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The Mountaineer Indian, unlike the Nascaupee, is very religious, and must, at least once a year, meet his father confessor. The camping ground since the abandonment of the mission, has lain lonely and deserted, save for three or four families who, occasionally in the summer season, come back again to pitch their tents where their forefathers camped and held their annual feasts in the old days.
"But have you never hunted here yourself?" I asked. "No, sir, I've never been in here at all. I travels right past up the Nascaupee. All I knows about it, sir, is what they tells me. I always follows the Nascaupee, sir."
For a mile we threaded our way among these islands and found ourselves at the mouth of the Crooked River where it enters the Nascaupee on the north. The two river courses lie near together for some distance, separated only by a sandy plateau, in places little more than a mile wide. At 10 A.M. we halted for lunch, and after the meal the men lay down in the willows to sleep.
Paddling straight towards Berry Head we passed it about six o'clock, and by 8 A.M. were safe on the Nascaupee River, where the winds could not greatly trouble us.
I examined them carefully through my binoculars and discovered a long line of water, like a silver thread, following the ridge running eastward, and decided that this must be the Nascaupee River, though later I was convinced that I was mistaken and that the river lay to the southward of the ridge. To the cast and north of our hill was an expanse of rolling, desolate wilderness.
This trail again returns to the Nascaupee River at Seal Lake and for some fifty miles above Seal Lake, follows the river. It then leaves the Nascaupee, making a second long detour through lakes to the north. Our food supply was then in so depleted a condition the party was obliged to separate, three of us returning to Northwest River.
There the walking must be smooth and easy; but we could not cross, the rapids were too heavy. During the afternoon we found the first and only fresh caribou tracks seen in the lower Nascaupee valley. A pair of fish eagles, circling high above us, screamed their disapproval of our presence there. We saw their nest at the very top of a dead spruce stub, some sixty feet or more above the ground.
Into this lake after luncheon we paddled, and when we reached its upper end, there was the mouth of a river, which we immediately hailed as the Nascaupee, the stream that was to lead us up to Lake Michikamau.
They watched his boat pass down through The Jug and out into the Bay, and then the silence of the wilderness closed upon him, and no word came as to whether or no Indian Jake met him at the Nascaupee River camp. In Labrador September is the pleasantest month of the year.
It was just 5 P.M. when, three hundred miles of my journey into the great, silent wilderness passed, I stepped out of the canoe to stand at last on the summit of the Divide the first of the white race to trace the Nascaupee River to its source. I had a strange feeling of being at the summit of the world. The country was flat and very sparsely wooded, but I could not see far.
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