THE MAIL-CARRIER
Half-way on that last day's mush we met the mail-man returning to the Koyukuk. So much had he been delayed that there was danger of a fine and all sorts of trouble, and the mail had been sent out to meet him at the noon cabin, together with a supply of grub for the return trip. But the caterer, whoever he was, forgot candles, and the mail-man would have had to make his way back to the Koyukuk without any means of artificial light, in the shortest days of the year, had we not been able to supply him with half a dozen candles that remained to us. It was a disappointment to George, the boy I had brought from the mission, that he must turn round and go back also. He had never "seen Tanana," which is quite a metropolis to him, and had looked forward to it keenly all the journey, but the boy braced up and took his disappointment manfully. A pitiful procession it was that passed us by and took our boy away; the poor, wearied dogs that had certainly earned the few days' rest they were so badly in need of left a trail of blood behind them that was sickening to see. Almost every one of them had sore, frozen feet; many of them were lame; and when we came to descend the long hill they had just climbed, right at its brow, where the stiffest pull had been, was a claw from a dog's foot frozen into bloody snow.
So far as there is anything heroic about the Alaskan trail, the mail-carriers are the real heroes. They muststart out in all weathers, at all temperatures; they have a certain specified time in which to make their trips and they must keep within that time or there is trouble. The bordering country of the Canadian Yukon has a more humane government than ours. There neither mail-carrier nor any one else, save in some life-or-death emergency, with licence from the Northwest Mounted Police, may take out horse or dogs to start a journey when the temperature is lower than 45° below zero; but I have seen a reluctant mail-carrier chased out at 60° below zero, on pain of losing his job, on the American side. Moreover, between the seasons, when travel on the rivers is positively dangerous to life, the mail must still be despatched and received, although so great is the known risk to the mail, as well as to the carrier, that no one will send any letter that he cares at all about reaching its destination until the trails are established or the steamboats run. But the virtually empty pouches must be transported from office to office through the running, or over the rotting ice, just the same, on pain of the high displeasure and penalty of a department without brains and without bowels. I have often wished since I came to Alaska that I could be postmaster-general for one week, and so I suppose has almost every other resident of the country.
The week following my arrival at Tanana was a solid week of cold weather, the thermometer ranging around 50° and 60° below zero, and that means keeping pretty close to the house. Even the sentries at the army post are withdrawn and the protection of the garrison is confidedto a man who watches the grounds from a glass-walled cupola above the headquarters building. Yet a week of confinement and inaction grows tiresome after life in the open.
Sunday is always a busy day here. The mission and native village are three miles away from the town, and service must be held at both. The mission at Tanana is not a happy place to visit for one who has the welfare of the natives at heart. Despite faithful and devoted effort to check it, the demoralisation goes on apace and the outlook is dark.
SINGLE MEN IN BARRACKS
"Single men in barracks don't grow into plaster saints," we are told; sometimes they seem to grow into drunken, lustful devils without compassion for childhood, not to mention any feeling of magnanimity towards a feebler race. And when a girl who has been rough-handled, or who has been given drink until she is unable to resist the multiple outrage practised upon her, is told to pick out the malefactors from a company of soldiers, all clean-shaven, all dressed alike, all around the same age, she generally fails to identify altogether. So the offence goes unwhipped, and the officer is likely as not to address a reprimand to the complaining missionary for "preferring charges you are unable to substantiate." Yet an officer who had himself written such a letter told me once that all Indians looked alike to him. Even should the girl identify one or more men, they have usually half a dozen comrades ready to swear an alibi.
Add to the trouble given by the soldiers the constant operation of the slinking bootleggers of the town, a scoreor more of whom are known to make money by this liquor peddling, and some of whom do nothing else for a living, yet whom it is next to impossible to convict, owing to the cumbrous machinery of the law and the attitude of juries, and it will be seen that the hands of those who are fighting for the native race are tied.
What has been said about the military does not by any means apply to all, either officers or men. Some of the officers have been decent, God-fearing men, conscious of the evil and zealous to suppress it; some of the men, indeed in all probability most of the men, quite free from such offence; some commanding officers have kept such a well-disciplined post that offences of all kinds have been greatly reduced. But the commanding officer is changed every year, and the whole force is changed every two years, so that there is no continuity of policy at the post, and an administration that has grown familiar with conditions and that stands so far as it can for clean living and sobriety and decency and the protection of the native people, may be followed by one that is loftily ignorant of the situation, careless about offences against morality, and impatient of any complaint.
