Heart So Hungry (25 page)

Gilbert became her escort on the trip back to the canoes, and all along the way he entertained her with his speculations about the size and age and sex of each of the animals he had felled with his imaginary bullets.

Mina and the others did not have to wait long with the canoes before George and Job came trotting down the rocky path, grinning from ear to ear. “What did you see?” Mina called out. But neither man would say a word until they were ten yards from the others. Then George told them in a half-whisper, “Get in the canoes!”

Mina scampered into her seat. “What did you see?”

George shoved the canoe into deeper water and hopped aboard.

“Tell me!” she begged.

But all he would say was “You better get your camera out. And let’s try not to make any more noise.”

The men dipped their paddles with a delicacy that barely made a hiss. The canoes glided forward another half-mile. “Here,” George finally said, and pointed to his right, and both canoes were turned ashore.

If Mina’s pulse had raced earlier, it was hammering now at double speed. She could feel it in her temples and even in her fingertips as she clutched the Kodak close to her chest. Then, disembarked, the party again made its way up a rocky slope, wincing with each noisy tumble of a loose stone. This time George took the lead and placed Mina directly behind him.

Not quite at the top, George paused, stood on his toes and peeked over the ridge. Grinning more broadly than ever, he turned and held out a hand to Mina. “Ladies first,” he said.

She took his hand and moved past him and climbed onto the ridgetop. What she saw there took her breath away. The next hillside from top to bottom was literally covered with caribou, a solid mass of brown and grey white-breasted animals feeding on luxuriant moss, bucks and does and fawns intermingled.

She did not hear the men coming up beside her, wasn’t aware, as she and somebody else started inching forward, who was at her side, didn’t want to look away from the magnificent herd for even an instant. She walked forward, the ground sloping away toward the hill where the caribou grazed. She snapped a couple of pictures but wanted desperately to be closer, closer yet, and she kept walking forward, one cautious step at a time, almost dizzy with excitement.

She and George—for it was he, of course, who accompanied her—had closed to just over two hundred yards when one of the stags near the bottom of the herd quivered, tossed its head, then
looked directly at Mina. Neck stiffened, splendid antlers held high, the animal turned from broadside to face her head-on. Within seconds the entire herd was alert and turned. Several more stags came forward to form a wall of imposing antlers.

Mina and George stopped in their tracks. She could hear nothing but the thunder of her heart. Slowly she raised the camera as high as her chest, held it steady. Took another step forward.

And with that movement the entire herd, thousands of animals, came stepping toward her, their massive antlers lowered. The horns were in velvet but looked nonetheless deadly. She shot a glance at George and he nodded to the rear, and it was all the encouragement she needed to retreat.

Job and Joe and Gilbert kept grinning even as Mina hurried past them. She was about to start back down the rocky slope to the canoes when she realized that she was alone and turned to look back. Now she saw why the men had not followed. The herd was not in pursuit of them after all. It had come only a few yards down the hillside, a bluff charge. The caribou were happily grazing again.

Sheepishly Mina returned to stand beside George. Then, as if to shame her further, Job and Joe and Gilbert all strode boldly toward the herd.

A large buck snorted and pawed the ground. A second later the caribou’s front line surged forward again, and now it was Mina’s turn to smile when the men wheeled around and raced back past her. She laughed all the way down to the canoes.

Later, pushing northward again, as the canoes came around a point Mina’s party spotted an island in the middle of the lake, three-quarters of a mile ahead. Stretched between the island and both shores of the mainland, moving from west to east, was a solid, seething line of swimming caribou, a bridge of animals two or three abreast. Several hundred stood bunched up on the island as if waiting their turn to wade into the water again and swim to the
eastern shore, where, one by one, the caribou came streaming up onto the shoreline, dripping water and flicking their tails, only to trot briskly across the rocks and over the hilltop.

Mina’s crew approached this spectacle slowly, watching from a distance until the entire herd had crossed onto dry land. Then the men paddled hard to land the canoes just above the point where the caribou had crossed. Mina and the others disembarked and followed on foot as the herd, now broken into companies of ten to twenty animals each, sauntered up and over the next hill, down its slope and up and over the next one. There they seemed to find a hillside to their liking and they spread out with a few sentinel stags at the bottom and started grazing again.

