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Updated: May 2, 2025
A bear had crossed close ahead, and before he could unlash his rifle the komatik had dashed right onto the animal, who, instead of running, stood up and showed fight. The team were all around him, rapidly snarling themselves up in their own traces. He had just time to draw his hunting knife across the traces and so save the dogs, caring much more for them than he did for the prey.
Since I have enjoyed the luxury of a driver, or a "carter" as we call them, my cunning in wriggling a komatik at full speed down steep mountain-sides through trees has somewhat waned. Comparatively early in the day we looped the loop and we were both heavy weights. It was nearly dark when we reached the last lap an enormous bay with a direct run of seven miles over sea ice.
That is to say, "fan shape," and not, as is customary in Alaska and among white men of the far northwest, in tandem. This was called the "bridle." Each dog had an individual trace, its end passed through the loop in the bridle and securely tied. Tinker, the leading dog, was fully thirty-five feet from the komatik when his trace was stretched to its full length. He had the longest trace of all.
At length we came upon land, but what land we did not know. The storm had abated by this time, and a fresh komatik track was visible, which we proceeded to follow. On all sides of us ice was piled in heaps as high as a house.
Perhaps, lying helpless upon the deck of the hospital ship, he shed a tear as he recalled the fine trips he used to have when his father took him to the post with dogs and komatik in winter, or he and his father went cruising in the boat along the coast in summer.
The storm delayed Ambrose and his friends, but after the weather cleared their komatik appeared. The lad was put on the operating table, the thigh re-broken and properly set by Doctor Grenfell, and the leg brought down to its proper length.
He gave no display of savagery, as did Sampson, but appeared to be beseeching his young master to do something his master could not understand. The cold had grown intense. The wind had become a stiff gale. The air was filled with a blinding dust of snow, so thick that Tinker, the leader, could scarcely be seen from the komatik.
He also in- formed me that wolves had followed him all the way from Okak to Hebron, mingling with his dogs at night, but at Hebron had left his trail. At three o'clock we reached the summit of Lamson's Hill and began the perilous descent, where only the most expert maneuvering on the part of the Eskimos saved our komatik from being smashed.
The days were long now, and with the coming of May the sun began to assert his strength. The snow softened at midday, and sealskin boots again took the place of buckskin moccasins. Toby and Charley, with dogs and komatik, hauled wood that Toby had cut in the fall, and more wood that Skipper Zeb felled each day, in preparation for another winter.
A sealskin thong called a bridle, of a varying length of from twenty to forty feet, is attached to the front of the komatik, and to the end of this the dogs' traces are fastened.
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