Heart So Hungry

by Randall Silvis

IN THE SECRET DEPTHS OF HIS HEART, Dillon Wallace often despaired of ever finding his way out of this cursed land. The other men in his party made no secret of their disgruntlement, especially Stevens and Richards, who grumbled often and loudly about the rapidly dwindling provisions and the unsatisfying rations. To a man, Wallace’s crew were dog-tired and ragged. The spectre of a starved and frozen Leonidas Hubbard was never far from their thoughts.

  Then came August 30. In the afternoon Stevens and Easton came trudging back to camp after a scouting mission that had taken several hours. They had climbed a summit named Corncob Hill in hopes of spotting the big waters of Lake Michikamau at last, and as the two men marched wearily into camp their colleagues waited, silent but hopeful. Both Stevens and Easton wore tired smiles, but there was no way to interpret those expressions with certainty. A smile could mean success or it could mean wan resignation to yet another failure.

  Wallace, who had been sitting near the tent, putting an edge on his knife, scarcely moved as Easton and Stevens covered the last few yards. What will I do, he wondered, if they didn’t see the lake? If they didn’t see it … I will have no choice. The decision will be made.

  Richards said, “Well, boys? Give us the news.”

  Pete Stevens hunkered down in front of Wallace. “Hill very steep,” he said. And then his smile widened. “I not care. I must know soon as I can, and I run to top. There I shut my eyes awhile, afraid to look. Then I open them and look. Very close I see when I open my eyes much water.”

  For Stanton, Wallace and Richards, those words were like a blast of pure oxygen. Wallace closed his eyes dreamily and felt himself sinking down into sweet relief. When he opened his eyes a moment later he was happy to see Stevens still there, still grinning, still bursting with the news.

  “Big water,” Stevens said. “So big I see no land when I look one way, just water. Very wide too, that water. I know I see Michikamau. My heart beat crazy and I feel very glad. I almost cry.”

  Every man in camp felt like crying. Their relief was too great, their gratitude too huge. They had no words for it, no response but for an ache in the chest, a constriction in the throat. Stanton thought, Easy sailing from here on in, and considered saying it aloud, but the moment was too special—it felt sacred somehow, and even he held his tongue in reverence of their discovery.

  The next morning, Pete Stevens had occasion to cry again. After breakfast, just as the men prepared to clean up and break camp, Wallace asked them to sit by the fire awhile longer. When they had settled into their seats again, he told them, “The time has come for three of you to turn back.”

  The notion of sending part of the crew back was not new to them; it had been proposed by Wallace on an earlier occasion, with the rationale that two men could move faster than five and that it would be preferable to have the mission completed with a partial crew rather than not at all. But Wallace’s pronouncement now, with Lake Michikamau glittering like an Eden so near at hand, struck the men like a blow. Wallace gave them no time to protest.

  “Richards is the natural choice to continue on with me,” he said. “He’s the most experienced man in the rapids, as well as best suited to the scientific work that remains. But he needs to be back in New York by winter for his university duties. And I made a solemn promise to his people that I would have him back to them by autumn.”

  He paused for a moment to swallow. His throat had grown husky. “Pete, too, would be a logical choice. But if he comes with me, how can the others be assured of getting back to civilization? Pete has to go along as their guide.”

  Wallace dragged his heel across the Labrador earth. This morning’s chore was his hardest task of the expedition. It was like deciding which of his arms and legs to cut away and which one to keep.

  “Easton and Stanton have both spoken with me about their desire to continue to Ungava. Both know what a dangerous undertaking it is, another four hundred miles to traverse … the heaviest rapids yet ahead … the near certainty of disaster if any one of us has another accident or becomes unable to travel. And I would like to keep them both. I would like to keep all of you with me. But winter is coming on fast and the food is running out and … well, you know this already. Success now depends on being able to move quickly. And so …”

  He was silent for a few seconds, then looked over at Stanton and offered a soft smile. Stanton knew what was coming, but he shook his head. “I won’t go back without you. I won’t.”

