When the ship arrived at Paradise River, Derm Wakeham stuck his head outside to test the Labrador summer. He got a slap of cold wind and rain in the face. Wakeham, the assistant purser on M.V. Taverner, dashed back inside the heaving ship. "Paradise River!" he cried. "If this is paradise, I'd hate to see hell."
As a regular visitor to Labrador, Wakeham knew what to expect, but he seemed less than enchanted with the Canadian wilderness that lies east of Quebec and north of the Island of Newfoundland in a forgotten corner of the continent. For centuries travelers took one look at this rocky coast and sailed on.
"Worthless country," said Bjarni Herjolfsson, a Norseman who is supposed to have seen Labrador in A.D. 986.
"Fit only for wild beasts," said Jacques Cartier, who visited in 1534 while probing for a northern route to Asia. "This must be the land God gave to Cain."
"The most extensive and dreariest wilderness I have ever beheld," said John James Audubon, who came to paint birds in 1833.
Few people, in short, have had a kind word for this harsh land, where ice can choke the seas in mid-July and the temperature falls to minus 50 degrees Fahrenheit in the long winter. Perhaps because of its bad reputation, Labrador remains essentially as Cartier and Audubon saw it, an inaccessible and austere land of rumpled black mountains, tea-colored rivers, and soupy green bogs. Only one gravel highway, known for its potholes and washouts, links Labrador to the outside world.
"When I drove the Labrador highway to Goose Bay a lot," said Francis Clarke, a resident of Churchill Falls in central Labrador, "I got so I could patch a gas tank faster than most people could change a tire." Francis's comment would be a complaint anywhere else. In Labrador, where people don't like things too easy, it's a boast.
Only 30,375 people live in Labrador's 112,000 square miles, which makes it one of the most sparsely populated regions of Canada. Four settlements hold more than half those people: Labrador City and Wabush, adjoining towns carved out of the western wilderness in the 1950s and '60s, where iron-ore mining is the major business; Churchill Falls, a town founded in 1967 on the site of one of North America's largest hydroelectric projects; and Happy Valley-Goose Bay, built during World War II as an airfield, now used by German, British, and Dutch fighter pilots for low-altitude training. Aside from a sprinkling of fishing settlements along the coast, the rest of Labrador is lonely country, patrolled by polar bears and wolves, foxes and caribou, black bears and ptarmigan. And it is home to some of the toughest and most resourceful humans you will find anywhere.
"If you survive here, you are entitled to live by your own standards," said Doris Saunders, a Labradorian who edits "Them Days" magazine, which collects stories about life on this hard edge of the North American continent.
"This is one of the few challenges left in a world of wimps," said Jack Cooper, an outfitter who introduced me to the pleasures of Labrador seven summers ago, when I went to fish for brook trout at his camp on Anne Marie Lake, south of the Mealy Mountains. For me, a citybound angler who spent more time fishing in imagination than water, Jack's place was like paradise found. The only way in or out is by chartered aircraft, which brings you down in a chain of lakes and rivers where a grand silence fills every wrinkle of the landscape. You often hear the fish, splashing out of the water to grab mayflies on the wing, before you see them. These brook trout--sequestered from overfishing and pollution--are among the largest in the world, averaging more than five pounds each. They look unreal, with thick black backs, fiery red bellies, and neon spots of yellow and orange, like the creation of an over-eager taxidermist.
I still recall every detail of the July evening I caught my first one. Loons squealed across the lake. I sat in a canoe with a friend and a fishing guide, and the three of us watched the water, as flat and black as polished marble. Then the marble shattered, a telltale ring forming where a cruising trout popped through for a fly. As the rings moved toward our canoe, I stood with my fly rod, flicking a Yellow Humpy in the trout's path. The fish grabbed it, and I was into a wild trout, a six-pound female that bent my rod double and made my knees wobble long after she had been netted and set free again. From that moment I was hooked. Year after year I have returned to pursue brookies in Labrador's long twilight, and I have grown to love the land God gave Cain.So it was with a touch of apprehension that I set out in a recent summer to explore more of this country, worried that knowing too much might spoil it all.
Within a week of landing, I learned that the Trans-Labrador Highway was being resurfaced and improved, which would bring more traffic from populous Quebec; that utilities were planning yet another big hydroelectric project on the Churchill River, which had already been dammed once, flooding hundreds of acres and forever changing Labrador's vast central plateau; that Indians and Inuit were engaged in an acrimonious land dispute with fellow citizens, which raised questions about development in Labrador; that the iron-ore mines and fishing industry were in a slump, worsening unemployment where jobs are too scarce already.
