The Law of Club and Fang

Buck’s first day on the Dyea beach was like a nightmare. Every hour wasfilled with shock and surprise. He had been suddenly jerked from the heart ofcivilization and flung into the heart of things primordial. No lazy, sun-kissedlife was this, with nothing to do but loaf and be bored. Here was neitherpeace, nor rest, nor a moment’s safety. All was confusion and action, andevery moment life and limb were in peril. There was imperative need to beconstantly alert; for these dogs and men were not town dogs and men. They weresavages, all of them, who knew no law but the law of club and fang.

He had never seen dogs fight as these wolfish creatures fought, and his firstexperience taught him an unforgetable lesson. It is true, it was a vicariousexperience, else he would not have lived to profit by it. Curly was the victim.They were camped near the log store, where she, in her friendly way, madeadvances to a husky dog the size of a full-grown wolf, though not half so largeas she. There was no warning, only a leap in like a flash, a metallic clip ofteeth, a leap out equally swift, and Curly’s face was ripped open fromeye to jaw.

It was the wolf manner of fighting, to strike and leap away; but there was moreto it than this. Thirty or forty huskies ran to the spot and surrounded thecombatants in an intent and silent circle. Buck did not comprehend that silentintentness, nor the eager way with which they were licking their chops. Curlyrushed her antagonist, who struck again and leaped aside. He met her next rushwith his chest, in a peculiar fashion that tumbled her off her feet. She neverregained them, This was what the onlooking huskies had waited for. They closedin upon her, snarling and yelping, and she was buried, screaming with agony,beneath the bristling mass of bodies.

So sudden was it, and so unexpected, that Buck was taken aback. He saw Spitzrun out his scarlet tongue in a way he had of laughing; and he saw François,swinging an axe, spring into the mess of dogs. Three men with clubs werehelping him to scatter them. It did not take long. Two minutes from the timeCurly went down, the last of her assailants were clubbed off. But she lay therelimp and lifeless in the bloody, trampled snow, almost literally torn topieces, the swart half-breed standing over her and cursing horribly. The sceneoften came back to Buck to trouble him in his sleep. So that was the way. Nofair play. Once down, that was the end of you. Well, he would see to it that henever went down. Spitz ran out his tongue and laughed again, and from thatmoment Buck hated him with a bitter and deathless hatred.

Before he had recovered from the shock caused by the tragic passing of Curly,he received another shock. François fastened upon him an arrangement of strapsand buckles. It was a harness, such as he had seen the grooms put on the horsesat home. And as he had seen horses work, so he was set to work, haulingFrançois on a sled to the forest that fringed the valley, and returning with aload of firewood. Though his dignity was sorely hurt by thus being made adraught animal, he was too wise to rebel. He buckled down with a will and didhis best, though it was all new and strange. François was stern, demandinginstant obedience, and by virtue of his whip receiving instant obedience; whileDave, who was an experienced wheeler, nipped Buck’s hind quarterswhenever he was in error. Spitz was the leader, likewise experienced, and whilehe could not always get at Buck, he growled sharp reproof now and again, orcunningly threw his weight in the traces to jerk Buck into the way he shouldgo. Buck learned easily, and under the combined tuition of his two mates andFrançois made remarkable progress. Ere they returned to camp he knew enough tostop at “ho,” to go ahead at “mush,” to swing wide onthe bends, and to keep clear of the wheeler when the loaded sled shot downhillat their heels.

“T’ree vair’ good dogs,” François told Perrault.“Dat Buck, heem pool lak hell. I tich heem queek asanyt’ing.”

