s 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 bowel