In five minutes Buck had made fourteen hundred dollars for Thornton and his friends. The mon made possible for them to travel east, where they wanted to look for a lost gold mine. Men said that this mine had more gold than any other mine in the north. Many had looked for it, and some had died looking for it. The only men who knew where it was were now dead
Thornton, Pete and Hans, with Buck and six other dogs, started off to the east in the spring. They travelled up the Stewart River and crossed the Mackenzie Mountains. They did not move quickly; the weather was good, and the men shot animals for food when they needed it. Sometimes they travelled for a week, and sometimes they stopped for a week and searched for gold in the ground. Sometimes they were hungry, and sometimes they had lots of food. They spent all the summer in the mountains, carrying everything they needed on their backs, sometimes making boats to go down rivers or across lakes.
In the autumn they came to a strange, flat country, with many lakes. They travelled on through the winter and met nobody, but once they found an old wooden house, with an old gun in it.
When the spring came, they found, not the lost mine, b a lake in a wide valley. Through the shallow water the goldshowed like yellow butter, and here their search ended. There was gold worth thousands of dollars in the lake, and they worked every day, filling bag after bag with gold.
The dogs had nothing to do except watch the men and eat the food which the men shot for them. Buck spent many evenings sitting by the fire.
As he sat, he saw again his dream world, where the strange hairy man sat next to him.He also heard something calling him into the forest. Sometimes, in the middle of the day, he lifted his head and listened, and then ran off into the forest.
One night he woke up a heard the call again, a long howl. He ran into the forest, following the sound, and came to an open place in the trees. And there, his nose pointing the sky, sat a wolf.