f dogs, half-wolves and wild wolves, urgent and prompting,
tasting the savor of the meat he ate, thirsting for the water he drank,
scenting the wind with him, listening with him and telling him the
sounds made by the wild life in the forest, dictating his moods,
directing his actions, lying down to sleep with him when he lay down,
and dreaming with him and beyond him and becoming themselves the stuff
of his dreams.

So peremptorily did these shades beckon him, that each day mankind and
the claims of mankind slipped farther from him. Deep in the forest a
call was sounding, and as often as he heard this call, mysteriously
thrilling and luring, he felt compelled to turn his back upon the fire
and the beaten earth around it, and to plunge into the forest, and on
and on, he knew not where or why; nor did he wonder where or why, the
call sounding imperiously, deep in the forest. But as often as he gained
the soft unbroken earth and the green shade, the love for John Thornton
drew him back to the fire again.

Thornton alone held him. The rest of mankind was as nothing. Chance
travellers might praise or pet him; but he was cold under it all,
and from a too demonstrative man he would get up and walk away. When
Thornton's partners, Hans and Pete, arrived on the long-expected raft,
Buck refused to notice them till he learned they were close to Thornton;
after that he tolerated them in a passive sort of way, accepting favors
from them as though he favored them by accepting. They were of the same
large type as Thornton, living close to the earth, thinking simply and
seeing clearly; and ere they swung the raft into the big eddy by the
saw-mill at Dawson, they understood Buck and his ways, and did not
insist upon an intimacy such as obtained with Skeet and Nig.

For Thornton, however, his love seemed to grow and grow. He, alone among
men, could put a pack upon Buck's back in the summer travelling. Nothing
was too great for Buck to do, when Thornton commanded. One day (they had
grub-staked themselves from the proceeds of the raft and left Dawson
for the head-waters of the Tanana) the men and dogs were sitting on the
crest of a cliff which fell away, straight down, to naked bed-rock three
hundred feet below. John Thornton was sitting near the edge, Buck at his
shoulder. A thoughtless whim seized Thornton, and he drew the attention
of Hans and Pete to the experiment he had in mind. "Jump, Buck!" he
commanded, sweeping his arm out and o