The call of the wild
pulled off his feet. The capsized sled ground over him, and the dogs
dashed on up the street, adding to the gayety of Skaguay as they
scattered the remainder of the outfit along its chief thoroughfare.
Kind-hearted citizens caught the dogs and gathered up the scattered
belongings. Also, they gave advice. Half the load and twice the dogs,
if they ever expected to reach Dawson, was what was said. Hal and his
sister and brother-in-law listened unwillingly, pitched tent, and
overhauled the outfit. Canned goods were turned out that made men
laugh, for canned goods on the Long Trail is a thing to dream about.
“Blankets for a hotel” quoth one of the men who laughed and helped.
“Half as many is too much; get rid of them. Throw away that tent, and
all those dishes,—who’s going to wash them, anyway? Good Lord, do you
think you’re travelling on a Pullman?”
And so it went, the inexorable elimination of the superfluous. Mercedes
cried when her clothes-bags were dumped on the ground and article after
article was thrown out. She cried in general, and she cried in
particular over each discarded thing. She clasped hands about knees,
rocking back and forth broken-heartedly. She averred she would not go
an inch, not for a dozen Charleses. She appealed to everybody and to
everything, finally wiping her eyes and proceeding to cast out even
articles of apparel that were imperative necessaries. And in her zeal,
when she had finished with her own, she attacked the belongings of her
men and went through them like a tornado.
This accomplished, the outfit, though cut in half, was still a
formidable bulk. Charles and Hal went out in the evening and bought six
Outside dogs. These, added to the six of the original team, and Teek
and Koona, the huskies obtained at the Rink Rapids on the record trip,
brought the team up to fourteen. But the Outside dogs, though
practically broken in since their landing, did not amount to much.
Three were short-haired pointers, one was a Newfoundland, and the other
two were mongrels of indeterminate breed. They did not seem to know
anything, these newcomers. Buck and his comrades looked upon them with
disgust, and though he speedily taught them their places and what not
to do, he could not teach them what to do. They did not take kindly to
trace and trail. With the exception of the two mongrels, they were
bewildered and spirit-broken by the strange savage environment in which
they found themselves and by the ill treatment they had received. The
two mongrels were without spirit at all; bones were the only things
breakable about them.
With the newcomers hopeless and forlorn, and the old team worn out by
twenty-five hundred miles of continuous trail, the outlook was anything
but bright. The two men, however, were quite cheerful. And they were
proud, too. They were doing the thing in style, with fourteen dogs.
They had seen other sleds depart over the Pass for Dawson, or come in
from Dawson, but never had they seen a sled with so many as fourteen
dogs. In the nature of Arctic travel there was a reason why fourteen
dogs should not drag one sled, and that was that one sled could not
carry the food for fourteen dogs. But Charles and Hal did not know
this. They had worked the trip out with a pencil, so much to a dog, so
many dogs, so many days, Q.E.D. Mercedes looked over their shoulders
and nodded comprehensively, it was all so very simple.
Late next morning Buck led the long team up the street. There was
nothing lively about it, no snap or go in him and his fellows. They
were starting dead weary. Four times he had covered the distance
between Salt Water and Dawson, and the knowledge that, jaded and tired,
he was facing the same trail once more, made him bitter. His heart was
not in the work, nor was the heart of any dog. The Outsides were timid
and frightened, the Insides without confidence in their masters.
Buck felt vaguely that there was no depending upon these two men and
the woman. They did not know how to do anything, and as the days went
by it became apparent that they could not learn. They were slack in all
things, without order or discipline. It took them half the night to
pitch a slovenly camp, and half the morning to break that camp and get
the sled loaded in fashion so slovenly that for the rest of the day
they were occupied in stopping and rearranging the load. Some days they
did not make ten miles. On other days they were unable to get started
at all. And on no day did they succeed in making more than half the
distance used by the men as a basis in their dog-food computation.
It was inevitable that they should go short on dog-food. But they
hastened it by overfeeding, bringing the day nearer when underfeeding
would commence. The Outside dogs, whose digestions had not been trained
by chronic famine to make the most of little, had voracious appetites.
And when, in addition to this, the worn-out huskies pulled weakly, Hal
decided that the orthodox ration was too small. He doubled it. And to
cap it all, when Mercedes, with tears in her pretty eyes and a quaver
in her throat, could not cajole him into giving the dogs still more,
she stole from the fish-sacks and fed them slyly. But it was not food
that Buck and the huskies needed, but rest. And though they were making
poor time, the heavy load they dragged sapped their strength severely.
Then came the underfeeding. Hal awoke one day to the fact that his
dog-food was half gone and the distance only quarter covered; further,
that for love or money no additional dog-food was to be obtained. So he
cut down even the orthodox ration and tried to increase the day’s
travel. His sister and brother-in-law seconded him; but they were
frustrated by their heavy outfit and their own incompetence. It was a
simple matter to give the dogs less food; but it was impossible to make
the dogs travel faster, while their own inability to get under way
earlier in the morning prevented them from travelling longer hours. Not
only did they not know how to work dogs, but they did not know how to
work themselves.
