Chapter 1
Into the Primitive
“Old longings nomadic leap,
Chafing at custom’s chain;
Again from its brumal sleep
Wakens the ferine strain.”
Buck did not read the newspapers, or he would
have known that trouble was brewing, not alone
for himself, but for every tide-water dog,
strong of muscle and with warm, long hair,
from Puget Sound to San Diego.
Because men, groping in the Arctic darkness,
had found a yellow metal, and because steamship
and transportation companies were booming
the find, thousands of men were rushing into
the Northland.
These men wanted dogs, and the dogs they wanted
were heavy dogs, with strong muscles by which
to toil, and furry coats to protect them from
the frost.
Buck lived at a big house in the sun-kissed
Santa Clara Valley.
Judge Miller’s place, it was called.
It stood back from the road, half hidden among
the trees, through which glimpses could be
caught of the wide cool veranda that ran around
its four sides.
The house was approached by gravelled driveways
which wound about through wide-spreading lawns
and under the interlacing boughs of tall poplars.
At the rear things were on even a more spacious
scale than at the front.
There were great stables, where a dozen grooms
and boys held forth, rows of vine-clad servants’
cottages, an endless and orderly array of
outhouses, long grape arbors, green pastures,
orchards, and berry patches.
Then there was the pumping plant for the artesian
well, and the big cement tank where Judge
Miller’s boys took their morning plunge
and kept cool in the hot afternoon.
And over this great demesne Buck ruled.
Here he was born, and here he had lived the
four years of his life.
It was true, there were other dogs, There
could not but be other dogs on so vast a place,
but they did not count.
They came and went, resided in the populous
kennels, or lived obscurely in the recesses
of the house after the fashion of Toots, the
Japanese pug, or Ysabel, the Mexican hairless,—strange
creatures that rarely put nose out of doors
or set foot to ground.
On the other hand, there were the fox terriers,
a score of them at least, who yelped fearful
promises at Toots and Ysabel looking out of
the windows at them and protected by a legion
of housemaids armed with brooms and mops.
But Buck was neither house-dog nor kennel-dog.
The whole realm was his.
He plunged into the swimming tank or went
hunting with the Judge’s sons; he escorted
Mollie and Alice, the Judge’s daughters,
on long twilight or early morning rambles;
on wintry nights he lay at the Judge’s feet
before the roaring library fire; he carried
the Judge’s grandsons on his back, or rolled
them in the grass, and guarded their footsteps
through wild adventures down to the fountain
in the stable yard, and even beyond, where
the paddocks were, and the berry patches.
Among the terriers he stalked imperiously,
and Toots and Ysabel he utterly ignored, for
he was king,—king over all creeping, crawling,
flying things of Judge Miller’s place, humans
included.
His father, Elmo, a huge St. Bernard, had
been the Judge’s inseparable companion,
and Buck bid fair to follow in the way of
his father.
He was not so large,—he weighed only one
hundred and forty pounds,—for his mother,
Shep, had been a Scotch shepherd dog.
Nevertheless, one hundred and forty pounds,
to which was added the dignity that comes
of good living and universal respect, enabled
him to carry himself in right royal fashion.
During the four years since his puppyhood
he had lived the life of a sated aristocrat;
he had a fine pride in himself, was even a
trifle egotistical, as country gentlemen sometimes
become because of their insular situation.
But he had saved himself by not becoming a
mere pampered house-dog.
Hunting and kindred outdoor delights had kept
down the fat and hardened his muscles; and
to him, as to the cold-tubbing races, the
love of water had been a tonic and a health
preserver.
And this was the manner of dog Buck was in
the fall of 1897, when the Klondike strike
dragged men from all the world into the frozen
North.
But Buck did not read the newspapers, and
he did not know that Manuel, one of the gardener’s
helpers, was an undesirable acquaintance.
Manuel had one besetting sin.
He loved to play Chinese lottery.
Also, in his gambling, he had one besetting
weakness—faith in a system; and this made
his damnation certain.
For to play a system requires money, while
the wages of a gardener’s helper do not
lap over the needs of a wife and numerous
progeny.
The Judge was at a meeting of the Raisin Growers’
Association, and the boys were busy organising
an athletic club, on the memorable night of
Manuel’s treachery.
No one saw him and Buck go off through the
orchard on what Buck imagined was merely a
stroll.
And with the exception of a solitary man,
no one saw them arrive at the little flag
station known as College Park.
This man talked with Manuel, and money chinked
between them.
“You might wrap up the goods before you
deliver ’m,” the stranger said gruffly,
and Manuel doubled a piece of stout rope around
Buck’s neck under the collar.
“Twist it, an’ you’ll choke ’m plentee,”
said Manuel, and the stranger grunted a ready
affirmative.
Buck had accepted the rope with quiet dignity.
To be sure, it was an unwonted performance:
but he had learned to trust in men he knew,
and to give them credit for a wisdom that
outreached his own.
But when the ends of the rope were placed
in the stranger’s hands, he growled menacingly.
He had merely intimated his displeasure, in
his pride believing that to intimate was to
command.
But to his surprise the rope tightened around
his neck, shutting off his breath.
In quick rage he sprang at the man, who met
him halfway, grappled him close by the throat,
and with a deft twist threw him over on his
back.
Then the rope tightened mercilessly, while
Buck struggled in a fury, his tongue lolling
out of his mouth and his great chest panting
futilely.
Never in all his life had he been so vilely
treated, and never in all his life had he
been so angry.
But his strength ebbed, his eyes glazed, and
he knew nothing when the train was flagged
and the two men threw him into the baggage
car.
The next he knew, he was dimly aware that
his tongue was hurting and that he was being
jolted along in some kind of a conveyance.
The hoarse shriek of a locomotive whistling
a crossing told him where he was.
He had travelled too often with the Judge
not to know the sensation of riding in a baggage
car.
He opened his eyes, and into them came the
unbridled anger of a kidnapped king.
The man sprang for his throat, but Buck was
too quick for him.
His jaws closed on the hand, nor did they
relax till his senses were choked out of him
once more.
“Yep, has fits,” the man said, hiding
his mangled hand from the baggageman, who
had been attracted by the sounds of struggle.
“I’m takin’ ’m up for the boss to
’Frisco.
A crack dog-doctor there thinks that he can
cure ’m.”
Concerning that night’s ride, the man spoke
most eloquently for himself, in a little shed
back of a saloon on the San Francisco water
front.
“All I get is fifty for it,” he grumbled;
“an’ I wouldn’t do it over for a thousand,
cold cash.”
His hand was wrapped in a bloody handkerchief,
and the right trouser leg was ripped from
knee to ankle.
“How much did the other mug get?” the
saloon-keeper demanded.
“A hundred,” was the reply.
“Wouldn’t take a sou less, so help me.”
“That makes a hundred and fifty,” the
saloon-keeper calculated; “and he’s worth
it, or I’m a squarehead.”
The kidnapper undid the bloody wrappings and
looked at his lacerated hand.
“If I don’t get the hydrophoby—”
“It’ll be because you was born to hang,”
laughed the saloon-keeper.
“Here, lend me a hand before you pull your
freight,” he added.
Dazed, suffering intolerable pain from throat
and tongue, with the life half throttled out
of him, Buck attempted to face his tormentors.
But he was thrown down and choked repeatedly,
till they succeeded in filing the heavy brass
collar from off his neck.
Then the rope was removed, and he was flung
into a cage like crate.
There he lay for the remainder of the weary
night, nursing his wrath and wounded pride.
He could not understand what it all meant.
What did they want with him, these strange
men?
Why were they keeping him pent up in this
narrow crate?
He did not know why, but he felt oppressed
by the vague sense of impending calamity.
Several times during the night he sprang to
his feet when the shed door rattled open,
expecting to see the Judge, or the boys at
least.
But each time it was the bulging face of the
saloon-keeper that peered in at him by the
sickly light of a tallow candle.
And each time the joyful bark that trembled
in Buck’s throat was twisted into a savage
growl.
But the saloon-keeper let him alone, and in
the morning four men entered and picked up
the crate.
More tormentors, Buck decided, for they were
evil-looking creatures, ragged and unkempt;
and he stormed and raged at them through the
bars.
They only laughed and poked sticks at him,
which he promptly assailed with his teeth
till he realised that that was what they wanted.
Whereupon he lay down sullenly and allowed
the crate to be lifted into a wagon.
Then he, and the crate in which he was imprisoned,
began a passage through many hands.
Clerks in the express office took charge of
him; he was carted about in another wagon;
a truck carried him, with an assortment of
boxes and parcels, upon a ferry steamer; he
was trucked off the steamer into a great railway
depot, and finally he was deposited in an
express car.
For two days and nights this express car was
dragged along at the tail of shrieking locomotives;
and for two days and nights Buck neither ate
nor drank.
In his anger he had met the first advances
of the express messengers with growls, and
they had retaliated by teasing him.
When he flung himself against the bars, quivering
and frothing, they laughed at him and taunted
him.
They growled and barked like detestable dogs,
mewed, and flapped their arms and crowed.
It was all very silly, he knew; but therefore
the more outrage to his dignity, and his anger
waxed and waxed.
He did not mind the hunger so much, but the
lack of water caused him severe suffering
and fanned his wrath to fever-pitch.
For that matter, high-strung and finely sensitive,
the ill treatment had flung him into a fever,
which was fed by the inflammation of his parched
and swollen throat and tongue.
He was glad for one thing: the rope was off
his neck.
