TENTH LETTER.
DOG LORE OF THE NORTH.

White Horse, Sunday, September 20, 1903.

We arrived about nine o’clock this morning. The voyage up the Yukon from Dawson has taken us since Wednesday at 2:30, when we cast off and stemmed the swift waters—twenty-four hours longer than going down. During the week of our stay at Dawson the days grew perceptibly shorter and the nights colder. There is no autumn in this land. Two weeks ago the foliage had just begun to turn; a week ago the aspens and birches were showing a golden yellow, but the willows and alders were yet green. Now every leaf is saffron and golden—gamboge—and red. In a week or more they will have mostly fallen. As yet the waters of the Yukon and affluent rivers show no ice. In three weeks they are expected to be frozen stiff, and so remain until the ice goes out next June. The seasons of this land are said to be “Winter and June, July and August.” To me it seems inconceivable that the Arctic frosts should descend so precipitately. But on every hand there is evident preparation for the cold, the profound cold. Double windows and doors are being fastened on. Immense piles of sawed and cut firewood are being stored close at hand. Sleighs and especially sledges are being painted and put in order; the dogs which have run wild, and mostly foraged for themselves during the summer, are being discovered, captured and led off by strings and straps and wires about their necks. Men are buying new dogs, and the holiday of dogkind is evidently close at an end. Women are already wearing some of their furs. Ice half to a full inch forms every night, and yesterday we passed through our first snow storm, and all the mountains round about, and even the higher hills, are to-day glistening in mantles of new, fresh, soft-looking snow. The steamers of the White Pass and Yukon Railway Company will be laid up in three weeks now, they tell us, and already the sleighs and teams for the overland stage route are being gathered, the stage houses at twenty-four-mile intervals being set in order, and the “Government road” being prepared afresh for the transmission of mails and passengers.

We have just seen some of the magnificent Labrador dogs, with their keeper, passing along the street, owned by the Government post here—immense animals, as big as big calves, heifers, yearlings, I might say. They take the mails to outlying posts and even to Dawson when too cold for the horses—horses are not driven when the thermometer is more than 40 degrees below!

As I sat in the forward cabin the other night watching the motley crowd we were taking “out,” two bright young fellows, who turned out to be “Government dog-drivers” going to the post here to report for winter duty, fell into animated discussion of their business, and told me much dog lore. The big, well-furred, long-legged “Labrador Huskies” are the most powerful as well as fiercest. A load of 150 pounds per dog is the usual burden, and seven to nine dogs attached each by a separate trace—the Labrador harness is used with them, so the dogs spread out fan-shaped from the sledge and do not interfere with each other. The great care of the driver is to maintain discipline, keep the dogs from shirking, from tangling up, and from attacking himself or each other. He carries a club and a seal-hide whip, and uses each unmercifully. If they think you afraid, the dogs will attack you instantly, and would easily kill you. And they incessantly attack each other, and the whole pack will always pounce on the under dog so as to surely be in at a killing, just for the fun of it, ripping up the unfortunate and lapping his blood eagerly, though they rarely eat him. And as these dogs are worth anywhere from $100 up, the driver has much ado to prevent the self-destruction of his team. And to club them till you stun them is the only way to stop their quarrels. Then, too, the dogs are clever and delight to spill the driver and gallop away from him, when he can rarely catch them until they draw up at the next post house, and it may be ten or twelve or thirty miles to that, unless it be that they get tangled among the trees or brush, when the driver will find them fast asleep, curled up in the snow, where each burrows out a cozy bed. The Malamutes, or native Indian dog, usually half wolf, are driven and harnessed differently—all in a line—and one before the other. They are shorter haired, faster, and infinitely meaner than the long-haired Huskie (of which sort the Labrador dogs are). Their delight is to get into a fight and become tangled, and the only way out is to club them into insensibility, and cut the leather harness, or they will cut the seal-hide thongs themselves at a single bite if they are quite sure your long plaited whip will not crack them before they can do it. These Malamutes are the usual dogs driven in this country, for few there are to afford or know how to handle the more powerful Labrador Huskie. And the Malamute is the king of all thieves. He will pull the leather boots off your feet while you sleep and eat them for a midnight supper; he delights to eat up his seal-hide harness; he has learned to open a wooden box and will devour canned food, opening any tin can made, with his sharp fangs, quicker than a steel can-opener. Canned tomatoes, fruit, vegetables, sardines, anything that man may put in, he will deftly take out. Even the tarpaulins and leather coverings of the goods he may be pulling, he will rip to pieces, and he will devour the load unless watched with incessant vigilance night and day. Yet, with all their wolfish greed and manners, these dogs perform astonishing feats of endurance, and never in all their lives receive a kindly word. “If you treat them kindly, they think you are afraid, and will at once attack you,” the driver said; “the only way to govern them is through fear.” Once a day only are they fed on raw fish, and while the Malamute prefers to pilfer and steal around the camp, the Huskie will go and fish for himself when off duty, if given the chance. Just like the bears and lynx of the salmon-running streams, he will stand along the shore and seize the fish that is shoved too far upon the shallows. Seventy miles a day is the rule with the Indians and their dog teams, and the white man does almost as much. Forty miles is it from here to Caribou Crossing, and the Northwest Mounted Police, with their Labrador teams, take the mails when the trains are snowbound and cover the distance in four to five hours. Great going this must be!

