Heart So Hungry (12 page)

The next day. Thirteen miles above Grand Lake, Mina and her crew pulled ashore for an early lunch. Job, Joe and Gilbert busied themselves with gathering wood and building a fire, unpacking the frying pan and kettle, the tea and bacon. George took up his rifle and said, “I’ll see if there’s any game about.”

“Shall I come along?” Mina asked.

“It’s not easy walking on these stones. And I don’t think you want to be crawling through the willow brush with me.”

“I wouldn’t mind at all, really. I’ve been sitting and doing nothing for too long now.”

George thought about it for a moment, searching his mind for a tactful response. “One person can move quieter than two, missus. You’ll be more comfortable here. You can even catch yourself a little nap in the shade there.”

But she was in no mood for napping. So after George walked off downstream, Mina headed upstream along the rocky shore.

Gilbert was the first to notice. “Missus Hubbard? You want me to come along with you?”

She continued to pick her way across the stones. “I do not, thank you.”

Joe and Job both gave Gilbert a look. He hesitated, then broke into a trot to catch her. Not loud enough for the others to hear, he told her, “We’re not supposed to let you go off on your own, missus.”

“Oh? And is that what you discuss all the time in your language I can’t understand?”

Gilbert blushed and looked at the ground.

“Very well, then,” she told him. She started walking again, and Gilbert soon fell into step behind her. She asked, “Will this be the first time you’ve accompanied a lady to the necessary room?”

Gilbert stopped walking. “I’ll just wait here,” he told her.

“Suit yourself.” She dared not look back, lest he see the smile she could not suppress.

The plain truth of it was that the lack of activity was beginning to grate on her. The men allowed her to do nothing. Oh, she could sit in the canoe and write in her journal all she wanted. She could make sketches of the hills and streams they passed. She could take readings with her sextant and compass. But she was not allowed to handle a paddle. And in camp, if she so much as reached for a stick of wood to lay it on the fire, one of the men would jump up and take it from her. “Let me do that, missus. No use both of us getting our hands dirty.”

And those long hours in the canoe when the men spoke only in their private language—that was exasperating too. At first she had thought the language melodious, as soothing as the gentle slap of water against the hull. But now she felt isolated by their conversations. She was being treated like a helpless child and she did not like it. She did not like it at all.

Laddie had included her in everything. Each and every one of his plans had been discussed with her. He had sought her advice, had given her his unpublished manuscripts to read. No man had ever treated her with the respect Laddie had. No man had ever loved her as Laddie had.

These were Mina’s thoughts as she stood on a large, odd-shaped boulder a quarter-mile above the camp. The boulder was black and slick with spray where it stuck out above the water and the top of it was scooped out like a bowl, which made her footing uneven. Surging beneath and beyond this boulder was the first set of rapids she and her crew would encounter on the Naskapi. The water was fast and loud and frothing white. It banged into rock and sluiced around depressions and tossed geysers of spray into the air—all of which generated so much noise that a single shot from George’s rifle registered on her ears only as a distant pop.

She inched her way out to the very edge of the slick rock. Heavy drops of cold water splashed onto her skirt. We will have to portage around this, she thought. But despite the river’s constant boom and
splash she did not feel any malice in it. The violence was not evil but a natural thing. Even playful. She was not the least bit frightened by it. In fact she found the noise and rush of the water quite soothing. The churn beneath her feet was nothing if not hypnotic, and she wondered what it would be like to be immersed in that water, to be a part of it, all darkness and wild thrashing on the surface, all deep serenity at the river’s smooth-washed bottom.

George’s voice was just a whisper at first, just another murmuring of water. “Missus Hubbard. Missus Hubbard, please.”

She became aware of him only after he had crept to within three feet of her, had leaned forward and pulled lightly on the hem of her sweater. “Missus Hubbard, please.”

She turned abruptly. How had he got so close? Where had he come from?

“What are you doing sneaking up on me?” she asked.

“Come on back a bit, missus. Will you do that for me?”

It did not make any sense to her. He was standing there with his rifle in one hand, his free hand reaching out to her. A dead porcupine lay at his feet. “What?” she asked.

“Just come back toward me a step or two. Will you do that for me?”

“For goodness’ sake, George! Do you think I intend to jump in?”

“You don’t intend to, I know. Nobody ever does. But you wouldn’t be the first person to get dizzy and fall in by accident. I know you don’t intend to.”

“Of course I don’t intend to!” Why did he look so pale all of a sudden? Why was there a tremble in his voice?

“All I want is for you to come toward me a step or two.”

“You are being very silly,” she told him. But she said this without looking directly into his eyes. Because now, as she did as he asked and moved gingerly away from the water, she felt how shaky her legs had become, felt the bubble of nausea in her stomach as she wondered, as if waking from a dream, just what she had been thinking
about all those minutes on the slippery lip of the boulder, all those minutes while George, unnoticed and no doubt terrified, had crept up close to her, petitioning softly, waiting for that awful moment when she might lean out just a few inches farther …

She came down off the boulder and stood beside him. “And what is that for?” she asked with a nod toward the porcupine.

“Tonight’s supper,” he told her. But even as he bent down and picked the porcupine up, holding it by its hind legs, his face remained white, his eyes wide.

Blood dripped from a hole in the animal’s side. Mina watched a few drops fall onto the black, wet stones. “I’m sure it will be delicious,” she said.

After lunch, as Job scoured the frying pan and Gilbert rinsed the plates, George pointed to a stream that entered the Naskapi just downriver of them. “Me and the boys is pretty sure that’s the Red Wine,” he told Mina.