That had given them an unfair advantage; but
now that it was off, he would show them.
They would never get another rope around his
neck.
Upon that he was resolved.
For two days and nights he neither ate nor
drank, and during those two days and nights
of torment, he accumulated a fund of wrath
that boded ill for whoever first fell foul
of him.
His eyes turned blood-shot, and he was metamorphosed
into a raging fiend.
So changed was he that the Judge himself would
not have recognised him; and the express messengers
breathed with relief when they bundled him
off the train at Seattle.
Four men gingerly carried the crate from the
wagon into a small, high-walled back yard.
A stout man, with a red sweater that sagged
generously at the neck, came out and signed
the book for the driver.
That was the man, Buck divined, the next tormentor,
and he hurled himself savagely against the
bars.
The man smiled grimly, and brought a hatchet
and a club.
“You ain’t going to take him out now?”
the driver asked.
“Sure,” the man replied, driving the hatchet
into the crate for a pry.
There was an instantaneous scattering of the
four men who had carried it in, and from safe
perches on top the wall they prepared to watch
the performance.
Buck rushed at the splintering wood, sinking
his teeth into it, surging and wrestling with
it.
Wherever the hatchet fell on the outside,
he was there on the inside, snarling and growling,
as furiously anxious to get out as the man
in the red sweater was calmly intent on getting
him out.
“Now, you red-eyed devil,” he said, when
he had made an opening sufficient for the
passage of Buck’s body.
At the same time he dropped the hatchet and
shifted the club to his right hand.
And Buck was truly a red-eyed devil, as he
drew himself together for the spring, hair
bristling, mouth foaming, a mad glitter in
his blood-shot eyes.
Straight at the man he launched his one hundred
and forty pounds of fury, surcharged with
the pent passion of two days and nights.
In mid air, just as his jaws were about to
close on the man, he received a shock that
checked his body and brought his teeth together
with an agonising clip.
He whirled over, fetching the ground on his
back and side.
He had never been struck by a club in his
life, and did not understand.
With a snarl that was part bark and more scream
he was again on his feet and launched into
the air.
And again the shock came and he was brought
crushingly to the ground.
This time he was aware that it was the club,
but his madness knew no caution.
A dozen times he charged, and as often the
club broke the charge and smashed him down.
After a particularly fierce blow, he crawled
to his feet, too dazed to rush.
He staggered limply about, the blood flowing
from nose and mouth and ears, his beautiful
coat sprayed and flecked with bloody slaver.
Then the man advanced and deliberately dealt
him a frightful blow on the nose.
All the pain he had endured was as nothing
compared with the exquisite agony of this.
With a roar that was almost lionlike in its
ferocity, he again hurled himself at the man.
But the man, shifting the club from right
to left, coolly caught him by the under jaw,
at the same time wrenching downward and backward.
Buck described a complete circle in the air,
and half of another, then crashed to the ground
on his head and chest.
For the last time he rushed.
The man struck the shrewd blow he had purposely
withheld for so long, and Buck crumpled up
and went down, knocked utterly senseless.
“He’s no slouch at dog-breakin’, that’s
wot I say,” one of the men on the wall cried
enthusiastically.
“Druther break cayuses any day, and twice
on Sundays,” was the reply of the driver,
as he climbed on the wagon and started the
horses.
Buck’s senses came back to him, but not
his strength.
He lay where he had fallen, and from there
he watched the man in the red sweater.
“‘Answers to the name of Buck,’” the
man soliloquised, quoting from the saloon-keeper’s
letter which had announced the consignment
of the crate and contents.
“Well, Buck, my boy,” he went on in a
genial voice, “we’ve had our little ruction,
and the best thing we can do is to let it
go at that.
You’ve learned your place, and I know mine.
Be a good dog and all ’ll go well and the
goose hang high.
Be a bad dog, and I’ll whale the stuffin’
outa you.
Understand?”
As he spoke he fearlessly patted the head
he had so mercilessly pounded, and though
Buck’s hair involuntarily bristled at touch
of the hand, he endured it without protest.
When the man brought him water he drank eagerly,
and later bolted a generous meal of raw meat,
chunk by chunk, from the man’s hand.
He was beaten (he knew that); but he was not
broken.
He saw, once for all, that he stood no chance
against a man with a club.
He had learned the lesson, and in all his
after life he never forgot it.
That club was a revelation.
It was his introduction to the reign of primitive
law, and he met the introduction halfway.
The facts of life took on a fiercer aspect;
and while he faced that aspect uncowed, he
faced it with all the latent cunning of his
nature aroused.
As the days went by, other dogs came, in crates
and at the ends of ropes, some docilely, and
some raging and roaring as he had come; and,
one and all, he watched them pass under the
dominion of the man in the red sweater.
Again and again, as he looked at each brutal
performance, the lesson was driven home to
Buck: a man with a club was a lawgiver, a
master to be obeyed, though not necessarily
conciliated.
Of this last Buck was never guilty, though
he did see beaten dogs that fawned upon the
man, and wagged their tails, and licked his
hand.
Also he saw one dog, that would neither conciliate
nor obey, finally killed in the struggle for
mastery.
Now and again men came, strangers, who talked
excitedly, wheedlingly, and in all kinds of
fashions to the man in the red sweater.
And at such times that money passed between
them the strangers took one or more of the
dogs away with them.
Buck wondered where they went, for they never
came back; but the fear of the future was
strong upon him, and he was glad each time
when he was not selected.
Yet his time came, in the end, in the form
of a little weazened man who spat broken English
and many strange and uncouth exclamations
which Buck could not understand.
“Sacredam!” he cried, when his eyes lit
upon Buck.
“Dat one dam bully dog!
Eh?
How moch?”
“Three hundred, and a present at that,”
was the prompt reply of the man in the red
sweater.
“And seem’ it’s government money, you
ain’t got no kick coming, eh, Perrault?”
Perrault grinned.
Considering that the price of dogs had been
boomed skyward by the unwonted demand, it
was not an unfair sum for so fine an animal.
The Canadian Government would be no loser,
nor would its despatches travel the slower.
Perrault knew dogs, and when he looked at
Buck he knew that he was one in a thousand—“One
in ten t’ousand,” he commented mentally.
Buck saw money pass between them, and was
not surprised when Curly, a good-natured Newfoundland,
and he were led away by the little weazened
man.
That was the last he saw of the man in the
red sweater, and as Curly and he looked at
receding Seattle from the deck of the Narwhal,
it was the last he saw of the warm Southland.
Curly and he were taken below by Perrault
and turned over to a black-faced giant called
François.
Perrault was a French-Canadian, and swarthy;
but François was a French-Canadian half-breed,
and twice as swarthy.
They were a new kind of men to Buck (of which
he was destined to see many more), and while
he developed no affection for them, he none
the less grew honestly to respect them.
He speedily learned that Perrault and François
were fair men, calm and impartial in administering
justice, and too wise in the way of dogs to
be fooled by dogs.
In the ’tween-decks of the Narwhal, Buck
and Curly joined two other dogs.
One of them was a big, snow-white fellow from
Spitzbergen who had been brought away by a
whaling captain, and who had later accompanied
a Geological Survey into the Barrens.
He was friendly, in a treacherous sort of
way, smiling into one’s face the while he
meditated some underhand trick, as, for instance,
when he stole from Buck’s food at the first
meal.
As Buck sprang to punish him, the lash of
François’s whip sang through the air, reaching
the culprit first; and nothing remained to
Buck but to recover the bone.
That was fair of François, he decided, and
the half-breed began his rise in Buck’s
estimation.
The other dog made no advances, nor received
any; also, he did not attempt to steal from
the newcomers.
He was a gloomy, morose fellow, and he showed
Curly plainly that all he desired was to be
left alone, and further, that there would
be trouble if he were not left alone.
“Dave” he was called, and he ate and slept,
or yawned between times, and took interest
in nothing, not even when the Narwhal crossed
Queen Charlotte Sound and rolled and pitched
and bucked like a thing possessed.
When Buck and Curly grew excited, half wild
with fear, he raised his head as though annoyed,
favoured them with an incurious glance, yawned,
and went to sleep again.
Day and night the ship throbbed to the tireless
pulse of the propeller, and though one day
was very like another, it was apparent to
Buck that the weather was steadily growing
colder.
At last, one morning, the propeller was quiet,
and the Narwhal was pervaded with an atmosphere
of excitement.
He felt it, as did the other dogs, and knew
that a change was at hand.
François leashed them and brought them on
deck.
At the first step upon the cold surface, Buck’s
feet sank into a white mushy something very
like mud.
He sprang back with a snort.
More of this white stuff was falling through
the air.
He shook himself, but more of it fell upon
him.
He sniffed it curiously, then licked some
up on his tongue.
It bit like fire, and the next instant was
gone.
This puzzled him.
He tried it again, with the same result.
The onlookers laughed uproariously, and he
felt ashamed, he knew not why, for it was
his first snow.
End of Chapter 1
Chapter 2
The Law of Club and Fang
Buck’s first day on the Dyea beach was like
a nightmare.
Every hour was filled with shock and surprise.
He had been suddenly jerked from the heart
of civilsation and flung into the heart of
things primordial.
No lazy, sun-kissed life was this, with nothing
to do but loaf and be bored.
Here was neither peace, nor rest, nor a moment’s
safety.
All was confusion and action, and every moment
life and limb were in peril.
There was imperative need to be constantly
alert; for these dogs and men were not town
dogs and men.
