We started for the Klondike in the fall rush of 1897, and we started too late to get over Chilcoot Pass before the freeze-up.  We packed our outfit on our backs part way over, when the snow began to fly, and then we had to buy dogs in order to sled it the rest of the way.  That was how we came to get that Spot.  Dogs were high, and we paid one hundred and ten dollars for him.  He looked worth it.  I say looked, because he was one of the finest-appearing dogs I ever saw.  He weighed sixty pounds, and he had all the lines of a good sled animal.  We never could make out his breed.  He wasn’t husky, nor Malemute, nor Hudson Bay; he looked like all of them and he didn’t look like any of them; and on top of it all he had some of the white man’s dog in him, for on one side, in the thick of the mixed yellow-brown-red-and-dirty-white that was his prevailing colour, there was a spot of coal-black as big as a water-bucket.  That was why we called him Spot.

He was a good looker all right.  When he was in condition his muscles stood out in bunches all over him.  And he was the strongest-looking brute I ever saw in Alaska, also the most intelligent-looking.  To run your eves over him, you’d think he could outpull three dogs of his own weight.  Maybe he could, but I never saw it.  His intelligence didn’t run that way.  He could steal and forage to perfection; he had an instinct that was positively gruesome for divining when work was to be done and for making a sneak accordingly; and for getting lost and not staying lost he was nothing short of inspired.  But when it came to work, the way that intelligence dribbled out of him and left him a mere clot of wobbling, stupid jelly would make your heart bleed.

There are times when I think it wasn’t stupidity.  Maybe, like some men I know, he was too wise to work.  I shouldn’t wonder if he put it all over us with that intelligence of his.  Maybe he figured it all out and decided that a licking now and again and no work was a whole lot better than work all the time and no licking.  He was intelligent enough for such a computation.  I tell you, I’ve sat and looked into that dog’s eyes till the shivers ran up and down my spine and the marrow crawled like yeast, what of the intelligence I saw shining out.  I can’t express myself about that intelligence.  It is beyond mere words.  I saw it, that’s all.  At times it was like gazing into a human soul, to look into his eyes; and what I saw there frightened me and started all sorts of ideas in my own mind of reincarnation and all the rest.  I tell you I sensed something big in that brute’s eyes; there was a message there, but I wasn’t big enough myself to catch it.  Whatever it was (I know I’m making a fool of myself)—­whatever it was, it baffled me.  I can’t give an inkling of what I saw in that brute’s eyes; it wasn’t light, it wasn’t colour; it was something that moved, away back, when the eyes themselves weren’t