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The Call of the Wild

by Jack London




Contents

 Chapter I. Into the Primitive
 Chapter II. The Law of Club and Fang
 Chapter III. The Dominant Primordial Beast
 Chapter IV. Who Has Won to Mastership
 Chapter V. The Toil of Trace and Trail
 Chapter VI. For the Love of a Man
 Chapter VII. The Sounding of the Call




Chapter I. 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 organizing 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 cagelike 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 realized 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 recognized 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 agonizing 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 soliloquized, 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, favored 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.




Chapter II. 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 civilization 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 unforgetable 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 civilized dog, an
unduly civilized 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 honored 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 gray 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 characterized 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. Civilized, he could have died for a
moral consideration, say the defence of Judge Miller’s riding-whip; but
the completeness of his decivilization 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 clamor 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.




Chapter III. 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 characterized 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
favored 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 misdemeanors. 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 full 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 manœuvred 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.




Chapter IV. 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 forevalued 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.




Chapter V. The Toil of Trace and Trail


Thirty days from the time it left Dawson, the Salt Water Mail, with
Buck and his mates at the fore, arrived at Skaguay. They were in a
wretched state, worn out and worn down. Buck’s one hundred and forty
pounds had dwindled to one hundred and fifteen. The rest of his mates,
though lighter dogs, had relatively lost more weight than he. Pike, the
malingerer, who, in his lifetime of deceit, had often successfully
feigned a hurt leg, was now limping in earnest. Sol-leks was limping,
and Dub was suffering from a wrenched shoulder-blade.

They were all terribly footsore. No spring or rebound was left in them.
Their feet fell heavily on the trail, jarring their bodies and 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-colored man, with weak and watery eyes and a
mustache that twisted fiercely and vigorously up, giving the lie to the
limply drooping lip it concealed. Hal was a youngster of nineteen or
twenty, with a big Colt’s revolver and a hunting-knife strapped about
him on a belt that fairly bristled with cartridges. This belt was the
most salient thing about him. It advertised his callowness—a callowness
sheer and unutterable. Both men were manifestly out of place, and why
such as they should adventure the North is part of the mystery of
things that passes understanding.

Buck heard the chaffering, saw the money pass between the man and the
Government agent, and knew that the Scotch half-breed and the
mail-train drivers were passing out of his life on the heels of
Perrault and 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 neighboring tent came out and looked on, grinning and
winking at one another.

“You’ve got a right smart load as it is,” said one of them; “and it’s
not me should tell you your business, but I wouldn’t tote that tent
along if I was you.”

“Undreamed of!” cried Mercedes, throwing up her hands in dainty dismay.
“However in the world could I manage without a tent?”

“It’s springtime, and you won’t get any more cold weather,” the man
replied.

She shook her head decidedly, and Charles and Hal put the last odds and
ends on top the mountainous load.

“Think it’ll ride?” one of the men asked.

“Why shouldn’t it?” Charles demanded rather shortly.

“Oh, that’s all right, that’s all right,” the man hastened meekly to
say. “I was just a-wonderin’, that is all. It seemed a mite top-heavy.”

Charles turned his back and drew the lashings down as well as he could,
which was not in the least well.

“An’ of course the dogs can hike along all day with that contraption
behind them,” affirmed a second of the men.

“Certainly,” said Hal, with freezing politeness, taking hold of the
gee-pole with one hand and swinging his whip from the other. “Mush!” he
shouted. “Mush on there!”

The dogs sprang against the breast-bands, strained hard for a few
moments, then relaxed. They were unable to move the sled.

“The lazy brutes, I’ll show them,” he cried, preparing to lash out at
them with the whip.

But Mercedes interfered, crying, “Oh, Hal, you mustn’t,” as she caught
hold of the whip and wrenched it from him. “The poor dears! Now you
must promise you won’t be harsh with them for the rest of the trip, or
I won’t go a step.”

“Precious lot you know about dogs,” her brother sneered; “and I wish
you’d leave me alone. They’re lazy, I tell you, and you’ve got to whip
them to get anything out of them. That’s their way. You ask any one.
Ask one of those men.”

Mercedes looked at them imploringly, untold repugnance at sight of pain
written in her pretty face.

“They’re weak as water, if you want to know,” came the reply from one
of the men. “Plum tuckered out, that’s what’s the matter. They need a
rest.”

“Rest be blanked,” said Hal, with his beardless lips; and Mercedes
said, “Oh!” in pain and sorrow at the oath.

But she was a clannish creature, and rushed at once to the defence of
her brother. “Never mind that man,” she said pointedly. “You’re driving
our dogs, and you do what you think best with them.”

Again Hal’s whip fell upon the dogs. They threw themselves against the
breast-bands, dug their feet into the packed snow, got down low to it,
and put forth all their strength. The sled held as though it were an
anchor. After two efforts, they stood still, panting. The whip was
whistling savagely, when once more Mercedes interfered. She dropped on
her knees before Buck, with tears in her eyes, and put her arms around
his neck.

“You poor, poor dears,” she cried sympathetically, “why don’t you pull
hard?—then you wouldn’t be whipped.” Buck did not like her, but he was
feeling too miserable to resist her, taking it as part of the day’s
miserable work.

One of the onlookers, who had been clenching his teeth to suppress hot
speech, now spoke up:—

“It’s not that I care a whoop what becomes of you, but for the dogs’
sakes I just want to tell you, you can help them a mighty lot by
breaking out that sled. The runners are froze fast. Throw your weight
against the gee-pole, right and left, and break it out.”

A third time the attempt was made, but this time, following the advice,
Hal broke out the runners which had been frozen to the snow. The
overloaded and unwieldy sled forged ahead, Buck and his mates
struggling frantically under the rain of blows. A hundred yards ahead
the path turned and sloped steeply into the main street. It would have
required an experienced man to keep the top-heavy sled upright, and Hal
was not such a man. As they swung on the turn the sled went over,
spilling half its load through the loose lashings. The dogs never
stopped. The lightened sled bounded on its side behind them. They were
angry because of the ill treatment they had received and the unjust
load. Buck was raging. He broke into a run, the team following his
lead. Hal cried “Whoa! whoa!” but they gave no heed. He tripped and was
pulled off his feet. The capsized sled ground over him, and the dogs
dashed on up the street, adding to the gayety of Skaguay as they
scattered the remainder of the outfit along its chief thoroughfare.

Kind-hearted citizens caught the dogs and gathered up the scattered
belongings. Also, they gave advice. Half the load and twice the dogs,
if they ever expected to reach Dawson, was what was said. Hal and his
sister and brother-in-law listened unwillingly, pitched tent, and
overhauled the outfit. Canned goods were turned out that made men
laugh, for canned goods on the Long Trail is a thing to dream about.
“Blankets for a hotel” quoth one of the men who laughed and helped.
“Half as many is too much; get rid of them. Throw away that tent, and
all those dishes,—who’s going to wash them, anyway? Good Lord, do you
think you’re travelling on a Pullman?”

And so it went, the inexorable elimination of the superfluous. Mercedes
cried when her clothes-bags were dumped on the ground and article after
article was thrown out. She cried in general, and she cried in
particular over each discarded thing. She clasped hands about knees,
rocking back and forth broken-heartedly. She averred she would not go
an inch, not for a dozen Charleses. She appealed to everybody and to
everything, finally wiping her eyes and proceeding to cast out even
articles of apparel that were imperative necessaries. And in her zeal,
when she had finished with her own, she attacked the belongings of her
men and went through them like a tornado.

This accomplished, the outfit, though cut in half, was still a
formidable bulk. Charles and Hal went out in the evening and bought six
Outside dogs. These, added to the six of the original team, and Teek
and Koona, the huskies obtained at the Rink Rapids on the record trip,
brought the team up to fourteen. But the Outside dogs, though
practically broken in since their landing, did not amount to much.
Three were short-haired pointers, one was a Newfoundland, and the other
two were mongrels of indeterminate breed. They did not seem to know
anything, these newcomers. Buck and his comrades looked upon them with
disgust, and though he speedily taught them their places and what not
to do, he could not teach them what to do. They did not take kindly to
trace and trail. With the exception of the two mongrels, they were
bewildered and spirit-broken by the strange savage environment in which
they found themselves and by the ill treatment they had received. The
two mongrels were without spirit at all; bones were the only things
breakable about them.

