We rested with Fraser until the twenty-third, and then with Mark Pallesser, a Groswater Bay Eskimo, turned in to Northwest River where Stanton, upon coming from the interior, had remained to wait for our return that he might join us for the balance of the journey out. The going was fearful and snowshoeing in the heavy snow tiresome. It required two days to reach Mulligan, where we spent the night with skipper Tom Blake, one of my good old friends, and at Tom’s we feasted on the first fresh venison we had had since leaving the Ungava district. In the whole distance from Whale River not a caribou had been killed during the winter by any one, while in the previous winter a single hunter at Davis Inlet shot in one day a hundred and fifty, and only ceased then because he had no more ammunition. Tom had killed three or four, and south of this point I learned of a hunter now and then getting one.
Northwest River was reached on Monday, February twenty-sixth, and we took Cotter by complete surprise, for he had not expected us for another month.
The day after our arrival Stanton came to the Post from a cabin three miles above, where he had been living alone, and he was delighted to see us.
The lumbermen at Muddy Lake, twenty miles away, heard of our arrival and sent down a special messenger with a large addition to the mail which I was carrying out and which had been growing steadily in bulk with its accumulations at every station.
This is the stormiest season of the year in Labrador, and weather conditions were such that it was not until March sixth that we were permitted to resume our journey homeward.
CHAPTER XXIV
THE END OF THE LONG TRAIL
The storm left the ice covered with a depth of soft snow into which the dogs sank deep and hauled the komatik with difficulty. Snowshoeing, too, was unusually hard. The day we left Northwest River (Tuesday, March sixth) the temperature rose above the freezing point, and when it froze that night a thin crust formed, through which our snowshoes broke, adding very materially to the labor of walking—and of course it was all walking.
As the days lengthened and the sun asserting his power, pushed higher and higher above the horizon, the glare upon the white expanse of snow dazzled our eyes, and we had to put on smoked glasses to protect ourselves from snow-blindness. Even with the glasses our driver, Mark, became partially snow-blind, and when, on the evening of the third day after leaving Northwest River, we reached his home at Karwalla, an Eskimo settlement a few miles west of Rigolet, it became necessary for us to halt until he was sufficiently recovered to enable him to travel again.