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themselves.
The first to go was Dub. Poor blundering thief that he was, always getting
caught and punished, he had none the less been a faithful worker. His wrenched
shoulder-blade, untreated and unrested, went from bad to worse, till finally Hal
shot him with the big Colt's revolver. It is a saying of the country that an Outside
dog starves to death on the ration of the husky, so the six Outside dogs under
Buck could do no less than die on half the ration of the husky. The Newfoundland
went first, followed by the three short-haired pointers, the two mongrels hanging
more grittily on to life, but going in the end.
By this time all the amenities and gentlenesses of the Southland had fallen away
from the three people. Shorn of its glamour and romance, Arctic travel became to
them a reality too harsh for their manhood and womanhood. Mercedes ceased
weeping over the dogs, being too occupied with weeping over herself and with
quarrelling with her husband and brother. To quarrel was the one thing they were
never too weary to do. Their irritability arose out of their misery, increased with
it, doubled upon it, outdistanced it. The wonderful patience of the trail which
comes to men who toil hard and suffer sore, and remain sweet of speech and
kindly, did not come to these two men and the woman. They had no inkling of
such a patience. They were stiff and in pain; their muscles ached, their bones
ached, their very hearts ached; and because of this they became sharp of speech,
and hard words were first on their lips in the morning and last at night.
Charles and Hal wrangled whenever Mercedes gave them a chance. It was the
cherished belief of each that he did more than his share of the work, and neither
forbore to speak this belief at every opportunity. Sometimes Mercedes sided with
her husband, sometimes with her brother. The result was a beautiful and
unending family quarrel. Starting from a dispute as to which should chop a few
sticks for the fire (a dispute which concerned only Charles and Hal), presently
would be lugged in the rest of the family, fathers, mothers, uncles, cousins, people
thousands of miles away, and some of them dead. That Hal's views on art, or the
sort of society plays his mother's brother wrote, should have anything to do with
the chopping of a few sticks of firewood, passes comprehension; nevertheless the
quarrel was as likely to tend in that direction as in the direction of Charles's
political prejudices. And that Charles's sister's tale-bearing tongue should be
relevant to the building of a Yukon fire, was apparent only to Mercedes, who
disburdened herself of copious opinions upon that topic, and incidentally upon a
few other traits unpleasantly peculiar to her husband's family. In the meantime
the fire remained unbuilt, the camp half pitched, and the dogs unfed.
Mercedes nursed a special grievance the grievance of sex. She was pretty and
soft, and had been chivalrously treated all her days. But the present treatment by
her husband and brother was everything save chivalrous. It was her custom to be
helpless. They complained. Upon which impeachment of what to her was her most
essential sex-prerogative, she made their lives unendurable. She no longer
considered the dogs, and because she was sore and tired, she persisted in riding
on the sled. She was pretty and soft, but she weighed one hundred and twenty
pounds a lusty last straw to the load dragged by the weak and starving animals.
She rode for days, till they fell in the traces and the sled stood still. Charles and
Hal begged her to get off and walk, pleaded with her, entreated, the while she
wept and importuned Heaven with a recital of their brutality.
On one occasion they took her off the sled by main strength. They never did it
again. She let her legs go limp like a spoiled child, and sat down on the trail. They
went on their way, but she did not move. After they had travelled three miles they
unloaded the sled, came back for her, and by main strength put her on the sled
again.
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,
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