Trails to Remember

Peter Martin is a senior projects editor at the University of Ottawa
Press.

The author of this charming memoir is one of the Labrador Goudies, a
large family who have made their distinctive mark in the special society
that arose and survives on Canada’s northeastern fringes. Among his
relatives are broadcasters and politicians. His mother was the author of
Woman of Labrador, an autobiography published to great acclaim in the
late 1960s.

Horace Goudie was born in 1922, to live in Mud Lake, Labrador. His
father took him on the trapline when Horace was 10. When he was 17, he
had lines of his own. The trappers lived on their backcountry lines from
September to January, and again from February to April. In the other
months the men hunted, fished, and built their boats, katimaks
(toboggans), and canoes. Their contacts with outside “civilization”
consisted principally of the Grenfell Mission, which gave them their
faith (they never hunted or trapped on the Sabbath; they practiced
automatic honesty and charity among themselves), and the Hudson’s Bay
Company, which bought their furs, supplied the few necessities they
didn’t produce themselves (tea and so forth), and kept them in debt.

In 1942 the Americans arrived to build an airbase at Goose Bay. The
lives of Horace and his people changed. Horace ate his first meatloaf:
“I never before seen, or even heard the word hamburger meat.”

In the years that followed, Horace was successful in the mainstream
economy: laborer, truck driver, guide, fishing camp builder, coastal
shipper. But whenever he could he went back to the land, back to the
traplines. Remembering, he writes: “Good times, beautiful things in
our life, I thought, always pass so very fast. I wondered, ‘Why?’
But I felt very happy too, happy to be here, happy because I felt like
being a part of this beautiful country, my Labrador.”

Horace Goudie emerges vividly from these pages, despite the absence of
any useful editorial help. So does his beautiful country, his Labrador.