Heart So Hungry (22 page)

There was no denying that Wallace’s crew were a miserable bunch, and not solely because of the insects. Morale had been fading day by day ever since the birthday banquet. How could they possibly hope to be on the George River and gliding toward Ungava by the last of August when now, with but three days left in July, they hadn’t even found Seal Lake yet? By Stanton’s calculations, which he kept to himself or grumbled out
sotto voce
when only Pete Stevens could hear, they spent more time searching for the damn Indian trail than actually walking on it. And those searches invariably carried them through hostile, if not downright malevolent, terrain. In the morning a mosquito-infested bog might threaten to suck them under; in the afternoon a lifeless sand desert would blast them with radiated heat; and in the evening they would struggle through a field of ankle-twisting rocks, or across a barren ridge scoured by an icy wind, or over a hundred acres of willow brush so thick they had to crawl on their hands and knees. And because every man was responsible for two loads during these portages, every mile of advance meant having to walk three miles, two of them while hauling a back-breaking load every inch of the way.

By now Pete Stevens’ khaki trousers were ripped in a dozen places. Even so, they were in better shape than the Mackinaw trousers worn by Richards and Easton, which had been shredded to rags. Wallace’s moleskin trousers had fared the best of any, sustaining but one small tear so far. But even with fresh clothing the men would have been footsore and heart-heavy. What they craved most
of all was not comfort but progress, and that commodity was in very short supply.

As was fresh meat. They had been catching as much fish as they could eat, but even with a bellyful of trout the men felt unsatisfied. Days earlier they had spotted three caribou swimming across a lake, and every man had scampered to get into position. But the animals made the shore and bounded into the brush before a single shot could be fired. The next day the party came upon another caribou swimming, but their three desperate shots fell far short of it.

So it was hardly surprising that Stanton should doubt his eyesight when, a few minutes after climbing out of bed that Saturday morning—still picking the sticky corpses off his neck while he sat by the fire and watched Pete Stevens boiling fish for their breakfast—he saw a large buck walking toward him down the shore.

Stanton blinked several times, shook his head, and waited for the taunting apparition to disappear. Instead it grew more substantial. A big, thick-necked stag, too intent on the moss to notice the men.

Stanton hissed to get Stevens’ attention. Then he nodded toward Wallace’s rifle, propped against a rock. In a whisper Stanton said, “Hand me the rifle, Pete. But move real slow. And look up there.”

Stevens looked first, then he made a grab for the rifle. He would have liked to take the shot himself, had been hungering for a kill since the trip began. But Stanton had spotted the buck first so it was rightly his shot. Stevens passed the rifle over to Stanton, who slid a bullet into place. The buck, as if asking to be brought down, strode onto a narrow neck of sand protruding into the water and obligingly turned broadside to the men.

“Should I take him now?” Stanton whispered.

Stevens gauged the distance. “Hundred-forty, fifty yards. Maybe wait. He maybe come closer.”

Stanton went down on one knee and took aim. “He’ll be hard to miss from here.”

“Maybe wait. See what he does.”

What the buck did was lift his head suddenly, sniff the air and, having caught the scent of smoke, wheel around in an instant and bound away. Stanton fired off several shots. Their only effect was to bring the remaining men running out of the tent. That morning’s boiled fish was seasoned with a fair measure of resentment.

After breakfast, Wallace, Easton and Stevens climbed to a snow-covered summit, hoping to see Seal Lake. Instead they saw another fifty or so lakes of varying sizes, none of them large enough to be Seal Lake. Yet another long maze of water and land and bog to be navigated. The sight was as disconcerting as it was dismaying. For the most part they were travelling by hearsay, what they had been told by trappers and Indians. The information had sounded reliable enough in the comfort of the North West River Post, but out in the wild, with the vast and trackless panorama laid before them, it seemed anything but precise.

They marched and waded and trudged all day, their only reward another disappointing supper of fishcakes, bread and boiled rice. Near the end of their meal Wallace made a sombre announcement. “I think we’d be wise to cut back on our bread, fellas. We’ve got a long way to go yet and there’s a real danger we’ll run out of flour before the end.”

Easton said, “It’s the bread that keeps us going.”