And the separatist spirit of neighboring Quebec, a province threatening divorce from Canada, had seeped over into Labrador.
Although formally part of the province of Newfoundland since joining the Canadian confederation in 1949, Labrador has always been a place apart, separated from Newfoundland by rough seas and temperament, and by the Labradorians' sense that they carry little political weight in distant St. John's, the provincial capital.
"The provincial government looks at Labrador as so small we don't matter," said Darrel J. Brenton, the mayor of Labrador City. "They just throw us a tidbit now and then."
A few people even talk about Labrador seceding from Newfoundland to seek status as a separate territory. "At least that way the revenues from Labrador's iron ore, hydropower, and fish would stay in Labrador," Doris Saunders told me. Secession may be a remote dream, but it is clear that many Labradorians see themselves as a breed distinct from Newfoundlanders.
"I would hope that if I ever said I was a Newfie, someone would gutshoot me so I'd die a slow and painful death," she joked. Some people wear their hearts on their sleeves. Doris seemed to wear hers all over, in a sweater patterned after the Labradorian flag. It had a spruce twig over the heart and stripes of white, green, and blue representing Labrador's eternal snow, land, and water. That flag, which is different from the flag of Newfoundland, fairly depicts the look of today's Labrador, where getting around is still something of an adventure. Fog stalls flights, floods smash bridges, ice delays sailings. Nature rules.
Traveling here, you learn to rely on bush pilots like Clayton Pilgrim. The first time I saw Clayton, with his gambler's mustache and a many-zippered jumpsuit, he was bent over a dock in Goose Bay, gassing up a battered single-engine floatplane with "Labrador Airways" emblazoned on its fuselage. Clayton stood up and began to swear with great flourish at the mosquitoes and blackflies, which tortured him as they do anyone who ventures outdoors during Labrador's brief summer.
Someone complimented Clayton on his immaculate cowboy boots, but didn't he worry about getting them wet? "No sweat," said Clayton, smiling to reveal a gold tooth. "I've been a bush pilot for some years. I do not get my feet wet. Let's go."
We went. I was traveling with photographer Richard Olsenius; Barbara Kitowski, a transplanted Yankee now working as an outfitter in Labrador; and Louie Montague, a trapper and woodsman. We were heading for a few days of camping at Seal Lake, a part of central Labrador few visitors ever see. Although this part of the interior was familiar to the Indians who roamed it for thousands of years, Labrador's heart was still unmapped territory when Leonidas Hubbard, Jr., came up from New York City to explore the north country in 1903.
Hubbard, a young assistant editor for "Outing" magazine, planned to cross the wilderness as no explorer had, canoeing from the village of North West River to Ungava Bay. He hoped his journey would fill in the blank spots on the map and secure his fame.
Our plane shuddered as Clayton changed direction and the turbulence tossed us around. Clayton ignored it, steering us north along the shore of Grand Lake, where Hubbard had turned into the unknown, up the Susan River, accompanied by a friend, Dillon Wallace, and by George Elson, a Scot-Cree guide from James Bay.
"That turn right there was Hubbard's fatal mistake," Louie shouted over the plane's engine. "A terrible mistake." He pointed to the map unfolded across his knees, showing me how the Susan petered out in a plateau hemmed in by mountains, while the Naskaupi River, at the top of Grand Lake, led to Seal Lake and the interior. "That's the river he should have followed," Louie said, tracing the Naskaupi northward with his finger toward Ungava Bay.
Hubbard eventually found himself stranded in the middle of Labrador, exhausted, low on food, with winter coming. He collapsed on October 18, unable to continue. He sent his companions for help and settled in his tent to wait and write: "Tonight or tomorrow perhaps the weather will improve so I can build a fire, eat the rest of my moccasins and have some bone broth....I am not suffering. I am sleepy. I think death from starvation is not so bad...." A search party found him dead in his tent two weeks later, covered by fresh snow.
Poor Hubbard achieved the fame he sought, though not in the way he intended. I felt some kinship with him, a fellow tenderfoot lured north, as he put it, into "a great unknown land right near home, as wild and primitive today as it has always been."
