knew, it meant death for Jan or for Bill. They were quite content in
their knowledge. But Jean could not conceivably have found content in
any prospect involving himself in monetary loss; for that would have
been contrary to the only guiding principles he knew. Pride in his own
unfailing knowledge of dogs and life in the north helped to make Jean
establish Jan as leader of the team. But if he could have foreseen
monetary loss in the arrangement, his pride had assuredly been called
down and Bill re-established in the lead.
Jean saw that Jan made an exceptionally fine leader. There was no sort
of doubt about it. He set a tremendously high working standard, and
hustled the team into accepting it by the exercise of an almost
uncannily far-seeing severity. Nothing escaped him, least of all a hint
of any kind of shirking. He was quicker than Jean's whip, more sure, and
more compelling. But while Jean saw all this, and more, with genuine
admiration for Jan, and for his own astuteness in foretelling this
exceptional capacity and acquiring ownership of the hound, he also saw,
with angry puzzlement, that his team was falling off in condition and in
efficiency as a unit.
It was not that the leader lacked either justice or discretion in his
fiery severity. Jan displayed both to a miracle. But the team had to
live between his severity while at work, and Bill's bitter and tireless
persecution and crafty incendiarism outside the traces. Over all, for
their consolation, were the whips of the masters. But so infernally
crafty was Bill, that he never once allowed the masters to detect the
real wickedness of the part he played. They could see poor Blackfoot's
bleeding hocks: "We got to call heem Redleg soon. Damn that Beel!"--but
they could not see Bill's continuous crafty incitements to mutiny, or
the hundred and one ways in which he strove, when out of harness, to
work up hatred of Jan among his mates, or when in harness to play subtle
tricks which should produce an effect discreditable to the new leader.
Intuitively Jan became aware of most of these things. But even where he
detected Bill at fault, he could not trounce the ex-leader as he
trounced the other dogs, because he and Bill knew very well that there
could be no sparring, no such lightsome thing as mere chastisement,
between them. There was war to the death in Bill's snarl when Jan so
much as looked at him. He was perfectly certain he could, and would,
kill Jan directly a suitable opportunity offered. Jan was not so sure
about that; but he did know very well that he was not capable of just
thrashing Bill and letting it go at that; for over and above Bill's
unbeaten prowess as a fighter and master dog there was a mortal hatred
in him where Jan was concerned--a hatred which, weighed as a fighting
asset, was almost equivalent to a second set of fangs.
And then came the memorable evening upon which Jean killed a bull-moose
and all the team fed full--except Bill.
XXVIII
THE FEAST AND THE FASTER
Jean and Jake were not out on a hunting expedition, and if it had
involved hunting, the probabilities are Jean would never have bagged
that bull-moose. But it happened that, when his sharp eyes sighted the
moose in mid-afternoon, the poor beast had just managed to break one of
its forelegs in a deep hole masked by snow. It was practically a sitting
shot for Jean, and that at a range which made missing impossible for
such a man.
The dogs were wild with excitement, but fortunately they were still in
the traces and anchored to a laden sled. In spite of this there was
something of a stampede among them until Jean made it clear that he
meant the team to remain in harness for the present. Then the masters'
whips, backed by policeman Jan's remorseless fangs, soon had order
re-established. And this was as well, for at that particular juncture
Jean and Jake were traveling fairly light, and a strong team can quickly
work serious damage by stampeding among trees with a light sled.
When Jean had examined the moose, he decided to avail himself of the
magnificent supply of fresh food it offered, and to carry on as large a
share of the meat when frozen as the sled would take. To this end he and
Jake decided to camp for the night at a spot no more than a few hundred
paces away from the dead moose. The dogs were too much excited to lie
down in their traces. (It was many weeks since any of them had tasted
fresh meat, and though dried salmon makes an excellent working dietary,
it is, of course, a very different thing from fresh meat with blood in
it.) So they stood and sat erect, with parted jaws all drooling, while
Jean and Jake set to work with their long knives on the great carcass.
The cutting up of a full-grown moose is no light task, and darkness had
fallen before the two men had finished stowing away all the heavy frozen
strips of moose-meat the sled could carry. Then, having removed the
choicest portions for their own use for that night and the next day,
Jean and Jake set to work to loose the dogs that they might tackle their
banquet. Jean knew the eight of them could give a pretty good account of
the remains on the skeleton.
