubly, and registering--well, what would a temperamental movie star be registering while in the act of telling a dog and a man what he thought of them for their joint responsibility in all but pitching him off a twenty-foot-high rock into a vortex of tumbling icebergs? Again (unless this part of the film has been discreetly cut in the studio before exhibition) I beg the indulgence of lip-readers.

The lake was deeply shadowed before we were finally at liberty to take up again the sartorics of "Lohengrin"; but it was not that fact, nor yet the not entirely prohibitive difficulty of making s.h.i.+ning armour out of tin cans, that nipped that cla.s.sic conception in the bud. Rather it was the astonis.h.i.+ng unstable-mindedness displayed by the bergs when impinged upon from without. Of the hundred or more hunks of floating ice within a five-hundred-yard radius of the point where our artificial berg had hit the water, only a half dozen or so of the broadest and flattest continued to expose the same profiles they had presented before the big splash. Most of the others had turned over and over repeatedly, and one, which seemed to "hang" in almost perfect balance, continued slowly revolving like a patent churn. "Lohengrin's Barge," half a mile distant from the heart of the "birth splash" and lapped by but the lightest of expiring waves, was rolling drunkenly to port and starboard as though in the trough of the seas of a typhoon. It looked ready to turn turtle at a touch, and there were too many angular projections on it--especially about the "swans"--to make even a man who aspired to grand opera care to court lightly the experience of tangling himself up in the wreck.

Descending to the timber-line meadow where the horses had been left, we found Harmon had brought up his outfit and pitched his tent midway of an enchanting vista framed in green-black pines and golden tamaracks, and with a wonderful background for "camp shots" both up and down the valley. There he was going to make his base, he said, until he found just the light he wanted on the Lake of the Hanging Glaciers. Then he hoped to get at least a negative or two that would do something approaching justice to so inspiring a subject. And there, working and waiting patiently through an almost unbroken succession of storms that raged in the high Selkirks for many days, he held on until he got what he wanted. It was in that quiet persistent way that he had been photographing the mountains of the Canadian West for many years, and it will be in that way that he will continue until he shall have attained somewhere near to the high goal he has set for his life's work--a complete photographic record of the Rockies and Selkirks. It is a privilege to have met an artist who works with so fine a spirit, who has set himself so high an ideal. A number of Harmon's scenic pictures of the mountains where the Columbia takes its rise are so much better than the best of my own of the same subjects, that I am giving them place in a work which it was my original intention to ill.u.s.trate entirely myself.

We returned to our camp at the head of Horse Thief Creek that night, and set out on our return to Windermere the following morning. Save for a rather sloppy pa.s.sage of the main ford, the journey was without incident. With light packs, we pushed right through to the head of the wagon-road--something over thirty miles--the first day. The seventeen miles to Invermere we covered in a leisurely fas.h.i.+on, reaching the hotel at three in the afternoon of the following day, Sunday, the twentieth of September. Here I found a wire from Chester, stating that it had finally proved impossible for him to get away from business, and asking me to go ahead and see the Big Bend trip through without him. In the event I decided to continue on down the river he would be glad to have his cameraman accompany me as long as the weather and light were favourable for his work. A letter with full instructions covering the two pictures he desired made had already been dispatched.

CHAPTER V

Ca.n.a.l FLATS TO BEAVERMOUTH

Chester's instructions respecting the two new pictures he wanted us to work on came through to Roos the day following our return to Windermere.

One of these was to be confined entirely to the Big Bend voyage.

Essaying again my role of "gentleman-c.u.m-sportsman," I was to get off the train at Beavermouth, meet my boatman, launch the boat and start off down the river. The various things seen and done _en voyage_ were to make up the picture.

In the other picture I was to play the part of a young rancher who was farming his hard-won clearing on the banks of the Columbia near its source. With the last of his crops in, he is a.s.sailed one day with a great longing to see the ocean. Suddenly it occurs to him that the river flowing right by his door runs all the way to the sea, and the sight of a prospector friend, about to push off with a sack of samples for the smelter many hundreds of miles below, suggests a means of making the journey. And so the two of them start off down the Columbia. What happened to them on their way was to be told in the picture. The introductory scenes of this picture were to be made somewhere in the vicinity of Windermere, but the thread of the story was to be picked up below the Arrow Lakes after the Big Bend voyage was over.

Hunting "location" and rainy weather kept us four or five days in Windermere and vicinity, giving an opportunity we otherwise would have missed to meet and become acquainted with the always kindly and hospitable and often highly distinguished people of this beautiful and interesting community. From the time of David Thompson, the great astronomer and explorer of the Northwest Company who wintered there in 1810, down to the present Windermere seems always to have attracted the right sort of people. The predominant cla.s.s is what one might call the gentleman-farmer, with the stress perhaps on "gentleman." I mean to say, that is, that while a number of them have failed of outstanding achievement as farmers, there was none that I met who would not have qualified as a gentleman, and in the very best sense of the word.

