He studied their faces. Finally Richards asked, “Do you think there’s a quitter here?”
The question made Wallace regret that he had even broached the subject of splitting up the outfit. “All right,” he conceded. “We’ll stick together awhile longer.”
But every man went to bed that night knowing his reprieve could not last forever. Wallace had raised the spectre of failure, had given voice to it, and now it would haunt them every step of the way.
Mina Hubbard’s expedition, August 8, 1905
YOUNG GILBERT BLAKE must have sensed good fortune in the air that morning, for in the clear dawn calm he awoke Mina with an exuberant rendition of “Glory, glory, hallelujah! as we go marching along!” When she emerged from her tent a short time later she found the other men in an expectant mood too. They had already packed away most of the gear and were ready to join her in a light breakfast.
A half-hour later Mina’s tent was taken down and packed with the rest of the outfit, and soon the canoes were launched once again. As they now neared the head of Lake Michikamats, all talk turned to speculation as to how easy or difficult it would be to locate the George River. Like Lake Michikamau, the George was an important milestone, the attainment of which would inspire and embolden. For it was the George they would ride down the northern slope of the Height of Land, no longer fighting the current but moving with it all the way to Ungava Bay.
Paramount in Mina’s mind was the knowledge that if they did not reach Ungava by the last week in August they would miss the Pelican’s departure from the post and would be stranded in that northern realm through a long, harsh winter, month after month of being locked in a prison of ice and snow. All that time Mina would be financially responsible for her four guides until she could get them home again—conceivably a full year from when she had first hired them. And five extra people would put quite a strain on the post’s stores; what would they do when supplies ran out?
But merely getting to Ungava was not her only objective. She also hoped, just as her husband had hoped, to meet the Barren Ground Indians, otherwise known as the Naskapi, whose inland camps, as far as anyone knew, had never been seen by a white person. Old wigwam poles and other signs of Montagnais habitation had been spotted several times so far by Mina’s party, but as yet no physical contact had been made. Mina wanted desperately to add to mankind’s meagre knowledge of how the natives survived in such an unpredictable and frequently inhospitable land.
Additionally, she wished to witness the migration of the barren ground caribou herds as they moved eastward toward the highlands between the George River and the Atlantic Ocean. Although massive herds were often observed west of Hudson Bay, there was no record of the animals’ movements through the interior being witnessed by a white person. And a great deal of luck would be needed to make Mina the first such witness, for the caribou’s movements were known to be erratic and, as with all life at those latitudes, influenced by the vagaries of weather.
And always, always, Mina wondered about “the others.” One night she wrote in her diary, “Always there is much talk of the other party and their probable doings, esp. the probability of their getting lost. All are familiar with the story of W.’s prowess in wilderness travel. Geo. and Gil both know Stanton. Gil says: ‘If Stanton falls off his seat in the canoe, he’ll get lost.’… Then his boy’s merry laughter in which everybody joins.”
Despite their derision of Wallace’s outfit, Mina could not help worrying. Was Wallace ahead of her or behind? Would it really matter whether she saw the Indians and the caribou if she arrived at Ungava Bay to find Wallace and his crew waiting there already, with Wallace smiling his smug, imperious smile as he sucked on his pipe?
She needed speed of movement if she hoped to be first to Ungava, but she also needed the opportunity to conduct the research that would validate her expedition in the eyes of the scientific world. Her goal, after all, was to fulfill her husband’s dream of charting the river valley and learning as much as possible about the way the Indians lived. Could she possibly succeed at both? Could she conduct the research and reach Ungava first? Day after day, hour after hour, she wrestled with the question of which objective should predominate.
What bothered her most were the delays forced upon them by the weather. That Tuesday morning, not long after they had started out, a fierce wind blew up from the southwest, raising waves that threatened to swamp the canoes.
“We’re too heavy for this wind!” George shouted over the howl. He pointed his paddle at a little cove scooped out along the sandy shore. “Over there!” he called to the others, and all four men paddled hard for safe harbour.
