Heart So Hungry

by Randall Silvis

  Over the course of that evening, as Mina doted and served, her stomach fluttering with trepidation, Hubbard’s exuberance eroded away Wallace’s doubts. Yes, they would have a grand time conquering the wilderness together. They would both be famous men.

  At evening’s close the Hubbard exploration into unknown Labrador was christened with a glass of sherry and a handshake. The men plighted their troth, as Wallace would later write in the dedication of his first book. The phrase made Mina grit her teeth in silence—this allusion to marriage—an allusion that might have been altogether ridiculous except that she, indeed, was to be left behind.

  Such desolation, inside and out. Mina’s first good look at the Labrador coastline, seen through the weak light of a coastal dawn and the grey of a bone-chilling drizzle, perfectly mirrored the anguish of her heart. It was July 5, 1903, and ahead in the mist lay Battle Harbour, a small settlement on Labrador’s southeastern shore, and the place where she would be put ashore to return home alone while Laddie and his crew continued.

  Over the past two weeks Mina had known little else but anguish, all of it suffered in silence, as was her duty as an explorer’s wife. Then yesterday the lurching motion of their steamer, the Virginia Lake, had got the best of her, and she had spent most of the afternoon and evening with her head in a bucket. Laddie had stroked her hair and called her his “dear, brave girl” and assured her repeatedly that they would reach calmer waters soon.

  The vomiting had stopped but the sickness had not left her. Somehow she knew it never would. The forebodings had begun in earnest on June 20, when she and Laddie had first stepped aboard the steamer Sylvia in New York harbour. With them had been Wallace and a half-Cree, half-Scottish woodsman from Ontario named George Elson.

  Mina had liked Elson at first sight, and not merely because he was a fellow Canadian. A small measure of reassurance was accorded her in the knowledge that Laddie would be guided through the woods by this robust, quiet man. George was taller than either Wallace or Hubbard, broad-shouldered and deep-chested. With his thick moustache he looked a bit like Teddy Roosevelt, as strong and solid as an ox. But there was a gentleness to him as well, and just the hint of Scottish music in his speech.

  Hired by letter out of the Hudson’s Bay post at Missanabie, Ontario, Elson had arrived in New York City a couple of days before the Sylvia was to sail. He had travelled those thousand miles on his own, though he had never before visited a city of any kind—only to find no one to meet him at Grand Central Station. But instead of wandering around hopelessly George had commandeered a cab and in short order gotten himself to Fifth Avenue and Hubbard’s office.

  But even George’s solid presence could not quiet Mina’s dark forebodings. The passage from New York to St. John’s, Newfoundland, where they had arrived on the twenty-sixth after a short layover in Halifax, had in no way been enjoyable for her, despite her husband’s and Wallace’s increasing excitement. Not long out of New York the rain had begun, and the Sylvia had bucked and lurched its way through a steady headwind.

  In St. John’s they were to transfer at once to the steamer Virginia Lake but, to Hubbard’s vexation and Mina’s secret relief, the ship was overdue and not expected for several more days. This delay gave Hubbard time to purchase and pack more provisions, and provided Mina an interlude from the fears that gnawed at her. To pass the time the entire party travelled to the village of Broad Cove, where, they had been promised, the trout fishing would be excellent. There Mina did her best to pretend that at the end of their short holiday she and Laddie would return to Congers and life would go on as usual.

  But she could not slow the hours no matter how tightly she clung to her Laddie each night, and just before noon on July 1 the party was again aboard ship.

  The Virginia Lake, overbooked and crowded even before they boarded, stank of spilled fuel and seal blubber. The ship functioned as a mail boat, a freighter and a passenger ship, and every spring it hauled a cargo of slaughtered seals from the Labrador coast to St. John’s. Its decks had not been adequately cleaned and were still foul and slippery. In comparison with the Sylvia, the Virginia Lake seemed tiny and repugnant.

  With its five small staterooms already claimed, the Hubbards were forced to settle for a cramped cubicle. Wallace acquired a berth only after browbeating a steward into relinquishing his own cabin. George, without complaint or expectations to the contrary, lugged his duffel to steerage.

