Chapter VI: Mush, You Huskies, Mush

When pioneer Jack McQuesten saw Bill deliver the final blow that knocked Black Pete out he knew he was safe in going ahead with the boys’ outfit. He also made it known that very night that they were in the market to buy some dogs, that nothing but the best would be good enough for them and that he himself would pick them out. The result was that within the next two or three days there was quite a bunch of dogs in Circle, enough I should say to make up half-a-dozen dog-teams.

“How many dogs do you reckon we’ll need to haul our outfit?” Bill wanted to know.

“What do you say, Mr. McQuesten?” Jack put it up to the storekeeper.

“You could get along with five or six dogs to the team, but seven will give you much better service and besides, if any thing should happen to any of them, you would be in no danger of getting stuck.”

“It’s better to have too many than too few,” said Jack Heaton.

Then they went out and took a look at the dogs and they were of all the kinds used in Alaska. Among the lot that were offered the boys were some genuine Eskimo dogs or _malamutes_ as they are called, a number of _huskies_, which are a mixture of various breeds of dogs that have been brought into Alaska, with the native Indian dogs; a few _Siwash_, or common Indian dogs and the rest were _outside_ dogs of various breeds.

“It’s like buyin’ a necktie in a department store--any of ’em would do but when you see ’em all together you don’t know which one you like the best,” confided Bill. “Now if they was hawses----”

“Leave it to me Bill,” broke in Jack; “it’s been a month of Sundays since I’ve had anything to do with dogs and dog teams but I’ll pick out the best of the bunch with Mr. McQuesten’s help. The malamute was the only kind of dog we used in the Arctic and we’ll buy all of them there are here--what, only four?--not enough for even one team. Can’t you get us three more of these malamutes, Mr. McQuesten, so that we’ll have at least one team of them?” asked Jack.

“These are all that I know about. It’s a great day when you see any one with a matched team of any kind of dogs. The husky is just as good a dog, or better for these parts, and there are five of them. You’ll have to make out with outside dogs for the others.” Then he whispered in Jack’s ear, “I wouldn’t take any of those Indian dogs if I was you, for they are the worst kind of thieves and will keep your teams in bad blood all of the time. But I will say they are good work dogs.”

“You’re in the know, Mr. McQuesten, and I’ll take your tip,” replied Jack.

This buying of dogs was an entirely new phase of business to Bill and he took in every word that the pair of Jacks, by which I mean Messrs. McQuesten and Heaton, were saying and to the remarks, arguments and laudations that the owners of the various dogs made and were having by and between themselves. It must be admitted that Bill stood at the foot of the pass when it came to knowing anything about these work dogs.

“Tell me this, Jack,” Bill whispered so that no one might learn of his profound ignorance, “what’s the diff’ ’tween a malamute and a husky?”

“More than there is between a broncho and a mustang, though the dogs of a dog team are always called _huskies_, regardless of the kinds of dogs it is made up of. See those handsome, alert-looking fellows over there with their ears sticking straight up?” Jack nodded toward them; “well, they are the malamutes.

“Their pointed ears are in that position for keeps, their noses are black and as sharp as a collie’s, while they have slitted eyes from which I shouldn’t wonder if the Eskimo got his idea for making his eye shades. Their pointed ears, keen eyes and sharp noses make them look as if they were ready to jump out of their hides. They’re the Ford motors of the Arctic region all right. Their close hair is about the color of a silver fox, and look at their tails! two of them stand up like wireless masts and those of the other two look as if they had been put over their backs with a curling iron.

“A husky looks a good deal like a malamute, for his ears are pointed too, but instead of being fixed in an upright position he can move them, so every once in a while you’ll notice he will let them drop. He doesn’t stand one, two, three though with the malamute for beauty.”

“McGargle over there says that dog drivers up here will take a husky anytime before they’d take a malamute. How do you make that out?”

“I make it out because McGargle has a couple of huskies he wants to sell. We’ll ask McQuesten anyway,” said Jack.

“I’ve just had a argument with my pard,” Bill said to the storekeeper as big as though he had all the inside information that is known about dogs, “and he says that the malamutes are the best and I says that the huskies are the best. Now what do you say?”

“Yes, huskies are supposed to be a little better workers for the kind of sledding we do in this part of the country, but speaking for myself I prefer the malamute because the snow doesn’t stick between his toes as easily and his feet are harder. After all it’s only a matter of choice and usually what you can get. Both kinds of dogs were made by Almighty God for the work they have to do and they do it well.

“This is true too of the outside dogs; some of them are just as good workers and just as good in every respect as either the malamutes or the huskies. It isn’t a question of which dogs are the best any more now than in the days back there when a good dog brought two hundred and fifty, five hundred, yes, even a thousand dollars.” McQuesten shook his head sadly. “But those good old days will never come back again.”

