第 五 章 · The Toil of Trace and Trail

. 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 doubling

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 François 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 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

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 falling 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.