The Labrador interior has long held the well-deserved reputation of being one of the most inhospitable places on Earth. It is a patchwork of Canadian Shield granites and sphagnum moss, labyrinthine caribou trails and desolate subarctic barrens, all set against glacier-scoured hills streching to an apparently limitless horizon. In the late spring of 1903, Leonidas Hubbard, a young writer, and Dillon Wallace, a forty-year-old New York attorney, set off with George Elson, a native guide with no firsthand knowledge of their destination, to explore the incompletely mapped Lake Michikamau region of interior Labrador.