ty 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 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 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.

"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
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 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 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 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 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,
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 discharing 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
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