ROSS AND HARMON. DRAGON MORAINE IN DISTANCE (above)
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 butter 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 glass 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 passing 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 passed 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 circumstance 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.