They were savages, all of them, who knew no
law but the law of club and fang.
He had never seen dogs fight as these wolfish
creatures fought, and his first experience
taught him an unforgettable lesson.
It is true, it was a vicarious experience,
else he would not have lived to profit by
it.
Curly was the victim.
They were camped near the log store, where
she, in her friendly way, made advances to
a husky dog the size of a full-grown wolf,
though not half so large as she.
There was no warning, only a leap in like
a flash, a metallic clip of teeth, a leap
out equally swift, and Curly’s face was
ripped open from eye to jaw.
It was the wolf manner of fighting, to strike
and leap away; but there was more to it than
this.
Thirty or forty huskies ran to the spot and
surrounded the combatants in an intent and
silent circle.
Buck did not comprehend that silent intentness,
nor the eager way with which they were licking
their chops.
Curly rushed her antagonist, who struck again
and leaped aside.
He met her next rush with his chest, in a
peculiar fashion that tumbled her off her
feet.
She never regained them, This was what the
onlooking huskies had waited for.
They closed in upon her, snarling and yelping,
and she was buried, screaming with agony,
beneath the bristling mass of bodies.
So sudden was it, and so unexpected, that
Buck was taken aback.
He saw Spitz run out his scarlet tongue in
a way he had of laughing; and he saw François,
swinging an axe, spring into the mess of dogs.
Three men with clubs were helping him to scatter
them.
It did not take long.
Two minutes from the time Curly went down,
the last of her assailants were clubbed off.
But she lay there limp and lifeless in the
bloody, trampled snow, almost literally torn
to pieces, the swart half-breed standing over
her and cursing horribly.
The scene often came back to Buck to trouble
him in his sleep.
So that was the way.
No fair play.
Once down, that was the end of you.
Well, he would see to it that he never went
down.
Spitz ran out his tongue and laughed again,
and from that moment Buck hated him with a
bitter and deathless hatred.
Before he had recovered from the shock caused
by the tragic passing of Curly, he received
another shock.
François fastened upon him an arrangement
of straps and buckles.
It was a harness, such as he had seen the
grooms put on the horses at home.
And as he had seen horses work, so he was
set to work, hauling François on a sled to
the forest that fringed the valley, and returning
with a load of firewood.
Though his dignity was sorely hurt by thus
being made a draught animal, he was too wise
to rebel.
He buckled down with a will and did his best,
though it was all new and strange.
François was stern, demanding instant obedience,
and by virtue of his whip receiving instant
obedience; while Dave, who was an experienced
wheeler, nipped Buck’s hind quarters whenever
he was in error.
Spitz was the leader, likewise experienced,
and while he could not always get at Buck,
he growled sharp reproof now and again, or
cunningly threw his weight in the traces to
jerk Buck into the way he should go.
Buck learned easily, and under the combined
tuition of his two mates and François made
remarkable progress.
Ere they returned to camp he knew enough to
stop at “ho,” to go ahead at “mush,”
to swing wide on the bends, and to keep clear
of the wheeler when the loaded sled shot downhill
at their heels.
“T’ree vair’ good dogs,” François
told Perrault.
“Dat Buck, heem pool lak hell.
I tich heem queek as anyt’ing.”
By afternoon, Perrault, who was in a hurry
to be on the trail with his despatches, returned
with two more dogs.
“Billee” and “Joe” he called them,
two brothers, and true huskies both.
Sons of the one mother though they were, they
were as different as day and night.
Billee’s one fault was his excessive good
nature, while Joe was the very opposite, sour
and introspective, with a perpetual snarl
and a malignant eye.
Buck received them in comradely fashion, Dave
ignored them, while Spitz proceeded to thrash
first one and then the other.
Billee wagged his tail appeasingly, turned
to run when he saw that appeasement was of
no avail, and cried (still appeasingly) when
Spitz’s sharp teeth scored his flank.
But no matter how Spitz circled, Joe whirled
around on his heels to face him, mane bristling,
ears laid back, lips writhing and snarling,
jaws clipping together as fast as he could
snap, and eyes diabolically gleaming—the
incarnation of belligerent fear.
So terrible was his appearance that Spitz
was forced to forego disciplining him; but
to cover his own discomfiture he turned upon
the inoffensive and wailing Billee and drove
him to the confines of the camp.
By evening Perrault secured another dog, an
old husky, long and lean and gaunt, with a
battle-scarred face and a single eye which
flashed a warning of prowess that commanded
respect.
He was called Sol-leks, which means the Angry
One.
Like Dave, he asked nothing, gave nothing,
expected nothing; and when he marched slowly
and deliberately into their midst, even Spitz
left him alone.
He had one peculiarity which Buck was unlucky
enough to discover.
He did not like to be approached on his blind
side.
Of this offence Buck was unwittingly guilty,
and the first knowledge he had of his indiscretion
was when Sol-leks whirled upon him and slashed
his shoulder to the bone for three inches
up and down.
Forever after Buck avoided his blind side,
and to the last of their comradeship had no
more trouble.
His only apparent ambition, like Dave’s,
was to be left alone; though, as Buck was
afterward to learn, each of them possessed
one other and even more vital ambition.
That night Buck faced the great problem of
sleeping.
The tent, illumined by a candle, glowed warmly
in the midst of the white plain; and when
he, as a matter of course, entered it, both
Perrault and François bombarded him with
curses and cooking utensils, till he recovered
from his consternation and fled ignominiously
into the outer cold.
A chill wind was blowing that nipped him sharply
and bit with especial venom into his wounded
shoulder.
He lay down on the snow and attempted to sleep,
but the frost soon drove him shivering to
his feet.
Miserable and disconsolate, he wandered about
among the many tents, only to find that one
place was as cold as another.
Here and there savage dogs rushed upon him,
but he bristled his neck-hair and snarled
(for he was learning fast), and they let him
go his way unmolested.
Finally an idea came to him.
He would return and see how his own team-mates
were making out.
To his astonishment, they had disappeared.
Again he wandered about through the great
camp, looking for them, and again he returned.
Were they in the tent?
No, that could not be, else he would not have
been driven out.
Then where could they possibly be?
With drooping tail and shivering body, very
forlorn indeed, he aimlessly circled the tent.
Suddenly the snow gave way beneath his fore
legs and he sank down.
Something wriggled under his feet.
He sprang back, bristling and snarling, fearful
of the unseen and unknown.
But a friendly little yelp reassured him,
and he went back to investigate.
A whiff of warm air ascended to his nostrils,
and there, curled up under the snow in a snug
ball, lay Billee.
He whined placatingly, squirmed and wriggled
to show his good will and intentions, and
even ventured, as a bribe for peace, to lick
Buck’s face with his warm wet tongue.
Another lesson.
So that was the way they did it, eh?
Buck confidently selected a spot, and with
much fuss and waste effort proceeded to dig
a hole for himself.
In a trice the heat from his body filled the
confined space and he was asleep.
The day had been long and arduous, and he
slept soundly and comfortably, though he growled
and barked and wrestled with bad dreams.
Nor did he open his eyes till roused by the
noises of the waking camp.
At first he did not know where he was.
It had snowed during the night and he was
completely buried.
The snow walls pressed him on every side,
and a great surge of fear swept through him—the
fear of the wild thing for the trap.
It was a token that he was harking back through
his own life to the lives of his forebears;
for he was a civilised dog, an unduly civilised
dog, and of his own experience knew no trap
and so could not of himself fear it.
The muscles of his whole body contracted spasmodically
and instinctively, the hair on his neck and
shoulders stood on end, and with a ferocious
snarl he bounded straight up into the blinding
day, the snow flying about him in a flashing
cloud.
Ere he landed on his feet, he saw the white
camp spread out before him and knew where
he was and remembered all that had passed
from the time he went for a stroll with Manuel
to the hole he had dug for himself the night
before.
A shout from François hailed his appearance.
“Wot I say?”
the dog-driver cried to Perrault.
“Dat Buck for sure learn queek as anyt’ing.”
Perrault nodded gravely.
As courier for the Canadian Government, bearing
important despatches, he was anxious to secure
the best dogs, and he was particularly gladdened
by the possession of Buck.
Three more huskies were added to the team
inside an hour, making a total of nine, and
before another quarter of an hour had passed
they were in harness and swinging up the trail
toward the Dyea Cañon.
Buck was glad to be gone, and though the work
was hard he found he did not particularly
despise it.
He was surprised at the eagerness which animated
the whole team and which was communicated
to him; but still more surprising was the
change wrought in Dave and Sol-leks.
They were new dogs, utterly transformed by
the harness.
All passiveness and unconcern had dropped
from them.
They were alert and active, anxious that the
work should go well, and fiercely irritable
with whatever, by delay or confusion, retarded
that work.
The toil of the traces seemed the supreme
expression of their being, and all that they
lived for and the only thing in which they
took delight.
Dave was wheeler or sled dog, pulling in front
of him was Buck, then came Sol-leks; the rest
of the team was strung out ahead, single file,
to the leader, which position was filled by
Spitz.
Buck had been purposely placed between Dave
and Sol-leks so that he might receive instruction.
Apt scholar that he was, they were equally
apt teachers, never allowing him to linger
long in error, and enforcing their teaching
with their sharp teeth.
Dave was fair and very wise.
He never nipped Buck without cause, and he
never failed to nip him when he stood in need
of it.
As François’s whip backed him up, Buck
found it to be cheaper to mend his ways than
to retaliate.
