Heart So Hungry

by Randall Silvis

  George gazed out into the bay. Gently he asked, “Is that why you did all this?”

  “It’s so unfair. It isn’t right that I should succeed, and live, when he did not. He was so much better than I can ever hope to be.”

  “In that case,” George told her, and laid his hand atop hers for just a moment, “maybe what’s best for you and me now is if we both try to be a little more like him.”

  It hurt so much to nod, to smile, to admit that George was right. It would all hurt from now on, every step and every breath. But she would do it. She would walk up that hill, she would greet Mrs. Ford. She would live and do what needed to be done, but she would never forget. And she would march to the front like a soldier.

  Dillon Wallace’s expedition, the final leg, 1905–06

  AFTER TWELVE WEEKS ON THE TRAIL, Wallace finally encountered the Labrador Indians. A small hunting party of four men and a boy waved from a hillside one afternoon, calling Wallace and Easton ashore. Wallace shared his tobacco and tea with the men, who then invited the two white explorers, by way of gesticulation and arm-pulling, to visit the Indians’ hunting camp three miles downstream. They were delighted to do so.

  The entire population of the camp turned out to greet the white men. Their tent was pitched between the Indians’ two deerskin wigwams, the camp stove was lit, and soon eleven Indians crowded inside the little tent with Wallace and Easton, where more tea and tobacco were served.

  Although the two groups could understand almost nothing of each other’s language, Wallace was made to understand that this was a band of Montagnais. Once or twice each year they travelled to the Hudson’s Bay post at Davis Inlet to trade their furs for ammunition, clothing and other necessities. Unlike the Indians Mina Hubbard had encountered, this band had been coming across small herds of caribou with some regularity. Hindquarters and other cuts were now hanging all over the camp, being dried for winter use.

  Wallace and Easton remained with the Indians until the following afternoon. Before departing they were warned to be on the lookout for dangerous rapids and waterfalls ahead. For two days after coming onto a “big, big river,” the Indians told them, travelling would be good. Beyond that, “Shepoo natchi, shepoo natchi.” No translation was needed other than the look of fear in the Indians’ eyes.

  The entire camp assembled along the shore to see the pair on their way. It was the Indians’ custom to pitch small stones at departing visitors; to be struck by a stone was supposed to ensure good fortune. Wallace and Easton sailed away unscathed.

  Even so, their luck held a while longer. The next day Wallace dropped two caribou with two shots from his .33 Winchester, from a distance he calculated at three hundred and fifty yards. With more meat than they could carry, he and Easton spent the next four days curing the venison and caching a portion of it in case they might need, for whatever reason, to turn back. Along with their remaining pemmican and other rations, they now had provisions for eight weeks or so, and felt confident that their days of privation were behind them.

  They spent another day travelling, and easily discovered the portage trail the Montagnais had told them to look for. But here their sudden change of diet caught up with them. Having overindulged on fresh venison for several meals in a row, both men became almost too ill to travel.

  They pressed on despite their gastrointestinal agonies, even running several rapids during a blinding snowstorm. When visibility became so poor that the man in the stern of the canoe could not even see the man seated in front, they decided that further travel would be foolhardy. For two days they were snowbound on the rocky shore. The wind drove waves against the boulders with such force that the spray flew thirty feet into the air. By the second day of their forced encampment, the ground was covered by a half-foot of snow and the rocks along the shore were encased in ice.

  On the morning of September 29 Wallace thought he detected a subsidence in the force of the wind. “If we don’t move now,” he told Easton, “before the river freezes up, we might have to leave the canoe behind for good.” It proved to be a near-fatal decision.

  As the men paddled downriver, the spray coming off the water froze in their beards and moustaches and numbed their faces. Their clothes were heavy with ice, as were their paddles and all exposed surfaces of the canoe. Before they knew it, they were in the midst of a stretch of white water. But because their speed was good and the course ahead seemed clear, they did not pause to reconsider the situation.

