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PinkMonkey.com Digital Library - PinkMonkey.com - Call Of The Wild by Jack London
CHAPTER FIVE

The Toil of Trace and Trail

THIRTY DAYS FROM THE TIME it left Dawson, the Salt Water
Mail, with Buck and his mates at the fore, arrived at Skaguay. They
were in a wretched state, worn out and worn down. Buck’s one
hundred and forty pounds had dwindled to one hundred and
fifteen. The rest of his mates, though lighter dogs, had relatively
lost more weight than he. Pike, the malingerer, who, in his lifetime
of deceit, had often successfully feigned a hurt leg, was now
limping in earnest. Sol-leks was limping, and Dub was suffering
from a wrenched shoulder-blade.

They were all terribly footsore. No spring or rebound was left in
them. Their feet fell heavily on the trail, jarring their bodies and
doubling the fatigue of a day’s travel. There was nothing the
matter with them except that they were dead tired. It was not the
dead-tiredness that comes through brief and excessive effort, from
which recovery is a matter of hours; but it was the dead-tiredness
that comes through the slow and prolonged strength drainage of
months of toil. There was no power of recuperation left, no reserve
strength to call upon. It had been all used, the last least bit of it.
Every muscle, every fibre, every cell, was tired, dead tired.

And there was reason for it. In less than five months they had
travelled twentyfive hundred miles, during the last eighteen
hundred of which they had had but five days’ rest. When they
arrived at Skaguay they were apparently on their last legs. They
could barely keep the traces taut, and on the down grades just
managed to keep out of the way of the sled.

‘Mush on, poor sore feets,’ the driver encouraged them as they
tottered down the main street of Skaguay. ‘Dis is de las’. Den we
get one long res’. Eh? For sure. One bully long res’.’ The drivers
confidently expected a long stopover. Themselves, they had
covered twelve hundred miles with two days’ rest, and in the
nature of reason and common justice they deserved an interval of
loafing. But so many were the men who had rushed into the
Klondyke, and so many were the sweethearts, wives, and kin that
had not rushed in, that the congested mail was taking on Alpine
proportions; also there were official orders. Fresh batches of
Hudson Bay dogs were to take the places of those worthless for the
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