Title: The Call of the Wild

Author: Jack London

THE CALL OF THE WILD

by Jack London

Contents

I Into the Primitive

II The Law of Club and Fang

III The Dominant Primordial Beast

IV Who Has Won to Mastership

V The Toil of Trace and Tail

VI For the Love of a Man

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 Francois.

Perrault was a French-Canadian, and swarthy; but Francois 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 Francois 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 Francois's whip

sang through the air, reaching the culprit first; and nothing remained

to Buck but to recover the bone. That was fair of Francois, 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. Francois 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

Francois, 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. Francois 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 Francois 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. Francois 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 Francois 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," Francois 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 Francois 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 Francois 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 Canon. 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 Francois'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 Solleks 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. Francois'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 Canon, 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.

Francois, 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 Francois 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 Francois 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.

Francois 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 Francois, 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 Francois'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 Francois, 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 Francois

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. Francois 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 Francois

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 Francois 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. Francois

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

Francois 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 Francois'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 Francois'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.

Francois 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 Francois, 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 Francois 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

Francois 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 Francois. 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. Francois 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. Francois knew he was behind all the

trouble, and Buck knew he knew; but Buck was too clever ever again to be

caught red-handed. He worked faithfully in the harness, for the toil

had become a delight to him; yet it was a greater delight slyly to

precipitate a fight amongst his mates and tangle the traces.

At the mouth of the Tahkeena, one night after supper, Dub turned up a

snowshoe rabbit, blundered it, and missed. In a second the whole team

was in full cry. A hundred yards away was a camp of the Northwest

Police, with fifty dogs, huskies all, who joined the chase. The rabbit

sped down the river, turned off into a small creek, up the frozen bed of

which it held steadily. It ran lightly on the surface of the snow, while

the dogs ploughed through by main strength. Buck led the pack, sixty

strong, around bend after bend, but he could not gain. He lay down low

to the race, whining eagerly, his splendid body flashing forward, leap

by leap, in the wan white moonlight. And leap by leap, like some pale

frost wraith, the snowshoe rabbit flashed on ahead.

All that stirring of old instincts which at stated periods drives men

out from the sounding cities to forest and plain to kill things

by chemically propelled leaden pellets, the blood lust, the joy to

kill--all this was Buck's, only it was infinitely more intimate. He was

ranging at the head of the pack, running the wild thing down, the living

meat, to kill with his own teeth and wash his muzzle to the eyes in warm

blood.

There is an ecstasy that marks the summit of life, and beyond which life

cannot rise. And such is the paradox of living, this ecstasy comes when

one is most alive, and it comes as a complete forgetfulness that one is

alive. This ecstasy, this forgetfulness of living, comes to the artist,

caught up and out of himself in a sheet of flame; it comes to the

soldier, war-mad on a stricken field and refusing quarter; and it came

to Buck, leading the pack, sounding the old wolf-cry, straining after

the food that was alive and that fled swiftly before him through the

moonlight. He was sounding the deeps of his nature, and of the parts of

his nature that were deeper than he, going back into the womb of Time.

He was mastered by the sheer surging of life, the tidal wave of being,

the perfect joy of each separate muscle, joint, and sinew in that it was

everything that was not death, that it was aglow and rampant, expressing

itself in movement, flying exultantly under the stars and over the face

of dead matter that did not move.

But Spitz, cold and calculating even in his supreme moods, left the pack

and cut across a narrow neck of land where the creek made a long bend

around. Buck did not know of this, and as he rounded the bend, the frost

wraith of a rabbit still flitting before him, he saw another and larger

frost wraith leap from the overhanging bank into the immediate path of

the rabbit. It was Spitz. The rabbit could not turn, and as the white

teeth broke its back in mid air it shrieked as loudly as a stricken man

may shriek. At sound of this, the cry of Life plunging down from Life's

apex in the grip of Death, the fall pack at Buck's heels raised a hell's

chorus of delight.

Buck did not cry out. He did not check himself, but drove in upon Spitz,

shoulder to shoulder, so hard that he missed the throat. They rolled

over and over in the powdery snow. Spitz gained his feet almost as

though he had not been overthrown, slashing Buck down the shoulder and

leaping clear. Twice his teeth clipped together, like the steel jaws of

a trap, as he backed away for better footing, with lean and lifting lips

that writhed and snarled.

In a flash Buck knew it. The time had come. It was to the death. As

they circled about, snarling, ears laid back, keenly watchful for the

advantage, the scene came to Buck with a sense of familiarity. He seemed

to remember it all,--the white woods, and earth, and moonlight, and the

thrill of battle. Over the whiteness and silence brooded a ghostly calm.

There was not the faintest whisper of air--nothing moved, not a leaf

quivered, the visible breaths of the dogs rising slowly and lingering in

the frosty air. They had made short work of the snowshoe rabbit, these

dogs that were ill-tamed wolves; and they were now drawn up in an

expectant circle. They, too, were silent, their eyes only gleaming and

their breaths drifting slowly upward. To Buck it was nothing new or

strange, this scene of old time. It was as though it had always been,

the wonted way of things.