  Moments later the canoe struck a submerged rock and swung broadside in the fierce current. They did not even have time to call out to one another before they were thrown into the icy water. Wallace was immediately pulled down, fully submerged and dragged along the river bottom, scraping between the rocks. Lungs burning, he was able finally to plant his feet on a rock and push to the surface in a relatively clear stretch of water. Some twenty feet away, the capsized canoe floated toward him. Easton was attached to the side of it, struggling to free himself, his jacket caught on a bolt.

  As Wallace swam toward him, Easton worked his hunting knife free and managed to cut himself loose. But their hands were so numb that neither man could get a grip on the slippery canoe, and no matter how deeply they gasped they could not pull a full breath into their lungs. Their legs seemed distant and useless, dead with cold, and their brains could not hold a thought for more than a few seconds.

  Somehow Easton found the presence of mind to take hold of the canoe’s tracking line. He clamped it between his teeth and swam toward shore. Wallace swam alongside the canoe, one hand kept underwater to hold in place the packs still trapped under the thwarts. In the meantime all the lighter packs and paddles were floating downstream. The heaviest packs—none of them tied down—had sunk irretrievably.

  For most of thirty minutes Wallace and Easton struggled to get the canoe ashore. When they reached solid ground, their legs would barely hold them up. Still, they managed to heave the canoe over on dry land and drain out the water.

  “F-fire,” Wallace stuttered. A full minute had seemed to pass between the time his brain conceived of the word and his mouth could express it. He and Easton both hobbled along the shoreline searching for wood, but not a stick was to be found. Reluctantly they dragged the canoe back into the water, climbed in and, using their frozen hands as oars, paddled an eighth of a mile to a wooded shoreline behind a little bay. By now all colour had drained from Easton’s face. His windburned and sunburned skin was deathly white.

  While Easton feebly tried to gather wood, plucking uselessly at low-hanging branches, Wallace attempted to find the waterproof matchbox in his trouser pocket. But his hand would not work right and he could not get his fingers to slide into his pocket. He could not think what to do. Convulsing in shivers, brain and body rattling, he loosened his belt, unbuckled his trousers. Finally, after much manoeuvring, he was able to work a hand down into the ice-stiff pocket. He brought out the matchbox, fumbled to get it open, struggled to pick out a match. Only by holding his hand very close to his face and squinting through the ice on his lashes could he tell whether a match was clutched between his fingers.

  When at last he had secured one, he struck it across the bottom of the box. But the box was wet and the match broke in half. He struggled again to get another match between his finger and thumb.

  Wallace looked up then at Easton, who had stopped plucking at branches and was standing not far away, swaying back and forth, his face pale and waxy, eyes blank. “Run!” Wallace shouted at him. He did not recognize his own voice; it sounded choked, distant and strange. “Run, Easton! Run!”

  They both tried to run, but their legs collapsed and they fell side by side. Wallace staggered and lurched climbing to his feet, took a few steps back toward Easton and fell over. Now he crawled to Easton, who lay there groping blindly with his hands, staring into space, seeing nothing.

  Wallace knew that only a fire could save them. Again he fumbled with the matchbox, got hold of a match, tried to light it and failed. Again
and again he tried, until only three matches remained. Three matches, he told himself. Three matches and then death.

  The first of the three flared, but his fingers could not hold onto it, and he dropped it in the snow. It hissed out. The second match lit too, and before he could drop this one he carefully laid it on a handful of dry moss at the base of a tree. The moss smoked and then caught fire. As quickly as he could, Wallace gathered up every twig within reach and laid them on the flames. When the fire seemed strong enough he reached for a larger piece of dead wood. Then another. Another. The blaze grew and warmed his face and hands. He hobbled to his feet again, stumbling about among the trees, and dragged one dry limb after another back to the fire. The wood crackled and spat. Easton, crawling on his hands and knees, dragged himself close to it. Wallace piled on more and more wood, his body warming as the blaze grew. Finally he laughed out loud.

  Later, when he wrote about the incident, Wallace observed that their firearms had all been lost in the river, “our clothing, nearly all our food, our axes and our paddles, and even the means of making new paddles were gone, but for the present we were safe. Life, no matter how uncertain, is sweet, and I laughed with the very joy of living.”