Louie tucked his map away and turned his back to the black hills passing below, where he has worked for half a century. "Hubbard wasn't really prepared," said Louie, who knows what it takes to survive in Labrador's bush. "If you're not prepared in this country, if you let up just one time and make a mistake, she'll get you. Hubbard didn't bring enough food. He didn't bring the right clothes. He didn't know this country. That's what killed him."
Clayton dropped toward Seal Lake and brought us down so skillfully that I could not tell where air ended and water began. We taxied toward a beach and, a few feet from shore, untied the canoe we had lashed to one of the plane's floats. Into it we loaded our gear--a few days' supply of food, a trapper's stove, four tents, an ax and a saw, some fishing gear--and sloshed ashore. Clayton disappeared into the sky. The sound of his engine melted with distance, and the world filled with silence. Then we noticed that the beach was stamped with bear tracks in all directions.
Barbara and Louie studied the tracks and eyed each other.Louie shrugged. "They probably won't bother us," he said. He was right. We spent our days at Seal Lake peacefully, fishing for lake trout, exploring the rivers and brooks in our canoe, pleased to find that the land was little changed from what Mina Hubbard saw nine decades ago. Mina, the young widow of Leonidas Hubbard, returned to Labrador in 1905 to finish the journey that killed her husband. Accompanied by George Elson and three other guides, she crossed more than 550 miles of the barren country from North West River to Ungava Bay in just 61 days. When word of her achievement reached the world, people were skeptical: "She cannot have carried out her original intentions," wrote one reporter. For one "so frail in appearance," wrote another, "it is scarcely possible to credit the...journey which she has just completed." But she had, and she wrote of her adventures in "A Woman's Way Through
Unknown Labrador." This became our guide to Seal Lake.
We sat around at night, reading Mina's words out loud, marveling at her toughness and her good luck, poring over maps that carry names she gave to the surrounding landmarks. Rain sputtered on Louie's tent, where we gathered for meals. Waves lapped the beach. The stove crackled. Louie told trappers' tales. Barbara smoked her pipe. We stared out through the tent flap at a fog that blotted out the mountains and all sense of time. It was easy to picture Mina, an upright Victorian figure in a long skirt, skimming by our camp in a canoe, impatient to finish the business her husband had started. Yet she always paused to admire the beauty of the countryside.
"Seal Lake in the calm of a summer day, with the summer sunshine upon it, and the beautiful Labrador sky above, is altogether lovely," Mina wrote. "When the day's journey ended I had seen so much that was beautiful, and so varied in its beauty, that I felt confused and bewildered."
We took our canoe north on a drizzling June morning to explore where Mina probably wrote those words, on a broad beach at the eastern end of Seal Lake. We went ashore to a clearing where Indians had camped recently. Mina Hubbard's beautiful beach now looked like a dump, littered with rusted cans, beer bottles, charred logs, empty shotgun shells, bird feathers. A piece of cardboard from a "Froot Loops" carton sloshed at the water's edge.
Few Labradorians criticize such behavior openly, but many privately wonder what will happen if the Canadian government grants control over most of Labrador to its 1,500 Innu Indians. (Although the names sound similar, the Innu are unrelated to the Inuit, who live along Labrador's northern coast. In fact, the two groups fought each other long ago. Like the Innu, the Inuit also claim rights to Labrador's lands and resources.)
The Innu, formerly known as Montagnais Indians in central Labrador and as Naskapi in the north, all belong to the Algonquian family, which includes native peoples from South Carolina to the fringes of the Arctic.
"Those old names--Montagnais and Naskapi--were given to us by other people," explained Peter Penashue, president of the Innu Nation. "We call ourselves Innu, which simply means 'the people.'"
Given the speed of change in the outside world, it is hard to remember that Penashue's people were still living as nomads just 30 years ago, when they moved from tents to houses in Sheshatsheits and Davis Inlet, their two primary settlements. Unemployment and alcoholism run high in both of these places, where the suicide rates are far above the norm for Canada.
"We're still in transition," Penashue told me in his office at Sheshatsheits, an Indian word meaning "river narrows." "We haven't really found our place in your world. My generation was the first one born in this community. My father and mother were still very much suffering from the move. Their lives were just falling apart. A lot of fighting. Father spent a lot of time in jail, Mom a lot of time in the hospital. It's a pattern you see all through everybody's lives here," he said, pointing a thumb over his shoulder toward the outside, where the street was gouged with potholes and littered with trash.
Was he suggesting that his people take to their nomadic life again?
