in
for flour and tea, bread and tea three times a day is all there is to
eat.

People cannot keep well on just bread and tea, or even bread and salt
fish and tea. It is not hard for us to imagine how we would feel if
every meal we had day in and day out was only bread and tea, and
sometimes not enough of that.

X

THE SEAL HUNTER

No less perilous is the business of fisherman and sealer than that of
hunter and trapper. Every turn a man makes down on The Labrador is
likely to carry him into some adventure that will place his life in
danger, at sea as on land. But there is no way out of it if a living
is to be made.

It is a strange fact that one never recognizes a great deal of danger
in the life that one is accustomed to living, no matter how perilous
it may seem to others. If a Labradorman were to come to any of our
towns or cities his heart would be in his mouth at every turn, for a
time at least, dodging automobiles and street cars. It would appear to
him an exceedingly hazardous existence that we live, and he would long
to be back to the peace and quiet and safety of his sea and
wilderness. And our streets would be dangerous ground to him, indeed,
until he became accustomed to dodging motor cars. He is nimble enough,
and on his own ground could put most of us to shame in that respect,
but here he is lacking in experience.

The same hunter will face the storms and solitude of the wilderness
trail without ever once feeling that he is in danger or afraid. He
knows how to do it. That is the life that he has been reared to live.
The average city man would perish in a day if left alone to care for
himself on a trapper's trail. He has never learned the business, and
he would not know how to take care of himself.

The Labradorman being both hunter and fisherman, is perfectly at home
both in the wilderness and on the sea. He has the dangers of both to
meet, but he does not recognize them as dangerous callings, though
every year some mate or neighbor loses his life. "'Tis the way o' th'
Lard."

Ice still covers the Labrador harbors in May, and this is when the
seal hunt begins, or, as the liveyere says, he goes "swileing." He
calls a seal a "swile." With a harpoon attached to a long line he
stations himself at a breathing hole in the ice which the seals under
the ice have kept open, and out of which, now and again, one raises
its nose and fills its lungs with air, for seals are animals, not
fish, and mus