86 ONE OF FIFTY DAYS IN SOUTHERN LABRADOR. 



and soaked is the boggy ground. For bog-trotting, or 

 moss-tramping, or climbing rocks, sealskins a la Esqui- 

 maux, so light and water-tight, are indispensable. 



The way lies round the head of a little bay, which 

 meets a quiet vale, filled with grass and ferns at the top, 

 but half-way down, as it widens out, choked with a 

 stunted spruce and fir growth, or what the people call 

 "tucking," or " tuckermel-bush." It is in vain that we 

 try to push through it, so dense the growth, so gnarled, 

 twisted, and grown together in one impenetrable mass 

 the trunks, and so flat and table-like the branches spread 

 out above. Here is a perfectly tight shelter, should it 

 rain. Many a hunter, belated at nightfall, has crept 

 under these bushes and made a comfortable night of it. 

 So the bears find good hiding-places here, and cannot be 

 found without dogs to scent them out. Lower down, 

 the valley extends into an alder-swamp, a lilliputian 

 growth, perhaps three feet high, choked with rank grasses 

 and sedges, crowding the sides of a slow-moving brook. 

 Here mosquitoes and black-flies swarm ; we are under 

 shelter of a cliflf, and there is no wind to keep off these 

 horrible pests. How they rage and torment, these myr- 

 iad entomological furies ! Now for a frantic rush out 

 of this purgatory, and a tiresome climb of a hundred 

 feet up this cliflf ! It is high, but not very rough, for all 

 the rocks are hidden by soft reindeer-moss, and the crev- 

 ices are filled up with tuckermel, and the ravines that 

 run down its sides have their dripping, mossy walls 

 sprinkled over with Alpine flowers and their bottoms 

 carpeted with coarse arctic grasses. Only here and there 

 patches of the original granite show themselves. Now 

 and then a brown or yellow butterfly flits by, or an arc- 



