There is a massive block of our American northlands that 

 constitutes a good fifth of the whole. It has no specific name 

 but is slowly coming to be referred to as the Labradorian 

 Peninsula. It forms a huge inverted triangle extending from the 

 northeastern corner of this continent, and, since each of its three 

 sides is more than 1200 miles long, it is approximately 720,000 

 square miles in area. This is equivalent to the block of 

 United States territory contained between New York, Miami, 

 and Omaha. 



It runs from the southern extension of James Bay up the 

 east coast of Hudson Bay, around the south coast of Hudson 

 Strait to Ungava Bay, and thence along the Labradorian coast to 



the Strait of Belle Isle. Off this lies Newfoundland, and the 

 whole of this island is included in the province. Its periphery, 

 in fact, crosses the Cabot Strait from Cape Race to Cape Breton 

 and swings up the Gulf of St. Lawrence to Chaleur Bay south of 

 the Gaspe Peninsula, then crosses that peninsula to Quebec. 

 From there it follows the junction of the pine-spruce forest and 

 the mixed or transition zone composed of conifers (principally 

 pines) and hardwoods (notably maples) west to Lake Nipissing. 

 From that point north to James Bay once more, its boundary 

 is almost entirely empirical, since there is no real difference 

 in the vegetation as one travels west across this line. 

 However, there is a natural gutter cutting the great, lowland, 

 clay-covered plain, from south of Moosonee on James Bay to 

 the upper Ottawa River about Tamiskaming, and continuing 

 thence south to the barrier at Niagara Falls. This was the 

 junction line of the east and west icecaps of old, and there are 

 subtle differences still remaining between the lands on either side. 



This is a forest province, apart from the triangle of tundra 

 and barren lands lying to the northwest of an irregular 

 transition belt stretching from southern Ungava Bay to the 

 region of the Belcher Islands in Hudson Bay. which is part of 

 the Arctic province. South and east of this tundraland lies a huge 

 stretch of spruce forest, four hundred miles wide, with some 

 aspen and birch and endless muskegs. This is but the eastern 

 extension of the great boreal spruce belt that stretches all the 

 way from the Mackenzie River via the Canadian lakes district. 

 To the south and east however this belt gradually merges 

 with a belt of pines and spruces and then with a strip roughly 

 two hundred miles wide composed of Transition forest. This 

 sweeps across the continent just north of the Great Lakes, strikes 

 the St. Lawrence valley between Quebec and the Strait of 

 Belle Isle on the one side and, crossing it, encompasses the 

 Gaspe Peninsula and Newfoundland along with the rest of both 

 shores of the Gulf of St. Lawrence. 



Forests are, of course, areas covered with trees, but the defini- 

 tion of a forest is not nearly so simple as we might suppose. For 

 our purposes we will use the term to denote areas on which trees 

 grow sufficiently close together for some part of their foliage to 

 touch that of all surrounding trees, thus forming what is called 

 a closed canopy. Tundra is, of course, not a forest though it could 

 be argued that its vegetation forms a closed canopy, albeit a very 

 low one, and also contains "trees," at least by one definition — 

 namely, the tiny, two-inch, dwarf, woody-stemmed willows 

 already mentioned. However, tundra is more typically a treeless 

 type of country clothed in a dense mat of lichens, mosses, stunted 

 herbs, and dwarfed creeping bushes, with some grasses and 

 sedges. 



The cause of these conditions is, of course, the permafrost 

 (see Chapter 4) which stops rain, melted snow, and other aeri- 

 ally derived moisture from sinking into the ground, while the 

 flatness of the whole country prevents the formation of drainage 

 systems. It is a curious fact that the precipitation over this area 

 is lower than that of the central Sahara, but the evaporation is 

 very slight. If there were a high winter snowfall or a summer 

 rainfall, proper drainage systems would develop simply through 

 the pressure of the water trying to flow off the land. If, on the 

 other hand, the snowfall were great enough, an icecap would 

 build up. 



Despite its barren appearance this country is not a wilderness. 



It is seething with life, and not only during the summer. The 

 variety of the flora, though all of modest individual proportions, 

 is very great, with one group of flowering herbaceous plants 

 coming out the moment the meager snow has melted, and con- 

 tinuing until it again blankets the land in the late fall. Predomi- 

 nant is the tiny tree known as the Arctic Willow, and there are 

 several mosses that form endless sodden cushions into which one 

 can sink to the waist or even on occasion right through. Where 

 there is bare rock, the lichens are particularly profuse and 

 brightly colored. There are no true bogs (in the sense described 

 in Chapter 9) because the permafrost and the nature of the 

 terrain inhibit their growth. 



The geological structure of this province is most interesting. 

 It is for the most part composed of the main block of what is 

 called the Laurentian Shield. This is a vast dome of extremely 

 ancient, if not absolutely primary, surface rocks that seem to 

 have been formed by the deposits laid down when the hydro- 

 sphere or water layer first formed on this planet. These rocks are 

 anchored in the next layer below the surface, forming what is 

 called by geologists a horst. This is a sort of island with roots, 

 of such solidity and for so long in "balance" with surrounding 

 areas that it cannot any more be compressed or pushed down 

 into the crust. It is, in fact, said to be in isostatic balance, a term 

 which implies that it long ago adjusted itself like a block of wood 

 put in a bathtub that has finally done with absorbing water and 



28 



