Jack London Continued

1. Projděte si opravené texty. pokuste se identifikovat společné problémy.
2. Víc hlav víc ví - vytvořte dvojice a společně zapracujte na opravě svých textů. Opravené texty vložte do komentářů k PŘEDCHOZÍMU BLOGOVÉMU VSTUPU - pod text originálu.
3. Dočtěte si závěr povídky a opět ve dvojicích přeložte vyznačené části. Překlady vložte do komentářů k tomuto blogovému vstupu a podepište jmény obou spoluautorů.


Though the hunger pangs were no longer so exquisite, he realized that he
was weak.  He was compelled to pause for frequent rests, when he attacked
the muskeg berries and rush-grass patches.  His tongue felt dry and
large, as though covered with a fine hairy growth, and it tasted bitter
in his mouth.  His heart gave him a great deal of trouble.  When he had
travelled a few minutes it would begin a remorseless thump, thump, thump,
and then leap up and away in a painful flutter of beats that choked him
and made him go faint and dizzy.

In the middle of the day he found two minnows in a large pool.  It was
impossible to bale it, but he was calmer now and managed to catch them in
his tin bucket.  They were no longer than his little finger, but he was
not particularly hungry.  The dull ache in his stomach had been growing
duller and fainter.  It seemed almost that his stomach was dozing.  He
ate the fish raw, masticating with painstaking care, for the eating was
an act of pure reason.  While he had no desire to eat, he knew that he
must eat to live.


_____________


He followed the trail of the other man who dragged himself along, and
soon came to the end of it--a few fresh-picked bones where the soggy moss
was marked by the foot-pads of many wolves.  He saw a squat moose-hide
sack, mate to his own, which had been torn by sharp teeth.  He picked it
up, though its weight was almost too much for his feeble fingers.  Bill
had carried it to the last.  Ha! ha!  He would have the laugh on Bill.  He
would survive and carry it to the ship in the shining sea.  His mirth was
hoarse and ghastly, like a raven's croak, and the sick wolf joined him,
howling lugubriously.  The man ceased suddenly.  How could he have the
laugh on Bill if that were Bill; if those bones, so pinky-white and
clean, were Bill?

He turned away.  Well, Bill had deserted him; but he would not take the
gold, nor would he suck Bill's bones.  Bill would have, though, had it
been the other way around, he mused as he staggered on.

He came to a pool of water.  Stooping over in quest of minnows, he jerked
his head back as though he had been stung.  He had caught sight of his
reflected face.  So horrible was it that sensibility awoke long enough to
be shocked.  There were three minnows in the pool, which was too large to
drain; and after several ineffectual attempts to catch them in the tin
bucket he forbore.  He was afraid, because of his great weakness, that he
might fall in and drown.  It was for this reason that he did not trust
himself to the river astride one of the many drift-logs which lined its
sand-spits.

That day he decreased the distance between him and the ship by three
miles; the next day by two--for he was crawling now as Bill had crawled;
and the end of the fifth day found the ship still seven miles away and
him unable to make even a mile a day.  Still the Indian Summer held on,
and he continued to crawl and faint, turn and turn about; and ever the
sick wolf coughed and wheezed at his heels.  His knees had become raw
meat like his feet, and though he padded them with the shirt from his
back it was a red track he left behind him on the moss and stones.  Once,
glancing back, he saw the wolf licking hungrily his bleeding trail, and
he saw sharply what his own end might be--unless--unless he could get the
wolf.  Then began as grim a tragedy of existence as was ever played--a
sick man that crawled, a sick wolf that limped, two creatures dragging
their dying carcasses across the desolation and hunting each other's
lives.

Had it been a well wolf, it would not have mattered so much to the man;
but the thought of going to feed the maw of that loathsome and all but
dead thing was repugnant to him.  He was finicky.  His mind had begun to
wander again, and to be perplexed by hallucinations, while his lucid
intervals grew rarer and shorter.

He was awakened once from a faint by a wheeze close in his ear.  The wolf
leaped lamely back, losing its footing and falling in its weakness.  It
was ludicrous, but he was not amused.  Nor was he even afraid.  He was
too far gone for that.  But his mind was for the moment clear, and he lay
and considered.  The ship was no more than four miles away.  He could see
it quite distinctly when he rubbed the mists out of his eyes, and he
could see the white sail of a small boat cutting the water of the shining
sea.  But he could never crawl those four miles.  He knew that, and was
very calm in the knowledge.  He knew that he could not crawl half a mile.
And yet he wanted to live.  It was unreasonable that he should die after
all he had undergone.  Fate asked too much of him.  And, dying, he
declined to die.  It was stark madness, perhaps, but in the very grip of
Death he defied Death and refused to die.

