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When my friend, Dillon Wallace III, agreed
to accompany me, I lost no time, using aerial survey photos and original
sketch maps from 1903 and 1913, in pinpointing the probable location of
the rock. Wallace's father had reached the site in 1913 the hard way--a
six-week canoe and portage trip by way of the perilous Beaver River.
A bronze marker intended for the stone was lost in the rapids on the way
to the site. At the risk of offending Wallace readers and wilderness paddlers
who might notice, Wallace III and I decided that only the helicopter could
assure a reasonable chance of success in completing our mission in the
time available.
As the late afternoon shadows lengthened
in the Susan valley, a place as wild and unspoiled as in Hubbard's day,
Forgie put down on a flat rock in the middle of the river, about 35 kilometres
above Grand Lake. With the rotor swinging full tilt, Dillon jumped out,
splashed across the boulder-strewn riverbed, and retrieved a plastic canister
we had cached nearby. I began a systematic search through the
black spruce growth close to the bank of the river while Dillon probed
the bush farther inland. |
The
orange thermos flask contained papers we had prepared in advance of the
earlier flight, but were unable to deposit at Hubbard's rock when the search
for it was suddenly terminated after our pilot and crew were ordered to
return to Goose Bay. Forgie lifted off and dropped us in the bush about
two kilometres upstream, close to where I calculated the inscribed boulder
lay.
A
speck of something white caught my eye on the side of a prominent boulder
in a small, caribou-moss clearing a few yards from the river's edge.
Practically speechless at my discovery, I managed in a few minutes to shout
for Dillon as I knelt before the stone and ran my fingers over the all-but-invisible
inscription his father had carved and painted, sixty years before, with
a brush made from a tuft of Gilbert Blake's hair. It was a trace
of white lead in the letter "L" of Hubbard's name that had drawn me to
the stone. We were in the upper reaches of Willie Baikie's trapping
ground of the 1940s, but clearly no trapper or traveller had passed this
way in a very long time--possibly not since 1913.