  Wallace could only nod and smile, not an acceptance of Stanton’s refusal, but a recognition of his loyalty. Then Wallace said, “Easton was the first to ask. In New York, in fact. He as much as told me, before we even started, that unless he could see this through to the end, he saw no reason to sign on for it at all. So for that reason, Easton is my choice. He and I will continue on alone.”

  Both Richards and Stevens had tears in their eyes. Only Stevens, whose English was limited, could fit his feelings into words. “Wish you let me go with you. Shoot grub, maybe. I hunt. Don’t care what danger. Don’t care if grub short. Maybe you don’t find portage—what then? Maybe not find river. I find him for you. I take you through. I bring you back safe to your sisters. Then I speak to them and they say I do right.”

  “I’m sorry, Pete, but no, I can’t. I’d like to take you through, but I’ve got to send you back to see the others safely out.”

  “I never think you do me this way. I don’t think you leave me this way.”

  Then, in an instant, his self-pity turned to concern for Wallace and Easton. “If grub short, you come back,” he told them. “Don’t wait too long. If you find Indian, then you all right. He help you. You short grub, don’t find Indian, that bad. Don’t wait till grub all gone. Come back.”

  Wallace promised to exercise all prudence. He would not endanger their lives.

  Stanton asked, “We’re going with you as far as Michikamau at least, aren’t we?”

  “You’ve got to let us go to Michikamau,” said Richards.

  And so it was decided. They spent the rest of that day caching materials and food for the three men to recover on their return from Lake Michikamau. There was another cache eight days back on the Naskapi, Stanton’s beloved pemmican. Richards gave Wallace a new shirt, a heavy one to help keep him warm in the cold weather ahead. He also presented him with a package not to be opened until the sixteenth of September, Richard’s birthday. Wallace and Easton, it was decided, would keep the tent as well; the others would sleep under the tarpaulin.

  And all that day and all through the night Wallace kept remembering another painful separation, when he and George Elson had bid goodbye to Hubbard along the banks of the Susan River. Nobody had ever described that parting more poignantly than Hubbard had in his journal:

  Sunday, October 18, 1903. Our past two days have been trying ones. I have not written my diary because so very weak. Day before yesterday we caught sight of a caribou, but it was on our lee, and, winding us, got away before a shot could be fired.

  Yesterday at an old camp, we found the end we had cut from a flour bag. It had a bit of flour sticking to it. We boiled it with our old caribou bones and it thickened the broth a little. We also found a can of mustard we had thrown away. I sat and held it in my hand a long time, thinking how it came from Congers and our home, and what a happy home it was. …

  This morning I was very, very sleepy. After the boys left—they left me tea, the caribou bones, and another end of flour sack found here, a rawhide caribou moccasin, and some yeast cakes—I drank a cup of strong tea and some bone broth. I also ate some of the really delicious rawhide, boiled with the bones, and it made me stronger—strong to write this. The boys have only tea and one-half pound pea meal. Our parting was most affecting. I did not feel so bad. George said, “The Lord help us, Hubbard. With His help I’ll save you if I can get out.” Then he cried. So did Wallace. Wallace stooped and kissed my cheek with his poor, sunken, bearded lips several times—and George did the same, and I kissed his cheek. Then they we
nt away. God bless and keep them.

  Wallace wished now, of course, that he had remained with Hubbard. How many hundreds of times had he chastised himself for ever leaving his best friend’s side? He knew that had they all stuck together, forged on somehow, carried Hubbard on a litter if necessary, within a week they would have made it out. They had been stronger together, but too weak alone.

  But if he knew this, why was he choosing again to separate? Well, he told himself, the situation is different now. The others are strong enough to make it back, plenty strong enough. Nobody is sick. And Easton and I are strong enough to continue. It is important that we do so, vitally important. I must continue on. Hubbard asked me to, after all. He made me promise to see this through.

  Still, it was a long cold night that Wallace spent with his thoughts and doubts. He could smell winter closing in on them. The chill in his nostrils smelled like death. He was not afraid of death, not any more, but he did not want to take anybody else down with him. He wished he could send them all back to safety, Easton included. He wished he could take them all with him to Ungava.

