野性的呼唤下

2011-07-27 20:37阅读：

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CHAPTER V
The Toil of Trace and Trail
Thirty days from the time it left Dawson, the Salt Water Mail, with
Buck and his mates at the fore, arrived at Skaguay. They were in a
wretched state, worn out and worn down. Buck's one hundred and
forty pounds had dwindled to one hundred and fifteen. The rest of his
mates, though lighter dogs, had relatively lost more weight than he.
Pike, the malingerer, who, in his lifetime of deceit, had often
successfully feigned a hurt leg, was now limping in earnest. Sol-leks
was limping, and Dub was suffering from a wrenched shoulder-blade.
They were all terribly footsore. No spring or rebound was left in
them. Their feet fell heavily on the trail, jarring their bodies and
doubting the fatigue of a day's travel. There was nothing the matter
with them except that they were dead tired. It was not the dead-
tiredness that comes through brief and excessive effort, from which
recovery is a matter of hou

rs; but it was the dead-tiredness that comes
through the slow and prolonged strength drainage of months of toil.
There was no power of recuperation left, no reserve strength to call upon.
It had been all used, the last least bit of it. Every , every fibre,
every cell, was tired, dead tired. And there was reason for it. In less
than five months they had travelled twenty-five hundred miles, during
the last eighteen hundred of which they had had but five days' rest.
When they arrived at Skaguay they were apparently on their last legs.
They could barely keep the traces taut, and on the down grades just
managed to keep out of the way of the sled.
'Mush on, poor sore feets,' the driver encouraged them as they
tottered down the main street of Skaguay. 'Dis is de las'. Den we get
one long res'. Eh? For sure. One bully long res'.'
The drivers confidently expected a long stopover. Themselves,
they had covered twelve hundred miles with two days' rest, and in the
nature of reason and common justice they deserved an interval of loafing.
But so many were the men who had rushed into the Klondike, and so
many were the sweethearts, wives, and kin that had not rushed in, that
the congested mail was taking on Alpine proportions; also, there were
official orders. Fresh batches of Hudson Bay dogs were to take the
places of those worthless for the trail. The worthless ones were to be
got rid of, and, since dogs count for little against dollars, they were to be sold.
Three days passed, by which time Buck and his mates found how
really tired and weak they were. Then, on the morning of the fourth
day, two men from the States came along and bought them, harness and
all, for a song. The men addressed each other as 'Hal' and 'Charles.'
Charles was a middle-aged, lightish-colored man, with weak and watery
eyes and a mustache that twisted fiercely and vigorously up, giving the
lie to the limply drooping lip it concealed. Hal was a youngster of
nineteen or twenty, with a big Colt's revolver and a hunting-knife
strapped about him on a belt that fairly bristled with cartridges. This
belt was the most salient thing about him. It advertised his callowness-
-a callowness sheer and unutterable. Both men were manifestly out of
place, and why such as they should adventure the North is part of the
mystery of things that passes understanding.
Buck heard the chaffering, saw the money pass between the man and
the Government agent, and knew that the Scotch half-breed and the
mail-train drivers were passing out of his life on the heels of Perrault and
Francois and the others who had gone before. When driven with his
mates to the new owners' camp, Buck saw a slipshod and slovenly affair,
tent half stretched, dishes unwashed, everything in disorder; also, he saw
a woman. 'Mercedes' the men called her. She was Charles's wife
and Hal's sister--a nice family party.
Buck watched them apprehensively as they proceeded to take down
the tent and load the sled. There was a great deal of effort about their
manner, but no businesslike method. The tent was rolled into an
awkward bundle three times as large as it should have been. The tin
dishes were packed away unwashed. Mercedes continually fluttered in
the way of her men and kept up an unbroken chattering of remonstrance
and advice. When they put a clothes-sack on the front of the sled, she
suggested it should go on the back; and when they had put it on the back,
and covered it over with a couple of other bundles, she discovered
overlooked articles which could abide nowhere else but in that very sack,
and they unloaded again.
Three men from a neighboring tent came out and looked on, grinning
and winking at one another.
'You've got a right smart load as it is,' said one of them; 'and it's not
me should tell you your business, but I wouldn't tote that tent along if I was you.'
'Undreamed of!' cried Mercedes, throwing up her hands in dainty
dismay. 'However in the world could I manage without a tent?'
'It's springtime, and you won't get any more cold weather,' the man replied.
She shook her head decidedly, and Charles and Hal put the last odds
and ends on top the mountainous load.
'Think it'll ride?' one of the men asked.
'Why shouldn't it?' Charles demanded rather shortly.
'Oh, that's all right, that's all right,' the man hastened meekly to say.
'I was just a-wonderin', that is all. It seemed a mite top-heavy.'
Charles turned his back and drew the lashings down as well as he
could, which was not in the least well.
'An' of course the dogs can hike along all day with that contraption
behind them,' affirmed a second of the men.
'Certainly,' said Hal, with freezing politeness, taking hold of the ustn't,' as she
caught hold of the whip and wrenched it from him. 'The poor dears!
Now you must promise you won't be harsh with them for the rest of the
trip, or I won't go a step.'
'Precious lot you know about dogs,' her brother sneered; 'and I wish
you'd leave me alone. They're lazy, I tell you, and you've got to whip
them to get anything out of them. That's their way. You ask any one.
Ask one of those men.'
Mercedes looked at them imploringly, untold repugnance at sight of
pain written in her pretty face.
'They're weak as water, if you want to know,' came the reply from
one of the men. 'Plum tuckered out, that's what's the matter. They need a rest.'
'Rest be blanked,' said Hal, with his beardless lips; and Mercedes
said, 'Oh!' in pain and sorrow at the oath.
But she was a clannish creature, and rushed at once to the defence of
her brother. 'Never mind that man,' she said pointedly. 'You're
driving our dogs, and you do what you think best with them.'
Again Hal's whip fell upon the dogs. They threw themselves
against the breast-bands, dug their feet into the packed snow, got down
low to it, and put forth all their strength. The sled held as though it were
an anchor. After two efforts, they stood still, panting. The whip was
whistling savagely, when once more Mercedes interfered. She dropped
on her knees before Buck, with tears in her eyes, and put her arms
around his neck.
'You poor, poor dears,' she cried sympathetically, 'why don't you
pull hard?--then you wouldn't be whipped.' Buck did not like her, but he
was feeling too miserable to resist her, taking it as part of the day's
miserable work.
One of the onlookers, who had been clenching his teeth to suppress
hot speech, now spoke up:--
'It's not that I care a whoop what becomes of you, but for the dogs'
sakes I just want to tell you, you can help them a mighty lot by breaking
out that sled. The runners are froze fast. Throw your weight against
the gee-pole, right and left, and break it out.'
A third time the attempt was made, but this time, following the
advice, Hal broke out the runners which had been frozen to the snow.
The overloaded and unwieldy sled forged ahead, Buck and his mates
struggling frantically under the rain of blows. A hundred yards ahead
the path turned and sloped steeply into the main street. It would have
required an experienced man to keep the top-heavy sled upright, and Hal
was not such a man. As they swung on the turn the sled went over,
spilling half its load through the loose lashings. The dogs never
stopped. The lightened sled bounded on its side behind them. They
were angry because of the ill treatment they had received and the unjust
load. Buck was raging. He broke into a run, the team following his
lead. Hal cried 'Whoa! whoa!' but they gave no heed. He tripped
and was pulled off his feet. The capsized sled ground over him, and the
dogs dashed on up the street, adding to the gayety of Skaguay as they
scattered the remainder of the outfit along its chief thoroughfare.
Kind-hearted citizens caught the dogs and gathered up the scattered
belongings. Also, they gave advice. Half the load and twice the dogs,
if they ever expected to reach Dawson, was what was said. Hal and his
sister and brother-in-law listened unwillingly, pitched tent, and
overhauled the outfit. Canned goods were turned out that made men
laugh, for canned goods on the Long Trail is a thing to dream about.
'Blankets for a hotel' quoth one of the men who laughed and helped.
'Half as many is too much; get rid of them. Throw away that tent, and
all those dishes,--who's going to wash them, anyway? Good Lord, do
you think you're travelling on a Pullman?'
And so it went, the inexorable elimination of the superfluous.
Mercedes cried when her clothes-bags were dumped on the ground and
article after article was thrown out. She cried in general, and she cried
in particular over each discarded thing. She clasped hands about knees,
rocking back and forth broken-heartedly. She averred she would not go
an inch, not for a dozen Charleses. She appealed to everybody and to
everything, finally wiping her eyes and proceeding to cast out even
articles of apparel that were imperative necessaries. And in her zeal,
when she had finished with her own, she attacked the belongings of her
men and went through them like a tornado.
This accomplished, the outfit, though cut in half, was still a
formidable bulk. Charles and Hal went out in the evening and bought
six Outside dogs. These, added to the six of the original team, and
Teek and Koona, the huskies obtained at the Rink Rapids on the record
trip, brought the team up to fourteen. But the Outside dogs, though
practically broken in since their landing, did not amount to much.
Three were short-haire
gee-pole with one hand and swinging his whip from the other. 'Mush!'
he shouted. 'Mush on there!'
The dogs sprang against the breast-bands, strained hard for a few
moments, then relaxed. They were unable to move the sled.
'The lazy brutes, I'll show them,' he cried, preparing to lash out at
them with the whip.
But Mercedes interfered, crying, 'Oh, Hal, you mustn't,' as she
caught hold of the whip and wrenched it from him. 'The poor dears!
Now you must promise you won't be harsh with them for the rest of the
trip, or I won't go a step.'
'Precious lot you know about dogs,' her brother sneered; 'and I wish
you'd leave me alone. They're lazy, I tell you, and you've got to whip
them to get anything out of them. That's their way. You ask any one.
Ask one of those men.'
Mercedes looked at them imploringly, untold repugnance at sight of
pain written in her pretty face.
'They're weak as water, if you want to know,' came the reply from
one of the men. 'Plum tuckered out, that's what's the matter. They
need a rest.'
