But April Comes With Melting Snows And May With Open Rivers And
Brown Earth Everywhere; Then, Indeed, The Reign Of
The dog is over.
The long yellow-birch canoe is taken down from the shanty roof or
from a sheltered
Scaffold, stitched, gummed, and launched; and the
dogs are turned loose to fend for themselves. 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.
In some seasons the dogs catch Rabbits enough to keep them up. But
this year the Rabbits were gone. They are very clever at robbing
fish-nets at times, but these were far from the fort. Reduced
to such desperate straits for food, what wonder that cannibalism
should be common! Not only the dead, but the sick or disabled of
their own kind are torn to pieces and devoured. I was told of one
case where a brutal driver disabled one of his dogs with heavy blows;
its companions did not wait till it was dead before they feasted.
It is hard to raise pups because the mothers so often devour their
own young; and this is a charge I never heard laid to the Wolf,
the ancestor of these dogs, which shows how sadly the creature has
been deteriorated by contact with man. There seems no length to
which they will not go for food. Politeness forbids my mentioning
the final diet for which they scramble around the camp. Never in my
life before have I seen such utter degradation by the power of the
endless hunger pinch.
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