o more than
an ordinary task for the monstrous Great Dane, and Shan Tung
subserviently but with hidden triumph passed outfit after outfit
exhausted by the way. He had reached Copper Creek Camp, which was
boiling and frothing with the excitement of gold-maddened men, and was
congratulating himself that he would soon be at the camps west of the
Peace, when the thing happened. A drunken Irishman, filled with a grim
and unfortunate sense of humor, spotted Shan Tung's wonderful cue and
coveted it. Wherefore there followed a bit of excitement in which Shan
Tung passed into his empyrean home with a bullet through his heart, and
the drunken Irishman was strung up for his misdeed fifteen minutes
later. Tao, the Great Dane, was taken by the leader of the men who
pulled on the rope. Tao's new master was a "drifter," and as he
drifted, his face was always set to the north, until at last a new
humor struck him and he turned eastward to the Mackenzie. As the
seasons passed, Tao found mates along the way and left a string of his
progeny behind him, and he had new masters, one after another, until he
was grown old and his muzzle was turning gray. And never did one of
these masters turn south with him. Always it was north, north with the
white man first, north with the Cree, and then wit h the Chippewayan,
until in the end the dog born in a Vancouver kennel died in an Eskimo
igloo on the Great Bear. But the breed of the Great Dane lived on. Here
and there, as the years passed, one would find among the Eskimo
trace-dogs, a grizzled-haired, powerful-jawed giant that was alien to
the arctic stock, and in these occasional aliens ran the blood of Tao,
the Dane.

Forty years, more or less, after Shan Tung lost his life and his cue at
Copper Creek Camp, there was born on a firth of Coronation Gulf a dog
who was named Wapi, which means "the Walrus." Wapi, at full growth, was
a throwback of more than forty dog generations. He was nearly as large
as his forefather, Tao. His fangs were an inch in length, his great
jaws could crack the thigh-bone of a caribou, and from the beginning
the hands of men and the fangs of beasts were against him. Almost from
the day of his birth until this winter of his fourth year, life for
Wapi had been an unceasing fight for existence. He was maya-tisew--bad
with the badness of a devil. His reputation had gone from master to
master and from igloo to igloo; women and children were afraid of him,
and men always spoke t