Mina did not accept the detour with equanimity. Now out of the howling wind, she looked back across the whitecapped lake. “Can’t we just keep moving, George? Even if we move slowly, it’s better than not moving at all!”
George’s ambition was simpler than hers. He only wanted to get Mina Hubbard to Ungava Bay in one piece and in time to catch the Pelican. But it was an ambition that made him, too, resentful of delay. “The problem is,” he explained, “we’re riding too low in the water. But how about this? If we leave some of the load here, I can take you on forward some.” He scanned for a likely spot, and soon found it far ahead on the western shore.
“There, that sandy point. That point will make a nice breakwater. Should be a lot calmer up there. We’ll take both canoes forward to it, then Job and Joe can come back here with one canoe and pick up the rest of the stuff.”
“And in the meantime,” Mina asked, “I will have to sit and wait up there?”
“We’ll find some exploring to keep us busy,” he promised.
What they found at the sandy point was a beautiful little bay. There, while Job and Joe returned down the lake, Gilbert waited with the remaining canoe as George and Mina climbed the high banks to a plateau covered in luxuriant reindeer moss. Not far away the ground sloped upward to moss-covered hills standing against a backdrop of spruce forest. But most thrilling of all to Mina was the sand mound overlooking the bay. The mound was blue-green with its blanket of moss, and standing out sharply atop the mound were four wooden crosses.
All of the graves—one large grave with three smaller ones below it—were enclosed by a simple fence of wooden pickets. Each cross bore an inscription in Montagnais, which George read to Mina. All of the inscriptions, but for one marking a smaller grave, were darkened by weathering.
Out on the sandy point stood the skeleton of a wigwam. Inside this framework the ground had been covered with spruce boughs that were still green, and all around the wigwam fresh shavings lay scattered. Mina scooped up a handful of shavings, inhaled their still sweet fragrance and let them tumble from one hand to the other. “This is where he made the cross,” she said. “He sat here outside his wigwam and made a cross for the newest grave.”
George nodded, his lips pursed solemnly.
Mina said, “He keeps coming back here to bury his family. His babies.”
George stared out at the water. There’s reminders everywhere, he thought. Even in a beautiful place like this. Death everywhere we go.
But Mina surprised him. “It’s a good place,” she said. Her eyes were sparkling and wet but she was smiling. The realization came to George then that she was no longer the shy little woman he had first met down in New York, that quiet, deferential woman who with her eyes had followed her husband’s every move, as if to lose sight of him would have been to lose sight of herself.
Mina turned and saw George looking at her. Her smile broadened. “Let’s keep exploring,” she said.
Everywhere they walked they found slender paths cutting across the reindeer moss. “A lot of caribou have been through here,” George told her. “And not so long ago.”
They found several old Indian camps as well, each marked by a fire ring made of rounded rocks. And in the shelter of a spruce thicket they were delighted to find a deep bed of fresh green boughs where an Indian had recently passed the night.
Just outside the thicket he had set up three poles pointing north.
“He’s probably following the caribou,” George explained. “The poles are meant to show which way he went.”
“He certainly had a comfortable little bed in there,” Mina said.
George said nothing. It seemed he was unable to stop looking at her, admiring her, thinking thoughts he usually confined to his journal. Not long ago he had written, “She is more than good to me. My sister could not be any kinder to me than she is … what a good friend I have.”
He forced himself to turn away, and the first thing he saw was a patch of tiny blue flowers growing out of the moss. He went straight for them without thinking, bent down and plucked three of the flowers and, holding them by their fragile stems, returned to hand them to Mina. “I know how much you like flowers,” he said.
She took them from his roughened hand and held them close to her nose. “They’re just like little bluebonnets,” she said. “And they smell wonderful! So fragrant. Did you smell them?”
He nodded that he had, thought he must have, though in truth it was something other than the flowers’ delicate perfume that made him light-headed.