According to custom the leader was the first dog loosed. Jan made a
bee-line for the skeleton. Within a few seconds six other dogs were
streaking across the intervening stretch of soft snow between the camp
and the belt of timber in which the moose had fallen. But the seventh
dog, Bill--though his jaws had been dripping eagerness like all the rest
of them--walked slowly in the same direction as though food were a
matter of indifference to him.
"What in hell's the matter with that Bill?" said Jake. "Seems like as if
he's full, but he can't be."
"Beel, hee's an angry dog for sure," said Jean, with a grin.
"Looks 'most as if he's sick," said Jake.
"H'm! Hate-seeck, mebbe," replied Jean, as the two turned to the task of
preparing their own supper.
As a fact no dog was ever more fit or more perfectly self-controlled
than Bill was at that moment. In his own good time and with a most
singular deliberateness he did set his teeth in fresh moose. But he did
it much as house-dogs in the world of civilization put their noses into
their well-filled dinner-dishes, with a deliberate absence of gusto
which would have simply astounded any understanding observer who could
have seen it. The other seven dogs were blissfully unconscious of
anything under heaven outside their own ravening lust of flesh. In a
temperature well below zero, the lure of fresh-killed meat at the end of
fourteen hundred miles of solid pulling, and five or six weeks of fish
rations, is a force the strength of which cannot easily be conceived by
livers of the sheltered life. It is the pull of an overwhelming strong
passion.
And Bill, the deposed leader of the team, just nosed and tasted with the
calm indifferent temperateness of an English house-dog; while every
organ of his supremely healthy body ached with a veritable neuralgia of
longing for red meat.
The rest of the team, including Jan, fed like wolves; indeed, some of
them were literally but one or two removes from the wolf, and all of
them had of late lived a life which brings any dog very close to the
wolf in his habits and instincts. It is a life which, so far as his
instincts are concerned, carries a dog back and back through innumerable
generations till his contact with his primeval ancestors is very close
and real.
They fed like hungry wolves, and their feeding was not a pretty sight.
When in his ravenous guzzling one dog's nose chanced to be thrust at all
nearly to another's, there would arise a horrid sound of half-choked
snarling; the fierce hissing rattle of snarls which came from flesh and
blood-glutted jaws. Obeying instincts to the full as strong as any human
passion which has ever gone to the making of tragedy, these working-dogs
made a wild orgy of their feast. They wantoned and they wallowed in
their perfectly natural gluttony. Having fed full and overfull, they
desired more by reason of their long hunger for meat and the hard vigor
of their lives. The last remains of flesh exhausted, they gnawed and
tugged at bones, each snarling still, though half exhausted, whenever
other fangs than his own touched a chosen bone.
And Bill, despite the flame of desire in his bowels, just nosed and
tasted, eating no more than an ordinary workaday ration. Long before the
final stage of bone-gnawing he actually walked away and curled himself
down at the roots of a big spruce where the ground rose slightly, some
fifty paces distant from the place of orgy.
A couple of hundred yards away, by the shelter of their fire, Jean and
Jake composed themselves to rest and smoke; for they also had fed full.
One by one even the lustiest of the dogs forsook the bones, drawing back
heavily, lazily licking their chops. The dense calm of satiety descended
slowly upon all the visible life-shapes in that place like the fumes of
some potent narcotic--upon all forms of life save one. Bill, curled at
the root of his spruce, had within him a blazing fire of life and
activity which no earthly force could slake while his breath remained to
fan it. But the rest of the world slept.
The moon that night was too young to shed much light. But just after
Jean and Jake sleepily laid aside their pipes and closed their eyes, the
aurora borealis flamed out icily in a clear sky, bringing more than all
the light Bill needed. In that frozen stillness Bill's brain was like
the interior of a lighted factory with all its machinery in full swing.
Fed by hate and slowly accumulated stores of bitter anger, his thoughts
went throbbing in and out the lighted convolutions of his brain with the
silent positive efficiency of a gas-engine's pistons.
