They were half-wild, starving beasts, and though utter cowards, yet where nine or ten of them get together they will mob and kill and eat an English dog.
Then I saw that my soldier friend was right, and that that dog knew and was worth more than a man.
Next, in lieu of his enemy, he saw Skipper's head, and crept to it and loved it, kissing with his tongue the hard cheeks, the closed lids of the eyes that his love could not open, the immobile lips that would not utter one of the love-words they had been used to utter to the little dog.
And, unlike the mere bush dogs, who stole shelter from the rain under overhanging eaves, Jerry was given a dry place under the roof where the heads of bushmen and of forgotten sandalwood traders hung down from above in the midst of a dusty confusion of dried viscera of sharks, crocodile skulls, and skeletons of Solomons rats that measured two-thirds of a yard in length from bone-tip of nose to bone-tip of tail.
If he rubbed once, the dog that sat on the chest of copper appeared; if he rubbed twice, there came the dog that watched over the silver chest; and if he rubbed three times, the one that guarded the gold appeared.
The dog was already outside the door, and before the Soldier could look round, in he came with the Princess.
At the fall of darkness they swung the dogs into a cluster of spruce trees on the edge of the waterway and made a camp.
Henry," said the other, munching with deliberation the beans he was eating, "did you happen to notice the way them dogs kicked up when I was a-feedin' 'em?
Each beast is harnessed, the weakest nearest to the driver, by his own separate trace, which runs under his left fore-leg to the main thong, where it is fastened by a sort of button and loop which can be slipped by a turn of the wrist, thus freeing one dog at a time.
When Kotuko the dog came to his full growth he enjoyed himself too.
Two estimates the steward quickly made of Michael: he was a likable dog, genial-natured on the face of it, and he was a valuable dog.
The dog had liked him from the start, and had followed him.
Be a good dog and all 'll go well and the goose hang high.
Also he saw one dog, that would neither conciliate nor obey, finally killed in the struggle for mastery.
On the river, where was a packed trail and where snowshoes were unnecessary, the dogs
averaged six miles an hour.