"Jack London. The Call of the Wild (Сборник из 7 рассказов на англ.)" - читать интересную книгу автора

" 'Answers to the name of Buck,' " the man soliloquized, quoting
from the saloon-keeper's letter which had announced the
consignment of the crate and contents. "Well, Buck, my boy," he
went on in a genial voice, "we've had our little ruction, and the
best thing we can do is to let it go at that. You've learned your
place, and I know mine. Be a good dog and all 'll go well and the
goose hang high. Be a bad dog, and I'll whale the stuffin' outa
you. Understand?"


As he spoke he fearlessly patted the head he had so mercilessly
pounded, and though Buck's hair involuntarily bristled at touch of
the hand, he endured it without protest. When the man brought him
water he drank eagerly, and later bolted a generous meal of raw
meat, chunk by chunk, from the man's hand.


He was beaten (he knew that); but he was not broken. He saw, once
for all, that he stood no chance against a man with a club. He
had learned the lesson, and in all his after life he never forgot
it. That club was a revelation. It was his introduction to the
reign of primitive law, and he met the introduction halfway. The
facts of life took on a fiercer aspect; and while he faced that
aspect uncowed, he faced it with all the latent cunning of his
nature aroused. As the days went by, other dogs came, in crates
and at the ends of ropes, some docilely, and some raging and
roaring as he had come; and, one and all, he watched them pass
under the dominion of the man in the red sweater. Again and
again, as he looked at each brutal performance, the lesson was
driven home to Buck: a man with a club was a lawgiver, a master to
be obeyed, though not necessarily conciliated. Of this last Buck
was never guilty, though he did see beaten dogs that fawned upon
the man, and wagged their tails, and licked his hand. Also he saw
one dog, that would neither conciliate nor obey, finally killed in
the struggle for mastery.


Now and again men came, strangers, who talked excitedly,
wheedlingly, and in all kinds of fashions to the man in the red
sweater. And at such times that money passed between them the
strangers took one or more of the dogs away with them. Buck
wondered where they went, for they never came back; but the fear
of the future was strong upon him, and he was glad each time when
he was not selected.


Yet his time came, in the end, in the form of a little weazened
man who spat broken English and many strange and uncouth