nd fitness. He represented
most of a northlander's ideals and dreams of what a sled-dog should be,
plus certain other qualities that came to him from his breeding, and
that no dog-musher would have even hoped for in a sled-dog: his immense
size, for example, and his wonderful dignity and grace of form and
action.

Jan never had been so superlatively fit; so instinct in every least hair
of his coat, in every littlest vein of his body, with tingling life and
pulsing energy. His coat crackled if a man's hand was passed along his
black saddle.

Despite the lissom grace of all his motions, Jan moved every limb with a
kind of exuberant snap, as though his strength spilled over from its
superabundance, and had to be expended at every opportunity to avoid
surcharge. His movements formed his safety-valve, you fancied. Robbed of
these, his abounding vitality would surely burst through the cage of his
great body in some way, and destroy him. He walked as though the forces
of gravitation were but barely sufficient to tether him down to mother
earth.

"And I reckon he weighs near a hundred and sixty," said Willis; a guess
the store scales proved good that night, when Jan registered exactly one
hundred and fifty-seven pounds, though he carried no fat, nor an ounce
of any kind of waste material.

XXXIV

THE PEACE RIVER TRAIL

Winter set in with unusual rigor, the temperature dropping after heavy
snow to fifty below zero, and hovering between thirty and sixty below
for weeks together.

Jim Willis and his sled-team lived on a practically "straight" meat
diet. Jan had forgotten the taste of sun-dried salmon, and men and dogs
together were living now on moose-meat chopped with an ax from the slabs
and chunks that were stowed away on the sled. Willis occasionally
treated himself to a dish of boiled beans, and when fortune favored he
ate ptarmigan. But moose-meat was the staple for man and dogs alike.

For months the valleys they had traversed had been rich in game. But in
the northland the movements of game are mysterious and unaccountable;
and now, in a bleak and gloomy stretch of country north of the Caribou
Mountains, they had seen no trace of life of any kind for a fortnight
except wolves. And of these, by day and by night, Jim Willis had seen
and heard more than he cared about. It seemed the brutes had come from
country quite unlike the valleys Willis had traveled, and resembling
more nearly that in which he now fou