The Lure of the Labrador Wild

From the opening

Here, b'y, is the issue of our plighted troth. Why I am the scribe and not you, God knows: and you have his secret.

"There's no sense in going further--it's the edge of cultivation," So they said, and I believed it... Till a voice, as bad as Conscience, rang interminable changes On one everlasting Whisper day and night repeated--so: "Something hidden. Go and find it. Go and look behind the Ranges-- Something lost behind the Ranges. Lost and waiting for you. Go!" --Kipling's "The Explorer."

Three years have passed since Hubbard and I began that fateful journey into Labrador of which this volume is a record. A little more than a year has elapsed since the first edition of our record made its appearance from the press. Meanwhile I have looked behind the ranges. Grand Lake has again borne me upon the bosom of her broad, deep waters into the great lonely wilderness that lured Hubbard to his death.

It was a day in June last year that found me again at the point where some inexplicable fate had led Hubbard and me to pass unexplored the bay that here extends northward to receive the Nascaupee River, along which lay the trail for which we were searching, and induced us to take, instead, that other course that carried us into the dreadful Susan Valley. How vividly I saw it all again--Hubbard resting on his paddle, and then rising up for a better view, as he said, "Oh, that's just a bay and it isn't worth while to take time to explore it. The river comes in up here at the end of the lake. They all said it was at the end of the lake." And we said, "Yes, it is at the end of the lake; they all said so," and went on, for that was before we knew--Hubbard never knew. A perceptible current, a questioning word, the turn of a paddle would have set us right.

A short sample. Read the whole book

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