Heart So Hungry (23 page)

They ate several of the ptarmigan that night and considered it a feast and thought that finally their luck had changed for the better. Michikamau, their salvation, was at hand.

But all through the next day and the next, and the day after that, Laddie and George and Wallace had searched in vain for a route to Michikamau. On the mountain their path had seemed so obvious. Now, in the valley, it eluded them. Then came a sleet storm that lasted for several days and kept them windbound in camp, again with almost nothing to eat.

Wallace wrote of those hard days in his first book:

On the morning of September 15, a Tuesday, with a high west wind squealing around them and needles of sleet pricking their faces, the three men took stock of their emergency rations. They had about two pounds of flour left, a pint of rice and three pounds of bacon. Plus eighteen pounds of pea meal—“to be held for emergency,” Hubbard wrote in his diary. They had travelled less than half the total distance to Ungava, had not yet reached Michikamau, and the weather showed no signs of improving. A Labrador winter was nipping at their heels.

In his diary Hubbard chronicled his thoughts. “To go on is certain failure to reach the caribou killing, and probable starvation. If we turn back we must stop and get grub, then cross our long
portage, then hunt more grub and finally freeze up preparatory to a sled dash to Northwest River. … I don’t see any thing better to do.”

The men sat huddled around their fire. The wind howled and blew the fire’s heat away and drove the sleet into their faces. After a few minutes Laddie shoved a couple of sticks into the fire. Then he climbed to his feet and, with a wet blanket wrapped around his reed-thin shoulders, he looked out across the water some twenty yards away. After a while he walked down through the brush and stood alone on the sandy shore. No matter which way he looked, he could see no opening to Michikamau.

Finally he turned and pushed back through the brush to stand again at the fire. His face was gaunt, his clothes ragged. He ached in every joint. For days now he and Wallace and George had been able to think of nothing but food and home. All were walking skeletons.

“Boys,” Laddie said—and Mina could imagine the way he must have smiled at them then, that wry turn of his beautiful mouth—“what do you say to turning back?”

Mina Hubbard’s expedition, August 1905

T
HE FIRST WEEK
of A
UGUST
brought good hunting to Mina’s party. All week long the weather on Lake Michikamau and then the smaller Lake Michikamats was squally and kept the crew in camp. But it did not keep them from hauling in one trout after another on their troll lines, including a fifteen-pounder caught by Joe and a whopping twenty-pounder hooked on Mina’s line. Later, while windbound on Michikamats, the party took four red-throated loons and a spruce partridge. On that same day, the seventh, while the loons were being prepared for lunch, Job caught sight of a caribou stag swimming across the lake to their south.
Within seconds he and Gilbert had a canoe in the water. A half-hour later the men returned to their island camp with a load of fresh venison.

That same day held yet one more surprise. While the men cut up the caribou and arranged the pieces of meat on a drying rack, the sound of wild geese calling to one another echoed across the water. Goose was a delicacy that had thus far eluded the party. George and Gilbert immediately dropped their hunting knives and, with their hands and forearms still bloody from the caribou, grabbed their rifles and raced on foot across the island. They returned an hour later with two young geese in hand.

A cold rain had been falling all day and the men had been out in it the whole time, fishing and hunting. But not one complaint was heard. They had laid in enough fresh meat to keep the party provisioned for quite a while, and they were exultant.

Only Mina harboured mixed feelings about the bounty. At supper she sat under the tarp with the others until Gilbert brought her a plate piled high with slices of venison. “Thank you, Gil,” she told him, and managed a smile, though her stomach was in knots. “But if you gentlemen don’t mind, I think I will dine in my tent tonight.”

Alone in her tent she sat cross-legged facing the open flap, the plate balanced on her knees. She appeared to be gazing out at the blazing fire and her happy, well-fed party, but in fact she was thinking about a previous caribou hunt, two years past. She had read the passage in Laddie’s journal so many times by now that she could envision clearly every moment described. She could see Laddie and George and Wallace creeping along the edge of a marsh, staying as low as possible. Sixty yards ahead, a lone caribou wanders along with its backside to them as it grazes on tender moss. This caribou isn’t a large animal, only an immature buck, but it could well be their salvation. All three men are thin and wasted from weeks of near-starvation and illness, their clothes in tatters, moccasins split.
Back in camp they have only a bit of pea meal left and a handful of charred goose bones, nothing more. Laddie is faring worst of all, weakened by a long bout with diarrhea. Still he pushes himself forward. His rifle is as heavy as an anchor. He can barely keep it from scraping the wet ground as he drags himself along in pursuit of the caribou.

George, carrying the second rifle, touches Laddie on the shoulder, a signal to stop. Wallace, armed with only a pistol, sinks to one knee beside them. George whispers, “We’re not getting any closer. Better take our shot while we can.”

Laddie nods. With a slow deliberation that makes his muscles ache he raises the rifle to his shoulder. He sights down the barrel. But the rifle is so heavy and he is so weak that the weapon wobbles in his hand, he cannot draw a steady bead. Meanwhile the caribou is moving farther away. Laddie lets out a breath, lowers the rifle, takes the strain off his arms for a moment. He blinks and shakes his head, tries to clear his vision, tries to find the strength to accomplish this feat which, not so long ago, he could have pulled off with ease. Then he lifts the rifle up again, quicker this time, resolute. Shoot now or die, he tells himself.

His bullet goes wide. The caribou flicks its head to the side, stretches its neck, sniffs the air. Its ears twitch. Now George takes aim but he is too quick, too desperate, and his shot splashes into the sodden ground at the caribou’s feet, sends a geyser of spray into the air. In an instant the caribou leaps away and, before the men can get off another shot, is gone.

