Indian Jake’s trail took a northerly direction from the Narrows tilt, and with tilts at similar intervals made a wide circuit, returning, as did the other trail, to the Narrows tilt. Thus it was arranged that each week Indian Jake and the boys should spend the period from Friday evening until Monday morning together.
It was the middle of October when they awoke one morning to hear the wind howling and shrieking outside. Upon opening the tilt door David was met by a cloud of swirling, drifting snow, and when he went to the river for a kettle of water he found it necessary to use his ax to cut a water hole through the ice. For three days and nights the storm raged over the wilderness, and when at length it passed, a new, intense, penetrating cold had settled upon the land. The long Labrador winter had come.
“Now,” said Indian Jake, “it’s time to get the traps set and the trails shaped up.”
Two long Indian toboggans, or “flat sleds,” as they called them, were leaning against the tilt. A supply of provisions and their sleeping bags were lashed securely upon these, and in the cold, frosty dawn of a Monday morning Indian Jake, hauling one, set out to the northward, and with David hauling the other, the two boys crossed the little river upon its hard frozen surface and plunged into the forest to the eastward, and the tedious rounds of the long white trail were begun.
The first journey of the season over a trail is always hard, for there is no hope that the next trap may hold a valuable pelt. So it was with David and Andy, though the novelty of the experience kept them to some extent buoyed and interested. But the work was hard, nevertheless. So far as possible they used the stumps that Thomas had used the previous year for their marten traps, but still there was the necessity of cutting and trimming new stumps. The snowshoeing, too, was far from good, for in the shelter of the trees the snow was soft, and they sank half way to their knees at every step. Out on the open marshes, however, where the wind had packed the snow firmly, they walked with ease. Here it was, in open, wind-swept regions, that they set their fox traps.
The silence was appalling. Down at The Jug there was always at least the howling and snarling of the dogs to break the quiet, when ice in winter throttled the otherwise unceasing song of Roaring Brook. But here in the wilderness no sound disturbed the monotonous stillness, save the winter wind soughing through the tree tops. It was a new world to the lads, and the world that they had known seemed far, far away.