ILLUSTRATIONS
[ The Perils of the Rapids (in color, from a painting by Oliver Kemp)]
[ Ice Encountered Off the Labrador Coast ]
[ “The Time For Action Had Come” ]
[ “Camp Was Moved to the First Small Lake” ]
[ “We Found a Long-disused Log Cache of the Indians”]
[ Below Lake Nipishish]
[ Through Ponds and Marshes Northward Toward Otter Lake]
[ “We Shall Call the River Babewendigash”]
[ “Pete, Standing by the Prostrate Caribou, Was Grinning From Ear to Ear”]
[ “A Network of Lakes and the Country as Level as a Table”]
[ Michikamau]
[ “Writing Letters to the Home Folks”]
[ “Our Lonely Perilous Journey Toward the Dismal Wastes ...Was Begun”]
[ Abandoned Indian Camp On the Shore of Lake Michikamats]
[ “One of the Wigwams Was a Large One and Oblong in Shape”]
[ “At Last ...We Saw the Post”]
[ “A Miserable Little Log Shack”]
[ A Group of Eskimo Women]
[ A Labrador Type]
[ Eskimo Children]
[ A Snow Igloo]
[ The Silence of the North (in color, from a painting by Frederic C. Stokes)]
[ “Nachvak Post of the Hudson’s Bay Company”. ]
[ “The Hills Grew Higher and Higher”]
[ “We Turned Into a Pass Leading to the Northward”]
[ The Moravian Mission at Ramah]
[ “Plodding Southward Over the Endless Snow”]
[ “Nain, the Moravian Headquarters in Labrador”]
[ “The Indians Were Here”]
[ Geological Specimens]
[ Maps.]
THE LONG LABRADOR TRAIL
CHAPTER I
THE VOICE OF THE WILDERNESS
“It’s always the way, Wallace! When a fellow starts on the long trail, he’s never willing to quit. It’ll be the same with you if you go with me to Labrador. When you come home, you’ll hear the voice of the wilderness calling you to return, and it will lure you back again.”
It seems but yesterday that Hubbard uttered those prophetic words as he and I lay before our blazing camp fire in the snow-covered Shawangunk Mountains on that November night in the year 1901, and planned that fateful trip into the unexplored Labrador wilderness which was to cost my dear friend his life, and both of us indescribable sufferings and hardships. And how true a prophecy it was! You who have smelled the camp fire smoke; who have drunk in the pure forest air, laden with the smell of the fir tree; who have dipped your paddle into untamed waters, or climbed mountains, with the knowledge that none but the red man has been there before you; or have, perchance, had to fight the wilds and nature for your very existence; you of the wilderness brotherhood can understand how the fever of exploration gets into one’s blood and draws one back again to the forests and the barrens in spite of resolutions to “go no more.”
It was more than this, however, that lured me back to Labrador. There was the vision of dear old Hubbard as I so often saw him during our struggle through that rugged northland wilderness, wasted in form and ragged in dress, but always hopeful and eager, his undying spirit and indomitable will focused in his words to me, and I can still see him as he looked when he said them: