Jan: A Dog and a Romance Part 14

Well, it would make little odds to Jan; if only these people would hurry up about taking him to his own man.

Thinking of that, Jan quite gladly made the best of the very cramped quarters given him in the buggy, though he grew desperately tired of those same quarters before night fell and he was transferred to the more roomy dog-box of a Canadian Northern train. Without doubt the train would take him direct to d.i.c.k. (Until the previous day, his sole experience of trains in Canada had been closely connected with d.i.c.k.) So confident was Jan of this, that he bent himself quite cheerfully to the task of tearing and eating the lump of meat given him by Jean before the train started. Evidently this Jean was a friendly, well-disposed sort of a person, and in any case any man at all engaged in taking Jan to d.i.c.k Vaughan deserved ready obedience and respect.

In some such way Jan reflected what time the C.N.R. train by which he traveled rumbled swiftly along its course for Edmonton; and d.i.c.k Vaughan, away back in Buck's Crossing, wondered what might be delaying the wagoner from Lambert's Siding; the wagoner he was not to see before the middle of the next day, and then only to learn that the man knew nothing of Jan's whereabouts.

When Jan left that train in the big crowded depot at Edmonton next day, winter had descended upon the greater part of North America. The change was the more marked for Jan by reason that snow had come to Edmonton a full day earlier than it came to Lambert's Siding. Jan had seen snow before on the Suss.e.x Downs; but that had been a kind of snow quite different from this. That snow had been soft and clammy. This was crisp and dry as salt. Also the air was colder than any air Jan had ever known, though mild enough for northern winter air, seeing that the thermometer registered only some five and twenty degrees of frost. And the sun shone brightly. There was no wind. It was an air rich in kindling, stimulating properties; an air that made life, movement, and activity desirable for all, and optimistic determination easy and natural for most folk.

"By gar!" said Jean to his friend Jake, as together they led Jan from the train. "You mark me now what I say, thees Jan he's got all them huskies beat beefore he start. Eh? Hee's great dog, thees Jan."

Jake nodded, and the three of them strode on through the dry powdery snow. One knew by their walk that these men had covered great distances on their feet. Their knees swung easily to every stride, with a hint of the dip that comes from long use of snow-shoes. For a little while Jan hardly thought of d.i.c.k Vaughan, so busy was he in absorbing new impressions. But when the walk had lasted almost an hour, he began again to wonder about d.i.c.k, and his deep-pouched eyes took on once more the set look of waiting watchfulness which meant that he was hoping at any moment to sight his man.

And then they came to a small wooden house with a large barn and a sod-walled stable beside it. Jan's chain was. .h.i.tched round a stout center post in the barn, and there he was left. Later Jean brought him a tin dish of water and a big lump of dried fish which had had some warm fat smeared over it, Jean having rightly guessed that it was Jan's first experience of this form of dog-food. The fat was well enough, and Jan licked it rather languidly. But the fish did not appeal to him, and so he left it and went off to sleep, little thinking that he would get no other kind of food than this for many days to come.

Toward the middle of the next day, Jan, feeling cramped and rather miserable as the result of his unaccustomed confinement, changed his mind about that fish and ate it; slowly, and without enjoyment, but yet with some benefit to himself. Less than an hour later Jean entered to him, carrying in his hands a contrivance of leather, with long trailing ends.

For a minute or so Jean stood looking down upon Jan appraisingly. There was no better judge of a dog--from one standpoint--in that part of Canada.

"By gar!" he muttered between his teeth. "That Sergeant Moore hee's a queer cuss, sure 'nuff, to give away a dog like thees for nothing; and then, by gar, to pay me ten dollar for takin' heem."

Then he stooped down and rubbed Jan's ears, with a friendly, knowledgeable way he had.

"Ah, you, Jan," he said, cheerily. "Here's your harness. Here, good dog, I show you."

And he proceeded to buckle a set of dog-harness about Jan's ma.s.sive chest and shoulders. In doing so he noticed for the first time d.i.c.k's st.i.tches in the hound's dewlap and shoulders.

"By gar!" he said, with a grin. "You bin fightin', Jan, eh? Ah, well, take care, Jan. We get no nursin' after fightin' here. Bes' leave that job to the huskies, Jan. Come on--good dog."

A hundred yards away, on the far side of the shack, Jan came upon the first dog-sled he had ever seen, with a team of seven dogs attached, now lying resting on the dry snow. They were a mixed team, four of them unmistakable huskies, one with collie characteristics, one having Newfoundland blood (through many crosses), and one, the leader, having the look of something midway between a big powerful Airedale and an old English sheep-dog, including the bobtail. This leader, Bill, as he was called, had the air of a master-worker, and was the only member of the pack (except the wheeler) who did not snarl as Jan was led toward them.

With the dogs was Jake, wearing a deep fur cap that came well down over the tops of his ears. In one hand Jake held a short-hafted whip with a rawhide thong, the point of which he could put through a dog's coat from ten paces distant.

