I told you about Spot breaking into our meat-cache.  It was nearly the death of us.  There wasn’t any more meat to be killed and meat was all we had to live on.  The moose had gone back several hundred miles and the Indians with them.  There we were.  Spring was on and we had to wait for the river to break.  We got pretty thin before we decided to eat the dogs, and we decided to eat Spot first.  Do you know what that dog did?  He sneaked.  Now how did he know our minds were made up to eat him?  We sat up nights laying for him, but he never came back, and we ate the other dogs.  We ate the whole team.

And now for the sequel.  You know what it is when a big river breaks up and a few billion tons of ice go out, jamming and milling and grinding.  Just in the thick of it, when the Stewart went out, rumbling and roaring, we sighted Spot out in the middle.  He’d got caught as he was trying to cross up above somewhere.  Steve and I yelled and shouted and ran up and down the bank, tossing our hats in the air.  Sometimes we’d stop and hug each other, we were that boisterous, for we saw Spot’s finish.  He didn’t have a chance in a million.  He didn’t have any chance at all.  After the ice-run, we got into a canoe and paddled down to the Yukon, and down the Yukon to Dawson, stopping to feed up for a week at the cabins at the mouth of Henderson Creek.  And as we came in to the bank at Dawson, there sat that Spot, waiting for us, his ears pricked up, his tail wagging, his mouth smiling, extending a hearty welcome to us.  Now how did he get out of that ice?  How did he know we were coming to Dawson, to the very hour and minute, to be out there on the bank waiting for us?

The more I think of that Spot, the more I am convinced that there are things in this world that go beyond science.  On no scientific grounds can that Spot be explained.  It’s psychic phenomena, or mysticism, or something of that sort, I guess, with a lot of Theosophy thrown in.  The Klondike is a good country.  I might have been there yet, and become a millionaire, if it hadn’t been for Spot.  He got on my nerves.  I stood him for two years all together, and then I guess my stamina broke.  It was the summer of 1899 when I pulled out.  I didn’t say anything to Steve.  I just sneaked.  But I fixed it up all right.  I wrote Steve a note, and enclosed a package of “rough-on-rats,” telling him what to do with it.  I was worn down to skin and bone by that Spot, and I was that nervous that I’d jump and look around when there wasn’t anybody within hailing distance.  But it was astonishing the way I recuperated when I got quit of him.  I got back twenty pounds before I arrived in San Francisco, and by the time I’d crossed the ferry to Oakland I was my old self again, so that even my wife looked in vain for any change in me.