We did have one find, though, that was so remarkable as to be worth all the trouble and disappointment of our otherwise futile search. This was a road-bridge, with instinct. The manner in which this had been displayed was so astonishing as to be almost beyond belief; indeed, I would hesitate about setting down the facts had I not a photograph to prove them. This bridge was perhaps sixty feet in length, and had doubtless been carried away by a freshet from some tributary of the upper river which it had spanned. This was probably somewhere between Golden and Windermere, so that it had run a hundred miles or more of swift water, including the falls of Surprise Rapids, without losing more than a few planks. This in itself was remarkable enough, but nothing at all to the fact that, when it finally decided it had come far enough, the sagacious structure had gone and planked itself down squarely across another stream. It was still a bridge in fact as well as in form. It had actually saved my feet from getting wet when I rushed to Blackmore’s aid in up-ending the cask of mud-diluted whisky. My photograph plainly shows Blackmore standing on the bridge, with the water flowing directly beneath him. It would have been a more comprehensive and convincing picture if there had been light enough for a snapshot. As it was, I had to set up on a stump, and in a position which showed less of both stream and bridge than I might have had from a better place. I swear (and so does Blackmore) that we didn’t place the bridge where it was. It was much too large for that. Roos wanted to shoot the whole three of us standing on it and registering “unbounded wonderment,” but the light was never right for it up to the morning of our departure, and then there wasn’t time.
It rained and snowed all that night and most of the following day. During the afternoon of the latter the clouds broke up twice or thrice, and through rifts in the drifting wracks we had transient glimpses of the peaks and glaciers of the Selkirks gleaming above the precipitous western walls of the lake. The most conspicuous feature of the sky-line was the three-peaked “Trident,” rising almost perpendicularly from a glittering field of glacial ice and impaling great masses of pendant cumulo-nimbi on its splintered prongs. Strings of lofty glacier-set summits marked the line of the back-bone of the Selkirks to southeast and northwest, each of them sending down rain-swollen torrents to tumble into the lake in cataracts and cascades. Behind, or east of us, we knew the Rockies reared a similar barrier of snow and ice, but this was cut off from our vision by the more imminent lake-wall under which we were camped. If Kinbasket Lake is ever made accessible to the tourist its fame will reach to the end of the earth. This is a consummation which may be effected in the event the Canadian Pacific wipes out Surprise Rapids with its hydro-electric project dam and backs up a lake to Beavermouth. The journey to this spot of incomparable beauty could then be made soft enough to suit all but the most effete.
A torrential rain, following a warm southerly breeze which sprang up in the middle of the afternoon, lowered the dense cloud-curtain again, and shortly, from somewhere behind the scenes, came the raucous rumble and roar of a great avalanche. Blackmore’s practised ear led him to pronounce it a slide of both earth and snow, and to locate it somewhere on Trident Creek, straight across the lake from our camp. He proved to be right on both counts. When the clouds lifted again at sunset, a long yellow scar gashed the shoulder of the mountain half way up Trident Creek to the glacier, and the clear stream from the latter had completely disappeared. Blackmore said it had been dammed up by the slide, and that there would be all hell popping when it broke through.
Scouting around for more boughs to soften his bed, Roos, just before supper, chanced upon Steinhoff’s grave. It was under a small pine, not fifty feet from our tent, but so hidden by the dense undergrowth that it had escaped our notice for two days. It was marked only by a fragment split from the stern of a white-painted boat nailed horizontally on the pine trunk and with the single word “Steinhoff” carved in rude capitals. At one corner, in pencil, was an inscription stating that the board had been put up in May, 1920, by Joe French and Leo Tennis. With the golden sunset light streaming through the trees, Roos, always strong for “pathetic human touches” to serve as a sombre background for his Mack Sennett stuff, could not resist the opportunity for a picture. Andy and Blackmore and I were to come climbing up to the grave from the lake, read the inscription, and then look at each other and shake our heads ominously, as though it was simply a matter of time until we, too, should fall prey to the implacable river. I refused straightaway, on the ground that I had signed up to act the part of a light comedy sportsman and not a heavy mourner. Blackmore and Andy were more amenable. In rehearsal, however, the expressions on their honest faces were so wooden and embarrassed that Roos finally called me up to stand out of range and “say something to make ’em look natural.” I refrain from recording what I said; but I still maintain that shot was an interruption of the “continuity” of my “gentleman-sportsman” picture. I have not yet heard if it survived the studio surgery.
Shortly before dark, Andy, going down to look at his set-line, found a three-foot ling or fresh-water cod floundering on the end of it. Roos persuaded him to keep it over night so that the elusive “fishing picture” might be made the following morning in case the light was good. As there were five or six inches of water in the bottom of the boat, Andy threw the ling in there for the night in preference to picketing him out on a line. There was plenty of water to have given the husky shovel-nose ample room to circulate with comfort if only he had been content to take it easy and not wax temperamental. Doubtless it was his imminent movie engagement that brought on his attack of flightiness. At any rate, he tried to burrow under a collapsible sheet-iron stove (which, preferring to do with a camp-fire, we had left in the boat) and got stuck. The forward five pounds of him had water enough to keep alive in, but in the night—when it cleared off and turned cold—his tail, which was bent up sharply under a thwart, froze stiff at almost right angles. But I am getting ahead of my story.
The next morning, the sixth of October, broke brilliantly clear, with the sun gilding the prongs of the “Trident” and throwing the whole snowy line of the Selkirks in dazzling relief against a deep turquoise sky. Blackmore, keen for an early start, so as not to be rushed in working down through the dreaded “Twenty-One-Mile” Rapids to Canoe River, rooted us out at daybreak and began breaking camp before breakfast. He had reckoned without the “fishing picture,” however. Roos wanted bright sunlight for it, claiming he was under special instructions to make something sparkling and snappy. All through breakfast he coached me on the intricate details of the action. “Make him put up a stiff fight,” he admonished through a mouthful of flapjack. “Of course he won’t fight, ’cause he ain’t that kind; but if you jerk and wiggle your pole just right it’ll make it look like he was. That’s what a real actor’s for—making things look like they is when they ain’t. Got me?” Then we went down and discovered that poor half-frozen fish with the eight-point alteration of the continuity of his back-bone.
The ling or fresh-water cod has an underhung, somewhat shark-like mouth, not unsuggestive of the new moon with its points turned downward. Roos’ mouth took on a similarly dejected droop when he found the condition the principal animal actor in his fish picture was in. But it was too late to give up now. Never might we have so husky a fighting fish ready to hand, and with a bright sun shining on it. Roos tried osteopathy, applied chiropractics and Christian Science without much effect. Our “lead” continued as rigid and unrelaxing as the bushman’s boomerang, whose shape he so nearly approximated. Then Andy wrought the miracle with a simple “laying on of hands.” What he really did was to thaw out the frozen rear end of the fish by holding it between his big, warm red Celtic paws; but the effect was as magical as a cure at Lourdes. The big ling was shortly flopping vigorously, and when Andy dropped him into a bit of a boulder-locked pool he went charging back and forth at the rocky barriers like a bull at a gate. Roos almost wept in his thankfulness, and forthwith promised the restorer an extra rum ration that night. Andy grinned his thanks, but reminded him that we ought to be at the old ferry by night, where something even better than “thirty per over-proof” rum would be on tap. It was indeed the morning of our great day. Stimulated by that inspiring thought, I prepared to outdo myself in the “fish picture,” the “set” for which was now ready.
BLACKMORE AND THE LING THAT REFUSED TO “REGISTER” (left)
THE WRITER, WITH PIKE-POLE JUST BEFORE LINING DEATH RAPIDS (right)