by Jack London
Despite the fact that Buck’s story grew almost organically from the author’s pen, London did not realize the huge best-seller he had just completed. After the Saturday Evening Post serialized The Call of the Wild (June-July 1903), London sold the rights to the book to Brett outright for two thousand dollars. London imagined Buck simply as a counterpart to the dog character he had created in “Bâtard,” which was first published in Cosmopolitan magazine in June 1902. This powerful tale details the “exceeding bitter hate” that existed between the evil sled driver, Black Leclère, and his equally evil dog, Bâtard (“Bâtard, ” p. 387). Dog and man, drawn together by some inexplicable force and tied together by their mutual hatred, are products of biology and environment. Like Buck and White Fang, B ^atard is a mixed breed—the son of a “great gray timber wolf” and a “snarling, bickering, obscene, husky, full-fronted and heavy-chested, with a malign eye, a cat-like grip on life, and a genius for trickery” (“Bâtard,” pp. 387—388).
Leclère, himself the product of violence, fosters Bâtard’s innate evil until “the very breath each drew was a challenge and a menace to the other. Their hate bound them together as love could never bind” (“Bâtard,” p. 389). Equals in violence and vileness, neither can “master” the other, and throughout the story, each bides his time, assesses the other’s weaknesses, and plots the other’s destruction. At the end of the text, man and dog die together. Leclère, who has been falsely accused of murder, stands on a box with a rope around his neck, while Bâtard sits grinning at his feet. When his executioners hastily leave to assess new evidence in Leclère’s case, Bâtard exacts his own revenge and knocks the box out from under his tormentor. The executioners, who return to free the innocent man, find Bâtard clinging by his teeth to Leclère’s dead body. They shoot him for it.
After detailing this anatomy of hate, London undertook to reen-vision the relationship between human and dog, and specifically between sled driver and sled dog. Native American tribes long used dogs to pull sleds, and dogs in the Arctic performed essential functions. Without them, the delivery of supplies, mail, and other necessities would have been nearly impossible. Despite the real function of dog as work animal, however, there exists between man and dog in London’s Klondike a deep and passionate love—nowhere is this more apparent than it is in the profound relationships between Buck and John Thornton and between White Fang and Weeden Scott. London loved his own dogs; he even fought a bitter custody battle with his first wife, Bessie Maddern, over their husky, Brown Wolf. Buck loves Thornton with a “love that was feverish and burning, that was adoration, that was madness” (p. 58). White Fang loves Weeden Scott with an emotion akin to religious devotion. London saw in the relationship between a man and a dog a sentiment so raw and so powerful that it can arrest an animal’s irresistible call to roam the trackless wilds or draw that wild animal away from freedom and into bondage.
The intense love exhibited between the human and the dog in these texts is both positive and affirming and dangerous and destabilizing. On the one hand, this love confirms the greater connection between the two animals; it reiterates the initial connection that drew the wolf into the human home in the first place. But at the same time, such all-powerful love displaces the fundamental command of nature to preserve the self and the species. Such a love demands a loss of borders between the self and the other, a loss that can potentially enact the destruction of the self. Consider, for instance, Buck’s willingness to throw himself off the cliff at Thornton’s command, all for the love of a man; or, more to the point, White Fang’s near-fatal impulse to protect Weeden’s family.
Love equalizes. It dismantles the hierarchy that places humans above “lesser” animals and, as a result, forces us to envision moral codes in a profoundly different way. Love makes operative this new vision of morality—the one based on social instincts and a concern for the “general good of the community.” Naturally, some found this portrait hard to ingest. Theodore Roosevelt called London a “nature faker” and accused him of shamelessly humanizing dogs in his novels and stories. London published a scathing reply to these charges in an essay entitled “The Other Animals”; in this piece, he argues that denying the reasoning and emotive capacities of animals denies the obvious kinship of creatures in the natural world. The final passage to these charges is worth quoting at length:
Let us be very humble. We who are so very human are very animal ... No ... though you stand on the top of the ladder of life, you must not kick out that ladder from under your feet. You must not deny your relatives, the other animals. Their history is your history, and if you kick them to the bottom of the abyss, to the bottom of the abyss you go yourself. By them you stand or fall. What you repudiate in them you repudiate in yourself.