Nearly all the time the boys were looking over the dogs and bartering with their owners for them they made a bedlam of the peace and quiet of Circle with their ear-splitting barking and howling, and Jack asked Bill to observe that it was the malamutes and huskies that did the howling, while the Siwashes and outside dogs did the barking.

“Whenever you find a dog barking, though he may look like a malamute or a husky you will know to a certainty that he is not full blooded but has some other strain in him,” explained Jack.

An Indian had half-a-dozen Siwashes for sale and Bill made it his business to get a line on them. Not knowing, or let us say, forgetting, that the Indian dog has the meanest disposition in the world, Bill held out his hand and snapped his fingers at one of them. As a reward for his kindy notice the dog returned the compliment by snapping savagely at his hand and had he not been tied to a stake and Bill somewhat of an acrobat, the brute would have made a partial meal from the extremity.

“No Siwashes for mine,” Bill bellowed; “I wouldn’t have a team o’ them Indian savages on a bet.”

Having selected the dogs they wanted the dickering began in earnest between the boys and the various owners, with McQuesten as referee. They drove some pretty good bargains too, though it just so happened they were favored by a slump in the dog market at that particular time so that dogs that used to fetch a hundred dollars or more they bought for twenty-five dollars or less.

The upshot of it all was that the malamutes and the huskies cost the boys in the neighborhood of twenty-five dollars apiece and the outside dogs from ten to fifteen dollars apiece. The outside dogs included a couple of cross-bred mastiffs, a couple of St. Bernards and a Newfoundland.

The boys paid over the money and got the names of the various dogs, which Jack wrote down, so that they would neither forget them nor get them twisted, for a dog will not respond to any save his own name any quicker than a man will, though he’s not so sensitive about it. The owners who had not been fortunate enough to have made sales took their dogs with them and went their way, but not happily for they knew not when Circle would see prospectors like these boys again.

“Now, men, bring the dogs over to the store and we’ll hitch them up for the boys,” said McQuesten.

“What in thunder to?” Bill wondered, but never a question did he ask.

The men and the boys took a couple of dogs apiece and when they brought up at the store McQuesten went in and in a few minutes returned with two sets of harness. These were made of strips of deerskin a couple of inches wide, fixed to rawhide traces. The strips were made into a loop that went round each dog’s neck to form a collar, and three strips, to which the traces were fastened, crossed his back, the first one just back of his forelegs, and the other two, which were fixed to the trace some fourteen inches apart, met on top of his back just in front of his hind legs.

In front of the store were two small two-wheeled carts which are used in the various towns to transport goods on during the summer months by means of dog teams. Then came the question of which should be the lead-dogs and which should be the wheel-dogs, as the dogs are called that are hitched in front and next to the sled, or in this case to the carts.

Next, old Jack and young Jack separated the dogs into two teams, with the plentiful advice of their former owners and others who were looking on, and then with the aid of more than willing hands of the old timers the dogs were hitched up with all the malamutes in one team and all of the huskies in the other.

“Now let’s get the names of these dogs straight, so that they’ll know when we’re talking to them,” said Jack to Bill.

“First off, which team do you want, Jack?” asked Bill, though he knew his partner, like himself, was strong for the malamutes.

“You take whichever one you want, Bill.”

“Well, I’ll take the huskies if you don’t mind,” he replied as if he meant it.

“That wouldn’t be regular, Bill; we’ll draw straws and whoever gets the long one takes the malamutes.”

“No, I must have them huskies. They’re the best dogs, that’s what all the drivers say, an’ as I don’t know much about drivin’ dog-teams I orter have the best one, what say, Mr. Jack?”

Jack McQuesten saw through Bill’s little game and his eyes twinkled for he had bored into Bill’s nature when he first saw him and he knew he had a heart as big as all Alaska.

“Give him the team of huskies, Jack,” was McQuesten’s decision; “Bill deserves them.”

In Jack’s team of malamutes ’Frisco was the lead-dog, with Wolf, Jennie, Tofty, Jim and Prince after him while Skookum was wheel-dog. The team of huskies that Bill fell heir to was made up of Sate, the leader, and after him came Caro, Lukeen, Danny, Lon, Moosehide and Jinx for wheeler.

How these dogs came by their names is, as Kipling used to say, another story, or, rather, more in the nature of a riddle, but we can make a guess at a few of them. For instance ’Frisco, who was a pure malamute, couldn’t have come from San Francisco, hence it is likely that his first owner had. Wolf, also a pure malamute, probably came by his name from having been a wolf killer, Tofty, from a town over near Fish Creek where he might have been born, while Skookum means _strong_ in the Chinook jargon. So much for Jack’s team.