The first to go was Dub. Poor blundering thief that he was, always
getting caught and punished, he had none the less been a faithful
worker. His wrenched shoulder-blade, untreated and unrested, went from
bad to worse, till finally Hal shot him with the big Colt’s revolver.
It is a saying of the country that an Outside dog starves to death on
the ration of the husky, so the six Outside dogs under Buck could do no
less than die on half the ration of the husky. The Newfoundland went
first, followed by the three short-haired pointers, the two mongrels
hanging more grittily on to life, but going in the end.
By this time all the amenities and gentlenesses of the Southland had
fallen away from the three people. Shorn of its glamour and romance,
Arctic travel became to them a reality too harsh for their manhood and
womanhood. Mercedes ceased weeping over the dogs, being too occupied
with weeping over herself and with quarrelling with her husband and
brother. To quarrel was the one thing they were never too weary to do.
Their irritability arose out of their misery, increased with it,
doubled upon it, outdistanced it. The wonderful patience of the trail
which comes to men who toil hard and suffer sore, and remain sweet of
speech and kindly, did not come to these two men and the woman. They
had no inkling of such a patience. They were stiff and in pain; their
muscles ached, their bones ached, their very hearts ached; and because
of this they became sharp of speech, and hard words were first on their
lips in the morning and last at night.
Charles and Hal wrangled whenever Mercedes gave them a chance. It was
the cherished belief of each that he did more than his share of the
work, and neither forbore to speak this belief at every opportunity.
Sometimes Mercedes sided with her husband, sometimes with her brother.
The result was a beautiful and unending family quarrel. Starting from a
dispute as to which should chop a few sticks for the fire (a dispute
which concerned only Charles and Hal), presently would be lugged in the
rest of the family, fathers, mothers, uncles, cousins, people thousands
of miles away, and some of them dead. That Hal’s views on art, or the
sort of society plays his mother’s brother wrote, should have anything
to do with the chopping of a few sticks of firewood, passes
comprehension; nevertheless the quarrel was as likely to tend in that
direction as in the direction of Charles’s political prejudices. And
that Charles’s sister’s tale-bearing tongue should be relevant to the
building of a Yukon fire, was apparent only to Mercedes, who
disburdened herself of copious opinions upon that topic, and
incidentally upon a few other traits unpleasantly peculiar to her
husband’s family. In the meantime the fire remained unbuilt, the camp
half pitched, and the dogs unfed.
Mercedes nursed a special grievance—the grievance of sex. She was
pretty and soft, and had been chivalrously treated all her days. But
the present treatment by her husband and brother was everything save
chivalrous. It was her custom to be helpless. They complained. Upon
which impeachment of what to her was her most essential
sex-prerogative, she made their lives unendurable. She no longer
considered the dogs, and because she was sore and tired, she persisted
in riding on the sled. She was pretty and soft, but she weighed one
hundred and twenty pounds—a lusty last straw to the load dragged by the
weak and starving animals. She rode for days, till they fell in the
traces and the sled stood still. Charles and Hal begged her to get off
and walk, pleaded with her, entreated, the while she wept and
importuned Heaven with a recital of their brutality.
On one occasion they took her off the sled by main strength. They never
did it again. She let her legs go limp like a spoiled child, and sat
down on the trail. They went on their way, but she did not move. After
they had travelled three miles they unloaded the sled, came back for
her, and by main strength put her on the sled again.
In the excess of their own misery they were callous to the suffering of
their animals. Hal’s theory, which he practised on others, was that one
must get hardened. He had started out preaching it to his sister and
brother-in-law. Failing there, he hammered it into the dogs with a
club. At the Five Fingers the dog-food gave out, and a toothless old
squaw offered to trade them a few pounds of frozen horse-hide for the
Colt’s revolver that kept the big hunting-knife company at Hal’s hip. A
poor substitute for food was this hide, just as it had been stripped
from the starved horses of the cattlemen six months back. In its frozen
state it was more like strips of galvanized iron, and when a dog
wrestled it into his stomach it thawed into thin and innutritious
leathery strings and into a mass of short hair, irritating and
indigestible.
And through it all Buck staggered along at the head of the team as in a
nightmare. He pulled when he could; when he could no longer pull, he
fell down and remained down till blows from whip or club drove him to
his feet again. All the stiffness and gloss had gone out of his
beautiful furry coat. The hair hung down, limp and draggled, or matted
with dried blood where Hal’s club had bruised him. His muscles had
wasted away to knotty strings, and the flesh pads had disappeared, so
that each rib and every bone in his frame were outlined cleanly through
the loose hide that was wrinkled in folds of emptiness. It was
heartbreaking, only Buck’s heart was unbreakable. The man in the red
sweater had proved that.
As it was with Buck, so was it with his mates. They were perambulating
skeletons. There were seven all together, including him. In their very