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Page 62
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.
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