FIRST WINTER AT ST. ANTHONY
Not one of the many who have wintered with us in the North has failed
to love our frozen season. To me it was one long delight. The
dog-driving, the intimate relationships with the people on whom one
was so often absolutely dependent, the opportunity to use to the real
help of good people in distress the thousand and one small things
which we had learned--all these made the knowledge that we were shut
off from the outside world rather a pleasure than a cause for regret.
Calls for the doctor were constant. I spent but three Sundays at home
the whole time, and my records showed fifteen hundred miles covered
with dogs.
The Eskimo dog is so strong and enduring that he is the doyen of
traction power in the North, when long distances and staying qualities
are required. But for short, sharp dashes of twenty to thirty miles
the lighter built and more vivacious Straits dog is the speedier and
certainly the less wolfish. We have attempted crossbreeding our
somewhat squat-legged Eskimo dogs with Kentucky wolf hounds, to
combine speed with endurance. The mail-carrier from Fullerton to
Winnipeg found that combination very desirable. With us, however, it
did not succeed. The pups were lank and weedy and not nearly so
capable as the ordinary Straits breed.
The real Labrador dog is a very slightly modified wolf. A good
specimen stands two feet six inches, or even two feet eight inches
high at the shoulder, measures over six feet six inches from the tip
of the nose to the tip of the tail, and will scale a hundred pounds.
The hair is thick and straight; the ears are pointed and stand
directly up. The large, bushy tail curves completely over on to the
back, and is always carried erect. The colour is generally tawny, like
that of a gray wolf, with no distinctive markings. The general
resemblance to wolves is so great that at Davis Inlet, where wolves
come out frequently in winter, the factor has seen his team mixed with
a pack of wolves on the beach in front of the door, and yet could not
shoot, being unable to distinguish one from the other. The Eskimo dog
never barks, but howls exactly like a wolf, in sitting posture with
the head upturned. The Labrador wolf has never been known to kill a
man, but during the years I have spent in that country I have known
the dogs to kill two children and one man, and to eat the body of
another. Our dogs have little or no fear, and unlike the wolves, will
unhesitatingly attack even the largest polar bear.
No amount of dry cold seems to affect the dogs. At 50 deg. F. below zero,
a dog will lie out on the ice and sleep without danger of frost-bite.
He may climb out of the sea with ice forming all over his fur, but he
seems not to mind one iota. I have seen his breath freeze so over his
face that he had to rub the coating off his eyes with his paws to
enable him to see the track.
The dogs have a wonderful instinct for finding their way under almost
insurmountable difficulties, and they have oftentimes been the means
of saving the lives of their masters. Once I was driving a distance of
seventy miles across country. The path was untravelled for the winter,
and was only a direction, not being cut or blazed. The leading dog had
been once across the previous year with the doctor. The "going" had
then been very bad; with snow and fog the journey had taken three
days. A large part of the way lay across wide frozen lakes, and
then through woods. As I had never been that way before I had to leave
it to the dog. Without a single fault, as far as we knew, he took us
across, and we accomplished the whole journey in twelve hours,
including one and a half hours for rest and lunch.
[Illustration: THREE OF THE DOCTOR'S DOGS]
The distance travelled and the average speed attained depends largely
on other factors than the dog power. We have covered seventy-five
miles in a day with comfort; we have done five with difficulty.
Ordinary speed would be six miles an hour, but I once did twenty-one
miles in two hours and a quarter over level ice. Sails can sometimes
be used with advantage on the komatik as an adjunct. The whole charm
of dog-team driving lies in its infinite variety of experiences, the
personal study of each dog, and the need for one's strength, courage,
and resourcefulness.
South and north of the little village of St. Anthony where we had
settled were other similar villages; and we decided that we could make
a round tour every second month at least. We soon found, however, a
great difficulty in getting started, because we always had some
patients in houses near about, whom we felt that we could not leave.
So we selected a motherly woman, whom we had learned that we could
trust to obey orders and not act on her own initiative and judgment,
and trained her as best we could to deal with some of these sick
people. Then, having borrowed and outfitted a couple of rooms in a
friend's house, we left our serious cases under her care, and started
for a month's travel with all the optimism of youth.
