In the year I had spent in Labrador I had never before heard a planter or native of Groswater Bay swear. But this explained it. The lumbermen from “civilization” were educating them.
At one o’clock on July first, half our outfit was portaged to the summit of the hill and we ate our dinner there in the broiling sun, for we were above the trees, which ended some distance below us. It was fearfully hot—a dead, suffocating heat—with not a breath of wind to relieve the stifling atmosphere, and some one asked what the temperature was.
“Eighty-seven in the shade, but no shade,” Richards remarked as he threw down his pack and consulted the thermometer where I had placed it under a low bush. “I’ll swear it’s a hundred and fifty in the sun.”
During dinner Pete pointed to the river far below us, saying, “Look! Indian canoe.” I could not make it out without my binoculars, but with their aid discerned a canoe on the river, containing a solitary paddler. None of us, excepting Pete, could see the canoe without the glasses, at which he was very proud and remarked: “No findin’ glass need me. See far, me. See long way off.”
On other occasions, afterward, I had reason to marvel at Pete’s clearness of vision.
It was John Ahsini in the canoe, as we discovered later when he joined us and helped Stanton up the hill with his last pack to our night camp on the summit. I invited John to eat supper with us and he accepted the invitation. He told us he was hunting “moshku” (bear) and was camped at the mouth of the Red River. He assured us that we would find no more hills like this one we were on, and, pointing to the northward, said, “Miam potagan” (good portage) and that we would find plenty “atuk” (caribou), “moshku” and “mashumekush” (trout). After supper I gave John some “stemmo,” and he disappeared down the trail to join his wife in their wigwam below.
We were all of us completely exhausted that night. Stanton was too tired to eat, and lay down upon the bare rocks to sleep. Pete stretched our tent wigwam fashion on some old Indian tepee poles, and, without troubling ourselves to break brush for a bed, we all soon joined Stanton in a dreamless slumber upon his rocky couch.
The night, like the day, was very warm, and when I aroused Pete at sunrise the next morning (July second) to get breakfast the mosquitoes were about our heads in clouds.
A magnificent panorama lay before us. Opposite, across the valley of the Nascaupee, a great hill held its snow-tipped head high in the heavens. Some four miles farther up to the northwest, the river itself, where it was choked with blocks of ice, made its appearance and threaded its way down to the southeast until it was finally lost in the spruce-covered valley. Beyond, bits of Grand Lake, like silver settings in the black surrounding forest, sparkled in the light of the rising sun. Away to the westward could be traced the rushing waters of the Red River making their course down through the sandy ridges that enclose its valley. To the northward lay a great undulating wilderness, the wilderness that we were to traverse. It was Sunday morning, and the holy stillness of the day engulfed our world.
When Pete had the fire going and the kettle singing I roused the boys and told them we would make this, our first Sunday in the bush, an easy one, and simply move our camp forward to a more hospitable and sheltered spot by a little brook a mile up the trail, and then be ready for the “tug of war” on Monday.