i had been with the 43rd about two months and during that time we had been out in "rest" twice, once at villers-au-bois and once at camblin l'abbe. they were very interesting french towns, especially to one who had always lived in western canada, and although they had been pretty badly knocked about by shelling they were havens of refuge, rest, and comfort to us after the trenches. but my man macpherson wouldn't grow enthusiastic with me over these two places. "wait till you see auchel, sir, that's the place for us. why it's the french 'home' of the 43rd. that's a real town and fine people, and they think there's no other battalion quite as good as ours." i heard the town often spoken about in the same way by others and was delighted when i learned one day that we were to move back to auchel. i wasn't disappointed in my expectations. the place had been a prosperous farming village until the discovery of coal nearby had developed it into a fine little town. it had retained much of its former quaintness, and the mines had brought it in contact with newer ideas by which it had benefited, and the town was vastly cleaner, better lighted, had better stores, and was generally more up-to-date than the old village had been.
as in all the many thousand french towns and villages, the roman catholic church edifice was by far the largest building. at auchel it was located in the market square without any enclosing fence, and on the weekly market-day when the square was crowded with stalls many of them would be placed against the buttresses of the church.
auchel was unique among the towns we knew in france in having a neat little protestant church as well, called "l'église evangelique." it was a plain building seating perhaps 150 people and built after the style of our own small country churches. on the wall at the right of the platform was the verse in french, "your iniquities have separated between you and your god," and on the other side, "he was wounded for our transgressions and bruised for our iniquities." high on the wall behind the pulpit was inscribed the verse, "dieu est amour," and just behind the speaker were the words, "god bless our sunday school." their pastor gladly gave us the use of the church. we held our communion service in it on sunday and turned it into a reading-room during the week.
it was in this protestant church at our own sacrament service that capt. jack verner was baptised and took his first communion. he is buried overseas.
it was in auchel, when our battalion had been warned to be ready to move at an hour's notice, that the padre gathered a dozen camerons who were not on duty, got a lorry and driver, and went off with his men to a town twenty-five miles away to get a supply of books, magazines, writing-paper and benches for his reading-room. i needed the men to load and unload the equipment. we were away all afternoon. when we came back, the adjutant, a conscientious scot, gave me what, from a military point of view i richly deserved, a right good scolding. no orders to move had come, but if they had, there would have been a serious reprimand coming to somebody. "all's well that ends well." we didn't move for a full ten days and in the meantime the men had their reading-room. our parade services were held in the ramshackle building which had been a cinema before the war. the most inspiring part of our worship was the singing. there was a piano to give us the right pitch and tempo, the congregation did the rest. it would have thrilled you to stand on the platform and hear those eight hundred men singing the grand old songs of zion. it was glorious. i was "lifted," and when the time came for the sermon i couldn't help preaching with heart as well as voice. it gave me an idea of the great loss we may sustain in over-modernizing our church services. the congregation often doesn't sing, or sings feebly. its voice of praise is frequently drowned out by the pipe-organ or choir. we obtrude these latter so much upon the eyes and ears of the people that we seem almost to merit the observation of a critical roman catholic, that he would rather bow before an altar and a crucifix in church, than before a showy, loud-voiced pipe-organ and choir, performing in front of an audience which apparently took little part in the service except to listen.
it was in auchel, too, that our battalion received its great gift from the women's canadian club of seattle, washington. on may 16th, 1918 the consignment reached us. it was, as far as i know, the biggest present in kind that was ever given a canadian battalion in france. how such bulky stuff got through at all and in such prime condition is a miracle that someone else will have to explain. but there it was. six big wooden boxes each half as large as a piano-box and packed full. there were many kinds of things and practically enough of every kind to give everybody in the battalion a good share of it all. i had to have a parade (voluntary), and macpherson and i handed out the stuff, which we had unpacked and arranged, to the men as they lined up. there were great quantities of fine candies in bulk and in many small fancy boxes, lots of chewing-gum and tobacco, hundreds of cigars and thousands of cigarettes. there were a score of immense homemade fruit cakes. then there was a generous abundance of dates, raisins, figs, writing-paper, pipes, pencils, fountain-pens, safety razors, snuff, vaseline, soap, tooth-brushes, wash-rags, socks, sapadilla, handkerchiefs, tooth-paste, shaving-soap, medicines, joke-books and many odds and ends in smaller quantities. most of the smaller parcels were tied up in pretty ribbon and white tissue-paper with christmas cards in them and ornamented with christmas labels, for the boxes had been due three months before.
it was in auchel that i talked to my men about northern dogs. one evening we gathered in l'église evangelique and i told them some stories about wolf-dogs i had known or handled.