Once, during a brief halt, when he got tangled
in the traces and delayed the start, both
Dave and Sol-leks flew at him and administered
a sound trouncing.
The resulting tangle was even worse, but Buck
took good care to keep the traces clear thereafter;
and ere the day was done, so well had he mastered
his work, his mates about ceased nagging him.
François’s whip snapped less frequently,
and Perrault even honoured Buck by lifting
up his feet and carefully examining them.
It was a hard day’s run, up the Cañon,
through Sheep Camp, past the Scales and the
timber line, across glaciers and snowdrifts
hundreds of feet deep, and over the great
Chilcoot Divide, which stands between the
salt water and the fresh and guards forbiddingly
the sad and lonely North.
They made good time down the chain of lakes
which fills the craters of extinct volcanoes,
and late that night pulled into the huge camp
at the head of Lake Bennett, where thousands
of goldseekers were building boats against
the break-up of the ice in the spring.
Buck made his hole in the snow and slept the
sleep of the exhausted just, but all too early
was routed out in the cold darkness and harnessed
with his mates to the sled.
That day they made forty miles, the trail
being packed; but the next day, and for many
days to follow, they broke their own trail,
worked harder, and made poorer time.
As a rule, Perrault travelled ahead of the
team, packing the snow with webbed shoes to
make it easier for them.
François, guiding the sled at the gee-pole,
sometimes exchanged places with him, but not
often.
Perrault was in a hurry, and he prided himself
on his knowledge of ice, which knowledge was
indispensable, for the fall ice was very thin,
and where there was swift water, there was
no ice at all.
Day after day, for days unending, Buck toiled
in the traces.
Always, they broke camp in the dark, and the
first grey of dawn found them hitting the
trail with fresh miles reeled off behind them.
And always they pitched camp after dark, eating
their bit of fish, and crawling to sleep into
the snow.
Buck was ravenous.
The pound and a half of sun-dried salmon,
which was his ration for each day, seemed
to go nowhere.
He never had enough, and suffered from perpetual
hunger pangs.
Yet the other dogs, because they weighed less
and were born to the life, received a pound
only of the fish and managed to keep in good
condition.
He swiftly lost the fastidiousness which had
characterised his old life.
A dainty eater, he found that his mates, finishing
first, robbed him of his unfinished ration.
There was no defending it.
While he was fighting off two or three, it
was disappearing down the throats of the others.
To remedy this, he ate as fast as they; and,
so greatly did hunger compel him, he was not
above taking what did not belong to him.
He watched and learned.
When he saw Pike, one of the new dogs, a clever
malingerer and thief, slyly steal a slice
of bacon when Perrault’s back was turned,
he duplicated the performance the following
day, getting away with the whole chunk.
A great uproar was raised, but he was unsuspected;
while Dub, an awkward blunderer who was always
getting caught, was punished for Buck’s
misdeed.
This first theft marked Buck as fit to survive
in the hostile Northland environment.
It marked his adaptability, his capacity to
adjust himself to changing conditions, the
lack of which would have meant swift and terrible
death.
It marked, further, the decay or going to
pieces of his moral nature, a vain thing and
a handicap in the ruthless struggle for existence.
It was all well enough in the Southland, under
the law of love and fellowship, to respect
private property and personal feelings; but
in the Northland, under the law of club and
fang, whoso took such things into account
was a fool, and in so far as he observed them
he would fail to prosper.
Not that Buck reasoned it out.
He was fit, that was all, and unconsciously
he accommodated himself to the new mode of
life.
All his days, no matter what the odds, he
had never run from a fight.
But the club of the man in the red sweater
had beaten into him a more fundamental and
primitive code.
Civilised, he could have died for a moral
consideration, say the defence of Judge Miller’s
riding-whip; but the completeness of his decivilisation
was now evidenced by his ability to flee from
the defence of a moral consideration and so
save his hide.
He did not steal for joy of it, but because
of the clamour of his stomach.
He did not rob openly, but stole secretly
and cunningly, out of respect for club and
fang.
In short, the things he did were done because
it was easier to do them than not to do them.
His development (or retrogression) was rapid.
His muscles became hard as iron, and he grew
callous to all ordinary pain.
He achieved an internal as well as external
economy.
He could eat anything, no matter how loathsome
or indigestible; and, once eaten, the juices
of his stomach extracted the last least particle
of nutriment; and his blood carried it to
the farthest reaches of his body, building
it into the toughest and stoutest of tissues.
Sight and scent became remarkably keen, while
his hearing developed such acuteness that
in his sleep he heard the faintest sound and
knew whether it heralded peace or peril.
He learned to bite the ice out with his teeth
when it collected between his toes; and when
he was thirsty and there was a thick scum
of ice over the water hole, he would break
it by rearing and striking it with stiff fore
legs.
His most conspicuous trait was an ability
to scent the wind and forecast it a night
in advance.
No matter how breathless the air when he dug
his nest by tree or bank, the wind that later
blew inevitably found him to leeward, sheltered
and snug.
And not only did he learn by experience, but
instincts long dead became alive again.
The domesticated generations fell from him.
In vague ways he remembered back to the youth
of the breed, to the time the wild dogs ranged
in packs through the primeval forest and killed
their meat as they ran it down.
It was no task for him to learn to fight with
cut and slash and the quick wolf snap.
In this manner had fought forgotten ancestors.
They quickened the old life within him, and
the old tricks which they had stamped into
the heredity of the breed were his tricks.
They came to him without effort or discovery,
as though they had been his always.
And when, on the still cold nights, he pointed
his nose at a star and howled long and wolflike,
it was his ancestors, dead and dust, pointing
nose at star and howling down through the
centuries and through him.
And his cadences were their cadences, the
cadences which voiced their woe and what to
them was the meaning of the stiffness, and
the cold, and dark.
Thus, as token of what a puppet thing life
is, the ancient song surged through him and
he came into his own again; and he came because
men had found a yellow metal in the North,
and because Manuel was a gardener’s helper
whose wages did not lap over the needs of
his wife and divers small copies of himself.
End of Chapter 2
Chapter 3
The Dominant Primordial Beast
The dominant primordial beast was strong in
Buck, and under the fierce conditions of trail
life it grew and grew.
Yet it was a secret growth.
His newborn cunning gave him poise and control.
He was too busy adjusting himself to the new
life to feel at ease, and not only did he
not pick fights, but he avoided them whenever
possible.
A certain deliberateness characterised his
attitude.
He was not prone to rashness and precipitate
action; and in the bitter hatred between him
and Spitz he betrayed no impatience, shunned
all offensive acts.
On the other hand, possibly because he divined
in Buck a dangerous rival, Spitz never lost
an opportunity of showing his teeth.
He even went out of his way to bully Buck,
striving constantly to start the fight which
could end only in the death of one or the
other.
Early in the trip this might have taken place
had it not been for an unwonted accident.
At the end of this day they made a bleak and
miserable camp on the shore of Lake Le Barge.
Driving snow, a wind that cut like a white-hot
knife, and darkness had forced them to grope
for a camping place.
They could hardly have fared worse.
At their backs rose a perpendicular wall of
rock, and Perrault and François were compelled
to make their fire and spread their sleeping
robes on the ice of the lake itself.
The tent they had discarded at Dyea in order
to travel light.
A few sticks of driftwood furnished them with
a fire that thawed down through the ice and
left them to eat supper in the dark.
Close in under the sheltering rock Buck made
his nest.
So snug and warm was it, that he was loath
to leave it when François distributed the
fish which he had first thawed over the fire.
But when Buck finished his ration and returned,
he found his nest occupied.
A warning snarl told him that the trespasser
was Spitz.
Till now Buck had avoided trouble with his
enemy, but this was too much.
The beast in him roared.
He sprang upon Spitz with a fury which surprised
them both, and Spitz particularly, for his
whole experience with Buck had gone to teach
him that his rival was an unusually timid
dog, who managed to hold his own only because
of his great weight and size.
François was surprised, too, when they shot
out in a tangle from the disrupted nest and
he divined the cause of the trouble.
“A-a-ah!” he cried to Buck.
“Gif it to heem, by Gar!
Gif it to heem, the dirty t’eef!”
Spitz was equally willing.
He was crying with sheer rage and eagerness
as he circled back and forth for a chance
to spring in.
Buck was no less eager, and no less cautious,
as he likewise circled back and forth for
the advantage.
But it was then that the unexpected happened,
the thing which projected their struggle for
supremacy far into the future, past many a
weary mile of trail and toil.
An oath from Perrault, the resounding impact
of a club upon a bony frame, and a shrill
yelp of pain, heralded the breaking forth
of pandemonium.
The camp was suddenly discovered to be alive
with skulking furry forms,—starving huskies,
four or five score of them, who had scented
the camp from some Indian village.
They had crept in while Buck and Spitz were
fighting, and when the two men sprang among
them with stout clubs they showed their teeth
and fought back.
They were crazed by the smell of the food.
Perrault found one with head buried in the
grub-box.
His club landed heavily on the gaunt ribs,
and the grub-box was capsized on the ground.
On the instant a score of the famished brutes
were scrambling for the bread and bacon.
The clubs fell upon them unheeded.
They yelped and howled under the rain of blows,
but struggled none the less madly till the
last crumb had been devoured.
In the meantime the astonished team-dogs had
burst out of their nests only to be set upon
by the fierce invaders.
Never had Buck seen such dogs.
It seemed as though their bones would burst
through their skins.
They were mere skeletons, draped loosely in
draggled hides, with blazing eyes and slavered
fangs.
