ose after them came the hunters from the western barren
lands, bringing with them loads of white fox and caribou skins, and an
army of big-footed, long-legged Mackenzie hounds that pulled like horses
and wailed like whipped puppies when the huskies and Eskimo dogs set
upon them. Packs of fierce Labrador dogs, never vanquished except by
death, came from close to Hudson's Bay. Team after team of little yellow
and gray Eskimo dogs, as quick with their fangs as were their black and
swift-running masters with their hands and feet, met the much larger and
dark-colored Malemutes from the Athabasca. Enemies of all these packs of
fierce huskies trailed in from all sides, fighting, snapping and
snarling, with the lust of killing deep born in them from their wolf
progenitors.

There was no cessation in the battle of the fangs. It began with the
first brute arrivals. It continued from dawn through the day and around
the camp-fires at night. There was never an end to the strife between
the dogs, and between the men and the dogs. The snow was trailed and
stained with blood and the scent of it added greater fierceness to the
wolf-breeds.

Half a dozen battles were fought to the death each day and night. Those
that died were chiefly the south-bred curs--mixtures of mastiff, Great
Dane, and sheep-dog--and the fatally slow Mackenzie hounds. About the
post rose the smoke of a hundred camp-fires, and about these fires
gathered the women and the children of the hunters. When the snow was no
longer fit for sledging, Williams, the factor, noted that there were
many who had not come, and the accounts of these he later scratched out
of his ledgers knowing that they were victims of the plague.

At last came the night of the Big Carnival, For weeks and months women
and children and men had been looking forward to this. In scores of
forest cabins, in smoke-blackened tepees, and even in the frozen homes
of the little Eskimos, anticipation of this wild night of pleasure had
given an added zest to life. It was the Big Circus--the good time given
twice each year by the company to its people.

This year, to offset the memory of plague and death, the factor had put
forth unusual exertions. His hunters had killed four fat caribou. In the
clearing there were great piles of dry logs, and in the center of all
there rose eight ten-foot tree-butts crotched at the top; and from
crotch to crotch there rested a stout sapling stripped of bark, and on
each sap