Stanton agreed. “Rice and fish don’t stick with a man long enough.”

“I don’t see as how we have a choice,” Wallace told them. “We cut down now or we run out before the end. And in the end we might need it more.”

“Cut down how far?” Richards asked.

“Down to a quarter-loaf per meal for each man.”

Easton groaned. Even with a full loaf at each meal, he was always hungry.

Pete Stevens said, “Indian need more bread than white man.”

“We all need more bread,” said Richards.

“We need to get used to having less.”

“Indian need more bread. Always have.”

“I know you think you do, Pete. But that’s only because you’re used to it. I’ve studied this long and hard and I have come to the conclusion that a bit of rationing is absolutely necessary. So from now on it will be one-quarter loaf per meal for each of us. Instead of baking four loafs for each meal, Pete, you’ll make just one. And when we have cornmeal or pea meal or lentils, we must do without bread altogether.”

Every man but Richards groaned aloud.

“Once we get to Seal Lake we can get some flour from Duncan’s tilt,” Wallace said. “Until then we have to be careful.”

Stanton muttered, “If we ever get to Seal Lake.”

Wallace chose not to acknowledge that remark.

Richards then said, “Maybe it’s time to start thinking about giving up on the Indian trail and taking to the water again. We could be to Seal Lake already if we had travelled by the route Duncan and the trappers use.”

“I have been thinking about that,” Wallace said. “The river would no doubt be quicker and easier.”

“Here here!”

“But it was Hubbard’s intention to locate the old trail if he could, as we have done, and to follow it whenever possible. To abandon that intention now, after all we’ve been through, just to make things easier on ourselves … well, it would feel like a surrender.”

Even as he said this, Wallace was wondering how many of the men were thinking, Better to surrender than to end up like Hubbard. Try as he might, he could not help thinking it himself. Was this trip doomed to play out as Hubbard’s had?

Damn it all, Wallace thought. In
The Lure of the Labrador Wild
he had plainly laid out Hubbard’s original intentions—to follow the old Indian trail to Lake Michikamau, then locate the headwaters of the George River and pass down that river to the Naskapi Indian
camps, there to witness the annual eastward migration of the caribou. Moreover, Wallace had stated to more than one newspaper reporter his own intention of fulfilling Hubbard’s dream, his belief that he was compelled to do so by his friend’s dying exhortation. How could he renege on that commitment now?

A cold, drenching rain fell that night, and the men lay silent in their bedrolls, already hungry for more bread. More bread, more meat, more of all the things they did not have. They had each signed on for this trip hoping for a fine adventure, a chance to prove their mettle and maybe share in a bit of the glory. None, but for Wallace, perhaps, had expected to have to endure such hardship and deprivation. And even Wallace had been confident that he could somehow circumvent the trials that had plagued Hubbard’s expedition. But this morning he had been forced for their own good to subject his crew to another hardship. The portages were an ordeal, yes, but until today the men had been able to propel themselves forward with the prospect of a hearty meal at the end of each march. Now that incentive had been whisked away. No meat and less bread.

Stanton lay awake a long time, remembering what Duncan McLean had once said: “If there aren’t any flies in hell, it can’t be as bad as this.” And if there is bread and meat in hell, Stanton thought, I hope we find our way there soon.

Mina Hubbard’s expedition, final days of July 1905

T
HE END OF THE MONTH
brought melancholy times to Mina. A listlessness descended out of nowhere and infected her party, a kind of Sunday laziness stretched through the entire weekend. A heavy rain on Saturday morning kept the party in camp until noon. Then came several hours of portaging, a late supper, and a long, still night
through which Mina lay awake thinking of her husband. It bothered her more than a little that she was finding so much pleasure on this trip. She had expected to suffer but, except for the insect bites, her suffering thus far had been insignificant in comparison to Laddie’s. It hardly seemed fair or right to Mina that she should be treated so generously to the wonders of this experience, free from sickness and hunger and debilitating fatigue, when her Laddie, who had loved the wilderness more than she did, had been denied this.

