Through Surprise Rapids
We pushed off from Beavermouth at three o’clock of the afternoon of September twenty-ninth. We had hoped for an early start, but the erratically running local freight, six or eight hours behind time, did not arrive with our boat until noon. The introductory shots had already been made. Made up momentarily as a gentleman—wearing an ankle length polished waterproof and a clean cap, that is,—I jumped the westbound Limited as it slowed down on entering the yard, dropping off presently at the platform with a “here-I-am” expression when Roos signalled that the focus was right. Then I shook hands with the waiting Blackmore, and together we strode to the door of the station and met the previously-rehearsed agent. (Roos had wanted me to shake hands with the agent as well as with Blackmore, but I overruled him by pointing out that I was a “gentleman-sportsman” not a “gentleman-politician,” and served notice on him that pump-handling must henceforth be reduced to a minimum.) We tried to perfect the agent in a sweeping gesture that would say as plainly as words “The train with your boat is just around that next bend, sir,” but somehow we couldn’t prevent his trying to elevate his lowly part. His lips mumbled the words we had put on them all right, but the gesture was a grandiose thing such as a Chesterfieldian footman might have employed in announcing “My Lord, the carriage waits.”
Roos, in all innocence, narrowly missed provoking a fight with a hot-tempered half-breed while he was setting up to shoot the incoming freight. He had an ingenious method of determining, without bending over his finder, just what his lens was going to “pick-up.” This consisted of holding his arms at full length, with his thumbs placed tip to tip and the forefingers standing straight up. The right-angling digits then framed for his eye an approximation of his picture. To one not used to it this esoteric performance looked distinctly queer, especially if he chanced to be standing somewhere near the arch priest’s line of vision. And that, as it happened, was exactly the place from which it was revealed to the choleric near-Shuswap section hand. I didn’t need the breed’s subsequent contrite explanation to know that, from where he had been standing, those twiddling thumbs and fingers, through the great fore-shortening of the arms, looked to be right on the end of the nose of the grimacing little man by the camera. Not even a self-respecting white man would have stood for what that twiddling connoted, let alone a man in whose veins flowed blood that must have been something like fifteen-sixteenths of the proudest of Canadian strains. Luckily, both Blackmore and his burly boatman were men of action. Even so, it was a near squeeze for both camera and cameraman. Roos emerged unscarred in anything but temperament. And, of course, as every one even on the fringes of the movies knows, the temperaments of both stars and directors are things that require frequent harrowing to keep them in good working order.
Roos’ filming of the unloading of the boat was the best thing he did on the trip. Every available man in Beavermouth was requisitioned. This must have been something like twenty-five or thirty. A half dozen, with skids and rollers, could have taken the boat off without exerting themselves seriously, but could hardly have “made it snappy.” And action was what the scene demanded. There was no time for a rehearsal. The agent simply told us where the car would be shunted to, Blackmore figured out the best line from there over the embankment and through the woods to the river, and Roos undertook to keep up with the procession with his camera. Blackmore was to superintend the technical operation and I was ordered to see that the men “acted natural.” And thus we went to it. The big boat, which must have weighed close to half a ton, came off its flat car like a paper shallop, but the resounding thwack with which her bows hit a switch-frog awakened Blackmore’s concern. “Easy! Easy! Don’t bust her bottom,” he began shouting; while I, on the other side, took up my refrain of “Don’t look at the camera!—make it snappy.” The consequence of these diametrically opposed orders was that the dozen or more men on my side did most of the work. But even so it was “snappy”—very.
Down the embankment we rushed like a speeding centipede, straight at the fine hog-proof wire fence of the C. P. R. right-of-way. That fence may have been hog-proof, but it was certainly not proof against the charge of a thirty-foot boat coming down a fifty per cent. grade pushed by twenty-five men. We had intended lifting over it, but our momentum was too great, especially after I had failed to desist from shouting “Make it snappy!” soon enough. The barrier gave way in two or three places, so that we were shedding trailing lengths of wire all the way to the river. On through the woods we juggernauted, Roos following in full cry. His city “news stuff” training was standing him in good stead, and he showed no less cleverness than agility in making successive “set-ups” without staying our progress. Only in the last fifty yards, where the going over the moss and pine needles was (comparatively speaking) lightning fast, did we distance him. Here, as there was plenty of time, he cut a hole in the trees and shot the launching through one of his favourite “sylvan frames.” For the push-off shot he provided his customary heart throb by bringing down the station agent’s three-year-old infant to wave farewell. That he didn’t try to feature the mother prominently seemed to indicate that what I had said at Windermere on the subject had had some effect.
After the “farewell” had been filmed, we landed at the fire ranger’s cabin to pick up Roos and his camera. The ranger told us that a couple of trappers who had been for some weeks engaged in portaging their winter supplies round Surprise Rapids would be waiting for us at the head of the first fall in the expectation of getting the job of packing our stuff down to the foot. “Nothing doing,” Blackmore replied decisively; “going straight through.” The ranger grinned and shook his grizzled head. “You’re the man to do it,” he said; “but jest the same, I’m glad it’s you and not me that has the job.”
The station agent came down with Roos, evidently with the cheering purpose of showing us the place where his predecessor and a couple of other men had been drowned in attempting to cross the river some months previously. “Only man in the boat to be picked up alive was a one-armed chap,” he concluded impressively. “Too late now for operations on any of this crew,” laughed Blackmore, pushing off with a pike-pole. “Besides, every man jack of us is going to have a two-arm job all the way.” To the parting cheers of the mackinawed mob on the bank, he eased out into the current and headed her down the Bend.
ARRIVAL OF OUR BOAT AT BEAVERMOUTH (above)
OUR FIRST CAMP AT BEAVERMOUTH (centre)
THE REMAINS OF A SUNKEN FOREST (below)