Mina had been enjoying this promenade for quite a while before she realized that she had no pictures of the animals at close range. Those on the far hill, spread out as they were, seemed much less dangerous than the ones that had chased her earlier, so she decided to venture nearer. The ground at the foot of the caribou’s hill was boggy beneath the moss, however, and Mina soon found herself sinking in up to her ankles. The squishing, sucking sound as she tried to move forward alerted the herd to her presence; they trotted farther up the hillside. For the next twenty minutes or so the herd moved ahead at a leisurely pace and only occasionally looked back to check on the progress of the lone woman and the four men who followed behind her.

By the time Mina’s party crested the next summit, the caribou were several hundred yards away. She knew then that she would be unable to get any closer. But instead of feeling disappointment Mina experienced a deep, quiet contentment. At one point, when she realized how silent her party had been all this time, how respectful and reverent, she looked from George to Joe to Job to Gilbert. “The enjoyment of them,” she later wrote, “showed itself in the kindling eyes and faces luminous with pleasure. All his long wilderness experience had never afforded Job anything to compare
with that which this day had brought him.” She and her crew had been witness to what relatively few individuals ever saw, the spectacle of migration, of thousands of caribou moving in one breathtaking mass.

From the hill where Mina’s party now stood they could see Lake Michikamats from end to end. To the north, where the hills on either side of the lake grew gradually smaller and smaller, falling away toward the Atlantic Ocean and Ungava Bay, was a series of lakes dotted by islands.

George came to stand close behind Mina. He laid his arm across her shoulder and pointed, his finger tracing a line in the air, drawing a squiggly path from lake to lake. “That’s our route,” he told her. “That’s where we’ll find your river.”

Her
river! She could not stop blushing, could not quiet the tremble of excitement. Was she really going to do it? Would they find the George River as easily as that? Was she really going to succeed? She dared not contemplate the possibility.

She pivoted slowly, taking in the panorama. “Oh, look!” she said. A brilliant rainbow was arcing out of the sky and seemed to come to rest on a boulder at the foot of the hill. It wasn’t the first rainbow they had seen in Labrador, but it was surely the most vivid and the nearest.

“Who wants the pot of gold?” she asked.

The men turned to her with puzzled looks.

“Don’t you know about the gold at the end of the rainbow?”

No, they had never heard of such a thing.

“There’s supposed to be a pot of gold buried at the foot of every rainbow, right where it touches the ground.”

George narrowed his eyes a bit and considered her with a wry smile. But Gilbert had heard all he needed to hear. In a flash he was racing wildly down the hill, arms flying.

But when Gilbert reached the boulder at the bottom of the hill, the rainbow had moved. It had slid away from him, out into the
middle of a lake. He turned and looked back up the hill and held out his arms in a gesture of confusion. The men howled with laughter and slapped their thighs. Mina did not even mind the drizzle of rain when it started anew, would not mind anything at all if only this moment would never end, this joy.

Dillon Wallace’s expedition, mid-August 1905

W
ITH NO MAN YET WILLING
to give up, Wallace decided to let the entire party continue on together at least as far as Lake Michikamau. The problem was, he had no idea how far ahead the great lake lay. So on Sunday, the thirteenth, he provided for an eventual retreat by having some of their scant provisions cached. Buried in a hole they dug in the ground, then covered with stones to protect them from scavengers, were thirty pounds of pemmican in tin cans, forty-five pounds of flour, some tea and ammunition. The men were happy to have their loads lightened but none rejoiced at leaving behind so much precious food. On one hand, they might never see it again. On the other hand, retreat for at least some of the men seemed inevitable, and without these emergency rations those men would in all likelihood starve.

