Tip:
Highlight text to annotate it
X
THE CALL OF THE WILD
by Jack London
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
*** last straw to the load dragged by the weak and starving animals.
She rode for days, till they fell in the traces and the sled stood
still. Charles and Hal begged her to get off and walk, pleaded with her,
entreated, the while she wept and importuned Heaven with a recital of
their brutality.
On one occasion they took her off the sled by main strength. They never
did it again. She let her legs go limp like a spoiled child, and sat
down on the trail. They went on their way, but she did not move. After
they had travelled three miles they unloaded the sled, came back for
her, and by main strength put her on the sled again.
In the excess of their own misery they were callous to the suffering of
their animals. Hal's theory, which he practised on others, was that one
must get hardened. He had started out preaching it to his sister and
brother-in-law. Failing there, he hammered it into the dogs with a club.
At the Five Fingers the dog-food gave out, and a toothless old squaw
offered to trade them a few pounds of frozen horse-hide for the Colt's
revolver that kept the big hunting-knife company at Hal's hip. A poor
substitute for food was this hide, just as it had been stripped from the
starved horses of the cattlemen six months back. In its frozen state it
was more like strips of galvanized iron, and when a dog wrestled it into
his stomach it thawed into thin and innutritious leathery strings and
into a mass of short hair, irritating and indigestible.
And through it all Buck staggered along at the head of the team as in
a nightmare. He pulled when he could; when he could no longer pull, he
fell down and remained down till blows from whip or club drove him
to his feet again. All the stiffness and gloss had gone out of his
beautiful furry coat. The hair hung down, limp and draggled, or matted
with dried blood where Hal's club had bruised him. His muscles had
wasted away to knotty strings, and the flesh pads had disappeared, so
that each rib and every bone in his frame were outlined cleanly
through the loose hide that was wrinkled in folds of emptiness. It was
heartbreaking, only Buck's heart was unbreakable. The man in the red
sweater had proved that.
As it was with Buck, so was it with his mates. They were perambulating
skeletons. There were seven all together, including him. In their very
great misery they had become insensible to the bite of the lash or the
bruise of the club. The pain of the beating was dull and distant,
just as the things their eyes saw and their ears heard seemed dull and
distant. They were not half living, or quarter living. They were simply
so many bags of bones in which sparks of life fluttered faintly. When a
halt was made, they dropped down in the traces like dead dogs, and the
spark dimmed and paled and seemed to go out. And when the club or whip
fell upon them, the spark fluttered feebly up, and they tottered to
their feet and staggered on.
There came a day when Billee, the good-natured, fell and could not rise.
Hal had traded off his revolver, so he took the axe and knocked Billee
on the head as he lay in the traces, then cut the carcass out of the
harness and dragged it to one side. Buck saw, and his mates saw, and
they knew that this thing was very close to them. On the next day Koona
went, and but five of them remained: Joe, too far gone to be malignant;
Pike, crippled and limping, only half conscious and not conscious enough
longer to malinger; Sol-leks, the one-eyed, still faithful to the toil
of trace and trail, and mournful in that he had so little strength with
which to pull; Teek, who had not travelled so far that winter and who
was now beaten more than the others because he was fresher; and Buck,
still at the head of the team, but no longer enforcing discipline or
striving to enforce it, blind with weakness half the time and keeping
the trail by the loom of it and by the dim feel of his feet.
It was beautiful spring weather, but neither dogs nor humans were aware
of it. Each day the sun rose earlier and set later. It was dawn by three
in the morning, and twilight lingered till nine at night. The whole long
day was a blaze of sunshine. The ghostly winter silence had given way
to the great spring murmur of awakening life. This murmur arose from all
the land, fraught with the joy of living. It came from the things that
lived and moved again, things which had been as dead and which had not
moved during the long months of frost. The sap was rising in the pines.
The willows and aspens were bursting out in young buds. Shrubs and vines
were putting on fresh garbs of green. Crickets sang in the nights, and
in the days all manner of creeping, crawling things rustled forth into
the sun. Partridges and woodpeckers were booming and knocking in the
forest. Squirrels were chattering, birds singing, and overhead honked
the wild-fowl driving up from the south in cunning wedges that split the
air.
From every hill slope came the trickle of running water, the music of
unseen fountains. All things were thawing, bending, snapping. The Yukon
was straining to break loose the ice that bound it down. It ate away
from beneath; the sun ate from above. Air-holes formed, fissures sprang
and spread apart, while thin sections of ice fell through bodily into
the river. And amid all this bursting, rending, throbbing of awakening
life, under the blazing sun and through the soft-sighing breezes, like
wayfarers to death, staggered the two men, the woman, and the huskies.
With the dogs falling, Mercedes weeping and riding, Hal swearing
innocuously, and Charles's eyes wistfully watering, they staggered into
John Thornton's camp at the mouth of White River. When they halted,
the dogs dropped down as though they had all been struck dead. Mercedes
dried her eyes and looked at John Thornton. Charles sat down on a log
to rest. He sat down very slowly and painstakingly what of his great
stiffness. Hal did the talking. John Thornton was whittling the last
touches on an axe-handle he had made from a stick of birch. He whittled
and listened, gave monosyllabic replies, and, when it was asked, terse
advice. He knew the breed, and he gave his advice in the certainty that
it would not be followed.