All through lunch she had been quiet, even sullen, stinging from something she could not put into words. She felt as if George had scolded her back there at the rapids. Though his tone had been gentle, he had scolded her with his eyes and his fear. Moreover, she had deserved it.

But now, at the mention of the Red Wine, her spirits lifted. “Did you find the Indian trail?”

He nodded and smiled. “Let’s go have a look at it.”

At the French trading post, Mina had obtained a crude map of the trail from one of the local Indians, and had been told by him that it was possible to reach Seal Lake by this route in two weeks. The trip from Seal Lake to Lake Michikamau would take twenty-two days. A trapper at the post had opined that she would need at least a month to reach Seal Lake if she held to the river. If these two observations were true, the Indian trail might save her party as much as two weeks of travel.

She and George walked downstream to the Red Wine. He had already built a bridge of stepping stones so that she would not have to wade up to her shins to get to the other side. She did not know whether to be angry or amused.

“Take hold of my hand,” he told her, and held it out to her, so callused and brown.

But it was not the hand that offended her. “I can make it across on my own, thank you. Besides, what do you plan to do—wade across through the water while I prance over the stones?”

“My boots won’t take on water the way your moccasins will.”

“My moccasins are well oiled.”

“Even so….”

She disregarded his hand. She disregarded the stepping stones as well, and plunged forward into the stream, splashing across. George stood there for a moment watching, shaking his head. Then he stepped across using the stones.

Approximately fifty yards beyond the Red Wine, George pointed to a slender path snaking into the alders. “Here it is,” he told her. The trail looked little wider than a deer path. Sparse grass and thorny vines grew ankle-high from the trail’s floor.

“Are you certain this is it?”

“It hasn’t been used in quite a while, so it’s getting all grown over again. But this is it all right.”

She stepped to the head of the trail and peered into the dimness. “So what do you think?” she asked.

“I think it might be pretty rough going. We might lose a good bit of time just hunting for the trail. On the other hand, we might go in there a ways and be able to stick to it as easy as a country lane.”

She looked back toward the river. “Plus,” George said, “there’s no telling what it will be like from here to Seal Lake. Could be mossy most of the way, which makes for nice spongy walking. Or it could be mostly boggy. Fact is, we’re likely to find a fair amount of each.”

She stared down the trail a while longer, then turned to face the river.

George said, “Maybe I’ll take Job and go scout ahead a mile or so. See how this trail looks farther on.”

Mina studied the river upstream and down. She gazed not only at the water but at the shoreline.

“I walked all along here looking for footprints and drag marks,” George told her. “If anybody’s been here, they was walking on air.”

“And what does that suggest to you?” she asked.

He chewed on the corner of his lip for a moment before he spoke. “Either they went right on by here without stopping … or else they haven’t got here yet.”

“Might we have passed them somewhere on Grand Lake?”

“We didn’t lay up long that second night. On the other hand, maybe they didn’t either.”

She wished he would do more than simply report the view from both sides. “What is your
opinion
on the matter, George?”

Again he paused before speaking. “My opinion, missus, is that you’d of kept your moccasins a lot drier if you’d of used that little bridge I built.”

She spun to look at him but found him smiling. He possessed such an innocent countenance, all good nature and noble intentions. And with that smile he made his point about the stepping stones. She had been obstinate and ungrateful. He had only meant to help.

As for the question of whether to take the river or the Indian trail, the first choice appealed to her; the unpredictability and dimness of the second did not. She might not always appreciate the confines of the canoe but she liked the sound and smell of the water and she liked the way the river felt beneath her.

“Why would the trail be any easier to follow farther in than it is right here?” she asked.

“It’s not likely it is. Not all grown over like it is.”

“So we might in fact lose more time by going that way.”

He nodded. “The only thing we know for sure is that the river’s going to get rougher from here on up. It won’t all be smooth paddling. We’ll be fighting the current all the way to the Height of Land.”

Mina could see Job and Joe and Gilbert standing near the canoes, no doubt wondering if they should pack up the teakettle or start unloading everything for a long portage up the trail. Finally she said, “I should like to stick to the river, George. If it’s all right with you.”

He grinned at her. Then he turned upstream and cupped his hands to his mouth. “Load ‘er up, boys!”

This time when Mina and George crossed the Red Wine, she tiptoed nimbly over the stepping stones. On the other side, she turned to him and curtsied. He smiled to himself all the rest of the day.

The river turned north and grew swifter. At a place called Point Lucie, still some forty miles from Seal Lake, Mina’s party encountered another set of rapids, a torrent of noise and water that made Mina tremble. The crash and boom and angry spray both terrified and attracted her. According to George, this was the place where trappers would leave their boats and make no attempt to take the canoes farther up, portaging their gear the rest of the way to Seal Lake.

Both banks of the river here were lined with last winter’s ice, great layered blocks and sheets of ice stacked eight feet high in places. Scattered along the half-mile width of the river beyond the rapids were sand islands and gravel-covered hummocks of ice. When the wind gusted across all this ice it chilled her to the bone, and a part of her felt helpless in the face of it all, the leaping, foaming river and the frozen sentinels that guarded it.

But the men knew what to do. The canoes were pulled to shore just below the rapids. Then George, Joe and Gilbert, again speaking only in Cree, set about building a fire. Job disappeared into the woods alone. Once the fire was blazing, Mina huddled close to it, trying to stay warm. She did not wish to have to say
anything to George about the isolation she felt at being left out of their conversation, for she was reluctant to pull rank on them—especially in the face of the icy obstacles ahead. She was the expedition leader, yes, but, as she knew better with each passing day, in title only. George was the real leader. The best Mina could do was to trust in his plans.