race, whining eagerly, his splendid body flashing forward, leap by
leap, in the wan white moonlight. And leap by leap, like some
pale frost wraith, the snowshoe rabbit flashed on ahead.

All that stirring of old instincts which at stated periods drives
men out from the sounding cities to forest and plain to kill
things by chemically propelled leaden pellets, the blood lust, the
joy to kill--all this was Buck's, only it was infinitely more
intimate. He was ranging at the head of the pack, running the
wild thing down, the living meat, to kill with his own teeth and
wash his muzzle to the eyes in warm blood.

There is an ecstasy that marks the summit of life, and beyond
which life cannot rise. And such is the paradox of living, this
ecstasy comes when one is most alive, and it comes as a complete
forgetfulness that one is alive. This ecstasy, this forgetfulness
of living, comes to the artist, caught up and out of himself in a
sheet of flame; it comes to the soldier, war-mad on a stricken
field and refusing quarter; and it came to Buck, leading the pack,
sounding the old wolf-cry, straining after the food that was alive
and that fled swiftly before him through the moonlight. He was
sounding the deeps of his nature, and of the parts of his nature
that were deeper than he, going back into the womb of Time. He
was mastered by the sheer surging of life, the tidal wave of
being, the perfect joy of each separate muscle, joint, and sinew
in that it was everything that was not death, that it was aglow
and rampant, expressing itself in movement, flying exultantly
under the stars and over the face of dead matter that did not
move.