The call of the wild
sit down for a long talk with them (“gas” he called it) was as much his
delight as theirs. He had a way of taking Buck’s head roughly between
his hands, and resting his own head upon Buck’s, of shaking him back
and forth, the while calling him ill names that to Buck were love
names. Buck knew no greater joy than that rough embrace and the sound
of murmured oaths, and at each jerk back and forth it seemed that his
heart would be shaken out of his body so great was its ecstasy. And
when, released, he sprang to his feet, his mouth laughing, his eyes
eloquent, his throat vibrant with unuttered sound, and in that fashion
remained without movement, John Thornton would reverently exclaim,
“God! you can all but speak!”
Buck had a trick of love expression that was akin to hurt. He would
often seize Thornton’s hand in his mouth and close so fiercely that the
flesh bore the impress of his teeth for some time afterward. And as
Buck understood the oaths to be love words, so the man understood this
feigned bite for a caress.
For the most part, however, Buck’s love was expressed in adoration.
While he went wild with happiness when Thornton touched him or spoke to
him, he did not seek these tokens. Unlike Skeet, who was wont to shove
her nose under Thornton’s hand and nudge and nudge till petted, or Nig,
who would stalk up and rest his great head on Thornton’s knee, Buck was
content to adore at a distance. He would lie by the hour, eager, alert,
at Thornton’s feet, looking up into his face, dwelling upon it,
studying it, following with keenest interest each fleeting expression,
every movement or change of feature. Or, as chance might have it, he
would lie farther away, to the side or rear, watching the outlines of
the man and the occasional movements of his body. And often, such was
the communion in which they lived, the strength of Buck’s gaze would
draw John Thornton’s head around, and he would return the gaze, without
speech, his heart shining out of his eyes as Buck’s heart shone out.
For a long time after his rescue, Buck did not like Thornton to get out
of his sight. From the moment he left the tent to when he entered it
again, Buck would follow at his heels. His transient masters since he
had come into the Northland had bred in him a fear that no master could
be permanent. He was afraid that Thornton would pass out of his life as
Perrault and 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 well the
law of club and fang, and he never forewent an advantage or drew back
from a foe he had started on the way to Death. He had lessoned from
Spitz, and from the chief fighting dogs of the police and mail, and
knew there was no middle course. He must master or be mastered; while
to show mercy was a weakness. Mercy did not exist in the primordial
life. It was misunderstood for fear, and such misunderstandings made
for death. Kill or be killed, eat or be eaten, was the law; and this
mandate, down out of the depths of Time, he obeyed.
He was older than the days he had seen and the breaths he had drawn. He
linked the past with the present, and the eternity behind him throbbed
through him in a mighty rhythm to which he swayed as the tides and
seasons swayed. He sat by John Thornton’s fire, a broad-breasted dog,
white-fanged and long-furred; but behind him were the shades of all
manner of dogs, half-wolves and wild wolves, urgent and prompting,
tasting the savor of the meat he ate, thirsting for the water he drank,
scenting the wind with him, listening with him and telling him the
sounds made by the wild life in the forest, dictating his moods,
directing his actions, lying down to sleep with him when he lay down,
and dreaming with him and beyond him and becoming themselves the stuff
of his dreams.
So peremptorily did these shades beckon him, that each day mankind and
the claims of mankind slipped farther from him. Deep in the forest a
call was sounding, and as often as he heard this call, mysteriously
thrilling and luring, he felt compelled to turn his back upon the fire
and the beaten earth around it, and to plunge into the forest, and on
and on, he knew not where or why; nor did he wonder where or why, the
call sounding imperiously, deep in the forest. But as often as he
gained the soft unbroken earth and the green shade, the love for John
Thornton drew him back to the fire again.
Thornton alone held him. The rest of mankind was as nothing. Chance
travellers might praise or pet him; but he was cold under it all, and
from a too demonstrative man he would get up and walk away. When
Thornton’s partners, Hans and Pete, arrived on the long-expected raft,
Buck refused to notice them till he learned they were close to
Thornton; after that he tolerated them in a passive sort of way,
accepting favors from them as though he favored them by accepting. They
were of the same large type as Thornton, living close to the earth,
thinking simply and seeing clearly; and ere they swung the raft into
the big eddy by the saw-mill at Dawson, they understood Buck and his
ways, and did not insist upon an intimacy such as obtained with Skeet
and Nig.
For Thornton, however, his love seemed to grow and grow. He, alone
among men, could put a pack upon Buck’s back in the summer travelling.