Spitz was a practised fighter. From Spitzbergen through the Arctic, and

across Canada and the Barrens, he had held his own with all manner of

dogs and achieved to mastery over them. Bitter rage was his, but never

blind rage. In passion to rend and destroy, he never forgot that his

enemy was in like passion to rend and destroy. He never rushed till

he was prepared to receive a rush; never attacked till he had first

defended that attack.

In vain Buck strove to sink his teeth in the neck of the big white dog.

Wherever his fangs struck for the softer flesh, they were countered by

the fangs of Spitz. Fang clashed fang, and lips were cut and bleeding,

but Buck could not penetrate his enemy's guard. Then he warmed up and

enveloped Spitz in a whirlwind of rushes. Time and time again he tried

for the snow-white throat, where life bubbled near to the surface, and

each time and every time Spitz slashed him and got away. Then Buck took

to rushing, as though for the throat, when, suddenly drawing back his

head and curving in from the side, he would drive his shoulder at the

shoulder of Spitz, as a ram by which to overthrow him. But instead,

Buck's shoulder was slashed down each time as Spitz leaped lightly away.

Spitz was untouched, while Buck was streaming with blood and panting

hard. The fight was growing desperate. And all the while the silent and

wolfish circle waited to finish off whichever dog went down. As Buck

grew winded, Spitz took to rushing, and he kept him staggering for

footing. Once Buck went over, and the whole circle of sixty dogs started

up; but he recovered himself, almost in mid air, and the circle sank

down again and waited.

But Buck possessed a quality that made for greatness--imagination. He

fought by instinct, but he could fight by head as well. He rushed, as

though attempting the old shoulder trick, but at the last instant swept

low to the snow and in. His teeth closed on Spitz's left fore leg. There

was a crunch of breaking bone, and the white dog faced him on three

legs. Thrice he tried to knock him over, then repeated the trick and

broke the right fore leg. Despite the pain and helplessness, Spitz

struggled madly to keep up. He saw the silent circle, with gleaming

eyes, lolling tongues, and silvery breaths drifting upward, closing in

upon him as he had seen similar circles close in upon beaten antagonists

in the past. Only this time he was the one who was beaten.

There was no hope for him. Buck was inexorable. Mercy was a thing

reserved for gentler climes. He manoeuvred for the final rush. The

circle had tightened till he could feel the breaths of the huskies on

his flanks. He could see them, beyond Spitz and to either side, half

crouching for the spring, their eyes fixed upon him. A pause seemed to

fall. Every animal was motionless as though turned to stone. Only Spitz

quivered and bristled as he staggered back and forth, snarling with

horrible menace, as though to frighten off impending death. Then Buck

sprang in and out; but while he was in, shoulder had at last squarely

met shoulder. The dark circle became a dot on the moon-flooded snow as

Spitz disappeared from view. Buck stood and looked on, the successful

champion, the dominant primordial beast who had made his kill and found

it good.

Chapter IV. Who Has Won to Mastership

"Eh? Wot I say? I spik true w'en I say dat Buck two devils." This was

Francois'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 Francois'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 Francois, 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?" Francois 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.

Francois was obdurate, but when he turned his back Buck again displaced

Sol-leks, who was not at all unwilling to go.

Francois 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 Francois, 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. Francois followed him up, whereupon he again retreated.

After some time of this, Francois 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.

Francois 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. Francois scratched his head again. He shook it and grinned

sheepishly at the courier, who shrugged his shoulders in sign that they

were beaten. Then Francois went up to where Sol-leks stood and called

to Buck. Buck laughed, as dogs laugh, yet kept his distance. Francois

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 Francois

called, and once more Buck laughed and kept away.

"T'row down de club," Perrault commanded.

Francois 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 Francois 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

Francois'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 Francois 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. Francois

called Buck to him, threw his arms around him, wept over him. And that

was the last of Francois 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

Francois and the others who had gone before. When driven with his mates

to the new owners' camp, Buck saw a slipshod and slovenly affair, tent

half stretched, dishes unwashed, everything in disorder; also, he saw a

woman. "Mercedes" the men called her. She was Charles's wife and Hal's

sister--a nice family party.

Buck watched them apprehensively as they proceeded to take down the tent

and load the sled. There was a great deal of effort about their manner,

but no businesslike method. The tent was rolled into an awkward bundle

three times as large as it should have been. The tin dishes were packed

away unwashed. Mercedes continually fluttered in the way of her men and

kept up an unbroken chattering of remonstrance and advice. When they put

a clothes-sack on the front of the sled, she suggested it should go on

the back; and when they had put it on the back, and covered it over

with a couple of other bundles, she discovered overlooked articles which

could abide nowhere else but in that very sack, and they unloaded again.

Three men from a neighboring tent came out and looked on, grinning and

winking at one another.

"You've got a right smart load as it is," said one of them; "and it's

not me should tell you your business, but I wouldn't tote that tent

along if I was you."

