Call of the Wild

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