The Lady Desdemona, his mother, for example, would certainly not have lived through a month of Jan's present life; very possibly not a week. Finn would have endured it much longer, because of his experiences in Australia, his knowledge of the wild kindred and their ways. But even Finn, despite his huge strength and exceptional knowledge, would not have come through this ordeal so well as Jan did, unless it had come to him as early in life as it came to Jan. And even then his survival would have been doubtful. The difference between the climates of Australia and the North-west Territory is hardly greater than the difference in stress and hardness between Finn's life in the Tinnaburra ranges, as leader of a dingo pack, and Jan's life in North-west Canada as learner in a sled-team. The physical strength of Finn the wolfhound, in whose veins ran the unmixed blood of many generations of wolfhound champions, might have been equal to the strain of Jan's new life. But his pride, his courtliness, his fine gentlemanliness, would likely have been the death of him in such a case. He would have died nobly, be sure of that. But it is likely he would have died. Now in the case of Jan, while he had inherited much of his sire's fine courtesy, much of his dam's noble dignity, yet these things were not so vitally of the essence of him as they were of his parents. They were a part of his character, and they had formed his manners. But they were not Jan. The essential Jan was an immensely powerful hound of mixed blood reared carefully, trained intelligently and well, and endowed from birth with a tremendously keen appetite for life--a keener appetite for life than falls to the lot of any champion-bred wolfhound or bloodhound. Jan was a gentleman rather than a fine gentleman; before either he was a hound, a dog; and before all else he was a master and lover of his life. And since, by the arrangements of Sergeant Moore, "Tom Smith," Jean, and Jake, he had to take his place between Snip and Blackfoot in a sled-team, it was well, exceedingly well, for Jan that these things were thus and not otherwise. Jan's supper on the evening of his first day in the traces was a meal he never forgot. The slab of dried fish Jean tossed to him was half as big again as the pieces given to the other dogs. For Jean--a just and not unkindly man in all such matters--well recognized that Jan was very much bigger and heavier than the average husky. (Jan was three and a half inches higher at the shoulder, and forty to fifty pounds heavier and more massive than any of his team-mates.) His previous night's supper Jan had eaten that morning. Still, the afternoon's work, in some thirty or forty degrees of frost, had put an edge on his appetite, and he tackled the fish--which two days before he would have scorned--with avidity.