Part 7

For dogs appeared in squads, platoons, companies, battalions, even as iron-filings cluster to a magnet. There was a most outrageous and unholy pow-wow when we had gone about five houses from the beach. All the dogs from near and far piled into it like hornets from a broken nest. There was no speech nor language known to dogdom in which their voices were not heard with howls and imprecations. Alas! even the gentle Sister Bailey had to abandon for the nonce her policy of moral suasion and get in among her protégés with thwackings of a bit of driftwood and a few well-directed pushes (not to say kicks) of the foot. Any moderate impact, when a scrap is in full swing, rebounds from the tough integuments like hailstones landing on a tin roof. Even an every-day argument of these beasts sounds like wholesale murder. It is a pathetic fact that with all the affectionate responsiveness of some of the animals to human notice there always lurks a danger. If you are a stranger, meeting a strange pack, it is well to keep your eyes upon them, and if you have not a stick in your hand, or a stone ready to throw, it is wholesome to stoop groundward and pretend you have a missile. Then, nine times out of ten, they will scatter. So often one would like to believe they are all dog, with all of the dog’s graces and goodnesses—but there reigns in the breast of each a vulpine jealousy that easily and instantly mounts to a blood-heat of maddened fury. Dogs of the same litter will fight as furiously and savagely as born enemies, though they may recognize in the traces intuitively the leadership of their mother at an age far beyond that at which civilized puppies become as contemptuous of their mother as she is of them.

Unhappily, there are many cases on authentic record when young children and old people, unable to defend themselves, have been devoured by dogs—not necessarily when the dogs were starving. A grewsome climax was reached when in the “flu” epidemic of 1918-19 on the Labrador the dogs fell on the dead and the dying and the enfeebled survivors could not stem the onslaught. No wonder, then, that Dr. Grenfell, with all his manifest affection for dogs that he has known, insists that the importation of reindeer is the salvation and the solution. Stubbornly the folk of the northern tip of the peninsula and the Labrador coast cling to the huskies that were banished, in favour of cows, horses, pigs and chickens, by their more sophisticated southern neighbours. Uncle Philip Coates at Eddy’s Cove is the only man on that shore, as far as is known, who keeps pigs.

A fisherman landing on an island off Cape Charles, on the side away from his home, found himself the object of the unwelcome attentions of a pack of dogs who were acting on the principle of the uncouth villager of the old story who cried: “’Ere’s a stranger, Bill—let’s ’eave ’arf a brick at him.” He is sure they would have pounced on him and polished off his bones, had he not seen one dog he knew—the leader. He called the dog’s name; the wolfish creature halted instantly. When the name was repeated, the dog slunk off, his ragged retinue at his heels.

It is sad to think that the dogs that will perform so nobly in the traces are such bad actors when they have nothing to do but to pick a quarrel in places where perhaps there is no foliage but the proud curled plumage of their tails. They are beside themselves with excitement when after the summer siesta they are harnessed to the komatik again. When the driver smartly rubs his hands and cries, “See the deer!”—or anything he pleases—it augments the fever. In Labrador “ouk, ouk!” turns the team to the right—perchance with a disconcerting promptness—and “urrah, urrah!” swerves it to the left. The corresponding directions in Newfoundland are “keep off!” and “hold in.” No reins are used—some drivers use no whip. The books of Dr. Grenfell abound in affectionate reference to the better nature of these animals and their extraordinary fidelity to duty. Like most of the people of the land, they do not fear to die. Their life is largely of neglect and pain: they spend much of their time crawling under the houses to get out of the way. Their pleasure is the greater when they find a human playmate ready to throw a stick into the water for them. Grand swimmers are they, and they will plunge into the coldest sea; and if they are hungry they dive in for a small fish without concern. It is hard to find a time when they are not ready to set their fangs to food—“full-fed” is an ideal condition to which most of them seldom attain. A square meal of whalemeat is their millennium. “I don’t see what satisfaction they get out of it,” said “Bill” Norwood—one of the volunteer “wops” building the Battle Harbour reservoir. “The meat in winter comes to them in frozen hunks, and they slide it down at one gulp, to melt in their stomach. That’s not quite my idea of enjoying a meal.”

