George was not at all comfortable with this invitation, as his expression conveyed when he relayed the information to Mina. But she said, “Oh, yes indeed!” There would be great interest, she knew, in her observations about how the Naskapi lived. How could she justify being a few minutes from the camp and not investigating it? Besides, just imagine how green Mr. Cabot would be when he read of her success! And if Cabot was green with envy, what colour would Wallace be?
Reluctantly, George acquiesced. He would accompany Mina up the hill. But the rest of the crew must remain at the canoes, not only to protect their remaining provisions and gear but to be ready to depart at a moment’s notice.
As Mina walked toward the camp, flanked by the chief on one side and George on the other, a young Naskapi man did everything he could to catch her eye. He preened and strutted, ran ahead, paused, allowed her to catch up, then ran ahead again, all the while putting himself on display for her. His efforts did not go unnoticed. Mina later described the amusing exhibition:
One of the young men, handsomer than the others, and conscious of the fact, had been watching me throughout with ardent interest. He was not only handsomer than the others, but his leggings were redder. As we walked up towards the camp he went a little ahead, and to one side managing to watch for the impression he evidently expected to make. A little distance from where we landed was a row of bark canoes turned upside down. As we passed them he turned and, to make sure that those red leggings should not fail of their mission, he put his foot up on one of the canoes, pretending, as I passed, to tie his moccasin, the while watching for the effect.
George noticed the blush of her cheeks and her coquettish smile. “It’s probably not a good idea to encourage him,” he said. He laid a light hand on her back and nudged her forward.
Mina couldn’t resist a bit of teasing. “But he’s quite handsome, don’t you think? Perhaps you should tell him I said so.”
She nearly laughed out loud at the look of alarm in George’s eyes. “Don’t worry,” she told him. “He’s not as handsome as you, despite those wonderful red leggings.”
What a wonderful time she was having!
At the top of the hill she could see several miles to the north. The river lay “like a great, broad river guarded on either side by the mountains.” The camp itself consisted of two large wigwams, the poles covered with deerskins sewn together. But the skins were worn and weathered, much like the faces of the Naskapi who stood around the wigwams, watching her approach:
Here the younger women and the children were waiting, and some of them had donned their best attire for the occasion of the strangers’ visit. Their dresses were of cotton and woolen goods. Few wore skin clothes, and those who did had on a rather long skin shirt with hood attached, but under the shirt were numerous cloth garments. Only the old men and little children were dressed altogether in skins. … The faces here were not bright and happy looking as at the Montagnais camp. Nearly all were sad and wistful. … Even the little children’s faces were sad and old in expression. …
Initially the women hung back from Mina, too shy to speak to her. She wondered how best to approach them. Then she spotted a young mother holding a baby bundled in a blanket. “I stepped towards her,” she wrote, “and touching the little bundle I spoke to her of her child and she held it so that I might see its face. It was a very young baby, born only the day before, I learned later, and the mother herself looked little more than a child. Her face was pale, and she looked weak and sick. Though she held her child towards me there was no lighting up of the face, no sign of responsive interest.”
Mina took a few photographs of the group and did her best to communicate by gesture with the women who crowded around her. It wasn’t long before George’s restlessness got the better of him. He motioned to her that they should return to the canoes.
“A while longer,” she said. “We don’t have to hurry now, do we?”
Considering how desperate the Naskapi were, how bereft of winter provisions, George did not trust their geniality to last forever. But he did not want to frighten Mina unnecessarily, so instead he told her, “We don’t know about the Pelican. It might come early. Even an hour’s delay on our part could make us miss it.”
The prospect of gliding triumphantly into Ungava only to see the Pelican steaming off, irretrievable, was all the encouragement Mina needed. Quickly she made her goodbyes. Most of the Indians walked as far as the edge of the hill with her and George.
“Send us a fair wind,” George told them.
“Yes,” the chief assured him. “A fair wind all the way.”
Minutes later, feeling a bit light-headed from the events of the past hour, Mina again seated herself in the centre of the canoe. From there she looked back up the hillside. The Naskapi were standing just as she and George had left them, looking still and sombre. How she regretted that she had not been able to give them more! Wistfully, she took out her handkerchief and waved it back and forth over her head. In an instant the hillside blossomed with colour and movement as the women slipped off their shawls and kerchiefs and waved them in response.
After George shoved the canoe out into the river again and the rhythmic slap and dip of paddles began, Mina felt like crying. She had done so much she had never expected to do. Michikamau. The Height of Land. The Montagnais. The Naskapi. And soon, in just five short days, Ungava. She should have been exultant, but instead she felt overwhelmed with sorrow.
What she had thought unattainable was now close at hand. Why could she not rejoice? Because she was not worthy of the accomplishments. The one who had been worthy had been denied, stymied at every turn, while her way had been easy in comparison. While Laddie had fully expected to succeed, she had fully expected to fail, had even hoped, in her darkest moments, to experience the same hardships, the same fate, as had befallen him.
George kept a close eye on her. He seemed to understand what she was thinking. He too was experiencing the bittersweet taste of their success. He too felt the guilt that was eating away at her.
