Heart So Hungry (21 page)

“I know you did. But I thought, when you went up there on that mountain all alone, maybe you would think different and go down to the rapids anyway.”

She kept her voice even and low. “When I got to the end of the lake and I saw you weren’t coming, and the thunderstorm was on its way and the flies were as bad as I’ve ever seen them, I thought I might as well be doing something interesting while I was getting soaked and eaten alive. I wasn’t going to just sit there for who knows how long and be miserable while I waited for you men to show up.”

He nodded, his face still grim. “That’s just what we said to each other. Who would ever think of climbing that hill in a thunderstorm?”

She understood that he did not mean the statement to be derisive, but a strange kind of compliment. She laughed softly.

George’s scowl deepened. “Look at us,” he said, and waved a hand toward Job. “Just look at what you done to us.”

“What have I done?” she asked.

“When I went to meet you and then couldn’t see you on the ridge, and then went to the rapids and couldn’t find you there, we begun to walk faster and faster, and then to run like crazy people. Poor Job, he could hardly speak, he was so worried about you. And
neither could I. So there was both of us out of breath and half-crying all the time and not knowing where to look. And now we can never trust you to go off on your own again. We just can’t.”

His last statement was uttered so despairingly, empty of accusation or anger but heavy with disappointment, that it nearly broke her heart. She had no desire to be the cause of such turmoil. On the other hand, she had had a taste of freedom and it had thrilled her. She was not willing to give it all back to the men and resign herself to being mere baggage again.

“I’ll make a bargain with you,” she said. “If I can have someone to go with me whenever I want to climb a hill or do anything else I think is necessary for my work, I promise not to go away alone again. But my escort has to go with me wherever I want to go. He will have to follow wherever I say. Agreed?”

George said, “What if you say you want to go into a rapid?”

“George! For goodness’ sake!”

“All right,” he said. “I suppose you wouldn’t ever say that, would you?”

“You know I wouldn’t. You have to learn to put some trust in me.”

“It’s not that I don’t trust you, missus.”

“You know what can happen out here, I understand. And so do I.” She thought of the bear that had blocked her trail, of the creature that might have been a bear and might have been a shadow, and of how all this trouble had probably started with it. She had been distracted by the bear and lost a lot of time in trying to avoid it, then trying to sneak up on it, only to find that it hadn’t been there at all, a probable phantom, a thing like fear itself, which, when confronted, evaporates into the mist. Before embarking on this trip she had been afraid of so many things. Now here she was telling George he had nothing to worry about, when in her own heart she understood that this very expedition was the result of a fear that would never leave her.

Her smile was small but sincere, a reconciliation. She held out her hand. “Do you accept my proposition?”

Wearily, George smiled too. He placed his hand atop hers. “I accept.”

Job, without so much as a grunt, turned and headed back toward camp. Mina and George followed a minute later.

“And the thing is,” George said, after a while, “you did it all so quick. Why, I was watching you go up on that mountain where you first went, and you were so busy and running about up there, just as busy as a Labrador fly. You looked just like a little girl that was playing at building something. And I thought how nice that you were enjoying yourself. Then the first thing I knew I heard the shots on the other side of the lake. We looked across the lake and couldn’t see anything, and we wondered about those shots and who could be there. Then it wasn’t long at all before Joe said, ‘Look there! Up on the mountain!’”

He shook his head, still shaken. “Then we saw you, but I never thought it was you. I didn’t see how it could be, that you could have gotten there so fast. Then Joe said, ‘Why, it’s a woman!’ And we knew it had to be you. But even then we couldn’t believe it. Who would ever think to look at you and the little short steps you take that you could move so quick? Why, we just couldn’t believe it. And the men got on me for it too. They said they had been on lots of trips before where there were women along, but they never were on a trip where the women didn’t do what they were told.”

She could not help but laugh at the incredulity in his voice, the tone of awe and confusion.

“Oh yes,” he said, as sombre as ever, “you go ahead and laugh if you like. It just shows me that you don’t care a bit about my feelings. Not a bit, do you?”

He had never before expressed his feelings to her so nakedly, and now here he was sounding forlorn and pathetic. Mina knew she shouldn’t laugh, but she couldn’t stop herself. So as not to give him the wrong impression, though, she leaned closer and laid a hand on George’s arm.

At first he looked wounded by her laughter, as if she were mocking him, but with her hand on his arm the hurt soon passed and he laughed too, if only a little. “I just thought I was never going to see you again,” he admitted. And now his pace slowed a bit, and they fell even farther behind Job. “I’m never going to forget about that and how bad it felt. I kept thinking about how frightened you would feel when you realized you were lost. It’s an awful thing to know you’re lost, and I just never wanted you to feel that. If I hadn’t ever been lost myself I wouldn’t know how bad it is.”

She rubbed her fingers over his forearm. “Thank you for worrying about me, George. But I was never really in any trouble.”

“But how could we know that? Don’t you see? And what would we do if you had got lost or fell in those rapids? Why, I could never go back again. None of us could. How could any of us ever go back without you?”

“But why not?” she said.

“Don’t you know what everybody would think if we came back without you? A white woman alone out here with four Indian men? Don’t you know what they would do to us if we was foolish enough to come back without you?”