There is a lot at stake in this argument. The dogs in London’s world are kin to us, struggling with others to get out of the pit. London reminds humans that their success and survival depends on the success and survival of the entire system. Each must recognize its roles in the larger community, and all must work for the “general good of the community.”
Love: This is the mysterious element that compels London to write his dog stories, and it is the element that keeps people reading them. Perhaps we love Buck’s story because the pull of the wild, of “the pleading of life,” of the “song of the huskies... pitched in minor-key” is ultimately greater than the pull of the “love of a man.” Perhaps we respond to White Fang for the opposite reason. London’s companion piece does more than explain how the wolf first came into the human home. It restores an upset balance and confirms the coadapted community. Perhaps we love these dogs because they have agency, they have choice. In a world where humans have beaten nature—even wild nature—into submission, these dogs stand out. Buck wrests control of his narrative away from the human telling the tale, and in the end, he truly does “get away” from Jack London.
Tina Gianquitto received her Ph.D. from Columbia University and is an Assistant Professor of Literature at the Colorado School of Mines, where she teaches courses on literature and the environment. She specializes in the intersections of nature and science in American literature and has published on nineteenth-century women and their representations of the natural world.
The Call of the Wild
I
Into the Primitive
“Old longings nomadic leap,
Chafing at custom’s chain;
Again from its brumal sleep
Wakens the ferine strain.”1
Buck did not read the newspapers, or he would have known that trouble was brewing, not alone for himself, but for every tide-water dog, strong of muscle and with warm, long hair, from Puget Sound to San Diego. Because men, groping in the Arctic darkness, had found a yellow metal, and because steamship and transportation companies were booming the find, thousands of men were rushing into the Northland.2 These men wanted dogs, and the dogs they wanted were heavy dogs, with strong muscles by which to toil, and furry coats to protect them from the frost.
Buck lived at a big house in the sun-kissed Santa Clara Valley 3 Judge Miller’s place, it was called. It stood back from the road, half hidden among the trees, through which glimpses could be caught of the wide cool veranda that ran around its four sides. The house was approached by gravelled driveways which wound about through wide-spreading lawns and under the interlacing boughs of tall poplars. At the rear things were on even a more spacious scale than at the front. There were great stables, where a dozen grooms and boys held forth, rows of vine-clad servants’ cottages, an endless and orderly array of outhouses, long grape arbors, green pastures, orchards, and berry patches. Then there was the pumping plant for the artesian well, and the big cement tank where Judge Miller’s boys took their morning plunge and kept cool in the hot afternoon.
And over this great demesne Buck ruled. Here he was born, and here he had lived the four years of his life. It was true, there were other idogs. There could not but be other dogs on so vast a place, but they did n
ot count. They came and went, resided in the populous kennels, or lived obscurely in the recesses of the house after the fashion of Toots, the Japanese pug, or Ysabel, the Mexican hairless,—strange creatures that rarely put nose out of doors or set foot to ground. On the other hand, there were the fox terriers, a score of them at least, who yelped fearful promises at Toots and Ysabel looking out of the windows at them and protected by a legion of housemaids armed with brooms and mops.
But Buck was neither house-dog nor kennel-dog. The whole realm was his. He plunged into the swimming tank or went hunting with the Judge’s sons; he escorted Mollie and Alice, the Judge’s daughters, on long twilight or early morning rambles; on wintry nights he lay at the Judge’s feet before the roaring library fire; he carried the Judge’s grandsons on his back, or rolled them in the grass, and guarded their footsteps through wild adventures down to the fountain in the stable yard, and even beyond, where the paddocks were, and the berry patches. Among the terriers he stalked imperiously, and Toots and Ysabel he utterly ignored, for he was king,—king over all creeping, crawling, flying things of Judge Miller’s place, humans included.