With the newcomers hopeless and forlorn, and the old team worn out by
twenty-five hundred miles of continuous trail, the outlook was anything
but bright. The two men, however, were quite cheerful. And they were
proud, too. They were doing the thing in style, with fourteen dogs.
They had seen other sleds depart over the Pass for Dawson, or come in
from Dawson, but never had they seen a sled with so many as fourteen
dogs. In the nature of Arctic travel there was a reason why fourteen
dogs should not drag one sled, and that was that one sled could not
carry the food for fourteen dogs. But Charles and Hal did not know
this. They had worked the trip out with a pencil, so much to a dog, so
many dogs, so many days, Q.E.D. Mercedes looked over their shoulders
and nodded comprehensively, it was all so very simple.

Late next morning Buck led the long team up the street. There was
nothing lively about it, no snap or go in him and his fellows. They
were starting dead weary. Four times he had covered the distance
between Salt Water and Dawson, and the knowledge that, jaded and tired,
he was facing the same trail once more, made him bitter. His heart was
not in the work, nor was the heart of any dog. The Outsides were timid
and frightened, the Insides without confidence in their masters.

Buck felt vaguely that there was no depending upon these two men and
the woman. They did not know how to do anything, and as the days went
by it became apparent that they could not learn. They were slack in all
things, without order or discipline. It took them half the night to
pitch a slovenly camp, and half the morning to break that camp and get
the sled loaded in fashion so slovenly that for the rest of the day
they were occupied in stopping and rearranging the load. Some days they
did not make ten miles. On other days they were unable to get started
at all. And on no day did they succeed in making more than half the
distance used by the men as a basis in their dog-food computation.

It was inevitable that they should go short on dog-food. But they
hastened it by overfeeding, bringing the day nearer when underfeeding
would commence. The Outside dogs, whose digestions had not been trained
by chronic famine to make the most of little, had voracious appetites.
And when, in addition to this, the worn-out huskies pulled weakly, Hal
decided that the orthodox ration was too small. He doubled it. And to
cap it all, when Mercedes, with tears in her pretty eyes and a quaver
in her throat, could not cajole him into giving the dogs still more,
she stole from the fish-sacks and fed them slyly. But it was not food
that Buck and the huskies needed, but rest. And though they were making
poor time, the heavy load they dragged sapped their strength severely.

Then came the underfeeding. Hal awoke one day to the fact that his
dog-food was half gone and the distance only quarter covered; further,
that for love or money no additional dog-food was to be obtained. So he
cut down even the orthodox ration and tried to increase the day’s
travel. His sister and brother-in-law seconded him; but they were
frustrated by their heavy outfit and their own incompetence. It was a
simple matter to give the dogs less food; but it was impossible to make
the dogs travel faster, while their own inability to get under way
earlier in the morning prevented them from travelling longer hours. Not
only did they not know how to work dogs, but they did not know how to
work themselves.

The first to go was Dub. Poor blundering thief that he was, always
getting caught and punished, he had none the less been a faithful
worker. His wrenched shoulder-blade, untreated and unrested, went from
bad to worse, till finally Hal shot him with the big Colt’s revolver.
It is a saying of the country that an Outside dog starves to death on
the ration of the husky, so the six Outside dogs under Buck could do no
less than die on half the ration of the husky. The Newfoundland went
first, followed by the three short-haired pointers, the two mongrels
hanging more grittily on to life, but going in the end.

By this time all the amenities and gentlenesses of the Southland had
fallen away from the three people. Shorn of its glamour and romance,
Arctic travel became to them a reality too harsh for their manhood and
womanhood. Mercedes ceased weeping over the dogs, being too occupied
with weeping over herself and with quarrelling with her husband and
brother. To quarrel was the one thing they were never too weary to do.
Their irritability arose out of their misery, increased with it,
doubled upon it, outdistanced it. The wonderful patience of the trail
which comes to men who toil hard and suffer sore, and remain sweet of
speech and kindly, did not come to these two men and the woman. They
had no inkling of such a patience. They were stiff and in pain; their
muscles ached, their bones ached, their very hearts ached; and because
of this they became sharp of speech, and hard words were first on their
lips in the morning and last at night.

Charles and Hal wrangled whenever Mercedes gave them a chance. It was
the cherished belief of each that he did more than his share of the
work, and neither forbore to speak this belief at every opportunity.
Sometimes Mercedes sided with her husband, sometimes with her brother.
The result was a beautiful and unending family quarrel. Starting from a
dispute as to which should chop a few sticks for the fire (a dispute
which concerned only Charles and Hal), presently would be lugged in the
rest of the family, fathers, mothers, uncles, cousins, people thousands
of miles away, and some of them dead. That Hal’s views on art, or the
sort of society plays his mother’s brother wrote, should have anything
to do with the chopping of a few sticks of firewood, passes
comprehension; nevertheless the quarrel was as likely to tend in that
direction as in the direction of Charles’s political prejudices. And
that Charles’s sister’s tale-bearing tongue should be relevant to the
building of a Yukon fire, was apparent only to Mercedes, who
disburdened herself of copious opinions upon that topic, and
incidentally upon a few other traits unpleasantly peculiar to her
husband’s family. In the meantime the fire remained unbuilt, the camp
half pitched, and the dogs unfed.

Mercedes nursed a special grievance—the grievance of sex. She was
pretty and soft, and had been chivalrously treated all her days. But
the present treatment by her husband and brother was everything save
chivalrous. It was her custom to be helpless. They complained. Upon
which impeachment of what to her was her most essential
sex-prerogative, she made their lives unendurable. She no longer
considered the dogs, and because she was sore and tired, she persisted
in riding on the sled. She was pretty and soft, but she weighed one
hundred and twenty pounds—a lusty last straw to the load dragged by the
weak and starving animals. She rode for days, till they fell in the
traces and the sled stood still. Charles and Hal begged her to get off
and walk, pleaded with her, entreated, the while she wept and
importuned Heaven with a recital of their brutality.

On one occasion they took her off the sled by main strength. They never
did it again. She let her legs go limp like a spoiled child, and sat
down on the trail. They went on their way, but she did not move. After
they had travelled three miles they unloaded the sled, came back for
her, and by main strength put her on the sled again.

In the excess of their own misery they were callous to the suffering of
their animals. Hal’s theory, which he practised on others, was that one
must get hardened. He had started out preaching it to his sister and
brother-in-law. Failing there, he hammered it into the dogs with a
club. At the Five Fingers the dog-food gave out, and a toothless old
squaw offered to trade them a few pounds of frozen horse-hide for the
Colt’s revolver that kept the big hunting-knife company at Hal’s hip. A
poor substitute for food was this hide, just as it had been stripped
from the starved horses of the cattlemen six months back. In its frozen
state it was more like strips of galvanized iron, and when a dog
wrestled it into his stomach it thawed into thin and innutritious
leathery strings and into a mass of short hair, irritating and
indigestible.

And through it all Buck staggered along at the head of the team as in a
nightmare. He pulled when he could; when he could no longer pull, he
fell down and remained down till blows from whip or club drove him to
his feet again. All the stiffness and gloss had gone out of his
beautiful furry coat. The hair hung down, limp and draggled, or matted
with dried blood where Hal’s club had bruised him. His muscles had
wasted away to knotty strings, and the flesh pads had disappeared, so
that each rib and every bone in his frame were outlined cleanly through
the loose hide that was wrinkled in folds of emptiness. It was
heartbreaking, only Buck’s heart was unbreakable. The man in the red
sweater had proved that.