"You can't bring back what we've already lost. We just want to take control of our lives, instead of being dependent on government resources," he said, expressing hope that the Innu land claims will give them dominion over their ancestral territory, or at least some compensation for the loss.
All of a sudden, it seems, everyone wants a piece of this land, which has gone virtually untouched during 9,000 years of human habitation. It began with Paleo-Indians, who were followed by Maritime Archaic Indians by 6000 B.C. The first Eskimos appeared in 2000 B.C. Other groups followed, including today's Inuit. Among the first Europeans to stay were Basque whalers, who seasonally occupied Labrador's south coast in the 16th century, followed by waves of French, English, Scots, and a few Scandinavians; they came for the fur trade--and for the abundant coastal fisheries first celebrated, and perhaps exaggerated, by explorers in the 15th century. One of them, Sebastian Cabot, wrote of cod schools so thick that "they sumtymes stayed [the] shippes."
The days of abundant cod are long gone, but Labrador has other riches increasingly attractive to outsiders and natives alike. Mining companies are exploring the western end of Seal Lake for copper. Geologists are scouring the interior for gold and other precious minerals. Quebec and Labrador are arguing over the fair price of hydropower generated in Labrador and sold in Quebec. An Austrian timber company wants to cut the forests around Cartwright.
"This country has just gotten too accessible," said Derek Blake, who traces his ancestors to one of Labrador's old Inuit clans. We stood on a ship headed for the coast as night came on, and watched a florid sky go black. Derek sighed. He recalled the days when nobody gave a hoot about coming to Labrador, and the few who did had to slog through on their own muscle, by canoe or on snowshoes. "I hope we develop in a way that leaves this land just as it is," he said.
I was reassured to hear his sentiments echoed all over Labrador, where people have been involved with the land and sea for so many generations that they cannot imagine life apart from the wild country.
By the first week in July, you still couldn't tell it was summer in Paradise River. The temperature was in the 40s when Derm Wakeham and I arrived with a boatload of others aboard Taverner. But there were other signs of the changing season: Ice was breaking up on the south coast, bringing Atlantic salmon up from the sea, followed by commercial fishermen.
For Labradorians, this seasonal migration is known as "shifting out," a time when whole families pick up and move to their summer fishing stations, traveling on vessels like Taverner. A few years back, Wakeham told me, so many fishermen packed such vessels that some had to be turned away. "Now we're lucky to have 20 or 30," he said, looking down the vacant passageway.
The drop in Taverner's business matched what seemed like an alarming decline in fish stocks. Both major commercial species--cod and salmon--were in trouble, so passengers spoke with an added note of concern this year. "Too many people fishing," said a man bound for Bluff Head Cove.
"Too many seals eating fish," said a woman headed for Spotted Island, for centuries an area rich in cod. "Too many foreigners dragging the bottom with their nets," she said, drawing on a cigarette and eyeing me as if I might be a suspect.
"Are you fishing this summer?" I asked.
"No, we've retired," she said. "We're going back home, as we calls it, because that's where we comes from, near Domino."
"Looks like you got out of fishing just in time, eh?"
"You're right there," she said. Her husband merely blew smoke at a sealed porthole and looked away. "We didn't catch a single cod last summer," she said. "They should have put a stop to it years ago."
Well, now they had. The day before, the Canadian government announced a two-year moratorium on commercial cod fishing for most of Labrador and Newfoundland. The goal was to stem the decline of cod stocks, but at great human cost: Some 26,000 cod fishermen and plant workers were suddenly out of jobs, in a place where unemployment already runs at 20 percent.
To ease the cod crisis, the federal government agreed to pay these newly unemployed up to $406 (U.S. $317) weekly for ten weeks. That helped for now, but the moratorium was a warning that the commercial fishermen themselves might become an endangered species unless they could switch to more plentiful crabs, arctic char, and scallops.
So this summer run on Taverner, once a journey of hope, would be the last for many fishermen, who boarded the big ship with their dories loaded and their nets neatly stowed and disembarked in the middle of nowhere, heading for summer stations at Venison Tickle, Packs Harbour, Black Tickle, Grady Harbour, and points south.
By the time we got to Ice Tickle, it was dark and gusting. While Taverner paused between two rocky headlands smeared with snow, a white boat came out of the mist to meet us. The dory's skipper, Kenny Allen, pulled alongside, as his wife, Georgina, their two children, and a golden retriever named Sparky clambered down Taverner's gangway to join him. Earlier Georgina had told me about last year's disastrous salmon fishing. "We got one salmon last year. One salmon! We pray that there's fish this year," she said, squeezing her eyes shut to emphasize the word. And if there aren't?