  The remainder of the expedition proved not much easier. After nearly losing their lives to hypothermia, Wallace and Easton were able to thaw out by the fire, but their situation was bleak indeed. They eventually managed to recover their paddles and a few other supplies that had floated downstream to an eddy, but their guns, axes, all cooking utensils, plus 350 unexposed photographic films were lost forever. Among the items salvaged were their blankets, clothing, tent, a supply of matches, tea, caribou tallow and fifty pounds of pemmican. They had no choice but to press on and hope that the current would carry them out of this hell.

  With the coming of October, winter cinched its noose tighter and tighter. Equipped with only summer clothing, and in an area where little wood was to be found—and when it was, it was usually wet—the men stayed cold day and night. With only pemmican and a few wild berries to sustain them, they suffered constantly from gnawing hunger. They saw flock after flock of ptarmigan, ducks and geese, but they had no guns or ammunition.

  They also encountered numerous Indian signs, but the hunting camps were all abandoned and nothing had been left behind. Storms raged and winds howled. The men fell into a tedious routine, moving during the daylight hours and camping at twilight. Most days they were drenched by rain or blinded by snow. They seldom spoke to one another, too deep in their misery for any but essential conversation. Easton had been so traumatized by his icy submersion that he no longer washed or bathed and refused any contact with water except for what he drank.

  Not until the evening of October 16 did Wallace and Easton spot the lights of the Ungava Bay post. Because the tide had left the bay drained of everything but mud, leaving no approach by canoe, they dragged their belongings to the safety of higher land, then started to pick their way along the face of a clifflike hill in hopes of reaching the post on foot. But their footing was dangerous and the light was receding rapidly. They found a niche a hundred feet or so above the mud and there piled up all the brush and loose wood they could find, meaning to light a signal fire at the first sign of life from the post.

  It wasn’t long before a lantern light appeared and began to move down toward the mudflats below the post. Wallace and Easton ignited their signal fire, then jumped up and down, waving their arms and shouting. In time the lantern light turned in their direction, seemed to be approaching them. Then it disappeared.

  Resigned to spending a cold night on the cliff, the men smoked their pipes and watched their signal fire slowly dying. “When all at once,” as Wallace described it, “there stepped out of the surrounding darkness into the radius of light cast by our now dying fire, an old Eskimo with an unlighted lantern in his hands, and a young fellow of fifteen or sixteen years of age.”

  The boy, who turned out to be the grandson of John Ford, the post agent, explained that the Eskimo had seen Wallace and Easton striking matches earlier to light their pipes, even before the signal fire was set ablaze. Since there were no matches left within a hundred miles of the post, Mr. Ford assumed that there were strangers stranded on the hill, and sent his grandson and the Eskimo to investigate. Their lantern had blown out along the way.

  With the relit lantern to guide them, Wallace and Easton were escorted to the agent’s house. Mr. Ford promptly treated them to a supper of fried trout, bread, jam and tea. There Wallace was informed of what he already suspected—that Mina Hubbard and her entire party had arrived in good condition, with provisions to spare, a full six weeks ahead of him. The only good news was that the Pelican was experiencing one of its typical delays and had not yet arrived.

  Whether to spare himself the humiliation of having to return on the Pelican with Mina Hubbard or, as he claimed in his book, because the post’s storehouse was virtually depleted and he did not wish to burden Mr. and Mrs. Ford with two more mouths to feed until the steamer arrived—or because he hoped to salvage his reputation as an explorer, which would now be brought into question—Wallace decided, in spite of Mr. Ford’s caution that such a plan would be unwise, that he and Easton would continue to Fort Chimo, the most isolated station in northern Labrador. From there they would “travel across the northern peninsula and around the coast in winter and learn more of the people and their life.”

