The Call of The Wild Illustrated - Cs PDF

The Call of the Wild (Illustrated)
Jack London
Published by Platypus Classics, 2015.

This is a work of fiction. Similarities to real people, places, or
events are entirely coincidental.
THE CALL OF THE WILD (ILLUSTRATED)
First edition. January 21, 2015.

Copyright © 2015 Jack London.
Written by Jack London.

The Call of the Wild
Jack London
2 Jack London
Copyright © 2015 Platypus Classics

All rights reserved.
ISBN: 1507659385
ISBN-13: 978-1507659380
Chapter I: Into the Primitive
"Old longings nomadic leap, Chafing at custom's chain; Again

from its brumal sleep Wakens the ferine strain."
Buck did not read the newspapers, or he would have known
that trouble was brewing, not alone for himself, but for every
tide- water dog, strong of muscle and with warm, long hair, from
Puget Sound to San Diego. Because men, groping in the Arctic
darkness, had found a yellow metal, and because steamship and
transportation companies were booming the find, thousands of
men were rushing into the Northland. These men wanted dogs,
and the dogs they wanted were heavy dogs, with strong muscles
by which to toil, and furry coats to protect them from the frost.
Buck lived at a big house in the sun-kissed Santa Clara Valley.
Judge Miller's place, it was called. It stood back from the road,
half hidden among the trees, through which glimpses could be
caught of the wide cool veranda that ran around its four sides.
The house was approached by gravelled driveways which wound
about through wide-spreading lawns and under the interlacing
boughs of tall poplars. At the rear things were on even a more
spacious scale than at the front. There were great stables, where a
dozen grooms and boys held forth, rows of vine-clad servants'
cottages, an endless and orderly array of outhouses, long grape
arbors, green pastures, orchards, and berry patches. Then there
was the pumping plant for the artesian well, and the big cement
tank where Judge Miller's boys took their morning plunge and
kept cool in the hot afternoon.
And over this great demesne Buck ruled. Here he was born,
and here he had lived the four years of his life. It was true, there
were other dogs, There could not but be other dogs on so vast a
4 Jack London
place, but they did not count. They came and went, resided in the
populous kennels, or lived obscurely in the recesses of the house
after the fashion of Toots, the Japanese pug, or Ysabel, the
Mexican hairless,—strange creatures that rarely put nose out of
doors or set foot to ground. On the other hand, there were the
fox terriers, a score of them at least, who yelped fearful promises
at Toots and Ysabel looking out of the windows at them and
protected by a legion of housemaids armed with brooms and
mops.
But Buck was neither house-dog nor kennel-dog. The whole
realm was his. He plunged into the swimming tank or went
hunting with the Judge's sons; he escorted Mollie and Alice, the
Judge's daughters, on long twilight or early morning rambles; on
wintry nights he lay at the Judge's feet before the roaring library
fire; he carried the Judge's grandsons on his back, or rolled them
in the grass, and guarded their footsteps through wild adventures
down to the fountain in the stable yard, and even beyond, where
the paddocks were, and the berry patches. Among the terriers he
stalked imperiously, and Toots and Ysabel he utterly ignored, for
he was king,—king over all creeping, crawling, flying things of
Judge Miller's place, humans included.
His father, Elmo, a huge St. Bernard, had been the Judge's
inseparable companion, and Buck bid fair to follow in the way of
his father. He was not so large,—he weighed only one hundred
and forty pounds,—for his mother, Shep, had been a Scotch
shepherd dog. Nevertheless, one hundred and forty pounds, to
which was added the dignity that comes of good living and
universal respect, enabled him to carry himself in right royal
fashion. During the four years since his puppyhood he had lived
the life of a sated aristocrat; he had a fine pride in himself, was
even a trifle egotistical, as country gentlemen sometimes become
because of their insular situation. But he had saved himself by not
becoming a mere pampered house-dog. Hunting and kindred
outdoor delights had kept down the fat and hardened his
THE CALL OF THE WILD 5
muscles; and to him, as to the cold-tubbing races, the love of

water had been a tonic and a health preserver.
And this was the manner of dog Buck was in the fall of 1897,
when the Klondike strike dragged men from all the world into
the frozen North. But Buck did not read the newspapers, and he
did not know that Manuel, one of the gardener's helpers, was an
undesirable acquaintance. Manuel had one besetting sin. He
loved to play Chinese lottery. Also, in his gambling, he had one
besetting weakness—faith in a system; and this made his
damnation certain. For to play a system requires money, while
the wages of a gardener's helper do not lap over the needs of a
wife and numerous progeny.
The Judge was at a meeting of the Raisin Growers'
Association, and the boys were busy organizing an athletic club,
on the memorable night of Manuel's treachery. No one saw him
and Buck go off through the orchard on what Buck imagined was
merely a stroll. And with the exception of a solitary man, no one
saw them arrive at the little flag station known as College Park.
This man talked with Manuel, and money chinked between
them.
"You might wrap up the goods before you deliver 'm," the
stranger said gruffly, and Manuel doubled a piece of stout rope
around Buck's neck under the collar.
"Twist it, an' you'll choke 'm plentee," said Manuel, and the
stranger grunted a ready affirmative.
Buck had accepted the rope with quiet dignity. To be sure, it
was an unwonted performance: but he had learned to trust in
men he knew, and to give them credit for a wisdom that
outreached his own. But when the ends of the rope were placed
in the stranger's hands, he growled menacingly. He had merely
intimated his displeasure, in his pride believing that to intimate
was to command. But to his surprise the rope tightened around
his neck, shutting off his breath. In quick rage he sprang at the
man, who met him halfway, grappled him close by the throat,
6 Jack London
and with a deft twist threw him over on his back. Then the rope
tightened mercilessly, while Buck struggled in a fury, his tongue
lolling out of his mouth and his great chest panting futilely.
Never in all his life had he been so vilely treated, and never in all
his life had he been so angry. But his strength ebbed, his eyes
glazed, and he knew nothing when the train was flagged and the
two men threw him into the baggage car.
The next he knew, he was dimly aware that his tongue was
hurting and that he was being jolted along in some kind of a
conveyance. The hoarse shriek of a locomotive whistling a
crossing told him where he was. He had travelled too often with
the Judge not to know the sensation of riding in a baggage car.
He opened his eyes, and into them came the unbridled anger of a
kidnapped king. The man sprang for his throat, but Buck was too
quick for him. His jaws closed on the hand, nor did they relax till
his senses were choked out of him once more.
"Yep, has fits," the man said, hiding his mangled hand from
the baggageman, who had been attracted by the sounds of
struggle. "I'm takin' 'm up for the boss to 'Frisco. A crack dog-
doctor there thinks that he can cure 'm."
Concerning that night's ride, the man spoke most eloquently
for himself, in a little shed back of a saloon on the San Francisco
water front.
"All I get is fifty for it," he grumbled; "an' I wouldn't do it over
for a thousand, cold cash."
His hand was wrapped in a bloody handkerchief, and the
right trouser leg was ripped from knee to ankle.
"How much did the other mug get?" the saloon-keeper
demanded.
"A hundred," was the reply. "Wouldn't take a sou less, so help
me."
"That makes a hundred and fifty," the saloon-keeper
calculated; "and he's worth it, or I'm a squarehead."
The kidnapper undid the bloody wrappings and looked at his

lacerated hand. "If I don't get the hydrophoby—"
"It'll be because you was born to hang," laughed the saloon-
keeper. "Here, lend me a hand before you pull your freight," he
added.
Dazed, suffering intolerable pain from throat and tongue,
with the life half throttled out of him, Buck attempted to face his
tormentors. But he was thrown down and choked repeatedly, till
they succeeded in filing the heavy brass collar from off his neck.
Then the rope was removed, and he was flung into a cagelike
crate.
There he lay for the remainder of the weary night, nursing his
wrath and wounded pride. He could not understand what it all
meant. What did they want with him, these strange men? Why
were they keeping him pent up in this narrow crate? He did not
know why, but he felt oppressed by the vague sense of impending
calamity. Several times during the night he sprang to his feet
when the shed door rattled open, expecting to see the Judge, or
the boys at least. But each time it was the bulging face of the
saloon-keeper that peered in at him by the sickly light of a tallow
candle. And each time the joyful bark that trembled in Buck's
throat was twisted into a savage growl.
But the saloon-keeper let him alone, and in the morning four
men entered and picked up the crate. More tormentors, Buck
decided, for they were evil-looking creatures, ragged and
unkempt; and he stormed and raged at them through the bars.
They only laughed and poked sticks at him, which he promptly
assailed with his teeth till he realized that that was what they
wanted. Whereupon he lay down sullenly and allowed the crate
to be lifted into a wagon. Then he, and the crate in which he was
imprisoned, began a passage through many hands. Clerks in the
express office took charge of him; he was carted about in another
wagon; a truck carried him, with an assortment of boxes and
parcels, upon a ferry steamer; he was trucked off the steamer into
8 Jack London
a great railway depot, and finally he was deposited in an express

car.
For two days and nights this express car was dragged along at
the tail of shrieking locomotives; and for two days and nights
Buck neither ate nor drank. In his anger he had met the first
advances of the express messengers with growls, and they had
retaliated by teasing him. When he flung himself against the bars,
quivering and frothing, they laughed at him and taunted him.
They growled and barked like detestable dogs, mewed, and
flapped their arms and crowed. It was all very silly, he knew; but
therefore the more outrage to his dignity, and his anger waxed
and waxed. He did not mind the hunger so much, but the lack of
water caused him severe suffering and fanned his wrath to fever-
pitch. For that matter, high-strung and finely sensitive, the ill
treatment had flung him into a fever, which was fed by the
inflammation of his parched and swollen throat and tongue.
He was glad for one thing: the rope was off his neck. That had
given them an unfair advantage; but now that it was off, he
would show them. They would never get another rope around his
neck. Upon that he was resolved. For two days and nights he
neither ate nor drank, and during those two days and nights of
torment, he accumulated a fund of wrath that boded ill for
whoever first fell foul of him. His eyes turned blood-shot, and he
was metamorphosed into a raging fiend. So changed was he that
the Judge himself would not have recognized him; and the
express messengers breathed with relief when they bundled him
off the train at Seattle.
Four men gingerly carried the crate from the wagon into a
small, high-walled back yard. A stout man, with a red sweater
that sagged generously at the neck, came out and signed the book
for the driver. That was the man, Buck divined, the next
tormentor, and he hurled himself savagely against the bars. The
man smiled grimly, and brought a hatchet and a club.
"You ain't going to take him out now?" the driver asked.
"Sure," the man replied, driving the hatchet into the crate for a
pry.
There was an instantaneous scattering of the four men who
had carried it in, and from safe perches on top the wall they
prepared to watch the performance.
Buck rushed at the splintering wood, sinking his teeth into it,
surging and wrestling with it. Wherever the hatchet fell on the
outside, he was there on the inside, snarling and growling, as
furiously anxious to get out as the man in the red sweater was
calmly intent on getting him out.
"Now, you red-eyed devil," he said, when he had made an
opening sufficient for the passage of Buck's body. At the same
time he dropped the hatchet and shifted the club to his right
hand.
And Buck was truly a red-eyed devil, as he drew himself
together for the spring, hair bristling, mouth foaming, a mad
glitter in his blood-shot eyes. Straight at the man he launched his
one hundred and forty pounds of fury, surcharged with the pent
passion of two days and nights. In mid air, just as his jaws were
about to close on the man, he received a shock that checked his
body and brought his teeth together with an agonizing clip. He
whirled over, fetching the ground on his back and side. He had
never been struck by a club in his life, and did not understand.
With a snarl that was part bark and more scream he was again on
his feet and launched into the air. And again the shock came and
he was brought crushingly to the ground. This time he was aware
that it was the club, but his madness knew no caution. A dozen
times he charged, and as often the club broke the charge and
smashed him down.
After a particularly fierce blow, he crawled to his feet, too
dazed to rush. He staggered limply about, the blood flowing from
nose and mouth and ears, his beautiful coat sprayed and flecked
with bloody slaver. Then the man advanced and deliberately
dealt him a frightful blow on the nose. All the pain he had
10 Jack London
endured was as nothing compared with the exquisite agony of