Weight on your komatik is a vital question, and not knowing for what
you may be called upon, makes the outfitting an art. I give the
experience of years. The sledge should be eleven feet long. Its
runners should be constructed of black spruce grown in the Far North
where wood grows slowly and is very tough, and yet quite light. The
runners should be an inch thick, eleven inches high, and about
twenty-six inches apart, the bottoms rising at the back half an inch,
as well as at the front toward the horns. The laths are fastened on
with alternate diagonal lashings, are two inches wide, and close
together. Such a komatik will "work" like a snake, adapting itself to
the inequalities of the ground, and will not spread or "buckle." Long
nails are driven up right through the runners, and clinched on the top
to prevent splitting. The runners should be shod with spring steel,
one inch wide; and a second runner, two and a half inches wide, may be
put between the lower one and the wood, to hold up the sledge when the
snow is soft. Thus one has on both a skate and a snowshoe at once. The
dogs' traces should be of skin and fastened with toggles or buttons to
the bowline. Dog food must be distributed along the komatik trail in
summer--though the people will make great sacrifices to feed "the
Doctor's team."
Clothing must be light; to perspire in cold weather is unpardonable,
for it will freeze inside your clothes at night. Fortunately warmth
depends only on keeping heat in; and we find an impervious, light,
dressed canvas best. The kossak should be made with, so to speak, no
neck through which the heat which one produces can leak out. The
headpiece must be attached to the tunic, which also clips tight round
the wrists and round the waist to retain the heat. The edges may be
bound with fur, especially about the hood, so as to be soft and tight
about the face, and to keep the air out. The Eskimo cuts his own hair
so as to fill that function. Light sealskin boots are best for all
weathers, but in very cold, dry seasons, deerskin dressed very soft
is warmer. The skin boot should be sewn with sinew which swells in
water and thus keeps the stitches water-tight. These skin boots are
made by the Eskimo women who chew the edges of the skin to make them
soft before sewing them with deer sinew. The little Eskimo girls on
the North Labrador coast are proficient in the art of chewing, as they
are brought up from childhood to help their mothers in this way, the
women having invariably lost their teeth at a very early age.
A light rifle should always be lashed on the komatik, as a rabbit, a
partridge, or a deer gives often a light to the eyes with the fresh
proteids they afford, like Jonathan's wild honey. In these
temperatures, with the muscular exercise required, my strictest of
vegetarian friends should permit us to bow in the House of Rimmon. One
day while crossing a bay I noticed some seals popping up their heads
out of the water beyond the ice edge. I had a fine leading dog bearing
the unromantic name of Podge, and pure white in colour. But he was an
excellent water dog, trained not only to go for birds, but to dive
under water for sunken seals. Owing to their increasing fat in winter,
seals as a rule float, though they invariably sink in summer. On this
particular occasion, having hitched up the team we crept out to the
ice edge, Podge following at my heels. Lying still on the ice, and
just occasionally lifting and waggling one's leg when the seal put up
his head, he mistook one for a basking brother, and being a very
curious animal, he again dived, and came up a few feet away. We shot
two, both of which Podge dived after and retrieved, to the unbounded
joy both of ourselves and his four-footed chums, who more than gladly
shared the carcasses with him later.
A friend, returning from an island, was jogging quietly along on the
bay ice, when his team suddenly went wild. A bear had crossed close
ahead, and before he could unlash his rifle the komatik had dashed
right onto the animal, who, instead of running, stood up and showed
fight. The team were all around him, rapidly snarling themselves up in
their own traces. He had just time to draw his hunting knife across
the traces and so save the dogs, caring much more for them than he did
for the prey. Whilst his dogs held the attention of the bear, he was
able, though only a few feet away, to unlash his rifle at his leisure,
and very soon ended the conflict.
A gun, however, is a temptation, even to a doctor, and nearly cost one
of my colleagues his life. He was crossing a big divide, or neck of
land, between bays, and was twenty miles from anywhere, when his dogs
took the trail of some deer, which were evidently not far off. Being
short of fresh food, he hitched up his team, and also his pilot's
team, leaving only his boy driver in charge, while the men pursued the
caribou. He enjoined the boy very strictly not to move on any account.
By an odd freak a sudden snowstorm swept out of a clear sky just after
they left. They missed their way, and two days later, starving and
tired out, they found their first refuge, a small house many miles
from the spot where they had left the sledges. When, however, they
sent a relief team to find the komatiks, they discovered the boy still
"standing by" his charge.