Stanton was particularly aggrieved to see the pemmican go into the ground. Only that morning had they sampled the first tin of it—a combination of ground meat, tallow and currants hermetically sealed in six-pound cans by Armor and Company of Chicago, and sold at the staggering cost of sixty cents per pound—and he had found the concoction much tastier and satisfying than expected. Finally, a flavourful and belly-filling breakfast again. But now, as he laid stones atop the cache, he felt an emotion very near to despair. There was no guarantee, when some of the men eventually turned
back, that they would return by this same route or be able to locate the cache again, so he was not convinced of the wisdom of leaving the food behind. Days later he was still secretly mourning the loss of the pemmican. In his journal, his only confidante, he wrote, “I almost felt as though I had buried my best friend … as indeed it was in this country, for without it we would die.”

Despite the burial of a hundred pounds of supplies, the load did not feel lighter for long. After lunch the next day, during an eleven-mile portage to the shore of another lake, Stanton staggered under his burden and fell. His heavy pack twisted sideways as he tumbled, which caused him to wrench a muscle in his back. For most of that day he straggled along a mile or more behind the others. Finally Easton, with the stern end of a canoe resting on his shoulder, noticed that Stanton was nowhere to be seen. Nor did Stanton respond to the men’s calls. Easton backtracked, found him sprawled and breathless on the trail, and relieved him of half his load. Stanton was in too much agony to manage more than a few words of gratitude.

Even with the weight of his pack cut in half, Stanton was unable to keep up with the others. Only after long hours of trudging on alone, wondering at times if he would ever see home or even his crewmates again, the whomp of an axe came echoing toward him, and he followed that inspiriting sound as if it were a lifeline until he eventually came to where Easton was chopping wood for a fire.

Stanton arrived in camp just in time to hear Easton cry out in pain. The axe blade, after a particularly weary strike, had caromed off the log to strike his leg on the shin bone. Stanton, who was nearest, immediately shrugged off his load and hobbled to the scene of the accident. The other men came running. Easton lay grimacing on the ground, rolling back and forth as he clutched at the wound. Blood seeped through his trousers and between his fingers. Richards knelt beside him and gingerly pushed up the pantleg to expose the wound. There was so much blood that the men feared
the worst. How could they possibly carry Easton out of this wilderness? Could they manage a litter, along with the canoes and all their provisions, and with one fewer man to share the load?

Water was brought from the lake and the blood was washed away. Stanton—who with shaking hands now found himself in charge of the ministrations, if only by virtue of being the first at the scene—breathed a sigh of relief. “It’s not as bad as it looks,” he said. “I don’t think the bone is injured. Bring me the boracic acid and some plaster and we’ll get this cut cleaned and dressed.”

Unfortunately the adhesive plaster had gotten wet and was of no use. So after cleaning the wound, Stanton had Wallace hold the edges of split skin together while electrical tape was wrapped around Easton’s leg.

Over the next few days the party’s progress was even slower than usual, owing more to the weather than to Easton’s wound. In two days they covered only eleven miles. A cold, driving rain with gusting winds made it impossible for one man to portage a canoe; the wind would lift it right out of his hands. With two men needed for each canoe, they had to break the outfit into three loads each, which meant that eleven miles of progress required fifty-five miles of actual walking, thirty-three of those miles with loads on their backs.

But if the weather was harsh, the terrain was brutal. They waded through marshes, trudged over rocky hills, crawled through tangled, dripping brush. Each day consisted of one portage after another toward yet another lake that, when seen from a distance, glimmered enticingly, only to prove too shallow to float a canoe in.

It had been awhile too since the men had come across any Indian signs. They had no idea where the trail to Michikamau lay. All they knew for certain was that they were not on it.

Most vexing of all was the sudden disappearance of game. No caribou tracks were to be seen. And not a single fish could be coaxed onto their hooks or into their net.

The men talked incessantly about the foods they missed from home, recalling their favourite bakeries and restaurants, vainly struggling to conjure up spiritual sustenance from remembered smells and textures and tastes.

On August 16, at breakfast, they scraped the last of the caribou stew off their plates. The meat had turned green but they dared not waste it. On the nineteenth they awoke to find the ground stiff with frost, the water glazed with ice.