this. With a roar that was almost lionlike in its ferocity, he again
hurled himself at the man. But the man, shifting the club from
right to left, coolly caught him by the under jaw, at the same time
wrenching downward and backward. Buck described a complete
circle in the air, and half of another, then crashed to the ground
on his head and chest.
For the last time he rushed. The man struck the shrewd blow
he had purposely withheld for so long, and Buck crumpled up
and went down, knocked utterly senseless.
"He's no slouch at dog-breakin', that's wot I say," one of the
men on the wall cried enthusiastically.
"Druther break cayuses any day, and twice on Sundays," was
the reply of the driver, as he climbed on the wagon and started
the horses.
Buck's senses came back to him, but not his strength. He lay
where he had fallen, and from there he watched the man in the
red sweater.
" 'Answers to the name of Buck,' " the man soliloquized,
quoting from the saloon-keeper's letter which had announced the
consignment of the crate and contents. "Well, Buck, my boy," he
went on in a genial voice, "we've had our little ruction, and the
best thing we can do is to let it go at that. You've learned your
place, and I know mine. Be a good dog and all 'll go well and the
goose hang high. Be a bad dog, and I'll whale the stuffin' outa
you. Understand?"
As he spoke he fearlessly patted the head he had so mercilessly
pounded, and though Buck's hair involuntarily bristled at touch
of the hand, he endured it without protest. When the man
brought him water he drank eagerly, and later bolted a generous
meal of raw meat, chunk by chunk, from the man's hand.
He was beaten (he knew that); but he was not broken. He
saw, once for all, that he stood no chance against a man with a
club. He had learned the lesson, and in all his after life he never
forgot it. That club was a revelation. It was his introduction to

the reign of primitive law, and he met the introduction halfway.
The facts of life took on a fiercer aspect; and while he faced that
aspect uncowed, he faced it with all the latent cunning of his
nature aroused. As the days went by, other dogs came, in crates
and at the ends of ropes, some docilely, and some raging and
roaring as he had come; and, one and all, he watched them pass
under the dominion of the man in the red sweater. Again and
again, as he looked at each brutal performance, the lesson was
driven home to Buck: a man with a club was a lawgiver, a master
to be obeyed, though not necessarily conciliated. Of this last
Buck was never guilty, though he did see beaten dogs that fawned
upon the man, and wagged their tails, and licked his hand. Also
he saw one dog, that would neither conciliate nor obey, finally
killed in the struggle for mastery.
Now and again men came, strangers, who talked excitedly,
wheedlingly, and in all kinds of fashions to the man in the red
sweater. And at such times that money passed between them the
strangers took one or more of the dogs away with them. Buck
wondered where they went, for they never came back; but the
fear of the future was strong upon him, and he was glad each time
when he was not selected.
Yet his time came, in the end, in the form of a little weazened
man who spat broken English and many strange and uncouth
exclamations which Buck could not understand.
"Sacredam!" he cried, when his eyes lit upon Buck. "Dat one
dam bully dog! Eh? How moch?"
"Three hundred, and a present at that," was the prompt reply
of the man in the red sweater. "And seem' it's government money,
you ain't got no kick coming, eh, Perrault?"
Perrault grinned. Considering that the price of dogs had been
boomed skyward by the unwonted demand, it was not an unfair
sum for so fine an animal. The Canadian Government would be
no loser, nor would its despatches travel the slower. Perrault
12 Jack London
knew dogs, and when he looked at Buck he knew that he was one
in a thousand—"One in ten t'ousand," he commented mentally.
Buck saw money pass between them, and was not surprised
when Curly, a good-natured Newfoundland, and he were led
away by the little weazened man. That was the last he saw of the
man in the red sweater, and as Curly and he looked at receding
Seattle from the deck of the Narwhal, it was the last he saw of the
warm Southland. Curly and he were taken below by Perrault and
turned over to a black-faced giant called Francois. Perrault was a
French-Canadian, and swarthy; but Francois was a French-
Canadian half-breed, and twice as swarthy. They were a new kind
of men to Buck (of which he was destined to see many more),
and while he developed no affection for them, he none the less
grew honestly to respect them. He speedily learned that Perrault
and Francois were fair men, calm and impartial in administering
justice, and too wise in the way of dogs to be fooled by dogs.
In the 'tween-decks of the Narwhal, Buck and Curly joined
two other dogs. One of them was a big, snow-white fellow from
Spitzbergen who had been brought away by a whaling captain,
and who had later accompanied a Geological Survey into the
Barrens. He was friendly, in a treacherous sort of way, smiling
into one's face the while he meditated some underhand trick, as,
for instance, when he stole from Buck's food at the first meal. As
Buck sprang to punish him, the lash of Francois's whip sang
through the air, reaching the culprit first; and nothing remained
to Buck but to recover the bone. That was fair of Francois, he
decided, and the half-breed began his rise in Buck's estimation.
The other dog made no advances, nor received any; also, he
did not attempt to steal from the newcomers. He was a gloomy,
morose fellow, and he showed Curly plainly that all he desired
was to be left alone, and further, that there would be trouble if he
were not left alone. "Dave" he was called, and he ate and slept, or
yawned between times, and took interest in nothing, not even
when the Narwhal crossed Queen Charlotte Sound and rolled
and pitched and bucked like a thing possessed. When Buck and
Curly grew excited, half wild with fear, he raised his head as
though annoyed, favored them with an incurious glance, yawned,
and went to sleep again.
Day and night the ship throbbed to the tireless pulse of the
propeller, and though one day was very like another, it was
apparent to Buck that the weather was steadily growing colder.
At last, one morning, the propeller was quiet, and the Narwhal
was pervaded with an atmosphere of excitement. He felt it, as did
the other dogs, and knew that a change was at hand. Francois
leashed them and brought them on deck. At the first step upon
the cold surface, Buck's feet sank into a white mushy something
very like mud. He sprang back with a snort. More of this white
stuff was falling through the air. He shook himself, but more of it
fell upon him. He sniffed it curiously, then licked some up on his
tongue. It bit like fire, and the next instant was gone. This
puzzled him. He tried it again, with the same result. The
onlookers laughed uproariously, and he felt ashamed, he knew
not why, for it was his first snow.
Chapter II: The Law of Club and Fang
Buck's first day on the Dyea beach was like a nightmare. Every
hour was filled with shock and surprise. He had been suddenly
jerked from the heart of civilization and flung into the heart of
things primordial. No lazy, sun-kissed life was this, with nothing
to do but loaf and be bored. Here was neither peace, nor rest, nor
a moment's safety. All was confusion and action, and every
moment life and limb were in peril. There was imperative need to
be constantly alert; for these dogs and men were not town dogs
and men. They were savages, all of them, who knew no law but
the law of club and fang.
He had never seen dogs fight as these wolfish creatures fought,
and his first experience taught him an unforgetable lesson. It is
true, it was a vicarious experience, else he would not have lived to
profit by it. Curly was the victim. They were camped near the log
store, where she, in her friendly way, made advances to a husky
dog the size of a full-grown wolf, though not half so large as she.
There was no warning, only a leap in like a flash, a metallic clip of
teeth, a leap out equally swift, and Curly's face was ripped open
from eye to jaw.
It was the wolf manner of fighting, to strike and leap away;
but there was more to it than this. Thirty or forty huskies ran to
the spot and surrounded the combatants in an intent and silent
circle. Buck did not comprehend that silent intentness, nor the
eager way with which they were licking their chops. Curly rushed
her antagonist, who struck again and leaped aside. He met her
next rush with his chest, in a peculiar fashion that tumbled her
off her feet. She never regained them, This was what the
onlooking huskies had waited for. They closed in upon her,
snarling and yelping, and she was buried, screaming with agony,
beneath the bristling mass of bodies.
So sudden was it, and so unexpected, that Buck was taken
aback. He saw Spitz run out his scarlet tongue in a way he had of
laughing; and he saw Francois, swinging an axe, spring into the
mess of dogs. Three men with clubs were helping him to scatter
them. It did not take long. Two minutes from the time Curly
went down, the last of her assailants were clubbed off. But she lay
there limp and lifeless in the bloody, trampled snow, almost
literally torn to pieces, the swart half-breed standing over her and
cursing horribly. The scene often came back to Buck to trouble
him in his sleep. So that was the way. No fair play. Once down,
that was the end of you. Well, he would see to it that he never
went down. Spitz ran out his tongue and laughed again, and from
that moment Buck hated him with a bitter and deathless hatred.
Before he had recovered from the shock caused by the tragic
passing of Curly, he received another shock. Francois fastened
upon him an arrangement of straps and buckles. It was a harness,
such as he had seen the grooms put on the horses at home. And as
he had seen horses work, so he was set to work, hauling Francois
on a sled to the forest that fringed the valley, and returning with a
load of firewood. Though his dignity was sorely hurt by thus
being made a draught animal, he was too wise to rebel. He
buckled down with a will and did his best, though it was all new
and strange. Francois was stern, demanding instant obedience,
and by virtue of his whip receiving instant obedience; while
Dave, who was an experienced wheeler, nipped Buck's hind
quarters whenever he was in error. Spitz was the leader, likewise
experienced, and while he could not always get at Buck, he
growled sharp reproof now and again, or cunningly threw his
weight in the traces to jerk Buck into the way he should go. Buck
learned easily, and under the combined tuition of his two mates
and Francois made remarkable progress. Ere they returned to
camp he knew enough to stop at "ho," to go ahead at "mush," to
16 Jack London
swing wide on the bends, and to keep clear of the wheeler when
the loaded sled shot downhill at their heels.
"T'ree vair' good dogs," Francois told Perrault. "Dat Buck,
heem pool lak hell. I tich heem queek as anyt'ing."
By afternoon, Perrault, who was in a hurry to be on the trail
with his despatches, returned with two more dogs. "Billee" and
"Joe" he called them, two brothers, and true huskies both. Sons of
the one mother though they were, they were as different as day
and night. Billee's one fault was his excessive good nature, while
Joe was the very opposite, sour and introspective, with a
perpetual snarl and a malignant eye. Buck received them in
comradely fashion, Dave ignored them, while Spitz proceeded to
thrash first one and then the other. Billee wagged his tail
appeasingly, turned to run when he saw that appeasement was of
no avail, and cried (still appeasingly) when Spitz's sharp teeth
scored his flank. But no matter how Spitz circled, Joe whirled
around on his heels to face him, mane bristling, ears laid back,
lips writhing and snarling, jaws clipping together as fast as he
could snap, and eyes diabolically gleaming—the incarnation of
belligerent fear. So terrible was his appearance that Spitz was
forced to forego disciplining him; but to cover his own
discomfiture he turned upon the inoffensive and wailing Billee
and drove him to the confines of the camp.
By evening Perrault secured another dog, an old husky, long
and lean and gaunt, with a battle-scarred face and a single eye
which flashed a warning of prowess that commanded respect. He
was called Sol-leks, which means the Angry One. Like Dave, he
asked nothing, gave nothing, expected nothing; and when he
marched slowly and deliberately into their midst, even Spitz left
him alone. He had one peculiarity which Buck was unlucky
enough to discover. He did not like to be approached on his
blind side. Of this offence Buck was unwittingly guilty, and the
first knowledge he had of his indiscretion was when Sol-leks
whirled upon him and slashed his shoulder to the bone for three
inches up and down. Forever after Buck avoided his blind side,
and to the last of their comradeship had no more trouble. His
only apparent ambition, like Dave's, was to be left alone; though,
as Buck was afterward to learn, each of them possessed one other
and even more vital ambition.
That night Buck faced the great problem of sleeping. The
tent, illumined by a candle, glowed warmly in the midst of the
white plain; and when he, as a matter of course, entered it, both
Perrault and Francois bombarded him with curses and cooking
utensils, till he recovered from his consternation and fled
ignominiously into the outer cold. A chill wind was blowing that
nipped him sharply and bit with especial venom into his
wounded shoulder. He lay down on the snow and attempted to
sleep, but the frost soon drove him shivering to his feet.
Miserable and disconsolate, he wandered about among the many
tents, only to find that one place was as cold as another. Here and
there savage dogs rushed upon him, but he bristled his neck-hair
and snarled (for he was learning fast), and they let him go his way
unmolested.
Finally an idea came to him. He would return and see how his
own team-mates were making out. To his astonishment, they had
disappeared. Again he wandered about through the great camp,
looking for them, and again he returned. Were they in the tent?
No, that could not be, else he would not have been driven out.
Then where could they possibly be? With drooping tail and
shivering body, very forlorn indeed, he aimlessly circled the tent.
Suddenly the snow gave way beneath his fore legs and he sank
down. Something wriggled under his feet. He sprang back,
bristling and snarling, fearful of the unseen and unknown. But a
friendly little yelp reassured him, and he went back to investigate.
A whiff of warm air ascended to his nostrils, and there, curled up
under the snow in a snug ball, lay Billee. He whined placatingly,
squirmed and wriggled to show his good will and intentions, and
18 Jack London
even ventured, as a bribe for peace, to lick Buck's face with his
warm wet tongue.
Another lesson. So that was the way they did it, eh? Buck
confidently selected a spot, and with much fuss and waste effort
proceeded to dig a hole for himself. In a trice the heat from his
body filled the confined space and he was asleep. The day had
been long and arduous, and he slept soundly and comfortably,
though he growled and barked and wrestled with bad dreams.
Nor did he open his eyes till roused by the noises of the
waking camp. At first he did not know where he was. It had
snowed during the night and he was completely buried. The
snow walls pressed him on every side, and a great surge of fear
swept through him—the fear of the wild thing for the trap. It
was a token that he was harking back through his own life to the
lives of his forebears; for he was a civilized dog, an unduly
civilized dog, and of his own experience knew no trap and so
could not of himself fear it. The muscles of his whole body
contracted spasmodically and instinctively, the hair on his neck
and shoulders stood on end, and with a ferocious snarl he
bounded straight up into the blinding day, the snow flying about
him in a flashing cloud. Ere he landed on his feet, he saw the
white camp spread out before him and knew where he was and
remembered all that had passed from the time he went for a stroll
with Manuel to the hole he had dug for himself the night before.
A shout from Francois hailed his appearance. "Wot I say?" the
dog-driver cried to Perrault. "Dat Buck for sure learn queek as
anyt'ing."
Perrault nodded gravely. As courier for the Canadian
Government, bearing important despatches, he was anxious to
secure the best dogs, and he was particularly gladdened by the
possession of Buck.
Three more huskies were added to the team inside an hour,
making a total of nine, and before another quarter of an hour had
passed they were in harness and swinging up the trail toward the
Dyea Canon. Buck was glad to be gone, and though the work was
hard he found he did not particularly despise it. He was surprised
at the eagerness which animated the whole team and which was
communicated to him; but still more surprising was the change
wrought in Dave and Sol-leks. They were new dogs, utterly
transformed by the harness. All passiveness and unconcern had
dropped from them. They were alert and active, anxious that the
work should go well, and fiercely irritable with whatever, by delay
or confusion, retarded that work. The toil of the traces seemed
the supreme expression of their being, and all that they lived for
and the only thing in which they took delight.
Dave was wheeler or sled dog, pulling in front of him was
Buck, then came Sol-leks; the rest of the team was strung out
ahead, single file, to the leader, which position was filled by Spitz.
Buck had been purposely placed between Dave and Sol-leks so
that he might receive instruction. Apt scholar that he was, they
were equally apt teachers, never allowing him to linger long in
error, and enforcing their teaching with their sharp teeth. Dave
was fair and very wise. He never nipped Buck without cause, and
he never failed to nip him when he stood in need of it. As
Francois's whip backed him up, Buck found it to be cheaper to
mend his ways than to retaliate. Once, during a brief halt, when
he got tangled in the traces and delayed the start, both Dave and
Sol- leks flew at him and administered a sound trouncing. The
resulting tangle was even worse, but Buck took good care to keep
the traces clear thereafter; and ere the day was done, so well had
he mastered his work, his mates about ceased nagging him.
Francois's whip snapped less frequently, and Perrault even
honored Buck by lifting up his feet and carefully examining
them.
It was a hard day's run, up the Canon, through Sheep Camp,
past the Scales and the timber line, across glaciers and snowdrifts
hundreds of feet deep, and over the great Chilcoot Divide, which
stands between the salt water and the fresh and guards
20 Jack London
forbiddingly the sad and lonely North. They made good time
down the chain of lakes which fills the craters of extinct
volcanoes, and late that night pulled into the huge camp at the
head of Lake Bennett, where thousands of goldseekers were
building boats against the break-up of the ice in the spring. Buck
made his hole in the snow and slept the sleep of the exhausted
just, but all too early was routed out in the cold darkness and
harnessed with his mates to the sled.
That day they made forty miles, the trail being packed; but
the next day, and for many days to follow, they broke their own
trail, worked harder, and made poorer time. As a rule, Perrault
travelled ahead of the team, packing the snow with webbed shoes
to make it easier for them. Francois, guiding the sled at the gee-
pole, sometimes exchanged places with him, but not often.
Perrault was in a hurry, and he prided himself on his knowledge
of ice, which knowledge was indispensable, for the fall ice was
very thin, and where there was swift water, there was no ice at all.
Day after day, for days unending, Buck toiled in the traces.
Always, they broke camp in the dark, and the first gray of dawn
found them hitting the trail with fresh miles reeled off behind
them. And always they pitched camp after dark, eating their bit
of fish, and crawling to sleep into the snow. Buck was ravenous.
The pound and a half of sun-dried salmon, which was his ration
for each day, seemed to go nowhere. He never had enough, and
suffered from perpetual hunger pangs. Yet the other dogs,
because they weighed less and were born to the life, received a
pound only of the fish and managed to keep in good condition.
He swiftly lost the fastidiousness which had characterized his
old life. A dainty eater, he found that his mates, finishing first,
robbed him of his unfinished ration. There was no defending it.
While he was fighting off two or three, it was disappearing down
the throats of the others. To remedy this, he ate as fast as they;
and, so greatly did hunger compel him, he was not above taking
what did not belong to him. He watched and learned. When he
saw Pike, one of the new dogs, a clever malingerer and thief, slyly
steal a slice of bacon when Perrault's back was turned, he
duplicated the performance the following day, getting 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
22 Jack London
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 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.
26 Jack London
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
28 Jack London
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. All 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 look, 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.
30 Jack London
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
32 Jack London
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
34 Jack London
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
36 Jack London
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.
Chapter IV: Who Has Won to Mastership
"Eh? Wot I say? I spik true w'en I say dat Buck two devils." This
was Francois's speech next morning when he discovered Spitz
missing and Buck covered with wounds. He drew him to the fire
and by its light pointed them out.
"Dat Spitz fight lak hell," said Perrault, as he surveyed the
gaping rips and cuts.
"An' dat Buck fight lak two hells," was Francois's answer. "An'
now we make good time. No more Spitz, no more trouble, sure."
While Perrault packed the camp outfit and loaded the sled,
the dog-driver proceeded to harness the dogs. Buck trotted up to
the place Spitz would have occupied as leader; but Francois, not
noticing him, brought Sol-leks to the coveted position. In his
judgment, Sol-leks was the best lead-dog left. Buck sprang upon
Sol-leks in a fury, driving him back and standing in his place.
"Eh? eh?" Francois cried, slapping his thighs gleefully. "Look at
dat Buck. Heem keel dat Spitz, heem t'ink to take de job."
"Go 'way, Chook!" he cried, but Buck refused to budge.
He took Buck by the scruff of the neck, and though the dog
growled threateningly, dragged him to one side and replaced Sol-
leks. The old dog did not like it, and showed plainly that he was
afraid of Buck. Francois was obdurate, but when he turned his
back Buck again displaced Sol-leks, who was not at all unwilling
to go.
Francois was angry. "Now, by Gar, I feex you!" he cried,
coming back with a heavy club in his hand.
Buck remembered the man in the red sweater, and retreated
slowly; nor did he attempt to charge in when Sol-leks was once
more brought forward. But he circled just beyond the range of
the club, snarling with bitterness and rage; and while he circled
he watched the club so as to dodge it if thrown by Francois, for
he was become wise in the way of clubs. The driver went about
his work, and he called to Buck when he was ready to put him in
his old place in front of Dave. Buck retreated two or three steps.
Francois followed him up, whereupon he again retreated. After
some time of this, Francois threw down the club, thinking that
Buck feared a thrashing. But Buck was in open revolt. He
wanted, not to escape a clubbing, but to have the leadership. It
was his by right. He had earned it, and he would not be content
with less.
Perrault took a hand. Between them they ran him about for
the better part of an hour. They threw clubs at him. He dodged.
They cursed him, and his fathers and mothers before him, and all
his seed to come after him down to the remotest generation, and
every hair on his body and drop of blood in his veins; and he
answered curse with snarl and kept out of their reach. He did not
try to run away, but retreated around and around the camp,
advertising plainly that when his desire was met, he would come
in and be good.
Francois sat down and scratched his head. Perrault looked at
his watch and swore. Time was flying, and they should have been
on the trail an hour gone. Francois scratched his head again. He
shook it and grinned sheepishly at the courier, who shrugged his
shoulders in sign that they were beaten. Then Francois went up
to where Sol-leks stood and called to Buck. Buck laughed, as dogs
laugh, yet kept his distance. Francois unfastened Sol-leks's traces
and put him back in his old place. The team stood harnessed to
the sled in an unbroken line, ready for the trail. There was no
place for Buck save at the front. Once more Francois called, and
once more Buck laughed and kept away.
"T'row down de club," Perrault commanded.
Francois complied, whereupon Buck trotted in, laughing
triumphantly, and swung around into position at the head of the
40 Jack London
team. His traces were fastened, the sled broken out, and with
both men running they dashed out on to the river trail.
Highly as the dog-driver had forevalued Buck, with his two
devils, he found, while the day was yet young, that he had
undervalued. At a bound Buck took up the duties of leadership;
and where judgment was required, and quick thinking and quick
acting, he showed himself the superior even of Spitz, of whom
Francois had never seen an equal.
But it was in giving the law and making his mates live up to it,
that Buck excelled. Dave and Sol-leks did not mind the change in
leadership. It was none of their business. Their business was to
toil, and toil mightily, in the traces. So long as that were not
interfered with, they did not care what happened. Billee, the
good-natured, could lead for all they cared, so long as he kept
order. The rest of the team, however, had grown unruly during
the last days of Spitz, and their surprise was great now that Buck
proceeded to lick them into shape.
Pike, who pulled at Buck's heels, and who never put an ounce
more of his weight against the breast-band than he was
compelled to do, was swiftly and repeatedly shaken for loafing;
and ere the first day was done he was pulling more than ever
before in his life. The first night in camp, Joe, the sour one, was
punished roundly—a thing that Spitz had never succeeded in
doing. Buck simply smothered him by virtue of superior weight,
and cut him up till he ceased snapping and began to whine for
mercy.
The general tone of the team picked up 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 celerity with which Buck
broke them in took away Francois's breath.
"Nevaire such a dog as dat Buck!" he cried. "No, nevaire!
Heem worth one t'ousan' dollair, by Gar! Eh? Wot you say,
Perrault?"
And Perrault nodded. He was ahead of the record then, and

