Heart So Hungry (26 page)

On the twentieth they finally hit upon a lake deep enough to carry the canoes. The land all around this lake had been burned over in recent years and the reindeer moss was still brittle and black; it sent up little puffs of ash with every footstep. The few remaining trees were dead—black, broken spears. There were no Indian signs and no sign of game and no sign of the trail to Michikamau. The land was dead and the streams feeding into the lake were dead. They christened this long body of water Lake Desolation.

On August 21 they opened their last bag of flour.

The next day they ate the last of their rice.

They were not yet halfway to their destination, unsure of their location, with nothing but a compass to guide them. Wallace considered all this as he raised a spoonful of rice toward his lips. But then he paused, his eyes on the spoon, the swollen kernels of rice a pale yellow streaked with brown. For the past twenty-two months he had not been able to look at rice without remembering a Sunday in October 1903, one week before Hubbard died.

What a beautiful, clear day that had been, but cold. So cold that Wallace and Hubbard had spent the afternoon wrapped in blankets in front of the fire, talking of food, of course, of chocolate and pies and puddings and French toast, of roast turkeys and baked hams, of fresh apples by the bucketful. George had gone off that day to one of their previous camps in search of any scraps of food they might have left behind, and when he returned at dusk with nothing but a few old caribou bones and two hooves he had dug up he apologized
for letting the men down. But Hubbard had tried to be cheerful as always, had said they could make a bully soup from the bones. So George pounded up the bones and dropped them in a kettle of boiling water with the hooves. The hooves were filled with maggots but nobody suggested they be thrown away. The maggots floated in the water like great, swollen grains of rice, and the bones gave up their gristle and marrow and the hooves released a lovely, greasy aroma that made the men’s mouths water.

“It smells and looks just like rice soup,” Hubbard had said. “My mother used to boil off a pile of ham hocks and put rice in with it. I could never get enough of it.”

“If we had some milk and flour and a little sugar we could make a rice pudding,” George joked.

They drank three cups each of the maggoty broth and then they chewed on the bones until every bit of gristle and hide had been gnawed away. Then George gathered up what was left of the bones and put them back in the pot for the next day’s breakfast. He had salvaged a set of antlers too, and these he broke up and added to the kettle. “They’re still in velvet and nice and greasy on the inside,” he told the others. “I saved the wenastica too”—the digested contents of the caribou’s stomach—“but it smells pretty rotten. What do you fellas think?”

“Put it in tomorrow’s soup,” Hubbard told him, and the next day they ate from the kettle three times, chewed on the same bones again and savoured the strong, rancid taste of the broth. And they joked again about the fat, meaty “rice” they had enjoyed the day before, and all of them wished they could dig up another supply of that rice. Maybe when they got back to New York they would try to get it on the menu at the finer restaurants. “Labrador rice soup with caribou hooves,” Hubbard said.

“Followed by a moss salad with wenastica dressing,” said Wallace.

“Then boiled caribou head,” George said, “with sliced snout.”

“Followed by Labrador rice pudding, of course.”

“Labrador rice could become as popular as caviar.”

“We’ll grow it on rotten meat in our backyards and pack it in tins and sell it for ten dollars an ounce.”

“We’ll be as rich as kings, and all thanks to our Labrador rice.”

But on Thursday, October 15, Hubbard could go no farther. “I got shaky and busted,” he wrote that night in his journal. Three days later he chewed on his last meal, a caribou moccasin. He was alone by then and planned to boil his belt and a pair of cowhide mittens for his next meal, but before he could do this he went to sleep and did not wake up. And now, two years later, Wallace could not even swallow a spoonful of rice, real rice and his last precious bit of it, without having his throat constrict and fight against it, swollen with memory, with guilt and grief and loss.

Mina Hubbard’s expedition, mid-to late August 1905

M
INA’S PARTY CONTINUED PADDLING
from one lake to the next, progressing gradually higher up the interior plateau at whose summit they hoped to find the headwaters of the Naskapi River. She fretted constantly and wondered aloud if this climbing would ever come to an end. Then, on the afternoon of August 10, they reached the northern end of their second lake for the day, and here they were stopped. They could locate no way out of the lake, could find nothing but a tiny stream feeding into it from the north. They scoured the lakeshore for some indication of which way to proceed.

Just when their frustration and confusion were at a peak, when it seemed sure that they had searched every inch of shoreline, they found it: the Indian trail. “What a glad and reassuring discovery it was,” Mina wrote, “for it meant that we were on the Indian highway from Lake Michikamau to George River.”

Shortly after four
P.M.
they started a portage that, to their delight and surprise, lasted only a hundred yards or so. At the end of the hike they came upon yet another lake, but this one had no stream feeding into it, nothing but a wide bog to the north. The men checked it again and again. Only when they were certain did George make the announcement.

“This is it,” he said. “The headwaters of the Naskapi.”

“Are you sure?” Mina asked.

Unable to hold his wide grin in check, George said, “All the water so far, everything south of this bog, which way does it drain?”

“Why, southward, of course.”

They walked to the northern end of the bog. “Now look,” he said.

But she had already looked, had already seen, and Mina’s grin was as irrepressible as his. Because here the water from the bog flowed northward—toward Ungava Bay! After three hundred miles of paddling and poling and portaging they had arrived finally at the summit of the interior plateau, the Height of Land, Labrador’s Great Divide.

Though she was standing at no great altitude, Mina could not escape the feeling that she stood at the top of the world. The land was flat and sparsely wooded and it fell away from her on all sides, most dramatically to the north and south. Unfortunately, because of her profligate use of the camera during the first week of the expedition, when everything she saw seemed exciting and new, she now had only a few films left. But this moment was an auspicious one—perhaps the most auspicious of the entire trip thus far—and she felt well justified in taking two more photographs. For the first she turned to the south, the way we came, she thought, back toward Lake Melville and the cold Atlantic. For the second picture she pivoted 180 degrees. The way we go, she told herself, and shot a photo of the lake just north of them, the gateway to their next three hundred miles.

