Heart So Hungry

by Randall Silvis

  A final man had been added to Wallace’s crew at the North West River Post, but George kept this information to himself as long as he could. George needed four strong men, including himself, to man his outfit’s two canoes, and he had hoped to find Duncan McLean at the post and hire him to join them. Duncan was one of the men George had dispatched two years earlier to rescue Wallace and Hubbard, and one of the men who had hauled Hubbard’s body out of the wilderness. But Wallace had gotten to Duncan first, before Duncan even realized that his old friend was in the area. So instead George persuaded Monsieur Duclos to grant a leave of absence to one of his employees, a boy named Gilbert Blake. He was only nineteen but a hard worker and a merry-hearted lad. More important to Mina, Gilbert had also been a member of the party that recovered her husband’s body. She could not resist posing the same questions to Gilbert that she had already asked a dozen times of George.

  “When you first found him, Gilbert, when you first looked inside the tent … how did he appear to you?”

  “Just like he was sleepin’,” Gilbert told her. He considered informing her that he preferred to be called Bert, which was how the men addressed him. But he let the opportunity pass. And as time wore on he came to enjoy her more formal use of his name. It made him feel that he was no longer a boy.

  “He hadn’t been disturbed in any way?”

  “No, missus, not a bit.”

  “No signs of animals having been about?”

  “There was some caribou tracks close around the tent, but nothing else. No signs of anything trying to get at the tent, if that’s what you mean.”

  “So he appeared peaceful to you?”

  “Like he had just gone to sleep and hadn’t waked up. His hand was on this little book he had been writing in.”

  “His journal.”

  “That’s the one. His hand was on it like he’d just finished writing something. But other than that his blankets was pulled up around him and he looked for all the world like he was just having himself a good long sleep.”

  Gilbert did not tell Mrs. Hubbard that her husband’s skin had been as blue as six-inch ice, and he did not tell her about the crust of ice on her husband’s moustache and eyebrows. He did not tell her that he was afraid of death and had refused to touch Mr. Hubbard or even get inside the tent with him. Instead, he smiled gently and told her, “When I go, missus, I hope I look as peaceful as your Mr. Hubbard did.”

  It was what she needed to hear, not once but again and again. In the weeks ahead Gilbert would repeat his answers many times, but never grudgingly. The repetition of soothing words helped him to sleep a lot better too.

  On Friday, June 27, at three in the afternoon, George knocked on the door of Mina’s bedroom in Monsieur Duclos’s house. “We’re loaded and ready,” he told her through the wood.

  “I’ll be right down!”

  “You want me to take your pack?”

  “I’ll bring it, George, thank you. Just give me a minute.”

  She sat at the foot of the feather bed with her ankles and knees pressed together, hands clasped close to her stomach. Again she closed her eyes and summoned Laddie’s smiling face. She did not pray for success in the days ahead, because what good was success without him there to share it? She only prayed that she would not be weak or cowardly and that she would not be the cause of any harm to the men.

  She came downstairs then and walked outside and toward the water, where not only her crew was gathered and waiting but also Monsieur Duclos’s entire household. Mr. Cotter and his entire household from the rival Hudson’s Bay post were there as well. Plus, it seemed, every other resident of the village.

  When she approached the dock, George was busy checking, for the fiftieth time, the straps binding their packs to the canoes. He looked up when a murmur went through the crowd, and he could hardly believe his eyes. Mrs. Hubbard was wearing not the relentless black garb, her unvarying dress for the past two years, but a long brown skirt that swept back and forth at her ankles, a black sweater and a narrow-brimmed hat of soft brown felt. She wore leather moccasins that reached nearly to her knees, and on one hip, strapped to a broad leather belt, a moleskin pouch and a hunting knife in its sheath. On the other hip she wore a revolver in a holster. She was carrying two cameras, a folding Kodak and a larger one for panoramic shots. Tucked close to her body, in a waterproof bag in the moleskin pouch, was Laddie’s Labrador journal.

