Chapter IV

The Call of the Wild, by Jack London

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.

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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 Francois 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 Francois  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.

Francois 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 Francois, 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 Francois'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 the long pole he carried, which he so  held that it fell each time across the hole made by his body.  But  a cold snap was on, the thermometer registering fifty below zero,  and each time he broke through he was compelled for very life to  build a fire and dry his garments.

Nothing daunted him.  It was because nothing daunted him that he  had been chosen for government courier.  He took all manner of  risks, resolutely thrusting his little weazened face into the  frost and struggling on from dim dawn to dark.  He skirted the  frowning shores on rim ice that bent and crackled under foot and  upon which they dared not halt.  Once, the sled broke through,  with Dave and Buck, and they were half-frozen and all but drowned  by the time they were dragged out.  The usual fire was necessary  to save them.  They were coated solidly with ice, and the two men  kept them on the run around the fire, sweating and thawing, so  close that they were singed by the flames.

At another time Spitz went through, dragging the whole team after  him up to Buck, who strained backward with all his strength, his  fore paws on the slippery edge and the ice quivering and snapping  all around.  But behind him was Dave, likewise straining backward,  and behind the sled was Francois, pulling till his tendons  cracked.

Again, the rim ice broke away before and behind, and there was no  escape except up the cliff.  Perrault scaled it by a miracle,  while Francois prayed for just that miracle; and with every thong  and sled lashing and the last bit of harness rove into a long  rope, the dogs were hoisted, one by one, to the cliff crest.   Francois came up last, after the sled and load.  Then came the  search for a place to descend, which descent was ultimately made  by the aid of the rope, and night found them back on the river  with a quarter of a mile to the day's credit.

By the time they made the Hootalinqua and good ice, Buck was  played out.  The rest of the dogs were in like condition; but  Perrault, to make up lost time, pushed them late and early.  The  first day they covered thirty-five miles to the Big Salmon; the  next day thirty-five more to the Little Salmon; the third day  forty miles, which brought them well up toward the Five Fingers.

Buck's feet were not so compact and hard as the feet of the  huskies.  His had softened during the many generations since the  day his last wild ancestor was tamed by a cave-dweller or river  man.  AU day long he limped in agony, and camp once made, lay down  like a dead dog.  Hungry as he was, he would not move to receive  his ration of fish, which Francois had to bring to him.  Also, the  dog-driver rubbed Buck's feet for half an hour each night after  supper, and sacrificed the tops of his own moccasins to make four  moccasins for Buck.  This was a great relief, and Buck caused even  the weazened face of Perrault to twist itself into a grin one  morning, when Francois forgot the moccasins and Buck lay on his  back, his four feet waving appealingly in the air, and refused to  budge without them.  Later his feet grew hard to the trail, and  the worn-out foot-gear was thrown away.

At the Pelly one morning, as they were harnessing up, Dolly, who  had never been conspicuous for anything, went suddenly mad.  She  announced her condition by a long, heartbreaking wolf howl that  sent every dog bristling with fear, then sprang straight for Buck.   He had never seen a dog go mad, nor did he have any reason to fear  madness; yet he knew that here was horror, and fled away from it  in a panic. Straight away he raced, with Dolly, panting and  frothing, one leap behind; nor could she gain on him, so great was  his terror, nor could he leave her, so great was her madness.  He  plunged through the wooded breast of the island, flew down to the  lower end, crossed a back channel filled with rough ice to another  island, gained a third island, curved back to the main river, and  in desperation started to cross it.  And all the time, though he  did not took, he could hear her snarling just one leap behind.   Francois called to him a quarter of a mile away and he doubled  back, still one leap ahead, gasping painfully for air and putting  all his faith in that Francois would save him.  The dog-driver  held the axe poised in his hand, and as Buck shot past him the axe  crashed down upon mad Dolly's head.

Buck staggered over against the sled, exhausted, sobbing for  breath, helpless.  This was Spitz's opportunity.  He sprang upon  Buck, and twice his teeth sank into his unresisting foe and ripped  and tore the flesh to the bone.  Then Francois's lash descended,  and Buck had the satisfaction of watching Spitz receive the worst  whipping as yet administered to any of the teams.

"One devil, dat Spitz," remarked Perrault.  "Some dam day heem  keel dat Buck."

"Dat Buck two devils, " was Francois's rejoinder.  "All de tam I  watch dat Buck I know for sure.  Lissen: some dam fine day heem  get mad lak hell an' den heem chew dat Spitz all up an) spit heem  out on de snow.  Sure.  I know."

