Call of the Wild and White Fang (Barnes & Noble Classics Series) Read online

  “Henry, it’s a blame misfortune to be out of ammunition.”

  Bill had finished his pipe, and was helping his companion spread the bed of fur and blanket upon the spruce boughs which he had laid over the snow before supper. Henry grunted, and began unlacing his moccasins.

  “How many cartridges did you say you had left?” he asked.

  “Three,” came the answer. “An’ I wisht ‘twas three hundred. Then I’d show ’em what for, damn ’em!”

  He shook his fist angrily at the gleaming eyes, and began securely to prop his moccasins before the fire.

  “An’ I wisht this cold snap’d break,” he went on. “It’s ben fifty below for two weeks now. An’ I wisht I’d never started on this trip, Henry. I don’t like the looks of it. I don’t feel right, somehow. An’ while I’m wishin’, I wisht the trip was over an’ done with, an’ you an’ me a-sittin’ by the fire in Fort McGurryn just about now an’ playin’ cribbageo—that’s what I wisht.”

  Henry grunted and crawled into bed. As he dozed off he was aroused by his comrade’s voice.

  “Say, Henry, that other one that come in an’ got a fish—why didn’t the dogs pitch into it? That’s what’s botherin’ me.”

  “You’re botherin’ too much, Bill,” came the sleepy response. “You was never like this before. You jes’ shut up now, an’ go to sleep, an’ you’ll be all hunkydory in the mornin’. Your stomach’s sour, that’s what’s botherin’ you.”

  The men slept, breathing heavily, side by side, under the one covering. The fire died down, and the gleaming eyes drew closer the circle they had flung about the camp. The dogs clustered together in fear, now and again snarling menacingly as a pair of eyes drew close. Once their uproar became so loud that Bill woke up. He got out of bed carefully, so as not to disturb the sleep of his comrade, and threw more wood on the fire. As it began to flame up, the circle of eyes drew farther back. He glanced casually at the huddling dogs. He rubbed his eyes and looked at them more sharply. Then he crawled back into the blankets.

  “Henry,” he said. “Oh, Henry.”

  Henry groaned as he passed from sleep to waking, and demanded, “What’s wrong now?”

  “Nothin‘,” came the answer, “only there’s seven of ’em again. I just counted.”

  Henry acknowledged receipt of the information with a grunt and slid into a snore as he drifted back into sleep.

  In the morning it was Henry who awoke first and routed his companion out of bed. Daylight was yet three hours away, though it was already six o’clock; and in the darkness Henry went about preparing breakfast, while Bill rolled the blankets and made the sled ready for lashing.

  “Say, Henry,” he asked suddenly, “how many dogs did you say we had?”

  “Six.”

  “Wrong,” Bill proclaimed triumphantly.

  “Seven again?” Henry queried.

  “No, five; one’s gone.”

  “The hell!” Henry cried in wrath, leaving the cooking to come and count the dogs.

  “You’re right, Bill,” he concluded. “Fatty’s gone.”

  “An’ he went like greased lightnin’ once he got started. Couldn’t ’ve seen ’m for smoke.”

  “No chance at all,” Henry concluded. “They jes’ swallowed ’m alive. I bet he was yelpin’ as he went down their throats, damn ’em!”

  “He always was a fool dog,” said Bill.

  “But no fool dog ought to be fool enough to go off an’ commit suicide that way.” He looked over the remainder of the team with a speculative eye that summed up instantly the salient traits of each animal. “I bet none of the others would do it.”

  “Couldn’t drive ’em away from the fire with a club,” Bill agreed. “I always did think there was somethin’ wrong with Fatty, anyway.”

  And this was the epitaph of a dead dog on the Northland trail—less scant than the epitaph of many another dog, of many a man.

  II

  The She-Wolf

  Breakfast eaten and the slim camp-outfit lashed to the sled, the men turned their backs on the cheery fire and launched out into the darkness. At once began to rise the cries that were fiercely sad—cries that called through the darkness and cold to one another and answered back. Conversation ceased. Daylight came at nine o‘clock. At midday the sky to the south warmed to rose-color, and marked where the bulge of the earth intervened between the meridian sun and the northern world. But the rose-color swiftly faded. The gray light of day that remained lasted until three o’clock, when it, too, faded, and the pall of the Arctic night descended upon the lone and silent land.

