land and Saint Bernard dogs,
has an interesting exception. There is a dog, not uncommon in Alaska,
that by a curious inversion of phrase is known as the "one-man-dog."
What is meant is the "one-dog-man dog," the dog that belongs to the man
that uses only one dog. Many and many a prospector pulls his whole
winter grub-stake a hundred miles or more into the hills with the aid of
one dog. His progress is slow, in bad places or on up grades he must
relay, and all the time he is doing more work than the dog is, but he
manages to get his stuff to his cabin or his camp with no other aid than
one dog can give. It is usually a large heavy dog--speed never being
asked of him, nor steady continuous winter work--often of one of the
breeds mentioned, or of its predominant strain. The companionship
between such a man and such a dog is very close, and the understanding
complete. Sometimes the dog will be his master's sole society for the
whole winter.

Indeed, any man of feeling who spends the winters with a dog team must
grow to a deep sympathy with the animals, and to a keen, sometimes
almost a poignant, sense of what he owes to them. There is a mystery
about domestic animals of whatever kind. It is a mystery that man should
be able to impose his will upon them, change their habits and
characters, constrain them to his tasks, take up all their lives with
unnatural toil. And that he should get affection and devotion in return
makes the mystery yet more mysterious.

The dog gets his food--often of poor quality and scant quantity--and
that is all he gets. Yet the life of a work dog that has a kind and
considerate master is not an unhappy one. The dog is as full of the
canine joy of life as though he had never worn a collar, and not only
sports and gambols when free, but really seems to like his work and do
it gladly. He will chafe at inaction; he will come eagerly to the
harness in the morning; often will come before he is called and ask to
be harnessed; and if for any reason--lameness or galled neck or sore
feet--a dog is cut out of the team temporarily, to run loose, he will
try at every chance to get back into his place and will often attack the
dog that seems to him to be occupying it; while a dog left behind will
howl most piteously and make desperate efforts to break his chain and
rejoin his companions and his labour. And the wonderful and pitiful
thing about it is that no sort of severity or brutality on his master's
part will