The Price List
Twelve hundred dollars. That is the last offer anyone makes for Buck, and the man who owns him turns it down with tears running down his face.
Fair warning: this is a full summary, so the ending and every death are in it. The book is a bit over thirty thousand words in seven chapters, and I read all of it in the Project Gutenberg text, ebook number two hundred fifteen.
Here is what I found. Buck is sold again and again, and each time the book either gives us a number or tells us there isn’t one. Follow those numbers and you follow the whole story: a pampered dog is stolen, priced, worked, spent, and finally becomes something money cannot buy. By my count he passes through seven sets of hands after Judge Miller. Let’s start with the first number.
Tag One: A Hundred and Fifty
Buck lives at Judge Miller’s place in the sun-kissed Santa Clara Valley. He is four years old, weighs one hundred and forty pounds, and rules the whole estate like a king. But Buck does not read the newspapers. Men in the Arctic have found a yellow metal, and thousands are rushing north, and they want heavy dogs with warm coats. It is the fall of eighteen ninety-seven.
Then comes Manuel, a gardener’s helper who loves to play the Chinese lottery and has faith in a system. A system needs money, and his wages do not stretch. While the Judge is at a meeting, Manuel walks Buck through the orchard to a little flag station. A stranger waits there. Money chinks between them, a rope goes around Buck’s neck, and the rope tightens.
Later, in a shed behind a San Francisco saloon, the stranger nurses his bitten hand. All I get is fifty, he grumbles. The saloon-keeper asks what the other man got, and the answer is a hundred. A hundred and fifty, the saloon-keeper calculates, and he’s worth it. That is Buck’s first price tag, and he does not even know he has one.
The Club
Buck goes into a crate. Two days and nights on a train with no food and no water, with express men mocking him through the bars. At Seattle a stout man in a red sweater opens the crate with a hatchet and holds a club.
Buck charges a dozen times, and each time the club knocks him down. In the text, he is beaten but not broken. He learns that a man with a club is a lawgiver, to be obeyed, though not necessarily conciliated.
Then the red sweater man sells him. A small, weazened Canadian named Perrault asks how much, and the answer is three hundred, and a present at that, because it is government money. That is tag two: three hundred dollars, twice the first.
Tag Two: Three Hundred
Perrault and his partner François take Buck north on a ship called the Narwhal.
On the Dyea beach he learns the law of club and fang. A friendly dog named Curly makes advances to a husky, and in two minutes thirty or forty huskies tear her apart. A white dog named Spitz watches and laughs with his scarlet tongue. From that moment Buck hates him.
Then the work. Harness, sled, and a ration of a pound and a half of dried salmon. Buck steals a slice of bacon, and another dog takes the punishment. The text calls it his first theft, and says it marks him as fit to survive, while his old moral nature goes to pieces. On cold nights he points his nose at a star and howls.
Spitz is the lead dog, and the fight is coming. It arrives during a chase after a snowshoe rabbit, with a circle of sixty dogs watching. Spitz fights well, but Buck uses his head. He goes low and breaks one foreleg, then the other, and the circle closes in. In the text, Buck has made his kill and found it good.
Tag Three: A Thousand, Said Out Loud
Next morning François finds Spitz gone and Buck covered in wounds. Buck takes the lead, and François, who tried to give it to Sol-leks, finds he had undervalued him. Heem worth one thousand dollars, François shouts to Perrault. That is tag three, and it is only a boast, not a sale.
Under Buck the team flies. Each day for fourteen days they average forty miles, and they arrive in Skaguay with a record run. Then come the orders. François throws his arms around Buck and weeps, and Perrault and François pass out of Buck’s life for good.
A Scotch half-breed takes the team, now hauling the mail. Here the book gives us a death that I find hard to read. Dave, the steady wheel dog, is sick inside, and the drivers take him out of the traces. He bites through Sol-leks’s harness and stands in his old place, begging with his eyes. They let him pull until he cannot, and then a revolver shot rings out behind the trees.
Thirty days after leaving Dawson, the mail train limps into Skaguay. Buck has dropped from one hundred and forty pounds to one hundred and fifteen. In under five months, the text says, the team has travelled twenty-five hundred miles.
