A. J. Dawson - Jan

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Toward the middle of the next day, Jan, feeling cramped and rather
miserable as the result of his unaccustomed confinement, changed his
mind about that fish and ate it; slowly, and without enjoyment, but yet
with some benefit to himself. Less than an hour later Jean entered to
him, carrying in his hands a contrivance of leather, with long trailing
ends.

For a minute or so Jean stood looking down upon Jan appraisingly. There
was no better judge of a dog--from one standpoint--in that part of
Canada.

"By gar!" he muttered between his teeth. "That Sergeant Moore hee's a
queer cuss, sure 'nuff, to give away a dog like thees for nothing; and
then, by gar, to pay me ten dollar for takin' heem."

Then he stooped down and rubbed Jan's ears, with a friendly,
knowledgeable way he had.

"Ah, you, Jan," he said, cheerily. "Here's your harness. Here, good dog,
I show you."

And he proceeded to buckle a set of dog-harness about Jan's massive
chest and shoulders. In doing so he noticed for the first time Dick's
stitches in the hound's dewlap and shoulders.

"By gar!" he said, with a grin. "You bin fightin', Jan, eh? Ah, well,
take care, Jan. We get no nursin' after fightin' here. Bes' leave that
job to the huskies, Jan. Come on--good dog."

A hundred yards away, on the far side of the shack, Jan came upon the
first dog-sled he had ever seen, with a team of seven dogs attached, now
lying resting on the dry snow. They were a mixed team, four of them
unmistakable huskies, one with collie characteristics, one having
Newfoundland blood (through many crosses), and one, the leader, having
the look of something midway between a big powerful Airedale and an old
English sheep-dog, including the bobtail. This leader, Bill, as he was
called, had the air of a master-worker, and was the only member of the
pack (except the wheeler) who did not snarl as Jan was led toward them.

With the dogs was Jake, wearing a deep fur cap that came well down over
the tops of his ears. In one hand Jake held a short-hafted whip with a
rawhide thong, the point of which he could put through a dog's coat from
ten paces distant.

"Take Mixer out an' put heem in behind Bill," said Jean. "We'll try Jan
in front of old Blackfoot."

It was not without thought, and kindly thought, that Jean ordered this
arrangement, for Blackfoot, though old and scarred, a trail-worn
veteran, had not a spark of unkindness in his composition. He was the
dog with Newfoundland blood in him, who, like Bill the leader, and
unlike the rest of the pack, had not snarled at sight of Jan. He even
held out a friendly muzzle in welcome as, rather reluctantly, Jan
allowed himself to be led to his place in front of Blackfoot. The husky
who filled the next forward place wheeled about as far as he could in
the traces and snapped viciously at Jan.

"Ah, Snip!" said Jean, quite pleasantly. But even as he spoke so
pleasantly, the whip he had picked up sang, and its thong, doubled,
landed fair and square in Snip's face, causing that worthy to whirl back
to his place with a yowl of consternation.

Jan was just beginning to think that he had put up with enough of this
sort of thing, and that he would leave these men and their dogs
altogether, when he heard a peremptory order given by Jean and felt
himself jerked forward by means of the harness he wore. In the same
moment Blackfoot's teeth nipped one of his hocks from behind, not
savagely, but yet sharply, and he bounded forward till checked by the
proximity of Snip's stern. He had no wish to touch Snip. But Snip also
was bounding forward it seemed. So Jan thrust out his fore feet and
checked. Instantly two things happened. A whip-lash curled painfully
round his left shoulder, crossing one of his newly healed wounds. And
again came a nip at one of his hocks, a sharper nip this time, and one
that drew two spots of blood.

"Mush, Jan! Mush on there!" said Jean, firmly, but not harshly; and
again the whip curled about Jan's shoulders as, puzzled, humiliated,
hurt, and above all bewildered, he plunged forward again in the traces,
and heard Jean mutter behind him:

"Good dog, thees Jan. By gar! hee's good dog."

And that was how the new life, the working life, began for Jan, the son
of Finn and Desdemona.

XXVI

THE RULE OF TRACE AND THONG

From this point there began for Jan a life so strangely, wildly
different from anything he had ever known or suspected to exist, that
only a dog of exceptionable fiber and stamina--in character as well as
physique--could possibly have survived transition to it from the smooth
routines which Jan had so far known.

