Chapter VI: Part 6

And then they came to a small wooden house with a large barn and a sod-walled stable beside it. Jan's chain was hitched round a stout center post in the barn, and there he was left. Later Jean brought him a tin dish of water and a big lump of dried fish which had had some warm fat smeared over it, Jean having rightly guessed that it was Jan's first experience of this form of dog-food. The fat was well enough, and Jan licked it rather languidly. But the fish did not appeal to him, and so he left it and went off to sleep, little thinking that he would get no other kind of food than this for many days to come.

Toward the middle of the next day, Jan, feeling cramped and rather miserable as the result of his unaccustomed confinement, changed his mind about that fish and ate it; slowly, and without enjoyment, but yet with some benefit to himself. Less than an hour later Jean entered to him, carrying in his hands a contrivance of leather, with long trailing ends.

For a minute or so Jean stood looking down upon Jan appraisingly. There was no better judge of a dog--from one standpoint--in that part of Canada.

"By gar!" he muttered between his teeth. "That Sergeant Moore hee's a queer cuss, sure 'nuff, to give away a dog like thees for nothing; and then, by gar, to pay me ten dollar for takin' heem."

Then he stooped down and rubbed Jan's ears, with a friendly, knowledgeable way he had.

"Ah, you, Jan," he said, cheerily. "Here's your harness. Here, good dog, I show you."

And he proceeded to buckle a set of dog-harness about Jan's massive chest and shoulders. In doing so he noticed for the first time Dick's stitches in the hound's dewlap and shoulders.

"By gar!" he said, with a grin. "You bin fightin', Jan, eh? Ah, well, take care, Jan. We get no nursin' after fightin' here. Bes' leave that job to the huskies, Jan. Come on--good dog."

A hundred yards away, on the far side of the shack, Jan came upon the first dog-sled he had ever seen, with a team of seven dogs attached, now lying resting on the dry snow. They were a mixed team, four of them unmistakable huskies, one with collie characteristics, one having Newfoundland blood (through many crosses), and one, the leader, having the look of something midway between a big powerful Airedale and an old English sheep-dog, including the bobtail. This leader, Bill, as he was called, had the air of a master-worker, and was the only member of the pack (except the wheeler) who did not snarl as Jan was led toward them.

With the dogs was Jake, wearing a deep fur cap that came well down over the tops of his ears. In one hand Jake held a short-hafted whip with a rawhide thong, the point of which he could put through a dog's coat from ten paces distant.

"Take Mixer out an' put heem in behind Bill," said Jean. "We'll try Jan in front of old Blackfoot."

It was not without thought, and kindly thought, that Jean ordered this arrangement, for Blackfoot, though old and scarred, a trail-worn veteran, had not a spark of unkindness in his composition. He was the dog with Newfoundland blood in him, who, like Bill the leader, and unlike the rest of the pack, had not snarled at sight of Jan. He even held out a friendly muzzle in welcome as, rather reluctantly, Jan allowed himself to be led to his place in front of Blackfoot. The husky who filled the next forward place wheeled about as far as he could in the traces and snapped viciously at Jan.

"Ah, Snip!" said Jean, quite pleasantly. But even as he spoke so pleasantly, the whip he had picked up sang, and its thong, doubled, landed fair and square in Snip's face, causing that worthy to whirl back to his place with a yowl of consternation.

Jan was just beginning to think that he had put up with enough of this sort of thing, and that he would leave these men and their dogs altogether, when he heard a peremptory order given by Jean and felt himself jerked forward by means of the harness he wore. In the same moment Blackfoot's teeth nipped one of his hocks from behind, not savagely, but yet sharply, and he bounded forward till checked by the proximity of Snip's stern. He had no wish to touch Snip. But Snip also was bounding forward it seemed. So Jan thrust out his fore feet and checked. Instantly two things happened. A whip-lash curled painfully round his left shoulder, crossing one of his newly healed wounds. And again came a nip at one of his hocks, a sharper nip this time, and one that drew two spots of blood.

"Mush, Jan! Mush on there!" said Jean, firmly, but not harshly; and again the whip curled about Jan's shoulders as, puzzled, humiliated, hurt, and above all bewildered, he plunged forward again in the traces, and heard Jean mutter behind him:

"Good dog, thees Jan. By gar! hee's good dog."

And that was how the new life, the working life, began for Jan, the son of Finn and Desdemona.

XXVI

THE RULE OF TRACE AND THONG

From this point there began for Jan a life so strangely, wildly different from anything he had ever known or suspected to exist, that only a dog of exceptionable fiber and stamina--in character as well as physique--could possibly have survived transition to it from the smooth routines which Jan had so far known.

To begin with, it was a life in which all days alike were full of toil, of ordered, unremitting work. And until it began Jan had never done an hour's work in his life. (In England, outside the sheep-dog fraternity and a few of the sporting breeds, all dogs spend their lives in unordered play, uncontrolled loafing, and largely superfluous sleeping.)

The Lady Desdemona, his mother, for example, would certainly not have lived through a month of Jan's present life; very possibly not a week. Finn would have endured it much longer, because of his experiences in Australia, his knowledge of the wild kindred and their ways. But even Finn, despite his huge strength and exceptional knowledge, would not have come through this ordeal so well as Jan did, unless it had come to him as early in life as it came to Jan. And even then his survival would have been doubtful. The difference between the climates of Australia and the North-west Territory is hardly greater than the difference in stress and hardness between Finn's life in the Tinnaburra ranges, as leader of a dingo pack, and Jan's life in North-west Canada as learner in a sled-team.

