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 feeling; but in the Northland, under the law of club and fang, whoso took such things into account was a fool, and in so far as he observed them he would fail to prosper.
Not that Buck reasoned it out.He was fit, that was all, and unconsciously he accommodated himself to the new mode of life.All his days, no matter what the odds, he had never run from a fight.But the club of the man in the red sweater had beaten into him a more fundamental and primitive code.
Civilized, he could have died for a moral consideration, say the defense of Judge Miller's riding whip; but the completeness of his decivilization was now evidenced by his ability to flee from the defense of a moral consideration and so save his hide.He did not steal for joy of it, but because of the clamor of his stomach.He did not rob openly, but stole secretly and cunningly, out of respect for club and fang.In short, the things he did were done because it was easier to do them than not to do them.
His development (or retrogression) was rapid.His 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.The domesticated generations fell from him.In vague ways he remembered back to the youth of the breed, to the time the wild dogs ranged in packs through the primeval forest and killed their meat as they ran it down.It was no task for him to learn to fight with cut and slash and the quick wolf snap.In this manner had fought forgotten ancestors.
They quickened the old life within him, and the old tricks which they had stamped into the heredity of the breed were his tricks.They came to him without effort or discovery, as though they had been his always.And when, on the still cold nights, he pointed his nose at a star and howled long and wolf-like, it was his ancestors, dead and dust, pointing nose at star and howling down through the centuries and through him.And his cadences were their cadences, the cadences which voiced their woe and what to them was the meaning of the stillness, and the cold, and dark.
Thus, as token of what a puppet thing life is, the ancient song surged through him and he came into his own again; and he came because men had found a yellow metal in the North, and because Manuel was a gardener's helper whose wages did not lap over the needs of his wife and divers small copies of himself.
