Ten Thousand Miles with a Dog Sled Part 13

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 pa.s.sed 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 companions.h.i.+p 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 suns.h.i.+ne of approaching spring, sharing labour and sharing ease, sharing privation and sharing plenty; it takes this close companions.h.i.+p 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.

[Sidenote: 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 paws down 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 quant.i.ty, 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 that came into his pa.s.sionate 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 brus.h.i.+ng 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 the same 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.

[Sidenote: 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 operation of 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 circ.u.mvent that precaution. And whenever the horse and his rider pa.s.sed, 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 pa.s.sed 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 thras.h.i.+ng 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 pa.s.ser-by, who had paused to see the proceedings and was leaning on the fence, said to me: "Well, you know where _you_ can go to. That's the doggonedest dog I ever seen!"

[Sidenote: 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 partners.h.i.+p 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 partners.h.i.+p. 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 partners.h.i.+p was dissolved by the horse'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 had given 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.

[Sidenote: 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, the enormous 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 his _vade mec.u.m_ at his fingers'

ends.

But his chief pa.s.sion 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, "We _armatures_ get badly imposed upon." 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 "mus.h.i.+ng" 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 wax _vespers_ which beats the sulphur match all to thunder."

[Sidenote: THE SULPHUR MATCH]

But they do not. Nothing in this country can take the place of the old-fas.h.i.+oned sulphur match, long since banished from civilised communities, and the sulphur match is the only match a man upon the trail will employ. Manufactured from blocks of wood without complete severance, so that the ends of the matches are still held together at the bottom in one solid ma.s.s, it is easy to strip one off at need and strike it upon the block. A block of a hundred such matches will take up much less s.p.a.ce than fifty of any other kind of match, and the blocks may be freely carried in any as they are commonly carried in every pocket without fear of accidental ignition. The only fire producer that it is worth while supplementing the sulphur match with is the even older-fas.h.i.+oned flint and steel, which to a man who smokes is a convenience in a wind. All the modern alcohol and gasoline pocket devices are extinguished by the lightest puff of wind, but the tinder, once ignited, burns the fiercer for the blast. With dry, shredded birch-bark I have made a fire upon occasion from the flint and steel.

One resource may here be mentioned, since we are on the subject, which is always carried in the hind-sack of my sled against difficulty in fire making. It is a tin tobacco-box filled with strips of cotton cloth cut to the size of the box and the whole saturated with kerosene. One or two of these strips will help very greatly in kindling a fire when damp twigs or shavings are all that are at hand. A few camphor b.a.l.l.s (the ordinary "moth b.a.l.l.s") will serve equally well; and there may come a time, on any long journey, when the forethought that has provided such aid will be looked back upon with very great satisfaction.

The mail trail from Tanana to Fairbanks touches the Tanana River only at one point, a few miles beyond the Hot Springs; but, as we wished to visit Nenana, we had to leave the mail trail after two days more of uneventful travel and strike out to the river and over its surface for seventeen or eighteen miles.

[Sidenote: A NOTABLE GENTLEWOMAN]

Nenana is a native village situated on the left bank of the Tanana, a little above the confluence of the Nenana River with that stream, and we have established an important and flouris.h.i.+ng school there which receives its forty pupils from many points on the Yukon and Tanana Rivers. None but thoroughly sound and healthy children of promise, full natives or half-breeds, are received at the school, and we seek to give both boys and girls opportunity for the cultivation of the native arts and for some of the white man's industrial training, in addition to the ordinary work of the schoolroom. The school was started and had the good fortune of its first four years' life under the care of a notable gentlewoman, Miss Annie Cragg Farthing, who was yet at its head at the time of this visit, but who died suddenly, a martyr to her devotion to the children, a year later; and a great Celtic cross in concrete, standing high on the bluff across the river, now marks the spot of her own selection--a spot that gives a fine view of Denali--where her body rests, and also the Alaskan mission's sense of the extraordinary value of her life.

It would be easy to give striking instances of the potency and stretch of this remarkable woman's influence amongst the native people, an influence--strange as it may sound to those who deem any half-educated, under-bred white woman competent to take charge of an Indian school--due as much to her wide culture, her perfect dignity and self-possession, her high breeding, as to the love and consecrated enthusiasm of her character. It is no exaggeration to say that Miss Farthing's work has left a mark broad and deep upon the Indian race of this whole region that will never be wiped out.

There is no greater pleasure than to spend a few days at this school; to foregather again with so many of the hopeful young scamps that one has oneself selected here and there and brought to the place; to mark the improvement in them, the taming and gentling, the drawing out of the sweet side of the nature that is commonly buried to the casual observer in the rudeness and shyness of savage childhood. To romp with them, to tell them tales and jingles, to get insensibly back into their familiar confidence again, to say the evening prayers with them, to join with their clear, fresh voices in the hymns and chants, is indeed to rejuvenate oneself. And to go away believing that real strength of character is developing, that real preparation is making for an Indian race that shall be a better Indian race and not an imitation white race, is the cure for the discouragement that must sometimes come to all those who are committed heart and soul to the cause of the Alaskan native.

School-teachers, it would seem, ought never to grow old; they should suck in new youth continually from the young life around them; and children are far and away the most interesting things in the world, more interesting even than dogs and great mountains.

[Sidenote: CHIVALROUS INDIAN YOUTH]

All the boys in the school, I think, swarmed across the river with us when we started away early in the morning, and the elder ones ran with the sled along the portage, mile after mile, until I turned them back lest they be late for school.