'Rest be blanked,' said Hal, with his beardless lips; and Mercedes
said, 'Oh!' in pain and sorrow at the oath.
But she was a clannish creature, and rushed at once to the defence of
her brother. 'Never mind that man,' she said pointedly. 'You're
driving our dogs, and you do what you think best with them.'
Again Hal's whip fell upon the dogs. They threw themselves
against the breast-bands, dug their feet into the packed snow, got down
low to it, and put forth all their strength. The sled held as though it were
an anchor. After two efforts, they stood still, panting. The whip was
whistling savagely, when once more Mercedes interfered. She dropped
on her knees before Buck, with tears in her eyes, and put her arms
around his neck.
'You poor, poor dears,' she cried sympathetically, 'why don't you
pull hard?--then you wouldn't be whipped.' Buck did not like her, but he
was feeling too miserable to resist her, taking it as part of the day's
miserable work.
One of the onlookers, who had been clenching his teeth to suppress
hot speech, now spoke up:--
'It's not that I care a whoop what becomes of you, but for the dogs'
sakes I just want to tell you, you can help them a mighty lot by breaking
out that sled. The runners are froze fast. Throw your weight against
the gee-pole, right and left, and break it out.'
A third time the attempt was made, but this time, following the
advice, Hal broke out the runners which had been frozen to the snow.
The overloaded and unwieldy sled forged ahead, Buck and his mates
struggling frantically under the rain of blows. A hundred yards ahead
the path turned and sloped steeply into the main street. It would have
required an experienced man to keep the top-heavy sled upright, and Hal
was not such a man. As they swung on the turn the sled went over,
spilling half its load through the loose lashings. The dogs never
stopped. The lightened sled bounded on its side behind them. They
were angry because of the ill treatment they had received and the unjust
load. Buck was raging. He broke into a run, the team following his
lead. Hal cried 'Whoa! whoa!' but they gave no heed. He tripped
and was pulled off his feet. The capsized sled ground over him, and the
dogs dashed on up the street, adding to the gayety of Skaguay as they
scattered the remainder of the outfit along its chief thoroughfare.
Kind-hearted citizens caught the dogs and gathered up the scattered
belongings. Also, they gave advice. Half the load and twice the dogs,
if they ever expected to reach Dawson, was what was said. Hal and his
sister and brother-in-law listened unwillingly, pitched tent, and
overhauled the outfit. Canned goods were turned out that made men
laugh, for canned goods on the Long Trail is a thing to dream about.
'Blankets for a hotel' quoth one of the men who laughed and helped.
'Half as many is too much; get rid of them. Throw away that tent, and
all those dishes,--who's going to wash them, anyway? Good Lord, do
you think you're travelling on a Pullman?'
And so it went, the inexorable elimination of the superfluous.
Mercedes cried when her clothes-bags were dumped on the ground and
article after article was thrown out. She cried in general, and she cried
in particular over each discarded thing. She clasped hands about knees,
rocking back and forth broken-heartedly. She averred she would not go
an inch, not for a dozen Charleses. She appealed to everybody and to
everything, finally wiping her eyes and proceeding to cast out even
articles of apparel that were imperative necessaries. And in her zeal,
when she had finished with her own, she attacked the belongings of her
men and went through them like a tornado.
This accomplished, the outfit, though cut in half, was still a
formidable bulk. Charles and Hal went out in the evening and bought
six Outside dogs. These, added to the six of the original team, and
Teek and Koona, the huskies obtained at the Rink Rapids on the record
trip, brought the team up to fourteen. But the Outside dogs, though
practically broken in since their landing, did not amount to much.
Three were short-haired pointers, one was a Newfoundland, and the
other two were mongrels of indeterminate breed. They did not seem to
know anything, these newcomers. Buck and his comrades looked upon
them with disgust, and though he speedily taught them their places and
what not to do, he could not teach them what to do. They did not take
kindly to trace and trail. With the exception of the two mongrels, they
were bewildered and spirit-broken by the strange savage environment in
which they found themselves and by the ill treatment they had received.
The two mongrels were without spirit at all; bones were the only things
breakable about them.
With the newcomers hopeless and forlorn, and the old team worn out
by twenty-five hundred miles of continuous trail, the outlook was
anything but bright. The two men, however, were quite cheerful. And
they were proud, too. They were doing the thing in style, with fourteen
dogs. They had seen other sleds depart over the Pass for Dawson, or
come in from Dawson, but never had they seen a sled with so many as
fourteen dogs. In the nature of Arctic travel there was a reason why
fourteen dogs should not drag one sled, and that was that one sled could
not carry the food for fourteen dogs. But Charles and Hal did not know
this. They had worked the trip out with a pencil, so much to a dog, so
many dogs, so many days, Q.E.D. Mercedes looked over their
shoulders and nodded comprehensively, it was all so very simple.
Late next morning Buck led the long team up the street. There was
nothing lively about it, no snap or go in him and his fellows. They were
starting dead weary. Four times he had covered the distance between
Salt Water and Dawson, and the knowledge that, jaded and tired, he was
facing the same trail once more, made him bitter. His heart was not in
the work, nor was the heart of any dog. The Outsides were timid and
frightened, the Insides without confidence in their masters.
Buck felt vaguely that there was no depending upon these two men
and the woman. They did not know how to do anything, and as the
days went by it became apparent that they could not learn. They were
slack in all things, without order or discipline. It took them half the
night to pitch a slovenly camp, and half the morning to break that camp
and get the sled loaded in fashion so slovenly that for the rest of the day
they were occupied in stopping and rearranging the load. Some days
they did not make ten miles. On other days they were unable to get
started at all. And on no day did they succeed in making more than
half the distance used by the men as a basis in their dog-food computation.
It was inevitable that they should go short on dog-food. But they
hastened it by overfeeding, bringing the day nearer when underfeeding
would commence. The Outside dogs, whose digestions had not been
trained by chronic famine to make the most of little, had voracious
appetites. And when, in addition to this, the worn- out huskies pulled
weakly, Hal decided that the orthodox ration was too small. He
doubled it. And to cap it all, when Mercedes, with tears in her pretty
eyes and a quaver in her throat, could not cajole him into giving the dogs
still more, she stole from the fish-sacks and fed them slyly. But it was
not food that Buck and the huskies needed, but rest. And though they
were making poor time, the heavy load they dragged sapped their
strength severely.
Then came the underfeeding. Hal awoke one day to the fact that
his dog-food was half gone and the distance only quarter covered;
further, that for love or money no additional dog-food was to be
obtained. So he cut down even the orthodox ration and tried to
increase the day's travel. His sister and brother-in-law seconded him;
but they were frustrated by their heavy outfit and their own
incompetence. It was a simple matter to give the dogs less food; but it
was impossible to make the dogs travel faster, while their own inability
to get under way earlier in the morning prevented them from travelling
longer hours. Not only did they not know how to work dogs, but they
did not know how to work themselves.
The first to go was Dub. Poor blundering thief that he was, always
getting caught and punished, he had none the less been a faithful worker.
His wrenched shoulder-blade, untreated and unrested, went from bad to
worse, till finally Hal shot him with the big Colt's revolver. It is a
saying of the country that an Outside dog starves to death on the ration
of the husky, so the six Outside dogs under Buck could do no less than
die on half the ration of the husky. The Newfoundland went first,
followed by the three short-haired pointers, the two mongrels hanging
more grittily on to life, but going in the end.
By this time all the amenities and gentlenesses of the Southland had
fallen away from the three people. Shorn of its glamour and romance,
Arctic travel became to them a reality too harsh for their manhood and
womanhood. Mercedes ceased weeping over the dogs, being too
occupied with weeping over herself and with quarrelling with her
husband and brother. To quarrel was the one thing they were never too
weary to do. Their irritability arose out of their misery, increased with
it, doubled upon it, outdistanced it. The wonderful patience of the trail
which comes to men who toil hard and suffer sore, and remain sweet of
speech and kindly, did not come to these two men and the woman.
They had no inkling of such a patience. They were stiff and in pain;
their muscles ached, their bones ached, their very hearts ached; and
because of this they became sharp of speech, and hard words were first
on their lips in the morning and last at night.
Charles and Hal wrangled whenever Mercedes gave them a chance.
It was the cherished belief of each that he did more than his share of
the work, and neither forbore to speak this belief at every opportunity.
Sometimes Mercedes sided with her husband, sometimes with her
brother. The result was a beautiful and unending family quarrel.
Starting from a dispute as to which should chop a few sticks for the fire
(a dispute which concerned only Charles and Hal), presently would be
lugged in the rest of the family, fathers, mothers, uncles, cousins, people
thousands of miles away, and some of them dead. That Hal's views on
art, or the sort of society plays his mother's brother wrote, should have
anything to do with the chopping of a few sticks of firewood, passes
comprehension; nevertheless the quarrel was as likely to tend in that
direction as in the direction of Charles's political prejudices. And that
Charles's sister's tale-bearing tongue should be relevant to the building
of a Yukon fire, was apparent only to Mercedes, who disburdened
herself of copious opinions upon that topic, and incidentally upon a few
other traits unpleasantly peculiar to her husband's family. In the
meantime the fire remained unbuilt, the camp half pitched, and the dogs unfed.
Mercedes nursed a special grievance--the grievance of sex. She was
pretty and soft, and had been chivalrously treated all her days. But the
present treatment by her husband and brother was everything save
chivalrous. It was her custom to be helpless. They complained.
Upon which impeachment of what to her was her most essential sex-
prerogative, she made their lives unendurable. She no longer
considered the dogs, and because she was sore and tired, she persisted in
riding on the sled. She was pretty and soft, but she weighed one
hundred and twenty pounds--a lusty last straw to the load dragged by the
weak and starving animals. She rode for days, till they fell in the traces
and the sled stood still. Charles and Hal begged her to get off and walk,
pleaded with her, entreated, the while she wept and importuned Heaven
with a recital of their brutality.
On one occasion they took her off the sled by main strength. They
never did it again. She let her legs go limp like a spoiled child, and sat
down on the trail. They went on their way, but she did not move.
After they had travelled three miles they unloaded the sled, came back
for her, and by main strength put her on the sled again.