  As darkness came on, the hunting-cries to right and left and rear drew closer—so close that more than once they sent surges of fear through the toiling dogs, throwing them into short-lived panics.

  At the conclusion of one such panic, when he and Henry had got the dogs back in the traces, Bill said:

  “I wisht they’d strike game somewheres, an’ go away an’ leave us alone.”

  “They do get on the nerves horrible,” Henry sympathized.

  They spoke no more until camp was made.

  Henry was bending over and adding ice to the bubbling pot of beans when he was startled by the sound of a blow, an exclamation from Bill, and a sharp snarling cry of pain from among the dogs. He straightened up in time to see a dim form disappearing across the snow into the shelter of the dark. Then he saw Bill, standing amid the dogs, half triumphant, half crest-fallen, in one hand a stout club, in the other the tail and part of the body of a sun-cured salmon.

  “It got half of it,” he announced; “but I got a whack at it jes’ the same. D’ye hear it squeal!”

  “What’d it look like?” Henry asked.

  “Couldn’t see. But it had four legs an’ a mouth an’ hair an’ looked like any dog.”

  “Must be a tame wolf, I reckon.”

  “It’s damned tame, whatever it is, comin’ in here at feedin’ time an’ gettin’ its whack of fish.”

  That night, when supper was finished and they sat on the oblong box and pulled at their pipes, the circle of gleaming eyes drew in even closer than before.

  “I wisht they’d spring up a bunch of moose or somethin’, an’ go away an’ leave us alone,” Bill said.

  Henry grunted with an intonation that was not all sympathy, and for a quarter of an hour they sat on in silence, Henry staring at the fire, and Bill at the circle of eyes that burned in the darkness just beyond the firelight.

  “I wisht we was pullin’ into McGurry right now,” he began again.

  “Shut up your wishin’ an’ your croakin’” Henry burst out angrily.

  “Your stomach’s sour. That’s what’s ailin’ you. Swallow a spoonful of sody, an’ you’ll sweeten up wonderful an’ be more pleasant company.”

  In the morning, Henry was aroused by fervid blasphemy that proceeded from the mouth of Bill. Henry propped himself up on an elbow and looked to see his comrade standing among the dogs beside the replenished fire, his arms raised in objurgation, his face distorted with passion.

  “Hello!” Henry called. “What’s up now?”

  “Frog’s gone,” came the answer.

  “No.”

  “I tell you yes.”

  Henry leaped out of the blankets and to the dogs. He counted them with care, and then joined his partner in cursing the powers of the Wild that had robbed them of another dog.

  “Frog was the strongest dog of the bunch,” Bill pronounced finally.

  “An’ he was no fool dog neither,” Henry added.

  And so was recorded the second epitaph in two days.

  A gloomy breakfast was eaten, and the four remaining dogs were harnessed to the sled. The day was a repetition of the days that had gone before. The men toiled without speech across the face of the frozen world. The silence was unbroken save by the cries of their pursuers, that, unseen, hung upon their rear. With the coming of night in the mid-afternoon, the cries sounded closer as the pursuers drew in according to thei
r custom; and the dogs grew excited and frightened, and were guilty of panics that tangled the traces and further depressed the two men.

  “There, that’ll fix you fool critters,” Bill said with satisfaction that night, standing erect at completion of his task.

  Henry left his cooking to come and see. Not only had his partner tied the dogs up, but he had tied them, after the Indian fashion, with sticks. About the neck of each dog he had fastened a leather thong. To this, and so close to the neck that the dog could not get his teeth to it, he had tied a stout stick four or five feet in length. The other end of the stick, in turn, was made fast to a stake in the ground by means of a leather thong. The dog was unable to gnaw through the leather at his own end of the stick. The stick prevented him from getting at the leather that fastened the other end.

  Henry nodded his head approvingly.

  “It’s the only contraption that’ll ever hold One Ear,” he said. “He can gnaw through leather as clean as a knife an’ jes’ about half as quick. They all ’ll be here in the mornin’ hunkydory.”

  “You jes’ bet they will,” Bill affirmed. “If one of ‘em turns up missin’, I’ll go without my coffee.”

