Heart So Hungry (13 page)

Within a half-hour Job returned from the woods carrying four stout poles, two balanced on each shoulder, his strong arms wrapped around them. The poles had been cut to the same length, about nine feet long, and each was approximately two and a half inches in circumference. These were laid by the fire while Job rummaged through the packs until he found four metal cones. These shods had been brought by George, made in the factory at Missanabie. Quietly and with deft strokes of the axe Job shaved one end of each pole until it was a snug fit for the metal shod. With the shods nailed in place and the teakettle drained, the party was ready for the water again.

“Let’s you and me get on up around the point,” George told Mina. Without waiting for her acquiescence he set off along the shore, picking his way past the rapids. She had no sooner caught up with him, where the rapids were strongest, the river deep and dark and loud, than she asked, shouting above the roar, “What about the others?”

He grinned and pointed downstream. To Mina’s amazement Job was coming up the middle of the river, right through the rapids, standing in the canoe as he poled against the current, the canoe bucking and turning as it rode the wild water. Before long the second canoe, with Gilbert and Joe doing the poling, also came into view. Mina thought she had never before seen such a wondrous sight, three men standing in the midst of the waves, climbing and falling, climbing and falling, working hard as they shoved their poles into the water and pulled themselves and their loads along, all the while laughing like daredevil boys, utterly fearless.

Fifteen minutes later, with Mina and George again in the canoes—Mina seated, the four men poling—she fought the urge to cling to the gunwales and hugged her knees instead. Even with the rapids behind them the current remained swift and filled with dangerous eddies, the water so deep that the men’s hands sometimes dipped below the icy water as they worked the poles. Occasionally one of the canoes would scrape across a chunk of ice, and when this happened to Mina’s canoe she gritted her teeth and held fast to her knees. Each time a pole was lifted from the water to be repositioned, the canoe stopped moving momentarily, and if the shod was not quickly plunged back into the river bottom the craft would slip backward with the current.

It was gruelling work, but Mina alone did not appear to be enjoying it. She could only sit rigidly in place, wondering when a shod would slip and allow the canoe to spin sideways and be swamped.

In time the water grew even rougher. George looked to Joe in the bow of the other canoe and gave a nod, and both canoes turned toward shore. Now, Mina thought, the first of the heavy portaging will begin, over and around the ice banks, the rough and slippery shore. She climbed eagerly out of the canoe, grateful for the chance to stand on solid ground again and to warm her fear-numbed limbs with movement.

She and George set off in advance of the others. Mina carried her rifle and cameras, George a light pack. She assumed that Job and Joe and Gilbert would soon follow, each laden with as much as he could carry. When the entire outfit had been moved ahead to calmer water, the canoes would be repacked and set afloat once more.

Along the way Mina spotted a pair of tiny blue violets growing amidst the gravel and ice. She picked these and held them to her nose and inhaled the subtlest of scents, but enough to gladden her heart. Laddie, upon making a discovery like this, these violets in the snow, would have placed them in her hair and recited a couplet
or two, his hand to her cheek, his eyes gazing into hers, and she would have fallen in love with him all over again.

George gave her a nudge, bringing her back to the present. She looked at him, then followed his gaze downstream. There came Job again, poling a fully loaded canoe up the dangerous rapid.

Later that night she was still reeling from the wonder of it, and she made this entry in her journal:

That night she went to bed contentedly, her tent pitched on a bank high above the river, where the ubiquitous mosquitoes were not so abundant. She lay there listening to the music of the water. Such men these were in whose hands she had placed her trust and her life! She knew that night that she could not have chosen better. And Labrador, for all its chill and danger, now seemed a wonderful place. Two violets in the snow … a marvel.

At that moment, she could think of only one thing missing from her life.

Dillon Wallace’s expedition, June 29, 1905

“H
ERE’S THE
I
NDIAN TRAIL
,” Wallace said. His voice was flat with weariness, heavy with resentment. They had been searching for it a long time and now would have to make camp for the night. Worse yet, the shoreline was veritably trampled with footprints made by moccasins and boots not their own, and in one place they found the skid marks where two canoes had been dragged ashore.

“How in the world did they pass us?” Stanton asked.

Easton said, “We spent a lot of time back at Grand Lake. On shore, I mean. Collecting data.”

Wallace tried not to sound as irritated as he felt. “This is a scientific expedition. Not a canoe race.”

He had a lot more to say, too—about how a couple of the men had handled, or rather, mishandled, their canoes; about all the time Richards and Stanton had wasted on an earlier scouting mission to locate this trail, only to report back on the presence of three trails, each of which then had to be explored. Yes, they had brought back a caribou for dinner, but was fresh meat, this early in the venture, worth the loss of time?

And then there were these damnable mosquitoes and blackflies! Never had Wallace encountered such a plague of biting and stinging insects. Even the smoke from his pipe failed to discourage their attacks on his face, neck and hands. His hair was matted with their carcasses, his flesh dotted with their blood mixed with his.

And now, most discouraging of all, the Indian trail, discovered at last, bore evidence of recent visitation. “Do you think they took it?” Stanton asked.

Wallace bit down on his tongue. It would do no good to snap at the men. A foolish question was best left ignored. Instead he told them, “We might as well make camp here for the night. Pete and I will see what we can learn from the trail; you other men get busy setting up camp.”

What Wallace and Pete found was that the trampled grass and broken twigs ended only thirty yards beyond the trailhead. Apparently the Hubbard party, daunted by the heavy underbrush, had returned to the river. Too rough for a woman, Wallace told himself, his first happy thought of the day.