In the excess of their own misery they were callous to the suffering
of their animals. Hal's theory, which he practised on others, was that
one must get hardened. He had started out preaching it to his sister and
brother-in-law. Failing there, he hammered it into the dogs with a club.
At the Five Fingers the dog-food gave out, and a toothless old squaw
offered to trade them a few pounds of frozen horse-hide for the Colt's
revolver that kept the big hunting-knife company at Hal's hip. A poor
substitute for food was this hide, just as it had been stripped from the
starved horses of the cattlemen six months back. In its frozen state it
was more like strips of galvanized iron, and when a dog wrestled it into
his stomach it thawed into thin and innutritious leathery strings and into
a mass of short hair, irritating and indigestible.
And through it all Buck staggered along at the head of the team as in
a nightmare. He pulled when he could; when he could no longer pull,
he fell down and remained down till blows from whip or club drove him
to his feet again. All the stiffness and gloss had gone out of his
beautiful furry coat. The hair hung down, limp and draggled, or matted
with dried blood where Hal's club had bruised him. His muscles had
wasted away to knotty strings, and the flesh pads had disappeared, so
that each rib and every bone in his frame were outlined cleanly through
the loose hide that was wrinkled in folds of emptiness. It was
heartbreaking, only Buck's heart was unbreakable. The man in the red
sweater had proved that.
As it was with Buck, so was it with his mates. They were
perambulating skeletons. There were seven all together, including him.
In their very great misery they had become insensible to the bite of the
lash or the bruise of the club. The pain of the beating was dull and
distant, just as the things their eyes saw and their ears heard seemed dull
and distant. They were not half living, or quarter living. They were
simply so many bags of bones in which sparks of life fluttered faintly.
When a halt was made, they dropped down in the traces like dead dogs,
and the spark dimmed and paled and seemed to go out. And when the
club or whip fell upon them, the spark fluttered feebly up, and they
tottered to their feet and staggered on.
There came a day when Billee, the good-natured, fell and could not
rise. Hal had traded off his revolver, so he took the axe and knocked
Billee on the head as he lay in the traces, then cut the carcass out of the
harness and dragged it to one side. Buck saw, and his mates saw, and
they knew that this thing was very close to them. On the next day
Koona went, and but five of them remained: Joe, too far gone to be
malignant; Pike, crippled and limping, only half conscious and not
conscious enough longer to malinger; Sol-leks, the one-eyed, still
faithful to the toil of trace and trail, and mournful in that he had so little
strength with which to pull; Teek, who had not travelled so far that
winter and who was now beaten more than the others because he was
fresher; and Buck, still at the head of the team, but no longer enforcing
discipline or striving to enforce it, blind with weakness half the time and
keeping the trail by the loom of it and by the dim feel of his feet.
It was beautiful spring weather, but neither dogs nor humans were
aware of it. Each day the sun rose earlier and set later. It was dawn
by three in the morning, and twilight lingered till nine at night. The
whole long day was a blaze of sunshine. The ghostly winter silence
had given way to the great spring murmur of awakening life. This
murmur arose from all the land, fraught with the joy of living. It came
from the things that lived and moved again, things which had been as
dead and which had not moved during the long months of frost. The
sap was rising in the pines. The willows and aspens were bursting out
in young buds. Shrubs and vines were putting on fresh garbs of green.
Crickets sang in the nights, and in the days all manner of creeping,
crawling things rustled forth into the sun. Partridges and woodpeckers
were booming and knocking in the forest. Squirrels were chattering,
birds singing, and overhead honked the wild-fowl driving up from the
south in cunning wedges that split the air.
From every hill slope came the trickle of running water, the music of
unseen fountains. AU things were thawing, bending, snapping. The
Yukon was straining to break loose the ice that bound it down. It ate
away from beneath; the sun ate from above. Air-holes formed, fissures
sprang and spread apart, while thin sections of ice fell through bodily
into the river. And amid all this bursting, rending, throbbing of
awakening life, under the blazing sun and through the soft-sighing
breezes, like wayfarers to death, staggered the two men, the woman, and
the huskies.
With the dogs falling, Mercedes weeping and riding, Hal swearing
innocuously, and Charles's eyes wistfully watering, they staggered into
John Thornton's camp at the mouth of White River. When they halted,
the dogs dropped down as though they had all been struck dead.
Mercedes dried her eyes and looked at John Thornton. Charles sat
down on a log to rest. He sat down very slowly and painstakingly what
of his great stiffness. Hal did the talking. John Thornton was
whittling the last touches on an axe-handle he had made from a stick of
birch. He whittled and listened, gave monosyllabic replies, and,
when it was asked, terse advice. He knew the breed, and he gave his
advice in the certainty that it would not be followed.
'They told us up above that the bottom was dropping out of the trail
and that the best thing for us to do was to lay over,' Hal said in response
to Thornton's warning to take no more chances on the rotten ice. 'They
told us we couldn't make White River, and here we are.' This last with a
sneering ring of triumph in it.
'And they told you true,' John Thornton answered. 'The bottom's
likely to drop out at any moment. Only fools, with the blind luck of
fools, could have made it. I tell you straight, I wouldn't risk my carcass
on that ice for all the gold in Alaska.'
'That's because you're not a fool, I suppose,' said Hal. 'All the same,
we'll go on to Dawson.' He uncoiled his whip. 'Get up there, Buck! Hi!
Get up there! Mush on!'
Thornton went on whittling. It was idle, he knew, to get between a
fool and his folly; while two or three fools more or less would not alter
the scheme of things.
But the team did not get up at the command. It had long since
passed into the stage where blows were required to rouse it. The whip
flashed out, here and there, on its merciless errands. John Thornton
compressed his lips. Sol-leks was the first to crawl to his feet. Teek
followed. Joe came next, yelping with pain. Pike made painful
efforts. Twice he fell over, when half up, and on the third attempt
managed to rise. Buck made no effort. He lay quietly where he had
fallen. The lash bit into him again and again, but he neither whined nor
struggled. Several times Thornton started, as though to speak, but
changed his mind. A moisture came into his eyes, and, as the whipping
continued, he arose and walked irresolutely up and down.
This was the first time Buck had failed, in itself a sufficient reason to
drive Hal into a rage. He exchanged the whip for the customary club.
Buck refused to move under the rain of heavier blows which now fell
upon him. Like his mates, he barely able to get up, but, unlike them, he
had made up his mind not to get up. He had a vague feeling of
impending doom. This had been strong upon him when he pulled in to
the bank, and it had not departed from him. What of the thin and rotten
ice he had felt under his feet all day, it seemed that he sensed disaster
close at hand, out there ahead on the ice where his master was trying to
drive him. He refused to stir. So greatly had he suffered, and so far
gone was he, that the blows did not hurt much. And as they continued
to fall upon him, the spark of life within flickered and went down. It
was nearly out. He felt strangely numb. As though from a great
distance, he was aware that he was being beaten. The last sensations of
pain left him. He no longer felt anything, though very faintly he could
hear the impact of the club upon his body. But it was no longer his
body, it seemed so far away.
And then, suddenly, without warning, uttering a cry that was
inarticulate and more like the cry of an animal, John Thornton sprang
upon the man who wielded the club. Hal was hurled backward, as
though struck by a failing tree. Mercedes screamed. Charles looked on
wistfully, wiped his watery eyes, but did not get up because of his
stiffness.
John Thornton stood over Buck, struggling to control himself, too
convulsed with rage to speak.
'If you strike that dog again, I'll kill you,' he at last managed to say
in a choking voice.
'It's my dog,' Hal replied, wiping the blood from his mouth as he
came back. 'Get out of my way, or I'll fix you. I'm going to Dawson.'
Thornton stood between him and Buck, and evinced no intention of
getting out of the way. Hal drew his long hunting-knife. Mercedes
screamed. cried, laughed, and manifested the chaotic abandonment of
hysteria. Thornton rapped Hal's knuckles with the axe-handle,
knocking the knife to the ground. He rapped his knuckles again as he
tried to pick it up. Then he stooped, picked it up himself, and with two
strokes cut Buck's traces.
Hal had no fight left in him. Besides, his hands were full with his
sister, or his arms, rather; while Buck was too near dead to be of further
use in hauling the sled. A few minutes later they pulled out from the
bank and down the river. Buck heard them go and raised his head to
see, Pike was leading, Sol-leks was at the wheel, and between were Joe
and Teek. They were limping and staggering. Mercedes was riding
the loaded sled. Hal guided at the gee-pole, and Charles stumbled
along in the rear.
As Buck watched them, Thornton knelt beside him and with rough,
kindly hands searched for broken bones. By the time his search had
disclosed nothing more than many bruises and a state of terrible
starvation, the sled was a quarter of a mile away. Dog and man
watched it crawling along over the ice. Suddenly, they saw its back
end drop down, as into a rut, and the gee-pole, with Hal clinging to it,
jerk into the air. Mercedes's scream came to their ears. They saw
Charles turn and make one step to run back, and then a whole section of
ice give way and dogs and humans disappear. A yawning hole was all
that was to be seen. The bottom had dropped out of the trail.
John Thornton and Buck looked at each other.
'You poor devil,' said John Thornton, and Buck licked his hand.
CHAPTER VI
For the Love of a Man
When John Thornton froze his feet in the previous December his
partners had made him comfortable and left him to get well, going on
themselves up the river to get out a raft of saw-logs for Dawson. He
was still limping slightly at the time he rescued Buck, but with the
continued warm weather even the slight limp left him. And here, lying
by the river bank through the long spring days, watching the running
water, listening lazily to the songs of birds and the hum of nature, Buck
slowly won back his strength.
A rest comes very good after one has travelled three thousand miles,
and it must be confessed that Buck waxed lazy as his wounds healed, his
muscles swelled out, and the flesh came back to cover his bones. For
that matter, they were all loafing,--Buck, John Thornton, and Skeet and
Nig,--waiting for the raft to come that was to carry them down to
Dawson. Skeet was a little Irish setter who early made friends with
Buck, who, in a dying condition, was unable to resent her first advances.
