Ten Thousand Miles with a Dog Sled Part 23

[Sidenote: DOG FOOD]

On the other hand, the dog's ration for many days is carried on the sled he hauls. There is a definite limit to it, of course, and knowledge of this limit made every experienced dog driver incredulous, from the first, of Doctor Cook's claim to have travelled some eleven hundred miles, from Etah to the North Pole and back, with a team of dogs hauling their own food. It is possible, however, on fair trails, with rigid economy, to travel five hundred miles and haul dog food and man food and the other indispensables of a long journey; and that is twice as far as it is ever necessary to travel in the interior of Alaska without reaching a supply point, the northern slope to the Arctic Ocean excepted.

Perhaps it would be putting it better to say that a team of seven dogs can haul their own and their driver's food and the camp equipment, all, of course, carefully reduced to a minimum, for a month. Dog food of one sort or another can be bought at any place where anything whatever is sold. Almost any Indian village will furnish dried fish, and it is often possible, with no other weapon than a .22 rifle, to feed dogs largely on the country through which they pa.s.s. The writer's team has had many a meal of ptarmigan, rabbits, quail, and spruce hen, while to enumerate other articles, on which at times and in stress for proper food, his dogs have sustained life and strength for travel, would be to enumerate all the common human comestibles. Aside from the usual ration of fish, tallow, and rice boiled together, corn-meal, beans, flour, oatmeal, sago (though that is poor stuff), tapioca, canned meats of all kinds, canned salmon, even canned kippered herring from Scotland, seal oil, seal and whale flesh, ham and bacon, horse flesh, moose and caribou and mountain-sheep flesh, canned "Boston brown bread," canned b.u.t.ter, canned milk, dried apples, sugar, cheese, crackers of all kinds, and a score of other matters have at times entered into their food. Dogs have been "tided over" tight places for days and days on horse oats boiled with tallow candles, working the while. Anything that a man can eat, and much that even a starving man would scarcely eat, will make food for dogs. At the last and worst, dog can be fed to dog and even to man. When a dog team reaches a mining camp where supplies of all sorts are scarce--and that is not an uncommon experience--it is sometimes an exceedingly expensive matter to feed it; but something can always be found that will serve to keep it going until the return to a better-stocked region.

In the winter of 1910-11, when there was such scarcity in the Iditarod, it cost the writer thirty-nine dollars and fifty cents to feed seven dogs for a week, and he has more than once been at almost a similar charge in the Koyukuk. But in all his travels he has never yet been unable to procure some sort of food for his dogs. At times they have been fed for days on rabbits straight; at times on ptarmigan straight.

[Sidenote: THE REINDEER'S USEFULNESS]

Speaking broadly, the reindeer is a stupid, unwieldy, and intractable brute, not comparing for a moment with the dog in intelligence or adaptability. The common notion that his name is derived from the use of reins in driving him, thus putting him in the cla.s.s with the horse, is a mistake; the word comes from a Norse root which refers to his moss-browsing habit. The "rein" with which he is driven is a rope tied around one of his horns. He has no cognisance of "gee" and "haw," nor of any other vocal direction, but must be yanked hither and thither with the rope by main force; while to stop him in his mad career, once he is started, it is often necessary to throw him with the rope. In Lapland there are doubtless individual deer better trained; the Lap herders tell of them with pride; but in the main this is a just description of reindeer handling. All the chief herders in Alaska are Laps, brought over for their knowledge of the animals, and the writer has repeatedly ridden behind some of their best deer.

Wherein, then, lies the success of the reindeer experiment in Alaska?

Chiefly in the provision of a regular meat supply by which the natives and whites in the vicinity of a herd are relieved from the precariousness of the chase or the rapacity of the cold-storage butcher company. The Esquimau, having served his allotted apprentices.h.i.+p of five years and entered upon possession of a herd, can at any time kill and dress a "kid of the flock" for his family or for the market. The price of butcher's meat has been kept down all over the Seward Peninsula by the compet.i.tion of the numerous reindeer herds, to the comfort of the population and the exasperation of the butcher company, and many an Esquimau has become pa.s.sably rich. The skin of the animal also furnishes a warm and much-needed material for clothing and finds a ready sale at a good price.

This success is, however, confined so far to the coast. The herds have not thriven in the interior and have now all been withdrawn to the coast. Beasts of prey killed them; a hoof disease destroyed many; others are supposed to have died from eating some poisonous fungus. In five or six years the herd at Tanana had not increased at all, but rather diminished, and the same is true of the other herds on the Yukon. The Indian, moreover, does not take to herding as the Esquimau does, and can hardly be induced to the segregation of himself and his family from his tribe which reindeer herding involves. The "apprentices" on the Yukon were nearly all of them Esquimaux from the coast.

