by Jack London
He was calm and collected. Though extremely weak, he had no sensation of pain. He was not hungry. The thought of food was not even pleasant to him, and whatever he did was done by his reason alone. He ripped off his pants legs to the knees and bound them about his feet. Somehow he had succeeded in retaining the tin bucket. He would have some hot water before he began what he foresaw was to be a terrible journey to the ship.
His movements were slow. He shook as with a palsy. When he started to collect dry moss he found he could not rise to his feet. He tried again and again, then contented himself with crawling about on hands and knees. Once he crawled near to the sick wolf. The animal dragged itself reluctantly out of his way, licking its chops with a tongue which seemed hardly to have the strength to curl. The man noticed that the tongue was not the customary healthy red. It was a yellowish brown and seemed coated with a rough and half-dry mucus.
After he had drunk a quart of hot water the man found he was able to stand, and even to walk as well as a dying man might be supposed to walk. Every minute or so he was compelled to rest. His steps were feeble and uncertain, just as the wolf’s that trailed him were feeble and uncertain; and that night, when the shining sea was blotted out by blackness, he knew he was nearer to it by no more than four miles.
Throughout the night he heard the cough of the sick wolf, and now and then the squawking of the caribou calves. There was life all around him, but it was strong life, very much alive and well, and he knew the sick wolf clung to the sick man’s trail in the hope that the man would die first. In the morning, on opening his eyes, he beheld it regarding him with a wistful and hungry stare. It stood crouched, with tail between its legs, like a miserable and woebegone dog. It shivered in the chill morning wind and grinned dispiritedly when the man spoke to it in a voice that achieved no more than a hoarse whisper.
The sun rose brightly, and all morning the man tottered and fell toward the ship on the shining sea. The weather was perfect. It was the brief Indian summer of the high latitudes. It might last a week. Tomorrow or next day it might be gone.
In the afternoon the man came upon a trail. It was of another man, who did not walk, but who dragged himself on all fours. The man thought it might be Bill, but he thought in a dull, uninterested way. He had no curiosity. In fact sensation and emotion had left him. He was no longer susceptible to pain. Stomach and nerves had gone to sleep. Yet the life that was in him drove him on. He was very weary, but it refused to die. It was because it refused to die that he still ate muskeg berries and minnows, drank his hot water, and kept a wary eye on the sick wolf.
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 sandspits.
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 whaleboat 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 lazaret 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. 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.
AFTERWORD
The Call of the Wild, by Jack London, is one of the most beloved stories of all time. It gained immediate and immense popularity after it was published in 1903 and is still one of the most widely read American classics, at home and worldwide. When you consider that it was written more than a century ago, its appeal may be entering the timeless territory where books like Steven son’s Treasure Island, Kipling’s The Jungle Book and Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn reside. It remains an enduring favorite of both children and adults.
Yet, though its original publishers thought it might appeal to a juvenile audience, perhaps because its main character is a dog, the book is quite dark. Rereading it as an adult, I was struck by the brutality of its narrative and the grim starkness of its underlying philosophy. It is a tale stretched on the grid of a simplistic but very dramatically depicted Spencerian universe, where the survival of the fittest rules all encounters. Its presentation of the terms of life and survival has an unrelievedly ruthless quality, and though it’s crammed with adventure and exciting events, the story—involving the kidnap, brutal ization, virtual enslavement, starvation and near death of a dog named Buck—is full of violence, greed and cruelty in many and various forms.
Like the other stories in this volume, the narrative is set in the Klondike during the gold rush, a time and place with which Jack London was intimately familiar, having spent a very challenging year there himself right before he took up the writing life. London pulls no punches; he lays out a world in which cunning and strength and know-how count for everything. Weakness, physical or emotional, is fatal. Delicacy, fair play, relaxation, abundance—all these things are brief or doomed. In this book, as in some other London books like The Sea-Wolf, the natural world becomes in some way the essential antagonist—and teacher—of the main character, a force that profoundly influences the hero’s moral and psychological development. The stark, demanding environment of the far North has a brooding, indelible presence in the unfolding of Buck’s drama. The very voice of the story has wind and snow in it, the breath of the arctic; and the natural world—the landscape, the weather, the seasons, nature itself—is an inescapable, majestic and unyielding presence in the lives of all the characters, some of whom never learn to live within its fierce embrace.