From then on it was war between them.  Spitz, as lead-dog and  acknowledged master of the team, felt his supremacy threatened by  this strange Southland dog.  And strange Buck was to him, for of  the many Southland dogs he had known, not one had shown up  worthily in camp and on trail.  They were all too soft, dying  under the toil, the frost, and starvation.  Buck was the  exception.  He alone endured and prospered, matching the husky in  strength, savagery, and cunning. Then he was a masterful dog, and  what made him dangerous was the fact that the club of the man in  the red sweater had knocked all blind pluck and rashness out of  his desire for mastery.  He was preeminently cunning, and could  bide his time with a patience that was nothing less than  primitive.

It was inevitable that the clash for leadership should come. Buck  wanted it.  He wanted it because it was his nature, because he had  been gripped tight by that nameless, incomprehensible pride of the  trail and trace--that pride which holds dogs in the toil to the  last gasp, which lures them to die joyfully in the harness, and  breaks their hearts if they are cut out of the harness.  This was  the pride of Dave as wheel-dog, of Sol-leks as he pulled with all  his strength; the pride that laid hold of them at break of camp,  transforming them from sour and sullen brutes into straining,  eager, ambitious creatures; the pride that spurred them on all day  and dropped them at pitch of camp at night, letting them fall back  into gloomy unrest and uncontent.  This was the pride that bore up  Spitz and made him thrash the sled-dogs who blundered and shirked  in the traces or hid away at harness-up time in the morning.   Likewise it was this pride that made him fear Buck as a possible  lead-dog.  And this was Buck's pride, too.

He openly threatened the other's leadership.  He came between him  and the shirks he should have punished.  And he did it  deliberately.  One night there was a heavy snowfall, and in the  morning Pike, the malingerer, did not appear.  He was securely  hidden in his nest under a foot of snow.  Francois called him and  sought him in vain.  Spitz was wild with wrath. He raged through  the camp, smelling and digging in every likely place, snarling so  frightfully that Pike heard and shivered in his hiding-place.

But when he was at last unearthed, and Spitz flew at him to punish  him, Buck flew, with equal rage, in between.  So unexpected was  it, and so shrewdly managed, that Spitz was hurled backward and  off his feet.  Pike, who had been trembling abjectly, took heart  at this open mutiny, and sprang upon his overthrown leader.  Buck,  to whom fair play was a forgotten code, likewise sprang upon  Spitz.  But Francois, chuckling at the incident while unswerving  in the administration of justice, brought his lash down upon Buck  with all his might.  This failed to drive Buck from his prostrate  rival, and the butt of the whip was brought into play.  Half- stunned by the blow, Buck was knocked backward and the lash laid  upon him again and again, while Spitz soundly punished the many  times offending Pike.

In the days that followed, as Dawson grew closer and closer, Buck  still continued to interfere between Spitz and the culprits; but  he did it craftily, when Francois was not around, With the covert  mutiny of Buck, a general insubordination sprang up and increased.   Dave and Sol-leks were unaffected, but the rest of the team went  from bad to worse.  Things no longer went right.  There was  continual bickering and jangling.  Trouble was always afoot, and  at the bottom of it was Buck.  He kept Francois busy, for the dog- driver was in constant apprehension of the life-and-death struggle  between the two which he knew must take place sooner or later; and  on more than one night the sounds of quarrelling and strife among  the other dogs turned him out of his sleeping robe, fearful that  Buck and Spitz were at it.

But the opportunity did not present itself, and they pulled into  Dawson one dreary afternoon with the great fight still to come.   Here were many men, and countless dogs, and Buck found them all at  work.  It seemed the ordained order of things that dogs should  work.  All day they swung up and down the main street in long  teams, and in the night their jingling bells still went by.  They  hauled cabin logs and firewood, freighted up to the mines, and did  all manner of work that horses did in the Santa Clara Valley.   Here and there Buck met Southland dogs, but in the main they were  the wild wolf husky breed.  Every night, regularly, at nine, at  twelve, at three, they lifted a nocturnal song, a weird and eerie  chant, in which it was Buck's delight to join.

With the aurora borealis flaming coldly overhead, or the stars  leaping in the frost dance, and the land numb and frozen under its  pall of snow, this song of the huskies might have been the  defiance of life, only it was pitched in minor key, with long- drawn wailings and half-sobs, and was more the pleading of life,  the articulate travail of existence.  It was an old song, old as  the breed itself--one of the first songs of the younger world in a  day when songs were sad.  It was invested with the woe of  unnumbered generations, this plaint by which Buck was so strangely  stirred.  When he moaned and sobbed, it was with the pain of  living that was of old the pain of his wild fathers, and the fear  and mystery of the cold and dark that was to them fear and  mystery.  And that he should be stirred by it marked the  completeness with which he harked back through the ages of fire  and roof to the raw beginnings of life in the howling ages.

