Buck's first day on the Dyea beach was like a nightmare. Every hour was filled with shock and surprise. He had been suddenly jerked from the heart of civilization and flung into the heart of things primordial.  No lazy, sun-kissed life was this, with nothing to do but loaf and be bored. These dogs and men were not town dogs and men.  They were savages, all of them, who knew no law but the law of club and fang.

He had never seen dogs fight as these wolfish creatures fought, and his first experience taught him an unforgettable lesson.  It is true, it was a vicarious experience, else he would not have lived to profit by it.  Curly was the victim.  They were camped near the log store, where she, in her friendly way, made advances to a husky dog the size of a full-grown wolf, though not half so large as she.  There was no warning, only a leap in like a flash, a metallic clip of teeth, a leap out equally swift, and Curly's face was ripped open from eye to jaw.

It was the wolf manner of fighting, to strike and leap away; but there was more to it than this.  Thirty or forty huskies ran to the spot and surrounded the combatants in an intent and silent circle. Curly rushed her antagonist, who struck again and leaped aside.  He met her next rush with his chest, in a peculiar fashion that tumbled her off her feet.  She never regained them. This was what the onlooking huskies had waited for.  They closed in upon her, snarling and yelping, and she was buried, screaming with agony, beneath the bristling mass of bodies.

So sudden was it, and so unexpected, that Buck was taken aback. He saw Spitz run out his scarlet tongue in a way he had of laughing; and he saw Francois, swinging an axe, spring into the mess of dogs.  Three men with clubs were helping him to scatter them.  It did not take long.  Two minutes from the time Curly went down, the last of her assailants were clubbed off.  But she lay there limp and lifeless in the bloody, trampled snow, almost literally torn to pieces, Francois standing over her and cursing horribly.  The scene often came back to Buck to trouble him in his sleep.

So that was the way.  No fair play.  Once down, that was the end of you.  Well, he would see to it that he never went down. Spitz ran out his tongue and laughed again, and from that moment Buck hated him with a bitter and deathless hatred.

Before he had recovered from the shock caused by the tragic passing of Curly, he received another shock.  Francois fastened upon him an arrangement of straps and buckles.  It was a harness, such as he had seen the grooms put on the horses at home.  And as he had seen horses work, so he was set to work, hauling Francois on a sled to the forest that fringed the valley, and returning with a load of firewood. Though his dignity was sorely hurt by thus being made a draught animal, he was too wise to rebel.  He buckled down with a will and did his best, though it was all new and strange.  Francois was stern, demanding instant obedience, and by virtue of his whip receiving instant obedience; while Dave, who was an experienced wheeler, nipped Buck's hind quarters whenever he was in error.  Spitz was the leader, likewise experienced, and while he could not always get at Buck, he growled sharp reproof now and again, or cunningly threw his weight in the traces to jerk Buck into the way he should go. 

Buck learned easily, and under the combined tuition of his two mates and Francois made remarkable progress.  Before they returned to camp he knew enough to stop at "Ho," to go ahead at "Mush," to swing wide on the bends, and to keep clear of the wheeler when the loaded sled shot downhill at their heels.

"Three very good dogs," Francois told Perrault.  "That Buck, him pull like hell.  I teach him quick as anything."

By afternoon, Perrault, who was in a hurry to be on the trail with his despatches, returned with two more dogs.  "Billee" and "Joe" he called them, two brothers, and true huskies both.  Sons of the one mother though they were, they were as different as day and night.  Billee's one fault was his excessive good nature, while Joe was the very opposite, sour and introspective, with a perpetual snarl and a malignant eye.  Buck received them in comradely fashion, Dave ignored them, while Spitz proceeded to thrash first one and then the other.

By evening Perrault secured another dog, an old husky, long and lean and gaunt, with a battle-scarred face and a single eye which flashed a warning of prowess that commanded respect.  He was called Sol-leks, which means the Angry One. Like Dave, he asked nothing, gave nothing, expected nothing; and when he marched slowly and deliberately into their midst, even Spitz left him alone.

 That night Buck faced the great problem of sleeping.  The tent, illumined by a candle, glowed warmly in the midst of the white plain; and when he, as a matter of course, entered it, both Perrault and Francois bombarded him with curses and cooking utensils, till he recovered from his consternation and fled ignominiously into the outer cold.  A chill wind was blowing that nipped him sharply and bit with especial venom into his wounded shoulder.  He lay down on the snow and attempted to sleep, but the frost soon drove him shivering to his feet.  Miserable and disconsolate, he wandered about among the many tents, only to find that one place was as cold as another.  Here and there savage dogs rushed upon him, but he bristled his neck-hair and snarled (for he was learning fast), and they let him go his way unmolested.

Finally an idea came to him.  He would return and see how his own team-mates were making out.  To his astonishment, they had disappeared.  Again he wandered about through the great camp, looking for them, and again he returned.  Were they in the tent?  No, that could not be, else he would not have been driven out.  Then where could they possibly be? With drooping tail and shivering body, very forlorn indeed, he aimlessly circled the tent.  Suddenly the snow gave way beneath his fore legs and he sank down.  Something wriggled under his feet.  He sprang back, bristling and snarling, fearful of the unseen and unknown.  But a friendly little yelp reassured him, and he went back to investigate.  A whiff of warm air ascended to his nostrils, and there, curled up under the snow in a snug ball, lay Billee.  He whined placatingly, squirmed and wriggled to show his good will and intentions, and even ventured, as a bribe for peace, to lick Buck's face with his warm wet tongue.