Nothing was too great for Buck to do, when Thornton commanded. One day
(they had grub-staked themselves from the proceeds of the raft and left
Dawson for the head-waters of the Tanana) the men and dogs were sitting
on the crest of a cliff which fell away, straight down, to naked
bed-rock three hundred feet below. John Thornton was sitting near the
edge, Buck at his shoulder. A thoughtless whim seized Thornton, and he
drew the attention of Hans and Pete to the experiment he had in mind.
“Jump, Buck!” he commanded, sweeping his arm out and over the chasm.
The next instant he was grappling with Buck on the extreme edge, while
Hans and Pete were dragging them back into safety.
“It’s uncanny,” Pete said, after it was over and they had caught their
speech.
Thornton shook his head. “No, it is splendid, and it is terrible, too.
Do you know, it sometimes makes me afraid.”
“I’m not hankering to be the man that lays hands on you while he’s
around,” Pete announced conclusively, nodding his head toward Buck.
“Py Jingo!” was Hans’s contribution. “Not mineself either.”
It was at Circle City, ere the year was out, that Pete’s apprehensions
were realized. “Black” Burton, a man evil-tempered and malicious, had
been picking a quarrel with a tenderfoot at the bar, when Thornton
stepped good-naturedly between. Buck, as was his custom, was lying in a
corner, head on paws, watching his master’s every action. Burton struck
out, without warning, straight from the shoulder. Thornton was sent
spinning, and saved himself from falling only by clutching the rail of
the bar.
Those who were looking on heard what was neither bark nor yelp, but a
something which is best described as a roar, and they saw Buck’s body
rise up in the air as he left the floor for Burton’s throat. The man
saved his life by instinctively throwing out his arm, but was hurled
backward to the floor with Buck on top of him. Buck loosed his teeth
from the flesh of the arm and drove in again for the throat. This time
the man succeeded only in partly blocking, and his throat was torn
open. Then the crowd was upon Buck, and he was driven off; but while a
surgeon checked the bleeding, he prowled up and down, growling
furiously, attempting to rush in, and being forced back by an array of
hostile clubs. A “miners’ meeting,” called on the spot, decided that
the dog had sufficient provocation, and Buck was discharged. But his
reputation was made, and from that day his name spread through every
camp in Alaska.
Later on, in the fall of the year, he saved John Thornton’s life in
quite another fashion. The three partners were lining a long and narrow
poling-boat down a bad stretch of rapids on the Forty-Mile Creek. Hans
and Pete moved along the bank, snubbing with a thin Manila rope from
tree to tree, while Thornton remained in the boat, helping its descent
by means of a pole, and shouting directions to the shore. Buck, on the
bank, worried and anxious, kept abreast of the boat, his eyes never off
his master.
At a particularly bad spot, where a ledge of barely submerged rocks
jutted out into the river, Hans cast off the rope, and, while Thornton
poled the boat out into the stream, ran down the bank with the end in
his hand to snub the boat when it had cleared the ledge. This it did,
and was flying down-stream in a current as swift as a mill-race, when
Hans checked it with the rope and checked too suddenly. The boat
flirted over and snubbed in to the bank bottom up, while Thornton,
flung sheer out of it, was carried down-stream toward the worst part of
the rapids, a stretch of wild water in which no swimmer could live.
Buck had sprung in on the instant; and at the end of three hundred
yards, amid a mad swirl of water, he overhauled Thornton. When he felt
him grasp his tail, Buck headed for the bank, swimming with all his
splendid strength. But the progress shoreward was slow; the progress
down-stream amazingly rapid. From below came the fatal roaring where
the wild current went wilder and was rent in shreds and spray by the
rocks which thrust through like the teeth of an enormous comb. The suck
of the water as it took the beginning of the last steep pitch was
frightful, and Thornton knew that the shore was impossible. He scraped
furiously over a rock, bruised across a second, and struck a third with
crushing force. He clutched its slippery top with both hands, releasing
Buck, and above the roar of the churning water shouted: “Go, Buck! Go!”
Buck could not hold his own, and swept on down-stream, struggling
desperately, but unable to win back. When he heard Thornton’s command
repeated, he partly reared out of the water, throwing his head high, as
though for a last look, then turned obediently toward the bank. He swam
powerfully and was dragged ashore by Pete and Hans at the very point
where swimming ceased to be possible and destruction began.
They knew that the time a man could cling to a slippery rock in the
face of that driving current was a matter of minutes, and they ran as
fast as they could up the bank to a point far above where Thornton was
hanging on. They attached the line with which they had been snubbing
the boat to Buck’s neck and shoulders, being careful that it should