By afternoon, Perrault, who was in a hurry to be on the trail with hisdespatches, returned with two more dogs. “Billee” and“Joe” he called them, two brothers, and true huskies both. Sons ofthe one mother though they were, they were as different as day and night.Billee’s one fault was his excessive good nature, while Joe was the veryopposite, sour and introspective, with a perpetual snarl and a malignant eye.Buck received them in comradely fashion, Dave ignored them, while Spitzproceeded to thrash first one and then the other. Billee wagged his tailappeasingly, turned to run when he saw that appeasement was of no avail, andcried (still appeasingly) when Spitz’s sharp teeth scored his flank. Butno matter how Spitz circled, Joe whirled around on his heels to face him, manebristling, ears laid back, lips writhing and snarling, jaws clipping togetheras fast as he could snap, and eyes diabolically gleaming—the incarnationof belligerent fear. So terrible was his appearance that Spitz was forced toforego disciplining him; but to cover his own discomfiture he turned upon theinoffensive and wailing Billee and drove him to the confines of the camp.

By evening Perrault secured another dog, an old husky, long and lean and gaunt,with a battle-scarred face and a single eye which flashed a warning of prowessthat commanded respect. He was called Sol-leks, which means the Angry One. LikeDave, he asked nothing, gave nothing, expected nothing; and when he marchedslowly and deliberately into their midst, even Spitz left him alone. He had onepeculiarity which Buck was unlucky enough to discover. He did not like to beapproached on his blind side. Of this offence Buck was unwittingly guilty, andthe first knowledge he had of his indiscretion was when Sol-leks whirled uponhim and slashed his shoulder to the bone for three inches up and down. Foreverafter Buck avoided his blind side, and to the last of their comradeship had nomore trouble. His only apparent ambition, like Dave’s, was to be leftalone; though, as Buck was afterward to learn, each of them possessed one otherand even more vital ambition.

That night Buck faced the great problem of sleeping. The tent, illumined by acandle, glowed warmly in the midst of the white plain; and when he, as a matterof course, entered it, both Perrault and François bombarded him with curses andcooking utensils, till he recovered from his consternation and fledignominiously into the outer cold. A chill wind was blowing that nipped himsharply and bit with especial venom into his wounded shoulder. He lay down onthe snow and attempted to sleep, but the frost soon drove him shivering to hisfeet. Miserable and disconsolate, he wandered about among the many tents, onlyto find that one place was as cold as another. Here and there savage dogsrushed upon him, but he bristled his neck-hair and snarled (for he was learningfast), and they let him go his way unmolested.

Finally an idea came to him. He would return and see how his own team-mateswere making out. To his astonishment, they had disappeared. Again he wanderedabout through the great camp, looking for them, and again he returned. Werethey in the tent? No, that could not be, else he would not have been drivenout. Then where could they possibly be? With drooping tail and shivering body,very forlorn indeed, he aimlessly circled the tent. Suddenly the snow gave waybeneath his fore legs and he sank down. Something wriggled under his feet. Hesprang back, bristling and snarling, fearful of the unseen and unknown. But afriendly little yelp reassured him, and he went back to investigate. A whiff ofwarm air ascended to his nostrils, and there, curled up under the snow in asnug ball, lay Billee. He whined placatingly, squirmed and wriggled to show hisgood will and intentions, and even ventured, as a bribe for peace, to lickBuck’s face with his warm wet tongue.

Another lesson. So that was the way they did it, eh? Buck confidently selecteda spot, and with much fuss and waste effort proceeded to dig a hole forhimself. In a trice the heat from his body filled the confined space and he wasasleep. The day had been long and arduous, and he slept soundly andcomfortably, though he growled and barked and wrestled with bad dreams.

Nor did he open his eyes till roused by the noises of the waking camp. At firsthe did not know where he was. It had snowed during the night and he wascompletely buried. The snow walls pressed him on every side, and a great surgeof fear swept through him—the fear of the wild thing for the trap. It wasa token that he was harking back through his own life to the lives of hisforebears; for he was a civilized dog, an unduly civilized dog, and of his ownexperience knew no trap and so could not of himself fear it. The muscles of hiswhole body contracted spasmodically and instinctively, the hair on his neck andshoulders stood on end, and with a ferocious snarl he bounded straight up intothe blinding day, the snow flying about him in a flashing cloud. Ere he landedon his feet, he saw the white camp spread out before him and knew where he wasand remembered all that had passed from the time he went for a stroll withManuel to the hole he had dug for himself the night before.

