Heart So Hungry

by Randall Silvis

  At first he looked wounded by her laughter, as if she were mocking him, but with her hand on his arm the hurt soon passed and he laughed too, if only a little. “I just thought I was never going to see you again,” he admitted. And now his pace slowed a bit, and they fell even farther behind Job. “I’m never going to forget about that and how bad it felt. I kept thinking about how frightened you would feel when you realized you were lost. It’s an awful thing to know you’re lost, and I just never wanted you to feel that. If I hadn’t ever been lost myself I wouldn’t know how bad it is.”

  She rubbed her fingers over his forearm. “Thank you for worrying about me, George. But I was never really in any trouble.”

  “But how could we know that? Don’t you see? And what would we do if you had got lost or fell in those rapids? Why, I could never go back again. None of us could. How could any of us ever go back without you?”

  “But why not?” she said.

  “Don’t you know what everybody would think if we came back without you? A white woman alone out here with four Indian men? Don’t you know what they would do to us if we was foolish enough to come back without you?”

  The full force of their fear and their dilemma struck her like a blow. Of course they were protective of her. Of course they wanted to shield her from all harm. They cared about her, yes, and that was a large part of their concern. But she had never stopped to think of the other aspect of their fear. If any accident befell her on this trip, if she drowned in the rapids or was attacked by a bear or got lost and could not be found, the men would be blamed for it. White society would not ask if Mina had behaved foolishly or if she had ignored their advice; judgment would be swift and harsh. She was a white woman, inexperienced in the wilderness, and they had been hired as her guides. They would be held responsible.

  Mina understood then that the men had risked their lives in more ways than one by agreeing to accompany her on this expedition. And this afternoon she had abused their courage and loyalty by playing a trick on them, a silly game meant to teach them a silly lesson. She felt small and childish and stupid with regret.

  “Plus I just kept thinking,” George said—his voice was husky now and he would not look at her, he kept his eyes on the ground—“I just kept thinking I might never see you again. And that was the worst feeling of them all.”

  She let her hand slip down his arm and brush across his fingers. Then, side by side and without speaking, they walked back toward camp.

  Joe and Gilbert had just finished setting up her tent when she arrived. They too had been searching for her earlier and now they did not know whether to smile. It was as if they had all agreed to scold her with their expressions but no one was terribly interested in doing so now. She did not say anything at first but went inside her tent and changed into dry clothing. When she came out again, all four men were seated around the fire underneath the tarpaulin and there was meat frying in the skillet and a pot of rice nearby.

  Mina walked over to the fire quickly in an attempt to stay dry. The rain continued to fall, though in a light drizzle now. It made a soft pattering sound on the tarpaulin and dripped steadily over one edge, which had been pitched lowest for good drainage. The men had scattered pine boughs under the tarp and the air smelled of woodsmoke and frying meat and of pine resin and rain.

  She took off her hat and shook the rain from it and laid it aside. “Oh, isn’t it nice and warm and fragrant in here,” she said. She sat on the ground next to Gilbert and looked at each of the men in turn. Only George would meet her gaze, his own soft and forgiving. The other men seemed to be waiting to be told how to react to her.

  She said, “I want you all to know how sorry I am for what I did today. I don’t mean for going off alone, which I enjoyed very much, but for making you worry about me.”

  She waited and said nothing more. Gilbert was the first to look in her direction, just a quick glance and a small quick smile. Then Job did the same. Joe poked at the fire with a stick. A few moments later he lifted his eyes enough to look in George’s direction, and when he saw that George was smiling, Joe too gave Mina a smile and a nod.

  “I think I should get my brandy bottle out now, don’t you?” she said. “I want us all to have a good bracer together, all right? Then we can all forgive each other and have a nice supper.”

  The men understood that she was making a concession to them, an act of contrition. The brandy bottle had been passed around on only one other occasion, the first day of the trip, a toast to their success. Joe said, “You’re not going to get an argument out of any of us when it comes to the brandy, missus.”

