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Page 77
The gun was never seen again; and, though Jim had good store of
ammunition, he now had no weapon of any sort or kind, save ax and whip.
This was the reason why the presence of large packs of hungry wolves
annoyed him and made him anxious to reach a Peace River station as
speedily as might be. He carried a fair stock of moose-meat, but
accidents might happen, and in any case, apart from the presence of
hungry wolves in large numbers, no man cares to be without weapons of
precision in the wilderness, for it is these which more than any other
thing give him his mastery over the predatory of the wild.
Just before three o'clock in an afternoon of still, intense cold, when
daylight was fading out, the narrow devious watercourse whose frozen
surface had formed Willis's trail for many a mile, brought him at last
to a bend of the Peace River from which he knew he could reach a
settlement within four or five days of good traveling. Therefore his
arrival at this point was of more interest and importance to Willis than
any ordinary camping halt. But it struck him as curious that Jan should
show the interest he did show in it.
"Seems like as if that blame dog knows everything," he muttered as he
saw Jan trotting to and fro over the trail, his flews sweeping the
trodden snow with eager, questing gestures, his stern waving as with
excitement of some sort.
"Surely there's been no game past this way," thought Willis, "or them
wolves would be on to the scent of it pretty quick."
He could hear his tireless escorts of the past week yowling a mile or
more away in the rear. Having built and lighted a fire of pine-knots, he
called the dogs about him to be fed. Jan seemed disinclined to answer
the call, being still busily questing to and fro. Willis had to call him
separately and sternly.
"You stay right here," he said, sharply. "This ain't no place for
hunting-excursions an' picnic-parties, let me tell you. You're big an'
husky, all right, but the gentlemen out back there 'd make no more o'
downing an' eatin' you than if you was a sody-cracker, so I tell ye now.
They're fifty to one an' hungry enough to eat chips."
His ration swallowed, Jan showed an inclination to roam again, though
his team-mates, with ears pricked and hackles rising in answer to the
wolf-calls, huddled about as near the camp-fire as they dared.
"H'm! 'Tain't jest like you to be contemplatin' sooicide, neither; but
it seems you've got some kind of a hunch that way to-night. Come here,
then," said Willis. And he proceeded to tether Jan securely to the sled,
within a yard of his own sleeping-place. "If I'd my old gun here, me
beauties," he growled, shaking his fist in the direction from which he
had come that day, "I'd give some o' ye something to howl about, I
reckon." Then to Jan, "Now you lie down there an' stay there till I
loose ye."
Obediently enough Jan proceeded to scoop out his nest in the snow, and
settle. But it was obvious that he labored with some unusual interest;
some unseen cause of excitement.
Next morning it seemed Jan had forgotten his peculiar interest in the
Peace River trail, his attention being confined strictly to the
customary routine of harnessing and schooling the team.
But two hours later he did a thing that Willis had never seen him do
before. He threw the team into disorder by coming to an abrupt
standstill in mid-trail without any hint of an order from his master. He
was sniffing hard at the trail, turning sharply from side to side, his
flews in the snow, while his nostrils avidly drank in whatever it was
they found there, as a parched dog drinks at a water-hole.
"Mush on there, Jan! What ye playin' at?" cried Willis.
At the word of command Jan plunged forward mechanically. But in the next
moment he had halted again and, nose in the snow, wheeled sharply to the
right, almost flinging on its side the dog immediately behind him in the
traces.
For an instant Jim Willis wondered uncomfortably if his leader had gone
mad. He had known sudden and apparently quite inexplicable cases of
madness among sled-dogs, and, like most others having any considerable
experience of the trail, he had more than once had to shoot a dog upon
whom madness had fallen. At all events, before striding forward to the
head of his team Willis fumbled under the lashings of the sled and drew
out the long-thonged dog-whip which for months now he had ceased to
carry on the trail, finding no use for it under Jan's leadership of the
team.
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