To begin with, it was a life in which all days alike were full of toil,
of ordered, unremitting work. And until it began Jan had never done an
hour's work in his life. (In England, outside the sheep-dog fraternity
and a few of the sporting breeds, all dogs spend their lives in
unordered play, uncontrolled loafing, and largely superfluous sleeping.)

The Lady Desdemona, his mother, for example, would certainly not have
lived through a month of Jan's present life; very possibly not a week.
Finn would have endured it much longer, because of his experiences in
Australia, his knowledge of the wild kindred and their ways. But even
Finn, despite his huge strength and exceptional knowledge, would not
have come through this ordeal so well as Jan did, unless it had come to
him as early in life as it came to Jan. And even then his survival would
have been doubtful. The difference between the climates of Australia and
the North-west Territory is hardly greater than the difference in stress
and hardness between Finn's life in the Tinnaburra ranges, as leader of
a dingo pack, and Jan's life in North-west Canada as learner in a
sled-team.

The physical strength of Finn the wolfhound, in whose veins ran the
unmixed blood of many generations of wolfhound champions, might have
been equal to the strain of Jan's new life. But his pride, his
courtliness, his fine gentlemanliness, would likely have been the death
of him in such a case. He would have died nobly, be sure of that. But it
is likely he would have died. Now in the case of Jan, while he had
inherited much of his sire's fine courtesy, much of his dam's noble
dignity, yet these things were not so vitally of the essence of him as
they were of his parents. They were a part of his character, and they
had formed his manners. But they were not Jan.

The essential Jan was an immensely powerful hound of mixed blood reared
carefully, trained intelligently and well, and endowed from birth with a
tremendously keen appetite for life--a keener appetite for life than
falls to the lot of any champion-bred wolfhound or bloodhound. Jan was a
gentleman rather than a fine gentleman; before either he was a hound, a
dog; and before all else he was a master and lover of his life. And
since, by the arrangements of Sergeant Moore, "Tom Smith," Jean, and
Jake, he had to take his place between Snip and Blackfoot in a
sled-team, it was well, exceedingly well, for Jan that these things were
thus and not otherwise.

Jan's supper on the evening of his first day in the traces was a meal he
never forgot. The slab of dried fish Jean tossed to him was half as big
again as the pieces given to the other dogs. For Jean--a just and not
unkindly man in all such matters--well recognized that Jan was very much
bigger and heavier than the average husky. (Jan was three and a half
inches higher at the shoulder, and forty to fifty pounds heavier and
more massive than any of his team-mates.) His previous night's supper
Jan had eaten that morning. Still, the afternoon's work, in some thirty
or forty degrees of frost, had put an edge on his appetite, and he
tackled the fish--which two days before he would have scorned--with
avidity.

He had swallowed one mouthful and was about to tear off another, when
Snip intervened with a terrifying snarl between Jan and his food. Jan,
who was learning fast, turned also with a snarling growl to ward off
Snip's fangs. And in that moment--it was no more than a moment--Bill,
the leader, stole and swallowed the whole remainder of Jan's supper.

Jean was watching this, and did not try to prevent it. But leaving Jan
to settle with Snip, he descended upon Bill with his whip,
double-thonged, and administered as sound a trouncing to that hardy
warrior as any member of the team had ever received. That ended, Jean
swung on his heel and gave Snip the butt of the whip-handle across the
top of his nose, and this so shrewdly that Snip's muzzle ached for
twenty-four hours, reminding him, every minute of the time, that he must
not harry Jan--while his master was in sight.

It would have been easy for Jean to have spared another ration of fish
for Jan, since in a few more days they would reach a Hudson Bay post at
which fresh supplies were to be taken in. But Jean was too wise for
this. He preferred that Jan should go hungry because he wanted Jan to
learn quickly. Jan educated meant dollars to Jean, and a good many of
them. Jan uneducated, or learning but slowly, would, as Jean well knew,
very soon mean Jan dead--a mere section of dog-food worth no dollars at
all. So Jean laughed at the big hound.

"You see, Jan," he said. "You watch um, Jan, an' learn queek--eh? Yes, I
think you learn queek."