As it was with Buck, so was it with his mates. They were perambulating
skeletons. There were seven all together, including him. In their very
great misery they had become insensible to the bite of the lash or the
bruise of the club. The pain of the beating was dull and distant, just
as the things their eyes saw and their ears heard seemed dull and
distant. They were not half living, or quarter living. They were simply
so many bags of bones in which sparks of life fluttered faintly. When a
halt was made, they dropped down in the traces like dead dogs, and the
spark dimmed and paled and seemed to go out. And when the club or whip
fell upon them, the spark fluttered feebly up, and they tottered to
their feet and staggered on.

There came a day when Billee, the good-natured, fell and could not
rise. Hal had traded off his revolver, so he took the axe and knocked
Billee on the head as he lay in the traces, then cut the carcass out of
the harness and dragged it to one side. Buck saw, and his mates saw,
and they knew that this thing was very close to them. On the next day
Koona went, and but five of them remained: Joe, too far gone to be
malignant; Pike, crippled and limping, only half conscious and not
conscious enough longer to malinger; Sol-leks, the one-eyed, still
faithful to the toil of trace and trail, and mournful in that he had so
little strength with which to pull; Teek, who had not travelled so far
that winter and who was now beaten more than the others because he was
fresher; and Buck, still at the head of the team, but no longer
enforcing discipline or striving to enforce it, blind with weakness
half the time and keeping the trail by the loom of it and by the dim
feel of his feet.

It was beautiful spring weather, but neither dogs nor humans were aware
of it. Each day the sun rose earlier and set later. It was dawn by
three in the morning, and twilight lingered till nine at night. The
whole long day was a blaze of sunshine. The ghostly winter silence had
given way to the great spring murmur of awakening life. This murmur
arose from all the land, fraught with the joy of living. It came from
the things that lived and moved again, things which had been as dead
and which had not moved during the long months of frost. The sap was
rising in the pines. The willows and aspens were bursting out in young
buds. Shrubs and vines were putting on fresh garbs of green. Crickets
sang in the nights, and in the days all manner of creeping, crawling
things rustled forth into the sun. Partridges and woodpeckers were
booming and knocking in the forest. Squirrels were chattering, birds
singing, and overhead honked the wild-fowl driving up from the south in
cunning wedges that split the air.

From every hill slope came the trickle of running water, the music of
unseen fountains. 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.




Chapter VI. For the Love of a Man


When John Thornton froze his feet in the previous December his partners
had made him comfortable and left him to get well, going on themselves
up the river to get out a raft of saw-logs for Dawson. He was still
limping slightly at the time he rescued Buck, but with the continued
warm weather even the slight limp left him. And here, lying by the
river bank through the long spring days, watching the running water,
listening lazily to the songs of birds and the hum of nature, Buck
slowly won back his strength.

A rest comes very good after one has travelled three thousand miles,
and it must be confessed that Buck waxed lazy as his wounds healed, his
muscles swelled out, and the flesh came back to cover his bones. For
that matter, they were all loafing,—Buck, John Thornton, and Skeet and
Nig,—waiting for the raft to come that was to carry them down to
Dawson. Skeet was a little Irish setter who early made friends with
Buck, who, in a dying condition, was unable to resent her first
advances. She had the doctor trait which some dogs possess; and as a
mother cat washes her kittens, so she washed and cleansed Buck’s
wounds. Regularly, each morning after he had finished his breakfast,
she performed her self-appointed task, till he came to look for her
ministrations as much as he did for Thornton’s. Nig, equally friendly,
though less demonstrative, was a huge black dog, half bloodhound and
half deerhound, with eyes that laughed and a boundless good nature.

To Buck’s surprise these dogs manifested no jealousy toward him. They
seemed to share the kindliness and largeness of John Thornton. As Buck
grew stronger they enticed him into all sorts of ridiculous games, in
which Thornton himself could not forbear to join; and in this fashion
Buck romped through his convalescence and into a new existence. Love,
genuine passionate love, was his for the first time. This he had never
experienced at Judge Miller’s down in the sun-kissed Santa Clara
Valley. With the Judge’s sons, hunting and tramping, it had been a
working partnership; with the Judge’s grandsons, a sort of pompous
guardianship; and with the Judge himself, a stately and dignified
friendship. But love that was feverish and burning, that was adoration,
that was madness, it had taken John Thornton to arouse.

This man had saved his life, which was something; but, further, he was
the ideal master. Other men saw to the welfare of their dogs from a
sense of duty and business expediency; he saw to the welfare of his as
if they were his own children, because he could not help it. And he saw
further. He never forgot a kindly greeting or a cheering word, and to
sit down for a long talk with them (“gas” he called it) was as much his
delight as theirs. He had a way of taking Buck’s head roughly between
his hands, and resting his own head upon Buck’s, of shaking him back
and forth, the while calling him ill names that to Buck were love
names. Buck knew no greater joy than that rough embrace and the sound
of murmured oaths, and at each jerk back and forth it seemed that his
heart would be shaken out of his body so great was its ecstasy. And
when, released, he sprang to his feet, his mouth laughing, his eyes
eloquent, his throat vibrant with unuttered sound, and in that fashion
remained without movement, John Thornton would reverently exclaim,
“God! you can all but speak!”

Buck had a trick of love expression that was akin to hurt. He would
often seize Thornton’s hand in his mouth and close so fiercely that the
flesh bore the impress of his teeth for some time afterward. And as
Buck understood the oaths to be love words, so the man understood this
feigned bite for a caress.

For the most part, however, Buck’s love was expressed in adoration.
While he went wild with happiness when Thornton touched him or spoke to
him, he did not seek these tokens. Unlike Skeet, who was wont to shove
her nose under Thornton’s hand and nudge and nudge till petted, or Nig,
who would stalk up and rest his great head on Thornton’s knee, Buck was
content to adore at a distance. He would lie by the hour, eager, alert,
at Thornton’s feet, looking up into his face, dwelling upon it,
studying it, following with keenest interest each fleeting expression,
every movement or change of feature. Or, as chance might have it, he
would lie farther away, to the side or rear, watching the outlines of
the man and the occasional movements of his body. And often, such was
the communion in which they lived, the strength of Buck’s gaze would
draw John Thornton’s head around, and he would return the gaze, without
speech, his heart shining out of his eyes as Buck’s heart shone out.

For a long time after his rescue, Buck did not like Thornton to get out
of his sight. From the moment he left the tent to when he entered it
again, Buck would follow at his heels. His transient masters since he
had come into the Northland had bred in him a fear that no master could
be permanent. He was afraid that Thornton would pass out of his life as
Perrault and 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 civilizing influence, the strain of the primitive,
which the Northland had aroused in him, remained alive and active.
Faithfulness and devotion, things born of fire and roof, were his; yet
he retained his wildness and wiliness. He was a thing of the wild, come
in from the wild to sit by John Thornton’s fire, rather than a dog of
the soft Southland stamped with the marks of generations of
civilization. Because of his very great love, he could not steal from
this man, but from any other man, in any other camp, he did not
hesitate an instant; while the cunning with which he stole enabled him
to escape detection.

His face and body were scored by the teeth of many dogs, and he fought
as fiercely as ever and more shrewdly. Skeet and Nig were too
good-natured for quarrelling,—besides, they belonged to John Thornton;
but the strange dog, no matter what the breed or valor, swiftly
acknowledged Buck’s supremacy or found himself struggling for life with
a terrible antagonist. And Buck was merciless. He had learned well the
law of club and fang, and he never forewent an advantage or drew back
from a foe he had started on the way to Death. He had lessoned from
Spitz, and from the chief fighting dogs of the police and mail, and
knew there was no middle course. He must master or be mastered; while
to show mercy was a weakness. Mercy did not exist in the primordial
life. It was misunderstood for fear, and such misunderstandings made
for death. Kill or be killed, eat or be eaten, was the law; and this
mandate, down out of the depths of Time, he obeyed.

