192 LABRADOR 
fire of the Saguenay ran from west of Quebec some seven 
hundred miles to the Romaine River, sweeping the country 
from the Gulf to the height of land. Such damp grounds 
as were spared could sustain little game, and afforded slight 
protection from the hunters to such as survived. The 
catastrophe, so far as resources for the Indians are con- 
cerned, was nearly complete. 
Earlier still the plateau had become largely non-support- 
ing. Hind, writing in the sixties of the country about 
the Moisie, gives a saddening account of the misfortunes 
of the Nascaupees. Many were forced to the shores. 
There food was to be had, but the change to the damp of 
the Gulf from the activity and sunshine of the high interior 
brought its natural consequences, and consumption and 
the unknown diseases of civilization soon brought their 
end. 
Where the soil remains, gradual replacement of the forest 
goes on, the higher ground most often turning to birch, 
with quaking asp, and the gravel river levels of the south- 
west to an open growth of Banksian pine, the ussishk of 
the Indians, and the cyprés of the French habitants. In 
favourable places the original forestation of spruce and fir 
succeeds, if poorly, in reéstablishing itself. 
The cause of fires is generally the carelessness of border 
whites, although Dr. Low’s supposition that not a few have 
begun with ‘wandering Indians, careful only in their own 
hunting-grounds,”’ is doubtless true enough. But it is to 
be remembered that the fire code of the real Indian is very 
rigid, and the fact that white advent found the country 
forested to the subarctic barrens tells its own tale. The 
people were far more numerous then, yet under their law 