Off by himself, separate from the demoralising influence of the low-down white, there is every hope and encouragement in the effort to elevate and educate the Indian; set down cheek by jowl with the riffraff of towns and barracks, his fate seems sealed.
DEATH-RATE AND BIRTH-RATE
Let these two mission stations, the Allakaket and Tanana, one hundred and fifty miles or so apart by the winter trail, represent the two conditions. In six years'time there has been manifest advance at the one and decay at the other. The birth-rate is greatly in excess of the death-rate at the Allakaket, the death-rate greatly in excess of the birth-rate at Tanana. In the year in which this journey was made there were thirty-four deaths and fourteen births at Tanana, and while the difference was an unusually large one, yet in the six years referred to there has not been one year in which the number of births exceeded the number of deaths. One does not have to be a prophet to foresee the inevitable result, if the process be not stopped.
A tribute should be paid to the zeal, now of one, now of another army surgeon at Fort Gibbon in tending the native sick, three miles away, when we have been unable to procure a physician of our own for the place. The missionary nurse, for five years last past Miss Florence Langdon, has been greatly helped in her almost desperate efforts here by the willing co-operation of these medical officers of the army.
Ourcourse from Tanana did not lie directly up the Tanana River, but up the Yukon to Rampart and then across country to the Hot Springs on the Tanana River. The seventy-five miles up the Yukon was through the Lower Ramparts, one of the most picturesque portions of this great river. The stream is confined in one deep channel by lofty mountains on both banks, and the scenery at times is very bold and wild. But its topography makes it the natural wind course of the country—a down-river wind in winter, an up-river wind in summer blows almost continually. It was no colder than 5° below zero when we started on the trip, but the wind made the travelling unpleasant. The second day it had increased to a gale, and every mile we travelled it grew stronger. We travelled three hours, and the last hour we made scarcely a mile. So thickly charged with flying snow was the wind and so dead ahead that despite parkee hoods it blinded us, and the dogs could hardly be forced to keep their heads towards it. Their faces were so coated with crusted snow that they looked curiouslylike the face of harlequin in the pantomime. It did become literally intolerable, and when Arthur said that he knew there was a cabin right across the river, we made our way thither and shortly found it and lay there the rest of the day, the gale blowing incessantly. This was disappointing, because it meant that I could not reach Rampart for the Sunday I had appointed.
Next day the wind had ceased and the thermometer went down to 30° below zero. In places the ice was blown clear of snow; in other places it was heavily drifted. By midday we had reached the lonely telegraph station at "The Rapids," and were very kindly received by the signal-corps men in charge. They gave us to eat and to drink and would take no money. There is little travel on this part of the river nowadays, and the telegraph men are glad to see any one who may chance to pass by. We pushed on heavily again, and had to stop and cut a gee pole presently, for it was hard to handle the sled without it; but the gee pole always means laborious travel. The cold was welcome; it meant no wind; and we were glad to see the thermometer drop lower than 50° below zero that night at the old mail cabin. The mail goes no longer on the Yukon River from Fort Yukon to Tanana, and, barring this point, Rampart, towards which we were travelling, which is supplied across country from the Hot Springs, over the route we should traverse, no spot on that three hundred and fifty miles of river receives any mail at all. The population is small and scattered, it is true; on the same grounds Alaska might be denied any mail at all. There has been much resentment at thisabandonment of the Yukon River by the post-office and several petitions for its restoration, but it has not been restored.
THE WIND-SWEPT YUKON
We travelled all the next day at 50° below zero, and it was one of the pleasantest days of the winter. There was not a breath of wind, the going steadily improved, and, best of all, for three hours we were travelling in the sunshine for the first time this winter. Only those who have been deprived of the sun can really understand how joyful and grateful his return is. There was no heat in his rays, this last day of January; the thermometer stood at 49° below at noon, and had risen but 5° since our start in the morning; but the mere sight of him glowing in the south, where a great bend of the river gave him to us through a gap in the mountains, was cheerful and invigorating after two months in which we had seen no more than his gilding of the high snows. The sun gives life to the dead landscape, colour to the oppressive monotony of white and black, and man's heart leaps to the change as jubilantly as does the face of nature.
