The Wild (6 page)

“Jim! Come on, man!” Merritt urged.

But still Jim hesitated. “It's like…some sort of massacre. Whatever's watching over him, I don't think it's angels.”

“Damn it, Jim!” Merritt barked.

Jack blinked, the ice crust on his eyelids melting thanks to the heat of Merritt's hands. He tried to speak.
Bickering like a couple of old hens,
he wanted to say. But his voice wouldn't come. Instead, he managed only a moan. Now, at last, he could see them, although his vision remained blurry.

“All right,” Jim said. “Help me snap off some of these branches. We'll need some kind of makeshift stretcher—”

Merritt scoffed. “Don't be daft. He's been out here long enough.”

The big man scraped ice from his red beard and then
put his mittens back on. He bent down and began to pry Jack away from the snow beneath, working his hands and arms underneath Jack's frozen, blood-stiffened clothes.

“Merritt. His eyes are open,” Jim said.

Looming above Jack, Merritt looked down and smiled beatifically, a young Father Christmas. “Well, well. So they are. Hang on, young Master London. We'll have you warm soon enough.”

“Or as warm as it ever gets out here,” Jim added, but despite the resignation in his words, his tone was far from defeatist. “Don't worry, Jack. You're not alone.”

No
, Jack thought as Merritt hoisted him up from the ground, snow and dead things—the wolf's offerings of life—sliding off him.
Not alone at all
.

Merritt slung Jack over his shoulder and began to trudge through the snow. Every step jolted Jack so it felt as if his bones were grinding together. His mind grew vaguer, thoughts flickering like a candle flame until they guttered out. The voices of his friends became a comforting drone that accompanied him down into the darkness, and he thought he heard a lonely howl off in the distance. But perhaps it was only the wind.

 

Later, Jack would say that Merritt and Jim saved his life, or—when he was feeling lyrical—that the fire breathed
life back into him, and that he felt like Prometheus bathed in heat for the first time. But in his heart he knew that his friends would have been too late had it not been for the gifts of warmth and blood brought to him by the wolf. Jim and Merritt knew it as well, but none of them liked to talk about it, even as the days passed by.

The two men were devoted to their younger companion. Not only did they warm him by the fire and wrap him in dry clothes and blankets, but they massaged his extremities to get the circulation running again, and as though visited by a miracle, Jack's frostbite cost him only the tip of one toe on his left foot, which Merritt removed with a small paring knife.

They had questions, of course, some of them spoken—and answered by Jack in simple terms, including the brief story of the fall that had first knocked him unconscious and stranded him in the cold—and others unspoken. Merritt and Jim often glanced at each other when the subject came up, as though each was wary that the other might venture too far in the conversation and then not be able to retreat.

Finally, after several days' recuperation, subsisting mostly on dried beef stores and canned beans, supplemented by the meat of a small hare Jim had found outside the cabin, limping from a fight with some predator or
other, Jack asked the question they could not escape.

“How did you find me?”

His voice remained a low rasp and his teeth hurt. They were all suffering from the beginnings of scurvy, he knew, and half the winter still stretched out in front of them.

Jim smiled and glanced uneasily at Merritt. His glasses shone in the firelight. He could wear them only indoors. Outside, the cold would make the metal stick to his skin and turn the glass brittle, and he couldn't risk the only pair of spectacles he had remaining to him. He'd broken his spare glasses on board the
Umatilla
during the voyage from San Francisco.

The men sat in the front room of the cabin on rough-hewn chairs, close enough to the Klondike stove that their faces were flushed. Merritt licked his lips in that way that Jack knew meant he craved a dash of whiskey, but they had none. They melted snow for water and managed tea or coffee every few days, rationing out the little pleasures to give themselves something to look forward to. But no whiskey.

“I nearly shot it, Jack,” Jim said, eyes haunted as he gazed into the middle distance at some piece of memory. “If my rifle hadn't frozen, I might've killed it.”

But Merritt shook his head. “No. You couldn't have. Not that one.”

