The next morning, two Chippewayans trailed in with a team of mongrel
curs from the south. Thereafter Cummins found but little time to
devote to Melisse. The snow was softening rapidly, and the daily
increasing warmth of the sun hastened the movement of the trappers.
Mukee's people from the western Barren Lands arrived first, bringing
with them great loads of musk-ox and caribou skins, and an army of
big-footed, long-legged Mackenzie hounds that pulled like horses and
wailed like whipped puppies when the huskies and Eskimo dogs set upon
them.
From east and west and south all trails now led to the post. By the
end of the third day after the arrival of the company's supplies, a
babel of fighting, yelling, ceaselessly moving discord had driven
forth the peace and quiet in which Cummins' wife had died. The
fighting and discord were among the dogs, and the yelling was a
necessary human accompaniment. Half a hundred packs, almost as wild
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.
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