gaining day by day. The trail was in excellent condition, well
packed and hard, and there was no new-fallen snow with which
to contend. It was not too cold. The temperature dropped to
fifty below zero and remained there the whole trip. The men
rode and ran by turn, and the dogs were kept on the jump, with
but infrequent stoppages.
The Thirty Mile River was comparatively coated with ice, and
they covered in one day going out what had taken them ten days
coming in. In one run they made a sixty-mile dash from the foot
of Lake Le Barge to the White Horse Rapids. Across Marsh,
Tagish, and Bennett (seventy miles of lakes), they flew so fast
that the man whose turn it was to run towed behind the sled at
the end of a rope. And on the last night of the second week they
topped White Pass and dropped down the sea slope with the
lights of Skaguay and of the shipping at their feet.
It was a record run. Each day for fourteen days they had
averaged forty miles. For three days Perrault and Francois threw
chests up and down the main street of Skaguay and were deluged
with invitations to drink, while the team was the constant centre
of a worshipful crowd of dog-busters and mushers. Then three or
four western bad men aspired to clean out the town, were riddled
like pepper-boxes for their pains, and public interest turned to
other idols. Next came official orders. Francois called Buck to
him, threw his arms around him, wept over him. And that was
the last of Francois and Perrault. Like other men, they passed out
of Buck's life for good.
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 no light running now, nor record
time, but heavy toil each day, with a heavy load behind; for this
was the mail train, carrying word from the world to the men who
sought gold under the shadow of the Pole.
42 Jack London
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.
44 Jack London
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.
46 Jack London
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 doubting 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'."
48 Jack London
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.
50 Jack London
"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
52 Jack London
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.
54 Jack London
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
56 Jack London
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 great misery they had become insensible to the
bite of the lash or the bruise of the club. The pain of the beating
was dull and distant, just as the things their eyes saw and their
ears heard seemed dull and distant. They were not half living, or
quarter living. They were simply so many bags of bones in which
sparks of life fluttered faintly. When a halt was made, they
dropped down in the traces like dead dogs, and the spark
dimmed and paled and seemed to go out. And when the club or
whip fell upon them, the spark fluttered feebly up, and they
tottered to their feet and staggered on.
There came a day when Billee, the good-natured, fell and
could not rise. Hal had traded off his revolver, so he took the axe
and knocked Billee on the head as he lay in the traces, then cut
the carcass 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 but five of them
58 Jack London
remained: Joe, too far gone to be malignant; Pike, crippled and