He closed his eyes and composed himself with infinite precaution.  He
steeled himself to keep above the suffocating languor that lapped like a
rising tide through all the wells of his being.  It was very like a sea,
this deadly languor, that rose and rose and drowned his consciousness bit
by bit.  Sometimes he was all but submerged, swimming through oblivion
with a faltering stroke; and again, by some strange alchemy of soul, he
would find another shred of will and strike out more strongly.

Without movement he lay on his back, and he could hear, slowly drawing
near and nearer, the wheezing intake and output of the sick wolf's
breath.  It drew closer, ever closer, through an infinitude of time, and
he did not move.  It was at his ear.  The harsh dry tongue grated like
sandpaper against his cheek.  His hands shot out--or at least he willed
them to shoot out.  The fingers were curved like talons, but they closed
on empty air.  Swiftness and certitude require strength, and the man had
not this strength.

The patience of the wolf was terrible.  The man's patience was no less
terrible.  For half a day he lay motionless, fighting off unconsciousness
and waiting for the thing that was to feed upon him and upon which he
wished to feed.  Sometimes the languid sea rose over him and he dreamed
long dreams; but ever through it all, waking and dreaming, he waited for
the wheezing breath and the harsh caress of the tongue.

He did not hear the breath, and he slipped slowly from some dream to the
feel of the tongue along his hand.  He waited.  The fangs pressed softly;
the pressure increased; the wolf was exerting its last strength in an
effort to sink teeth in the food for which it had waited so long.  But
the man had waited long, and the lacerated hand closed on the jaw.
Slowly, while the wolf struggled feebly and the hand clutched feebly, the
other hand crept across to a grip.  Five minutes later the whole weight
of the man's body was on top of the wolf.  The hands had not sufficient
strength to choke the wolf, but the face of the man was pressed close to
the throat of the wolf and the mouth of the man was full of hair.  At the
end of half an hour the man was aware of a warm trickle in his throat.  It
was not pleasant.  It was like molten lead being forced into his stomach,
and it was forced by his will alone.  Later the man rolled over on his
back and slept.

* * * * *

There were some members of a scientific expedition on the whale-ship
'Bedford'.  From the deck they remarked a strange object on the shore.  It
was moving down the beach toward the water.  They were unable to classify
it, and, being scientific men, they climbed into the whale-boat alongside
and went ashore to see.  And they saw something that was alive but which
could hardly be called a man.  It was blind, unconscious.  It squirmed
along the ground like some monstrous worm.  Most of its efforts were
ineffectual, but it was persistent, and it writhed and twisted and went
ahead perhaps a score of feet an hour.

* * * * *

Three weeks afterward the man lay in a bunk on the whale-ship _Bedford_,
and with tears streaming down his wasted cheeks told who he was and what
he had undergone.  He also babbled incoherently of his mother, of sunny
Southern California, and a home among the orange groves and flowers.

The days were not many after that when he sat at table with the
scientific men and ship's officers.  He gloated over the spectacle of so
much food, watching it anxiously as it went into the mouths of others.
With the disappearance of each mouthful an expression of deep regret came
into his eyes.  He was quite sane, yet he hated those men at mealtime.  He
was haunted by a fear that the food would not last.  He inquired of the
cook, the cabin-boy, the captain, concerning the food stores.  They
reassured him countless times; but he could not believe them, and pried
cunningly about the lazarette to see with his own eyes.

It was noticed that the man was getting fat.  He grew stouter with each
day.  The scientific men shook their heads and theorized.  They limited
the man at his meals, but still his girth increased and he swelled
prodigiously under his shirt.

The sailors grinned.  They knew.  And when the scientific men set a watch
on the man, they knew too.  They saw him slouch for'ard after breakfast,
and, like a mendicant, with outstretched palm, accost a sailor.  The
sailor grinned and passed him a fragment of sea biscuit.  He clutched it
avariciously, looked at it as a miser looks at gold, and thrust it into
his shirt bosom.  Similar were the donations from other grinning sailors.

The scientific men were discreet.  They let him alone.  But they privily
examined his bunk.  It was lined with hardtack; the mattress was stuffed
with hardtack; every nook and cranny was filled with hardtack.  Yet he
was sane.  He was taking precautions against another possible famine--that
was all.  He would recover from it, the scientific men said; and he did,
ere the _Bedford's_ anchor rumbled down in San Francisco Bay.