But the hunger-madness made them terrifying,
irresistible.
There was no opposing them.
The team-dogs were swept back against the
cliff at the first onset.
Buck was beset by three huskies, and in a
trice his head and shoulders were ripped and
slashed.
The din was frightful.
Billee was crying as usual.
Dave and Sol-leks, dripping blood from a score
of wounds, were fighting bravely side by side.
Joe was snapping like a demon.
Once, his teeth closed on the fore leg of
a husky, and he crunched down through the
bone.
Pike, the malingerer, leaped upon the crippled
animal, breaking its neck with a quick flash
of teeth and a jerk, Buck got a frothing adversary
by the throat, and was sprayed with blood
when his teeth sank through the jugular.
The warm taste of it in his mouth goaded him
to greater fierceness.
He flung himself upon another, and at the
same time felt teeth sink into his own throat.
It was Spitz, treacherously attacking from
the side.
Perrault and François, having cleaned out
their part of the camp, hurried to save their
sled-dogs.
The wild wave of famished beasts rolled back
before them, and Buck shook himself free.
But it was only for a moment.
The two men were compelled to run back to
save the grub, upon which the huskies returned
to the attack on the team.
Billee, terrified into bravery, sprang through
the savage circle and fled away over the ice.
Pike and Dub followed on his heels, with the
rest of the team behind.
As Buck drew himself together to spring after
them, out of the tail of his eye he saw Spitz
rush upon him with the evident intention of
overthrowing him.
Once off his feet and under that mass of huskies,
there was no hope for him.
But he braced himself to the shock of Spitz’s
charge, then joined the flight out on the
lake.
Later, the nine team-dogs gathered together
and sought shelter in the forest.
Though unpursued, they were in a sorry plight.
There was not one who was not wounded in four
or five places, while some were wounded grievously.
Dub was badly injured in a hind leg; Dolly,
the last husky added to the team at Dyea,
had a badly torn throat; Joe had lost an eye;
while Billee, the good-natured, with an ear
chewed and rent to ribbons, cried and whimpered
throughout the night.
At daybreak they limped warily back to camp,
to find the marauders gone and the two men
in bad tempers.
Fully half their grub supply was gone.
The huskies had chewed through the sled lashings
and canvas coverings.
In fact, nothing, no matter how remotely eatable,
had escaped them.
They had eaten a pair of Perrault’s moose-hide
moccasins, chunks out of the leather traces,
and even two feet of lash from the end of
François’s whip.
He broke from a mournful contemplation of
it to look over his wounded dogs.
“Ah, my frien’s,” he said softly, “mebbe
it mek you mad dog, dose many bites.
Mebbe all mad dog, sacredam!
Wot you t’ink, eh, Perrault?”
The courier shook his head dubiously.
With four hundred miles of trail still between
him and Dawson, he could ill afford to have
madness break out among his dogs.
Two hours of cursing and exertion got the
harnesses into shape, and the wound-stiffened
team was under way, struggling painfully over
the hardest part of the trail they had yet
encountered, and for that matter, the hardest
between them and Dawson.
The Thirty Mile River was wide open.
Its wild water defied the frost, and it was
in the eddies only and in the quiet places
that the ice held at all.
Six days of exhausting toil were required
to cover those thirty terrible miles.
And terrible they were, for every foot of
them was accomplished at the risk of life
to dog and man.
A dozen times, Perrault, nosing the way broke
through the ice bridges, being saved by the
long pole he carried, which he so held that
it fell each time across the hole made by
his body.
But a cold snap was on, the thermometer registering
fifty below zero, and each time he broke through
he was compelled for very life to build a
fire and dry his garments.
Nothing daunted him.
It was because nothing daunted him that he
had been chosen for government courier.
He took all manner of risks, resolutely thrusting
his little weazened face into the frost and
struggling on from dim dawn to dark.
He skirted the frowning shores on rim ice
that bent and crackled under foot and upon
which they dared not halt.
Once, the sled broke through, with Dave and
Buck, and they were half-frozen and all but
drowned by the time they were dragged out.
The usual fire was necessary to save them.
They were coated solidly with ice, and the
two men kept them on the run around the fire,
sweating and thawing, so close that they were
singed by the flames.
At another time Spitz went through, dragging
the whole team after him up to Buck, who strained
backward with all his strength, his fore paws
on the slippery edge and the ice quivering
and snapping all around.
But behind him was Dave, likewise straining
backward, and behind the sled was François,
pulling till his tendons cracked.
Again, the rim ice broke away before and behind,
and there was no escape except up the cliff.
Perrault scaled it by a miracle, while François
prayed for just that miracle; and with every
thong and sled lashing and the last bit of
harness rove into a long rope, the dogs were
hoisted, one by one, to the cliff crest.
François came up last, after the sled and
load.
Then came the search for a place to descend,
which descent was ultimately made by the aid
of the rope, and night found them back on
the river with a quarter of a mile to the
day’s credit.
By the time they made the Hootalinqua and
good ice, Buck was played out.
The rest of the dogs were in like condition;
but Perrault, to make up lost time, pushed
them late and early.
The first day they covered thirty-five miles
to the Big Salmon; the next day thirty-five
more to the Little Salmon; the third day forty
miles, which brought them well up toward the
Five Fingers.
Buck’s feet were not so compact and hard
as the feet of the huskies.
His had softened during the many generations
since the day his last wild ancestor was tamed
by a cave-dweller or river man.
All day long he limped in agony, and camp
once made, lay down like a dead dog.
Hungry as he was, he would not move to receive
his ration of fish, which François had to
bring to him.
Also, the dog-driver rubbed Buck’s feet
for half an hour each night after supper,
and sacrificed the tops of his own moccasins
to make four moccasins for Buck.
This was a great relief, and Buck caused even
the weazened face of Perrault to twist itself
into a grin one morning, when François forgot
the moccasins and Buck lay on his back, his
four feet waving appealingly in the air, and
refused to budge without them.
Later his feet grew hard to the trail, and
the worn-out foot-gear was thrown away.
At the Pelly one morning, as they were harnessing
up, Dolly, who had never been conspicuous
for anything, went suddenly mad.
She announced her condition by a long, heartbreaking
wolf howl that sent every dog bristling with
fear, then sprang straight for Buck.
He had never seen a dog go mad, nor did he
have any reason to fear madness; yet he knew
that here was horror, and fled away from it
in a panic.
Straight away he raced, with Dolly, panting
and frothing, one leap behind; nor could she
gain on him, so great was his terror, nor
could he leave her, so great was her madness.
He plunged through the wooded breast of the
island, flew down to the lower end, crossed
a back channel filled with rough ice to another
island, gained a third island, curved back
to the main river, and in desperation started
to cross it.
And all the time, though he did not look,
he could hear her snarling just one leap behind.
François called to him a quarter of a mile
away and he doubled back, still one leap ahead,
gasping painfully for air and putting all
his faith in that François would save him.
The dog-driver held the axe poised in his
hand, and as Buck shot past him the axe crashed
down upon mad Dolly’s head.
Buck staggered over against the sled, exhausted,
sobbing for breath, helpless.
This was Spitz’s opportunity.
He sprang upon Buck, and twice his teeth sank
into his unresisting foe and ripped and tore
the flesh to the bone.
Then François’s lash descended, and Buck
had the satisfaction of watching Spitz receive
the worst whipping as yet administered to
any of the teams.
“One devil, dat Spitz,” remarked Perrault.
“Some dam day heem keel dat Buck.”
“Dat Buck two devils,” was François’s
rejoinder.
“All de tam I watch dat Buck I know for
sure.
Lissen: some dam fine day heem get mad lak
hell an’ den heem chew dat Spitz all up
an’ spit heem out on de snow.
Sure.
I know.”
From then on it was war between them.
Spitz, as lead-dog and acknowledged master
of the team, felt his supremacy threatened
by this strange Southland dog.
And strange Buck was to him, for of the many
Southland dogs he had known, not one had shown
up worthily in camp and on trail.
They were all too soft, dying under the toil,
the frost, and starvation.
Buck was the exception.
He alone endured and prospered, matching the
husky in strength, savagery, and cunning.
Then he was a masterful dog, and what made
him dangerous was the fact that the club of
the man in the red sweater had knocked all
blind pluck and rashness out of his desire
for mastery.
He was preeminently cunning, and could bide
his time with a patience that was nothing
less than primitive.
It was inevitable that the clash for leadership
should come.
Buck wanted it.
He wanted it because it was his nature, because
he had been gripped tight by that nameless,
incomprehensible pride of the trail and trace—that
pride which holds dogs in the toil to the
last gasp, which lures them to die joyfully
in the harness, and breaks their hearts if
they are cut out of the harness.
This was the pride of Dave as wheel-dog, of
Sol-leks as he pulled with all his strength;
the pride that laid hold of them at break
of camp, transforming them from sour and sullen
brutes into straining, eager, ambitious creatures;
the pride that spurred them on all day and
dropped them at pitch of camp at night, letting
them fall back into gloomy unrest and uncontent.
This was the pride that bore up Spitz and
made him thrash the sled-dogs who blundered
and shirked in the traces or hid away at harness-up
time in the morning.
Likewise it was this pride that made him fear
Buck as a possible lead-dog.
And this was Buck’s pride, too.
He openly threatened the other’s leadership.
He came between him and the shirks he should
have punished.
And he did it deliberately.
One night there was a heavy snowfall, and
in the morning Pike, the malingerer, did not
appear.
