The Call of the Wild, by Jack London
R >>
Ryan, Kirstin, Linda and Rick Trapp >> The Call of the Wild, by Jack London
Pages:
1 |
2 |
3 | 4 |
5 |
6 |
7 |
8
Buck did not like it, but he bore up well to the work, taking
pride in it after the manner of Dave and Sol-leks, and seeing that
his mates, whether they prided in it or not, did their fair share.
It was a monotonous life, operating with machine-like regularity.
One day was very like another. At a certain time each morning the
cooks turned out, fires were built, and breakfast was eaten.
Then, while some broke camp, others harnessed the dogs, and they
were under way an hour or so before the darkness fell which gave
warning of dawn. At night, camp was made. Some pitched the
flies, others cut firewood and pine boughs for the 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, though it was
good to loaf around, after the fish was eaten, for an hour or so
with the other dogs, of which there were fivescore and odd. There
were fierce fighters among them, but three battles with the
fiercest brought Buck to mastery, so that when he bristled and
showed his teeth they got out of his way.
Best of all, perhaps, he loved to lie near the fire, hind legs
crouched under him, fore legs stretched out in front, head raised,
and eyes blinking dreamily at the flames. Sometimes he thought of
Judge Miller's big house in the sun-kissed Santa Clara Valley, and
of the cement swimming-tank, and Ysabel, the Mexican hairless, and
Toots, the Japanese pug; but oftener 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. The Sunland was very dim and distant, and such memories
had no power over him. Far more potent were the memories of his
heredity that gave things he had never seen before a seeming
familiarity; the instincts (which were but the memories of his
ancestors become habits) which had lapsed in later days, and still
later, in him, quickened and become alive again.
Sometimes as he crouched there, blinking dreamily at the flames,
it seemed that the flames were of another fire, and that as he
crouched by this other fire he saw another and different man from
the half-breed cook before him. This other man was shorter of leg
and longer of arm, with muscles that were stringy and knotty
rather than rounded and swelling. The hair of this man was long
and matted, and his head slanted back under it from the eyes. He
uttered strange sounds, and seemed very much afraid of the
darkness, into which he peered continually, clutching in his hand,
which hung midway between knee and foot, a stick with a heavy
stone made fast to the end. He was all but naked, a ragged and
fire-scorched skin hanging part way down his back, but on his body
there was much hair. In some places, across the chest and
shoulders and down the outside of the arms and thighs, it was
matted into almost a thick fur. He did not stand erect, but with
trunk inclined forward from the hips, on legs that bent at the
knees. About his body there was a peculiar springiness, or
resiliency, almost catlike, and a quick alertness as of one who
lived in perpetual fear of things seen and unseen.
At other times this hairy man squatted by the fire with head
between his legs and slept. On such occasions his elbows were on
his knees, his hands clasped above his head as though to shed rain
by the hairy arms. And beyond that fire, in the circling
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 crashing of their bodies through the
undergrowth, and the noises they made in the night. And dreaming
there by the Yukon bank, with lazy eyes blinking at the fire,
these sounds and sights of another world would make the hair to
rise along his back and stand on end across his shoulders and up
his neck, till he whimpered low and suppressedly, or growled
softly, and the half-breed cook shouted at him, "Hey, you Buck,
wake up!" Whereupon the other world would vanish and the real
world come into his eyes, and he would get up and yawn and stretch
as though he had been asleep.
It was a hard trip, with the mail behind them, and the heavy work
wore them down. They were short of weight and in poor condition
when they made Dawson, and should have had a ten days' or a week's
rest at least. But in two days' time they dropped down the Yukon
bank from the Barracks, loaded with letters for the outside. The
dogs were tired, the drivers grumbling, and to make matters worse,
it snowed every day. This meant a soft trail, greater friction on
the runners, and heavier pulling for the dogs; yet the drivers
were fair through it all, and did their best for the animals.
