Heart So Hungry

by Randall Silvis

  He had no confidence in her ability to navigate. None of the men had believed her earlier when she had predicted the appearance of the Naskapi camp. But she had been right then and she was right now; she could feel it in her bones. Still, she had to admit that George was correct about the danger of submerged boulders and more rapids. Better to arrive at Ungava a day late but dry and alive than to float there face down with their lungs full of water—that was George’s implication.

  For Mina’s part, she would have been willing to risk drowning. Consequently the night was a restless one for her. She fretted alone in her tent, read from Laddie’s journal, wrote in her diary, reread her field notes, looked at flowers she had plucked and pressed inside the pages of her diary—the delicate blue cornflowers, the tiny violets, the sweet pink bell of the vining Linnea borealis, still fragrant, still evocative. She slept only fitfully, waking several times through the night to peek outside, anxious for the first rosy slivers of dawn to appear on the horizon.

  When morning finally came it was all she could do not to shout at the men to move faster. Why did the simplest of tasks take such an inordinately long time? She gulped down only half a cup of tea for breakfast and, rather than give the men an opportunity to pour themselves a second cup, emptied what remained in the kettle into her water bottle.

  “We can drink this as our celebratory toast when we reach Ungava,” she said.

  When she carried the water bottle to her tent to be packed with the other things, Joe whispered to the men, “It will taste good in camp at tonight’s supper too.” They laughed softly, grinning and nodding. Not one of them expected to reach the post that day.

  A mile below their camp they encountered another set of rapids, too dangerous to run. After a short portage they emerged onto a kind of plain where the river spread out to over two miles wide. Again the canoes were put in the water. With the wind at their backs they were making good time again, the current strong and the men paddling in a steady rhythm.

  The next rapid came upon them suddenly, with no rumble of warning. Both canoes were nearly on the brink of it, rounding a bend, before it was spotted, and only with desperate paddling did the men manage to pull ashore in time. Afterward they stood on shore for nearly half an hour, catching their breath and letting their racing hearts calm. Then George surprised Mina. “I think Job and I might try to run this rapid,” he said.

  Job said nothing, but his eyes lit up and a small smile creased his lips.

  Joe and Gilbert decided to portage. As they were separating the loads they would carry, Mina, who had been studying the turn of the river ahead, approached George. “When you get out beyond those points of rock,” she told him, “you should be able to see the island opposite the post. Wave back to me to let me know you saw it.”

  George smiled. “All right. I’ll watch for it.”

  “I’m telling you, it’s there.”

  “I’ll watch for it,” he said.

  But she knew what that smile meant, and it infuriated her. She turned and marched back to the other canoe and sat down on a pack.

  George and Job worked their canoe into position to take the rapid. But within seconds the current had them in its grip, pulling them away from their intended path. They paddled mightily, digging at the water, but they could not turn the canoe. Finally both men gave up and dropped down low in the craft, mere ballast.

  Immediately the canoe swung around and shot stern-first down the rapids. Mina was on her feet now, straining up on her toes, breathless. Then she began to run along the shore, trying her best not to lose sight of them. The canoe was dancing, she thought, like a leaf on wild water. Job and George remained huddled low, riding it out.

  For a few minutes they disappeared from Mina’s view. Up ahead the river swung from west to north, and though she could hear what sounded like George’s voice echoing over the water, she could not make out any words. Had they capsized? Was George calling for help? She ran faster, stumbling and lurching over the loose rocks. She could hear Joe and Gilbert coming up fast behind her.

  A huge boulder blocked her path. She climbed over it, scraping an elbow. At the top, she shot a look downriver. There, sixty or so yards ahead, the canoe floated on calm water. And George was standing in the bow, facing her, waving his cap back and forth over his head, shouting at the top of his voice. It took her a while to understand what he was saying.

  “I see the island!” he called. “I see the island!”

