At last there was left but the one dog
Soon it became necessary to kill another dog. Dick, with a remnant of his old feeling, pleaded for the life of Billy, his pet. Sam would not entertain for a moment the destruction of the hound. There remained only Claire, the sledge-dog, with her pathetic brown eyes, and her affectionate ways of the female dog. They went to kill her, and discovered her in the act of defending the young to which she had just given birth. Near at hand crouched Mack and Billy, their eyes red with famine, their jaws a-slaver, eager to devour the newborn puppies. And in the grim and dreadful sight Sam Bolton seemed at last to glimpse the face of his terrible antagonist.
They beat back the dogs, and took the puppies. These they killed and dressed. Thus Claire’s life was bought for her by the sacrifice of her progeny.
But even that was a temporary respite. She fell in her turn, and was devoured, to the last scrap of her hide. Dick again intervened to save Billy, but failed. Sam issued his orders the more peremptorily as he felt his strength waning, and realised the necessity of economising every ounce of it, even to that required in the arguing of expedients. Dick yielded with slight resistance, as he had yielded in the case of the girl. All matters but the one were rapidly becoming unimportant to him. That concentration of his forces which represented the weapon of his greatest utility, was gradually taking place. He was becoming an engine of dogged determination, an engine whose burden the older man had long carried on his shoulders, but which now he was preparing to launch when his own strength should be gone.
At last there was left but the one dog, Mack, the hound, with the wrinkled face and the long, hanging ears. He developed unexpected endurance and an entire willingness, pulling strongly on the sledge, waiting in patience for his scanty meal, searching the faces of his masters with his wise brown eyes, dumbly sympathetic in a trouble whose entirety he could not understand.
The two men took turns in harnessing themselves to the sledge with Mack. The girl followed at the gee-pole.
May-may-gwán showed the endurance of a man. She made no complaint. Always she followed, and followed with her mind alert. Where Dick shut obstinately his faculties within the bare necessity of travel, she and her other companion were continually alive to the possibilities of expedient. This constituted an additional slight but constant drain on their vital forces.
Starvation gained on them. Perceptibly their strength was waning. Dick wanted to kill the other dog. His argument was plausible. The toboggan was now very light. The men could draw it. They would have the dog-meat to recruit their strength.
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