The cabin was built of logs, and faced the south, with its entrance through an enclosed porch on the western gable. This porch served both as a protection from winter storms and as a store room. Here were kept dog harness, fish nets, and innumerable odds and ends incident to the life and occupation of a trapper and fisherman. And in one end of the porch, neatly piled in tiers, was an ever-ready supply of firewood.
A door from the porch led into a living room crudely and primitively furnished, but possessed of an indescribable atmosphere of cozy comfort. The uncarpeted floor, the home-made table, the chests which served both as storage places for clothing and as seats, the three crude but substantial home-made chairs, and the shelves for dishes, were scoured clean and white with sand and soap, for Margaret, through her Scotch ancestry, had inherited a penchant for cleanliness and neatness.
“I likes to keep the house tidy,” she said to Doctor Joe once, when he complimented her. “’Tis a wonderful comfort to have un tidy and clean.”
There were three windows, draped with snow-white muslin—an unusual luxury. Two of these windows looked to the southward to catch the sun with its cheer, and before them lay the wide vista of Eskimo Bay, and beyond the Bay the grim, snow-capped peaks of the Mealy Mountains. The other window was in the rear, but here the view was restricted by the forest, which sheltered the cabin from the frigid northern blasts of the sub-arctic winters.
A big box stove, which would accommodate great billets of wood, and crackled cheerily, and a bunk built against the wall like a ship’s bunk, and which served Thomas as a bed, completed the furnishings.
Originally the cabin had contained no other rooms than the living room and the porch, but when the children came, and grew, Thomas, with his desire for “plenty o’ room to stretch,” erected an addition on the eastern end, which he partitioned into two sleeping compartments, one for Margaret and the other for the boys.
Mighty content were Thomas Angus and his family. A snug cabin, a neighbor “right handy,” the trading posts near enough to visit now and again on business or on pleasure, and enough to eat—what more could be desired?
Thomas Angus was a good hunter, and provided well for his family, which in Labrador means that for the most part his catch of fur was good in winter, his fish nets yielded well in summer, and therefore his flour barrel was seldom empty.