"I can't very well," admitted White, "but this cask has got to be filled, and the sooner we do it the quicker we can get away. Break off a couple of leafy branches to fight with and then keep 'em off both of us as well as you can. It will only take a few minutes longer."
In spite of their efforts at self-defence, faces, hands, and Cabot's bare legs were covered with blood before their task was completed, and they were once more in the boat pulling furiously for the wind-swept water of the open bay.
"I never expected to find mosquitoes this far north," said Cabot, as the pests began to disappear before the freshening breeze and the rowers paused for breath.
"Strangers are apt to be unpleasantly surprised by them," replied White, "but they are here all the same, and they extend as far north as any white man has ever been. I have been told that they are as bad in Greenland as here, and I expect they flourish at the North Pole itself. They certainly are the curse of Labrador, and until ice makes in the fall they effectually prevent all travel into the interior. Even the Indians have to come to the coast in summer to escape them, while the whites who visit this country for the fishing make their settlements on the barest and most wind-swept places. The few who live here the year round have summer homes on the coast, but build their winter houses inland, at the heads of bays or the mouths of rivers, where there is timber to afford some protection from the cold. Those are winter houses back there."
"I wondered why they were abandoned," said Cabot, "but I don't any longer."
"By the way," suggested White, "you forgot to try the trout fishing. Shall we go back?"
"I wouldn't go fishing on that stream if every trout in it was of solid gold and I could scoop them out with my hands," asserted Cabot. "In fact, I don't know of anything short of starvation, or dying of thirst, that would take me back there."
After supper our lads went ashore at the island settlement, and were hospitably received by the dwellers in its half-dozen stoutly built, earthen-roofed houses. These were constructed of logs, set on end like palisades, and while they were scantily furnished, they were warm and comfortable. In them Cabot, who was regarded with great curiosity on account of having come from the far foreign city of New York, asked many questions, and acquired much information concerning the strange country to which Fate had brought him. Thus he learned that Labrador is a province of Newfoundland, and that while its prolific fisheries attract some 20,000 people to its bleak shores every summer, its entire resident white population hardly exceeds one thousand souls. He was told that from June to October news of the outside world is received by steamer from St. Johns every two or three weeks, but that during the other eight months of the year only three mails reach the country, coming by dog sledge from far-away Quebec.
While Cabot was gathering these and many other interesting bits of information, White was becoming confirmed in his belief that to make a successful trading trip he must carry his goods far to the northward.
So at daybreak of the following morning the "Sea Bee" was once more got under way, and ran up the rock-bound coast past Chateau Bay, with its superb Castle Rock, to Battle Harbour, the metropolis of Labrador, which place was reached late the same evening.