Jack Heaton, gold seeker

by A. Frederick Collins

It was plain to be seen that the dogs were glad to be in the traces again and they all stood alert and ready for the word to mush, which means the same thing as the farmer’s gid-ap. While Jack had had some experience with driving a dog team in the Arctic he was by no means an adept at it and poor Bill was as helpless as a pedestrian crossing Fifth Avenue at Forty-Second Street. But the men knew and the dogs know what to do.

There was a crack of a whip that sounded like a pistol shot, with a yell of “mush, you huskies,” and Bill’s team was at it and away. Another crack of a whip and another “mush on” from Jack, when his team followed a close second in the wake of the other. It was great sport for the old timers watching the breaking in of the new teams and their new drivers. For the boys it was real hard work and they felt as though they were sweating blood in their efforts to keep the dogs under control.

Every day from that time on Jack and Bill hitched up their dog teams and carted goods to and from the boat landing and the store for Jack McQuesten and when there was nothing else to do they would get on their carts and ride all round the town to the end that they might learn how to drive the dogs right and so that the dogs would get used to them.

As both Jack and Bill were past masters in the game of handling horses they used the same tactics with the dogs—that is to say, they treated them decently and punished them only when they really needed it. At first the dogs didn’t know what the boys were up to, being so kind to them; they seemed to think it was a trick and some of them resented it. Now it has been said that malamutes and huskies have no affection for anyone, not even the man that feeds them, but Jack and Bill believed that dogs are alike the world over and they proceeded to prove it by making friends with these work-dogs of the north. This in the face of the fact that the old timers told them that petting the dogs would spoil them, but the boys thought differently.

Came then the first fall of snow and winter had set in. For the next week or so the boys drove their dog teams around hitched to the sleds and both did much walking on their snow-shoes. Like driving a dog team walking on snow-shoes requires practice, only not nearly as much, and while Jack had learned both of these things in the Arctic they were an entirely new means of transportation to Bill, but he took to them with avidity for they were in the nature of sport.

As I had occasion to remark in an earlier account of Bill, he could learn anything that had to do with the concrete, as for instance riding or shooting or athletics, but when it came to the abstract, such as extracting cube root, how wireless works or the way chemical elements combine, he was as compact as the antlers of a bull moose. But he was like the rest of the human herd in that he would have given his gold-tooth to be able to do what someone else could do, only it must have to do with the working of the mind. What Bill did have, though, was a good memory, but he lacked the fundamentals of education and this was where he fell down. But this has nothing to do with snowshoes and how he learned to use them.

His first efforts at snowshoeing were like everyone’s else, laughable in the extreme, and the natives who congregated to watch him roared as he spilled himself this way or that way and then must needs have assistance to get up again. Before he had done with it, though, he could walk on them very swiftly notwithstanding his rather short bowed legs and it was surprising how quickly he learned the swinging outward motion that must be acquired in order to become an expert.

To cap the climax he laughed best at them by laughing last when he turned a complete back somersault with a pair of five-foot snowshoes on and that, as you will allow, is some very considerable trick.

“He’ll do!” as Jack McQuesten put it.

A good deal of snow had fallen, the streams and rivers had frozen over so that the sledding was good and it was getting around the zero mark. The long awaited day had arrived and Jack McQuesten had packed their outfit on the sleds, at the same time showing the boys how to do it. There is a wonderful knack in knowing how to pack, and the “freight-car” that Bill had declared they would need to carry their outfit, which the old trader had made up for them, his experienced hands compressed into two comfortable loads. It was next to impossible, as Jack said, to believe that such an enormous amount of stores could be contained in so small a space.