Heart So Hungry (2 page)

From his hospital bed he regaled the shy girl—and he could not help but think of her as a girl, so deferent and modest, though at thirty she was two years his senior—with the tales he never tired of recounting. He told her of Peary’s work in Greenland and among the Eskimos and his plans to conquer the North Pole, “The North Pole! Just think of it.” He told her of Stanley’s exploration in mysterious Africa, of John Wesley Powell’s thrilling one-armed exploits in the American West. The name of Leonidas Hubbard Jr. will one day be added to that list, he told her. Exactly where he would go and precisely what he would accomplish, he did not yet know. But a place in history awaited him.

Mina was certain of this as well. She could feel his greatness when he spoke, could feel her skin flush with the intensity of his passions. That he even deigned to confide in her, a plain and unworldly farm girl from Ontario, this she found amazing and beyond explanation.

It was clear to Hubbard that Mina was smitten with him, and he had to admit that they would make a good pair. But what did he, an unemployed journalist, have to offer other than his stories, the tales he knew by heart of his grandfather’s exploits as an Indian hunter in Ohio, his father’s adventures as a hunter and trapper in the forbidding wilds of Michigan?

In Hubbard’s darkest hours Mina’s quiet faith in him became his only strength. She knew in her heart that a man of his talents would soon be on his feet, more successful than ever. “I don’t think anything
can keep you down,” she confessed with a blush. And because Mina believed it—dear, sweet girl—Hubbard believed it too.

After four frustrating weeks he was finally moved out of the quarantine ward. For a man as restless as he, it was like a release from prison. He walked endlessly up and down the hallways, filling the time between Mina’s visits to his room. He had never been the kind of man who could sit still for long, not unless he was reliving an adventure through his writing or reading, traipsing through dark forest, paddling against the current up a glittering stream. Besides, he had to toughen up his legs if he was soon to hit the streets again.

He promised Mina that when he was released from the hospital he would take her hiking and canoeing and fishing. They would go on picnics and explore the surrounding woodlands together. Mina happily agreed to accompany him wherever he wished to go.

In the meantime Hubbard walked the halls. During one of these strolls he noticed a man seated at the bedside of a pale but pretty woman, holding her hand in both of his. The man, who appeared to be maybe ten years older than Hubbard, heavier and with thinning hair, was dressed in a good suit, a suit far more fashionable than any Hubbard could afford. But the man’s face was drawn, his eyes clouded with grief. And on the cheeks of the pale woman whose hand he clutched was the telltale bloom of consumption.

Hubbard felt compassion for that man, and a strange kind of kinship. He considered approaching him, offering his sympathies. After noticing the gentleman on a few more occasions, always seated at his wife’s bedside, looking so utterly alone, that was what Hubbard did. The husband, after a moment’s hesitation, seized Hubbard’s hand. His grip, Hubbard later told Mina, was as desperate as that of a man “about to drown in the ocean of his grief.”

The man’s name was Dillon Wallace and he worked as a lawyer in Manhattan. He and his wife, Jennie, had been married only three years. And now she would soon be gone from him. It was so cruel and unfair, he confessed; too much for a man to bear.

Hubbard and Wallace spent many hours together in the hospital. Hubbard spoke of his own misfortunes, if only to demonstrate that Wallace was not the sole recipient of raw treatment from the fates, and as evidence that tragedy can be overcome—“Must be overcome!”—lest one wishes to linger forever in the fog of despair.

They talked of the activities they had once enjoyed, found they each longed for the pleasure of a hike through woods where no sound of man intruded, for the accomplishment of filling a creel with sleek trout pulled from a sun-spangled stream. In their shared miseries and common pleasures they took strength and comfort.

Not long after meeting Wallace, Hubbard was released from the hospital. But no longer was he alone in New York. He had made many friends through his work at the
Daily News
and the
Saturday Evening Post
and he had developed a deep bond with Dillon Wallace. His most devoted friend by far, however, and now also his sweetheart, was Miss Benson. All readily assisted Hubbard every way they could, with money, letters of introduction, and with a confidence in him to match his own.