He was older than the days he had seen and the breaths he had drawn. He
linked the past with the present, and the eternity behind him throbbed
through him in a mighty rhythm to which he swayed as the tides and
seasons swayed. He sat by John Thornton’s fire, a broad-breasted dog,
white-fanged and long-furred; but behind him were the shades of all
manner of dogs, half-wolves and wild wolves, urgent and prompting,
tasting the savor of the meat he ate, thirsting for the water he drank,
scenting the wind with him, listening with him and telling him the
sounds made by the wild life in the forest, dictating his moods,
directing his actions, lying down to sleep with him when he lay down,
and dreaming with him and beyond him and becoming themselves the stuff
of his dreams.

So peremptorily did these shades beckon him, that each day mankind and
the claims of mankind slipped farther from him. Deep in the forest a
call was sounding, and as often as he heard this call, mysteriously
thrilling and luring, he felt compelled to turn his back upon the fire
and the beaten earth around it, and to plunge into the forest, and on
and on, he knew not where or why; nor did he wonder where or why, the
call sounding imperiously, deep in the forest. But as often as he
gained the soft unbroken earth and the green shade, the love for John
Thornton drew him back to the fire again.

Thornton alone held him. The rest of mankind was as nothing. Chance
travellers might praise or pet him; but he was cold under it all, and
from a too demonstrative man he would get up and walk away. When
Thornton’s partners, Hans and Pete, arrived on the long-expected raft,
Buck refused to notice them till he learned they were close to
Thornton; after that he tolerated them in a passive sort of way,
accepting favors from them as though he favored them by accepting. They
were of the same large type as Thornton, living close to the earth,
thinking simply and seeing clearly; and ere they swung the raft into
the big eddy by the saw-mill at Dawson, they understood Buck and his
ways, and did not insist upon an intimacy such as obtained with Skeet
and Nig.

For Thornton, however, his love seemed to grow and grow. He, alone
among men, could put a pack upon Buck’s back in the summer travelling.
Nothing was too great for Buck to do, when Thornton commanded. One day
(they had grub-staked themselves from the proceeds of the raft and left
Dawson for the head-waters of the Tanana) the men and dogs were sitting
on the crest of a cliff which fell away, straight down, to naked
bed-rock three hundred feet below. John Thornton was sitting near the
edge, Buck at his shoulder. A thoughtless whim seized Thornton, and he
drew the attention of Hans and Pete to the experiment he had in mind.
“Jump, Buck!” he commanded, sweeping his arm out and over the chasm.
The next instant he was grappling with Buck on the extreme edge, while
Hans and Pete were dragging them back into safety.

“It’s uncanny,” Pete said, after it was over and they had caught their
speech.

Thornton shook his head. “No, it is splendid, and it is terrible, too.
Do you know, it sometimes makes me afraid.”

“I’m not hankering to be the man that lays hands on you while he’s
around,” Pete announced conclusively, nodding his head toward Buck.

“Py Jingo!” was Hans’s contribution. “Not mineself either.”

It was at Circle City, ere the year was out, that Pete’s apprehensions
were realized. “Black” Burton, a man evil-tempered and malicious, had
been picking a quarrel with a tenderfoot at the bar, when Thornton
stepped good-naturedly between. Buck, as was his custom, was lying in a
corner, head on paws, watching his master’s every action. Burton struck
out, without warning, straight from the shoulder. Thornton was sent
spinning, and saved himself from falling only by clutching the rail of
the bar.

Those who were looking on heard what was neither bark nor yelp, but a
something which is best described as a roar, and they saw Buck’s body
rise up in the air as he left the floor for Burton’s throat. The man
saved his life by instinctively throwing out his arm, but was hurled
backward to the floor with Buck on top of him. Buck loosed his teeth
from the flesh of the arm and drove in again for the throat. This time
the man succeeded only in partly blocking, and his throat was torn
open. Then the crowd was upon Buck, and he was driven off; but while a
surgeon checked the bleeding, he prowled up and down, growling
furiously, attempting to rush in, and being forced back by an array of
hostile clubs. A “miners’ meeting,” called on the spot, decided that
the dog had sufficient provocation, and Buck was discharged. But his
reputation was made, and from that day his name spread through every
camp in Alaska.

Later on, in the fall of the year, he saved John Thornton’s life in
quite another fashion. The three partners were lining a long and narrow
poling-boat down a bad stretch of rapids on the Forty-Mile Creek. Hans
and Pete moved along the bank, snubbing with a thin Manila rope from
tree to tree, while Thornton remained in the boat, helping its descent
by means of a pole, and shouting directions to the shore. Buck, on the
bank, worried and anxious, kept abreast of the boat, his eyes never off
his master.

At a particularly bad spot, where a ledge of barely submerged rocks
jutted out into the river, Hans cast off the rope, and, while Thornton
poled the boat out into the stream, ran down the bank with the end in
his hand to snub the boat when it had cleared the ledge. This it did,
and was flying down-stream in a current as swift as a mill-race, when
Hans checked it with the rope and checked too suddenly. The boat
flirted over and snubbed in to the bank bottom up, while Thornton,
flung sheer out of it, was carried down-stream toward the worst part of
the rapids, a stretch of wild water in which no swimmer could live.

Buck had sprung in on the instant; and at the end of three hundred
yards, amid a mad swirl of water, he overhauled Thornton. When he felt
him grasp his tail, Buck headed for the bank, swimming with all his
splendid strength. But the progress shoreward was slow; the progress
down-stream amazingly rapid. From below came the fatal roaring where
the wild current went wilder and was rent in shreds and spray by the
rocks which thrust through like the teeth of an enormous comb. The suck
of the water as it took the beginning of the last steep pitch was
frightful, and Thornton knew that the shore was impossible. He scraped
furiously over a rock, bruised across a second, and struck a third with
crushing force. He clutched its slippery top with both hands, releasing
Buck, and above the roar of the churning water shouted: “Go, Buck! Go!”

Buck could not hold his own, and swept on down-stream, struggling
desperately, but unable to win back. When he heard Thornton’s command
repeated, he partly reared out of the water, throwing his head high, as
though for a last look, then turned obediently toward the bank. He swam
powerfully and was dragged ashore by Pete and Hans at the very point
where swimming ceased to be possible and destruction began.

They knew that the time a man could cling to a slippery rock in the
face of that driving current was a matter of minutes, and they ran as
fast as they could up the bank to a point far above where Thornton was
hanging on. They attached the line with which they had been snubbing
the boat to Buck’s neck and shoulders, being careful that it should
neither strangle him nor impede his swimming, and launched him into the
stream. He struck out boldly, but not straight enough into the stream.
He discovered the mistake too late, when Thornton was abreast of him
and a bare half-dozen strokes away while he was being carried
helplessly past.

Hans promptly snubbed with the rope, as though Buck were a boat. The
rope thus tightening on him in the sweep of the current, he was jerked
under the surface, and under the surface he remained till his body
struck against the bank and he was hauled out. He was half drowned, and
Hans and Pete threw themselves upon him, pounding the breath into him
and the water out of him. He staggered to his feet and fell down. The
faint sound of Thornton’s voice came to them, and though they could not
make out the words of it, they knew that he was in his extremity. His
master’s voice acted on Buck like an electric shock, He sprang to his
feet and ran up the bank ahead of the men to the point of his previous
departure.

Again the rope was attached and he was launched, and again he struck
out, but this time straight into the stream. He had miscalculated once,
but he would not be guilty of it a second time. Hans paid out the rope,
permitting no slack, while Pete kept it clear of coils. Buck held on
till he was on a line straight above Thornton; then he turned, and with
the speed of an express train headed down upon him. Thornton saw him
coming, and, as Buck struck him like a battering ram, with the whole
force of the current behind him, he reached up and closed with both
arms around the shaggy neck. Hans snubbed the rope around the tree, and
Buck and Thornton were jerked under the water. Strangling, suffocating,
sometimes one uppermost and sometimes the other, dragging over the
jagged bottom, smashing against rocks and snags, they veered in to the
bank.