  Most of all, he wished that he and Hubbard had never said goodbye.

  Next afternoon, Wallace was still thinking of goodbyes. As he pushed through a stand of brush on their march to Michikamau, following Pete Stevens, with the other men several minutes behind, it seemed to him that all the important moments of his life, ever since his wife’s death, had been marked by sad goodbyes. Hubbard had gotten Wallace moving after Jennie’s death, gotten him into the woods and the wilderness, out of his misery. Except that there was no end to misery, was there? Not really. Even a beautiful, clear day like this one, this warm, still Sunday, even this perfect day could not be enjoyed for itself. Because the end of this march would mean the end of his companionship with Stevens and Richards and Stanton. The end of a brotherhood.

  It had happened much the same way with Hubbard. That had been on a September day as well, a day just as beautiful as this one. Hubbard, looking so joyful, nearly transcendent, had come down off a ridge to announce that he and George had seen Lake Michikamau, that it waited for them just over the next ridge, waited there like salvation itself.

  But they had never made it beyond that ridge, and that was why a beautiful September day could make Wallace’s eyes sting, could make his heart ache. The smell of the soil, the rich scent of boot-turned moss—every nuance of this journey reminded him of the other one.

  He came out of the brush with his head lowered, a scratch burning along his forearm. He straightened up, more to ease the ache in his chest than for any other reason, and he lifted his eyes to look ahead. And there he saw the great broad lake at last. Pete was standing at the shoreline, not twenty yards ahead, grinning from ear to ear.

  Oh, Hubbard, Wallace thought, and the ache in his heart swelled, his eyes blurred. Oh, how I wish it were you standing there!

  Wallace crossed slowly to the edge of the lake, as solemn as a penitent. Pete understood, and he was quiet too—no whoops of triumph, no wild laughter. After a few moments he took off his cap and knelt on the rocks. He bent his wide hat brim into the shape of a cup, dipped it in the water, filled the cup and handed it to Wallace.

  “You reach Michikamau at last,” Stevens said. “Drink Michikamau waters before others come.”

  Wallace raised the makeshift cup to his lips and tilted it up. The water was icy cold and dizzying. He felt himself wanting to swoon at the sweet, sorrowful taste of it, wanting to let go of everything. This would be a good place to let go, he thought.

  But there was a long way to travel yet and he could not let go. He merely smiled and passed the hat back to Pete, who drank what was left in it and then stood there, not speaking, until they were joined by the others, who carried just one canoe this time, the one that would take Wallace and Easton away from them.

  An hour or so later they pitched their camp—their forty-sixth camp, and their last one together—on a rocky point a few hundred yards farther north. The remainder of the day was conducted in hushed tones, all movements made lugubrious by the sad knowledge of what tomorrow would bring. They divided up the food, then Wallace and Easton wrote letters for Richards to carry out and post at the first opportunity. Each man wondered if he would ever see the men of the other group again. They thought of all the things that could go wrong for either party, all the things that already had. And each man felt inexpressibly alone.

  After supper they built up the fire to a roaring blaze, laying on every piece of wood they could find, saving only enough for a small breakfast fire. The sky remained clear and vast and untroubled, the stars brilliant. The men talked for a while and made plans for where they would meet again when all had returned safely home. Wallace could not help but reflect on his and Hubbard’s and Elson’s similar conversations, of his and Hubbard’s plans to buy a farm together, to show George all the sights of New York City, to live out long lives of fast friendship and unflinching loyalty.

  Beauty and misery, Wallace thought. Beauty and sorrow.

  Afterward he read a passage from the Bible. Then Pete sang a few songs for them. “Home, Sweet Home” was first, then “I’m Going for Glory, My Heart Is Sore.” When he sang “Pray for Me While I Am Gone,” his soft voice quavered and broke, and the others squinted and cleared their throats as if the smoke were getting to them.

