Read the chapter
The Call of the Wild
Chapter 6. The Toil of Trace and Trail
Thirty days after it left Dawson, the Salt Water Mail, with Buck and his teammates in front, arrived at Skaguay.
They were in a terrible state, worn out and exhausted.
Buck's one hundred and forty pounds had dropped to one hundred and fifteen.
The rest of his teammates, though lighter dogs, had lost more weight than he had.
Pike, the lazy one, who in his life of trickery had often pretended to have a hurt leg, was now limping for real.
Sol-leks was limping, and Dub was suffering from a hurt shoulder blade.
They were all terribly sore-footed, they had no spring or energy left.
Their feet fell heavily on the trail, shaking their bodies and doubling the tiredness of a day's travel.
There was nothing wrong with them except that they were dead tired.
It wasn't the dead-tiredness that comes from short and extreme effort, from which recovery takes only hours.
It was the dead-tiredness that comes from the slow and long draining of strength from months of work.
They had no power to recover left, no extra strength to use.
It had all been used, every last bit of it.
Every muscle, every fiber, every cell was tired, dead tired.
And there was a reason for it.
In less than five months, they had traveled twenty-five hundred miles.
During the last eighteen hundred of those miles, they had had only five days of rest.
When they arrived at Skaguay, they were clearly on their last legs.
They could barely keep the traces tight, and on the downhill slopes they just managed to stay out of the way of the sled.
"Mush on, poor sore feet," the driver encouraged them as they walked unsteadily down the main street of Skaguay.
"This is the last. Then we get one long rest. Eh? For sure. One great long rest."
The drivers confidently expected a long stop.
They themselves had covered twelve hundred miles with two days of rest, and by reason and common fairness, they deserved a break.
But so many men had rushed into the Klondike, and so many sweethearts, wives, and family hadn't rushed in, that the crowded mail was growing huge.
Also, there were official orders, Fresh groups of Hudson Bay dogs were to take the places of those too weak for the trail.
The weak ones were to be gotten rid of, and since dogs count for little against money, they were to be sold.
Three days passed, and by that time Buck and his teammates found out 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 very little money.
The men called each other "Hal"
Charles was a middle-aged man with light hair, weak watery eyes, and a mustache twisting upward over a thin weak lip.
Hal was a young man of nineteen or twenty, with a big Colt revolver and a hunting knife on a cartridge-filled belt.
This belt was the most noticeable thing about him.
It showed his inexperience, a complete and total inexperience.
Both men were clearly out of place, why people like them would venture to the North is a mystery.
Buck heard the bargaining, he saw the money pass between the man and the government agent.
Then he knew the Scotch half-breed and the mail drivers were leaving his life.
They followed Perrault, Francois, and the others who had gone before.
Taken to the new owners' camp, Buck saw a messy, careless camp, a half-pitched tent, unwashed dishes, everything in disorder.
He also saw a woman standing near the tent, watching them with interest.
"Mercedes" the men called her.
She was Charles's wife and Hal's sister, a nice family group.
Buck watched them nervously as they started to take down the tent and load the sled.
They put a lot of effort into their work, but they had no organized method.
The tent was rolled into a clumsy bundle three times as big as it should have been.
The tin dishes were packed away unwashed.
Mercedes kept getting in the way of her men and never stopped talking with complaints and advice.
When they put a clothes bag on the front of the sled, she suggested it should go on the back.
They put it on the back and covered it with other bundles.
Then she found things they had forgotten.
Those things could only go in that bag, so they unloaded again.
Three men from a nearby tent came out and watched, grinning and winking at each other.
"You've got a pretty big load as it's," said one of them.
"And it's not for me to tell you your business, but I wouldn't take that tent along if I were you."
"Unthinkable!" cried Mercedes, throwing up her hands in delicate shock.
"How 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 firmly, and Charles and Hal put the last odds and ends on top of the huge load.
"Do you think it'll ride?" one of the men asked.
"Why shouldn't it?" Charles demanded rather sharply.
"Oh, that's all right, that's all right," the man quickly said in a mild voice.
"I was just wondering, that's all. It seemed a bit top-heavy."
Charles turned his back and tied the ropes down as well as he could, which wasn't well at all.
"And of course the dogs can hike all day with that thing behind them," said a second man.
"Certainly," said Hal with cold politeness, taking hold of the steering pole with one hand and swinging his whip with the other.
"Mush!" he shouted.
"Mush on there!"
The dogs jumped against the breast bands, pulled hard for a few moments, then relaxed, they couldn't move the sled.
"The lazy beasts, I'll show them," he cried, getting ready to hit them with the whip.
But Mercedes stopped him, crying, "Oh, Hal, you mustn't," as she grabbed the whip and pulled 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."
"You don't know much about dogs," her brother sneered.
"And I wish you'd leave me alone. They're lazy, I tell you,"
"And you have to whip them to get anything out of them. That's their way. Ask anyone. Ask one of those men."
Mercedes looked at them pleadingly, with clear dislike of pain written on her pretty face.
"They're weak as water, if you want to know," came the reply from one of the men.
"Completely worn out, that's what's the matter. They need a rest."
"Rest be damned," said Hal with his beardless lips, and Mercedes said, "Oh!" in pain and sorrow at the curse.
But she was loyal to her family, and she quickly rushed to defend her brother.
"Never mind that man," she said sharply.
