or people in different
parts of the world.

About an hour was allowed for the dinner halt, and then the journey was
resumed. There were the usual mishaps that necessarily belonged to this
mode of travel. Sleds were occasionally upset, and if at the time
anyone happened to be riding, he was buried in the snow, from which he
emerged none the worse for the plunge, but generally amidst the laughter
of those more fortunate. Several times a fox or some other animal ran
across the trail, and then it required some effort and sternness to
control the dogs and prevent them from starting off after these animals,
which are their natural foes. The older dogs had learned somewhat by
experience the folly of trying while thus harnessed to heavy sleds to
capture wild foxes, and so merely confined their efforts to loud
barkings and a little more vigorous tugging at their traces. The
younger and less disciplined trains, however, with less discretion and
more zeal, at once dashed away from the beaten trail made by the trains
ahead of them, and recklessly plunged into the forest after the game.

"Who would imagine," said Frank, "that dogs so heavily loaded could thus
fairly fly over the snow-covered logs and rocks and among the trees at
such a rate?"

They learned then, and in many an experience afterward, of the latent
strength there is in an apparently wearied dog. Only give him the
stimulus to develop it, and it is simply surprising to all who witness
it.

Alec's fleet train was the most excited and intractable. Bruce could
not stand the sight of a saucy fox or a snarling wild cat passing across
the trail, only a few hundred feet ahead of him, with any degree of
equanimity. After him he must and would go, in spite of Alec's hardest
efforts to keep him in the trail. Bruce, with the other three dogs,
about as eager as himself, would often leave the track and with a spurt
get off several hundred yards in the woods before he could be stopped.
Sometimes their stopping would be rather abrupt. Generally the trees
were so close together that it was not long ere the head of the sled
came in violent collision with a great one. This, of course, stopped
them most effectually. At other times, while Bruce, the leader, decided
to take one side of a small tree, the dog next to him took the other
side. This divergency of views on the part of the dogs also quickly put
an end to their advance.

Alec, in his determined efforts to arrest t