What would travellers in the sea of ice or seekers for the North Pole have done without the dog? It has drawn them and their food in all their journeys over the ice and the Eskimo dog is the only animal besides man that ever reached the Pole. Without its aid Peary, the great explorer, would never have got to the North Pole or got back again to his ship. Is it not well to speak, then, about how the dog helped him in this famous discovery?
When Peary took his ship, the Roosevelt, far to the north, he had on board more than two hundred dogs and plenty of walrus meat to feed them. When he went north over the ice these dogs were used to draw the sledges loaded with food and other supplies. The explorers had to walk; no dogs could be spared to draw them.
[Illustration: Alaskan Dog Team. The Winter Mail-Carriers]
On his last dash to the north, from 87° 57´ north latitude to 90° (a distance of about 140 miles), he had five sledges and forty dogs. The sledges were the pick of twenty-five that had started from the ship and the dogs were the best of all his teams. Also for drivers he had his four best Eskimos. With these sledges and men and dogs he got to the North Pole, which no one had ever reached before, and the faithful dogs shared the glory of the discovery. They came back with him--some of them, for some died on the way. The poor brutes did not know what they had done, and no doubt thought a good meal of walrus meat better than a dozen Poles, either North or South.
Now shall we say something about the South Pole? Dogs have been used there too, but when Lieutenant Shackleton, the English explorer, made his famous journey in that region in 1909, he took with him four of the hardy ponies of the North, thinking they would be better than dogs. But his ponies died, one by one, and he and his men had to drag their sledges back by hand, eating the frozen pony meat as they toiled along over mountains of ice. Later explorers have taken dogs with them as better fitted for the work than the best ponies.
I do not need to tell you what the Elephant is like. Almost everybody has seen this noble creature, the largest of all animals except the whale. It belongs in its way to the hoofed animals, though it has five toes on each foot. For these are covered by a sort of elastic hoof, something like that of the camel, which gives it an easy, springy step. Though its home is in Asia and Africa, it has often been brought to America and shown in menageries and other places. It is a great, clumsy-looking brute, with a long, flexible trunk, ivory tusks, great flapping ears, stout legs and broad hoofs. The tusks, you know, are great overgrown teeth made of hard ivory.