An hour or more was devoted to making out a list of the articles necessary for the trip. While from then until the very time of departure Phil kept thinking of and adding new items to this list, Serge was kept equally busy in trying to reduce its length.
Before Kurilla was dismissed that evening both he and his son Chitsah were engaged to accompany the boys at least as far as Forty Mile, a distance of one thousand miles, though beyond that point they would not promise to go.
From Kurilla also Gerald Hamer agreed to purchase, at his own price, his fine team of dogs, of which bushy-tailed Musky was leader, big Amook and Mint were steer-dogs, and Luvtuk and Shag completed the nimble-footed quintet. This was hereafter to be known as Phil’s team, for, having already had some experience in driving them, it was believed that he could manage them better than dogs unaccustomed to his astonishing pronunciation of the native words of command. Kurilla was to bring them to him the very next morning to be fed, for in dog-sledging it is a rule that every driver shall feed his own team, in order to win their regard and persuade them that he is not an unmitigated evil.
The season was now late November, and though the morrow was Thanksgiving day, or believed to be such in absence of any proclamation to that effect, it was to be devoted to preparations, and the start was to be made at sunrise of the following morning. Therefore Phil’s last words of the night were:
“I am dead tired, old man, but I want you to wake me early all the same, for I shall have only one day in which to feed my dogs and teach them to know me.”
[CHAPTER XII]
PHIL FEEDS HIS DOGS
It did not seem to Phil that he had any more than closed his eyes before he was awakened by such a babel of yelps and barkings as notified him that further sleep was out of the question, and also that his dogs were waiting to be fed. Hearty imprecations showered on the heads of the vociferous team from the direction of Mr. Sims’s room, and threats to treat them to a dose of duck-shot, so hastened Phil’s movements that in a few seconds he had slipped on his seal-skin boots and fur parka, and was outside in the stinging cold. There in the moonlight stood Kurilla, with a broad grin on his good-humored face, holding in leash Phil’s team. Every member of it, but big Amook loudest of all, was vigorously demanding his three meals of the day before and the one already due on the present morning, or four in all.