THE RACE FOR UNGAVA
Five days to Ungava!
Seated in' the canoe with time to think I could not seem to realise the situation. Indian House Lake! Five days to Ungava! Oh! how I wanted it to be true. Ungava, in spite of hopes and resolves, had seemed always far away, mysterious, and unattainable, but now it had been suddenly thrust forward almost within my reach. If true, this would mean the well-nigh certain achievement of my heart's desire—the completion of my husband's work. Yet there were the rapids, where the skill and judgment of the men were our safeguards. One little miscalculation and it would take but an instant to whelm us in disaster. Still we had come so far on the way with success, surely it would be given to us to reach the goal in safety. But here inevitably thought flew to one who had been infinitely worthy but who had been denied.
Five days to Ungava! and because I so much wished it to be true I was afraid, for the hard things of life will sometimes make cowards of its pilgrims.
The Barren Grounds Water was very fair in the morning sunshine. It was as if, while exploring some great ruin, we had chanced into a secret, hidden chamber, the most splendid of them all, and when after lunch the promised fair wind sprang up, and the canoes with well-filled sails were speeding northward, the lake and its guardian hills became bluer and more beautiful than ever.
Nowhere did we find the lake more than two miles wide. Long points reaching out from either shore cut off the view and seemed to change the course; but in reality they did not, for it was always northward. To right and left there were the hills, now barren altogether, or again with a narrow belt of "greenwoods"—spruce, balsam, tamarack—along the shore. In many places skeleton wigwams marked the site of old Nascaupee camps. The hills on the east in places rose abruptly from the water, but on the west they stood a little back with sand-hills on terraces between and an occasional high, wedge-shaped point of sand and loose rock reached almost halfway across the lake. Often as I looked ahead, the lake seemed to end; but, the distant point passed, it stretched on again into the north till with repetition of this experience, it began to seem as if the end would never come. Streams entered through narrow openings between the hills, or roared down their steep sides. At one point the lake narrowed to about a quarter of a mile in width where the current was very swift. Beyond this point we saw the last caribou of the trip.
It was a three-year-old doe. She stood at the shore watching us curiously as we came towards her. Then stepping daintily in, she began to swim across. We soon caught her up and after playing round her in the canoe for a time the men with shouts of laughter headed her inshore and George, in the bow, leaning over caught her by the tail and we were towed merrily in the wake. Every minute I expected the canoe to turn over. However, George was soon obliged to relinquish his hold for the doe's feet touched bottom and in a moment she was speeding up the steep hillside stopping now and then to look back with wondering frightened eyes at the strange creatures she had so unexpectedly encountered.
Here where the caribou were rare, George River mosquitoes made life miserable for us. The flies, which in the Nascaupee country had been such a trial to me, had not driven the men to the use of their veils except on rare occasions; but now they were being worn even out on the lake where we were still tormented. Backs and hats were brown with the vicious wretches where they would cling waiting for a lull in the wind to swarm about our heads in such numbers that even their war song made one shiver and creep. They were larger by far than any Jersey mosquitoes ever dreamed of being, and their bite was like the touch of a live coal. Sometimes in the tent a continual patter on the roof as they flew against it sounded like a gentle rain.
The foot of the lake was finally reached on Monday evening, August 21st, at sunset, and we went into camp fifty-five to sixty miles from where we had entered it, and within sound of the first pitch in the one hundred and thirty miles of almost continuous rapids over which we were to travel. That night Job had a dream of them. He believed in dreams a little and it troubled him. He thought we were running in rapids which were very difficult, and becoming entrapped in the currents were carried over the brink of a fall. In the morning he told his dream, and the others were warned of danger ahead. My canoe was to lead the way with George in the bow and Job in the stern, while Joe and Gilbert were to follow close behind. When we left our camp an extra paddle was placed within easy reach of each canoe man so that should one snap at a critical moment another could instantly replace it.
This was a new attitude towards the work ahead and as we paddled slowly in the direction of the outlet where the hills drew together, as if making ready to surround and imprison us, my mind was full of vague imaginings concerning the river.