"But she managed to write in pencil on a bit of paper, 'come over quickly.' She put it in a piece of sealskin and tied it with a piece of deer-thong round a dog's neck.
"He ran with it to the nearest house, which was ten miles away. And soon men came and brought them aid, and their lives were saved.—Well, John, I'm coming back in a day or two to see how you are. And I'll call in on neighbor Martha Dennis, and she'll make you some nice broth to take the place of the stew the dogs got."
"Thank you, Doctor! I'll be glad to see you when you comes back. I don't know what us would do, if it wasn't for you, Doctor!"
To the stories that the Doctor and his patient told each other might be added many more true tales of the intelligence of the "husky" dogs.
Sometimes a man at work in the forest, getting in his winter's supply of fire-wood, will send the dog home with no message at all.
Then the good wife looks about, to see what the dog's master has forgotten. It may be an axe-head, or his pipe, or his lunch of bread and potatoes.
Whatever it is, she ties it to the dog and back he trots to his master in the woods, a willing express-messenger.
But one of the finest deeds set down to the credit of a "husky" is what a plain, every-day "mutt" dog did at Martin's Point, on the west coast of Newfoundland near Bonne Bay, in December 1919.
The steamer Ethie, Captain English commanding, was making her last southward trip of the season. I knew the Ethie well, every inch of her, for I had made the up trip and the down trip aboard her only a few weeks before. Through no fault of her gallant captain, she had been carrying a great many more passengers than she ever was meant to carry. On a pinch, she had accommodations for fifty. But on one trip, by standing up the fishermen in the washroom as if they were bunches of asparagus, she had taken three hundred passengers. From a hundred to two hundred was a common number. I had been one of about twenty-five lucky enough to find a "berth" in the small dining-saloon. The berth was like a parcel-rack in a railway car. The people of the coast were signing a long petition to have the miserable old tub laid up and a larger, modern vessel substituted.
When Captain English was nearing Martin's Point on the Ethie's last voyage, a high sea was running, and she sprang a leak. The water rushed into the fireroom. Captain English went below and made an appeal to "his boys" not to desert their fires and not to fail him.