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I . Judge Miller’s Place Buck did not read the newspapers , so he did not know that trouble was coming . It was coming for every strong dog with warm , long hair on the Pacific coast . Men had found gold in the Arctic , and thousands of them were rushing north . These men needed dogs : big , heavy dogs with strong muscles for hard work and thick coats to protect them from the frost . Buck lived at a big house in the sunny Santa Clara Valley . People called it Judge Miller’s place . It stood among the trees , with a wide , cool veranda around all four sides . Behind it there were stables , cottages for the servants , green fields , fruit trees and a big tank of water where the Judge’s sons swam every morning . Over all this land Buck was king . He had been born here , and he had lived here for all four years of his life . There were other dogs , of course , but they did not count . Toots , a little pug , and Ysabel , a Mexican hairless dog , hardly ever put their noses out of doors , and the fox terriers lived in the kennels . But Buck was neither a house dog nor a kennel dog . The whole place was his . He swam in the tank and went hunting with the Judge’s sons . He walked with Mollie and Alice , the Judge’s daughters , early in the morning or late in the evening . On winter nights he lay at the Judge’s feet in front of the library fire , and he carried the Judge’s grandsons on his back . He was king over every living thing on Judge Miller’s place , and that included the humans . His father , Elmo , a huge St . Bernard , had been the Judge’s closest companion . Buck was not quite so large , because his mother , Shep , had been a Scottish shepherd dog . Still , he weighed a hundred and forty pounds , and he carried himself like a royal person . He was proud , perhaps a little too proud , but hunting and swimming had kept his muscles hard . This was the kind of dog Buck was in the autumn of 1897 , when the gold strike in the Klondike pulled men from all over the world into the frozen North . And Buck did not know that Manuel , one of the gardener’s helpers , was a dangerous man to trust . Manuel loved to gamble . He believed in a system for winning the lottery , but a system needs money , and Manuel had a wife and many children to feed . One evening , when the Judge was at a meeting , Manuel took Buck for what Buck thought was a walk . Nobody saw them leave . Only one man saw them arrive at the little railway station called College Park . This man talked with Manuel , and money passed between them . “ You should tie him up before you hand him over , ” the stranger said roughly . Manuel put a thick rope around Buck’s neck , under his collar . “ Just pull it tight and he can’t breathe , ” Manuel said .
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