The call of the wild
land. There was life abroad in it different from the life which had
been there throughout the summer. No longer was this fact borne in upon
him in some subtle, mysterious way. The birds talked of it, the
squirrels chattered about it, the very breeze whispered of it. Several
times he stopped and drew in the fresh morning air in great sniffs,
reading a message which made him leap on with greater speed. He was
oppressed with a sense of calamity happening, if it were not calamity
already happened; and as he crossed the last watershed and dropped down
into the valley toward camp, he proceeded with greater caution.
Three miles away he came upon a fresh trail that sent his neck hair
rippling and bristling, It led straight toward camp and John Thornton.
Buck hurried on, swiftly and stealthily, every nerve straining and
tense, alert to the multitudinous details which told a story—all but
the end. His nose gave him a varying description of the passage of the
life on the heels of which he was travelling. He remarked the pregnant
silence of the forest. The bird life had flitted. The squirrels were in
hiding. One only he saw,—a sleek gray fellow, flattened against a gray
dead limb so that he seemed a part of it, a woody excrescence upon the
wood itself.
As Buck slid along with the obscureness of a gliding shadow, his nose
was jerked suddenly to the side as though a positive force had gripped
and pulled it. He followed the new scent into a thicket and found Nig.
He was lying on his side, dead where he had dragged himself, an arrow
protruding, head and feathers, from either side of his body.
A hundred yards farther on, Buck came upon one of the sled-dogs
Thornton had bought in Dawson. This dog was thrashing about in a
death-struggle, directly on the trail, and Buck passed around him
without stopping. From the camp came the faint sound of many voices,
rising and falling in a sing-song chant. Bellying forward to the edge
of the clearing, he found Hans, lying on his face, feathered with
arrows like a porcupine. At the same instant Buck peered out where the
spruce-bough lodge had been and saw what made his hair leap straight up
on his neck and shoulders. A gust of overpowering rage swept over him.
He did not know that he growled, but he growled aloud with a terrible
ferocity. For the last time in his life he allowed passion to usurp
cunning and reason, and it was because of his great love for John
Thornton that he lost his head.
The Yeehats were dancing about the wreckage of the spruce-bough lodge
when they heard a fearful roaring and saw rushing upon them an animal
the like of which they had never seen before. It was Buck, a live
hurricane of fury, hurling himself upon them in a frenzy to destroy. He
sprang at the foremost man (it was the chief of the Yeehats), ripping
the throat wide open till the rent jugular spouted a fountain of blood.
He did not pause to worry the victim, but ripped in passing, with the
next bound tearing wide the throat of a second man. There was no
withstanding him. He plunged about in their very midst, tearing,
rending, destroying, in constant and terrific motion which defied the
arrows they discharged at him. In fact, so inconceivably rapid were his
movements, and so closely were the Indians tangled together, that they
shot one another with the arrows; and one young hunter, hurling a spear
at Buck in mid air, drove it through the chest of another hunter with
such force that the point broke through the skin of the back and stood
out beyond. Then a panic seized the Yeehats, and they fled in terror to
the woods, proclaiming as they fled the advent of the Evil Spirit.
And truly Buck was the Fiend incarnate, raging at their heels and
dragging them down like deer as they raced through the trees. It was a
fateful day for the Yeehats. They scattered far and wide over the
country, and it was not till a week later that the last of the
survivors gathered together in a lower valley and counted their losses.
As for Buck, wearying of the pursuit, he returned to the desolated
camp. He found Pete where he had been killed in his blankets in the
first moment of surprise. Thornton’s desperate struggle was
fresh-written on the earth, and Buck scented every detail of it down to
the edge of a deep pool. By the edge, head and fore feet in the water,
lay Skeet, faithful to the last. The pool itself, muddy and discolored
from the sluice boxes, effectually hid what it contained, and it
contained John Thornton; for Buck followed his trace into the water,
from which no trace led away.
All day Buck brooded by the pool or roamed restlessly about the camp.
Death, as a cessation of movement, as a passing out and away from the
lives of the living, he knew, and he knew John Thornton was dead. It
left a great void in him, somewhat akin to hunger, but a void which
ached and ached, and which food could not fill. At times, when he
paused to contemplate the carcasses of the Yeehats, he forgot the pain
of it; and at such times he was aware of a great pride in himself,—a
pride greater than any he had yet experienced. He had killed man, the
noblest game of all, and he had killed in the face of the law of club
and fang. He sniffed the bodies curiously. They had died so easily. It
was harder to kill a husky dog than them. They were no match at all,
were it not for their arrows and spears and clubs. Thenceforward he
would be unafraid of them except when they bore in their hands their
arrows, spears, and clubs.
