This peculiarity of the water led me to look carefully for a current when our canoe was launched, and I believed I noticed one. Then I fancied I heard a rapid to the westward. Easton said there was no current and he could not hear a rapid, and to satisfy myself, we paddled toward the sound. We had not gone far when the current became quite perceptible, and just above could be seen the waters of a brook that fed the lake, pouring down through the rocks. We were on the George River at last! Our feelings can be imagined when the full realization of our good fortune came to us, and we turned our canoe to float down on the current of the little stream that was to grow into a mighty river as it carried us on its turbulent bosom toward Ungava Bay.
The course of the stream here was almost due east. The surrounding country continued low and swampy. Tamarack was the chief timber and much of it was straight and fine, with some trees fully twelve inches in diameter at the butt, and fifty feet in height.
A rocky, shallow place in the river that we had to portage brought us into an expansion of considerable size, and here we pitched our first camp on the George River. This was an event that Hubbard had planned and pictured through the weary weeks of hardship on the Susan Valley trail and the long portages across the ranges in his expedition of 1903.
“When we reach the George River, we’ll meet the Indians and all will be well,” he used to say, and how anxiously we looked forward for that day, which never came.
At the time when he made the suggestion to turn back from Windbound Lake I at first opposed it on the ground that we could probably reach the George River, where game would be found and the Indians would be met with, in much less time than it would take to make the retreat to Northwest River. Finally I agreed that it was best to return. On the twenty-first of September the retreat was begun and Hubbard died on the eighteenth of October. Now, two years later, I realized that from Windbound Lake we could have reached Michikamau in five or six days at the very outside, and less than two weeks, allowing for delays through bad weather and our weakened condition, would have brought us to the George River, where, at that time of the year, ducks and ptarmigans are always plentiful. All these things I pondered as I sat by this camp fire, and I asked myself, “Why is it that when Fate closes our eyes she does not lead us aright?” Of course it is all conjecture, but I feel assured that if Hubbard and I had gone on then instead of turning back, Hubbard would still be with us.
Below the expansion on which our first camp on the river was pitched the stream trickled through the thickly strewn rocks in a wide bed, where it took a sharp turn to the northward and emptied into another expansion several miles in length, with probably a stream joining it from the northeast, though we were unable to investigate this, as high winds prevailed which made canoeing difficult, and we had to content ourselves with keeping a direct course.
It seemed as though with the crossing of the northern divide winter had come. On the night we reached the George River the temperature fell to ten degrees below the freezing point, and the following day it never rose above thirty-five degrees, and a high wind and snow squalls prevailed that held traveling in check. On the morning of the fifteenth we started forward in the teeth of a gale and the snow so thick we could not see the shore a storm that would be termed a “blizzard” in New York—and after two hours’ hard work were forced to make a landing upon a sandy point with only a mile and a quarter to our credit.
Here we found the first real butchering camp of the Indians—a camp of the previous spring. Piles of caribou bones that had been cracked to extract the marrow, many pairs of antlers, the bare poles of large lodges and extensive arrangements, such as racks and cross poles for dressing and curing deerskins. In a cache we found two muzzle-loading guns, cooking utensils, steel traps, and other camping and hunting paraphernalia.
On the portage around the last shallow rapid was a winter camp, where among other things was a komatik (dog sledge), showing that some of these Indians at least on the northern barrens used dogs for winter traveling. In the south of Labrador this would be quite out of the question, as there the bush is so thick that it does not permit the snow to drift and harden sufficiently to bear dogs, and the use of the komatik is therefore necessarily confined to the coast or near it. The Indian women there are very timid of the “husky” dogs, and the animals are not permitted near their camps.
The sixteenth of September—the day we passed through this large expansion—was Richards’ birthday. When we bade good-by to the other men it was agreed that both parties should celebrate the day, wherever they might be, with the best dinner that could be provided from our respective stores. The meal was to be served at exactly seven o’clock in the evening, that we might feel on this one occasion that we were all sitting down to eat together, and fancy ourselves reunited. In the morning we opened the package that Richards gave us, and found in it a piece of fat pork and a quart of flour, intended for a feast of our favorite “darn goods.” With self-sacrificing generosity he had taken these from the scanty rations they had allowed themselves for their return that we might have a pleasant surprise. With the now plentiful game this made it possible to prepare what seemed to us a very elaborate menu for the wild wastes of interior Labrador. First, there was bouillon, made from beef capsules; then an entrée of fried ptarmigan and duck giblets; a roast of savory black duck, with spinach (the last of our desiccated vegetables); and for dessert French toast à la Labrador (alias darn goods), followed by black coffee. When it was finished we spent the evening by the camp fire, smoking and talking of the three men retreating down our old trail, and trying to calculate at which one of the camping places they were bivouacked. Every night since our parting this had been our chief diversion, and I must confess that with each day that took us farther away from them an increased loneliness impressed itself upon us. Solemn and vast was the great silence of the trackless wilderness as more and more we came to realize our utter isolation from all the rest of the world and all mankind.