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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.

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and he met the introduction halfway. The facts of life took on a fiercer
aspect; and while he faced that aspect uncowed, he faced it with all the
latent cunning of his nature aroused. As the days went by, other dogs
came, in crates and at the ends of ropes, some docilely, and some raging
and roaring as he had come; and, one and all, he watched them pass
under the dominion of the man in the red sweater. Again and again, as he
looked at each brutal performance, the lesson was driven home to Buck:
a man with a club was a lawgiver, a master to be obeyed, though not
necessarily conciliated. Of this last Buck was never guilty, though he
did see beaten dogs that fawned upon the man, and wagged their tails,
and licked his hand. Also he saw one dog, that would neither conciliate
nor obey, finally killed in the struggle for mastery.

Now and again men came, strangers, who talked excitedly, wheedlingly,
and in all kinds of fashions to the man in the red sweater. And at such
times that money passed between them the strangers took one or more of
the dogs away with them. Buck wondered where they went, for they never
came back; but the fear of the future was strong upon him, and he was
glad each time when he was not selected.

Yet his time came, in the end, in the form of a little weazened man who
spat broken English and many strange and uncouth exclamations which Buck
could not understand.

"Sacredam!" he cried, when his eyes lit upon Buck. "Dat one dam bully
dog! Eh? How moch?"

"Three hundred, and a present at that," was the prompt reply of the man
in the red sweater. "And seem' it's government money, you ain't got no
kick coming, eh, Perrault?"

Perrault grinned. Considering that the price of dogs had been boomed
skyward by the unwonted demand, it was not an unfair sum for so fine
an animal. The Canadian Government would be no loser, nor would its
despatches travel the slower. Perrault knew dogs, and when he looked at
Buck he knew that he was one in a thousand--"One in ten t'ousand," he
commented mentally.

Buck saw money pass between them, and was not surprised when Curly, a
good-natured Newfoundland, and he were led away by the little weazened
man. That was the last he saw of the man in the red sweater, and as
Curly and he looked at receding Seattle from the deck of the Narwhal, it
was the last he saw of the warm Southland. Curly and he were taken below
by Perrault and turned over to a black-faced giant called Francois.
Perrault was a French-Canadian, and swarthy; but Francois was a
French-Canadian half-breed, and twice as swarthy. They were a new kind
of men to Buck (of which he was destined to see many more), and while
he developed no affection for them, he none the less grew honestly to
respect them. He speedily learned that Perrault and Francois were fair
men, calm and impartial in administering justice, and too wise in the
way of dogs to be fooled by dogs.

In the 'tween-decks of the Narwhal, Buck and Curly joined two other
dogs. One of them was a big, snow-white fellow from Spitzbergen who had
been brought away by a whaling captain, and who had later accompanied
a Geological Survey into the Barrens. He was friendly, in a treacherous
sort of way, smiling into one's face the while he meditated some
underhand trick, as, for instance, when he stole from Buck's food at the
first meal. As Buck sprang to punish him, the lash of Francois's whip
sang through the air, reaching the culprit first; and nothing remained
to Buck but to recover the bone. That was fair of Francois, he decided,
and the half-breed began his rise in Buck's estimation.

The other dog made no advances, nor received any; also, he did not
attempt to steal from the newcomers. He was a gloomy, morose fellow, and
he showed Curly plainly that all he desired was to be left alone, and
further, that there would be trouble if he were not left alone. "Dave"
he was called, and he ate and slept, or yawned between times, and took
interest in nothing, not even when the Narwhal crossed Queen Charlotte
Sound and rolled and pitched and bucked like a thing possessed. When
Buck and Curly grew excited, half wild with fear, he raised his head as
though annoyed, favored them with an incurious glance, yawned, and went
to sleep again.