And then the conversation turned to the great cold of this far north land, when during the long nights the sun only shows for an hour or two above the horizon.

When the thermometer falls below fifty degrees (Fahr.), then are the horses put away, what few there may be, and the dogs transport the freight and mails along the Government road between White Horse and Dawson, as well as from Dawson to the mining camps to which the stage lines usually run. Indeed, throughout all of this north land, with the coming of the snow, the dogs are harnessed to the sledges and become the constant traveling companions of man.

The air is dry in all this great interior basin of the continent, and, consequently, the great cold is not so keenly felt as in the damper airs nearer to the sea. The dogs can travel in all weathers which man can stand, and even when it becomes so cold that men dare not move. The lowest Government record of the thermometer yet obtained at Dawson City is eighty-three degrees below zero. These great falls of temperature only occasionally occur, but when the thermometer comes down to minus sixty degrees, then men stay fast indoors, and only venture out as the necessity demands; then the usually clear atmosphere becomes filled with a misty fog, often so thick that it is difficult to see a hundred yards away.

When traveling with a dog team, or, indeed, when “mushing” upon snow-shoes across streams and forests, men go rather lightly clad, discarding furs, and ordinarily wearing only thick clothes, with the long canvas parquet as protection against the wind rather than against the temperature; then motion becomes a necessity, and to tarry means to freeze. The danger of the traveler going by himself is that the frost may affect his eyesight, freezing the eyelids together, perhaps dazing his sight, unless snow-glasses are worn. And the ice forms in the nostrils so rapidly, as well as about the mouth, and upon the mustache and beard, that it is a constant effort to keep the face free from accumulating ice. In small parties, however, men travel long distances, watching each other as well as themselves to insure escape from the ravages of the frost. When the journey is long and the toil has become severe, the Arctic drowsiness is another of the enemies which must be prevented from overcoming the traveler, and the methods are often cruel which friends must exercise in order to prevent their companions from falling asleep.

During this long period of Arctic winter and Arctic night, there seems to be no great cessation in the struggle for gold; the diggings in the Klondike and remoter regions retain their companies of men toiling to find the gold. The frozen gravels are blasted out and piled up to be thawed the next summer by the heat of the sun and washed with the flowing waters.

While the Arctic night prevails for twenty-two or twenty-three hours out of the twenty-four, yet so brilliant are the stars and so refulgent are the heavens with the lightening of the aurora borealis, that men work and travel and carry on the usual occupations, little hindered by the absence of the sun. Sometimes, in the very coldest days, is beheld the curious phenomenon of several suns appearing above the horizon, and these are called the “sun dogs,” the sun itself being seemingly surrounded by lesser ones. I was fortunate enough to obtain a fine photograph taken on one of these days, which I am able to send you.

The freezing of the Yukon comes on very suddenly, the great river often becoming solid in a night. The curious thing of these northern lakes and rivers is, that the ice forms first upon the bottom, and, rising, fills the water with floating masses and ice particles, which then become congealed almost immediately.

Early in last October our steamer “White Horse,” on which we are now traveling, became permanently frozen in when within one hundred miles of Dawson City, the apparently clear river freezing so quickly that the boat became fast for the winter, and the passengers were compelled to “mush” their way, as best they might, across the yet snowless country, a terrible and trying experience in the gathering cold.

You may be in a row-boat or a canoe upon ice-free waters, and, as you paddle, you may notice bubbles and particles of ice coming to the surface. Great, then, is the danger. The bottom has begun to freeze. You may be frozen in before you reach the shore in ice yet too thin to walk upon or permit escape.

For the greater part of the winter season the frozen streams become the natural highways of the traveler, and the dog teams usually prefer the snow-covered ice rather than attempt to go over the rougher surface of the land.

Another curious thing, friends tell me, affects them in this winter night-time, and that is the disposition of men to hibernate. Fifteen and sixteen hours of sleep are commonly required, while in the nightless summer-time three and four and five hours satisfy all the demands nature seems to make—thus the long sleeps of winter compensate for the lack of rest taken during the summer-time.

And yet these hardy men of the north tell me that they enjoy the winter, and that they perform their toils with deliberation and ease, and take full advantage of the long sleeping periods.

The Yukon freezes up about the 10th of October, the snow shortly follows, and there is no melting of the ice until early June. This year the ice went out from the river at Dawson upon June 10th; thus, there are seven to eight months of snow and ice-bound winter in this Arctic land.