As to Bill’s team, Sate, it seems clear, is a contraction of Satan, and was so called because he was an imp of knowledge, as wise and wily as huskies are made. Caro is a town over by Chandlar Lake, about a hundred miles northwest of Fort Yukon; Lukeen got his name from old Fort Lukeen, on the Kushokwin River, but on whose site the town of Kolmakoffsky now stands. He was a long, long way from the place where his slit-eyes first saw the light of day. Moosehide may have derived his cognomen by having eaten this delicacy when he was once starving to death, while Jinx is a name that is always associated with bad luck and he finally lived up to it.

The storekeeper handed Jack and Bill a rawhide whip apiece, about twelve or fourteen feet long, and told two of the drivers to give the boys a _hand_, which was his easy way of saying to show them how to manage the teams, for it takes much time and a deal of practice before a tenderfoot can drive these dogs by word of mouth and the crack of the whip.

It was plain to be seen that the dogs were glad to be in the traces again and they all stood alert and ready for the word to _mush_, which means the same thing as the farmer’s _gid-ap_. While Jack had had some experience with driving a dog team in the Arctic he was by no means an adept at it and poor Bill was as helpless as a pedestrian crossing Fifth Avenue at Forty-Second Street. But the men knew and the dogs know what to do.

There was a crack of a whip that sounded like a pistol shot, with a yell of “_mush, you huskies_,” and Bill’s team was at it and away. Another crack of a whip and another “mush on” from Jack, when his team followed a close second in the wake of the other. It was great sport for the old timers watching the breaking in of the new teams and their new drivers. For the boys it was real hard work and they felt as though they were sweating blood in their efforts to keep the dogs under control.

Every day from that time on Jack and Bill hitched up their dog teams and carted goods to and from the boat landing and the store for Jack McQuesten and when there was nothing else to do they would get on their carts and ride all round the town to the end that they might learn how to drive the dogs right and so that the dogs would get used to them.

As both Jack and Bill were past masters in the game of handling horses they used the same tactics with the dogs--that is to say, they treated them decently and punished them only when they really needed it. At first the dogs didn’t know what the boys were up to, being so kind to them; they seemed to think it was a trick and some of them resented it. Now it has been said that malamutes and huskies have no affection for anyone, not even the man that feeds them, but Jack and Bill believed that dogs are alike the world over and they proceeded to prove it by making friends with these work-dogs of the north. This in the face of the fact that the old timers told them that petting the dogs would spoil them, but the boys thought differently.

Came then the first fall of snow and winter had set in. For the next week or so the boys drove their dog teams around hitched to the sleds and both did much walking on their snow-shoes. Like driving a dog team walking on snow-shoes requires practice, only not nearly as much, and while Jack had learned both of these things in the Arctic they were an entirely new means of transportation to Bill, but he took to them with avidity for they were in the nature of sport.

As I had occasion to remark in an earlier account of Bill, he could learn anything that had to do with the concrete, as for instance riding or shooting or athletics, but when it came to the abstract, such as extracting cube root, how wireless works or the way chemical elements combine, he was as compact as the antlers of a bull moose. But he was like the rest of the human herd in that he would have given his gold-tooth to be able to do what someone else could do, only it must have to do with the working of the mind. What Bill did have, though, was a good memory, but he lacked the fundamentals of education and this was where he fell down. But this has nothing to do with snowshoes and how he learned to use them.

His first efforts at snowshoeing were like everyone’s else, laughable in the extreme, and the natives who congregated to watch him roared as he spilled himself this way or that way and then must needs have assistance to get up again. Before he had done with it, though, he could walk on them very swiftly notwithstanding his rather short bowed legs and it was surprising how quickly he learned the swinging outward motion that must be acquired in order to become an expert.

To cap the climax he laughed best at them by laughing last when he turned a complete back somersault with a pair of five-foot snowshoes on and that, as you will allow, is some very considerable trick.

“He’ll do!” as Jack McQuesten put it.

A good deal of snow had fallen, the streams and rivers had frozen over so that the sledding was good and it was getting around the zero mark. The long awaited day had arrived and Jack McQuesten had packed their outfit on the sleds, at the same time showing the boys how to do it. There is a wonderful knack in knowing how to pack, and the “freight-car” that Bill had declared they would need to carry their outfit, which the old trader had made up for them, his experienced hands compressed into two comfortable loads. It was next to impossible, as Jack said, to believe that such an enormous amount of stores could be contained in so small a space.

The dogs were harnessed and they knew that now they were in for some real work but they were none the less anxious for the start. Then there emerged from McQuesten’s store two strange figures dressed in furs from head to foot. They were neither Eskimos nor Indians but a look at them full in the face revealed that they were no other than a couple of youthful gold seekers who had come out of the far east and answered to the names of Jack and Bill. Truly they looked of the North, Northern.

