rise. Hal had traded off his revolver, so he took the axe and knocked
Billee on the head as he lay in the traces, then cut the carcass out of
the harness and dragged it to one side. Buck saw, and his mates saw,
and they knew that this thing was very close to them. On the next day
Koona went, and but five of them remained: Joe, too far gone to be
malignant; Pike, crippled and limping, only half conscious and not
conscious enough longer to malinger; Sol-leks, the one-eyed, still
faithful to the toil of trace and trail, and mournful in that he had so
little strength with which to pull; Teek, who had not travelled so far
that winter and who was now beaten more than the others because he was
fresher; and Buck, still at the head of the team, but no longer
enforcing discipline or striving to enforce it, blind with weakness
half the time and keeping the trail by the loom of it and by the dim
feel of his feet.
It was beautiful spring weather, but neither dogs nor humans were aware
of it. Each day the sun rose earlier and set later. It was dawn by
three in the morning, and twilight lingered till nine at night. The
whole long day was a blaze of sunshine. The ghostly winter silence had
given way to the great spring murmur of awakening life. This murmur
arose from all the land, fraught with the joy of living. It came from
the things that lived and moved again, things which had been as dead
and which had not moved during the long months of frost. The sap was
rising in the pines. The willows and aspens were bursting out in young
buds. Shrubs and vines were putting on fresh garbs of green. Crickets
sang in the nights, and in the days all manner of creeping, crawling
things rustled forth into the sun. Partridges and woodpeckers were
booming and knocking in the forest. Squirrels were chattering, birds
singing, and overhead honked the wild-fowl driving up from the south in
cunning wedges that split the air.
From every hill slope came the trickle of running water, the music of
unseen fountains. All things were thawing, bending, snapping. The Yukon
was straining to break loose the ice that bound it down. It ate away
from beneath; the sun ate from above. Air-holes formed, fissures sprang
and spread apart, while thin sections of ice fell through bodily into
the river. And amid all this bursting, rending, throbbing of awakening
life, under the blazing sun and through the soft-sighing breezes, like
wayfarers to death, staggered the two men, the woman, and the huskies.
48