Mina had been enjoying this promenade for quite a while before she realized that she had no pictures of the animals at close range. Those on the far hill, spread out as they were, seemed much less dangerous than the ones that had chased her earlier, so she decided to venture nearer. The ground at the foot of the caribou’s hill was boggy beneath the moss, however, and Mina soon found herself sinking in up to her ankles. The squishing, sucking sound as she tried to move forward alerted the herd to her presence; they trotted farther up the hillside. For the next twenty minutes or so the herd moved ahead at a leisurely pace and only occasionally looked back to check on the progress of the lone woman and the four men who followed behind her.
By the time Mina’s party crested the next summit, the caribou were several hundred yards away. She knew then that she would be unable to get any closer. But instead of feeling disappointment Mina experienced a deep, quiet contentment. At one point, when she realized how silent her party had been all this time, how respectful and reverent, she looked from George to Joe to Job to Gilbert. “The enjoyment of them,” she later wrote, “showed itself in the kindling eyes and faces luminous with pleasure. All his long wilderness experience had never afforded Job anything to compare with that which this day had brought him.” She and her crew had been witness to what relatively few individuals ever saw, the spectacle of migration, of thousands of caribou moving in one breathtaking mass.
From the hill where Mina’s party now stood they could see Lake Michikamats from end to end. To the north, where the hills on either side of the lake grew gradually smaller and smaller, falling away toward the Atlantic Ocean and Ungava Bay, was a series of lakes dotted by islands.
George came to stand close behind Mina. He laid his arm across her shoulder and pointed, his finger tracing a line in the air, drawing a squiggly path from lake to lake. “That’s our route,” he told her. “That’s where we’ll find your river.”
Her river! She could not stop blushing, could not quiet the tremble of excitement. Was she really going to do it? Would they find the George River as easily as that? Was she really going to succeed? She dared not contemplate the possibility.
She pivoted slowly, taking in the panorama. “Oh, look!” she said. A brilliant rainbow was arcing out of the sky and seemed to come to rest on a boulder at the foot of the hill. It wasn’t the first rainbow they had seen in Labrador, but it was surely the most vivid and the nearest.
“Who wants the pot of gold?” she asked.
The men turned to her with puzzled looks.
“Don’t you know about the gold at the end of the rainbow?”
No, they had never heard of such a thing.
“There’s supposed to be a pot of gold buried at the foot of every rainbow, right where it touches the ground.”
George narrowed his eyes a bit and considered her with a wry smile. But Gilbert had heard all he needed to hear. In a flash he was racing wildly down the hill, arms flying.
But when Gilbert reached the boulder at the bottom of the hill, the rainbow had moved. It had slid away from him, out into the middle of a lake. He turned and looked back up the hill and held out his arms in a gesture of confusion. The men howled with laughter and slapped their thighs. Mina did not even mind the drizzle of rain when it started anew, would not mind anything at all if only this moment would never end, this joy.
Dillon Wallace’s expedition, mid-August 1905
WITH NO MAN YET WILLING to give up, Wallace decided to let the entire party continue on together at least as far as Lake Michikamau. The problem was, he had no idea how far ahead the great lake lay. So on Sunday, the thirteenth, he provided for an eventual retreat by having some of their scant provisions cached. Buried in a hole they dug in the ground, then covered with stones to protect them from scavengers, were thirty pounds of pemmican in tin cans, forty-five pounds of flour, some tea and ammunition. The men were happy to have their loads lightened but none rejoiced at leaving behind so much precious food. On one hand, they might never see it again. On the other hand, retreat for at least some of the men seemed inevitable, and without these emergency rations those men would in all likelihood starve.