Thornton came to, belly downward and being violently propelled back and
forth across a drift log by Hans and Pete. His first glance was for
Buck, over whose limp and apparently lifeless body Nig was setting up a
howl, while Skeet was licking the wet face and closed eyes. Thornton
was himself bruised and battered, and he went carefully over Buck’s
body, when he had been brought around, finding three broken ribs.

“That settles it,” he announced. “We camp right here.” And camp they
did, till Buck’s ribs knitted and he was able to travel.

That winter, at Dawson, Buck performed another exploit, not so heroic,
perhaps, but one that put his name many notches higher on the
totem-pole of Alaskan fame. This exploit was particularly gratifying to
the three men; for they stood in need of the outfit which it furnished,
and were enabled to make a long-desired trip into the virgin East,
where miners had not yet appeared. It was brought about by a
conversation in the Eldorado Saloon, in which men waxed boastful of
their favorite dogs. Buck, because of his record, was the target for
these men, and Thornton was driven stoutly to defend him. At the end of
half an hour one man stated that his dog could start a sled with five
hundred pounds and walk off with it; a second bragged six hundred for
his dog; and a third, seven hundred.

“Pooh! pooh!” said John Thornton; “Buck can start a thousand pounds.”

“And break it out? and walk off with it for a hundred yards?” demanded
Matthewson, a Bonanza King, he of the seven hundred vaunt.

“And break it out, and walk off with it for a hundred yards,” John
Thornton said coolly.

“Well,” Matthewson said, slowly and deliberately, so that all could
hear, “I’ve got a thousand dollars that says he can’t. And there it
is.” So saying, he slammed a sack of gold dust of the size of a bologna
sausage down upon the bar.

Nobody spoke. Thornton’s bluff, if bluff it was, had been called. He
could feel a flush of warm blood creeping up his face. His tongue had
tricked him. He did not know whether Buck could start a thousand
pounds. Half a ton! The enormousness of it appalled him. He had great
faith in Buck’s strength and had often thought him capable of starting
such a load; but never, as now, had he faced the possibility of it, the
eyes of a dozen men fixed upon him, silent and waiting. Further, he had
no thousand dollars; nor had Hans or Pete.

“I’ve got a sled standing outside now, with twenty fiftypound sacks of
flour on it,” Matthewson went on with brutal directness; “so don’t let
that hinder you.”

Thornton did not reply. He did not know what to say. He glanced from
face to face in the absent way of a man who has lost the power of
thought and is seeking somewhere to find the thing that will start it
going again. The face of Jim O’Brien, a Mastodon King and old-time
comrade, caught his eyes. It was as a cue to him, seeming to rouse him
to do what he would never have dreamed of doing.

“Can you lend me a thousand?” he asked, almost in a whisper.

“Sure,” answered O’Brien, thumping down a plethoric sack by the side of
Matthewson’s. “Though it’s little faith I’m having, John, that the
beast can do the trick.”

The Eldorado emptied its occupants into the street to see the test. The
tables were deserted, and the dealers and gamekeepers came forth to see
the outcome of the wager and to lay odds. Several hundred men, furred
and mittened, banked around the sled within easy distance. Matthewson’s
sled, loaded with a thousand pounds of flour, had been standing for a
couple of hours, and in the intense cold (it was sixty below zero) the
runners had frozen fast to the hard-packed snow. Men offered odds of
two to one that Buck could not budge the sled. A quibble arose
concerning the phrase “break out.” O’Brien contended it was Thornton’s
privilege to knock the runners loose, leaving Buck to “break it out”
from a dead standstill. Matthewson insisted that the phrase included
breaking the runners from the frozen grip of the snow. A majority of
the men who had witnessed the making of the bet decided in his favor,
whereat the odds went up to three to one against Buck.

There were no takers. Not a man believed him capable of the feat.
Thornton had been hurried into the wager, heavy with doubt; and now
that he looked at the sled itself, the concrete fact, with the regular
team of ten dogs curled up in the snow before it, the more impossible
the task appeared. Matthewson waxed jubilant.

“Three to one!” he proclaimed. “I’ll lay you another thousand at that
figure, Thornton. What d’ye say?”

Thornton’s doubt was strong in his face, but his fighting spirit was
aroused—the fighting spirit that soars above odds, fails to recognize
the impossible, and is deaf to all save the clamor for battle. He
called Hans and Pete to him. Their sacks were slim, and with his own
the three partners could rake together only two hundred dollars. In the
ebb of their fortunes, this sum was their total capital; yet they laid
it unhesitatingly against Matthewson’s six hundred.

The team of ten dogs was unhitched, and Buck, with his own harness, was
put into the sled. He had caught the contagion of the excitement, and
he felt that in some way he must do a great thing for John Thornton.
Murmurs of admiration at his splendid appearance went up. He was in
perfect condition, without an ounce of superfluous flesh, and the one
hundred and fifty pounds that he weighed were so many pounds of grit
and virility. His furry coat shone with the sheen of silk. Down the
neck and across the shoulders, his mane, in repose as it was, half
bristled and seemed to lift with every movement, as though excess of
vigor made each particular hair alive and active. The great breast and
heavy fore legs were no more than in proportion with the rest of the
body, where the muscles showed in tight rolls underneath the skin. Men
felt these muscles and proclaimed them hard as iron, and the odds went
down to two to one.

“Gad, sir! Gad, sir!” stuttered a member of the latest dynasty, a king
of the Skookum Benches. “I offer you eight hundred for him, sir, before
the test, sir; eight hundred just as he stands.”

Thornton shook his head and stepped to Buck’s side.

“You must stand off from him,” Matthewson protested. “Free play and
plenty of room.”

The crowd fell silent; only could be heard the voices of the gamblers
vainly offering two to one. Everybody acknowledged Buck a magnificent
animal, but twenty fifty-pound sacks of flour bulked too large in their
eyes for them to loosen their pouch-strings.

Thornton knelt down by Buck’s side. He took his head in his two hands
and rested cheek on cheek. He did not playfully shake him, as was his
wont, or murmur soft love curses; but he whispered in his ear. “As you
love me, Buck. As you love me,” was what he whispered. Buck whined with
suppressed eagerness.

The crowd was watching curiously. The affair was growing mysterious. It
seemed like a conjuration. As Thornton got to his feet, Buck seized his
mittened hand between his jaws, pressing in with his teeth and
releasing slowly, half-reluctantly. It was the answer, in terms, not of
speech, but of love. Thornton stepped well back.

“Now, Buck,” he said.

Buck tightened the traces, then slacked them for a matter of several
inches. It was the way he had learned.

“Gee!” Thornton’s voice rang out, sharp in the tense silence.

Buck swung to the right, ending the movement in a plunge that took up
the slack and with a sudden jerk arrested his one hundred and fifty
pounds. The load quivered, and from under the runners arose a crisp
crackling.

“Haw!” Thornton commanded.

Buck duplicated the manœuvre, this time to the left. The crackling
turned into a snapping, the sled pivoting and the runners slipping and
grating several inches to the side. The sled was broken out. Men were
holding their breaths, intensely unconscious of the fact.

“Now, MUSH!”

Thornton’s command cracked out like a pistol-shot. Buck threw himself
forward, tightening the traces with a jarring lunge. His whole body was
gathered compactly together in the tremendous effort, the muscles
writhing and knotting like live things under the silky fur. His great
chest was low to the ground, his head forward and down, while his feet
were flying like mad, the claws scarring the hard-packed snow in
parallel grooves. The sled swayed and trembled, half-started forward.
One of his feet slipped, and one man groaned aloud. Then the sled
lurched ahead in what appeared a rapid succession of jerks, though it
never really came to a dead stop again...half an inch...an inch... two
inches... The jerks perceptibly diminished; as the sled gained
momentum, he caught them up, till it was moving steadily along.

