The Reverend Dr. Sawyer, who these past months had been doing his utmost to comfort Mina, waited in the open beside Leon’s grave, several yards lower on the hill. His carriage, an economical Dearborn, was parked along the side of the road. Mina could see the sorrel’s breath each time the mare snorted, could see her own exhalations one white puff after another. She wondered if that was what the soul looked like when it floated free from the body, a wisp of breath invisible in an instant, suddenly freed.
Finally there came the sound of another carriage, the muted clop of hooves on snowy ground. Mina peeked around the tree. A hack, rented in Williamstown, pulled up behind Dr. Sawyer’s carriage. A moment later George Elson climbed out, dressed in his brown, rough clothes, the heavy trousers and jacket. His hands and head were bare. He came straight up the hill toward Dr. Sawyer. And that was one of the things Mina liked most about George, the way he could take one glance at a situation, size it up, then act decisively and without hesitation.
He came to the graveside and shook Dr. Sawyer’s hand. The reverend spoke briefly. George turned just enough to look uphill toward the fir tree, and nodded once. But before walking up to meet her he faced the grave, stood there motionless. And Mina was grateful for that as well, that George felt the need for a few moments with her Laddie. The two men had obviously been very fond of one another.
Eventually George came up the hill and walked around to her side of the tree. She pulled both hands from the muff and grasped his hand in hers. “Thank you so much for coming,” she said.
“Thank you for sending the ticket money.”
She could feel the strength in his hand, the cold, hard, callused palm. Her hands seemed tiny in comparison, he thought, and so warm. Softer than any woman’s hand on his had ever been. Back home he could never dare to hold a white woman’s hand in a public place, but here in the cemetery, with the reverend tactfully averting his gaze, George allowed himself to savour her touch.
“Don’t you want to know why I asked you to come all this way again?” she asked.
“I’m sure you’ll tell me when you’re ready to.”
“I want you to write something for me,” she said.
Something like panic tightened his throat. “I don’t write all that good, missus.”
“I don’t want it to be fancy or writerly. I want it in your own words.”
The way she smiled up at him and stood so close, that look of trust in her eyes, it was all very unsettling for George. He drew his hands away and slipped them into his pockets. “I’ll do my best for you.”
“What I want,” she told him, “is for you to tell the story of what happened up there. I want you to write it all down for me, everything you can remember. You can stay with Dr. Sawyer while you work on it. You will be paid for your time, of course.”
He did not know how to respond to this. Initially he had assumed that she wanted him to write a letter of some kind, a page or two. But now it seemed she intended for him to write about the entire trip, every arduous day of it. He doubted he was up to such a task.
“I am writing a book about the expedition,” she said, “based on Mr. Hubbard’s journal. And I would like very much to include your information as well.”
“The way I write ain’t fit for a book,” he told her.
“It will be fine, George, trust me. Between Mr. Hubbard’s notes and your remembrance I will be able to provide a complete and honest accounting.”
Something about the way she emphasized honest troubled him.
“And when the book is published, you will be in it too. How will your friends back home like that?”
He could scarcely guess how his friends would react.
“And I have something else to ask you as well,” she said. “There is something important I’ve been trying to understand.”
He said nothing, only waited.
“It concerns Mr. Wallace.”
Aha, George thought. But he said not a word.
“Can you tell me now,” she asked, “just as you remember it, about the day Mr. Wallace was found? After you and he discovered the flour, I mean, and he then headed back toward camp with it?”
“I wasn’t with him then,” George said. “So I don’t know what all I can tell you.”
“But you know the way it happened.”
“I know what Duncan and Donald and Allen told me about it.”
“Then that’s what I want to hear.”
“What part exactly?”
“What I am most curious about is how close Mr. Wallace got to the tent. What was his nearest distance to it, I mean.”
“Well, from what the fellas say, maybe two hundred yards or so.”
“He didn’t walk past it in the night, possibly?”
“Oh, I don’t think so, no. The fellas said that after they found him and got him settled by the fire, then they went looking for the tent themselves, Donald and Allen did, following Mr. Wallace’s tracks, more or less. And what they told me is that those tracks come to a stop somewhere about two hundred yards shy of the tent.”
“They simply came to a stop?” she asked. “The tracks didn’t go all around the tent in a circle, or anything like that?”
“Not from what I was told, they didn’t.”
“Tell me exactly, George. Exactly what did the tracks suggest to Donald and Allen?”
“Well,” George said, feeling the cold now, a shiver in his spine, “from what the boys said, it looked to them like Mr. Wallace just come to a stop. He maybe stood there awhile, but that’s something you can’t tell from tracks most of the time. But then it looked like he’d just turned around and come back a ways and made himself a little camp.”
“What was his camp like when they found it?”
“Well, he had a nice fire going, they said. And a nice place to lay down where he’d piled up some pine branches.”
“And he was able to walk all right?”
“He was cold and all, and fairly weak from not eating. But they said he walked into their camp with them just fine.” Mina nodded. She was no longer smiling.
“That’s what the boys told me anyways,” he said. “We’ve talked about it quite a bit since then and that’s always the way they tell it.”