"Then we'll find something else to make by. Or maybe we'll move. We don't want to, because the fishing is our ancestry. The old folks say there'll be a lot of salmon this year. I hope they're right." Despite the rain, Georgina's family was all smiles now, setting out together for a new season. She shouted good-bye over the wind: "I'll write you and let you hear how we did fishing." Kenny gunned the motor, and they disappeared in the fog.
I went off to explore other parts of Labrador that summer, but I never forgot the image of Georgina's family in the rain, full of hope. I wondered if they had caught any salmon, if the prices were good, if this would be their last season. Months later, I heard. Georgina, true to her word, sent me a letter. It was good news. The Allens had netted 600 salmon. The prices were good. "It was nice to see the men come from the nets with a smile on their faces," she wrote. And next year? The Allens would stick with it--and pray for salmon.
Most other fishermen were quitting. Last year, in an effort to conserve salmon stocks, the Canadian government began paying commercial fishermen up to $50,000 each to leave the business. The hope was that less competition would help the few fishermen who remained. And it would save salmon for the sportfishermen, who spend millions of dollars in Atlantic Canada each year pursuing what many consider to be the king of game fish.
By the end of 1992 Canada's salmon buy-out seemed to be working. In Labrador some 60 percent had taken the payments and abandoned their nets. On the Island of Newfoundland, where there is a five-year moratorium on commercial salmon fishing, 96 percent had turned in their licenses. The salmon needed a rest, I knew, but another part of me was rooting for the diehards like Georgina. It was painful to imagine their fishing stations abandoned to the elements, like other settlements I had seen up and down Labrador's coast, where the doors of empty cabins slapped in the wind and forsaken anchors rusted in the marshes.
The northern seaboard is dotted with ghost towns at regular intervals--Killinek, Ramah, Okak, and Zoar among them--all built by Moravian missionaries from Europe, who established outposts of Christianity among Labrador's Inuit beginning in 1771. But, faced with rising costs and the inconvenience of maintaining scattered settlements in the wilderness, the church had closed many such missions by the 1950s.
To get a sense of what it was like in an old Moravian village, I invited Jessie Ford and Christine Baikie to join me for a flying visit to Hebron, an outpost built in 1831 but now long deserted and no longer a regular stop for ships. We went by helicopter. It had been 50 years since Jessie, a woman in her 60s, had visited Hebron. "Oh, it used to be so nice," she said, standing in the sanctuary of the old Moravian church where she and her sister worshiped so long ago. Water dripped through the church's roof and puddled the floor, but Jessie and Christine chattered away, happy to be girls in Hebron again. They found the hooks in a doorjamb where their father had hung a swing for them. They paused at a window where they used to watch the water. They remembered how the men sat on the roof of the church in the dark at Easter and played the old familiar hymns on brass instruments before the whole village woke up and walked through the snow to the cemetery for a sunrise service.
Jessie looked all around her, blinking. "All the people who lived here in them days is dead now."
"Everybody was real friendly," said Christine. "Anybody who got a caribou or partridges shared them. When someone died, it was felt by the whole community, like it was one of your family, you know?"
"Would you want to come back to live here?" I asked.
"Yep," said Jessie.
"I wouldn't mind it," said Christine. "It was a wonderful place. No drinking. No drugs. No kids fighting."
"I do wish the kids today could live like we did," said Jessie.
"Yeah, but you'd never get 'em to live here," said Christine.
"Too quiet, I suppose," said Jessie.
"Too boring," said Christine.
The problem with living in the middle of a wilderness like Labrador is that, except for single-industry towns like Happy Valley-Goose Bay, Churchill Falls, and Labrador City, there are few places to work. Many young Labradorians thus face the prospect of going outside for work or staying home and taking welfare.
"I'd like to stay, but it doesn't look too likely," said Brad St. Croix, a 16-year-old who was standing in line outside a video arcade in Labrador City. "Nothing to do."
"Everybody thinks this place will be gone in ten years," said Dexter Gilbert, an eager youth in a Boston Bruins cap. He had graduated from high school just two days before and wanted to stay. But he worried about a job. The iron-ore mines were declining, plagued by a worldwide slump, and if they went, so did Lab City.