He was securely hidden in his nest under a
foot of snow.
François called him and sought him in vain.
Spitz was wild with wrath.
He raged through the camp, smelling and digging
in every likely place, snarling so frightfully
that Pike heard and shivered in his hiding-place.
But when he was at last unearthed, and Spitz
flew at him to punish him, Buck flew, with
equal rage, in between.
So unexpected was it, and so shrewdly managed,
that Spitz was hurled backward and off his
feet.
Pike, who had been trembling abjectly, took
heart at this open mutiny, and sprang upon
his overthrown leader.
Buck, to whom fair play was a forgotten code,
likewise sprang upon Spitz.
But François, chuckling at the incident while
unswerving in the administration of justice,
brought his lash down upon Buck with all his
might.
This failed to drive Buck from his prostrate
rival, and the butt of the whip was brought
into play.
Half-stunned by the blow, Buck was knocked
backward and the lash laid upon him again
and again, while Spitz soundly punished the
many times offending Pike.
In the days that followed, as Dawson grew
closer and closer, Buck still continued to
interfere between Spitz and the culprits;
but he did it craftily, when François was
not around, With the covert mutiny of Buck,
a general insubordination sprang up and increased.
Dave and Sol-leks were unaffected, but the
rest of the team went from bad to worse.
Things no longer went right.
There was continual bickering and jangling.
Trouble was always afoot, and at the bottom
of it was Buck.
He kept François busy, for the dog-driver
was in constant apprehension of the life-and-death
struggle between the two which he knew must
take place sooner or later; and on more than
one night the sounds of quarrelling and strife
among the other dogs turned him out of his
sleeping robe, fearful that Buck and Spitz
were at it.
But the opportunity did not present itself,
and they pulled into Dawson one dreary afternoon
with the great fight still to come.
Here were many men, and countless dogs, and
Buck found them all at work.
It seemed the ordained order of things that
dogs should work.
All day they swung up and down the main street
in long teams, and in the night their jingling
bells still went by.
They hauled cabin logs and firewood, freighted
up to the mines, and did all manner of work
that horses did in the Santa Clara Valley.
Here and there Buck met Southland dogs, but
in the main they were the wild wolf husky
breed.
Every night, regularly, at nine, at twelve,
at three, they lifted a nocturnal song, a
weird and eerie chant, in which it was Buck’s
delight to join.
With the aurora borealis flaming coldly overhead,
or the stars leaping in the frost dance, and
the land numb and frozen under its pall of
snow, this song of the huskies might have
been the defiance of life, only it was pitched
in minor key, with long-drawn wailings and
half-sobs, and was more the pleading of life,
the articulate travail of existence.
It was an old song, old as the breed itself—one
of the first songs of the younger world in
a day when songs were sad.
It was invested with the woe of unnumbered
generations, this plaint by which Buck was
so strangely stirred.
When he moaned and sobbed, it was with the
pain of living that was of old the pain of
his wild fathers, and the fear and mystery
of the cold and dark that was to them fear
and mystery.
And that he should be stirred by it marked
the completeness with which he harked back
through the ages of fire and roof to the raw
beginnings of life in the howling ages.
Seven days from the time they pulled into
Dawson, they dropped down the steep bank by
the Barracks to the Yukon Trail, and pulled
for Dyea and Salt Water.
Perrault was carrying despatches if anything
more urgent than those he had brought in;
also, the travel pride had gripped him, and
he purposed to make the record trip of the
year.
Several things favoured him in this.
The week’s rest had recuperated the dogs
and put them in thorough trim.
The trail they had broken into the country
was packed hard by later journeyers.
And further, the police had arranged in two
or three places deposits of grub for dog and
man, and he was travelling light.
They made Sixty Mile, which is a fifty-mile
run, on the first day; and the second day
saw them booming up the Yukon well on their
way to Pelly.
But such splendid running was achieved not
without great trouble and vexation on the
part of François.
The insidious revolt led by Buck had destroyed
the solidarity of the team.
It no longer was as one dog leaping in the
traces.
The encouragement Buck gave the rebels led
them into all kinds of petty misdemeanours.
No more was Spitz a leader greatly to be feared.
The old awe departed, and they grew equal
to challenging his authority.
Pike robbed him of half a fish one night,
and gulped it down under the protection of
Buck.
Another night Dub and Joe fought Spitz and
made him forego the punishment they deserved.
And even Billee, the good-natured, was less
good-natured, and whined not half so placatingly
as in former days.
Buck never came near Spitz without snarling
and bristling menacingly.
In fact, his conduct approached that of a
bully, and he was given to swaggering up and
down before Spitz’s very nose.
The breaking down of discipline likewise affected
the dogs in their relations with one another.
They quarrelled and bickered more than ever
among themselves, till at times the camp was
a howling bedlam.
Dave and Sol-leks alone were unaltered, though
they were made irritable by the unending squabbling.
François swore strange barbarous oaths, and
stamped the snow in futile rage, and tore
his hair.
His lash was always singing among the dogs,
but it was of small avail.
Directly his back was turned they were at
it again.
He backed up Spitz with his whip, while Buck
backed up the remainder of the team.
François knew he was behind all the trouble,
and Buck knew he knew; but Buck was too clever
ever again to be caught red-handed.
He worked faithfully in the harness, for the
toil had become a delight to him; yet it was
a greater delight slyly to precipitate a fight
amongst his mates and tangle the traces.
At the mouth of the Tahkeena, one night after
supper, Dub turned up a snowshoe rabbit, blundered
it, and missed.
In a second the whole team was in full cry.
A hundred yards away was a camp of the Northwest
Police, with fifty dogs, huskies all, who
joined the chase.
The rabbit sped down the river, turned off
into a small creek, up the frozen bed of which
it held steadily.
It ran lightly on the surface of the snow,
while the dogs ploughed through by main strength.
Buck led the pack, sixty strong, around bend
after bend, but he could not gain.
He lay down low to the race, whining eagerly,
his splendid body flashing forward, leap by
leap, in the wan white moonlight.
And leap by leap, like some pale frost wraith,
the snowshoe rabbit flashed on ahead.
All that stirring of old instincts which at
stated periods drives men out from the sounding
cities to forest and plain to kill things
by chemically propelled leaden pellets, the
blood lust, the joy to kill—all this was
Buck’s, only it was infinitely more intimate.
He was ranging at the head of the pack, running
the wild thing down, the living meat, to kill
with his own teeth and wash his muzzle to
the eyes in warm blood.
There is an ecstasy that marks the summit
of life, and beyond which life cannot rise.
And such is the paradox of living, this ecstasy
comes when one is most alive, and it comes
as a complete forgetfulness that one is alive.
This ecstasy, this forgetfulness of living,
comes to the artist, caught up and out of
himself in a sheet of flame; it comes to the
soldier, war-mad on a stricken field and refusing
quarter; and it came to Buck, leading the
pack, sounding the old wolf-cry, straining
after the food that was alive and that fled
swiftly before him through the moonlight.
He was sounding the deeps of his nature, and
of the parts of his nature that were deeper
than he, going back into the womb of Time.
He was mastered by the sheer surging of life,
the tidal wave of being, the perfect joy of
each separate muscle, joint, and sinew in
that it was everything that was not death,
that it was aglow and rampant, expressing
itself in movement, flying exultantly under
the stars and over the face of dead matter
that did not move.
But Spitz, cold and calculating even in his
supreme moods, left the pack and cut across
a narrow neck of land where the creek made
a long bend around.
Buck did not know of this, and as he rounded
the bend, the frost wraith of a rabbit still
flitting before him, he saw another and larger
frost wraith leap from the overhanging bank
into the immediate path of the rabbit.
It was Spitz.
The rabbit could not turn, and as the white
teeth broke its back in mid air it shrieked
as loudly as a stricken man may shriek.
At sound of this, the cry of Life plunging
down from Life’s apex in the grip of Death,
the fall pack at Buck’s heels raised a hell’s
chorus of delight.
Buck did not cry out.
He did not check himself, but drove in upon
Spitz, shoulder to shoulder, so hard that
he missed the throat.
They rolled over and over in the powdery snow.
Spitz gained his feet almost as though he
had not been overthrown, slashing Buck down
the shoulder and leaping clear.
Twice his teeth clipped together, like the
steel jaws of a trap, as he backed away for
better footing, with lean and lifting lips
that writhed and snarled.
In a flash Buck knew it.
The time had come.
It was to the death.
As they circled about, snarling, ears laid
back, keenly watchful for the advantage, the
scene came to Buck with a sense of familiarity.
He seemed to remember it all,—the white
woods, and earth, and moonlight, and the thrill
of battle.
Over the whiteness and silence brooded a ghostly
calm.
There was not the faintest whisper of air—nothing
moved, not a leaf quivered, the visible breaths
of the dogs rising slowly and lingering in
the frosty air.
They had made short work of the snowshoe rabbit,
these dogs that were ill-tamed wolves; and
they were now drawn up in an expectant circle.
They, too, were silent, their eyes only gleaming
and their breaths drifting slowly upward.
To Buck it was nothing new or strange, this
scene of old time.
It was as though it had always been, the wonted
way of things.
Spitz was a practised fighter.
From Spitzbergen through the Arctic, and across
Canada and the Barrens, he had held his own
with all manner of dogs and achieved to mastery
over them.
Bitter rage was his, but never blind rage.
In passion to rend and destroy, he never forgot
that his enemy was in like passion to rend
and destroy.