"Undreamed of!" cried Mercedes, throwing up her hands in dainty dismay.

"However in the world could I manage without a tent?"

"It's springtime, and you won't get any more cold weather," the man

replied.

She shook her head decidedly, and Charles and Hal put the last odds and

ends on top the mountainous load.

"Think it'll ride?" one of the men asked.

"Why shouldn't it?" Charles demanded rather shortly.

"Oh, that's all right, that's all right," the man hastened meekly to

say. "I was just a-wonderin', that is all. It seemed a mite top-heavy."

Charles turned his back and drew the lashings down as well as he could,

which was not in the least well.

"An' of course the dogs can hike along all day with that contraption

behind them," affirmed a second of the men.

"Certainly," said Hal, with freezing politeness, taking hold of the

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 barely able to get up, but, unlike them, he

had made up his mind not to get up. He had a vague feeling of impending

doom. This had been strong upon him when he pulled in to the bank, and

it had not departed from him. What of the thin and rotten ice he had

felt under his feet all day, it seemed that he sensed disaster close at

hand, out there ahead on the ice where his master was trying to drive

him. He refused to stir. So greatly had he suffered, and so far gone was

he, that the blows did not hurt much. And as they continued to fall upon

him, the spark of life within flickered and went down. It was nearly

out. He felt strangely numb. As though from a great distance, he was

aware that he was being beaten. The last sensations of pain left him. He

no longer felt anything, though very faintly he could hear the impact of

the club upon his body. But it was no longer his body, it seemed so far

away.

And then, suddenly, without warning, uttering a cry that was

inarticulate and more like the cry of an animal, John Thornton sprang

upon the man who wielded the club. Hal was hurled backward, as

though struck by a failing tree. Mercedes screamed. Charles looked on

wistfully, wiped his watery eyes, but did not get up because of his

stiffness.

John Thornton stood over Buck, struggling to control himself, too

convulsed with rage to speak.

"If you strike that dog again, I'll kill you," he at last managed to say

in a choking voice.

"It's my dog," Hal replied, wiping the blood from his mouth as he came

back. "Get out of my way, or I'll fix you. I'm going to Dawson."

Thornton stood between him and Buck, and evinced no intention of getting

out of the way. Hal drew his long hunting-knife. Mercedes screamed,

cried, laughed, and manifested the chaotic abandonment of hysteria.

Thornton rapped Hal's knuckles with the axe-handle, knocking the knife

to the ground. He rapped his knuckles again as he tried to pick it up.

Then he stooped, picked it up himself, and with two strokes cut Buck's

traces.

Hal had no fight left in him. Besides, his hands were full with his

sister, or his arms, rather; while Buck was too near dead to be of

further use in hauling the sled. A few minutes later they pulled out

from the bank and down the river. Buck heard them go and raised his head

to see, Pike was leading, Sol-leks was at the wheel, and between were

Joe and Teek. They were limping and staggering. Mercedes was riding the

loaded sled. Hal guided at the gee-pole, and Charles stumbled along in

the rear.

As Buck watched them, Thornton knelt beside him and with rough, kindly

hands searched for broken bones. By the time his search had disclosed

nothing more than many bruises and a state of terrible starvation, the

sled was a quarter of a mile away. Dog and man watched it crawling along

over the ice. Suddenly, they saw its back end drop down, as into a rut,

and the gee-pole, with Hal clinging to it, jerk into the air. Mercedes's

scream came to their ears. They saw Charles turn and make one step to

run back, and then a whole section of ice give way and dogs and humans

disappear. A yawning hole was all that was to be seen. The bottom had

dropped out of the trail.

John Thornton and Buck looked at each other.

"You poor devil," said John Thornton, and Buck licked his hand.

Chapter VI. For the Love of a Man

When John Thornton froze his feet in the previous December his partners

had made him comfortable and left him to get well, going on themselves

up the river to get out a raft of saw-logs for Dawson. He was still

limping slightly at the time he rescued Buck, but with the continued

warm weather even the slight limp left him. And here, lying by the river

bank through the long spring days, watching the running water, listening

lazily to the songs of birds and the hum of nature, Buck slowly won back

his strength.

A rest comes very good after one has travelled three thousand miles,

and it must be confessed that Buck waxed lazy as his wounds healed, his

muscles swelled out, and the flesh came back to cover his bones. For

that matter, they were all loafing,--Buck, John Thornton, and Skeet

and Nig,--waiting for the raft to come that was to carry them down to

Dawson. Skeet was a little Irish setter who early made friends with

Buck, who, in a dying condition, was unable to resent her first

advances. She had the doctor trait which some dogs possess; and as a

mother cat washes her kittens, so she washed and cleansed Buck's

wounds. Regularly, each morning after he had finished his breakfast,

she performed her self-appointed task, till he came to look for her

ministrations as much as he did for Thornton's. Nig, equally friendly,

though less demonstrative, was a huge black dog, half bloodhound and

half deerhound, with eyes that laughed and a boundless good nature.

