Select the correct answer. How does the historical setting of the passage contribute to the theme? A. It creates the setting for the theme of desperation and the struggle to gain wealth. B. It shows the attitude of the men for the theme of an overwhelming desire for more. C. It emphasizes the harsh conditions to be overcome for the theme of perseverance. D. It illustrates the environment for the theme of man verses nature in the wilderness.


And this was the manner of dog Buck was in the fall of 1897, when the Klondike strike dragged men from all the world into the frozen North . . .

Thirty days from the time it left Dawson, the Salt Water Mail, with Buck and his mates at the fore, arrived at Skaguay. They were in a wretched state, worn out and worn down. Buck's one hundred and forty pounds had dwindled to one hundred and fifteen. The rest of his mates, though lighter dogs, had relatively lost more weight than he. Pike, the malingerer, was now limping in earnest. Sol-leks was limping, and Dub was suffering from a wrenched shoulder-blade.

They were all terribly footsore. No spring or rebound was left in them. Their feet fell heavily on the trail, jarring their bodies and doubling the fatigue of a day's travel. There was nothing the matter with them except that they were exhausted. It was not the dead-tiredness that comes through brief and excessive effort, from which recovery is a matter of hours; but it was the dead-tiredness that comes through the slow and prolonged strength drainage of months of toil. There was no power of recuperation left, no reserve strength to call upon. It had been all used, the last least bit of it. Every muscle, every fibre, every cell, was tired, dead tired. And there was reason for it. In less than five months they had traveled twenty-five hundred miles, during the last eighteen hundred of which they had had but five days' rest. When they arrived at Skaguay they were apparently on their last legs. They could barely keep the traces taut, and on the down grades just managed to keep out of the way of the sled.

"Mush on, poor sore feets," the driver encouraged them as they tottered down the main street of Skaguay.

The drivers, themselves, they had covered twelve hundred miles with two days' rest, and in the nature of reason and common justice, they deserved an interval of loafing. But so many were the men who had rushed into the Klondike, that the congested mail was taking on Alpine amounts; also, there were official orders. Fresh batches of Hudson Bay dogs were to take the places of those too tired for the trail. The tired ones were to be sold.