The call of the wild
away with the whole chunk. A great uproar was raised, but he was
unsuspected; while Dub, an awkward blunderer who was always getting
caught, was punished for Buck’s misdeed.
This first theft marked Buck as fit to survive in the hostile Northland
environment. It marked his adaptability, his capacity to adjust himself
to changing conditions, the lack of which would have meant swift and
terrible death. It marked, further, the decay or going to pieces of his
moral nature, a vain thing and a handicap in the ruthless struggle for
existence. It was all well enough in the Southland, under the law of
love and fellowship, to respect private property and personal feelings;
but in the Northland, under the law of club and fang, whoso took such
things into account was a fool, and in so far as he observed them he
would fail to prosper.
Not that Buck reasoned it out. He was fit, that was all, and
unconsciously he accommodated himself to the new mode of life. All his
days, no matter what the odds, he had never run from a fight. But the
club of the man in the red sweater had beaten into him a more
fundamental and primitive code. Civilized, he could have died for a
moral consideration, say the defence of Judge Miller’s riding-whip; but
the completeness of his decivilization was now evidenced by his ability
to flee from the defence of a moral consideration and so save his hide.
He did not steal for joy of it, but because of the clamor of his
stomach. He did not rob openly, but stole secretly and cunningly, out
of respect for club and fang. In short, the things he did were done
because it was easier to do them than not to do them.
His development (or retrogression) was rapid. His muscles became hard
as iron, and he grew callous to all ordinary pain. He achieved an
internal as well as external economy. He could eat anything, no matter
how loathsome or indigestible; and, once eaten, the juices of his
stomach extracted the last least particle of nutriment; and his blood
carried it to the farthest reaches of his body, building it into the
toughest and stoutest of tissues. Sight and scent became remarkably
keen, while his hearing developed such acuteness that in his sleep he
heard the faintest sound and knew whether it heralded peace or peril.
He learned to bite the ice out with his teeth when it collected between
his toes; and when he was thirsty and there was a thick scum of ice
over the water hole, he would break it by rearing and striking it with
stiff fore legs. His most conspicuous trait was an ability to scent the
wind and forecast it a night in advance. No matter how breathless the
air when he dug his nest by tree or bank, the wind that later blew
inevitably found him to leeward, sheltered and snug.
And not only did he learn by experience, but instincts long dead became
alive again. The domesticated generations fell from him. In vague ways
he remembered back to the youth of the breed, to the time the wild dogs
ranged in packs through the primeval forest and killed their meat as
they ran it down. It was no task for him to learn to fight with cut and
slash and the quick wolf snap. In this manner had fought forgotten
ancestors. They quickened the old life within him, and the old tricks
which they had stamped into the heredity of the breed were his tricks.
They came to him without effort or discovery, as though they had been
his always. And when, on the still cold nights, he pointed his nose at
a star and howled long and wolflike, it was his ancestors, dead and
dust, pointing nose at star and howling down through the centuries and
through him. And his cadences were their cadences, the cadences which
voiced their woe and what to them was the meaning of the stiffness, and
the cold, and dark.
Thus, as token of what a puppet thing life is, the ancient song surged
through him and he came into his own again; and he came because men had
found a yellow metal in the North, and because Manuel was a gardener’s
helper whose wages did not lap over the needs of his wife and divers
small copies of himself.
Chapter III. The Dominant Primordial Beast
The dominant primordial beast was strong in Buck, and under the fierce
conditions of trail life it grew and grew. Yet it was a secret growth.
His newborn cunning gave him poise and control. He was too busy
adjusting himself to the new life to feel at ease, and not only did he
not pick fights, but he avoided them whenever possible. A certain
deliberateness characterized his attitude. He was not prone to rashness
and precipitate action; and in the bitter hatred between him and Spitz
he betrayed no impatience, shunned all offensive acts.
On the other hand, possibly because he divined in Buck a dangerous
rival, Spitz never lost an opportunity of showing his teeth. He even
went out of his way to bully Buck, striving constantly to start the
fight which could end only in the death of one or the other. Early in
the trip this might have taken place had it not been for an unwonted
accident. At the end of this day they made a bleak and miserable camp
on the shore of Lake Le Barge. Driving snow, a wind that cut like a
white-hot knife, and darkness had forced them to grope for a camping
place. They could hardly have fared worse. At their backs rose a
perpendicular wall of rock, and Perrault and François were compelled to
make their fire and spread their sleeping robes on the ice of the lake
itself. The tent they had discarded at Dyea in order to travel light. A
few sticks of driftwood furnished them with a fire that thawed down
through the ice and left them to eat supper in the dark.
Close in under the sheltering rock Buck made his nest. So snug and warm
was it, that he was loath to leave it when François distributed the
fish which he had first thawed over the fire. But when Buck finished
his ration and returned, he found his nest occupied. A warning snarl
told him that the trespasser was Spitz. Till now Buck had avoided
trouble with his enemy, but this was too much. The beast in him roared.
