the whip curled about Jan's shoulders as, puzzled, humiliated,
hurt, and above all bewildered, he plunged forward again in the traces,
and heard Jean mutter behind him:

"Good dog, thees Jan. By gar! hee's good dog."

And that was how the new life, the working life, began for Jan, the son
of Finn and Desdemona.

XXVI

THE RULE OF TRACE AND THONG

From this point there began for Jan a life so strangely, wildly
different from anything he had ever known or suspected to exist, that
only a dog of exceptionable fiber and stamina--in character as well as
physique--could possibly have survived transition to it from the smooth
routines which Jan had so far known.

To begin with, it was a life in which all days alike were full of toil,
of ordered, unremitting work. And until it began Jan had never done an
hour's work in his life. (In England, outside the sheep-dog fraternity
and a few of the sporting breeds, all dogs spend their lives in
unordered play, uncontrolled loafing, and largely superfluous sleeping.)

The Lady Desdemona, his mother, for example, would certainly not have
lived through a month of Jan's present life; very possibly not a week.
Finn would have endured it much longer, because of his experiences in
Australia, his knowledge of the wild kindred and their ways. But even
Finn, despite his huge strength and exceptional knowledge, would not
have come through this ordeal so well as Jan did, unless it had come to
him as early in life as it came to Jan. And even then his survival would
have been doubtful. The difference between the climates of Australia and
the North-west Territory is hardly greater than the difference in stress
and hardness between Finn's life in the Tinnaburra ranges, as leader of
a dingo pack, and Jan's life in North-west Canada as learner in a
sled-team.

The physical strength of Finn the wolfhound, in whose veins ran the
unmixed blood of many generations of wolfhound champions, might have
been equal to the strain of Jan's new life. But his pride, his
courtliness, his fine gentlemanliness, would likely have been the death
of him in such a case. He would have died nobly, be sure of that. But it
is likely he would have died. Now in the case of Jan, while he had
inherited much of his sire's fine courtesy, much of his dam's noble
dignity, yet these things were not so vitally of the essence of him as
they were of his parents. They were a part of his character, and they
had formed his ma