A shout from François hailed his appearance. “Wot I say?” thedog-driver cried to Perrault. “Dat Buck for sure learn queek asanyt’ing.”

Perrault nodded gravely. As courier for the Canadian Government, bearingimportant despatches, he was anxious to secure the best dogs, and he wasparticularly gladdened by the possession of Buck.

Three more huskies were added to the team inside an hour, making a total ofnine, and before another quarter of an hour had passed they were in harness andswinging up the trail toward the Dyea Cañon. Buck was glad to be gone, andthough the work was hard he found he did not particularly despise it. He wassurprised at the eagerness which animated the whole team and which wascommunicated to him; but still more surprising was the change wrought in Daveand Sol-leks. They were new dogs, utterly transformed by the harness. Allpassiveness and unconcern had dropped from them. They were alert and active,anxious that the work should go well, and fiercely irritable with whatever, bydelay or confusion, retarded that work. The toil of the traces seemed thesupreme expression of their being, and all that they lived for and the onlything in which they took delight.

Dave was wheeler or sled dog, pulling in front of him was Buck, then cameSol-leks; the rest of the team was strung out ahead, single file, to theleader, which position was filled by Spitz.

Buck had been purposely placed between Dave and Sol-leks so that he mightreceive instruction. Apt scholar that he was, they were equally apt teachers,never allowing him to linger long in error, and enforcing their teaching withtheir sharp teeth. Dave was fair and very wise. He never nipped Buck withoutcause, and he never failed to nip him when he stood in need of it. AsFrançois’s whip backed him up, Buck found it to be cheaper to mend hisways than to retaliate. Once, during a brief halt, when he got tangled in thetraces and delayed the start, both Dave and Sol-leks flew at him andadministered a sound trouncing. The resulting tangle was even worse, but Bucktook good care to keep the traces clear thereafter; and ere the day was done,so well had he mastered his work, his mates about ceased nagging him.François’s whip snapped less frequently, and Perrault even honored Buckby lifting up his feet and carefully examining them.

It was a hard day’s run, up the Cañon, through Sheep Camp, past theScales and the timber line, across glaciers and snowdrifts hundreds of feetdeep, and over the great Chilcoot Divide, which stands between the salt waterand the fresh and guards forbiddingly the sad and lonely North. They made goodtime down the chain of lakes which fills the craters of extinct volcanoes, andlate that night pulled into the huge camp at the head of Lake Bennett, wherethousands of goldseekers were building boats against the break-up of the ice inthe spring. Buck made his hole in the snow and slept the sleep of the exhaustedjust, but all too early was routed out in the cold darkness and harnessed withhis mates to the sled.

That day they made forty miles, the trail being packed; but the next day, andfor many days to follow, they broke their own trail, worked harder, and madepoorer time. As a rule, Perrault travelled ahead of the team, packing the snowwith webbed shoes to make it easier for them. François, guiding the sled at thegee-pole, sometimes exchanged places with him, but not often. Perrault was in ahurry, and he prided himself on his knowledge of ice, which knowledge wasindispensable, for the fall ice was very thin, and where there was swift water,there was no ice at all.

Day after day, for days unending, Buck toiled in the traces. Always, they brokecamp in the dark, and the first gray of dawn found them hitting the trail withfresh miles reeled off behind them. And always they pitched camp after dark,eating their bit of fish, and crawling to sleep into the snow. Buck wasravenous. The pound and a half of sun-dried salmon, which was his ration foreach day, seemed to go nowhere. He never had enough, and suffered fromperpetual hunger pangs. Yet the other dogs, because they weighed less and wereborn to the life, received a pound only of the fish and managed to keep in goodcondition.