Stanton was particularly aggrieved to see the pemmican go into the ground. Only that morning had they sampled the first tin of it—a combination of ground meat, tallow and currants hermetically sealed in six-pound cans by Armor and Company of Chicago, and sold at the staggering cost of sixty cents per pound—and he had found the concoction much tastier and satisfying than expected. Finally, a flavourful and belly-filling breakfast again. But now, as he laid stones atop the cache, he felt an emotion very near to despair. There was no guarantee, when some of the men eventually turned back, that they would return by this same route or be able to locate the cache again, so he was not convinced of the wisdom of leaving the food behind. Days later he was still secretly mourning the loss of the pemmican. In his journal, his only confidante, he wrote, “I almost felt as though I had buried my best friend … as indeed it was in this country, for without it we would die.”
Despite the burial of a hundred pounds of supplies, the load did not feel lighter for long. After lunch the next day, during an eleven-mile portage to the shore of another lake, Stanton staggered under his burden and fell. His heavy pack twisted sideways as he tumbled, which caused him to wrench a muscle in his back. For most of that day he straggled along a mile or more behind the others. Finally Easton, with the stern end of a canoe resting on his shoulder, noticed that Stanton was nowhere to be seen. Nor did Stanton respond to the men’s calls. Easton backtracked, found him sprawled and breathless on the trail, and relieved him of half his load. Stanton was in too much agony to manage more than a few words of gratitude.
Even with the weight of his pack cut in half, Stanton was unable to keep up with the others. Only after long hours of trudging on alone, wondering at times if he would ever see home or even his crewmates again, the whomp of an axe came echoing toward him, and he followed that inspiriting sound as if it were a lifeline until he eventually came to where Easton was chopping wood for a fire.
Stanton arrived in camp just in time to hear Easton cry out in pain. The axe blade, after a particularly weary strike, had caromed off the log to strike his leg on the shin bone. Stanton, who was nearest, immediately shrugged off his load and hobbled to the scene of the accident. The other men came running. Easton lay grimacing on the ground, rolling back and forth as he clutched at the wound. Blood seeped through his trousers and between his fingers. Richards knelt beside him and gingerly pushed up the pantleg to expose the wound. There was so much blood that the men feared the worst. How could they possibly carry Easton out of this wilderness? Could they manage a litter, along with the canoes and all their provisions, and with one fewer man to share the load?
Water was brought from the lake and the blood was washed away. Stanton—who with shaking hands now found himself in charge of the ministrations, if only by virtue of being the first at the scene—breathed a sigh of relief. “It’s not as bad as it looks,” he said. “I don’t think the bone is injured. Bring me the boracic acid and some plaster and we’ll get this cut cleaned and dressed.”
Unfortunately the adhesive plaster had gotten wet and was of no use. So after cleaning the wound, Stanton had Wallace hold the edges of split skin together while electrical tape was wrapped around Easton’s leg.
Over the next few days the party’s progress was even slower than usual, owing more to the weather than to Easton’s wound. In two days they covered only eleven miles. A cold, driving rain with gusting winds made it impossible for one man to portage a canoe; the wind would lift it right out of his hands. With two men needed for each canoe, they had to break the outfit into three loads each, which meant that eleven miles of progress required fifty-five miles of actual walking, thirty-three of those miles with loads on their backs.
But if the weather was harsh, the terrain was brutal. They waded through marshes, trudged over rocky hills, crawled through tangled, drippi
ng brush. Each day consisted of one portage after another toward yet another lake that, when seen from a distance, glimmered enticingly, only to prove too shallow to float a canoe in.
It had been awhile too since the men had come across any Indian signs. They had no idea where the trail to Michikamau lay. All they knew for certain was that they were not on it.
Most vexing of all was the sudden disappearance of game. No caribou tracks were to be seen. And not a single fish could be coaxed onto their hooks or into their net.
The men talked incessantly about the foods they missed from home, recalling their favourite bakeries and restaurants, vainly struggling to conjure up spiritual sustenance from remembered smells and textures and tastes.
On August 16, at breakfast, they scraped the last of the caribou stew off their plates. The meat had turned green but they dared not waste it. On the nineteenth they awoke to find the ground stiff with frost, the water glazed with ice.