RAMPART AND ITS SALOON
Rampart City differs from Circle City, the other decayed mining town of the Yukon River, only in that the process is further advanced. Year by year there are a few less men on the creeks behind it, a few less residents in the town itself. Its long, straggling water-front consists in the main of empty buildings, the windows boarded up, the snow drifted high about the doors. One store now serves all ends of trade, one liquor shop serves all the desire for drink of the whites, and slops over throughthe agency of two or three dissolute squaw men and half-breeds to the natives up and down the river.[C]
Rampart had one fat year, 1898, when many hundreds of gold seekers, approaching the Klondike by Saint Michael and the lower Yukon were attracted and halted by the gold discoveries on Big and Little Minook, and spent the winter here. The next spring news was brought of the rich discoveries on Anvil Creek, behind Cape Nome, and an exodus began which grew into a veritable stampede in 1900, when the gold discoveries in the beach itself were made. Rampart's large population faded away as surely and as quickly to Nome as Circle City's population did to the Klondike. The Indians are almost all gone from their village a mile above the town; they dwindled away with the dwindling prosperity, some to Tanana, some to other points down the river; and what used to be the worst small native community in the interior of Alaska has almost ceased to exist. Most of the littleband of white folks still remaining were gathered together at night, and appreciated, I thought, their semiannual opportunity for Divine service.
"DEVELOPED"
There is no resisting the melancholy that hangs over a place like this. As one treads the crazy, treacherous board sidewalks, full of holes and rotten planks, now rising a step or two, now falling, and reads the dimmed and dirty signs that once flaunted their gold and colours, "Golden North," "Pioneer," "Reception," "The Senate" (why should every town in Alaska have a "Senate" saloon and not one a "House of Representatives"?), one conjures up the scenes of rude revelry these drinking places witnessed a few years ago. How high the hopes of sudden riches burned in the breasts of the men who went in and out of them, doomed to utter disappointment in the vast majority! What a rapscallion crew, male and female, followed this great mob of gold seekers, and grew richer as their victims grew poorer! What earned and borrowed and saved and begged and stolen moneys were frittered away and flung away that winter; what health and character were undermined! How the ribaldry and valiant, stupid blasphemy rang out in these tumbling-down shanties! Go out on the creeks and see the hills denuded of their timber, the stream-beds punched with innumerable holes, filled up or filling up, the cabins and sluice-boxes rotting into the moss, here and there a broken pick and shovel, here and there a rusting boiler, and take notice that this region has been "developed."
When the debit and credit sides of the ledger are balanced, what remains to Alaska of all these thousands ofmen, of all the many hundreds of thousands of dollars they brought with them? Those creeks, stripped, gutted, and deserted; this town, waiting for a kindly fire with a favouring breeze to wipe out its useless emptiness; a few half-breed children at mission schools; a hardy native tribe, sophisticated, diseased, demoralised, and largely dead—that seems the net result.
The portage trail from Rampart to the Tanana River goes up Minook Creek and follows the valley to its head, then crosses a summit and passes down through several small mining settlements to the Hot Springs. The trail saves traversing two sides of the triangle which it makes with the two rivers.
The dogs' feet and legs had suffered so much from the deep snow and the heavy labour of the journey out of the Koyukuk and the rough ice of the Yukon that I was compelled to have not merely moccasins but moose-hide leggings made here, coming right up to the belly and tying over the back. All the hair was worn away from the back of the legs and the skin was in many places raw.
We had thought to cover the twenty-five or thirty miles up the valley and over the summit to a road-house just beyond its foot, but rough drifted trails and a high wind held us back until it was dark before the ascent was reached, and we pitched our tent and reserved the climb for the morrow.
It was a hard grind owing to the drifted snow and the wind that still disputed our passage, but the view from the summit, nearly eighteen hundred feet above last night's camp, was compensation enough, for it gave usthe great mountain, Denali, or, as the map makers and some white men call it, Mount McKinley. Perhaps an hundred and fifty miles away, as the crow flies, it rose up and filled all the angle of vision to the southwest. It is not a peak, it is a region, a great soaring of the earth's crust, rising twenty thousand feet high; so enormous in its mass, in its snow-fields and glaciers, its buttresses, its flanking spurs, its far-flung terraces of foot-hills and approaches, that it completely dominates the view whenever it is seen at all. I have heard people say they thought they had seen Denali, as I have heard travellers say they thought they had seen Mount Everest from Darjiling; but no one ever thought he saw Denali if he saw it at all. There is no possible question about it, once the mountain has risen before the eyes; and although Mount Everest is but the highest of a number of great peaks, while Denali stands alone in unapproached predominance, yet I think the man who has really looked upon the loftiest mountain in the world could have no doubt about it ever after.