He sprang upon Spitz with a fury which surprised them both, and Spitz
particularly, for his whole experience with Buck had gone to teach him
that his rival was an unusually timid dog, who managed to hold his own
only because of his great weight and size.
François was surprised, too, when they shot out in a tangle from the
disrupted nest and he divined the cause of the trouble. “A-a-ah!” he
cried to Buck. “Gif it to heem, by Gar! Gif it to heem, the dirty
t’eef!”
Spitz was equally willing. He was crying with sheer rage and eagerness
as he circled back and forth for a chance to spring in. Buck was no
less eager, and no less cautious, as he likewise circled back and forth
for the advantage. But it was then that the unexpected happened, the
thing which projected their struggle for supremacy far into the future,
past many a weary mile of trail and toil.
An oath from Perrault, the resounding impact of a club upon a bony
frame, and a shrill yelp of pain, heralded the breaking forth of
pandemonium. The camp was suddenly discovered to be alive with skulking
furry forms,—starving huskies, four or five score of them, who had
scented the camp from some Indian village. They had crept in while Buck
and Spitz were fighting, and when the two men sprang among them with
stout clubs they showed their teeth and fought back. They were crazed
by the smell of the food. Perrault found one with head buried in the
grub-box. His club landed heavily on the gaunt ribs, and the grub-box
was capsized on the ground. On the instant a score of the famished
brutes were scrambling for the bread and bacon. The clubs fell upon
them unheeded. They yelped and howled under the rain of blows, but
struggled none the less madly till the last crumb had been devoured.
In the meantime the astonished team-dogs had burst out of their nests
only to be set upon by the fierce invaders. Never had Buck seen such
dogs. It seemed as though their bones would burst through their skins.
They were mere skeletons, draped loosely in draggled hides, with
blazing eyes and slavered fangs. But the hunger-madness made them
terrifying, irresistible. There was no opposing them. The team-dogs
were swept back against the cliff at the first onset. Buck was beset by
three huskies, and in a trice his head and shoulders were ripped and
slashed. The din was frightful. Billee was crying as usual. Dave and
Sol-leks, dripping blood from a score of wounds, were fighting bravely
side by side. Joe was snapping like a demon. Once, his teeth closed on
the fore leg of a husky, and he crunched down through the bone. Pike,
the malingerer, leaped upon the crippled animal, breaking its neck with
a quick flash of teeth and a jerk, Buck got a frothing adversary by the
throat, and was sprayed with blood when his teeth sank through the
jugular. The warm taste of it in his mouth goaded him to greater
fierceness. He flung himself upon another, and at the same time felt
teeth sink into his own throat. It was Spitz, treacherously attacking
from the side.
Perrault and François, having cleaned out their part of the camp,
hurried to save their sled-dogs. The wild wave of famished beasts
rolled back before them, and Buck shook himself free. But it was only
for a moment. The two men were compelled to run back to save the grub,
upon which the huskies returned to the attack on the team. Billee,
terrified into bravery, sprang through the savage circle and fled away
over the ice. Pike and Dub followed on his heels, with the rest of the
team behind. As Buck drew himself together to spring after them, out of
the tail of his eye he saw Spitz rush upon him with the evident
intention of overthrowing him. Once off his feet and under that mass of
huskies, there was no hope for him. But he braced himself to the shock
of Spitz’s charge, then joined the flight out on the lake.
Later, the nine team-dogs gathered together and sought shelter in the
forest. Though unpursued, they were in a sorry plight. There was not
one who was not wounded in four or five places, while some were wounded
grievously. Dub was badly injured in a hind leg; Dolly, the last husky
added to the team at Dyea, had a badly torn throat; Joe had lost an
eye; while Billee, the good-natured, with an ear chewed and rent to
ribbons, cried and whimpered throughout the night. At daybreak they
limped warily back to camp, to find the marauders gone and the two men
in bad tempers. Fully half their grub supply was gone. The huskies had
chewed through the sled lashings and canvas coverings. In fact,
nothing, no matter how remotely eatable, had escaped them. They had
eaten a pair of Perrault’s moose-hide moccasins, chunks out of the
leather traces, and even two feet of lash from the end of François’s
whip. He broke from a mournful contemplation of it to look over his
wounded dogs.
“Ah, my frien’s,” he said softly, “mebbe it mek you mad dog, dose many
bites. Mebbe all mad dog, sacredam! Wot you t’ink, eh, Perrault?”
The courier shook his head dubiously. With four hundred miles of trail
still between him and Dawson, he could ill afford to have madness break
out among his dogs. Two hours of cursing and exertion got the harnesses
into shape, and the wound-stiffened team was under way, struggling
painfully over the hardest part of the trail they had yet encountered,
and for that matter, the hardest between them and Dawson.
The Thirty Mile River was wide open. Its wild water defied the frost,
and it was in the eddies only and in the quiet places that the ice held
at all. Six days of exhausting toil were required to cover those thirty
terrible miles. And terrible they were, for every foot of them was
accomplished at the risk of life to dog and man. A dozen times,
Perrault, nosing the way broke through the ice bridges, being saved by