  They could not paddle fast enough to suit her. “Do hurry a little,” she told George. And for a minute or so he plied his oar more vigorously, but with the post itself not yet in sight his efforts and those of the other men struck Mina as altogether too leisurely. And how merrily the men chatted, as if out for a Sunday glide across a lake in a park. Thirty minutes earlier she had feared for George’s and Job’s lives. Now she wanted to knock their heads together.

  At the same time, the thought of soon returning to her previous life made her weak with fear. Two nights earlier she had written in her diary: “Now that the work is so nearly done … I dread going back. … What am I going to do? I don’t know.”

  But with the post so near, every minute seemed ten. By her calculations another hour passed before a white speck materialized on a distant point of land. Now five sets of eyes squinted hard, keeping the speck in sight lest it disappear again. And soon the speck grew into a dot of white, then gradually filled out until it took the shape of a small building. A few minutes later Mina’s crew could make out several black specks moving around in front of the building—people walking! And there was a boat out in the open water—not the Pelican, unfortunately, just a rowboat. Manned, it soon appeared, by an Eskimo and his son, who were busy checking their nets.

  Mina’s canoe was the first to pull alongside the fisherman’s boat. The father leaned over to shake George’s hand. “Are we near the post?” George asked. “The Hudson’s Bay post?”

  The Eskimo nodded and smiled. He answered in his own language, which nobody in Mina’s party understood.

  “He seems to be saying yes,” Mina said.

  “Has the Pelican arrived?” George asked.

  The same nod and smile, accompanied by slightly different words.

  “It has? The steamer has arrived? Has it departed already?”

  The boy, who looked to be twelve or so, smiled and nodded too.

  Mina said, “Let’s just keep going, George. Thank you!” she told the fisherman. “Thank you very much!” Then, “Hurry, George, please. Please do try to hurry.”

  A few minutes later the post was sighted, deep in a cove on the right bank of the river, still far enough ahead as to appear microscopic against the background of mountains, with the vast Ungava Bay fanning out to the north. “There it was deep in a cove,” Mina later wrote, “on the right bank of the river, a little group of tiny buildings nestling in at the foot of a mountain of solid rock.” The tide was low and the cove held almost no water. A wide, boulder-strewn mudflat stretched between the canoes and the shore below the post.

  Mina had been turning in one direction after another, scanning the water. Finally she said it. “The steamer isn’t here.”

  “Maybe it hasn’t arrived yet,” George said.

  “And maybe it’s already gone.” Oh, how she wanted to upbraid George at that moment! How she ached to cry out, Why didn’t you listen to me last night when I wanted to go on? But then she remembered the last set of rapids and how close her party had come to being sucked into them. If the canoes had entered that rapid last night, when the light was dim and visibility poor, there was small chance any of them would have survived. So yes, she had been right about the post. But George had been right about the rapids.

  Where the mudflats began, the men stowed their paddles and reached for the poles. To Mina’s surprise the canoes were poled along quite smoothly, slipping over the mud with only an inch or so of water beneath the hulls.

  A man in hip waders was coming toward them across the
mud. A white man. He was trailed by six Eskimos. “That must be Mr. Ford,” Mina said.

  She could not wait until he closed the last twenty yards. She stood in the canoe and shouted, “Has the ship been here?”

  “Oh, yes!” he called back. “Yes, indeed!”

  “And gone again?”

  “Yes, indeed!” he answered.

  She dropped down onto her seat. What she wanted was to bury her face in her hands, weep herself into oblivion. Instead she sat stone-faced. They had come so far, had done so much, only to fail in the final objective. Now she would be forced to spend a long, idle winter here, all of them would. And she would have to keep four men on her payroll all the while. How could she possibly afford it?

  The post agent came trudging up to her, his boots sucking mud. “What ship do you mean?” he asked with a smile. “Is there any other ship expected here, other than the company’s ship?”

  “No, that’s the one I mean,” she told him. “The Pelican. Has she been here?”

  “Oh, yes,” he said, reaffirming her worst fear. Then, after a pause, he added, “She was here last September. I expect her in September again. Another two weeks or so.”