His father, Elmo, a huge St. Bernard, had been the Judge’s inseparable companion, and Buck bid fair to follow in the way of his father. He was not so large,—he weighed only one hundred and forty pounds,—for his mother, Shep, had been a Scotch shepherd dog. Nevertheless, one hundred and forty pounds, to which was added the dignity that comes of good living and universal respect, enabled him to carry himself in right royal fashion. During the four years since his puppyhood he had lived the life of a sated aristocrat; he had a fine pride in himself, was even a trifle egotistical, as country gentlemen sometimes become because of their insular situation. But he had saved himself by not becoming a mere pampered house-dog. Hunting and kindred outdoor delights had kept down the fat and hardened his muscles; and to him, as to the cold-tubbing races, the love of water had been a tonic and a health preserver.
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. But Buck did not read the newspapers, and he did not know that Manuel, one of the gardener’s helpers, was an undesirable acquaintance. Manuel had one besetting sin. He loved to play Chinese lottery.4 Also, in his gambling, he had one besetting weakness—faith in a system; and this made his damnation certain. For to play a system requires money, while the wages of a gardener’s helper do not lap over the needs of a wife and numerous progeny.
The Judge was at a meeting of the Raisin Growers’ Association, and the boys were busy organizing an athletic club, on the memorable night of Manuel’s treachery. No one saw him and Buck go off through the orchard on what Buck imagined was merely a stroll. And with the exception of a solitary man, no one saw them arrive at the little flag station known as College Park. This man talked with Manuel, and money chinked between them.
“You might wrap up the goods before you deliver ’m,” the stranger said gruffly, and Manuel doubled a piece of stout rope around Buck’s neck under the collar.
“Twist it, an’ you’ll choke ’m plentee,” said Manuel, and the stranger grunted a ready affirmative.
Buck had accepted the rope with quiet dignity. To be sure, it was an unwonted performance: but he had learned to trust in men he knew, and to give them credit for a wisdom that outreached his own. But when the ends of the rope were placed in the stranger’s hands, he growled menacingly. He had merely intimated his displeasure, in his pride believing that to intimate was to command. But to his surprise the rope tightened around his neck, shutting off his breath. In quick rage he sprang at the man, who met him halfway, grappled him close by the throat, and with a deft twist threw him over on his back. Then the rope tightened mercilessly, while Buck struggled in a fury, his tongue lolling out of his mouth and his great chest panting futilely. Never in all his life had he been so vilely treated, and never in all his life had he been so angry. But his strength ebbed, his eyes glazed, and he knew nothing when the train was flagged and the two men threw him into the baggage car.
The next he knew, he was dimly aware that his tongue was hurting and that he was being jolted along in some kind of a conveyance. The hoarse shriek of a locomotive whistling a crossing told him where he was. He had travelled too often with the Judge not to know the sensation of riding in a baggage car. He opened his eyes, and into them came the unbridled anger of a kidnapped king. The man sprang for his throat, but Buck was too quick for him. His jaws closed on the hand, nor did they relax till his senses were choked out of him once more.
“Yep, has fits,” the man said, hiding his mangled hand from the baggageman, who had been attracted by the sounds of struggle. “I’m takin’ ’m up for the boss to ‘Frisco. A crack dog-doctor there thinks that he can cure ’m:’
Concerning that night’s ride, the man spoke most eloquently for himself, in a little shed back of a saloon on the San Francisco water front.
“All I get is fifty for it,” he grumbled; “an’ I wouldn’t do it over for a thousand, cold cash.”
His hand was wrapped in a bloody handkerchief, and the right trouser leg was ripped from knee to ankle.
“How much did the other mug get?” the saloon-keeper demanded.