He never rushed till he was prepared to receive
a rush; never attacked till he had first defended
that attack.
In vain Buck strove to sink his teeth in the
neck of the big white dog.
Wherever his fangs struck for the softer flesh,
they were countered by the fangs of Spitz.
Fang clashed fang, and lips were cut and bleeding,
but Buck could not penetrate his enemy’s
guard.
Then he warmed up and enveloped Spitz in a
whirlwind of rushes.
Time and time again he tried for the snow-white
throat, where life bubbled near to the surface,
and each time and every time Spitz slashed
him and got away.
Then Buck took to rushing, as though for the
throat, when, suddenly drawing back his head
and curving in from the side, he would drive
his shoulder at the shoulder of Spitz, as
a ram by which to overthrow him.
But instead, Buck’s shoulder was slashed
down each time as Spitz leaped lightly away.
Spitz was untouched, while Buck was streaming
with blood and panting hard.
The fight was growing desperate.
And all the while the silent and wolfish circle
waited to finish off whichever dog went down.
As Buck grew winded, Spitz took to rushing,
and he kept him staggering for footing.
Once Buck went over, and the whole circle
of sixty dogs started up; but he recovered
himself, almost in mid air, and the circle
sank down again and waited.
But Buck possessed a quality that made for
greatness—imagination.
He fought by instinct, but he could fight
by head as well.
He rushed, as though attempting the old shoulder
trick, but at the last instant swept low to
the snow and in.
His teeth closed on Spitz’s left fore leg.
There was a crunch of breaking bone, and the
white dog faced him on three legs.
Thrice he tried to knock him over, then repeated
the trick and broke the right fore leg.
Despite the pain and helplessness, Spitz struggled
madly to keep up.
He saw the silent circle, with gleaming eyes,
lolling tongues, and silvery breaths drifting
upward, closing in upon him as he had seen
similar circles close in upon beaten antagonists
in the past.
Only this time he was the one who was beaten.
There was no hope for him.
Buck was inexorable.
Mercy was a thing reserved for gentler climes.
He manoeuvred for the final rush.
The circle had tightened till he could feel
the breaths of the huskies on his flanks.
He could see them, beyond Spitz and to either
side, half crouching for the spring, their
eyes fixed upon him.
A pause seemed to fall.
Every animal was motionless as though turned
to stone.
Only Spitz quivered and bristled as he staggered
back and forth, snarling with horrible menace,
as though to frighten off impending death.
Then Buck sprang in and out; but while he
was in, shoulder had at last squarely met
shoulder.
The dark circle became a dot on the moon-flooded
snow as Spitz disappeared from view.
Buck stood and looked on, the successful champion,
the dominant primordial beast who had made
his kill and found it good.
End of Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Who Has Won to Mastership
“Eh?
Wot I say?
I spik true w’en I say dat Buck two devils.”
This was François’s speech next morning
when he discovered Spitz missing and Buck
covered with wounds.
He drew him to the fire and by its light pointed
them out.
“Dat Spitz fight lak hell,” said Perrault,
as he surveyed the gaping rips and cuts.
“An’ dat Buck fight lak two hells,”
was François’s answer.
“An’ now we make good time.
No more Spitz, no more trouble, sure.”
While Perrault packed the camp outfit and
loaded the sled, the dog-driver proceeded
to harness the dogs.
Buck trotted up to the place Spitz would have
occupied as leader; but François, not noticing
him, brought Sol-leks to the coveted position.
In his judgment, Sol-leks was the best lead-dog
left.
Buck sprang upon Sol-leks in a fury, driving
him back and standing in his place.
“Eh?
eh?”
François cried, slapping his thighs gleefully.
“Look at dat Buck.
Heem keel dat Spitz, heem t’ink to take
de job.”
“Go ’way, Chook!” he cried, but Buck
refused to budge.
He took Buck by the scruff of the neck, and
though the dog growled threateningly, dragged
him to one side and replaced Sol-leks.
The old dog did not like it, and showed plainly
that he was afraid of Buck.
François was obdurate, but when he turned
his back Buck again displaced Sol-leks, who
was not at all unwilling to go.
François was angry.
“Now, by Gar, I feex you!” he cried, coming
back with a heavy club in his hand.
Buck remembered the man in the red sweater,
and retreated slowly; nor did he attempt to
charge in when Sol-leks was once more brought
forward.
But he circled just beyond the range of the
club, snarling with bitterness and rage; and
while he circled he watched the club so as
to dodge it if thrown by François, for he
was become wise in the way of clubs.
The driver went about his work, and he called
to Buck when he was ready to put him in his
old place in front of Dave.
Buck retreated two or three steps.
François followed him up, whereupon he again
retreated.
After some time of this, François threw down
the club, thinking that Buck feared a thrashing.
But Buck was in open revolt.
He wanted, not to escape a clubbing, but to
have the leadership.
It was his by right.
He had earned it, and he would not be content
with less.
Perrault took a hand.
Between them they ran him about for the better
part of an hour.
They threw clubs at him.
He dodged.
They cursed him, and his fathers and mothers
before him, and all his seed to come after
him down to the remotest generation, and every
hair on his body and drop of blood in his
veins; and he answered curse with snarl and
kept out of their reach.
He did not try to run away, but retreated
around and around the camp, advertising plainly
that when his desire was met, he would come
in and be good.
François sat down and scratched his head.
Perrault looked at his watch and swore.
Time was flying, and they should have been
on the trail an hour gone.
François scratched his head again.
He shook it and grinned sheepishly at the
courier, who shrugged his shoulders in sign
that they were beaten.
Then François went up to where Sol-leks stood
and called to Buck.
Buck laughed, as dogs laugh, yet kept his
distance.
François unfastened Sol-leks’s traces and
put him back in his old place.
The team stood harnessed to the sled in an
unbroken line, ready for the trail.
There was no place for Buck save at the front.
Once more François called, and once more
Buck laughed and kept away.
“T’row down de club,” Perrault commanded.
François complied, whereupon Buck trotted
in, laughing triumphantly, and swung around
into position at the head of the team.
His traces were fastened, the sled broken
out, and with both men running they dashed
out on to the river trail.
Highly as the dog-driver had fore valued Buck,
with his two devils, he found, while the day
was yet young, that he had undervalued.
At a bound Buck took up the duties of leadership;
and where judgment was required, and quick
thinking and quick acting, he showed himself
the superior even of Spitz, of whom François
had never seen an equal.
But it was in giving the law and making his
mates live up to it, that Buck excelled.
Dave and Sol-leks did not mind the change
in leadership.
It was none of their business.
Their business was to toil, and toil mightily,
in the traces.
So long as that were not interfered with,
they did not care what happened.
Billee, the good-natured, could lead for all
they cared, so long as he kept order.
The rest of the team, however, had grown unruly
during the last days of Spitz, and their surprise
was great now that Buck proceeded to lick
them into shape.
Pike, who pulled at Buck’s heels, and who
never put an ounce more of his weight against
the breast-band than he was compelled to do,
was swiftly and repeatedly shaken for loafing;
and ere the first day was done he was pulling
more than ever before in his life.
The first night in camp, Joe, the sour one,
was punished roundly—a thing that Spitz
had never succeeded in doing.
Buck simply smothered him by virtue of superior
weight, and cut him up till he ceased snapping
and began to whine for mercy.
The general tone of the team picked up immediately.
It recovered its old-time solidarity, and
once more the dogs leaped as one dog in the
traces.
At the Rink Rapids two native huskies, Teek
and Koona, were added; and the celerity with
which Buck broke them in took away François’s
breath.
“Nevaire such a dog as dat Buck!” he cried.
“No, nevaire!
Heem worth one t’ousan’ dollair, by Gar!
Eh?
Wot you say, Perrault?”
And Perrault nodded.
He was ahead of the record then, and gaining
day by day.
The trail was in excellent condition, well
packed and hard, and there was no new-fallen
snow with which to contend.
It was not too cold.
The temperature dropped to fifty below zero
and remained there the whole trip.
The men rode and ran by turn, and the dogs
were kept on the jump, with but infrequent
stoppages.
The Thirty Mile River was comparatively coated
with ice, and they covered in one day going
out what had taken them ten days coming in.
In one run they made a sixty-mile dash from
the foot of Lake Le Barge to the White Horse
Rapids.
Across Marsh, Tagish, and Bennett (seventy
miles of lakes), they flew so fast that the
man whose turn it was to run towed behind
the sled at the end of a rope.
And on the last night of the second week they
topped White Pass and dropped down the sea
slope with the lights of Skaguay and of the
shipping at their feet.
It was a record run.
Each day for fourteen days they had averaged
forty miles.
For three days Perrault and François threw
chests up and down the main street of Skaguay
and were deluged with invitations to drink,
while the team was the constant centre of
a worshipful crowd of dog-busters and mushers.
Then three or four western bad men aspired
to clean out the town, were riddled like pepper-boxes
for their pains, and public interest turned
to other idols.
Next came official orders.
François called Buck to him, threw his arms
around him, wept over him.
And that was the last of François and Perrault.
Like other men, they passed out of Buck’s
life for good.
A Scotch half-breed took charge of him and
his mates, and in company with a dozen other
dog-teams he started back over the weary trail
to Dawson.
It was no light running now, nor record time,
but heavy toil each day, with a heavy load
behind; for this was the mail train, carrying
word from the world to the men who sought
gold under the shadow of the Pole.
