XI

_WINTER PRACTICE_

It is, then, to the outporter, to the men of the fleet and to the

Labrador liveyere that Doctor Grenfell devotes himself. The hospital

at Indian Harbour is the centre of the Labrador activity; the hospital

at St. Anthony is designed to care for the needs of the French shore

folk; the hospital at Battle Harbour--the first established, and,

possibly, the best equipped of all--receives patients from all

directions, but especially from the harbours of the Strait and the

Gulf. In the little hospital-ship, _Strathcona_, the doctor himself

darts here and there and everywhere, all summer long, responding to

calls, searching out the sick, gathering patients for the various

hospitals. She is known to every harbour of the coast; and she is

often overcrowded with sick bound to the hospitals for treatment or

operation. Often, indeed, in cases of emergency, operations are

performed aboard, while she tosses in the rough seas. She is never a

moment idle while the waters are open. But in the fall, when

navigation closes, she must go into winter quarters; and then the sick

and starving are sought out by dog-team and komatik. There is no

cessation of beneficent activity; there is merely a change in the

manner of getting about. Summer journeys are hard enough, God knows!

But winter travel is a matter of much greater difficulty and hardship.

Not that the difficulty and hardship seem ever to be perceived by the

mission-doctor; quite the contrary: there is if anything greater

delight to be found in a wild, swift race over rotten or heaving ice,

or in a night in the driving snow, than in running the _Strathcona_

through a nor'east gale. The Indian Harbour hospital is closed in the

fall; so intense is the cold, so exposed the situation, so scarce the

wood, so few the liveyeres, that it has been found unprofitable to

keep it open. There is another way of meeting the needs of the

situation; and that is by despatching the Battle Harbour doctor

northward in midwinter. The folk know that he is bound towards

them--know the points of call--can determine within a month the time

of his arrival. So they bring the sick to these places--and patiently

wait. This is a hard journey--made alone with the dogs. Many a night

the doctor must get into his sleeping bag and make himself as

comfortable as possible in the snow, snuggled close to his dogs, for

the sake of the warmth of their bodies. Six hundred miles north in the

dead of winter, six hundred miles back again; it takes a man of

unchangeable devotion to undertake it!

[Illustration: "THE HOSPITAL AT BATTLE HARBOR"]

* * * * *

The Labrador dogs--pure and half-breed "huskies," with so much of the

wolf yet in them that they never bark--are for the most part used by

the doctor on his journeys. There would be no getting anywhere without

them; and it must be said that they are magnificent animals, capable

of heroic deeds. Every prosperous householder has at least six or

eight full-grown sled-dogs and more puppies than he can keep track of.

In summer they lie everywhere under foot by day, and by night howl in

a demoniacal fashion far and near; but they fish for themselves in

shallow water, and are fat, and may safely be stepped over. In winter

they are lean, desperately hungry, savage, and treacherous--in

particular, a menace to the lives of children, whom they have been

known to devour. There was once a father, just returned from a day's

hunt on the ice, who sent his son to fetch a seal from the waterside;

the man had forgotten for the moment that the dogs were roaming the

night and very hungry--and so he lost both his seal and his son. The

four-year-old son of the Hudson Bay Company's agent at Cartwright

chanced last winter to fall down in the snow. He was at once set upon

by the pack; and when he was rescued (his mother told me the story) he

had forty-two ugly wounds on his little body. For many nights

afterwards the dogs howled under the window where he lay moaning.

Eventually those concerned in the attack were hanged by the neck,

which is the custom in such cases.

* * * * *

Once, when Dr. Grenfell was wintering at St. Anthony, on the French

shore, there came in great haste from Conch, a point sixty miles

distant, a komatik with an urgent summons to the bedside of a man who

lay dying of hemorrhage. And while the doctor was preparing for this

journey, a second komatik, despatched from another place, arrived with

a similar message.

"Come at once," it was. "My little boy has broken his thigh."

The doctor chose first to visit the lad. At ten o'clock that night he

was at the bedside. It had been a dark night--black dark: with the

road precipitous, the dogs uncontrollable, the physician in great

haste. The doctor thought, many a time, that there would be "more than

one broken limb" by the time of his arrival. But there was no

misadventure; and he found the lad lying on a settle, in great pain,

wondering why he must suffer so.

"Every minute or two," says the doctor, "there would be a jerk, a

flash of pain, and a cry to his father, who was holding him all the

time."

The doctor was glad "to get the chloroform mask over the boy's

face"--he is a sympathetic man, the doctor; glad, always, to ease

pain. And at one o'clock in the morning the broken bone was set and

the doctor had had a cup of tea; whereupon, he retired to a bed on the

floor and a few hours' "watch below." At daylight, when he was up and

about to depart, the little patient had awakened and was merrily

calling to the doctor's little retriever.

"He was as merry as a cricket," says the doctor, "when I bade him

good-bye."

* * * * *

About twelve hours on the way to Conch, where the man lay dying of

hemorrhage--a two days' journey--the doctor fell in with a dog-train

bearing the mail. And the mail-man had a letter--a hasty summons to a

man in great pain some sixty miles in another direction. It was

impossible to respond. "That call," says the doctor, sadly, "owing to

sheer impossibility, was not answered." It was haste away to Conch,

over the ice and snow--for the most of the time on the ice of the

sea--in order that the man who lay dying there might be succoured. But

there was another interruption. When the dog-train reached the coast,

there was a man waiting to intercept it: the news of the doctor's

probable coming had spread.