In a yawl that the _Strathcona_ dragged astern three plaintive huskies, to be committed to the pack at St. Anthony, hungrily sniffed the meat-laden breeze that blew from our deck. They were perturbed at finding themselves going to sea. I may add that when they got ashore the youngest of the three—a mere baby—jumped on a rock and bit the nose of the leader of the St. Anthony pack, Eric by name, thereby winning respect for himself and his two comrades among the aborigines who might otherwise have fallen upon them and rent them limb from limb.

The dogs at Battle Harbour live up to the name of the settlement. Like all other “huskies,” they are ready to fight on slight provocation, and the night is made vocal with their long-drawn ululations. Their appetite is insatiable—they devour with enthusiasm whatsoever things are thrown out at the kitchen door—they even ate a towel that went astray—and when nothing better offers they will wade into the water in quest of caplin, or cods’ heads. In their enthusiasm for food the dogs will dig through boards to get at cattle and pigs, and cows and chickens seldom live where the dogs are numerous.

The murderous proclivities of the dogs of the Labrador furnished one of the chief reasons, as has been said before, why the Doctor went to such great pains and to such a relatively large expense to import and domicile the reindeer.

“It was wildly exciting work, I can tell you, lassoing those reindeer and tying their legs in that country over yonder,” he said, as the _Strathcona_ rounded the rugged bread-loaf island of Cape Onion. He pointed to the settlement of Island Bay behind it. “There we were blown across the bay on the ice—dogs, komatik and all—roaring with laughter at our own predicament, helpless before the great gale of wind.” Thus he recalls without bitterness the costly undertaking whose fruition has been—and still is—one of his dearest dreams. Conveying the captured reindeer across the Strait in a schooner to Canada with almost nobody to help him was a Herculean task. Some day the Legislature at St. John’s may see fit to divert a little money to establishing the docile and reliable reindeer in place of treacherous and predatory dogs. It is a greater loss to the island than to Grenfell that the scheme must wait.

With a mob of dogs in every village, a mob actuated most of the time by an insatiable hunger driving it forth in quest of any sort of food, it has been impossible in most places to keep a cow or a goat, and hay is prohibitively costly to import. Dr. Grenfell has described with pathos how Labrador mothers, in default even of canned milk for the baby, are in the habit of chewing hard bread into a pulpy mass to fill the infant’s mouth and thus produce the illusion of nutriment until it is able to masticate and assimilate “loaf” for itself. In few countries is milk so scarce.

The reindeer might be the cow of the Labrador. The reindeer is able to find a square meal amid the moss and lichens, and it yields milk so rich as to require dilution to bring it down to the standard of cow’s milk, while it is free from the peculiar flavour of the milk of the goat. The Lapps make the milk into a “cream cheese” which Dr. Grenfell has tried out on his sledge journeys and heartily endorses.

Nearly three hundred reindeer were obtained by Dr. Grenfell in Lapland in 1907, with three Lapland families to herd them and teach herding. They were landed at Cremailliere, (locally called “Camelias”), three miles south of St. Anthony. At the end of four years the herd numbered a thousand. In 1912, twelve hundred and fifty at once were corraled. Poaching and want of police protection made it desirable to transfer the animals across the Straits to Canada. Some of them, by virtue of strenuous effort, were collected in 1918 and transported to the St. Augustine River district where now they flourish and increase in number. Some day, it would seem from the great success of the reindeer-herds of Alaska—introduced by Dr. Sheldon Jackson and fostered by the United States Government—these fine animals will surely replace the dogs on the Labrador, when local prejudice against them has been overcome or has evaporated. They are useful not merely for the milk but for the meat and the skins, as well as for transportation. They live at peace instead of on the precarious verge of battle. The “experiment” has not collapsed in dismal failure. It is only in abeyance to the ultimate assured success, and it is not too much to predict that another generation or two will see the reindeer numerous and useful throughout the Labrador.

