Chapter Five
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'."
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.
"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 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.
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 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 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 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.
"You poor devil," said John Thornton, and Buck licked his hand.
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