"They told us up above that the bottom was dropping out of the trail and
that the best thing for us to do was to lay over," Hal said in response
to Thornton's warning to take no more chances on the rotten ice. "They
told us we couldn't make White River, and here we are." This last with a
sneering ring of triumph in it.
"And they told you true," John Thornton answered. "The bottom's likely
to drop out at any moment. Only fools, with the blind luck of fools,
could have made it. I tell you straight, I wouldn't risk my carcass on
that ice for all the gold in Alaska."
"That's because you're not a fool, I suppose," said Hal. "All the same,
we'll go on to Dawson." He uncoiled his whip. "Get up there, Buck! Hi!
Get up there! Mush on!"
Thornton went on whittling. It was idle, he knew, to get between a fool
and his folly; while two or three fools more or less would not alter the
scheme of things.
But the team did not get up at the command. It had long since passed
into the stage where blows were required to rouse it. The whip flashed
out, here and there, on its merciless errands. John Thornton compressed
his lips. Sol-leks was the first to crawl to his feet. Teek followed.
Joe came next, yelping with pain. Pike made painful efforts. Twice he
fell over, when half up, and on the third attempt managed to rise. Buck
made no effort. He lay quietly where he had fallen. The lash bit into
him again and again, but he neither whined nor struggled. Several times
Thornton started, as though to speak, but changed his mind. A moisture
came into his eyes, and, as the whipping continued, he arose and walked
irresolutely up and down.
This was the first time Buck had failed, in itself a sufficient reason
to drive Hal into a rage. He exchanged the whip for the customary club.
Buck refused to move under the rain of heavier blows which now fell upon
him. Like his mates, he was barely able to get up, but, unlike them, he
had made up his mind not to get up. He had a vague feeling of impending
doom. This had been strong upon him when he pulled in to the bank, and
it had not departed from him. What of the thin and rotten ice he had
felt under his feet all day, it seemed that he sensed disaster close at
hand, out there ahead on the ice where his master was trying to drive
him. He refused to stir. So greatly had he suffered, and so far gone was
he, that the blows did not hurt much. And as they continued to fall upon
him, the spark of life within flickered and went down. It was nearly
out. He felt strangely numb. As though from a great distance, he was
aware that he was being beaten. The last sensations of pain left him. He
no longer felt anything, though very faintly he could hear the impact of
the club upon his body. But it was no longer his body, it seemed so far
away.
And then, suddenly, without warning, uttering a cry that was
inarticulate and more like the cry of an animal, John Thornton sprang
upon the man who wielded the club. Hal was hurled backward, as
though struck by a falling tree. Mercedes screamed. Charles looked on
wistfully, wiped his watery eyes, but did not get up because of his
stiffness.
John Thornton stood over Buck, struggling to control himself, too
convulsed with rage to speak.
"If you strike that dog again, I'll kill you," he at last managed to say
in a choking voice.
"It's my dog," Hal replied, wiping the blood from his mouth as he came
back. "Get out of my way, or I'll fix you. I'm going to Dawson."
Thornton stood between him and Buck, and evinced no intention of getting
out of the way. Hal drew his long hunting-knife. Mercedes screamed,
cried, laughed, and manifested the chaotic abandonment of hysteria.
Thornton rapped Hal's knuckles with the axe-handle, knocking the knife
to the ground. He rapped his knuckles again as he tried to pick it up.
Then he stooped, picked it up himself, and with two strokes cut Buck's
traces.
Hal had no fight left in him. Besides, his hands were full with his
sister, or his arms, rather; while Buck was too near dead to be of
further use in hauling the sled. A few minutes later they pulled out
from the bank and down the river. Buck heard them go and raised his head
to see, Pike was leading, Sol-leks was at the wheel, and between were
Joe and Teek. They were limping and staggering. Mercedes was riding the
loaded sled. Hal guided at the gee-pole, and Charles stumbled along in
the rear.
As Buck watched them, Thornton knelt beside him and with rough, kindly
hands searched for broken bones. By the time his search had disclosed
nothing more than many bruises and a state of terrible starvation, the
sled was a quarter of a mile away. Dog and man watched it crawling along
over the ice. Suddenly, they saw its back end drop down, as into a rut,
and the gee-pole, with Hal clinging to it, jerk into the air. Mercedes's
scream came to their ears. They saw Charles turn and make one step to
run back, and then a whole section of ice give way and dogs and humans
disappear. A yawning hole was all that was to be seen. The bottom had
dropped out of the trail.
John Thornton and Buck looked at each other.
"You poor devil," said John Thornton, and Buck licked his hand.
End of Chapter V
THE CALL OF THE WILD
by Jack London
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 ***
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 *** 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 *** 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.
End of Chapter VI �