limping, only half conscious and not conscious enough longer to
malinger; Sol-leks, the one-eyed, still faithful to the toil of trace
and trail, and mournful in that he had so little strength with
which to pull; Teek, who had not travelled so far that winter and
who was now beaten more than the others because he was
fresher; and Buck, still at the head of the team, but no longer
enforcing discipline or striving to enforce it, blind with weakness
half the time and keeping the trail by the loom of it and 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 lingered till nine at
night. The whole long day was a blaze of sunshine. The ghostly
winter silence had given way to the great spring murmur of
awakening life. This murmur arose from all the land, fraught
with the joy of living. It came from the things that lived and
moved again, things which had been as dead and which had not
moved during the long months of frost. The sap was rising in the
pines. The willows and aspens were bursting out in young buds.
Shrubs and vines were putting on fresh garbs of green. Crickets
sang in the nights, and in the days all manner of creeping,
crawling things rustled forth into the sun. Partridges and
woodpeckers were booming and knocking in the forest. Squirrels
were chattering, birds singing, and overhead honked the wild-
fowl driving up from the south in cunning wedges that split the
air.
From every hill slope came the trickle of running water, the
music of unseen fountains. All things were thawing, bending,
snapping. The Yukon was straining to break loose the ice that
bound it down. It ate away from beneath; the sun ate from above.
Air-holes formed, fissures sprang and spread apart, while thin
sections of ice fell through bodily into the river. And amid all this
bursting, rending, throbbing of awakening life, under the blazing
sun and through the soft-sighing breezes, like wayfarers to death,

staggered the two men, the woman, and the huskies.
With the dogs falling, Mercedes weeping and riding, Hal
swearing innocuously, and Charles's eyes wistfully watering, they
staggered into John Thornton's camp at the mouth of White
River. When they halted, the dogs dropped down as though they
had all been struck dead. Mercedes dried her eyes and looked at
John Thornton. Charles sat down on a log to rest. He sat down
very slowly and painstakingly what of his great stiffness. Hal did
the talking. John Thornton was whittling the last touches on an
axe-handle he had made from a stick of birch. He whittled and
listened, gave monosyllabic replies, and, when it was asked, terse
advice. He knew the breed, and he gave his advice in the certainty
that it would not be followed.
"They told us up above that the bottom was dropping out of
the trail and that the best thing for us to do was to lay over," Hal
said in response to Thornton's warning to take no more chances
on the rotten ice. "They told us we couldn't make White River,
and here we are." This last with a sneering ring of triumph in it.
"And they told you true," John Thornton answered. "The
bottom's likely to drop out at any moment. Only fools, with the
blind luck of fools, could have made it. I tell you straight, I
wouldn't risk my carcass 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 uncoiled his whip. "Get up
there, Buck! Hi! Get up there! Mush on!"
Thornton went on whittling. It was idle, he knew, to get
between a fool and his folly; while two or three fools more or less
would not alter the scheme of things.
But the team did not get up at the command. It had long since
passed into the stage where blows were required to rouse it. The
whip flashed out, here and there, on its merciless errands. John
Thornton compressed his lips. Sol-leks was the first to crawl to
his feet. Teek followed. Joe came next, yelping with pain. Pike
60 Jack London
made painful efforts. Twice he fell over, when half up, and on the
third attempt managed to rise. Buck made no effort. He lay
quietly where he had fallen. The lash bit into him again and
again, but he neither whined nor struggled. Several times
Thornton started, as though to speak, but changed his mind. A
moisture came into his eyes, and, as the whipping continued, he
arose and walked irresolutely up and down.
This was the first time Buck had failed, in itself a sufficient
reason to drive Hal into a rage. He exchanged the whip for the
customary club. Buck refused to move under the rain of heavier
blows which now fell upon him. Like his mates, he barely able to
get up, but, unlike them, he had made up his mind not to get up.
He had a vague feeling of impending doom. This had been strong
upon him when he pulled in to the bank, and it had not departed
from him. What of the thin and rotten ice he had felt under his
feet all day, it seemed that he sensed disaster close at hand, out
there ahead on the ice where his master was trying to drive him.
He refused to stir. So greatly had he suffered, and so far gone was
he, that the blows did not hurt much. And as they continued to
fall upon him, the spark of life within flickered and went down.
It was nearly out. He felt strangely numb. As though from a great
distance, he was aware that he was being beaten. The last
sensations of pain left him. He no longer felt anything, though
very faintly he could hear the impact of the club upon his body.
But it was no longer his body, it seemed so far away.
And then, suddenly, without warning, uttering a cry that was
inarticulate and more like the cry of an animal, John Thornton
sprang upon the man who wielded the club. Hal was hurled
backward, as though struck by a failing tree. Mercedes screamed.
Charles looked on wistfully, wiped his watery eyes, but did not
get up because of his stiffness.
John Thornton stood over Buck, struggling to control
himself, too convulsed with rage to speak.
"If you strike that dog again, I'll kill you," he at last managed to
say in a choking voice.
"It's my dog," Hal replied, wiping the blood from his mouth as
he came back. "Get out of my way, or I'll fix you. I'm going to
Dawson."
Thornton stood between him and Buck, and evinced no
intention of getting out of the way. Hal drew his long hunting-
knife. Mercedes screamed. cried, laughed, and manifested the
chaotic abandonment of hysteria. Thornton rapped Hal's
knuckles with the axe-handle, knocking the knife to the ground.
He rapped his knuckles again as he tried to pick it up. Then he
stooped, picked it up himself, and with two strokes cut Buck's
traces.
Hal had no fight left in him. Besides, his hands were full with
his sister, or his arms, rather; while Buck was too near dead to be
of further use in hauling the sled. 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, Sol-leks was at the wheel,
and between were Joe and Teek. They were limping and
staggering. Mercedes was riding the loaded sled. Hal guided at
the gee-pole, and Charles stumbled along in the rear.
As Buck watched them, Thornton knelt beside him and with
rough, kindly hands searched for broken bones. By the time his
search had disclosed 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 crawling along over the ice. Suddenly, they
saw its back end drop down, as into a rut, and the gee-pole, with
Hal clinging to it, jerk 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 give way and dogs and humans
disappear. A yawning hole was all that was to be seen. The
bottom had dropped out of the trail.
John Thornton and Buck looked at each other.
62 Jack London
"You poor devil," said John Thornton, and Buck licked his
hand.
Chapter VI: For the Love of a Man
When John Thornton froze his feet in the previous December

his partners had made him comfortable and left him to get well,
going on themselves up the river to get out a raft of saw-logs for
Dawson. He was still limping slightly at the time he rescued
Buck, but with the continued warm weather even the slight limp
left him. And here, lying by the river bank through the long
spring days, watching the running water, listening lazily to the
songs of birds and the hum of nature, Buck slowly won back his
strength.
A rest comes very good after one has travelled three thousand
miles, and it must be confessed that Buck waxed lazy as his
wounds healed, his muscles swelled out, and the flesh came back
to cover his bones. For that matter, they were all loafing,—Buck,
John Thornton, and Skeet and Nig,—waiting for the raft to
come that was to carry them down to Dawson. Skeet was a little
Irish setter who early made friends with Buck, who, in a dying
condition, was unable to resent her first advances. She had the
doctor trait which some dogs possess; and as a mother cat washes
her kittens, so she washed and cleansed Buck's wounds.
Regularly, each morning after he had finished his breakfast, she
performed her self- appointed task, till he came to look for her
ministrations as much as he did for Thornton's. Nig, equally
friendly, though less demonstrative, was a huge black dog, half
bloodhound and half deerhound, with eyes that laughed and a
boundless good nature.
To Buck's surprise these dogs manifested no jealousy toward
him. They seemed to share the kindliness and largeness of John
Thornton. As Buck grew stronger they enticed him into all sorts
64 Jack London
of ridiculous games, in which Thornton himself could not

forbear to join; and in this fashion Buck romped through his
convalescence and into a new existence. Love, genuine passionate
love, was his for the first time. This he had never experienced at
Judge Miller's down in the sun-kissed Santa Clara Valley. With
the Judge's sons, hunting and tramping, it had been a working
partnership; with the Judge's grandsons, a sort of pompous
guardianship; and with the Judge himself, a stately and dignified
friendship. But love that was feverish and burning, that was
adoration, that was madness, it had taken John Thornton to
arouse.
This man had saved his life, which was something; but,
further, he was the ideal master. Other men saw to the welfare of
their dogs from a sense of duty and business expediency; he saw
to the welfare of his as if they were his own children, because he
could not help it. And he saw further. He never forgot a kindly
greeting or a cheering word, and to sit down for a long talk with
them ("gas" he called it) was as much his delight as theirs. He had
a way of taking Buck's head roughly between his hands, and
resting his own head upon Buck's, of shaking him back and forth,
the while calling him ill names that to Buck were love names.
Buck knew no greater joy than that rough embrace and the
sound of murmured oaths, and at each jerk back and forth it
seemed that his heart would be shaken out of his body so great
was its ecstasy. And when, released, he sprang to his feet, his
mouth laughing, his eyes eloquent, his throat vibrant with
unuttered sound, and in that fashion remained without
movement, John Thornton would reverently exclaim, "God! you
can all but speak!"
Buck had a trick of love expression that was akin to hurt. He
would often seize Thornton's hand in his mouth and close so
fiercely that the flesh bore the impress of his teeth for some time
afterward. And as Buck understood the oaths to be love words, so
the man understood this feigned bite for a caress.
For the most part, however, Buck's love was expressed in

adoration. While he went wild with happiness when Thornton
touched him or spoke to him, he did not seek these tokens.
Unlike Skeet, who was wont to shove her nose under Thornton's
hand and nudge and nudge till petted, or Nig, who would stalk
up and rest his great head on Thornton's knee, Buck was content
to adore at a distance. He would lie by the hour, eager, alert, at
Thornton's feet, looking up into his face, dwelling upon it,
studying it, following with keenest interest each fleeting
expression, every movement or change of feature. Or, as chance
might have it, he would lie farther away, to the side or rear,
watching the outlines of the man and the occasional movements
of his body. And often, such was the communion in which they
lived, the strength of Buck's gaze would draw John Thornton's
head around, and he would return the gaze, without speech, his
heart shining out of his eyes as Buck's heart shone out.
For a long time after his rescue, Buck did not like Thornton
to get out of his sight. From the moment he left the tent to when
he entered it again, Buck would follow at his heels. His transient
masters since he had come into the Northland had bred in him a
fear that no master could be permanent. He was afraid that
Thornton would pass out of his life as Perrault and Francois and
the Scotch half-breed had passed out. Even in the night, in his
dreams, he was haunted by this fear. At such times he would
shake off sleep and creep through the chill to the flap of the tent,
where he would stand and listen to the sound of his master's
breathing.
But in spite of this great love he bore John Thornton, which
seemed to bespeak the soft civilizing influence, the strain of the
primitive, which the Northland had aroused in him, remained
alive and active. Faithfulness and devotion, things born of fire
and roof, were his; yet he retained his wildness and wiliness. He
was a thing of the wild, come in from the wild to sit by John
Thornton's fire, rather than a dog of the soft Southland stamped
66 Jack London
with the marks of generations of civilization. Because of his very

great love, he could not steal from this man, but from any other
man, in any other camp, he did not hesitate an instant; while the
cunning with which he stole enabled him to escape detection.
His face and body were scored by the teeth of many dogs, and
he fought as fiercely as ever and more shrewdly. Skeet and Nig
were too good-natured for quarrelling,—besides, they belonged
to John Thornton; but the strange dog, no matter what the breed
or valor, swiftly acknowledged Buck's supremacy or found
himself struggling for life with a terrible antagonist. And Buck
was merciless. He had learned well the law of club and fang, and
he never forewent an advantage or drew back from a foe he had
started on the way to Death. He had lessoned from Spitz, and
from the chief fighting dogs of the police and mail, and knew
there was no middle course. He must master or be mastered;
while to show mercy was a weakness. Mercy did not exist in the
primordial life. It was misunderstood for fear, and such
misunderstandings made for death. Kill or be killed, eat or be
eaten, was the law; and this mandate, down out of the depths of
Time, he obeyed.
He was older than the days he had seen and the breaths he
had drawn. He linked the past with the present, and the eternity
behind him throbbed through him in a mighty rhythm to which
he swayed as the tides and seasons swayed. He sat by John
Thornton's fire, a broad-breasted dog, white-fanged and long-
furred; but behind him were the shades of all manner of dogs,
half-wolves and wild wolves, urgent and prompting, tasting the
savor of the meat he ate, thirsting for the water he drank,
scenting the wind with him, listening with him and telling him
the sounds made by the wild life in the forest, dictating his
moods, directing his actions, lying down to sleep with him when
he lay down, and dreaming with him and beyond him and
becoming themselves the stuff of his dreams.
So peremptorily did these shades beckon him, that each day

