She made less than thirty yards in the first ten minutes. And that was when the rain began, a sky-emptying downpour that came without warning to steal away what was left of her breath. It came as abruptly as if she had stepped into a hitherto invisible and soundless waterfall. It nearly knocked her to her knees.
She stood there trembling, afraid to move. The rain was so heavy that she could see no more than a few feet ahead. Every drop felt like a bumblebee trying to drive itself into her skull. Maybe this is the land God gave to Cain, she thought.
She had no choice but to keep moving. One step at a time, heel to toe, calf muscles aching. The good thing about the rain was that it muted the sounds of her movement. The bad thing was that it muted and concealed the bear’s movements too, if indeed the thing was a bear and if indeed it was moving. To make matters worse, the rain brought the blackflies out in droves, and they clung to her by the hundreds, sticking in her hair like nettles and crawling over her rain-slicked cheeks.
Another twenty minutes or so and she came at last to the place where she had thought the bear must be. But the little clearing was empty, with no tracks or trampled grass to indicate that a large animal had been there. Had she been fooled by her eyes again? A trick of the light? She was relieved to find the clearing empty but she was utterly drained by the experience of getting down to it, each step an ordeal that strained every muscle. She told herself, I think I won’t bother to mention this to the men.
But where were the men? By the time she reached the bottom of the valley, the rain had lessened from a deluge to a steady downpour. From the shoreline she could see the entire length of the lake, and the canoes were nowhere to be seen. What was keeping them? Was George perhaps trying to teach her a lesson about not going off without him and not paying heed to his weather prognostications?
She stood there awhile longer, alternately worrying and fuming. Meanwhile the rain drummed down and the blackflies chewed away at her. Not long ago, upon spotting the thing she had thought was a bear, she had speculated that she would not care to be anybody’s supper. Well, the bear was gone, poof, just like that, but thanks to the flies she was the plat du jour anyway.
The flies had not bothered her up on the rocky hilltop, she remembered. Not a single one had buzzed her there. And besides, she would be able to see farther from on top. But this time she would climb to a different ridge, the one to the east, because from there she would be able to look back to the falls, around which the men should have portaged by now.
From the top, another twenty minutes later, she could see the mist rising from the falls, could see the rock outcroppings and the path the men would have had to take up and over the ridgeline, but the land all around was unpeopled, no sign of her party. The rain continued to fall but not so hard as to obscure her view. So if the men had been back there anywhere, she would have seen them. It was as if they had vanished from the face of the earth.
And now she truly did feel alone—not so much an intrepid explorer as a stranded one. For just a moment a bubble of panic rose in her chest. But it was nonsense to imagine that the men had disappeared. They were down there somewhere, she simply needed to locate them. And when she did, was she ever going to give them a piece of her mind!
She hiked north along the ridges, which here were nothing but long, crooked lengths of naked rock, weathered to a smooth surface on top but sheared off sharply on both sides. She walked to the very end of the ridgeline, a full mile. From there she could see down to the little bay where, before lunch, the canoes and other gear had been deposited. And where, to her amazement, the men remained.
They had not yet even started across the lake. The canoes had been turned upside down over the packs so as to keep the gear dry. And the men were seated snugly under a tarpaulin stretched over the campfire—smoking their pipes and drinking tea!
Her pulse hammered again, but this time with a flush of anger. What did they think they were doing down there, enjoying themselves, while she was up here getting soaked to the skin and nearly drowned and—
“Take your rubber shirt,” George had told her. “It’s going to rain.” And now she thought she understood; the men were teaching her a lesson in the advisability of taking good advice when it was offered. She imagined that she could see George sitting down there right now, chuckling to himself, all the men joking about the good drenching she was getting, speculating as to how she would never again disregard their advice, never again entertain thoughts of going off like that on her own.
They were teaching her a lesson, that was what it amounted to. And the more she thought about it, the less angry she felt. The men, in choosing to stay put, hadn’t placed her in any danger—not really. She would have encountered the bear, if it was a bear, whether they had moved forward or not. So where was the harm in their little joke? Besides, George had been right about the rain. She would trust him from now on, at least in regard to his weather forecasts.
The men were safe and she was safe, so why be angry? In fact, she felt a rekindling of her fondness for the men. Brothers teased sisters, didn’t they? And that was what the men were to her. It was only natural that they should have a little fun at her expense.
In her book she described her reaction to the situation this way: “I laughed a little and thought: ‘Oh! I know something better than that. This afternoon I shall go where I like and do what I please, like the little fly, and have one good time.’”
To let them know she was safe and sound, no harm done, she fired off two shots from her revolver. As long as the men knew where she was, why not let them enjoy their snuggery and tea while she continued her explorations? She couldn’t get any wetter, could she? So off she went to climb the next ridge—the highest one yet, promising an even more impressive view.