Day and night the ship throbbed to the tireless pulse of the propeller,
and though one day was very like another, it was apparent to Buck that
the weather was steadily growing colder. At last, one morning, the
propeller was quiet, and the Narwhal was pervaded with an atmosphere of
excitement. He felt it, as did the other dogs, and knew that a change
was at hand. Francois leashed them and brought them on deck. At the
first step upon the cold surface, Buck's feet sank into a white mushy
something very like mud. He sprang back with a snort. More of this white
stuff was falling through the air. He shook himself, but more of it fell
upon him. He sniffed it curiously, then licked some up on his tongue. It
bit like fire, and the next instant was gone. This puzzled him. He tried
it again, with the same result. The onlookers laughed uproariously, and
he felt ashamed, he knew not why, for it was his first snow.




Chapter II. The Law of Club and Fang


Buck's first day on the Dyea beach was like a nightmare. Every hour was
filled with shock and surprise. He had been suddenly jerked from the
heart of civilization and flung into the heart of things primordial.
No lazy, sun-kissed life was this, with nothing to do but loaf and be
bored. Here was neither peace, nor rest, nor a moment's safety. All
was confusion and action, and every moment life and limb were in peril.
There was imperative need to be constantly alert; for these dogs and men
were not town dogs and men. They were savages, all of them, who knew no
law but the law of club and fang.

He had never seen dogs fight as these wolfish creatures fought, and his
first experience taught him an unforgetable lesson. It is true, it was
a vicarious experience, else he would not have lived to profit by it.
Curly was the victim. They were camped near the log store, where she, in
her friendly way, made advances to a husky dog the size of a full-grown
wolf, though not half so large as she. There was no warning, only a leap
in like a flash, a metallic clip of teeth, a leap out equally swift, and
Curly's face was ripped open from eye to jaw.

It was the wolf manner of fighting, to strike and leap away; but there
was more to it than this. Thirty or forty huskies ran to the spot and
surrounded the combatants in an intent and silent circle. Buck did not
comprehend that silent intentness, nor the eager way with which they
were licking their chops. Curly rushed her antagonist, who struck again
and leaped aside. He met her next rush with his chest, in a peculiar
fashion that tumbled her off her feet. She never regained them, This
was what the onlooking huskies had waited for. They closed in upon her,

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His development (or retrogression) was rapid. His muscles became hard as
iron, and he grew callous to all ordinary pain. He achieved an internal
as well as external economy. He could eat anything, no matter how
loathsome or indigestible; and, once eaten, the juices of his stomach
extracted the last least particle of nutriment; and his blood carried it
to the farthest reaches of his body, building it into the toughest and
stoutest of tissues. Sight and scent became remarkably keen, while his
hearing developed such acuteness that in his sleep he heard the faintest
sound and knew whether it heralded peace or peril. He learned to bite
the ice out with his teeth when it collected between his toes; and when
he was thirsty and there was a thick scum of ice over the water hole, he
would break it by rearing and striking it with stiff fore legs. His most
conspicuous trait was an ability to scent the wind and forecast it a
night in advance. No matter how breathless the air when he dug his
nest by tree or bank, the wind that later blew inevitably found him to
leeward, sheltered and snug.

And not only did he learn by experience, but instincts long dead became
alive again. The domesticated generations fell from him. In vague ways
he remembered back to the youth of the breed, to the time the wild dogs
ranged in packs through the primeval forest and killed their meat as
they ran it down. It was no task for him to learn to fight with cut
and slash and the quick wolf snap. In this manner had fought forgotten
ancestors. They quickened the old life within him, and the old tricks
which they had stamped into the heredity of the breed were his tricks.
They came to him without effort or discovery, as though they had been
his always. And when, on the still cold nights, he pointed his nose at a
star and howled long and wolflike, it was his ancestors, dead and dust,
pointing nose at star and howling down through the centuries and through
him. And his cadences were their cadences, the cadences which voiced
their woe and what to them was the meaning of the stiffness, and the
cold, and dark.

Thus, as token of what a puppet thing life is, the ancient song surged
through him and he came into his own again; and he came because men had
found a yellow metal in the North, and because Manuel was a gardener's
helper whose wages did not lap over the needs of his wife and divers
small copies of himself.




