“But have you never hunted here yourself?” I asked.
“No, sir, I’ve never been in here at all. I travels right past up the Nascaupee. All I knows about it, sir, is what they tells me. I always follows the Nascaupee, sir.”
Above us rose a high, steep hill covered for two-thirds of the way from its base with a thick growth of underbrush, but quite barren on top save for a few bunches of spruce brush.
The old trail, unused for eight or ten years, headed toward the hill and was quite easily traced for some fifty yards from the old camp. Then it disappeared completely in a dense undergrowth of willows, alders and spruce.
While Pete made preparation for our supper and Duncan unloaded his boat and hauled it up preparatory to leaving it until his return from the interior, the rest of us tried to follow the trail through the brush. But beyond where the thick undergrowth began there was nothing at all that, to us, resembled a trail. Finally, I instructed Pete to go with Richards and see what he could do while the rest of us made camp. Pete started ahead, forging his way through the thick growth. In ten minutes I heard him shout from the hillside, “He here—I find him,” and saw Pete hurrying up the steep incline.
When Richards and Pete returned an hour later we had camp pitched and supper cooking. They reported the trail, as far as they had gone, very rough and hard to find. For some distance it would have to be cut out with an ax, and nowhere was it bigger than a rabbit run. Duncan rather favored going as far, as Seal Lake by the trail that he knew and which followed the Nascaupee. This trail he believed to be much easier than the long unused Indian trail, which was undoubtedly in many places entirely obscured and in any case extremely difficult to follow. I dismissed his suggestion, however, with little consideration. My, object was to trace the old Indian trail and explore as much of the country as possible, and not to hide myself in an enclosed river valley. Therefore, I decided that next day we should scout ahead to the first water to which the trail led and cut out the trail where necessary. The work I knew would be hard, but we were expecting to do hard work. We were not on a summer picnic.
A rabbit which Stanton had shot and a spruce grouse that fell before Pete’s pistol, together with what remained of our porcupine, hot coffee, and Mrs. Blake’s good bread, made a supper that we ate with zest while we talked over the prospects of the trail. Supper fin-ished, Pete carefully washed his dishes, then carefully washed his dishcloth, which latter he hung upon a bough near the fire to dry. His cleanliness about his cooking was a revelation to me. I had never before seen a camp man or guide so neat in this respect.
The real work of the trip was now to begin, the hard portaging, the trail finding and trail making, and we were to break the seal of a land that had, through the ages, held its secret from all the world, excepting the red man. This is what we were thinking of when we gathered around our camp fire that evening, and filled and lighted our pipes and puffed silently while we watched the newborn stars of evening come into being one by one until the arch of heaven was aglow with the splendor of a Labrador night. And when we at length went to our bed of spruce boughs it was to dream of strange scenes and new worlds that we were to conquer.