Chapter IV. Who Has Won The Mastership

“Eh? What I say? I speak true when I say that Buck is two devils.” This was Francois’s speech next morning when he found that Spitz was missing and Buck was covered with wounds. He drew him to the fire and by its light looked at them.

“That Spitz fights like hell,” said Perrault.

“And that Buck fights like two hells. And now we make good time. No more Spitz, no more trouble, sure.”

When the dog-driver harnessed the dogs, Buck came to Spitz’s place of a leader; but Francois brought Solleks to the position. In his opinion, Solleks was the best lead-dog left. But Buck sprang upon Solleks in a fury, driving him back and standing in his place.

“Eh? eh?” Francois cried. “Look at that Buck. He killed that Spitz, he thinks he’ll take the job.”

“Go away!” he cried, but Buck refused.

He took Buck, and, though the dog growled menacingly, dragged him to one side and replaced Solleks. The old dog did not like it, and showed that he was afraid of Buck. When Francois turned his back Buck again displaced Solleks.

Francois was angry. “Now I’ll show you!” he cried, coming back with a heavy club in his hand.

Buck remembered the man in the red sweater, and went back slowly. It fact, it was an open revolt. He wanted to have the leadership. It was his by right. He had earned it, and he would not be content with less.

Perrault and Francois chased Buck for a part of an hour. They threw clubs at him. They cursed him, and his fathers and mothers before him, and all to come after him down to the last generation; and he answered with snarl and kept out of their reach. He did not try to run away, but showed clearly that when his desire was met, he would come in and be good.

Perrault looked at his watch and cursed. Time was flying. Francois thought for some time, and, as he and Perrault understood they were beaten, he went up to where Solleks stood and called to Buck. Buck laughed, as dogs laugh. Francois unfastened Solleks’s traces and put him back in his old place. There was no place for Buck save at the front. Once more Francois called, and once more Buck laughed and kept away. Only when the club was thrown once more, he came in, laughing triumphantly, and took position at the head of the team.

Buck took up the duties of leadership; and where judgment was needed, he showed himself even better than Spitz.

The general tone of the team changed immediately. It recovered its old-time solidarity, and once more the dogs leaped as one dog in the traces. At the Rink Rapids two native huskies, Teek and Koona, were added; and the speed with which Buck taught them astonished Francois.

The trail was in excellent condition. It was not too cold, the temperature dropped to fifty below zero and remained there the whole trip. The Thirty Mile River was covered with ice, and they covered in one day what used to take them ten days. They ran so fast that it was hard for the men to hold. And on the last night of the second week they ran past White Pass and down the sea slope with the lights of Skaguay at their feet.

It was a record run. Each day for fourteen days they made forty miles. For three days Perrault and Francois received many invitations to drink, while the team was the constant centre of admiring crowd. Next came official orders. Francois called Buck to him, threw his arms around him, and cried over him. And thus Francois and Perrault, like other men, passed out of Buck’s life.

A Scotch half-breed took charge of him and his mates, and in company with a dozen other dog-teams he started back over the weary trail to Dawson. It was heavy toil each day now, with a heavy load behind; for this was the mail train, carrying news from the world to the men who looked for gold at the Pole.

Buck did not like it, but he took pride in the work, like Dave and Solleks, and saw to that his mates did their fair share. It was a monotonous life. At a certain time each morning the cooks turned out, fires were built, and breakfast was eaten. At night, camp was made. Some made fires, others cut firewood and prepared beds, and still others carried water or ice for the cooks. Also, the dogs were fed. To them, this was the one feature of the day. There were fierce fighters among this hundred of dogs, but three battles with the fiercest brought Buck to mastery.

Best of all he loved to lie near the fire, hind legs crouched, fore legs stretched, head raised, looking at the fire. Sometimes he thought of Judge Miller’s big house in the sun-kissed Santa Clara Valley, and of the cement swimming-tank where he swam; but more often he remembered the man in the red sweater, the death of Curly, the great fight with Spitz, and the good things he had eaten or would like to eat. He was not homesick. Those memories had no power over him. Because more powerful were the memories of his ancestors that gave the things he had never seen before a seeming familiarity.

Sometimes, when he lay there, it seemed to him that he saw another fire and another man, not the half-breed cook, and this other man had shorter legs and longer arms, his muscles were knotty rather than rounded. His hair was long and dull, and his head slanted back under it from the eyes. He made strange sounds, and was very much afraid of the darkness. In his hand he held a stick with a heavy stone on its end. He only had an animal skin as an outfit, but on his body there was much hair. He did not stand erect, but in his body there was almost catlike plasticity.

