Heart So Hungry (34 page)

With the coming of October, winter cinched its noose tighter and tighter. Equipped with only summer clothing, and in an area where little wood was to be found—and when it was, it was usually wet—the men stayed cold day and night. With only pemmican and a few wild berries to sustain them, they suffered constantly from gnawing hunger. They saw flock after flock of ptarmigan, ducks and geese, but they had no guns or ammunition.

They also encountered numerous Indian signs, but the hunting camps were all abandoned and nothing had been left behind. Storms raged and winds howled. The men fell into a tedious routine, moving during the daylight hours and camping at twilight.
Most days they were drenched by rain or blinded by snow. They seldom spoke to one another, too deep in their misery for any but essential conversation. Easton had been so traumatized by his icy submersion that he no longer washed or bathed and refused any contact with water except for what he drank.

Not until the evening of October 16 did Wallace and Easton spot the lights of the Ungava Bay post. Because the tide had left the bay drained of everything but mud, leaving no approach by canoe, they dragged their belongings to the safety of higher land, then started to pick their way along the face of a clifflike hill in hopes of reaching the post on foot. But their footing was dangerous and the light was receding rapidly. They found a niche a hundred feet or so above the mud and there piled up all the brush and loose wood they could find, meaning to light a signal fire at the first sign of life from the post.

It wasn’t long before a lantern light appeared and began to move down toward the mudflats below the post. Wallace and Easton ignited their signal fire, then jumped up and down, waving their arms and shouting. In time the lantern light turned in their direction, seemed to be approaching them. Then it disappeared.

Resigned to spending a cold night on the cliff, the men smoked their pipes and watched their signal fire slowly dying. “When all at once,” as Wallace described it, “there stepped out of the surrounding darkness into the radius of light cast by our now dying fire, an old Eskimo with an unlighted lantern in his hands, and a young fellow of fifteen or sixteen years of age.”

The boy, who turned out to be the grandson of John Ford, the post agent, explained that the Eskimo had seen Wallace and Easton striking matches earlier to light their pipes, even before the signal fire was set ablaze. Since there were no matches left within a hundred miles of the post, Mr. Ford assumed that there were strangers stranded on the hill, and sent his grandson and the Eskimo to investigate. Their lantern had blown out along the way.

With the relit lantern to guide them, Wallace and Easton were escorted to the agent’s house. Mr. Ford promptly treated them to a supper of fried trout, bread, jam and tea. There Wallace was informed of what he already suspected—that Mina Hubbard and her entire party had arrived in good condition, with provisions to spare, a full six weeks ahead of him. The only good news was that the
Pelican
was experiencing one of its typical delays and had not yet arrived.

Whether to spare himself the humiliation of having to return on the
Pelican
with Mina Hubbard or, as he claimed in his book, because the post’s storehouse was virtually depleted and he did not wish to burden Mr. and Mrs. Ford with two more mouths to feed until the steamer arrived—or because he hoped to salvage his reputation as an explorer, which would now be brought into question—Wallace decided, in spite of Mr. Ford’s caution that such a plan would be unwise, that he and Easton would continue to Fort Chimo, the most isolated station in northern Labrador. From there they would “travel across the northern peninsula and around the coast in winter and learn more of the people and their life.”

Wallace and Easton spent three days at the post—with Wallace avoiding Mina Hubbard all the while—as they waited for the ice to form, to make a dogsled trip to Fort Chimo feasible. On the third day the
Pelican
came steaming into the bay. From the ship’s commander Wallace received satisfying news: Richards, Stevens and Stanton were all safe and sound at the North West River Post. Now, with transportation at hand, Mr. Ford again advised against Wallace’s proposed dogsled expedition. But Wallace would not be swayed.

On October 22 the
Pelican
weighed anchor with both the Hubbard party and, briefly, the remains of the Wallace party aboard. Wallace and Easton, still in their threadbare summer clothing and meagrely provisioned, disembarked just twenty miles later, at the mouth of the George River. There they boarded a small
boat manned by Eskimos and began their trip to Fort Chimo, 150 miles away.

The ensuing journey proved to be every bit as perilous as the one to Ungava Bay. Six days after leaving the
Pelican
, Wallace, Easton and their Eskimo guides were forced to seek refuge on an island from a gale that raged for three days and transformed Ungava Bay into a minefield of pack ice. With their small boat now useless, the party had no option, when the storm finally subsided, but to set off on foot, without snowshoes, across the drifted snow and cracked ice.

Three days later another storm hit. This time Wallace and Easton hunkered down in a log hut while the Eskimos continued on. Six days later, with Wallace and Easton again out of food, rescuers pounded on the door of the hut. They had arrived with a dogsled team, deerskin clothing and boots.

On November 28 the two white men finally reached Fort Chimo. There they remained until early January, when they returned to Fort George by dogsled and resumed their journey down the eastern coast of Labrador.

On April 17, 1906, their Labrador adventure came to an end at the southern coastal town of Natashquan. All told, Wallace and Easton had explored a thousand miles of Labrador’s interior and had travelled another two thousand miles along the coast.