How my heart burns within me whenever I get view of this great monarch of the North! There it stood, revealed from base to summit in all its stupendous size, all its glistening majesty. I would far rather climb that mountain than own the richest gold-mine in Alaska. Yet how its apparent nearness mocks one; what time and cost and labour are involved even in approaching its base with food and equipment for an attempt to reach its summit! How many schemes I have pondered and dreamed these seven years past for climbing it! Some day time and opportunity and resource may serve, pleaseGod, and I may have that one of my heart's desires; if not, still it is good to have seen it from many different coigns of vantage, from this side and from that; to have felt the awe of its vast swelling bulk, the superb dignity of its firm-seated, broad-based uplift to the skies with a whole continent for a pedestal; to have gazed eagerly and longingly at its serene, untrodden summit, far above the eagle's flight, above even the most daring airman's venture, and to have desired and hoped to reach it; to desire and hope to reach it still.[D]
Plunging down the steep descent we went for four miles, and then after a hearty dinner at the road-house, essayed to make twenty-one miles more to the Hot Springs. But night fell again with a number of miles yet to come, the recent storm had furrowed the trail diagonally with hard windrows of snow that overturned the sled repeatedly and formed an hindrance that grew greater and greater, and again we made camp in the dark, short of our expected goal.
Of late I had been carrying an hip ring, a rubber ring inflated by the breath that is the best substitute for a mattress. The ring had been left behind at Rampart, and so dependent does one grow on the little luxuries and ameliorations one permits oneself that these two nights in camp were almost sleepless for lack of it.
THE HOT SPRINGS
Three hours more brought us to the spacious hotel, with its forty empty rooms, that had been put up, out of all sense or keeping, in a wild, plunging attempt to "exploit"the Hot Springs and make a great "health resort" of the place. The hot water had been piped a quarter of a mile or so to spacious swimming-baths in the hotel; all sorts of expense had been lavished on the place; but it had been a failure from the first, and has since been closed and has fallen into dilapidation. The bottoms have dropped out of the cement baths, the paper hangs drooping from the damp walls, the unsubstantial foundations have yielded until the floors are heaved like the waves of the sea.[E]But at this time the hotel was still maintained and we stayed there, and its wide entrance-hall and lobby formed an excellent place to gather the inhabitants of the little town for Divine service—again the only opportunity in the year.
What a curious phenomenon thermal springs constitute in these parts! Here is a series of patches of ground, free from snow, while all the country has been covered two or three feet deep these four months; green with vegetation, while all living things elsewhere are wrapped in winter sleep. Here is open, rushing water, throwing up clouds of steam that settles upon everything as dense hoar frost, while all other water is held in the adamantine fetters of the ice. Where does that constant unfailing stream of water at 110° Fahrenheit come from? Where does it get its heat? I know of half a dozen such thermal springs in Alaska,—one far away above the Arctic Circle between the upper courses of the Kobuk and the Noatak Rivers, that I have heard strange tales about from the Esquimaux and that I have always wanted to visit.
Whenever I see this gush of hot water in the very midst of the ice and the snow, I am reminded of my surprise on the top of Mount Tacoma. We had climbed some eight thousand feet of snow and were shivering in a bitter wind on the summit, yet when the hand was thrust in a cleft of the rock it had to be withdrawn by reason of the heat. One knows about the internal fire of some portion of the earth's mass, of course, but such striking manifestations of it, such bold irruption of heat in the midst of the kingdom of the cold, must always bring a certain astonishment except to those who take everything as a matter of course.
It is evident that this hot water, capable of distribution over a considerable area of land, makes an exceedingly favourable condition for subarctic agriculture, and a great deal of ground has been put under cultivation with large yield of potatoes and cabbage and other vegetables. But the limitations of Alaskan conditions have shorn all profit from the enterprise. There is no considerable market nearer than Fairbanks, almost two hundred miles away by the river. If the potatoes are allowed to remain in the ground until they are mature, there is the greatest danger of the whole crop freezing while on the way to market, and in any case the truck-farmers around Fairbanks find that their proximity to the consumer more than offsets the advantage of the Hot Springs.
