you're a dead sure aim," returned the man who had owned the
dog.

But the other drivers were already coasting over the white wastes. The
owner looked at his sleighs as if wondering whether they would stand an
additional burden. Then probably reflecting that old age is not
desirable for a suffering dog in a bitingly keen frost, he turned
towards the husky with his hand in his belt. Thwack--thwack went the
tail as much as to say: "Of course he wouldn't desert me after I've
hauled his sleigh all my life! Thwack--thwack! I'd get up and jump all
around him if I could; there isn't a dog-gone husky in all polar land
with half as good a master as I have!"

The man stopped. Instead of going to the dog he ran back to his sleigh,
loaded his arms full of frozen fish and threw them down before the dog.
Then he put one caribou-skin under the old dog, spread another over him
and ran away with his train while the husky was still guzzling. The fish
had been poisoned to be thrown out to the wolves that so often pursue
Northern dog trains.

Once a party of hunters crossing the Northern Rockies came on a dog
train stark and stiff. Where was the master who had bidden them stand
while he felt his way blindly through the white whirl of a blizzard for
the lost path? In the middle of the last century, one of that famous
family of fur traders, a MacKenzie, left Georgetown to go north to Red
River in Canada. He never went back to Georgetown and he never reached
Red River; but his coat was found fluttering from a tree, a death signal
to attract the first passer-by, and the body of the lost trader was
discovered not far off in the snow. Unless it is the year of the rabbit
pest and the rabbit ravagers are bold with hunger, the pursuing wolves
seldom give full chase. They skulk far to the rear of the dog trains,
licking up the stains of the bleeding feet, or hanging spectrally on
the dim frosty horizon all night long. Hunger drives them on; but they
seem to lack the courage to attack. I know of one case where the wolves
followed the dog trains bringing out a trader's family from the North
down the river-bed for nearly five hundred miles. What man hunter would
follow so far?

The farther north the fox hunter goes, the shorter grow the days, till
at last the sun, which has rolled across the south in a wheel of fire,
dwindles to a disk, the disk to a rim--then no rim at all comes up, and
it is midwinter night, night but not darkness. The white of en