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one winter i heard that a group of men were prospecting on duncan creek about two hundred miles farther out than my location at gold bottom. i decided to take a month or two away from my regular circuit on the creeks around me and pay a visit to these new diggings, take along some reading matter, tell them the news, have some services, and bring back their mail.
i needed a dog-team for the trip. my own dogs were not then old enough for a long journey nor were they properly broken, and so i picked up an odd dog here and there on the creek until i had a string of six. they were of mixed sorts but all had been broken to the sleigh, and their owners, who had no work for them, were glad to have the dogs taken off their hands, fed and cared for.
i'm not going to speak of them all but only of three that had more distinctive characters than the others.
when we travel with dogs in the north they are hitched up tandem (usually) to a sleigh about two feet wide, a foot from the ground, and eight or nine feet long, and are guided by voice and gestures only. there are no reins. of course you carry a black-snake whip to urge the lazy ones on. this whip is about ten feet long with a heavy loaded butt needed for protection if a refractory husky should turn on you. the leader is the all-important dog. the others have only to keep their traces taut and follow on, but the leader has to use his head with all his wolf and dog senses and instincts. he must find and keep on top of the old trail if there is one buried under the drifts, know whether new ice is safe enough or not, and avoid the serious peril of water under the snow, for at very low temperature, with creek channels frozen solid, water is squeezed out and runs under the snow. it of course freezes very quickly, but if you and your dogs get into it, while still liquid in extreme cold weather, it means an immediate camping to save your feet and those of your dogs, and dry wood may not be near just then. this may well mean death, for death soon comes to the crippled man or dog away from help in the sub-arctic winter if he cannot build a fire. your leader too, must respond to all the few words of command. these are "mush!", a corruption, through the old french-canadian coureurs-du-bois of "marchez!"; "whoa!", the whole team knows that welcome word; "gee!" to turn to the right, and "haw!" to swing to the left.
now this pick-up dog-team of mine was strange to me and i to them, so the introduction was a fight or two until they knew i was boss. then i had to "learn" my dogs and place them in the string so that they could work properly, and also see that they all did work until they became a real team where each dog was doing his share.
i first picked on a big grey-muzzled malemute named steal as a likely fellow to lead. dogs' names there don't usually indicate their character, but his did. all malemutes are born thieves, some men think. i don't agree, but in this case i had a thief by nature, education, and name. he would break into your "cache" if it could be done and steal what he fancied. his owner claimed he could read labels on canned goods, for he would carry away bully-beef tins but not canned-fruit. it was his keen nose, not his eyes of course, that told him the difference. once you knew of this failing it could be easily guarded against on the trail. it would have been of little moment if steal had done his duty as leader. he knew all the tricks of the trail and would have made a fine leader if he had tried to do his bit. but i hadn't gone far before i realized that he wouldn't work away from the whip. running behind the eight-foot sleigh i had it and the five dogs between me and steal. his traces were always trailing. he would rarely quicken his pace no matter how fiercely i shouted "mush on, you malemute!", nor for the crack of the whip. i had to run along beside the team on the narrow trail, throwing them partly off, before i could reach him with the whip. then he would dig in for a few hundred yards but soon commenced to slow down, continually looking back to see if i were coming at him again. this performance was demoralizing to team and driver, so some change had to be made. i put a smaller dog named mike in the lead and hitched steal up next the sleigh as my "wheel-dog." he worked there. he knew perfectly that his game was up and put his shoulder against the collar from that on. he was that sort of dog that works well under the lash, although as a fact i never had to strike him now. i simply cracked the whip above him if he showed signs of shirking and he would get right in and pull, at the same time emitting a series of howls that could not have been more woeful if he were being killed. anyway, i could see that the dogs in front took it as a warning of the punishment awaiting the laggard and would pull so hard i would sometimes have to slow them down.
do not think i was cruel, or drove the dogs at their top speed always. in the north there is more real kindness and expert care used by dog-mushers in handling their wolf-dogs than in the way pet-dogs and house-dogs are treated in our cities. a dog doesn't appreciate having its nose kissed by human lips, and it is gross unkindness to let unthinking impulse lead you to over-feed them, or give them wrong food and make them sick and weak. it is cruel to keep your dog chained up for days at a time alone in your back-yard, varied only by taking him out for a walk usually on a leash. our trail-dogs are almost always healthy, hungry, and happy. each day they have, what every dog really needs and loves above all else, a long run in the wilds with other dogs, satisfying the old, inborn, "pack" instinct. they are carefully fed, not much in the morning, perhaps a chunk each of dried salmon and the same at noon. a good feed at dawn or during the day would mean a sick or "heavy" dog along the trail. but at night the first meal prepared is for the dogs, a good, big, hot feed of boiled rice, cornmeal, or oatmeal, with a liberal allowance of fat bacon cut up and mixed in and perhaps a couple of dog-biscuits each to crunch for dessert. every toe of every dog was examined daily and any sign of sensitiveness would mean a salve, or, if expedient, a soft moccasin small enough to fit the foot and protect it from the trail. the dogs were felt carefully all over to see if they were sore anywhere. too much depended on his dogs on the trail for a man to be careless, or harsh, or ignorant, in their handling.