Jim shuddered but sat up a bit straighter, his expression
growing stern. Superstition seemed to offend him, and he looked around, hands fidgeting as though searching for something. Jack knew he wanted his Bible, but it must be in the other room by his bedroll, where he kept it most often to have it close to hand. Close to his heart.

“Don't be a fool. A wolf is a wolf,” Jim said, straining his usually amiable rapport with his friend.

“Not this one,” Merritt replied darkly, a challenge in his eyes. When Jim did not debate him, he turned to Jack. “It sat out there on the edge of the clearing, half hidden in the trees, and it stared at this cabin—at me—like my mother used to wait for me at the front door when I was late for dinner. That wolf wanted our attention.”

Jim nodded. “On that we can agree. Big damn thing, too.”

“Eventually we reckoned we had to check it out,” Merritt went on. “I took the rifle, and we went over to the spot in the trees where it had been standing for hours, only when we got there, the wolf wasn't there—”

“Vanished deeper into the woods,” Jim interrupted.

Merritt glanced away, as if to say there might be more to the story.

“So you followed it?” Jack asked. His fingers were still stiff and painful, and his feet still felt like slabs of frozen beef. The cold had gotten down deep inside of him, and no matter how hot the fire, he felt like he would never get warm.

“We followed it,” Jim echoed.

“We did nothing of the sort,” Merritt grumbled. He gave a murmur of dissatisfaction and stared at Jack. “When I say the wolf wasn't there, that's precisely what I mean. There were no tracks. No sign of the wolf at all, as if…”

He trailed off.

Jim wouldn't look at either of them. He'd set about cleaning his glasses with the edge of his sleeve.

“Then how did you find me?” Jack asked, inching closer to the stove even as he stared at the flecks of gold and green in Merritt's eyes.

“A shadow in the forest, that's all,” the big man replied. “Jim will tell you it was the wolf, but I didn't see anything but its eyes and its shadow. It kept ahead of us, pausing to wait when we fell behind. It wasn't long before it led us right to you. When we saw all that blood, and the rabbits and such all torn up, we were sure you'd been mauled by a bear.”

Jim got up and dusted off the seat of his pants. “There'd been new snow. It covered the tracks. The wolf led us to you.” He turned his back and walked away.

Jack and Merritt exchanged a glance, but they didn't talk any more about it. Neither of them had any desire to do so.

 

The weeks passed, and Jack's rescue seemed to mark a turning point in their fortunes. Their supplies still
dwindled to almost nothing, but hunting trips were more often successful than not. And several times when they'd gone days without fresh meat, one of the men found a wounded rabbit or squirrel somewhere close to the cabin, leaving a bloody trail in the snow as it crawled away from whatever had wounded it. As soon as Jack felt well enough, and the cold no longer felt as though it ate at his bones, he resumed his daily walk. This time, however, he did not wander from camp in an attempt to make contact with his observer. To his great confusion, and a mixture of relief and strange sadness, the feeling of being watched had significantly abated, existing on the periphery of his mind. If the wolf—the creature he had come to think of as his spirit guide—was still with him, it did not deign to show itself or to make itself known in any other way. From time to time he would hear distant howls, but he felt no shiver of recognition. They were ordinary wolves trying to survive the white silence, no different from Jack, Merritt, and Jim.

Some days he walked up to the spot where his friends had discovered him—the patch of snow-covered earth where Jack felt certain he had actually died, if only for a handful of minutes. Yet no trace remained of the event itself. New snow had long since blanked out the bright crimson of the blood, and though he tried several times to dredge up a dead rabbit, hare, or wolverine by dragging
his boots through the snow, he never came up with even a bone. Merritt and Jim had been far too superstitious to eat any of the meat on those animals, so Jack knew that his companions had not removed the carcasses. Yet the spot seemed untouched, somehow cleansed. If the others had not discovered him there and seen the dead animals for themselves, he would have thought the long winter had taken a terrible toll on his mind.