To Buck's surprise these dogs manifested no jealousy toward him. They

seemed to share the kindliness and largeness of John Thornton. As Buck

grew stronger they enticed him into all sorts of ridiculous games, in

which Thornton himself could not forbear to join; and in this fashion

Buck romped through his convalescence and into a new existence. Love,

genuine passionate love, was his for the first time. This he had never

experienced at Judge Miller's down in the sun-kissed Santa Clara Valley.

With the Judge's sons, hunting and tramping, it had been a working

partnership; with the Judge's grandsons, a sort of pompous guardianship;

and with the Judge himself, a stately and dignified friendship. But love

that was feverish and burning, that was adoration, that was madness, it

had taken John Thornton to arouse.

This man had saved his life, which was something; but, further, he was

the ideal master. Other men saw to the welfare of their dogs from a

sense of duty and business expediency; he saw to the welfare of his as

if they were his own children, because he could not help it. And he saw

further. He never forgot a kindly greeting or a cheering word, and to

sit down for a long talk with them ("gas" he called it) was as much his

delight as theirs. He had a way of taking Buck's head roughly between

his hands, and resting his own head upon Buck's, of shaking him back

and forth, the while calling him ill names that to Buck were love

names. Buck knew no greater joy than that rough embrace and the sound of

murmured oaths, and at each jerk back and forth it seemed that his heart

would be shaken out of his body so great was its ecstasy. And when,

released, he sprang to his feet, his mouth laughing, his eyes eloquent,

his throat vibrant with unuttered sound, and in that fashion remained

without movement, John Thornton would reverently exclaim, "God! you can

all but speak!"

Buck had a trick of love expression that was akin to hurt. He would

often seize Thornton's hand in his mouth and close so fiercely that the

flesh bore the impress of his teeth for some time afterward. And as

Buck understood the oaths to be love words, so the man understood this

feigned bite for a caress.

For the most part, however, Buck's love was expressed in adoration.

While he went wild with happiness when Thornton touched him or spoke to

him, he did not seek these tokens. Unlike Skeet, who was wont to shove

her nose under Thornton's hand and nudge and nudge till petted, or Nig,

who would stalk up and rest his great head on Thornton's knee, Buck was

content to adore at a distance. He would lie by the hour, eager, alert,

at Thornton's feet, looking up into his face, dwelling upon it, studying

it, following with keenest interest each fleeting expression, every

movement or change of feature. Or, as chance might have it, he would lie

farther away, to the side or rear, watching the outlines of the man and

the occasional movements of his body. And often, such was the communion

in which they lived, the strength of Buck's gaze would draw John

Thornton's head around, and he would return the gaze, without speech,

his heart shining out of his eyes as Buck's heart shone out.

For a long time after his rescue, Buck did not like Thornton to get out

of his sight. From the moment he left the tent to when he entered it

again, Buck would follow at his heels. His transient masters since he

had come into the Northland had bred in him a fear that no master could

be permanent. He was afraid that Thornton would pass out of his life as

Perrault and Francois and the Scotch half-breed had passed out. Even in

the night, in his dreams, he was haunted by this fear. At such times

he would shake off sleep and creep through the chill to the flap of

the tent, where he would stand and listen to the sound of his master's

breathing.

But in spite of this great love he bore John Thornton, which seemed

to bespeak the soft civilizing influence, the strain of the primitive,

which the Northland had aroused in him, remained alive and active.

Faithfulness and devotion, things born of fire and roof, were his; yet

he retained his wildness and wiliness. He was a thing of the wild, come

in from the wild to sit by John Thornton's fire, rather than a dog

of the soft Southland stamped with the marks of generations of

civilization. Because of his very great love, he could not steal from

this man, but from any other man, in any other camp, he did not hesitate

an instant; while the cunning with which he stole enabled him to escape

detection.

His face and body were scored by the teeth of many dogs, and he

fought as fiercely as ever and more shrewdly. Skeet and Nig were too

good-natured for quarrelling,--besides, they belonged to John Thornton;

but the strange dog, no matter what the breed or valor, swiftly

acknowledged Buck's supremacy or found himself struggling for life with

a terrible antagonist. And Buck was merciless. He had learned well the

law of club and fang, and he never forewent an advantage or drew back

from a foe he had started on the way to Death. He had lessoned from

Spitz, and from the chief fighting dogs of the police and mail, and knew

there was no middle course. He must master or be mastered; while to show

mercy was a weakness. Mercy did not exist in the primordial life. It was

misunderstood for fear, and such misunderstandings made for death. Kill

or be killed, eat or be eaten, was the law; and this mandate, down out

of the depths of Time, he obeyed.

