Heart So Hungry (30 page)

The men thought it a grand thing for them to be towed by a wild animal. Mina did not. And she knew that the doe did not think so either. But she was reluctant to order George to let go. Then the doe turned west, cutting across the bow of the other canoe, refusing to be turned northward again. A couple of minutes later the doe’s feet touched bottom and dug in hard, jerking the canoe along, and George was forced to relinquish his prize or be dragged up onto the rocks. The caribou bolted halfway up a steep hillside before pausing to look back.

“It thinks it escaped with its life,” Joe said.

In a girlish falsetto Gilbert asked, “Oh, my my! What was that thing had ahold of me? Oh, my, but it was heavy!”

Only Mina did not laugh. “Someday something might grab you by the tail,” she told them, “and maybe then you will understand how the poor thing felt.”

For a few moments the men were silent. Then an explosion of laughter echoed over the lake.

“Current pull harder and harder,” Job told them. His face seemed exceedingly pale that morning, August 22, and he did not attack his breakfast as he usually did but held the tin plate balanced on his knees, his gaze going off over the campfire and into the mist on the river. His eyes, Mina thought, looked like those of the caribou George had caught by the tail—glazed with fear.

“We try slow down but no good,” he continued, speaking haltingly now, recounting his dream. “Try get ashore but current too strong.”

Only Mina was not troubled by the dream. What troubled her was the deadly seriousness with which the other men sat listening.

“Water get faster and faster. River louder and louder. Then no water up ahead. Only sky up ahead. We paddle like crazy but it no good. Bert go over edge first, canoe tippin’ down and him slidin’ over with it. Then I go out behind him. Then George and Joe and the missus come too. We all go over and down. Long, long way down. We still fallin’ when I wake up.”

He had said more in one minute than he normally said in a day. And the impact of his words left all the men with no appetite, only a sick feeling in the pits of their stomachs.

Mina tried to calm their fears. “You only dreamed of the rapids because you could hear them from your tent, Job. And because the Naskapi told us to be careful of them.”

Gilbert said, “Dreams tell the future, missus.”

She turned to George for some assistance in the matter, but he too looked stricken. “Well,” she finally said, “I think a dream like Job’s is meant to warn us of a
possibility
, not a certainty. It only means we should be exceedingly careful from now on. As we will be.”

As a precaution, that day the men made certain not to re-create the specifics of Job’s dream. Instead of riding with Gilbert, as he had in the dream, Job rode in the stern of Mina’s canoe, with George in the bow seat. The other canoe, which usually took the lead, followed behind. Each man kept his foot atop an extra paddle, lest one break or be lost in heavy water.

Even so, from their first moments on the river that morning it seemed likely that Job’s dream might come true. The river, which had already been dark, now seemed the colour of ink. They could not see the bottom nor pick out boulders submerged only a few inches below the surface. Also, the slope of the river steepened sharply, and the rapids swelled in both quantity and amplitude.

Nor was there any break in the rapids. One chute led to the next one, with at most a few moments of smooth water in between. The men almost never paddled to increase their speed but employed their oars as rudders and as drags to slow them down. The water
foamed and churned around standing boulders, heaved and leapt over submerged ones.

After every run the canoes were pulled ashore so that the party could catch their breath and quiet the trembling in their limbs. Mina considered proposing that they spend more time portaging, but she knew how unpredictable were the arrival and departure of any ships to the remote posts, and even more than she feared the rapids she feared missing the
Pelican
.

So they continued on. Job stood in the stern of Mina’s canoe, shouting directions over the roar of the river while George struggled with his paddle to turn the canoe aside from a boulder rushing toward them. Hour after hour it continued, day after day. All the while, Mina sat helplessly in the centre seat, hunkered low and gripping her knees so that she would not lurch to the side and throw the entire canoe off balance.

It was stressful work for all of them. So stressful that, though they were making good time and covering more miles per hour than ever before, their muscles ached, especially in the neck and arms and shoulders, and they cut each day short, for a longer night was needed to ease the strain of even a few hours on such demanding water. And from the night of the twenty-fourth on they all had troubling dreams, including Mina—dreams of tumbling over cataracts and plunging into black, frigid pools, of being driven down into an icy, bottomless river. They came to breakfast with blank stares and wan expressions, all wondering to themselves if today would be the day their luck ran out.

Yet disaster, as it often does, seemed to come out of nowhere. The set of rapids they were travelling that morning was no worse than others they had run, but the party was exhausted by now, depleted by the constant strain. Job, standing in the stern, was the first to notice the black boulder coming toward them, charging like a bull submerged under the foam. For a moment he could not make up his mind whether to take the canoe to the right or the left
of it, and he shouted his directions to George an instant too late. The right side of the canoe banged against the rock, sending the stern lurching toward the centre of the river. Job caught hold of the gunwale just in time to keep from being ejected, and plunked down heavily on the seat. But the canoe was turned broadside in the current, and a moment later the bow slammed against a rock protruding from shore. The stern turned downriver, but not far—only far enough to wedge itself against another boulder. With the canoe turned nearly perpendicular to the rushing water and locked in place at both ends, the waves banged against the side one after another, violently bucking the craft and its passengers up and down.

Mina, gasping from the cold shock of each surge as it slammed against the canoe and splashed over her, could barely get the words out to shout, “What should I do?”

