The Island were in a cluster, at the opposite side of a clear, still bay. They were mostly barren rock, like every other Island along this part of the rugged Labrador coast. The only difference was that they appeared to be hanging from the sky, far above the horizon.
Looking at this phenomenon from the deck... I though once again of an observation made to me by an old Labrador hand first time I came to this beautiful yet forbidding part of the world... this place can surprise the hell out of you... you know..?
Even a Map of Labrador is deceptive. The political entity known as Labrador is an annexe of the Canadian province of Newfoundland... but geographically and ecologically the Labrador Peninsula comprises all the coastal area from the entrance to Hudson Bay down to the mouth of the St. Lawrence River including a section that is now part of the province of Quebec. Untill the 1920s the entire peninsula was commonly referred to as Labrador. You would fit the whole of great Britain into Labrador's 113,000 square miles and have enough room left over to Denmark.
Villages are only about forty years old, as many as there are on a single fifteen mile stretch of the south coast of England.
Dazzling Northern Lights and nocturnal wolf calls, silently testify to Labrador's awful isolation; and to its haunting loneliness. "Lots of Ghost in Hebron" a little Black-eyed Eskimo girl told me; her father did not disagree.
It was in Nain that I first had a glance to the first Autumn out of my home. It was the first of September and Nain had been enjoying Indian Summer at its balmiest - the finest weather Canada has to offer anywhere at any time of year. Due to the mild temperature, visibility was sharp to explore the countryside.
At night I crawled up into my sleeping bag in a deserted mission school dormitory. But when I woke in the morning, I swung my feet down on the wooden floor and I felt the sting of cold through my double heavy woollen socks.
What I had taken for dust on the floor was actually granular snow that had sifted through the broken window panes while I was sleeping.
I glanced out at a pewter-gry sky that sent a fresh chill through my body just looking at it. The wind was whipping the snow off the bare black rock and chasing it restless about. The wind blew my breath behind me in a plume of visible vapour when I stepped outside. I was wrapped into my sleeping bag, but I thought; Was I benumb because of the beautiful sight or was I still dreaming?
Around noon that day, a bizzard was raging to the south of us. It turned out, however that it wasn't so bad, luckily we all had our cross country skies, and it made us arrive faster on our trail to the next village.
This formidable country is virtually impenetrable by normal means. Best way is by foot or on skies. This seemingly limitless expanse of wilderness, you can watch the different ecosystems merge into one another: from open mixed forest growing in the southern third of Labrador to the corniferous forest in the colder midsection; thence to the no-man's land between forest and subartic tundra, with its mixture of stunted trees and swampy alpine meadows; and finally to the Artic tundra itself covered for most of the year by snow and supporting little more than willows bushes, low sedges and that hardy lichen called caribou moss.
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