He was older than the days he had seen and the breaths he had drawn. He

linked the past with the present, and the eternity behind him throbbed

through him in a mighty rhythm to which he swayed as the tides and

seasons swayed. He sat by John Thornton's fire, a broad-breasted dog,

white-fanged and long-furred; but behind him were the shades of all

manner of dogs, half-wolves and wild wolves, urgent and prompting,

tasting the savor of the meat he ate, thirsting for the water he drank,

scenting the wind with him, listening with him and telling him the

sounds made by the wild life in the forest, dictating his moods,

directing his actions, lying down to sleep with him when he lay down,

and dreaming with him and beyond him and becoming themselves the stuff

of his dreams.

So peremptorily did these shades beckon him, that each day mankind and

the claims of mankind slipped farther from him. Deep in the forest a

call was sounding, and as often as he heard this call, mysteriously

thrilling and luring, he felt compelled to turn his back upon the fire

and the beaten earth around it, and to plunge into the forest, and on

and on, he knew not where or why; nor did he wonder where or why, the

call sounding imperiously, deep in the forest. But as often as he gained

the soft unbroken earth and the green shade, the love for John Thornton

drew him back to the fire again.

Thornton alone held him. The rest of mankind was as nothing. Chance

travellers might praise or pet him; but he was cold under it all,

and from a too demonstrative man he would get up and walk away. When

Thornton's partners, Hans and Pete, arrived on the long-expected raft,

Buck refused to notice them till he learned they were close to Thornton;

after that he tolerated them in a passive sort of way, accepting favors

from them as though he favored them by accepting. They were of the same

large type as Thornton, living close to the earth, thinking simply and

seeing clearly; and ere they swung the raft into the big eddy by the

saw-mill at Dawson, they understood Buck and his ways, and did not

insist upon an intimacy such as obtained with Skeet and Nig.

For Thornton, however, his love seemed to grow and grow. He, alone among

men, could put a pack upon Buck's back in the summer travelling. Nothing

was too great for Buck to do, when Thornton commanded. One day (they had

grub-staked themselves from the proceeds of the raft and left Dawson

for the head-waters of the Tanana) the men and dogs were sitting on the

crest of a cliff which fell away, straight down, to naked bed-rock three

hundred feet below. John Thornton was sitting near the edge, Buck at his

shoulder. A thoughtless whim seized Thornton, and he drew the attention

of Hans and Pete to the experiment he had in mind. "Jump, Buck!" he

commanded, sweeping his arm out and over the chasm. The next instant he

was grappling with Buck on the extreme edge, while Hans and Pete were

dragging them back into safety.

"It's uncanny," Pete said, after it was over and they had caught their

speech.

Thornton shook his head. "No, it is splendid, and it is terrible, too.

Do you know, it sometimes makes me afraid."

"I'm not hankering to be the man that lays hands on you while he's

around," Pete announced conclusively, nodding his head toward Buck.

"Py Jingo!" was Hans's contribution. "Not mineself either."

It was at Circle City, ere the year was out, that Pete's apprehensions

were realized. "Black" Burton, a man evil-tempered and malicious, had

been picking a quarrel with a tenderfoot at the bar, when Thornton

stepped good-naturedly between. Buck, as was his custom, was lying in a

corner, head on paws, watching his master's every action. Burton struck

out, without warning, straight from the shoulder. Thornton was sent

spinning, and saved himself from falling only by clutching the rail of

the bar.

Those who were looking on heard what was neither bark nor yelp, but a

something which is best described as a roar, and they saw Buck's body

rise up in the air as he left the floor for Burton's throat. The man

saved his life by instinctively throwing out his arm, but was hurled

backward to the floor with Buck on top of him. Buck loosed his teeth

from the flesh of the arm and drove in again for the throat. This time

the man succeeded only in partly blocking, and his throat was torn open.

Then the crowd was upon Buck, and he was driven off; but while a surgeon

checked the bleeding, he prowled up and down, growling furiously,

attempting to rush in, and being forced back by an array of hostile

clubs. A "miners' meeting," called on the spot, decided that the dog had

sufficient provocation, and Buck was discharged. But his reputation was

made, and from that day his name spread through every camp in Alaska.

Later on, in the fall of the year, he saved John Thornton's life in

quite another fashion. The three partners were lining a long and narrow

poling-boat down a bad stretch of rapids on the Forty-Mile Creek. Hans

and Pete moved along the bank, snubbing with a thin Manila rope from

tree to tree, while Thornton remained in the boat, helping its descent

by means of a pole, and shouting directions to the shore. Buck, on the

bank, worried and anxious, kept abreast of the boat, his eyes never off

his master.

At a particularly bad spot, where a ledge of barely submerged rocks

jutted out into the river, Hans cast off the rope, and, while Thornton

poled the boat out into the stream, ran down the bank with the end in

his hand to snub the boat when it had cleared the ledge. This it did,

and was flying down-stream in a current as swift as a mill-race, when

Hans checked it with the rope and checked too suddenly. The boat flirted

over and snubbed in to the bank bottom up, while Thornton, flung sheer

out of it, was carried down-stream toward the worst part of the rapids,

a stretch of wild water in which no swimmer could live.

