The call of the wild
great misery they had become insensible to the bite of the lash or the
bruise of the club. The pain of the beating was dull and distant, just
as the things their eyes saw and their ears heard seemed dull and
distant. They were not half living, or quarter living. They were simply
so many bags of bones in which sparks of life fluttered faintly. When a
halt was made, they dropped down in the traces like dead dogs, and the
spark dimmed and paled and seemed to go out. And when the club or whip
fell upon them, the spark fluttered feebly up, and they tottered to
their feet and staggered on.
There came a day when Billee, the good-natured, fell and could not
rise. Hal had traded off his revolver, so he took the axe and knocked
Billee on the head as he lay in the traces, then cut the carcass out of
the harness and dragged it to one side. Buck saw, and his mates saw,
and they knew that this thing was very close to them. On the next day
Koona went, and but five of them remained: Joe, too far gone to be
malignant; Pike, crippled and limping, only half conscious and not
conscious enough longer to malinger; Sol-leks, the one-eyed, still
faithful to the toil of trace and trail, and mournful in that he had so
little strength with which to pull; Teek, who had not travelled so far
that winter and who was now beaten more than the others because he was
fresher; and Buck, still at the head of the team, but no longer
enforcing discipline or striving to enforce it, blind with weakness
half the time and keeping the trail by the loom of it and by the dim
feel of his feet.
It was beautiful spring weather, but neither dogs nor humans were aware
of it. Each day the sun rose earlier and set later. It was dawn by
three in the morning, and twilight lingered till nine at night. The
whole long day was a blaze of sunshine. The ghostly winter silence had
given way to the great spring murmur of awakening life. This murmur
arose from all the land, fraught with the joy of living. It came from
the things that lived and moved again, things which had been as dead
and which had not moved during the long months of frost. The sap was
rising in the pines. The willows and aspens were bursting out in young
buds. Shrubs and vines were putting on fresh garbs of green. Crickets
sang in the nights, and in the days all manner of creeping, crawling
things rustled forth into the sun. Partridges and woodpeckers were
booming and knocking in the forest. Squirrels were chattering, birds
singing, and overhead honked the wild-fowl driving up from the south in
cunning wedges that split the air.
From every hill slope came the trickle of running water, the music of
unseen fountains. All things were thawing, bending, snapping. The Yukon
was straining to break loose the ice that bound it down. It ate away
from beneath; the sun ate from above. Air-holes formed, fissures sprang
and spread apart, while thin sections of ice fell through bodily into
the river. And amid all this bursting, rending, throbbing of awakening
life, under the blazing sun and through the soft-sighing breezes, like
wayfarers to death, staggered the two men, the woman, and the huskies.
With the dogs falling, Mercedes weeping and riding, Hal swearing
innocuously, and Charles’s eyes wistfully watering, they staggered into
John Thornton’s camp at the mouth of White River. When they halted, the
dogs dropped down as though they had all been struck dead. Mercedes
dried her eyes and looked at John Thornton. Charles sat down on a log
to rest. He sat down very slowly and painstakingly what of his great
stiffness. Hal did the talking. John Thornton was whittling the last
touches on an axe-handle he had made from a stick of birch. He whittled
and listened, gave monosyllabic replies, and, when it was asked, terse
advice. He knew the breed, and he gave his advice in the certainty that
it would not be followed.
“They told us up above that the bottom was dropping out of the trail
and that the best thing for us to do was to lay over,” Hal said in
response to Thornton’s warning to take no more chances on the rotten
ice. “They told us we couldn’t make White River, and here we are.” This
last with a sneering ring of triumph in it.
“And they told you true,” John Thornton answered. “The bottom’s likely
to drop out at any moment. Only fools, with the blind luck of fools,
could have made it. I tell you straight, I wouldn’t risk my carcass on
that ice for all the gold in Alaska.”
“That’s because you’re not a fool, I suppose,” said Hal. “All the same,
we’ll go on to Dawson.” He uncoiled his whip. “Get up there, Buck! Hi!
Get up there! Mush on!”
Thornton went on whittling. It was idle, he knew, to get between a fool
and his folly; while two or three fools more or less would not alter
the scheme of things.
But the team did not get up at the command. It had long since passed
into the stage where blows were required to rouse it. The whip flashed
out, here and there, on its merciless errands. John Thornton compressed
his lips. Sol-leks was the first to crawl to his feet. Teek followed.
Joe came next, yelping with pain. Pike made painful efforts. Twice he
fell over, when half up, and on the third attempt managed to rise. Buck
made no effort. He lay quietly where he had fallen. The lash bit into
him again and again, but he neither whined nor struggled. Several times
Thornton started, as though to speak, but changed his mind. A moisture
came into his eyes, and, as the whipping continued, he arose and walked
irresolutely up and down.
This was the first time Buck had failed, in itself a sufficient reason
to drive Hal into a rage. He exchanged the whip for the customary club.
