men, and countless dogs, and Buck found them all at work. It seemed the
ordained order of things that dogs should work. All day they swung up
and down the main street in long teams, and in the night their jingling
bells still went by. They hauled cabin logs and firewood, freighted up
to the mines, and did all manner of work that horses did in the Santa
Clara Valley. Here and there Buck met Southland dogs, but in the main
they were the wild wolf husky breed. Every night, regularly, at nine,
at twelve, at three, they lifted a nocturnal song, a weird and eerie
chant, in which it was Buck s delight to join.
With the aurora borealis flaming coldly overhead, or the stars leaping
in the frost dance, and the land numb and frozen under its pall of
snow, this song of the huskies might have been the defiance of life,
only it was pitched in minor key, with long-drawn wailings and
half-sobs, and was more the pleading of life, the articulate travail of
existence. It was an old song, old as the breed itself one of the first
songs of the younger world in a day when songs were sad. It was
invested with the woe of unnumbered generations, this plaint by which
Buck was so strangely stirred. When he moaned and sobbed, it was with
the pain of living that was of old the pain of his wild fathers, and
the fear and mystery of the cold and dark that was to them fear and
mystery. And that he should be stirred by it marked the completeness
with which he harked back through the ages of fire and roof to the raw
beginnings of life in the howling ages.
Seven days from the time they pulled into Dawson, they dropped down the
steep bank by the Barracks to the Yukon Trail, and pulled for Dyea and
Salt Water. Perrault was carrying despatches if anything more urgent
than those he had brought in; also, the travel pride had gripped him,
and he purposed to make the record trip of the year. Several things
favored him in this. The week s rest had recuperated the dogs and put
them in thorough trim. The trail they had broken into the country was
packed hard by later journeyers. And further, the police had arranged
in two or three places deposits of grub for dog and man, and he was
travelling light.
They made Sixty Mile, which is a fifty-mile run, on the first day; and
the second day saw them booming up the Yukon well on their way to
Pelly. But such splendid running was achieved not without great trouble
and vexation on the part of Francois. The insidious revolt led by Buck
26