When crossing wide stretches of country we are often obliged to camp
if it comes on dark. It is quite impossible to navigate rough country
when one cannot see stumps, windfalls, or snags; and I have more than
once, while caught in a forest looking for our tilt, been obliged
to walk ahead with a light, and even to search the snow for tracks
with the help of matches, when one's torch has carelessly been left at
home. On one occasion, having stopped our team in deep snow at
nightfall, we left it in the woods to walk out to a village, only five
or six miles distant, on our snowshoes. We entirely lost our way, and
ended up at the foot of some steep cliffs which we had climbed down,
thinking that our destination lay at their feet. The storm of the day
had broken the sea ice from the land, and we could not get round the
base of the cliffs, though we could see the village lights twinkling
away, only a mile or two across the bay. Climbing steep hills through
dense woods in deep snow in the dark calls for some endurance,
especially as a white snow-bank looks like an open space through the
dark trees. I have actually stuck my face into a perpendicular bluff,
thinking that I was just coming out into the open. Oddly enough, when
after much struggling we had mounted the hill, we heard voices, and
suddenly met two men, who had also been astray all day, but now knew
the way home. They were "all in" for want of food, and preferred
camping for the night. A good fire and some chunks of sweet cake so
greatly restored them, however, that we got under way again in a
couple of hours, further stimulated to do so by the bitter cold,
against which, in the dark, we could not make adequate shelter.
Moreover, we had perspired with the violent exercise and our clothes
were freezing from the inside out.
[Illustration: A Hilly Trail
A KOMATIK JOURNEY]
[Illustration: Crossing a Brook
A KOMATIK JOURNEY]
You must always carry an axe, not only for firewood, but for getting
water--unless you wish to boil snow, which is a slow process, and apt
to burn your kettle. Also when you have either lost the trail or there
is none, you must have an axe to clear a track as you march ahead of
your dogs. Then there is, of course, the unfortunate question of food.
Buns baked with chopped pork in them give one fine energy-producing
material, and do not freeze. A sweet hard biscuit is made on the coast
which is excellent in one's pocket. Cocoa, cooked pork fat, stick
chocolate, are all good to have. Our sealers carry dry oatmeal and
sugar in their "nonny bags," which, mixed with snow, assuage their
thirst and hunger as well. Pork and beans in tins are good, but they
freeze badly. I have boiled a tin in our kettle for fifteen minutes,
and then found a lump of ice in the middle of the substance when it
was turned out into the dish.
Winter travelling on this coast oftentimes involves considerable
hardships, as when once our doctor lost the track and he and his men
had to spend several nights in the woods. They were so reduced by
hunger that they were obliged to chew pieces of green sealskin which
they cut from their boots and to broil their skin gloves over a fire
which they had kindled.
One great joy which comes with the work is the sympathy one gets with
the really poor, whether in intelligence, physical make-up, or worldly
assets. One learns how simple needs and simple lives preserve simple
virtues that get lost in the crush of advancing civilization. Many and
many a time have the poor people by the wayside refused a penny for
their trouble. On one occasion I came in the middle of the night to a
poor man's house. He was in bed and the lights out, and it was bitter
cold. He got out of bed in a trice and went down to his stage carrying
an old hurricane lantern to feed my dogs, while his wife, after he had
lit a fire in the freezing cold room, busied herself making me some
cocoa. Milk and sugar were provided, and not till long afterwards did
I know that it was a special little hoard kept for visitors. Later I
was sent to bed--quite unaware that the good folk had spent the first
part of the night in it, and were now themselves on the neighbouring
floor. Nor would a sou's return be asked. "It's the way of t' coast,"
the good fellow assured me.
Another time my host for the night had gone when I rose for breakfast.
I found that he had taken the road which I was intending to travel to
the next village, some fourteen miles distant, just to break and mark
a trail for us as we did not know the way; and secondly to carry some
milk and sugar to "save the face" of my prospective host for the next
day, who had "made a bad voyage" that year. Still another time no less
than forty men from Conche marched ahead on a twenty-mile track to
make it possible for our team to travel quickly to a neighbouring
settlement.