The full force of their fear and their dilemma struck her like a blow. Of course they were protective of her. Of course they wanted to shield her from all harm. They cared about her, yes, and that was a large part of their concern. But she had never stopped to think of the other aspect of their fear. If any accident befell her on this trip, if she drowned in the rapids or was attacked by a bear or got lost and could not be found, the men would be blamed for it. White society would not ask if Mina had behaved foolishly or if she had ignored their advice; judgment would be swift and harsh. She was a white woman, inexperienced in the wilderness, and they had been hired as her guides. They would be held responsible.

Mina understood then that the men had risked their lives in more ways than one by agreeing to accompany her on this expedition. And
this afternoon she had abused their courage and loyalty by playing a trick on them, a silly game meant to teach them a silly lesson. She felt small and childish and stupid with regret.

“Plus I just kept thinking,” George said—his voice was husky now and he would not look at her, he kept his eyes on the ground—“I just kept thinking I might never see you again. And that was the worst feeling of them all.”

She let her hand slip down his arm and brush across his fingers. Then, side by side and without speaking, they walked back toward camp.

Joe and Gilbert had just finished setting up her tent when she arrived. They too had been searching for her earlier and now they did not know whether to smile. It was as if they had all agreed to scold her with their expressions but no one was terribly interested in doing so now. She did not say anything at first but went inside her tent and changed into dry clothing. When she came out again, all four men were seated around the fire underneath the tarpaulin and there was meat frying in the skillet and a pot of rice nearby.

Mina walked over to the fire quickly in an attempt to stay dry. The rain continued to fall, though in a light drizzle now. It made a soft pattering sound on the tarpaulin and dripped steadily over one edge, which had been pitched lowest for good drainage. The men had scattered pine boughs under the tarp and the air smelled of woodsmoke and frying meat and of pine resin and rain.

She took off her hat and shook the rain from it and laid it aside. “Oh, isn’t it nice and warm and fragrant in here,” she said. She sat on the ground next to Gilbert and looked at each of the men in turn. Only George would meet her gaze, his own soft and forgiving. The other men seemed to be waiting to be told how to react to her.

She said, “I want you all to know how sorry I am for what I did today. I don’t mean for going off alone, which I enjoyed very much, but for making you worry about me.”

She waited and said nothing more. Gilbert was the first to look
in her direction, just a quick glance and a small quick smile. Then Job did the same. Joe poked at the fire with a stick. A few moments later he lifted his eyes enough to look in George’s direction, and when he saw that George was smiling, Joe too gave Mina a smile and a nod.

“I think I should get my brandy bottle out now, don’t you?” she said. “I want us all to have a good bracer together, all right? Then we can all forgive each other and have a nice supper.”

The men understood that she was making a concession to them, an act of contrition. The brandy bottle had been passed around on only one other occasion, the first day of the trip, a toast to their success. Joe said, “You’re not going to get an argument out of any of us when it comes to the brandy, missus.”

She put her wet hat back on and hurried through the rain again and into her tent. A few moments later she returned and handed the bottle to George, then went back to her seat at the other end of the line.

George uncapped the bottle and took a long swallow. Then he had another short one before passing the bottle to Job. Job drank from it and passed the bottle to Joe. The men were all being very solemn now, she thought, all but Gilbert, who sat with his head bowed. When the bottle was passed to him he took only a short gulp before lowering it. But Joe gave him a nudge with an elbow and Gilbert raised the bottle again and had another drink. He could not even look at Mina when he held the bottle toward her, but sat there with his head averted and his shoulders shaking.

Mina took the bottle and held it out toward the men as if to toast them. Then she raised the bottle to her lips and tilted it up. Only then did she realize that the day’s games were not yet over. The men had drained the brandy bottle completely. They had left not a drop for her.

Dillon Wallace’s expedition, last week of July 1905

A
RESPITE FROM DRUDGERY
finally came to Wallace’s party on the twenty-sixth. The previous Sunday, Duncan McLean, anxious for home, had bid the party goodbye and set off alone. The men missed him sorely. “As he disappeared down the trail,” Wallace would write, “a strange sense of loneliness came upon us, for it seemed to us that his going broke the last link that connected us with the outside world.”

They spent the next three days moving through a series of lakes, alternately paddling and portaging. Then, on the twenty-sixth, they happened upon a flock of five geese floating along on the water. Pete downed three of the geese with his shotgun. Wallace later described their special dinner that night: “This was Easton’s twenty-second birthday and it occurred to me that it would be a pleasant variation to give a birthday dinner in his honor and to have a sort of feast to relieve the monotony of our daily life, and give the men something to think about and revive their spirits.” He instructed that two of the geese be prepared for the feast. They would also have plenty of hot bread and a pudding concocted from the few remaining prunes. Their supply of coffee was running so low that it had now been restricted to Sundays only, but for this occasion he eased the restriction.

“How we enjoyed it!” he wrote.

But the spell would be broken. On the morning of Saturday, July 29, Stanton crawled out of his bedroll at five-thirty, utterly depleted after a torturous night. Never had the flies been so insistent, so insatiable. His skin was black with their corpses and blood, stinging as if from several loads of birdshot. His only comfort, and it was cold comfort indeed, was that the insects had not singled him out in their carnage. Every face in camp was swollen and blood-speckled, as red as raw sausage.