The physical strength of Finn the wolfhound, in whose veins ran the unmixed blood of many generations of wolfhound champions, might have been equal to the strain of Jan's new life. But his pride, his courtliness, his fine gentlemanliness, would likely have been the death of him in such a case. He would have died nobly, be sure of that. But it is likely he would have died. Now in the case of Jan, while he had inherited much of his sire's fine courtesy, much of his dam's noble dignity, yet these things were not so vitally of the essence of him as they were of his parents. They were a part of his character, and they had formed his manners. But they were not Jan.

The essential Jan was an immensely powerful hound of mixed blood reared carefully, trained intelligently and well, and endowed from birth with a tremendously keen appetite for life--a keener appetite for life than falls to the lot of any champion-bred wolfhound or bloodhound. Jan was a gentleman rather than a fine gentleman; before either he was a hound, a dog; and before all else he was a master and lover of his life. And since, by the arrangements of Sergeant Moore, "Tom Smith," Jean, and Jake, he had to take his place between Snip and Blackfoot in a sled-team, it was well, exceedingly well, for Jan that these things were thus and not otherwise.

Jan's supper on the evening of his first day in the traces was a meal he never forgot. The slab of dried fish Jean tossed to him was half as big again as the pieces given to the other dogs. For Jean--a just and not unkindly man in all such matters--well recognized that Jan was very much bigger and heavier than the average husky. (Jan was three and a half inches higher at the shoulder, and forty to fifty pounds heavier and more massive than any of his team-mates.) His previous night's supper Jan had eaten that morning. Still, the afternoon's work, in some thirty or forty degrees of frost, had put an edge on his appetite, and he tackled the fish--which two days before he would have scorned--with avidity.

He had swallowed one mouthful and was about to tear off another, when Snip intervened with a terrifying snarl between Jan and his food. Jan, who was learning fast, turned also with a snarling growl to ward off Snip's fangs. And in that moment--it was no more than a moment--Bill, the leader, stole and swallowed the whole remainder of Jan's supper.

Jean was watching this, and did not try to prevent it. But leaving Jan to settle with Snip, he descended upon Bill with his whip, double-thonged, and administered as sound a trouncing to that hardy warrior as any member of the team had ever received. That ended, Jean swung on his heel and gave Snip the butt of the whip-handle across the top of his nose, and this so shrewdly that Snip's muzzle ached for twenty-four hours, reminding him, every minute of the time, that he must not harry Jan--while his master was in sight.

It would have been easy for Jean to have spared another ration of fish for Jan, since in a few more days they would reach a Hudson Bay post at which fresh supplies were to be taken in. But Jean was too wise for this. He preferred that Jan should go hungry because he wanted Jan to learn quickly. Jan educated meant dollars to Jean, and a good many of them. Jan uneducated, or learning but slowly, would, as Jean well knew, very soon mean Jan dead--a mere section of dog-food worth no dollars at all. So Jean laughed at the big hound.

"You see, Jan," he said. "You watch um, Jan, an' learn queek--eh? Yes, I think you learn queek."

Thus in that little matter of the daily meal, if Jan had gone on making the mistake he made on his first night in the wilderness, not all Jean's authority could have saved him. The rest of the team, by hook or crook, would have kept him food-less and killed him outright long before the slower process of starvation could have released him. But, his first lesson sufficed for Jan. When his next supper came he had done a day and a half's work; he had lived and exerted himself more in that day and a half than during any average month of his previous life. As a consequence, when Bill and Snip looked round for Jan's supper, after bolting their own, they saw a great hound with stiff legs and erect hackles, alert in every hair of his body--but no supper. The supper, very slightly masticated and swallowed with furious haste, was already beginning its task of helping to stiffen Jan's fibers and give fierceness to the lift of his upper lip.

But that was far from being the end of the lesson. In point of size, and in other ways, Jan was exceptional. He needed more than the other dogs; and because he needed more, and had the sort of personality which makes for survival, he got more. Jean gave him more than was given to the others. But that was not enough. Jan was so hungry, what with his strivings in the traces and the novelty for him of this life of tense unceasing effort and alertness, that his appetite was as a thorn in his belly and as a spur to his ingenuity and enterprise.

It is the law of the sled-dog that you shall not steal your trace-mates' grub. Jan broke this law wherever he saw the glint of a chance to do so; that is, wherever he could manage it by force of fang and shoulder, or by cunning--beyond the range of the whip. He did more. He stole his master's food; not every day, of course, but just as often as extreme cunning and tireless watchfulness enabled him to manage it. He was caught once, and only once, and beaten off with a gee-pole and a club; pretty sorely beaten, too. But--

"Don' mark heem, Jake! Don' touch hees head."

Jean might be ever so angry, but he never lost his temper. He might punish ever so sorely, but he never lost sight of his main objective and could not be induced to knock dollars off his own property. Incidentally he knew precisely what his aching hunger meant to Jan, and why the big dog stole. But that knowledge did not weigh one atom with Jean in apportioning Jan's food, or his punishment for stealing; both being meted out, not with any view to Jan's comfort, but solely with the aim of protecting the food-supply and keeping up Jan's value in dollars. For Jean, before and above all else, was able; a finished product of the quite pitiless wilderness in which he made out, not only to survive where many went under, but in surviving to prosper.

