His tone was conversational. Jan gave a short, low bark; and in the same
moment the five huskies flung themselves into their collars behind him.
The sled--its runners already tight frozen--creaked, jerked, and slid
forward just eight feet. Jan let out a low, warning growl. The team
stood still without a word from its owner.
"Say, does he talk?" asked a bystander. And then, with a chuckle: "Use a
knife an' fork to his grub, Jim?"
"Oh, as to that," said Willis, "he don't need to do no talkin'. He can
make any husky understand without talk; an' when that husky understands,
if he won't do as Jan says, Jan'll smother him, quick an' lively."
As Jan stood now at the head of his team, awaiting final orders, he
formed a picture of perfect canine health and fitness. He represented
most of a northlander's ideals and dreams of what a sled-dog should be,
plus certain other qualities that came to him from his breeding, and
that no dog-musher would have even hoped for in a sled-dog: his immense
size, for example, and his wonderful dignity and grace of form and
action.
Jan never had been so superlatively fit; so instinct in every least hair
of his coat, in every littlest vein of his body, with tingling life and
pulsing energy. His coat crackled if a man's hand was passed along his
black saddle.
Despite the lissom grace of all his motions, Jan moved every limb with a
kind of exuberant snap, as though his strength spilled over from its
superabundance, and had to be expended at every opportunity to avoid
surcharge. His movements formed his safety-valve, you fancied. Robbed of
these, his abounding vitality would surely burst through the cage of his
great body in some way, and destroy him. He walked as though the forces
of gravitation were but barely sufficient to tether him down to mother
earth.
"And I reckon he weighs near a hundred and sixty," said Willis; a guess
the store scales proved good that night, when Jan registered exactly one
hundred and fifty-seven pounds, though he carried no fat, nor an ounce
of any kind of waste material.
XXXIV
THE PEACE RIVER TRAIL
Winter set in with unusual rigor, the temperature dropping after heavy
snow to fifty below zero, and hovering between thirty and sixty below
for weeks together.
Jim Willis and his sled-team lived on a practically "straight" meat
diet. Jan had forgotten the taste of sun-dried salmon, and men and dogs
together were living now on moose-meat chopped with an ax from the slabs
and chunks that were stowed away on the sled. Willis occasionally
treated himself to a dish of boiled beans, and when fortune favored he
ate ptarmigan. But moose-meat was the staple for man and dogs alike.
For months the valleys they had traversed had been rich in game. But in
the northland the movements of game are mysterious and unaccountable;
and now, in a bleak and gloomy stretch of country north of the Caribou
Mountains, they had seen no trace of life of any kind for a fortnight
except wolves. And of these, by day and by night, Jim Willis had seen
and heard more than he cared about. It seemed the brutes had come from
country quite unlike the valleys Willis had traveled, and resembling
more nearly that in which he now found himself. For these wolves were
gaunt and poor, and the absence of game made them more than normally
audacious. So far from seeking to avoid man and his dogs, they seemed to
infest Willis's trail, ranging emptily and wistfully to his rear and
upon either side as hungry sharks patrol a ship's wake.
The circumstances would have had little enough of significance for
Willis, but for an accident which befell just before the cold snap set
in. Hastening along the track of a moose he had already mortally
wounded, beside one of the tributaries of the Mackenzie, Willis had had
the misfortune to take a false step among half-formed ice, and he and
his gun had fallen into deep water. The bigger part of a day was given
to the attempted salvaging of that gun. But in the end the quest had to
be relinquished.
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.
A glance now showed the cause of Jan's abrupt unordered right turn.
Close to the trail Jim saw the fresh remains of a camp-fire beside the
deep marks of a sled's runners.
"Well, an' what of it?" said he to Jan, sharply. "'Tain't the first time
you've struck another man's trail, is it? What 'n the nation ails ye to
be so het up about it, anyway?"
And then, with his practised trailer's eyes he began to examine these
tracks himself.
"H'm! Do seem kind o' queer, too," he muttered. "The sled's a
middlin'-heavy one, all right, only I don't see but one dog's track
here, and that's onusu'l. Mus' be a pretty good husky, Jan, to shift
that load on his own--eh? But hold on! I reckon there's two men slep'
here. But there's only one man's track on the trail, an' only one dog.
Some peculiar, I allow: but this here stoppin' and turnin' an' playin'
up is altogether outside the contrac', Jan. Clean contr'y to discipline.