But young Gilbert Blake’s enthusiasm remained untainted. “On to Ungava!” he cried out.
George flinched. To his mind the moment deserved, at the least, humility. Still, he could not chide the boy for brimming with youthful energy. He only said, “We have to make it through the rapids yet.”
“Will they be bad?” Mina asked.
“As bad as any we’ve seen so far.”
She did not know if she was more frightened or excited by the prospect.
Indian House Lake glittered calm and serene in the morning sunshine, and the pull of the current made paddling easy. After lunch a gentle breeze blew up from the south, so George called for the sails to be rigged and soon the canoes were speeding along gracefully, pushed by wind and pulled by current.
In most places the lake appeared to be approximately two miles wide. Occasionally a wedge of sand stretched into the water from one shore or another, and frequently a stream came pouring down from the hills. In the afternoon the eastern and western shores closed toward one another, and where the lake was only a quarter-mile wide the party saw their last caribou of the trip, a single animal walking along the shore on their right.
“It’s a female,” George said.
Joe agreed. “Maybe three years old or so.”
“Let’s take the sails down and see if we can get close to it.”
The doe stood at the water’s edge some fifty yards ahead, alert and watching as the canoes drew closer. Mina said, “You’re not going to shoot it, are you? Surely we don’t need the meat now.”
“We just want to play with it,” George told her.
The canoes were kept in the shallows as they continued their approach. Only at the last minute did the caribou show any fear at all, and even then it seemed not the least bit skittish. Almost daintily it stepped into the water and started to swim toward the opposite shore.
“Now!” George told the others. “Paddle hard!”
They
came toward the caribou at an angle, cutting it off. The moment the doe reversed direction, so did one of the canoes, with George and Job herding the caribou from the east, Gilbert and Joe from the west. Laughing and shouting directions at one another, the men set the doe on a zigzag course northward up the lake.
“Oh, please stop tormenting her!” Mina cried.
George, in the bow, told Job, “Get me up as close as you can.” Job did so. And a minute later George leaned forward as far as he could, reached into the water and seized the caribou by her tail. Mina felt the canoe being jerked forward. The other men cheered. Job, content to be towed all the way to Ungava, laid his paddle across his lap, leaned back, crossed his arms and grinned like a sultan.
The men thought it a grand thing for them to be towed by a wild animal. Mina did not. And she knew that the doe did not think so either. But she was reluctant to order George to let go. Then the doe turned west, cutting across the bow of the other canoe, refusing to be turned northward again. A couple of minutes later the doe’s feet touched bottom and dug in hard, jerking the canoe along, and George was forced to relinquish his prize or be dragged up onto the rocks. The caribou bolted halfway up a steep hillside before pausing to look back.
“It thinks it escaped with its life,” Joe said.
In a girlish falsetto Gilbert asked, “Oh, my my! What was that thing had ahold of me? Oh, my, but it was heavy!”
Only Mina did not laugh. “Someday something might grab you by the tail,” she told them, “and maybe then you will understand how the poor thing felt.”
For a few moments the men were silent. Then an explosion of laughter echoed over the lake.
“Current pull harder and harder,” Job told them. His face seemed exceedingly pale that morning, August 22, and he did not attack his breakfast as he usually did but held the tin plate balanced on his knees, his gaze going off over the campfire and into the mist on the river. His eyes, Mina thought, looked like those of the caribou George had caught by the tail—glazed with fear.
“We try slow down but no good,” he continued, speaking haltingly now, recounting his dream. “Try get ashore but current too strong.”
Only Mina was not troubled by the dream. What troubled her was the deadly seriousness with which the other men sat listening.
“Water get faster and faster. River louder and louder. Then no water up ahead. Only sky up ahead. We paddle like crazy but it no good. Bert go over edge first, canoe tippin’ down and him slidin’ over with it. Then I go out behind him. Then George and Joe and the missus come too. We all go over and down. Long, long way down. We still fallin’ when I wake up.”
He had said more in one minute than he normally said in a day. And the impact of his words left all the men with no appetite, only a sick feeling in the pits of their stomachs.
Mina tried to calm their fears. “You only dreamed of the rapids because you could hear them from your tent, Job. And because the Naskapi told us to be careful of them.”
Gilbert said, “Dreams tell the future, missus.”
She turned to George for some assistance in the matter, but he too looked stricken. “Well,” she finally said, “I think a dream like Job’s is meant to warn us of a possibility, not a certainty. It only means we should be exceedingly careful from now on. As we will be.”
As a precaution, that day the men made certain not to re-create the specifics of Job’s dream. Instead of riding with Gilbert, as he had in the dream, Job rode in the stern of Mina’s canoe, with George in the bow seat. The other canoe, which usually took the lead, followed behind. Each man kept his foot atop an extra paddle, lest one break or be lost in heavy water.
Even so, from their first moments on the river that morning it seemed likely that Job’s dream might come true. The river, which had already been dark, now seemed the colour of ink. They could not see the bottom nor pick out boulders submerged only a few inches below the surface. Also, the slope of the river steepened sharply, and the rapids swelled in both quantity and amplitude.
