The Call of the Wild and Selected Stories Read online

  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. And with the coming of the night, brooding and mourning by the pool, Buck became alive to a stirring of the new life in the forest other than that which the Yeehats had made. He stood up, listening and scenting. From far away drifted 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 persisted 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.

  Hunting their living meat, as the Yeehats were hunting it, on the flanks of the migrating moose, the wolf pack had at last crossed over from the land of streams and timber and invaded Buck’s valley. 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 sharp succession; and one after the other they drew back, streaming blood from slashed throats or shoulders.

  This was sufficient to fling the whole pack forward, pell-mell, crowded together, blocked and confused by its eagerness to pull down the prey. Buck’s marvelous quickness and agility stood him in good stead. Pivoting on his hind legs, and snapping and gashing, he was everywhere at once, presenting a front which was apparently unbroken so swiftly did he whirl and guard from side to side. But to prevent them from getting behind him, he was forced back, down past the pool and into the creek bed, till he brought up against a high gravel bank. He worked along to a right angle in the bank which the men had made in the course of mining, and in this angle he came to bay, protected on three sides and 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 discomfited. 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 and lean and gray, advanced cautiously, in a friendly manner, and 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, gaunt and battle-scarred, came forward. Buck writhed his lips into the preliminary of a snarl, but sniffed noses with him. Whereupon 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 accents. 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 were not many when the Yeehats noted a change in the breed of timber wolves; for some were seen with splashes of brown on head and muzzle, and with a rift of white centering down the chest. But more remarkable than this, the Yeehats tell of a Ghost Dog that runs at the head of the pack. They are afraid of this Ghost Dog, for it has cunning greater than they, stealing from their camps in fierce winters, robbing their traps, slaying their dogs, and defying their bravest hunters.

  Nay, the tale grows worse. Hunters there are who fail to return to the camp, and hunters there have been whom their tribesmen found with throats slashed cruelly open and with wolf prints about them in the snow greater than the prints of any wolf. Each fall, when the Yeehats follow the movement of the moose, there is a certain valley which they never enter. And women there are who become sad when the word goes over the fire of how the Evil Spirit came to select that valley for an abiding place.

  In the summers there is one visitor, however, to that valley, of which the Yeehats do not know. It is a great, gloriously 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, with long grasses growing through it and vegetable mold overrunning it and hiding its yellow from the sun; and here he muses for a time, howling once, long and mournfully, ere he departs.

  But he is not always alone. When the long winter nights come on and the wolves follow their meat into the lower valleys, he may be seen running at the head of the pack through the pale moonlight or glimmering borealis, leaping gigantic above his fellows, his great throat a-bellow as he sings a song of the younger world, which is the song of the pack.

  Diable—a Dog

  The dog was a devil. This was recognized throughout the Northland. Hell’s Spawn he was called by many men, but his master, Black Lecle‘re, chose for him the shameful name Diable. Now Black Lecle‘re was also a devil, and the twain were well matched. The first they met, Diable was a puppy, lean and hungry and with bitter eyes; and they met with snap and snarl and wicked looks, for Lecle‘re’s upper lip had a wolfish way of lifting and showing the cruel white teeth. And it lifted then and his eyes glinted viciously as he reached for Diable and dragged him out from the squirming litter. It was certain that they divined each other, for on the instant Diable had buried his puppy fangs in Lecle‘re’s hand and Lecle‘re, with thumb and finger, was coolly choking his young life out of him.

  “Sacrédam!” the Frenchman said softly, flirting the quick blood from his bitten hand and gazing down on the little puppy choking and gasping in the snow.

  Lecle‘re turned to John Hamlin, storekeeper of the Sixty Mile Post. “Dat fo’ wa’t Ah lak heem. ’Ow moch, eh, you, m’sieu’? ’Ow moch? Ah buy heem, now.”

  And because he hated him with an exceeding bitter hate, Lecle‘re bought Diable. And for five years the twain adventured across the Northland, from St. Michael’s and the Yukon Delta to the head reaches of the Pelly and even so far as the Peace River, Athabaska and the Great Slave. And they acquired a reputation for uncompromising wickedness the like of which never before had attached itself to man and dog.

  Diable’s father was a great gray timber wolf. But the mother of Diable, as he dimly remembered her, was a snarling, bickering husky, full-fronted and heavy-chested, with a malign eye, a catlike grip on life, and a genius for trickery and evil. There was neither faith nor trust in her. Much of evil and much of strength were there in these, Diable’s progenitors, and, bone and flesh of their bone and flesh, he had inherited it all. And then came Black Lecle‘re, to lay his heavy hand on the bit of pulsating puppy life, to press and prod and mold it till it became a big, bristling beast, acute in knavery, overspilling with hate, sinister, malignant, diabolical. With a proper master the puppy might have made a fairly ordinary, efficient sled dog. He never got the chance. Lecle‘re but confirmed him in his congenital iniquity.