Come, mush on there! D'ye hear me? Mush on, the lot o' ye."
It may be that, if he had had no reason for haste, Jim Willis would have
gone farther in the matter of investigating Jan's peculiar conduct. As
it was he saw every reason against delay and no justification for close
study of a trail which he was desirous only of putting behind him. As a
result he carried his whip for the rest of that day, and used it more
often than it had been used in all the months since he first saw Jan.
For, contrary to all habit and custom, Jan seemed to-day most singularly
indifferent to his master's wishes, and yet not indifferent, either, to
these or to anything, but so much preoccupied with other matters as to
be neglectful of these.
He checked frequently in his stride to sniff hard and long at the trail.
And after one or two of these checks Jim Willis sent the end of his
whip-thong sailing through the keen air from his place beside the sled
clear into Jan's flank by way of reminder and indorsement of his sharp,
"Mush on there, Jan!"
When a halt was called for camping, as the early winter darkness set in,
the unbelievable thing happened. Jan, the first dog to be loosed, took
one long, ardent sniff at the trail before him and then loped on ahead
with never a backward glance for master or team-mates.
"Here, you, Jan! Come in here! Come right in here! D'ye hear me? Jan!
Jan! You crazy? Come in here! Come--here!"
Jim Willis flung all his master's authority into the harsh
peremptoriness of his last call. And Jan checked in his stride as he
heard it. Then the hound shook his shoulders as though a whip-lash had
struck them, sniffed hard again at the trail, and went on.
Willis caused his whip to sing, and himself shouted till he was hoarse.
Jan, the perfect exemplar of sled-dog discipline, apparently defied him.
The big hound was out of sight now.
"Well!" exclaimed Willis as he turned to unharness and feed his other
dogs. And again, "Well!" And then, after a pause: "Now I know you're
plumb crazy. But all the same--Well, it's got me properly beat. Anyhow,
crazy or no, I guess you're meat just the same, an', by the great
Geewhillikins! you'll be dead meat, an' digested meat at that, before
you're an hour older, my son, if I know anything o' wolves." Later, as
he proceeded to thaw out his supper, "Well, I do reckon that's a blame
pity," growled Willis to his fire, by way of epitaph. And for Jim Willis
that was saying a good deal.
XXXV
THE END OF JAN'S LONE TRAIL
With every stride in his solitary progress along that dark trail Jan's
gait and appearance took on more of certitude and of swift concentration
upon an increasingly clear and definite objective.
Of the wolves in the neighborhood all save two remained, uneasily
ranging the neighborhood of the trail to the rear of Willis's camp. As
it seemed to them, Jim Willis's outfit was a sure and safe quarry. It
represented meat which must, in due course, become food for them. And so
they did not wish to leave it behind them, in a country bare of game.
Two venturesome speculators from the pack had, however, worked round to
the front, one on either side of the trail. And these were now loping
silent along, each sixty or seventy yards away, watching Jan. Jan was
conscious of their presence, as one is conscious of the proximity of
mosquitoes. He regarded their presence neither more nor less seriously
than this. But he did not forget them. Now and again one or other of
them would close in to, perhaps, twenty or thirty paces in a sweeping
curve. Then Jan's lip would writhe and rise on the side nearest the
encroaching wolf, and a long, bitter snarl of warning would escape him.
"If I hadn't got important business in hand, I'd stop and flay you for
your insolence," his snarl said. "I'll do it now, if you're not careful.
Sheer off!"
And each time the wolf sheered off, in a sweeping curve, still keeping
the lone hound under careful observation.
Wolves are very acute judges; desperate fighters for their lives and
when driven by hunger, but at no time really brave. If Jan had fallen by
the way, these two would have been into him like knives. While he ran,
exhibiting his fine powers, and snarled, showing his fearlessness, no
two wolves would tackle him, and even the full pack would likely have
trailed him for miles before venturing an attack.
But, however that might be, it is a fact that Jan spared no more than
the most occasional odd ends of thought for these two silent, slinking
watchers of his trail. His active mind was concentrated upon quite other
matters, and was becoming more and more set and concentrated, more
absorbingly preoccupied with every minute of his progress.
A bloodhound judge who had watched Jan now would have known that he no
longer sniffed the trail, as he ran, for guidance. The trail was too
fresh for that. He could have followed it with his nose held high in the
air. It was for the sheer joy it brought him that he ran now with
low-hanging flews, drinking in the scent he followed. And because of the
warmth of the trail, Jan followed it at the gallop, his great frame well
extended to every stride.
