CHAPTER XII

 OUR GOOD FRIEND, THE DOG 

     "Without dogs one can do nothing on a sledge trip. Reindeer have been suggested, but they are not equal to dogs in rough ice. Horses or ponies have been tried, but with indifferent re­sults. On a smooth road they are, of course, superior to dogs, but amid hummocks and pockets they are of little avail. Besides, if we had a smooth road, the Pole would have been dis­covered long ago. One great advantage of the use of dogs is their ability to endure anything in the way of cold. Fifty below zero has no terrors for them. 

     "I remember one camp we made. It was in February, shortly after our start, and before the sun had risen. A storm came down upon us from off the glaciers of the near-by land. We were upon a level, snowless stretch of ice, and the wind fairly blew us off our feet. Only by bracing to leeward with a ski-stick, could we stand at all. The dogs were determined to run with the wind, and it was almost more than we could do to keep them anywhere near the course. Much of the time we had to drag the dogs, sledges, and all, with the icy wind blowing the breath out of our bodies. The storm increased in fury, and as it was absolutely impossible to camp on this smooth bare ice, we looked eagerly for some hummocks or ridges where we might make the tent-pegs hold, or at least bury them in the snow so that they would not be blown miles away the moment we let go of them. 

     "At last we found some small hummocks and stopped to make camp. Usually this is the most pleasant of tasks. One takes keen delight in preparing for, the night, and heavenly it seems to crawl in out of the wind, and to hear the lamp sing as it boils the coffee and the soup. But this was a most bitter camp-making. It seemed impossible to do anything. The air was so filled with snow that we could barely see one an­other. 

     " ' Make the dogs snug first,' " I said, " ' or they'll perish.' 

     "So we scooped out a sort of trench, and buried the dogs in the snow, and then tried to rig up some sort of shelter for ourselves. It was not easy. No tent could stand in that blast, and so we fastened down the ends of the canvas, crawled under, boiled some coffee, and spread the sleeping-bags. A few hours later the violence of the storm was moderated, and I looked out to see how things were coming on. 

     "There were the dogs lying on top of the snow, as happy as they could be, though a stiff breeze was still blowing and the temperature was about thirty-five degrees below zero. In trying to make these dogs comfortable I had frozen my nose and my cheeks, and some of the men had suf­fered similar trifling frost nips. So after this we permitted the dogs to hunt their own shelter. It was never too cold for them. Some times on breaking camp in the morning we had to dig them out of snow-drifts; but once a dog has shaken himself vigorously, straightened out his cramped legs, quarreled with one or two of his neighbors, and wagged his tail a few times at his master, he is ready for business. 

     "A Siberian dog will pull only a quarter as much as a man can pull, and he needs about a pound of food per day, or half as much as the man. But he requires no sleeping-bag or tent, no extra clothing and boots, no water has to be melted for him, he smokes no tobacco. Best of all, if he gets hurt, or becomes ill or exhausted, you don't have to drag him on a sledge or turn back. You convert him into fresh meat for the survivors. That is the economy of dog-sledging in these dashes for the Pole. 

     "Your four-legged comrade drags fifty or sixty pounds of load, and he carries twenty-five or thirty pounds of meat "on the hoof." But killing these faithful fellows who have worked in harness by your side, who lick the hand that is about to smite them, and look up into the murder­er's eyes with true dog trustfulness, was the bit­terest of all the bitter things we had to do. We killed only a half dozen, using a rifle, and did the job off a little way from camp, behind a hum­mock, in a sneaking sort of way, as if we were ashamed of it, as we were. 

     "Good boys, those dogs. I became very fond of my team, rogues though they were, some of them. Dogs name themselves, and mine bore the cognomens of "The Deacon," "The Dandy," "The Assassin" (the latter had killed only half a dozen of his brethren the previous winter) , "The Lady," "The Fox," "The Judge," and "The Sport." "The Assassin" was the leader, and a noble draft-dog he was. He pulled just like a mule. His only fault was that he wanted to be at the head of the procession all of the time. If put behind another sledge, he would not "track," but cut cross-lots at every turn of the trail. He broke two sledges in this way in the rough ice, to say nothing of some of my good resolutions. I tried to discipline him by putting him back among the team; but he felt the dis‑grace, and wouldn't pull at all, so I had to make him leader again. 

     "With all their mean tricks, I loved these dogs. You see, I had to work right alongside them, with a harness over my shoulders. On good ice the dogs would pull the load, but whenever the sledge stuck in a rough place or pocket of deep snow—and this was once in three or five minutes—I had to keep it going, or start it if it stopped. The dogs would pull only when they felt motion behind them. They had a sly way, too, of watching me out of the corners of their eyes, and when the sledge dragged a little hard and they saw I was not pulling, they stopped short, as much as to say : 

     " How do you expect to get along if you don't do your share of the pulling ?' 

     "But I fooled them by pretending to work very hard when actually I was not moving ten pounds. At every step they got even with me by twisting themselves up into knots, tangling their trace lines in the most hopeless way, and then lying down to rest while I, with frost-nipped fingers and such patience as I could command, straight­ened things out. 

     "But there were compensations for all these annoyances in the fine way the beasts worked. It was not necessary to beat them, and whipping or beating was not allowed on this trip. It was

wonderful what we could do with these dogs by talking cheerily to them. They didn't know what we said to them, but they were as keen to scent the tone in which we said it, as they were to smell a bear or a seal. When we were blue and talked snappishly or petulantly to them, they became discouraged, too, and didn't work half so well. Brace up and sing to them, and call them "old boy," and put a jolly ring in your voice, and they would pull their legs off for you. 

     "All but 'The Fox,'—he was a born shirker. He used to go lame all of a sudden, so that he couldn't pull; and at first I sympathized a good deal with him and called him pet names. Then I discovered that he was shamming and that a genteel touch with the end of my ski-stick served to cure his lameness in a jiffy. But the habit of going lame when he became tired he never got over, and for months he tried two or three times a day, to deceive us, always with the same result."