mike was a dandy little dog and served me well the whole journey through. he wasn't as knowing on the trail as steal and got us into a tumble that might have had troublesome results. travelling along a ledge running about fifteen feet above the bottom of the gulch, he took the team too near the edge and got on the "comb" of snow which broke off with him and he dragged the whole team, sleigh, and driver over the brink, to roll in a confused heap to the bottom. it took me an hour, when daylight was precious, to get straightened out and going again, but otherwise we were none the worse.
i found that mike had one other fault. it took me two or three days to notice it. he had the knack of keeping his traces straight but not tight. he rarely pulled more than enough just to keep them from sagging. no matter how hard the going mike was only a "leader." he never got down and pulled. i hesitate to criticize him, for at least he did do his work as leader when without him i'd have been in a fix. he did his own part, carried his own harness, and willingly. that's a great, good quality, in dog or man. often, though, i wished he would forget being a leader, drop his dignity, and just be an ordinary work-dog, especially in deep snow climbing a steep bank when the other dogs and the driver were pulling and shoving with all our strength to make the grade.
at duncan i found a hearty welcome and spent ten days visiting around the cabins. before i started back an old-timer named brodeur came into camp limping behind his dogs. his axe had glanced while felling a tree and gashed his foot. first-aid was given, but it was evident that he should be taken to dawson where he could get expert surgical treatment. we arranged that he should come back with me. before we left he sold his dogs and sleigh for thirty-five ounces of gold, about five hundred dollars. the dog he wouldn't sell was his leader, named shep, the best sleigh-dog i have ever seen in the north. brodeur refused to sell him for any money, not, however, because of the dog's usefulness, that would have had a market value, but for what you would call sentimental reasons. to put it simply, they loved each other.
of course there was only one place in the team for this king among dogs and mike now came second in the string. what a grand dog shep was! i can't tell you half his fine qualities. i don't know what noble dog breed was mixed with the wolf in him, but he was master of the team, in harness and out of it, from the start, and they seemed to sense it and not resent it. the first night steal tried to dispute it by leaving his own pile of hot rice to snap some from the far-side of shep's. before you could think steal was down half-buried in the snow yelling in his accustomed way, while shep nipped a few little slits in his ears. it wasn't a fight. it was corrective punishment properly administered, in the same spirit in which you spank your little boy. a dog can travel quite as well with a few healthy cuts in his ears as without. was it shep's way of boxing his ears? shep was no bully, but he wouldn't allow any fights among the dogs. he had, too, the rare art of "jollying" the team along the trail. this was seen when the going had been hard all day and the dogs were growing weary. then he would talk to them as he travelled in his whining, malemute way, and it would seem to brighten them up. perhaps he told them funny dog stories, or pictured the joys of a good supper when they got to dry timber and camped. whatever your explanation, shep was the cause, and the effect was seen in a brisk and willing lot of dogs going strong at the close of the day. always he pulled his best. whenever it was heavy sledding he would get right down dog-fashion, with his belly close to the trail, tongue hanging out, and do all he knew to keep things moving; heart, lungs, muscles, toe-nails and teeth were all enlisted in his effort to serve the man he loved who was riding under the robe in the sleigh behind. how did he use his teeth? this way—climbing up a bank through the brush, making around an overflow on the creek, we were nearly being stalled; shep, not content with his usual efforts, had managed to grip with his teeth a stout branch that stretched conveniently near, and was using teeth and neck-muscles to add to his pulling power! do you wonder that brodeur loved the dog? shep never knew the feel of the whip in punishment. at night when the team was unharnessed his first move was to the sleigh where he shoved his muzzle into the old man's hand and looked into his face asking him, i suppose, if everything was going well.
we reached dawson in good form and soon had brodeur comfortably located in the "good samaritan" hospital. shep made his bed, the first night, in the snow a few yards from the door, but he discovered which window was brodeur's, and he camped under it against the logs of the hospital until his master was well. the foot mended rapidly and soon the old trapper and his noble dog were back in the hills again.