XXVII

MUTINY IN THE TEAM

Jean made sure he would sell Jan at Fort Frontenac. And that he did not was due to accidental causes over which he had no control.

Jean asked three hundred dollars. The would-be buyer--a man pretty nearly as able as Jean himself in northland craft--had only two hundred in cash; but possessed, besides, an invincible objection to owing or borrowing. (Resembling Jean in his knowledge of the wild, he was curiously different in most other ways, having a good deal of sentiment and a keen, almost conventional sense of honor.)

"He's worth three hundred, all right," said the man--who hailed from New England--when he had seen Jan at work.

"You bet," said Jean, laconically.

"But I just haven't got the money, or he'd be my dog."

Jean grinned. "Ah, well, eet's money talks," said he. And on that they parted; for this last talk between them came when Jean's team was pulling out for the north-west, after a profitable little rest-time in which Jean had exchanged a little rubbish for a lot of good food and a quite considerable wad of dollars.

But Jean did, on occasion, make mistakes; not vital mistakes, but slips that might injure his pocket. He made one when he put Jan in the lead, and named Bill wheeler, in place of Blackfoot. Jean wanted to make a completely educated dog of Jan as soon as might be. But he did not want to lose Bill--a very useful dog--nor yet to injure Blackfoot's health and efficiency. Bill, as leader reduced to wheeling, made Blackfoot's life a hell upon earth for the kindly wise old dog with Newfoundland blood in him; and that, of course, was not good for Blackfoot.

But this was not the worst of it. As recognized leader of the team, Bill could endure Jan's officious zeal, and even make shift to suffer the big hound's real supremacy, while by craft he could avoid a conflagration. So far, then, Bill had remained a force making for discipline and the working efficiency of the team. As wheeler, he became at one stride a crafty and embittered mutineer, aiming primarily at Jan's discomfiture, and generally at the disruption of the team as a compact entity. When not occupied in working off his vindictive spleen upon poor Blackfoot, whose hind quarters he gashed at every opportunity, Bill concentrated all his notable energies upon stirring up disorder, indiscipline, confusion, and strife among his mates.

Jean flogged Bill pretty severely; and in the interval he said:

"Tha's all right, Bill. Jan 'll lick all thees outer you, bimeby."

And that was where Jean's mistake lay. Jan could safely be trusted to lick pretty well anything into, or out of, the rest of the team; but there was that in Bill, the ex-leader, which no power on earth would lick out of him. He knew it; and Jan knew it. And that was where, in this one matter, they both saw a little farther than the astute Jean. The thing of it was that what they saw did not trouble either of them. They were content to bide the issue. But had he known of it, Jean would not have been at all content with anything of the sort. Far from it.

In any event, the issue involved loss for Jean, since, as both dogs well knew, it meant death for Jan or for Bill. They were quite content in their knowledge. But Jean could not conceivably have found content in any prospect involving himself in monetary loss; for that would have been contrary to the only guiding principles he knew. Pride in his own unfailing knowledge of dogs and life in the north helped to make Jean establish Jan as leader of the team. But if he could have foreseen monetary loss in the arrangement, his pride had assuredly been called down and Bill re-established in the lead.

Jean saw that Jan made an exceptionally fine leader. There was no sort of doubt about it. He set a tremendously high working standard, and hustled the team into accepting it by the exercise of an almost uncannily far-seeing severity. Nothing escaped him, least of all a hint of any kind of shirking. He was quicker than Jean's whip, more sure, and more compelling. But while Jean saw all this, and more, with genuine admiration for Jan, and for his own astuteness in foretelling this exceptional capacity and acquiring ownership of the hound, he also saw, with angry puzzlement, that his team was falling off in condition and in efficiency as a unit.

It was not that the leader lacked either justice or discretion in his fiery severity. Jan displayed both to a miracle. But the team had to live between his severity while at work, and Bill's bitter and tireless persecution and crafty incendiarism outside the traces. Over all, for their consolation, were the whips of the masters. But so infernally crafty was Bill, that he never once allowed the masters to detect the real wickedness of the part he played. They could see poor Blackfoot's bleeding hocks: "We got to call heem Redleg soon. Damn that Beel!"--but they could not see Bill's continuous crafty incitements to mutiny, or the hundred and one ways in which he strove, when out of harness, to work up hatred of Jan among his mates, or when in harness to play subtle tricks which should produce an effect discreditable to the new leader.

Intuitively Jan became aware of most of these things. But even where he detected Bill at fault, he could not trounce the ex-leader as he trounced the other dogs, because he and Bill knew very well that there could be no sparring, no such lightsome thing as mere chastisement, between them. There was war to the death in Bill's snarl when Jan so much as looked at him. He was perfectly certain he could, and would, kill Jan directly a suitable opportunity offered. Jan was not so sure about that; but he did know very well that he was not capable of just thrashing Bill and letting it go at that; for over and above Bill's unbeaten prowess as a fighter and master dog there was a mortal hatred in him where Jan was concerned--a hatred which, weighed as a fighting asset, was almost equivalent to a second set of fangs.