  Wallace and Easton spent three days at the post—with Wallace avoiding Mina Hubbard all the while—as they waited for the ice to form, to make a dogsled trip to Fort Chimo feasible. On the third day the Pelican came steaming into the bay. From the ship’s commander Wallace received satisfying news: Richards, Stevens and Stanton were all safe and sound at the North West River Post. Now, with transportation at hand, Mr. Ford again advised against Wallace’s proposed dogsled expedition. But Wallace would not be swayed.

  On October 22 the Pelican weighed anchor with both the Hubbard party and, briefly, the remains of the Wallace party aboard. Wallace and Easton, still in their threadbare summer clothing and meagrely provisioned, disembarked just twenty miles later, at the mouth of the George River. There they boarded a small boat manned by Eskimos and began their trip to Fort Chimo, 150 miles away.

  The ensuing journey proved to be every bit as perilous as the one to Ungava Bay. Six days after leaving the Pelican, Wallace, Easton and their Eskimo guides were forced to seek refuge on an island from a gale that raged for three days and transformed Ungava Bay into a minefield of pack ice. With their small boat now useless, the party had no option, when the storm finally subsided, but to set off on foot, without snowshoes, across the drifted snow and cracked ice.

  Three days later another storm hit. This time Wallace and Easton hunkered down in a log hut while the Eskimos continued on. Six days later, with Wallace and Easton again out of food, rescuers pounded on the door of the hut. They had arrived with a dogsled team, deerskin clothing and boots.

  On November 28 the two white men finally reached Fort Chimo. There they remained until early January, when they returned to Fort George by dogsled and resumed their journey down the eastern coast of Labrador.

  On April 17, 1906, their Labrador adventure came to an end at the southern coastal town of Natashquan. All told, Wallace and Easton had explored a thousand miles of Labrador’s interior and had travelled another two thousand miles along the coast.

  Mina Hubbard gets ready for another day on the water, 1905.

  Mina resting on the trail, 1905.

  Mina tends to breakfast, 1905.

  Mina does some mending in camp, 1905.

  Three of Mina’s crew members manoeuvre through shallow water, 1905.

  Mina attempts to communicate with the Naskapi women, 1905.

  A Montagnais boy offers Mina a shy smile, 1905.

  Some of the native women and children Mina met, 1905.

  Some Montagnais Indians pose for Mina, 1905.

  George and the other men skin a caribou, 190
5.

  One of the men looks back on Gertrude Falls, 1905.

  Mina and her crew are welcomed to Ungava Bay, 1905.

  One of Mina’s last visits to Laddie’s grave in Haverstraw, New York, date unknown.

  PART III

  Afterword

  BOTH MINA HUBBARD AND DILLON WALLACE went on to write books about their expeditions. Neither book makes a single mention of the rival expedition nor once acknowledges the competitive nature of the race to Ungava. The name and spirit of Leonidas Hubbard Jr., however, haunt both narratives.

  Wallace’s book, The Long Labrador Trail, was the more popular of the two accounts and went through numerous printings. First published in 1907, a year before Mina’s A Woman’s Way Through Unknown Labrador, its prose is distinctly more lively, more calculated to emphasize the dangers and tribulations of the ordeal. Indeed, Wallace’s crew experienced far more mishaps and missteps than did Mina’s. His journey, in comparison to hers, seems to follow a blunderer’s route to Michikamau, with the Wallace party more often lost than not. Also, whereas Mina accorded full credit for the success of her mission to her crew, Wallace’s various accounts accentuate his own role as decision-maker and leader, and sometimes offer contradictory explanations for the choices he made.

  In The Long Labrador Trail, for example, Wallace claims that he decided to continue from Ungava to Fort Chimo because too few provisions remained in the Hudson’s Bay Company’s stores. But in an article in Outing Magazine dated February 1906, he wrote:

  I have decided that instead of returning with the Pelican I shall go to Ft. Chimo at the earliest possible moment and endeavor to get into the deer killings with the Indians, and get, if possible, photographs of the spearing and the general slaughter that will take place. … Then with dogs I shall return home as quickly as possible via the coast…. The long journey with Eskimos and life in snow igloos offer little pleasure—but will give good material.