Seven days from the time they pulled into Dawson, they dropped  down the steep bank by the Barracks to the Yukon Trail, and pulled  for Dyea and Salt Water.  Perrault was carrying despatches if  anything more urgent than those he had brought in; also, the  travel pride had gripped him, and he purposed to make the record  trip of the year.  Several things favored him in this.  The week's  rest had recuperated the dogs and put them in thorough trim.  The  trail they had broken into the country was packed hard by later  journeyers.  And further, the police had arranged in two or three  places deposits of grub for dog and man, and he was travelling  light.

They made Sixty Mile, which is a fifty-mile run, on the first day;  and the second day saw them booming up the Yukon well on their way  to Pelly.  But such splendid running was achieved not without  great trouble and vexation on the part of Francois.  The insidious  revolt led by Buck had destroyed the solidarity of the team.  It  no longer was as one dog leaping in the traces.  The encouragement  Buck gave the rebels led them into all kinds of petty  misdemeanors.  No more was Spitz a leader greatly to be feared.   The old awe departed, and they grew equal to challenging his  authority.  Pike robbed him of half a fish one night, and gulped  it down under the protection of Buck.  Another night Dub and Joe  fought Spitz and made him forego the punishment they deserved.   And even Billee, the good-natured, was less good-natured, and  whined not half so placatingly as in former days.  Buck never came  near Spitz without snarling and bristling menacingly.  In fact,  his conduct approached that of a bully, and he was given to  swaggering up and down before Spitz's very nose.

The breaking down of discipline likewise affected the dogs in  their relations with one another.  They quarrelled and bickered  more than ever among themselves, till at times the camp was a  howling bedlam.  Dave and Sol-leks alone were unaltered, though  they were made irritable by the unending squabbling.  Francois  swore strange barbarous oaths, and stamped the snow in futile  rage, and tore his hair.  His lash was always singing among the  dogs, but it was of small avail. Directly his back was turned they  were at it again.  He backed up Spitz with his whip, while Buck  backed up the remainder of the team.  Francois knew he was behind  all the trouble, and Buck knew he knew; but Buck was too clever  ever again to be caught red-handed.  He worked faithfully in the  harness, for the toil had become a delight to him; yet it was a  greater delight slyly to precipitate a fight amongst his mates and  tangle the traces.

At the mouth of the Tahkeena, one night after supper, Dub turned  up a snowshoe rabbit, blundered it, and missed.  In a second the  whole team was in full cry.  A hundred yards away was a camp of  the Northwest Police, with fifty dogs, huskies all, who joined the  chase.  The rabbit sped down the river, turned off into a small  creek, up the frozen bed of which it held steadily.  It ran  lightly on the surface of the snow, while the dogs ploughed  through by main strength.  Buck led the pack, sixty strong, around  bend after bend, but he could not gain.  He lay down low to the  race, whining eagerly, his splendid body flashing forward, leap by  leap, in the wan white moonlight.  And leap by leap, like some  pale frost wraith, the snowshoe rabbit flashed on ahead.

All that stirring of old instincts which at stated periods drives  men out from the sounding cities to forest and plain to kill  things by chemically propelled leaden pellets, the blood lust, the  joy to kill--all this was Buck's, only it was infinitely more  intimate.  He was ranging at the head of the pack, running the  wild thing down, the living meat, to kill with his own teeth and  wash his muzzle to the eyes in warm blood.

There is an ecstasy that marks the summit of life, and beyond  which life cannot rise.  And such is the paradox of living, this  ecstasy comes when one is most alive, and it comes as a complete  forgetfulness that one is alive.  This ecstasy, this forgetfulness  of living, comes to the artist, caught up and out of himself in a  sheet of flame; it comes to the soldier, war-mad on a stricken  field and refusing quarter; and it came to Buck, leading the pack,  sounding the old wolf-cry, straining after the food that was alive  and that fled swiftly before him through the moonlight.  He was  sounding the deeps of his nature, and of the parts of his nature  that were deeper than he, going back into the womb of Time.  He  was mastered by the sheer surging of life, the tidal wave of  being, the perfect joy of each separate muscle, joint, and sinew  in that it was everything that was not death, that it was aglow  and rampant, expressing itself in movement, flying exultantly  under the stars and over the face of dead matter that did not  move.