And then came the memorable evening upon which Jean killed a bull-moose and all the team fed full--except Bill.

XXVIII

THE FEAST AND THE FASTER

Jean and Jake were not out on a hunting expedition, and if it had involved hunting, the probabilities are Jean would never have bagged that bull-moose. But it happened that, when his sharp eyes sighted the moose in mid-afternoon, the poor beast had just managed to break one of its forelegs in a deep hole masked by snow. It was practically a sitting shot for Jean, and that at a range which made missing impossible for such a man.

The dogs were wild with excitement, but fortunately they were still in the traces and anchored to a laden sled. In spite of this there was something of a stampede among them until Jean made it clear that he meant the team to remain in harness for the present. Then the masters' whips, backed by policeman Jan's remorseless fangs, soon had order re-established. And this was as well, for at that particular juncture Jean and Jake were traveling fairly light, and a strong team can quickly work serious damage by stampeding among trees with a light sled.

When Jean had examined the moose, he decided to avail himself of the magnificent supply of fresh food it offered, and to carry on as large a share of the meat when frozen as the sled would take. To this end he and Jake decided to camp for the night at a spot no more than a few hundred paces away from the dead moose. The dogs were too much excited to lie down in their traces. (It was many weeks since any of them had tasted fresh meat, and though dried salmon makes an excellent working dietary, it is, of course, a very different thing from fresh meat with blood in it.) So they stood and sat erect, with parted jaws all drooling, while Jean and Jake set to work with their long knives on the great carcass.

The cutting up of a full-grown moose is no light task, and darkness had fallen before the two men had finished stowing away all the heavy frozen strips of moose-meat the sled could carry. Then, having removed the choicest portions for their own use for that night and the next day, Jean and Jake set to work to loose the dogs that they might tackle their banquet. Jean knew the eight of them could give a pretty good account of the remains on the skeleton.

According to custom the leader was the first dog loosed. Jan made a bee-line for the skeleton. Within a few seconds six other dogs were streaking across the intervening stretch of soft snow between the camp and the belt of timber in which the moose had fallen. But the seventh dog, Bill--though his jaws had been dripping eagerness like all the rest of them--walked slowly in the same direction as though food were a matter of indifference to him.

"What in hell's the matter with that Bill?" said Jake. "Seems like as if he's full, but he can't be."

"Beel, hee's an angry dog for sure," said Jean, with a grin.

"Looks 'most as if he's sick," said Jake.

"H'm! Hate-seeck, mebbe," replied Jean, as the two turned to the task of preparing their own supper.

As a fact no dog was ever more fit or more perfectly self-controlled than Bill was at that moment. In his own good time and with a most singular deliberateness he did set his teeth in fresh moose. But he did it much as house-dogs in the world of civilization put their noses into their well-filled dinner-dishes, with a deliberate absence of gusto which would have simply astounded any understanding observer who could have seen it. The other seven dogs were blissfully unconscious of anything under heaven outside their own ravening lust of flesh. In a temperature well below zero, the lure of fresh-killed meat at the end of fourteen hundred miles of solid pulling, and five or six weeks of fish rations, is a force the strength of which cannot easily be conceived by livers of the sheltered life. It is the pull of an overwhelming strong passion.

And Bill, the deposed leader of the team, just nosed and tasted with the calm indifferent temperateness of an English house-dog; while every organ of his supremely healthy body ached with a veritable neuralgia of longing for red meat.

The rest of the team, including Jan, fed like wolves; indeed, some of them were literally but one or two removes from the wolf, and all of them had of late lived a life which brings any dog very close to the wolf in his habits and instincts. It is a life which, so far as his instincts are concerned, carries a dog back and back through innumerable generations till his contact with his primeval ancestors is very close and real.

They fed like hungry wolves, and their feeding was not a pretty sight. When in his ravenous guzzling one dog's nose chanced to be thrust at all nearly to another's, there would arise a horrid sound of half-choked snarling; the fierce hissing rattle of snarls which came from flesh and blood-glutted jaws. Obeying instincts to the full as strong as any human passion which has ever gone to the making of tragedy, these working-dogs made a wild orgy of their feast. They wantoned and they wallowed in their perfectly natural gluttony. Having fed full and overfull, they desired more by reason of their long hunger for meat and the hard vigor of their lives. The last remains of flesh exhausted, they gnawed and tugged at bones, each snarling still, though half exhausted, whenever other fangs than his own touched a chosen bone.

And Bill, despite the flame of desire in his bowels, just nosed and tasted, eating no more than an ordinary workaday ration. Long before the final stage of bone-gnawing he actually walked away and curled himself down at the roots of a big spruce where the ground rose slightly, some fifty paces distant from the place of orgy.

A couple of hundred yards away, by the shelter of their fire, Jean and Jake composed themselves to rest and smoke; for they also had fed full. One by one even the lustiest of the dogs forsook the bones, drawing back heavily, lazily licking their chops. The dense calm of satiety descended slowly upon all the visible life-shapes in that place like the fumes of some potent narcotic--upon all forms of life save one. Bill, curled at the root of his spruce, had within him a blazing fire of life and activity which no earthly force could slake while his breath remained to fan it. But the rest of the world slept.