She had the doctor trait which some dogs possess; and as a mother cat
washes her kittens, so she washed and cleansed Buck's wounds.
Regularly, each morning after he had finished his breakfast, she
performed her self- appointed task, till he came to look for her
ministrations as much as he did for Thornton's. Nig, equally friendly,
though less demonstrative, was a huge black dog, half bloodhound and
half deerhound, with eyes that laughed and a boundless good nature.
To Buck's surprise these dogs manifested no jealousy toward him.
They seemed to share the kindliness and largeness of John Thornton.
As Buck grew stronger they enticed him into all sorts of ridiculous
games, in which Thornton himself could not forbear to join; and in this
fashion Buck romped through his convalescence and into a new
existence. Love, genuine passionate love, was his for the first time.
This he had never experienced at Judge Miller's down in the sun-kissed
Santa Clara Valley. With the Judge's sons, hunting and tramping, it had
been a working partnership; with the Judge's grandsons, a sort of
pompous guardianship; and with the Judge himself, a stately and
dignified friendship. But love that was feverish and burning, that was
adoration, that was madness, it had taken John Thornton to arouse.
This man had saved his life, which was something; but, further, he
was the ideal master. Other men saw to the welfare of their dogs from
a sense of duty and business expediency; he saw to the welfare of his as
if they were his own children, because he could not help it. And he saw
further. He never forgot a kindly greeting or a cheering word, and to sit
down for a long talk with them ('gas' he called it) was as much his
delight as theirs. He had a way of taking Buck's head roughly between
his hands, and resting his own head upon Buck's, of shaking him back
and forth, the while calling him ill names that to Buck were love names.
Buck knew no greater joy than that rough embrace and the sound of
murmured oaths, and at each jerk back and forth it seemed that his heart
would be shaken out of his body so great was its ecstasy. And when,
released, he sprang to his feet, his mouth laughing, his eyes eloquent, his
throat vibrant with unuttered sound, and in that fashion remained
without movement, John Thornton would reverently exclaim, 'God! you can all but speak!'
Buck had a trick of love expression that was akin to hurt. He would
often seize Thornton's hand in his mouth and close so fiercely that the
flesh bore the impress of his teeth for some time afterward. And as
Buck understood the oaths to be love words, so the man understood this
feigned bite for a caress.
For the most part, however, Buck's love was expressed in adoration.
While he went wild with happiness when Thornton touched him or
spoke to him, he did not seek these tokens. Unlike Skeet, who was
wont to shove her nose under Thornton's hand and nudge and nudge till
petted, or Nig, who would stalk up and rest his great head on Thornton's
knee, Buck was content to adore at a distance. He would lie by the
hour, eager, alert, at Thornton's feet, looking up into his face, dwelling
upon it, studying it, following with keenest interest each fleeting
expression, every movement or change of feature. Or, as chance might
have it, he would lie farther away, to the side or rear, watching the
outlines of the man and the occasional movements of his body. And
often, such was the communion in which they lived, the strength of
Buck's gaze would draw John Thornton's head around, and he would
return the gaze, without speech, his heart shining out of his eyes as
Buck's heart shone out.
For a long time after his rescue, Buck did not like Thornton to get
out of his sight. From the moment he left the tent to when he entered it
again, Buck would follow at his heels. His transient masters since he had
come into the Northland had bred in him a fear that no master could be
permanent. He was afraid that Thornton would pass out of his life as
Perrault and Francois and the Scotch half-breed had passed out. Even
in the night, in his dreams, he was haunted by this fear. At such times
he would shake off sleep and creep through the chill to the flap of the
tent, where he would stand and listen to the sound of his master's breathing.
But in spite of this great love he bore John Thornton, which seemed
to bespeak the soft civilizing influence, the strain of the primitive, which
the Northland had aroused in him, remained alive and active.
Faithfulness and devotion, things born of fire and roof, were his; yet he
retained his wildness and wiliness. He was a thing of the wild, come in
from the wild to sit by John Thornton's fire, rather than a dog of the soft
Southland stamped with the marks of generations of civilization.
Because of his very great love, he could not steal from this man, but
from any other man, in any other camp, he did not hesitate an instant;
while the cunning with which he stole enabled him to escape detection.
His face and body were scored by the teeth of many dogs, and he
fought as fiercely as ever and more shrewdly. Skeet and Nig were too
good-natured for quarrelling,--besides, they belonged to John Thornton;
but the strange dog, no matter what the breed or valor, swiftly
acknowledged Buck's supremacy or found himself struggling for life
with a terrible antagonist. And Buck was merciless. He had learned
well the law of club and fang, and he never forewent an advantage or
drew back from a foe he had started on the way to Death. He had
lessoned from Spitz, and from the chief fighting dogs of the police and
mail, and knew there was no middle course. He must master or be
mastered; while to show mercy was a weakness. Mercy did not exist in
the primordial life. It was misunderstood for fear, and such
misunderstandings made for death. Kill or be killed, eat or be eaten,
was the law; and this mandate, down out of the depths of Time, he obeyed.
He was older than the days he had seen and the breaths he had drawn.
He linked the past with the present, and the eternity behind him throbbed
through him in a mighty rhythm to which he swayed as the tides and
seasons swayed. He sat by John Thornton's fire, a broad-breasted dog,
white-fanged and long-furred; but behind him were the shades of all
manner of dogs, half-wolves and wild wolves, urgent and prompting,
tasting the savor of the meat he ate, thirsting for the water he drank,
scenting the wind with him, listening with him and telling him the
sounds made by the wild life in the forest, dictating his moods, directing
his actions, lying down to sleep with him when he lay down, and
dreaming with him and beyond him and becoming themselves the stuff
of his dreams.
So peremptorily did these shades beckon him, that each day mankind
and the claims of mankind slipped farther from him. Deep in the forest a
call was sounding, and as often as he heard this call, mysteriously
thrilling and luring, he felt compelled to turn his back upon the fire and
the beaten earth around it, and to plunge into the forest, and on and on,
he knew not where or why; nor did he wonder where or why, the call
sounding imperiously, deep in the forest. But as often as he gained the
soft unbroken earth and the green shade, the love for John Thornton
drew him back to the fire again.
Thornton alone held him. The rest of mankind was as nothing.
Chance travellers might praise or pet him; but he was cold under it all,
and from a too demonstrative man he would get up and walk away.
When Thornton's partners, Hans and Pete, arrived on the long-expected
raft, Buck refused to notice them till he learned they were close to
Thornton; after that he tolerated them in a passive sort of way, accepting
favors from them as though he favored them by accepting. They were
of the same large type as Thornton, living close to the earth, thinking
simply and seeing clearly; and ere they swung the raft into the big eddy
by the saw- mill at Dawson, they understood Buck and his ways, and did
not insist upon an intimacy such as obtained with Skeet and Nig.
For Thornton, however, his love seemed to grow and grow. He,
alone among men, could put a pack upon Buck's back in the summer
travelling. Nothing was too great for Buck to do, when Thornton
commanded. One day (they had grub-staked themselves from the
proceeds of the raft and left Dawson for the head-waters of the Tanana)
the men and dogs were sitting on the crest of a cliff which fell away,
straight down, to naked bed-rock three hundred feet below. John
Thornton was sitting near the edge, Buck at his shoulder. A thoughtless
whim seized Thornton, and he drew the attention of Hans and Pete to the
experiment he had in mind. 'Jump, Buck!' he commanded, sweeping
his arm out and over the chasm. The next instant he was grappling
with Buck on the extreme edge, while Hans and Pete were dragging
them back into safety.
'It's uncanny,' Pete said, after it was over and they had caught their speech.
Thornton shook his head. 'No, it is splendid, and it is terrible, too.
Do you know, it sometimes makes me afraid.'
'I'm not hankering to be the man that lays hands on you while he's
around,' Pete announced conclusively, nodding his head toward Buck.
'Py Jingo!' was Hans's contribution. 'Not mineself either.'
It was at Circle City, ere the year was out, that Pete's apprehensions
were realized. 'Black' Burton, a man evil-tempered and malicious,
had been picking a quarrel with a tenderfoot at the bar, when Thornton
stepped good-naturedly between. Buck, as was his custom, was lying
in a corner, head on paws, watching his master's every action. Burton
struck out, without warning, straight from the shoulder. Thornton was
sent spinning, and saved himself from falling only by clutching the rail
of the bar.
Those who were looking on heard what was neither bark nor yelp,
but a something which is best described as a roar, and they saw Buck's
body rise up in the air as he left the floor for Burton's throat. The man
saved his life by instinctively throwing out his arm, but was hurled
backward to the floor with Buck on top of him. Buck loosed his teeth
from the flesh of the arm and drove in again for the throat. This time
the man succeeded only in partly blocking, and his throat was torn open.
Then the crowd was upon Buck, and he was driven off; but while a
surgeon checked the bleeding, he prowled up and down, growling
furiously, attempting to rush in, and being forced back by an array of
hostile clubs. A 'miners' meeting,' called on the spot, decided that the
dog had sufficient provocation, and Buck was discharged. But his
reputation was made, and from that day his name spread through every
camp in Alaska.
Later on, in the fall of the year, he saved John Thornton's life in quite
another fashion. The three partners were lining a long and narrow
poling-boat down a bad stretch of rapids on the Forty- Mile Creek. Hans
and Pete moved along the bank, snubbing with a thin Manila rope from
tree to tree, while Thornton remained in the boat, helping its descent by
means of a pole, and shouting directions to the shore. Buck, on the
bank, worried and anxious, kept abreast of the boat, his eyes never off
his master.
At a particularly bad spot, where a ledge of barely submerged rocks
jutted out into the river, Hans cast off the rope, and, while Thornton
poled the boat out into the stream, ran down the bank with the end in his
hand to snub the boat when it had cleared the ledge. This it did, and
was flying down-stream in a current as swift as a mill-race, when Hans
checked it with the rope and checked too suddenly. The boat flirted
over and snubbed in to the bank bottom up, while Thornton, flung sheer
out of it, was carried down-stream toward the worst part of the rapids, a
stretch of wild water in which no swimmer could live.
