Read the chapter
The Call of the Wild
Chapter 10. The Sounding of the Call, Part 2
As fall came on, the moose appeared in greater numbers, moving slowly down to meet winter in lower, less harsh valleys.
Buck had already pulled down a stray half-grown calf.
But he wished strongly for larger and more dangerous prey.
And he came upon it one day on the divide at the head of the creek.
A group 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, he was as dangerous an enemy as even Buck could want.
Back and forth the bull tossed his great antlers, branching to fourteen points and reaching seven feet between the tips.
His small eyes burned with a vicious and bitter light, while he roared with fury at the sight of Buck.
From the bull's side, just forward of the flank, a feathered arrow-end stuck out, which explained his savageness.
Guided by that instinct which came from the old hunting days of the ancient world, Buck began to cut the bull out from the herd.
It was no small task, he'd bark and dance about in front of the bull.
He stayed just out of reach of the great antlers.
He also avoided the terrible wide hoofs.
A single blow from them could have crushed his life out.
Unable to turn his back on the fanged danger and go on, the bull would be driven into fits of rage.
At such moments he charged Buck, who retreated cleverly, luring him on by pretending he couldn't escape.
When thus separated from his fellows, two or three younger bulls would charge Buck and let the wounded bull rejoin the herd.
There is a patience of the wild, dogged, tireless, and persistent as life itself.
It holds motionless for endless hours the spider in its web, the snake in its coils, and the panther in its hiding place.
This patience belongs especially to life when it hunts its living food.
It belonged to Buck as he stayed close to the flank of the herd.
He slowed its march and irritated the young bulls.
He worried the cows with their half-grown calves.
He drove the wounded bull mad with helpless rage.
For half a day this continued, Buck multiplied himself.
He attacked from all sides, he surrounded the herd in a whirlwind of danger.
He cut out his victim as fast as it could rejoin its mates.
He wore out the patience of creatures that are hunted.
That patience is lesser than that of creatures that hunt.
The day went on, the sun dropped to its bed in the northwest.
Darkness returned, and the fall nights were six hours long.
The young bulls came back more slowly to help their attacked leader.
The coming winter was pushing them on to the lower levels.
And it seemed they could never shake off this tireless creature that held them back.
Besides, it wasn't the life of the herd, or of the young bulls, that was threatened.
Only one life was demanded, a lesser interest than their own, and in the end they paid the price.
Twilight fell, the old bull stood with lowered head, watching his mates.
He saw the cows he had known, the calves he had fathered, and the bulls he had mastered.
They hurried on at a fast pace through the fading light.
He couldn't follow, for before his nose leaped the merciless fanged terror that wouldn't let him go.
He weighed more than half a ton.
He had lived a long, strong life, full of fight and struggle.
At the end he faced death at the teeth of a creature whose head didn't reach beyond his great knuckled knees.
From then on, night and day, Buck never left his prey and never gave it a moment's rest.
He did not let it eat the leaves of trees or the shoots of young birch and willow.
Nor did he give the wounded bull a chance to drink his burning thirst in the small streams they crossed.
Often, in desperation, the bull burst into long stretches of flight.
Buck didn't try to stop him at such times.
Instead, he loped easily at his heels, satisfied with the game.
When the moose stood still, Buck lay down.
He attacked fiercely when the moose tried to eat or drink.
The great head drooped more and more under its tree of horns, and the slow trot grew weaker and weaker.
He began to stand for long periods, with nose to the ground and sad ears hanging limply.
And Buck found more time to get water for himself and to rest.
Panting with red lolling tongue and eyes fixed on the big bull, Buck sensed a change coming over the land.
He could feel a new stir in the land.
As the moose were coming into the land, other kinds of life were coming in.
Forest and stream and air seemed full of their presence.
The news of it came to him, not by sight, or sound, or smell, but by some other and more subtle sense.
He heard nothing, saw nothing, yet knew that the land was somehow different.
That through it strange things were happening and moving.
And he decided to investigate after he had finished the business in hand.
At last, at the end of the fourth day, he pulled the great moose down.
For a day and a night he stayed by the kill, eating and sleeping, turn and turn about.
Then, rested, refreshed and strong, he turned his face toward camp and John Thornton.
He broke into a long, easy lope.
He went on, hour after hour, never lost in the tangled way.
He headed straight home through strange country.
His certainty of direction put man and his magnetic needle to shame.
As he held on, he became more and more aware of the new stir in the land.