Thus in that little matter of the daily meal, if Jan had gone on making
the mistake he made on his first night in the wilderness, not all Jean's
authority could have saved him. The rest of the team, by hook or crook,
would have kept him food-less and killed him outright long before the
slower process of starvation could have released him. But, his first
lesson sufficed for Jan. When his next supper came he had done a day and
a half's work; he had lived and exerted himself more in that day and a
half than during any average month of his previous life. As a
consequence, when Bill and Snip looked round for Jan's supper, after
bolting their own, they saw a great hound with stiff legs and erect
hackles, alert in every hair of his body--but no supper. The supper,
very slightly masticated and swallowed with furious haste, was already
beginning its task of helping to stiffen Jan's fibers and give
fierceness to the lift of his upper lip.

But that was far from being the end of the lesson. In point of size, and
in other ways, Jan was exceptional. He needed more than the other dogs;
and because he needed more, and had the sort of personality which makes
for survival, he got more. Jean gave him more than was given to the
others. But that was not enough. Jan was so hungry, what with his
strivings in the traces and the novelty for him of this life of tense
unceasing effort and alertness, that his appetite was as a thorn in his
belly and as a spur to his ingenuity and enterprise.

It is the law of the sled-dog that you shall not steal your trace-mates'
grub. Jan broke this law wherever he saw the glint of a chance to do so;
that is, wherever he could manage it by force of fang and shoulder, or
by cunning--beyond the range of the whip. He did more. He stole his
master's food; not every day, of course, but just as often as extreme
cunning and tireless watchfulness enabled him to manage it. He was
caught once, and only once, and beaten off with a gee-pole and a club;
pretty sorely beaten, too. But--

"Don' mark heem, Jake! Don' touch hees head."

Jean might be ever so angry, but he never lost his temper. He might
punish ever so sorely, but he never lost sight of his main objective and
could not be induced to knock dollars off his own property. Incidentally
he knew precisely what his aching hunger meant to Jan, and why the big
dog stole. But that knowledge did not weigh one atom with Jean in
apportioning Jan's food, or his punishment for stealing; both being
meted out, not with any view to Jan's comfort, but solely with the aim
of protecting the food-supply and keeping up Jan's value in dollars. For
Jean, before and above all else, was able; a finished product of the
quite pitiless wilderness in which he made out, not only to survive
where many went under, but in surviving to prosper.

XXVII

MUTINY IN THE TEAM

Jean made sure he would sell Jan at Fort Frontenac. And that he did not
was due to accidental causes over which he had no control.

Jean asked three hundred dollars. The would-be buyer--a man pretty
nearly as able as Jean himself in northland craft--had only two hundred
in cash; but possessed, besides, an invincible objection to owing or
borrowing. (Resembling Jean in his knowledge of the wild, he was
curiously different in most other ways, having a good deal of sentiment
and a keen, almost conventional sense of honor.)

"He's worth three hundred, all right," said the man--who hailed from New
England--when he had seen Jan at work.

"You bet," said Jean, laconically.

"But I just haven't got the money, or he'd be my dog."

Jean grinned. "Ah, well, eet's money talks," said he. And on that they
parted; for this last talk between them came when Jean's team was
pulling out for the north-west, after a profitable little rest-time in
which Jean had exchanged a little rubbish for a lot of good food and a
quite considerable wad of dollars.

But Jean did, on occasion, make mistakes; not vital mistakes, but slips
that might injure his pocket. He made one when he put Jan in the lead,
and named Bill wheeler, in place of Blackfoot. Jean wanted to make a
completely educated dog of Jan as soon as might be. But he did not want
to lose Bill--a very useful dog--nor yet to injure Blackfoot's health
and efficiency. Bill, as leader reduced to wheeling, made Blackfoot's
life a hell upon earth for the kindly wise old dog with Newfoundland
blood in him; and that, of course, was not good for Blackfoot.

But this was not the worst of it. As recognized leader of the team, Bill
could endure Jan's officious zeal, and even make shift to suffer the big
hound's real supremacy, while by craft he could avoid a conflagration.
So far, then, Bill had remained a force making for discipline and the
working efficiency of the team. As wheeler, he became at one stride a
crafty and embittered mutineer, aiming primarily at Jan's discomfiture,
and generally at the disruption of the team as a compact entity. When
not occupied in working off his vindictive spleen upon poor Blackfoot,
whose hind quarters he gashed at every opportunity, Bill concentrated
all his notable energies upon stirring up disorder, indiscipline,
confusion, and strife among his mates.

Jean flogged Bill pretty severely; and in the interval he said:

"Tha's all right, Bill. Jan 'll lick all thees outer you, bimeby."