  She put her wet hat back on and hurried through the rain again and into her tent. A few moments later she returned and handed the bottle to George, then went back to her seat at the other end of the line.

  George uncapped the bottle and took a long swallow. Then he had another short one before passing the bottle to Job. Job drank from it and passed the bottle to Joe. The men were all being very solemn now, she thought, all but Gilbert, who sat with his head bowed. When the bottle was passed to him he took only a short gulp before lowering it. But Joe gave him a nudge with an elbow and Gilbert raised the bottle again and had another drink. He could not even look at Mina when he held the bottle toward her, but sat there with his head averted and his shoulders shaking.

  Mina took the bottle and held it out toward the men as if to toast them. Then she raised the bottle to her lips and tilted it up. Only then did she realize that the day’s games were not yet over. The men had drained the brandy bottle completely. They had left not a drop for her.

  Dillon Wallace’s expedition, last week of July 1905

  A RESPITE FROM DRUDGERY finally came to Wallace’s party on the twenty-sixth. The previous Sunday, Duncan McLean, anxious for home, had bid the party goodbye and set off alone. The men missed him sorely. “As he disappeared down the trail,” Wallace would write, “a strange sense of loneliness came upon us, for it seemed to us that his going broke the last link that connected us with the outside world.”

  They spent the next three days moving through a series of lakes, alternately paddling and portaging. Then, on the twenty-sixth, they happened upon a flock of five geese floating along on the water. Pete downed three of the geese with his shotgun. Wallace later described their special dinner that night: “This was Easton’s twenty-second birthday and it occurred to me that it would be a pleasant variation to give a birthday dinner in his honor and to have a sort of feast to relieve the monotony of our daily life, and give the men something to think about and revive their spirits.” He instructed that two of the geese be prepared for the feast. They would also have plenty of hot bread and a pudding concocted from the few remaining prunes. Their supply of coffee was running so low that it had now been restricted to Sundays only, but for this occasion he eased the restriction.

  “How we enjoyed it!” he wrote.

  “No hotel ever served such a banquet,” one of the boys remarked as we filled our pipes and lighted them with brands from the fire. Then with that blissful feeling that nothing but a good dinner can give, we lay at length on the deep white moss, peacefully puffing smoke at the stars as they blinked sleepily one by one out of the blue of the great arch above us until the whole firmament was glittering with a mass of sparkling heaven gems … the vast silence of the wilderness possessed the world and, wrapped in his own thoughts, no man spoke to break the spell.

  But the spell would be broken. On the morning of Saturday, July 29, Stanton crawled out of his bedroll at five-thirty, utterly depleted after a torturous night. Never had the flies been so insistent, so insatiable. His skin was black with their corpses and blood, stinging as if from several loads of birdshot. His only comfort, and it was cold comfort indeed, was that the insects had not singled him out in their carnage. Every face in camp was swollen and blood-speckled, as red as raw sausage.

  There was no denying that Wallace’s crew were a miserable bunch, and not solely because of the ins
ects. Morale had been fading day by day ever since the birthday banquet. How could they possibly hope to be on the George River and gliding toward Ungava by the last of August when now, with but three days left in July, they hadn’t even found Seal Lake yet? By Stanton’s calculations, which he kept to himself or grumbled out sotto voce when only Pete Stevens could hear, they spent more time searching for the damn Indian trail than actually walking on it. And those searches invariably carried them through hostile, if not downright malevolent, terrain. In the morning a mosquito-infested bog might threaten to suck them under; in the afternoon a lifeless sand desert would blast them with radiated heat; and in the evening they would struggle through a field of ankle-twisting rocks, or across a barren ridge scoured by an icy wind, or over a hundred acres of willow brush so thick they had to crawl on their hands and knees. And because every man was responsible for two loads during these portages, every mile of advance meant having to walk three miles, two of them while hauling a back-breaking load every inch of the way.

  By now Pete Stevens’ khaki trousers were ripped in a dozen places. Even so, they were in better shape than the Mackinaw trousers worn by Richards and Easton, which had been shredded to rags. Wallace’s moleskin trousers had fared the best of any, sustaining but one small tear so far. But even with fresh clothing the men would have been footsore and heart-heavy. What they craved most of all was not comfort but progress, and that commodity was in very short supply.

