Labrador Days
I
IN Labrador we divide our year into three seasons, winter, spring, and fall. You seldom hear our folk talking of summer. Though it is little enough hot weather we get north of the Straits of Belle Isle, it is ample for our tastes, for a hot day sets all Northerners a-loafing — while the brisk cold of winter stirs the blood, and keeps the laziest laggard on the move. This service, as the old sea dog Whitbourne remarks, is rendered to us in summer by the mosquito, which marks out the loiterer with unfailing vigor.
We should be the slaves of the seasons if we were not the masters of them. During seven months the sea is closed to us, and the land is uninhabitable the other five. We are driven out on to the seaboard for the fishery in spring and we return up the long bays in the fall for the trapping season, to the little house nestling in among the trees. We must reap the harvest of the sea during the ‘open water’; and so the barren wavebeaten rocks of the Atlantic coast are flecked with the tiny log tilts which are inhabited until the chilling ocean drives the fish away again.
It is a grand sight in the spring to see the first rush to the shore of the fish called capelin. Those who are accustomed to speak of the economy of Nature would blush to see these fish being destroyed or destroying themselves in thousands on the beach. The waves ripple up black with the seething fish, and soon the sands are ankle-deep in spawn. Beasts innumerable are preying on them, dogs famished after the winter, foxes now ragged and tawny and useless for fur, bears woken and hungry after their long winter siesta, mink and marten no longer forced to a weary hunt for a mouthful or driven to the mean crime of robbery.
Gulls and petrels and hawks hover overhead, puffins and loons and auks swim both above and below the school of fish, while the oily surface of the very sea is alive with jostling, ‘breaching’ cod, so that at times we say the sea is ‘dry’ with fish. Behind the cod come the jumpers and the blowers, ice porpoises and grampuses, sharks and dogfish. All are celebrating the event of the brief summer by a colossal beanfeast, at which everyone seems to be eating his next-door neighbor. Long before the great holocaust is over, the fisherman comes along and sweeps the participants impartially into his mighty net.
Now it is that the nets, made during the long winter evenings and on the uncivil days, when it is impossible to visit the fur traps because of the blizzard howling outside, bring the reward of industry; and men, women, and children find employment ‘making the fish’ — that is, cleaning, sorting, and drying the catch for the foreign market. Alas, there are many enemies of the great nets or traps. If the ever-flowing Arctic Current carries one of our countless giant icebergs from the eternal glaciers of the North into the nets as they are moored out from the rocks, it is a major disaster. When an iceberg is approaching, the part of wisdom is to get out of the way, for to tow perhaps a million tons of ice away from the precious net is not to be thought of. It is always dangerous to be too familiar with an iceberg. Gales of wind, too, will soon rip to ribbons the twine, which it will take half the winter to put right again.
Often enough a large whale, following the fish, will swim straight, into a trap net. I recall a whale tangled in a maze of twine, which rushed off with the door of the trap like a modern Samson. Another burst through the wall as if it had been a tissue-paper hoop in a circus. Another, contemptuously rolling about inside the net, as if in an improvised bath, got himself so tightly held down by the big mooring anchors that he was unable to get to the surface in time to breathe, with the result that he had to pay for his frolic with many a ‘pound of flesh.’
It is always a jolly crowd that, with a winter’s ‘diet’ secured from the summer’s work, prepares, as soon as the first snow falls, ‘to go up the bay’ for winter quarters. The first flying snow that comes to hide the traces of the summer carnage of fish sounds a glad Angelus to summon these scattered Toilers of the Deep from the boisterous ocean to the peace and security of our old-time winter.
Frozen in — and the great world frozen out. It might seem as though we must greet the last visit of the mail boat, which in summer links us with civilization, with a sinking feeling in our hearts. Some would suppose that the rattle and the crash as she butted her way into the fast-forming harbor ice sounded a death knell to those now to be buried alive in this ‘dreary abode of half-starved humanity.’ No such thing! There is no happier Christmas crowd than that which gathers on the impromptu wharf of ice for the last call of the steamer. Noisy dog-teams and shouting drivers are soon alongside, the steel-shod runners of their homemade sleighs or komatiks humming merrily over the crisp snow as they hurtle down on to the level ice from the high land, racing with each other and fearful of being late for the impatient steamer. When at length the last package is delivered, and the loaded komatiks are ready for the shore, and the boat is backing astern, soon to disappear from our horizon, it is a right cheerful note that bids her ‘Good-bye.’ Now we can settle down to enjoy the pursuits and pleasures of a subarctic winter, free from thaw and slush and damp.