“Would it surprise you to know that Mr. Wallace is telling a different story?”
“He is?”
“According to his latest version, he became so delirious that he walked past the tent without seeing it. He says he camped within a stone’s throw of the tent and spent his last hours walking in circles, completely out of his senses, until his feet were so frozen he could walk no farther. That’s the story he’s telling now. Though in the letter to his sister, the one he wrote from Labrador, he said something different. He said then that when he felt the search was hopeless, he gave up and turned toward Grand Lake. Does it surprise you that his story has changed?”
“I suppose it does,” George said. “Who’s he telling this new story to—the newspapers?”
“He has put it into a book. The book I commissioned him to write. But it is filled with exaggerations and untruths, George. You would be ashamed of some of the things he says, I’m sure. That is why we must write an honest account of what took place up there. You will help me, won’t you?”
He said what he always said. “I’ll do the best I can.”
She smiled and reached for his hand again. “And we must be careful to tell no one about our plans. If word gets out that you are staying in town, the newspapers will surely be after you for an interview. It is important that you refuse to speak with them. Will you agree?”
It seemed a small thing to George to keep his mouth shut on the matter, the least of her requests. He would not be comfortable telling a lie but he was used to being stingy with his words. The best course of action, he decided, was to write down the story just as quickly as he could, then get back to Missanabie before the local folk, especially Mr. Wallace, even knew he had been in town.
Mina and George met
several times over the next two weeks, always in the privacy of Dr. Sawyer’s home. Early on it was decided that George’s narrative should focus on the final days of the expedition. “Those are the important days,” Mina told him. By which George understood her to mean the days when Wallace’s behaviour was in question.
George resolved to be scrupulously honest in what he wrote, putting down the events exactly as he remembered them. And apparently that was what Mina expected of him, for each time she reviewed his progress she praised his memory and his eye for detail. She never told him what to write nor suggested he employ a different word or phrase than the one he had chosen. She did sometimes show him the proper spelling for a word, or suggest where to place a comma or the even more mysterious dash or semicolon. And he was eager for the assistance. He had no wish to appear illiterate.
She was especially touched by those entries that spoke of Laddie’s affection for George. “Mr. Hubbard tells me he will get a room for me in New York. He again that night asked me to stay with him a couple of months in Congers before I go home to Missanabie, and also to pay him a visit real often, and also that he would never go out doing any travelling without me.”
Tears sprang to her eyes and her breath grew short when she read of the men’s hardship, and how, on October 11, they found some old caribou bones. “The bones were full of maggots, and when it boiled for some time the maggots would boil out. It just looked like it had been a little rice in it. We drunk it up, maggots and all. It was pretty high, but found it good. Nothing was too bad for us to eat.”
The following day, a “fine day,” brought no relief from their hunger. “We ate one of Mr. Hubbard’s old moccasins, made out of caribou skin, that he made himself. We boiled it in the frying pan, till it got kind of soft, and we shared it in three parts.”
But most affecting of all was George’s passage for October 16, the day salvation came so close to hand. The three men had trudged to a stream where, weeks earlier, they had caught several fish. Now the stream was dry. But then, as if by miracle, a caribou came walking toward them.
We all fell flat on the ground, but he was on the lee side of us and soon found out we were there. He stood—behind some little trees and had his head up looking towards where we were, and all of a sudden he was gone, and we didn’t have the chance to fire. I got up. A swamp I knew of. I made for that swamp thinking I would cut across him. I tried to run, yet I was very, very weak. Oh! how hard I tried to run. But when I got out there he was across on the other side. I was away for some time, yet when I came to the boys, they were still lain in the same way, and their faces to the ground, and did not move till I spoke to them.
So much of what George wrote brought tears to Mina’s eyes. She had thought she must surely be empty of tears by now, but still they came. And each time George witnessed this, whether her eyes merely glistened or the tears ran freely over her cheeks, he ached for her. He ached with a deep, bruising pain that went all the way through him. He ached with the knowledge that a bit of luck here or there might have made all the difference for Mr. Hubbard, but that George, for all his trying, had never been able to force that luck upon them. He felt responsible for all the mistakes, though none of the decisions had rested with him. But Mina never accused him of failing her husband, never once allowed him to assume any blame.
During Christmas dinner at Dr. Sawyer’s, after the good pastor’s excruciatingly long blessing of the food, Mina insisted on thanking the Lord personally, not just for the pastor’s hospitality but for George’s friendship and loyalty. George got so choked up by her words that for the next ten minutes he was unable to speak without a quiver in his voice.
After Christmas, George did not see Mina again for several days. It was late in the first week of 1905 when she finally called on him to inquire if the narrative was finished. But from the very first minute of this meeting he suspected that her mind was on something other than his manuscript. He was sure he detected a change in her, a quality of inner repose. He thought, she seems like she’s made her mind up about something.
She read his new pages and pronounced them very fine. But afterward she sat with the pages on her lap as she gazed into the fireplace. The pastor had laid on several logs of applewood, and the room was warm and smelled vaguely of autumn. And there was such a stillness to Mina that day; George was mystified. Until finally she turned to him and spoke. The calmness of her voice unsettled him as much as the words.
