n't you realise it's about the only part of the
continent that hasn't been explored? As a matter of fact, there isn't
much more known of the interior of Labrador now than when Cabot
discovered the coast more than four hundred years ago." He jumped up to
throw more wood on the fire. "Think of it, Wallace!" he went on, "A
great unknown land right near home, as wild and primitive to-day as it
has always been! I want to see it. I want to get into a really wild
country and have some of the experiences of the old fellows who
explored and opened up the country where we are now."

Resuming his place by the blazing logs, Hubbard unfolded to me his
plan, then vague and in the rough, of exploring a part of the unknown
eastern end of the peninsula. Of trips such as this he had been
dreaming since childhood. When a mere boy on his father's farm in
Michigan, he had lain for hours out under the trees in the orchard
poring over a map of Canada and making imaginary journeys into the
unexplored. Boone and Crockett were his heroes, and sometimes he was
so affected by the tales of their adventures that he must needs himself
steal away to the woods and camp out for two or three days.

It was at this period that he resolved to head some day an exploring
expedition of his own, and this resolution he forgot neither while a
student nor while serving as a newspaper man in Detroit and New York.
At length, through a connection he made with a magazine devoted to
out-of-door life, he was able to make several long trips into the wild.
Among other places, he visited the Hudson Bay region, and once
penetrated to the winter hunting ground of the Mountaineer Indians,
north of Lake St. John, in southern Labrador. These trips, however,
failed to satisfy him; his ambition was to reach a region where no
white man had preceded him. Now, at the age of twenty-nine, he believed
that his ambition was about to be realised.

"It's always the way, Wallace," he said; "when a fellow starts on a
long trail, he's never willing to quit. It'll be the same with you if
you go with me to Labrador. You'll say each trip will be the last, but
when you come home you'll hear the voice of the wilderness calling you
to return, and it will lure you away again and again. I thought my
Lake St. John trip was something, but while there I stood at the
portals of the unknown, and it brought back stronger than ever the old
longing to make discoveries, so that now the walls of t