In this world nature possesses a kind of relentlessly fierce beauty and grandeur, which in itself draws people into it, but every step taken in this northern wilderness must be planned for and carefully executed. Mistakes and ignorance—or sometimes simply bad luck—can mean not just failure, but death. The vastness and severity of the Klondike’s terrain and weather create an indifferent and dangerous battlefield where all creatures, human and otherwise, must develop a hardened muscularity, both physical and psychic. But there is fever here, and driving ambition: this forbidding context lures men with the prospect of riches and opportunity in the form of gold, game and commerce, and so the daunting natural world itself becomes both a dangerous adversary to outwit and a measure of the fitness of man and beast. Wind, snow, darkness, cold, wolves: all these are potential and ever-present enemies to the unprepared interloper and even, sometimes, to the old hand.
The narrative, with a kind of unrelenting rhythm and weather of its own, matches these life-threatening rigors of the Alaskan wilderness with the harsh social hierarchies of the men and animals who struggle to survive there, pursuing their various forms of daily bread or future wealth in an atmosphere of greed and lawlessness. Buck, through no volition of his own, is caught in this extreme environment, both physical and social. He must adapt or perish, and the story leads you through his awakening understanding of himself, his new world and his place in it. Though ultimately this harsh environment does bring out the best in certain characters, including Buck and John Thornton, reading the book as an adult can bring to mind all the darkest horrors of human behavior. With a breath as cold and chilling as the Alaskan winter itself, it lays out not just the unforgiving commands and dangers of pioneering life in the northern wilderness but also the morally challenging and often desperate situation of the people drawn to the Klondike in their search for riches, adventure or a more elemental life. As in the story “Love of Life,” people are frequently stripped down to mere survival machines; all the easy moral maxims of social life are tested—and most found wanting—in this ferocious landscape. This sometimes seems to be one of London’s driving motives, as though his calling is to remind everyone of the chill below the warmth of our cozy social conventions. At the center of this are the harsh life of a sled dog and the literally dog-eat-dog hierarchy of the pack Buck must learn to negotiate. As Buck thinks to himself upon observing the friendly dog Curly’s death by pack attack, “So that was the way. No fair play.”
So why has the book been so durably appealing to so many readers, young and old?
When you mention The Call of the Wild to someone who read it as a child or young adult, it’s not cruelty or violence or frostbite or sunless noons the person recalls—it’s Buck: his endurance, his strength, his ultimate discovery of self, all in the midst of an ultimate challenge. It’s a tale of almost mythic power. On this reading, suffering through Buck’s hardships with the knowledge that it would only get worse, I found myself resisting the bleakness of the story. And yet, as Buck hardens and perseveres, coming horribly close to death, something of an almost tragic splendor comes into the story. When he finally meets Thornton and experiences love, developing a unique and iconic
relationship with him, the fact that he will need to travel on, even past this, becomes somehow, not just bearable, but inevitable—and satisfying in its honoring of what love and loss mean in life. The story breaks you down, beats you about the psychic head and shoulders, and squeezes you through the eye of an emotional needle, where, somehow, on the other side, you find yourself in a sere but serene territory of acceptance and calm regarding life’s troubles and challenges, satis factions and losses. In the course of the story Buck has become himself, capable of negotiating all of life’s by-ways. While the story has its simplistic and sentimental side, it is this accomplished arc that makes it so powerful and gives it mythic weight.
The Call of the Wild depicts a classic hero’s journey, following Buck as he develops an adaptive flexibility that allows him victory over the kind of elemental catastrophes that can befall all creatures. What magnetizes readers is the alchemy of transformation. The big, indomitable dog at the heart of this tale stands for all adventurers and pioneers who make it through a fierce tempering process and take on a largeness beyond the ordinary, becoming legendary. Buck and the story of his unquenchable will embody the essence of heroism, the victory of the spirit against all odds, and the discovery of the deepest drives at the heart of the self.
And London doesn’t make it easy for us. We have to work our way through various darknesses. This, too, is characteristic of stories and books with enduring appeal.
Buck is not “nice.” Very early in the story he discovers the necessity of an unstinting attention, not just to survival, but to winning all fights, to the negotiation of the pack’s hierarchy, to cunning and manipulation and theft, to the skills of the hunt and the pleasures of a blood instinct. Consider how he brings down the bull moose, slowly harassing it to death, keeping it from food and water, ruthlessly and relentlessly pursuing it till he makes it into his kill. But he is not a creature merely of instinct. He has and makes choices. In the latter part of the story, he chooses Thornton over his call to wildness so long as Thornton is alive, and though he would gladly kill any man who threatened Thornton, he controls himself in the presence of the unwelcome fondling and noodling of both people and other canines when it is right to do so. The morality and honor of both survival and identity—the mixed and often conflicted nature of self—are presented with some complexity both here and in London’s book The Sea-Wolf , which is about a similar conflict between the necessities of civilization and survival in a wilderness.