Still holding the flowers to her nose she turned and looked out across the shining waters of the lake, saw the blue rounded hills in the distance and the blue and silver sky above them. “I almost wish we never had to leave here,” she told him. “Don’t you, George?”
Yes, he surely did, though he answered with only a nod.
Mina’s party made their lunch that day on the sandy beach below the Indian graves. Afterward, with the canoes fully loaded again, they pushed northward. The wind was not as treacherous now, though it continued to gust and to drive a fine, pricking rain into their faces, so they held close to the relative shelter of the western shore. All along the way Mina did as she had always done while the men paddled; she made observations and notes in her journal, wrote about the Indian graves while they were still fresh in her mind, described the abandoned camps they had seen, “one a large oblong, sixteen feet in length, with two fireplaces in it … and a doorway at either end.”
They had progressed little more than a mile when Job suddenly sat up very straight in the bow of the canoe. Gilbert, in the stern, was the first to notice the change of posture, and he reacted instantly by half-standing so as to follow Job’s gaze. Both men stopped paddling, seemingly frozen in position. The second canoe drew closer, and its passengers too now looked to the east. And there, on the crest of a ridge not far off the water’s edge, silhouetted against the ashen sky, was a patch of dark colour—a group of four caribou grazing.
Without a word the canoes were turned and steered across the lake to land at the base of a rock wall directly beneath the ridge. Job, Joe and Gilbert each took up a rifle. Using only hand gestures, they picked out a path that, winding up through the rocks, would bring them onto the ridge just below the caribou. George was anxious to join them but he held his excitement in check as he and Mina followed twenty yards behind the others.
The three men were lying flat on their bellies when George and Mina caught up with them on the summit. The four caribou they had first seen had now merged with a herd of fifteen, all of them nuzzling at the sweet grass in a swampy area a hundred and fifty yards to the north. Mina’s heart thudded in her chest at the sight of them. Gilbert slowly drew the rifle up to his shoulder, raised himself onto his elbows and squinted along the barrel.
“Oh, please, please don’t shoot them,” she whispered. “They’re much too beautiful to shoot. Please don’t.”
Gilbert turned to smile at her, then faced the herd again. His finger slid inside the trigger housing. One, two, three, four times his finger twitched, and each time the rifle barrel swung an inch or so to the side as he took dead aim on another animal. But he only pantomimed shooting the caribou, and with each twitch of his finger he made a soft whistling noise as of a bullet flying. All four caribou mock-shot, he turned to Mina and flashed an even broader grin.
George whispered to her, “We only kill when we need the meat. So you don’t need to worry. Those animals out there might save somebody’s life someday. It would be a sin to kill them just for fun.”
Every man in the group wanted to raise his weapon, ached to raise his weapon and fire—she could tell this by the brightness of their eyes, the eager way they watched the caribou feeding. But they held those desires in check, and Mina loved the men all the better for it.
They watched the caribou for a quarter-hour or so, until some small noise or faint scent caused a quiver of alarm to ripple through the herd. Then off the animals trotted into the nearby brush.
“How about if the rest of you go back to the canoes,” George suggested, “while Job and me go investigate? Maybe there’s a bigger herd up ahead somewhere.”
It was one of the few times George had opted to go off without Mina, and she felt the separation immediately and viscerally. But she knew how loyal a companion he had been all this time, even though she had never been able to match his natural pace and had forced him to walk at hers, so she said nothing to deter him. A bit sullenly despite her efforts not to show her emotions, she watched as George and Job headed off.
Gilbert became her escort on the trip back to the canoes, and all along the way he entertained her with his speculations about the size and age and sex of each of the animals he had felled with his imaginary bullets.
Mina and the others did not have to wait long with the canoes before George and Job came trotting down the rocky path, grinning from ear to ear. “What did you see?” Mina called out. But neither man would say a word until they were ten yards from the others. Then George told them in a half-whisper, “Get in the canoes!”