“Don’t move!” George answered.

Gingerly he picked a coil of rope off the bottom of the canoe and looped it around his neck. Then, moving forward an inch at a time, he managed to grab hold of the long, pointed rock protruding into the river and, with fingertips digging in, straining for purchase on the slippery surface, he pulled himself up out of the canoe and onto a precarious ledge. From there he leaned over awkwardly, looking as if he might fall into the water at any moment, and secured the rope to an eye-hook on the bow.

Meanwhile Job was moving too, another rope in hand, crawling bit by bit over the stern, stretching out his body until he could reach an eye-hook mounted at his end. He lay half-turned onto his side so that his back was braced against the boulder, with water pouring over him front and back. After securing his line he crawled back into the canoe, then very delicately crept past Mina to the bow and climbed onto the pointed rock beside George.

With the men’s weight out of the boat, the bucking, lurching motion became even more violent. Mina sat huddled tight, every
breath a gasp. She prayed that she would not be told to climb out of the canoe too; she doubted that she could make her body move.

But no, she was told to sit tight. Soon George and Job positioned themselves along the edge of the boulder. They pulled the bow and stern lines taut, then lifted the front end of the canoe clear of its impediment. This allowed the current to turn the bow downstream again, and gradually the stern slid free as well. Now Job took hold of both lines and, grimacing with the effort, held the canoe in place while George eased himself onto his seat and took up his paddle. Job held the ropes a moment longer, then suddenly tossed both into the canoe and, with an alacrity Mina could only marvel at, dropped down onto his seat as they shot forward down the river.

The incident had a strangely salubrious effect on all the men, especially Job. He viewed the near disaster as the one predicted by his dream, and now it was behind him, no harm done. At supper that night, despite a freezing blast of wind that had the party huddling close to the whipping flames of their campfire, he laughed and ate heartily and, for the first time all week, played a few songs on his mouth organ.

Mina found herself in a more contemplative mood. Alone in her tent that night, she wrote:

Dillon Wallace’s expedition, late August through mid-September 1905

I
N THE SECRET DEPTHS OF HIS HEART
, Dillon Wallace often despaired of ever finding his way out of this cursed land. The other men in his party made no secret of their disgruntlement, especially Stevens and Richards, who grumbled often and loudly about the rapidly dwindling provisions and the unsatisfying rations. To a man, Wallace’s crew were dog-tired and ragged. The spectre of a starved and frozen Leonidas Hubbard was never far from their thoughts.

Then came August 30. In the afternoon Stevens and Easton came trudging back to camp after a scouting mission that had taken several hours. They had climbed a summit named Corncob Hill in hopes of spotting the big waters of Lake Michikamau at last, and as the two men marched wearily into camp their colleagues waited, silent but hopeful. Both Stevens and Easton wore tired smiles, but there was no way to interpret those expressions with certainty. A smile could mean success or it could mean wan resignation to yet another failure.

Wallace, who had been sitting near the tent, putting an edge on his knife, scarcely moved as Easton and Stevens covered the last few yards. What will I do, he wondered, if they didn’t see the lake? If they didn’t see it … I will have no choice. The decision will be made.

Richards said, “Well, boys? Give us the news.”

Pete Stevens hunkered down in front of Wallace. “Hill very steep,” he said. And then his smile widened. “I not care. I must know soon as I can, and I run to top. There I shut my eyes awhile, afraid to look. Then I open them and look. Very close I see when I open my eyes much water.”

For Stanton, Wallace and Richards, those words were like a blast of pure oxygen. Wallace closed his eyes dreamily and felt himself sinking down into sweet relief. When he opened his eyes a moment later he was happy to see Stevens still there, still grinning, still bursting with the news.

“Big water,” Stevens said. “So big I see no land when I look one way, just water. Very wide too, that water. I know I see Michikamau. My heart beat crazy and I feel very glad. I almost cry.”

Every man in camp felt like crying. Their relief was too great, their gratitude too huge. They had no words for it, no response but for an ache in the chest, a constriction in the throat. Stanton thought, Easy sailing from here on in, and considered saying it aloud, but the moment was too special—it felt sacred somehow, and even he held his tongue in reverence of their discovery.

The next morning, Pete Stevens had occasion to cry again. After breakfast, just as the men prepared to clean up and break camp, Wallace asked them to sit by the fire awhile longer. When they had settled into their seats again, he told them, “The time has come for three of you to turn back.”

The notion of sending part of the crew back was not new to them; it had been proposed by Wallace on an earlier occasion, with the rationale that two men could move faster than five and that it would be preferable to have the mission completed with a partial crew rather than not at all. But Wallace’s pronouncement now, with Lake Michikamau glittering like an Eden so near at hand, struck the men like a blow. Wallace gave them no time to protest.

“Richards is the natural choice to continue on with me,” he said. “He’s the most experienced man in the rapids, as well as best suited to the scientific work that remains. But he needs to be back in New York by winter for his university duties. And I made a solemn promise to his people that I would have him back to them by autumn.”

He paused for a moment to swallow. His throat had grown husky. “Pete, too, would be a logical choice. But if he comes with me, how can the others be assured of getting back to civilization? Pete has to go along as their guide.”

Wallace dragged his heel across the Labrador earth. This morning’s chore was his hardest task of the expedition. It was like deciding which of his arms and legs to cut away and which one to keep.