At other times this hairy man sat by the fire with head between his legs and slept. And beyond his fire, in the darkness, Buck could see many gleaming coals, two by two, always two by two, which he knew to be the eyes of great beasts of prey. And he could hear the noises they made in the night. And as he lay dreaming there by the Yukon bank, these sounds and sights of another world made the hair to rise along his back, till he whimpered low, or growled softly, and the half-breed cook shouted at him, “Hey, Buck, wake up!”. Then the other world disappeared and the real world came into his eyes, and he would get up and yawn and stretch as though he had been asleep.

It was a hard trip. They were in poor condition when they came Dawson, and should have had a week’s rest at least. But in two days’ time they were down the Yukon bank again, loaded with letters for the outside world. The dogs and the drivers were tired, and to make matters worse, it snowed every day. This meant a soft trail, and heavier pulling for the dogs; but the drivers were fair and did their best for the animals.

Each night the dogs were attended to first. They ate before the drivers ate, and no man took his sleeping-robe till he had examined the dogs he drove. Still, their strength went down. Since the beginning of the winter they had travelled eighteen hundred miles; and eighteen hundred miles will affect even the strongest.

It was Dave who suffered most of all. Something had gone wrong with him. Sometimes, in the traces, when the sled stopped or started suddenly, he cried out with pain. All the drivers became interested in his case, they knew something was wrong inside him, but they could locate no broken bones.

By the time Cassiar Bar was reached, he was so weak that he was falling in the traces. The Scotch half-breed wanted him to run free behind the sled. Sick as he was, Dave did not want to be taken out of harness, whimpering broken-heartedly when he saw Solleks in the position he had held and served so long. The pride of trace and trail was his, and, sick unto death, he could not bear that another dog should do his work.

When the sled started he attacked Solleks with his teeth, whining and yelping and crying with grief and pain. The half-breed tried to drive him away with the whip; but he paid no attention to it, and the man had not the heart to strike harder. Finally, Dave managed to run behind till the train made another stop, when he found his sled, where he had bitten through both of Solleks’s traces, and stood in his proper place.

He pleaded with his eyes to remain there. So, the drivers decided, as Dave was to die anyway, that he should die in the traces, content and happy. He was harnessed in again, and proudly he pulled as he used to, though more than once he cried out with pain.

But he held out till camp was reached, when his driver made a place for him by the fire. Morning found him too weak to travel. At harness-up time he tried to crawl toward where the harnesses were being put on his mates. His strength left him, and the last his mates saw of him he lay breathing hard in the snow. But they could hear him mournfully howling till they passed out of sight behind the trees.

Here the train was stopped. The Scotch half-breed slowly returned to the camp they had left. A revolver-shot rang out. The man came back, the whips snapped, the bells sang merrily, the sleds started along the trail; but Buck knew, and every dog knew, what had happened behind the trees.

Chapter V. The Toil of Trace and Trail

Thirty days from the time it left Dawson, the Salt Water Mail, with Buck and his mates, arrived at Skaguay. They were in an awful condition. Buck’s one hundred and forty pounds were now one hundred and fifteen. The rest of his mates, though lighter dogs, had lost more weight than he, and many of them were hurt. Also, they were all terribly footsore – and dead tired. It was the dead-tiredness that comes through the months of toil. There was no reserve strength, it had been all used. In less than five months they had travelled twenty-five hundred miles, during which they had had but a few days’ rest. When they arrived at Skaguay they could hardly keep the traces taut, and just managed to keep out of the way of the sled when it went downhill.

The drivers expected a long stopover. But many people needed correspondence with or from Klondike; also, there were official orders. Fresh dogs were to take the places of those tired for the trail. The tired ones were to be got rid of, and, as dogs cost a lot, they were to be sold.

On the morning of the fourth day, two men from the States came and bought them, harness and all, for a song. The men’s name were Hal and Charles. Charles was a middle-aged white man, with weak and watery eyes and a moustache over the drooping upper lip. Hal was a young man of nineteen or twenty, with a big Colt’s revolver and a hunting-knife on his belt. Both men were clearly out of place, and why such as they should go to the North is beyond understanding.

Buck saw the money pass between the man and the Government agent, and knew that the Scotch half-breed and the mail-train drivers were passing out of his life, too. In his new owners’ camp, Buck saw tent half made, dishes unwashed, everything in disorder; also, he saw a woman, Mercedes. She was Charles’s wife and Hal’s sister – a nice family party.

Buck watched them as they continued to load the sled. There were efforts, but no businesslike method. Mercedes kept talking and giving advice to the men. When they put a clothes-bag on the sled, she discovered some forgotten articles which could go nowhere else but in that very sack, and they unloaded again.

