Heart So Hungry Read Free Page B

leapt to his feet, unable to sit still any longer. He searched the ground for a good piece of wood, found a log nearly three feet long, heaved it onto the fire. Then, even as he continued to speak, he poked and prodded at the log with a long stick, sending one swirl of embers after another into the night sky. Perhaps he did not view those dancing sparks as fireworks tohis words, but Wallace did. It was as if the sparks were coming from Hubbard himself, an emanation of his passion.
    “Just think of it!” he said. “A great unknown land right at our fingertips! I’ve been to the edge of Labrador already for that article I did on the Montagnais trappers. But what I want is to get into the really wild country. I want to have the same experience the old fellas had when they first opened up the very country where we now sit.”
    Wallace nodded and sucked on his pipe. He did not wish to smile too broadly lest Hubbard suspect he was amused by these ambitions. “Just how would we go about it?” he asked.
    “What I propose is to set off north across Grand Lake by canoe. Grand Lake is some forty miles long. You don’t have to go much beyond it, only as far as the Naskapi River, to be into virgin territory. Land no white man has ever seen, Wallace. And I mean to claim a piece of the unknown, just as Boone and Crockett and all the others did before us. Just as Peary is doing. Man, I’ve been dreaming about this kind of thing all my life. And now—don’t ask me to explain it because I don’t think I can—but now, at last, I know that Labrador is the place for me. And furthermore, I know without a doubt that we can pull it off.”
    Wallace lifted his pipe away from his mouth. He considered the crackling log, the sputter of boiling sap. “I’m not as confident as you are that I would be up to such an adventure.”
    “You say that every time I suggest another outing. But you always come with me, don’t you? Last time, you said you really didn’t have time any more for these trips of ours, yet here you sit, looking happy as a clam.”
    “True enough,” Wallace admitted. “But this isn’t Labrador.”
    Hubbard jabbed at the fire. Sparks shot into the air. “I thought my Lake St. John trip might be enough for me.” He smiled wistfully. The scent of wood smoke always filled him with a strange longing. “And for a minute or two, it was. But as I stood there gazing everdeeper into Labrador
—looking into the unknown, Wallace! Can you imagine what that was like
?—I knew then that the mere beginning of the unknown would never be sufficient. I have to go. I have no choice but to do it.”
    He sat motionless for a minute or two, his gaze going over the fire and beyond Wallace, into the unfathomable darkness.
    He spoke softly now. “The city is like a poison for me. Sure, I go there every day, I do my work, same as everybody else. But I’m not alive there. Not the way I am out here. That’s why we make these trips, isn’t it? To make us feel alive again? I challenge you to tell me it’s not the same with you, because I know it is. Back at the office you feel like little more than a machine, don’t you? But out here with the elements, out here where you have to catch your food and blaze your own trail, don’t you feel like more of a man than at any other time? Really, Wallace, isn’t that why you keep coming back for more?”
    And there it was, in words too bald for Wallace to articulate himself, words too honest for him to utter. Since his wife’s death he had tried to numb himself with work, yes, but he did not love the work any more, he did not awaken to it each morning with a sense of renewal and expectation. He threw himself into it because it deadened him.
    But out here … How good he had felt traipsing through the snow this afternoon. These expeditions were tiring, yes, but the exhaustion was satisfying somehow, far more satisfying than the dull fatigue of office work could ever be. Here every morning he