  As was fresh meat. They had been catching as much fish as they could eat, but even with a bellyful of trout the men felt unsatisfied. Days earlier they had spotted three caribou swimming across a lake, and every man had scampered to get into position. But the animals made the shore and bounded into the brush before a single shot could be fired. The next day the party came upon another caribou swimming, but their three desperate shots fell far short of it.

  So it was hardly surprising that Stanton should doubt his eyesight when, a few minutes after climbing out of bed that Saturday morning—still picking the sticky corpses off his neck while he sat by the fire and watched Pete Stevens boiling fish for their breakfast—he saw a large buck walking toward him down the shore.

  Stanton blinked several times, shook his head, and waited for the taunting apparition to disappear. Instead it grew more substantial. A big, thick-necked stag, too intent on the moss to notice the men.

  Stanton hissed to get Stevens’ attention. Then he nodded toward Wallace’s rifle, propped against a rock. In a whisper Stanton said, “Hand me the rifle, Pete. But move real slow. And look up there.”

  Stevens looked first, then he made a grab for the rifle. He would have liked to take the shot himself, had been hungering for a kill since the trip began. But Stanton had spotted the buck first so it was rightly his shot. Stevens passed the rifle over to Stanton, who slid a bullet into place. The buck, as if asking to be brought down, strode onto a narrow neck of sand protruding into the water and obligingly turned broadside to the men.

  “Should I take him now?” Stanton whispered.

  Stevens gauged the distance. “Hundred-forty, fifty yards. Maybe wait. He maybe come closer.”

  Stanton went down on one knee and took aim. “He’ll be hard to miss from here.”

  “Maybe wait. See what he does.”

  What the buck did was lift his head suddenly, sniff the air and, having caught the scent of smoke, wheel around in an instant and bound away. Stanton fired off several shots. Their only effect was to bring the remaining men running out of the tent. That morning’s boiled fish was seasoned with a fair measure of resentment.

  After breakfast, Wallace, Easton and Stevens climbed to a snow-covered summit, hoping to see Seal Lake. Instead they saw another fifty or so lakes of varying sizes, none of them large enough to be Seal Lake. Yet another long maze of water and land and bog to be navigated. The sight was as disconcerting as it was dismaying. For the most part they were travelling by hearsay, what they had been told by trappers and Indians. The information had sounded reliable enough in the comfort of the North West River Post, but out in the wild, with the vast and trackless panorama laid before them, it seemed anything but precise.

  They marched and waded and trudged all day, their only reward another disappointing supper of fishcakes, bread and boiled rice. Near the end of their meal Wallace made a sombre announcement. “I think we’d be wise to cut back on our bread, fellas. We’ve got a long way to go yet and there’s a real danger we’ll run out of flour before the end.”

  Easton said, “It’s the bread that keeps us going.”

  Stanton agreed. “Rice and fish don’t stick with a man long enough.”

  “I don’t see as how we have a choice,” Wallace told them. “We cut down now or we run out before the end. And in the end we might need it more.”

  “Cut down how far?” Richards asked.

  “Down to a quarter-loaf per meal for each man.”

  Easton groaned. Even with a full loaf at each meal, he was always hungry.

  Pete Stevens said, “Indian need more bread than white man.”

  “We all need more bread,” said Richards.

  “We need to get used to having less.”

  “Indian need more bread. Always have.”

  “I know you think you do, Pete. But that’s only because you’re used to it. I’ve studied this long and hard and I have come to the conclusion that a bit of rationing is absolutely necessary. So from now on it will be one-quarter loaf per meal for each of us. Instead of baking four loafs for each meal, Pete, you’ll make just one. And when we have cornmeal or pea meal or lentils, we must do without bread altogether.”

  Every man but Richards groaned aloud.

  “Once we get to Seal Lake we can get some flour from Duncan’s tilt,” Wallace said. “Until then we have to be careful.”