"It's bad for these kids," Barbara Kitowski said. "They love this place. Their souls are in the villages where they grew up, but they have to go away to find work, and have all kinds of problems on the outside. They can't adjust to the pace, so then they come back and can't make a living."
I saw what she meant in Nain, a predominantly Inuit village in Labrador's far north, where youths walk around looking bored and vacant. Some drink to pass the time, but a larger problem is solvent abuse, sniffing the fumes from gasoline to get high, according to Mounties stationed there.
"This is the worst time of year," said K.G. Coakley, a constable of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. "It's too late in the season for people to get out on their snowmobiles and still a bit early for their boats," Coakley said. "So they stay inside and get depressed." That problem is shared by young and old in Nain.
"Yeah," said W.R. Mooney, another constable. "Just a couple of weeks ago we had an armed standoff with a guy who blew his brains out in front of us."
"Most of the cases that we investigate--shootings, assaults, fighting--are related to alcohol," Coakley said.
In the rest of Labrador, unemployment is a problem; in Nain, where the jobless rate pushes 80 percent, it is epidemic. Inuit, who have long been fiercely independent, now struggle with the settled life. "It's a hell of a lot better now than it was in the 1940s and '50s, probably 100 percent better," said Toby Andersen, director of land claims for the Labrador Inuit Association. "But we are still living far short of the Canadian standards, in terms of health care, education, and housing. Housing is one of the biggest problems--just up the road here we've got a three-bedroom house with 20 people living in it, despite the provincial government's promise that it would provide adequate housing for us. Things are better, but it's like we're chipping away at a big cement wall with a little chisel. We have to fight tooth and nail for everything that most Canadians take for granted."
Yet there are Inuit success stories. Fran Williams, whom I visited in Nain one evening, is one. "We're nothing if not adaptable," she explained. "We've survived in a harsh country through sad times, and I am optimistic that we will continue." Fran's mission is to keep the Inuit language, Inuktitut, alive. Through the radio and television broadcasts of the OKalaKatiget Communications Society, she supervises 20 hours of broadcasting each week. She lit another cigarette in a vain attempt to keep the mosquitoes at bay and spoke of what makes you Inuit.
"We still have very strong family connections. We never look into the future more than a day or two. Going out on the land--hunting and fishing--that's a part of our life that will never die out. Nobody expects to go back to the way we used to live, but we can have parts of it--caribou, char, bake-apple berries, salmon--that's all we need."
The remarkable thing is that any vestiges of their culture survive at all. Many of the missionaries tried to wipe out indigenous religion.But one missionary stands out for his gentleness and sympathy toward all Labradorians--Wilfred Grenfell, an energetic doctor who first visited the Labrador coast in 1892 on behalf of the Royal National Mission to Deep Sea Fishermen. For 40 years he served the sick and the poor, traveling by dog team and by the hospital ship Strathcona. He helped reduce the incidence of tuberculosis, scurvy, rickets, and beriberi and established a string of regional nursing stations and hospitals that bear his name today.
Walking through Nain one evening, I could see how the Inuit still rely on the old ways: Slabs of arctic char dried on wooden racks in a backyard, sealskins hung on a clothesline, caribou antlers guarded the door of a shed. Down by the docks, people tinkered with boat engines and scraped paint, getting ready for seal hunting and another season of char fishing. Groups of men and women stood on the pier, chatting as their neighbors loaded rods and rifles into boats.
Up the hill, the bell was tolling for an evening service at the Moravian church, an old wooden building sagging on its foundations.
I slid into a back pew and listened as the congregation sang old German hymns in Inuktitut, led by a man in a gray sweatshirt with a tattoo on his forearm. His name was Amos, and he had the calm dignity of a natural leader, steering the 50 or so worshipers through songs that sounded mournful and beautiful at the same time. Two cultures blended in the music, drifting in the rafters, spilling out over the wooden houses of town.
If you leave the church and go north of Nain, beyond the limit of permanent settlement, you pass the tree line and enter a wild land of sparkling fjords and enormous caribou herds, a place where some of the rocks have been dated at 3.6 billion years, which makes them among the oldest on earth.
