With Grenfell on the LabradorWaldo, Fullerton L. (Fullerton Leonard)
History
With Grenfell on the Labrador
Waldo, Fullerton L. (Fullerton Leonard)
Grenfell, Wilfred Thomason, Sir, 1865-1940
We cast anchor at Pleasure Harbour because of rough weather and for a
few hours had one of the Doctor’s all too infrequent play-times, while
waiting for the Strait to abate its fury to permit of a possible
crossing.
Here a delicious trout stream tumbled and swirled from sullen, mist-hung
uplands into a piratical cove where two small schooners swung at anchor.
Like so many of these places the cove was a complete surprise—you came
round the rock with no hint that it was there till you found it, placid
as a tarn and deep and black, with big blue hills stretching to the
northward beyond the fuzzy fringes of the nearer trees and the mottled
barrens where the clouds were poised and the ghosts of the mist
descended. (A tuneful, sailor-like name it is that the Eskimoes give to
a ghost—the “Yo-ho”: and they say that the Northern Lights are the
spirits of the dead at play).
An unhandy person with a rod, I was allowed by Dr. Grenfell and Dr.
McConnell to go ahead and spoil the nicest trout-pools with my fly. Even
though cod fishermen at the mouth of the stream had unlawfully placed a
net to keep the trout from ascending, there were plenty of trout in the
brook, and in the course of several hours forty-nine were good enough to
attach themselves to my line. The banks were soggy under the long green
grass: the water was acutely cold: and in two places there were small
fields of everlasting snow in angles of the rock. It was an ideal
trout-brook, for it was full of swirling black eddies, rippling rapids,
and deep, still pools. The brook began at a lake which was roughened by
a wind blowing steadily toward us. Dr. Grenfell cast against the wind
where the lake discharged its contents into the brook, and the line was
swept back to his boots. With unwearying patience he cast again and
again, and while I strove in vain to land a single fish from the lake he
caught one monster after another, almost at his own feet. All the way up
the brook he had successfully fished in the most unpromising places,
that we had given over with little effort, and here he was again getting
by far the best results in the most difficult places of all. There
seemed to be a parallel here with his medical and spiritual enterprise
on the Labrador. He has worked for poor and humble people, when others
have asked impatiently: “Why do you throw away your life upon a handful
of fishermen round about a bleak and uncomfortable island where people
have no business to live anyway?” He could not leave the fishermen’s
stage at the mouth of the brook this time without being called upon to
examine a fisherman troubled by failing eyesight. On the run of a couple
of hundred yards in a rowboat to the _Strathcona_ the thunder-clouds
rolled up, with lightning, and as we set foot on board the deluge came.
[Illustration: FRITZ AND HIS MASTER.]
[Illustration: “DOCTOR.”]
III
AT ST. ANTHONY
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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