The freeze-up came on when we were at the mouth of Henderson Creek, and we traded him off for two sacks of flour to an outfit that was bound up White River after copper.  Now that whole outfit was lost.  Never trace nor hide nor hair of men, dogs, sleds, or anything was ever found.  They dropped clean out of sight.  It became one of the mysteries of the country.  Steve and I plugged away up the Stewart, and six weeks afterward that Spot crawled into camp.  He was a perambulating skeleton, and could just drag along; but he got there.  And what I want to know is, who told him we were up the Stewart?  We could have gone to a thousand other places.  How did he know?  You tell me, and I’ll tell you.

No losing him.  At the Mayo he started a row with an Indian dog.  The buck who owned the dog took a swing at Spot with an axe, missed him, and killed his own dog.  Talk about magic and turning bullets aside—­I, for one, consider it a blamed sight harder to turn an axe aside with a big buck at the other end of it.  And I saw him do it with my own eyes.  That buck didn’t want to kill his own dog.  You’ve got to show me.

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?