heads against my legs and, I believe, recognized me.

It was nearly two o'clock in the morning. We went immediately to the
Post house and roused out Mr. Stuart Cotter, the agent (Mackenzie is
no longer there), and received from him a royal welcome. He called
his Post servant and instructed him to bring in our things, and while
we changed our dripping clothes for dry ones, his housekeeper prepared
a light supper. It was five o'clock in the morning when I retired.

In the previous autumn I had written Duncan McLean, one of the four
men who came to my rescue on the Susan River, that should I ever come
to Labrador again and be in need of a man I would like to engage him.
Cotter told me that Duncan had just come from his trapping path and
was at the Post kitchen, so when we had finished breakfast, at eight
o'clock that morning, I saw Duncan and, as he was quite willing to go
with us, I arranged with him to accompany us a short distance into the
country to help us pack over the first portage and to bring back
letters.

He expressed a wish to visit his father at Kenemish before starting
into the country, but promised to be back the next evening ready for
the start on Monday morning, the twenty-sixth, and I consented. I
knew hard work was before us, and as I wished all hands to be well
rested and fresh at the outset, I felt that a couple of days' idleness
would do us no harm.

Some five hundred yards east of Mr. Cotter's house is an old,
abandoned mission chapel, and behind it an Indian burying ground. The
cleared space of level ground between the house and chapel was, for a
century or more, the camping ground of the Mountaineer Indians who