And that was where Jean's mistake lay. Jan could safely be trusted to
lick pretty well anything into, or out of, the rest of the team; but
there was that in Bill, the ex-leader, which no power on earth would
lick out of him. He knew it; and Jan knew it. And that was where, in
this one matter, they both saw a little farther than the astute Jean.
The thing of it was that what they saw did not trouble either of them.
They were content to bide the issue. But had he known of it, Jean would
not have been at all content with anything of the sort. Far from it.

In any event, the issue involved loss for Jean, since, as both dogs well
knew, it meant death for Jan or for Bill. They were quite content in
their knowledge. But Jean could not conceivably have found content in
any prospect involving himself in monetary loss; for that would have
been contrary to the only guiding principles he knew. Pride in his own
unfailing knowledge of dogs and life in the north helped to make Jean
establish Jan as leader of the team. But if he could have foreseen
monetary loss in the arrangement, his pride had assuredly been called
down and Bill re-established in the lead.

Jean saw that Jan made an exceptionally fine leader. There was no sort
of doubt about it. He set a tremendously high working standard, and
hustled the team into accepting it by the exercise of an almost
uncannily far-seeing severity. Nothing escaped him, least of all a hint
of any kind of shirking. He was quicker than Jean's whip, more sure, and
more compelling. But while Jean saw all this, and more, with genuine
admiration for Jan, and for his own astuteness in foretelling this
exceptional capacity and acquiring ownership of the hound, he also saw,
with angry puzzlement, that his team was falling off in condition and in
efficiency as a unit.

It was not that the leader lacked either justice or discretion in his
fiery severity. Jan displayed both to a miracle. But the team had to
live between his severity while at work, and Bill's bitter and tireless
persecution and crafty incendiarism outside the traces. Over all, for
their consolation, were the whips of the masters. But so infernally
crafty was Bill, that he never once allowed the masters to detect the
real wickedness of the part he played. They could see poor Blackfoot's
bleeding hocks: "We got to call heem Redleg soon. Damn that Beel!"--but
they could not see Bill's continuous crafty incitements to mutiny, or
the hundred and one ways in which he strove, when out of harness, to
work up hatred of Jan among his mates, or when in harness to play subtle
tricks which should produce an effect discreditable to the new leader.

Intuitively Jan became aware of most of these things. But even where he
detected Bill at fault, he could not trounce the ex-leader as he
trounced the other dogs, because he and Bill knew very well that there
could be no sparring, no such lightsome thing as mere chastisement,
between them. There was war to the death in Bill's snarl when Jan so
much as looked at him. He was perfectly certain he could, and would,
kill Jan directly a suitable opportunity offered. Jan was not so sure
about that; but he did know very well that he was not capable of just
thrashing Bill and letting it go at that; for over and above Bill's
unbeaten prowess as a fighter and master dog there was a mortal hatred
in him where Jan was concerned--a hatred which, weighed as a fighting
asset, was almost equivalent to a second set of fangs.

And then came the memorable evening upon which Jean killed a bull-moose
and all the team fed full--except Bill.

XXVIII

THE FEAST AND THE FASTER

Jean and Jake were not out on a hunting expedition, and if it had
involved hunting, the probabilities are Jean would never have bagged
that bull-moose. But it happened that, when his sharp eyes sighted the
moose in mid-afternoon, the poor beast had just managed to break one of
its forelegs in a deep hole masked by snow. It was practically a sitting
shot for Jean, and that at a range which made missing impossible for
such a man.

The dogs were wild with excitement, but fortunately they were still in
the traces and anchored to a laden sled. In spite of this there was
something of a stampede among them until Jean made it clear that he
meant the team to remain in harness for the present. Then the masters'
whips, backed by policeman Jan's remorseless fangs, soon had order
re-established. And this was as well, for at that particular juncture
Jean and Jake were traveling fairly light, and a strong team can quickly
work serious damage by stampeding among trees with a light sled.

When Jean had examined the moose, he decided to avail himself of the
magnificent supply of fresh food it offered, and to carry on as large a
share of the meat when frozen as the sled would take. To this end he and
Jake decided to camp for the night at a spot no more than a few hundred
paces away from the dead moose. The dogs were too much excited to lie
down in their traces. (It was many weeks since any of them had tasted
fresh meat, and though dried salmon makes an excellent working dietary,
it is, of course, a very different thing from fresh meat with blood in
it.) So they stood and sat erect, with parted jaws all drooling, while
Jean and Jake set to work with their long knives on the great carcass.

