This, I Take It, Is One Of The
Greatest Feats Of A Civiliser.
The world has not yet heard, much
less comprehended, the magnitude of the achievement; when it does
there will be no name on the Canadian roll of fame that will stand
higher or be blazoned more brightly than that of James Evans the
missionary.
CHAPTER XXIII
THE DOGS OF FORT RESOLUTION
It sounds like the opening of an epic poem but it is not.
The Chipewyan calender is divided in two seasons - dog season and
canoe season. What the horse is to the Arab, what the Reindeer is
to the Lap and the Yak to the Thibetan, the dog is to the Chipewyan
for at least one-half of the year, until it is displaced by the
canoe.
During dog season the canoes are piled away somewhat carelessly or
guarded only from the sun. During canoe season the dogs are treated
atrociously. Let us remember, first, that these are dogs in every
doggy sense, the worshipping servants of man, asking nothing but
a poor living in return for abject love and tireless service, as
well as the relinquishment of all family ties and natural life. In
winter, because they cannot serve without good food, they are well
fed on fish that is hung on scaffolds in the fall in time to be
frozen before wholly spoiled. The journeys they will make and the
devoted service they render at this time is none too strongly set
forth in Butler's "Cerf Vola" and London's "Call of the Wild." It
is, indeed, the dog alone that makes life possible during the white
half-year of the boreal calender.
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