The Spell of the Yukon | Page 4

I'm stuck on it all.
The winter! the brightness that blinds you,?The white land locked tight as a drum,?The cold fear that follows and finds you,?The silence that bludgeons you dumb.?The snows that are older than history,?The woods where the weird shadows slant;?The stillness, the moonlight, the mystery,?I've bade 'em good-by -- but I can't.
There's a land where the mountains are nameless,?And the rivers all run God knows where;?There are lives that are erring and aimless,?And deaths that just hang by a hair;?There are hardships that nobody reckons;?There are valleys unpeopled and still;?There's a land -- oh, it beckons and beckons,?And I want to go back -- and I will.
They're making my money diminish;?I'm sick of the taste of champagne.?Thank God! when I'm skinned to a finish?I'll pike to the Yukon again.?I'll fight -- and you bet it's no sham-fight;?It's hell! -- but I've been there before;?And it's better than this by a damsite --?So me for the Yukon once more.
There's gold, and it's haunting and haunting;?It's luring me on as of old;?Yet it isn't the gold that I'm wanting?So much as just finding the gold.?It's the great, big, broad land 'way up yonder,?It's the forests where silence has lease;?It's the beauty that thrills me with wonder,?It's the stillness that fills me with peace.
The Heart of the Sourdough
There where the mighty mountains bare their fangs unto the moon, There where the sullen sun-dogs glare in the snow-bright, bitter noon, And the glacier-glutted streams sweep down at the clarion call of June.
There where the livid tundras keep their tryst with the tranquil snows; There where the silences are spawned, and the light of hell-fire flows Into the bowl of the midnight sky, violet, amber and rose.
There where the rapids churn and roar, and the ice-floes bellowing run; Where the tortured, twisted rivers of blood rush to the setting sun -- I've packed my kit and I'm going, boys, ere another day is done.

I knew it would call, or soon or late, as it calls the whirring wings; It's the olden lure, it's the golden lure,?it's the lure of the timeless things,?And to-night, oh, God of the trails untrod,?how it whines in my heart-strings!
I'm sick to death of your well-groomed gods, your make believe and your show; I long for a whiff of bacon and beans, a snug shakedown in the snow; A trail to break, and a life at stake, and another bout with the foe.
With the raw-ribbed Wild that abhors all life,?the Wild that would crush and rend,?I have clinched and closed with the naked North,?I have learned to defy and defend;?Shoulder to shoulder we have fought it out --?yet the Wild must win in the end.
I have flouted the Wild. I have followed its lure,?fearless, familiar, alone;?By all that the battle means and makes I claim that land for mine own; Yet the Wild must win, and a day will come when I shall be overthrown.
Then when as wolf-dogs fight we've fought, the lean wolf-land and I; Fought and bled till the snows are red under the reeling sky; Even as lean wolf-dog goes down will I go down and die.
The Three Voices
The waves have a story to tell me,?As I lie on the lonely beach;?Chanting aloft in the pine-tops,?The wind has a lesson to teach;?But the stars sing an anthem of glory?I cannot put into speech.
The waves tell of ocean spaces,?Of hearts that are wild and brave,?Of populous city places,?Of desolate shores they lave,?Of men who sally in quest of gold?To sink in an ocean grave.
The wind is a mighty roamer;?He bids me keep me free,?Clean from the taint of the gold-lust,?Hardy and pure as he;?Cling with my love to nature,?As a child to the mother-knee.
But the stars throng out in their glory,?And they sing of the God in man;?They sing of the Mighty Master,?Of the loom his fingers span,?Where a star or a soul is a part of the whole,?And weft in the wondrous plan.
Here by the camp-fire's flicker,?Deep in my blanket curled,?I long for the peace of the pine-gloom,?When the scroll of the Lord is unfurled,?And the wind and the wave are silent,?And world is singing to world.
The Law of the Yukon
This is the law of the Yukon, and ever she makes it plain:?"Send not your foolish and feeble; send me your strong and your sane -- Strong for the red rage of battle; sane for I harry them sore; Send me men girt for the combat, men who are grit to the core; Swift as the panther in triumph, fierce as the bear in defeat, Sired of a bulldog parent, steeled in the furnace heat.?Send me the best of your breeding, lend me your chosen ones; Them will I take to my bosom, them will I call my sons;?Them will I gild with my treasure, them