Buck had sprung in on the instant; and at the end of three hundred
yards, amid a mad swirl of water, he overhauled Thornton. When he
felt him grasp his tail, Buck headed for the bank, swimming with all his
splendid strength. But the progress shoreward was slow; the progress
down-stream amazingly rapid. From below came the fatal roaring
where the wild current went wilder and was rent in shreds and spray by
the rocks which thrust through like the teeth of an enormous comb.
The suck of the water as it took the beginning of the last steep pitch was
frightful, and Thornton knew that the shore was impossible. He
scraped furiously over a rock, bruised across a second, and struck a third
with crushing force. He clutched its slippery top with both hands,
releasing Buck, and above the roar of the churning water shouted: 'Go, Buck! Go!'
Buck could not hold his own, and swept on down-stream, struggling
desperately, but unable to win back. When he heard Thornton's
command repeated, he partly reared out of the water, throwing his head
high, as though for a last look, then turned obediently toward the bank.
He swam powerfully and was dragged ashore by Pete and Hans at the
very point where swimming ceased to be possible and destruction began.
They knew that the time a man could cling to a slippery rock in the
face of that driving current was a matter of minutes, and they ran as fast
as they could up the bank to a point far above where Thornton was
hanging on. They attached the line with which they had been snubbing
the boat to Buck's neck and shoulders, being careful that it should
neither strangle him nor impede his swimming, and launched him into
the stream. He struck out boldly, but not straight enough into the
stream. He discovered the mistake too late, when Thornton was abreast
of him and a bare half-dozen strokes away while he was being carried
helplessly past.
Hans promptly snubbed with the rope, as though Buck were a boat.
The rope thus tightening on him in the sweep of the current, he was
jerked under the surface, and under the surface he remained till his body
struck against the bank and he was hauled out. He was half drowned,
and Hans and Pete threw themselves upon him, pounding the breath into
him and the water out of him. He staggered to his feet and fell down.
The faint sound of Thornton's voice came to them, and though they
could not make out the words of it, they knew that he was in his
extremity. His master's voice acted on Buck like an electric shock, He
sprang to his feet and ran up the bank ahead of the men to the point of
his previous departure.
Again the rope was attached and he was launched, and again he
struck out, but this time straight into the stream. He had miscalculated
once, but he would not be guilty of it a second time. Hans paid out the
rope, permitting no slack, while Pete kept it clear of coils. Buck held
on till he was on a line straight above Thornton; then he turned, and with
the speed of an express train headed down upon him. Thornton saw
him coming, and, as Buck struck him like a battering ram, with the
whole force of the current behind him, he reached up and closed with
both arms around the shaggy neck. Hans snubbed the rope around the
tree, and Buck and Thornton were jerked under the water. Strangling,
suffocating, sometimes one uppermost and sometimes the other,
dragging over the jagged bottom, smashing against rocks and snags, they
veered in to the bank.
Thornton came to, belly downward and being violently propelled
back and forth across a drift log by Hans and Pete. His first glance was
for Buck, over whose limp and apparently lifeless body Nig was setting
up a howl, while Skeet was licking the wet face and closed eyes.
Thornton was himself bruised and battered, and he went carefully over
Buck's body, when he had been brought around, finding three broken ribs.
'That settles it,' he announced. 'We camp right here.' And camp
they did, till Buck's ribs knitted and he was able to travel.
That winter, at Dawson, Buck performed another exploit, not so
heroic, perhaps, but one that put his name many notches higher on the
totem-pole of Alaskan fame. This exploit was particularly gratifying to
the three men; for they stood in need of the outfit which it furnished, and
were enabled to make a long-desired trip into the virgin East, where
miners had not yet appeared. It was brought about by a conversation in
the Eldorado Saloon, in which men waxed boastful of their favorite dogs.
Buck, because of his record, was the target for these men, and Thornton
was driven stoutly to defend him. At the end of half an hour one man
stated that his dog could start a sled with five hundred pounds and walk
off with it; a second bragged six hundred for his dog; and a third, seven hundred.
'Pooh! pooh!' said John Thornton; 'Buck can start a thousand pounds.'
'And break it out? and walk off with it for a hundred yards?'
demanded Matthewson, a Bonanza King, he of the seven hundred vaunt.
'And break it out, and walk off with it for a hundred yards,' John
Thornton said coolly.
'Well,' Matthewson said, slowly and deliberately, so that all could
hear, 'I've got a thousand dollars that says he can't. And there it is.' So
saying, he slammed a sack of gold dust of the size of a bologna sausage
down upon the bar.
Nobody spoke. Thornton's bluff, if bluff it was, had been called.
He could feel a flush of warm blood creeping up his face. His tongue
had tricked him. He did not know whether Buck could start a thousand
pounds. Half a ton! The enormousness of it appalled him. He had
great faith in Buck's strength and had often thought him capable of
starting such a load; but never, as now, had he faced the possibility of it,
the eyes of a dozen men fixed upon him, silent and waiting. Further, he
had no thousand dollars; nor had Hans or Pete.
'I've got a sled standing outside now, with twenty fiftypound sacks
of flour on it,' Matthewson went on with brutal directness; 'so don't let
that hinder you.'
Thornton did not reply. He did not know what to say. He glanced
from face to face in the absent way of a man who has lost the power of
thought and is seeking somewhere to find the thing that will start it
going again. The face of Jim O'Brien, a Mastodon King and old-time
comrade, caught his eyes. It was as a cue to him, seeming to rouse him
to do what he would never have dreamed of doing.
'Can you lend me a thousand?' he asked, almost in a whisper.
'Sure,' answered O'Brien, thumping down a plethoric sack by the
side of Matthewson's. 'Though it's little faith I'm having, John, that the
beast can do the trick.'
The Eldorado emptied its occupants into the street to see the test.
The tables were deserted, and the dealers and gamekeepers came forth to
see the outcome of the wager and to lay odds. Several hundred men,
furred and mittened, banked around the sled within easy distance.
Matthewson's sled, loaded with a thousand pounds of flour, had been
standing for a couple of hours, and in the intense cold (it was sixty
below zero) the runners had frozen fast to the hard-packed snow. Men
offered odds of two to one that Buck could not budge the sled. A
quibble arose concerning the phrase 'break out.' O'Brien contended it
was Thornton's privilege to knock the runners loose, leaving Buck to
'break it out' from a dead standstill. Matthewson insisted that the
phrase included breaking the runners from the frozen grip of the snow.
A majority of the men who had witnessed the making of the bet decided
in his favor, whereat the odds went up to three to one against Buck.
There were no takers. Not a man believed him capable of the feat.
Thornton had been hurried into the wager, heavy with doubt; and now
that he looked at the sled itself, the concrete fact, with the regular team
of ten dogs curled up in the snow before it, the more impossible the task
appeared. Matthewson waxed jubilant.
'Three to one!' he proclaimed. 'I'll lay you another thousand at
that figure, Thornton. What d'ye say?'
Thornton's doubt was strong in his face, but his fighting spirit was
aroused--the fighting spirit that soars above odds, fails to recognize the
impossible, and is deaf to all save the clamor for battle. He called Hans
and Pete to him. Their sacks were slim, and with his own the three
partners could rake together only two hundred dollars. In the ebb of
their fortunes, this sum was their total capital; yet they laid it
unhesitatingly against Matthewson's six hundred.
The team of ten dogs was unhitched, and Buck, with his own harness,
was put into the sled. He had caught the contagion of the excitement,
and he felt that in some way he must do a great thing for John Thornton.
Murmurs of admiration at his splendid appearance went up. He was in
perfect condition, without an ounce of superfluous flesh, and the one
hundred and fifty pounds that he weighed were so many pounds of grit
and virility. His furry coat shone with the sheen of silk. Down the
neck and across the shoulders, his mane, in repose as it was, half bristled
and seemed to lift with every movement, as though excess of vigor made
each particular hair alive and active. The great breast and heavy fore
legs were no more than in proportion with the rest of the body, where the
muscles showed in tight rolls underneath the skin. Men felt these
muscles and proclaimed them hard as iron, and the odds went down to
two to one.
'Gad, sir! Gad, sir!' stuttered a member of the latest dynasty, a king
of the Skookum Benches. 'I offer you eight hundred for him, sir,
before the test, sir; eight hundred just as he stands.'
Thornton shook his head and stepped to Buck's side.
'You must stand off from him,' Matthewson protested. 'Free play
and plenty of room.'
The crowd fell silent; only could be heard the voices of the gamblers
vainly offering two to one. Everybody acknowledged Buck a
magnificent animal, but twenty fifty-pound sacks of flour bulked too
large in their eyes for them to loosen their pouch-strings.
Thornton knelt down by Buck's side. He took his head in his two
hands and rested cheek on cheek. He did not playfully shake him, as
was his wont, or murmur soft love curses; but he whispered in his ear.
'As you love me, Buck. As you love me,' was what he whispered.
Buck whined with suppressed eagerness.
The crowd was watching curiously. The affair was growing
mysterious. It seemed like a conjuration. As Thornton got to his feet,
Buck seized his mittened hand between his jaws, pressing in with his
teeth and releasing slowly, half-reluctantly. It was the answer, in terms,
not of speech, but of love. Thornton stepped well back.
'Now, Buck,' he said.
Buck tightened the traces, then slacked them for a matter of several
inches. It was the way he had learned.
'Gee!' Thornton's voice rang out, sharp in the tense silence.
Buck swung to the right, ending the movement in a plunge that took
up the slack and with a sudden jerk arrested his one hundred and fifty
pounds. The load quivered, and from under the runners arose a crisp crackling.
'Haw!' Thornton commanded.
Buck duplicated the manoeuvre, this time to the left. The crackling
turned into a snapping, the sled pivoting and the runners slipping and
grating several inches to the side. The sled was broken out. Men
were holding their breaths, intensely unconscious of the fact.
'Now, MUSH!'