In camp that night a strange contentment came over her. Not long ago there had been little room in her heart but for grief and
resentment; now a whole other emotion was making room for itself. As always, she attempted to sort out her feelings by writing in her journal.

“How little I had dreamed when setting out on my journey,” she wrote, “that it would prove beautiful and of such compelling interest as I had found it. I had not thought of interest—except that of getting the work done—nor of beauty. How could Labrador be beautiful?” It was, after all, a cruel and inhospitable land. Its temperatures seared your skin during the summer day and froze your flesh on summer nights. Labrador teased you with a bounty of fish and game one week, then tormented you with emptiness the next. Its waters tried to drown you, its land tried to suck you under. At every turn Labrador sent clouds of insects to sting and bite and drive you nearly mad. And what of winter? It could descend on them at any moment, could freeze them in their tracks. They might yet find themselves snowbound, might wake up tomorrow morning to water choked with ice, the trail buried beneath a foot of snow.

Worst of all, Labrador had stolen Mina’s soulmate, had starved her Laddie into submission, had knocked him flat and frozen him while he slept. How could such a place be beautiful?

Even so,

The work, the redemption of her husband’s reputation, required that she continue on, no matter how strong the urge to remain there
at the top of the world. Another long journey lay ahead, but this time they would move with the current rather than against it. The change of flow, however, did not guarantee an easing of their labour. The water would be swifter now, and in many places dangerously fast. Instead of pushing their canoes away from deadly rapids and roaring cataracts, the current would now do its best to draw them to their doom.

The first three hundred miles had been completed by Mina’s party in just under two months. They now had little more than two weeks to complete the last three hundred miles. If they failed, the
Pelican
would depart Ungava Bay without them and they would be stranded there until spring—if, indeed, they even made it that far.

And there was another nagging question to consider. Where was Wallace—ahead or behind? Her accomplishments would mean nothing if he bested her. In that case her Laddie would be doomed to ignominy.

Mina prayed that the rest of the journey would be swift, that the weather would hold awhile longer, not grow too cold nor the wind blow too fiercely. And as for fierceness, what of the Indians? She felt in her bones that her party would soon come across the natives, and none of her group knew what kind of welcome to expect.

So she prayed. She prayed for the safety of her guides and that their food would last and that no one would fall sick and no mistakes would be made. She prayed not for herself but for George and Joe and Job and Gilbert. And always, always, she prayed for Laddie.

The next day, around noon, as the group portaged below the lake atop the divide—which Mina had christened Lake Hubbard—dark clouds rolled across the sky and all but obliterated the sun. For nearly a week the sun hid from them. Violent storms of rain and wind and snow assailed the expedition. At the end of that week, six days after their joy at attaining the Height of Land, they found themselves a mere thirty miles from the site of their accomplishment. The men, who heretofore had shown little of Mina’s anxiety,
grew more and more restless. They attempted to hide their concern from her by speaking in Cree, but she could read the worry on their faces. Their troubled looks had grown increasingly frequent after the fourteenth, the day they came upon an Indian camp recently abandoned—and to which the Indians obviously intended to return soon.

Several uncovered wigwam frames remained erect in this camp, including one large oblong structure with three fireplaces. Lying about in piles were pots and kettles and tubs, plus clothes, piles of fur scraped from deerskins and heaps of broken animal bones. Hanging from a tree were several steel traps and the iron pounders used for breaking bones. On a stage under two deerskins George found a rifle, a shotgun and a piece of dried meat.

Everything was left undisturbed, and soon the party took to the river again. The volume of water seemed to be increasing now, the current growing swifter. Then the rapids began. Mina later described the experience in her book: “… as the little canoe careered wildly down the slope from one lake to the next with, in the beginning, many a scrape on the rocks of the river bed, my nervous system contracted steadily till, at the foot where we slipped out into smooth water again, it felt as if dipped into an astringent.”

Evening in their camp brought little relief from her nervousness. After supper that night the men sat around the campfire and exchanged stories they had heard about various groups of Indians. Some of the stories attested to the Indians’ hospitality toward strangers. But the men also spoke of the Hannah Bay massacre that had taken place in the middle of the previous century, when a band of Indians from the interior, angered that greedy fur traders were depleting the game, had sneaked into the fort at Rupert House on James Bay and killed all the whites. Then they had slaughtered the half-breeds and coastal Indians too because of their friendship with the whites.

All during the conversation Mina busied herself giving her revolver a good cleaning. Joe tapped the ashes from his pipe and
said, “If it were only the Hudson Bay Indians we were coming to, there would be no doubt about the welcome we’d get. But nobody knows about the Naskapi.”

The other men nodded soberly. George, a few moments later, turned to Mina. “You’re giving that revolver a fine rubbing up tonight.”

“Yes,” she replied, and laughed a little. “I’m getting ready for the Naskapi.”

But none of the men returned her laugh. “They would not shoot you,” George told her.

“No?” she said. “Why not?”

“It would be us they would kill if they took the notion. Whatever their conjuror tells them to do, they will do.”

Mina thought George’s remark just a little too grave, and she laughed softly. Again, she laughed alone. “Well, maybe when their conjuror sees me coming at them with my pistol, he’ll tell them to kill me too.”

“No,” Gilbert said, “they would not kill you, Mrs. Hubbard. It would be to keep you at their camp that they would kill us.”

She lay awake through most of that night, a very clean revolver at her side.