  The history of Lecle‘re and the dog is a history of war—of five cruel, relentless years, of which their first meeting is fit summary. To begin with, it was Lecle‘re’s fault, for he hated with understanding and intelligence, while the long-legged, ungainly puppy hated only blindly, instinctively, without reason or method. At first there were no refinements of cruelty (these were to come later), but simple beatings and crude brutalities. In one of these, Diable had an ear injured. He never regained control of the riven muscles, and ever after the ear drooped limply down to keep keen the memory of his tormentor. And he never forgot.

  His puppyhood was a period of foolish rebellion. He was always worsted, but he fought back because it w
as his nature to fight back. And he was unconquerable. Yelping shrilly from the pain of lash and club, he none the less always contrived to throw in the defiant snarl, the bitter, vindictive menace of his soul, which fetched without fail more blows and beatings. But his was his mother’s tenacious grip on life. Nothing could kill him. He flourished under misfortune, grew fat with famine, and out of his terrible struggle for life developed a preternatural intelligence. His was the stealth and cunning of his mother, the fierceness and valor of his wolf sire.

  Possibly it was because of his father that he never wailed. His puppy yelps passed with his lanky legs, so that he became grim and taciturn, quick to strike, slow to warn. He answered curse with snarl and blow with snap, grinning the while his implacable hatred; but never again, under the extremest agony, did Lecle‘re bring from him the cry of fear or pain. This unconquerableness only fanned Lecle‘re’s wrath and stirred him to greater devil-tries. Did Lecle‘re give Diable half a fish and to his mates whole ones, Diable went forth to rob other dogs of their fish. Also he robbed caches and expressed himself in a thousand rogueries till he became a terror to all dogs and the masters of dogs. Did Lecle‘re beat Diable and fondle Babette—Babette, who was not half the worker he was—why, Diable threw her down in the snow and broke her hind leg in his heavy jaws, so that Lecle‘re was forced to shoot her. Likewise, in bloody battles Diable mastered all his teammates, set them the law of trail and forage, and made them live to the law he set.

  In five years he heard but one kind word, received but one soft stroke of a hand, and then he did not know what manner of things they were. He leaped like the untamed thing he was, and his jaws were together in a flash. It was the missionary at Sunrise, a newcomer in the country, who spoke the kind word and gave the soft stroke of the hand. And for six months after, he wrote no letters home to the States, and the surgeon at McQuestion traveled two hundred miles on the ice to save him from blood poisoning.

  Men and dogs looked askance at Diable when he drifted into their camps and posts, and they greeted him with feet threateningly lifted for the kick, or with bristling manes and bared fangs. Once a man did kick Diable, and Diable, with quick wolf snap, closed his jaws like a steel trap on the man’s leg and crunched down to the bone. Whereat the man was determined to have his life, only Black Lecle‘re, with ominous eyes and naked hunting knife, stepped in between. The killing of Diable—ah, sacrédam! that was a pleasure Leclère re served for himself. Someday it would happen, or else—bah! who was to know? Anyway, the problem would be solved.

  For they had become problems to each other, this man and beast, or rather, they had become a problem, the pair of them. The very breath each drew was a challenge and a menace to the other. Their hate bound them together as love could never bind. Lecle‘re was bent on the coming of the day when Diable should wilt in spirit and cringe and whimper at his feet. And Diable—Lecle‘re knew what was in Diable’s mind, and more than once had read it in his eyes. And so clearly had he read that when the dog was at his back he made it a point to glance often over his shoulder.

  Men marveled when Lecle‘re refused large money for the dog. “Someday you’ll kill him and be out his price,” said John Hamlin, once, when Diable lay panting in the snow where Lecle‘re had kicked him and no one knew whether his ribs were broken and no one dared look to see.

  “Dat,” said Lecle‘re dryly, “dat is my bizness, m’sieu’.”

  And the men marveled that Diable did not run away. They did not understand. But Lecle‘re understood. He was a man who had lived much in the open, beyond the sound of human tongue, and he had learned the voices of wind and storm, the sigh of night, the whisper of dawn, the clash of day. In a dim way he could hear the green things growing, the running of the sap, the bursting of the bud. And he knew the subtle speech of the things that moved, of the rabbit in the snare, the moody raven beating the air with hollow wing, the baldface shuffling under the moon, the wolf like a gray shadow gliding betwixt the twilight and the dark. And to him Diable spoke clear and direct. Full well he understood why Diable did not run away, and he looked more often over his shoulder.

  When in anger, Diable was not nice to look upon, and more than once had he leaped for Lecle‘re’s throat, to be stretched quivering and senseless in the snow by the butt of the ever-ready dog whip. And so Diable learned to bide his time. When he reached his full strength and prime of youth, he thought the time had come. He was broad-chested, powerfully muscled, of far more than ordinary size, and his neck from head to shoulders was a mass of bristling hair—to all appearances a full-blooded wolf. Lecle‘re was lying asleep in his furs when Diable deemed the time to be ripe. He crept upon him stealthily, head low to earth and lone ear laid back, with a feline softness of tread to which even Lecle‘re’s delicate tympanum could not responsively vibrate. The dog breathed gently, very gently, and not till he was close at hand did he raise his head. He paused for a moment and looked at the bronzed bull throat, naked and knotty and swelling to a deep and steady pulse. The slaver dripped down his fangs and slid off his tongue at the sight, and in that moment he remembered his drooping ear, his uncounted blows and wrongs, and without a sound sprang on the sleeping man.