But when they were gone, still I saw them, saw them gathered round the grey-haired lady I had left, fawning upon her with their eyes, their hearts filled with as true chivalry as ever animated knight or champion of the olden time. Tall, upstanding fellows of sixteen or seventeen, clean-limbed and broad-shouldered, wild-run all their lives; hunters, with a tale of big game to the credit of some of them would make an English sportsman envious; unaccustomed to any restraint at all and p.r.o.ne to chafe at the slightest; unaccustomed to any respect for women, to any of the courtesies of life, I saw them fly at a word, at a look, to do her bidding, saw cap s.n.a.t.c.hed from head if they encountered her about the buildings, saw them jump up and hold open the door if she moved to pa.s.s out of a room, saw the eager devotion that would have served her upon bended knee had they thought it would please her. It was wonderful, the only thing of quite its kind I had ever seen in my life.

When early in the school's history an old medicine-man at Nenana had been roused to animosity by her refusal to countenance an offensive Indian custom touching the adolescent girls, and had defiantly announced his intention to make medicine against her, I can see her now, her staff in her hand, attended by two or three of her devoted youths, invading the midnight pavilion of the conjurer, in the very midst of his conjurations, tossing his paraphernalia outside, laying her staff smartly across the shoulders of the trembling shaman, and driving the gaping crew helter-skelter before her, their awe of the witchcraft overawed by her commanding presence. I make no apology that I thought of the scourge of small cords that was used on an occasion in the temple at Jerusalem, when I heard of it. It gave a shrewder blow to the lingering tyrannical superst.i.tion of the medicine-man than decades of preaching and reasoning would have done. No man living could have done the thing with like effect, nor any woman save one of her complete self-possession and natural authority. The younger villagers chuckle over the jest of it to this day, and the old witch-doctor himself was crouching at her feet and, as one may say, eating out of her hand, within the year.

I saw these boys again, in my mind's eye, gone back to their homes here and there on the Yukon and the Tanana after their two or three years at this school, carrying with them some better ideal of human life than they could ever get from the elders of the tribe, from the little sordid village trader, from most of the whites they would be thrown with, keeping something of the vision of gentle womanhood, something of the "unbought grace of life," something of the keen sense of truth and honour, of the n.o.bility of service, something deeper and stronger than mere words of the love of G.o.d, which they had learned of her whom they all revered; each one, however much overflowed again by the surrounding waters of mere animal living, tending a little shrine of sweeter and better things in his heart.

[Sidenote: LONG-REMEMBERED TEACHING]

Here, three years after the visit and the journey narrated, when these words are written with diaries and letters and memoranda around me, I am just come from a long native powwow, a meeting of all the Indians of a village for the annual election of a village council, important in the evolution of that self-government we covet for these people, but undeniably tedious. And, because at our missions we seek to a.s.sociate with us every force that looks to the betterment of the natives, we had invited the new government teacher, a lady of long experience in Indian schools, to be present. She had sat patiently through the protracted meeting, and at its close, when she rose to go, a young Indian man jumped up and held her fur cloak for her and put it gently about her shoulders. When she had thanked him she asked with a smile: "Where did you learn to be so polite?" A gleam came into the fellow's eyes, then he dropped them and replied, "Miss Farthing taught me."

Two days before, returning from a journey, I had spent the night at a road-house kept by a white man married to an Indian woman. There was excellent yeast bread on the table, and good bread is a rare thing in Alaska. "Where did you learn to make such good bread?" I inquired of the woman. There came the same light to her eyes and the same answer to her lips. Yet it was nine years ago, long before the school at Nenana was started, that this Indian boy and girl had been under Miss Farthing's teaching at Circle City.

They tell us there is no longer much place or use for gentility in the world, for men and women nurtured and refined above the common level; tell us in particular that woman is only now emanc.i.p.ating herself from centuries of ineffectual nonage, only now entering upon her active career.

Yet I am of opinion, from such opportunities to observe and compare as my constant travel has given me, that the quiet work of this gracious woman of the old school, with her dignity that nothing ever invaded and her poise that nothing ever disturbed, is perhaps the most powerful single influence that has come into the lives of the natives of interior Alaska.

Two days brought us past the little native village and mission at Chena (which is p.r.o.nounced Shen-a?), past the little white town of the same name, to Fairbanks, the chief town of interior Alaska. Chena is at the virtual head of the navigation of the Tanana River and is quite as near to the gold-producing creeks as Fairbanks, which latter place is not on the Tanana River at all but on a slough, impracticable for almost any craft at low water. For every topographical reason, from every consideration of natural advantage, Chena should have been the river port and town of these gold-fields. But Chena was so sure of her manifold natural advantages that she became unduly confident and grasping. When the traders at Fairbanks offered to remove to Chena at the beginning of the camp, if the traders at Chena would provide a site, the offer was scornfully rejected. "They would have to come, anyway, or go out of business." But they did not come; rather they put their backs up and fought. And because Fairbanks was enterprising and far-sighted, while Chena was avaricious and narrow, because Fairbanks offered free sites and Chena charged enormously for water-front, business went the ten miles up the often unnavigable slough and settled there, and by and by built a little railway that it might be independent of the uncertain boat service. The company came, the courts came, the hospital came, the churches came, and Chena woke up from its dreams of easy wealth to find itself and its manifold natural advantages pa.s.sed by and ignored and the big town firmly established elsewhere.

How well I remember the virulent little newspaper published at Chena in those days and the bitterness and vituperation it used to pour out week by week! One wishes a file of it had been preserved. Alaskan journalism has presented many amusing curiosities that no one has had leisure to collect, but nothing more amusing than the frenzy of impotent wrath Chena vented when it saw its cherished prospects and opportunities slipping out of its grasp for ever.

"If of all words on tongue or pen, The saddest are 'it might have been,'

Full sad are those we often see, It is, but it hadn't ought to be."