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The Call of the Wild
Chapter 7. The Toil of Trace and Trail, Part 2
Then the underfeeding began, and the dogs' food was cut in half.
Hal woke up one day to the fact that his dog-food was half gone and the distance was only a quarter covered.
Further, he couldn't get any more dog-food for love or money.
So he cut down even the normal ration and tried to increase the day's travel.
His sister and brother-in-law supported 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.
And their own inability to get started earlier in the morning stopped them from traveling longer hours.
Not only did they not know how to work dogs, but they didn't know how to work themselves.
The first to go was Dub, whose injured shoulder finally gave way from overwork.
Poor blundering thief that he was, always getting caught and punished, he had still been a faithful worker.
His wrenched shoulder-blade, untreated and unrested, went from bad to worse.
Finally Hal shot him with the big Colt's revolver.
There's a saying in the country that an Outside dog starves to death on the ration of a 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 hung on to life more stubbornly, but they went in the end.
By this time, all the politeness and gentleness of the Southland had fallen away from the three people.
Stripped of its glamour and romance, Arctic travel became to them a reality too harsh for their manhood and womanhood.
Mercedes stopped crying over the dogs, she was too busy crying over herself and quarreling with her husband and brother.
Quarreling was the one thing they were never too tired to do.
Their irritability came from their misery, grew with it, doubled upon it, and outdistanced it.
The wonderful patience of the trail comes to men who work hard and suffer sorely and still stay sweet of speech and kind.
But that patience didn't come to these two men and the woman.
They had no idea of such 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.
Hard words were first on their lips in the morning and last at night.
Charles and Hal argued whenever Mercedes gave them a chance.
Each one firmly believed that he did more than his share of the work.
Neither one held back from saying this at every opportunity.
Sometimes Mercedes sided with her husband, sometimes with her brother.
The result was a beautiful and endless family quarrel.
It started from a dispute about who should chop a few sticks for the fire, a dispute that only concerned Charles and Hal.
But soon the rest of the family was dragged in, fathers, mothers, uncles, cousins, people thousands of miles away, and some of them dead.
That Hal's views on art, or the society plays his mother's brother wrote, could matter to chopping sticks of firewood is absurd.
Still, the quarrel was just as likely to go 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 building a Yukon fire was clear only to Mercedes.
She let out many opinions on that topic, and also on a few other unpleasant traits of her husband's family.
In the meantime, the fire remained unbuilt, the camp was half set up, and the dogs were unfed.
Mercedes held a special complaint, the complaint of her sex.
She was pretty and soft, and had been treated chivalrously all her days.
But the present treatment by her husband and brother was anything but chivalrous.
It was her habit to be helpless.
They complained about it, At this attack on what she saw as her most important female right, she made their lives unbearable.
She no longer considered the dogs, and because she was sore and tired, she insisted on riding on the sled.
She was pretty and soft, used to being treated with constant chivalry and care.
But she weighed one hundred and twenty pounds, a heavy last straw on the load pulled by the weak and starving animals.
She rode for days, until they fell in the traces and the sled stood still.
Charles and Hal begged her to get off and walk.
They pleaded with her and begged her, while she wept and called on Heaven with a story of their cruelty.
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 didn't move.
After they had traveled 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 practiced 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 ran out.
A toothless old woman offered pounds of frozen horse-hide for the Colt's revolver that kept the big hunting-knife at Hal's hip.
This hide was a poor substitute for food.
It had been stripped from the starved horses of the cattlemen six months before.
In its frozen state, it was more like strips of galvanized iron.
When a dog swallowed it, it thawed into thin, unnutritious leathery strings and a mass of short hair, irritating and hard to digest.
And through it all, Buck staggered along at the head of the team as if in a nightmare, he pulled when he could.
When he could no longer pull, he fell down and stayed down until 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 messy, or matted with dried blood where Hal's club had bruised him.
His muscles had wasted away to knotty strings, the flesh pads had disappeared.
So each rib and every bone in his body were clearly outlined through the loose hide, which 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 it was with his mates.
They were walking 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 weren't 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 on them, the spark fluttered feebly up, and they tottered to their feet and staggered on.