Mina scampered into her seat. “What did you see?”
George shoved the canoe into deeper water and hopped aboard.
“Tell me!” she begged.
But all he would say was “You better get your camera out. And let’s try not to make any more noise.”
The men dipped their paddles with a delicacy that barely made a hiss. The canoes glided forward another half-mile. “Here,” George finally said, and pointed to his right, and both canoes were turned ashore.
If Mina’s pulse had raced earlier, it was hammering now at double speed. She could feel it in her temples and even in her fingertips as she clutched the Kodak close to her chest. Then, disembarked, the party again made its way up a rocky slope, wincing with each noisy tumble of a loose stone. This time George took the lead and placed Mina directly behind him.
Not quite at the top, George paused, stood on his toes and peeked over the ridge. Grinning more broadly than ever, he turned and held out a hand to Mina. “Ladies first,” he said.
She took his hand and moved past him and climbed onto the ridgetop. What she saw there took her breath away. The next hillside from top to bottom was literally covered with caribou, a solid mass of brown and grey white-breasted animals feeding on luxuriant moss, bucks and does and fawns intermingled.
She did not hear the men coming up beside her, wasn’t aware, as she and somebody else started inching forward, who was at her side, didn’t want to look away from the magnificent herd for even an instant. She walked forward, the ground sloping away toward the hill where the caribou grazed. She snapped a couple of pictures but wanted desperately to be closer, closer yet, and she kept walking forward, one cautious step at a time, almost dizzy with excitement.
She and George—for it was he, of course, who accompanied her—had closed to just over two hundred yards when one of the stags near the bottom of the herd quivered, tossed its head, then looked directly at Mina. Neck stiffened, splendid antlers held high, the animal turned from broadside to face her head-on. Within seconds the entire herd was alert and turned. Several more stags came forward to form a wall of imposing antlers.
Mina and George stopped in their tracks. She could hear nothing but the thunder of her heart. Slowly she raised the camera as high as her chest,
held it steady. Took another step forward.
And with that movement the entire herd, thousands of animals, came stepping toward her, their massive antlers lowered. The horns were in velvet but looked nonetheless deadly. She shot a glance at George and he nodded to the rear, and it was all the encouragement she needed to retreat.
Job and Joe and Gilbert kept grinning even as Mina hurried past them. She was about to start back down the rocky slope to the canoes when she realized that she was alone and turned to look back. Now she saw why the men had not followed. The herd was not in pursuit of them after all. It had come only a few yards down the hillside, a bluff charge. The caribou were happily grazing again.
Sheepishly Mina returned to stand beside George. Then, as if to shame her further, Job and Joe and Gilbert all strode boldly toward the herd.
A large buck snorted and pawed the ground. A second later the caribou’s front line surged forward again, and now it was Mina’s turn to smile when the men wheeled around and raced back past her. She laughed all the way down to the canoes.
Later, pushing northward again, as the canoes came around a point Mina’s party spotted an island in the middle of the lake, three-quarters of a mile ahead. Stretched between the island and both shores of the mainland, moving from west to east, was a solid, seething line of swimming caribou, a bridge of animals two or three abreast. Several hundred stood bunched up on the island as if waiting their turn to wade into the water again and swim to the eastern shore, where, one by one, the caribou came streaming up onto the shoreline, dripping water and flicking their tails, only to trot briskly across the rocks and over the hilltop.
Mina’s crew approached this spectacle slowly, watching from a distance until the entire herd had crossed onto dry land. Then the men paddled hard to land the canoes just above the point where the caribou had crossed. Mina and the others disembarked and followed on foot as the herd, now broken into companies of ten to twenty animals each, sauntered up and over the next hill, down its slope and up and over the next one. There they seemed to find a hillside to their liking and they spread out with a few sentinel stags at the bottom and started grazing again.
Heart So Hungry Page 18
