CHAPTER XXIII 



THE DOGS OF FORT RESOLUTION 



It sounds like the opening of an epic poem but it 

 is not. 



The Chipewyan calender is divided in two seasons — 

 dog season and canoe season. What the horse is to 

 the Arab, what the Reindeer is to the Lap and the Yak 

 to the Thibetan, the dog is to the Chipewyan for at 

 least one-half of the year, until it is displaced by the 

 canoe. 



During dog season the canoes are piled away some- 

 what carelessly or guarded only from the sun. During 

 canoe season the dogs are treated atrociously. Let 

 us remember, first, that these are dogs in every doggy 

 sense, the worshipping servants of man, asking noth- 

 ing but a poor living in return for abject love and tire- 

 less service, as well as the relinquishment of all family 

 ties and natural life. In winter, because they cannot 

 serve without good food, they are well fed on fish that 

 is hung on scaffolds in the fall in time to be frozen 

 before wholly spoiled. The journeys they will make 

 and the devoted service they render at this time is 

 none too strongly set forth in Butler's "Cerf Vola" 

 and London's "Call of the Wild." It is, indeed, the 

 dog alone that makes life possible during the white 

 half-year of the boreal calender. One cannot be many 



159 



