T C W

J L

P : 1903
S :W

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 C 1I P

"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 , 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.
 C 2T L C
F

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 Sol- leks flew at him and
administered a sound trouncing. The resulting tangle was even
worse, but Buck took good care to keep the traces clear thereafter;
and ere the day was done, so well had he mastered his work, his
mates about ceased nagging him. 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.
C 3T D P
B

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.
 C 4W H W
M

"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.
 C 5T T T
T

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.
 C 6F L M

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.
C 7T S C

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 wild- fowl 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 shell- fish 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.
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