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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 ***, 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 *** 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 *** 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
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
"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
"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.