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Updated: May 9, 2025
We did not know then that in abandoning Lost Trail Lake for Lake Disappointment we were wandering from the Indian trail to Michikamau. Some Indians I met during the winter at Northwest River Post told me that a river flowed out of the western end of Lost Trail Lake into the very southeast bay of Lake Michikamau we were longing so much to see. This was the trail. And we lost it.
The rapid proved to be really a fall where a good-sized stream emptied into the lake. We had big hopes of trout, but found the stream too shoal and rapid, with almost no pools, and we caught only a dozen small ones. Towards evening we took a northwesterly course in the canoe in search of the lake's outlet to Michikamau.
If we could reach Michikamau by September first that should give me ample time, I believed, to reach the George River before the caribou migration would take place. The following morning we started forward with a will, and with many little lakes to cross and short portages between them, we made fairly good progress, and each lake took us one step higher on the plateau.
Heard big river, found it flows southeast. Must go into Hamilton, but it is a big one, several times as big as the Northwest at its biggest. Where does it come from? Can it be Michikamau? Thursday, August 6th. Slept some last night, lying on two dead spruce tops, too wet and cold to sleep very well. Mosquitoes awful. George went to my river.
As we glided out on what proved to be, after all, another lake instead of an arm of Michikamau, we saw that land, not water, stretched across the western horizon. South from our island camp the shore of the lake was a low ridge sloping to the water in three distinct terraces, moss-covered and smooth as a carefully kept lawn, with here and there a clump of stunted fir trees.
"Maybe better, I don't know," remarked Pete, rather skeptically. "Always hard find trail out big lakes. May leave plenty places. Take more time hunt trail maybe now. Indian maps no good. Maybe easier when we find him." Pete was right, and I did not know the difficulties still to be met with before we should reach Michikamau.
This, the largest lake in eastern Labrador, is between eighty and ninety miles in length, with a width varying from six to twenty-five miles. The Grand River, as well as a portion of Lake Michikamau, some years ago was explored and correctly mapped; but the other rivers that flow to the eastward have either been mapped only from hearsay or not at all.
Michikamau has a bad name amongst the Indians for heavy seas, particularly in the autumn months when the northwest gales sometimes blow for weeks at a time without cessation, and the Indians say that they are often held on its shores for long periods by high running seas that no canoe could weather.
At that we sent up three rousing cheers the river problem seemed to be solved; apparently the road to Michikamau lay straight before us. A little above the bend in the river we came upon an old gander and goose and two unfeathered young.
Looking over the great expanse of water stretching miles away to the westward, we wondered what our new lake had in store for us of hope and success, of failure and, despair. Would it lead us to Michikamau? If not, what were we to do? On its farther shore, about twenty miles to the northwest, rose in solemn majesty a great, grey mountain, holding its head high above all the surrounding world.
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