I have come into one of our tiny villages when the snow has already covered the hills, and the ice on the inland lakes already ‘bears,’ and found a dozen families waiting for the word to start the journey of twenty or thirty miles to the river mouth at the head of the bay, whence some will trek many more miles to their trapping grounds farther in the interior. Such migrations are becoming rarer in these days. The long boats are filled with every conceivable object of household use, and also, it is to be hoped, with a winter’s supplies: barrels of flour, kegs of molasses, tubs of butter, chests of tea, casks of pork, bags of hard bread or biscuit, a puncheon of beef, and so forth; all the bedding, stoves, furniture, boxes, guns, nets, traps — and then on top the goats, if any, the team of dogs, and lastly the women and children. No, there is not much room left to row, and if winter comes on very rapidly, and the whole cavalcade has to camp once or twice on the way, the experiences are not all beer and skittles.
II
In what other country in the world is every man his own houseowner, provided with free firewood galore? Nay, all here are also ‘carriage folk,’ for our dogs cost little, feeding themselves in summer on the offal of our fish and in winter on old whale meat, cod-liver blubber, seal carcasses, or anything else they happen to find about.
We devote the slack days of the late fall to excursions into the country for caribou, which are conveniently descending to the woodlands from the high hills where they have been feeding to escape from the mosquitoes of summer, and are also wending their way south, as they find it harder to get at the luscious mosses on the now frozen ground. These give us fresh venison to freeze for our meat supply in winter, skins for our sleeping bags, and moccasins to use with snowshoes over the beautifully level and direct winter snow roads. The caribou also afford us the thread and sinew for our skin boots. These must be light and soft to allow the feet to move freely and so keep from freezing, and should also be watertight and snowtight.
The hot sun in spring makes the snow surface wet, and we cannot then use the smoked deerskin boots. The deficiency, however, is generously supplied by the seals, which we catch in nets in early spring and late fall, or shoot in boats between the great ice pans, or, in unsportsmanlike fashion, club on the ice floe at their breeding time in March or April. Unsportsmanlike as is the killing of the seals at such a time, to venture off on the heaving masses of arctic ice that are running along the shore, to start out to hunt seals that have been spied from the headland, to risk getting ashore at some projecting point miles farther along, require far more courage than much so-called sport, and have cost more lives than many a quail or partridge.
The sealskins are invaluable to our local Labrador men. Boots made from them weigh only a pound a pair. They are completely watertight, and, tying below the knee, keep out the snow that otherwise would melt against the warm stocking. Sealskins also give us our gloves, while the Eskimos of the far North use them to cover their boats and tubiks and themselves. In cold weather, especially in winter, a sealskin kossak worn over a good sweater is an almost ideal garment.
As for the meat of the seal, we preserve it in nature’s own larder, nailing it up well out of the reach of the dogs, though even that might not be necessary, for I have known a fallen seal flipper to be so hard frozen that it puzzled a dog to make a scratch on it.
Outside, around the cottage walls, are stretched on large frames the skins of the beautiful bay seals. These we allow the frost to bleach before we soften them for wearing, by scraping and breaking the fibres. Only the better-off folk who remain salmon fishing in the bay can keep sheep, and these animals never dare go outside the fold, for our team dogs love sheep all too dearly. The hand loom, still to be seen at work in the houses of those who do their own spinning, carding, and knitting, affords many happy hours to the womenfolk, besides homeliness to the cottage and warm woolens for the men.
A few years ago a large steamer homeward bound was cast on the inhospitable (I ought really to say ‘hospitable’) rocks of our shore. Jagged rocks, piercing through her bottom, held her in an upright position as if she were still afloat. Before she sank, there was time to salve all the movable cargo, including a quantity of sheep. The wool was eagerly annexed by the settlers; but the mutton was given to the dogs, just as you, no doubt, would treat our pièce de résistance, the flipper of the baby seal, as only too patently combining in itself the aromas of the fish and game courses.
We do not breakfast Sunday on baked beans, and our substitute, known as ‘brewis,’ — made of dried codfish, soaked hardtack, and fat pork, — might appear to you unpalatable. But in a climate like Labrador we have that best of all sauces, hunger.
III
What a great day it is when at last all is snugly ’stowed away,’and, leaving the women to put the last finishing touches inside the winter cottage, with trap and rifle we are ready to start out to reconnoitre the fur path for the first time. How the cronk of a lingering flock of geese makes one’s blood t ingle; what a thrill the fresh track of a land bear sends through one! Here, plainly written on the snow, is the story of a chase by a fierce little marten or sable; there are the long gliding marks of an otter that has come to live in the open headwater of his great pool, where likely enough he has been ‘trouting’ during all the months that the country has been handed over to the inhabitants of the wild. Here are the slots of a recently passed company of deer, and there are the pad marks of some lonely old wolf, following in the wake of his to-morrow’s dinner.
But most important to the trapper is the clean-cut dainty track between those boulders by the landwash marking a fox’s highroad to his hunting ground. Who knows if it is a silver-hair or a brown one! It may mean a hundred dollars running about, and the trapper’s ingenuity may turn it into cash.
