68 HUNTING CAMPS. 



bay until we came to the mouth of Jack Lane's Brook to 

 give it its full name. Here, seeing some ducks and waders, 

 we did a little shooting for the pot before .starting in earnest. 



A few hours later we were engaged in hauling our craft 

 up a small rapid, when we perceived a figure approaching 

 us along the north bank. It was that of a very old half- 

 breed. A white forked beard swept his breast, and as we 

 came nearer we saw that he was clad from head to foot in 

 sealskins. His name was Old Man Lane, though whether 

 it was to him or to his father that the locality owed its title 

 we did not learn. He told us that he had been setting a 

 bear-trap a mile or so above, and on our return when we 

 mentioned our meeting with him we heard that, having taken 

 a bear in a trap earlier in the season, the old man, finding 

 himself without a gun, had gone steadily to work and 

 stoned the bear to death. But as we saw him crooked with 

 rheumatism he seemed to have scarcely vitality to stagger 

 over the rough ground. 



A couple of evenings later, having spent the inter- 

 vening time in the ordinary routine of travel and recon- 

 noitring, Jack Wells and I made our camp in a disused 

 lodge which must have been originally built by Eskimo 

 hunters. We had now gained a fair idea of the nature of 

 the country. Endless barrens, white, yellow, and red with 

 reindeer moss, and dotted with Arctic berries, rolled away 

 until they merged in a dim blue tumult of mountains which 

 shut in the horizon ; here and there in the hollows of the hills 

 stood little clumps 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 set- 

 tlers only visit them when they are frozen and obliterated 

 by a mantle of snow. 



Certainly it is a wild and gloomy country, far more 



