第32章

As he held on he became more and more conscious of the new stir in the land.There was life abroad in it different from the life which had been there throughout the summer.No longer was this fact borne in upon him in some subtle, mysterious way.The birds talked of it, the squirrels chattered about it, the very breeze whispered of it.Several times he stopped and drew in the fresh morning air in great sniffs, reading a message which made him leap on with greater speed.He was oppressed with a sense of calamity happening, if it were not calamity already happened; and as he crossed the last watershed and dropped down into the valley toward camp, he proceeded with greater caution.

Three miles away he came upon a fresh trail that sent his neck hair rippling and bristling, It led straight toward camp and John Thornton.Buck hurried on, swiftly and stealthily, every nerve straining and tense, alert to the multitudinous details which told a story--all but the end.His nose gave him a varying description of the passage of the life on the heels of which he was travelling.He remarked die pregnant silence of the forest.The bird life had flitted.The squirrels were in hiding.One only he saw,--a sleek gray fellow, flattened against a gray dead limb so that he seemed a part of it, a woody excrescence upon the wood itself.

As Buck slid along with the obscureness of a gliding shadow, his nose was jerked suddenly to the side as though a positive force had gripped and pulled it.He followed the new scent into a thicket and found Nig.He was lying on his side, dead where he had dragged himself, an arrow protruding, head and feathers, from either side of his body.

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 fresh-written on the earth, and Buck scented every detail of it down to the edge of a deep pool.By the edge, head and fore feet in the water, lay Skeet, faithful to the last.The pool itself, muddy and discolored from the sluice boxes, effectually hid what it contained, and it contained John Thornton; for Buck followed his trace into the water, from which no trace led away.