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 
