Jack London The Call Of The Wild

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backs, rafted across blue mountain lakes, and descended or ascended unknown
rivers in slender boats whipsawed from the standing forest.
The months came and went, and back and forth they twisted through the
uncharted vastness, where no men were and yet where men had been if the Lost
Cabin were true. They went across divides in summer blizzards, shivered under
the midnight sun on naked mountains between the timber line and the eternal
snows, dropped into summer valleys amid swarming gnats and flies, and in the
shadows of glaciers picked strawberries and flowers as ripe and fair as any the
Southland could boast. In the fall of the year they penetrated a weird lake
country, sad and silent, where wildfowl had been, but where then there was no
life nor sign of life only the blowing of chill winds, the forming of ice in sheltered
places, and the melancholy rippling of waves on lonely beaches.
And through another winter they wandered on the obliterated trails of men who
had gone before. Once, they came upon a path blazed through the forest, an
ancient path, and the Lost Cabin seemed very near. But the path began nowhere
and ended nowhere, and it remained mystery, as the man who made it and the
reason he made it remained mystery. Another time they chanced upon the time-
graven wreckage of a hunting lodge, and amid the shreds of rotted blankets John
Thornton found a long-barrelled flint-lock. He knew it for a Hudson Bay Company
gun of the young days in the Northwest, when such a gun was worth its height in
beaver skins packed flat, And that was all no hint as to the man who in an early
day had reared the lodge and left the gun among the blankets.
Spring came on once more, and at the end of all their wandering they found, not
the Lost Cabin, but a shallow placer in a broad valley where the gold showed like
yellow butter across the bottom of the washing-pan. They sought no farther. Each
day they worked earned them thousands of dollars in clean dust and nuggets, and
they worked every day. The gold was sacked in moose-hide bags, fifty pounds to
the bag, and piled like so much firewood outside the spruce-bough lodge. Like
giants they toiled, days flashing on the heels of days like dreams as they heaped
the treasure up.
There was nothing for the dogs to do, save the hauling in of meat now and
again that Thornton killed, and Buck spent long hours musing by the fire. The
vision of the short-legged hairy man came to him more frequently, now that there
was little work to be done; and often, blinking by the fire, Buck wandered with
him in that other world which he remembered.
The salient thing of this other world seemed fear. When he watched the hairy
man sleeping by the fire, head between his knees and hands clasped above, Buck
saw that he slept restlessly, with many starts and awakenings, at which times he
would peer fearfully into the darkness and fling more wood upon the fire. Did
they walk by the beach of a sea, where the hairy man gathered shellfish and ate
them as he gathered, it was with eyes that roved everywhere for hidden danger
and with legs prepared to run like the wind at its first appearance. Through the
forest they crept noiselessly, Buck at the hairy man's heels; and they were alert
and vigilant, the pair of them, ears twitching and moving and nostrils quivering,
for the man heard and smelled as keenly as Buck. The hairy man could spring up
into the trees and travel ahead as fast as on the ground, swinging by the arms
from limb to limb, sometimes a dozen feet apart, letting go and catching, never
falling, never missing his grip. In fact, he seemed as much at home among the
trees as on the ground; and Buck had memories of nights of vigil spent beneath
trees wherein the hairy man roosted, holding on tightly as he slept.
And closely akin to the visions of the hairy man was the call still sounding in
the depths of the forest. It filled him with a great unrest and strange desires. It
caused him to feel a vague, sweet gladness, and he was aware of wild yearnings
and stirrings for he knew not what. Sometimes he pursued the call into the forest,
looking for it as though it were a tangible thing, barking softly or defiantly, as the
mood might dictate. He would thrust his nose into the cool wood moss, or into the
black soil where long grasses grew, and snort with joy at the fat earth smells; or
he would crouch for hours, as if in concealment, behind fungus-covered trunks of
fallen trees, wide-eyed and wide-eared to all that moved and sounded about him.
It might be, lying thus, that he hoped to surprise this call he could not
understand. But he did not know why he did these various things. He was
impelled to do them, and did not reason about them at all.
Irresistible impulses seized him. He would be lying in camp, dozing lazily in the
heat of the day, when suddenly his head would lift and his ears cock up, intent
and listening, and he would spring to his feet and dash away, and on and on, for
hours, through the forest aisles and across the open spaces where the niggerheads
bunched. He loved to run down dry watercourses, and to creep and spy upon the
bird life in the woods. For a day at a time he would lie in the underbrush where
he could watch the partridges drumming and strutting up and down. But
especially he loved to run in the dim twilight of the summer midnights, listening
to the subdued and sleepy murmurs of the forest, reading signs and sounds as
man may read a book, and seeking for the mysterious something that called
called, waking or sleeping, at all times, for him to come.
One night he sprang from sleep with a start, eager-eyed, nostrils quivering and
scenting, his mane bristling in recurrent waves. From the forest came the call (or
one note of it, for the call was many noted), distinct and definite as never
before, a long-drawn howl, like, yet unlike, any noise made by husky dog. And
he knew it, in the old familiar way, as a sound heard before. He sprang through
the sleeping camp and in swift silence dashed through the woods. As he drew
closer to the cry he went more slowly, with caution in every movement, till he [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

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