Thornton's command cracked out like a pistol-shot. Buck threw
himself forward, tightening the traces with a jarring lunge. His whole
body was gathered compactly together in the tremendous effort, the
muscles writhing and knotting like live things under the silky fur. His
great chest was low to the ground, his head forward and down, while his
feet were flying like mad, the claws scarring the hard-packed snow in
parallel grooves. The sled swayed and trembled, half-started forward.
One of his feet slipped, and one man groaned aloud. Then the sled
lurched ahead in what appeared a rapid succession of jerks, though it
never really came to a dead stop again ...half an inch...an inch . . . two
inches. . . The jerks perceptibly diminished; as the sled gained
momentum, he caught them up, till it was moving steadily along.
Men gasped and began to breathe again, unaware that for a moment
they had ceased to breathe. Thornton was running behind, encouraging
Buck with short, cheery words. The distance had been measured off,
and as he neared the pile of firewood which marked the end of the
hundred yards, a cheer began to grow and grow, which burst into a roar
as he passed the firewood and halted at command. Every man was
tearing himself loose, even Matthewson. Hats and mittens were flying
in the air. Men were shaking hands, it did not matter with whom, and
bubbling over in a general incoherent babel.
But Thornton fell on his knees beside Buck. Head was against head,
and he was shaking him back and forth. Those who hurried up heard
him cursing Buck, and he cursed him long and fervently, and softly and lovingly.
'Gad, sir! Gad, sir!' spluttered the Skookum Bench king. 'I'll give
you a thousand for him, sir, a thousand, sir--twelve hundred, sir.'
Thornton rose to his feet. His eyes were wet. The tears were
streaming frankly down his cheeks. 'Sir,' he said to the Skookum
Bench king, 'no, sir. You can go to hell, sir. It's the best I can do for
you, sir.'
Buck seized Thornton's hand in his teeth. Thornton shook him back
and forth. As though animated by a common impulse, the onlookers
drew back to a respectful distance; nor were they again indiscreet
enough to interrupt.
CHAPTER VII
The Sounding of the Call
When Buck earned sixteen hundred dollars in five minutes for John
Thornton, he made it possible for his master to pay off certain debts and
to journey with his partners into the East after a fabled lost mine, the
history of which was as old as the history of the country. Many men
had sought it; few had found it; and more than a few there were who had
never returned from the quest. This lost mine was steeped in tragedy
and shrouded in mystery. No one knew of the first man. The oldest
tradition stopped before it got back to him. From the beginning there
had been an ancient and ramshackle cabin. Dying men had sworn to it,
and to the mine the site of which it marked, clinching their testimony
with nuggets that were unlike any known grade of gold in the Northland.
But no living man had looted this treasure house, and the dead were
dead; wherefore John Thornton and Pete and Hans, with Buck and half a
dozen other dogs, faced into the East on an unknown trail to achieve
where men and dogs as good as themselves had failed. They sledded
seventy miles up the Yukon, swung to the left into the Stewart River,
passed the Mayo and the McQuestion, and held on until the Stewart
itself became a streamlet, threading the upstanding peaks which marked
the backbone of the continent.
John Thornton asked little of man or nature. He was unafraid of the
wild. With a handful of salt and a rifle he could plunge into the
wilderness and fare wherever he pleased and as long as he pleased.
Being in no haste, Indian fashion, he hunted his dinner in the course of
the day's travel; and if he failed to find it, like the Indian, he kept on
travelling, secure in the knowledge that sooner or later he would come to
it. So, on this great journey into the East, straight meat was the bill of
fare, ammunition and tools principally made up the load on the sled, and
the time-card was drawn upon the limitless future.
To Buck it was boundless delight, this hunting, fishing, and
indefinite wandering through strange places. For weeks at a time they
would hold on steadily, day after day; and for weeks upon end they
would camp, here and there, the dogs loafing and the men burning holes
through frozen muck and gravel and washing countless pans of dirt by
the heat of the fire. Sometimes they went hungry, sometimes they
feasted riotously, all according to the abundance of game and the fortune
of hunting. Summer arrived, and dogs and men packed on their backs,
rafted across blue mountain lakes, and descended or ascended unknown
rivers in slender boats whipsawed from the standing forest.
The months came and went, and back and forth they twisted through
the uncharted vastness, where no men were and yet where men had been
if the Lost Cabin were true. They went across divides in summer
blizzards, shivered under the midnight sun on naked mountains between
the timber line and the eternal snows, dropped into summer valleys amid
swarming gnats and flies, and in the shadows of glaciers picked
strawberries and flowers as ripe and fair as any the Southland could
boast. In the fall of the year they penetrated a weird lake country, sad
and silent, where wild- fowl had been, but where then there was no life nor
sign of life-- only the blowing of chill winds, the forming of ice in
sheltered places, and the melancholy rippling of waves on lonely beaches.
And through another winter they wandered on the obliterated trails
of men who had gone before. Once, they came upon a path blazed
through the forest, an ancient path, and the Lost Cabin seemed very near.
But the path began nowhere and ended nowhere, and it remained
mystery, as the man who made it and the reason he made it remained
mystery. Another time they chanced upon the time-graven wreckage of
a hunting lodge, and amid the shreds of rotted blankets John Thornton
found a long-barrelled flint-lock. He knew it for a Hudson Bay
Company gun of the young days in the Northwest, when such a gun was
worth its height in beaver skins packed flat, And that was all--no hint as
to the man who in an early day had reared the lodge and left the gun
among the blankets.
Spring came on once more, and at the end of all their wandering they
found, not the Lost Cabin, but a shallow placer in a broad valley where
the gold showed like yellow butter across the bottom of the washing-pan.
They sought no farther. Each day they worked earned them thousands
of dollars in clean dust and nuggets, and they worked every day. The
gold was sacked in moose-hide bags, fifty pounds to the bag, and piled
like so much firewood outside the spruce-bough lodge. Like giants
they toiled, days flashing on the heels of days like dreams as they
heaped the treasure up.
There was nothing for the dogs to do, save the hauling in of meat
now and again that Thornton killed, and Buck spent long hours musing
by the fire. The vision of the short-legged hairy man came to him more
frequently, now that there was little work to be done; and often, blinking
by the fire, Buck wandered with him in that other world which he remembered.
The salient thing of this other world seemed fear. When he
watched the hairy man sleeping by the fire, head between his knees and
hands clasped above, Buck saw that he slept restlessly, with many starts
and awakenings, at which times he would peer fearfully into the
darkness and fling more wood upon the fire. Did they walk by the
beach of a sea, where the hairy man gathered shell- fish and ate them as he
gathered, it was with eyes that roved everywhere for hidden danger and
with legs prepared to run like the wind at its first appearance. Through
the forest they crept noiselessly, Buck at the hairy man's heels; and they
were alert and vigilant, the pair of them, ears twitching and moving and
nostrils quivering, for the man heard and smelled as keenly as Buck.
The hairy man could spring up into the trees and travel ahead as fast as
on the ground, swinging by the arms from limb to limb, sometimes a
dozen feet apart, letting go and catching, never falling, never missing his
grip. In fact, he seemed as much at home among the trees as on the
ground; and Buck had memories of nights of vigil spent beneath trees
wherein the hairy man roosted, holding on tightly as he slept.
And closely akin to the visions of the hairy man was the call still
sounding in the depths of the forest. It filled him with a great unrest
and strange desires. It caused him to feel a vague, sweet gladness, and
he was aware of wild yearnings and stirrings for he knew not what.
Sometimes he pursued the call into the forest, looking for it as though it
were a tangible thing, barking softly or defiantly, as the mood might
dictate. He would thrust his nose into the cool wood moss, or into the
black soil where long grasses grew, and snort with joy at the fat earth
smells; or he would crouch for hours, as if in concealment, behind
fungus- covered trunks of fallen trees, wide-eyed and wide-eared to all
that moved and sounded about him. It might be, lying thus, that he
hoped to surprise this call he could not understand. But he did not
know why he did these various things. He was impelled to do them,
and did not reason about them at all.
Irresistible impulses seized him. He would be lying in camp,
dozing lazily in the heat of the day, when suddenly his head would lift
and his ears cock up, intent and listening, and he would spring to his feet
and dash away, and on and on, for hours, through the forest aisles and
across the open spaces where the niggerheads bunched. He loved to
run down dry watercourses, and to creep and spy upon the bird life in the
woods. For a day at a time he would lie in the underbrush where he
could watch the partridges drumming and strutting up and down. But
especially he loved to run in the dim twilight of the summer midnights,
listening to the subdued and sleepy murmurs of the forest, reading signs
and sounds as man may read a book, and seeking for the mysterious
something that called--called, waking or sleeping, at all times, for him to come.
One night he sprang from sleep with a start, eager-eyed, nostrils
quivering and scenting, his mane bristling in recurrent waves. From the
forest came the call (or one note of it, for the call was many noted),
distinct and definite as never before,--a long-drawn howl, like, yet unlike,
any noise made by husky dog. And he knew it, in the old familiar way,
as a sound heard before. He sprang through the sleeping camp and in
swift silence dashed through the woods. As he drew closer to the cry
he went more slowly, with caution in every movement, till he came to an
open place among the trees, and looking out saw, erect on haunches,
with nose pointed to the sky, a long, lean, timber wolf.
He had made no noise, yet it ceased from its howling and tried to
sense his presence. Buck stalked into the open, half crouching, body
gathered compactly together, tail straight and stiff, feet falling with
unwonted care. Every movement advertised commingled threatening
and overture of friendliness. It was the menacing truce that marks the
meeting of wild beasts that prey. But the wolf fled at sight of him.
He followed, with wild leapings, in a frenzy to overtake. He ran him
into a blind channel, in the bed of the creek where a timber jam barred
the way. The wolf whirled about, pivoting on his hind legs after the
fashion of Joe and of all cornered husky dogs, snarling and bristling,
clipping his teeth together in a continuous and rapid succession of snaps.
Buck did not attack, but circled him about and hedged him in with
friendly advances. The wolf was suspicious and afraid; for Buck made
three of him in weight, while his head barely reached Buck's shoulder.
Watching his chance, he darted away, and the chase was resumed.