  One of the worst moments for Mina during the entire passage occurred in the open air of the deck, on a grey afternoon when icebergs could be seen rising and falling in the open sea. Smaller chunks of ice that the men called growlers scraped past the hull with a prolonged squeak and an awful moan. Mina had gone topside with Laddie for one of his frequent inspections of the gear. He was met there by William Brooks Cabot, a former acquaintance who had also travelled north on the Sylvia. Cabot was embarking on his own canoe trip, this one a solitary paddle along the Labrador coastline, in hopes of encountering Naskapi Indians when they came to the trading posts. Cabot, an engineer and gentleman explorer from Boston, had been making annual treks into northern Canada since 1899. He would spend months at a time travelling alone or with a few friends, hiking and canoeing.

  Cabot would later explain his passion for the wilderness in his book In Northern Labrador: “My objective was Indians. They were people in the primitive hunter stage … living substantially in the pre-Columbian age of the continent. … They lived under their own law, in their old faith unchanged.” It had been Cabot who, when he and Hubbard had first met in Quebec during one of Hubbard’s early writing assignments, had planted in Hubbard’s brain the notion of following the Northwest River into unknown Labrador.

  Now, on the deck of the Virginia Lake, Cabot cast a critical eye at Hubbard’s canoe as it lay surrounded by other gear. “An eighteen-foot Old Town, I see. Canvas-covered. Same as mine.”

  “A good choice for both of us,” Hubbard said.

  “Except that I will be travelling alone. Yours will carry three men and all your gear. Through some reportedly tempestuous waters, no less. Personally I would be concerned about swamping. Too much weight for one canoe to carry.”

  “I’ve been assured that it will more than suffice.”

  It wasn’t long before George Elson joined them on deck. He stood off to the side, smoking his pipe but taking in every word of Laddie’s conversation with Cabot. Mina now and then looked to George to see how the exchange was striking him. For her part, she did not appreciate the critical tone of Cabot’s observations.

  “You’ve weighed everything, of course?” Cabot asked.

  “It comes to approximately five hundred pounds.”

  Cabot cocked an eyebrow. “And three men add what, another four hundred fifty?”

  Hubbard laughed good-naturedly and slapped Cabot on the shoulder. “Don’t worry, we’ll all fit in quite nicely. I’ve checked and rechecked a dozen times.”

  Mina could have vouched for that, had anybody asked. She had listened to the litany so many times, had checked the items off on Laddie’s list so frequently that she knew every item in the outfit: One miner’s tent, six and a half feet by seven, six pounds. Five blankets, seventeen pounds. Two six-by-seven-foot tarps, three pack straps, two waterproof bags each containing forty pounds of flour. Twelve smaller waterproof bags containing sugar, chocolate, notebooks and other supplies. Kodaks plus thirty rolls of 120-exposure film packed in tin cans. Four thirty-five-pound sacks of flour, thirty pounds of bacon, twenty pounds of lard, thirty pounds of sugar, fourteen pounds of salt, four pounds of dried apples, ten pounds of rice, twenty pounds of erbswurst, ten pounds each of pea-flour and tea, five of coffee, six of chocolate, ten of hardtack and ten more of tea.

  “Where are your firearms?” Cabot asked.

  “In our cabins. Wallace and I each have a lightweight .45–70 rifle.”

  “For the caribou.”

  “Precisely.”

  “Good choice there. What else?”

&nb
sp; “A pistol each for partridges and such.”

  “That’s it?” Cabot asked.

  “Wholly sufficient, I should think.”

  “No shotgun?”

  “Too heavy.”

  “You won’t bring down many geese or ducks with a rifle.”

  “Merely enough to feed us,” Hubbard said, and he gave a wink to George.

  George waited for Cabot to ask his opinion on the matter, even formulated what he thought was a tactful response: Being as how I don’t have Mr. Hubbard’s skill with a rifle, he would answer, a shotgun wouldn’t be a bad thing to have.

  But of course Cabot would never turn to a half-breed for corroboration. “Even a small-bore shotgun would be preferable to none,” he said.

  “The ammunition alone would tip the scales. My aim is to travel as lightly as possible.”