It may be that the salt of the coast region is essential to the well-being of the reindeer; it is not so with the caribou--and the reindeer is nothing but a domesticated caribou--many herds of which, in the interior of Alaska, never visit the coast at all; but all caribou herds have their salt-licks, and one wishes that the oft-recommended plan of furnis.h.i.+ng salt for the herds in the interior had been adopted by the government for a season before their removal was determined upon.

Like most other "resources" of Alaska, the imported reindeer, at first decried and ridiculed, has now become the slender foundation for extravagant speculations of prosperity. The "millions of acres waiting for the plough" in the interior have lately been supplemented in this visionary treasury by the capitalisation of the vast tundras of the coast, the golden wheat-fields of the one finding counterpart in the mult.i.tudinous herds of the other. The growing dearth of cattle-range in the United States offers, it seems, to Alaska the opportunity of supplying the American market with meat, and the kindling fancy of the enthusiastic "booster" sees trains loaded with frozen reindeer meat rolling into Chicago.

While the reindeer will never supersede the dog as a draught animal anywhere, the horse is rapidly superseding him on good trails in the more settled and peopled regions. In the Fairbanks and Nome districts, in the Circle and Koyukuk districts, in the Fortymile and in the Iditarod--in all districts where any extensive mining is carried on--heavy freights are moved by horses, and this tendency will doubtless increase rather than diminish. The dog team cannot compete with the horse team when it comes to moving heavy loads over good trails. The grain that the horse eats is imported, and in the main will probably always be imported, but oats cut green and properly cared for make excellent fodder, and the native hay, while not nearly as nutritious as the imported timothy, will sufficiently supplement grain.

We hear a great deal nowadays of the benefits which are to come to Alaska from the railroad which the United States is expected to build from tide-water to the Yukon, and the clamorous voices of the journalist and the professional promoter and politician, which seem the only voices which ever reach the ear of government, are insistent that this is the one great thing that will bring prosperity to the country. Yet the writer is confident that he expresses almost the unanimous opinion of those who live in the country, outside of the cla.s.ses mentioned, when he says that if the amount of money which this railroad will cost were expended upon good highways and trails the benefit would be much greater. It is means of intercommunication between the various parts of the country that is the great need of Alaska; some of its most promising sections are almost inaccessible now or accessible only at great trouble and expense. Access to the country itself, for the introduction of merchandise, is furnished easily enough during three or four months of the year by its incomparable system of waterways. Good highways, well engineered and well maintained, over which horse teams could be used summer and winter, would remove much of what at present is the almost prohibitive cost of distributing that merchandise from river points.

Such roads would give an enormous stimulus to prospecting, and would render it possible to work gold placers all over the country that are of too low grade to be worked at the present rates of transportation. A _really_ good highway from Valdez to Fairbanks and the making of the long-ago begun Valdez-Eagle road; a good highway from Fairbanks to the upper Tanana as far as the Nabesna, connecting with the one from the Copper River country and the coast; another from the Yukon into the Koyukuk and the Chandalar; another from Fairbanks into the Kantishna, connecting with one from the lower Kuskokwim and one from the Iditarod; a road from Eagle across the almost unknown region (save for the line of the 141st meridian) between the Yukon and the Porcupine Rivers; two or three roads between the Yukon and the Tanana; a road from the Koyukuk to Kotzebue Sound--these would const.i.tute main arteries of travel and would open up the country as no trunk railroad will ever do. The expense would be great, both of construction and maintenance, but it would probably not be greater than the cost of constructing and maintaining the proposed railroad. Twenty or thirty ordinary freight trains a year would bring in all the goods that Alaska consumes. Before that amount can be very greatly increased there must be a large development of the means by which it is to be distributed throughout the country.

Some day, perhaps, these roads will be made, and the horse, not the dog, will be the draught animal upon them. Yet it would be a rash conclusion that even then the time will be at hand when there will be no longer use for the work dog in Alaska. Away from these main arteries of travel he will still be employed. So long as great part of the land remains a n.o.ble arctic wilderness; so long as the prospector strikes farther and farther into the rugged mountains; so long as quick travel over great stretches of country is necessary or desirable; so long as the salmon swarm up the rivers to furnish food for the catching; so long as the Indian moves from fis.h.i.+ng camp to village and from village to hunting camp--so long will the dog be hitched to the sled in Alaska; so long will his joyful yelp and his plaintive whine be heard in the land; so long will his warm tongue seek his master's hand, even the hand that strikes him, and his eloquent eyes speak his utter allegiance.