A thousand deaths by Jack London

one chance shot broke a wing. Then she fluttered away, running,

trailing the broken wing, with him in pursuit.

The little chicks had no more than whetted his appetite. He hopped

and bobbed clumsily along on his injured ankle, throwing stones and

screaming hoarsely at times; at other times hopping and bobbing

silently along, picking himself up grimly and patiently when he

fell, or rubbing his eyes with his hand when the giddiness

threatened to overpower him.

The chase led him across swampy ground in the bottom of the valley,

and he came upon footprints in the soggy moss. They were not his

own – he could see that. They must be Bill’s. But he could not

stop, for the mother ptarmigan was running on. He would catch her

first, then he would return and investigate.

He exhausted the mother ptarmigan; but he exhausted himself. She

lay panting on her side. He lay panting on his side, a dozen feet

away, unable to crawl to her. And as he recovered she recovered,

fluttering out of reach as his hungry hand went out to her. The

chase was resumed. Night settled down and she escaped. He

stumbled from weakness and pitched head foremost on his face,

cutting his cheek, his pack upon his back. He did not move for a

long while; then he rolled over on his side, wound his watch, and

lay there until morning.

Another day of fog. Half of his last blanket had gone into foot-

wrappings. He failed to pick up Bill’s trail. It did not matter.

His hunger was driving him too compellingly – only – only he

wondered if Bill, too, were lost. By midday the irk of his pack

became too oppressive. Again he divided the gold, this time merely

spilling half of it on the ground. In the afternoon he threw the

rest of it away, there remaining to him only the half-blanket, the

tin bucket, and the rifle.

An hallucination began to trouble him. He felt confident that one

cartridge remained to him. It was in the chamber of the rifle and

he had overlooked it. On the other hand, he knew all the time that

the chamber was empty. But the hallucination persisted. He fought

it off for hours, then threw his rifle open and was confronted with

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emptiness. The disappointment was as bitter as though he had

really expected to find the cartridge.

He plodded on for half an hour, when the hallucination arose again.

Again he fought it, and still it persisted, till for very relief he

opened his rifle to unconvince himself. At times his mind wandered

farther afield, and he plodded on, a mere automaton, strange

conceits and whimsicalities gnawing at his brain like worms. But

these excursions out of the real were of brief duration, for ever

the pangs of the hunger-bite called him back. He was jerked back

abruptly once from such an excursion by a sight that caused him

nearly to faint. He reeled and swayed, doddering like a drunken

man to keep from falling. Before him stood a horse. A horse! He

could not believe his eyes. A thick mist was in them, intershot

with sparkling points of light. He rubbed his eyes savagely to

clear his vision, and beheld, not a horse, but a great brown bear.

The animal was studying him with bellicose curiosity.

The man had brought his gun halfway to his shoulder before he

realized. He lowered it and drew his hunting-knife from its beaded

sheath at his hip. Before him was meat and life. He ran his thumb

along the edge of his knife. It was sharp. The point was sharp.

He would fling himself upon the bear and kill it. But his heart

began its warning thump, thump, thump. Then followed the wild

upward leap and tattoo of flutters, the pressing as of an iron band

about his forehead, the creeping of the dizziness into his brain.

His desperate courage was evicted by a great surge of fear. In his

weakness, what if the animal attacked him? He drew himself up to

his most imposing stature, gripping the knife and staring hard at

the bear. The bear advanced clumsily a couple of steps, reared up,

and gave vent to a tentative growl. If the man ran, he would run

after him; but the man did not run. He was animated now with the

courage of fear. He, too, growled, savagely, terribly, voicing the

fear that is to life germane and that lies twisted about life’s

deepest roots.

The bear edged away to one side, growling menacingly, himself

appalled by this mysterious creature that appeared upright and

unafraid. But the man did not move. He stood like a statue till

the danger was past, when he yielded to a fit of trembling and sank

down into the wet moss.

He pulled himself together and went on, afraid now in a new way.

It was not the fear that he should die passively from lack of food,

but that he should be destroyed violently before starvation had

exhausted the last particle of the endeavor in him that made toward

surviving. There were the wolves. Back and forth across the

desolation drifted their howls, weaving the very air into a fabric

of menace that was so tangible that he found himself, arms in the

air, pressing it back from him as it might be the walls of a wind-

blown tent.

Now and again the wolves, in packs of two and three, crossed his

path. But they sheered clear of him. They were not in sufficient

numbers, and besides they were hunting the caribou, which did not

battle, while this strange creature that walked erect might scratch

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11

and bite.

In the late afternoon he came upon scattered bones where the wolves

had made a kill. The debris had been a caribou calf an hour

before, squawking and running and very much alive. He contemplated

the bones, clean-picked and polished, pink with the cell-life in

them which had not yet died. Could it possibly be that he might be

that ere the day was done! Such was life, eh? A vain and fleeting

thing. It was only life that pained. There was no hurt in death.

To die was to sleep. It meant cessation, rest. Then why was he

not content to die?

But he did not moralize long. He was squatting in the moss, a bone

in his mouth, sucking at the shreds of life that still dyed it

faintly pink. The sweet meaty taste, thin and elusive almost as a

memory, maddened him. He closed his jaws on the bones and

crunched. Sometimes it was the bone that broke, sometimes his

teeth. Then he crushed the bones between rocks, pounded them to a

pulp, and swallowed them. He pounded his fingers, too, in his

haste, and yet found a moment in which to feel surprise at the fact

that his fingers did not hurt much when caught under the descending

rock.

Came frightful days of snow and rain. He did not know when he made

camp, when he broke camp. He travelled in the night as much as in

the day. He rested wherever he fell, crawled on whenever the dying

life in him flickered up and burned less dimly. He, as a man, no

longer strove. It was the life in him, unwilling to die, that

drove him on. He did not suffer. His nerves had become blunted,

numb, while his mind was filled with weird visions and delicious

dreams.

But ever he sucked and chewed on the crushed bones of the caribou

calf, the least remnants of which he had gathered up and carried

with him. He crossed no more hills or divides, but automatically

followed a large stream which flowed through a wide and shallow

valley. He did not see this stream nor this valley. He saw

nothing save visions. Soul and body walked or crawled side by

side, yet apart, so slender was the thread that bound them.

He awoke in his right mind, lying on his back on a rocky ledge.

The sun was shining bright and warm. Afar off he heard the

squawking of caribou calves. He was aware of vague memories of

rain and wind and snow, but whether he had been beaten by the storm

for two days or two weeks he did not know.

For some time he lay without movement, the genial sunshine pouring

upon him and saturating his miserable body with its warmth. A fine

day, he thought. Perhaps he could manage to locate himself. By a

painful effort he rolled over on his side. Below him flowed a wide

and sluggish river. Its unfamiliarity puzzled him. Slowly he

followed it with his eyes, winding in wide sweeps among the bleak,

bare hills, bleaker and barer and lower-lying than any hills he had

yet encountered. Slowly, deliberately, without excitement or more