  When he finished singing, Pete told Wallace and Easton, “I goin’ to pray for you fellas every day when I say my prayers. Can’t pray much without my book but I do my best. Pray best I can for you every day.”

  That night they all prayed—prayed themselves to sleep. Next morning, after breakfast, Wallace took out his Bible again to read aloud. This time he read John 14, the same chapter he had read to Hubbard on the morning of October 18, 1903, before heading out into the storm. He did wonder about the wisdom of reading that same chapter again, wondered if he was maybe calling up another disaster, invoking a repeat of tragedy. But no other chapter seemed appropriate.

  “‘Peace I leave with you,’” he read, “‘my peace I give unto you; not as the world giveth, give I unto you. Let not your heart be troubled, neither let it be afraid.’”

  Then the men shook hands, held them long and hard. They turned away finally, as men do, when tears filled their eyes. Wallace and Easton climbed into the canoe and took up their paddles. The other men shouldered their packs. And the single group became two, one gliding north, the other trudging south.

  Wallace and Easton crossed the divide approximately a week later. They had little time to savour the accomplishment, however, for winter was upon them. The temperature at their first George River camp fell to twenty-two degrees that night and climbed only to thirty-five the next day. That day they advanced only a mile and a quarter, moving “in the teeth of a gale,” Wallace wrote, “the snow so thick we could not see the shore.”

  On the sixteenth of September they celebrated Richards’ birthday by opening the package he had given them. In it they found a portion of Richards’ own rations, a piece of fat pork and a quart of flour.

  All the men had agreed before parting that on Richards’ birthday, at precisely seven P.M., each group should enjoy the best dinner they could provide for themselves, and in this way they might feel that the party was united again, if only for an hour or so. Wallace and Easton’s feast began with a cup of beef bouillon made from capsules. Then came fried ptarmigan and duck giblets, then a roast of black duck, spinach prepared from the last of their dried vegetables, fried bread and black coffee. Later, beneath charcoal skies and frosty winds, they smoked their pipes and speculated on where the other party might be camped that night.

  But the hope that all might feel reunited by the birthday celebration was in vain. “I must confess,” Wallace later wrote “that with each day that took us farther away from them an increased loneliness impressed itself upon us. Solemn and vast was the great silence of the trackless wilderness as more and more we came to realize our utter isolation from all the rest of the w
orld and all mankind.”

  Mina Hubbard’s expedition, last days of August 1905

  AFTER THE NEAR DISASTER on August 22, Job relaxed and no longer worried about his dream. Calamity had been thwarted and, unless he had another dream, he did not expect it to visit them again.

  Mina almost wished that the men would grow sombre again, and apply all their energies to the task of paddling, for no matter how swiftly the canoes raced down the rapids she wanted more miles put behind them. The valley through which the George River rushed seemed to be closing in on her, the mountains like fortress walls.

  George must have felt some of the same claustrophobia. After three days of shooting rapids and portaging around roaring cataracts, when the river began to widen and the suffocating mountains receded, he gazed back toward the high stone walls in the distance and observed, “It looks as if we just got out of prison.”

  The river remained wild until the afternoon of August 26, when finally the canoes glided onto smooth water. After a few hours of paddling, however, and much to Mina’s dismay, George nodded toward a point of land not far ahead and announced that they would pull ashore there and set up camp.

  “But the post is only seven or eight miles ahead!” Mina told him.

  “It might be farther,” George said. “We don’t really know.”

  “I took a reading with the sextant at noon.”

  “Even so … it’s going to be too dark soon. We’ve got smooth water now but there’s no telling how long it will last.”

  “Didn’t you say not long ago that if the Pelican is at Ungava it would try to get underway on Saturday night? Well, today is Saturday, isn’t it? Or don’t you trust the calendar any more than you trust my readings?”

  He looked into the western sky. “There won’t be enough light for us to see what’s just under the water,” he explained. “And I doubt we’re through the last of the rapids yet. And anyway …”

  Then he stopped himself. Mina, though, knew what he was thinking: And anyway, the post is probably farther than you think.