Bill understood everything in the world that night in his own world, and
he overlooked nothing. He would have given much, very much, to have been
able to remove Jean's camp a mile or so away. The belt of open
snow-space between it and him was all too narrow for his liking. Well he
knew how swiftly Jean could move, how certainly he could strike when the
need arose. But for this Bill had done murder that night, as surely as
ever softly treading human desperado in the dead of night has done
murder at a bedside. As it was he thought he must fight. Well, he was
prepared. Nay, his bowels yearned for it just as strongly as any dog's
bowels had yearned for fresh-killed meat that night. More strongly, for
in him the one yearning had mastered and ridden down the other yearning,
thus giving him his perfect preparation.
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.
And now, toward the end of Jan's twentieth or thirtieth move, when his
subconsciousness was simply one ache of continuous boding discomfort,
while still his outer consciousness barely permitted the lifting of his
heavy eyelids, now Bill, that incarnation of calculating watchfulness,
gathered up his magnificent muscles for the act which should bring the
first instalment of his reward, the guerdon of his season of
super-canine self-mastery. In another second or so Jan would sink down
again to sleep. Bill did not snarl or growl. He needed no trumpet-call.
He made no more sound than a cat makes in leaping for a bird. Yet he
rushed upon the blinking, half-comatose Jan as though impelled thereto
from the mouth of a spring cannon.
There was no possibility that in his then condition Jan could withstand
the shock of that furious impact. And he did not. Indeed, he spun
through the air feet uppermost, and Bill, in his eyes a cold flame of
elation, knew that when he did reach earth it would be to yield the
throat-hold at which your fighting-dog always aims, and to die the death
which he, Bill, had long pictured for the usurper of his office.
XXIX
THE FIGHT IN THE WOODS
The one thing for which Bill had made no allowance was the thing of
which he could not possibly have any knowledge; the strength of Jan's
subconscious self which had now been wide awake for some time.
During the fraction of time which Jan's body spent in mid-air this
subconscious self of his worked several miracles simultaneously. It
jagged the whole of Jan's outer consciousness into the widest
wakefulness. It explained to him the inner meaning of most things that
had happened since Jean shot the moose. And acting through a muscular
system which, always fine, had been made well-nigh perfect during the
past six weeks, it succeeded in accomplishing the patently impossible
and bringing Jan to earth again almost erect, certainly on his four feet
and with spread jaws pointing toward Bill--instead of landing him on the
broad of his back where Bill had quite properly and logically expected
to see him.
Now began the fight between Bill and Jan, ex-leader and leader; the
veteran northland dog, comparatively empty and exquisitely poised and
prepared; and the new-comer from the outside world, terribly full,
heavy, and unprepared. All, or nearly all, had fallen out as Bill had
planned. Their distance from the camp was a safe one; Jan was grossly
bloated and he, Bill, was in quite perfect fighting trim.
Only one thing was wrong: Jan ought, by all the calculations of his
enemy, to be lying feet up with his throat exposed; and instead he was
standing, and as it happened, on slightly raised ground, waiting with
dripping jaws for Bill's attack. Bill knew not fear. His brain was as
brilliantly lighted, his furnace of hate as hot within him, as ever.
But--the new-wakened Jan's snarl was certainly terrific, and his bulk,
as he stood there with erect stern, bristling hackles, high-lifted lips,
and legs planted like buttresses--the bulk of him was immense.
"Come on!" his roaring snarl seemed to say. And fiery Bill, like a
wrestler, pranced to and fro for an opening. Rage filled him to the
throat, but never for an instant did it cloud his vision. Jan's instinct
kept him still, warning him that he was too heavy now for the lightning
footwork of the wolves, that his sole chance lay in his strength, and
that by the same token his strength must be conserved.
Whoof! Tsss!
Jan's right ear hung in two separate flaps. Valiantly he strove to
extort some penalty by thrust of massive shoulder and clash of fangs.
But Bill to all seeming was twice his own length away in the same
instant that he flashed in to the attack. Jan breathed hard in a defiant
snarl.
Hup! Grrrr!
The massive shoulder which had missed its thrust was cut clear into the
bone, a groove four inches long, and in the selfsame fraction of a
second the catlike Bill, from two lengths distant, darted his red tongue
in and out at Jan in cold ribaldry.
