“You take whichever one you want, Bill.”
“Well, I’ll take the huskies if you don’t mind,” he replied as if he meant it.
“That wouldn’t be regular, Bill; we’ll draw straws and whoever gets the long one takes the malamutes.”
“No, I must have them huskies. They’re the best dogs, that’s what all the drivers say, an’ as I don’t know much about drivin’ dog-teams I orter have the best one, what say, Mr. Jack?”
Jack McQuesten saw through Bill’s little game and his eyes twinkled for he had bored into Bill’s nature when he first saw him and he knew he had a heart as big as all Alaska.
“Give him the team of huskies, Jack,” was McQuesten’s decision; “Bill deserves them.”
In Jack’s team of malamutes ’Frisco was the lead-dog, with Wolf, Jennie, Tofty, Jim and Prince after him while Skookum was wheel-dog. The team of huskies that Bill fell heir to was made up of Sate, the leader, and after him came Caro, Lukeen, Danny, Lon, Moosehide and Jinx for wheeler.
How these dogs came by their names is, as Kipling used to say, another story, or, rather, more in the nature of a riddle, but we can make a guess at a few of them. For instance ’Frisco, who was a pure malamute, couldn’t have come from San Francisco, hence it is likely that his first owner had. Wolf, also a pure malamute, probably came by his name from having been a wolf killer, Tofty, from a town over near Fish Creek where he might have been born, while Skookum means strong in the Chinook jargon. So much for Jack’s team.
As to Bill’s team, Sate, it seems clear, is a contraction of Satan, and was so called because he was an imp of knowledge, as wise and wily as huskies are made. Caro is a town over by Chandlar Lake, about a hundred miles northwest of Fort Yukon; Lukeen got his name from old Fort Lukeen, on the Kushokwin River, but on whose site the town of Kolmakoffsky now stands. He was a long, long way from the place where his slit-eyes first saw the light of day. Moosehide may have derived his cognomen by having eaten this delicacy when he was once starving to death, while Jinx is a name that is always associated with bad luck and he finally lived up to it.
The storekeeper handed Jack and Bill a rawhide whip apiece, about twelve or fourteen feet long, and told two of the drivers to give the boys a hand, which was his easy way of saying to show them how to manage the teams, for it takes much time and a deal of practice before a tenderfoot can drive these dogs by word of mouth and the crack of the whip.