resulting tangle was even worse, but Buck took 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. Francois s whip
snapped less frequently, and Perrault even honored Buck by lifting up
his feet and carefully examining them.
It was a hard day s run, up the Canon, through Sheep Camp, past the
Scales and the timber line, across glaciers and snowdrifts hundreds of
feet deep, and over the great Chilcoot Divide, which stands between the
salt water and the fresh and guards forbiddingly the sad and lonely
North. They made good time down the chain of lakes which fills the
craters of extinct volcanoes, and late that night pulled into the huge
camp at the head of Lake Bennett, where thousands of goldseekers were
building boats against the break-up of the ice in the spring. Buck made
his hole in the snow and slept the sleep of the exhausted just, but all
too early was routed out in the cold darkness and harnessed with his
mates to the sled.
That day they made forty miles, the trail being packed; but the next
day, and for many days to follow, they broke their own trail, worked
harder, and made poorer time. As a rule, Perrault travelled ahead of
the team, packing the snow with webbed shoes to make it easier for
them. Francois, guiding the sled at the gee-pole, sometimes exchanged
places with him, but not often. Perrault was in a hurry, and he prided
himself on his knowledge of ice, which knowledge was indispensable, 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 broke camp in the dark, and the first gray of dawn found them
hitting the trail with fresh 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 was ravenous. The pound and a half of
sun-dried salmon, which was his ration for each day, seemed to go
nowhere. He never had enough, and suffered from perpetual hunger pangs.
Yet the other dogs, because they weighed less and were born to the
life, received a pound only of the fish and managed to keep in good
condition.
He swiftly lost the fastidiousness which had characterized his old
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