Night came on, and a full moon rose high over the trees into the sky,
lighting the land till it lay bathed in ghostly day. And with the
coming of the night, brooding and mourning by the pool, Buck became
alive to a stirring of the new life in the forest other than that which
the Yeehats had made, He stood up, listening and scenting. From far
away drifted a faint, sharp yelp, followed by a chorus of similar sharp
yelps. As the moments passed the yelps grew closer and louder. Again
Buck knew them as things heard in that other world which persisted in
his memory. He walked to the centre of the open space and listened. It
was the call, the many-noted call, sounding more luringly and
compellingly than ever before. And as never before, he was ready to
obey. John Thornton was dead. The last tie was broken. Man and the
claims of man no longer bound him.
Hunting their living meat, as the Yeehats were hunting it, on the
flanks of the migrating moose, the wolf pack had at last crossed over
from the land of streams and timber and invaded Buck’s valley. Into the
clearing where the moonlight streamed, they poured in a silvery flood;
and in the centre of the clearing stood Buck, motionless as a statue,
waiting their coming. They were awed, so still and large he stood, and
a moment’s pause fell, till the boldest one leaped straight for him.
Like a flash Buck struck, breaking the neck. Then he stood, without
movement, as before, the stricken wolf rolling in agony behind him.
Three others tried it in sharp succession; and one after the other they
drew back, streaming blood from slashed throats or shoulders.
This was sufficient to fling the whole pack forward, pell-mell, crowded
together, blocked and confused by its eagerness to pull down the prey.
Buck’s marvellous quickness and agility stood him in good stead.
Pivoting on his hind legs, and snapping and gashing, he was everywhere
at once, presenting a front which was apparently unbroken so swiftly
did he whirl and guard from side to side. But to prevent them from
getting behind him, he was forced back, down past the pool and into the
creek bed, till he brought up against a high gravel bank. He worked
along to a right angle in the bank which the men had made in the course
of mining, and in this angle he came to bay, protected on three sides
and with nothing to do but face the front.
And so well did he face it, that at the end of half an hour the wolves
drew back discomfited. The tongues of all were out and lolling, the
white fangs showing cruelly white in the moonlight. Some were lying
down with heads raised and ears pricked forward; others stood on their
feet, watching him; and still others were lapping water from the pool.
One wolf, long and lean and gray, advanced cautiously, in a friendly
manner, and Buck recognized the wild brother with whom he had run for a
night and a day. He was whining softly, and, as Buck whined, they
touched noses.
Then an old wolf, gaunt and battle-scarred, came forward. Buck writhed
his lips into the preliminary of a snarl, but sniffed noses with him,
Whereupon the old wolf sat down, pointed nose at the moon, and broke
out the long wolf howl. The others sat down and howled. And now the
call came to Buck in unmistakable accents. He, too, sat down and
howled. This over, he came out of his angle and the pack crowded around
him, sniffing in half-friendly, half-savage manner. The leaders lifted
the yelp of the pack and sprang away into the woods. The wolves swung
in behind, yelping in chorus. And Buck ran with them, side by side with
the wild brother, yelping as he ran.
And here may well end the story of Buck. The years were not many when
the Yeehats noted a change in the breed of timber wolves; for some were
seen with splashes of brown on head and muzzle, and with a rift of
white centring down the chest. But more remarkable than this, the
Yeehats tell of a Ghost Dog that runs at the head of the pack. They are
afraid of this Ghost Dog, for it has cunning greater than they,
stealing from their camps in fierce winters, robbing their traps,
slaying their dogs, and defying their bravest hunters.
Nay, the tale grows worse. Hunters there are who fail to return to the
camp, and hunters there have been whom their tribesmen found with
throats slashed cruelly open and with wolf prints about them in the
snow greater than the prints of any wolf. Each fall, when the Yeehats
follow the movement of the moose, there is a certain valley which they
never enter. And women there are who become sad when the word goes over
the fire of how the Evil Spirit came to select that valley for an
abiding-place.
In the summers there is one visitor, however, to that valley, of which
the Yeehats do not know. It is a great, gloriously coated wolf, like,
and yet unlike, all other wolves. He crosses alone from the smiling
timber land and comes down into an open space among the trees. Here a
yellow stream flows from rotted moose-hide sacks and sinks into the
ground, with long grasses growing through it and vegetable mould
overrunning it and hiding its yellow from the sun; and here he muses
for a time, howling once, long and mournfully, ere he departs.
But he is not always alone. When the long winter nights come on and the
wolves follow their meat into the lower valleys, he may be seen running
at the head of the pack through the pale moonlight or glimmering
borealis, leaping gigantic above his fellows, his great throat a-bellow
as he sings a song of the younger world, which is the song of the pack.