The moon that night was too young to shed much light. But just after Jean and Jake sleepily laid aside their pipes and closed their eyes, the aurora borealis flamed out icily in a clear sky, bringing more than all the light Bill needed. In that frozen stillness Bill's brain was like the interior of a lighted factory with all its machinery in full swing. Fed by hate and slowly accumulated stores of bitter anger, his thoughts went throbbing in and out the lighted convolutions of his brain with the silent positive efficiency of a gas-engine's pistons.

Bill understood everything in the world that night in his own world, and he overlooked nothing. He would have given much, very much, to have been able to remove Jean's camp a mile or so away. The belt of open snow-space between it and him was all too narrow for his liking. Well he knew how swiftly Jean could move, how certainly he could strike when the need arose. But for this Bill had done murder that night, as surely as ever softly treading human desperado in the dead of night has done murder at a bedside. As it was he thought he must fight. Well, he was prepared. Nay, his bowels yearned for it just as strongly as any dog's bowels had yearned for fresh-killed meat that night. More strongly, for in him the one yearning had mastered and ridden down the other yearning, thus giving him his perfect preparation.

The full-fed team-dogs had been too idle that night to dig out proper sleeping-nests for themselves in the snow. A mere circling whisp of head and tail and feet had served them, and the upper half of Jan's magnificent frame lay fully exposed halfway down the slope from Bill's tree. Very deliberately now Bill rose, and moved toward Jan, walking with dainty, springy steps like a cat at play. In all that countryside Bill possessed an absolute monopoly of springiness and elasticity. But, at their most sluggish, dogs in the northland are, of course, more alert than the home-staying dogs of civilization. Snip snarled fatly as Bill passed with his catlike tread. Jan, the crimson haw of one eye gleaming as its lid lifted, growled savagely but low as Bill approached him. His big limbs twitched convulsively and the hair about his shoulders stiffened; but so grossly full-fed was he that he did not rise, though the note of his growl ascended toward that of a snarl as Bill came nearer.

Here again, and for the hundredth time that night, Bill's icy self-control, his really marvelous command of his impulses, was sorely tried. His enemy actually was recumbent in the snow before him, while he, taut as a strung bow, was most exquisitely poised for the attack. Why fight? Why not swift delicious murder, and the gush of the loathed one's throat-blood between his fangs? Bill knew well why it must not be. But given the knowledge, how many dogs in his case, nay, how many men similarly tempted, could have forced discretion to master impulse?

Attempted murder must mean furious uproar, and uproar must mean attempted rescue; and attempted rescue, so close to camp, might well rob Bill of the life he claimed. It might leave Jan alive and himself clubbed into insensibility. In the fire-lighted brain of Bill was understanding of all things, and the determination to take no chances with regard to this the greatest killing of his life.

And so, with the most delicate care, the most minutely measured instalments of provocation, he proceeded to "crowd" the infinitely sluggish Jan. So sunk in sloth was Jan that he, who three hours earlier had been pricked to fury by an insolent glance from Bill's eyes, now positively submitted to the actual touch of Bill's nose on his hocks before he would budge. And then with a long snarl he only edged himself a yard or two away.

"Be still, be still! For God's sake give peace!" his heavy movements seemed to say.

Peace! And in Bill's lighted brain the roar of furnaces and the remorseless whirl of swiftly driven machinery!

With the fathomless scorn of the self-mastering ascetic for the sodden debauchee, Bill proceeded coldly with his task of "crowding" Jan out and away from the safety of that place and into the wilderness. In a few minutes he ventured to hasten matters by actually nipping one of Jan's hind legs with his teeth. But with what precise delicacy! It had been sweet to drive the fangs home and feel the bone and sinew crack. But that would not mean death and might bring rescue. So Bill's jaws pressed no more hardly than those of a nursing-mother of his kind what time she draws a too venturesome pup into the shelter of her warm dugs.

It was beautifully done; a triumph of self-mastery and an exquisitely gauged piece of tactics. It brought Jan quickly lumbering to his feet, snarling savagely but not very loudly. It sent him sullenly some twenty, thirty paces nearer to his doom and farther from the camp. A dozen paces Bill followed him, crowding threateningly to enforce the right direction. And then Bill halted, not wishing to risk causing Jan to dodge and double backward toward the camp. And because his persecutor stopped when he did, Jan followed the line of least resistance, lumbering on down the slope into the deep wood for twenty paces more before lowering himself again with a grunt for the repose which, to his glutted sloth, seemed more desirable now than all the meat in the world, aye, and of more pressing import than all his dignity, than all his new pride in working efficiency in his leadership.

With a patience no red Indian could have excelled, Bill repeated these tactics twenty or thirty times; but always with the same nicely balanced accuracy; with ample pauses between each fresh beginning; with mathematically accurate gauging of the precise provocation needed to shift Jan farther and farther into the wilderness without seriously and dangerously arousing his somnolent faculties.

But though he himself did not know it, and Bill could not possibly suspect it, it yet was a fact that something of wakefulness remained and grew through the intervals between Jan's forced marches. It seemed that though he did most unwillingly move on and on at Bill's cunningly given behests, Jan barely was roused from his heavy sleep into which he plunged fathoms deep every time he resumed the recumbent position. So it seemed. Thus Bill saw the outworking of his devilishly ingenious tactics. And could Jan have understood any challenge on the subject, he would have admitted that this was the way it worked.