He swiftly lost the fastidiousness which had characterized his old life. Adainty eater, he found that his mates, finishing first, robbed him of hisunfinished ration. There was no defending it. While he was fighting off two orthree, it was disappearing down the throats of the others. To remedy this, heate as fast as they; and, so greatly did hunger compel him, he was not abovetaking what did not belong to him. He watched and learned. When he saw Pike,one of the new dogs, a clever malingerer and thief, slyly steal a slice ofbacon when Perrault’s back was turned, he duplicated the performance thefollowing day, getting away with the whole chunk. A great uproar was raised,but he was unsuspected; while Dub, an awkward blunderer who was always gettingcaught, was punished for Buck’s misdeed.

This first theft marked Buck as fit to survive in the hostile Northlandenvironment. It marked his adaptability, his capacity to adjust himself tochanging conditions, the lack of which would have meant swift and terribledeath. It marked, further, the decay or going to pieces of his moral nature, avain thing and a handicap in the ruthless struggle for existence. It was allwell enough in the Southland, under the law of love and fellowship, to respectprivate property and personal feelings; but in the Northland, under the law ofclub and fang, whoso took such things into account was a fool, and in so far ashe observed them he would fail to prosper.

Not that Buck reasoned it out. He was fit, that was all, and unconsciously heaccommodated himself to the new mode of life. All his days, no matter what theodds, he had never run from a fight. But the club of the man in the red sweaterhad beaten into him a more fundamental and primitive code. Civilized, he couldhave died for a moral consideration, say the defence of Judge Miller’sriding-whip; but the completeness of his decivilization was now evidenced byhis ability to flee from the defence of a moral consideration and so save hishide. He did not steal for joy of it, but because of the clamor of his stomach.He did not rob openly, but stole secretly and cunningly, out of respect forclub and fang. In short, the things he did were done because it was easier todo them than not to do them.

His development (or retrogression) was rapid. His muscles became hard as iron,and he grew callous to all ordinary pain. He achieved an internal as well asexternal economy. He could eat anything, no matter how loathsome orindigestible; and, once eaten, the juices of his stomach extracted the lastleast particle of nutriment; and his blood carried it to the farthest reachesof his body, building it into the toughest and stoutest of tissues. Sight andscent became remarkably keen, while his hearing developed such acuteness thatin his sleep he heard the faintest sound and knew whether it heralded peace orperil. He learned to bite the ice out with his teeth when it collected betweenhis toes; and when he was thirsty and there was a thick scum of ice over thewater hole, he would break it by rearing and striking it with stiff fore legs.His most conspicuous trait was an ability to scent the wind and forecast it anight in advance. No matter how breathless the air when he dug his nest by treeor bank, the wind that later blew inevitably found him to leeward, shelteredand snug.

And not only did he learn by experience, but instincts long dead became aliveagain. The domesticated generations fell from him. In vague ways he rememberedback to the youth of the breed, to the time the wild dogs ranged in packsthrough the primeval forest and killed their meat as they ran it down. It wasno task for him to learn to fight with cut and slash and the quick wolf snap.In this manner had fought forgotten ancestors. They quickened the old lifewithin him, and the old tricks which they had stamped into the heredity of thebreed were his tricks. They came to him without effort or discovery, as thoughthey had been his always. And when, on the still cold nights, he pointed hisnose at a star and howled long and wolflike, it was his ancestors, dead anddust, pointing nose at star and howling down through the centuries and throughhim. And his cadences were their cadences, the cadences which voiced their woeand what to them was the meaning of the stiffness, and the cold, and dark.

Thus, as token of what a puppet thing life is, the ancient song surged throughhim and he came into his own again; and he came because men had found a yellowmetal in the North, and because Manuel was a gardener’s helper whosewages did not lap over the needs of his wife and divers small copies ofhimself.