  George turned to look at her. His grin was the widest she had ever seen.

  But Mina, for a reason she could not yet articulate nor barely understand, continued to sit there with no expression on her face. She knew she should be joyful at that moment, should be exultant. Instead she felt empty of all emotion, peculiarly drained. “My heart should have swelled with emotion,” she wrote, “but it did not. I can not remember any time in my life when I had less feeling.”

  George misinterpreted her response. He asked Mr. Ford, “Have any others arrived before us? Another party?”

  “You are the first,” the agent said. “Congratulations, Mrs. Hubbard. You are Mrs. Hubbard, are you not? I don’t see how you could be anybody else.”

  He held out his hand to her. She took it, suddenly weak, suddenly hollow, and forced a smile. But she felt no happiness. Distantly, as if she had become separated from her body, she felt slightly nauseated. And as Mr. Ford helped her to her feet again, she could only wonder at this sense of detachment. Something was over, that was why she felt as she did. That was what sickened her. Something monumental had come to an end. And for the life of her she could not decide whether she had succeeded or failed.

  “Wait,” George said before she stepped out of the canoe. “You can’t wade through the mud in your moccasins.” He rummaged through a pack until he came up with a pair of sealskin boots. Mina leaned on Mr. Ford’s arm and raised one foot to George, then the other, so that he could pull off her moccasins and push on the boots.

  Properly shod, she used a paddle as a walking stick and, holding Mr. Ford’s arm with her other hand, she stepped onto the mud and waded toward shore. He tried to make conversation but she found even the simplest of responses an ordeal.

  “I can only imagine the adventures you’ve had,” he told her.

  “Yes,” she said. “Many.”

  “Fraught with hardships, I would imagine.”

  “Only a few.”

  “Amazing, considering the journey you’ve made. Did you happen to come across the caribou?”

  “We did, yes.”

  “You did? And the Indians?”

  “Yes.”

  “You visited their camp? Was it the Montagnais or the Naskapi?”

  “Both,” she said. “We saw both.”

  “I can only imagine,” he told her. “A woman. What a wonderful accomplishment you’ve made!”

  She smiled. The effort all but drained her. She felt very tired, very sleepy. With each blink of her eyes she wondered if she could get her eyelids open again. She wished she had her tent to go to now. Or Laddie’s tent. If only she could join her Laddie in his tent where he waited for her …

  She realized then that Mr. Ford was escorting her onto solid ground. They were moving up the hill toward the main building, a small white house some fifty yards away. She could see a white woman, Mrs. Ford, waiting at the bottom of the porch steps, beaming, a large, rather plump woman, hands clasped above her chest.

  But Mina could not breathe. She could get no air into her lungs. She let the paddle fall from her hand, let her hand slip off Mr. Ford’s arm. She turned toward the river, looked back across the mudflats with the gulls and plovers flying about, squawking. She was shivering now, freezing, and though not a drop of rain was falling she could feel icy pricks of rain stinging her face and hands, blurring her vision.

  She had been thinking about Laddie’s tent, his last camp, the one he had described in his journal. She knew that entry so completely, knew every word of it by heart. She had carried the image in her mind all summer long and could see the tent now as clearly as if it existed not twenty yards from where she stood, could feel the icy rain, the cold tingling of her cheeks. The October wind was whipping the canvas of Laddie’s small tent, the fabric snapping. Laddie was lying on his side just inside the open flap, a blanket wrapped about his thin shoulders as he wrote in his diary:

  My tent is pitched in open tent style in front of a big rock. The rock reflects the fire, but now it is going out because of the rain. I think I shall let it go and close the tent, till the rain is over, thus keeping out wind and saving wood. To-night or tomorrow perhaps the weather will improve so I can build a fire, eat the rest of my moccasins and have some bone broth. Then I can boil my belt and oiltanned moccasins and a pair of cowhide mittens. They ought to help some. I am not suffering. The acute pangs of hunger have given way to indifference. I am sleepy. I think death from starvation is not so bad. But let no one suppose that I expect it. I am prepared, that is all. I think the boys will be able, with the Lord’s help, to save me.