Chapter III. The Dominant Primordial Beast


The dominant primordial beast was strong in Buck, and under the fierce
conditions of trail life it grew and grew. Yet it was a secret growth.
His newborn cunning gave him poise and control. He was too busy
adjusting himself to the new life to feel at ease, and not only did
he not pick fights, but he avoided them whenever possible. A certain
deliberateness characterized his attitude. He was not prone to rashness
and precipitate action; and in the bitter hatred between him and Spitz
he betrayed no impatience, shunned all offensive acts.

On the other hand, possibly because he divined in Buck a dangerous
rival, Spitz never lost an opportunity of showing his teeth. He even
went out of his way to bully Buck, striving constantly to start the
fight which could end only in the death of one or the other. Early in
the trip this might have taken place had it not been for an unwonted
accident. At the end of this day they made a bleak and miserable camp
on the shore of Lake Le Barge. Driving snow, a wind that cut like a
white-hot knife, and darkness had forced them to grope for a camping
place. They could hardly have fared worse. At their backs rose a
perpendicular wall of rock, and Perrault and Francois were compelled to
make their fire and spread their sleeping robes on the ice of the lake
itself. The tent they had discarded at Dyea in order to travel light.
A few sticks of driftwood furnished them with a fire that thawed down
through the ice and left them to eat supper in the dark.

Close in under the sheltering rock Buck made his nest. So snug and warm
was it, that he was loath to leave it when Francois distributed the
fish which he had first thawed over the fire. But when Buck finished his
ration and returned, he found his nest occupied. A warning snarl told
him that the trespasser was Spitz. Till now Buck had avoided trouble
with his enemy, but this was too much. The beast in him roared. He
sprang upon Spitz with a fury which surprised them both, and Spitz
particularly, for his whole experience with Buck had gone to teach him
that his rival was an unusually timid dog, who managed to hold his own
only because of his great weight and size.

Francois was surprised, too, when they shot out in a tangle from the
disrupted nest and he divined the cause of the trouble. "A-a-ah!"
he cried to Buck. "Gif it to heem, by Gar! Gif it to heem, the dirty
t'eef!"

Spitz was equally willing. He was crying with sheer rage and eagerness
as he circled back and forth for a chance to spring in. Buck was no less
eager, and no less cautious, as he likewise circled back and forth for
the advantage. But it was then that the unexpected happened, the thing
which projected their struggle for supremacy far into the future, past
many a weary mile of trail and toil.

An oath from Perrault, the resounding impact of a club upon a bony
frame, and a shrill yelp of pain, heralded the breaking forth of
pandemonium. The camp was suddenly discovered to be alive with skulking
furry forms,--starving huskies, four or five score of them, who had
scented the camp from some Indian village. They had crept in while Buck
and Spitz were fighting, and when the two men sprang among them with
stout clubs they showed their teeth and fought back. They were crazed
by the smell of the food. Perrault found one with head buried in the
grub-box. His club landed heavily on the gaunt ribs, and the grub-box
was capsized on the ground. On the instant a score of the famished
brutes were scrambling for the bread and bacon. The clubs fell upon them
unheeded. They yelped and howled under the rain of blows, but struggled
none the less madly till the last crumb had been devoured.

In the meantime the astonished team-dogs had burst out of their nests
only to be set upon by the fierce invaders. Never had Buck seen such
dogs. It seemed as though their bones would burst through their skins.
They were mere skeletons, draped loosely in draggled hides, with blazing
eyes and slavered fangs. But the hunger-madness made them terrifying,
irresistible. There was no opposing them. The team-dogs were swept back
against the cliff at the first onset. Buck was beset by three huskies,
and in a trice his head and shoulders were ripped and slashed. The din
was frightful. Billee was crying as usual. Dave and Sol-leks, dripping
blood from a score of wounds, were fighting bravely side by side. Joe
was snapping like a demon. Once, his teeth closed on the fore leg of
a husky, and he crunched down through the bone. Pike, the malingerer,
leaped upon the crippled animal, breaking its neck with a quick flash of
teeth and a jerk, Buck got a frothing adversary by the throat, and was

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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

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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

t/wild.txt  view on Meta::CPAN

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.

t/wild.txt  view on Meta::CPAN

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

t/wild.txt  view on Meta::CPAN

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.