All that stirring of old instincts which at stated periods drives men
out from the sounding cities to forest and plain to kill things by
chemically propelled leaden pellets, the blood lust, the joy to
kill all this was Buck s, only it was infinitely more intimate. He was
ranging at the head of the pack, running the wild thing down, the
living meat, to kill with his own teeth and wash his muzzle to the eyes
in warm blood.
There is an ecstasy that marks the summit of life, and beyond which
life cannot rise. And such is the paradox of living, this ecstasy comes
when one is most alive, and it comes as a complete forgetfulness that
one is alive. This ecstasy, this forgetfulness of living, comes to the
artist, caught up and out of himself in a sheet of flame; it comes to
the soldier, war-mad on a stricken field and refusing quarter; and it
came to Buck, leading the pack, sounding the old wolf-cry, straining
after the food that was alive and that fled swiftly before him through
the moonlight. He was sounding the deeps of his nature, and of the
parts of his nature that were deeper than he, going back into the womb
of Time. He was mastered by the sheer surging of life, the tidal wave
of being, the perfect joy of each separate muscle, joint, and sinew in
that it was everything that was not death, that it was aglow and
rampant, expressing itself in movement, flying exultantly under the
stars and over the face of dead matter that did not move.
But Spitz, cold and calculating even in his supreme moods, left the
pack and cut across a narrow neck of land where the creek made a long
bend around. Buck did not know of this, and as he rounded the bend, the
frost wraith of a rabbit still flitting before him, he saw another and
larger frost wraith leap from the overhanging bank into the immediate
path of the rabbit. It was Spitz. The rabbit could not turn, and as the
white teeth broke its back in mid air it shrieked as loudly as a
stricken man may shriek. At sound of this, the cry of Life plunging
down from Life s apex in the grip of Death, the full pack at Buck s
heels raised a hell s chorus of delight.
Buck did not cry out. He did not check himself, but drove in upon
Spitz, shoulder to shoulder, so hard that he missed the throat. They
rolled over and over in the powdery snow. Spitz gained his feet almost
as though he had not been overthrown, slashing Buck down the shoulder
and leaping clear. Twice his teeth clipped together, like the steel
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