Men gasped and began to breathe again, unaware that for a moment they
had ceased to breathe. Thornton was running behind, encouraging Buck
with short, cheery words. The distance had been measured off, and as he
neared the pile of firewood which marked the end of the hundred yards,
a cheer began to grow and grow, which burst into a roar as he passed
the firewood and halted at command. Every man was tearing himself
loose, even Matthewson. Hats and mittens were flying in the air. Men
were shaking hands, it did not matter with whom, and bubbling over in a
general incoherent babel.

But Thornton fell on his knees beside Buck. Head was against head, and
he was shaking him back and forth. Those who hurried up heard him
cursing Buck, and he cursed him long and fervently, and softly and
lovingly.

“Gad, sir! Gad, sir!” spluttered the Skookum Bench king. “I’ll give you
a thousand for him, sir, a thousand, sir—twelve hundred, sir.”

Thornton rose to his feet. His eyes were wet. The tears were streaming
frankly down his cheeks. “Sir,” he said to the Skookum Bench king, “no,
sir. You can go to hell, sir. It’s the best I can do for you, sir.”

Buck seized Thornton’s hand in his teeth. Thornton shook him back and
forth. As though animated by a common impulse, the onlookers drew back
to a respectful distance; nor were they again indiscreet enough to
interrupt.




Chapter VII. The Sounding of the Call


When Buck earned sixteen hundred dollars in five minutes for John
Thornton, he made it possible for his master to pay off certain debts
and to journey with his partners into the East after a fabled lost
mine, the history of which was as old as the history of the country.
Many men had sought it; few had found it; and more than a few there
were who had never returned from the quest. This lost mine was steeped
in tragedy and shrouded in mystery. No one knew of the first man. The
oldest tradition stopped before it got back to him. From the beginning
there had been an ancient and ramshackle cabin. Dying men had sworn to
it, and to the mine the site of which it marked, clinching their
testimony with nuggets that were unlike any known grade of gold in the
Northland.

But no living man had looted this treasure house, and the dead were
dead; wherefore John Thornton and Pete and Hans, with Buck and half a
dozen other dogs, faced into the East on an unknown trail to achieve
where men and dogs as good as themselves had failed. They sledded
seventy miles up the Yukon, swung to the left into the Stewart River,
passed the Mayo and the McQuestion, and held on until the Stewart
itself became a streamlet, threading the upstanding peaks which marked
the backbone of the continent.

John Thornton asked little of man or nature. He was unafraid of the
wild. With a handful of salt and a rifle he could plunge into the
wilderness and fare wherever he pleased and as long as he pleased.
Being in no haste, Indian fashion, he hunted his dinner in the course
of the day’s travel; and if he failed to find it, like the Indian, he
kept on travelling, secure in the knowledge that sooner or later he
would come to it. So, on this great journey into the East, straight
meat was the bill of fare, ammunition and tools principally made up the
load on the sled, and the time-card was drawn upon the limitless
future.

To Buck it was boundless delight, this hunting, fishing, and indefinite
wandering through strange places. For weeks at a time they would hold
on steadily, day after day; and for weeks upon end they would camp,
here and there, the dogs loafing and the men burning holes through
frozen muck and gravel and washing countless pans of dirt by the heat
of the fire. Sometimes they went hungry, sometimes they feasted
riotously, all according to the abundance of game and the fortune of
hunting. Summer arrived, and dogs and men packed on their backs, rafted
across blue mountain lakes, and descended or ascended unknown rivers in
slender boats whipsawed from the standing forest.

The months came and went, and back and forth they twisted through the
uncharted vastness, where no men were and yet where men had been if the
Lost Cabin were true. They went across divides in summer blizzards,
shivered under the midnight sun on naked mountains between the timber
line and the eternal snows, dropped into summer valleys amid swarming
gnats and flies, and in the shadows of glaciers picked strawberries and
flowers as ripe and fair as any the Southland could boast. In the fall
of the year they penetrated a weird lake country, sad and silent, where
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 where the niggerheads bunched. He loved to run
down dry watercourses, and to creep and spy upon the bird life in the
woods. For a day at a time he would lie in the underbrush where he
could watch the partridges drumming and strutting up and down. But
especially he loved to run in the dim twilight of the summer midnights,
listening to the subdued and sleepy murmurs of the forest, reading
signs and sounds as man may read a book, and seeking for the mysterious
something that called—called, waking or sleeping, at all times, for him
to come.

One night he sprang from sleep with a start, eager-eyed, nostrils
quivering and scenting, his mane bristling in recurrent waves. From the
forest came the call (or one note of it, for the call was many noted),
distinct and definite as never before,—a long-drawn howl, like, yet
unlike, any noise made by husky dog. And he knew it, in the old
familiar way, as a sound heard before. He sprang through the sleeping
camp and in swift silence dashed through the woods. As he drew closer
to the cry he went more slowly, with caution in every movement, till he
came to an open place among the trees, and looking out saw, erect on
haunches, with nose pointed to the sky, a long, lean, timber wolf.

He had made no noise, yet it ceased from its howling and tried to sense
his presence. Buck stalked into the open, half crouching, body gathered
compactly together, tail straight and stiff, feet falling with unwonted
care. Every movement advertised commingled threatening and overture of
friendliness. It was the menacing truce that marks the meeting of wild
beasts that prey. But the wolf fled at sight of him. He followed, with
wild leapings, in a frenzy to overtake. He ran him into a blind
channel, in the bed of the creek where a timber jam barred the way. The
wolf whirled about, pivoting on his hind legs after the fashion of Joe
and of all cornered husky dogs, snarling and bristling, clipping his
teeth together in a continuous and rapid succession of snaps.

Buck did not attack, but circled him about and hedged him in with
friendly advances. The wolf was suspicious and afraid; for Buck made
three of him in weight, while his head barely reached Buck’s shoulder.
Watching his chance, he darted away, and the chase was resumed. Time
and again he was cornered, and the thing repeated, though he was in
poor condition, or Buck could not so easily have overtaken him. He
would run till Buck’s head was even with his flank, when he would whirl
around at bay, only to dash away again at the first opportunity.

But in the end Buck’s pertinacity was rewarded; for the wolf, finding
that no harm was intended, finally sniffed noses with him. Then they
became friendly, and played about in the nervous, half-coy way with
which fierce beasts belie their fierceness. After some time of this the
wolf started off at an easy lope in a manner that plainly showed he was
going somewhere. He made it clear to Buck that he was to come, and they
ran side by side through the sombre twilight, straight up the creek
bed, into the gorge from which it issued, and across the bleak divide
where it took its rise.

On the opposite slope of the watershed they came down into a level
country where were great stretches of forest and many streams, and
through these great stretches they ran steadily, hour after hour, the
sun rising higher and the day growing warmer. Buck was wildly glad. He
knew he was at last answering the call, running by the side of his wood
brother toward the place from where the call surely came. Old memories
were coming upon him fast, and he was stirring to them as of old he
stirred to the realities of which they were the shadows. He had done
this thing before, somewhere in that other and dimly remembered world,
and he was doing it again, now, running free in the open, the unpacked
earth underfoot, the wide sky overhead.

They stopped by a running stream to drink, and, stopping, Buck
remembered John Thornton. He sat down. The wolf started on toward the
place from where the call surely came, then returned to him, sniffing
noses and making actions as though to encourage him. But Buck turned
about and started slowly on the back track. For the better part of an
hour the wild brother ran by his side, whining softly. Then he sat
down, pointed his nose upward, and howled. It was a mournful howl, and
as Buck held steadily on his way he heard it grow faint and fainter
until it was lost in the distance.

John Thornton was eating dinner when Buck dashed into camp and sprang
upon him in a frenzy of affection, overturning him, scrambling upon
him, licking his face, biting his hand—“playing the general tom-fool,”
as John Thornton characterized it, the while he shook Buck back and
forth and cursed him lovingly.