"I've a fresh team o' dogs," sir, said he, "t' take you t' the island.

There's a man there, an' he's wonderful sick."

Would the doctor go? Yes--he would go! But he had no sooner reached

that point of the mainland whence he was bound across a fine stretch

of ice to the island than he was again intercepted. It was a young

man, this time, whose mother lay ill, with no other Protestant family

living within fifty miles. Would the doctor help her? Yes--the doctor

would; and did. And when he was about to be on his way again----

"Could you bear word," said the woman, "t' Mister Elliot t' come bury

my boy? He said he'd come, sir; but now my little lad has been lying

dead, here, since January."

It was then early in March. Mr. Elliot was a Protestant fisherman who

was accustomed to bury the Protestant dead of that district. Yes--the

doctor would bear word to him. Having promised this, he set out to

visit the sick man on the island; for whom, also, he did what he

could.

* * * * *

Off again towards Conch--now with fresh teams, which had been provided

by the friends of the man who lay there dying. And by the way a man

brought his little son for examination and treatment--"a lad of three

years," says the doctor; "a bright, healthy, embryo fisherman,

light-haired and blue-eyed, a veritable celt."

"And what's the matter with him?" was the physician's question.

"He've a club foot, sir," was the answer.

And so it turned out: the lad had a club foot. He was fond of telling

his mother that he had a right foot and a wrong one. "The wrong one,

mama," said he, "is no good." He was to be a cripple for life--utterly

incapacitated: the fishing does not admit of club feet. But the doctor

made arrangements for the child's transportation to the St. Anthony

hospital, where he could, without doubt be cured; and then hurried on.

* * * * *

The way now led through a district desperately impoverished--as much

by ignorance and indolence as by anything else. At one settlement of

tilts there were forty souls, "without a scrap of food or money," who

depended upon their neighbours--and the opening of navigation was

still three months distant! In one tilt there lay what seemed to be a

bundle of rags.

"And who is this?" the doctor asked.

It was a child. "The fair hair of a blue-eyed boy of about ten years

disclosed itself," says the doctor. "Stooping over him I attempted to

turn his face towards me. It was drawn, with pain, and a moan escaped

the poor little fellow's lips. He had disease of the spine, with open

sores in three places. He was stark naked, and he was starved to a

skeleton. He gave me a bright smile before I left, but I confess to a

shudder of horror at the thought that his lot might have been mine. Of

course the 'fear of pauperizing' had to disappear before the claims of

humanity. Yet, there, in the depth of winter," the doctor asks, with

infinite compassion, "would not a lethal draught be the kindest friend

of that little one of Him that loved the children?"

* * * * *

For five days the doctor laboured in Conch, healing many of the folk,

helping more; and at the end of that period the man who has suffered

the hemorrhage was so far restored that with new dogs the doctor set

out for Canada Bay, still travelling southward. There, as he says, "we

had many interesting cases." One of these involved an operation: that

of "opening a knee-joint and removing a loose body," with the result

that a fisherman who had long been crippled was made quite well again.

Then there came a second call from Conch. Seventeen men had come for

the physician, willing to haul the komatik themselves, if no dogs were

to be had. To this call the doctor immediately responded; and having

treated patients at Conch and by the way, he set out upon the return

journey to St. Anthony, fearing that his absence had already been

unduly prolonged. And he had not gone far on the way before he fell in

with another komatik, provided with a box, in which lay an old woman

bound to St. Anthony hospital, in the care of her sons, to have her

foot amputated.

Crossing Hare Bay, the doctor had a slight mishap--rather amusing,

too, he thinks.

"One of my dogs fell through the ice," says he. "There was a biting

nor'west wind blowing, and the temperature was ten degrees below zero.

When we were one mile from the land, I got off to run and try the

ice. It suddenly gave way, and in I fell. It did not take me long to

get out, for I have had some little experience, and the best advice

sounds odd: it is 'keep cool.' But the nearest house being at least

ten miles, it meant, then, almost one's life to have no dry clothing.

Fortunately, I had. The driver at once galloped the dogs back to the

woods we had left, and I had as hard a mile's running as ever I had;

for my clothing was growing to resemble the armour of an ancient

knight more and more, every yard, and though in my youth I was

accustomed to break the ice to bathe if necessary, I never tried

running a race in a coat of mail. By the time I arrived at the trees

and got out of the wind, my driver had a rubber poncho spread on the

snow under a snug spruce thicket; and I was soon as dry and a great

deal warmer than before."

At St. Anthony, the woman's foot was amputated; and in two days the

patient was talking of "getting up." Meantime, a komatik had arrived

in haste from a point on the northwest coast--a settlement one hundred

and twenty miles distant. The doctor was needed there--and the doctor

went!

* * * * *

[Illustration: "THE DOCTOR ON A WINTER'S JOURNEY"]

This brief and inadequate description of a winter's journey may not

serve to indicate the hardship of the life the doctor leads: he has

small regard for that; but it may faintly apprise the reader of the

character of the work done, and of the will with which the doctor does

it. One brief journey! The visitation of but sixty miles of coast! Add

to this the numerous journeys of that winter, the various summer

voyages of the _Strathcona_; conceive that the folk of two thousand

miles are visited every year, often twice a year: then multiply by

ten--for the mission has been in efficient existence for ten

years--and the reader may reach some faint conception of the sum of

good wrought by this man. But without knowing the desolate

land--without observing the emaciated bodies of the children--without

hearing the cries of distress--it is impossible adequately to realize

the blessing his devotion has brought to the coast.