The Mosquitoes And Flies Were Now Coming Thick And Fast.

I thought them very bad, but George insisted that you could not even call this a beginning.

I wore a veil of black silk net, but the mesh was hardly fine enough, and the flies managed to crawl through. They would get their heads in and then kick and struggle and twist till they were all through, when they immediately proceeded to work. The men did not seem to care to put their veils on even when not at work, and I wondered how they could take the little torments so calmly.

On the morning of July 6th we reached the Seal Islands expansion. Around these islands the river flows with such force and swiftness that the water can be seen to pile up in ridges in the channel. Here we found Donald Blake's tilt. Donald is Gilbert's brother, and in winter they trap together up the Nascaupee valley as far as Seal Lake, which lies 100 miles from Northwest River post. Often in imagination I had pictured these little havens so far in the wilderness and lonely, and now I had come to a real one. It was a tiny log building set near the edge of the river bank among the spruce trees. Around it lay a thick bed of chips, and scattered about were the skeletons of martens of last winter's catch. One had to stoop a good deal to get in at the narrow doorway. It was dark, and not now an attractive-looking place, yet as thought flew back to the white wilderness of a few months before, the trapper and his long, solitary journeys in the relentless cold, with at last the wolfish night closing round him, it made all different, and one realised a little how welcome must have seemed the thought and the sight of the tiny shelter.

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