his own thoughts, no man spoke to break the spell. Finally Pete began
a snatch of Indian song:

"Puhgedewawa enenewug
Nuhbuggesug kamiwauw."

Then he drew from his pocket a harmonica, and for half an hour played
soft music that harmonized well with the night and the surroundings;
when he ceased, all but Richards and I went to their blankets. We two
remained by the dying embers of our fire for another hour to enjoy the
perfect night, and then, before we turned to our beds, made an
observation for compass variation, which calculations the following
morning showed to be thirty-seven degrees west of the true north.

Paddling through the ponds, polling and tracking through the rapids or
portaging around them up the little river on which we were encamped
the night before, brought us to Otter Lake, which was considerably
larger than Lake Minisinaqua, but not so large as Nipishish. The main
body was not over a mile and a half in width, but it had a number of
bays and closely connected tributary lakes. Its eastern end, which we
did not explore, penetrated low spruce and balsam-covered hills. To
the north and northeast were rugged, rock-tipped hills, rising to an
elevation of some seven hundred feet above the lake. The country at
their base was covered with a green forest of small fir, spruce and
birch, and near the water, in marshy places, as is the case nearly
everywhere in Labrador, tamarack, but the hills themselves had been
fire swept, and were gray with weather-worn, dead trees. On the
summits, and for two hundred feet below, bare basaltic rock indicated
that at this elevation they had never sustained any growth, save a few
straggling bushes. On some of these hills there still remained