The Long Labrador Trail | Page 8

twenty miles above the rapid. Our progress during the day had been slow, as the wind had died away and we had, several times, to wait for Duncan to overtake us in his slower rowboat.
While the rest of us "made camp" Duncan cut wood for a rousing fire, as the evening was cool, and Pete put a porcupine to boil for supper. We were a hungry crowd when we sat down to eat. I had told the boys how good porcupine was, how it resembled lamb and what a treat we were to have. But all porcupines are not alike, and this one was not within my reckoning. Tough! He was certainly "the oldest inhabitant," and after vain efforts to chew the leathery meat, we turned in disgust to bread and coffee, and Easton, at least, lost faith forever in my judgment of toothsome game, and formed a particular prejudice against porcupines which he never overcame. Pete assured us, however, that, "This porcupine, he must boil long. I boil him again to-night and boil him again to-morrow morning. Then he very good for breakfast. Porcupine fine. Old one must be cooked long."
So Pete, after supper, put the porcupine on to cook some more, promising that we should find it nice and tender for breakfast.
As I sat that night by the low-burning embers of our first camp fire I forgot my new companions. Through the gathering night mists I could just discern the dim outlines of the opposite shore of Grand Lake. It was over there, just west of that high spectral bluff, that Hubbard and I, on a wet July night, had pitched our first camp of the other trip. In fancy I was back again in that camp and Hubbard was talking to me and telling me of the "bully story" of the mystic land of won- ders that lay "behind the ranges" he would have to take back to the world.
"We're going to traverse a section no white man has ever seen," he exclaimed, "and we'll add something to the world's knowledge of geography at least, and that's worth while. No matter how little a man may add to the fund of human knowledge it's worth the doing, for it's by little bits that we've learned to know so much of our old world. There's some hard work before us, though, up there in those hills, and some hardships to meet."
Ah, if we had only known!
Some one said it was time to "turn in," and I was brought suddenly to a sense of the present, but a feeling of sadness possessed me when I took my place in the crowded tent, and I lay awake long, thinking of those other days.
Clear and crisp was the morning of June twenty-eighth. The atmosphere was bracing and delightful, the azure of the sky above us shaded to the most delicate tints of blue at the horizon, and, here and there, bits of clouds, like bunches of cotton, flecked the sky. The sun broke grandly over the rugged hills, and the lake, like molten silver, lay before us.
A fringe of ice had formed during the night along the shore. We broke it and bathed our hands and faces in the cool water, then sat down in a circle near our camp fire to renew our attack upon the porcupine, which had been sending out a most delicious odor from the kettle where Pete had it cooking. But alas for our expectations! Our teeth would make no impression upon it, and Easton remarked that "the rubber trust ought to hunt porcupines, for they are a lot tougher than rubber and just as pliable."
"I don't know why," said Pete sadly. "I boil him long time."
That day we continued our course along the northern shore of the lake until we reached the deep bay which Hubbard and I had failed to enter and explore on the other trip, and which failure had resulted so tragically. This bay is some five miles from the westerly end of Grand Lake, and is really the mouth of the Nascaupee and Crooked Rivers which flow into the upper end of it. There was little or no wind and we had to go slowly to permit Duncan, in his rowboat, to keep pace with us. Darkness was not far off when we reached Duncan's tilt (a small log hut), three miles up the Nascaupee River, where we stopped for the night.
This is the tilt in which Allen Goudy and Duncan lived at the time they came to my rescue in 1903, and where I spent three days getting strength for my trip down Grand Lake to the Post. It is Duncan's sup- ply base in the winter months when he hunts along the Nascaupee River, one hundred and twenty miles