Against the Elements: Surviving in Newfoundland and Labrador's Great Outdoors

Melvin Baker is an archivist and historian at Memorial University of
Newfoundland, and the co-editor of Dictionary of Newfoundland and
Labrador Biography.

Against the Elements is mainly an instructional survival guide for
hunters, fishers, and hikers in the Newfoundland and Labrador
wilderness. The text, which is based on the author’s extensive camping
and fishing experiences over half a century, is organized into short
chapters on a range of subjects; these include what cooking supplies to
have, how to cook and prepare meals over an open fire, and what camping
equipment should be carried.

But the book is more than informational, it is also part memoir, and
readers are entertained with the author’s stories of his experiences
first as a policeman in Newfoundland from the 1940s and later as a
magistrate. His accounts, like the one about how local residents made
moonshine and built smokehouses to cure fish and meat, are interspersed
with humor; those of his public service in Labrador among the Inuit
deserve further treatment.