To get his strength back that summer, Hubbard spent some time camping in the Shawangunk Mountains in southern New York state. It was precisely what he needed, a medicine taken in the whisper of a breeze through the branches, the call of crows in foggy tree-tops, the scent of a campfire, the delicious puck and sibilance of rain pattering on a canvas tent. His new friend Dillon Wallace sometimes accompanied him on these trips. The long hikes and quiet evenings were salubrious for Wallace, a widower now. In fact it was only at these times with Hubbard or when buried in work at his Manhattan office that the lawyer could step away from his grief for a while.

That August Hubbard armed himself with a packet of articles and a letter of introduction and called on Caspar Whitney, editor and owner of a popular outdoor magazine called
Outing
. Whitney, like all who met Hubbard, could not help but be impressed with the
young man’s enthusiasm and confidence. Though slight of stature, Hubbard projected a powerful presence, a charisma. There was always a smile on his handsome face, and his sharp, finely chiselled features, especially those eyes bright with the spirit of adventure, commanded attention.

The man has energy and ambition, Whitney thought. Why not give him a try? Whitney offered an assignment, an article about the Adirondacks. Hubbard turned it in under deadline, a fine piece of writing.

“All right,” Whitney told him. “I’ll take you on.”

And suddenly all past miseries fell away from Leonidas Hubbard Jr. Not only was he a salaried writer again, but his work would appear in the same pages as that of Peary and Teddy Roosevelt.

Early the next year, Hubbard decided that the time was right for him to act upon his “firm resolution” that “a certain portion of Canada be annexed to the United States.” He travelled to the farming country of Bewdley, Ontario, to request permission for that annexation. Mr. and Mrs. Benson were delighted by his proposal, and they granted their approval.

Hubbard returned to New York City an exultant man. All the pieces of his life’s dream were falling into place. A plum position with a prestigious magazine and a lovely, sweet woman who had agreed to be his wife. It was everything he had ever hoped for.

Within days he was assigned a series of articles that would take him through the southern states. Neither he nor Mina could abide the notion of being separated for the months it would take to complete the assignment, so arrangements were quickly made for what Mina would describe as “a quiet wedding in a little church in New York.” On the last day of the first month of 1901, they began their life together as husband and wife.

For the next five months theirs was a transient life. From the mountains of Virginia they travelled through the backwoods and along the dusty roads of North Carolina, Tennessee and Mississippi.
Hubbard not only gathered research and filed articles for
Outing
, he sold freelance pieces too, one on moonshining and one about an old pirate hangout, both to
The Atlantic Monthly
.

Mina served as his assistant, eagerly pitching in at every turn. Whether hunting, hiking, researching, writing, or simply talking of his plans for their life together, Hubbard was indefatigable, and his optimism was contagious. Mina had never felt so alive nor so loved.

After their southern trip the couple rented a house in Wurtsboro, a village in New York’s scenic Mamakating Valley, from which Hubbard could commute to work in Manhattan. The hunting and fishing in the Mamakating Valley were excellent, and the Hubbards’ friends visited them regularly. Especially Dillon Wallace. Mina found the lawyer to be a quiet man and sometimes a bit too sombre, but of course she forgave him his melancholy air; he had every right to it.

Mina frequently cooked for her Laddie and their guests in Wurtsboro, veritable feasts praised by everyone who sampled them—roasts of lamb or beef, mountains of mashed potatoes, honey-glazed carrots, cakes and puddings and coffee and brandy. Sometimes the Hubbards and a friend or two would venture forth on a camping trip into the mountains, and these were the suppers Mina most enjoyed, communally prepared over a campfire for appetites so huge after a day of tramping and canoeing that even the simplest of fare—fried trout and bacon, tea with biscuits and marmalade—satisfied as no banquet ever could.

But Mina did not always accompany her husband on his camping trips. In November 1901 he travelled to the Shawangunk Mountains with Dillon Wallace, and it was on this trip that Hubbard first articulated the dream he had been harbouring since just a boy. A dream to lead an expedition of his own into uncharted territory, an exploration of unknown lands that would forever after link the name of that land with his own.