XII A WIDE, WIDE “PARISH”

To take the measure of the man Dr. Grenfell is and the work he does it is necessary to know something of the land and the waters round about, where he puts his life in jeopardy year after year, day unto day, to save the lives of others. There is much more to “Dr. Grenfell’s parish” than the “rock, fog and bog” of the old saying. Such observations as are here assembled are the raw material for the Doctor’s inimitable tales of life on the Labrador.

The great fact of life here is the sea, and much of existence is in giving battle to it. The little boys practice jumping across rain-barrels and mud-puddles, because some day they hope to get a “ticket” (a berth on a sealer) and go to the ice, and when it is “a good big copy from pan to pan”—that is to say, a considerable distance from one floating ice-cake to the next—their ability to jump like their own island sheep may save their lives.

The word “copy” comes from the childish game of following the leader and doing as he does. A little piece of ice is called a knob, and a larger piece is a pan. A pan is the same thing as a floe, but the latter expression is not in common usage.

Every youth who aspires to qualify as a skipper must go before an examining board of old sea-wise and weather-wise pilots, and prove himself letter-perfect in the text of that big book, “The Newfoundland and Labrador Pilot and Guide.” His examiners scorn the knowledge of the book, very often, for they have the facts at the fingers’ ends from long and harsh experience of the treacherous waters, with the criss-cross currents, the hidden reefs, the sudden fogs, the contrary winds. So they delight to make life miserable for the young mariner by heckling him.

The disasters that now and then overtake the sealing-fleet are ever present in the minds of those who do business in these waters. They know what it means for a ship’s company to be caught out on the ice in a snow-storm, far from the vessel. In early March the wooden ships race for the Straits of Belle Isle, and three days later the faster iron ships follow. When they get to where the seals are sunning themselves around the blow-holes in the ice, the crew go out with their gaffs (staves) and kill the usually unresisting animals by hitting them over the back of the head. It sounds like simple and easy hunting, and in good weather it is. But a long-continued storm changes the complexion of the adventure to that of the gravest peril.

One captain saved his men by making them dance like mad the long night through, while he crooned the music to them. At the end of each five minutes he let them rest on their piles of gaffs, and then they were made to spring to their feet again and resume the frantic gyrations that kept them from freezing to death. In the same storm, the _Greenland_ of Harbour Grace lost 52 of her 100 men.

They still talk of the fate of the _Queen_ on Gull Island off Cape St. John, though the wreck took place nigh unto forty years ago. There was no lighthouse then. The island lifts its head hundreds of feet above the mean of the tides, and only the long rank grass and the buttercups live there in summer. But this was in a December night, and the wind blew a gale. There were six passengers—a woman among them. When the passengers had battled their way ashore through the leaping surf, the crew went back on the doomed ship to salvage some of the provisions. For they knew that at this forsaken angle of the island no help from any passing ship was likely till the spring.

The passengers toiled to the top of the bleak islet, lugging with them a fragment of a sail. The crew, aboard the vessel, were carried by the furious winds and waters out to the Old Harry Shoals, where they lost their lives when the sea beat the vessel to pieces.

The sequel is known by a little diary in which a doctor—one of the hapless half-dozen—made notes with his own blood till his stiffening fingers refused to scrawl another entry.

It seems from this pathetic note-book that the six at the end of a few days, tortured with thirst and starvation, drew lots to see who should die.

The lot fell to the woman. Her brother offered himself in her place.

Then the entries in the book cease; and the curtain that fell was not lifted till spring brought a solitary hunter to the island. He shot a duck from his boat, and it fell in the breakers. Afterwards he said it was a phantom fowl, sent from heaven to guide him. For he did not see it again, though he landed and searched the beach.

But he saw splinters flung high by the surf that seemed to him a clear indication of a wreck.

He clambered to the top of the islet. There he found, under the rotted sail, the six bodies, and in the hand of one, was a piece of flesh torn from one of the bodies.

Even when their lives are endangered the fishermen preserve their keen mindfulness of the religious proprieties. Caught on an ice-pan together, Protestants and Catholics prayed, their backs to one another, on opposite sides of the pan—and the same thing has happened in ships’ cabins. The sailors are not above a round oath now and then, but there are many God-fearing, prayerful men among them. “These are my sailing orders, sir,” said an old retired sea-dog to me as he patted the cheek of his Bible.