The cutting up of a full-grown moose is no light task, and darkness had
fallen before the two men had finished stowing away all the heavy frozen
strips of moose-meat the sled could carry. Then, having removed the
choicest portions for their own use for that night and the next day,
Jean and Jake set to work to loose the dogs that they might tackle their
banquet. Jean knew the eight of them could give a pretty good account of
the remains on the skeleton.

According to custom the leader was the first dog loosed. Jan made a
bee-line for the skeleton. Within a few seconds six other dogs were
streaking across the intervening stretch of soft snow between the camp
and the belt of timber in which the moose had fallen. But the seventh
dog, Bill--though his jaws had been dripping eagerness like all the rest
of them--walked slowly in the same direction as though food were a
matter of indifference to him.

"What in hell's the matter with that Bill?" said Jake. "Seems like as if
he's full, but he can't be."

"Beel, hee's an angry dog for sure," said Jean, with a grin.

"Looks 'most as if he's sick," said Jake.

"H'm! Hate-seeck, mebbe," replied Jean, as the two turned to the task of
preparing their own supper.

As a fact no dog was ever more fit or more perfectly self-controlled
than Bill was at that moment. In his own good time and with a most
singular deliberateness he did set his teeth in fresh moose. But he did
it much as house-dogs in the world of civilization put their noses into
their well-filled dinner-dishes, with a deliberate absence of gusto
which would have simply astounded any understanding observer who could
have seen it. The other seven dogs were blissfully unconscious of
anything under heaven outside their own ravening lust of flesh. In a
temperature well below zero, the lure of fresh-killed meat at the end of
fourteen hundred miles of solid pulling, and five or six weeks of fish
rations, is a force the strength of which cannot easily be conceived by
livers of the sheltered life. It is the pull of an overwhelming strong
passion.

And Bill, the deposed leader of the team, just nosed and tasted with the
calm indifferent temperateness of an English house-dog; while every
organ of his supremely healthy body ached with a veritable neuralgia of
longing for red meat.

The rest of the team, including Jan, fed like wolves; indeed, some of
them were literally but one or two removes from the wolf, and all of
them had of late lived a life which brings any dog very close to the
wolf in his habits and instincts. It is a life which, so far as his
instincts are concerned, carries a dog back and back through innumerable
generations till his contact with his primeval ancestors is very close
and real.

They fed like hungry wolves, and their feeding was not a pretty sight.
When in his ravenous guzzling one dog's nose chanced to be thrust at all
nearly to another's, there would arise a horrid sound of half-choked
snarling; the fierce hissing rattle of snarls which came from flesh and
blood-glutted jaws. Obeying instincts to the full as strong as any human
passion which has ever gone to the making of tragedy, these working-dogs
made a wild orgy of their feast. They wantoned and they wallowed in
their perfectly natural gluttony. Having fed full and overfull, they
desired more by reason of their long hunger for meat and the hard vigor
of their lives. The last remains of flesh exhausted, they gnawed and
tugged at bones, each snarling still, though half exhausted, whenever
other fangs than his own touched a chosen bone.

And Bill, despite the flame of desire in his bowels, just nosed and
tasted, eating no more than an ordinary workaday ration. Long before the
final stage of bone-gnawing he actually walked away and curled himself
down at the roots of a big spruce where the ground rose slightly, some
fifty paces distant from the place of orgy.

A couple of hundred yards away, by the shelter of their fire, Jean and
Jake composed themselves to rest and smoke; for they also had fed full.
One by one even the lustiest of the dogs forsook the bones, drawing back
heavily, lazily licking their chops. The dense calm of satiety descended
slowly upon all the visible life-shapes in that place like the fumes of
some potent narcotic--upon all forms of life save one. Bill, curled at
the root of his spruce, had within him a blazing fire of life and
activity which no earthly force could slake while his breath remained to
fan it. But the rest of the world slept.

The moon that night was too young to shed much light. But just after
Jean and Jake sleepily laid aside their pipes and closed their eyes, the
aurora borealis flamed out icily in a clear sky, bringing more than all
the light Bill needed. In that frozen stillness Bill's brain was like
the interior of a lighted factory with all its machinery in full swing.
Fed by hate and slowly accumulated stores of bitter anger, his thoughts
went throbbing in and out the lighted convolutions of his brain with the
silent positive efficiency of a gas-engine's pistons.

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