Each night the dogs were attended to first. They ate before the
drivers ate, and no man sought his sleeping-robe till he had seen
to the feet of the dogs he drove. Still, their strength went
down. Since the beginning of the winter they had travelled
eighteen hundred miles, dragging sleds the whole weary distance;
and eighteen hundred miles will tell upon life of the toughest.
Buck stood it, keeping his mates up to their work and maintaining
discipline, though he, too, was very tired. Billee cried and
whimpered regularly in his sleep each night. Joe was sourer than
ever, and Sol-leks was unapproachable, blind side or other side.
But it was Dave who suffered most of all. Something had gone
wrong with him. He became more morose and irritable, and when
camp was pitched at once made his nest, where his driver fed him.
Once out of the harness and down, he did not get on his feet again
till harness-up time in the morning. Sometimes, in the traces,
when jerked by a sudden stoppage of the sled, or by straining to
start it, he would cry out with pain. The driver examined him,
but could find nothing. All the drivers became interested in his
case. They talked it over at meal-time, and over their last pipes
before going to bed, and one night they held a consultation. He
was brought from his nest to the fire and was pressed and prodded
till he cried out many times. Something was wrong inside, but
they could locate no broken bones, could not make it out.
By the time Cassiar Bar was reached, he was so weak that he was
falling repeatedly in the traces. The Scotch half-breed called a
halt and took him out of the team, making the next dog, Sol-leks,
fast to the sled. His intention was to rest Dave, letting him run
free behind the sled. Sick as he was, Dave resented being taken
out, grunting and growling while the traces were unfastened, and
whimpering broken-heartedly when he saw Sol-leks in the position
he had held and served so long. For 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 floundered in the soft snow alongside
the beaten trail, attacking Sol-leks with his teeth, rushing
against him and trying to thrust him off into the soft snow on the
other side, striving to leap inside his traces and get between him
and the sled, and all the while whining and yelping and crying with
grief and pain. The half-breed tried to drive him away with the
whip; but he paid no heed to the stinging lash, and the man had
not the heart to strike harder. Dave refused to run quietly on the
trail behind the sled, where the going was easy, but continued to
flounder alongside in the soft snow, where the going was most
difficult, till exhausted. Then he fell, and lay where he fell,
howling lugubriously as the long train of sleds churned by.
With the last remnant of his strength he managed to stagger along
behind till the train made another stop, when he floundered past
the sleds to his own, where he stood alongside Sol-leks. His
driver lingered a moment to get a light for his pipe from the man
behind. Then he returned and started his dogs. They swung out on
the trail with remarkable lack of exertion, turned their heads
uneasily, and stopped in surprise. The driver was surprised, too;
the sled had not moved. He called his comrades to witness the
sight. Dave had bitten through both of Sol-leks's traces, and was
standing directly in front of the sled in his proper place.
He pleaded with his eyes to remain there. The driver was
perplexed. His comrades talked of how a dog could break its heart
through being denied the work that killed it, and recalled
instances they had known, where dogs, too old for the toil, or
injured, had died because they were cut out of the traces. Also,
they held it a mercy, since Dave was to die anyway, that he should
die in the traces, heart-easy and content. So he was harnessed in
again, and proudly he pulled as of old, though more than once he
cried out involuntarily from the bite of his inward hurt. Several
times he fell down and was dragged in the traces, and once the
sled ran upon him so that he limped thereafter in one of his hind
legs.
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 to his driver. By convulsive
efforts he got on his feet, staggered, and fell. Then he wormed
his way forward slowly toward where the harnesses were being put
on his mates. He would advance his fore legs and drag up his body
with a sort of hitching movement, when he would advance his fore
legs and hitch ahead again for a few more inches. His strength
left him, and the last his mates saw of him he lay gasping in the
snow and yearning toward them. But they could hear him mournfully
howling till they passed out of sight behind a belt of river
timber.
