File:In the Alaskan wilderness (1917) (14774999964).jpg

Identifier: inalaskanwildern00gord (find matches)
Title: In the Alaskan wilderness
Year: 1917 (1910s)
Authors: Gordon, G. B. (George Byron), 1870-1927
Subjects: Eskimo languages Alaska -- Description and travel
Publisher: Philadelphia : The John C. Winston Company
Contributing Library: University of California Libraries
Digitizing Sponsor: MSN

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. These irons we brought with us andfortunately so, for we found before many daysthat the poles in many stretches of swift waterand hard bottom would not have taken holdwithout the iron bits. The poles were sixteenfeet in length and this length proved almost tooshort in deep water. At this camp we had a strange and patheticvisitor. A lost dog came out of the woods, swamthe left fork of the stream and made the appealfor the friendship and the protection of manthat only a dog can make. He was, I think,a dog that had never known much kindness,for he crawled across the sand-bar, slowly drag-ging himself on the ground, in the most abjectattitude that even a dog in the last extremityof his need can assume. How he came to bethere I cannot say, but we suspected that oneof the small flat-bottomed steamers that plyup and down the Tanana as far as Fairbankshad stopped, not far away, perhaps weeks before,to get wood, and having gone ashore, the dogwas left behind. He was evidently half starved 36
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and in a desperate state. He, at any rate, hadnot felt the call of the wild, or if he had, he soontired of it, for a more sorry and a more melancholyanimal, we both agreed, had never been seen.When we spoke to him he rose to his feet andthere was a look in his eyes that I have neverforgotten. It had in it the whole story of therelation of the dog to man. It was the appealfrom the past, the silent servitude, the triedfriendship, and the claim for protection of fiftythousand years. It was the opening up of aweird vista running back to the savage dawnof man filled with vague memories of companion-ship and devotion. No lost human soul in itsutter extremity could make an appeal one-halfso profound. When he had been fed he lay down in frontof the tent and never once took his eye off us.From that time on he tried to show in every waythat the one object of his life was to give suchservice as a dog can give in return for humancompanionship—his supreme need. It was at this camp that we had ou

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