Phrases of the sea enter into every phase of daily human intercourse. “You should have given yourself more room to veer and haul,” said the same old sailor to me when I was in a hurry. Fish when half-cured are said to be “half-saved,” and a man who is “not all there” is likely to be styled “half-saved.”

“Down killik” is used impartially on arrival at the fishing grounds or at home after a voyage—the “killik” being a stone anchor for small craft or for nets. (A “killy-claw” is of wood with the stone in the middle.) You may hear an old fisherman say of his retirement from the long warfare with the sea for a living: “My killiks are down; my boat is moored.” One of them who was blind in his left eye, said as he lay dying, referring to his own soul: “She’s on her last tack, heading for I don’t know where: the port light is out, and the starboard is getting very dim.” A few minutes later he passed away.

The ordinary talk is full of poetry. “If I could only rig up a derrick, now, to hoist me over the fore part of the winter,” an old salt will say, “wi’ the help o’ God and a sou’westerly wind and a few swyles I could last till the spring.” By “swyles,” of course, he means “seals.” A man’s a man when he has killed his seal. Seal-meat is an anti-scorbutic, and the sealers present the “paws,” or flippers, as great delicacies to their friends. A “big feed” is a “scoff.” Sealing brings men together in conviviality and comaraderie, and it is the great ambition of most of the youth of Newfoundland to “go to the ice.” Many are the stowaways aboard the sealing craft. If a man goes “half his hand” it means he gets half his catch for his labour.

“Seal” is pronounced “swyle,” “syle,” or “swoyle” and Swale Island also takes its name from this most important mammal. Seals wandering in search of their blow-holes have been found as far as six or seven miles inland.

As might be expected, there survives in the vernacular—especially of the older people—many words and phrases that smack of their English dialect origin, and words that were the English undefiled of Chaucer’s or Shakespeare’s day. Certain proper names represent a curious conversion of a French name no longer understood.

In Dorsetshire dialect v is used for f, and in Newfoundland one hears “fir” pronounced “vir” or “var.” Firewood is “vir-wood.” Women who are “vuzzing up their vires” are fussing (making ready) their fires. We have “it wouldn’t be vitty” in place of “it wouldn’t be fitting.” A pig “veers”; it does not farrow. The use of “thiccy” for “this” is familiar to readers of “Lorna Doone.” “The big spuds are not very jonnick yet” means that the potatoes are not well done. If something “hatches” in your “glutch,” it catches in your throat. Blizzard is a word not used, and a lass at school, confusing it with gizzard, said it meant the insides of a hen. The remains of birds or of animals are the “rames.” “O yes you, I ’low” is a common form of agreement. To be photographed is to be “skitched off,” and of snapshots it is sometimes said by an old fisherman to a “kodak fiend”: “I heard ye firin’ of ’em.”

“Cass ’n goo,” for “can’t you go” may be heard at Notre Dame Bay, as well as “biss ’n gwine” for “aren’t you going?” and “thees cass’n do it” for “thee can’t do it.” The berries called “harts” (whorts) are, I presume, the “hurts” of Surrey.

A vivid toast for a sealer going to the icefields was “Bloody decks to ’im!”

When bad weather is brewing, “We’re going to have dirt” is a common expression.

A fisherman who had hooked a queer creature that must have been first cousin to the sea-serpent said, “It had a head like a hulf, a neck like a harse; I cut the line and let it go to hell.”

Here is a puzzler: “Did ye come on skits or on cart and dogs?” That means, “Did you come on skates or on a dog-sledge?” Dog-cat is a dog-sledge. Cat is short for catamaran, which is not a sea-boat but a land-sledge, so that when you hear it said: “He’s taken his dog and his cat and gone to the woods” you may know that it means “He’s taken his dog and his sledge.”

Just as we change the position of the _r_ in going from _three_ to _third_, we find the letters transposed in “aps” for aspen, “haps” for hasp, “waps” for “wasp” and “wordle” for world. Labrador is Larbador, and “down to the Larbador” or “down on the Larbador” are common expressions.