“A hundred,” was the reply. “Wouldn’t take a soua less, so help me.”
“That makes a hundred and fifty,” the saloon-keeper calculated; “and he’s worth it, or I’m a squarehead.”b
The kidnapper undid the bloody wrappings and looked at his lacerated hand. “If I don’t get the hydrophoby—”
“It’ll be because you was born to hang,” laughed the saloon-keeper. “Here, lend me a hand before you pull your freight,”c he added.
Dazed, suffering intolerable pain from throat and tongue, with the life half throttled out of him, Buck attempted to face his tormentors. But he was thrown down and choked repeatedly, till they succeeded in filing the heavy brass collar from off his neck. Then the rope was removed, and he was flung into a cagelike crate.
There he lay for the remainder of the weary night, nursing his wrath and wounded pride. He could not understand what it all meant. What did they want with him, these strange men? Why were they keeping him pent up in this narrow crate? He did not know why, but he felt oppressed by the vague sense of impending calamity. Several times during the night he sprang to his feet when the shed door rattled open, expecting to see the judge, or the boys at least. But each time it was the bulging face of the saloon-keeper that peered in at him by the sickly light of a tallow candle. And each time the joyful bark that trembled in Buck’s throat was twisted into a savage growl.
But the saloon-keeper let him alone, and in the morning four men entered and picked up the crate. More tormentors, Buck decided, for they were evil-looking creatures, ragged and unkempt; and he stormed and raged at them through the bars. They only laughed and poked sticks at him, which he promptly assailed with his teeth till he realized that that was what they wanted. Whereupon he lay down sullenly and allowed the crate to be lifted into a wagon. Then he, and the crate in which he was imprisoned, began a passage through many hands. Clerks in the express office took charge of him; he was carted about in another wagon; a truck carried him, with an assortment of boxes and parcels, upon a ferry steamer; he was trucked off the steamer into a great railway depot, and finally he was deposited in an express car.
For two days and nights this express car was dragged along at the tail of shrieking locomotives; and for two days and nights Buck neither ate nor drank. In his anger he had met the first advances of the express messengers with growls, and they had retaliated by teasing him. When he flung himself against the bars, quivering and frothing, they laughed at him and taunted him. They growled and barked like detestable dogs, mewed, and flapped their arms and crowed. It was all very silly, he knew; but therefore the more outrage to his dignity, and his anger waxed and waxed. He did not mind the hunger so much, but the lack of water caused him severe suffering and fanned h
is wrath to fever-pitch. For that matter, high-strung and finely sensitive, the ill treatment had flung him into a fever, which was fed by the inflammation of his parched and swollen throat and tongue.
He was glad for one thing: the rope was off his neck. That had given them an unfair advantage; but now that it was off, he would show them. They would never get another rope around his neck. Upon that he was resolved. For two days and nights he neither ate nor drank, and during those two days and nights of torment, he accumulated a fund of wrath that boded ill for whoever first fell foul of him. His eyes turned blood-shot, and he was metamorphosed into a raging fiend. So changed was he that the Judge himself would not have recognized him; and the express messengers breathed with relief when they bundled him off the train at Seattle.
Four men gingerly carried the crate from the wagon into a small, high-walled back yard. A stout man, with a red sweater that sagged generously at the neck, came out and signed the book for the driver. That was the man, Buck divined, the next tormentor, and he hurled himself savagely against the bars. The man smiled grimly, and brought a hatchet and a club.
“You ain’t going to take him out now?” the driver asked.
“Sure,” the man replied, driving the hatchet into the crate for a pry.
There was an instantaneous scattering of the four men who had carried it in, and from safe perches on top the wall they prepared to watch the performance.
Buck rushed at the splintering wood, sinking his teeth into it, surging and wrestling with it. Wherever the hatchet fell on the outside, he was there on the inside, snarling and growling, as furiously anxious to get out as the man in the red sweater was calmly intent on getting him out.