Finally just as the first dull streaks of daylight sifted through the thick air the cracks of their rawhide whips broke the monotony of weeks of waiting and the orders to “mush on, you huskies” from both Jack and Bill who were at the handle bars of their sleds started the teams down the main street of Circle at a brisk pace.

They crossed the Yukon River and took the No Name River that flows into it a little to the north of Circle and whose headwaters lay some forty miles to the east of it. By noon they calculated they had covered about fifteen miles and here they made their first stop, had a drink of hot tea from their thermos bottles and did justice to some other edibles that Sing Nook had knocked together for them, and they were not Alaska strawberries either.

After they and the dogs had rested half-an-hour, they broke out their sleds, which means loosening the runners, which freeze and stick fast, by moving the sled sidewise with the gee pole, and started up the river again. They didn’t make such good time now for the work was new and was telling on them even more than it was on the dogs. So by sundown they had made only ten miles more, but Bill said he thought that was doing mighty well under the circumstances and Jack thought so too. They had hoped, though, to make the head of the stream that night.

“Four days o’ this kind o’ goin’ will put us in the land o’ the Yeehats,” said Bill.

They pitched their tent on the bank of the river and built a rousing fire just outside of it. Then they fed the dogs a generous piece of fish each, which is the principal diet of the dogs in Alaska; this done they got their own suppers and, just to see how it would go, they warmed up some pemmican, got out the hardtack and made a big pot of coffee.

Here it was that Bill was introduced to that celebrated food which was the chief factor in the discovery of the North Pole, though of course Peary and his malamutes and the Eskimos had something to do with it too.

“Pemmican,” allowed Bill, making a face that would put shame to an ancestor on a totem-pole, “seems to be a concoction on the order o’ a brownstone house built up o’ schnitzel and artificial rubber. I suppose it is all right though when everything else is all wrong but when we get there,” and he pointed somewhere in a direction that might lead to the North Star, the one hundred and thirty-fourth parallel and New York, but meaning their winter quarters to be, “it will be venison steak for ours.”

The dogs, tired after their first day’s work, since they had been idle all summer, had disappeared, having dug out holes in the snow and gone to bed. The boys, though they were dead tired too, were in no mood for sleep, but in their fur clothes they were as warm as though ensconced in their own steam-heated homes, while the mellow glow of the candle light inside their tent gave it as cheery an aspect as a cluster of electric lights in a parlor.

So they sat around for an hour or so after supper discussing their successful start, their outfit, the dogs and--not to be forgotten for a single moment--the gold they were after. It was good to know that here, far from the civilized haunts of men, there were fourteen huskies, strong of leg and tough of feet, sleeping out there under the snow who could carry them to the farthermost ends of the frozen North if needs be. It gave them a great feeling of security.

“Imagine us, Jack, a-drivin’ down Broadway or Fifth Avenoo! What’d the people think anyway?” Bill dreamed in an audible voice.

“I opine we wouldn’t get very far,” replied Jack, laughing at this ridiculous idea of his pal’s.

“I’d like to know why not?” queried Bill.

“Because the _Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals_ wouldn’t stand for it for a moment. They would send the dogs to the _Bide-a-Wee_ home and us to Randall’s Island.[4] And then the tables would be turned for we’d get the dried fish and water and they’d get the pemmican, pink tea and ice cream.”

[4] The reformatory in New York where bad boys are sent.

“I’m on, Buddy; what’s all right in one part o’ the United States is a crime in some other part o’ it. I guess we’ll stay right here with our huskies, eh, Jack?”

“I’ll say we will for about six months--or until we find that gold.”

“These Indian guys ain’t such slouches, are they?” went on Bill, who having filled up on pemmican was in a talkative mood. “Imagine them havin’ sense enough to hitch up a lot o’ dogs and puttin’ them to work pullin’ loads. Some invention I calls it.”

“Oh, I don’t know,” said Jack. “While the Indians used dog teams before the white men came here, the Indians didn’t know anything about using a smart dog for a leader and driving them by word of mouth.”

“How’d they do it, then!”

“By having an Indian boy run ahead of the dogs and of course the dogs ran after him. It was the white man that put an intelligent dog ahead of the team to lead them. You must have noticed to-day that our lead dogs, ’Frisco and Sate, did mighty little real pulling but they kept the other dogs spread out and pulling their level best. And it’s the leaders who _ho_ and _mush_ and _gee_ and _haw_ when we yell at them and impart our orders to the other dogs of the teams. It’s always the white man who puts the finishing touches on things he finds.”

“We’ll put the finishin’ touches on them sacks o’ gold, I’m sayin’,” Bill rejoined and then calming down a bit he added, “when we finds ’em.”

The fire had burned low and the boys got into their sleeping bags, when they followed their dogs into the shadowy land of dreams. But while the dogs dreamed of getting their fill of fish just once, their young masters dreamed of enough yellow gold to last them for all time.