Wilfred shook his head. “That’s over a thousand miles!” he exclaimed.
George nodded. “I know, and Pomiuk’s thigh was not properly healed. In fact, as I understand it, no one even took him to a doctor to have it looked at when the accident happened.”
“So where is the boy now? He must be about thirteen,” Wilfred said.
“That’s the question that the Reverend Carpenter wants answered. Apparently he got one letter that Pomiuk had dictated to a passing hunter, but nothing more. So he wrote to the Hudson Bay Company, asking if they had heard anything of him. I would have said no until a week ago, when a fur trapper came in and told me that a lad who had been south was lying sick—actually dying, he said—in a tent about ten miles farther up the fjord. It sounds like it could be Pomiuk, and I’d find some way to get the letter to him if I could be sure it were him.”
“How strange it must have been for the Eskimos to go to Chicago and be stared at like animals in a zoo. And then for one of them not to be taken care of properly when he got sick. That’s inexcusable!” Wilfred said.
Later that night, even though Wilfred lay in a comfortable bed for the first time in weeks, he could not sleep. He could not get Pomiuk out of his mind. He prayed off and on through the night that God would guide him to the boy so that he could help him. In the morning he put a challenge to George.
“You say you think the boy is ten miles farther up the fjord. Why don’t we take the Sir Donald up there and see if we can find him. I may be able to do something for him, and you can report back that you delivered the letter.”
“It’s not something I would do alone,” George replied, “but I have heard so many stories of your escapades that I think I’ll be safe with you. All right, let’s do it together.”
By lunchtime the Sir Donald was steaming up the fjord. Wilfred and George stood on deck taking turns using the eyeglass to scan the boulders strewn at the bottom of the rocky cliffs. Some of these boulders were twenty feet high, and Wilfred began to feel like he was looking for a needle in a haystack. The skin tent they were looking for would be well camouflaged against the grayness of the shore, and if it had been pitched on the leeward side of a boulder, they would never see it. Still, as he prayed, Wilfred felt that they should keep looking. He wasn’t sure why it was so important to find one dying Eskimo boy, but deep down he knew it was.
The water was calm, and so when night fell, Wilfred anchored the Sir Donald close to shore and waited for first light to continue the search.
The next day George and Wilfred took a canoe ashore and climbed one of the cliffs to get a better look at what lay around them. From the cliff top Wilfred scanned the scene, taking in a huge waterfall that was cascading down a far-off cliff. As he looked, his eye rested on a tiny, pointed object near the waterfall. He adjusted the focus on his spyglass. Sure enough, it was a tent.
Jubilantly the two men clambered over to it and, after yelling a greeting, lifted the tent flap. They smelled Pomiuk before they saw him. He was covered with an old reindeer skin, and his own skin was yellow and his face drawn in pain. His hazel eyes were fixed in fear on the two visitors who had appeared from nowhere.
A woman who was in the tent with the boy sat motionless, also staring at the men. George exchanged a few words with them and nodded at Wilfred. “Yes, he is the boy we are looking for. He hasn’t moved for a week, and he won’t eat.”
Slowly Wilfred crawled over to the boy and pulled back the reindeer skin. Pomiuk wore a fur jacket, but his bottom half was bare. Gaping wounds covered his thigh, where Wilfred supposed infection from his unhealed broken bones had set in. Without immediate help, Wilfred guessed that the boy had only hours to live.
Just then another person appeared in the tent. He introduced himself as Kupah, the boy’s stepfather.
“Tell them we must take him away on the Sir Donald to the hospital at Indian Harbor and that we will bring him back when he is better,” Wilfred instructed George.
George passed the message on to Kupah, who shrugged his shoulders. “Take him,” he said. “He cannot travel on with us, and we need to get to the hunting grounds.”
Very gently Wilfred lifted the reindeer skin with Pomiuk in it and backed out of the tent. He guessed the boy weighed about ninety pounds, hardly a burden to someone as physically active as Wilfred.
The two men and the boy made their way back to the canoe and then onto the Sir Donald. Wilfred wasted no time in washing Pomiuk and dressing his wounds. That was all he could do for now; he knew he had to get Pomiuk back to the hospital quickly.
Wilfred found a deerskin pouch hung around Pomiuk’s neck. He took the pouch from him and opened it. Inside were a photograph of an elderly man and a piece of paper that turned out to be a letter from the Reverend Carpenter wishing Pomiuk well and saying that he was praying for him. Wilfred pointed to the photo and said, “Reverend Carpenter?”
Pomiuk nodded. “Yes,” he said in halting English. “Me know him. Me even love him.”
“And I am sure he loves you, too,” Wilfred replied, surprised at how much English Pomiuk spoke.
After dropping off George, the Sir Donald began the voyage back to Indian Harbor. When he was not at the helm, Wilfred spent many hours tending to Pomiuk’s wounds and teaching him English. Wilfred acted out many Bible stories, which made Pomiuk laugh with delight. Pomiuk also learned several hymns, and although he was still in great pain from his wounds, he often lay on his bed singing happily.
Wilfred found a lot to admire in the spunky boy he was looking after, and he prayed that Pomiuk would find Christ through the Bible stories he heard each day. When the Sir Donald pulled in at Hopedale to take on more coal to fire the boiler, Wilfred asked the Moravians to tell Pomiuk the gospel message in his own language. Much to everyone’s delight, Pomiuk immediately accepted it and asked to be baptized. A short baptismal service was held, and Pomiuk was given the Christian name Gabriel and a concertina to accompany his energetic hymn singing.