Three men from a neighbouring tent came out and looked on.

“Think it’ll ride?” one of the men asked.

“Why shouldn’t it?”

“Oh, that’s all right, I was just wondering, that is all. It seemed very heavy.”

Charles turned his back and drew the lashings down as well as he could, which was not well at all.

“And of course the dogs can run all day with that mountain behind them,” said the second man.

“Certainly,” said Hal, with freezing politeness, took the gee-pole with one hand and his whip with the other. “Mush!” he shouted.

The dogs tried to pull hard for a few moments, then relaxed. They were unable to move the sled.

“The lazy animals, I’ll show them,” he cried, preparing to lash with the whip.

But Mercedes cried, “Oh, Hal, you mustn’t! The poor dogs! Now you must promise you won’t be cruel with them for the rest of the trip, or I won’t go a step.”

“They’re lazy, I tell you, and you’ve got to whip them to get anything out of them. Ask any of those men.”

“They’re weak as water, if you want to know,” was the reply from one of the men. “They need a rest.”

Again Hal’s whip fell upon the dogs. They tried hard, but the sled did not move. Mercedes dropped on her knees before Buck, with tears in her eyes, and put her arms around his neck.

“You poor, poor dears,” she cried, “why don’t you pull harder? – then you wouldn’t be whipped.” Buck did not like her, but he was feeling too miserable to resist.

One of the onlookers, who had been fighting with himself not to be too rude, now spoke up: “It’s not that I care what becomes of you, but for the dogs’ sakes I just want to tell you, you can help them a lot by breaking out that sled. The runners are froze fast. Throw your weight against the gee-pole, right and left, and break it out.”

This time the advice was followed. Buck and his mates struggled madly under the rain of blows – and pulled. A hundred yards ahead the path turned and into the main street. As they turned, the sled bent, losing half its load through the loose lashings. The dogs never stopped. The lightened sled was behind them now, and they were angry because of the ill treatment.

Kind-hearted citizens caught the dogs and gathered up the lost things. Also, they gave advice. Half the load and twice the dogs, they said.

And so it went. Mercedes cried when her clothes-bags were put on the ground and article after article was thrown out. She cried in general, and she cried in particular over each thing. But finally she wiped her eyes and cast out even those articles that were imperative necessaries. When she had finished with her own, she attacked the belongings of her men and went through them like a tornado.

But the outfit, though cut in half, was still a big bag. Charles and Hal went out in the evening and bought six more dogs. These, added to the six of the original team, and Teek and Koona (the huskies obtained on the record trip), brought the team up to fourteen. But the new dogs were not good. Three were short-haired pointers, one was a Newfoundland, and the other two were some mongrels. They did not seem to know anything. Buck and his comrades looked upon them with disgust, and though he quickly taught them their places and what not to do, he could not teach them what to do. They were thin and spirit-broken by the strange environment in which they found themselves in.

With the newcomers hopeless, and the old team worn out, the future was not bright. The two men, however, were quite cheerful. And they were proud, too. They were doing the thing in style, with 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, and Mercedes looked over their shoulders and nodded. It was all so very simple.

Late next morning Buck led the team up the street. Four times he had covered the distance between Salt Water and Dawson, and the knowledge that he was facing the same trail once more made him sad. His heart was not in the work, nor was the heart of any dog.

Buck felt 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 clear that they could not learn. They were slow, without order or discipline. 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 calculation.

It was inevitable that they should go short on dog-food. But they hastened it by overfeeding, bringing the day nearer when underfeeding would come. Thus, Hal learnt one day that his dog-food was half gone and the distance only quarter covered. So he cut down the ration and tried to increase the day’s travel. It was a simple matter to give the dogs less food; but it was impossible to make them travel faster.

The first to go was Dub. Poor thief that he was, always getting caught and punished, he had nonetheless been a good worker. His shoulder-blade, injured on the previous journey, went from bad to worse, till finally Hal shot him with his big Colt’s revolver. Of the Outside dogs, the Newfoundland died first, followed by the three short-haired pointers, and the two mongrels.

By this time all the softness of the Southland had fallen away from the three people. Mercedes stopped crying over the dogs, because she cried over herself and quarreled with her husband and brother.

To quarrel was the one thing they were never too tired to do. Sometimes Mercedes sided with her husband, sometimes with her brother. The result was an endless family quarrel. Deciding who should cut wood for the fire, they ended up discussing and offending the rest of each other’s family, fathers, mothers, uncles, cousins, people thousands of miles away, and some of them dead. In the meantime the fire remained unbuilt, the camp half made, and the dogs unfed.