The Blank Tag
And now Buck is sold with no price at all. Worn-out dogs, the officials decide, count for little against dollars, and two men from the States buy the whole team, harness and all, for a song. The text gives no figure. I checked: this is the one sale of Buck’s life without a number.
The buyers are Hal, a boy of nineteen or twenty with a big revolver, his brother-in-law Charles, and Hal’s sister Mercedes. They work out the trip with a pencil, so much to a dog, so many dogs, so many days, and they end up with fourteen dogs. They do not know that one sled cannot carry food for fourteen dogs.
Everything goes wrong at the speed of arithmetic. They overfeed, then underfeed. Dub is shot first. The six outside dogs die on half a husky’s ration. Billee is killed with an axe. By the spring thaw only five dogs remain, and Mercedes rides on the sled, all one hundred and twenty pounds of her.
They stagger into John Thornton’s camp at the mouth of the White River. Thornton warns them the ice is rotten. Hal laughs and uncoils his whip. Buck refuses to stand, because he can feel the ice going. The club comes down, and Thornton springs on Hal and cuts the traces. The sled moves on without Buck. A quarter of a mile away, the trail drops out from under it, and Hal, Charles, Mercedes and the dogs disappear into the river.
John Thornton and Buck look at each other. You poor devil, Thornton says, and Buck licks his hand.
Tag Four: Not for Sale
With Thornton, Buck finally learns what love is. The text says he never knew it at Judge Miller’s. In Circle City a man named Burton hits Thornton, and Buck tears Burton’s throat open; a miners’ meeting decides the dog had provocation. In the rapids, Buck saves Thornton and breaks three ribs doing it.
Then comes the bet. At the Eldorado Saloon the men brag about their dogs. One says five hundred pounds, another six hundred, another seven. Thornton says Buck can start a thousand and walk off with it for a hundred yards. Matthewson, a Bonanza King, slams down a sack of gold dust: a thousand dollars says he can’t. Thornton has no thousand, and borrows it from Jim O’Brien.
The sled holds twenty fifty-pound sacks of flour. It is sixty below zero, and the runners are frozen fast. A king of the Skookum Benches offers eight hundred dollars for Buck on the spot, and Thornton shakes his head. He kneels, puts his cheek against Buck’s, and whispers, as you love me, Buck.
Buck breaks the sled out and walks it a hundred yards. Thornton cries. The same king raises his offer to a thousand, then to twelve hundred. Thornton tells him to go to hell. That is the only tag he refuses. In five minutes, the text says, Buck earns sixteen hundred dollars for Thornton.
The Last Price
With that money, Thornton, Hans, Pete and Buck go east after a fabled lost mine. They never find the cabin. They find a shallow placer where the gold shows like yellow butter, and they pile it in moose-hide bags, fifty pounds to the bag. In my reading, this is the book’s joke. The gold is finally easy, and nothing in the camp has a price anymore.
Buck now hears a call from the forest. He runs a day and a night beside a timber wolf, then turns back for Thornton. He hunts a wounded bull moose for four days until it falls.
When he returns, the camp is wrecked. Nig lies dead with an arrow through him. Hans is feathered with arrows. The Yeehats are dancing around the ruins, and Buck tears into them. For the last time in his life, the text says, he lets passion rule cunning, because of his love for Thornton. Pete is dead in his blankets. Thornton’s trail ends at a muddy pool, and Skeet lies at its edge. Buck knows Thornton is dead.
The last tie is broken. A wolf pack arrives in the moonlight, and Buck holds a corner of the bank against them until the lean gray wolf who ran with him comes forward and touches noses. They howl together, and Buck runs with the pack.
The Closing Ledger
Here is the final ledger. A hundred and fifty. Three hundred. One thousand, said out loud. A blank. Eight hundred, a thousand, twelve hundred, all refused. Sixteen hundred earned. And then nothing, because the one man who valued him is dead.
The book ends with a legend. The Yeehats notice timber wolves with brown on the muzzle and a white patch on the chest, and speak of a Ghost Dog that runs at the head of the pack. In summer a great wolf comes alone to the valley, howls once, long and mournful, and leaves.
A note on the language: the text uses period words and a very one-sided picture of the Yeehats, and I have described events plainly. My question for you: which price tag hit hardest, the first one, the blank one, or the one Thornton refused? Tell me in the comments. Subscribe for more books, one clear angle at a time, and tap like if the price list helped.
