ful that Buck and Spitz were at it.

But the opportunity did not present itself, and they pulled into Dawson
one dreary afternoon with the great fight still to come. Here were many
men, and countless dogs, and Buck found them all at work. It seemed the
ordained order of things that dogs should work. All day they swung up
and down the main street in long teams, and in the night their jingling
bells still went by. They hauled cabin logs and firewood, freighted up
to the mines, and did all manner of work that horses did in the Santa
Clara Valley. Here and there Buck met Southland dogs, but in the main
they were the wild wolf husky breed. Every night, regularly, at nine, at
twelve, at three, they lifted a nocturnal song, a weird and eerie chant,
in which it was Buck's delight to join.

With the aurora borealis flaming coldly overhead, or the stars leaping
in the frost dance, and the land numb and frozen under its pall of snow,
this song of the huskies might have been the defiance of life, only it
was pitched in minor key, with long-drawn wailings and half-sobs, and
was more the pleading of life, the articulate travail of existence. It
was an old song, old as the breed itself--one of the first songs of the
younger world in a day when songs were sad. It was invested with the woe
of unnumbered generations, this plaint by which Buck was so strangely
stirred. When he moaned and sobbed, it was with the pain of living that
was of old the pain of his wild fathers, and the fear and mystery of the
cold and dark that was to them fear and mystery. And that he should be
stirred by it marked the completeness with which he harked back through
the ages of fire and roof to the raw beginnings of life in the howling
ages.

Seven days from the time they pulled into Dawson, they dropped down the
steep bank by the Barracks to the Yukon Trail, and pulled for Dyea and
Salt Water. Perrault was carrying despatches if anything more urgent
than those he had brought in; also, the travel pride had gripped him,
and he purposed to make the record trip of the year. Several things
favored him in this. The week's rest had recuperated the dogs and put
them in thorough trim. The trail they had broken into the country was
packed hard by later journeyers. And further, the police had arranged
in two or three places deposits of grub for dog and man, and he was
travelling light.

They made Sixty Mile, which is a fifty-mile run, on the first day; and
the second