Nor was there any break in the rapids. One chute led to the next one, with at most a few moments of smooth water in between. The men almost never paddled to increase their speed but employed their oars as rudders and as drags to slow them down. The water foamed and churned around standing boulders, heaved and leapt over submerged ones.
After every run the canoes were pulled ashore so that the party could catch their breath and quiet the trembling in their limbs. Mina considered proposing that they spend more time portaging, but she knew how unpredictable were the arrival and departure of any ships to the remote posts, and even more than she feared the rapids she feared missing the Pelican.
So they continued on. Job stood in the stern of Mina’s canoe, shouting directions over the roar of the river while George struggled with his paddle to turn the canoe aside from a boulder rushing toward them. Hour after hour it continued, day after day. All the while, Mina sat helplessly in the centre seat, hunkered low and gripping her knees so that she would not lurch to the side and throw the entire canoe off balance.
It was stressful work for all of them. So stressful that, though they were making good time and covering more miles per hour than ever before, their muscles ached, especially in the neck and arms and shoulders, and they cut each day short, for a longer night was needed to ease the strain of even a few hours on such demanding water. And from the night of the twenty-fourth on they all had troubling dreams, including Mina—dreams of tumbling over cataracts and plunging into black, frigid pools, of being driven down into an icy, bottomless river. They came to breakfast with blank stares and wan expressions, all wondering to themselves if today would be the day their luck ran out.
Yet disaster, as it often does, seemed to come out of nowhere. The set of rapids they were travelling that morning was no worse than others they had run, but the party was exhausted by now, depleted by the constant strain. Job, standing in the stern, was the first to notice the black boulder coming toward them, charging like a bull submerged under the foam. For a moment he could not make up his mind whether to take the canoe to the right or the left of it, and he shouted his directions to George an instant too late. The right side of the canoe banged against the rock, sending the stern lurching toward the centre of the river. Job caught hold of the gunwale just in time to keep from being ejected, and plunked down heavily on the seat. But the canoe was turned broadside in the current, and a moment later the bow slammed against a rock protruding from shore. The stern turned downriver, but not far—only far enough to wedge itself against another boulder. With the canoe turned nearly perpendicular to the rushing water and locked in place at both ends, the waves banged against the side one after another, violently bucking the craft and its passengers up and down.
Mina, gasping from the cold shock of each surge as it slammed against the canoe and splashed over her, could barely get the words out to shout, “What should I do?”
“Don’t move!” George answered.
Gingerly he picked a coil of rope off the bottom of the canoe and looped it around his neck. Then, moving forward an inch at a time, he managed to grab hold of the long, pointed rock protruding into the river and, with fingertips digging in, straining for purchase on the slippery surface, he pulled himself up out of the canoe and onto a precarious ledge. From there he leaned over awkwardly, looking as if he might fall into the water at any moment, and secured the rope to an eye-hook on the bow.
Meanwhile Job was moving too, another rope in hand, crawling bit by bit over the stern, stretching out his body until he could reach an eye-hook mounted at his end. He lay half-turned onto his side so that his back was braced against the boulder, with water pouring over him front and back. After securing his line he crawled back into the canoe, then very delicately crept past Mina to the bow and climbed onto the pointed rock beside George.
With the men’s weight out of the boat, the bucking, lurching motion became even more violent. Mina sat huddled tight, every breath a gasp. She prayed t
hat she would not be told to climb out of the canoe too; she doubted that she could make her body move.
But no, she was told to sit tight. Soon George and Job positioned themselves along the edge of the boulder. They pulled the bow and stern lines taut, then lifted the front end of the canoe clear of its impediment. This allowed the current to turn the bow downstream again, and gradually the stern slid free as well. Now Job took hold of both lines and, grimacing with the effort, held the canoe in place while George eased himself onto his seat and took up his paddle. Job held the ropes a moment longer, then suddenly tossed both into the canoe and, with an alacrity Mina could only marvel at, dropped down onto his seat as they shot forward down the river.
The incident had a strangely salubrious effect on all the men, especially Job. He viewed the near disaster as the one predicted by his dream, and now it was behind him, no harm done. At supper that night, despite a freezing blast of wind that had the party huddling close to the whipping flames of their campfire, he laughed and ate heartily and, for the first time all week, played a few songs on his mouth organ.
Mina found herself in a more contemplative mood. Alone in her tent that night, she wrote:
Fire in an open place tonight, and I do not like to go out to supper. It is so cold. Thinking now we may possibly get to the Post day after tomorrow. … All feel that we may have good hope of catching the steamer. Perhaps we shall get to tide water tomorrow. There have been signs of porcupine along the way today, and one standing wigwam. There is one big bed of moss berries … right at my tent door tonight. So strange, almost unbelievable, to think we are coming so near to Ungava. I begin to realize that I have never actually counted on being able to get here.
Dillon Wallace’s expedition, late August through mid-September 1905
Heart So Hungry Page 22