Often I have thought how many of these things would I do for my poorer
friends. We who speak glibly of the need of love for our neighbours as
being before that for ourselves, would we share a bed, a room, or give
hospitality to strangers even in our kitchens, after they had awakened
us in the middle of the night by slinging snowballs at our bedroom
windows?
One day that winter a father of eight children sent in from a
neighbouring island for immediate help. His gun had gone off while his
hand was on the muzzle, and practically blown it to pieces. To treat
him ten miles away on that island was impossible, so we brought him in
for operation. To stop the bleeding he had plunged his hand into a
flour barrel and then tied it up in a bag, and as a result the wounded
arm was poisoned way up above the elbow. He preferred death to losing
his right arm. Day and night for weeks our nurse tended him, as he
hovered between life and death with general blood poisoning. Slowly
his fine constitution brought him through, and at last a secondary
operation for repair became possible. We took chances on bone-grafting
to form a hand; and he was left with a flipper like a seal's, able,
however, to oppose one long index finger and "nip a line" when he
fished. But there was no skin for it. So Dr. Beattie and I shared the
honours of supplying some. Pat--for that was his name--has been a
veritable apostle of the hospital ever since, and has undoubtedly been
the means of enabling others to risk the danger of our suspected
proselytizing. For though he had English Episcopal skin on the palm of
his hand and Scotch Presbyterian skin on the back, the rest of him
still remained a devout Roman Catholic.
Another somewhat parallel case occurred the following year, when a
dear old Catholic lady was hauled fifty miles over the snow by her two
stalwart sons, to have her leg removed for tubercular disease of the
ankle. She did exceedingly well, and the only puzzle which we could
not solve was where to raise the necessary hundred dollars for a new
leg--for her disposition, even more than her necessity, compelled her
to move about. While lecturing that winter in America, I asked friends
to donate to me any of their old legs which they no longer needed, and
soon I found myself the happy possessor of two good wooden limbs, one
of which exactly suited my requirements. A departed Methodist had left
it, and the wife's clergyman, a Congregationalist, had handed it to
me, an Episcopalian, and I had the joy of seeing it a real blessing to
as good a Roman Catholic as I know. As the priest says, there is now
at least one Protestant leg established in his parish.
We once reached a house at midnight, found a boy with a broken thigh,
and had to begin work by thawing out frozen board in order to plane
it for splints, then pad and fix it, and finally give chloroform on
the kitchen table. On another occasion we had to knock down a
partition in a tiny cottage, make a full-length wooden bath, pitching
the seams to make it water-tight, in order to treat a severe
cellulitis. Now it would be a maternity case, now a dental one, now a
gunshot wound or an axe cut with severed tendons to adjust, now
pneumonia, when often in solitary and unlearned homes, we would
ourselves do the nursing and especially the cooking, as that art for
the sick is entirely uncultivated on the coast.
The following winter I lectured in England and then crossed in the
early spring to the United States and lectured both there and in
Canada, receiving great kindness and much help for the work.
As I have stated in the previous chapter we had raised, largely
through the generosity of Lord Strathcona, the money for a suitable
little hospital steamer, and she had been built to our design in
England. I had steamed her round to our fitting yard at Great
Yarmouth, and had her fitted for our work before sailing. While I was
in America, my old Newfoundland crew went across and fetched her over,
so that June found us once more cruising the Labrador coast.
While working with the large fleet of schooners, which at that time
fished in August and September from Cape Mugford to Hudson Bay
Straits, I visited as usual the five stations of the Moravian
Brethren. They were looking for a new place to put a station, and at
their request I took their representative to Cape Chidley in the
Strathcona.
This northern end of Labrador is extremely interesting to cruise. The
great Appalachian Mountain Range runs out here right to the water
edge, and forms a marvellous sea-front of embattled cliffs from two
thousand to three thousand feet in height. The narrow passages which
here and there run far into the mountains, and represent old valleys
scooped out by ice action, are dominated all along by frowning peaks,
whose pointed summits betray the fact that they overtopped the ice
stream in the glacial age. The sharp precipices and weather-worn sides
are picked out by coloured lichens, and tiny cold-proof Arctic plants,
and these, with the deep blue water and unknown vistas that keep
constantly opening up as one steams along the almost fathomless
fjords, afford a fascination beyond measure.