And now, toward the end of Jan's twentieth or thirtieth move, when his subconsciousness was simply one ache of continuous boding discomfort, while still his outer consciousness barely permitted the lifting of his heavy eyelids, now Bill, that incarnation of calculating watchfulness, gathered up his magnificent muscles for the act which should bring the first instalment of his reward, the guerdon of his season of super-canine self-mastery. In another second or so Jan would sink down again to sleep. Bill did not snarl or growl. He needed no trumpet-call. He made no more sound than a cat makes in leaping for a bird. Yet he rushed upon the blinking, half-comatose Jan as though impelled thereto from the mouth of a spring cannon.

There was no possibility that in his then condition Jan could withstand the shock of that furious impact. And he did not. Indeed, he spun through the air feet uppermost, and Bill, in his eyes a cold flame of elation, knew that when he did reach earth it would be to yield the throat-hold at which your fighting-dog always aims, and to die the death which he, Bill, had long pictured for the usurper of his office.

XXIX

THE FIGHT IN THE WOODS

The one thing for which Bill had made no allowance was the thing of which he could not possibly have any knowledge; the strength of Jan's subconscious self which had now been wide awake for some time.

During the fraction of time which Jan's body spent in mid-air this subconscious self of his worked several miracles simultaneously. It jagged the whole of Jan's outer consciousness into the widest wakefulness. It explained to him the inner meaning of most things that had happened since Jean shot the moose. And acting through a muscular system which, always fine, had been made well-nigh perfect during the past six weeks, it succeeded in accomplishing the patently impossible and bringing Jan to earth again almost erect, certainly on his four feet and with spread jaws pointing toward Bill--instead of landing him on the broad of his back where Bill had quite properly and logically expected to see him.

Now began the fight between Bill and Jan, ex-leader and leader; the veteran northland dog, comparatively empty and exquisitely poised and prepared; and the new-comer from the outside world, terribly full, heavy, and unprepared. All, or nearly all, had fallen out as Bill had planned. Their distance from the camp was a safe one; Jan was grossly bloated and he, Bill, was in quite perfect fighting trim.

Only one thing was wrong: Jan ought, by all the calculations of his enemy, to be lying feet up with his throat exposed; and instead he was standing, and as it happened, on slightly raised ground, waiting with dripping jaws for Bill's attack. Bill knew not fear. His brain was as brilliantly lighted, his furnace of hate as hot within him, as ever. But--the new-wakened Jan's snarl was certainly terrific, and his bulk, as he stood there with erect stern, bristling hackles, high-lifted lips, and legs planted like buttresses--the bulk of him was immense.

"Come on!" his roaring snarl seemed to say. And fiery Bill, like a wrestler, pranced to and fro for an opening. Rage filled him to the throat, but never for an instant did it cloud his vision. Jan's instinct kept him still, warning him that he was too heavy now for the lightning footwork of the wolves, that his sole chance lay in his strength, and that by the same token his strength must be conserved.

Whoof! Tsss!

Jan's right ear hung in two separate flaps. Valiantly he strove to extort some penalty by thrust of massive shoulder and clash of fangs. But Bill to all seeming was twice his own length away in the same instant that he flashed in to the attack. Jan breathed hard in a defiant snarl.

Hup! Grrrr!

The massive shoulder which had missed its thrust was cut clear into the bone, a groove four inches long, and in the selfsame fraction of a second the catlike Bill, from two lengths distant, darted his red tongue in and out at Jan in cold ribaldry.

A little show of temper now on Jan's part had been a thing of priceless worth to Bill. Indeed, it was the ex-leader's one desire, its provocation his sole objective for the moment. This it was that drew his pointed red tongue in and out like a flame, this the tuning-fork that gave his snarl its key; the note of insolent, jeering defiance.

"You hog! You're bloated. Ungainly beast, I can bleed you when and where I will. Take that!" snarled Bill, as he flashed in again, tearing clean away a little section of soft-coated fine skin from the left side of Jan's dewlap, where Desdemona's blood in him left him but lightly covered.

(In the bloodhound the skin is very loose and fine in texture all about the head and flews and dewlap. In Jan it hardened quickly on the neck, where the mat of his dense coat thickened.)

Again and again, not fewer than a dozen times in all, Bill drank deep of sheer delight as he flashed in and out upon Jan, drawing blood every single time, reaching bone more than once or twice, and winning back to safety without the loss of so much as one hair.

Jan no longer snarled. He had no breath to waste. He was standing to his fearsome punishment like a bulldog now. And like a bulldog he seemed, in a heavy, dogged way, and almost to glory in the bitter thrusts he took.

Then Bill overstepped himself. Striving to win a second bite from the one rush, he got the full thrust of Jan's bloody right shoulder so shrewdly directed that Bill went down under it as corn under a sickle. So far so good for Jan; and by good rights that thrust should have given him his lead to victory. But the plain truth is Jan was too full of moose-meat. He plunged down and forward for the throat-hold--appreciably too late--and lost more than blood and fur from his flank as Bill wheeled into action again without any apparent loss of poise, though he had turned completely over on the snow.