  It was all George could do to keep from whistling in approval. He and the other men of his crew exchanged nods and smiles.

  Young Gilbert Blake spoke up just as Mina reached the waters edge. “It’s a fine day for starting out, Mrs. Hubbard.”

  She gazed across the water, which was calm for a change, then slowly took in the sky, a bleached-out blue with a slow, soft scroll of clouds. In the distance the blue mountains crowned with snow seemed almost to glow in the afternoon light.

  “I do believe this is the sunniest day we’ve had so far,” she said. “It’s an absolutely perfect day.”

  George told her, “Monsieur Duclos offered to take us as far as the Naskapi in his yacht, but there’s not enough wind for the sails.”

  She thanked the agent for his offer and his hospitality. “But I think it’s better this way, don’t you? We shall begin and end under our own power.”

  Duclos and several others crowded around Mina to wish her well. They had every confidence, they said, that she would succeed in her endeavour. Even Mr. Cotter told her, “You can do it, Mrs. Hubbard. And without any trouble too.”

  She turned away as quickly as was possible without appearing rude. The good wishes made her chest ache and her eyes sting. “Are you ready for me, Mr. Elson?” she asked.

  “Whenever you are,” he said.

  She came forward, one hand to her hat, the other reaching for George’s arm as she stepped carefully over the stones. While she settled herself in the middle of one canoe, between George in the stern and Job sitting forward, Gilbert climbed into the bow seat of the other. Joe pushed that canoe off, then hopped into the stern seat. A cheer went up from the shore as the paddles dipped.

  Mina did not look back nor say another word until certain that her voice was out of range of the shore. “I noticed nobody watching us from the other side of the river, George. And Mr. Cotter had come over to our side.”

  “They left last night,” George told her.

  Her breath caught in her chest. “What time?”

  “After supper, Mr. Cotter said.”

  She nodded. She sat stiffly, her back as straight as a board. George wondered if she would sit like that for the next two months.

  Minutes later she said, “I’m glad to see the water so calm.”

  Job said, “It’s fixin’ to roughen up some. And a little wind going to turn that lake into trouble.”

  George winced when he heard this, though not because it was new information to him. In Cree he said, “From now on let’s keep that kind of thing to ourselves.”

  Job dipped his paddle, pulled and dipped. “Sorry. Wasn’t thinkin’.”

  “That’s a beautiful language,” Mina told them. “What did you say?”

  George answered, “I’ll teach you some words if you like.”

  “If you teach me too many, you won’t be able to keep your secrets.”

  “I’m not a man that has any secrets.”

  She turned at the waist, cocked an eyebrow when she looked at him. “How far ahead of us are they?”

  “According to Mr. Cotter they was only going the three miles to Tom Blake’s place. They’d of spent the night there, then would’ve got off sometime this morning.”

  She faced forward again. “Is there anything else you haven’t told me?”

  “They signed up Duncan McLean to guide them as far as Big Lake. He’s one of the two fellas rescued Mr. Wallace that first time. They got to Duncan before I had a chance.”

  She said nothing, only sat very straight.

  The other canoe glided alongside t
heirs. Joe said, “Which leaves me to wonder who’ll be left to rescue Wallace this time around.”

  Gilbert flashed Mina a grin. “Won’t be that Stanton fella, I can tell you that. Man’s so skinny, I’m afraid somebody’s going to mistake him for a fishing pole and dunk his head in the water.”

  “What about that Easton?” Joe said. “Nearly drowned once already so far, and that was in St. John’s harbour!”

  The men chuckled and shook their heads. Gilbert asked, “How’s a fella go about fallin’ off a iceberg anyway?”

  “You start,” George answered, “by being foolish enough to climb one in the first place.”

  Now even Mina could not help but smile.

  George told her, “We’ll catch them, Mrs. Hubbard. Don’t you worry about that.”

  “All I can say,” said Gilbert, “is we better do it quick. Else who they gonna have to show them the way?”