mankind and the claims of mankind slipped farther from him.
Deep in the forest a call was sounding, and as often as he heard
this call, mysteriously thrilling and luring, he felt compelled to
turn his back upon the fire and the beaten earth around it, and to
plunge into the forest, and on and on, he knew not where or why;
nor did he wonder where or why, the call sounding imperiously,
deep in the forest. But as often as he gained the soft unbroken
earth and the green shade, the love for John Thornton drew him
back to the fire again.
Thornton alone held him. The rest of mankind was as
nothing. Chance travellers might praise or pet him; but he was
cold under it all, and from a too demonstrative man he would get
up and walk away. When Thornton's partners, Hans and Pete,
arrived on the long-expected raft, Buck refused to notice them till
he learned they were close to Thornton; after that he tolerated
them in a passive sort of way, accepting favors from them as
though he favored them by accepting. They were of the same
large type as Thornton, living close to the earth, thinking simply
and seeing clearly; and ere they swung the raft into the big eddy
by the saw- mill at Dawson, they understood Buck and his ways,
and did not insist upon an intimacy such as obtained with Skeet
and Nig.
For Thornton, however, his love seemed to grow and grow.
He, alone among men, could put a pack upon Buck's back in the
summer travelling. Nothing was too great for Buck to do, when
Thornton commanded. One day (they had grub-staked
themselves from the proceeds of the raft and left Dawson for the
head-waters of the Tanana) the men and dogs were sitting on the
crest of a cliff which fell away, straight down, to naked bed-rock
three hundred feet below. John Thornton was sitting near the
edge, Buck at his shoulder. A thoughtless whim seized Thornton,
and he drew the attention of Hans and Pete to the experiment he
had in mind. "Jump, Buck!" he commanded, sweeping his arm
68 Jack London
out and over the chasm. The next instant he was grappling with
Buck on the extreme edge, while Hans and Pete were dragging
them back into safety.
"It's uncanny," Pete said, after it was over and they had caught
their speech.
Thornton shook his head. "No, it is splendid, and it is terrible,
too. Do you know, it sometimes makes me afraid."
"I'm not hankering to be the man that lays hands on you while
he's around," Pete announced conclusively, nodding his head
toward Buck.
"Py Jingo!" was Hans's contribution. "Not mineself either."
It was at Circle City, ere the year was out, that Pete's
apprehensions were realized. "Black" Burton, a man evil-
tempered and malicious, had been picking a quarrel with a
tenderfoot at the bar, when Thornton stepped good-naturedly
between. Buck, as was his custom, was lying in a corner, head on
paws, watching his master's every action. Burton struck out,
without warning, straight from the shoulder. Thornton was sent
spinning, and saved himself from falling only by clutching the rail
of the bar.
Those who were looking on heard what was neither bark nor
yelp, but a something which is best described as a roar, and they
saw Buck's body rise up in the air as he left the floor for Burton's
throat. The man saved his life by instinctively throwing out his
arm, but was hurled backward to the floor with Buck on top of
him. Buck loosed his teeth from the flesh of the arm and drove in
again for the throat. This time the man succeeded only in partly
blocking, and his throat was torn open. Then the crowd was
upon Buck, and he was driven off; but while a surgeon checked
the bleeding, he prowled up and down, growling furiously,
attempting to rush in, and being forced back by an array of
hostile clubs. A "miners' meeting," called on the spot, decided
that the dog had sufficient provocation, and Buck was
discharged. But his reputation was made, and from that day his
name spread through every camp in Alaska.
Later on, in the fall of the year, he saved John Thornton's life
in quite another fashion. The three partners were lining a long
and narrow poling-boat down a bad stretch of rapids on the
Forty- Mile Creek. Hans and Pete moved along the bank,
snubbing with a thin Manila rope from tree to tree, while
Thornton remained in the boat, helping its descent by means of a
pole, and shouting directions to the shore. Buck, on the bank,
worried and anxious, kept abreast of the boat, his eyes never off
his master.
At a particularly bad spot, where a ledge of barely submerged
rocks jutted out into the river, Hans cast off the rope, and, while
Thornton poled the boat out into the stream, ran down the bank
with the end in his hand to snub the boat when it had cleared the
ledge. This it did, and was flying down-stream in a current as
swift as a mill-race, when Hans checked it with the rope and
checked too suddenly. The boat flirted over and snubbed in to
the bank bottom up, while Thornton, flung sheer out of it, was
carried down-stream toward the worst part of the rapids, a
stretch of wild water in which no swimmer could live.
Buck had sprung in on the instant; and at the end of three
hundred yards, amid a mad swirl of water, he overhauled
Thornton. When he felt him grasp his tail, Buck headed for the
bank, swimming with all his splendid strength. But the progress
shoreward was slow; the progress down-stream amazingly rapid.
From below came the fatal roaring where the wild current went
wilder and was rent in shreds and spray by the rocks which thrust
through like the teeth of an enormous comb. The suck of the
water as it took the beginning of the last steep pitch was frightful,
and Thornton knew that the shore was impossible. He scraped
furiously over a rock, bruised across a second, and struck a third
with crushing force. He clutched its slippery top with both
70 Jack London
hands, releasing Buck, and above the roar of the churning water
shouted: "Go, Buck! Go!"
Buck could not hold his own, and swept on down-stream,
struggling desperately, but unable to win back. When he heard
Thornton's command repeated, he partly reared out of the water,
throwing his head high, as though for a last look, then turned
obediently toward the bank. He swam powerfully and was
dragged ashore by Pete and Hans at the very point where
swimming ceased to be possible and destruction began.
They knew that the time a man could cling to a slippery rock
in the face of that driving current was a matter of minutes, and
they ran as fast as they could up the bank to a point far above
where Thornton was hanging on. They attached the line with
which they had been snubbing the boat to Buck's neck and
shoulders, being careful that it should neither strangle him nor
impede his swimming, and launched him into the stream. He
struck out boldly, but not straight enough into the stream. He
discovered the mistake too late, when Thornton was abreast of
him and a bare half-dozen strokes away while he was being
carried helplessly past.
Hans promptly snubbed with the rope, as though Buck were a
boat. The rope thus tightening on him in the sweep of the
current, he was jerked under the surface, and under the surface he
remained till his body struck against the bank and he was hauled
out. He was half drowned, and Hans and Pete threw themselves
upon him, pounding the breath into him and the water out of
him. He staggered to his feet and fell down. The faint sound of
Thornton's voice came to them, and though they could not make
out the words of it, they knew that he was in his extremity. His
master's voice acted on Buck like an electric shock, He sprang to
his feet and ran up the bank ahead of the men to the point of his
previous departure.
Again the rope was attached and he was launched, and again
he struck out, but this time straight into the stream. He had
miscalculated once, but he would not be guilty of it a second

time. Hans paid out the rope, permitting no slack, while Pete
kept it clear of coils. Buck held on till he was on a line straight
above Thornton; then he turned, and with the speed of an
express train headed down upon him. Thornton saw him
coming, and, as Buck struck him like a battering ram, with the
whole force of the current behind him, he reached up and closed
with both arms around the shaggy neck. Hans snubbed the rope
around the tree, and Buck and Thornton were jerked under the
water. Strangling, suffocating, sometimes one uppermost and
sometimes the other, dragging over the jagged bottom, smashing
against rocks and snags, they veered in to the bank.
Thornton came to, belly downward and being violently
propelled back and forth across a drift log by Hans and Pete. His
first glance was for Buck, over whose limp and apparently lifeless
body Nig was setting up a howl, while Skeet was licking the wet
face and closed eyes. Thornton was himself bruised and battered,
and he went carefully over Buck's body, when he had been
brought around, finding three broken ribs.
"That settles it," he announced. "We camp right here." And
camp they did, till Buck's ribs knitted and he was able to travel.
That winter, at Dawson, Buck performed another exploit, not
so heroic, perhaps, but one that put his name many notches
higher on the totem-pole of Alaskan fame. This exploit was
particularly gratifying to the three men; for they stood in need of
the outfit which it furnished, and were enabled to make a long-
desired trip into the virgin East, where miners had not yet
appeared. It was brought about by a conversation in the Eldorado
Saloon, in which men waxed boastful of their favorite dogs. Buck,
because of his record, was the target for these men, and Thornton
was driven stoutly to defend him. At the end of half an hour one
man stated that his dog could start a sled with five hundred
pounds and walk off with it; a second bragged six hundred for his
dog; and a third, seven hundred.
72 Jack London
"Pooh! pooh!" said John Thornton; "Buck can start a

thousand pounds."
"And break it out? and walk off with it for a hundred yards?"
demanded Matthewson, a Bonanza King, he of the seven
hundred vaunt.
"And break it out, and walk off with it for a hundred yards,"
John Thornton said coolly.
"Well," Matthewson said, slowly and deliberately, so that all
could hear, "I've got a thousand dollars that says he can't. And
there it is." So saying, he slammed a sack of gold dust of the size of
a bologna sausage down upon the bar.
Nobody spoke. Thornton's bluff, if bluff it was, had been
called. He could feel a flush of warm blood creeping up his face.
His tongue had tricked him. He did not know whether Buck
could start a thousand pounds. Half a ton! The enormousness of
it appalled him. He had great faith in Buck's strength and had
often thought him capable of starting such a load; but never, as
now, had he faced the possibility of it, the eyes of a dozen men
fixed upon him, silent and waiting. Further, he had no thousand
dollars; nor had Hans or Pete.
"I've got a sled standing outside now, with twenty fiftypound
sacks of flour on it," Matthewson went on with brutal directness;
"so don't let that hinder you."
Thornton did not reply. He did not know what to say. He
glanced from face to face in the absent way of a man who has lost
the power of thought and is seeking somewhere to find the thing
that will start it going again. The face of Jim O'Brien, a
Mastodon King and old-time comrade, caught his eyes. It was as
a cue to him, seeming to rouse him to do what he would never
have dreamed of doing.
"Can you lend me a thousand?" he asked, almost in a whisper.
"Sure," answered O'Brien, thumping down a plethoric sack by
the side of Matthewson's. "Though it's little faith I'm having,
John, that the beast can do the trick."
The Eldorado emptied its occupants into the street to see the
test. The tables were deserted, and the dealers and gamekeepers
came forth to see the outcome of the wager and to lay odds.
Several hundred men, furred and mittened, banked around the
sled within easy distance. Matthewson's sled, loaded with a
thousand pounds of flour, had been standing for a couple of
hours, and in the intense cold (it was sixty below zero) the
runners had frozen fast to the hard-packed snow. Men offered
odds of two to one that Buck could not budge the sled. A quibble
arose concerning the phrase "break out." O'Brien contended it
was Thornton's privilege to knock the runners loose, leaving
Buck to "break it out" from a dead standstill. Matthewson
insisted that the phrase included breaking the runners from the
frozen grip of the snow. A majority of the men who had
witnessed the making of the bet decided in his favor, whereat the
odds went up to three to one against Buck.
There were no takers. Not a man believed him capable of the
feat. Thornton had been hurried into the wager, heavy with
doubt; and now that he looked at the sled itself, the concrete fact,
with the regular team of ten dogs curled up in the snow before it,
the more impossible the task appeared. Matthewson waxed
jubilant.
"Three to one!" he proclaimed. "I'll lay you another thousand
at that figure, Thornton. What d'ye say?"
Thornton's doubt was strong in his face, but his fighting spirit
was aroused—the fighting spirit that soars above odds, fails to
recognize the impossible, and is deaf to all save the clamor for
battle. He called Hans and Pete to him. Their sacks were slim,
and with his own the three partners could rake together only two
hundred dollars. In the ebb of their fortunes, this sum was their
total capital; yet they laid it unhesitatingly against Matthewson's
six hundred.
The team of ten dogs was unhitched, and Buck, with his own
harness, was put into the sled. He had caught the contagion of
74 Jack London
the excitement, and he felt that in some way he must do a great