There was life abroad in it different from the life which had been there throughout the summer.
No longer was this fact brought to him in some subtle, mysterious way.
The birds talked of it, the squirrels chattered about it, the very breeze whispered of it.
Several times he stopped and drew in the fresh morning air in great sniffs, reading a message which made him leap on with greater speed.
He felt a sense of disaster happening, if it weren't disaster already happened.
And as he crossed the last watershed and dropped down into the valley toward camp, he went with greater caution.
Three miles away he came upon a fresh trail that sent his neck hair rippling and bristling.
It led straight toward camp and John Thornton.
Buck hurried on, swiftly and secretly, every nerve strained and tense, alert to the many details which told a story, all but the end.
His nose gave him a changing description of the passage of the life on the heels of which he was traveling.
He noticed the heavy silence of the forest.
The bird life had flown away, the squirrels were in hiding.
He saw only one, a sleek gray fellow flattened against a dead limb, seeming part of it, a woody growth on the wood.
As Buck slid along like a gliding shadow, his nose jerked aside as if a strong force had gripped and pulled it.
He followed the new scent into a thicket and found Nig.
He was lying on his side, dead where he had dragged himself, an arrow sticking out, head and feathers, from either side of his body.
A hundred yards farther on, Buck came upon one of the sled-dogs Thornton had bought in Dawson.
This dog was thrashing about in a death-struggle, directly on the trail, and Buck passed around him without stopping.
From the camp came the faint sound of many voices, rising and falling in a sing-song chant.
Moving forward on his belly to the edge of the clearing, he found Hans, lying on his face, covered with arrows like a porcupine.
At the same moment Buck looked where the spruce-bough lodge had been and saw what made his hair rise on his neck.
A gust of overpowering rage swept over him.
He didn't know that he growled, but he growled aloud with a terrible ferocity.
For the last time in his life he let passion take over cunning and reason.
And it was because of his great love for John Thornton that he lost his head.
The Yeehats were dancing about the wreckage of the spruce-bough lodge.
They heard a fearful roaring and saw an animal rushing upon them like none they had ever seen before.
It was Buck, a live hurricane of fury, throwing himself upon them in a frenzy to destroy.
He sprang at the foremost man, the chief of the Yeehats, ripping his throat open until torn jugular spouted a fountain of blood.
He didn't stop to worry the victim, but ripped in passing, with the next bound tearing wide the throat of a second man.
There was no stopping him as he tore through the crowd with murderous fury.
He plunged about in their very midst, tearing, destroying, in constant and terrible motion which defied the arrows they shot at him.
In fact, so unbelievably fast were his movements, and so closely were the Indians tangled together, that they shot one another with the arrows.
A young hunter threw a spear at Buck in mid air.
The spear drove through the chest of another hunter.
The point broke through the skin of his back and stuck out, then a panic seized the Yeehats.
And they fled in terror to the woods, shouting as they fled the coming of the Evil Spirit.
And truly Buck was the Fiend made flesh, raging at their heels and pulling them down like deer as they raced through the trees.
It was a fateful day for the Yeehats.
They scattered far and wide over the country.
And it wasn't till a week later that the last of the survivors gathered together in a lower valley and counted their losses.
As for Buck, tired of the chase, he returned to the ruined camp.
He found Pete where he had been killed in his blankets in the first moment of surprise.
Thornton's desperate struggle was fresh-written on the earth, and Buck smelled every detail of it down to the edge of a deep pool.
By the edge, head and front feet in the water, lay Skeet, faithful to the last.
The pool itself, muddy and discolored from the sluice boxes, completely hid what it contained, and it contained John Thornton.
For Buck followed his trace into the water, from which no trace led away.
All day Buck brooded by the pool or wandered restlessly about the camp.
Death, as a stopping of movement, as a passing out and away from the lives of the living, he knew.
And he knew John Thornton was dead.
It left a great emptiness in him, somewhat like hunger, but a void which ached and ached, and which food couldn't fill.
At times, when he stopped to look at the bodies of the Yeehats, he forgot the pain of it.
And at such times he felt a great pride in himself, a pride greater than any he had yet felt.
He had killed man, the noblest game of all, and he had killed in the face of the law of club and fang.
He sniffed the bodies curiously, they had died so easily.
It was harder to kill a husky dog than them.
They were no match at all, were it not for their arrows and spears and clubs.
From then on he'd be unafraid of them except when they carried in their hands their arrows, spears, and clubs.
