head of the team as in
a nightmare. He pulled when he could; when he could no longer pull, he
fell down and remained down till blows from whip or club drove him
to his feet again. All the stiffness and gloss had gone out of his
beautiful furry coat. The hair hung down, limp and draggled, or matted
with dried blood where Hal's club had bruised him. His muscles had
wasted away to knotty strings, and the flesh pads had disappeared, so
that each rib and every bone in his frame were outlined cleanly
through the loose hide that was wrinkled in folds of emptiness. It was
heartbreaking, only Buck's heart was unbreakable. The man in the red
sweater had proved that.

As it was with Buck, so was it with his mates. They were perambulating
skeletons. There were seven all together, including him. In their very
great misery they had become insensible to the bite of the lash or the
bruise of the club. The pain of the beating was dull and distant,
just as the things their eyes saw and their ears heard seemed dull and
distant. They were not half living, or quarter living. They were simply
so many bags of bones in which sparks of life fluttered faintly. When a
halt was made, they dropped down in the traces like dead dogs, and the
spark dimmed and paled and seemed to go out. And when the club or whip
fell upon them, the spark fluttered feebly up, and they tottered to
their feet and staggered on.

There came a day when Billee, the good-natured, fell and could not rise.
Hal had traded off his revolver, so he took the axe and knocked Billee
on the head as he lay in the traces, then cut the carcass out of the
harness and dragged it to one side. Buck saw, and his mates saw, and
they knew that this thing was very close to them. On the next day Koona
went, and but five of them remained: Joe, too far gone to be malignant;
Pike, crippled and limping, only half conscious and not conscious enough
longer to malinger; Sol-leks, the one-eyed, still faithful to the toil
of trace and trail, and mournful in that he had so little strength with
which to pull; Teek, who had not travelled so far that winter and who
was now beaten more than the others because he was fresher; and Buck,
still at the head of the team, but no longer enforcing discipline or
striving to enforce it, blind with weakness half the time and keeping
the trail by the loom of it and by the dim feel of his feet.

It was beautiful spring weather, but neither dogs nor humans were aware
of it