Once before in the Sir Donald we had tried to navigate the narrow run
that cuts off the island on which Cape Chidley stands from the
mainland of Labrador, but had missed the way among the many openings,
and only noted from a hilltop the course we should have taken, by the
boiling current which we saw below, whose vicious whirlpools like
miniature maelstroms poured like a dashing torrent from Ungava Bay
into the Atlantic.
It was, however, with our hearts somewhere near our mouths that we
made an attempt to get through this year, for we knew nothing of the
depth, except that the Eskimos had told us that large icebergs drove
through at times. We could steam nine knots, and we essayed to cover
the tide, which we found against us, as we neared the narrowest part,
which is scarcely one hundred yards wide. The current carried us
bodily astern, however, and glad enough we were to drive stern
foremost into a cove on one side and find thirteen fathoms of water to
hold on in till the tide should turn. When at last it did turn, and
got under way, it fairly took us in its teeth, and we shot through, an
impotent plaything on the heaving bosom of the resistless waters. We
returned safely, with a site selected and a fair chart of the "Tickle"
(Grenfell Tickle).
When winter closed in, I arranged for an old friend, a clerk of the
Hudson Bay Company, to stay with me at St. Anthony, and once more we
settled down in rooms hired in a cottage. We had a driver, a team of
dogs, and an arrangement with a paternal Government to help out by
making an allowance of twenty-five cents for medicine for such
patients as could not themselves pay that amount, and in those days
the number was quite large.
When early spring came the hospital question revived. An expedition
into the woods was arranged, and with a hundred men and thrice as many
dogs, we camped in the trees, and at the end of the fortnight came
home hauling behind us the material for a thirty-six by thirty-six
hospital. Being entirely new to us it proved a very happy experience.
We were quartermasters and general providers. Our kitchen was dug down
in thick woods through six feet of snow, and our main reliance was on
boiled "doughboys"--the "sinkers" among which, with a slice of fat
pork or a basin of bird soup, were as popular as lobster a la Newburg
at Delmonico's or Sherry's.
The next summer we had trouble with a form of selfishness which I have
always heartily hated--the liquor traffic. Suppose we do allow that a
man has a right to degrade his body with swallowing alcohol, he
certainly has no more right to lure others to their destruction for
money than a filibuster has a right to spend his money in gunpowder
and shoot his fellow countrymen. To our great chagrin we found that an
important neighbour near one of our hospitals was selling intoxicants
to the people--girls and men. One girl found drunk on the hillside
brought home to me the cost of this man's right to "do as he liked."
We promptly declared war, and I thanked God who had made "my hands to
war, and my fingers to fight"--when that is the only way to resist the
Devil successfully and to hasten the kingdom of peace.
This man and I had had several disagreements, and I had been warned
not to land on the premises on pain of being "chucked into the sea."
But when I tested the matter out by landing quite alone from a
row-boat, after a "few wor-r-r-ds" his coast-born hospitality overcame
him, and as his bell sounded the dinner call, he promptly invited me
to dine with him. I knew that he would not poison the food, and soon
we were glowering at one another over his own table--where his painful
efforts to convince me that he was right absolutely demonstrated the
exact opposite.
My chance came that summer. We were steaming to our Northern hospital
from the deep bay which runs in a hundred and fifty miles. About
twenty miles from the mouth a boat hailed us out of the darkness, and
we stopped and took aboard a wrecked crew of three men. They had
struck our friend's well-insured old steam launch on a shoal and she
had sunk under them. We took them aboard, boat and all, wrote down
carefully their tale of woe, and then put the steamer about, pushed as
near the wreck as we dared and anchored. Her skipper came forward and
asked me what I intended doing, and I told him I was going to survey
the wreck. A little later he again came to ask permission to go aboard
the wreck to look for something he had forgotten. I told him certainly
not. Just before sunrise the watch called me and said that the wrecked
crew had launched their boat, and were rowing toward the steamer.
"Launch ours at once, and drive them back" was an order which our boys
obeyed with alacrity and zest. It was a very uneasy three men who
faced me when they returned. They were full of bluff at what they
would do for having their liberties thus interfered with, but
obviously uneasy at heart.
With some labour we discovered that the water only entered the wreck
at low tide and forward; so by buoying her with casks, tearing up her
ballast deck, and using our own pumps as well as buckets--at which all
hands of my crew worked with a good will, we at last found the hole.
