How Eskimo Dogs Are Trained.
By St. Nicholas
AS THE Eskimos must sometimes be babies, so the dogs must at sometime be puppies, and the puppies are allowed inside the igloo on the bed, where they are the favorite playthings of the young heir. His mother makes him a number of doll dog-harnesses for the puppies, fixes him up a dog-whip, almost like his father's, and then he amuses himself harnessing them, hitching them to a hatchet, the water-bucket, or any object that is at hand, and driving them around in the igloo and storm igloo, or out-of-doors when the weather is very pleasant. As soon as the puppies get a little bigger, the larger boys take them in hand, and, by the time they are old enough to be used for work in the sledges, they are almost well-trained dogs. And so with the little Eskimo himself; when he is a young man he is a good dog-driver, and knows how to manage a sledge under all circumstances. This is the hardest thing that an Eskimo has to learn. I have known white men to equal them in rowing in their little seal-skin canoes; I have seen white men build good igloos; but I have never seen a white man who was a good dog-driver; and the Eskimos told me that they had never seen such an one, either. When they drive their dogs, it is in the shape of the letter V, the foremost dog being at the converging point, and the harness-traces running back in V-shapes to the sledge. The forward dog is called the “leader,” or “chief,” and in trading dogs, a “leader” is worth two good followers, or ordinary workers. The Eskimo dog-driver manages the leader wholly by the voice, making him stop, go ahead, to the right or to the left, as he may speak to him; and as he acts, so do the others, who soon learn to watch him closely, and, strongest of all, to obey him even after they are unharnessed, although the “leader” may not be one of the largest and strongest dogs in the team.—St. Nicholas.