CHAPTER 3

They were

perambulating skeletons. There were seven all together, including him.

In their very great misery they had become insensible to the bite of the

lash or the bruise of the club. The pain of the beating was dull and

distant, just as the things their eyes saw and their ears heard seemed dull

and distant. They were not half living, or quarter living. They were

simply so many bags of bones in which sparks of life fluttered faintly.

When a halt was made, they dropped down in the traces like dead dogs,

and the spark dimmed and paled and seemed to go out. And when the

club or whip fell upon them, the spark fluttered feebly up, and they

tottered to their feet and staggered on.

There came a day when Billee, the good-natured, fell and could not

rise. Hal had traded off his revolver, so he took the axe and knocked

Billee on the head as he lay in the traces, then cut the carcass out of the

harness and dragged it to one side. Buck saw, and his mates saw, and

they knew that this thing was very close to them. On the next day Koona

went, and but five of them remained: Joe, too far gone to be malignant;

Pike, crippled and limping, only half conscious and not conscious

enough longer to malinger; Sol-leks, the one-eyed, still faithful to the

toil of trace and trail, and mournful in that he had so little strength with

which to pull; Teek, who had not travelled so far that winter and who

was now beaten more than the others because he was fresher; and Buck,

still at the head of the team, but no longer enforcing discipline or

striving to enforce it, blind with weakness half the time and keeping the

trail by the loom of it and by the dim feel of his feet.It was beautiful spring weather, but neither dogs nor humans were

aware of it. Each day the sun rose earlier and set later. It was dawn by

three in the morning, and twilight lingered till nine at night. The whole

long day was a blaze of sunshine. The ghostly winter silence had given

way to the great spring murmur of awakening life. This murmur arose

from all the land, fraught with the joy of living. It came from the things

that lived and moved again, things which had been as dead and which

had not moved during the long months of frost. The sap was rising in the

pines. The willows and aspens were bursting out in young buds. Shrubs

and vines were putting on fresh garbs of green. Crickets sang in the

nights, and in the days all manner of creeping, crawling things rustled

forth into the sun. Partridges and woodpeckers were booming and

knocking in the forest. Squirrels were chattering, birds singing, and

overhead honked the wild-fowl driving up from the south in cunning

wedges that split the air.

From every hill slope came the trickle of running water, the music of

unseen fountains. All things were thawing, bending, snapping. The

Yukon was straining to break loose the ice that bound it down. It ate

away from beneath; the sun ate from above. Air-holes formed, fissures

sprang and spread apart, while thin sections of ice fell through bodily

into the river. And amid all this bursting, rending, throbbing of

awakening life, under the blazing sun and through the soft-sighing

breezes, like wayfarers to death, staggered the two men, the woman, and

the huskies.

With the dogs falling, Mercedes weeping and riding, Hal swearing

innocuously, and Charles's eyes wistfully watering, they staggered into

John Thornton's camp at the mouth of White River. When they halted,

the dogs dropped down as though they had all been struck dead.

Mercedes dried her eyes and looked at John Thornton. Charles sat down

on a log to rest. He sat down very slowly and painstakingly, what of his

great stiffness. Hal did the talking. John Thornton was whittling the last

touches on an axe-handle he had made from a stick of birch. He whittled

and listened, gave monosyllabic replies, and, when it was asked, terse

advice. He knew the breed, and he gave his advice in the certainty that it

would not be followed."They told us up above that the bottom was dropping out of the trail

and that the best thing for us to do was to lay over," Hal said in response

to Thornton's warning to take no more chances on the rotten ice. "They

told us we couldn't make White River, and here we are." This last with a

sneering ring of triumph in it.

"And they told you true," John Thornton answered. "The bottom's

likely to drop out at any moment. Only fools, with the blind luck of

fools, could have made it. I tell you straight, I wouldn't risk my carcass

on that ice for all the gold in Alaska."

"That's because you're not a fool, I suppose," said Hal. "All the

same, we'll go on to Dawson." He uncoiled his whip. "Get up there,

Buck! Hi! Get up there! Mush on!"

Thornton went on whittling. It was idle, he knew, to get between a

fool and his folly, while two or three fools more or less would not alter

the scheme of things.

But the team did not get up at the command. It had long since passed

into the stage where blows were required to rouse it. The whip flashed

out, here and there, on its merciless errands. John Thornton compressed

his lips. Sol-leks was the first to crawl to his feet. Teek followed. Joe

came next, yelping with pain. Pike made painful efforts. Twice he fell

over, when half up, and on the third attempt managed to rise. Buck made

no effort. He lay quietly where he had fallen. The lash bit into him again

and again, but he neither whined nor struggled. Several times Thornton

started, as though to speak, but changed his mind. A moisture came into

his eyes, and, as the whipping continued, he arose and walked

irresolutely up and down.

This was the first time Buck had failed, in itself a sufficient reason to

drive Hal into a rage. He exchanged the whip for the customary club.

Buck refused to move under the rain of heavier blows which now fell

upon him. Like his mates, he was barely able to get up, but, unlike them,

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

impending doom. This had been strong upon him when he pulled in to

the bank, and it had not departed from him. What of the thin and rotten

ice he had felt under his feet all day, it seemed that he sensed disaster

close at hand, out there ahead on the ice where his master was trying todrive him. He refused to stir. So greatly had he suffered, and so far gone

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

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

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

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

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

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

away.

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

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

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

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

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

stiffness.

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

convulsed with rage to speak.

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

in a choking voice.

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

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

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

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

screamed, cried, laughed, and manifested the chaotic abandonment of

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

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

it up. Then he stooped, picked it up himself, and with two strokes cut

Buck's traces.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

the rear.As Buck watched them, Thornton knelt beside him and with rough,

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

disclosed nothing more than many bruises and a state of terrible

starvation, the sled was a quarter of a mile away. Dog and man watched

it crawling along over the ice. Suddenly, they saw its back end drop

down, as into a rut, and the gee-pole, with Hal clinging to it, jerk into the

air. Mercedes's scream came to their ears. They saw Charles turn and

make one step to run back, and then a whole section of ice give way and

dogs and humans disappear. A yawning hole was all that was to be seen.

The bottom had dropped out of the trail.

John Thornton and Buck looked at each other.

"You poor devil," said John Thornton, and Buck licked his hand.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 Buckgrew 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 tillpetted, 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 François 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 wellthe 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, acceptingfavors 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'sbody 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 therocks 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 miscalculatedonce, 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 fifty-pound 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 sixtybelow 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. Menfelt 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 manœuvre, 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.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 ofthe 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 BayCompany 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; andBuck 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 cryhe 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. Heknew 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 meatas 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 it 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 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. Tosights 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 the 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 tree-tops.

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 bandof 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 nevershake 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, risingand 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. Bythe 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 wolvesswung 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.