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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
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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 [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]