In the excess of their own misery they were callous to the suffering of
their animals. Hal s theory, which he practised on others, was that one
must get hardened. He had started out preaching it to his sister and
brother-in-law. Failing there, he hammered it into the dogs with a
club. At the Five Fingers the dog-food gave out, and a toothless old
squaw offered to trade them a few pounds of frozen horse-hide for the
Colt s revolver that kept the big hunting-knife company at Hal s hip. A
poor substitute for food was this hide, just as it had been stripped
from the starved horses of the cattlemen six months back. In its frozen
state it was more like strips of galvanized iron, and when a dog
wrestled it into his stomach it thawed into thin and innutritious
leathery strings and into a mass of short hair, irritating and
indigestible.
And through it all Buck staggered along at the head of the team as in a
nightmare. He pulled when he could; when he could no longer pull, he
fell down and remained down till blows from whip or club drove him to
his feet again. All the stiffness and gloss had gone out of his
beautiful furry coat. The hair hung down, limp and draggled, or matted
with dried blood where Hal s club had bruised him. His muscles had
wasted away to knotty strings, and the flesh pads had disappeared, so
that each rib and every bone in his frame were outlined cleanly through
the loose hide that was wrinkled in folds of emptiness. It was
heartbreaking, only Buck s heart was unbreakable. The man in the red
sweater had proved that.
As it was with Buck, so was it with his mates. They were perambulating
skeletons. There were seven all together, including him. In their very
great misery they had become insensible to the bite of the lash or the
bruise of the club. The pain of the beating was dull and distant, just
as the things their eyes saw and their ears heard seemed dull and
distant. They were not half living, or quarter living. They were simply
so many bags of bones in which sparks of life fluttered faintly. When a
halt was made, they dropped down in the traces like dead dogs, and the
spark dimmed and paled and seemed to go out. And when the club or whip
fell upon them, the spark fluttered feebly up, and they tottered to
their feet and staggered on.
There came a day when Billee, the good-natured, fell and could not
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