own hands and brain do not provide. He must be resourceful
and self-reliant.

I venture to say there is not a boy living--a real red-blooded boy or
red-blooded man either for that matter--who has not dreamed of the day
when he might experience the thrill of venturing into such a
wilderness as we have described. This was America as the discoverers
found it, and as it was before the great explorers and adventurers
opened it to civilization. This was Labrador as Grenfell found
Labrador, and as it is to-day--the great "silent peninsula of the
North." It occupies a large corner of the North American continent,
and much of it is still unexplored, a vast, grim, lonely land, but one
of majestic grandeur and beauty.

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

The hardy pioneers and settlers of Labrador, as we have seen, have
made their homes only on the seacoast, leaving the interior to
wandering Indian hunters. They do, to be sure, enter the wilderness
for short distances in winter when they are following their business
as hunters, but none has ever made his home beyond the sound of the
sea.

In the forests of the south and southeast are the Mountaineer Indians,
as they are called by all English speaking people; or, if we wish to
put on airs and assume French we may call them the _Montaignais_
Indians. In the North are the Nascaupees, today the most primitive
Indians on the North American continent. In the west and southwest are
the Crees.

All of these Indians are of the great Algonquin family, and are much
like those that Natty Bumpo chummed with or fought against, and those
who lived in New York and New England when the settlers first came to
what are now our eastern states. Labrador is so large, and there are
so few Indians to occupy it, however, that the explorer may wander
through it for months, as I have done, without ever once seeing the
smoke rising from an Indian tepee or hearing a human voice.

The Eskimos of the north coast are much like the Eskimos of Greenland,
both in language and in the way they live. Their summer shelters are
skin tents, which they call _tupeks_. In winter they build dome-shaped
houses from blocks of snow, though they sometimes have cave-like
shelters of stone and earth built against the side of a hill. The snow
houses they call _iglooweuks_, or houses of snow; the stone and earth
shelters are _igloosoaks_, or big igloos, the word igloo, in the
Eskimo language, meaning house.