A. J. Dawson - Jan

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And so, trailing beside him the gnawed-off ends of his traces, Jan
dragged his emaciated frame along in jerks over the hard-trodden snow
while the folk of the town cheered the departing steamer. In a little
while Jan came to a small tent, the flap of which hung loose and open.
At the entrance Jan smelt the fresh trail of a man; from within came--to
nostrils cunning as Jan's--the odor of foodstuffs. Jan propped and
jerked himself feebly into the tent, though for months now he had known
that it was forbidden to enter the habitations of men-folk.

Nosing weakly to and fro, Jan found on a low shelf a can of milk. A
half-blind jab of his muzzle brought it tumbling to the ground. Its lid
was open, but the milk was firmly frozen. Jan licked at it, cutting his
deep flews as he did so on the uneven edges of the tin. The warmth of
his tongue extracted a certain sweet milkiness from this. But the metal
edges were raw and sharp; Jan's exhaustion was very great, and presently
he sank down upon the twig-strewn ground, and lay there, breathing in
weak, sobbingly uncertain gasps, the milk-can between his outstretched
paws.

Jan was now drawing very near, nearer than he had ever been before, to
the Great Divide.

Within a hundred yards of Jan were groups of solid frame houses, with
warm kitchens in them, and abundant food. But the tent, standing by
itself, came first; and, though he could not know it, the tent was, on
the whole, the very best of all the habitations in that bleak little
town--for Jan. For this tent was the temporary home of an American named
Willis--James Gurney Willis; as knowledgeable a man as Jean himself and,
in addition, one known wherever he went into the northland as a white
man.

Not many minutes after Jan's lying down there Jim Willis came striding
up to his tent from the wharf, and found the half of its floor-space
occupied by the gaunt wreck of the biggest hound he had ever seen.
Willis was a man of experience in other places than the northland, and
he would always have known a bloodhound when he saw one. But never had
he seen a hound of any kind with such a frame as that he saw before him
now. The dead, blood-matted black and iron-gray coat was no bloodhound's
coat, he thought; too long and wiry and dense for that. But yet the
head--And, anyway, thought Willis, how came the poor beast to have died
just there, in his tent?

And in that moment the heavy lids of Jan's eyes twitched and lifted a
little. It was rather ghastly. They showed no eyes, properly speaking.
The eyes seemed to have receded, turned over, disappeared in some way.
All that the lifted lids showed Willis was two deep, triangular patches
of blood-red membrane. And above the prominent, thatched brows rose the
noble bloodhound forehead, serried wrinkle over wrinkle to the lofty
peak of the skull.

"My God!" muttered Willis, with no irreverent intent.

Always rich in the bloodhound characteristic of abundant folds of loose,
rolling skin about the head, neck, and shoulders, the wreck of Jan, from
which so very many pounds of solid flesh had been lost during the past
month, seemed to carry the skin of two hounds. And set deep in these
pouched and pendent folds of skin--tattered, blood-stained banners of
the hound's past glories--the face of Jan was as a wedge, incredibly
long and narrow.

His eyes had been torn out, it seemed. That was what forced the
exclamation from Willis. But it was only an abnormal extension of the
blood-red haws that Willis saw. The eyeballs had rolled up and back
somewhat, as they mostly do when a hound is _in extremis_; but they
would have shown if Jan had had the strength properly to lift his lids.
Yet he had seen Willis. It was his utter weakness, combined with the
hanging weight of his wrinkled face and flew-skin, that caused the
ghastly show of blood-red membrane only where eyeballs should have been.

But Jan did see Willis, and the loose skin of his battered shoulders
even shrank a little, in anticipation of a blow. Jan thought himself
still in the traces. (As a fact he was; and breast-band, too.)

The moment Willis spoke--his low "My God!"--Jan fancied he had heard the
old order to "Mush on!" and doubtless that another blow from the haft of
Beeching's whip was due. In view of his then desperate state, the effort
with which Jan answered the command he fancied he heard was a positive
miracle. He actually staggered to his feet, though too weak to lift his
eyelids, and plunged forward, with weakly scrabbling paws, to throw his
weight upon the traces. And plunging against nothing but space, he had
surely crashed to earth again, and in that moment crossed the Divide,
but for Willis.

Willis was not of the type of men who waste breath over repetitions of
exclamation of surprise. As Jan slowly heaved up his body, in a last
effort at duty, Willis swiftly lowered his own body, dropping upon his
knees, both arms widely extended. And it was at Willis's broad chest,
and between his strongly supporting arms, that the wreck of Jan plunged,
in response to what must be reckoned by far the greatest effort, till
then, that the great hound had ever made.