With a couple of local men, I set out to explore this region, traveling from Nain in a 24-foot cruiser. It was early summer, but ice still pressed the coast, which made for tense traveling. We inched through a maze of floes that glowed turquoise and silver. They grumbled as we brushed past. Leads opened and closed all around, reminding me of what happened to the English explorer John Knight in 1606. Searching for the Northwest Passage, Knight got stuck in ice off the coast of Labrador--same place, same time of year--and went ashore, where he disappeared, probably killed by Inuit hunters. No danger of that these days, but it did appear that we were sailing for trouble. A few hours out, our radio sputtered and died. A few hours after that, we stopped for lunch and learned that some of our bottled food was spoiled. We finally came to a wall of ice that seemed to stretch forever across our path. The boat's captain, a transplanted Scot named Tom Goodwin, scrambled atop the cabin to look things over. He dropped back on deck with a thump. "That's it," he said, reversing the engines and turning us south again. Frustrated, he slowly shook his head. "Labrador!" he growled, making the word sound like an incurable disease.
"Nobody really lives off the land these days," said Douglas Blake, up to his shins in snow on a January morning. The temperature was stuck somewhere around zero, and the ice on Grand Lake was frozen four feet thick. But since the sun was shining and Douglas had some days off coming to him, I finally prevailed upon him to take me into the bush.
Like a few other Labradorians, Douglas still traps animals on occasion, but more as a diversion than a necessity. "The last man who trapped full-time quit a couple of years ago," said Douglas, whose own trapping lines loop a hundred miles north from North West River, up the southern shore of Grand Lake, up the Beaver River, and back down the lake's northern shore.
Blakes have trapped along this lake for generations. Douglas's ancestors did it on snowshoes; we used snowmobiles, driving on the frozen lake, dismounting every few miles to see if anything had wandered into his traps, baited with bits of fish.
Douglas paused beneath a white spruce so big you couldn't get your arms around it. He reached into his coat, produced a small bottle and gave me a whiff. Peppermint oil. "There's some scent from beaver glands in there too," he said, sprinkling a few drops on a stick that he put on the ground. Concealed in the roots a few feet away a leg-hold trap was staked to the spruce. "The scent brings the animal over to investigate, then he smells the bait. Then, with any luck...," said Douglas, snapping his fingers to complete the sentence.
"What are you hoping for?" I asked.
"Marten, fox--maybe a lynx." He led me through the frozen brush to our snowmobiles. "I'd be surprised if we got a lynx. Nobody's seen one around here since the big forest fire in 1985." And even if a lynx turned up, the skin would fetch only $85 or so, down from the $800 range of the 1980s. That was before the recession, and before animal-rights activists made fur unfashionable.
"So why are we out here?"
"Better than being inside," Douglas answered. He was right. The air was sharp, the mountains muffled in snow, the blue sky shining as if newly made. We zoomed along the ice, all alone, bumping over cracks and pressure ridges, checking traps.
"Nothing here," Douglas said from the bushes. "Nope," he said, farther up the lake. Nothing. Nothing. Nothing. Then we found a luckless Canada jay, which had blundered into a marten trap and broken its neck. Back on the machines. Nothing. Nothing. Nothing. Then wolf tracks. They looked bold and purposeful, heading straight up the shoreline. Douglas, who works as a wildlife officer for the provincial government, guessed that five wolves formed this pack.
"Fresh tracks," he said. We followed until one set of tracks peeled off from the others and headed toward shore, straight for the traps. Then the tracks stopped cold, 20 feet short of the traps, and I could picture the big animal sniffing the air, catching the warning scent, doubling back to join the others.
Twenty stops later, the day ended at twilight, with one dead jay to show for it. I was thawing by a cast-iron stove, which popped and sizzled in Douglas's one-room cabin. Here, near the northwest end of Grand Lake, Leonidas Hubbard had disappeared up the Susan River all those years ago.
"We'd be starved like Hubbard too if we were living off the land," said Douglas, mopping up the last bit of grouse stew with a hunk of bread. "It's one of those lean years," he added, reminding me how the natural cycle works in Labrador, scarce years followed by fat ones, followed by scarce again. Hubbard had hit a scarce one.
I thought of him and all the others I knew now--Jack, Doris, Georgina, and Louie among them--who loved Labrador as I did, despite its stinginess and harsh edges. You had to put up with a lot, but Labrador's unexpected fits of generosity made the trouble worthwhile, as on this January night. Dark closed like a lid on the mountains, shutting out the world, and the stars blazed to life in a sky suddenly too small to hold them. All of Labrador seemed to glow under a crust of snow, looking empty and beautiful.
Copyright 1993 National Geographic Society. All Rights Reserved.