Night came on, and a full moon rose high over the trees into the sky, lighting the land till it lay bathed in ghostly day.
When night came, Buck brooded and mourned by the pool.
He became aware of a stirring of new life in the forest, different from the life the Yeehats had made.
He stood up, listening and scenting, From far away came a faint, sharp yelp, followed by a chorus of similar sharp yelps.
As the moments passed, the yelps grew closer and louder.
Again Buck knew them as things heard in that other world which stayed in his memory.
He walked to the center of the open space and listened.
It was the call, the many-noted call, sounding more luringly and compellingly than ever before.
And as never before, he was ready to obey.
John Thornton was dead, the last tie was broken.
Man and the claims of man no longer bound him.
The wolf pack had crossed over from the land of streams and timber.
They invaded Buck's valley, hunting their living food on the flanks of the migrating moose, just as the Yeehats hunted it.
Into the clearing where the moonlight streamed, they poured in a silvery flood.
And in the center of the clearing stood Buck, motionless as a statue, waiting their coming.
They were awed, so still and large he stood, and a moment's pause fell, till the boldest one leaped straight for him.
Like a flash Buck struck, breaking the neck.
Then he stood, without movement, as before, the stricken wolf rolling in agony behind him.
Three others tried it in quick succession.
And one after the other they drew back, streaming blood from slashed throats or shoulders.
This was enough to throw the whole pack forward, in a confused crowd, blocked and confused by its eagerness to pull down the prey.
Buck's wonderful quickness and agility helped him greatly.
Turning on his hind legs and snapping and cutting, he was everywhere at once.
He whirled so fast and guarded from side to side that his front seemed unbroken.
To keep them from getting behind him, he forced back past the pool into the creek bed until he struck a gravel bank.
He worked his way to a right angle in the bank.
The men had made this angle while mining.
There, he made his stand, he was protected on three sides, with nothing to do but face the front.
And so well did he face it, that at the end of half an hour the wolves drew back defeated.
The tongues of all were out and lolling, the white fangs showing cruelly white in the moonlight.
Some were lying down with heads raised and ears pricked forward.
Others stood on their feet, watching him.
And still others were lapping water from the pool.
One wolf, long, lean, and gray, came forward carefully in a friendly manner.
Buck recognized the wild brother with whom he had run for a night and a day.
He was whining softly, and, as Buck whined, they touched noses.
Then an old wolf, thin and battle-scarred, came forward.
Buck curled his lips into the start of a snarl, but sniffed noses with him.
Then the old wolf sat down, pointed nose at the moon, and broke out the long wolf howl.
The others sat down and howled, and now the call came to Buck in unmistakable sounds, he, too, sat down and howled.
This over, he came out of his angle and the pack crowded around him, sniffing in half-friendly, half-savage manner.
The leaders lifted the yelp of the pack and sprang away into the woods.
The wolves swung in behind, yelping in chorus.
And Buck ran with them, side by side with the wild brother, yelping as he ran.
And here may well end the story of Buck.
The years weren't many when the Yeehats noticed a change in the breed of timber wolves.
For some were seen with splashes of brown on head and muzzle, and with a line of white running down the chest.
But more remarkable than this, the Yeehats tell of a Ghost Dog that runs at the head of the pack.
They're afraid of this Ghost Dog, for it has cunning greater than they.
It steals from their camps in fierce winters, robs their traps, kills their dogs, and defies their bravest hunters.
No, the tale grows worse, Some hunters fail to return to camp.
Others are found with their throats cruelly cut open.
Around them in the snow are wolf prints larger than any normal wolf's.
Each fall, when the Yeehats follow the movement of the moose, there's a certain valley which they never enter.
And women become sad when word goes over the fire that the Evil Spirit chose that valley for a home.
In the summers there's one visitor, however, to that valley, of which the Yeehats don't know.
It's a great, beautifully coated wolf, like, and yet unlike, all other wolves.
He crosses alone from the smiling timber land and comes down into an open space among the trees.
Here a yellow stream flows from rotted moose-hide sacks and sinks into the ground.
Long grasses grow through it, and vegetable mold covers it, hiding its yellow from the sun.
And here he thinks for a time, howling once, long and mournfully, before he leaves.
But he isn't always alone, When the long winter nights come, the wolves follow their meat into the lower valleys.
He may be seen running at the head of the pack through the pale moonlight.
He leaps huge above his fellows, his great throat bellowing.
He sings a song of the younger world, which is the song of the pack.