ARCTIC AGRICULTURE
When the great initial difficulties of farming in Alaska are overcome, when the moss is removed and the ground, frozen solidly to bedrock, is broken and thawed, when its natural acidity is counteracted by the application of somealkali, and its reeking surface moisture is drained away; when after three or four years' cultivation it begins to make some adequate return of roots and greens, there remains the constant difficulty of a market. Around the mining settlements and during the uncertain life of the mining settlements, truck-farming pays very well, but it could easily be overdone so that prices would fall below the point of any profit at all. Transportation is expensive, and rates for a short haul on the rivers are high, out of all proportion to rates for the long haul from the outside, so that potatoes from the Pacific coast are brought in and sold in competition with the native-grown. And despite the protestations of the agricultural experimental stations, the outside or "chechaco" potato has the advantage of far better quality than that grown in Alaska. Tastes differ, and a man may speak only as he finds. For my part, I have eaten native potatoes raised in almost every section of interior Alaska, and have been glad to get them, but I have never eaten a native potato that compared favourably with any good "outside" potato. The native potato is commonly wet and waxy; I have never seen a native potato that would burst into a glistening mass of white flour, or that had the flavour of a really good potato.
There has been much misconception about the interior of Alaska that obtains yet in some quarters, although there is no excuse for it now. Not only the interior of Alaska, but all land at or near sea-level in the arctic regions that is not under glacial ice-caps, is snow free and surface-thawed in the summer and has aluxuriant vegetation. The polar ox (Sverdrup's protest against the term "musk-ox" should surely prevail) ranges in great bands north of the 80th parallel and must secure abundant food; and when Peary determined the insularity of Greenland he found its most northerly point a mass of verdure and flowers.
No doubt potatoes and turnips, lettuce and cabbage, could be raised anywhere in those regions; the intensity of the season compensates for its shortness; the sun is in the heavens twenty-four hours in the day, and all living things sprout and grow with amazing rankness and celerity under the strong compulsion of his continuous rays. Spring comes literally with a shout and a rush here in Alaska, and must cry even louder and stride even faster in the "ultimate climes of the pole." If the possibility of raising garden-truck and tubers constitutes a "farming country," then all the arctic regions not actually under glacial ice may be so classed.
Any one who visits the Koyukuk may see monster turnips and cabbages raised at Coldfoot, near the 68th parallel; from Sir William Parry's description we may feel quite sure that vegetables of size and excellence might be raised at the head of Bushnan's Cove of Melville Island, on the 75th parallel; he called it "an arctic paradise"; Greely reported "grass twenty-four inches high and many butterflies" in the interior of Grinnell Land under the 82d parallel; and if gold were ever discovered on the north coast of Greenland one might quite expect to hear that some enterprising Swede was growing turnips and cabbages at Cape Morris Jessup above the 83d parallel, and getting a dollar a pound for them.
In favourable seasons and in favourable spots of interior Alaska certain early varieties of Siberian oats and rye have been matured, and it stands to the credit of the Experiment Station at Rampart that a little wheat was once ripened there, though it took thirteen months from the sowing to the ripening. When the rest of the world fills up so that economic pressure demands the utilisation of all earth that will produce any sort of food, it may be that large tracts in Alaska will be put under the plough; but it is hard to believe that nine tenths of all this vast country will ever be other than wild waste land. At present the farming population is strictly an appendage of the mining population, and the mining population rather diminishes than increases.
Your health resort that no one will resort to is a dull place at best and a poor dependence for merchandising, so that the little town of Hot Springs is fortunate in having some mining country around it to fall back upon for its trade. We lay an extra day there, waiting for the stage from Fairbanks to break trail for us through the heavy, drifted snow, having had enough of trail breaking for a while. At midnight the stage came, two days late, and its coming caused me as keen a sorrow and as great a loss as I have had since I came to Alaska.
NANOOK'S DEATH
We knew naught of it until the next morning, when, breakfast done and the sled lashed, we were ready to hitch the dogs and depart. They had been put in the horse stable for there was no dog house; the health resorter, actual or prospective, is not likely to be a dog man one supposes; but they were loose in the morning and came to the call, all but one—Nanook. Him wesought high and low, and at last Arthur found him, but in what pitiful case! He dragged himself slowly and painfully along, his poor bowels hanging down in the outer hide of his belly, fearfully injured internally, done for and killed already. It was not difficult to account for it. When the horses came in at midnight, one of them had kicked the dog and ruptured his whole abdomen.
There was no use in inquiring whose fault it was. The dogs should have been chained; so much was our fault. But it was hard to resist some bitter recollection that before this "exploitation" of the springs, when there was a modest road-house instead of a mammoth hotel, there had been kennels for dogs instead of nothing but stables for horses.
