He was a most independent dog was Nanook, a thoroughly bad dog, as one would say in some use of that term--a thief who had no shame in his thievery but rather gloried in it. If you left anything edible within his ingenious and comprehensive reach he regarded it as a challenge. There comes to me a ludicrous incident that concerned a companion of one winter journey. He had carefully prepared a lunch and had wrapped it neatly in paper, and he placed it for a moment on the sled while he turned to put his scarf about him. But in that moment Nanook saw it and it was gone. Through the snow, over the brush, in and out amongst the stumps the chase proceeded, until Nanook was finally caught and my companion recovered most of the paper, for the dog had wolfed the grub as he ran. He would stand and take any licking you offered and never utter a sound but give a bark of defiance when you were done, and he would bear you no ill will in the world and repeat his offence at the next opportunity. Yet so absurdly sensitive was he in other matters of his person that the simple operation of clipping the hair from between his toes, to prevent the "balling-up" of the snow, took two men to perform, one to sit on the dog and the other to ply the scissors, and was accompanied always with such howls and squeals as would make a hearer think we were flaying him alive. Nanook's acquaintance with horses began in Fairbanks the first season I owned him, before I had had the harness upon him, when he was rising two years old. The dogs and I were staying at the hospital we had just established--because in those days there was nowhere else to stay--waiting for the winter. One of the mining magnates of the infancy of the camp (broken and dead long since; Bret Harte's lines, "Busted himself in White Pine and blew out his brains down in 'Frisco," often occur to me as the sordid histories of to-day repeat those of fifty years ago) had imported a saddle-horse and, as the mild days of that charming autumn still deferred the snow, he used to ride out past the hospital for a canter. The dog had learned to lift the latch of the gate of the hospital yard with his nose and get out, and when I put a wedge above the latch for greater security he learned also to circumvent that precaution. And whenever the horse and his rider passed, Nanook would open the gate and lead the whole pack in a noisy pursuit that changed the canter to a run and brought us natural but mortifying remonstrance.