Onward the Sir Donald steamed until she reached Indian Harbor, where Pomiuk was hospitalized and his leg immobilized. Wilfred wrote to the Reverend Carpenter in Boston telling him that Pomiuk, while not completely out of danger, was responding well to treatment and that he would stay at the Indian Harbor hospital through the winter.
Within two weeks a reply arrived. In the letter the Reverend Carpenter thanked Wilfred for caring for Pomiuk and asked how much it would cost to keep him in the hospital for the winter. The Reverend Carpenter went on to explain that he was the writer of the children’s page in his denomination’s newspaper, The Congregationalist. From the time he first met Pomiuk, he had written about him to the children, and now that Pomiuk had been found, hundreds of children from all over the United States were sending money and clothing for him.
What’s more, the Reverend Carpenter told Wilfred that he would like to meet him, and he invited him to Boston during the winter months. Since Wilfred was already booked to speak in several Canadian cities during the winter, he decided to extend his tour to take in Boston as well. Wilfred had taken the Sir Donald only two hundred miles south to Battle Harbor, however, when Celia Williams sent word that Pomiuk had taken a turn for the worse and she did not know what to do with him.
Despite the coming of winter and the treacherous ice that accompanied it, Wilfred turned the steamer around and headed back to treat Pomiuk. Icicles hung from the ship’s railing as they steamed northward, but they arrived in Indian Harbor without incident, and Wilfred was again able to stabilize Pomiuk. It was decided that Pomiuk would be better cared for by Dr. Robinson, who was going to spend the winter fifty miles south of Indian Harbor as a guest of the Hudson Bay Company manager at the outpost at Rigolet Harbor. The manager had a large house that he was happy to have used as a hospital through the winter.
Since the temporary hospital at Rigolet was open, Dr. Willway and Nurse Williams decided not to stay at Indian Harbor but to return to England for the winter. Dr. Willway was technically only on loan from the London Missionary Society, and he needed to report back to his mission superiors.
Wilfred took Fred Willway, Celia Williams, and Pomiuk on board and headed south as fast as the Sir Donald’s engines would go. Along the way Pomiuk, who had learned to write and draw while hospitalized, produced a stack of drawings and letters for the Reverend Carpenter. Wilfred tucked them away in his desk, hoping to deliver them personally sometime after Christmas.
They dropped Pomiuk off at Rigolet and then steamed on to Battle Harbor, where they stopped for a quick visit with Nurse Ada Carwardine. By now snow was falling and ice fingers were reaching out from land into the sea. The fishing schooners had all gone south for the winter, and only the Liveyeres and a few Eskimos remained to winter along the coast.
Nurse Carwardine had agreed to stay in Battle Harbor for the winter and keep the hospital open. Wilfred admired her courage; it was going to be a long, lonely winter for her. She would be the first nurse ever to winter over on the Labrador coast. She was already finding it a challenge to keep herself and the hospital warm. The missionaries held a service and prayed for her before they hurried back on board the Sir Donald, hoping to beat the ice packs that were growing by the minute.
Wilfred set course for St. Anthony, on the northern tip of Newfoundland island. He dropped off Celia and Fred so they could take the faster mail steamer to St. John’s. From there they would take an Allen Line ship to London. Wilfred sent a letter with them to the mission council, explaining that he was going to spend the winter in Canada and the United States raising awareness and, he hoped, funds for the mission.
After the mail steamer left, Wilfred made his way along the Newfoundland coast, finally arriving at St. John’s. He held several meetings and did follow-up treatment on many of the fishermen who had been treated by the mission’s doctors over the summer. When he had done all he could, he took a passenger ship to Halifax, Canada, to begin his winter speaking tour.
Of all the stories Wilfred told when he spoke, he soon discovered that Pomiuk’s was the one that touched people’s hearts. He traveled to Montreal and then to Toronto. He thanked God for the great success that his time in Canada had been. He had no idea that it would soon be overshadowed by his visit to Boston.
In early January 1896, Wilfred crossed the border and entered the United States of America for the first time. He then took a train to Boston.
It seemed to Wilfred that the Reverend Carpenter knew everyone in the city, and the hearts of thousands of people had already been stirred by the story of Pomiuk. When Wilfred spoke at the minister’s church, all of the pews filled up quickly and people stood at the back for the entire service. Each speaking engagement the Reverend Carpenter arranged for Wilfred led to three more, and soon Wilfred was the talk of the town. Newspapers carried headlines telling where Wilfred was speaking and what he was expected to say.
One young woman, Emma White, attended many of Wilfred’s meetings. She was the librarian at the Congregational Church headquarters in Boston, and she was so enthusiastic about helping the people of Newfoundland and Labrador that she offered to set up a committee to support Wilfred’s work there. Another friend of the Reverend Carpenter, Arthur Estabrook, who was a leading banker in the city, offered to serve on the committee and to finance an office for it.
When it came time to leave Boston, Wilfred was humbled by all of the interest in his work. Hundreds of church leaders had asked him what they could do to help, and he told them all the same thing: Come and help if you can; pray and give if you can’t. Wilfred knew that most of the interest that had been stirred up was a direct result of his going to find Pomiuk. He thanked God that he had felt compelled to search for the boy.