  “They jes’ know we ain’t loaded to kill,” Henry remarked at bedtime, indicating the gleaming circle that hemmed them in. “If we could put a couple of shots into ’em, they’d be more respectful. They come closer every night. Get the firelight out of your eyes an’ look hard—there! Did you see that one?”

  For some time the two men amused themselves with watching the movement of vague forms on the edge of the firelight. By looking closely and steadily at where a pair of eyes burned in the darkness, the form of the animal would slowly take shape. They could even see these forms move at times.

  A sound among the dogs attracted the men’s attention. One Ear was uttering quick, eager whines, lunging at the length of his stick toward the darkness, and desisting now and again in order to make frantic attacks on the stick with his teeth.

  “Look at that, Bill,” Henry whispered.

  Full into the firelight, with a stealthy, sidelong movement, glided a doglike animal. It moved with commingled mistrust and daring, cautiously observing the men, its attention fixed on the dogs. One Ear strained the full length of the stick toward the intruder and whined with eagerness.

  “That fool One Ear don’t seem scairt much,” Bill said in a low tone.

  “It’s a she-wolf,” Henry whispered back, “an’ that accounts for Fatty an’ Frog. She’s the decoy for the pack. She draws out the dog an’ then all the rest pitches in an’ eats ’m up.”

  The fire crackled. A log fell apart with a loud spluttering noise. At the sound of it the strange animal leaped back into the darkness.

  “Henry, I’m a-thinkin,’” Bill announced.

  “Thinkin’ what?”

  “I’m a-thinkin’ that was the one I lambasted with the club.”

  “Ain’t the slightest doubt in the world,” was Henry’s response.

  “An’ right here I want to remark,” Bill went on, “that that animal’s familyarity with campfires is suspicious an’ immoral.”

  “It knows for certain more’n a self-respectin’ wolf ought to know,” Henry agreed. “A wolf that knows enough to come in with the dogs at feedin’ time has had experiences.”

  “Ol’ Villan had a dog once that run away with the wolves,” Bill cogitated aloud. “I ought to know. I shot it out of the pack in a moose pasture over on Little Stick. An’ Ol’ Villan cried like a baby. Hadn’t seen it for three years, he said. Ben with the wolves all that time.”

  “I reckon you’ve called the turn, Bill. That wolf’s a dog, an’ it’s eaten fish many’s the time from the hand of man.”

  “An’ if I get a chance at it, that wolf that’s a dog’ll be jes’ meat,” Bill declared. “We can’t afford to lose no more animals.”

  “But you’ve only got three cartridges,” Henry objected.

  “I’ll wait for a dead sure shot,” was the reply.

  In the morning Henry renewed the fire and cooked breakfast to the accompaniment of his partner’s snoring.

  “You was sleepin’ jes’ too comfortable for anythin’,” Henry told him as he routed him out for breakfast. “I hadn’t the heart to rouse you.”

  Bill began to eat sleepily. He noticed that his cup was empty and started to reach for the pot. But the pot was beyond arm’s length and beside Henry.

  “Say, Henry,” he chided gently, “ain’t you forgot somethin’?”

  Henry looked about with great carefulness and shook his head. Bill held up the empty cup.

  “You don’t get no coffee,” Henry announced.

  “Ain’t run out?” Bill asked anxiously.

  “Nope.”

  “Ain’t thinkin’ it’ll hurt my digestion?”

  “Nope.”

  A flush of angry blood pervaded Bill’s face.

  “Then it’s jes’ warm an’ anxious I am to be hearin’ you explain yourself,” he said.

  “Spanker’s gone,” Henry answered.

  Without haste, with the air of one resigned to misfortune, Bill turned his head, and from where he sat counted the dogs.

  “How’d it happen?” he asked apathetically.

  Henry shrugged his shoulders. “Don’t know. Unless One Ear gnawed ’m loose. He couldn’t a-done it himself, that’s sure.”

  “The darned cuss.” Bill spoke gravely and slowly, with no hint of the anger that was raging within. “Jes’ because he couldn’t chew himself loose, he chews Spanker loose.”