Buck had sprung in on the instant; and at the end of three hundred

yards, amid a mad swirl of water, he overhauled Thornton. When he felt

him grasp his tail, Buck headed for the bank, swimming with all his

splendid strength. But the progress shoreward was slow; the progress

down-stream amazingly rapid. From below came the fatal roaring where the

wild current went wilder and was rent in shreds and spray by the rocks

which thrust through like the teeth of an enormous comb. The suck of the

water as it took the beginning of the last steep pitch was frightful,

and Thornton knew that the shore was impossible. He scraped furiously

over a rock, bruised across a second, and struck a third with crushing

force. He clutched its slippery top with both hands, releasing Buck, and

above the roar of the churning water shouted: "Go, Buck! Go!"

Buck could not hold his own, and swept on down-stream, struggling

desperately, but unable to win back. When he heard Thornton's command

repeated, he partly reared out of the water, throwing his head high, as

though for a last look, then turned obediently toward the bank. He swam

powerfully and was dragged ashore by Pete and Hans at the very point

where swimming ceased to be possible and destruction began.

They knew that the time a man could cling to a slippery rock in the face

of that driving current was a matter of minutes, and they ran as fast as

they could up the bank to a point far above where Thornton was hanging

on. They attached the line with which they had been snubbing the boat to

Buck's neck and shoulders, being careful that it should neither strangle

him nor impede his swimming, and launched him into the stream. He struck

out boldly, but not straight enough into the stream. He discovered the

mistake too late, when Thornton was abreast of him and a bare half-dozen

strokes away while he was being carried helplessly past.

Hans promptly snubbed with the rope, as though Buck were a boat. The

rope thus tightening on him in the sweep of the current, he was jerked

under the surface, and under the surface he remained till his body

struck against the bank and he was hauled out. He was half drowned, and

Hans and Pete threw themselves upon him, pounding the breath into him

and the water out of him. He staggered to his feet and fell down. The

faint sound of Thornton's voice came to them, and though they could not

make out the words of it, they knew that he was in his extremity. His

master's voice acted on Buck like an electric shock, He sprang to his

feet and ran up the bank ahead of the men to the point of his previous

departure.

Again the rope was attached and he was launched, and again he struck

out, but this time straight into the stream. He had miscalculated once,

but he would not be guilty of it a second time. Hans paid out the rope,

permitting no slack, while Pete kept it clear of coils. Buck held on

till he was on a line straight above Thornton; then he turned, and with

the speed of an express train headed down upon him. Thornton saw him

coming, and, as Buck struck him like a battering ram, with the whole

force of the current behind him, he reached up and closed with both arms

around the shaggy neck. Hans snubbed the rope around the tree, and

Buck and Thornton were jerked under the water. Strangling, suffocating,

sometimes one uppermost and sometimes the other, dragging over the

jagged bottom, smashing against rocks and snags, they veered in to the

bank.

Thornton came to, belly downward and being violently propelled back

and forth across a drift log by Hans and Pete. His first glance was for

Buck, over whose limp and apparently lifeless body Nig was setting up a

howl, while Skeet was licking the wet face and closed eyes. Thornton was

himself bruised and battered, and he went carefully over Buck's body,

when he had been brought around, finding three broken ribs.

"That settles it," he announced. "We camp right here." And camp they

did, till Buck's ribs knitted and he was able to travel.

That winter, at Dawson, Buck performed another exploit, not so heroic,

perhaps, but one that put his name many notches higher on the totem-pole

of Alaskan fame. This exploit was particularly gratifying to the three

men; for they stood in need of the outfit which it furnished, and were

enabled to make a long-desired trip into the virgin East, where miners

had not yet appeared. It was brought about by a conversation in the

Eldorado Saloon, in which men waxed boastful of their favorite dogs.

Buck, because of his record, was the target for these men, and Thornton

was driven stoutly to defend him. At the end of half an hour one man

stated that his dog could start a sled with five hundred pounds and

walk off with it; a second bragged six hundred for his dog; and a third,

seven hundred.

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

"And break it out? and walk off with it for a hundred yards?" demanded

Matthewson, a Bonanza King, he of the seven hundred vaunt.

"And break it out, and walk off with it for a hundred yards," John

Thornton said coolly.

"Well," Matthewson said, slowly and deliberately, so that all could

hear, "I've got a thousand dollars that says he can't. And there it

is." So saying, he slammed a sack of gold dust of the size of a bologna

sausage down upon the bar.

Nobody spoke. Thornton's bluff, if bluff it was, had been called. He

could feel a flush of warm blood creeping up his face. His tongue had

tricked him. He did not know whether Buck could start a thousand pounds.

Half a ton! The enormousness of it appalled him. He had great faith in

Buck's strength and had often thought him capable of starting such a

load; but never, as now, had he faced the possibility of it, the eyes

of a dozen men fixed upon him, silent and waiting. Further, he had no

thousand dollars; nor had Hans or Pete.

"I've got a sled standing outside now, with twenty fiftypound sacks of

flour on it," Matthewson went on with brutal directness; "so don't let

that hinder you."