For two days and nights Buck never left camp, never let Thornton out of
his sight. He followed him about at his work, watched him while he ate,
saw him into his blankets at night and out of them in the morning. But
after two days the call in the forest began to sound more imperiously
than ever. Buck’s restlessness came back on him, and he was haunted by
recollections of the wild brother, and of the smiling land beyond the
divide and the run side by side through the wide forest stretches. Once
again he took to wandering in the woods, but the wild brother came no
more; and though he listened through long vigils, the mournful howl was
never raised.

He began to sleep out at night, staying away from camp for days at a
time; and once he crossed the divide at the head of the creek and went
down into the land of timber and streams. There he wandered for a week,
seeking vainly for fresh sign of the wild brother, killing his meat as
he travelled and travelling with the long, easy lope that seems never
to tire. He fished for salmon in a broad stream that emptied somewhere
into the sea, and by this stream he killed a large black bear, blinded
by the mosquitoes while likewise fishing, and raging through the forest
helpless and terrible. Even so, it was a hard fight, and it aroused the
last latent remnants of Buck’s ferocity. And two days later, when he
returned to his kill and found a dozen wolverenes quarrelling over the
spoil, he scattered them like chaff; and those that fled left two
behind who would quarrel no more.

The blood-longing became stronger than ever before. He was a killer, a
thing that preyed, living on the things that lived, unaided, alone, by
virtue of his own strength and prowess, surviving triumphantly in a
hostile environment where only the strong survived. Because of all this
he became possessed of a great pride in himself, which communicated
itself like a contagion to his physical being. It advertised itself in
all his movements, was apparent in the play of every muscle, spoke
plainly as speech in the way he carried himself, and made his glorious
furry coat if anything more glorious. But for the stray brown on his
muzzle and above his eyes, and for the splash of white hair that ran
midmost down his chest, he might well have been mistaken for a gigantic
wolf, larger than the largest of the breed. From his St. Bernard father
he had inherited size and weight, but it was his shepherd mother who
had given shape to that size and weight. His muzzle was the long wolf
muzzle, save that 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 vigor 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 humor ran through his deeds, and it was
his delight to steal upon the squirrels, and, when he all but had them,
to let them go, chattering in mortal fear to the treetops.

As the fall of the year came on, the moose appeared in greater
abundance, moving slowly down to meet the winter in the lower and less
rigorous valleys. Buck had already dragged down a stray part-grown
calf; but he wished strongly for larger and more formidable quarry, and
he came upon it one day on the divide at the head of the creek. A band
of twenty moose had crossed over from the land of streams and timber,
and chief among them was a great bull. He was in a savage temper, and,
standing over six feet from the ground, was as formidable an antagonist
as even Buck could desire. Back and forth the bull tossed his great
palmated antlers, branching to fourteen points and embracing seven feet
within the tips. His small eyes burned with a vicious and bitter light,
while he roared with fury at sight of Buck.

From the bull’s side, just forward of the flank, protruded a feathered
arrow-end, which accounted for his savageness. Guided by that instinct
which came from the old hunting days of the primordial world, Buck
proceeded to cut the bull out from the herd. It was no slight task. He
would bark and dance about in front of the bull, just out of reach of
the great antlers and of the terrible splay hoofs which could have
stamped his life out with a single blow. Unable to turn his back on the
fanged danger and go on, the bull would be driven into paroxysms of
rage. At such moments he charged Buck, who retreated craftily, luring
him on by a simulated inability to escape. But when he was thus
separated from his fellows, two or three of the younger bulls would
charge back upon Buck and enable the wounded bull to rejoin the herd.

There is a patience of the wild—dogged, tireless, persistent as life
itself—that holds motionless for endless hours the spider in its web,
the snake in its coils, the panther in its ambuscade; this patience
belongs peculiarly to life when it hunts its living food; and it
belonged to Buck as he clung to the flank of the herd, retarding its
march, irritating the young bulls, worrying the cows with their
half-grown calves, and driving the wounded bull mad with helpless rage.
For half a day this continued. Buck multiplied himself, attacking from
all sides, enveloping the herd in a whirlwind of menace, cutting out
his victim as fast as it could rejoin its mates, wearing out the
patience of creatures preyed upon, which is a lesser patience than that
of creatures preying.

As the day wore along and the sun dropped to its bed in the northwest
(the darkness had come back and the fall nights were six hours long),
the young bulls retraced their steps more and more reluctantly to the
aid of their beset leader. The down-coming winter was harrying them on
to the lower levels, and it seemed they could never shake off this
tireless creature that held them back. Besides, it was not the life of
the herd, or of the young bulls, that was threatened. The life of only
one member was demanded, which was a remoter interest than their lives,
and in the end they were content to pay the toll.

As twilight fell the old bull stood with lowered head, watching his
mates—the cows he had known, the calves he had fathered, the bulls he
had mastered—as they shambled on at a rapid pace through the fading
light. He could not follow, for before his nose leaped the merciless
fanged terror that would not let him go. Three hundredweight more than
half a ton he weighed; he had lived a long, strong life, full of fight
and struggle, and at the end he faced death at the teeth of a creature
whose head did not reach beyond his great knuckled knees.

From then on, night and day, Buck never left his prey, never gave it a
moment’s rest, never permitted it to browse the leaves of trees or the
shoots of young birch and willow. Nor did he give the wounded bull
opportunity to slake his burning thirst in the slender trickling
streams they crossed. Often, in desperation, he burst into long
stretches of flight. At such times Buck did not attempt to stay him,
but loped easily at his heels, satisfied with the way the game was
played, lying down when the moose stood still, attacking him fiercely
when he strove to eat or drink.

The great head drooped more and more under its tree of horns, and the
shambling trot grew weak and weaker. He took to standing for long
periods, with nose to the ground and dejected ears dropped limply; and
Buck found more time in which to get water for himself and in which to
rest. At such moments, panting with red lolling tongue and with eyes
fixed upon the big bull, it appeared to Buck that a change was coming
over the face of things. He could feel a new stir in the land. As the
moose were coming into the land, other kinds of life were coming in.
Forest and stream and air seemed palpitant with their presence. The
news of it was borne in upon him, not by sight, or sound, or smell, but
by some other and subtler sense. He heard nothing, saw nothing, yet
knew that the land was somehow different; that through it strange
things were afoot and ranging; and he resolved to investigate after he
had finished the business in hand.

At last, at the end of the fourth day, he pulled the great moose down.
For a day and a night he remained by the kill, eating and sleeping,
turn and turn about. Then, rested, refreshed and strong, he turned his
face toward camp and John Thornton. He broke into the long easy lope,
and went on, hour after hour, never at loss for the tangled way,
heading straight home through strange country with a certitude of
direction that put man and his magnetic needle to shame.

As he held on he became more and more conscious of the new stir in the
land. There was life abroad in it different from the life which had
been there throughout the summer. No longer was this fact borne in upon
him in some subtle, mysterious way. The birds talked of it, the
squirrels chattered about it, the very breeze whispered of it. Several
times he stopped and drew in the fresh morning air in great sniffs,
reading a message which made him leap on with greater speed. He was
oppressed with a sense of calamity happening, if it were not calamity
already happened; and as he crossed the last watershed and dropped down
into the valley toward camp, he proceeded with greater caution.

Three miles away he came upon a fresh trail that sent his neck hair
rippling and bristling, It led straight toward camp and John Thornton.
Buck hurried on, swiftly and stealthily, every nerve straining and
tense, alert to the multitudinous details which told a story—all but
the end. His nose gave him a varying description of the passage of the
life on the heels of which he was travelling. He remarked the pregnant
silence of the forest. The bird life had flitted. The squirrels were in
hiding. One only he saw,—a sleek gray fellow, flattened against a gray
dead limb so that he seemed a part of it, a woody excrescence upon the
wood itself.

As Buck slid along with the obscureness of a gliding shadow, his nose
was jerked suddenly to the side as though a positive force had gripped
and pulled it. He followed the new scent into a thicket and found Nig.
He was lying on his side, dead where he had dragged himself, an arrow
protruding, head and feathers, from either side of his body.

