A hundred yards farther on, Buck came upon one of the sled-dogs
Thornton had bought in Dawson. This dog was thrashing about in a
death-struggle, directly on the trail, and Buck passed around him
without stopping. From the camp came the faint sound of many voices,
rising and falling in a sing-song chant. Bellying forward to the edge
of the clearing, he found Hans, lying on his face, feathered with
arrows like a porcupine. At the same instant Buck peered out where the
spruce-bough lodge had been and saw what made his hair leap straight up
on his neck and shoulders. A gust of overpowering rage swept over him.
He did not know that he growled, but he growled aloud with a terrible
ferocity. For the last time in his life he allowed passion to usurp
cunning and reason, and it was because of his great love for John
Thornton that he lost his head.
The Yeehats were dancing about the wreckage of the spruce-bough lodge
when they heard a fearful roaring and saw rushing upon them an animal
the like of which they had never seen before. It was Buck, a live
hurricane of fury, hurling himself upon them in a frenzy to destroy. He
sprang at the foremost man (it was the chief of the Yeehats), ripping
the throat wide open till the rent jugular spouted a fountain of blood.
He did not pause to worry the victim, but ripped in passing, with the
next bound tearing wide the throat of a second man. There was no
withstanding him. He plunged about in their very midst, tearing,
rending, destroying, in constant and terrific motion which defied the
arrows they discharged at him. In fact, so inconceivably rapid were his
movements, and so closely were the Indians tangled together, that they
shot one another with the arrows; and one young hunter, hurling a spear
at Buck in mid air, drove it through the chest of another hunter with
such force that the point broke through the skin of the back and stood
out beyond. Then a panic seized the Yeehats, and they fled in terror to
the woods, proclaiming as they fled the advent of the Evil Spirit.
And truly Buck was the Fiend incarnate, raging at their heels and
dragging them down like deer as they raced through the trees. It was a
fateful day for the Yeehats. They scattered far and wide over the
country, and it was not till a week later that the last of the
survivors gathered together in a lower valley and counted their losses.
As for Buck, wearying of the pursuit, he returned to the desolated
camp. He found Pete where he had been killed in his blankets in the
first moment of surprise. Thornton s desperate struggle was
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