Of a sudden he checked. It was exactly as though he had run his head
into a noose on the end of a snare line made fast to one of the darkling
trees which skirted his path on the right-hand side. Here the scent
which he followed left the trail almost at right angles, turning into
the wood.
A moment more and Jan came into full view of a camp-fire, beside which
were a sled, a single dog, and two men. But Jan saw no camp-fire, nor
any other thing than the track under his questing nose.
The single dog by the sled leaped to its feet with a growling bark. One
of the two men stood up sharply in the firelight, ordering his dog in to
heel. His eyes (full of wonder) lighted then on the approaching figure
of Jan, head down; and he reached for his rifle where it lay athwart the
log on which he had been sitting.
As Jan drew in, the other dog flew at his throat. Without wasting breath
upon a snarl, Jan gave the husky his shoulder, with a jar which sent the
poor beast sprawling into the red flickering edge of the fire. And in
the same moment Jan let out a most singular cry as he reared up on his
hind feet, allowing his fore paws, very gently and without pressure, to
rest on the man's chest.
His cry had something of a bark in it, but yet was not a bark. It had a
good deal of a kind of crooning whine about it, but yet was not a whine.
It was just a cry of almost overpowering joy and gladness; and it was so
uncannily different from any dog-talk she had ever heard, that the
singed and frightened husky bitch by the fire stood gaping open-mouthed
to harken at it.
And the man--long-practised discipline made him lay down his gun,
instead of dropping it; and then he voiced an exclamation of
astonishment scarcely more articulate than Jan's own cry, and his two
arms swung out and around the hound's massive shoulders in a movement
that was an embrace.
"Why, Jan--dear old Jan! Jan, come back to me--here! Good old Jan!"
It was with something strangely like a sob that the bearded sergeant,
Dick Vaughan, sank down to a sitting position on the log, with Jan's
head between his hands.
His beard was evidence of a longish spell on the trail; and the weakness
that permitted of his catching his breath in a childlike sob--that was
due, perhaps, to solitude and the peculiar strain of his present
business on the trail, as well as to the great love he felt for the
hound he had thought lost to him for ever.
"How d'ye do, Devil! How d'ye do! We were just hurryin' on for your
place. Will ye take a drop o' rye? I'm boss here. That's only my
chore-boy you're slobberin' over, Mister Devil. Eh, but it's hunky down
to Coney Island, ain't it?"
These remarks came in a jerky sort of torrent from the second man, one
of whose peculiarities was that his arms above the elbow were lashed
with leather thongs to his body. There were leather hobbles about his
ankles, and on the ground near by him lay a pair of unlocked handcuffs,
carefully swathed in soft-tanned deerskin.
Sergeant Dick Vaughan's companion may possibly have accentuated the
solitude in which he traveled; such a companion could hardly have
mitigated it as a source of nervous strain, for he was mad as a March
hare. But there was nothing else harelike about him, for he was
homicidally mad, and had killed two men and half killed a third before
Sergeant Vaughan laid hands upon him. And his was not the only madness
the sergeant had had to contend with on this particular trip.
A strong and overtried man's weakness is not a thing that any one cares
to enlarge upon, but without offense it may perhaps be stated that tears
fell on the iron-gray hair of Jan's muzzle as he stood there with his
soft flews pressed hard against Dick Vaughan's thigh. It seemed he
wanted to bore right into the person of his sovereign lord; he who had
never asked for any man's caress through all the long months of
wandering, toil, and hardship that divided him from the Regina barracks.
His nose burrowed lovingly under Dick's coat with never a thought of
fear or of a trap, although, for many months now, his first instinct had
been to keep his head free, vision clear, and feet to the ground,
whatever befell.
"My old Jan! My dear old Jan!"
Dick Vaughan paid no sort of heed to the jerky maunderings of his poor
demented charge. But Jan did. Without stirring his head, Jan edged his
body away at right angles from the madman, and the hair bristled over
his shoulder-blades when the man spoke.
Jan did not know much about human ailments, perhaps, but he had seen a
husky go mad, and had narrowly escaped being bitten by the beast before
Jim Willis had shot it. He did not think it out in any way, but he was
intuitively conscious that this man was abnormal, irresponsible, unlike
other men. The homicidal devil was the force uppermost in this
particular man, and that naturally left no room for emanations of the
milk of human kindness and goodness. Jan was instantly aware of the
lack. In effect he knew this man was killing-mad.