The announcement took place after supper one evening. The men, sweetly exhausted from a day of snowshoeing through the woods, fired up their pipes and leaned back on the pine boughs in the lean-to they had built. Hubbard sat for a while staring at the campfire, all but motionless. At these times Wallace was content to empty his mind of all practical concerns, to allow the gathering night and the flutter of flames to work their magic on him.

But Hubbard’s was a restless mind, never at peace. Abruptly he said, “Wallace, how would you like to go to Labrador with me?”

Wallace sucked on his pipe, then blew out a lazy stream of smoke. Another camping trip, he thought. Somewhere new.

“And where might Labrador be?” he asked. He had a vague knowledge of the area’s whereabouts, knew that it existed somewhere in the northeast corner of the continent. He imagined the fishing would be good there.

Hubbard grabbed his knapsack, produced pencil and notebook. With excited strokes he sketched an outline of the island of Newfoundland. Above its northernmost point he drew a wavy line. “The Strait of Belle Isle,” he said. And just above the strait, like a triangular piece of lace attached to the side of Canada, was Labrador. Hubbard wasn’t surprised that Wallace knew little about the place. Little was known of it. And that, precisely, was why Labrador called to him.

“Don’t you realize it’s the only part of the continent that hasn’t been explored? John Cabot claimed the land for England back in 1497, but all he explored was the coastline. The interior is virtually unknown.”

In 1901 most of the Labrador-Ungava peninsula’s 500,000 square miles were still a mystery to all but its indigenous population. Bordered on the west and south by Quebec and on the east by the waters of the Atlantic Ocean, Labrador is a rugged and forbidding territory made up primarily of some of the oldest rocks on earth.

Its deep valleys, ancient mountains, high cliffs and scoured plains were shaped by the Laurentide Ice Sheet some eighteen thousand years ago. The climate is marked by long, harsh winters and short summers. In the north, summers are too cool to support full tree growth; the terrain there and along the coast is mainly tundra. In the interior valleys, protected from the brutal winds, copses of balsam fir and dense forests of black spruce grow, but just as common are vast boglands, barrens, and valley floors covered in lichen and moss.

In 1534 Jacques Cartier deemed Labrador “the land God gave to Cain.” Even so, whalers and fishermen and explorers from Spain, France, Portugal and England were drawn to the Labrador coast, as were Moravian missionaries beginning in 1752, nine years after a French trading post was established at Davis Inlet. Here the indigenous peoples came in the summer to trade furs and fish for sugar, tobacco, tea and other items.

It wasn’t long before the coastline had been well mapped. Not so the interior. Europeans found little reason to venture far inland. In the winter of 1838, a Hudson’s Bay Company agent named John McLean made a dogsled trip from Fort Chimo south to the North West River Post, and at some point travelled on the Naskapi River. But, as Dillon Wallace would later point out in his book
The Lure of the Labrador Wild
, “The record left by him of the journey … is very incomplete, and the exact route he took is by no means certain.”

The interior was well known to the indigenous peoples, however, who moved about nomadically as hunters, trappers and fishermen. The Innu and Inuit both claim Labrador as their home, but though they share a coincidental similarity in name they are unrelated. The Inuit (Eskimos) are the descendants of the Thule, an ancient whaling culture from Alaska. The Thule originally settled along the northern coast. Over time, as they followed the movements of whales and seals down the eastern shoreline, they migrated as far south as the Strait of Belle Isle.

While the Inuit depended largely on whales for their survival, the Innu depended on caribou. The Innu are an Algonkian Indian nation who had once been thought to be two separate groups, the Naskapi and the Montagnais. Both spoke dialects of the Cree language, though the dialects were dissimilar enough that early white explorers mistakenly identified the groups as separated by more than distance. The name Montagnais comes from the French word for “mountaineer” and was applied to the Innu first encountered along the northern shores of the Gulf of St. Lawrence. The Montagnais in turn referred to their southern neighbours as Naskapi, which has been variously translated as “the interior people” and “shabby dressers.”

Both the Naskapi and the Montagnais possessed an intimate knowledge of the maze of waterways and footpaths that criss-crossed inland Labrador. This knowledge was passed down from generation to generation but never recorded. So in 1717 the French geographer Emanuel Bouman could accurately observe, on behalf of all Europeans, “We have no knowledge of the inland parts of this country.”