  Stanton muttered, “If we ever get to Seal Lake.”

  Wallace chose not to acknowledge that remark.

  Richards then said, “Maybe it’s time to start thinking about giving up on the Indian trail and taking to the water again. We could be to Seal Lake already if we had travelled by the route Duncan and the trappers use.”

  “I have been thinking about that,” Wallace said. “The river would no doubt be quicker and easier.”

  “Here here!”

  “But it was Hubbard’s intention to locate the old trail if he could, as we have done, and to follow it whenever possible. To abandon that intention now, after all we’ve been through, just to make things easier on ourselves … well, it would feel like a surrender.”

  Even as he said this, Wallace was wondering how many of the men were thinking, Better to surrender than to end up like Hubbard. Try as he might, he could not help thinking it himself. Was this trip doomed to play out as Hubbard’s had?

  Damn it all, Wallace thought. In The Lure of the Labrador Wild he had plainly laid out Hubbard’s original intentions—to follow the old Indian trail to Lake Michikamau, then locate the headwaters of the George River and pass down that river to the Naskapi Indian camps, there to witness the annual eastward migration of the caribou. Moreover, Wallace had stated to more than one newspaper reporter his own intention of fulfilling Hubbard’s dream, his belief that he was compelled to do so by his friend’s dying exhortation. How could he renege on that commitment now?

  A cold, drenching rain fell that night, and the men lay silent in their bedrolls, already hungry for more bread. More bread, more meat, more of all the things they did not have. They had each signed on for this trip hoping for a fine adventure, a chance to prove their mettle and maybe share in a bit of the glory. None, but for Wallace, perhaps, had expected to have to endure such hardship and deprivation. And even Wallace had been confident that he could somehow circumvent the trials that had plagued Hubbard’s expedition. But this morning he had been forced for their own good to subject his crew to another hardship. The portages were an ordeal, yes, but until today the men had been able to propel themselves forward with the prospect of a hea
rty meal at the end of each march. Now that incentive had been whisked away. No meat and less bread.

  Stanton lay awake a long time, remembering what Duncan McLean had once said: “If there aren’t any flies in hell, it can’t be as bad as this.” And if there is bread and meat in hell, Stanton thought, I hope we find our way there soon.

  Mina Hubbard’s expedition, final days of July 1905

  THE END OF THE MONTH brought melancholy times to Mina. A listlessness descended out of nowhere and infected her party, a kind of Sunday laziness stretched through the entire weekend. A heavy rain on Saturday morning kept the party in camp until noon. Then came several hours of portaging, a late supper, and a long, still night through which Mina lay awake thinking of her husband. It bothered her more than a little that she was finding so much pleasure on this trip. She had expected to suffer but, except for the insect bites, her suffering thus far had been insignificant in comparison to Laddie’s. It hardly seemed fair or right to Mina that she should be treated so generously to the wonders of this experience, free from sickness and hunger and debilitating fatigue, when her Laddie, who had loved the wilderness more than she did, had been denied this.

  Rain fell again on Sunday morning, and again the sky cleared by noon. To Mina’s eye they were now on the most picturesque part of the river, a series of waterfalls and rapids that took her breath away, each more spectacular than the previous one. To each she gave a name. First came Maid Marion Falls, a fifty-foot plummet into a narrow gorge carved through the gneiss and schist of Laurentian rock. Then Gertrude Falls, ten feet higher than Maid Marion, a gushing, roaring cataract. And finally Isabella Falls, a mile-long series of falls and rapids and chutes. Here, she would write, “the water poured over ledges, flowed in a foaming, roaring torrent round little rocky islands, or rushed madly down a chute.”

  Even the rocks were beautiful, varying in colour from a rich umber to a subtle purple. The rock walls rising up on each side of the river had been sheared off nearly perpendicular, and moss grew in most of the cracks, adding lines of grey, green and vermilion to the palette. The surrounding countryside had not been burned over but was blanketed everywhere by luxuriant reindeer moss, above which grew tall spruces and balsam trees.