  Lecle‘re awoke to the pang of the fangs in his throat, and, perfect animal that he was, he awoke clearheaded and with full comprehension. He closed on the hound’s windpipe with both his hands and rolled out of his furs to get his weight uppermost. But the thousands of Diable’s ancestors had clung at the throats of unnumbered moose and caribou and dragged them down, and the wisdom of those ancestors was his. When Lecle‘re’s weight came on top of him, he drove his hind legs upward and in and clawed down chest and abdomen, ripping and tearing through skin and muscle. And when he felt the man’s body wince above him and lift, he worried and shook at the man’s throat. His teammates closed around in a snarling, slavering circle, and Diable, with failing breath and fading sense, knew that their jaws were hungry for him. But that did not matter—it was the man, the man above him, and he ripped and clawed and shook and worried to the last ounce of his strength. But Lecle‘re choked him with both his hands till Diable’s chest heaved and writhed for the air denied, and his eyes glazed and his jaws slowly loosened and his tongue protruded black and swollen.

  “Eh? Bon, you devil!” Lecle‘re gurgled, mouth and throat clogged with his own blood, as he shoved the dizzy dog from him.

  And then Lecle‘re cursed the other dogs off as they fell upon Diable. They drew back into a wider circle, squatting alertly on their haunches and licking their chops, each individual hair on every neck bristling and erect.

  Diable recovered quickly, and at sound of Lecle‘re’s voice, tottered to his feet and swayed weakly back and forth.

  “A-a-ah! You beeg devil!” Lecle‘re spluttered. “Ah fix you. Ah fix you plentee, by Gar!”

  Diable, the air biting into his exhausted lungs like wine, flashed full into the man’s face, his jaws missing and coming together with a metallic clip. They rolled over and over on the snow, Lecle‘re striking madly with his fists. Then they separated, face to face, and circled back and forth before each other for an opening. Lecle‘re could have drawn his knife. His rifle was at his feet. But the beast in him was up and raging. He would do the thing with his hands—and his teeth. The dog sprang in, but Lecle‘re knocked him over with a blow of his fist, fell upon him, and buried his teeth to the bone in the dog’s shoulder.

  It was a primordial setting and a primordial scene, such as might have been in the savage youth of the world. An open space in a dark forest, a ring of grinning wolf-dogs, and in the center two beasts, locked in combat, snapping and snarling, raging madly about, panting, sobbing, cursing, straining, wild with passion, blind with lust, in a fury of murder, ripping, tearing and clawing in elemental brutishness.

  But Lecle‘re caught the dog behind the ear with a blow from his fist, knocking him over and for an instant stunning him. Then Lecle‘re leaped upon him with his feet, and sprang up and down, striving
to grind him into the earth. Both Diable’s hind legs were broken ere Lecle‘re ceased that he might catch breath.

  “A-a-ah! A-a-ah!” he screamed, incapable of articulate speech, shaking his fist through sheer impotence of throat and larynx.

  But Diable was indomitable. He lay there in a hideous, helpless welter, his lip feebly lifting and writhing to the snarl he had not the strength to utter. Lecle‘re kicked him, and the tired jaws closed on the ankle but could not break the skin.

  Then Lecle‘re picked up the whip and proceeded almost to cut him to pieces, at each stroke of the lash crying: “Dis taim Ah break you! Eh? By Gar, Ah break you!”

  In the end, exhausted, fainting from loss of blood, he crumpled up and fell by his victim, and, when the wolf-dogs closed in to take their vengeance, with his last consciousness dragged his body on top of Diable to shield him from their fangs.

  This occurred not far from Sunrise, and the missionary, opening the door to Lecle‘re a few hours later, was surprised to note the absence of Diable from the team. Nor did his surprise lessen when Lecle‘re threw back the robes from the sled, gathered Diable into his arms, and staggered across the threshold. It happened that the surgeon of McQuestion was up on a gossip, and between them they proceeded to repair Lecle‘re.

  “Merci, non,” said he. “Do you fix firs’ de dog. To die? Non. Eet is not good. Becos’ heem Ah mus’ yet break. Dat fo’ w’at he mus’ not die.”

  The surgeon called it a marvel, the missionary a miracle, that Lecle‘re lived through at all; but so weakened was he that in the spring the fever got him and he went on his back again. The dog had been in even worse plight, but his grip on life prevailed, and the bones of his hind legs knitted and his internal organs righted themselves during the several weeks he lay strapped to the floor. And by the time Lecle‘re, finally convalescent, sallow and shaky, took the sun by the cabin door, Diable had reasserted his supremacy and brought not only his own team mates but the missionary’s dogs into subjection.