It was round. There were no splinters on the inside. We made a huge
bung from a stick of wood, plugged the opening, finished pumping her
out, and before dark had her floating alongside us. Late that night we
were once more anchored--this time opposite the dwelling-house of my
friend the owner. We immediately went ashore and woke him up. There is
a great deal in doing things at the psychological moment; and by
midnight I had a deed duly drawn up, signed and sealed, selling me the
steamer for fifty cents. I still see the look in his eyes as he gave
me fifty cents change from a dollar. He was a self-made man, had
acquired considerable money, and was keen as a ferret at business. The
deed was to me a confession that he was in the plot for barratry, to
murder the boat for her insurance.
On our trip South we picked up the small steamer, and towing her to a
Hudson Bay Company's Post we put her "on the hard," photographed the
hole, with all the splintering on the outside, and had a proper survey
of the hull made by the Company's shipwright. The unanimous verdict
was "wilful murder." In the fall as her own best witness, we tried to
tow her to St. John's, but in a heavy breeze of wind and thick snow
we lost her at sea--and with her our own case as well. The law decided
that there was no evidence, and my friend, making out that he had lost
the boat and the insurance, threatened to sue me for the value.
The sequel of the story may as well be told here. A year or so later I
had just returned from Labrador. It used to be said always that our
boat "brought up the keel of the Labrador"; but this year our friend
had remained until every one else had gone. Just as we were about to
leave for England, the papers in St. John's published the news of the
loss of a large foreign-going vessel, laden with fish for the
Mediterranean, near the very spot where our friend lived. On a visit a
little later to the shipping office I found the event described in the
graphic words of the skipper and mate. Our friend the consignee had
himself been on board at the time the "accident" occurred. After
prodigies of valour they had been forced to leave the ship, condemn
her, and put her up for sale. Our friend, the only buyer at such a
time on the coast, had bought her in for eighty dollars.
It was the end of November, and already a great deal of ice had made.
The place was six hundred miles north. The expense of trying to save
the ship would be great. But was she really lost? The heroics sounded
too good to be true. All life is a venture. Why not take one in the
cause of righteousness? That night in a chartered steam trawler, with
a trusty diver, we steamed out of the harbour, steering north. Our
skipper was the sea rival of the famous Captain Blandford; and the way
he drove his little craft, with the ice inches thick from the driving
spray all over the bridge and blocking the chart-room windows, made
one glad to know that the good sea genius of the English was still so
well preserved.
When our distance was run down we hauled in for the land, but had to
lay "hove to" (with the ship sugared like a Christmas cake), as we
were unable to recognize our position in the drifting snow. At length
we located the islands, and never shall I forget as we drew near
hearing the watch call out, "A ship's topmasts over the land." It was
the wreck we were looking for.
It took some hours to cut through the ice in which she lay, before
ever we could get aboard; and even the old skipper showed excitement
when at last we stood on her deck. Needless to say, she was not upside
down, nor was she damaged in any way, though she was completely
stripped of all running gear. The diver reported no damage to her
bottom, while the mate reported the fish in her hold dry, and the
hatches still tightly clewed, never having been stirred.
With much hearty good-will our crew jettisoned fish enough into our
own vessel to float the craft. Fearing that so late in the year we
might fail to tow her safely so far, and remembering the outcome of
our losing the launch, we opened the stores on the island, and finding
both block and sails, neatly labelled and stowed away, we soon had our
prize not only refitted for sea, but also stocked with food, water,
chart, and compass and all essentials for a voyage across the
Atlantic, if she were to break loose and we to lose her. The last
orders were to the mate, who was put on board her with a crew, "If not
St. John's then Liverpool."
No such expedient, however, proved necessary. Though we had sixty
fathoms of anchor chain on each of our wire cables to the ship, we
broke one in a seaway and had to haul under the lee of some cliffs and
repair damages. Often for hours together the vessel by day and her
lights by night would disappear, and our hearts would jump into our
mouths for fear we might yet fail. But at last, with all our bunting
up, and both ships dressed as if for a holiday, we proudly entered the
Narrows of St. John's, the cynosure of all eyes. The skipper and our
friend had gone to England, so the Government had them extradited. The
captain, who was ill with a fatal disease, made a full confession, and
both men were sent to prison.
That was how we "went dry" in our section of Labrador.