Instead of “the hatch” the telescoped form “th’ ’atch” is used. We have “turr” for “tern” and “loo” for “loon,” and “yammit” (emmet) for “ant.”

The tendency to combine syllables is illustrated in the pronunciation of Twillingate as Twulngate.

A scaffolding for fish is known as a “flake.” Here the split cod are outspread to dry and, by the way, a decision of the Newfoundland Supreme Court declares “cod” and “fish” synonymous. The scaffolding is made of poles called longers, and it is suggested that these “longers” are the “longiores” which Caesar used to build bridges, according to his Commentaries. A silk hat is known as a beaver, or behaviour, and so when you hear it said, “I saw Tom Murphy; he must have been at a funeral; he had his behaviour on,” it means not that he was circumspect in his conduct, but that he wore the formal headgear. “Sammy must ’a’ been writin’ some poetry. I saw him just now a-humourin’ of it with his foot.” Cannot you see the bard beating out the rhythm with his foot, as a musician sometimes does when he is sure that he is in time and the rest are mistaken?

“South’ard,” “north’ard,” “east’ard,” “west’ard” are current maritime usage, and the adjective “wester” is heard.

Legal Latin is drawn upon for “tal qual”—_talis qualis_—applied in a bargain for fish “just as they come.”

Here is a quaint one. The end of a pile, above the surface of a wharf, is a gump-head. Gump and block are one and the same thing. We of the United States use the word “gump” or “chump” figuratively for a “blockhead.”

“The curse o’ Crummle on ye” is a rural expression still heard, and refers to Cromwell’s bloody descent on Ireland.

“I find my kinkhorn and I can’t glutch” means “I have a pain in my throat and I can’t swallow.” The kinkhorn is the Adam’s apple. A man at Chimney Cove remarked: “I have a pain in my kinkhorn and it has gone to my wizen (chest).”

A dog is often called a “crackie.” Caribou is shortened to “boo.” A door that has stuck is said to be “plimmed up.” A man who ate hard bread and drank water said “It plimmed up inside and nearly killed me.”

To say of a girl that she “blushed up like a bluerag” refers to the custom of enclosing a lump of blueing in a cloth when laundering clothes. “The wind baffles round the house” is a beautiful way of saying that it was blustering.

“Bruise” is a very popular dish of hard bread boiled with fish, and with “scrunchins” (pork) fried and put over it. It is the equivalent of Philadelphia’s famous “scrapple.” A guide, admitting that bread and tea are the staple articles of diet in many an outpost, said reflectively: “Yes, that’s all those people live on. Now there’s other things. There’s beans.”

When a man says that his hands are “hard afrore” (hard frozen) we remember Milton in “Paradise Lost,” “the air burns frore.” Frozen potatoes are “frosty tiddies.” Head is often called “heed.” “Tigyer,” said by an old man to a mischievous lad, means “Take yerself off.” “Is en?” is a way of saying “Is he?” An old man cut his finger and said that he had a “risen” on it, which is certainly more of a finality than a “rising.” “I’m going chock to Gargamelle” means “I’m going all the way to Gargamelle,” the latter name from “garçon gamelle,” said to signify “the boy who looks after the soup.”

Instead of “squashed,” “squatted” is a common word, as in the expression “I squatted my finger.” And there are many other provincialisms not in the dictionaries.

The fathom is a land-measure of length, as well as a sea-measure of depth. The leading dog of a team is six or seven “fathoms” ahead of the komatik.

“Start calm” means perfectly calm, and then they may say expressively “The wind’s up and down the mast.”

“Puddick” is a common name for the stomach.

“Take it abroad” is “take it apart”; “do you relish enough,” is “have you eaten plenty?” “Poor sign fish” means that fish are scarce. Woods that are tall are said to be “taunt.”

These few examples of distinctive phraseology might be multiplied a thousand-fold.

As for the proper names, a fascinating field of research lies before a patient investigator who commands the leisure. Here are but a few of countless examples that might be cited.