Time and again he was cornered, and the thing repeated, though he was
in poor condition, or Buck could not so easily have overtaken him. He
would run till Buck's head was even with his flank, when he would whirl
around at bay, only to dash away again at the first opportunity.
But in the end Buck's pertinacity was rewarded; for the wolf, finding
that no harm was intended, finally sniffed noses with him. Then they
became friendly, and played about in the nervous, half- coy way with
which fierce beasts belie their fierceness. After some time of this the
wolf started off at an easy lope in a manner that plainly showed he was
going somewhere. He made it clear to Buck that he was to come, and
they ran side by side through the sombre twilight, straight up the creek
bed, into the gorge from which it issued, and across the bleak divide
where it took its rise.
On the opposite slope of the watershed they came down into a level
country where were great stretches of forest and many streams, and
through these great stretches they ran steadily, hour after hour, the sun
rising higher and the day growing warmer. Buck was wildly glad. He
knew he was at last answering the call, running by the side of his wood
brother toward the place from where the call surely came. Old
memories were coming upon him fast, and he was stirring to them as of
old he stirred to the realities of which they were the shadows. He had
done this thing before, somewhere in that other and dimly remembered
world, and he was doing it again, now, running free in the open, the
unpacked earth underfoot, the wide sky overhead.
They stopped by a running stream to drink, and, stopping, Buck
remembered John Thornton. He sat down. The wolf started on
toward the place from where the call surely came, then returned to him,
sniffing noses and making actions as though to encourage him. But
Buck turned about and started slowly on the back track. For the better
part of an hour the wild brother ran by his side, whining softly. Then
he sat down, pointed his nose upward, and howled. It was a mournful
howl, and as Buck held steadily on his way he heard it grow faint and
fainter until it was lost in the distance.
John Thornton was eating dinner when Buck dashed into camp and
sprang upon him in a frenzy of affection, overturning him, scrambling
upon him, licking his face, biting his hand--'playing the general tom-
fool,' as John Thornton characterized it, the while he shook Buck back
and forth and cursed him lovingly.
For two days and nights Buck never left camp, never let Thornton
out of his sight. He followed him about at his work, watched him
while he ate, saw him into his blankets at night and out of them in the
morning. But after two days the call in the forest began to sound more
imperiously than ever. Buck's restlessness came back on him, and he
was haunted by recollections of the wild brother, and of the smiling land
beyond the divide and the run side by side through the wide forest
stretches. Once again he took to wandering in the woods, but the wild
brother came no more; and though he listened through long vigils, the
mournful howl was never raised.
He began to sleep out at night, staying away from camp for days at a
time; and once he crossed the divide at the head of the creek and went
down into the land of timber and streams. There he wandered for a
week, seeking vainly for fresh sign of the wild brother, killing his meat
as he travelled and travelling with the long, easy lope that seems never
to tire. He fished for salmon in a broad stream that emptied somewhere
into the sea, and by this stream he killed a large black bear, blinded by
the mosquitoes while likewise fishing, and raging through the forest
helpless and terrible. Even so, it was a hard fight, and it aroused the
last latent remnants of Buck's ferocity. And two days later, when he
returned to his kill and found a dozen wolverenes quarrelling over the
spoil, he scattered them like chaff; and those that fled left two behind
who would quarrel no more.
The blood-longing became stronger than ever before. He was a
killer, a thing that preyed, living on the things that lived, unaided, alone,
by virtue of his own strength and prowess, surviving triumphantly in a
hostile environment where only the strong survived. Because of all this
he became possessed of a great pride in himself, which communicated
itself like a contagion to his physical being. It advertised itself in all
his movements, was apparent in the play of every muscle, spoke plainly
as speech in the way he carried himself, and made his glorious furry coat
if anything more glorious. But for the stray brown on his muzzle and
above his eyes, and for the splash of white hair that ran midmost down
his chest, he might well have been mistaken for a gigantic wolf, larger
than the largest of the breed. From his St. Bernard father he had
inherited size and weight, but it was his shepherd mother who had given
shape to that size and weight. His muzzle was the long wolf muzzle,
save that was larger than the muzzle of any wolf; and his head,
somewhat broader, was the wolf head on a massive scale. His cunning
was wolf cunning, and wild cunning; his intelligence, shepherd
intelligence and St. Bernard intelligence; and all this, plus an
experience gained in the fiercest of schools, made him as formidable a
creature as any that intelligence roamed the wild. A carnivorous animal
living on a straight meat diet, he was in full flower, at the high tide of his
life, overspilling with vigor and virility. When Thornton passed a
caressing hand along his back, a snapping and crackling followed the
hand, each hair discharing its pent magnetism at the contact. Every
part, brain and body, nerve tissue and fibre, was keyed to the most
exquisite pitch; and between all the parts there was a perfect equilibrium
or adjustment. To sights and sounds and events which required
action, he responded with lightning-like rapidity. Quickly as a husky
dog could leap to defend from attack or to attack, he could leap twice as
quickly. He saw the movement, or heard sound, and responded in less
time than another dog required to compass the mere seeing or hearing.
He perceived and determined and responded in the same instant. In
point of fact the three actions of perceiving, determining, and responding
were sequential; but so infinitesimal were the intervals of time between
them that they appeared simultaneous. His muscles were surcharged
with vitality, and snapped into play sharply, like steel springs. Life
streamed through him in splendid flood, glad and rampant, until it
seemed that it would burst him asunder in sheer ecstasy and pour forth
generously over the world.
'Never was there such a dog,' said John Thornton one day, as the
partners watched Buck marching out of camp.
'When he was made, the mould was broke,' said Pete.
'Py jingo! I t'ink so mineself,' Hans affirmed.
They saw him marching out of camp, but they did not see the instant
and terrible transformation which took place as soon as he was within
the secrecy of the forest. He no longer marched. At once he became a
thing of the wild, stealing along softly, cat- footed, a passing shadow that
appeared and disappeared among the shadows. He knew how to take
advantage of every cover, to crawl on his belly like a snake, and like a
snake to leap and strike. He could take a ptarmigan from its nest, kill a
rabbit as it slept, and snap in mid air the little chipmunks fleeing a
second too late for the trees. Fish, in open pools, were not too quick
for him; nor were beaver, mending their dams, too wary. He killed to
eat, not from wantonness; but he preferred to eat what he killed himself.
So a lurking humor ran through his deeds, and it was his delight to steal
upon the squirrels, and, when he all but had them, to let them go,
chattering in mortal fear to the treetops.
As the fall of the year came on, the moose appeared in greater
abundance, moving slowly down to meet the winter in the lower and less
rigorous valleys. Buck had already dragged down a stray part-grown
calf; but he wished strongly for larger and more formidable quarry, and
he came upon it one day on the divide at the head of the creek. A band
of twenty moose had crossed over from the land of streams and timber,
and chief among them was a great bull. He was in a savage temper,
and, standing over six feet from the ground, was as formidable an
antagonist as even Buck could desire. Back and forth the bull tossed his
great palmated antlers, branching to fourteen points and embracing
seven feet within the tips. His small eyes burned with a vicious and
bitter light, while he roared with fury at sight of Buck.
From the bull's side, just forward of the flank, protruded a feathered
arrow-end, which accounted for his savageness. Guided by that instinct
which came from the old hunting days of the primordial world, Buck
proceeded to cut the bull out from the herd. It was no slight task. He
would bark and dance about in front of the bull, just out of reach of the
great antlers and of the terrible splay hoofs which could have stamped
his life out with a single blow. Unable to turn his back on the fanged
danger and go on, the bull would be driven into paroxysms of rage. At
such moments he charged Buck, who retreated craftily, luring him on by
a simulated inability to escape. But when he was thus separated from
his fellows, two or three of the younger bulls would charge back upon
Buck and enable the wounded bull to rejoin the herd.
There is a patience of the wild--dogged, tireless, persistent as life
itself--that holds motionless for endless hours the spider in its web, the
snake in its coils, the panther in its ambuscade; this patience belongs
peculiarly to life when it hunts its living food; and it belonged to Buck
as he clung to the flank of the herd, retarding its march, irritating the
young bulls, worrying the cows with their half-grown calves, and
driving the wounded bull mad with helpless rage. For half a day this
continued. Buck multiplied himself, attacking from all sides,
enveloping the herd in a whirlwind of menace, cutting out his victim as
fast as it could rejoin its mates, wearing out the patience of creatures
preyed upon, which is a lesser patience than that of creatures preying.
As the day wore along and the sun dropped to its bed in the
northwest (the darkness had come back and the fall nights were six
hours long), the young bulls retraced their steps more and more
reluctantly to the aid of their beset leader. The down-coming winter was
harrying them on to the lower levels, and it seemed they could never
shake off this tireless creature that held them back. Besides, it was not
the life of the herd, or of the young bulls, that was threatened. The life
of only one member was demanded, which was a remoter interest than
their lives, and in the end they were content to pay the toll.
As twilight fell the old bull stood with lowered head, watching his
mates--the cows he had known, the calves he had fathered, the bulls he
had mastered--as they shambled on at a rapid pace through the fading
light. He could not follow, for before his nose leaped the merciless
fanged terror that would not let him go. Three hundredweight more
than half a ton he weighed; he had lived a long, strong life, full of fight
and struggle, and at the end he faced death at the teeth of a creature
whose head did not reach beyond his great knuckled knees.
From then on, night and day, Buck never left his prey, never gave it a
moment's rest, never permitted it to browse the leaves of trees or the
shoots of young birch and willow. Nor did he give the wounded bull
opportunity to slake his burning thirst in the slender trickling streams
they crossed. Often, in desperation, he burst into long stretches of flight.
At such times Buck did not attempt to stay him, but loped easily at his
heels, satisfied with the way the game was played, lying down when the
moose stood still, attacking him fiercely when he strove to eat or drink.
The great head drooped more and more under its tree of horns, and
the shambling trot grew weak and weaker. He took to standing for long
periods, with nose to the ground and dejected ears dropped limply; and
Buck found more time in which to get water for himself and in which to
rest. At such moments, panting with red lolling tongue and with eyes
fixed upon the big bull, it appeared to Buck that a change was coming
over the face of things. He could feel a new stir in the land. As the
moose were coming into the land, other kinds of life were coming in.
