ay, unless in a case of great necessity, we were
told not to expect the Julia Sheridan back from Indian Harbour until
Monday noon; and so we were compelled to possess our souls in patience
and enjoy the hospitality of Mr. Fraser. I must confess that while I
was anxious to get on, I was at the same time not so greatly
disappointed at our enforced delay; it gave me an opportunity to see
something of the novel life of the post.

While at Rigolet we of course tried to get all the information possible
about the country to which we were going. No Indians had been to the
post for months, and the white men and Eskimos knew absolutely nothing
about it. At length Hubbard was referred to "Skipper" Tom Blake, a
breed, who had trapped at the upper or western end of Grand Lake. From
Blake he learned that Grand Lake was forty miles long, and that canoe
travel on it was good to its upper end, where the Nascaupee River
flowed into it. Blake believed we could paddle up the Nascaupee some
eighteen or twenty miles, where we should find the Red River, a wide,
shallow, rapid stream that flowed into the Nascaupee from the south.
Above this point he had no personal knowledge of the country, and
advised us to see his son Donald, whom he expected to arrive that day
from his trapping grounds on Seal Lake. Donald, he said, had been
farther inland and knew more about the country than anyone else on the
coast.

Donald did arrive a little later, and upon questioning him Hubbard
learned that Seal Lake, which, he said, was an expansion of the
Nascaupee River, had been the limit of his travels inland. Donald
reiterated what his father had told us of Grand Lake and the lower
waters of the Nascaupee, adding that for many miles above the point
where the Nascaupee was joined by the Red we should find canoe travel
impossible, as the Nascaupee "tumbled right down off the mountains."
Up the Nascaupee as far as the Red River he had sailed his boat. He
had heard from the Indians that the Nascaupee came from Lake
Michikamau, and he believed it to be a fact. This convinced us that
the Nascaupee was the river A. P. Low, of the Geological Survey, had
mapped as the Northwest. The Red River Donald had crossed in winter
some twenty miles above its mouth, and while it was wide, it was so
shallow and swift that he was sure it would not admit of canoeing. He
could not tell its source, and was sure the Indians had never travelled
on it. In answer to Hubbard's