A hundred yards farther on, Buck came upon one of the sled-dogs
Thornton had bought in Dawson. This dog was thrashing about in a
death-struggle, directly on the trail, and Buck passed around him
without stopping. From the camp came the faint sound of many voices,
rising and falling in a sing-song chant. Bellying forward to the edge
of the clearing, he found Hans, lying on his face, feathered with
arrows like a porcupine. At the same instant Buck peered out where the
spruce-bough lodge had been and saw what made his hair leap straight up
on his neck and shoulders. A gust of overpowering rage swept over him.
He did not know that he growled, but he growled aloud with a terrible
ferocity. For the last time in his life he allowed passion to usurp
cunning and reason, and it was because of his great love for John
Thornton that he lost his head.

The Yeehats were dancing about the wreckage of the spruce-bough lodge
when they heard a fearful roaring and saw rushing upon them an animal
the like of which they had never seen before. It was Buck, a live
hurricane of fury, hurling himself upon them in a frenzy to destroy. He
sprang at the foremost man (it was the chief of the Yeehats), ripping
the throat wide open till the rent jugular spouted a fountain of blood.
He did not pause to worry the victim, but ripped in passing, with the
next bound tearing wide the throat of a second man. There was no
withstanding him. He plunged about in their very midst, tearing,
rending, destroying, in constant and terrific motion which defied the
arrows they discharged at him. In fact, so inconceivably rapid were his
movements, and so closely were the Indians tangled together, that they
shot one another with the arrows; and one young hunter, hurling a spear
at Buck in mid air, drove it through the chest of another hunter with
such force that the point broke through the skin of the back and stood
out beyond. Then a panic seized the Yeehats, and they fled in terror to
the woods, proclaiming as they fled the advent of the Evil Spirit.

And truly Buck was the Fiend incarnate, raging at their heels and
dragging them down like deer as they raced through the trees. It was a
fateful day for the Yeehats. They scattered far and wide over the
country, and it was not till a week later that the last of the
survivors gathered together in a lower valley and counted their losses.
As for Buck, wearying of the pursuit, he returned to the desolated
camp. He found Pete where he had been killed in his blankets in the
first moment of surprise. Thornton’s desperate struggle was
fresh-written on the earth, and Buck scented every detail of it down to
the edge of a deep pool. By the edge, head and fore feet in the water,
lay Skeet, faithful to the last. The pool itself, muddy and discolored
from the sluice boxes, effectually hid what it contained, and it
contained John Thornton; for Buck followed his trace into the water,
from which no trace led away.

All day Buck brooded by the pool or roamed restlessly about the camp.
Death, as a cessation of movement, as a passing out and away from the
lives of the living, he knew, and he knew John Thornton was dead. It
left a great void in him, somewhat akin to hunger, but a void which
ached and ached, and which food could not fill, At times, when he
paused to contemplate the carcasses of the Yeehats, he forgot the pain
of it; and at such times he was aware of a great pride in himself,—a
pride greater than any he had yet experienced. He had killed man, the
noblest game of all, and he had killed in the face of the law of club
and fang. He sniffed the bodies curiously. They had died so easily. It
was harder to kill a husky dog than them. They were no match at all,
were it not for their arrows and spears and clubs. Thenceforward he
would be unafraid of them except when they bore in their hands their
arrows, spears, and clubs.

Night came on, and a full moon rose high over the trees into the sky,
lighting the land till it lay bathed in ghostly day. And with the
coming of the night, brooding and mourning by the pool, Buck became
alive to a stirring of the new life in the forest other than that which
the Yeehats had made, He stood up, listening and scenting. From far
away drifted a faint, sharp yelp, followed by a chorus of similar sharp
yelps. As the moments passed the yelps grew closer and louder. Again
Buck knew them as things heard in that other world which persisted in
his memory. He walked to the centre of the open space and listened. It
was the call, the many-noted call, sounding more luringly and
compellingly than ever before. And as never before, he was ready to
obey. John Thornton was dead. The last tie was broken. Man and the
claims of man no longer bound him.

Hunting their living meat, as the Yeehats were hunting it, on the
flanks of the migrating moose, the wolf pack had at last crossed over
from the land of streams and timber and invaded Buck’s valley. Into the
clearing where the moonlight streamed, they poured in a silvery flood;
and in the centre of the clearing stood Buck, motionless as a statue,
waiting their coming. They were awed, so still and large he stood, and
a moment’s pause fell, till the boldest one leaped straight for him.
Like a flash Buck struck, breaking the neck. Then he stood, without
movement, as before, the stricken wolf rolling in agony behind him.
Three others tried it in sharp succession; and one after the other they
drew back, streaming blood from slashed throats or shoulders.

This was sufficient to fling the whole pack forward, pell-mell, crowded
together, blocked and confused by its eagerness to pull down the prey.
Buck’s marvellous quickness and agility stood him in good stead.
Pivoting on his hind legs, and snapping and gashing, he was everywhere
at once, presenting a front which was apparently unbroken so swiftly
did he whirl and guard from side to side. But to prevent them from
getting behind him, he was forced back, down past the pool and into the
creek bed, till he brought up against a high gravel bank. He worked
along to a right angle in the bank which the men had made in the course
of mining, and in this angle he came to bay, protected on three sides
and with nothing to do but face the front.

And so well did he face it, that at the end of half an hour the wolves
drew back discomfited. The tongues of all were out and lolling, the
white fangs showing cruelly white in the moonlight. Some were lying
down with heads raised and ears pricked forward; others stood on their
feet, watching him; and still others were lapping water from the pool.
One wolf, long and lean and gray, advanced cautiously, in a friendly
manner, and Buck recognized the wild brother with whom he had run for a
night and a day. He was whining softly, and, as Buck whined, they
touched noses.

Then an old wolf, gaunt and battle-scarred, came forward. Buck writhed
his lips into the preliminary of a snarl, but sniffed noses with him,
Whereupon the old wolf sat down, pointed nose at the moon, and broke
out the long wolf howl. The others sat down and howled. And now the
call came to Buck in unmistakable accents. He, too, sat down and
howled. This over, he came out of his angle and the pack crowded around
him, sniffing in half-friendly, half-savage manner. The leaders lifted
the yelp of the pack and sprang away into the woods. The wolves swung
in behind, yelping in chorus. And Buck ran with them, side by side with
the wild brother, yelping as he ran.


And here may well end the story of Buck. The years were not many when
the Yeehats noted a change in the breed of timber wolves; for some were
seen with splashes of brown on head and muzzle, and with a rift of
white centring down the chest. But more remarkable than this, the
Yeehats tell of a Ghost Dog that runs at the head of the pack. They are
afraid of this Ghost Dog, for it has cunning greater than they,
stealing from their camps in fierce winters, robbing their traps,
slaying their dogs, and defying their bravest hunters.

Nay, the tale grows worse. Hunters there are who fail to return to the
camp, and hunters there have been whom their tribesmen found with
throats slashed cruelly open and with wolf prints about them in the
snow greater than the prints of any wolf. Each fall, when the Yeehats
follow the movement of the moose, there is a certain valley which they
never enter. And women there are who become sad when the word goes over
the fire of how the Evil Spirit came to select that valley for an
abiding-place.

In the summers there is one visitor, however, to that valley, of which
the Yeehats do not know. It is a great, gloriously coated wolf, like,
and yet unlike, all other wolves. He crosses alone from the smiling
timber land and comes down into an open space among the trees. Here a
yellow stream flows from rotted moose-hide sacks and sinks into the
ground, with long grasses growing through it and vegetable mould
overrunning it and hiding its yellow from the sun; and here he muses
for a time, howling once, long and mournfully, ere he departs.

But he is not always alone. When the long winter nights come on and the
wolves follow their meat into the lower valleys, he may be seen running
at the head of the pack through the pale moonlight or glimmering
borealis, leaping gigantic above his fellows, his great throat a-bellow
as he sings a song of the younger world, which is the song of the pack.