nd the dogs he drove
got to know and love one another better.

Grenfell has done seventy-five miles in a day easily: but how far one
goes depends on the state of the ice and snow and the roughness of the
trail: sometimes five miles a day is as much as the dogs, pulling
their very hearts out, are able to cover. Six miles an hour is an
average rate of speed when it is "good going." Once the Doctor made
twenty-one miles in a little more than two hours, over level ice.

The building of the sled, or komatik, is a most important matter. The
Doctor prefers one eleven feet long, of black spruce, with runners an
inch thick, covered with spring steel. With such a sled, and a good
team of dogs attached with proper traces, travel on firm and level
snow is an exhilarating experience. But a thousand and one things may
go wrong, the dogs when not running are forever picking bloody
quarrels, and continual vigilance is the price of a swift, smooth
passage.

A member of Grenfell's staff had crossed a neck of land between two
bays, and was "twenty miles from anywhere," when his dogs struck the
fresh trail of deer.

At such times the dogs are likely to take leave of all their senses
save the instinct of the chase. These plucky beasts were no exception
to the rule.

As they were short of food, the two teams were hitched to one sled,
and the other sled, laden, was left in charge of a boy, while the men
gave chase to the caribou. Like Casabianca on the burning deck, the
boy had been told not to stir from that chilly, lonesome spot.

But just as the men got under way, a terrible snowstorm sprang up from
nowhere, and so enveloped and bewildered the hunters that for two days
they wandered, till they lost all hope.

Then, by great good luck, starving and worn out, they came to a little
house many long and weary miles from where the boy was left with the
komatiks.

They sent a relief team back to find him. There he was, standing by
the sleds like a good, true soldier, just where they told him to
remain. He was bound to be faithful unto death, even though he should
freeze stiff for his obedience to orders.

Another time, the team was halted in a wood at nightfall, and Grenfell
and his comrades started to walk on snowshoes to the village six miles
distant.

They lost their way, and found themselves by nightfall at the foot of
steep cliffs which they could not get round, though the village was
hardly more than a mile away and its lights