When first weeks and then months had elapsed since that day, his routine had become little more than exercise. He made his body work to keep himself limber, though as their supplies had decreased, they had all grown weaker. Now, on the day they had gauged as the first of April, he could move his teeth, loosened by scurvy, around in his mouth. They had no mirror, and for that he was glad. He wouldn't have liked to see his own reflection if his features were as gaunt and his gums as black as those of his companions.

Spring must not be far, although the white silence still reigned and the snow and ice made it impossible for him to imagine the earth ever flowering, the sun ever shining brightly, the river ever flowing again. The past few weeks had brought visitors to the cabin, drawn by the smoke and willing to travel far afield from their own camps now that the cold did not bite as deeply and their own supplies
had run low. Trappers and prospectors and even Indians paid visits, hoping for a bit of anything they had run out of themselves. The best Jack and his friends could offer was a cup of weak tea and good conversation, but surprisingly that seemed to be enough. These veterans of the Yukon, of the gold fever and the wilderness life, came full of stories, and when Jack regaled them with his tales of life as an oyster pirate and vagabond, they repaid him in kind. He squirreled these stories away as a miser would pennies, hoarding them only to take them out and examine them later.

Stories were in Jack London's blood. Tales of adventure fed him when other sustenance became meager at best. And now he had one hell of a story of his own, and wanted only to survive to live the next one.

Such were the thoughts that lingered in his mind when he trod the by-now-familiar path back toward the cabin that morning. The daylight hours lasted longer and longer, and he felt reinvigorated every time the sun appeared. As he reached a turn in the path and came in sight of the clearing where the cabin stood, he heard Merritt bellowing.

“Jack!” the big man shouted. “Jack, where are you?”

The excitement in his voice was unmistakable and contagious. Something had happened, some piece of good news, and Jack could think of only one thing that would
give Merritt Sloper such happiness. Jack picked up his pace, tromping along the path as swiftly as he could manage.

“Merritt?” he called, bursting from the trees into the clearing. He glanced around, confounded for a moment by the absence of anyone in the clearing. “Merritt, what is it?”

Then the door opened and Jim Goodman stepped out wrapped in one of the furs they had sewn over the long winter.

“What's all the shouting?” Jim asked as Jack hurried toward him.

“Not a clue. I heard Merritt, but—”

“I'm here!” Merritt called, and they both turned to see him ambling around the side of the cabin. The winter had been hard on all of them, but Merritt remained a big, burly man in spite of the weight he'd lost. He gave them a good-natured grin.

“Let's have the last of the good coffee,” Merritt told them. “The bit we've been saving to celebrate.”

Jack gripped Merritt's shoulders. “The river?”

For weeks they had taken turns visiting the river every day, waiting and hoping.

Merritt nodded. “The ice is breaking. You should hear it. It sounds like the whole planet is cracking in half. There's movement as well, shifting here and there.”

Jack whooped loudly and embraced him, then spun
toward the cabin. “Pack your things, gentlemen! We're going to Dawson!”

But Jim still stood in the open door of the cabin. He hadn't moved. Jack thought, at first, that something awful had happened to him—some madness or illness. Then he heard the man's soft, shuddery breaths, and the prayer he spoke with a hitch in his voice.

“It's all right, Jim,” Jack said, putting a firm hand on his shoulder. “We're going to be all right now. We made it through.”

Only then did Jim lift his eyes to look at his friends. Only then did he smile, and begin to laugh, and moments later they were all laughing and whooping with elation.

Merritt clapped Jack on the back. “Go on, then, kid. Make that pot of coffee. We've earned it!”

Jack did as he was asked, not even minding that Merritt had called him “kid.” And a cup of coffee had never tasted so good.

 

The three days that followed were some of the longest of Jack's life. With the snow beginning to melt and the sun showing its face, a sense of renewal filled him—renewal of life and of purpose. The world seemed to be awakening around him, and as the winter retreated, so did the aura of mysticism that had blanketed the land. Both
Merritt's and Jim's conflicting superstitions seemed to burn off like fog.

Trees dripped with melting ice, which glittered like diamonds when the morning sun spread across the landscape. The days grew longer, and Jack spent a good portion of every one down at the river.