Gratitude For Past
Services Or Future Does Not Enter Into The Owner's Thoughts To
Secure A Fair Allowance Of Food.
All their training and instinct
prompts them to hang about camp, where, kicked, stoned, beaten,
and starved, they steal and hunt as best they may, until the sad
season of summer is worn away and merry winter with its toil and
good food is back once more.
From leaving Fort MacMurray we saw daily the starving dog, and
I fed them when I could. At Smith Landing the daily dog became a
daily fifty. One big fellow annexed us. "I found them first," he
seemed to say, and no other dog came about our camp without a fight.
Of course he fared well on our scraps, but many a time it made my
heart ache and my food-store suffer to see the gaunt skeletons in
the bushes, just beyond his sphere of influence, watching for a
chance to rush in and secure a mouthful of - anything to stay the
devastating pang. My journal of the time sets forth in full detail
the diversity of their diet, not only every possible scrap of
fish and meat or whatsoever smelled of fish or meat, but rawhide,
leather, old boots, flour-bags, potato-peelings, soap, wooden
fragments of meat-boxes, rags that have had enough animal contact
to be odorous. An ancient dishcloth, succulent with active service,
was considered a treat to be bolted whole; and when in due course
the cloth was returned to earth, it was intact, bleached, purged, and
purified as by chemic fires and ready for a new round of benevolences.
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