Jan breathed like a bull as he resumed the defensive; and like a bull he lowered his head with a swaying motion as though to ease his labored breathing and drain his jaws of the spume that clogged them. He was bleeding now from more than a dozen wounds. The frost nipped those wounds stingingly. The hard trampled snow about his feet was flecked with blood and foam--his life-blood, his foam. Bill remained unscathed and to all seeming as coldly calculating as ever.

At this stage a backer of Jan (if any such reckless wight existed) might easily have booked a hundred to one against the big hound from an audience of experienced northland men, had any been there to see this wonderful fray. It seemed a breathless business enough, with never a moment for anything like reflection. But of a truth, as Jan swung his massive head now in a gesture which added blazing coals to the fire of triumphant hate in Bill, his mind was busy with a mort of curious things. There were many differences between Jan and the average dog, and this illustrated one of them. As he stood heavily swaying to Bill's lightning attacks, he saw pictures in his busy mind through a mist of blood; pictures that made the whole business of this fight far more terrible for him than it would have been for most dogs.

The dominating picture Jan saw, and the one that kept forcing itself forward upon the screen of his imagination through and over all the others that came and went, was a picture of himself on his back in the trampled snow. Bill's jaws were at his throat in this picture, and his blood ebbed out, an awful tide, flooding the snow with its crimson for as far as he could see. And then the picture moved and showed him the satisfied, triumphant Bill, walking proudly away to the camp to his regained leadership; and himself, Jan, stark, helpless, dead, in that forsaken clear patch in the woods with only the cold gleam of the aurora borealis to bear him company.

Another picture showed him the stripped framework of the moose and his own reckless feasting there with the rest of the pack, while Bill, pitilessly far-seeing Bill, watched them and abstained. Jan saw it all now and gulped upon his bitterness as he realized how cunningly it had all been planned, and just why it was that, while his enemy seemed made of steel springs actuated by electricity, he, Jan, was heavy and clumsy as an English house-dog.

So that was the way of this bloody business thought Jan as, swifter than a bullet, Bill registered another visit to his streaming right shoulder. There was no trace left now of that queer stubborn sort of bulldog glory in the endurance of punishment which Jan had shown during the first half-dozen attacks. His stern was still erect, bladelike, his hackles almost as stiff as before. But the flame of his deep-hawed and now glazing eyes had died down to a dim red smolder; his hard breathing spared nothing for a snarl now, and his head and body movements were, if anything, a little slower than before.

And in and out among the vivid pictures in his mind of immediate local happenings came swiftly passing little silhouettes of people and happenings farther away in point of time and distance. He saw Dick Vaughan, in scarlet tunic and yellow-striped breeches, sitting on a box with his, Jan's, head between his knees, his hands fondling the long ears that now were so terribly torn and bloody. He saw the great, gray, lordly Finn pacing gravely beside the Master and Betty Murdoch on the Downs at Nuthill; himself trotting to and fro between Betty and the noble hound that sired him. He heard Dick Vaughan's long, throbbing whistle, and then the old familiar call:

"Jan, boy! Ja--an!"

And as he heard this call he had never once failed to answer, some subtle force at work in Jan loosed the cord that had seemed to hold him fettered to the heavy aftermath of his greed that night. His heart swelled within him in answer to the sovereign's call, till it seemed to send new blood, hot and compelling, racing through all his veins into the last least crevices of his remotest members. His massive head ceased to sway. It was uplifted in the moment that a roaring baying cry escaped him; he knew not how or why. And that was the moment called psychological. For it was the instant of a new and different attack from Bill, this tremendous moment of Jan's real awakening.

For some minutes now, while he flashed in and out, bleeding his prey in preparation for the final assault, Bill had noted with infinite cold joy that swaying motion of Jan's great head. He knew it well for the gesture of the baited creature, and as the head swung lower the flames of Bill's hate shot higher and ever higher; for this lower swaying, as he knew, was the signal of the end for which he had striven so cunningly and long.

At the moment that Jan heard Dick's call, Bill drew up his muscles for administration of the final thrust. (The bull had bled sufficiently. Now for the steel in the nape.) Bill leaped, red froth flying from his bared fangs. As he leaped, Jan's strange baying roar smote upon his senses with a chill foreboding. He knew nothing of the call that had loosed from its lethargy the essential Jan. But the roar spoke of doom and Bill flinched; wavered in his attack, as a horse will momentarily waver at a high leap. That peril might have passed. But it was part of a double blunder. The leap had been wrongly conceived. It had come too soon. And now the leaper balked, conscious of error; conscious also, dimly, of some terrific change in Jan, heralded by his awe-inspiring cry.

Bill jarred down to earth, short of his mark, his feet ill placed, his world awry. And in that instant the big hound was upon him like a bolt from heaven: the strangest attack surely that ever dog faced, or so it must have seemed to stricken Bill, the northland fighter for the killing throat-hold, who never had seen the famous killing grip that was always used by Jan's tall sire, Finn the wolfhound.

Jan came down upon Bill as though from the clouds. (He stood a full four inches higher than Bill.) His huge jaws, stretched to cracking-point, took Bill where the base of the skull meets the spinal cord. One jaw on either side that rope of life, they drove down; through the matted armor of Bill's coat, through skin and flesh, and on to their ultimate destination, under the crushing pressure of a hundred and forty pounds of steel-like muscle, bone, and sinew, the invincible product of the trail-life developed upon a foundation of scientifically attained health and strength.

