A thousand deaths by Jack London

the manner of men who are much by themselves. “Only a fool would

travel at such a temperature. If it isn’t eighty below, it’s

because it’s seventy-nine.”

He pulled out his watch, and after some fumbling got it back into

the breast pocket of his thick woollen jacket. Then he surveyed

the heavens and ran his eye along the white sky-line to the south.

“Twelve o’clock,” he mumbled, “A clear sky, and no sun.”

He plodded on silently for ten minutes, and then, as though there

had been no lapse in his speech, he added:

“And no ground covered, and it’s too cold to travel.”

Suddenly he yelled “Whoa!” at the dogs, and stopped. He seemed in

a wild panic over his right hand, and proceeded to hammer it

furiously against the gee-pole.

“You – poor – devils!” he addressed the dogs, which had dropped

down heavily on the ice to rest. His was a broken, jerky

utterance, caused by the violence with which he hammered his numb

hand upon the wood. “What have you done anyway that a two-legged

other animal should come along, break you to harness, curb all your

natural proclivities, and make slave-beasts out of you?”

He rubbed his nose, not reflectively, but savagely, in order to

drive the blood into it, and urged the dogs to their work again.

He travelled on the frozen surface of a great river. Behind him it

stretched away in a mighty curve of many miles, losing itself in a

fantastic jumble of mountains, snow-covered and silent. Ahead of

him the river split into many channels to accommodate the freight

of islands it carried on its breast. These islands were silent and

white. No animals nor humming insects broke the silence. No birds

flew in the chill air. There was no sound of man, no mark of the

handiwork of man. The world slept, and it was like the sleep of

death.

John Messner seemed succumbing to the apathy of it all. The frost

was benumbing his spirit. He plodded on with bowed head,

unobservant, mechanically rubbing nose and cheeks, and batting his

steering hand against the gee-pole in the straight trail-stretches.

But the dogs were observant, and suddenly they stopped, turning

their heads and looking back at their master out of eyes that were

wistful and questioning. Their eyelashes were frosted white, as

were their muzzles, and they had all the seeming of decrepit old

age, what of the frost-rime and exhaustion.

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18

The man was about to urge them on, when he checked himself, roused

up with an effort, and looked around. The dogs had stopped beside

a water-hole, not a fissure, but a hole man-made, chopped

laboriously with an axe through three and a half feet of ice. A

thick skin of new ice showed that it had not been used for some

time. Messner glanced about him. The dogs were already pointing

the way, each wistful and hoary muzzle turned toward the dim snow-

path that left the main river trail and climbed the bank of the

island.

“All right, you sore-footed brutes,” he said. “I’ll investigate.

You’re not a bit more anxious to quit than I am.”

He climbed the bank and disappeared. The dogs did not lie down,

but on their feet eagerly waited his return. He came back to them,

took a hauling-rope from the front of the sled, and put it around

his shoulders. Then he GEE’D the dogs to the right and put them at

the bank on the run. It was a stiff pull, but their weariness fell

from them as they crouched low to the snow, whining with eagerness

and gladness as they struggled upward to the last ounce of effort

in their bodies. When a dog slipped or faltered, the one behind

nipped his hind quarters. The man shouted encouragement and

threats, and threw all his weight on the hauling-rope.

They cleared the bank with a rush, swung to the left, and dashed up

to a small log cabin. It was a deserted cabin of a single room,

eight feet by ten on the inside. Messner unharnessed the animals,

unloaded his sled and took possession. The last chance wayfarer

had left a supply of firewood. Messner set up his light sheet-iron

stove and starred a fire. He put five sun-cured salmon into the

oven to thaw out for the dogs, and from the water-hole filled his

coffee-pot and cooking-pail.

While waiting for the water to boil, he held his face over the

stove. The moisture from his breath had collected on his beard and

frozen into a great mass of ice, and this he proceeded to thaw out.

As it melted and dropped upon the stove it sizzled and rose about

him in steam. He helped the process with his fingers, working

loose small ice-chunks that fell rattling to the floor.

A wild outcry from the dogs without did not take him from his task.

He heard the wolfish snarling and yelping of strange dogs and the

sound of voices. A knock came on the door.

“Come in,” Messner called, in a voice muffled because at the

moment he was sucking loose a fragment of ice from its anchorage on

his upper lip.

The door opened, and, gazing out of his cloud of steam, he saw a

man and a woman pausing on the threshold.

“Come in,” he said peremptorily, “and shut the door!”

Peering through the steam, he could make out but little of their

personal appearance. The nose and cheek strap worn by the woman

and the trail-wrappings about her head allowed only a pair of black

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19

eyes to be seen. The man was dark-eyed and smooth-shaven all

except his mustache, which was so iced up as to hide his mouth.

“We just wanted to know if there is any other cabin around here,”

he said, at the same time glancing over the unfurnished state of

the room. “We thought this cabin was empty.”

“It isn’t my cabin,” Messner answered. “I just found it a few

minutes ago. Come right in and camp. Plenty of room, and you

won’t need your stove. There’s room for all.”

At the sound of his voice the woman peered at him with quick

curiousness.

“Get your things off,” her companion said to her. “I’ll unhitch

and get the water so we can start cooking.”

Messner took the thawed salmon outside and fed his dogs. He had to

guard them against the second team of dogs, and when he had

re‰ntered the cabin the other man had unpacked the sled and fetched

water. Messner’s pot was boiling. He threw in the coffee, settled

it with half a cup of cold water, and took the pot from the stove.

He thawed some sour-dough biscuits in the oven, at the same time

heating a pot of beans he had boiled the night before and that had

ridden frozen on the sled all morning.

Removing his utensils from the stove, so as to give the newcomers a

chance to cook, he proceeded to take his meal from the top of his

grub-box, himself sitting on his bed-roll. Between mouthfuls he

talked trail and dogs with the man, who, with head over the stove,

was thawing the ice from his mustache. There were two bunks in the

cabin, and into one of them, when he had cleared his lip, the

stranger tossed his bed-roll.

“We’ll sleep here,” he said, “unless you prefer this bunk. You’re

the first comer and you have first choice, you know.”

“That’s all right,” Messner answered. “One bunk’s just as good as

the other.”

He spread his own bedding in the second bunk, and sat down on the

edge. The stranger thrust a physician’s small travelling case

under his blankets at one end to serve for a pillow.

“Doctor?” Messner asked.

“Yes,” came the answer, “but I assure you I didn’t come into the

Klondike to practise.”

The woman busied herself with cooking, while the man sliced bacon

and fired the stove. The light in the cabin was dim, filtering

through in a small window made of onion-skin writing paper and

oiled with bacon grease, so that John Messner could not make out

very well what the woman looked like. Not that he tried. He

seemed to have no interest in her. But she glanced curiously from

time to time into the dark corner where he sat.

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20

“Oh, it’s a great life,” the doctor proclaimed enthusiastically,

pausing from sharpening his knife on the stovepipe. “What I like

about it is the struggle, the endeavor with one’s own hands, the

primitiveness of it, the realness.”

“The temperature is real enough,” Messner laughed.

“Do you know how cold it actually is?” the doctor demanded.

The other shook his head.

“Well, I’ll tell you. Seventy-four below zero by spirit

thermometer on the sled.”

“That’s one hundred and six below freezing point – too cold for