7 New Masters

CHAPTER 7 New Masters Thirty days after they left Dawson, Buck and his teammates arrived at Skaguay. They were carrying the Salt Water mail. The dogs were very tired and worn out. Buck normally weighed one hundred and forty pounds, but now he was only one hundred and fifteen. Even though the other dogs were lighter than Buck, they had also lost more weight. Pike, who often pretended to have a hurt leg so he would not have to work, was now limping for real. Sol-leks was also limping, and Dub's shoulder was hurt.

Their legs were all terribly sore. There was no spring or bounce left in them. Their feet felt heavy on the trail. There was nothing wrong with the dogs except that they were dead tired. It was not the kind of tiredness that comes from a small bit of hard work, when it takes only a few hours to recover. This was the kind of tiredness that comes after many long months of hard work. The dogs did not have any strength left. It had all been used—every last bit of it. Every muscle was dead tired. In less than five months they had traveled twenty-five hundred miles, and during the last eighteen hundred miles they had taken only five days of rest. When they arrived at Skaguay, they looked like they were on their last legs. They could barely pull the sled, and on the downhills they just managed to keep out of the way of the sled. "Mush on, you poor sore feet," the driver encouraged them as they tottered down the

main street of Skaguay. "This is the last. Then we will get one long rest, hey? For sure. One very long rest." The drivers were sure that they would have a long rest. But there were so many men rushing into the Klondike looking for gold, and many of them did not bring their families with them, which meant that there was a lot of mail, along with the official orders. Fresh batches of Hudson Bay dogs were coming in to take the places of those who could not run the trail anymore. The ones who could no longer run were sold. Three days passed, and Buck and his teammates found out how tired and weak they really were. On the morning of the fourth day, two men from the South came along and bought them, harness and all. The men called each other Hal and Charles. Charles was a middle-aged man, with watery eyes and a mustache that twisted up at the

ends. Hal was only nineteen or twenty, and carried a big gun and hunting knife strapped to his belt. Both men were out of place here in the North, and no one could understand why they had come. Buck heard the men talking, saw the money pass between the man and the government agent, and knew that the Scottish driver and the mail train drivers were passing out of his life just like Perrault and Francois and the others who had gone before. When they arrived at their new camp, Buck saw a messy place. The tent was falling down, and there were unwashed dishes. He also saw a woman, whom the men called Mercedes. She was Charles's wife and Hal's sister. Buck watched them nervously as they tried to take down the tent and load the sled. They were trying hard, but they did not know what to do. They rolled the tent into a bundle three times as large as it should have

been. They left the dishes unwashed and packed them. Mercedes and the two men talked and argued all the time. When they put a sack of clothes on the front of the sled, she suggested it should go on the back. After they had put it there, and covered it with a few other bundles, she found more things they forgot to pack, and that had to go in the clothes sack, so they unloaded everything and started again. Three men from a camp nearby came and watched, grinning and winking at each other. "You have a heavy load already," said one of them. "I shouldn't tell you your business, but I wouldn't take that tent along if I was you." "Impossible!" Mercedes cried, throwing up her hands. "How in the world could we manage without a tent?" "You don't need it. It's springtime, and you

won't get any more cold weather," the man replied. She shook her head as Charles and Hal put the last few items on top of the huge load. "Think it'll ride?" one of the men asked. "Why shouldn't it?" Charles said angrily. "Oh, that's all right, that's all right," the man said quickly. "I was just wondering, that's all. It seemed a little top-heavy." Charles turned his back and pulled the ropes down as well as he could, which was not very well at all. "And you're sure the dogs can hike all day with that load behind them?" another man asked. "Certainly," said Hal. "Mush!" he shouted. "Mush on there!" The dogs sprang forward in the harness, strained hard for a few moments, then relaxed. They could not move the sled.