The men worked with the quickness of long practice. Gold-pan, coffee-pot, and cooking-pail were soon thawing the heaped frost-crystals into water. Smoke extracted a stick of beans from the sled. Already cooked, with a generous admixture of cubes of fat pork and bacon, the beans had been frozen into this portable immediacy. He chopped off chunks with an ax, as if it were so much firewood, and put them into the frying-pan to thaw. Solidly frozen sourdough biscuits were likewise placed to thaw. In twenty minutes from the time they halted, the meal was ready to eat.
“About forty below,” Shorty mumbled through a mouthful of beans. “Say—I hope it don't get colder—or warmer, neither. It's just right for trail breaking.”
Smoke did not answer. His own mouth full of beans, his jaws working, he had chanced to glance at the lead-dog, lying half a dozen feet away. That gray and frosty wolf was gazing at him with the infinite wistfulness and yearning that glimmers and hazes so often in the eyes of Northland dogs. Smoke knew it well, but never got over the unfathomable wonder of it. As if to shake off the hypnotism, he set down his plate and coffee-cup, went to the sled, and began opening the dried-fish sack.
“Hey!” Shorty expostulated. “What 'r' you doin'?”
“Breaking all law, custom, precedent, and trail usage,” Smoke replied. “I'm going to feed the dogs in the middle of the day—just this once. They've worked hard, and that last pull to the top of the divide is before them. Besides, Bright there has been talking to me, telling me all untellable things with those eyes of his.”
Shorty laughed skeptically. “Go on an' spoil 'em. Pretty soon you'll be manicurin' their nails. I'd recommend cold cream and electric massage—it's great for sled-dogs. And sometimes a Turkish bath does 'em fine.”
“I've never done it before,” Smoke defended. “And I won't again. But this once I'm going to. It's just a whim, I guess.”
“Oh, if it's a hunch, go to it.” Shorty's tones showed how immediately he had been mollified. “A man's always got to follow his hunches.”
“It isn't a hunch, Shorty. Bright just sort of got on my imagination for a couple of twists. He told me more in one minute with those eyes of his than I could read in the books in a thousand years. His eyes were acrawl with the secrets of life. They were just squirming and wriggling there. The trouble is I almost got them, and then I didn't. I'm no wiser than I was before, but I was near them.” He paused and then added, “I can't tell you, but that dog's eyes were just spilling over with cues to what life is, and evolution, and star-dust, and cosmic sap, and all the rest—everything.”
“Boiled down into simple American, you got a hunch,” Shorty insisted.