66 HUNTING CAMPS. 



of evergreen trees, overgrown with moss, harps for the 

 wind, inexpressibly lonely. There were marshes also 

 and deep lakes, unchristened as yet, for the surface of 

 Labrador is mostly water and the smaller lochs are 

 nameless. Nor is this unnatural, seeing that the settlers 

 only visit them when they are frozen and obliterated by 

 a mantle of snow. 



Certainly it is a wild and gloomy country, far more 

 sterile than the wildest parts of Newfoundland, a fact 

 upon which Jack always laid emphasis when he lit the 

 camp fire, bemoaning the absence of birch bark, and 

 evidently holding but a poor opinion of a country where, 

 as he said, a man could not " get warm to rights." On 

 the evening upon which we made our camp in the 

 deserted cabin beside the shores of the lake, I took my 

 rifle and went for a stroll on the heights to the south of 

 the outlet. It had rained in the day, and the black flies 

 had been exceedingly pressing in their attentions ; but 

 with the evening a wind blew out of the north-west, 

 always a herald of fine weather in the Labrador autumn, 

 the heavy clouds and the sultry airs passed away, giving 

 place to the clear blue northern sky. My way led me 

 over a series of ridges which seemed to roll for miles 

 upwards to the height of land. It was impossible for 

 hundreds of yards at a time to put down one's foot 

 without crushing masses of purple and yellow berries. 

 The Arctic summer may be short, but it crowds into its 

 brief life a wealth of achievement. To man Labrador 

 is, in all her moods, cruelly inhospitable, but to fur and 

 feather she is during the autumn months a kindly step- 

 mother. As I walked forward covey after covey of 

 spruce grouse rose wild from their feast of berries. A 

 few nights before we had seen and marked down thirty 