On the twentieth they finally hit upon a lake deep enough to carry the canoes. The land all around this lake had been burned over in recent years and the reindeer moss was still brittle and black; it sent up little puffs of ash with every footstep. The few remaining trees were dead—black, broken spears. There were no Indian signs and no sign of game and no sign of the trail to Michikamau. The land was dead and the streams feeding into the lake were dead. They christened this long body of water Lake Desolation.
On August 21 they opened their last bag of flour.
The next day they ate the last of their rice.
They were not yet halfway to their destination, unsure of their location, with nothing but a compass to guide them. Wallace considered all this as he raised a spoonful of rice toward his lips. But then he paused, his eyes on the spoon, the swollen kernels of rice a pale yellow streaked with brown. For the past twenty-two months he had not been able to look at rice without remembering a Sunday in October 1903, one week before Hubbard died.
What a beautiful, clear day that had been, but cold. So cold that Wallace and Hubbard had spent the afternoon wrapped in blankets in front of the fire, talking of food, of course, of chocolate and pies and puddings and French toast, of roast turkeys and baked hams, of fresh apples by the bucketful. George had gone off that day to one of their previous camps in search of any scraps of food they might have left behind, and when he returned at dusk with nothing but a few old caribou bones and two hooves he had dug up he apologized for letting the men down. But Hubbard had tried to be cheerful as always, had said they could make a bully soup from the bones. So George pounded up the bones and dropped them in a kettle of boiling water with the hooves. The hooves were filled with maggots but nobody suggested they be thrown away. The maggots floated in the water like great, swollen grains of rice, and the bones gave up their gristle and marrow and the hooves released a lovely, greasy aroma that made the men’s mouths water.
“It smells and looks just like rice soup,” Hubbard had said. “My mother used to boil off a pile of ham hocks and put rice in with it. I could never get enough of it.”
“If we had some milk and flour and a little sugar we could make a rice pudding,” George joked.
They drank three cups each of the maggoty broth and then they chewed on the bones until every bit of gristle and hide had been gnawed away. Then George gathered up what was left of the bones and put them back in the pot for the next day’s breakfast. He had salvaged a set of antlers too, and these he broke up and added to the kettle. “They’re still in velvet and nice and greasy on the inside,” he told the others. “I saved the wenastica too”—the digested contents of the caribou’s stomach—“but it smells pretty rotten. What do you fellas think?”
“Put it in tomorrow’s soup,” Hubbard told him, and the next day they ate from the kettle three times, chewed on the same bones again and savoured the strong, rancid taste of the broth. And they joked again about the fat, meaty “rice” they had enjoyed the day before, and all of them wished they could dig up another supply of that rice. Maybe when they got back to New York they would try to get it on the menu at the finer restaurants. “Labrador rice soup with caribou hooves,” Hubbard said.
“Followed by a moss salad with wenastica dressing,” said Wallace.
“Then boiled caribou head,” George said, “with sliced snout.”
“Followed by Labrador rice pudding, of course.”
“Labrador rice could become as popular as caviar.”
“We’ll grow it on rotten meat in our backyards and pack it in tins and sell it for ten dollars an ounce.”
“We’ll be as rich as kings, and all thanks to our Labrador rice.”
But on Thursday, October 15, Hubbard could go no farther. “I got shaky and busted,” he wrote that night in his journal. Three days later he chewed on his last meal, a caribou moccasin. He was alone by then and planned to boil his belt and a pair of cowhide mittens for his next meal, but before he could do this he went to sleep and did not wake up. And now, two years later, Wallace could not even swallow a spoonful of rice, real rice and his last precious bit of it, without having his throat constrict and fight against it, swollen with memory, with guilt and grief and loss.
Mina Hubbard’s expedition, mid-to late August 1905
MINA’S PARTY CONTINUED PADDLING from one lake to the next, progressing gradually higher up the interior plateau at whose summit they hoped to find the headwaters of the Naskapi River. She fretted constantly and wondered aloud if this climbing would ever come to an end. Then, on the afternoon of August 10, they reached the northern end of their second lake for the day, and here they were stopped. They could locate no way out of the lake, could find nothing but a tiny stream feeding into it from the north. They scoured the lakeshore for some indication of which way to proceed.