But remarkable, nay unique, in his experience as the contact was, Jan
spared no thought for it. His hackles rose a little and he edged away
from the madman, because instinct in him enforced so much. For his mind
and his heart they were filled to overflowing; they were afloat on the
flood-tide of his consciousness of his sovereign's physical presence,
the touch of his body.
The night was far spent when Dick Vaughan proceeded to tether his
prisoner as comfortably as might be and to stretch himself in his
blankets for sleep. Jan may have slept a little that night, but his eyes
were never completely closed for more than a minute at a stretch; and
his muzzle, resting on his paws, was never more than three feet from
Dick's head. It was to be noted, too, that he chose to lie between Dick
and the madman, although the proximity of the latter was more than a
little painful to Jan.
Toward morning, when the fire was practically out, the husky bitch came
timidly nosing about Jan's neighborhood, and Jan breathed through his
nose at her in quite friendly fashion. But when she happened to place
one foot across the direct line in which the hound watched his
sovereign's face--then Jan growled, so low and softly as not to waken
Dick, and yet with a significance which the husky instantly comprehended
and acted on.
"Anywhere else you like, but not between my lord and me, for he is mine,
and I am his; not to be divided."
So said Jan's low, throaty growl. And the husky, comprehending,
withdrew, and dug herself a place in the snow under Jan's lee, which, as
the big hound thought, was well and fittingly done. He gave the bitch an
approving glance from the tail of one eye.
The pride of Jan, like his happiness, was just now deep beyond all reach
of plummets.
XXXVI
"SO LONG, JAN!"
The way in which Jan brought Jim Willis and Dick Vaughan together that
morning was notable and strange.
In finding Dick, Jan had found all he wanted in life. But at the back of
his mind was a sort of duty thought which made it clear to him that he
must let Willis know about these things, if possible. Willis had
undoubted and very strong claims upon the leader of his team, and Jan,
at this stage of his North American life and discipline, was not the dog
to ignore those claims. He wanted Jim Willis to know. He desired
absolution. And, short of letting Dick out of his sight--a step which no
threat or inducement would have led him to take--Jan was going to set
this matter right.
The outworking of his determination, in the first place, caused a number
of delays, and then, when by affectionate play of one kind and another
he could no longer keep Dick from the trail, he set to work to try and
drag or seduce his lord back over his tracks of the previous day. Now
Dick was far too well versed in doggy ways to make the mistake of
supposing that Jan was indulging mere wantonness. He knew very well that
Jan was not that sort of a dog.
"H'm! And then, again, old chap, as I said last night, you can't have
dropped from heaven upon the trail beneath. There must be somebody else
where you've come from. I see the collar and trace marks on your old
shoulders--bless you! What would Betty say to them, old son? So don't
excite yourself. We'll wait a bit and see what happens. I could do with
the help of a team, I can tell you, for my own shoulder's bruised to the
bone from the trace. You take it from me, Jan, one man and one husky are
no sort of a team. No, sir, no sort of a team at all. So sit down, my
son, and let me fill a pipe."
Naturally enough, Dick thought he waited as the result of his own
reflections, to see what things the trail Jan had traveled by would
bring forth. But, all the same, he would not have waited but for Jan's
artful insistence on it. Sometimes, but not very often, a dog acquires
such guile in the world of civilization. In the wild it comes easily and
naturally, even to animals having but a tithe of Jan's exceptional
intelligence and wealth of imagination.
Dick Vaughan had not waited long there beside the trail when his ears
and Jan's caught the sound of Jim Willis's voice and the singing of his
whip. Evidently, in the absence of their leader, Jan's team-mates had
not settled down very well to the day's work. In the distance, away back
on the trail, could be heard now and again the howl of a wolf.
Jim Willis showed no surprise when, in response to a wave of Dick's
hand, he drew up his team alongside a R.N.W.M.P. man and his own missing
team-leader. Jim was not much given to showing surprise in the presence
of other men. He nodded his comprehension, as Dick told the story of
Jan's appearance on the previous evening, and of his disappearance, many
months before, from Lambert's Siding in Saskatchewan.
"It's a bit of a miracle that I should find him again--or he find me,
rather--away up here, isn't it?" said Dick.
"Ah! Pretty 'cute sort of a dog, Jan," said the laconic Jim.