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Jan: A Dog and a Romance, a fiction by Alec John Dawson |
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Chapter 34. The Peace River Trail |
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_ CHAPTER XXXIV. THE PEACE RIVER TRAIL Winter set in with unusual rigor, the temperature dropping after heavy snow to fifty below zero, and hovering between thirty and sixty below for weeks together. Jim Willis and his sled-team lived on a practically "straight" meat diet. Jan had forgotten the taste of sun-dried salmon, and men and dogs together were living now on moose-meat chopped with an ax from the slabs and chunks that were stowed away on the sled. Willis occasionally treated himself to a dish of boiled beans, and when fortune favored he ate ptarmigan. But moose-meat was the staple for man and dogs alike. For months the valleys they had traversed had been rich in game. But in the northland the movements of game are mysterious and unaccountable; and now, in a bleak and gloomy stretch of country north of the Caribou Mountains, they had seen no trace of life of any kind for a fortnight except wolves. And of these, by day and by night, Jim Willis had seen and heard more than he cared about. It seemed the brutes had come from country quite unlike the valleys Willis had traveled, and resembling more nearly that in which he now found himself. For these wolves were gaunt and poor, and the absence of game made them more than normally audacious. So far from seeking to avoid man and his dogs, they seemed to infest Willis's trail, ranging emptily and wistfully to his rear and upon either side as hungry sharks patrol a ship's wake. The circumstances would have had little enough of significance for Willis, but for an accident which befell just before the cold snap set in. Hastening along the track of a moose he had already mortally wounded, beside one of the tributaries of the Mackenzie, Willis had had the misfortune to take a false step among half-formed ice, and he and his gun had fallen into deep water. The bigger part of a day was given to the attempted salvaging of that gun. But in the end the quest had to be relinquished. The gun was never seen again; and, though Jim had good store of ammunition, he now had no weapon of any sort or kind, save ax and whip. This was the reason why the presence of large packs of hungry wolves annoyed him and made him anxious to reach a Peace River station as speedily as might be. He carried a fair stock of moose-meat, but accidents might happen, and in any case, apart from the presence of hungry wolves in large numbers, no man cares to be without weapons of precision in the wilderness, for it is these which more than any other thing give him his mastery over the predatory of the wild. Just before three o'clock in an afternoon of still, intense cold, when daylight was fading out, the narrow devious watercourse whose frozen surface had formed Willis's trail for many a mile, brought him at last to a bend of the Peace River from which he knew he could reach a settlement within four or five days of good traveling. Therefore his arrival at this point was of more interest and importance to Willis than any ordinary camping halt. But it struck him as curious that Jan should show the interest he did show in it. "Seems like as if that blame dog knows everything," he muttered as he saw Jan trotting to and fro over the trail, his flews sweeping the trodden snow with eager, questing gestures, his stern waving as with excitement of some sort. "Surely there's been no game past this way," thought Willis, "or them wolves would be on to the scent of it pretty quick." He could hear his tireless escorts of the past week yowling a mile or more away in the rear. Having built and lighted a fire of pine-knots, he called the dogs about him to be fed. Jan seemed disinclined to answer the call, being still busily questing to and fro. Willis had to call him separately and sternly. "You stay right here," he said, sharply. "This ain't no place for hunting-excursions an' picnic-parties, let me tell you. You're big an' husky, all right, but the gentlemen out back there 'd make no more o' downing an' eatin' you than if you was a sody-cracker, so I tell ye now. They're fifty to one an' hungry enough to eat chips." His ration swallowed, Jan showed an inclination to roam again, though his team-mates, with ears pricked and hackles rising in answer to the wolf-calls, huddled about as near the camp-fire as they dared. "H'm! 