Part 2 (2/2)

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 woodcraftsmans.h.i.+p 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 s.h.i.+vers. 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 suns.h.i.+ne 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 hards.h.i.+p some of these northwest mountaineers have survived is almost beyond belief.

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