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Updated: June 12, 2025
The remainder of the malamutes kept watch by the camp in their absence. The sun had long since sunk below the western horizon. Following in its wake great banks of luminous clouds swept by, finally culminating in a heavy sheet of haze.
They soon learned to travel as well in the dusky snow-light as by daylight, and enjoyed it better, for there was no glare of the sun on the white mantled earth. Their dog-teams were good ones, and a source of comfort to the travelers whose experience with this mode of migration was limited. While the weary men slept in their little tents by night the malamutes howled and rested at intervals.
Dubby was a marvelous tactician the others only novices, and in a very brief period there were three well-minced malamutes who limped disconsolately in different directions; leaving a conquering hero on the field, with the spoils of war a ruffled gray kitten in a shivering state of uncertainty as to her ultimate fate, but too weak to make any further defense.
"It served her right for not being as good a sport as most of the Eskimos. And anyway, every one on Seward Peninsula, of any nationality, is supposed to know that whatever a driver or his dogs need, in the All Alaska Sweepstakes, should be his without a dissenting voice or a rebellious foot." "Moose Jones used to say," quoted Ben rather timidly, "that most Malamutes are stubborn.
Each time that a new dog came up he looked at Joe Delesse, but, as yet Joe had failed to give the signal. On the platform the Indian was holding two malamutes in leash now and Paquette was crying, in a well simulated fit of great fury: "What, you cheap kimootisks, will you let this pair of malamutes go for seven mink and a cross fox. Are you men? Are you poverty-stricken? Are you blind?
But they are the price of one dog alone. Shall they both go at that? Shall the Indian have them for twenty beaver twenty beaver that may be taken from a single house in a day while it has taken these malamutes two and a half years to grow? I say, you cheap kimootisks " And then an amazing thing happened. It was like a bomb falling in that crowded throng of wondering and amazed forest people.
With biting lash and sharp commands the drivers urged them into a swifter run. Rock was forcing his dogs now; he made the smoke fly from their hides when they lagged. He vowed that he would not permit this French Canadian to outdistance him. He swore a good deal at his malamutes; he cursed himself as a weakling, a quitter; anger at his fatigue ran through him.
North, aye, North, through a land accurst, shunned by the scouring brutes, And all I heard was my own harsh word and the whine of the malamutes, Till at last I came to a cabin squat, built in the side of a hill, And I burst in the door, and there on the floor, frozen to death, lay Bill. * * From "Ballads of a Cheechako."
When the starved and exhausted malamutes dragged their silent burden into the Northwest Mounted Police outpost barracks at Crooked Bow twenty-four hours later, an ax and a sapling bar were required to pry Francois Breault from his bier. Previous to this process, however, Sergeant Fitzgerald, in charge at the outpost, took possession of the soiled envelope pinned to Breault's red scarf.
Undisturbed by his prisoner's struggles, he read loudly: "Joe Thorn and Henry Baker quit work fifteenth, leaving for Fairbanks over winter trail, with five dogs four gray and white malamutes, black shepherd leader. Thorn medium size, thirty-five, red hair. Baker dark, scar on cheek. WILSON, Cashier." The doctor's features spread into a broad grin.
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