  The men laughed and nodded and dug hard with their oars. Mina said, in a voice that feigned exasperation, “I am surrounded by joke-makers.”

  “True enough,” Joe answered. “But none that ever fell off a iceberg.”

  The sun was just coming up the next morning when George called out, “All aboard!” and woke Mina from a restless sleep. She rolled over in her tent, wrapped like a mummy in her blankets. The grey light of early morning lay across the balloon-silk canopy, providing just enough illumination that she could see the hands on her watch. Three A.M.! She had crawled into her tent less than two hours earlier. There had been a light supper after midnight, then a short nap, and now here was George calling her to breakfast already. There was going to be a lot to get used to on this trip.

  Not that she minded getting up and moving again. Maybe the long hours of daylight in these latitudes, even if it was generally a weak daylight, were the cause of her restlessness. Or maybe it was her eagerness to keep moving, to pass beyond not only Wallace but her own doubts and fears.

  After supper the previous night, when the men had stretched out on their blankets before a roaring fire, not even bothering to erect their own tent, Mina had retired to her portable little house to write in her diary. But all she had been able to think about was Laddie and how sweet the night would be had he been with her in the tent. They had shared so many nights like that, and in every season. She remembered the cool nights in upstate New York, nights so quiet she could almost hear the stars twinkling. The string of sultry nights on their southern trip, when crickets and buzzing insects and bullfrogs sang so loudly that their cacophony set her teeth on edge—until Laddie taught her to hear them as a symphony, every croak and buzz a love call, a thousand Romeos declaiming to their radiant Juliets.

  No matter the weather, Mina had never felt uncomfortable when lying next to her husband. Often they had slept holding hands. Now all she could do was try to reach for him with her nightly prayers and with the words of her journal. It helped a little, but it was never as comforting as his flesh against hers.

  She pulled on her moccasins and joined the men outside at the fire. After a quick breakfast of tea, fried bread and bacon they climbed into the canoes again. The rhythm of the water had not left her in the night, the steady beat of the paddles dipping and pulling, the gentle back-and-forth rock of the canoes. The wind was up a little this morning, riffling the surface, so no mist lay across the water, and the men paddled hard right from the start, eager to get off the lake and onto the river, where a wind as light as this one would have little effect on them.

  They spoke mostly in Cree as they paddled, though nobody was especially talkative. Already the land was beginning to rise toward the plateau far away in the middle of the peninsula, toward that summit near Lake Michikamau known as the Height of Land. There, on the northern slope, the waters would run northward rather than southward, and from that point on they would ride with the current instead of working against it, a fast slide all the way to Ungava. But the Height of Land was still a long way off, and Ungava even farther, more than six hundred miles away through a maze of uncharted swamps and streams and rivers and lakes, past rapids and waterfalls and nobody knew what else.

  It was some time after seven when Mina felt a subtle change in their movement, almost like a shift in barometric pressure. But George’s paddle was the cause of it; the paddle had gone still and dragged through the water like a rudder. Mina turned to look at him. He was sitting motionless, the paddle held against the side of the canoe as he stared off to the west.

  Mina followed his gaze. Then she too spotted the narrow channel where it entered the lake. It was not easy to pick out between the sandhills and, farther back, the dark green firs, and she would have missed it for sure had not George’s gaze directed her to it. “Is that the Naskapi?” she asked.

  All George said was, “The Susan.”

  Her breath caught in her throat. She looked again. The Susan’s water was not as dark as the lake’s but deep green and glinting with sunlight. Just looking at it made Mina’s throat thicken and her eyes sting. She hated the Susan River, hated the very sight of it. Still she could not look away, not even as George dipped his paddle again. She could very nearly see another canoe pausing there at the mouth of the Susan, an eighteen-foot Old Town. George sat in the stern of that canoe, just as he did in hers. Wallace held the middle seat. And there was Laddie in the bow, sitting as tall as he could, hands resting on the paddle as it lay across the gunwales. Between the thumb and forefinger of each hand he held the only known map of the area.

