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Page 58
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.
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