But Spitz, cold and calculating even in his supreme moods, left  the pack and cut across a narrow neck of land where the creek made  a long bend around.  Buck did not know of this, and as he rounded  the bend, the frost wraith of a rabbit still flitting before him,  he saw another and larger frost wraith leap from the overhanging  bank into the immediate path of the rabbit.  It was Spitz.  The  rabbit could not turn, and as the white teeth broke its back in  mid air it shrieked as loudly as a stricken man may shriek.  At  sound of this, the cry of Life plunging down from Life's apex in  the grip of Death, the fall pack at Buck's heels raised a hell's  chorus of delight.

Buck did not cry out.  He did not check himself, but drove in upon  Spitz, shoulder to shoulder, so hard that he missed the throat.   They rolled over and over in the powdery snow. Spitz gained his  feet almost as though he had not been overthrown, slashing Buck  down the shoulder and leaping clear. Twice his teeth clipped  together, like the steel jaws of a trap, as he backed away for  better footing, with lean and lifting lips that writhed and  snarled.

In a flash Buck knew it.  The time had come.  It was to the death.   As they circled about, snarling, ears laid back, keenly watchful  for the advantage, the scene came to Buck with a sense of  familiarity.  He seemed to remember it all,--the white woods, and  earth, and moonlight, and the thrill of battle.  Over the  whiteness and silence brooded a ghostly calm. There was not the  faintest whisper of air--nothing moved, not a leaf quivered, the  visible breaths of the dogs rising slowly and lingering in the  frosty air.  They had made short work of the snowshoe rabbit,  these dogs that were ill-tamed wolves; and they were now drawn up  in an expectant circle. They, too, were silent, their eyes only  gleaming and their breaths drifting slowly upward.  To Buck it was  nothing new or strange, this scene of old time.  It was as though  it had always been, the wonted way of things.

Spitz was a practised fighter.  From Spitzbergen through the  Arctic, and across Canada and the Barrens, he had held his own  with all manner of dogs and achieved to mastery over them.  Bitter  rage was his, but never blind rage.  In passion to rend and  destroy, he never forgot that his enemy was in like passion to  rend and destroy.  He never rushed till he was prepared to receive  a rush; never attacked till he had first defended that attack.

In vain Buck strove to sink his teeth in the neck of the big white  dog.  Wherever his fangs struck for the softer flesh, they were  countered by the fangs of Spitz.  Fang clashed fang, and lips were  cut and bleeding, but Buck could not penetrate his enemy's guard.   Then he warmed up and enveloped Spitz in a whirlwind of rushes.   Time and time again he tried for the snow-white throat, where life  bubbled near to the surface, and each time and every time Spitz  slashed him and got away. Then Buck took to rushing, as though for  the throat, when, suddenly drawing back his head and curving in  from the side, he would drive his shoulder at the shoulder of  Spitz, as a ram by which to overthrow him.  But instead, Buck's  shoulder was slashed down each time as Spitz leaped lightly away.

Spitz was untouched, while Buck was streaming with blood and  panting hard.  The fight was growing desperate.  And all the while  the silent and wolfish circle waited to finish off whichever dog  went down.  As Buck grew winded, Spitz took to rushing, and he  kept him staggering for footing.  Once Buck went over, and the  whole circle of sixty dogs started up; but he recovered himself,  almost in mid air, and the circle sank down again and waited.

But Buck possessed a quality that made for greatness--  imagination.  He fought by instinct, but he could fight by head as  well.  He rushed, as though attempting the old shoulder trick, but  at the last instant swept low to the snow and in.  His teeth  closed on Spitz's left fore leg.  There was a crunch of breaking  bone, and the white dog faced him on three legs.  Thrice he tried  to knock him over, then repeated the trick and broke the right  fore leg.  Despite the pain and helplessness, Spitz struggled  madly to keep up.  He saw the silent circle, with gleaming eyes,  lolling tongues, and silvery breaths drifting upward, closing in  upon him as he had seen similar circles close in upon beaten  antagonists in the past. Only this time he was the one who was  beaten.

There was no hope for him.  Buck was inexorable.  Mercy was a  thing reserved for gender climes.  He manoeuvred for the final  rush.  The circle had tightened till he could feel the breaths of  the huskies on his flanks.  He could see them, beyond Spitz and to  either side, half crouching for the spring, their eyes fixed upon  him.  A pause seemed to fall.  Every animal was motionless as  though turned to stone.  Only Spitz quivered and bristled as he  staggered back and forth, snarling with horrible menace, as though  to frighten off impending death.  Then Buck sprang in and out; but  while he was in, shoulder had at last squarely met shoulder.  The  dark circle became a dot on the moon-flooded snow as Spitz  disappeared from view.  Buck stood and looked on, the successful  champion, the dominant primordial beast who had made his kill and  found it good .

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Chapter IV