A little show of temper now on Jan's part had been a thing of priceless
worth to Bill. Indeed, it was the ex-leader's one desire, its
provocation his sole objective for the moment. This it was that drew his
pointed red tongue in and out like a flame, this the tuning-fork that
gave his snarl its key; the note of insolent, jeering defiance.
"You hog! You're bloated. Ungainly beast, I can bleed you when and where
I will. Take that!" snarled Bill, as he flashed in again, tearing clean
away a little section of soft-coated fine skin from the left side of
Jan's dewlap, where Desdemona's blood in him left him but lightly
covered.
(In the bloodhound the skin is very loose and fine in texture all about
the head and flews and dewlap. In Jan it hardened quickly on the neck,
where the mat of his dense coat thickened.)
Again and again, not fewer than a dozen times in all, Bill drank deep of
sheer delight as he flashed in and out upon Jan, drawing blood every
single time, reaching bone more than once or twice, and winning back to
safety without the loss of so much as one hair.
Jan no longer snarled. He had no breath to waste. He was standing to his
fearsome punishment like a bulldog now. And like a bulldog he seemed, in
a heavy, dogged way, and almost to glory in the bitter thrusts he took.
Then Bill overstepped himself. Striving to win a second bite from the
one rush, he got the full thrust of Jan's bloody right shoulder so
shrewdly directed that Bill went down under it as corn under a sickle.
So far so good for Jan; and by good rights that thrust should have given
him his lead to victory. But the plain truth is Jan was too full of
moose-meat. He plunged down and forward for the throat-hold--appreciably
too late--and lost more than blood and fur from his flank as Bill
wheeled into action again without any apparent loss of poise, though he
had turned completely over on the snow.
Jan breathed like a bull as he resumed the defensive; and like a bull he
lowered his head with a swaying motion as though to ease his labored
breathing and drain his jaws of the spume that clogged them. He was
bleeding now from more than a dozen wounds. The frost nipped those
wounds stingingly. The hard trampled snow about his feet was flecked
with blood and foam--his life-blood, his foam. Bill remained unscathed
and to all seeming as coldly calculating as ever.
At this stage a backer of Jan (if any such reckless wight existed) might
easily have booked a hundred to one against the big hound from an
audience of experienced northland men, had any been there to see this
wonderful fray. It seemed a breathless business enough, with never a
moment for anything like reflection. But of a truth, as Jan swung his
massive head now in a gesture which added blazing coals to the fire of
triumphant hate in Bill, his mind was busy with a mort of curious
things. There were many differences between Jan and the average dog, and
this illustrated one of them. As he stood heavily swaying to Bill's
lightning attacks, he saw pictures in his busy mind through a mist of
blood; pictures that made the whole business of this fight far more
terrible for him than it would have been for most dogs.
The dominating picture Jan saw, and the one that kept forcing itself
forward upon the screen of his imagination through and over all the
others that came and went, was a picture of himself on his back in the
trampled snow. Bill's jaws were at his throat in this picture, and his
blood ebbed out, an awful tide, flooding the snow with its crimson for
as far as he could see. And then the picture moved and showed him the
satisfied, triumphant Bill, walking proudly away to the camp to his
regained leadership; and himself, Jan, stark, helpless, dead, in that
forsaken clear patch in the woods with only the cold gleam of the aurora
borealis to bear him company.
Another picture showed him the stripped framework of the moose and his
own reckless feasting there with the rest of the pack, while Bill,
pitilessly far-seeing Bill, watched them and abstained. Jan saw it all
now and gulped upon his bitterness as he realized how cunningly it had
all been planned, and just why it was that, while his enemy seemed made
of steel springs actuated by electricity, he, Jan, was heavy and clumsy
as an English house-dog.
So that was the way of this bloody business thought Jan as, swifter than
a bullet, Bill registered another visit to his streaming right shoulder.
There was no trace left now of that queer stubborn sort of bulldog glory
in the endurance of punishment which Jan had shown during the first
half-dozen attacks. His stern was still erect, bladelike, his hackles
almost as stiff as before. But the flame of his deep-hawed and now
glazing eyes had died down to a dim red smolder; his hard breathing
spared nothing for a snarl now, and his head and body movements were, if
anything, a little slower than before.