ON THE LABRADOR. 71 



immense height above the half -grown feathery balls which 

 represented her brood, and which would one day be great 

 northern divers weighing 9 Ibs. apiece, and capable of 

 killing the largest trout and ounaniche. 



Presently her cries ceased, and the splash of her plunge 

 into the lake came quite clearly. Then it seemed to grow 

 rapidly darker, the wild had gone to its rest, the circle of 

 sight narrowed, darkness seemed to lie in pools in every 

 hollow, and, long before I saw Jack crouched beside the 

 open fire, the stars had come out and the owls were calling 

 in the green timber on the shores of the lake. 



Making Igloo Camp our headquarters, we spent the next 

 and following days in long rovings about the surrounding 

 country. Once we found a fortnight-old track of a caribou 

 stag, and twice a young spruce tree stripped of its bark, 

 but the stags which had rubbed the velvet from their horns 

 among the branches had done so at least a couple of years 

 before, as not only were the trees long dead, but their 

 fellows had grown up and overtopped them. Yet even if 

 the country lacked what we most wished to find, it pos- 

 sessed a singular, if harsh, charm of its own. One spot 

 particularly I used to love to visit, whether alone or in 

 Jack's company. This was a little lake which lay some two 

 miles to the north-west of our camp. Surrounded by trees 

 and seemingly of great depth, it presented the appearance of 

 an unfathomable pit sunk into the roots of the hills. The 

 inevitable diver and her brood called ceaselessly upon its 

 waters, bringing back to memory the beautiful and poetic 

 words of Saltatha, the Yellowknife Indian, " You say the 

 Kingdom of Heaven is good, my father ; but tell me, 

 is it better than the land of the musk-ox in summer, when 

 the lakes are sometimes misty and sometimes blue, and 

 the loons cry often ? That is good, my father, and if 

 Heaven is better, I shall be willing to dwell there until I 

 am very, very old.'* Besides the loons two ospreys haunted 