And if the thing had ended there, this incident alone proved that when
he chose the tent, before any of the more ambitious habitations near by,
Jan had chosen what was assuredly the best place for him in all that
town.

XXXIII

BACK TO THE TRAIL

Late that same evening two men who looked in to see Jim Willis found him
playing sick-nurse to all that remained of the strangest-looking hound
ever seen in those parts. His stove was well alight, and near by, on the
bed, were a spoon, a flask of whisky, a dish of hot milk, and some
meat-juice in a jar.

There was some talk about the hound, and then the bigger of the visitors
said:

"Well, Jim, what's it to be? Will you tackle the job, or won't you? You
must admit, if the trail _is_ bad, the money's pretty good. Will you
go?"

Willis nodded shortly. That meant acquiescence in the statement that the
money was "good." Then he pointed to the hound, whose head rested on his
knee. (He himself was sitting on the ground.)

"Well, no, Mike; I guess I won't," he said, slowly. "You say I'd have to
hit out to-morrow; and I reckon I'm going to try an' yank this feller
back into the world before I go anywheres."

"But, hell, Jim," said the other man, a little petulantly. "I like a
dawg as well as the next man, and this one does seem to have been some
husky in his time. Only--well, you admit yourself the money's good,
and--say, I won't try any bluffs with you. There ain't another man in
the place we could trust to do the job. Come, now, is it a go, Jim?"

Willis pondered a minute, eying Jan's head the while.

"Well, Mike," he said at length, "I've kinder given my word to this
feller here. He's a sort of a guest o' mine, in a way--in my tent, and
that. No, Mike, I'll not hit out to-morrow, not for any money. But if
you'd care to leave it for a week or ten days--ten days, say, I'll go.
An' that's the best I can do for ye. Think it over, an' let me know
to-morrow."

And with that the two men had to content themselves. They went out
growling. Three minutes later the shorter of the two returned.

"Say, Jim," he remarked, as he thrust his head and shoulders in at the
tent-flap, "I've been puzzling my head about that blame crittur ever
since we first come in; an' now I've located him. He's dyin' a long way
from home, Jim, is that dawg. But I can give ye his name. He's Jan,
that's who he is. There! See his eyes move then, when I said 'Jan.'
Look! Jan! See that?"

Jim Willis nodded comprehendingly as he watched Jan's feebly flickering
eyelids.

"Yes, sir," continued the other man; "I've seen a picture of him in the
Vancouver _News-Advertiser._ He's Jan of the R.N.W.M.P., that's who he
is; 'the Mounted Police bloodhound,' they called him. He tracked a
murderer down one time, somewhere out Regina way; though how in the
nation he ever made this burg has me fairly beat. Where'n the world did
that blame _chechaquo_ raise him, d'ye suppose? Surely he'd never have
sand enough to go around dog-stealing, would he? An' from the North-west
Mounted! Not on your life he wouldn't. Sneakin' coppers out've a blin'
man's bowl 'd be more in his line o' country, I reckon. But that's Jan,
all right; an' you can take it from me. Queer world, ain't it? Well, so
long, Jim. I jest thought I'd look back an' tell ye. So long!"

"So long, Jock. Oh, say, Jock! What's happened the rest o' that--that
feller's team, anyway?" asked Willis.

"Well, Seattle Charley told me they was plum petered out. Most of 'em's
died, I believe. But two or three's alive. That Indian musher across the
creek's got 'em, doctoring of 'em up, Charley says. He reckons to pull
some round, an' make a bit on 'em, I suppose. But this feller here, he's
too far gone, Jim. You can see he's done."

"Ah! Well, good night, Jock."

"S'long!"

And with that Jim Willis was left alone again with the hound he was
nursing.

He folded a deerskin coat loosely, and placed it under Jan's head. Then
he reached for his spoon, and proceeded to force down a little more warm
whisky and milk beside the clenched jaws. One knew, by the way he lifted
one of Jan's flews, raised the dog's head, and gently rubbed his gullet
between thumb and forefinger to help the liquor down, that he had
handled sick dogs before to-day. He had covered Jan's body with an old
buffalo robe, and now he proceeded to fill a jar with boiling water, and
placed that against Jan's chest.

* * * * *

There could be no doubt but what Jan chose more wisely than he knew in
entering that tent.

On the morning of the ninth day--Jim Willis's word was a little better
than the bonds of some men--after the departure for the south of
Beeching and Harry, Willis hit the trail upon the commission he had
undertaken for Mike and Jock; or for the more richly moneyed powers
behind those two.