Along the way, she stopped to admire a great grey boulder balanced precariously atop a pile of smaller rocks. What an artist is Nature! she thought. The sculpture was as impressive as any by Rodin. She walked around it for several minutes, studying it from every angle. Then came the pop of two rifle shots. She walked fifty yards to where she could peer down at the cove, and there were the men standing outside the tarpaulin, Joe with a rifle in his hands, all four of them peering up in her direction.
Mina fired her revolver once in reply. She waved, a wide wet smile on her face. “I’m fine!” she shouted, though she knew they would not hear her small voice so far below. “I’m having a grand time!” Then she thought, And now let’s see who has the last laugh. Moving as briskly as was safe, she hurried ahead toward the next ridge, meaning to get there before the men could round her up and corral her again.
To obtain the next ridge she would first have to descend the current one, and the only way down was very steep. Moss, rock and dirt were all slick with rain. She slid and scraped along a wide crevice in the rock, but finally made her way to the bottom. Here lay a bog that had to be crossed. She intended to race across it, but by the third step she was sunk halfway up to her shins in the muck. Only by holding onto the tops of her high moccasins as she retreated could she prevent them from being sucked off with every step.
Back on solid ground, she considered her options. If the bog could not be crossed she would have to go around it. Again she hurried on her way, and laughed to herself to think how terrified the men would be if they could see her heedless pace. They had meant to teach her a lesson but she was having none of that. Despite the rain and the ravenous flies and the squish of her moccasins she was having a wonderful time on her own. A bully time, as Laddie would have said. Maybe there was more than a little of his frontier spirit inside her after all.
She had only begun her ascent of the second ridge when two more rifle shots echoed up from the lake. She grinned and moved even faster. Who’s getting the lesson now? she thought. The flies had once again become desperately thick, so she broke a bough from a spruce tree and waved it back and forth in front of her face as she walked. Her ears and neck were sticky with blood from the insects’ bites, but sh
e asked herself, What do flies matter when you are free? She resolved to go just as far as she could that afternoon, and not to return until somebody caught up with her or darkness fell, whichever came first. She felt confident that at least two of the men would take the gear forward to make camp along the lake at the point where she had originally been directed to meet them. So she had no fear of getting lost. Even in complete darkness she could follow the shoreline back to a campfire. In the meantime she would show George once and for all who was an explorer and who wasn’t. More important, she would prove it to herself.
To her disappointment, she was unable to see the full course of the river from the top of the next ridge unless she crept dangerously close to the precipitous edge, which looked as if it might crumble beneath her weight. So she decided to continue along the ridge as far as she could. There she would surely find a way down to the river and eventually back to camp.
In mid-afternoon, after walking two miles along the ridgetop, she paused to rest. She sat on a rounded boulder and, now that the rain had dwindled to a drizzle, considered the panorama spread out below. I didn’t let a bear stop me, she told herself, whether it was a real bear or not. And I didn’t let the rain stop me, nor the flies nor the bog nor the cliffs. I got here all by myself and I didn’t let anything or anybody stop me from doing it.
She had had many good days in Labrador so far, but this, she decided, was the best of them all. She was tired, but it was the sweetest fatigue she had known in a long time. The only thing she could compare it to was the lovely exhaustion she had felt lying naked and sweaty in a tent with Laddie after a long day of hiking and fishing and frying trout and eating it and sopping up the butter with chunks of bread, and then crawling under a blanket with the man she adored, smelling smoky sweet and loving her so completely. And afterward there had been only the two of them in the whole world and they had had the stars and the loons calling and that was the happiest she had ever felt in her life. And the happiest, she now knew, she would ever feel. They had had dozens of nights like that together, but she would give up all of Labrador and all of America and all of existence just to have one more of those nights with him.
But she never would. Never again. And with this thought the old familiar ache swooped over her, heavy and chilling. She sat there on the rock and all the happiness went out of her. She was cold and tired and hungry and nothing mattered or would ever matter again.
Her reverie was broken by the pop of several gunshots. “The sounds were very faint,” she later wrote,
but followed each other in quick succession. I laughed, and thought I knew what was happening where they came from. The shots seemed to come from the ridge I was on; but for some time I could not see any one. Finally, I caught sight of one of the men. He was waving his arms about wildly, and I could hear very faintly the sound of shooting. Then another figure appeared, and they started running towards me.
Suddenly I became frightened. Perhaps all the excitement was not on my account after all, and I began to wonder if something dreadful had happened. Had any one been hurt, or drowned? I started quickly toward them, but as soon as they were near enough for me to see their faces plainly, I knew that I had been the sole cause of the trouble. It was George and Job. The perspiration was dripping from their faces, which were pale and filled with an expression, the funniest mixture of indignant resentment, anxiety, and relief that could possibly be imagined.
When they came up I smiled at them, but there was not any answering smile.
George stood for a few moments before her, catching his breath. Then he folded his arms across his chest. “Well,” he finally said, and looked at her directly. “I guess you very near done it this time, didn’t you?”
“What did I do?” she asked.
“Why you just about had us crazy!”