  “That’s got to be it,” Laddie said.

  Wallace asked, “Does it correspond to Low’s map?”

  “The Naskapi’s the only river he shows.” Then, a moment later, “George?”

  And George said, “It’s what everybody told us back at the post. The Naskapi flows into the end of the lake.”

  Laddie grinned and folded the map. “It’s the Naskapi for sure, boys. Onward and upward we go. Excelsior!”

  Mina wished with all her heart that she could call them back. But her voice would not carry that far, two years into the past. Laddie had written about the Susan in his journal, mistakenly referring to it as the Naskapi. A rock-strewn bottom too shallow for paddling. Laddie and his crew would lose valuable time fighting against it, they would use up too many provisions, get hopelessly lost.

  Mina sat with her head down as the men paddled, staring at her hands, holding everything inside. The men said nothing to disturb her until, an hour or so later, George broke the silence. Softly he said, “Here we are.”

  She looked up to see the Naskapi burbling into Grand Lake, wider and deeper than the Susan, unmistakable once seen. She did not know how to feel about being there. This should have been her husband’s river, but he had never even seen it. Its emerald water spilled into the brown of Grand Lake and spread out in a wide, rippling fan. The bay was wide too and surrounded by high sandhills, and there were several wooded islands clustered around the mouth of the river, crowding close as if to drink from the Naskapi’s green water.

  It was a lovely spot, and Mina ached with the unfair beauty of it all.

  The next day. Thirteen miles above Grand Lake, Mina and her crew pulled ashore for an early lunch. Job, Joe and Gilbert busied themselves with gathering wood and building a fire, unpacking the frying pan and kettle, the tea and bacon. George took up his rifle and said, “I’ll see if there’s any game about.”

  “Shall I come along?” Mina asked.

  “It’s not easy walking on these stones. And I don’t think you want to be crawling through the willow brush with me.”

  “I wouldn’t mind at all, really. I’ve been sitting and doing nothing for too long now.”

  George thought about it for a moment, searching his mind for a tactful response. “One person can move quieter than two, missus. You’ll be more comfortable here. You can even catch yourself a little nap in the shade there.”

  But she was in no mood for napping. So after George walked off downstream, Mina headed upstream along the rock
y shore.

  Gilbert was the first to notice. “Missus Hubbard? You want me to come along with you?”

  She continued to pick her way across the stones. “I do not, thank you.”

  Joe and Job both gave Gilbert a look. He hesitated, then broke into a trot to catch her. Not loud enough for the others to hear, he told her, “We’re not supposed to let you go off on your own, missus.”

  “Oh? And is that what you discuss all the time in your language I can’t understand?”

  Gilbert blushed and looked at the ground.

  “Very well, then,” she told him. She started walking again, and Gilbert soon fell into step behind her. She asked, “Will this be the first time you’ve accompanied a lady to the necessary room?”

  Gilbert stopped walking. “I’ll just wait here,” he told her.

  “Suit yourself.” She dared not look back, lest he see the smile she could not suppress.

  The plain truth of it was that the lack of activity was beginning to grate on her. The men allowed her to do nothing. Oh, she could sit in the canoe and write in her journal all she wanted. She could make sketches of the hills and streams they passed. She could take readings with her sextant and compass. But she was not allowed to handle a paddle. And in camp, if she so much as reached for a stick of wood to lay it on the fire, one of the men would jump up and take it from her. “Let me do that, missus. No use both of us getting our hands dirty.”

  And those long hours in the canoe when the men spoke only in their private language—that was exasperating too. At first she had thought the language melodious, as soothing as the gentle slap of water against the hull. But now she felt isolated by their conversations. She was being treated like a helpless child and she did not like it. She did not like it at all.

  Laddie had included her in everything. Each and every one of his plans had been discussed with her. He had sought her advice, had given her his unpublished manuscripts to read. No man had ever treated her with the respect Laddie had. No man had ever loved her as Laddie had.