Bill, the fearless and unbeaten, now screamed aloud; not for mercy, but in mortal pain. His tense body squirmed, convulsed, under Jan's great weight like a thing galvanized by electricity.

Jan's jaws sank deeper.

Bill snapped at the bloody snow in his frenzy, actually breaking his own fangs.

Jan's jaws sank deeper.

A long horrible shudder passed through the squirming body of Bill. And Jan's jaws sank a little deeper. Then with a dreadful sucking sound and a sharp gasp for breath, those jaws parted and were withdrawn; for Bill's long fight and his life were ended now, and Jan was quite alone in that desolate place.

XXX

REAL LEADERSHIP

The thrifty Jean was far from pleased when, on the morning after his lucky moose-shot, he found that the sled-team was short of one dog. As it happened, Jake was the first to note the absence of Bill, the ex-leader; and while he looked this way and that for the missing dog, Jean, by a thought process which went a little farther, called Jan to him and proceeded to look over the big hound.

"You don't need to look for no Beel," he said, grimly, to Jake. "Look thees Jan, here. By gar! that was some fight, now I'm telling you. See that, an' thees. Look that ear. See thees shoulder. By gar! that Beel he fight good an' hard. But when he fight Jan, tha's the feenish--for Beel."

Jake and Jean together made the best job they could of patching up Jan's wounds a little against the frost and the rub of trace and breast-band.

"Good dog, too, that blame Bill," mused Jake.

"Sure, he was good dog, very good dog; by gar! yes," agreed Jean. "But thees Jan, hee's best of all dogs. No good for Beel to fight heem. Only he was too blame full o' moose-meat, he don' lose no blood to Beel, you bet. That why Beel he don' eat las' night. Seeck? No. He too cunning, that Beel." A long pause, while Jean spat out chewed tobacco and juice over one of Jan's worst wounds, with a view to its antiseptic and healing properties. And then, on a grunting sigh: "Ah, well, I reckon that makes Jan's price five hunderd. That blame Beel, he worth two hunderd any day."

So, by Jean's simple commercial method, the big hound's wounds and the previous night's great fight were best summed up by reckoning that they added two hundred dollars to Jan's market price. And, all things considered, he was very likely right; for there could be no sort of doubt about it, the episode had taught Jan lessons he never would forget; it had advanced his education hugely and added a big slice to the sum of his knowledge of the wild northland life. Therefore it had made him the more fit to survive in the north; and hence it must have added to his value.

Dogs may not do much talking one with another, as humans understand talk; but their methods of intercourse suffice them. Just as Jean saw no need to hunt for the missing Bill, once he had looked over Jan's wounds, so every dog in the team knew perfectly well why Bill was not of their number that morning. They asked no questions; but they knew. The thing was indelibly recorded in their minds. Bill, who had mastered them, had disputed Jan's mastery. And now Bill was no more. They would not forget.

But all the same, their deductive powers were far from perfect. They saw in Jan a leader who could not hide the soreness and stiffness caused by his many wounds. They, for their part, were feeling rather like indiscreet workmen after a public holiday that has been too recklessly enjoyed. They had no headache, but were feeling fat and lazy; and, noting the stiffness of Jan's movements, they slouched and shirked, and caused delays over the making of a start that morning.

"H'm! Too much moose-meat. Thees will be a short day," growled Jean, as he reached out for his whip before proceeding farther with the harnessing. Only the stiff-legged leader was in his place; the rest lay dotted about with lolling tongues, bent on loafing.

Jan saw Jean go for his whip. But it was no fear of the lash that moved him to action. He had been desperately conscious for a good many hours of his stiffness and weariness, and had hoped his services as policeman of the team would not have been needed that morning. Now, in a flash, he comprehended the true position. And he knew the sled was now twice its previous weight. He looked across at Jean, and gave a short, low bark, which meant:

"Don't you trouble about your whip. This is my job. Don't suppose I've forgotten it, or that this team is going to be any the weaker for Bill's loss. Devil a bit of it."

And with that Jan tossed aside his stiffness and flew around among his six team-mates, the very incarnation of masterful leadership. Not one dog, not even old Blackfoot, escaped him; and if their leader began the day's work as a sorely wounded dog, it was certain that each dog behind him began it with one sore spot to occupy his mind withal. Inside of one minute he had the six of them standing alertly to attention in their respective places, waiting for their harness and itching to be off; not by reason of any sudden access of virtue or industry in them, but because the leader they had thought too sore and stiff to accomplish much that day was pacing sternly up and down their rank, with fangs bared, and the hint of a snarl in every breath he drew; ready, and apparently rather anxious, to visit condign punishment upon the first dog who should stir one paw a single inch from its proper place.

"Five hunderd!" shouted Jean, with his broad, cheery grin. "By gar! tha' Jan hee's worth ten hunderd of any man's money for team-leadin'. Yes, _sir_; an' you can say I said so. I don't care where the nex' come from; tha' Jan, hee's masterpiece."

Jake readily admitted, when, over their pipes that night, he and Jean came to review the day's run, that the team had worked better this day than on any previous day in the past month.

"With double load, an' one dog short," Jean reminded him.

"That's so," said Jake. "I guess that moose-meat's put good heart into them."