Here the train was halted. The Scotch half-breed slowly retraced
his steps to the camp they had left. The men ceased talking. A
revolver-shot rang out. The man came back hurriedly. The whips
snapped, the bells tinkled merrily, the sleds churned along the
trail; but Buck knew, and every dog knew, what had taken place
behind the belt of river 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 at the fore, arrived at Skaguay. They
were in a wretched state, worn out and worn down. Buck's one
hundred and forty pounds had dwindled to one hundred and fifteen.
The rest of his mates, though lighter dogs, had relatively lost
more weight than he. Pike, the malingerer, who, in his lifetime
of deceit, had often successfully feigned a hurt leg, was now
limping in earnest. Sol-leks was limping, and Dub was suffering
from a wrenched shoulder-blade.
They were all terribly footsore. No spring or rebound was left in
them. Their feet fell heavily on the trail, jarring their bodies
and doubling the fatigue of a day's travel. There was nothing the
matter with them except that they were dead tired. It was not the
dead-tiredness that comes through brief and excessive effort, from
which recovery is a matter of hours; but it was the dead-tiredness
that comes through the slow and prolonged strength drainage of
months of toil. There was no power of recuperation left, no
reserve strength to call upon. It had been all used, the last
least bit of it. Every muscle, every fibre, every cell, was
tired, dead tired. And there was reason for it. In less than
five months they had travelled twenty-five hundred miles, during
the last eighteen hundred of which they had had but five days'
rest. When they arrived at Skaguay they were apparently on their
last legs. They could barely keep the traces taut, and on the
down grades just managed to keep out of the way of the sled.
"Mush on, poor sore feets," the driver encouraged them as they
tottered down the main street of Skaguay. "Dis is de las'. Den we
get one long res'. Eh? For sure. One bully long res'."
The drivers confidently expected a long stopover. Themselves,
they had covered twelve hundred miles with two days' rest, and in
the nature of reason and common justice they deserved an interval
of loafing. But so many were the men who had rushed into the
Klondike, and so many were the sweethearts, wives, and kin that
had not rushed in, that the congested mail was taking on Alpine
proportions; also, there were official orders. Fresh batches of
Hudson Bay dogs were to take the places of those worthless for the
trail. The worthless ones were to be got rid of, and, since dogs
count for little against dollars, they were to be sold.
Three days passed, by which time Buck and his mates found how
really tired and weak they were. Then, on the morning of the
fourth day, two men from the States came along and bought them,
harness and all, for a song. The men addressed each other as
"Hal" and "Charles." Charles was a middle-aged, lightish-colored
man, with weak and watery eyes and a mustache that twisted
fiercely and vigorously up, giving the lie to the limply drooping
lip it concealed. Hal was a youngster of nineteen or twenty, with
a big Colt's revolver and a hunting-knife strapped about him on a
belt that fairly bristled with cartridges. This belt was the most
salient thing about him. It advertised his callowness--a
callowness sheer and unutterable. Both men were manifestly out of
place, and why such as they should adventure the North is part of
the mystery of things that passes understanding.
Buck heard the chaffering, 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 on the heels of
Perrault and Francois and the others who had gone before. When
driven with his mates to the new owners' camp, Buck saw a slipshod
and slovenly affair, tent half stretched, dishes unwashed,
everything in disorder; also, he saw a woman. "Mercedes" the men
called her. She was Charles's wife and Hal's sister--a nice
family party.
Buck watched them apprehensively as they proceeded to take down
the tent and load the sled. There was a great deal of effort
about their manner, but no businesslike method. The tent was
rolled into an awkward bundle three times as large as it should
have been. The tin dishes were packed away unwashed. Mercedes
continually fluttered in the way of her men and kept up an
unbroken chattering of remonstrance and advice. When they put a
clothes-sack on the front of the sled, she suggested it should go
on the back; and when they had put it on the back, and covered it
over with a couple of other bundles, she discovered overlooked
articles which could abide nowhere else but in that very sack, and
they unloaded again.