There came a day when Billee, the good-natured one, fell and couldn't get up.
Hal had traded off his revolver, so he took the axe and knocked Billee on the head as he lay in the traces.
Then he cut the body out of the harness and dragged it to one side.
Buck saw, and his mates saw, and they knew that this thing was very close to them.
On the next day, Koona went, Only five of them remained, Joe, too far gone to be mean.
Pike, crippled and limping, only half conscious and not conscious enough to pretend to be sick anymore.
Sol-leks, the one-eyed, still faithful to the work of trace and trail, and sad because he had so little strength to pull.
Teek hadn't traveled so far that winter.
He was now beaten more than the others because he was fresher.
Buck was still at the head of the team.
He no longer enforced discipline, blind with weakness half the time.
He kept the trail by its shape and 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 came from all the land, full of the joy of living.
It came from the things that lived and moved again, things which had been as dead and which hadn't 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 clothes of green.
Crickets sang in the nights, and in the days, all kinds of creeping, crawling things rustled out 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 clever 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.
In the middle of this bursting, tearing, throbbing of awakening life, under the blazing sun and soft-sighing breezes, life stirred.
Like travelers to death, the two men, the woman, and the huskies staggered.
With dogs falling, Mercedes weeping on the sled, Hal swearing, Charles's eyes watering, they staggered into John Thornton's camp at White River's mouth.
When they stopped, 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 carefully because 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 short answers, and, when asked, gave brief advice.
He knew the breed, and he gave his advice knowing for sure that it wouldn't be followed.
Hal said, "They told us up above that the bottom was dropping out of the trail."
He added, "The best thing for us to do was to wait."
"They told us we couldn't make White River, and here we're." 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 body 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 useless, he knew, to get between a fool and his folly.
And two or three fools more or less wouldn't change the scheme of things.
But the team didn't 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 pressed his lips together, Sol-leks was the first to crawl to his feet.
Teek followed, Joe came next, yelping with pain.
Pike made painful efforts, Twice he fell over when half up, and on the third attempt he managed to rise.
Buck made no effort, he lay quietly where he had fallen.
The lash bit into him again and again, but he didn't whine or struggle.
Several times Thornton started, as though to speak, but changed his mind, a moisture came into his eyes.
And as the whipping continued, he got up and walked back and forth, unsure of what to do.
This was the first time Buck had failed.
That alone was enough reason to drive Hal into a rage.
He exchanged the whip for the usual club.
Buck refused to move under the rain of heavier blows that now fell on him.
Like his mates, he was barely able to get up.
But unlike them, he had made up his mind not to get up.
He had a vague feeling of coming disaster.
This had been strong on him when he pulled in to the bank, and it hadn't left him.
All day, he had felt thin and rotten ice under his feet.
It seemed he sensed disaster close at hand.
His master was trying to drive him out there ahead on the ice.
He refused to stir, he had suffered so greatly and was so far gone that the blows didn't hurt much.
And as they continued to fall on 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 feelings of pain left him.
He no longer felt anything, though very faintly he could hear the impact of the club on his body.
But it was no longer his body, it seemed so far away.
Then, suddenly, with an animal-like cry, John Thornton leaped at the man holding the club.
Hal was thrown backward, as though struck by a falling tree.
Mercedes screamed, Charles looked on sadly, wiped his watery eyes, but didn't get up because of his stiffness.
John Thornton stood over Buck, struggling to control himself, too shaken 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 showed no intention of getting out of the way.
Hal drew his long hunting-knife, Mercedes screamed, cried, laughed, and showed the chaotic abandon of hysteria.
Thornton hit Hal's knuckles with the axe-handle, knocking the knife to the ground.
He hit 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.
And Buck was too near dead to be of any more use in pulling 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 them 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, kind hands searched for broken bones.
By the time his search found only bruises and 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, sharp and full of terror.
They saw Charles turn and take one step to run back, and then a whole section of ice gave way and dogs and humans disappeared.
A yawning hole was all that could be seen.
The bottom had dropped out of the trail.
John Thornton and Buck looked at each other.
"You poor devil," said John Thornton, and Buck licked his hand.