Buck did not like it, but he bore up well
to the work, taking pride in it after the
manner of Dave and Sol-leks, and seeing that
his mates, whether they prided in it or not,
did their fair share.
It was a monotonous life, operating with machine-like
regularity.
One day was very like another.
At a certain time each morning the cooks turned
out, fires were built, and breakfast was eaten.
Then, while some broke camp, others harnessed
the dogs, and they were under way an hour
or so before the darkness fell which gave
warning of dawn.
At night, camp was made.
Some pitched the flies, others cut firewood
and pine boughs for the beds, and still others
carried water or ice for the cooks.
Also, the dogs were fed.
To them, this was the one feature of the day,
though it was good to loaf around, after the
fish was eaten, for an hour or so with the
other dogs, of which there were fivescore
and odd.
There were fierce fighters among them, but
three battles with the fiercest brought Buck
to mastery, so that when he bristled and showed
his teeth they got out of his way.
Best of all, perhaps, he loved to lie near
the fire, hind legs crouched under him, fore
legs stretched out in front, head raised,
and eyes blinking dreamily at the flames.
Sometimes he thought of Judge Miller’s big
house in the sun-kissed Santa Clara Valley,
and of the cement swimming-tank, and Ysabel,
the Mexican hairless, and Toots, the Japanese
pug; but oftener he remembered the man in
the red sweater, the death of Curly, the great
fight with Spitz, and the good things he had
eaten or would like to eat.
He was not homesick.
The Sunland was very dim and distant, and
such memories had no power over him.
Far more potent were the memories of his heredity
that gave things he had never seen before
a seeming familiarity; the instincts (which
were but the memories of his ancestors become
habits) which had lapsed in later days, and
still later, in him, quickened and become
alive again.
Sometimes as he crouched there, blinking dreamily
at the flames, it seemed that the flames were
of another fire, and that as he crouched by
this other fire he saw another and different
man from the half-breed cook before him.
This other man was shorter of leg and longer
of arm, with muscles that were stringy and
knotty rather than rounded and swelling.
The hair of this man was long and matted,
and his head slanted back under it from the
eyes.
He uttered strange sounds, and seemed very
much afraid of the darkness, into which he
peered continually, clutching in his hand,
which hung midway between knee and foot, a
stick with a heavy stone made fast to the
end.
He was all but naked, a ragged and fire-scorched
skin hanging part way down his back, but on
his body there was much hair.
In some places, across the chest and shoulders
and down the outside of the arms and thighs,
it was matted into almost a thick fur.
He did not stand erect, but with trunk inclined
forward from the hips, on legs that bent at
the knees.
About his body there was a peculiar springiness,
or resiliency, almost catlike, and a quick
alertness as of one who lived in perpetual
fear of things seen and unseen.
At other times this hairy man squatted by
the fire with head between his legs and slept.
On such occasions his elbows were on his knees,
his hands clasped above his head as though
to shed rain by the hairy arms.
And beyond that fire, in the circling darkness,
Buck could see many gleaming coals, two by
two, always two by two, which he knew to be
the eyes of great beasts of prey.
And he could hear the crashing of their bodies
through the undergrowth, and the noises they
made in the night.
And dreaming there by the Yukon bank, with
lazy eyes blinking at the fire, these sounds
and sights of another world would make the
hair to rise along his back and stand on end
across his shoulders and up his neck, till
he whimpered low and suppressedly, or growled
softly, and the half-breed cook shouted at
him, “Hey, you Buck, wake up!”
Whereupon the other world would vanish and
the real world come into his eyes, and he
would get up and yawn and stretch as though
he had been asleep.
It was a hard trip, with the mail behind them,
and the heavy work wore them down.
They were short of weight and in poor condition
when they made Dawson, and should have had
a ten days’ or a week’s rest at least.
But in two days’ time they dropped down
the Yukon bank from the Barracks, loaded with
letters for the outside.
The dogs were tired, the drivers grumbling,
and to make matters worse, it snowed every
day.
This meant a soft trail, greater friction
on the runners, and heavier pulling for the
dogs; yet the drivers were fair through it
all, and did their best for the animals.
Each night the dogs were attended to first.
They ate before the drivers ate, and no man
sought his sleeping-robe till he had seen
to the feet of the dogs he drove.
Still, their strength went down.
Since the beginning of the winter they had
travelled eighteen hundred miles, dragging
sleds the whole weary distance; and eighteen
hundred miles will tell upon life of the toughest.
Buck stood it, keeping his mates up to their
work and maintaining discipline, though he,
too, was very tired.
Billee cried and whimpered regularly in his
sleep each night.
Joe was sourer than ever, and Sol-leks was
unapproachable, blind side or other side.
But it was Dave who suffered most of all.
Something had gone wrong with him.
He became more morose and irritable, and when
camp was pitched at once made his nest, where
his driver fed him.
Once out of the harness and down, he did not
get on his feet again till harness-up time
in the morning.
Sometimes, in the traces, when jerked by a
sudden stoppage of the sled, or by straining
to start it, he would cry out with pain.
The driver examined him, but could find nothing.
All the drivers became interested in his case.
They talked it over at meal-time, and over
their last pipes before going to bed, and
one night they held a consultation.
He was brought from his nest to the fire and
was pressed and prodded till he cried out
many times.
Something was wrong inside, but they could
locate no broken bones, could not make it
out.
By the time Cassiar Bar was reached, he was
so weak that he was falling repeatedly in
the traces.
The Scotch half-breed called a halt and took
him out of the team, making the next dog,
Sol-leks, fast to the sled.
His intention was to rest Dave, letting him
run free behind the sled.
Sick as he was, Dave resented being taken
out, grunting and growling while the traces
were unfastened, and whimpering broken-heartedly
when he saw Sol-leks in the position he had
held and served so long.
For the pride of trace and trail was his,
and, sick unto death, he could not bear that
another dog should do his work.
When the sled started, he floundered in the
soft snow alongside the beaten trail, attacking
Sol-leks with his teeth, rushing against him
and trying to thrust him off into the soft
snow on the other side, striving to leap inside
his traces and get between him and the sled,
and all the while whining and yelping and
crying with grief and pain.
The half-breed tried to drive him away with
the whip; but he paid no heed to the stinging
lash, and the man had not the heart to strike
harder.
Dave refused to run quietly on the trail behind
the sled, where the going was easy, but continued
to flounder alongside in the soft snow, where
the going was most difficult, till exhausted.
Then he fell, and lay where he fell, howling
lugubriously as the long train of sleds churned
by.
With the last remnant of his strength he managed
to stagger along behind till the train made
another stop, when he floundered past the
sleds to his own, where he stood alongside
Sol-leks.
His driver lingered a moment to get a light
for his pipe from the man behind.
Then he returned and started his dogs.
They swung out on the trail with remarkable
lack of exertion, turned their heads uneasily,
and stopped in surprise.
The driver was surprised, too; the sled had
not moved.
He called his comrades to witness the sight.
Dave had bitten through both of Sol-leks’s
traces, and was standing directly in front
of the sled in his proper place.
He pleaded with his eyes to remain there.
The driver was perplexed.
His comrades talked of how a dog could break
its heart through being denied the work that
killed it, and recalled instances they had
known, where dogs, too old for the toil, or
injured, had died because they were cut out
of the traces.
Also, they held it a mercy, since Dave was
to die anyway, that he should die in the traces,
heart-easy and content.
So he was harnessed in again, and proudly
he pulled as of old, though more than once
he cried out involuntarily from the bite of
his inward hurt.
Several times he fell down and was dragged
in the traces, and once the sled ran upon
him so that he limped thereafter in one of
his hind legs.
But he held out till camp was reached, when
his driver made a place for him by the fire.
Morning found him too weak to travel.
At harness-up time he tried to crawl to his
driver.
By convulsive efforts he got on his feet,
staggered, and fell.
Then he wormed his way forward slowly toward
where the harnesses were being put on his
mates.
He would advance his fore legs and drag up
his body with a sort of hitching movement,
when he would advance his fore legs and hitch
ahead again for a few more inches.
His strength left him, and the last his mates
saw of him he lay gasping in the snow and
yearning toward them.
But they could hear him mournfully howling
till they passed out of sight behind a belt
of river timber.
Here the train was halted.
The Scotch half-breed slowly retraced his
steps to the camp they had left.
The men ceased talking.
A revolver-shot rang out.
The man came back hurriedly.
The whips snapped, the bells tinkled merrily,
the sleds churned along the trail; but Buck
knew, and every dog knew, what had taken place
behind the belt of river trees.
End of Chapter 4
Chapter 5
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 doubling 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 hours; 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 muscle, 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-coloured
man, with weak and watery eyes and a moustache
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 François
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 neighbouring 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 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 galvanised 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.
All 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 was 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 falling 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.
End of Chapter 5
Chapter 6
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 François 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
civilising 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 civilisation.
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 valour, 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 savour 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 favours
from them as though he favoured 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 realised.
“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 favourite 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 favour, 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 recognise 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 vigour 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.
End of Chapter 6
Chapter 7
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
wildfowl 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 shellfish 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.
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
characterised 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 it 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
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 vigour
and virility.
When Thornton passed a caressing hand along
his back, a snapping and crackling followed
the hand, each hair discharging 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 humour 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 the pregnant silence of the forest.
The bird life had flitted.
The squirrels were in hiding.
One only he saw,—a sleek grey fellow, flattened
against a grey 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 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 discoloured 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 grey, advanced
cautiously, in a friendly manner, and Buck
recognised 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.