Back at camp, where the fire was blazing, he announced that his party would here abandon the river in favour of the Indian trail. “It will provide us with better opportunity to conduct our studies of the area.”

“Plus it’s faster,” Easton said with a grin.

Wallace responded with a smile.

“Though pretty rough in there,” Pete Stevens said. “Might get better, might not.”

“No matter,” said Wallace. “What does matter is the contribution we can make to the scientific knowledge of the area.”

Besides, in his heart he knew that the Indian trail was his best hope for catching and passing the Hubbard party. And that, he knew as well, was the way it was meant to be.

“This hill is nothing but damn clay!” Easton complained the next day.

They had already climbed the hill once in this drizzling rain, each man with a heavy pack on his back, and that trip up and down to the shoreline had turned the wet ground into a slippery ooze. Every man in the party had stumbled two or three times, crashing to his knees or, in Stanton’s case, slipping onto his backside on the descent. Their clothes and boots and hands were heavy with mud.

Wallace had daubed some of the mud on his face as a deterrent to the blackflies, but the mud proved no more effective than the grease and commercial “bug dope” the men smeared over every inch of exposed skin. Even Duncan McLean, a native of this country, was made miserable by the pests.

“Damn these flies!” he said, and slapped first at the back of his neck, then at a cheek. “Goddamn little sonsabitches eat a man alive!”

On this second trip up the hill Stevens carried the front end of a canoe, with Richards bringing up the rear. In front of them, Stanton and Easton hauled the other canoe. Wallace and McLean, at the rear of the pack, shouldered the final loads of gear.

“Where did you learn to swear like that?” Wallace asked.

“Lumber camps,” said McLean.

“What else did the white man teach you? Anything useful?”

“Swearing is sometimes useful, sir.”

“How so?”

“Keeps me from screaming.” He stuck a finger in his ear and dug out a fly.

“They call them the devil’s angels,” Stanton said over his shoulder.

“Hmpf. More like the devil hisself.”

A minute or two later Richards called out, “How much farther to the top?”

Stanton lifted his head from under the bow of the canoe. “Another sixty, seventy yards.”

“It must be ninety degrees already. And not even noon.”

“At four this morning the thermometer read thirty.”

“Freezing at night and hot as Hades during the day. Lovely place you brought us to, Wallace. Remind me to build a summer home here.”

The pack straps pulled hard on Wallace’s shoulders, cutting his skin. “One step at a time, gentlemen.”

He had barely gotten the words out when he heard a loud grunt followed instantly by a thud. Then came more grunts and exclamations and, before he knew it, Stevens and Richards came sliding toward him. They had been bowled over by Stanton and Easton after Stanton slipped and dropped the stern end of his canoe, pulling Easton down as well. Duncan flattened himself against the
side of the hill, then Wallace lurched into the brush just as the canoe came shooting toward him, sliding on its side. He watched it go scraping and bumping toward the bottom like an unmanned toboggan on an icy hill. It banged to a halt in an alder bush some two hundred feet below.

Wallace looked uphill at the men sprawled across the trail, the remaining canoe lodged between them. “Everybody all right?” he asked.

“Damn sonsabitching clay,” McLean said.

Mina Hubbard’s expedition, July 1905

S
UNDAY
, J
ULY 2
,
A DAY OF REST
. It had been more than two years since Mina had awakened to such an idyllic day. By way of the Naskapi they had passed through a body of water the trappers called Mountain Cat Lake, a small, clear lake surrounded by spruce-covered hills, and their camp not far above this lake was their finest yet, high on a sandy point well away from the rapids, where the only watery sound in the night was a pleasing susurrus of current.

Now, at dawn, Mina hunkered near the water’s edge, rubbing her dirty clothes against a large, smooth stone. Across the shore the land rose in a gentle slope to a long wooded hill; at its base were gravel flats blanketed in the fresh green grasses of spring. The flats were criss-crossed by little waterways of burbling crystal water. Now and then, as the sun shone over the hilltops, those streams sparkled red or orange, and the dew on the grass glinted like a scattering of diamonds.

She was amazed by the contentment she felt. Her feet were swollen from long hours of hiking along the rocky shore, now and then turning an ankle, and her face and hands were red and bumpy
with the bites of blackflies and mosquitoes, which even now droned and swooped around her. But somehow she felt above all the torment. The men had risen early to bathe in the misty river and all were now clean-shaven and dressed in clean clothes. Gilbert, up by the campfire, was cutting Joe’s hair. Job, scouring the skillet, sang softly to himself. George sat in the sun just outside his tent and read his Bible.

They had come together, Mina thought, to a soothing place, this sandy point, this place of wondrous calm.

The sense of peace stayed with her throughout the day. She smelled spruce trees in the air, heard birdsong in the trees. When she went to her tent in the afternoon for a nap before supper, she felt no need to wear herself out first with fervent prayer. Her mind today was not a roil of dark thoughts. She could only wonder if, the day before, they had passed some magic meridian and crossed over into an enchanted land.

A thunderstorm burst upon them in the evening, brief and refreshing, driving the flies away just before dark. Afterward the air was redolent with the fragrance of pine and river and rain-washed stones. And that night, after writing in her journal, Mina crawled between her blankets and listened for a while to a loon calling in the distance, serenading its mate, and Mina knew that she had been given this day as a blessing, a calm that could not last, and she said only “Thank you” before closing her eyes to the soft midnight light.