And so this wilderness has lain since creation, unmarred by the hand of civilized man, clean and unsullied, as God made it.  The air, laden with the perfume of spruce and balsam, is pure and wholesome.  The water carries no germs from the refuse of man, and one may drink it freely, from river and brook and lake, without fear of contamination.  There is no sound to break the silence of ages save the song of river rapids, the thunder of mighty falls, or the whisper or moan of wind in the tree tops; or, perchance, the distant cry of a wolf, the weird laugh of a loon or the honk of the wild goose.

There are no roads or beaten trails other than the trails of the caribou, the wild deer that make this their home.  The nearest railroad is half a thousand miles away.  Automobiles are unknown and would be quite useless here.  Great rivers and innumerable emerald lakes render the land impassable for horses.  The traveler must make his own trails, and he must depend in summer upon his canoe or boat, and in winter upon his snowshoes and his sledge, hauled by great wolf dogs.

With his gun and traps and fishing gear he must glean his living from the wilderness or from the sea.  If he would have a shelter he must fell trees with his axe and build it with his own skill.  He has little that his 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.