It was beautiful spring weather, but neither dogs nor humans were aware of it.Each day the sun rose earlier and set later.It was dawn by three in the morning, and twilight lingered till nine at night.The whole long day was a blaze of sunshine.The ghostly winter silence had given way to the great spring murmur of awakening life.This murmur arose from all the land, fraught with the joy of living.It came from the things that lived and moved again, things which had been as dead and which had not moved during the long months of frost.The sap was rising in the pines.The willows and aspens were bursting out in young buds.Shrubs and vines were putting on fresh garbs of green.Crickets sang in the nights, and in the days all manner of creeping, crawling things rustled forth into the sun.Partridges and woodpeckers were booming and knocking in the forest.Squirrels were chattering, birds singing, and overhead honked the wild fowl driving up from the south in cunning wedges that split the air.
From every hill slope came the trickle of water, the music of unseen fountains.All things were thawing, bending, snapping.The Yukon was straining to break loose the ice that bound it down.It ate away from beneath; the sun ate from above.Air-holes formed, fissures sprang and spread apart, while thin sections of ice fell through bodily into the river.And amid all this bursting, rending, throbbing of awakening life, under the blazing sun and through the soft-sighing breezes, like wayfarers to death, staggered the two men, the woman and the huskies.
With the dogs falling, Mercedes weeping and riding, Hal swearing innocuously, and Charles eyes wistfully watering, they staggered into John Thornton's camp at the mouth of the White River.When they halted, the dogs dropped down as though they had all been struck dead.Mercedes dried her eyes and looked at John Thornton.Charles sat down on a log to rest.He sat down very slowly and painstakingly, what of his great stiffness.Hal did the talking.John Thornton was whittling the last touches on an axe-handle he had made from a stick of birch.He whittled and listened, gave monosyllabic replies, and when it was asked, terse advice.He knew the breed, and he gave his advice in the certainty that it would not be followed.
"They told us up above that the bottom was dropping out of the trail and that the best thing for us to do was to lay over," Hal said in response to Thornton's warning to take no more chances on the rotten ice."They told us we couldn't make White River, and here we are." This last with a sneering ring of triumph in it.
"And they told you true," John Thornton answered."The bottom's likely to drop out at any moment.Only fools, with the blind luck of fools, could have made it.I tell you straight, I wouldn't risk my carcass on that ice for all the gold in Alaska.""That's because you're not a fool, I suppose," said Hal."All the same, we'll go on to Dawson." He uncoiled his whip."Get up there, Buck! Hi!
Get up there! Mush on!"
Thornton went on whittling.It was idle, he knew, to get between a fool and his folly; while two or three fools more or less would not alter the scheme of things.