Rain fell again on Sunday morning, and again the sky cleared by noon. To Mina’s eye they were now on the most picturesque part of the river, a series of waterfalls and rapids that took her breath away, each more spectacular than the previous one. To each she gave a name. First came Maid Marion Falls, a fifty-foot plummet into a narrow gorge carved through the gneiss and schist of Laurentian rock. Then Gertrude Falls, ten feet higher than Maid Marion, a gushing, roaring cataract. And finally Isabella Falls, a mile-long series of falls and rapids and chutes. Here, she would write, “the water poured over ledges, flowed in a foaming, roaring torrent round little rocky islands, or rushed madly down a chute.”

Even the rocks were beautiful, varying in colour from a rich umber to a subtle purple. The rock walls rising up on each side of the river had been sheared off nearly perpendicular, and moss grew in most of the cracks, adding lines of grey, green and vermilion to the palette. The surrounding countryside had not been burned over but was blanketed everywhere by luxuriant reindeer moss, above which grew tall spruces and balsam trees.

But every time Mina caught herself smiling at the beauty of the landscape, marvelling at the quiet, harmonious air of the place, a troubling thought intruded: Do I deserve all this?

A laborious portage around the falls brought them to a succession of small lakes. Here, in the green woods along the shore, they spotted several wigwam poles left behind by Montagnais Indians. Mina was thrilled by this discovery. The men remained strangely silent.

After Mina and her crew had paddled over the fourth of the small lakes, they came to a place where the river turned south through three sets of heavy rapids. Joe and Job scouted for a portage route around these and returned with the happy news that they had come upon the old Indian trail to Michikamau. The blazes were old and faded but the path was clear. It promised easy portaging to the next calm water.

After a portage of a quarter-mile or so, Mina’s party took to the canoes and passed through another lake. There George pointed to a high hill on the opposite shore, perhaps three miles away. “We should be able to see Lake Michikamau from that hill,” he announced.

This time it was the men’s turn to be delighted. Mina, however, felt a peculiar heaviness in her stomach, a dread. Michikamau had been such an important landmark for her husband, that point in the journey where all the hard passage would lie behind them; the point from which success would be virtually guaranteed. But Laddie had never reached Michikamau.

“For all I know we might be on the lake already,” George told her. “This might be a part of it. In any case, we’ll be able to tell for sure from up on that hill.”

Mina’s legs felt suddenly tired, her back weak, and as the men paddled toward shore she searched her mind for some excuse that might keep her from having to climb that hill with the others; might keep her from having ever to lay eyes on Lake Michikamau. But in the end she said nothing. And march to the front like a soldier, she kept telling herself. And so she climbed.

It was just as George had said, a panorama of mountains, lakes and islands. And there, to the west, the great glittering expanse of Lake Michikamau, that ninety-mile spread of smooth water. She looked at it with tears in her eyes.

“Over there,” George told her, and pointed east, “that’s where we came through from Seal Lake.”

“And over there,” he said a moment later, pointing to a lonely-looking grey mountain a few miles to the southwest, “that’s Mount Hubbard. That’s where Mr. Hubbard and me stood when we first saw Michikamau.”

Mina could only nod, she could not speak.

“That dark line running across the brow of that hill, that’s the line of bushes where we shot all the ptarmigan.” He paused for a moment, then added softly, his voice hoarse, “We had us a fine supper that night.”

The view all around was a beautiful one, but Mina felt only agony. She could almost see George and her Laddie standing over there atop Mount Hubbard, hugging each other and jumping up and down with joy, haggard and weak but hopeful at last. It had been, perhaps, her husband’s last happy moment. “BIG DAY,” he had written in his journal.

On that afternoon—September 9, 1903, a Wednesday—with their spirits buoyed by the imminence of Michikamau and the nine ptarmigan and one rabbit they had shot, Laddie and George had hiked the four miles downhill to where Wallace was picking blueberries. “It’s there! It’s there!” Hubbard had shouted when he first spotted Wallace. “Michikamau is there, just behind the ridge. We saw the big water. We saw it!” Then all three men had hugged and danced a happy jig.

Ravenous, they quickly built a fire on the rocks. By then it was early evening. They had eaten nothing that day but for a watery soup made from a portion of their emergency rations—three slices of bacon and three spoonfuls of flour. They were so hungry that, while waiting for the birds to cook, they wrapped the entrails around sticks and roasted them over the flames and devoured them half-raw.