Now for trap No. 1, neatly hidden after being well smoked to remove the nasty smell of white man, and then a dainty piece of fish and perhaps a smear of Florida water and a little assafœtida added. A fox loves these incongruities; a lynx prefers valerian; a marten has a leaning for castoreum and is not averse to aniseed. To bait a beaver trap is easy, for a chunk of birchwood is all he needs, but to set a trap for him under the ice requires no little initiation.
A girl on this coast was given a trap of her own to earn pin money. To her great joy she found a well-frequented fox path, and set her trap accordingly. But every day the fox circled round and round the dainty morsel, and then departed. Once or twice he sprung the trap and bore off the bait in triumph. He tried it once too often, however, for the girl set the trap unbaited in the little circular track, leaving the bait as before in the centre. The next day she had a noble silver fox.
The most harmful aspect of trapping is its cruelty. A fox may be caught for days in a trap with his legs broken; and many a one, when left long in a trap, has eaten off his own leg above and below where it is caught, and so has escaped on three. Of course, the limb has been frozen first. Mercifully the neck trap, which kills at once, is rapidly coming into use. The native Eskimo trap, of which one often sees specimens as one travels the hills, was made of stones and catches the fox alive and quite painlessly.
To be sure, Reynard himself is a cruel villain, very fond of torturing his own victims before he has finally worried them to death; and almost every animal here can live only by destroying some other creature, including ourselves. It is impossible to be a vegetarian where there are no vegetables. As a matter of fact, in these climes foxes depend chiefly on mice for their living. These mice exist in enormous numbers among the deep layers of stones, covered with mosses and lichens, that everywhere carpet the land. Extreme frosts alternating with occasional thaws in the early spring break up the rocks. If it were not for this the mice would not have safe retreats in summer and countless vaulted passages to travel in during the winter. In fact, they could not exist at all.
in time of plenty, Reynard makes caches of these mice against an evil day. But he is a suspicious scamp, and has been seen as he travels along his path, though already carrying an unneeded mouse in his mouth, every now and again to scent around and dig up some long-defunct victim, just to see how it is getting on.
IV
Life on a coast like this naturally has its superstitions and its tragedies. One of our woodsmen left his home one morning as usual, but at nightfall did not return. The snow was six feet deep everywhere, and he had taken with him neither food nor preparations for camping. Much anxiety was felt, but next morning he returned safe and sound. He firmly believes that the fairies ‘lugged him away.’ There was no liquor to be had, even had he been addicted to it, and we never had any reason to doubt his sanity. It appears he was returning on his usual path when he heard the fairies calling, and, as they had often called people away, he knew that he had to go. At night he made a hole close to a tree trunk, put a great arctic owl he had shot under his feet and half a dozen willow grouse round his legs, hauled his kossak or hood over his head, and slept ‘with ne’er a frost burn — but the blood was some time before it trickled back through my veins.’
The remarkable efficacy of faith is well sustained by the strong reliance our fishermen put in charms. Not only have I lost a patient because he would wait lor an ‘old woman from the Bay’ to come and charm him rather than suffer the knife, but another patient so strongly insisted that I must charm his diseased molar rather than use my forceps that I consented in exasperation to go through the motions. Ever since he has stoutly maintained that that tooth, at least, has never troubled him once.
Our tragedies are mainly due to our isolation. A father of one of our fishing families was compelled one midwinter to leave his wife and children and take to the komatik path to find food. He was away from home far longer than he intended to be, and when at last he returned he found his wife and little lad were missing. The other children told him, ‘Mother went out to look for you, as you were so long.’ Nothing was seen of the lost ones till months after. A fisherman was in the woods for firing when he thought he saw something like a rag out on a marsh. He went to it only to discover the still-frozen bodies of the mother and her little boy.
In one of our deep inlets known as Byron’s Bay dwells a solitary family in the winter. The oldest boy had ventured out on to the young ice after a seal. Suddenly from the shore the father saw him disappear. Unable to swim, the father rushed for his fishing line. Fixing the stout jigger in his belt, he gave the end of the line to his daughter to hold, and hurried out till he reached the hole, where he also fell through. Down he went, with only the frail strength of a single fishing line between himself and a horrible death. He was unfortunately too late to get more than the body of his boy, but, marvelous to relate, with that he escaped alive to the shore.
Our daily bread in Labrador depends largely on our physical accomplishments, our energy, and our courage. We may deal in the insecurities of the hunt, but that is better than the securities of civilization. For there is a marvelous attraction in the freedom of the life. There is the excitement of daily contest, the joy of having overcome some difficulty quite unaided. Our Labrador days confirm the truth of Nietzsche’s dictum that ‘everything worth while in the world has been accomplished notwithstanding.’