Willis's team consisted of five huskies, good workers all; and he
traveled pretty light, with a sled packed and lashed as only an old hand
at the trail can perform that task. But the queer thing about the outfit
was that Willis had a sixth dog with him, a dog half as large again as
any in the traces; and this one walked at Jim's heel, idle; though, at
the outset, it had taken some sharp talk to get him there. Indeed, the
big dog had almost fought for a place at the head of the team of
huskies. But Jim Willis was accustomed to see to it that his will, not
theirs, ruled all the dogs he handled; and as he had decided that this
particular dog should, for the present, run loose at his heels, the
thing fell out thus, and not otherwise.

In nine days Jan had made a really wonderful recovery. He was not strong
and hard yet, of course; but, as every one who had observed his case
admitted, it was something of a miracle that he should be alive at all.
And here he was setting out upon a fourteen-hundred-mile journey, and,
to begin with, fighting for a place in the traces.

"If I have any more of your back-talk, my gentleman," Jim Willis had
said, with gruff apparent sternness, "I'll truss you like a Thanksgiving
turkey an' lash you atop the sled. So you get to heel an' stay there.
D'ye hear me?"

And Jan, not without a hint of convalescent peevishness, had heard, and
dropped behind.

The bones of his big frame were still a deal too prominent, and he
carried more than even the bloodhound's proper share of loose, rolling
skin. But his fine black and iron-gray coat had regained its gleaming
vitality; his tread, if still a little uncertain, was springy; his dark
hazel eyes showed bright and full of spirit above their crimson haws;
his stern was carried more than half erect, and he was gaining weight in
almost every hour; not mere fatty substance--Willis saw to that--but the
genuine weight that comes with swelling muscles and the formation of
healthy flesh.

"There's nothing like the trail for a pick-me-up," said Jim Willis. And
as the days slipped past, and the miles of silent whiteness were flung
behind his sled, it became apparent that he was in the right of it, so
far, at all events, as Jan was concerned.

It was exactly forty-two days later that they sighted salt water again
and were met in the town's one street by Mike and Jock. And on that day,
as on each of twenty preceding days, Willis's team consisted of six
dogs, instead of five, and the leader of the team was half as big again
as his mates. It was noticed that Willis's whip was carried jammed in
the lower lashing of his sled-pack, instead of in his hand. He had
learned as much, and more, than Jean had ever known about Jan's powers
as a team-leader.

"No use for a whip with that chap in the lead," he told an inquirer. "If
you hit Jan, I reckon he'd bust the traces; and he don't give you a
chance to find fault with the huskies. I reckon he'd eat 'em before he'd
let 'em really need a whip. I haven't carried mine these three weeks
now."

"You don't say," commented a bystander. Jim nodded to show he did "say."

"I tell ye that dog he don't just do what you tell him; he finds out
what you want before you know it, and blame well does it before you can
open your mouth. An' he makes the huskies do it, too, on schedule, I can
tell you, or he'll know the reason why. Yes, sir. I take no credit for
his training. I guess he was kinder born to the job, an' knows it better
'n what I do. I don't know who did train him, if anybody ever did; but
as a leadin' sled-dog he's got all the Yukon whipped to a standstill.
He's the limit. Now you watch!"

Of set purpose, Willis spoke with elaborate carelessness.

"Just mush on a yard or two, not far, Jan."

His tone was conversational. Jan gave a short, low bark; and in the same
moment the five huskies flung themselves into their collars behind him.
The sled--its runners already tight frozen--creaked, jerked, and slid
forward just eight feet. Jan let out a low, warning growl. The team
stood still without a word from its owner.

"Say, does he talk?" asked a bystander. And then, with a chuckle: "Use a
knife an' fork to his grub, Jim?"

"Oh, as to that," said Willis, "he don't need to do no talkin'. He can
make any husky understand without talk; an' when that husky understands,
if he won't do as Jan says, Jan'll smother him, quick an' lively."

As Jan stood now at the head of his team, awaiting final orders, he
formed a picture of perfect canine health and fitness. He represented
most of a northlander's ideals and dreams of what a sled-dog should be,
plus certain other qualities that came to him from his breeding, and
that no dog-musher would have even hoped for in a sled-dog: his immense
size, for example, and his wonderful dignity and grace of form and
action.

Jan never had been so superlatively fit; so instinct in every least hair
of his coat, in every littlest vein of his body, with tingling life and
pulsing energy. His coat crackled if a man's hand was passed along his
black saddle.

