These big, strong, savage, thick-coated dogs of the realm of ice, are so much like the wolf that if let loose they would soon begin to make their living in the wolf's way. Their owners do not think of making pets or hunters of them. They simply feed and drive them and keep them in order with the whip. What the Eskimo dog dearly loves is a fight, and they snarl and snap at one another as savagely as any wolf could do. Only the sharp use of the whip can keep them from fighting.
The Eskimos could not live in their cold country without the aid of these hardy animals. No other creatures could be found so well suited to their needs. With their thick and warm coat of hair these dogs can bear the greatest cold, and at night all they need for bed or shelter is a snow-bank into which they can dig and bury themselves. Here they sleep as cosily as if they were in a bed of feathers.
They will eat any kind of meat or fish, and can drag a sledge with great speed and for hours at a time over the ice. Thus it may be seen that the Eskimos and Indians of the north have a useful servant in the dog. They hitch it to their sledges, the number of dogs varying with the load to be drawn. No reins are needed. There is a leader to the team trained to follow a trail and to obey its master's orders. The driver also carries a long, stinging whip with which he is very expert and can reach any dog in the team. If they get into a fight, as they are apt to do even when drawing a sledge, the whip is used to bring them back to their work.
What would travellers in the sea of ice or seekers for the North Pole have done without the dog? It has drawn them and their food in all their journeys over the ice and the Eskimo dog is the only animal besides man that ever reached the Pole. Without its aid Peary, the great explorer, would never have got to the North Pole or got back again to his ship. Is it not well to speak, then, about how the dog helped him in this famous discovery?
When Peary took his ship, the Roosevelt, far to the north, he had on board more than two hundred dogs and plenty of walrus meat to feed them. When he went north over the ice these dogs were used to draw the sledges loaded with food and other supplies. The explorers had to walk; no dogs could be spared to draw them.
Alaskan Dog Team. The Winter Mail-Carriers
On his last dash to the north, from 87° 57´ north latitude to 90° (a distance of about 140 miles), he had five sledges and forty dogs. The sledges were the pick of twenty-five that had started from the ship and the dogs were the best of all his teams. Also for drivers he had his four best Eskimos. With these sledges and men and dogs he got to the North Pole, which no one had ever reached before, and the faithful dogs shared the glory of the discovery. They came back with him—some of them, for some died on the way. The poor brutes did not know what they had done, and no doubt thought a good meal of walrus meat better than a dozen Poles, either North or South.
Now shall we say something about the South Pole? Dogs have been used there too, but when Lieutenant Shackleton, the English explorer, made his famous journey in that region in 1909, he took with him four of the hardy ponies of the North, thinking they would be better than dogs. But his ponies died, one by one, and he and his men had to drag their sledges back by hand, eating the frozen pony meat as they toiled along over mountains of ice. Later explorers have taken dogs with them as better fitted for the work than the best ponies.