  “But at the expense of practicality?” Cabot shook his head. “Even if I had to carry reduced-shot charges, I wouldn’t think of going into the bush without a shotgun.”

  “Reduced-shot? You know, I hadn’t considered that.” But Hubbard continued to smile, unperturbed by Cabot’s criticism.

  Mina studied George’s frown and wondered if it was an indication of uncertainty. It was true that Laddie had never solicited George’s expertise in outfitting the party; nor had he sought advice from any of the more experienced personnel at Outing. But why should he? This was Laddie’s expedition from beginning to end. Surely he knew what he was doing.

  “Where is your gill net?” Cabot asked.

  “I plan to pick one up at the North West River Post. The locals will know better than I what size fish we’ll be taking.”

  Cabot offered a nod of approval. But Mina’s relief was short-lived. “You’ve written ahead to order it, of course.”

  “I’ve been too busy with other details. But what kind of post would it be that has no gill nets available?”

  At this Cabot lifted his gaze to the sky. Was that barely audible grunt a suppressed sigh of exasperation? Mina wondered. How dare he criticize, if only by implication, her husband’s choices? Laddie had been planning the trip for months! He knew everything there was to know about it.

  Yet even as Mina’s face flushed with anger over Cabot’s impertinence, her stomach fluttered with anxiety. The sickness of dread was as strong as it had ever been. Had her stomach not been so empty she would have had to rush to the rail. As it was, she felt hollowed out by fear, a brittle shell about to collapse.

  Later that day the coast of Labrador appeared off to their left, a hazy adumbration. Mina stood at the rail with her Laddie, Wallace and George, a driving rain stinging their faces. The sea was a violent churning of opposing colours, of whitecaps smashing over black water. As for the rocky coast of Labrador glimpsed through the rain, it seemed to Mina the embodiment of bleakness, a line of sea-pounded, wind-scoured rocks, lifeless and black.

  Wallace said, “It appears brutally inhospitable, wouldn’t you agree?”

  Laddie laughed, revelling in the challenge, enjoying even the rain. “We’ll have a bully time of it, boys!”

  Mina gripped his arm. Don’t go, she thought.

  That night, her last aboard ship with her husband, she clung to him in their narrow bunk. She lay with her face pressed to his neck so that her every breath inhaled the scent of him. And for the first time, she hinted at her fear.

  “What Cabot said earlier,” she told him. “I have to admit that it worries me.”

  Laddie stroked her hair. “He’s never been to the interior, only up and down the coast.”

  “But isn’t the interior a harsher place than the coast? So perhaps his concerns are not so unwarranted after all.”

  “I’ve been advised to expect a plenitude of wild game,” he assured her. “Don’t be surprised if I gain a few pounds while I’m there.”

  “But what if—?”

  “Shhh,” Laddie told her. “Don’t worry, beloved. I am not a reckless man.”

  She slept little that night. Instead she watched her husband sleep. She listened to his breathing. She laid her hand upon his heart and felt its rhythm in her fingertips.

  She tried with all her might to will away the dawn, but a grey light eventually came seeping into the cabin, a light as sickly as she felt. Some time before six a.m. Laddie walked her onto the deck. Though the sea was calmer there in Battle Harbour, an icy drizzle was falling, making the deck even slicker—a good excuse for holding desperately to Laddie’s arm. In the weak light of morning, while her insides thrashed and heaved, Mina pulled off her gloves and wove her fingers between Laddie’s. She had so much to say but she choked down every word. She was determined not to cry, not to taint his departure with her misery.

  “Will you miss me, sweetheart?” he asked.

  What answer could possibly encompass the extent to which she would miss him? She could only lay her head against his chest and suggest, with the grip of her fingers, how mightily she would feel his absence.

  Then Captain Parsons was there beside them. Mina had thought him a somewhat nervous man throughout the trip, though rightfully so, responsible as he was for manoeuvring the Virginia Lake through a maze of icebergs, fog and frothing seas. He appeared much calmer now that the ship was at anchor, even merry as he raised a hand to point ashore.

  “If you look halfway up that hill there, Missus Hubbard, you can see the Grenfell Mission house. That there is where you’ll be staying till I come back down the coast to fetch you home.”

