and as savage as the wolves from whom half of them possessed a strong
inheritance of blood, were thrown suddenly into warring confusion.

All the dogs were fighters except the big, soft-throated Mackenzie
hounds, with the slow strength of oxen in their movements, and the
quarter-strained and half-strained mongrels from the south; and upon
these unfortunates the others preyed. Packs of fierce Labrador dogs,
never vanquished except by death, came from close to Hudson's Bay.
Team after team of the little yellow and gray Eskimo dogs, as quick
with their fangs as were their black and swift-running masters with
their hands and feet, met the much larger and darker-colored Malemutes
from the Athabasca. Enemies of all these, fighting, snapping, and
snarling, with the lust of killing deep born in them from their wolf
progenitors, packs of fierce huskies trailed in from all sides.

There was no cessation in the battle of the fangs. It began with the
first brute arrivals. It continued from dawn through the day, and
around the campfires at night. There was never an end to the strife
between the dogs, and between the men and the dogs. The snow was
stained and trailed with blood, and the scent of it added greater
fierceness to the wolf-breeds. Half a dozen battles were fought to the
death each day and night. Those that died were chiefly the south-bred
curs--mixtures of mastiff, Great Dane, and sheep-dogs--and the fatally
slow Mackenzie hounds.

From its towering height the sentinel spruce frowned down upon the
savage life that had come to outrage the grave it guarded. Yet beyond
all this discord and bloody strife there was a great, throbbing human
happiness--a beating of honest hearts filled to overflowing with the
joys of the moment, a welding of new friendships, a renewal of old