thing for John Thornton. Murmurs of admiration at his splendid
appearance went up. He was in perfect condition, without an
ounce of superfluous flesh, and the one hundred and fifty pounds
that he weighed were so many pounds of grit and virility. His
furry coat shone with the sheen of silk. Down the neck and across
the shoulders, his mane, in repose as it was, half bristled and
seemed to lift with every movement, as though excess of vigor
made each particular hair alive and active. The great breast and
heavy fore legs were no more than in proportion with the rest of
the body, where the muscles showed in tight rolls underneath the
skin. Men felt these muscles and proclaimed them hard as iron,
and the odds went down to two to one.
"Gad, sir! Gad, sir!" stuttered a member of the latest dynasty, a
king of the Skookum Benches. "I offer you eight hundred for
him, sir, before the test, sir; eight hundred just as he stands."
Thornton shook his head and stepped to Buck's side.
"You must stand off from him," Matthewson protested. "Free
play and plenty of room."
The crowd fell silent; only could be heard the voices of the
gamblers vainly offering two to one. Everybody acknowledged
Buck a magnificent animal, but twenty fifty-pound sacks of flour
bulked too large in their eyes for them to loosen their pouch-
strings.
Thornton knelt down by Buck's side. He took his head in his
two hands and rested cheek on cheek. He did not playfully shake
him, as was his wont, or murmur soft love curses; but he
whispered in his ear. "As you love me, Buck. As you love me," was
what he whispered. Buck whined with suppressed eagerness.
The crowd was watching curiously. The affair was growing
mysterious. It seemed like a conjuration. As Thornton got to his
feet, Buck seized his mittened hand between his jaws, pressing in
with his teeth and releasing slowly, half-reluctantly. It was the
answer, in terms, not of speech, but of love. Thornton stepped

well back.
"Now, Buck," he said.
Buck tightened the traces, then slacked them for a matter of
several inches. It was the way he had learned.
"Gee!" Thornton's voice rang out, sharp in the tense silence.
Buck swung to the right, ending the movement in a plunge
that took up the slack and with a sudden jerk arrested his one
hundred and fifty pounds. The load quivered, and from under
the runners arose a crisp crackling.
"Haw!" Thornton commanded.
Buck duplicated the manoeuvre, this time to the left. The
crackling turned into a snapping, the sled pivoting and the
runners slipping and grating several inches to the side. The sled
was broken out. Men were holding their breaths, intensely
unconscious of the fact.
"Now, MUSH!"
Thornton's command cracked out like a pistol-shot. Buck
threw himself forward, tightening the traces with a jarring lunge.
His whole body was gathered compactly together in the
tremendous effort, the muscles writhing and knotting like live
things under the silky fur. His great chest was low to the ground,
his head forward and down, while his feet were flying like mad,
the claws scarring the hard-packed snow in parallel grooves. The
sled swayed and trembled, half-started forward. One of his feet
slipped, and one man groaned aloud. Then the sled lurched
ahead in what appeared a rapid succession of jerks, though it
never really came to a dead stop again ...half an inch...an inch . . .
two inches. . . The jerks perceptibly diminished; as the sled
gained momentum, he caught them up, till it was moving steadily
along.
Men gasped and began to breathe again, unaware that for a
moment they had ceased to breathe. Thornton was running
behind, encouraging Buck with short, cheery words. The distance
76 Jack London
had been measured off, and as he neared the pile of firewood

which marked the end of the hundred yards, a cheer began to
grow and grow, which burst into a roar as he passed the firewood
and halted at command. Every man was tearing himself loose,
even Matthewson. Hats and mittens were flying in the air. Men
were shaking hands, it did not matter with whom, and bubbling
over in a general incoherent babel.
But Thornton fell on his knees beside Buck. Head was against
head, and he was shaking him back and forth. Those who hurried
up heard him cursing Buck, and he cursed him long and
fervently, and softly and lovingly.
"Gad, sir! Gad, sir!" spluttered the Skookum Bench king. "I'll
give you a thousand for him, sir, a thousand, sir—twelve
hundred, sir."
Thornton rose to his feet. His eyes were wet. The tears were
streaming frankly down his cheeks. "Sir," he said to the Skookum
Bench king, "no, sir. You can go to hell, sir. It's the best I can do
for you, sir."
Buck seized Thornton's hand in his teeth. Thornton shook
him back and forth. As though animated by a common impulse,
the onlookers drew back to a respectful distance; nor were they
again indiscreet enough to interrupt.
Chapter VII: The Sounding of the Call
When Buck earned sixteen hundred dollars in five minutes for

John Thornton, he made it possible for his master to pay off
certain debts and to journey with his partners into the East after
a fabled lost mine, the history of which was as old as the history
of the country. Many men had sought it; few had found it; and
more than a few there were who had never returned from the
quest. This lost mine was steeped in tragedy and shrouded in
mystery. No one knew of the first man. The oldest tradition
stopped before it got back to him. From the beginning there had
been an ancient and ramshackle cabin. Dying men had sworn to
it, and to the mine the site of which it marked, clinching their
testimony with nuggets that were unlike any known grade of gold
in the Northland.
But no living man had looted this treasure house, and the
dead were dead; wherefore John Thornton and Pete and Hans,
with Buck and half a dozen other dogs, faced into the East on an
unknown trail to achieve where men and dogs as good as
themselves had failed. They sledded seventy miles up the Yukon,
swung to the left into the Stewart River, passed the Mayo and the
McQuestion, and held on until the Stewart itself became a
streamlet, threading the upstanding peaks which marked the
backbone of the continent.
John Thornton asked little of man or nature. He was unafraid
of the wild. With a handful of salt and a rifle he could plunge
into the wilderness and fare wherever he pleased and as long as he
pleased. Being in no haste, Indian fashion, he hunted his dinner
in the course of the day's travel; and if he failed to find it, like the
Indian, he kept on travelling, secure in the knowledge that sooner
78 Jack London
or later he would come to it. So, on this great journey into the
East, straight meat was the bill of fare, ammunition and tools
principally made up the load on the sled, and the time-card was
drawn upon the limitless future.
To Buck it was boundless delight, this hunting, fishing, and
indefinite wandering through strange places. For weeks at a time
they would hold on steadily, day after day; and for weeks upon
end they would camp, here and there, the dogs loafing and the
men burning holes through frozen muck and gravel and washing
countless pans of dirt by the heat of the fire. Sometimes they
went hungry, sometimes they feasted riotously, all according to
the abundance of game and the fortune of hunting. Summer
arrived, and dogs and men packed on their backs, rafted across
blue mountain lakes, and descended or ascended unknown rivers
in slender boats whipsawed from the standing forest.
The months came and went, and back and forth they twisted
through the uncharted vastness, where no men were and yet
where men had been if the Lost Cabin were true. They went
across divides in summer blizzards, shivered under the midnight
sun on naked mountains between the timber line and the eternal
snows, dropped into summer valleys amid swarming gnats and
flies, and in the shadows of glaciers picked strawberries and
flowers as ripe and fair as any the Southland could boast. In the
fall of the year they penetrated a weird lake country, sad and
silent, where wild- fowl had been, but where then there was no
life nor sign of life—only the blowing of chill winds, the forming
of ice in sheltered places, and the melancholy rippling of waves
on lonely beaches.
And through another winter they wandered on the
obliterated trails of men who had gone before. Once, they came
upon a path blazed through the forest, an ancient path, and the
Lost Cabin seemed very near. But the path began nowhere and
ended nowhere, and it remained mystery, as the man who made
it and the reason he made it remained mystery. Another time
they chanced upon the time-graven wreckage of a hunting lodge,

and amid the shreds of rotted blankets John Thornton found a
long-barrelled flint-lock. He knew it for a Hudson Bay Company
gun of the young days in the Northwest, when such a gun was
worth its height in beaver skins packed flat, And that was all—no
hint as to the man who in an early day had reared the lodge and
left the gun among the blankets.
Spring came on once more, and at the end of all their
wandering they found, not the Lost Cabin, but a shallow placer
in a broad valley where the gold showed like yellow butter across
the bottom of the washing-pan. They sought no farther. Each day
they worked earned them thousands of dollars in clean dust and
nuggets, and they worked every day. The gold was sacked in
moose-hide bags, fifty pounds to the bag, and piled like so much
firewood outside the spruce-bough lodge. Like giants they toiled,
days flashing on the heels of days like dreams as they heaped the
treasure up.
There was nothing for the dogs to do, save the hauling in of
meat now and again that Thornton killed, and Buck spent long
hours musing by the fire. The vision of the short-legged hairy
man came to him more frequently, now that there was little work
to be done; and often, blinking by the fire, Buck wandered with
him in that other world which he remembered.
The salient thing of this other world seemed fear. When he
watched the hairy man sleeping by the fire, head between his
knees and hands clasped above, Buck saw that he slept restlessly,
with many starts and awakenings, at which times he would peer
fearfully into the darkness and fling more wood upon the fire.
Did they walk by the beach of a sea, where the hairy man
gathered shell- fish and ate them as he gathered, it was with eyes
that roved everywhere for hidden danger and with legs prepared
to run like the wind at its first appearance. Through the forest
they crept noiselessly, Buck at the hairy man's heels; and they
were alert and vigilant, the pair of them, ears twitching and
80 Jack London
moving and nostrils quivering, for the man heard and smelled as
keenly as Buck. The hairy man could spring up into the trees and
travel ahead as fast as on the ground, swinging by the arms from
limb to limb, sometimes a dozen feet apart, letting go and
catching, never falling, never missing his grip. In fact, he seemed
as much at home among the trees as on the ground; and Buck
had memories of nights of vigil spent beneath trees wherein the
hairy man roosted, holding on tightly as he slept.
And closely akin to the visions of the hairy man was the call
still sounding in the depths of the forest. It filled him with a great
unrest and strange desires. It caused him to feel a vague, sweet
gladness, and he was aware of wild yearnings and stirrings for he
knew not what. Sometimes he pursued the call into the forest,
looking for it as though it were a tangible thing, barking softly or
defiantly, as the mood might dictate. He would thrust his nose
into the cool wood moss, or into the black soil where long grasses
grew, and snort with joy at the fat earth smells; or he would
crouch for hours, as if in concealment, behind fungus- covered
trunks of fallen trees, wide-eyed and wide-eared to all that moved
and sounded about him. It might be, lying thus, that he hoped to
surprise this call he could not understand. But he did not know
why he did these various things. He was impelled to do them, and
did not reason about them at all.
Irresistible impulses seized him. He would be lying in camp,
dozing lazily in the heat of the day, when suddenly his head
would lift and his ears cock up, intent and listening, and he
would spring to his feet and dash away, and on and on, for hours,
through the forest aisles and across the open spaces where the
niggerheads bunched. He loved to run down dry watercourses,
and to creep and spy upon the bird life in the woods. For a day at
a time he would lie in the underbrush where he could watch the
partridges drumming and strutting up and down. But especially
he loved to run in the dim twilight of the summer midnights,
listening to the subdued and sleepy murmurs of the forest,
reading signs and sounds as man may read a book, and seeking for
the mysterious something that called—called, waking or sleeping,
at all times, for him to come.
One night he sprang from sleep with a start, eager-eyed,
nostrils quivering and scenting, his mane bristling in recurrent
waves. From the forest came the call (or one note of it, for the call
was many noted), distinct and definite as never before,—a long-
drawn howl, like, yet unlike, any noise made by husky dog. And
he knew it, in the old familiar way, as a sound heard before. He
sprang through the sleeping camp and in swift silence dashed
through the woods. As he drew closer to the cry he went more
slowly, with caution in every movement, till he came to an open
place among the trees, and looking out saw, erect on haunches,
with nose pointed to the sky, a long, lean, timber wolf.
He had made no noise, yet it ceased from its howling and
tried to sense his presence. Buck stalked into the open, half
crouching, body gathered compactly together, tail straight and
stiff, feet falling with unwonted care. Every movement advertised
commingled threatening and overture of friendliness. It was the
menacing truce that marks the meeting of wild beasts that prey.
But the wolf fled at sight of him. He followed, with wild leapings,
in a frenzy to overtake. He ran him into a blind channel, in the
bed of the creek where a timber jam barred the way. The wolf
whirled about, pivoting on his hind legs after the fashion of Joe
and of all cornered husky dogs, snarling and bristling, clipping his
teeth together in a continuous and rapid succession of snaps.
Buck did not attack, but circled him about and hedged him in
with friendly advances. The wolf was suspicious and afraid; for
Buck made three of him in weight, while his head barely reached
Buck's shoulder. Watching his chance, he darted away, and the
chase was resumed. Time and again he was cornered, and the
thing repeated, though he was in poor condition, or Buck could
not so easily have overtaken him. He would run till Buck's head
82 Jack London
was even with his flank, when he would whirl around at bay, only
to dash away again at the first opportunity.
But in the end Buck's pertinacity was rewarded; for the wolf,
finding that no harm was intended, finally sniffed noses with
him. Then they became friendly, and played about in the
nervous, half- coy way with which fierce beasts belie their
fierceness. After some time of this the wolf started off at an easy
lope in a manner that plainly showed he was going somewhere.
He made it clear to Buck that he was to come, and they ran side
by side through the sombre twilight, straight up the creek bed,
into the gorge from which it issued, and across the bleak divide
where it took its rise.
On the opposite slope of the watershed they came down into
a level country where were great stretches of forest and many
streams, and through these great stretches they ran steadily, hour
after hour, the sun rising higher and the day growing warmer.
Buck was wildly glad. He knew he was at last answering the call,
running by the side of his wood brother toward the place from
where the call surely came. Old memories were coming upon him
fast, and he was stirring to them as of old he stirred to the
realities of which they were the shadows. He had done this thing
before, somewhere in that other and dimly remembered world,
and he was doing it again, now, running free in the open, the
unpacked earth underfoot, the wide sky overhead.
They stopped by a running stream to drink, and, stopping,
Buck remembered John Thornton. He sat down. The wolf
started on toward the place from where the call surely came, then
returned to him, sniffing noses and making actions as though to
encourage him. But Buck turned about and started slowly on the
back track. For the better part of an hour the wild brother ran by
his side, whining softly. Then he sat down, pointed his nose
upward, and howled. It was a mournful howl, and as Buck held
steadily on his way he heard it grow faint and fainter until it was
lost in the distance.
John Thornton was eating dinner when Buck dashed into