Despite the lissom grace of all his motions, Jan moved every limb with a
kind of exuberant snap, as though his strength spilled over from its
superabundance, and had to be expended at every opportunity to avoid
surcharge. His movements formed his safety-valve, you fancied. Robbed of
these, his abounding vitality would surely burst through the cage of his
great body in some way, and destroy him. He walked as though the forces
of gravitation were but barely sufficient to tether him down to mother
earth.

"And I reckon he weighs near a hundred and sixty," said Willis; a guess
the store scales proved good that night, when Jan registered exactly one
hundred and fifty-seven pounds, though he carried no fat, nor an ounce
of any kind of waste material.

XXXIV

THE PEACE RIVER TRAIL

Winter set in with unusual rigor, the temperature dropping after heavy
snow to fifty below zero, and hovering between thirty and sixty below
for weeks together.

Jim Willis and his sled-team lived on a practically "straight" meat
diet. Jan had forgotten the taste of sun-dried salmon, and men and dogs
together were living now on moose-meat chopped with an ax from the slabs
and chunks that were stowed away on the sled. Willis occasionally
treated himself to a dish of boiled beans, and when fortune favored he
ate ptarmigan. But moose-meat was the staple for man and dogs alike.

For months the valleys they had traversed had been rich in game. But in
the northland the movements of game are mysterious and unaccountable;
and now, in a bleak and gloomy stretch of country north of the Caribou
Mountains, they had seen no trace of life of any kind for a fortnight
except wolves. And of these, by day and by night, Jim Willis had seen
and heard more than he cared about. It seemed the brutes had come from
country quite unlike the valleys Willis had traveled, and resembling
more nearly that in which he now found himself. For these wolves were
gaunt and poor, and the absence of game made them more than normally
audacious. So far from seeking to avoid man and his dogs, they seemed to
infest Willis's trail, ranging emptily and wistfully to his rear and
upon either side as hungry sharks patrol a ship's wake.

The circumstances would have had little enough of significance for
Willis, but for an accident which befell just before the cold snap set
in. Hastening along the track of a moose he had already mortally
wounded, beside one of the tributaries of the Mackenzie, Willis had had
the misfortune to take a false step among half-formed ice, and he and
his gun had fallen into deep water. The bigger part of a day was given
to the attempted salvaging of that gun. But in the end the quest had to
be relinquished.

The gun was never seen again; and, though Jim had good store of
ammunition, he now had no weapon of any sort or kind, save ax and whip.
This was the reason why the presence of large packs of hungry wolves
annoyed him and made him anxious to reach a Peace River station as
speedily as might be. He carried a fair stock of moose-meat, but
accidents might happen, and in any case, apart from the presence of
hungry wolves in large numbers, no man cares to be without weapons of
precision in the wilderness, for it is these which more than any other
thing give him his mastery over the predatory of the wild.

Just before three o'clock in an afternoon of still, intense cold, when
daylight was fading out, the narrow devious watercourse whose frozen
surface had formed Willis's trail for many a mile, brought him at last
to a bend of the Peace River from which he knew he could reach a
settlement within four or five days of good traveling. Therefore his
arrival at this point was of more interest and importance to Willis than
any ordinary camping halt. But it struck him as curious that Jan should
show the interest he did show in it.

"Seems like as if that blame dog knows everything," he muttered as he
saw Jan trotting to and fro over the trail, his flews sweeping the
trodden snow with eager, questing gestures, his stern waving as with
excitement of some sort.

"Surely there's been no game past this way," thought Willis, "or them
wolves would be on to the scent of it pretty quick."

He could hear his tireless escorts of the past week yowling a mile or
more away in the rear. Having built and lighted a fire of pine-knots, he
called the dogs about him to be fed. Jan seemed disinclined to answer
the call, being still busily questing to and fro. Willis had to call him
separately and sternly.

"You stay right here," he said, sharply. "This ain't no place for
hunting-excursions an' picnic-parties, let me tell you. You're big an'
husky, all right, but the gentlemen out back there 'd make no more o'
downing an' eatin' you than if you was a sody-cracker, so I tell ye now.
They're fifty to one an' hungry enough to eat chips."

His ration swallowed, Jan showed an inclination to roam again, though
his team-mates, with ears pricked and hackles rising in answer to the
wolf-calls, huddled about as near the camp-fire as they dared.

"H'm! 'Tain't jest like you to be contemplatin' sooicide, neither; but
it seems you've got some kind of a hunch that way to-night. Come here,
then," said Willis. And he proceeded to tether Jan securely to the sled,
within a yard of his own sleeping-place. "If I'd my old gun here, me
beauties," he growled, shaking his fist in the direction from which he
had come that day, "I'd give some o' ye something to howl about, I
reckon." Then to Jan, "Now you lie down there an' stay there till I
loose ye."