"You're driving our dogs, and you do what you think is best with them."
Again Hal's whip fell on the dogs.
They threw themselves against the breast bands, dug their feet into the packed snow, got low to it, and put out all their strength.
The sled held as if it were an anchor.
After two tries, they stood still, panting.
The whip was whistling wildly, when once more Mercedes stopped him.
She dropped to 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 didn't like her, but he felt too miserable to resist her, taking it as part of the day's miserable work.
One of the watchers, who had been clenching his teeth to hold back angry words, now spoke up.
It's not that I care what happens to you, but for the dogs' sake, you can help them by breaking out that sled.
"The runners are frozen fast."
"Throw your weight against the steering pole, right and left, and break it out."
A third time they tried, but this time, following the advice, Hal broke out the runners that had been frozen to the snow.
The overloaded and clumsy sled moved forward, Buck and his teammates struggling wildly under the rain of blows.
A hundred yards ahead, the path turned and sloped steeply into the main street.
It would have taken an experienced man to keep the top-heavy sled upright, and Hal wasn't such a man.
As they swung into the turn, the sled tipped over, spilling half its load through the loose ropes.
The dogs never stopped, the lighter sled bounced on its side behind them.
They were angry because of the bad treatment they had received and the unfair load.
Buck was furious, he broke into a run, and the team followed him.
Hal cried "Whoa! Whoa!" but they paid no attention.
He tripped and was pulled off his feet.
The tipped sled scraped over him.
The dogs dashed up the street, scattering the rest of the supplies and adding to the fun in Skaguay.
Kind-hearted people caught the dogs and gathered up the scattered belongings.
They also gave advice, Half the load and twice the dogs, if they ever hoped to reach Dawson, was what they said.
Hal and his sister and brother-in-law listened unwillingly, set up the tent, and went through the supplies.
Canned goods were taken out that made men laugh, because canned goods on the Long Trail is something to dream about.
"Blankets for a hotel," said 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 traveling on a train?"
And so it went, the unavoidable removal of the unnecessary things.
Mercedes cried when her clothes bags were dumped on the ground and item after item was thrown out.
She cried in general, and she cried in particular over each thing she threw away.
She clasped her hands around her knees, rocking back and forth broken-heartedly.
She said she wouldn't go an inch, not for a dozen Charleses.
She appealed to everyone and everything, finally wiping her eyes and starting to throw out even items of clothing that were absolutely necessary.
And in her excitement, when she had finished with her own things, she attacked the belongings of her men and went through them like a storm.
When this was done, the supplies, though cut in half, were still a huge amount.
Charles and Hal went out in the evening and bought six Outside dogs.
These dogs were added to the six of the original team.
Teek and Koona, the huskies they had gotten at the Rink Rapids on the record trip, made the team total fourteen.
But the Outside dogs, though they had been somewhat trained since their arrival, didn't amount to much.
Three were short-haired pointers, one was a Newfoundland, and the other two were mixed breeds of unknown type.
These newcomers didn't seem to know anything.
Buck and his teammates looked at them with disgust, he taught them their places and faults, but couldn't teach them how to work.
They didn't take well to the trace and the trail.
Except for the two mixed breeds, they were confused and broken in spirit by the strange wild environment and by bad treatment.
The two mixed breeds had no spirit at all.
Bones were the only things breakable about them.
With the newcomers hopeless and sad, 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 leave over the Pass for Dawson, or come in from Dawson.
But they had never seen a sled with as many as fourteen dogs.
In the nature of Arctic travel, there was a reason why fourteen dogs shouldn't pull one sled.
That reason was that one sled couldn't carry the food for fourteen dogs.
But Charles and Hal didn't know this.
They had worked out the trip with a pencil, so much per dog, so many dogs, so many days, and that was that.
Mercedes looked over their shoulders and nodded knowingly, it was all so very simple.
Late the next morning, Buck led the long team up the street.
There was nothing lively about it, no energy or spirit in him and his teammates, they were starting dead tired.
He had covered the distance between Salt Water and Dawson four times.
Knowing he was worn out and facing the same trail again made him bitter.
His heart wasn't in the work, and neither was the heart of any dog.
The Outsides were timid and frightened, the Insides had no confidence in their masters.
Buck felt vaguely that he couldn't depend on these two men and the woman.
They didn't know how to do anything, and as the days went by, it became clear that they couldn't learn.
They were careless in everything, without order or discipline.
It took them half the night to set up a messy camp.
It took half the morning to take down that camp and load the sled.
For the rest of the day, they were busy stopping and rearranging the load.
Some days they didn't make ten miles.
On other days, they couldn't get started at all.
And on no day did they succeed in making more than half the distance the men had used as a basis for their dog-food calculations.
It was unavoidable that they'd run short on dog food.
But they made it happen faster by overfeeding, bringing the day closer when underfeeding would begin.
The Outside dogs, whose stomachs hadn't been trained by constant hunger to make the most of little, had huge appetites.
And when, in addition to this, the worn-out huskies pulled weakly, Hal decided that the normal amount of food was too small.
He doubled it, Mercedes had tears in her pretty eyes and a shake in her voice.
She couldn't convince him to give the dogs more food.
So she stole from the fish sacks and fed them secretly.
But it wasn't food that Buck and the huskies needed.
It was rest, and though they were making slow progress, the heavy load they pulled used up their strength badly.