Mercedes liked to be helpless. Because she was tired, she insisted upon riding on the sled. She was pretty, but she weighed one hundred and twenty pounds. On one occasion the men took her off the sled by strength. Like a spoiled child, she 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 strength put her on the sled again.

In their misery they were the source of suffering for their animals. At the Five Fingers the dog-food finished, and a toothless old squaw sold them a few pounds of frozen horse meat for Hal’s Colt’s revolver. A poor substitute for food was this meat, as it had been made from the starved horses six months back.

And through it all Buck ran 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 got him up to his feet again. All the beauty had gone from his furry coat, stained with dried blood where Hal’s club had bruised him. No normal muscles, only bones, outlined cleanly. It was heart-breaking, only Buck’s heart was unbreakable. The man in the red sweater had proved that.

So was it with his mates. They were walking skeletons. There were seven all together, including him. They had become insensible to the bite of the lash or the bruise of the club. They were simply seven bags of bones in which sparks of life fluttered faintly. When a stop was made, they fell down in the traces like dead dogs, and the sparks paled and seemed to go out. And when the club or whip fell upon them, the sparks fluttered feebly up, and they got up and went on.

There came a day when Billee, the good-natured, fell and could not rise. Hal had sold his revolver, so he took the axe and knocked Billee on the head as he lay in the traces, then cut the body 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 only five of them remained: Joe, no longer malignant; Pike, limping; Solleks, the one-eyed, still faithful to the work, and sad in that he had so little strength with which to pull; Teek, who was now beaten more than the others because he was fresher; and Buck, still at the head of the team, but no longer administering discipline, blind with weakness and keeping the trail 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 continued till nine at night. The winter silence changed into the great spring sounds of awakening life. These sounds came from the things that lived and moved again, things which had been as dead during the long months of frost. The trees, the birds, the animals and even the water in the springs – all woke up to the new life. The Yukon was trying to break the ice that bound it down. It ate the ice from beneath; the sun ate from above.

Finally, they came into John Thornton’s camp at the mouth of White River. When they stopped, the dogs fell down as if dead.

Hal did the talking. John Thornton was making an axe-handle; he listened, gave short replies and advice. He knew this kind of people, and he gave his advice in the certainty that it would not be followed.

“They told us we couldn’t get to White River, yet here we are,” Hal said with some triumph.

“And they told you true,” John Thornton answered. “The ice is likely to break at any moment. Only fools, with the blind luck of fools, could have made it. I wouldn’t risk walking 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 took his whip. “Get up there, Buck! Mush on!”

Thornton went on making the axe-handle. It was useless, he knew, to get between a fool and his folly.

But the team did not get up at the command. It had long since passed into the stage where blows could rouse it. The whip flashed out. John Thornton compressed his lips. Solleks was the first to crawl to his feet. Teek, Joe and Pike made some painful efforts and followed. Buck made no effort. He lay quietly where he had fallen. Several times Thornton started, as though to speak, but changed his mind. His eyes watered, and, as the whipping continued, he stood up and walked up and down.

Hal exchanged the whip for the club. Buck refused to move under the rain of heavier blows. Like his mates, he was barely able to get up, but, unlike them, he had made up his mind not to get up. He felt the coming disaster, there, ahead on the ice where his master was trying to drive him. He refused to move. So greatly had he suffered, that the blows did not hurt much. And as they continued to fall upon him, the spark of life within him flickered and went down. He felt strangely numb. As though from a great distance, he was aware that he was being beaten.

And then, suddenly, with a cry that was more like the cry of an animal, John Thornton sprang upon Hal.

“If you strike that dog again, I’ll kill you,” he at last managed to say.

“It’s my dog. Get out of my way. I’m going to Dawson.”

Thornton stood between him and Buck. Hal drew his long hunting-knife, but Thornton struck his knuckles with the axe-handle, knocking the knife to the ground. Then he cut Buck’s traces.

Hal had no fight left in him. He saw Buck was too near dead to be of any use. 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, Solleks was at the wheel, and between were Joe and Teek. They were all limping. Mercedes was riding the loaded sled. Hal guided, and Charles followed.

As Buck watched them, Thornton knelt beside him and with rough, kindly hands searched for broken bones. By the time he found 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 going along over the ice. Suddenly, they saw its back end drop down, and the gee-pole, with Hal, rise 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 broke and dogs and humans disappeared. A yawning hole was all that was to be seen.

John Thornton and Buck looked at each other.

“You poor devil,” said John Thornton, and Buck licked his hand.