Obediently enough Jan proceeded to scoop out his nest in the snow, and
settle. But it was obvious that he labored with some unusual interest;
some unseen cause of excitement.

Next morning it seemed Jan had forgotten his peculiar interest in the
Peace River trail, his attention being confined strictly to the
customary routine of harnessing and schooling the team.

But two hours later he did a thing that Willis had never seen him do
before. He threw the team into disorder by coming to an abrupt
standstill in mid-trail without any hint of an order from his master. He
was sniffing hard at the trail, turning sharply from side to side, his
flews in the snow, while his nostrils avidly drank in whatever it was
they found there, as a parched dog drinks at a water-hole.

"Mush on there, Jan! What ye playin' at?" cried Willis.

At the word of command Jan plunged forward mechanically. But in the next
moment he had halted again and, nose in the snow, wheeled sharply to the
right, almost flinging on its side the dog immediately behind him in the
traces.

For an instant Jim Willis wondered uncomfortably if his leader had gone
mad. He had known sudden and apparently quite inexplicable cases of
madness among sled-dogs, and, like most others having any considerable
experience of the trail, he had more than once had to shoot a dog upon
whom madness had fallen. At all events, before striding forward to the
head of his team Willis fumbled under the lashings of the sled and drew
out the long-thonged dog-whip which for months now he had ceased to
carry on the trail, finding no use for it under Jan's leadership of the
team.

A glance now showed the cause of Jan's abrupt unordered right turn.
Close to the trail Jim saw the fresh remains of a camp-fire beside the
deep marks of a sled's runners.

"Well, an' what of it?" said he to Jan, sharply. "'Tain't the first time
you've struck another man's trail, is it? What 'n the nation ails ye to
be so het up about it, anyway?"

And then, with his practised trailer's eyes he began to examine these
tracks himself.

"H'm! Do seem kind o' queer, too," he muttered. "The sled's a
middlin'-heavy one, all right, only I don't see but one dog's track
here, and that's onusu'l. Mus' be a pretty good husky, Jan, to shift
that load on his own--eh? But hold on! I reckon there's two men slep'
here. But there's only one man's track on the trail, an' only one dog.
Some peculiar, I allow: but this here stoppin' and turnin' an' playin'
up is altogether outside the contrac', Jan. Clean contr'y to discipline.
Come, mush on there! D'ye hear me? Mush on, the lot o' ye."

It may be that, if he had had no reason for haste, Jim Willis would have
gone farther in the matter of investigating Jan's peculiar conduct. As
it was he saw every reason against delay and no justification for close
study of a trail which he was desirous only of putting behind him. As a
result he carried his whip for the rest of that day, and used it more
often than it had been used in all the months since he first saw Jan.
For, contrary to all habit and custom, Jan seemed to-day most singularly
indifferent to his master's wishes, and yet not indifferent, either, to
these or to anything, but so much preoccupied with other matters as to
be neglectful of these.

He checked frequently in his stride to sniff hard and long at the trail.
And after one or two of these checks Jim Willis sent the end of his
whip-thong sailing through the keen air from his place beside the sled
clear into Jan's flank by way of reminder and indorsement of his sharp,
"Mush on there, Jan!"

When a halt was called for camping, as the early winter darkness set in,
the unbelievable thing happened. Jan, the first dog to be loosed, took
one long, ardent sniff at the trail before him and then loped on ahead
with never a backward glance for master or team-mates.

"Here, you, Jan! Come in here! Come right in here! D'ye hear me? Jan!
Jan! You crazy? Come in here! Come--here!"

Jim Willis flung all his master's authority into the harsh
peremptoriness of his last call. And Jan checked in his stride as he
heard it. Then the hound shook his shoulders as though a whip-lash had
struck them, sniffed hard again at the trail, and went on.

Willis caused his whip to sing, and himself shouted till he was hoarse.
Jan, the perfect exemplar of sled-dog discipline, apparently defied him.
The big hound was out of sight now.

"Well!" exclaimed Willis as he turned to unharness and feed his other
dogs. And again, "Well!" And then, after a pause: "Now I know you're
plumb crazy. But all the same--Well, it's got me properly beat. Anyhow,
crazy or no, I guess you're meat just the same, an', by the great
Geewhillikins! you'll be dead meat, an' digested meat at that, before
you're an hour older, my son, if I know anything o' wolves." Later, as
he proceeded to thaw out his supper, "Well, I do reckon that's a blame
pity," growled Willis to his fire, by way of epitaph. And for Jim Willis
that was saying a good deal.

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