I doubt if all the veterinary surgeons in the world could have saved the dog, but there was none to try; and there was only one thing to do, hate it as we might. Arthur and I were grateful that neither of us had to do it, for the driver of the mail stage, who had some compunctions of conscience, I think, volunteered to save us the painful duty. "I know how you feel," he said slowly and kindly; "I've got a dog I think a heap of myself, but that dog ain't nothin' to me an' I'll do it for you."
Nanook knew perfectly well that it was all over with him. Head and tail down, the picture of resigned dejection, he stood like a petrified dog. And when I put my face down to his and said "Good-bye," he licked me for the first time in his life. In the six years I had owned him and driven him I had never felt his tongue before, though I had always loved him best of the bunch. He was not the licking kind.
We hitched up our diminished team and pulled out, for we had thirty miles to make in the short daylight and we had lost time already; and as we crossed the bridge over the steaming slough we saw the man going slowly down to the river with the dog, the chain in one hand, a gun in the other. My eyes filled with tears; I could not look at Arthur nor he at me as I passed forward to run ahead of the team, and I was glad when I realised that we had drawn out of ear-shot.
All day as I trudged or trotted now on snow-shoes and now off, as the trail varied in badness, that dog was in my mind and his loss upon my heart, the feel of his tongue upon my cheek. It takes the close companionship between a man and his dogs in this country, travelling all the winter long, winter after winter, through the bitter cold and the storm and darkness, through the long, pleasant days of the warm sunshine of approaching spring, sharing labour and sharing ease, sharing privation and sharing plenty; it takes this close companionship to make a man appreciate a dog. As I reckoned it up, Nanook had fallen just short of pulling my sled ten thousand miles. If he had finished this season with me he would have done fully that, and I had intended to pension him after this winter, to provide that so long as he lived he should have his fish and rice every day. Some doubt I had had of old Lingo lasting through the winter, but none of Nanook, and they were the only survivors of my original team.
THE TALKING DOG
Nanook was in as good spirits as ever I knew him that last night, coming to me and plumping his huge fore pawsdown on my moccasins, challenging me to play the game of toe treading that he loved; and whenever he beat me at it he would seize my ankle in his jaws and make me hop around on one foot, to his great delight. He was my talking dog. He had more different tones in his bark than any other dog I ever knew. He never came to the collar in the morning, he never was released from it at night, without a cheery "bow-wow-wow." And we never stopped finally to make camp but he lifted up his voice. There was something curious about that. Only two nights before, when we had been unable to reach the health resort owing to wind-hardened drifts right across the trail that overturned the heavy sled again and again, swing the gee pole as one would, and had stopped several times in the growing dusk to inspect a spot that seemed to promise a camping place, Arthur had remarked that Nanook never spoke until the spot was reached on which we decided to pitch the tent. What faculty he had of recognising a good place, of seeing that both green spruce and dry spruce were there in sufficient quantity, I do not know—or whether he got his cue from the tones of our voice—but he never failed to give tongue when the stop was final and never opened his mouth when it was but tentative.
I could almost tell the nature of any disturbance that arose from the tone of Nanook's bark. Was it some stray Indian dog prowling round the camp; was it the distant howling of wolves; was it the approach of some belated traveller—there was a distinct difference in the way he announced each. I well remember the new note thatcame into his passionate protest when he was chained to a stump at the reindeer camp, and the foolish creatures streamed all over the camping-ground that night. To have them right beside him and yet be unable to reach them, to have them brushing him with their antlers while he strained helplessly at the chain, was adding insult to injury. And he kept me awake over it all night and told me about it at intervals all next day.
The coat that dog had was the heaviest and thickest I ever saw. On his back the long hair parted in the middle, and underneath the hair was fur and underneath the fur was wool. He was an outdoors dog strictly. It was only in the last year or two that he could be induced voluntarily to enter a house; he seemed, like Mowgli, to have a suspicion of houses. And if he did come in he had no respect for the house at all. When first I had him he would dig and scratch out of a dog-house on the coldest night, if he could, and lay himself down comfortably on the snow. Cold meant little to him. Fifty, sixty, seventy below zero, all night long at such temperatures he would sleep quite contentedly. The only difference I could see that these low temperatures made to him was an increasing dislike to be disturbed. When he had carefully tucked his nose between his paws and adjusted his tail over all, he had gone to bed, and to make him take his nose out of its nest and uncurl himself was like throwing the clothes off a sleeping man. He never dug a hole for himself in the snow. I never saw a dog do that yet. In my opinion that is one of the nature-faker's stories. A dog lies in snow just as he lies in sand, with thesame preliminary turn-round-three-times that has been so much speculated about. We always make a bed for them, when it is very cold, by cutting and stripping a few spruce boughs, and they highly appreciate such a couch and will growl and fight if another dog try to take it. They need more food and particularly they need more fat when they lie out at extreme low temperatures, and we seek to increase that element in their rations by adding tallow or bacon or bear's-grease—or seal oil—or whatever oleaginous substance we can come by.
