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Perrault shouted , a club struck something hard , and there was a cry of pain . Suddenly the camp was full of creeping , furry shapes . Starving huskies , eighty or a hundred of them , had smelled the camp from a village somewhere nearby . They were mad with hunger . Perrault found one with its head in the food box , and the box fell over . At once twenty of them were fighting for the bread and bacon . The men’s clubs fell on them , but they did not care . They howled under the blows and went on eating until every crumb was gone . Then the strange dogs turned on the team . They were skeletons covered with loose skin , with burning eyes and long teeth , and nothing could stop them . Three huskies attacked Buck , and in a moment his head and shoulders were cut and bleeding . Dave and Sol - leks fought bravely side by side . Buck caught one husky by the throat and killed it . He threw himself on another , and at that moment he felt teeth in his own throat . It was Spitz , attacking him from the side like a coward . Billee was so frightened that he became brave . He broke through the wild circle and ran away over the ice , and the rest of the team followed him . As Buck got ready to jump after them , Spitz rushed at him to knock him off his feet . Buck knew that if he fell under that crowd of huskies , he was finished . He stood firm and then ran after the others . The nine team dogs hid in the forest for the rest of the night . Every one of them was wounded in four or five places . Dolly , the last dog to join the team at Dyea , had a badly torn throat , Joe had lost an eye , and Billee’s ear was chewed to pieces . At daylight they limped back to camp . The strange huskies had gone , and half the food had gone with them . “ Ah , my friends , ” François said softly , looking at the wounded dogs . “ Maybe all these bites make you mad dogs . What do you think , Perrault ? ” Perrault shook his head . There were still four hundred miles of trail between him and Dawson , and he could not afford to have madness among his dogs . V . Thin Ice The Thirty Mile River was wide open . Its wild water was too fast to freeze , and there was ice only in the quiet places near the banks . It took six days of exhausting work to cover those thirty terrible miles . A dozen times Perrault , who walked in front , broke through the ice . Each time he was saved by the long pole he carried , which fell across the hole . The temperature was fifty degrees below zero , so each time he had to build a fire and dry his clothes , or he would have died .
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