in. But Jean was too wise for
this. He preferred that Jan should go hungry because he wanted Jan to
learn quickly. Jan educated meant dollars to Jean, and a good many of
them. Jan uneducated, or learning but slowly, would, as Jean well knew,
very soon mean Jan dead--a mere section of dog-food worth no dollars at
all. So Jean laughed at the big hound.

"You see, Jan," he said. "You watch um, Jan, an' learn queek--eh? Yes, I
think you learn queek."

Thus in that little matter of the daily meal, if Jan had gone on making
the mistake he made on his first night in the wilderness, not all Jean's
authority could have saved him. The rest of the team, by hook or crook,
would have kept him food-less and killed him outright long before the
slower process of starvation could have released him. But, his first
lesson sufficed for Jan. When his next supper came he had done a day and
a half's work; he had lived and exerted himself more in that day and a
half than during any average month of his previous life. As a
consequence, when Bill and Snip looked round for Jan's supper, after
bolting their own, they saw a great hound with stiff legs and erect
hackles, alert in every hair of his body--but no supper. The supper,
very slightly masticated and swallowed with furious haste, was already
beginning its task of helping to stiffen Jan's fibers and give
fierceness to the lift of his upper lip.

But that was far from being the end of the lesson. In point of size, and
in other ways, Jan was exceptional. He needed more than the other dogs;
and because he needed more, and had the sort of personality which makes
for survival, he got more. Jean gave him more than was given to the
others. But that was not enough. Jan was so hungry, what with his
strivings in the traces and the novelty for him of this life of tense
unceasing effort and alertness, that his appetite was as a thorn in his
belly and as a spur to his ingenuity and enterprise.

It is the law of the sled-dog that you shall not steal your trace-mates'
grub. Jan broke this law wherever he saw the glint of a chance to do so;
that is, wherever he could manage it by force of fang and shoulder, or
by cunning--beyond the range of the whip. He did more. He stole his
master's food; not every day, of course, but just as often as extreme
cunning and tireless watchfulness enabled him to manage it. He was
caught once, and only once, and beaten off with a gee-pole and a club;
pretty sorely beaten, t