camp and sprang upon him in a frenzy of affection, overturning
him, scrambling upon him, licking his face, biting his hand—
"playing the general tom-fool," as John Thornton characterized
it, the while he shook Buck back and forth and cursed him
lovingly.
For two days and nights Buck never left camp, never let
Thornton out of his sight. He followed him about at his work,
watched him while he ate, saw him into his blankets at night and
out of them in the morning. But after two days the call in the
forest began to sound more imperiously than ever. Buck's
restlessness came back on him, and he was haunted by
recollections of the wild brother, and of the smiling land beyond
the divide and the run side by side through the wide forest
stretches. Once again he took to wandering in the woods, but the
wild brother came no more; and though he listened through long
vigils, the mournful howl was never raised.
He began to sleep out at night, staying away from camp for
days at a time; and once he crossed the divide at the head of the
creek and went down into the land of timber and streams. There
he wandered for a week, seeking vainly for fresh sign of the wild
brother, killing his meat as he travelled and travelling with the
long, easy lope that seems never to tire. He fished for salmon in a
broad stream that emptied somewhere into the sea, and by this
stream he killed a large black bear, blinded by the mosquitoes
while likewise fishing, and raging through the forest helpless and
terrible. Even so, it was a hard fight, and it aroused the last latent
remnants of Buck's ferocity. And two days later, when he
returned to his kill and found a dozen wolverenes quarrelling
over the spoil, he scattered them like chaff; and those that fled
left two behind who would quarrel no more.
The blood-longing became stronger than ever before. He was
a killer, a thing that preyed, living on the things that lived,
unaided, alone, by virtue of his own strength and prowess,
84 Jack London
surviving triumphantly in a hostile environment where only the

strong survived. Because of all this he became possessed of a great
pride in himself, which communicated itself like a contagion to
his physical being. It advertised itself in all his movements, was
apparent in the play of every muscle, spoke plainly as speech in
the way he carried himself, and made his glorious furry coat if
anything more glorious. But for the stray brown on his muzzle
and above his eyes, and for the splash of white hair that ran
midmost down his chest, he might well have been mistaken for a
gigantic wolf, larger than the largest of the breed. From his St.
Bernard father he had inherited size and weight, but it was his
shepherd mother who had given shape to that size and weight.
His muzzle was the long wolf muzzle, save that was larger than
the muzzle of any wolf; and his head, somewhat broader, was the
wolf head on a massive scale.
His cunning was wolf cunning, and wild cunning; his
intelligence, shepherd intelligence and St. Bernard intelligence;
and all this, plus an experience gained in the fiercest of schools,
made him as formidable a creature as any that intelligence
roamed the wild. A carnivorous animal living on a straight meat
diet, he was in full flower, at the high tide of his life, overspilling
with vigor and virility. When Thornton passed a caressing hand
along his back, a snapping and crackling followed the hand, each
hair discharging its pent magnetism at the contact. Every part,
brain and body, nerve tissue and fibre, was keyed to the most
exquisite pitch; and between all the parts there was a perfect
equilibrium or adjustment. To sights and sounds and events
which required action, he responded with lightning-like rapidity.
Quickly as a husky dog could leap to defend from attack or to
attack, he could leap twice as quickly. He saw the movement, or
heard sound, and responded in less time than another dog
required to compass the mere seeing or hearing. He perceived
and determined and responded in the same instant. In point of
fact the three actions of perceiving, determining, and responding
were sequential; but so infinitesimal were the intervals of time

between them that they appeared simultaneous. His muscles
were surcharged with vitality, and snapped into play sharply, like
steel springs. Life streamed through him in splendid flood, glad
and rampant, until it seemed that it would burst him asunder in
sheer ecstasy and pour forth generously over the world.
"Never was there such a dog," said John Thornton one day, as
the partners watched Buck marching out of camp.
"When he was made, the mould was broke," said Pete.
"Py jingo! I t'ink so mineself," Hans affirmed.
They saw him marching out of camp, but they did not see the
instant and terrible transformation which took place as soon as
he was within the secrecy of the forest. He no longer marched. At
once he became a thing of the wild, stealing along softly, cat-
footed, a passing shadow that appeared and disappeared among
the shadows. He knew how to take advantage of every cover, to
crawl on his belly like a snake, and like a snake to leap and strike.
He could take a ptarmigan from its nest, kill a rabbit as it slept,
and snap in mid air the little chipmunks fleeing a second too late
for the trees. Fish, in open pools, were not too quick for him; nor
were beaver, mending their dams, too wary. He killed to eat, not
from wantonness; but he preferred to eat what he killed himself.
So a lurking humor ran through his deeds, and it was his delight
to steal upon the squirrels, and, when he all but had them, to let
them go, chattering in mortal fear to the treetops.
As the fall of the year came on, the moose appeared in greater
abundance, moving slowly down to meet the winter in the lower
and less rigorous valleys. Buck had already dragged down a stray
part-grown calf; but he wished strongly for larger and more
formidable quarry, and he came upon it one day on the divide at
the head of the creek. A band of twenty moose had crossed over
from the land of streams and timber, and chief among them was a
great bull. He was in a savage temper, and, standing over six feet
from the ground, was as formidable an antagonist as even Buck
86 Jack London
could desire. Back and forth the bull tossed his great palmated
antlers, branching to fourteen points and embracing seven feet
within the tips. His small eyes burned with a vicious and bitter
light, while he roared with fury at sight of Buck.
From the bull's side, just forward of the flank, protruded a
feathered arrow-end, which accounted for his savageness. Guided
by that instinct which came from the old hunting days of the
primordial world, Buck proceeded to cut the bull out from the
herd. It was no slight task. He would bark and dance about in
front of the bull, just out of reach of the great antlers and of the
terrible splay hoofs which could have stamped his life out with a
single blow. Unable to turn his back on the fanged danger and go
on, the bull would be driven into paroxysms of rage. At such
moments he charged Buck, who retreated craftily, luring him on
by a simulated inability to escape. But when he was thus
separated from his fellows, two or three of the younger bulls
would charge back upon Buck and enable the wounded bull to
rejoin the herd.
There is a patience of the wild—dogged, tireless, persistent as
life itself—that holds motionless for endless hours the spider in
its web, the snake in its coils, the panther in its ambuscade; this
patience belongs peculiarly to life when it hunts its living food;
and it belonged to Buck as he clung to the flank of the herd,
retarding its march, irritating the young bulls, worrying the cows
with their half-grown calves, and driving the wounded bull mad
with helpless rage. For half a day this continued. Buck multiplied
himself, attacking from all sides, enveloping the herd in a
whirlwind of menace, cutting out his victim as fast as it could
rejoin its mates, wearing out the patience of creatures preyed
upon, which is a lesser patience than that of creatures preying.
As the day wore along and the sun dropped to its bed in the
northwest (the darkness had come back and the fall nights were
six hours long), the young bulls retraced their steps more and
more reluctantly to the aid of their beset leader. The down-
coming winter was harrying them on to the lower levels, and it

seemed they could never shake off this tireless creature that held
them back. Besides, it was not the life of the herd, or of the young
bulls, that was threatened. The life of only one member was
demanded, which was a remoter interest than their lives, and in
the end they were content to pay the toll.
As twilight fell the old bull stood with lowered head, watching
his mates—the cows he had known, the calves he had fathered,
the bulls he had mastered—as they shambled on at a rapid pace
through the fading light. He could not follow, for before his nose
leaped the merciless fanged terror that would not let him go.
Three hundredweight more than half a ton he weighed; he had
lived a long, strong life, full of fight and struggle, and at the end
he faced death at the teeth of a creature whose head did not reach
beyond his great knuckled knees.
From then on, night and day, Buck never left his prey, never
gave it a moment's rest, never permitted it to browse the leaves of
trees or the shoots of young birch and willow. Nor did he give the
wounded bull opportunity to slake his burning thirst in the
slender trickling streams they crossed. Often, in desperation, he
burst into long stretches of flight. At such times Buck did not
attempt to stay him, but loped easily at his heels, satisfied with
the way the game was played, lying down when the moose stood
still, attacking him fiercely when he strove to eat or drink.
The great head drooped more and more under its tree of
horns, and the shambling trot grew weak and weaker. He took to
standing for long periods, with nose to the ground and dejected
ears dropped limply; and Buck found more time in which to get
water for himself and in which to rest. At such moments, panting
with red lolling tongue and with eyes fixed upon the big bull, it
appeared to Buck that a change was coming over the face of
things. He could feel a new stir in the land. As the moose were
coming into the land, other kinds of life were coming in. Forest
and stream and air seemed palpitant with their presence. The
88 Jack London
news of it was borne in upon him, not by sight, or sound, or

smell, but by some other and subtler sense. He heard nothing,
saw nothing, yet knew that the land was somehow different; that
through it strange things were afoot and ranging; and he resolved
to investigate after he had finished the business in hand.
At last, at the end of the fourth day, he pulled the great moose
down. For a day and a night he remained by the kill, eating and
sleeping, turn and turn about. Then, rested, refreshed and strong,
he turned his face toward camp and John Thornton. He broke
into the long easy lope, and went on, hour after hour, never at
loss for the tangled way, heading straight home through strange
country with a certitude of direction that put man and his
magnetic needle to shame.
As he held on he became more and more conscious of the new
stir in the land. There was life abroad in it different from the life
which had been there throughout the summer. No longer was
this fact borne in upon him in some subtle, mysterious way. The
birds talked of it, the squirrels chattered about it, the very breeze
whispered of it. Several times he stopped and drew in the fresh
morning air in great sniffs, reading a message which made him
leap on with greater speed. He was oppressed with a sense of
calamity happening, if it were not calamity already happened;
and as he crossed the last watershed and dropped down into the
valley toward camp, he proceeded with greater caution.
Three miles away he came upon a fresh trail that sent his neck
hair rippling and bristling, It led straight toward camp and John
Thornton. Buck hurried on, swiftly and stealthily, every nerve
straining and tense, alert to the multitudinous details which told
a story—all but the end. His nose gave him a varying description
of the passage of the life on the heels of which he was travelling.
He remarked die pregnant silence of the forest. The bird life had
flitted. The squirrels were in hiding. One only he saw,—a sleek
gray fellow, flattened against a gray dead limb so that he seemed a
part of it, a woody excrescence upon the wood itself.
As Buck slid along with the obscureness of a gliding shadow,