'Tain't jest like you to be contemplatin' sooicide, neither; but it seems you've got some kind of a hunch that way to-night. Come here, then," said Willis. And he proceeded to tether Jan securely to the sled, within a yard of his own sleeping-place. "If I'd my old gun here, me beauties," he growled, shaking his fist in the direction from which he had come that day, "I'd give some o' ye something to howl about, I reckon." Then to Jan, "Now you lie down there an' stay there till I loose ye." Obediently enough Jan proceeded to scoop out his nest in the snow, and settle. But it was obvious that he labored with some unusual interest; some unseen cause of excitement. Next morning it seemed Jan had forgotten his peculiar interest in the Peace River trail, his attention being confined strictly to the customary routine of harnessing and schooling the team. But two hours later he did a thing that Willis had never seen him do before. He threw the team into disorder by coming to an abrupt standstill in mid-trail without any hint of an order from his master. He was sniffing hard at the trail, turning sharply from side to side, his flews in the snow, while his nostrils avidly drank in whatever it was they found there, as a parched dog drinks at a water-hole. "Mush on there, Jan! What ye playin' at?" cried Willis. At the word of command Jan plunged forward mechanically. But in the next moment he had halted again and, nose in the snow, wheeled sharply to the right, almost flinging on its side the dog immediately behind him in the traces. For an instant Jim Willis wondered uncomfortably if his leader had gone mad. He had known sudden and apparently quite inexplicable cases of madness among sled-dogs, and, like most others having any considerable experience of the trail, he had more than once had to shoot a dog upon whom madness had fallen. At all events, before striding forward to the head of his team Willis fumbled under the lashings of the sled and drew out the long-thonged dog-whip which for months now he had ceased to carry on the trail, finding no use for it under Jan's leadership of the team. A glance now showed the cause of Jan's abrupt unordered right turn. Close to the trail Jim saw the fresh remains of a camp-fire beside the deep marks of a sled's runners. "Well, an' what of it?" said he to Jan, sharply. "'Tain't the first time you've struck another man's trail, is it? What 'n the nation ails ye to be so het up about it, anyway?" And then, with his practised trailer's eyes he began to examine these tracks himself. "H'm! Do seem kind o' queer, too," he muttered. "The sled's a middlin'-heavy one, all right, only I don't see but one dog's track here, and that's onusu'l. Mus' be a pretty good husky, Jan, to shift that load on his own--eh? But hold on! I reckon there's two men slep' here. But there's only one man's track on the trail, an' only one dog. Some peculiar, I allow: but this here stoppin' and turnin' an' playin' up is altogether outside the contrac', Jan. Clean contr'y to discipline. Come, mush on there! D'ye hear me? Mush on, the lot o' ye." It may be that, if he had had no reason for haste, Jim Willis would have gone farther in the matter of investigating Jan's peculiar conduct. As it was he saw every reason against delay and no justification for close study of a trail which he was desirous only of putting behind him. As a result he carried his whip for the rest of that day, and used it more often than it had been used in all the months since he first saw Jan. For, contrary to all habit and custom, Jan seemed to-day most singularly indifferent to his master's wishes, and yet not indifferent, either, to these or to anything, but so much preoccupied with other matters as to be neglectful of these. He checked frequently in his stride to sniff hard and long at the trail. And after one or two of these checks Jim Willis sent the end of his whip-thong sailing through the keen air from his place beside the sled clear into Jan's flank by way of reminder and indorsement of his sharp, "Mush on there, Jan!" When a halt was called for camping, as the early winter darkness set in, the unbelievable thing happened. Jan, the first dog to be loosed, took one long, ardent sniff at the trail before him and then loped on ahead with never a backward glance for master or team-mates. "Here, you, Jan! Come in here! Come right in here! D'ye hear me? Jan! Jan! You crazy? Come in here! Come--here!" Jim Willis flung all his master's authority into the harsh peremptoriness of his last call. And Jan checked in his stride as he heard it. Then the hound shook his shoulders as though a whip-lash had struck them, sniffed hard again at the trail, and went on. Willis caused his whip to sing, and himself shouted till he was hoarse. Jan, the perfect exemplar of sled-dog discipline, apparently defied him. The big hound was out of sight now. "Well!" exclaimed Willis as he turned to unharness and feed his other dogs. And again, "Well!" And then, after a pause: "Now I know you're plumb crazy. But all the same--Well, it's got me properly beat. Anyhow, crazy or no, I guess you're meat just the same, an', by the great Geewhillikins! you'll be dead meat, an' digested meat at that, before you're an hour older, my son, if I know anything o' wolves." Later, as he proceeded to thaw out his supper, "Well, I do reckon that's a blame pity," growled Willis to his fire, by way of epitaph. And for Jim Willis that was saying a good deal. _ |
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