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Page 61
"What in hell's the matter with that Bill?" said Jake. "Seems like as if
he's full, but he can't be."
"Beel, hee's an angry dog for sure," said Jean, with a grin.
"Looks 'most as if he's sick," said Jake.
"H'm! Hate-seeck, mebbe," replied Jean, as the two turned to the task of
preparing their own supper.
As a fact no dog was ever more fit or more perfectly self-controlled
than Bill was at that moment. In his own good time and with a most
singular deliberateness he did set his teeth in fresh moose. But he did
it much as house-dogs in the world of civilization put their noses into
their well-filled dinner-dishes, with a deliberate absence of gusto
which would have simply astounded any understanding observer who could
have seen it. The other seven dogs were blissfully unconscious of
anything under heaven outside their own ravening lust of flesh. In a
temperature well below zero, the lure of fresh-killed meat at the end of
fourteen hundred miles of solid pulling, and five or six weeks of fish
rations, is a force the strength of which cannot easily be conceived by
livers of the sheltered life. It is the pull of an overwhelming strong
passion.
And Bill, the deposed leader of the team, just nosed and tasted with the
calm indifferent temperateness of an English house-dog; while every
organ of his supremely healthy body ached with a veritable neuralgia of
longing for red meat.
The rest of the team, including Jan, fed like wolves; indeed, some of
them were literally but one or two removes from the wolf, and all of
them had of late lived a life which brings any dog very close to the
wolf in his habits and instincts. It is a life which, so far as his
instincts are concerned, carries a dog back and back through innumerable
generations till his contact with his primeval ancestors is very close
and real.
They fed like hungry wolves, and their feeding was not a pretty sight.
When in his ravenous guzzling one dog's nose chanced to be thrust at all
nearly to another's, there would arise a horrid sound of half-choked
snarling; the fierce hissing rattle of snarls which came from flesh and
blood-glutted jaws. Obeying instincts to the full as strong as any human
passion which has ever gone to the making of tragedy, these working-dogs
made a wild orgy of their feast. They wantoned and they wallowed in
their perfectly natural gluttony. Having fed full and overfull, they
desired more by reason of their long hunger for meat and the hard vigor
of their lives. The last remains of flesh exhausted, they gnawed and
tugged at bones, each snarling still, though half exhausted, whenever
other fangs than his own touched a chosen bone.
And Bill, despite the flame of desire in his bowels, just nosed and
tasted, eating no more than an ordinary workaday ration. Long before the
final stage of bone-gnawing he actually walked away and curled himself
down at the roots of a big spruce where the ground rose slightly, some
fifty paces distant from the place of orgy.
A couple of hundred yards away, by the shelter of their fire, Jean and
Jake composed themselves to rest and smoke; for they also had fed full.
One by one even the lustiest of the dogs forsook the bones, drawing back
heavily, lazily licking their chops. The dense calm of satiety descended
slowly upon all the visible life-shapes in that place like the fumes of
some potent narcotic--upon all forms of life save one. Bill, curled at
the root of his spruce, had within him a blazing fire of life and
activity which no earthly force could slake while his breath remained to
fan it. But the rest of the world slept.
The moon that night was too young to shed much light. But just after
Jean and Jake sleepily laid aside their pipes and closed their eyes, the
aurora borealis flamed out icily in a clear sky, bringing more than all
the light Bill needed. In that frozen stillness Bill's brain was like
the interior of a lighted factory with all its machinery in full swing.
Fed by hate and slowly accumulated stores of bitter anger, his thoughts
went throbbing in and out the lighted convolutions of his brain with the
silent positive efficiency of a gas-engine's pistons.
Bill understood everything in the world that night in his own world, and
he overlooked nothing. He would have given much, very much, to have been
able to remove Jean's camp a mile or so away. The belt of open
snow-space between it and him was all too narrow for his liking. Well he
knew how swiftly Jean could move, how certainly he could strike when the
need arose. But for this Bill had done murder that night, as surely as
ever softly treading human desperado in the dead of night has done
murder at a bedside. As it was he thought he must fight. Well, he was
prepared. Nay, his bowels yearned for it just as strongly as any dog's
bowels had yearned for fresh-killed meat that night. More strongly, for
in him the one yearning had mastered and ridden down the other yearning,
thus giving him his perfect preparation.
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