ce, whining eagerly, his splendid body flashing forward, leap
by leap, in the wan white moonlight. And leap by leap, like some pale
frost wraith, the snowshoe rabbit flashed on ahead.

All that stirring of old instincts which at stated periods drives men
out from the sounding cities to forest and plain to kill things
by chemically propelled leaden pellets, the blood lust, the joy to
kill--all this was Buck's, only it was infinitely more intimate. He was
ranging at the head of the pack, running the wild thing down, the living
meat, to kill with his own teeth and wash his muzzle to the eyes in warm
blood.

There is an ecstasy that marks the summit of life, and beyond which life
cannot rise. And such is the paradox of living, this ecstasy comes when
one is most alive, and it comes as a complete forgetfulness that one is
alive. This ecstasy, this forgetfulness of living, comes to the artist,
caught up and out of himself in a sheet of flame; it comes to the
soldier, war-mad on a stricken field and refusing quarter; and it came
to Buck, leading the pack, sounding the old wolf-cry, straining after
the food that was alive and that fled swiftly before him through the
moonlight. He was sounding the deeps of his nature, and of the parts of
his nature that were deeper than he, going back into the womb of Time.
He was mastered by the sheer surging of life, the tidal wave of being,
the perfect joy of each separate muscle, joint, and sinew in that it was
everything that was not death, that it was aglow and rampant, expressing
itself in movement, flying exultantly under the stars and over the face
of dead matter that did not move.

But Spitz, cold and calculating even in his supreme moods, left the pack
and cut across a narrow neck of land where the creek made a long bend
around. Buck did not know of this, and as he rounded the bend, the frost
wraith of a rabbit still flitting before him, he saw another and larger
frost wraith leap from the overhanging bank into the immediate path of
the rabbit. It was Spitz. The rabbit could not turn, and as the white
teeth broke its back in mid air it shrieked as loudly as a stricken man
may shriek. At sound of this, the cry of Life plunging down from Life's
apex in the grip of Death, the fall pack at Buck's heels raised a hell's
chorus of delight.

Buck did not cry out. He did not check himself, but drove in upon Spitz,
shoulder to shoulder, so hard that he missed the throat. They rolled
over an