Job halted a step behind George. Mina looked to him for a reaction but he was bent double, trying to catch his breath. She faced George again. “Had you crazy? About what?”
“Why, we thought you were lost!”
It made no sense to her. “Didn’t you see me over on that ridge when I fired those shots?”
“Yes we did. And when we got up to the end of the lake we fired two shots, and we thought you would come back then. I went up to the ridge to meet you. And when I saw you weren’t there I was sure you must have went down to the rapids. So I ran down there. And when I didn’t find you there I thought you either fell in the rapids or you got lost somewhere.”
He was so breathless when he spoke, his voice so tight and shaky with fear, that for his sake she tried to soften her tone. But his assumption that she must have done something stupid or careless was annoying. “Didn’t I promise not to go to those rapids?” she asked.
“I know you did. But I thought, when you went up there on that mountain all alone, maybe you would think different and go down to the rapids anyway.”
She kept her voice even and low. “When I got to the end of the lake and I saw you weren’t coming, and the thunderstorm was on its way and the flies were as bad as I’ve ever seen them, I thought I might as well be doing something interesting while I was getting soaked and eaten alive. I wasn’t going to just sit there for who knows how long and be miserable while I waited for you men to show up.”
He nodded, his face still grim. “That’s just what we said to each other. Who would ever think of climbing that hill in a thunderstorm?”
She understood that he did not mean the statement to be derisive, but a strange kind of compliment. She laughed softly.
George’s scowl deepened. “Look at us,” he said, and waved a hand toward Job. “Just look at what you done to us.”
“What have I done?” she asked.
“When I went to meet you and then couldn’t see you on the ridge, and then went to the rapids and couldn’t find you there, we begun to walk faster and faster, and then to run like crazy people. Poor Job, he could hardly speak, he was so worried about you. And neither could I. So there was both of us out of breath and half-crying all the time and not knowing where to look. And now we can never trust you to go off on your own again. We just can’t.”
His last statement was uttered so despairingly, empty of accusation or anger but heavy with disappointment, that it nearly broke her heart. She had no desire to be the cause of such turmoil. On the other hand, she had had a taste of freedom and it had thrilled her. She was not willing to give it all back to the men and resign herself to being mere baggage again.
“I’ll make a bargain with you,” she said. “If I can have someone to go with me whenever I want to climb a hill or do anything else I think is necessary for my work, I promise not to go away alone again. But my escort has to go with me wherever I want to go. He will have to follow wherever I say. Agreed?”
George said, “What if you say you want to go into a rapid?”
“George! For goodness’ sake!”
“All right,” he said. “I suppose you wouldn’t ever say that, would you?”
“You know I wouldn’t. You have to learn to put some trust in me.”
“It’s not that I don’t trust you, missus.”
“You know what can happen out here, I understand. And so do I.” She thought of the bear that had blocked her trail, of the creature that might have been a bear and might have been a shadow, and of how all this trouble had probably started with it. She had been distracted by the bear and lost a lot of time in trying to avoid it, then trying to sneak up on it, only to find that it hadn’t been there at all, a probable phantom, a thing like fear itself, which, when confronted, evaporates into the mist. Before embarking on this trip she had been afraid of so many things. Now here she was telling George he had nothing to worry about, when in her own heart she understood that this very expedition was the result of a fear that would never leave her.
Her smile was small but sincere, a reconciliation. She held out her hand. “Do you accept my proposition?”
Wearily, George smiled too. He placed his ha
nd atop hers. “I accept.”
Job, without so much as a grunt, turned and headed back toward camp. Mina and George followed a minute later.
“And the thing is,” George said, after a while, “you did it all so quick. Why, I was watching you go up on that mountain where you first went, and you were so busy and running about up there, just as busy as a Labrador fly. You looked just like a little girl that was playing at building something. And I thought how nice that you were enjoying yourself. Then the first thing I knew I heard the shots on the other side of the lake. We looked across the lake and couldn’t see anything, and we wondered about those shots and who could be there. Then it wasn’t long at all before Joe said, ‘Look there! Up on the mountain!’”
He shook his head, still shaken. “Then we saw you, but I never thought it was you. I didn’t see how it could be, that you could have gotten there so fast. Then Joe said, ‘Why, it’s a woman!’ And we knew it had to be you. But even then we couldn’t believe it. Who would ever think to look at you and the little short steps you take that you could move so quick? Why, we just couldn’t believe it. And the men got on me for it too. They said they had been on lots of trips before where there were women along, but they never were on a trip where the women didn’t do what they were told.”
She could not help but laugh at the incredulity in his voice, the tone of awe and confusion.
“Oh yes,” he said, as sombre as ever, “you go ahead and laugh if you like. It just shows me that you don’t care a bit about my feelings. Not a bit, do you?”
He had never before expressed his feelings to her so nakedly, and now here he was sounding forlorn and pathetic. Mina knew she shouldn’t laugh, but she couldn’t stop herself. So as not to give him the wrong impression, though, she leaned closer and laid a hand on George’s arm.
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