“I have decided to go to Labrador, George. And I would like very much for you to go there with me.”
At first he felt dizzied by her remarks, cold-cocked by an unexpected blow. The pastor’s parlour suddenly shrank and darkened and began to spin. He had nearly died in Labrador! Mr. Hubbard had died! Why would George, or anyone, for that matter, ever wish to go back?
“Mr. Wallace, as you know, has already announced his intention of fulfilling my husband’s plan. But I am a Hubbard and he is not, and if any name is to be attached to the successful completion of that journey, it shall be my husband’s name.”
“Missus,” George began, having no idea what he would say, “it can be a miserable place.”
“But you know the way now, don’t you? You’ve seen where the Naskapi enters Grand Lake?”
“That’s just the beginning of the trip. There’s another six hundred miles—”
“Moreover,” she said, smiling serenely, “we will complete Mr. Hubbard’s mission exactly as he planned it. Mr. Wallace intends to outfit his expedition more amply and to turn it into what he calls a scientific expedition. He has even persuaded Outing to support his efforts. Do you not see the ignominy in this, George? The disrespect to my husband?”
What could he say? It was unthinkable that he, a half-breed, an unmarried man, should accompany her into the wilderness. And anyway, she was completely inexperienced in the trials they would face. It was unheard of for a woman to embark on such an adventure—a white woman accompanied by a half-breed and, by necessity, a few other males? It was scandalous. And it was inconceivable that he could agree to this plan.
When he looked at her he could see the flames from the fireplace dancing in her eyes. Softly she told him, “I want you to think about the consequences, George, if we do not go to Labrador. They will be far more severe, I think, than if we go.”
“How’s that, missus?” he managed to ask.
“If Mr. Wallace completes his journey, everyone will believe the lies he has written. They will believe that the first expedition failed because of my husband. That it was his own shortcomings—not the weather nor the unusual absence of game nor even simple bad luck, but his personal shortcomings—that brought about his death. Is that what you believe, George?”
“No,” he said. “It was all those other things.”
“Precisely. But we are the only people who can prove that. Mr. Wallace will not. His only ambition is to prove himself the better man.”
Never before had George felt such a sense of suffocation. He felt utterly boxed in by her logic. Nor did he possess the words to refute her, or the strength to try. It would be easier to die in Labrador, he decided, than to argue with her.
“When did you figure on leaving?” he asked.
“In June,” she told him. “Just as Mr. Hubbard originally planned.”
All through the winter and spring they kept their secret. It was harder than George had thought it would be, especially after he returned to Missanabie at the end of January and went back to working for Mr. King at the Hudson’s Bay Company. Offers came in requesting his services as a guide for hunting and fishing excursions planned for the summer, but he turned them all down as politely as he could. His friends wanted to know why. You got something against making easy money?
What could he say? The art of deceit eluded him. “I’ve had my fill of that kind of work for a while, I guess.” And it was true, as far as it went. He certainly had had his fill of the kind of work that could starve a man, steal his strength, rob him of his life. His
closest friends, those who knew how the experience with Leonidas Hubbard had changed George, thought they understood. But others continued to badger him. Here he was a famous man, written up in papers from St. John’s to New York City. What’s the matter, George? Afraid to go into the bush again?
Plus there were all those letters from Mrs. Hubbard to explain. In a place like Missanabie, if a letter arrived from the States, everybody in town soon knew about it. Mina wrote frequently to tell George about the plans she was making, the provisions she had ordered, the contacts she had made with a publisher eager for a book about her expedition. Now and then she included a newspaper clipping about Wallace’s preparations. From these George learned of Wallace’s attempt to give his trip the imprimatur of science. He had signed on a young geologist to help him scout the area for mineral deposits, a young forestry student and an Ojibway guide.
Mina also wrote to ask George’s advice. Should she order this or that? How many of each? Could he fill out the crew with a couple of good men who could be counted on to hold their tongues about the plans?
She wrote to inform him that certain people, the necessary people, had been informed of her expedition—friends of hers or Mr. Hubbard’s who could be relied upon for financial support. But she had been careful to tell them something less than the full truth. A dissimulation, yes, but unavoidable. She had told them that she planned to visit Labrador for the purpose of gathering information for her book about Mr. Hubbard, that she would travel only as far as the North West River Post to conduct interviews. She seemed, in her letters, to take some delight in this charade, and in the admonishment of her friends that even a modest foray into that brutal peninsula might well prove the undoing of such a delicate lady.
But George’s worst moment came the day he received a letter from Dillon Wallace, a letter he had been expecting. He and Wallace had not been what George would have called friends, had never shared the depth of affection and respect George had had with Mr. Hubbard. In fact, there had been times on the trail when Wallace’s bossy tone had rubbed George the wrong way. Even so, it always made sense that Wallace would want George to accompany him on this second journey. After all, George now knew as much about the interior as any man. Moreover, he and Wallace had lived through the ordeal together, and that fact alone created a bond between them.
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