[Lieut. Schwatka in St. Nicholas.]
    You boys who have a favorite Carlo or Nero at home may like to know something about the Esquimau dogs; asking what they have to eat, and whether, like your own favorites, they get three meals a day and any number of intermediate lunches. No doubt you will think that they really should get ever so much more on account of their hard work in pulling the sledges, and in such a cold country. Yet, hard as it may seem, the Esquimau dog never gets fed oftener than every third day, while in times of want and starvation in that terrible country of cold the length of time these poor dogs will go without food seems beyond belief.
    I once had a fast team of nineteen fat Esquimau dogs that went six or seven days between meals for three consecutive feedings before they reached the journey’s end and good food; and althrough they looked very thin, and were no doubt very weak, none of them died, and yet they had been dragging a heavy sledge for a great part of the time. Other travelers among the Esquimax have given equally wonderfull accounts of their powers of fasting. The Esquimaux have many times of want and deprivation, and then their poor dogs must suffer very much. But when they are fed every day with good, fat walrus meat, and do not have too much hard work to do, they will get as fat and saucy and playful as your own dogs, with three meals a day.
    One of the very last things you would imagine to be good for them is the best food they get-that is, tough walrus hide, about an inch in thickness and as wiry as sole leather. Give your team of dogs a good meal of this before you start, take along a light supply of it for them, and you can be gone a couple of weeks on a trip; when you get back feed them up well, and they will be as fat and strong as ever in a very few days.
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