Then we left them. Easton and I dipped our paddles into the water, and our lonely, perilous journey toward the dismal wastes beyond the northern divide was begun. Once I turned to see the three men, with packs on their backs, ascending the knoll back of the place where our camp had been. When I looked again they were gone.
CHAPTER XII
OVER THE NORTHERN DIVIDE
Michikamau is approximately between eighty and ninety miles in length, including the unexplored southeast bay, and from eight to twenty-five miles in width. It is surrounded by rugged hills, which reach an elevation of about five hundred feet above the lake. They are generally wooded for perhaps two hundred feet from the base, with black spruce, larch, and an occasional small grove of white birch. Above the timber line their tops are uncovered save by white lichens or stunted shrubs. The western side of the lake is studded with low islands, but its main body is unobstructed. The water is exceedingly clear, and is said by the Indians to have a great depth. The shores are rocky, sometimes formed of massive bed rock in which is found the beautifully colored labradorite; sometimes strewn with loose bowlders. Our entrance had been made in a bay several miles north of the point where the Nascaupee River, its outlet, leaves the lake and we kept to the east side as we paddled north.
No artist’s imaginative brush ever pictured such gorgeous sunsets and sunrises as Nature painted for us here on the Great Lake of the Indians. Every night the sun went down in a blaze of glory and left behind it all the colors of the spectrum. The dark hills across the lake in the west were silhouetted against a sky of brilliant red which shaded off into banks of orange and amber that reached the azure at the zenith. The waters of the lake took the reflection of the red at the horizon and became a flood of restless blood. The sky colorings during these few days were the finest that I ever saw in Labrador, not only in the evening but in the morning also.
Michikamau has a bad name amongst the Indians for heavy seas, particularly in the autumn months when the northwest gales sometimes blow for weeks at a time without cessation, and the Indians say that they are often held on its shores for long periods by high running seas that no canoe could weather. These were the same winds that held Hubbard and me prisoners for nearly two weeks on the smaller Windbound Lake in 1903, bringing us to the verge of starvation before we were permitted to begin our race for life down the trail toward Northwest River. Fate was kinder now, and but one day’s rough water interfered with progress.
Early on the third day after parting from the other men, we found ourselves at the end of Michikamau where a shallow river, in which large bowlders were thickly scattered, flowed into it from the north. This was the stream draining Lake Michikamats, the next important point in our journey. Michikamau, it might be explained, means, in the Indian tongue, big water—so big you cannot see the land beyond; Michikamats means a smaller body of water beyond which land may be seen. So somebody has paradoxically defined it “a little big lake.”