avel.

[Sidenote: DOG FOOD]

On the other hand, the dog's ration for many days is carried on the sled
he hauls. There is a definite limit to it, of course, and knowledge of
this limit made every experienced dog driver incredulous, from the
first, of Doctor Cook's claim to have travelled some eleven hundred
miles, from Etah to the North Pole and back, with a team of dogs hauling
their own food. It is possible, however, on fair trails, with rigid
economy, to travel five hundred miles and haul dog food and man food and
the other indispensables of a long journey; and that is twice as far as
it is ever necessary to travel in the interior of Alaska without
reaching a supply point, the northern slope to the Arctic Ocean
excepted.

Perhaps it would be putting it better to say that a team of seven dogs
can haul their own and their driver's food and the camp equipment, all,
of course, carefully reduced to a minimum, for a month. Dog food of one
sort or another can be bought at any place where anything whatever is
sold. Almost any Indian village will furnish dried fish, and it is often
possible, with no other weapon than a .22 rifle, to feed dogs largely on
the country through which they pass. The writer's team has had many a
meal of ptarmigan, rabbits, quail, and spruce hen, while to enumerate
other articles, on which at times and in stress for proper food, his
dogs have sustained life and strength for travel, would be to enumerate
all the common human comestibles. Aside from the usual ration of fish,
tallow, and rice boiled together, corn-meal, beans, flour, oatmeal, sago
(though that is poor stuff), tapioca, canned meats of all kinds, canned
salmon, even canned kippered herring from Scotland, seal oil, seal and
whale flesh, ham and bacon, horse flesh, moose and caribou and
mountain-sheep flesh, canned "Boston brown bread," canned butter, canned
milk, dried apples, sugar, cheese, crackers of all kinds, and a score of
other matters have at times entered into their food. Dogs have been
"tided over" tight places for days and days on horse oats boiled with
tallow candles, working the while. Anything that a man can eat, and much
that even a starving man would scarcely eat, will make food for dogs. At
the last and worst, dog can be fed to dog and even to man. When a dog
team reaches a mining camp where supplies of all sorts are scarce--and
that is not an uncommon experience--it is sometimes an exceedingly
expensive matter to feed i