Thornton did not reply. He did not know what to say. He glanced from

face to face in the absent way of a man who has lost the power of

thought and is seeking somewhere to find the thing that will start

it going again. The face of Jim O'Brien, a Mastodon King and old-time

comrade, caught his eyes. It was as a cue to him, seeming to rouse him

to do what he would never have dreamed of doing.

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

"Sure," answered O'Brien, thumping down a plethoric sack by the side of

Matthewson's. "Though it's little faith I'm having, John, that the beast

can do the trick."

The Eldorado emptied its occupants into the street to see the test. The

tables were deserted, and the dealers and gamekeepers came forth to see

the outcome of the wager and to lay odds. Several hundred men, furred

and mittened, banked around the sled within easy distance. Matthewson's

sled, loaded with a thousand pounds of flour, had been standing for a

couple of hours, and in the intense cold (it was sixty below zero) the

runners had frozen fast to the hard-packed snow. Men offered odds of two

to one that Buck could not budge the sled. A quibble arose concerning

the phrase "break out." O'Brien contended it was Thornton's privilege

to knock the runners loose, leaving Buck to "break it out" from a dead

standstill. Matthewson insisted that the phrase included breaking the

runners from the frozen grip of the snow. A majority of the men who had

witnessed the making of the bet decided in his favor, whereat the odds

went up to three to one against Buck.

There were no takers. Not a man believed him capable of the feat.

Thornton had been hurried into the wager, heavy with doubt; and now that

he looked at the sled itself, the concrete fact, with the regular team

of ten dogs curled up in the snow before it, the more impossible the

task appeared. Matthewson waxed jubilant.

"Three to one!" he proclaimed. "I'll lay you another thousand at that

figure, Thornton. What d'ye say?"

Thornton's doubt was strong in his face, but his fighting spirit was

aroused--the fighting spirit that soars above odds, fails to recognize

the impossible, and is deaf to all save the clamor for battle. He called

Hans and Pete to him. Their sacks were slim, and with his own the three

partners could rake together only two hundred dollars. In the ebb of

their fortunes, this sum was their total capital; yet they laid it

unhesitatingly against Matthewson's six hundred.

The team of ten dogs was unhitched, and Buck, with his own harness, was

put into the sled. He had caught the contagion of the excitement, and

he felt that in some way he must do a great thing for John Thornton.

Murmurs of admiration at his splendid appearance went up. He was in

perfect condition, without an ounce of superfluous flesh, and the one

hundred and fifty pounds that he weighed were so many pounds of grit and

virility. His furry coat shone with the sheen of silk. Down the neck and

across the shoulders, his mane, in repose as it was, half bristled and

seemed to lift with every movement, as though excess of vigor made each

particular hair alive and active. The great breast and heavy fore legs

were no more than in proportion with the rest of the body, where the

muscles showed in tight rolls underneath the skin. Men felt these

muscles and proclaimed them hard as iron, and the odds went down to two

to one.

"Gad, sir! Gad, sir!" stuttered a member of the latest dynasty, a king

of the Skookum Benches. "I offer you eight hundred for him, sir, before

the test, sir; eight hundred just as he stands."

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

"You must stand off from him," Matthewson protested. "Free play and

plenty of room."

The crowd fell silent; only could be heard the voices of the gamblers

vainly offering two to one. Everybody acknowledged Buck a magnificent

animal, but twenty fifty-pound sacks of flour bulked too large in their

eyes for them to loosen their pouch-strings.

Thornton knelt down by Buck's side. He took his head in his two hands

and rested cheek on cheek. He did not playfully shake him, as was his

wont, or murmur soft love curses; but he whispered in his ear. "As you

love me, Buck. As you love me," was what he whispered. Buck whined with

suppressed eagerness.

The crowd was watching curiously. The affair was growing mysterious. It

seemed like a conjuration. As Thornton got to his feet, Buck seized his

mittened hand between his jaws, pressing in with his teeth and releasing

slowly, half-reluctantly. It was the answer, in terms, not of speech,

but of love. Thornton stepped well back.

"Now, Buck," he said.

Buck tightened the traces, then slacked them for a matter of several

inches. It was the way he had learned.

"Gee!" Thornton's voice rang out, sharp in the tense silence.

Buck swung to the right, ending the movement in a plunge that took up

the slack and with a sudden jerk arrested his one hundred and fifty

pounds. The load quivered, and from under the runners arose a crisp

crackling.

"Haw!" Thornton commanded.

Buck duplicated the manoeuvre, this time to the left. The crackling

turned into a snapping, the sled pivoting and the runners slipping and

grating several inches to the side. The sled was broken out. Men were

holding their breaths, intensely unconscious of the fact.

"Now, MUSH!"

Thornton's command cracked out like a pistol-shot. Buck threw himself

forward, tightening the traces with a jarring lunge. His whole body

was gathered compactly together in the tremendous effort, the muscles

writhing and knotting like live things under the silky fur. His great

chest was low to the ground, his head forward and down, while his

feet were flying like mad, the claws scarring the hard-packed snow in

parallel grooves. The sled swayed and trembled, half-started forward.

