While we were drinking tea and eating hard bread I noted that the settlement contained some thirty men, with their wives and children. The women hastened to prepare a dinner of unborn-deer's flesh and deer tongues. Frozen marrow bones, uncooked, were broken and the marrow, in the shape of sticks or candles, was passed around as a great delicacy. These dishes, together with frozen cranberries, formed our repast, and a very good one we voted it.
When we were done I went outside and found, to my surprise, that the dogs had not yet been fed. I remonstrated with Chrisoffsky, but he answered that they had not yet finished their evening toilet. Then I saw that the dogs were busy licking themselves and biting the pieces of frozen snow out from between their toes. My driver explained that if they were fed before performing this very necessary task, they would immediately lie down to sleep and wake up in the morning with sore feet and rheumatism, and then they would be useless for several days. It takes the dogs a good hour before they have groomed themselves fit for dinner. They seem to know that they can get nothing to eat before this work is done, but the minute they have finished they sit up and begin to howl for their meal. Each dog receives two or three salmon backs and heads. This is a fairly good amount considering that the salmon were originally eighteen- or twenty-pound fish. The dogs were all left in harness and still attached to the main tug. This is pulled taut and anchored at the front with the polka, which prevents the dogs from fighting, for no more than two can reach each other at a time. As they feed, the drivers watch them to see that they do not steal each other's food. After they finish their dinner they scratch a shallow place in the snow, curl up with their backs to the wind and go to sleep. They are never unfastened from the sledge from one end of the journey to the other. They literally live in the harness. While the dogs were eating, the mongrel curs belonging to the encampment (an entirely different breed from the sledge-dog) stood around and yelped saucily at the big intruders, but the sledge-dogs gave them no notice whatever.
Theodosia Chrisoffsky, Guide.
The dogs sleep quietly all night unless one of them happens to raise his nose and emit a long-drawn howl. At this signal they all join in the howl for about three minutes, stopping at the same instant. If some puppy happens to give an additional yelp, all the others turn a disgusted look at him as if, indeed, he ought to display better manners. This howling concert generally comes off two or three times a night. We do not know what causes it, but probably it is some subconscious recollection of their ancestral wolfhood. The same thing happens whenever the team stops on the road. They all sit and howl for several minutes.
On the road the dogs are fed simply with the dried fish heads and backs; but at home a more elaborate meal is prepared for them. Water is put into a sort of trough, and then rotten fish, which has been kept in pits, is added, with a few of the dried fish, and the whole is cooked by throwing in red-hot stones. This is fed to the dogs only at night. In the summer-time the dogs have to forage for themselves, which they do by digging out tundra-rats. By the time summer is over the dogs are so fat that they have to be tied up and systematically starved till brought into condition for the sledge again. This period is one long concert of howls, but the natives do not seem to mind it. The food of the dogs is entirely carnivorous, for they would rather live by gnawing their own harness than to eat bread, even if the latter could be supplied. The instinct by which these animals foresee the coming of a blizzard is truly wonderful. The unfailing sign of a coming storm is the pawing of the snow. For what reason they paw the snow will probably never be known. This, too, may be some residual taint of their original savage state.