They are too weak to follow. Too weak to even drag themselves back to camp, back to another bowl of watery pea meal soup, another nibble of charred bones. They remain with their faces pressed to the wet ground.

This was the image Mina was seeing from her tent that night. It was why every bite of food she forced down lay in her stomach like a cold weight. It was why her every accomplishment not only
pleased but stung. She was grateful, yes, and made sure to offer up a prayer of thanks for the food. Still, she could not help but think that her party’s good luck, in fact her party’s very presence on the beneficent lakes, had been bought at a cost that could never be recovered.

Dillon Wallace’s expedition, early August 1905

W
ALLACE’S PARTY SPENT
the first few days of the month as they had spent most of the previous days, battling chilling rain, pestilential insects, torturous terrain and their own gnawing hunger. But they were on a river now that Wallace had named the Babewendigash. It flowed to the northwest, and to Wallace that was an encouraging sign, for it could mean only that the river had as its outlet the Naskapi River. Even so, August 4 was to prove a particularly challenging day.

After an early and unsatisfying breakfast of lentils and tea, the men searched for a portage route around dangerous rapids. Finding none, they were forced to run the rapids. To do so with fully loaded canoes would be not merely dangerous but foolhardy, so Stanton volunteered to carry as much as he could up a steep rise of 250 feet, then down the other side to the riverbank. He soon had reason to regret his choice. The hillside was so precipitously pitched that with a heavy pack strapped to his back he could not stand upright but had to crawl on his hands and knees, grabbing hold of bushes when he could, and at other times digging his nails into the earth to keep from sliding backward all the way to the bottom.

He had never worked so hard to advance such a short distance. Many times he paused, feet braced against a root or stone, certain
he could go no farther, on the verge of surrender, nearly ready to shrug off the heavy pack and let it go cascading down the gelatinous slope. After what seemed half a day but could not have been much more than an hour, he reached the summit, mud-blackened from head to toe, exhausted and sore to the very tips of his fingers. There he found the other four men waiting for him. They had successfully navigated the rapids, then climbed the far side of the hill so as to assume some of his load. But the ensuing descent from the ridge was no easier. One by one the men slid, rolled, stumbled and pitched headlong into the bushes as they made their way down to the river again.

The next day, finally, brought a change of fortune. After another meatless and breadless breakfast, this time consisting of cornmeal mush and tea, the party progressed less than a mile before Pete Stevens lifted his paddle from the water and pointed it at a sandy beach a hundred or so yards ahead. On the sand, sleeping, lay a caribou buck.

Breathlessly the men landed their canoes. Pete, rifle in hand, crept toward a bank from which he could look down on the buck. Easton moved upshore to take a stand opposite the caribou, while Wallace remained below it. Inch by inch they closed in.

Awakened by the men’s scent, the buck sprang to its feet and raced into the willows. Wallace and Easton lost sight of it almost immediately and lowered their rifles. But Stevens could hear the animal crashing through the brush. The noise it made seemed to be getting louder. He stood frozen in his spot, rifle butt tight against his shoulder.

Stevens’ pulse was hammering in his head, drowning out all other sounds now. And finally the animal emerged onto a burned-over plateau above the beach. It stood two hundred yards away from Stevens. He steadied his hand, aimed and fired. The buck twitched but otherwise did not move. Stevens raised his aim just a fraction and fired again, and the caribou dropped where it stood.

Pete Stevens let out a whoop that could have been heard a mile away. This was the moment he had been waiting for ever since the trip had begun, his chance to be more than a mere cook and camp servant. A marksman, a hunter. The provider of life-saving meat.

The men wasted no time in building a fire on the shore. A thick tenderloin steak was cut for each of them even before the animal was fully dressed, then set to roasting over the flames. They had had no fresh meat for nearly a month now and all were determined to enjoy every bite of it. The brisket was served for supper that night, the liver fried for breakfast the next morning, the heart and tongue boiled for lunch. Their bellies full for a change, they found the long portages and relentless onslaught of insects more tolerable, if only because, at the end of each march, another serving of fresh meat awaited them, tender and black-crusted and sweet.

But five ravenous men can make short work of a caribou. In no time at all the best cuts of meat had been devoured. Then came several meals of caribou stew, breakfast, lunch and dinner. The stew was hearty and filling at first, then dished out in smaller and smaller portions. The portages grew long again. The hours and miles dragged. Hunger returned and loads grew heavier. Weariness never abated.

Then one evening, after a supper of rice and fishcakes and a last dollop of stew, after the men had gathered in the candlelit tent and all the pipes were going, Wallace startled them by asking, “Who wants to go home?”

They all wanted to go home. On the other hand, none was willing to do so.

“We’ll get another caribou soon,” Richards said.

Stevens nodded enthusiastically. “More deer up ahead.”

But Wallace reminded them of how far they had yet to go. He pointed out that their flour and pork were getting low, the lentils and cornmeal were nearly gone. How many caribou would they have to kill in order to sustain themselves along the way? And,
considering the number of caribou they had seen so far, what were the chances of coming upon more game with any regularity? The odds were against them. Their luck, of which they had had damn little thus far, had all but run out.

“Winter is just around the corner,” he reminded them. “Three of you men should turn back before we get snowed in. I’ll go ahead with one other man and try to finish this thing.”

“What other man?” Stanton asked.

Wallace considered each of their faces, the sunken eyes and hollow cheeks. “Who wants to try to see it through with me?”

Four voices sang out in unison. “I do!”

He could not bring himself to point out their individual shortcomings and failures, though he had already essayed each man’s abilities many times. And he could not bring himself to send a man back if he did not wish to go. He had hoped for volunteers, in fact had expected a couple of the men to jump at his offer. Later, Wallace would write: