Along in the late afternoon of the next day they came to a river and Jack proclaimed that they had at last reached the end of their long trip.
“This is the Big Black River all right and if I haven’t missed my guess we are about ten miles below the Arctic Circle and fifteen or twenty miles west of the International boundary line. Put her there, old pard, we’re in the land of the Yeehats at last!”
“With nary a Yeehat in sight,” said Bill as they grasped hands, “but I’m goin’ to keep my rifle handy if it’s all the same to you.”
Then came the work of building their winter quarters which was to be a log cabin of one room about twelve feet wide and fourteen feet long. There were plenty of trees about, the chief kind being Alaska spruce, and owing to its abundance in the more northern parts of Alaska it is used for work of every description, such as cabins, mining timber, firewood, sleds, etc.
The first thing to be done was to fell the trees and they began by sawing them down with their crosscut saw. Bill said he would rather chop them down and that he could do it easier and quicker than both of them could do it together with the saw. While this work was in progress the dogs grew restless on account of their inactivity and enlivened things up every now and then with a fight; then Jack would go among them, like Daniel in the lion’s den, and use the butt-end of his whip handle on them until they broke apart.
“I’ll give you muts something to do that will take the fight out of you,” he told them, and he did, for as Bill felled each tree his pardner, as he had now begun to call him, lashed a rope round an end and hitching the dogs to it put them to doing work the like of which none of them had ever done before.
And pull? Why, boy, they pulled so hard that their muscles looked as if they would break through their hides. After he had broken out a log and was ready to start Jack would give his long whip a tremendous crack and yell mush! when every dog did his duty and they liked it too.
It was a never ending source of wonder to the boys that these animals liked to work. And yet under the influence of kind treatment they were very affectionate, especially the malamutes, though none of them showed it in a way at all like dogs that live in the lap of luxury. Neither would it do to pet one of them to the exclusion of the others else there would be a terrific fight going on in an instant for they were fearfully jealous, and would not tolerate the slightest show of partiality.
“I’ve got one o’ them high-brow ideas, Jack; I’ve been thinkin’ and thinkin’ as I’ve watched these huskies, and after what you told me about the way the dogs acted on the front over there in France, I’ve conclooded they’ve got human brains just the same as you and me. They could talk if they wants to but they just pretend they can’t so they won’t have to argy with a feller. They’re just like them furriners in Noo York, they can savvy anything they wanter and anything they don’t wanter savvy—why they don’t.”
“Then you believe in reincarnation,” said Jack.