THE DOGS 279 



The natives always use great whips with a lash as long 

 as thirty feet. With that the driver can strike any dog 

 he wishes, even at full gallop. The length of the handle is 

 immaterial. Indeed, I have known an Eskimo kill many 

 partridges (or spruce grouse) by flicking them with a whip 

 which had no handle at all. Any good hand with a whip 

 will drive nails into a post with it, and will cut a hole 

 almost through a door-panel. 



For endurance, few animals can equal our dogs. As I 

 have said before, cold seems absolutely immaterial. At 

 50 F. below zero, a dog will lie out on the ice and sleep 

 without danger of frost-bite. He may climb out of the 

 sea with ice forming all over his fur, but he seems not to 

 mind one iota. I have seen his breath freeze so over his 

 face that he had to rub the coating off his eyes with his paws 

 to enable him to see the track. I have driven him from 

 daylight to dark on bright spring days when a couple of 

 hours of such exposure would blind the unprotected eyes 

 of most men. I have never yet known a dog's eyes to 

 suffer at all. 



No dog is fed more than once a day, and one might almost 

 say no dog is ever given all he wants to eat. Yet a team 

 will, when unavoidable, go two and three days without food 

 on a journey, and yet show scarcely a sign of fatigue. To 

 feed its puppies, a dog will vomit the food it has eaten itself. 



For speed and endurance it is difficult to surpass these 

 wonderful animals. An old friend, a Hudson's Bay factor 

 at Moose Factory, in a letter describing a journey he re- 

 cently made with ten dogs, and nearly a thousand pounds' 

 weight on the komatik, says : " We covered the one hundred 

 and eighty miles of distance in two and a half days, and the 