"Take Mixer out an' put heem in behind Bill," said Jean. "We'll try Jan in front of old Blackfoot."

It was not without thought, and kindly thought, that Jean ordered this arrangement, for Blackfoot, though old and scarred, a trail-worn veteran, had not a spark of unkindness in his composition. He was the dog with Newfoundland blood in him, who, like Bill the leader, and unlike the rest of the pack, had not snarled at sight of Jan. He even held out a friendly muzzle in welcome as, rather reluctantly, Jan allowed himself to be led to his place in front of Blackfoot. The husky who filled the next forward place wheeled about as far as he could in the traces and snapped viciously at Jan.

"Ah, Snip!" said Jean, quite pleasantly. But even as he spoke so pleasantly, the whip he had picked up sang, and its thong, doubled, landed fair and square in Snip's face, causing that worthy to whirl back to his place with a yowl of consternation.

Jan was just beginning to think that he had put up with enough of this sort of thing, and that he would leave these men and their dogs altogether, when he heard a peremptory order given by Jean and felt himself jerked forward by means of the harness he wore. In the same moment Blackfoot's teeth nipped one of his hocks from behind, not savagely, but yet sharply, and he bounded forward till checked by the proximity of Snip's stern. He had no wish to touch Snip. But Snip also was bounding forward it seemed. So Jan thrust out his fore feet and checked. Instantly two things happened. A whip-lash curled painfully round his left shoulder, crossing one of his newly healed wounds. And again came a nip at one of his hocks, a sharper nip this time, and one that drew two spots of blood.

"Mush, Jan! Mush on there!" said Jean, firmly, but not harshly; and again the whip curled about Jan's shoulders as, puzzled, humiliated, hurt, and above all bewildered, he plunged forward again in the traces, and heard Jean mutter behind him:

"Good dog, thees Jan. By gar! hee's good dog."

And that was how the new life, the working life, began for Jan, the son of Finn and Desdemona.

XXVI

THE RULE OF TRACE AND THONG

From this point there began for Jan a life so strangely, wildly different from anything he had ever known or suspected to exist, that only a dog of exceptionable fiber and stamina--in character as well as physique--could possibly have survived transition to it from the smooth routines which Jan had so far known.

To begin with, it was a life in which all days alike were full of toil, of ordered, unremitting work. And until it began Jan had never done an hour's work in his life. (In England, outside the sheep-dog fraternity and a few of the sporting breeds, all dogs spend their lives in unordered play, uncontrolled loafing, and largely superfluous sleeping.)

The Lady Desdemona, his mother, for example, would certainly not have lived through a month of Jan's present life; very possibly not a week.

Finn would have endured it much longer, because of his experiences in Australia, his knowledge of the wild kindred and their ways. But even Finn, despite his huge strength and exceptional knowledge, would not have come through this ordeal so well as Jan did, unless it had come to him as early in life as it came to Jan. And even then his survival would have been doubtful. The difference between the climates of Australia and the North-west Territory is hardly greater than the difference in stress and hardness between Finn's life in the Tinnaburra ranges, as leader of a dingo pack, and Jan's life in North-west Canada as learner in a sled-team.

The physical strength of Finn the wolfhound, in whose veins ran the unmixed blood of many generations of wolfhound champions, might have been equal to the strain of Jan's new life. But his pride, his courtliness, his fine gentlemanliness, would likely have been the death of him in such a case. He would have died n.o.bly, be sure of that. But it is likely he would have died. Now in the case of Jan, while he had inherited much of his sire's fine courtesy, much of his dam's n.o.ble dignity, yet these things were not so vitally of the essence of him as they were of his parents. They were a part of his character, and they had formed his manners. But they were not Jan.

The essential Jan was an immensely powerful hound of mixed blood reared carefully, trained intelligently and well, and endowed from birth with a tremendously keen appet.i.te for life--a keener appet.i.te for life than falls to the lot of any champion-bred wolfhound or bloodhound. Jan was a gentleman rather than a fine gentleman; before either he was a hound, a dog; and before all else he was a master and lover of his life. And since, by the arrangements of Sergeant Moore, "Tom Smith," Jean, and Jake, he had to take his place between Snip and Blackfoot in a sled-team, it was well, exceedingly well, for Jan that these things were thus and not otherwise.

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 ma.s.sive 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 appet.i.te, 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 b.u.t.t 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 appet.i.te 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.

XXVII

MUTINY IN THE TEAM

Jean made sure he would sell Jan at Fort Frontenac. And that he did not was due to accidental causes over which he had no control.

Jean asked three hundred dollars. The would-be buyer--a man pretty nearly as able as Jean himself in northland craft--had only two hundred in cash; but possessed, besides, an invincible objection to owing or borrowing. (Resembling Jean in his knowledge of the wild, he was curiously different in most other ways, having a good deal of sentiment and a keen, almost conventional sense of honor.)

"He's worth three hundred, all right," said the man--who hailed from New England--when he had seen Jan at work.