The brief summer of Northern Labrador had passed, and the Eskimos around the Hudson’s Bay Post at Katatallik were busy preparing for the approaching winter. The season previous, according to the accurate notes of the Moravians, kept for over a hundred years, had been the worst on record; and now again, as the long, cold, […]

It was Christmas Eve, and Malcolm McCrea, just back from the woods, was throwing down some frozen seal meat from the scaffold for his hungry dogs after their long day’s hauling. Malcolm was only eighteen, and in winter still lived with his father in their home below the falls of Pike’s River. However, now that […]

It was getting late in the year. The steep cliffs that everywhere flank the sides of the great bay were already hoary with snow. The big ponds were all “fast,” and the fall deer hunt which follows the fishery was over. Most of the boats were hauled up, well out of reach of the “ballicater” […]

The house was fairly shaking in the gale, and any one but Uncle Rube, who had lived in it since he put it there forty years before, would have been expecting things to happen. But the old man sat dozing in his chair beside the crackling stove, and the circling rings of smoke rising over […]

The ice in the big bay had broken up suddenly that year in the latter part of March before a tremendous ocean swell heaving in beneath it. The piles of firewood and the loads of timber for the summer fishing-rooms on all the outer islands were left standing on the landwash. The dog-teams usually haul […]

“Spin me a yarn, Uncle Eph. I’m fairly played out. We’ve been on the go from daylight and I’m too tired to write up the day’s work.” “A yarn, Doctor. I’m no hand at yarns,” said the master of the spick-and-span little cottage at which I and my dogs had brought up for the night. […]

A crowd of visitors had landed from the fortnightly mail boat, and had come up to see the sights of our little harbour while our mails and freight were being landed and the usual two hours were allowed to collect and put aboard any return packages or letters. The island on which the station stands […]

Jean Marquette had nothing French about him but his name. Indeed “ne’er a word of French” could the old man remember, for he had lived for many years on the bleak, northeast side of Labrador; and few folk knew why, for all his forbears from sunny France had studiously avoided the Atlantic seaboard. Over his […]

“It must be nigh sixty years ago, but I remembers it as if it was yesterday, when a new settler come to live in our harbour,” said Skipper Life Flynn, at whose house I was spending the night with my driver and dogs. “Life” was short for Eliphoreth–the “given” names being mostly out of the […]