One of his feet slipped, and one man groaned aloud. Then the sled

lurched ahead in what appeared a rapid succession of jerks, though it

never really came to a dead stop again...half an inch...an inch... two

inches... The jerks perceptibly diminished; as the sled gained momentum,

he caught them up, till it was moving steadily along.

Men gasped and began to breathe again, unaware that for a moment they

had ceased to breathe. Thornton was running behind, encouraging Buck

with short, cheery words. The distance had been measured off, and as he

neared the pile of firewood which marked the end of the hundred yards,

a cheer began to grow and grow, which burst into a roar as he passed

the firewood and halted at command. Every man was tearing himself loose,

even Matthewson. Hats and mittens were flying in the air. Men were

shaking hands, it did not matter with whom, and bubbling over in a

general incoherent babel.

But Thornton fell on his knees beside Buck. Head was against head,

and he was shaking him back and forth. Those who hurried up heard him

cursing Buck, and he cursed him long and fervently, and softly and

lovingly.

"Gad, sir! Gad, sir!" spluttered the Skookum Bench king. "I'll give you

a thousand for him, sir, a thousand, sir--twelve hundred, sir."

Thornton rose to his feet. His eyes were wet. The tears were streaming

frankly down his cheeks. "Sir," he said to the Skookum Bench king, "no,

sir. You can go to hell, sir. It's the best I can do for you, sir."

Buck seized Thornton's hand in his teeth. Thornton shook him back and

forth. As though animated by a common impulse, the onlookers drew back

to a respectful distance; nor were they again indiscreet enough to

interrupt.

Chapter VII. The Sounding of the Call

When Buck earned sixteen hundred dollars in five minutes for John

Thornton, he made it possible for his master to pay off certain debts

and to journey with his partners into the East after a fabled lost mine,

the history of which was as old as the history of the country. Many men

had sought it; few had found it; and more than a few there were who had

never returned from the quest. This lost mine was steeped in tragedy and

shrouded in mystery. No one knew of the first man. The oldest tradition

stopped before it got back to him. From the beginning there had been an

ancient and ramshackle cabin. Dying men had sworn to it, and to the mine

the site of which it marked, clinching their testimony with nuggets that

were unlike any known grade of gold in the Northland.

But no living man had looted this treasure house, and the dead were

dead; wherefore John Thornton and Pete and Hans, with Buck and half a

dozen other dogs, faced into the East on an unknown trail to achieve

where men and dogs as good as themselves had failed. They sledded

seventy miles up the Yukon, swung to the left into the Stewart River,

passed the Mayo and the McQuestion, and held on until the Stewart itself

became a streamlet, threading the upstanding peaks which marked the

backbone of the continent.

John Thornton asked little of man or nature. He was unafraid of the

wild. With a handful of salt and a rifle he could plunge into the

wilderness and fare wherever he pleased and as long as he pleased. Being

in no haste, Indian fashion, he hunted his dinner in the course of the

day's travel; and if he failed to find it, like the Indian, he kept on

travelling, secure in the knowledge that sooner or later he would come

to it. So, on this great journey into the East, straight meat was the

bill of fare, ammunition and tools principally made up the load on the

sled, and the time-card was drawn upon the limitless future.

To Buck it was boundless delight, this hunting, fishing, and indefinite

wandering through strange places. For weeks at a time they would hold

on steadily, day after day; and for weeks upon end they would camp, here

and there, the dogs loafing and the men burning holes through frozen

muck and gravel and washing countless pans of dirt by the heat of the

fire. Sometimes they went hungry, sometimes they feasted riotously, all

according to the abundance of game and the fortune of hunting. Summer

arrived, and dogs and men packed on their backs, rafted across blue

mountain lakes, and descended or ascended unknown rivers in slender

boats whipsawed from the standing forest.

The months came and went, and back and forth they twisted through the

uncharted vastness, where no men were and yet where men had been if

the Lost Cabin were true. They went across divides in summer blizzards,

shivered under the midnight sun on naked mountains between the timber

line and the eternal snows, dropped into summer valleys amid swarming

gnats and flies, and in the shadows of glaciers picked strawberries and

flowers as ripe and fair as any the Southland could boast. In the fall

of the year they penetrated a weird lake country, sad and silent,

where 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 was larger than the muzzle of any wolf; and his head,

somewhat broader, was the wolf head on a massive scale.

His cunning was wolf cunning, and wild cunning; his intelligence,

shepherd intelligence and St. Bernard intelligence; and all this, plus

an experience gained in the fiercest of schools, made him as formidable

a creature as any that intelligence roamed the wild. A carnivorous

animal living on a straight meat diet, he was in full flower, at the

high tide of his life, overspilling with vigor and virility. When

Thornton passed a caressing hand along his back, a snapping and

crackling followed the hand, each hair 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.