Those who dwell on the coast are called “liveyeres” because they say, “Oh, ay, zur, I lives yere!” in answer to the question. These are not to be confounded with the Newfoundland fishermen who sail the Labrador seas in the fishing season—an adventurous, thrifty folk, bright-eyed, hearty in laughter—twenty-five thousand hale men and boys, with many a wife and maid, who come and return again. Less than four thousand poor folk have on the long coast the “permanent abode” of which the learned work speaks—much less, I should think, from the Strait of Belle Isle to Cape Chidley. It is an evil fate to be born there: the Newfoundlanders who went north from their better country, the Hudson Bay Company’s servants who took wives from the natives, all the chance comers who procrastinated their escape, desperately wronged their posterity; the saving circumstance is the very isolation of the dwelling-place—no man knows, no man really knows, that elsewhere the earth is kinder to her children and fairer far than the wind-swept, barren coast to which he is used. They live content, bearing many children, in inclemency, in squalor, and, from time to time, in uttermost poverty—such poverty as clothes a child in a trouser leg and feeds babies and strong men alike on nothing but flour and water. They were born there: that is where they came from; that is why they live there.
“’Tis a short feast and a long famine,” said a northern “liveyere,” quite cheerfully; to him it was just a commonplace fact of life.
There are degrees of wretchedness: a frame cottage is the habitation of the rich and great where the poor live in turf huts; and the poor subsist on roots and a paste of flour and water when the rich feast on salt junk. The folk who live near the Strait of Belle Isle and on the gulf shore may be in happier circumstances. To be sure, they know the pinch of famine; but some—the really well-to-do—are clear of the over-shadowing dread of it. The “liveyeres” of the north dwell in huts, in lonely coves of the bays, remote even from neighbours as ill-cased as themselves; there they live and laugh and love and suffer and die and bury their dead—alone. To the south, however, there are little settlements in the more sheltered harbours—the largest of not more than a hundred souls—where there is a degree of prosperity and of comfort; potatoes are a luxury, but the flour-barrel is always full, the pork-barrel not always empty, and there are raisins in the duff on feast-days; moreover, there are stoves in the whitewashed houses (the northern “liveyere’s” stove is more often than not a flat rock), beds to sleep in, muslin curtains in the little windows, and a flower, it may be, sprouting desperately in a red pot on the sill. That is the extreme of luxury—rare to be met with; and it is at all times open to dissolution by famine.
“Sure, zur, last winter,” a stout young fellow boasted, “we had all the grease us wanted!”
It is related of a thrifty settler named Olliver, however, who lived with his wife and five children at Big Bight,—he was a man of superior qualities, as the event makes manifest,—that, having come close to the pass of starvation at the end of a long winter, he set out afoot over the hills to seek relief from his nearest neighbour, forty miles away. But there was no relief to be had; the good neighbour had already given away all that he dared spare, and something more. Twelve miles farther on he was again denied; it is said that the second neighbour mutely pointed to his flour-barrel and his family—which was quite sufficient for Olliver, who thereupon departed to a third house, where his fortune was no better. Perceiving then that he must depend upon the store of food in his own house, which was insufficient to support the lives of all, he returned home, sent his wife and eldest son and eldest daughter away on a pretext, despatched his three youngest children with an axe, and shot himself. As he had foreseen, wife, daughter, and son survived until the “break-up” brought food within their reach; and the son was a well-grown boy, and made a capable head of the house thereafter.
“THE LABRADOR ‘LIVEYERE’”
The “liveyere” is a fisherman and trapper. In the summer he catches cod; in the winter he traps the fox, otter, mink, lynx, and marten, and sometimes he shoots a bear, white or black, and kills a wolf. The “planter,” who advances the salt to cure the fish, takes the catch at the end of the season, giving in exchange provisions at an incredible profit; the Hudson Bay Company takes the fur, giving in exchange provisions at an even larger profit; for obvious reasons, both aim (there are exceptions, of course) to keep the “liveyere” in debt—which is not by any means a difficult matter, for the “liveyere” is both shiftless and (what is more to the point) illiterate. So it comes about that what he may have to eat and wear depends upon the will of the “planter” and of the company; and when for his ill-luck or his ill-will both cast him off—which sometimes happens—he looks starvation in the very face. A silver fox, of good fur and acceptable colour, is the “liveyere’s” great catch; no doubt his most ecstatic nightmare has to do with finding one fast in his trap; but when, “more by chance than good conduct,” as they say, he has that heavenly fortune (the event is of the rarest), the company pays sixty or eighty dollars for that which it sells abroad for $600. Of late, however, the free-traders seem to have established a footing on the coast; their stay may not be long, but for the moment, at any rate, the “liveyere” may dispose of his fur to greater advantage—if he dare.
The earth yields the “liveyere” nothing but berries, which are abundant, and, in midsummer, “turnip tops”; and as numerous dogs are needed for winter travelling—wolfish creatures, savage, big, famished—no domestic animals can be kept. There was once a man who somehow managed for a season to possess a pig and a sheep; he marooned his dogs on an island half a mile off the coast; unhappily, however, there blew an off-shore wind in the night, and next morning neither the pig nor the sheep was to be found; the dogs were engaged in innocent diversions on the island, but there was evidence sufficient on their persons, so to speak, to convict them of the depredation in any court of justice. There are no cows on the coast, no goats,—consequently no additional milk-supply for babies,—who manage from the beginning, however, to thrive on bread and salt beef, if put to the necessity. There are no pigs—there is one pig, I believe,—no sheep, no chickens; and the first horses to be taken to the sawmill on Hamilton Inlet so frightened the natives that they scampered in every direction for their lives whenever the team came near, crying: “Look out! The harses is comin’!” The caribou are too far inland for most of the settlers; but at various seasons (excluding such times as there is no game at all) there are to be had grouse, partridge, geese, eider-duck, puffin, gulls, loon and petrel, bear, arctic hare, and bay seal, which are shot with marvellously long and old guns—some of them ancient flintlocks.