 Another lesson.  So that was the way they did it, eh?  Buck confidently selected a spot, and with much fuss and wasted effort proceeded to dig a hole for himself.  In a trice the heat from his body filled the confined space and he was asleep.  The day had been long and arduous, and he slept soundly and comfortably, though he growled and barked and wrestled with bad dreams.

 Three more huskies were added to the team inside an hour, and soon they were in harness and swinging up the trail toward the Dyea Canyon.  Buck was glad to be gone, and though the work was hard he found he did not particularly despise it.  He was surprised at the eagerness which animated the whole team and which was communicated to him; but still more surprising was the change wrought in Dave and Sol-leks.  They were new dogs, utterly transformed by the harness.  All passiveness and unconcern had dropped from them. They were alert and active, anxious that the work should go well, and fiercely irritable with whatever, by delay or confusion, retarded that work.  The toil of the traces seemed the supreme expression of their being, and all that they lived for and the only thing in which they took delight.

 Dave was wheeler or sled dog, pulling in front of him was Buck, then came Sol-leks; the rest of the team was strung out ahead, single file, to the leader, which position was filled by Spitz.   Buck had been purposely placed between Dave and Sol-leks so that he might receive instruction.  Apt scholar that he was, they were equally apt teachers, never allowing him to linger long in error, and enforcing their teaching with their sharp teeth.  Dave was fair and very wise.  He never nipped Buck without cause, and he never failed to nip him when he stood in need of it.  As Francois's whip backed him up, Buck found it to be cheaper to mend his ways than to retaliate. Once, during a brief halt, when he got tangled in the traces and delayed the start, both Dave and Sol-leks flew at him and administered a sound trouncing.  The resulting tangle was even worse, but Buck took good care to keep the traces clear thereafter; and before the day was done, so well had he mastered his work, his mates about ceased nagging him.  Francois's whip snapped less frequently, and Perrault even honored Buck by lifting up his feet and carefully examining them.

It was a hard day's run, up the Canyon, through Sheep Camp, past the Scales and the timber line, across glaciers and snowdrifts hundreds of feet deep, and over the great Chilcoot Divide, which stands between the salt water and the fresh, and guards forbiddingly the sad and lonely North.  They made good time down the chain of lakes which fills the craters of extinct volcanoes, and late that night pulled into the huge camp at the head of Lake Bennett, where thousands of goldseekers were building boats against the break-up of the ice in the spring.  Buck made his hole in the snow and slept the sleep of the exhausted just, but all too early was routed out in the cold darkness and harnessed with his mates to the sled.

 That day they made forty miles, the trail being packed; but the next day, and for many days to follow, they broke their own trail, worked harder, and made poorer time.  As a rule, Perrault travelled ahead of the team, packing the snow with webbed shoes to make it easier for them.  Francois, guiding the sled at the gee-pole, sometimes exchanged places with him, but not often. 

Perrault was in a hurry, and he prided himself on his knowledge of ice, which knowledge was indispensable, for the fall ice was very thin, and where there was swift water, there was no ice at all. Day after day, for days unending, Buck toiled in the traces. Always, they broke camp in the dark, and the first gray of dawn found them hitting the trail with fresh miles reeled off behind them.  And always they pitched camp after dark, eating their bit of fish, and crawling to sleep into the snow.  Buck was ravenous.  The pound and a half of sun-dried salmon, which was his ration for each day, seemed to go nowhere.  He never had enough, and suffered from perpetual hunger pangs. Yet the other dogs, because they weighed less and were born to the life, received a pound only of the fish and managed to keep in good condition.

He swiftly lost the fastidiousness which had characterized his old life.  A dainty eater, he found that his mates, finishing first, robbed him of his unfinished ration.  There was no defending it.  While he was fighting off two or three, it was disappearing down the throats of the others.  To remedy this, he ate as fast as they; and, so greatly did hunger compel him, he was not above taking what did not belong to him.  He watched and learned.  When he saw Pike, one of the new dogs, a clever malingerer and thief, slyly steal a slice of bacon when Perrault's back was turned, he duplicated the performance the following day, getting away with the whole chunk. A great uproar was raised, but he was unsuspected; while Dub, an awkward blunderer who was always getting caught, was punished for Buck's misdeed.

 This first theft marked Buck as fit to survive in the hostile Northland environment.  It marked his adaptability, his capacity to adjust himself to changing conditions, the lack of which would have meant swift and terrible death.  It marked, further, the decay or going to pieces of his moral nature, a vain thing and a handicap in the ruthless struggle for existence.  It was all well enough in the Southland, under the law of love and fellowship, to respect private property and personal feelings; but in the Northland, under the law of club and fang, whoso took such things into account was a fool.

Buck’s muscles became hard as iron, and he grew callous to all ordinary pain. He achieved an internal as well as external economy.  He could eat anything, no matter how loathsome or indigestible; and, once eaten, the juices of his stomach extracted the last least particle of nutriment; and his blood carried it to the farthest reaches of his body, building it into the toughest and stoutest of tissues.  Sight and scent became remarkably keen, while his hearing developed such acuteness that in his sleep he heard the faintest sound and knew whether it heralded peace or peril.  He learned to bite the ice out with his teeth when it collected between his toes; and when he was thirsty and there was a thick scum of ice over the water hole, he would break it by rearing and striking it with stiff fore legs. His most conspicuous trait was an ability to scent the wind and forecast it a night in advance.  No matter how breathless the air when he dug his nest by tree or bank, the wind that later blew inevitably found him to leeward, sheltered and snug.

And not only did he learn by experience, but instincts long dead became alive again.   And when, on the still cold nights, he pointed his nose at a star and howled long and wolflike, it was his ancestors, dead and dust, pointing nose at star and howling down through the centuries and through him.