Buck refused to move under the rain of heavier blows which now fell
upon him. Like his mates, he was barely able to get up, but, unlike
them, he had made up his mind not to get up. He had a vague feeling of
impending doom. This had been strong upon him when he pulled in to the
bank, and it had not departed from him. What of the thin and rotten ice
he had felt under his feet all day, it seemed that he sensed disaster
close at hand, out there ahead on the ice where his master was trying
to drive him. He refused to stir. So greatly had he suffered, and so
far gone was he, that the blows did not hurt much. And as they
continued to fall upon him, the spark of life within flickered and went
down. It was nearly out. He felt strangely numb. As though from a great
distance, he was aware that he was being beaten. The last sensations of
pain left him. He no longer felt anything, though very faintly he could
hear the impact of the club upon his body. But it was no longer his
body, it seemed so far away.
And then, suddenly, without warning, uttering a cry that was
inarticulate and more like the cry of an animal, John Thornton sprang
upon the man who wielded the club. Hal was hurled backward, as though
struck by a falling tree. Mercedes screamed. Charles looked on
wistfully, wiped his watery eyes, but did not get up because of his
stiffness.
John Thornton stood over Buck, struggling to control himself, too
convulsed with rage to speak.
“If you strike that dog again, I’ll kill you,” he at last managed to
say in a choking voice.
“It’s my dog,” Hal replied, wiping the blood from his mouth as he came
back. “Get out of my way, or I’ll fix you. I’m going to Dawson.”
Thornton stood between him and Buck, and evinced no intention of
getting out of the way. Hal drew his long hunting-knife. Mercedes
screamed, cried, laughed, and manifested the chaotic abandonment of
hysteria. Thornton rapped Hal’s knuckles with the axe-handle, knocking
the knife to the ground. He rapped his knuckles again as he tried to
pick it up. Then he stooped, picked it up himself, and with two strokes
cut Buck’s traces.
Hal had no fight left in him. Besides, his hands were full with his
sister, or his arms, rather; while Buck was too near dead to be of
further use in hauling the sled. A few minutes later they pulled out
from the bank and down the river. Buck heard them go and raised his
head to see, Pike was leading, Sol-leks was at the wheel, and between
were Joe and Teek. They were limping and staggering. Mercedes was
riding the loaded sled. Hal guided at the gee-pole, and Charles
stumbled along in the rear.
As Buck watched them, Thornton knelt beside him and with rough, kindly
hands searched for broken bones. By the time his search had disclosed
nothing more than many bruises and a state of terrible starvation, the
sled was a quarter of a mile away. Dog and man watched it crawling
along over the ice. Suddenly, they saw its back end drop down, as into
a rut, and the gee-pole, with Hal clinging to it, jerk into the air.
Mercedes’s scream came to their ears. They saw Charles turn and make
one step to run back, and then a whole section of ice give way and dogs
and humans disappear. A yawning hole was all that was to be seen. The
bottom had dropped out of the trail.
John Thornton and Buck looked at each other.
“You poor devil,” said John Thornton, and Buck licked his hand.
Chapter VI. For the Love of a Man
When John Thornton froze his feet in the previous December his partners
had made him comfortable and left him to get well, going on themselves
up the river to get out a raft of saw-logs for Dawson. He was still
limping slightly at the time he rescued Buck, but with the continued
warm weather even the slight limp left him. And here, lying by the
river bank through the long spring days, watching the running water,
listening lazily to the songs of birds and the hum of nature, Buck
slowly won back his strength.
A rest comes very good after one has travelled three thousand miles,
and it must be confessed that Buck waxed lazy as his wounds healed, his
muscles swelled out, and the flesh came back to cover his bones. For
that matter, they were all loafing,—Buck, John Thornton, and Skeet and
Nig,—waiting for the raft to come that was to carry them down to
Dawson. Skeet was a little Irish setter who early made friends with
Buck, who, in a dying condition, was unable to resent her first
advances. She had the doctor trait which some dogs possess; and as a
mother cat washes her kittens, so she washed and cleansed Buck’s
wounds. Regularly, each morning after he had finished his breakfast,
she performed her self-appointed task, till he came to look for her
ministrations as much as he did for Thornton’s. Nig, equally friendly,
though less demonstrative, was a huge black dog, half bloodhound and
half deerhound, with eyes that laughed and a boundless good nature.
To Buck’s surprise these dogs manifested no jealousy toward him. They
seemed to share the kindliness and largeness of John Thornton. As Buck
grew stronger they enticed him into all sorts of ridiculous games, in
which Thornton himself could not forbear to join; and in this fashion
Buck romped through his convalescence and into a new existence. Love,
genuine passionate love, was his for the first time. This he had never
experienced at Judge Miller’s down in the sun-kissed Santa Clara
Valley. With the Judge’s sons, hunting and tramping, it had been a
working partnership; with the Judge’s grandsons, a sort of pompous
guardianship; and with the Judge himself, a stately and dignified
friendship. But love that was feverish and burning, that was adoration,
that was madness, it had taken John Thornton to arouse.
This man had saved his life, which was something; but, further, he was
the ideal master. Other men saw to the welfare of their dogs from a
sense of duty and business expediency; he saw to the welfare of his as
if they were his own children, because he could not help it. And he saw
further. He never forgot a kindly greeting or a cheering word, and to