  “Well, Spanker’s troubles is over, anyway; I guess he’s digested by this time an’ cavortin’ over the landscape in the bellies of twenty different wolves,” was Henry’s epitaph on this, the latest lost dog. “Have some coffee, Bill.”

  But Bill shook his head.

  “Go on,” Henry pleaded, elevating the pot.

  Bill shoved his cup aside. “I’ll be ding-dong-danged if I do. I said I wouldn’t if ary dog turned up missin’, an’ I won’t.”

  “It’s darn good coffee,” Henry said enticingly.

  But Bill was stubborn, and he ate a dry breakfast, washed down with mumbled curses at One Ear for the trick he had played.

  “I’ll tie ’em up out of reach of each other to-night,” Bill said, as they took the trail.

  They had traveled little more than a hundred yards, when Henry, who was in front, bent down and picked up something with which his snowshoe had collided. It was dark, and he could not see it, but he recognized it by the touch. He flung it back, so that it struck the sled and bounced along until it fetched up on Bill’s snowshoes.

  “Mebbe you’ll need that in your business,” Henry said.

  Bill uttered an exclamation. It was all that was left of Spanker—the stick with which he had been tied.

  “They ate ’m hide an’ all,” Bill announced. “The stick’s as clean as a whistle. They’ve ate the leather offen both ends. They’re damn hungry, Henry, an’ they’ll have you an’ me guessin’ before this trip’s over.”

  Henry laughed defiantly. “I ain’t been trailed this way by wolves before, but I’ve gone through a whole lot worse an’ kept my health. Takes more’n a handful of them pesky critters to do for yours truly, Bill, my son.”

  “I don’t know, I don’t know,” Bill muttered ominously.

  “Well, you’ll know all right when we pull into McGurry.”

  “I ain’t feelin’ special enthusiastic,” Bill persisted.

  “You’re off color, that’s what’s the matter with you,” Henry dogmatized. “What you need is quinine,p an’ I’m goin’ to dose you up stiff as soon as we make McGurry.”

  Bill grunted his disagreement with the diagnosis, and lapsed into silence. The day was like all the days. Light came at nine o‘clock. At twelve o’clock the southern horizon was warmed by the unseen sun; and then began the cold gray of afternoon that would merge, three hours later, into night.

  It was just after the sun�
�s futile effort to appear, that Bill slipped the rifle from under the sled-lashings and said:

  “You keep right on, Henry, I’m goin’ to see what I can see.”

  “You’d better stick by the sled,” his partner protested. “You’ve only got three cartridges, an’ there’s no tellin’ what might happen.”

  “Who’s croakin’ now?” Bill demanded triumphantly.

  Henry made no reply, and plodded on alone, though often he cast anxious glances back into the gray solitude where his partner had disappeared. An hour later, taking advantage of the cut-offs around which the sled had to go, Bill arrived.

  “They’re scattered an’ rangin’ along wide,” he said; “keepin’ up with us an’ lookin’ for game at the same time. You see, they’re sure of us, only they know they’ve got to wait to get us. In the meantime they’re willin’ to pick up anythin’ eatable that comes handy.”

  “You mean they think they’re sure of us,” Henry objected pointedly.

  But Bill ignored him. “I seen some of them. They’re pretty thin. They ain’t had a bite in weeks, I reckon, outside of Fatty an’ Frog an’ Spanker; an’ there’s so many of ’em that that didn’t go far. They’re remarkable thin. Their ribs is like washboards, an’ their stomachs is right up against their backbones. They’re pretty desperate, I can tell you. They’ll be goin’ mad yet, an’ then watch out.”

  A few minutes later, Henry, who was now traveling behind the sled, emitted a low, warning whistle. Bill turned and looked, then quietly stopped the dogs. To the rear, from around the last bend and plainly into view, on the very trail they had just covered, trotted a furry, slinking form. Its nose was to the trail, and it trotted with a peculiar, sliding, effortless gait. When they halted, it halted, throwing up its head and regarding them steadily with nostrils that twitched as it caught and studied the scent of them.

  “It’s the she-wolf,” Bill whispered.

  The dogs had lain down in the snow, and he walked past them to join his partner at the sled. Together they watched the strange animal that had pursued them for days and that had already accomplished the destruction of half their dog-team.