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While Jan, in warding off their attacks, tried to explain, good-humoredly, that he meant them no ill, Jinny and Poll made off with their bones. But of this the two huskies knew nothing, being fully occupied by their joint attack upon the great dog who, had they but known it, was destined for some time to be their master, in the traces and out of them.
Here, about the base of a tree, the snow had been recently trampled and a fire smouldered. It was Spurling's first camp. Granger, having unharnessed and fed his huskies, taking his axe from his girdle, cut down a sapling fir and roused the dying embers to a blaze. The flames shot up, and, climbing the bark of the tree, crackled among the branches overhead.
And I like him because he saved you." Next morning the Swede interrupted his knitting long enough to toss my last ten dollars across the bar. "Ay tank you ship now?" says he. The huskies who were gathered about the room immediately chorused their disapproval. "Oh, give the poor beggar a chance!" they sang out. "Let him rest up a spell, Swede!" But the Swede had gauged me correctly.
Men must reasonably do this in self defense. That a brow-beaten dog gives up and drops from the race through sheer discouragement often happens; but well fed and with considerate treatment a malamute will bravely work to the last moment. A few hundred miles farther east and these dogs would be exchanged for "Hudson Bay huskies", or sent back over the trail to Dawson to be sold.
He must leave her, get back the shortest, quickest way to civilization, and send other men, trustworthy men, in for her. It could be done even though the storm continued. He could get a dog-team, Alaskan huskies, to be had in Truckee; he could load sledges with provisions; he could put the right man in charge and then lead the way.
Once a huge moose crashed through the forest a hundred paces away, but the huskies paid no attention to it; a little farther on a lynx, aroused from his sun bath on a rock, rolled like a great gray ball across the trail, the dogs cringed but for an instant at the sight of this mortal enemy of theirs, and then went on. Slower and slower grew the pace.
One of my friends, an agent of the Hudson's Bay Company, was once traveling with a native Labradorman driver along the Labrador coast, when his train of eight big huskies, suddenly becoming excited, gave an extra strain on their traces and snapped the "bridle," the long walrus hide thong that connects the traces with the komatik.
The stillness of the world was magical; in the miles of landscape which were visible, nothing stirred. The snapping of a twig sounded like the crashing ruin of a forest giant. The gliding of the sled across the snow, and the padding footsteps of the huskies, thundered down the tunnel of the river through the pines like the galloping of heavy artillery over gravel.
An' don't be ashamed to turn back if you don't kill any meat." A week later, Smoke found himself among the jumbled ranges south of Indian River. On the divide from the Klondike he had abandoned the sled and packed his wolf-dogs. The six big huskies each carried fifty pounds, and on his own back was an equal burden.
Even the big bald-face grew clumsy and blind and quarrelsome, in the end to be dragged down by a handful of yelping huskies. He remembered how he had abandoned his own father on an upper reach of the Klondike one winter, the winter before the missionary came with his talk-books and his box of medicines.
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