Forest and stream and air seemed palpitant with their presence. The
news of it was borne in upon him, not by sight, or sound, or smell, but
by some other and subtler sense. He heard nothing, saw nothing, yet
knew that the land was somehow different; that through it strange things
were afoot and ranging; and he resolved to investigate after he had
finished the business in hand.
At last, at the end of the fourth day, he pulled the great moose down.
For a day and a night he remained by the kill, eating and sleeping, turn
and turn about. Then, rested, refreshed and strong, he turned his face
toward camp and John Thornton. He broke into the long easy lope, and
went on, hour after hour, never at loss for the tangled way, heading
straight home through strange country with a certitude of direction that
put man and his magnetic needle to shame.
As he held on he became more and more conscious of the new stir in
the land. There was life abroad in it different from the life which had
been there throughout the summer. No longer was this fact borne in
upon him in some subtle, mysterious way. The birds talked of it, the
squirrels chattered about it, the very breeze whispered of it. Several
times he stopped and drew in the fresh morning air in great sniffs,
reading a message which made him leap on with greater speed. He was
oppressed with a sense of calamity happening, if it were not calamity
already happened; and as he crossed the last watershed and dropped
down into the valley toward camp, he proceeded with greater caution.
Three miles away he came upon a fresh trail that sent his neck hair
rippling and bristling, It led straight toward camp and John Thornton.
Buck hurried on, swiftly and stealthily, every nerve straining and tense,
alert to the multitudinous details which told a story--all but the end.
His nose gave him a varying description of the passage of the life on the
heels of which he was travelling. He remarked die pregnant silence of
the forest. The bird life had flitted. The squirrels were in hiding.
One only he saw,--a sleek gray fellow, flattened against a gray dead limb
so that he seemed a part of it, a woody excrescence upon the wood itself.
As Buck slid along with the obscureness of a gliding shadow, his
nose was jerked suddenly to the side as though a positive force had
gripped and pulled it. He followed the new scent into a thicket and
found Nig. He was lying on his side, dead where he had dragged
himself, an arrow protruding, head and feathers, from either side of his body.
A hundred yards farther on, Buck came upon one of the sled-dogs
Thornton had bought in Dawson. This dog was thrashing about in a
death-struggle, directly on the trail, and Buck passed around him without
stopping. From the camp came the faint sound of many voices, rising
and falling in a sing-song chant. Bellying forward to the edge of the
clearing, he found Hans, lying on his face, feathered with arrows like a
porcupine. At the same instant Buck peered out where the spruce-
bough lodge had been and saw what made his hair leap straight up on his
neck and shoulders. A gust of overpowering rage swept over him. He
did not know that he growled, but he growled aloud with a terrible
ferocity. For the last time in his life he allowed passion to usurp
cunning and reason, and it was because of his great love for John
Thornton that he lost his head. The Yeehats were dancing about the
wreckage of the spruce-bough lodge when they heard a fearful roaring
and saw rushing upon them an animal the like of which they had never
seen before. It was Buck, a live hurricane of fury, hurling himself upon
them in a frenzy to destroy. He sprang at the foremost man (it was the
chief of the Yeehats), ripping the throat wide open till the rent jugular
spouted a fountain of blood. He did not pause to worry the victim, but
ripped in passing, with the next bound tearing wide the throat of a
second man. There was no withstanding him. He plunged about in
their very midst, tearing, rending, destroying, in constant and terrific
motion which defied the arrows they discharged at him. In fact, so
inconceivably rapid were his movements, and so closely were the
Indians tangled together, that they shot one another with the arrows; and
one young hunter, hurling a spear at Buck in mid air, drove it through
the chest of another hunter with such force that the point broke through
the skin of the back and stood out beyond. Then a panic seized the
Yeehats, and they fled in terror to the woods, proclaiming as they fled
the advent of the Evil Spirit.
And truly Buck was the Fiend incarnate, raging at their heels and
dragging them down like deer as they raced through the trees. It was a
fateful day for the Yeehats. They scattered far and wide over the
The Call of the Wild
81
country, and it was not till a week later that the last of the survivors
gathered together in a lower valley and counted their losses. As for
Buck, wearying of the pursuit, he returned to the desolated camp. He
found Pete where he had been killed in his blankets in the first moment
of surprise. Thornton's desperate struggle was fresh-written on the
earth, and Buck scented every detail of it down to the edge of a deep
pool. By the edge, head and fore feet in the water, lay Skeet, faithful to
the last. The pool itself, muddy and discolored from the sluice boxes,
effectually hid what it contained, and it contained John Thornton; for
Buck followed his trace into the water, from which no trace led away.
All day Buck brooded by the pool or roamed restlessly about the
camp. Death, as a cessation of movement, as a passing out and away
from the lives of the living, he knew, and he knew John Thornton was
dead. It left a great void in him, somewhat akin to hunger, but a void
which ached and ached, and which food could not fill, At times, when he
paused to contemplate the carcasses of the Yeehats, he forgot the pain of
it; and at such times he was aware of a great pride in himself,--a pride
greater than any he had yet experienced. He had killed man, the
noblest game of all, and he had killed in the face of the law of club and
fang. He sniffed the bodies curiously. They had died so easily. It
was harder to kill a husky dog than them. They were no match at all,
were it not for their arrows and spears and clubs. Thenceforward he
would be unafraid of them except when they bore in their hands their
arrows, spears, and clubs.
Night came on, and a full moon rose high over the trees into the sky,
lighting the land till it lay bathed in ghostly day. And with the coming of
the night, brooding and mourning by the pool, Buck became alive to a
stirring of the new life in the forest other than that which the Yeehats had
made, He stood up, listening and scenting. From far away drifted a
faint, sharp yelp, followed by a chorus of similar sharp yelps. As the
moments passed the yelps grew closer and louder. Again Buck knew
them as things heard in that other world which persisted in his memory.
He walked to the centre of the open space and listened. It was the call,
the many- noted call, sounding more luringly and compellingly than ever
before. And as never before, he was ready to obey. John Thornton
was dead. The last tie was broken. Man and the claims of man no longer bound him.
Hunting their living meat, as the Yeehats were hunting it, on the
flanks of the migrating moose, the wolf pack had at last crossed over
from the land of streams and timber and invaded Buck's valley. Into
the clearing where the moonlight streamed, they poured in a silvery
flood; and in the centre of the clearing stood Buck, motionless as a
statue, waiting their coming. They were awed, so still and large he
stood, and a moment's pause fell, till the boldest one leaped straight for
him. Like a flash Buck struck, breaking the neck. Then he stood,
without movement, as before, the stricken wolf rolling in agony behind
him. Three others tried it in sharp succession; and one after the other
they drew back, streaming blood from slashed throats or shoulders.
This was sufficient to fling the whole pack forward, pell-mell,
crowded together, blocked and confused by its eagerness to pull down
the prey. Buck's marvellous quickness and agility stood him in good
stead. Pivoting on his hind legs, and snapping and gashing, he was
everywhere at once, presenting a front which was apparently unbroken
so swiftly did he whirl and guard from side to side. But to prevent
them from getting behind him, he was forced back, down past the pool
and into the creek bed, till he brought up against a high gravel bank.
He worked along to a right angle in the bank which the men had made in
the course of mining, and in this angle he came to bay, protected on
three sides and with nothing to do but face the front.
And so well did he face it, that at the end of half an hour the wolves
drew back discomfited. The tongues of all were out and lolling, the
white fangs showing cruelly white in the moonlight. Some were lying
down with heads raised and ears pricked forward; others stood on their
feet, watching him; and still others were lapping water from the pool.
One wolf, long and lean and gray, advanced cautiously, in a friendly
manner, and Buck recognized the wild brother with whom he had run for
a night and a day. He was whining softly, and, as Buck whined, they
touched noses.
Then an old wolf, gaunt and battle-scarred, came forward. Buck
writhed his lips into the preliminary of a snarl, but sniffed noses with
him, Whereupon the old wolf sat down, pointed nose at the moon, and
broke out the long wolf howl. The others sat down and howled. And
now the call came to Buck in unmistakable accents. He, too, sat down
and howled. This over, he came out of his angle and the pack crowded
around him, sniffing in half- friendly, half-savage manner. The leaders
lifted the yelp of the pack and sprang away into the woods. The wolves
swung in behind, yelping in chorus. And Buck ran with them, side by
side with the wild brother, yelping as he ran.
* * *
And here may well end the story of Buck. The years were not many
when the Yeehats noted a change in the breed of timber wolves; for
some were seen with splashes of brown on head and muzzle, and with a
rift of white centring down the chest. But more remarkable than this,
the Yeehats tell of a Ghost Dog that runs at the head of the pack. They
are afraid of this Ghost Dog, for it has cunning greater than they, stealing
from their camps in fierce winters, robbing their traps, slaying their dogs,
and defying their bravest hunters.
Nay, the tale grows worse. Hunters there are who fail to return to
the camp, and hunters there have been whom their tribesmen found with
throats slashed cruelly open and with wolf prints about them in the snow
greater than the prints of any wolf. Each fall, when the Yeehats follow
the movement of the moose, there is a certain valley which they never
enter. And women there are who become sad when the word goes over
the fire of how the Evil Spirit came to select that valley for an abiding- place.
In the summers there is one visitor, however, to that valley, of which
the Yeehats do not know. It is a great, gloriously coated wolf, like, and
yet unlike, all other wolves. He crosses alone from the smiling timber
land and comes down into an open space among the trees. Here a
yellow stream flows from rotted moose- hide sacks and sinks into the
ground, with long grasses growing through it and vegetable mould
overrunning it and hiding its yellow from the sun; and here he muses for
a time, howling once, long and mournfully, ere he departs.
But he is not always alone. When the long winter nights come on
and the wolves follow their meat into the lower valleys, he may be seen
running at the head of the pack through the pale moonlight or
glimmering borealis, leaping gigantic above his fellows, his great throat
a-bellow as he sings a song of the younger world, which is the song of the pack.

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