Sportsmen and lovers of the out-of-doors, there was this fine bond of fellows.h.i.+p between all of them. Nowhere have I encountered a fresher, more wholesome social atmosphere than that of this fine community of the upper Columbia.

That genial and big-hearted old Scot, Randolph Bruce, I recall with especial affection, as must every one of the many who has known the hospitality of his great log lodge on a bay of the lake below Invermere.

An Edinburgh engineer, Bruce was one of the builders of the Canadian Pacific, and as such an a.s.sociate and intimate of Van Horne, O'Shaughnessy and the rest of those st.u.r.dy pioneers who pushed to accomplishment the most notable piece of railway construction the world has ever known. In love with the West by the time the railway was finished, he built him a home in the most beautiful spot he knew--such a spot as few even among the Scottish lochs could rival--and a.s.sociated himself with various projects for the advancement of the country. At the present time he is the owner of the Paradise mine, one of the richest silver-lead properties in British Columbia, and the head of an enterprise which purposes to bring the Windermere region to its own among the grandest of the playgrounds of North America.

We made the preliminary scenes for the "farmer" picture at a gem of a little mountain ranch in a clearing to the west of Lake Windermere.

Shooting through one of his favourite "sylvan frames," Roos picked me up violently shocking hay at the end of a long narrow field which the labour of a young Scotch immigrant had reclaimed from the encompa.s.sing forest. (As a matter of fact the hay was already in shocks when we arrived, and I had to unshock a few shocks so as to shock them up again before the camera and thus give the impression that this was the last of my season's crop.) Then I threw up a couple of shocks for him set up at closer range, with more attention to "technique." (This latter came easy for me, as I had been pitching hay for a fortnight on my California ranch earlier in the summer.) Finally I stopped work, leaned on my fork and gazed into the distance with visioning eyes. (I was supposed to be thinking of the sea, Roos explained, and in the finished picture there would be a "cut-in" of breakers at this point.) Then I registered "impatience" and "restlessness," hardening to "firm resolve." At this juncture I threw down my fork and strode purposefully out of the right side of the picture. (The cabin to which I was supposed to be striding was really on my left, but Roos explained that some sort of a movie Median law made it imperative always to exit to right.) Then we went over to make the cabin shots.

[Ill.u.s.tration: OLD HUDSON BAY CART AT BEAVERMOUTH (_above_)]

[Ill.u.s.tration: MY FIRST PUSH-OFF AT THE HEAD OF CANOE NAVIGATION ON THE COLUMBIA (_below_)]

[Ill.u.s.tration: OPENING SCENE OF THE "FARMER" PICTURE]

[Ill.u.s.tration: OLD STERN WHEELERS AT GOLDEN (_above_)]

[Ill.u.s.tration: A QUIET STRETCH OF THE COLUMBIA NEAR GOLDEN (_below_)]

The owner of the cabin was away at the moment, but his young Scotch wife--a bonnie bit of a la.s.s who might have been the inspiration for "Annie Laurie"--was on hand and mightily interested. She asked if I was Bill Hart, and Roos made the tactical error of guffawing, as though the idea was absurd. She was a good deal disappointed at that, but still very ready to help with anything calculated to immortalize her wee home by emblazoning it on the imperishable celluloid. First I strode into the cabin, but almost immediately to emerge unfolding a map. Going over to a convenient stump, I sat down and disposed of a considerable footage of "intent study." Then we made a close-up of the map--the Pacific Northwest--with my index finger starting at Windermere and tracing the course of the Columbia on its long winding way to the sea. That proved that there was water transit all the way to that previous cut-in of breakers which my visioning eyes had conjured up just before I threw down my fork. I stood up and gazed at the nearby river (which was really Lake Windermere, a mile distant), and presently stiffened to my full height, registering "discovery." What I was supposed to see was a prospector tinkering with his boat. As this latter scene could not be made until we had bought a boat and signed up a "prospector," all that was left to do here was to shoot me striding away from the cabin on the way to discuss ways and means with my mythical companion, and then striding back, getting my roll of blankets and exiting in a final fade-out. As we had neglected to provide a roll of blankets for this shot, we had to improvise one from such material as was available. I forget all that went to make up that fearful and wonderful package; but it is just as well the precariously-roped bundle didn't resolve into its component parts until the fade-out was pretty nearly complete.

Roos tried hard to introduce "human interest" and "heart appeal" by staging a farewell scene with "wife and child," both of which were ready to hand. I was adamant, however, even when he agreed to compromise by leaving out the child. He was rather stubborn about it, refusing to admit the validity of my argument to the effect that a would-be screen hero who deserted so fair a wife would alienate the sympathies of the crowd at the outset. Finally it was decided for us. "It's too late noo,"

cooed a wee voice in which I thought I detected both reproach and relief; "while ye're talkin', yon cooms Jock."