CANINE CHARACTER
He was a most independent dog was Nanook, a thoroughly bad dog, as one would say in some use of that term—a thief who had no shame in his thievery but rather gloried in it. If you left anything edible within his ingenious and comprehensive reach he regarded it as a challenge. There comes to me a ludicrous incident that concerned a companion of one winter journey. He had carefully prepared a lunch and had wrapped it neatly in paper, and he placed it for a moment on the sled while he turned to put his scarf about him. But in that moment Nanook saw it and it was gone. Through the snow, over the brush, in and out amongst the stumps the chase proceeded, until Nanook was finally caught and my companion recovered most of the paper, for the dog had wolfed the grub as he ran. He would stand and take any licking you offered and never utter a sound but give a bark of defiance when you were done, and he would bear you no ill will in the world and repeat his offence at the next opportunity. Yet so absurdly sensitive was he in other matters of his person that the simple operationof clipping the hair from between his toes, to prevent the "balling-up" of the snow, took two men to perform, one to sit on the dog and the other to ply the scissors, and was accompanied always with such howls and squeals as would make a hearer think we were flaying him alive.
Nanook's acquaintance with horses began in Fairbanks the first season I owned him, before I had had the harness upon him, when he was rising two years old. The dogs and I were staying at the hospital we had just established—because in those days there was nowhere else to stay—waiting for the winter. One of the mining magnates of the infancy of the camp (broken and dead long since; Bret Harte's lines, "Busted himself in White Pine and blew out his brains down in 'Frisco," often occur to me as the sordid histories of to-day repeat those of fifty years ago) had imported a saddle-horse and, as the mild days of that charming autumn still deferred the snow, he used to ride out past the hospital for a canter.
The dog had learned to lift the latch of the gate of the hospital yard with his nose and get out, and when I put a wedge above the latch for greater security he learned also to circumvent that precaution. And whenever the horse and his rider passed, Nanook would open the gate and lead the whole pack in a noisy pursuit that changed the canter to a run and brought us natural but mortifying remonstrance.
The rider had just passed and the dogs had pursued as usual, and I had rushed out and recalled them with difficulty. Nanook I had by the collar. Dragging him into the yard, shutting the gate, and putting in the wedge,I picked up a stick and gave him a few sharp blows with it. Then flinging him off, I said: "Now, you stay in here; I'll give you a sound thrashing if you do that again!" I was just getting acquainted with him then. The moment I loosed his collar the dog went deliberately to the gate, stood on his hind legs while he pulled out the wedge with his teeth, lifted the latch with his nose and swung open the gate, and standing in the midst turned round and said to me: "Bow-wow-wow-wow-wow-wow!" It was so pointed that a passer-by, who had paused to see the proceedings and was leaning on the fence, said to me: "Well, you know whereyoucan go to. That's the doggonedest dog I ever seen!"
PARTNERS
It was a pleasure to come back to Nanook after any long absence—a pleasure I was used to look forward to. There was no special fawning or demonstration of affection; he was not that kind; that I might have from any of the others; but from none but Nanook the bark of welcome with my particular inflection in it that no one else ever got. "Well, well; here's the boss again; glad to see you back"; that was about all it said. For he was a most independent dog and took to himself an air of partnership rather than subjection. Any man can make friends with any dog if he will, there is no question about that, but it takes a long time and mutual trust and mutual forbearance and mutual appreciation to make a partnership. Not every dog is fit to be partner with a man; nor every man, I think, fit to be partner with a dog.
Well, that long partnership was dissolved by thehorse's hoof and I was sore for its dissolution. There was none left now that could remember the old days of the team save Lingo, and he grew crusty and somewhat crabbed. He was still the guardian of the sled, still the insatiable hand-shaker, but he grew more and more unsocial with his mates, and we heard his short, sharp, angry double bark at night more frequently than we used to. He reminded me of the complaining owl in Gray's "Elegy." He resented any dog even approaching the sled, resented the dogs moving about at all to disturb his "ancient solitary reign."
