1885.] . Life and Nature in Southern Labrador. 367 
river was a pleasant one. It was about three miles from its 
mouth to an expansion of the river, on whose shores were four 
or five winter houses. Although most of the settlers live on the 
coast through the year, some have their winter and summer 
houses. Those who live up the interior, sometimes a distance of 
seventy miles from the coast, where there is wood and game, 
move from the shore about the 20th of October. They spend a 
month in cutting wood, a family burning through the winter 
about thirty cords. Then succeeds a month of hunting and trap- 
ping. The snow does not come, we were told, until the last of 
December, although we should judge this to be an extreme state- 
ment, and the snow is not usually more than three feet deep. 
The people profess to like the winter better than the summer. 
They shoot deer, foxes, &c., black fox being sometimes secured, 
whose skin is worth between two and three hundred dollars. 
Grouse are abundant, a good hunter securing from sixty to sev- 
enty a day in favorable seasons. At any rate fresh meat is ob- 
tained for each family two or three times a week. 
The houses are small, built of wood, boarded and shingled, 
seldom constructed of logs, and are heated by peculiar stoves, 
great square structures resembling Dutch stoves, and heating the 
whole house, the two living rooms opening into each other, the 
stove being placed partly in each. 
The French residents at the Mecatina islands, more social and 
gayer than the phlegmatic English settlers about the mouth of 
the Esquimaux and Salmon rivers, spend the winter evening in 
dancing and other gayeties to which the Anglo-Saxon, in Labra- 
dor at least, is a comparative stranger. 
The Esquimaux river at its eastern entrance is but a few rods ` 
wide. Passing Esquimaux island we sailed out into a broad bay 
or expansion of the river, with ravines leading down to it, and 
under the steep bank protected from the northerly winds were 
the winter houses previously described. Up the river, just beyond 
Mrs. Chevalier’s, the river contracted into narrows with rapids ; 
it then opened into another bay or expansion two miles wide, the 
river being a succession of lakes connected by rapids, and this is 
typical of the rivers and streams of the Labrador peninsula. A 
barge cannot sail up the Esquimaux river more than fifteen miles, 
although one can push farther on in a flat boat. We were told 
that the river is about two hundred miles in length, and although 
perhaps the largest in Labrador it has never been explored. 
