Percy Cuthfert

Percy Cuthfert — 'Poor old Cuthfert' — is the sort of man the Yukon tests and finds wanting, a soft creature whose will buckles where the trail demands iron. He is the counterweight to men like Sitka Charley and Malemute Kid, the living proof that the North does not forgive those who cannot carry their own flour. His presence in the story measures the cost of weakness in a land where the weak are left in the snow, and the reader watches him the way the other characters do — with a pity that knows how the arithmetic ends.