  Mina nodded, unable to respond, her throat constricted, eyes blurring.

  “Soon’s you’re in the jolly boat, ma’am, we can lower it down and set you ashore.”

  George was the first to bid her goodbye. He stepped up shyly, moved as if to reach for her hand, then thought better of it and drew back, clasped his hands at his waist. “Have a good trip home,” he told her. “I’m glad you was able to come along this far.”

  She gave him a look he understood well. Please take care of him, her eyes begged.

  Next came Dillon Wallace. “Don’t you worry now,” he said. “And try not to miss him too much. George and I will see that he doesn’t get into too much trouble.”

  “Only enough to make it interesting!” Laddie answered. And when Mina looked up at him she saw that his cheeks too were streaked with tears.

  George and Wallace remained behind as Laddie walked her to the jolly boat. “My lovely sweet girl,” he whispered, and held her close a final time. “You will try to enjoy the summer with your sister, won’t you? Will you promise to do that for me?”

  When she looked up she could see nothing but his face, her world gone black all around the edges. Next thing she knew she was seated in the jolly boat, his hands slipping away from hers as they lowered the boat away.

  “I will dream of you every night!” he called down to her. “You’ll think of me too, won’t you?”

  She could barely get her breath now, felt the sea coming up to her and then suddenly there, cold and hard and as black as the Styx, bucking her up and down. She wanted to call to Laddie but she had no breath, no words, only choking sobs as the oarsman splashed his paddles down and, with a few quick strokes, began to carry her away.

  “Goodbye, beloved!” her husband called, but before she could find her voice again, the morning haze gathered around him as he stood leaning over the rail, hand raised in farewell.

  “Laddie!” she cried at last, but he looked little more than a ghost now, a small grey figure enveloped in grey, her husband of thirty months, her life, enshrouded and fading, and gone.

  In frozen January the telegram came. Mr. Hubbard died October 18 in the interior of Labrador.

  Mina was staggered by the blow, though she had been anticipating such a message since the morning of their last embrace. A vague fear had become suspicion when, that fall, no word had come from him, and the party was unaccounted for at the posts they might have reached, should have reached by the last of August. And with each passing day she had become m
ore certain of it, had read it in the distant emptiness of the stars she gazed at each night.

  Yes, she had known it long before the telegram came. But hope, sometimes, is our only defence against knowledge, and since August Mina had been wielding hope like a stick to beat the wolves away.

  Now she stood with the telegram trembling in her hand, the words swimming before her eyes. All this time, she thought. He has been gone all this time. October 18. Three months. He has been gone three months now. All of winter. He has been gone all winter.

  Not until May 27, a Friday, was his body returned to Brooklyn, packed in salt in a lead-lined wooden coffin accompanied by George Elson and Dillon Wallace. Two months earlier the story of the men’s ordeal had appeared in the New York Times. Much of the article was given over to a long letter Wallace had written to his sister in December from the North West River Post, where he and Elson had remained for a while to recuperate from their brush with death. From this article, which included heart-rending passages from Laddie’s journal, Mina learned the haunting details of her husband’s death. She read how, on October 18, Wallace and Elson had left her Laddie alone at the campsite because he was too sick to travel farther; how they had then separated, Wallace marching off to recover some cached flour for himself and Laddie while Elson retreated in search of rescuers. After ten days George had finally succeeded in sending a small party of men back to the campsite. They had come first upon Wallace, wandering around in the snow “in stocking feet and underwear, hatless and coatless.” He had found the flour but never managed to get back to camp with it. The rescue party then located Laddie’s tent, but too late. By all appearances he had died on the very day Wallace and Elson departed from him.

  And now, a full seven months after his death, he was being returned to her on the Sylvia. Mina shuddered with the memory of how vibrant, how alive he had been last June when they boarded that ship hand in hand for his journey north.

  She told herself that she should feel some pity too for George and Dillon because of their terrible ordeals. But how to pity the survivors? All she could think was that Laddie was gone. According to Wallace’s letter to his sister, George had struggled valiantly for ten days, wading through deep snow with nothing but rags wrapped around his feet, fording icy streams, even building a raft with his bare hands and then nearly drowning when it broke apart, all to send help to her husband.