His work was well-nigh done, and old Lingo had honestly earned his rest. With the end of this winter he would enter upon the easy old age that I had designed for both of them. Lingo had never failed me; never let his traces slack if he could keep them taut, never in his life had whip laid on his back to make him pull; a faithful old work dog for whom I had a hearty respect and regard. But he never found his way to my heart as Nanook did. I loved Nanook, and had lost something personal out of my life in losing him. There are other dogs that I am fond of—better dogs in some ways that either Nanook or Lingo, swifter certainly—but I think I shall never have two dogs again that have meant as much to me as these two. All the other dogs were of the last two years and thought they belonged to Arthur, who fed them and handled them most. But Nanook and Lingo had seen boys come and boys go, and they knew better.
Six years is not very much of a man's life, but it is all a dog's life; all his effective working life. Nanook hadgiven it all to me, willingly, gladly. He pulled so freely because he loved to pull. He delighted in the winter, in the snow and the cold; rejoiced to be on the trail, rejoiced to work. When we made ready to depart after a few days at a mission or in a town, Nanook was beside himself with joy. He would burst forth into song as he saw the preparations in hand, would run all up and down the gamut of his singular flexible voice, would tell as plainly to all around as though he spoke it in English and Indian and Esquimau that the inaction had irked him, that he was eager to be gone again.
Well, he was dead; as fine a dog as ever lived; as faithful and intelligent a creature as any man ever had, not of human race, for servant, companion, and friend. And I thought the more of myself that he had put his tongue to my cheek when I said good-bye to him.
THE AMATEUR PHOTOGRAPHER
Here on the Tanana was one of the most interesting original characters of the many in the land: an old inhabitant of Alaska and of the Northwest who had followed many avocations and was now settled down on the river bank, with a steamboat wood-yard, a road-house for the entertainment of occasional travellers, and a little stock of trade goods chiefly for Indians of the vicinity. A round, fat, pursy man he was, past the middle life, with a twinkling eye and a bristling moustache, and a most amazing knack of picking up new words and using them incorrectly. He had fallen out with the great trading company of Alaska and did almost all his purchasing from a "mail-order house" in Chicago, theenormous quarto catalogue on the flimsiest thin paper issued by that establishment being his chief book of reference and his choice continual reading. He would declaim by the hour on the iniquitous prices that prevail in the interior and had the quotations of prices of every conceivable merchandise from hisvade mecumat his fingers' ends.
But his chief passion of the past two or three years was photography, in the which he had made but little progress, despite considerable expenditures; and he had come to the conclusion about the time of our visit that what he needed was a fine lens, although, as a matter of fact, he had never learned to use his cheap one. He had recently become acquainted with sensitive film and had ordered a supply. By a transposition of letters, which the nature of the substance doubtless confirmed in his mind when it arrived, he always spoke of these convenient strips of celluloid as "flims," and was just now most eloquently indignant that, although he had broken utterly with the Northern Commercial Company and refused to trade with them at all, the supply of "flims" he had received from the mail-order house were labelled "N. C." "Them blamed monopolists has cornered the flims," he exclaimed, and was hardly persuaded that the letters signified "non-curling" and did not darkly hint at a conspiracy in restraint of trade.
He produced and displayed a number of pieces of apparatus of a generally useless kind which he had ordered on the strength of their much advertising, and he observed sententiously, "Wearmaturesget badly imposedupon." Here were patent gimcrack printing devices, although he had scarce anything worth printing; all sorts of atrocious fancy borders with which he sought in vain to embellish out-of-focus under-exposures; orthochromatic filters and colour screens with which he was eliminating undesirable rays, although the chief thing his negatives lacked was light of any kind. His soiled and stained development trays were scattered about a large table amidst dirty cups and saucers and plates and dishes, while at the other end of the table, surmounting a pile of thumbed and greasy magazines and newspapers, lay the monstrous mail-order catalogue with pencilled indications of further apparatus to be purchased.
But his zeal and enthusiasm and resolute riding of his hobby were very attractive. If he ever gets out of his head the notion that success depends upon apparatus he will doubtless become a photographer of sorts. Enthusiasm of any kind other than mining and "mushing" enthusiasm is so rare in this land that it is welcome even when it seems wasted. He had recently discovered the wax match in his catalogue, and as a parting gift he presented me with a box of "them there waxvesperswhich beats the sulphur match all to thunder."