The Lure of the Labrador Wild | Page 7

confused
sense of its being a sort of Arctic wilderness. Hubbard proceeded to
enlighten me, by tracing with his pencil, on the fly- leaf of his notebook,

an outline map of the peninsula.
"Very interesting," I commented. "But why do you wish to go there?"
"Man," he replied, "don't you realise it's about the only part of the
continent that hasn't been explored? As a matter of fact, there isn't
much more known of the interior of Labrador now than when Cabot
discovered the coast more than four hundred years ago." He jumped up
to throw more wood on the fire. "Think of it, Wallace!" he went on, "A
great unknown land right near home, as wild and primitive to-day as it
has always been! I want to see it. I want to get into a really wild
country and have some of the experiences of the old fellows who
explored and opened up the country where we are now."
Resuming his place by the blazing logs, Hubbard unfolded to me his
plan, then vague and in the rough, of exploring a part of the unknown
eastern end of the peninsula. Of trips such as this he had been dreaming
since childhood. When a mere boy on his father's farm in Michigan, he
had lain for hours out under the trees in the orchard poring over a map
of Canada and making imaginary journeys into the unexplored. Boone
and Crockett were his heroes, and sometimes he was so affected by the
tales of their adventures that he must needs himself steal away to the
woods and camp out for two or three days.
It was at this period that he resolved to head some day an exploring
expedition of his own, and this resolution he forgot neither while a
student nor while serving as a newspaper man in Detroit and New York.
At length, through a connection he made with a magazine devoted to
out-of-door life, he was able to make several long trips into the wild.
Among other places, he visited the Hudson Bay region, and once
penetrated to the winter hunting ground of the Mountaineer Indians,
north of Lake St. John, in southern Labrador. These trips, however,
failed to satisfy him; his ambition was to reach a region where no white
man had preceded him. Now, at the age of twenty-nine, he believed that
his ambition was about to be realised.
"It's always the way, Wallace," he said; "when a fellow starts on a long
trail, he's never willing to quit. It'll be the same with you if you go with
me to Labrador. You'll say each trip will be the last, but when you
come home you'll hear the voice of the wilderness calling you to return,
and it will lure you away again and again. I thought my Lake St. John
trip was something, but while there I stood at the portals of the

unknown, and it brought back stronger than ever the old longing to
make discoveries, so that now the walls of the city seem to me a prison
and I simply must get away."
My friend's enthusiasm was contagious. It had never previously
occurred to me to undertake the game of exploration; but, like most
American boys, I had had youthful dreams of going into a great wild
country, even as my forefathers had gone, and Hubbard's talk brought
back the old juvenile love of adventure. That night before we lay down
to sleep I said: "Hubbard, I'll go with you." And so the thing was
settled--that was how Hubbard's expedition had its birth.
More than a year passed, however, before Hubbard was able to make
definite arrangements to get away. I believe it was in February, 1903,
that the telephone bell in my law office rang, and Hubbard's voice at
the other end of the wire conveyed to me the information that he had
"bully news."
"Is that so?" I said. "What's up?
"The Labrador trip is all fixed for this summer," was the excited reply.
"Come out to Congers to-night without fail, and we'll talk it over."
In accordance with his invitation, I went out that evening to visit my
friend in his suburban home. I shall never forget the exuberance of his
joy. You would have thought he was a boy about to be released from
school. By this time he had become the associate editor of the
magazine for which he had been writing, but he had finally been able to
induce his employers to consent to the project upon which he had set
his heart and grant him a leave of absence.
"It will be a big thing, Wallace," he said in closing; "it ought to make
my reputation."
Into the project of penetrating the vast solitudes of desolate Labrador,