  He was too tired to write any more. He laid the pen aside, laid his hand atop the book, spread his fingers across it. He would rest for a while and maybe write some more later. Or he would write tomorrow. But first he would sleep. Yes, sleep was so lovely. Such an easy thing. He thought he could sleep for a long time now. It was the easiest thing in the world to do, to go to that place where the pain disappeared, just to close his eyes and sleep …

  Even after the image faded away and the rain stopped and it was again a bright, clear day in August 1905—when Mina was again standing in Ungava with Mr. Ford below the Hudson’s Bay Company house, with Mrs. Ford waiting on the bottom porch step—even then she could not bring herself to climb the last fifty yards to that house. She stood looking out across the mudflats, staring at the two canoes still beached out there, the two men sitting motionless in each canoe.

  “Mrs. Hubbard?” Mr. Ford said, and touched her gently on the shoulder. “Shall we continue now? Mrs. Ford is so anxious to meet you, you know. She’s been watching for you every day. You will be the first white woman she’s seen in two long years.”

  And something in Mr. Ford’s words, something in his voice, brought Mina back to reality. She realized suddenly, with the abruptness of a slap, why George and Joe and Job and Gilbert had not followed her up the hill, why they had not moved from the canoes.

  Because she was white and they were not. And they were back in civilization now, at a white man’s post. They were her charges here, she was responsible for them. They did not own this place as they owned the wilderness. They could not act without her consent.

  Her body flushed with shame. How could she have been so neglectful? Those four men had brought her here safely, triumphantly, protecting her every step of the way, and she had walked away from them without a word. Laddie would never have been so selfish. He had been thinking of others to the very last, at the hour of his death, thinking only of his companions and their comfort.

  “We were like Light and Darkness,” she later wrote, “and with the light gone how deep was the darkness. Once I had thought I stood up beside him, but in what a school had I learned that I only reached to his feet. And now all my effort, though it might achieve that which he would be glad a
nd proud of, could never bring him back.

  “I must go back to the men at once.”

  She pulled away from Mr. Ford and strode down the hill, her muddy boots slapping the ground. “Mrs. Hubbard?” he called. “If there’s something you need from the canoe I’ll have the Eskimo boys bring it in!”

  She gave no answer, did not look back. She marched toward the canoes, out across the mud, scattering the gulls. She came first to Job in the bow of the canoe and reached out and seized his hand in both of hers. “Thank you, Job, thank you so very much. For all you’ve done. I can never thank you enough.”

  She did the same with Joe. Then Gilbert. Then George. Her cheeks were streaked with tears. “We will all walk up together,” she told them. “The final hike together. I’m so sorry I went ashore without you. Please forgive me, please. I would not even be here were it not for each of you.”

  The men wanted her to walk in front of them but she refused. “That’s not the way it’s been, is it?” she asked. “You led me everywhere. And now you shall lead me home.”

  It made her feel a little better to see how the men beamed, how proudly they strode across the mud, Job and Joe and Gilbert side by side and leading the way. George, as always, walked beside her. She moved close and took his hand. Immediately his eyes flared with panic and he tried to pull his hand from hers before Mr. Ford could see. But she held tight. “Don’t let go,” she told him.

  “But missus … you don’t understand. It’s not like before. It could get me in trouble.”

  With that she released him. “Then give me your arm. The mud is so slippery, anyone can understand that.”

  She laid her hand on his arm and for a moment they walked like that, like a gentleman and his lady. But then he felt the pressure of her hand on his arm increasing, realized that she had slowed, was reluctant to go on.

  “There’s nothing beyond this for me,” she said. She came to a stop. Her hand squeezed his arm. “Can’t we just turn around, George? Can’t we pretend we’ve never come this far?”