his nose was jerked suddenly to the side as though a positive force
had gripped and pulled it. He followed the new scent into a
thicket and found Nig. He was lying on his side, dead where he
had dragged himself, an arrow protruding, head and feathers,
from either side of his body.
A hundred yards farther on, Buck came upon one of the sled-
dogs Thornton had bought in Dawson. This dog was thrashing
about in a death-struggle, directly on the trail, and Buck passed
around him without stopping. From the camp came the faint
sound of many voices, rising and falling in a sing-song chant.
Bellying forward to the edge of the clearing, he found Hans, lying
on his face, feathered with arrows like a porcupine. At the same
instant Buck peered out where the spruce-bough lodge had been
and saw what made his hair leap straight up on his neck and
shoulders. A gust of overpowering rage swept over him. He did
not know that he growled, but he growled aloud with a terrible
ferocity. For the last time in his life he allowed passion to usurp
cunning and reason, and it was because of his great love for John
Thornton that he lost his head.
The Yeehats were dancing about the wreckage of the spruce-
bough lodge when they heard a fearful roaring and saw rushing
upon them an animal the like of which they had never seen
before. It was Buck, a live hurricane of fury, hurling himself upon
them in a frenzy to destroy. He sprang at the foremost man (it
was the chief of the Yeehats), ripping the throat wide open till
the rent jugular spouted a fountain of blood. He did not pause to
worry the victim, but ripped in passing, with the next bound
tearing wide the throat of a second man. There was no
withstanding him. He plunged about in their very midst, tearing,
rending, destroying, in constant and terrific motion which defied
the arrows they discharged at him. In fact, so inconceivably rapid
were his movements, and so closely were the Indians tangled
together, that they shot one another with the arrows; and one
90 Jack London
young hunter, hurling a spear at Buck in mid air, drove it through

the chest of another hunter with such force that the point broke
through the skin of the back and stood out beyond. Then a panic
seized the Yeehats, and they fled in terror to the woods,
proclaiming as they fled the advent of the Evil Spirit.
And truly Buck was the Fiend incarnate, raging at their heels
and dragging them down like deer as they raced through the
trees. It was a fateful day for the Yeehats. They scattered far and
wide over the country, and it was not till a week later that the last
of the survivors gathered together in a lower valley and counted
their losses. As for Buck, wearying of the pursuit, he returned to
the desolated camp. He found Pete where he had been killed in
his blankets in the first moment of surprise. Thornton's
desperate struggle was fresh-written on the earth, and Buck
scented every detail of it down to the edge of a deep pool. By the
edge, head and fore feet in the water, lay Skeet, faithful to the last.
The pool itself, muddy and discolored from the sluice boxes,
effectually hid what it contained, and it contained John
Thornton; for Buck followed his trace into the water, from
which no trace led away.
All day Buck brooded by the pool or roamed restlessly about
the camp. Death, as a cessation of movement, as a passing out and
away from the lives of the living, he knew, and he knew John
Thornton was dead. It left a great void in him, somewhat akin to
hunger, but a void which ached and ached, and which food could
not fill, At times, when he paused to contemplate the carcasses of
the Yeehats, he forgot the pain of it; and at such times he was
aware of a great pride in himself,—a pride greater than any he
had yet experienced. He had killed man, the noblest game of all,
and he had killed in the face of the law of club and fang. He
sniffed the bodies curiously. They had died so easily. It was
harder to kill a husky dog than them. They were no match at all,
were it not for their arrows and spears and clubs. Thenceforward
he would be unafraid of them except when they bore in their

hands their arrows, spears, and clubs.
Night came on, and a full moon rose high over the trees into
the sky, lighting the land till it lay bathed in ghostly day. And
with the coming of the night, brooding and mourning by the
pool, Buck became alive to a stirring of the new life in the forest
other than that which the Yeehats had made, He stood up,
listening and scenting. From far away drifted a faint, sharp yelp,
followed by a chorus of similar sharp yelps. As the moments
passed the yelps grew closer and louder. Again Buck knew them
as things heard in that other world which persisted in his
memory. He walked to the centre of the open space and listened.
It was the call, the many- noted call, sounding more luringly and
compellingly than ever before. And as never before, he was ready
to obey. John Thornton was dead. The last tie was broken. Man
and the claims of man no longer bound him.
Hunting their living meat, as the Yeehats were hunting it, on
the flanks of the migrating moose, the wolf pack had at last
crossed over from the land of streams and timber and invaded
Buck's valley. Into the clearing where the moonlight streamed,
they poured in a silvery flood; and in the centre of the clearing
stood Buck, motionless as a statue, waiting their coming. They
were awed, so still and large he stood, and a moment's pause fell,
till the boldest one leaped straight for him. Like a flash Buck
struck, breaking the neck. Then he stood, without movement, as
before, the stricken wolf rolling in agony behind him. Three
others tried it in sharp succession; and one after the other they
drew back, streaming blood from slashed throats or shoulders.
This was sufficient to fling the whole pack forward, pell-mell,
crowded together, blocked and confused by its eagerness to pull
down the prey. Buck's marvellous quickness and agility stood him
in good stead. Pivoting on his hind legs, and snapping and
gashing, he was everywhere at once, presenting a front which was
apparently unbroken so swiftly did he whirl and guard from side
92 Jack London
to side. But to prevent them from getting behind him, he was

forced back, down past the pool and into the creek bed, till he
brought up against a high gravel bank. He worked along to a
right angle in the bank which the men had made in the course of
mining, and in this angle he came to bay, protected on three sides
and with nothing to do but face the front.
And so well did he face it, that at the end of half an hour the
wolves drew back discomfited. The tongues of all were out and
lolling, the white fangs showing cruelly white in the moonlight.
Some were lying down with heads raised and ears pricked
forward; others stood on their feet, watching him; and still others
were lapping water from the pool. One wolf, long and lean and
gray, advanced cautiously, in a friendly manner, and Buck
recognized the wild brother with whom he had run for a night
and a day. He was whining softly, and, as Buck whined, they
touched noses.
Then an old wolf, gaunt and battle-scarred, came forward.
Buck writhed his lips into the preliminary of a snarl, but sniffed
noses with him, Whereupon the old wolf sat down, pointed nose
at the moon, and broke out the long wolf howl. The others sat
down and howled. And now the call came to Buck in
unmistakable accents. He, too, sat down and howled. This over,
he came out of his angle and the pack crowded around him,
sniffing in half- friendly, half-savage manner. The leaders lifted
the yelp of the pack and sprang away into the woods. The wolves
swung in behind, yelping in chorus. And Buck ran with them,
side by side with the wild brother, yelping as he ran.
And here may well end the story of Buck. The years were not
many when the Yeehats noted a change in the breed of timber
wolves; for some were seen with splashes of brown on head and
muzzle, and with a rift of white centring down the chest. But
more remarkable than this, the Yeehats tell of a Ghost Dog that
runs at the head of the pack. They are afraid of this Ghost Dog,
for it has cunning greater than they, stealing from their camps in
fierce winters, robbing their traps, slaying their dogs, and defying
their bravest hunters.
Nay, the tale grows worse. Hunters there are who fail to return to
the camp, and hunters there have been whom their tribesmen
found with throats slashed cruelly open and with wolf prints
about them in the snow greater than the prints of any wolf. Each
fall, when the Yeehats follow the movement of the moose, there
is a certain valley which they never enter. And women there are
who become sad when the word goes over the fire of how the Evil
Spirit came to select that valley for an abiding-place.
In the summers there is one visitor, however, to that valley, of
which the Yeehats do not know. It is a great, gloriously coated
wolf, like, and yet unlike, all other wolves. He crosses alone from
the smiling timber land and comes down into an open space
among the trees. Here a yellow stream flows from rotted moose-
hide sacks and sinks into the ground, with long grasses growing
through it and vegetable mould overrunning it and hiding its
yellow from the sun; and here he muses for a time, howling once,
long and mournfully, ere he departs.
But he is not always alone. When the long winter nights come
on and the wolves follow their meat into the lower valleys, he
may be seen running at the head of the pack through the pale
moonlight or glimmering borealis, leaping gigantic above his
fellows, his great throat a-bellow as he sings a song of the younger
world, which is the song of the pack.
ABOUT THE BOOK
The Call of the Wild is a novel by Jack London published in

1903. The story is set in the Yukon during the 1890s Klondike
Gold Rush—a period when strong sled dogs were in high
demand. The novel's central character is a dog named Buck, a
domesticated dog living at a ranch in the Santa Clara Valley of
California as the story opens. Stolen from his home and sold into
service as sled dog in Alaska, he reverts to a wild state. Buck is
forced to fight in order to dominate other dogs in a harsh
climate. Eventually he sheds the veneer of civilization, relying on
primordial instincts and learned experience to emerge as a leader
in the wild.
London lived for most of a year in the Yukon collecting
material for the book. The story was serialized in the Saturday
Evening Post in the summer of 1903; a month later it was
released in book form. The novel’s great popularity and success
made a reputation for London. Much of its appeal derives from
the simplicity of this tale of survival. As early as 1908 the story
was adapted to film and it has since seen several more cinematic
adaptations.
Illustrations
96 Jack London
98 Jack London
100 Jack London
102 Jack London
104 Jack London
Author Biography
John Griffith "Jack" London (born John Griffith Chaney,

January 12, 1876 – November 22, 1916) was an American
author, journalist, and social activist. He was a pioneer in the
then-burgeoning world of commercial magazine fiction and was
one of the first fiction writers to obtain worldwide celebrity and a
large fortune from his fiction alone.[6] Some of his most famous
works include The Call of the Wild and White Fang, both set in
the Klondike Gold Rush, as well as the short stories "To Build a
Fire", "An Odyssey of the North", and "Love of Life". He also
wrote of the South Pacific in such stories as "The Pearls of Parlay"
and "The Heathen", and of the San Francisco Bay area in The Sea
Wolf.
London was a passionate advocate of unionization, socialism,
and the rights of workers. He wrote several powerful works
dealing with these topics, such as his dystopian novel The Iron
Heel, his non-fiction exposé The People of the Abyss, and The
War of the Classes.

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The Call of the Wild (Illustrated)

Published by Platypus Classics, 2015.

THE CALL OF THE WILD (ILLUSTRATED)

First edition. January 21, 2015.

Written by Jack London.

Copyright © 2015 Platypus Classics

"Old longings nomadic leap, Chafing at custom's chain; Again

muscles; and to him, as to the cold-tubbing races, the love of

The kidnapper undid the bloody wrappings and looked at his

a great railway depot, and finally he was deposited in an express

endured was as nothing compared with the exquisite agony of

forgot it. That club was a revelation. It was his introduction to

The dominant primordial beast was strong in Buck, and under

In the meantime the astonished team-dogs had burst out of

Later, the nine team-dogs gathered together and sought

completeness with which he harked back through the ages of fire

they were made irritable by the unending squabbling. Francois

living, comes to the artist, caught up and out of himself in a sheet

of familiarity. He seemed to remember it all,—the white woods,

dog went down. As Buck grew winded, Spitz took to rushing,

And Perrault nodded. He was ahead of the record then, and

he crouched by this other fire he saw another and different man

By the time Cassiar Bar was reached, he was so weak that he

He pleaded with his eyes to remain there. The driver was

The drivers confidently expected a long stopover. Themselves,

Buck watched them apprehensively as they proceeded to take

"Certainly," said Hal, with freezing politeness, taking hold of

"You poor, poor dears," she cried sympathetically, "why don't

It was inevitable that they should go short on dog-food. But

the three short-haired pointers, the two mongrels hanging more

Mercedes, who disburdened herself of copious opinions upon

remained: Joe, too far gone to be malignant; Pike, crippled and

sun and through the soft-sighing breezes, like wayfarers to death,

When John Thornton froze his feet in the previous December

of ridiculous games, in which Thornton himself could not

For the most part, however, Buck's love was expressed in

with the marks of generations of civilization. Because of his very

So peremptorily did these shades beckon him, that each day

miscalculated once, but he would not be guilty of it a second

"Pooh! pooh!" said John Thornton; "Buck can start a

the excitement, and he felt that in some way he must do a great

answer, in terms, not of speech, but of love. Thornton stepped

had been measured off, and as he neared the pile of firewood

When Buck earned sixteen hundred dollars in five minutes for

they chanced upon the time-graven wreckage of a hunting lodge,

John Thornton was eating dinner when Buck dashed into

surviving triumphantly in a hostile environment where only the

were sequential; but so infinitesimal were the intervals of time

coming winter was harrying them on to the lower levels, and it

news of it was borne in upon him, not by sight, or sound, or

As Buck slid along with the obscureness of a gliding shadow,

young hunter, hurling a spear at Buck in mid air, drove it through

he would be unafraid of them except when they bore in their

to side. But to prevent them from getting behind him, he was

The Call of the Wild is a novel by Jack London published in

John Griffith "Jack" London (born John Griffith Chaney,

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