Three men from a neighboring tent came out and looked on, grinning
and winking at one another.
"You've got a right smart load as it is," said one of them; "and
it's not me should tell you your business, but I wouldn't tote
that tent along if I was you."
"Undreamed of!" cried Mercedes, throwing up her hands in dainty
dismay. "However in the world could I manage without a tent?"
"It's springtime, and you won't get any more cold weather," the
man replied.
She shook her head decidedly, and Charles and Hal put the last
odds and ends on top the mountainous load.
"Think it'll ride?" one of the men asked.
"Why shouldn't it?" Charles demanded rather shortly.
"Oh, that's all right, that's all right," the man hastened meekly
to say. "I was just a-wonderin', that is all. It seemed a mite
top-heavy."
Charles turned his back and drew the lashings down as well as he
could, which was not in the least well.
"An' of course the dogs can hike along all day with that
contraption behind them," affirmed a second of the men.
"Certainly," said Hal, with freezing politeness, taking hold of
the gee-pole with one hand and swinging his whip from the other.
"Mush!" he shouted. "Mush on there!"
The dogs sprang against the breast-bands, strained hard for a few
moments, then relaxed. They were unable to move the sled.
"The lazy brutes, I'll show them," he cried, preparing to lash out
at them with the whip.
But Mercedes interfered, crying, "Oh, Hal, you mustn't," as she
caught hold of the whip and wrenched it from him. "The poor dears!
Now you must promise you won't be harsh with them for the rest of
the trip, or I won't go a step."
"Precious lot you know about dogs," her brother sneered; "and I
wish you'd leave me alone. They're lazy, I tell you, and you've
got to whip them to get anything out of them. That's their way.
You ask any one. Ask one of those men."
Mercedes looked at them imploringly, untold repugnance at sight of
pain written in her pretty face.
"They're weak as water, if you want to know," came the reply from
one of the men. "Plum tuckered out, that's what's the matter.
They need a rest."
"Rest be blanked," said Hal, with his beardless lips; and Mercedes
said, "Oh!" in pain and sorrow at the oath.
But she was a clannish creature, and rushed at once to the defence
of her brother. "Never mind that man," she said pointedly.
"You're driving our dogs, and you do what you think best with
them."
Again Hal's whip fell upon the dogs. They threw themselves
against the breast-bands, dug their feet into the packed snow, got
down low to it, and put forth all their strength. The sled held as
though it were an anchor. After two efforts, they stood still,
panting. The whip was whistling savagely, when once more Mercedes
interfered. She dropped on her knees before Buck, with tears in
her eyes, and put her arms around his neck.
"You poor, poor dears," she cried sympathetically, "why don't you
pull hard?--then you wouldn't be whipped." Buck did not like her,
but he was feeling too miserable to resist her, taking it as part
of the day's miserable work.
One of the onlookers, who had been clenching his teeth to suppress
hot speech, now spoke up:--
"It's not that I care a whoop what becomes of you, but for the
dogs' sakes I just want to tell you, you can help them a mighty
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."
A third time the attempt was made, but this time, following the
advice, Hal broke out the runners which had been frozen to the
snow. The overloaded and unwieldy sled forged ahead, Buck and his
mates struggling frantically under the rain of blows. A hundred
yards ahead the path turned and sloped steeply into the main
street. It would have required an experienced man to keep the
top-heavy sled upright, and Hal was not such a man. As they swung
on the turn the sled went over, spilling half its load through the
loose lashings. The dogs never stopped. The lightened sled
bounded on its side behind them. They were angry because of the
ill treatment they had received and the unjust load. Buck was
raging. He broke into a run, the team following his lead. Hal
cried "Whoa! whoa!" but they gave no heed. He tripped and was
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.
Pages:
1 |
2 |
3 | 4 |
5 |
6 |
7 |
8