Now Gold, the master collie, completely exhausted and blinded by the snow, came slinking back to his mistress. Marian rubbed the snow from the eyes of the faithful dog and, patting his side, bade him go back into the fight. Tears came to her eyes as the dog bravely returned to his task.
The time came at last when all three dogs seemed done in; when the deer all but stopped; when it seemed impossible that they might be kept moving another five minutes. Then it was that the indomitable Marian sank down upon her sled in the depths of despair.
“Look! Look!” cried Patsy, who had turned about to rub the frost from her cheeks. “Wolves! A whole pack of them!”
Marian wheeled about for one look; then, digging into her pack, drew forth her rifle.
“We’ll die fighting!” she murmured as she took steady aim at the foremost member of the pack that came tearing up the trail.
She was about to press the trigger when Patsy gave her arm a sudden pull.
“Wait!” she cried. “Wait! Those are not wolves. They’re dogs; great big, wonderful dogs!”
CHAPTER XXVII
THE END OF THE TRAIL
Troops of conflicting hopes and fears waged battle in Marian’s brain when she realized that the pack approaching them on the run up the trail in the teeth of the storm were not wolves, but dogs. There are two types of dogs in Alaska; one, more wolf than dog, is the native wolf dog. This type, once he is loosed, leaps at the throat of the first reindeer he sees. A pack of these dogs, in such a crisis as the girls were now facing, would not only destroy many of the feebly struggling, worn-out and helpless younger deer, but beyond doubt would drive the remainder of the herd into such a wild panic as would lose them to their owners forever.
Were the dogs of this or the other type—white men’s dogs, who treat the reindeer as they might cattle or sheep, and merely bark at them and drive them forward? If they were white men’s dogs they might save the day; for the barking of such a pack, as fresh for the struggle they appeared to be, would doubtless drive the exhausted deer to renewed efforts and carry them on over the top.