Wilfred was seated on a folded blanket, with a buffalo-robe tucked over his feet. Louison flourished a whip in the air to make the dogs start. Away went Yula with something of the velocity of an arrow from a bow, knocking down Gaspé, who thought of holding the back of the sled to guide it.
He scrambled to his feet and ran after it. Yula was careering over the snow at racehorse speed, ten miles an hour, and poor little Yankee, almost frightened out of his senses, was bent upon making a dash at the ribbon waving so enticingly before his eyes. He darted forward. He hung back. He lurched from side to side. He twisted, he turned. He upset the equilibrium of the sledge. It banged against a tree on one side, and all but tilted over on the other. One end went down into a badger hole, leaving Wilfred and his blanket in a heap on the snow, when Yankee, lightened of half his load, fairly leaped upon Yula's back and hopelessly entangled the traces. The boys concealed an uneasy sense of ignominious failure under an assertion calculated to put as good a face as they could on the matter: "We have not got it quite right yet, but we shall."
CHAPTER XI.
THE HUNTERS' CAMP.
A burst of merry laughter made the two boys look round, half afraid that it might be at their own expense.
Wilfred felt a bit annoyed when he perceived a little party of horsemen spurring towards the fort. But Gaspé ran after them, waving his arms with a bonjour as he recognized his own Louison's cousin, Batiste, among the foremost.
Dog training and dog driving are the never-failing topics of interest among the hunters and trappers. Batiste had reined in his horse to watch the ineffectual efforts of the boys to disentangle the two dogs, who were fighting and snarling with each other over the upturned sled.
Batiste and his comrades soon advanced from watching to helping. The sled was lifted up, the traces disentangled, and Wilfred and Gaspé were told and made to feel that they knew nothing at all about dog driving, and might find themselves in a heap all pell-mell at the bottom of the river bank some day if they set about it in such a reckless fashion. They were letting the dogs run just where they liked. Dogs wanted something to follow. Batiste jumped from his horse at last, quite unable to resist the pleasure of breaking in a young dog.
"It takes two to manage a dog team," he asserted. "It wants a man in snow-shoes to walk on in front and mark a track, and another behind to keep them steady to their work."
Dogs, horses, men, and boys all turned back together to discuss Yankee's undeveloped powers. But no, Batiste himself could do nothing with him. Yankee refused to haul.