Just when their frustration and confusion were at a peak, when it seemed sure that they had searched every inch of shoreline, they found it: the Indian trail. “What a glad and reassuring discovery it was,” Mina wrote, “for it meant that we were on the Indian highway from Lake Michikamau to George River.”
Shortly after four P.M. they started a portage that, to their delight and surprise, lasted only a hundred yards or so. At the end of the hike they came upon yet another lake, but this one had no stream feeding into it, nothing but a wide bog to the north. The men checked it again and again. Only when they were certain did George make the announcement.
“This is it,” he said. “The headwaters of the Naskapi.”
“Are you sure?” Mina asked.
Unable to hold his wide grin in check, George said, “All the water so far, everything south of this bog, which way does it drain?”
“Why, southward, of course.”
They walked to the northern end of the bog. “Now look,” he said.
But she had already looked, had already seen, and Mina’s grin was as irrepressible as his. Because here the water from the bog flowed northward—toward Ungava Bay! After three hundred miles of paddling and poling and portaging they had arrived finally at the summit of the interior plateau, the Height of Land, Labrador’s Great Divide.
Though she was standing at no great altitude, Mina could not escape the feeling that she stood at the top of the world. The land was flat and sparsely wooded and it fell away from her on all sides, most dramatically to the north and south. Unfortunately, because of her profligate use of the camera during the first week of the expedition, when everything she saw seemed exciting and new, she now had only a few films left. But this moment was an auspicious one—perhaps the most auspicious of the entire trip thus far—and she felt well justified in taking two more photographs. For the first she turned to the south, the way we came, she thought, back toward Lake Melville and the cold Atlantic. For the second picture she pivoted 180 degrees. The way we go, she told herself, and shot a photo of the lake just north of them, the gateway to their next three hundred miles.
In camp that night a strange contentment came over her. Not long ago there had been little room
in her heart but for grief and resentment; now a whole other emotion was making room for itself. As always, she attempted to sort out her feelings by writing in her journal.
“How little I had dreamed when setting out on my journey,” she wrote, “that it would prove beautiful and of such compelling interest as I had found it. I had not thought of interest—except that of getting the work done—nor of beauty. How could Labrador be beautiful?” It was, after all, a cruel and inhospitable land. Its temperatures seared your skin during the summer day and froze your flesh on summer nights. Labrador teased you with a bounty of fish and game one week, then tormented you with emptiness the next. Its waters tried to drown you, its land tried to suck you under. At every turn Labrador sent clouds of insects to sting and bite and drive you nearly mad. And what of winter? It could descend on them at any moment, could freeze them in their tracks. They might yet find themselves snowbound, might wake up tomorrow morning to water choked with ice, the trail buried beneath a foot of snow.
Worst of all, Labrador had stolen Mina’s soulmate, had starved her Laddie into submission, had knocked him flat and frozen him while he slept. How could such a place be beautiful?
Even so,
how beautiful it had been, with a strange, wild beauty, the remembrance of which buries itself silently in the deep part of one’s being. In the beginning there had been no response to it in my heart, but gradually in its silent way it had won, and now was like the strength-giving presence of an understanding friend. The long miles which separated me from the world did not make me feel far away—just far enough to be nice—and many times I found myself wishing I need never have to go back again. But the work could not all be done here.
The work, the redemption of her husband’s reputation, required that she continue on, no matter how strong the urge to remain there at the top of the world. Another long journey lay ahead, but this time they would move with the current rather than against it. The change of flow, however, did not guarantee an easing of their labour. The water would be swifter now, and in many places dangerously fast. Instead of pushing their canoes away from deadly rapids and roaring cataracts, the current would now do its best to draw them to their doom.
Heart So Hungry Page 19
