death of Curly, the great fight with Spitz, and the good things he had
eaten or would like to eat. He was not homesick. The Sunland was very
dim and distant, and such memories had no power over him. Far more
potent were the memories of his heredity that gave things he had never
seen before a seeming familiarity; the instincts (which were but the
memories of his ancestors become habits) which had lapsed in later
days, and still later, in him, quickened and become alive again.
Sometimes as he crouched there, blinking dreamily at the flames, it
seemed that the flames were of another fire, and that as he crouched by
this other fire he saw another and different man from the half-breed
cook before him. This other man was shorter of leg and longer of arm,
with muscles that were stringy and knotty rather than rounded and
swelling. The hair of this man was long and matted, and his head
slanted back under it from the eyes. He uttered strange sounds, and
seemed very much afraid of the darkness, into which he peered
continually, clutching in his hand, which hung midway between knee and
foot, a stick with a heavy stone made fast to the end. He was all but
naked, a ragged and fire-scorched skin hanging part way down his back,
but on his body there was much hair. In some places, across the chest
and shoulders and down the outside of the arms and thighs, it was
matted into almost a thick fur. He did not stand erect, but with trunk
inclined forward from the hips, on legs that bent at the knees. About
his body there was a peculiar springiness, or resiliency, almost
catlike, and a quick alertness as of one who lived in perpetual fear of
things seen and unseen.
At other times this hairy man squatted by the fire with head between
his legs and slept. On such occasions his elbows were on his knees, his
hands clasped above his head as though to shed rain by the hairy arms.
And beyond that fire, in the circling darkness, Buck could see many
gleaming coals, two by two, always two by two, which he knew to be the
eyes of great beasts of prey. And he could hear the crashing of their
bodies through the undergrowth, and the noises they made in the night.
And dreaming there by the Yukon bank, with lazy eyes blinking at the
fire, these sounds and sights of another world would make the hair to
rise along his back and stand on end across his shoulders and up his
neck, till he whimpered low and suppressedly, or growled softly, and
the half-breed cook shouted at him, Hey, you Buck, wake up! Whereupon
the other world would vanish and the real world come into his eyes, and
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