by Jack London
White Fang received the nursing. Judge Scott’s suggestion of a trained nurse was indignantly clamored down by the girls, who themselves undertook the task. And White Fang won out on the one chance in ten thousand denied him by the surgeon.
The latter was not to be censured for his misjudgment. All his life he had tended and operated on the soft humans of civilization, who lived sheltered lives and had descended out of many sheltered generations. Compared with White Fang, they were frail and flabby, and clutched life without any strength in their grip. White Fang had come straight from the Wild, where the weak perish early and shelter is vouchsafed to none. In neither his father nor his mother was there any weakness, nor in the generations before them. A constitution of iron and the vitality of the Wild were White Fang’s inheritance, and he clung to life, the whole of him and every part of him, in spirit and in flesh, with the tenacity that of old belonged to all creatures.
Bound down a prisoner, denied even movement by the plaster casts and bandages, White Fang lingered out the weeks. He slept long hours and dreamed much, and through his mind passed an unending pageant of Northland visions. All the ghosts of the past arose and were with him. Once again he lived in the lair with Kiche, crept trembling to the knees of Gray Beaver to tender his allegiance, ran for his life before Lip-lip and all the howling bedlam of the puppy-pack.
He ran again through the silence, hunting his living food through the months of famine; and again he ran at the head of the team, the gut-whips of Mit-sah and Gray Beaver snapping behind, their voices crying “Raa! Raa!” when they came to a narrow passage and the team closed together like a fan to go through. He lived again all his days with Beauty Smith and the fights he had fought. At such times he whimpered and snarled in his sleep, and they that looked on said that his dreams were bad.
But there was one particular nightmare from which he suffered—the clanking, clanging monsters of electric cars that were to him colossal screaming lynxes. He would lie in a screen of bushes, watching for a squirrel to venture far enough out on the ground from its tree-refuge. Then, when he sprang out upon it, it would transform itself into an electric car, menacing and terrible, towering over him like a mountain, screaming and clanging and spitting fire at him. It was the same when he challenged the hawk down out of the sky. Down out of the blue it would rush, as it dropped upon him changing itself into the ubiquitous electric car. Or again, he would be in the pen of Beauty Smith. Outside the pen, men would be gathering, and he knew that a fight was on. He watched the door for his antagonist to enter. The door would open, and thrust in upon him would come the awful electric car. A thousand times this occurred, and each time the terror it inspired was as vivid and great as ever.
Then came the day when the last bandage and the last plaster cast were taken off. It was a gala day. All Sierra Vista was gathered around. The master rubbed his ears, and he crooned his love-growl. The master’s wife called him the “Blessed Wolf,” which name was taken up with acclaim and all the women called him the Blessed Wolf.
He tried to rise to his feet, and after several attempts fell down from weakness. He had lain so long that his muscles had lost their cunning, and all the strength had gone out of them. He felt a little shame because of his weakness, as though, forsooth, he were failing the gods in the service he owed them. Because of this he made heroic efforts to arise, and at last he stood on his four legs, tottering and swaying back and forth.
“The Blessed Wolf!” chorused the women.
Judge Scott surveyed them triumphantly.
“Out of your own mouths be it,” he said. “Just as I contended right along. No mere dog could have done what he did. He’s a wolf.”
“A Blessed Wolf,” amended the Judge’s wife.
“Yes, Blessed Wolf,” agreed the Judge. “And henceforth that shall be my name for him.”
“He’ll have to learn to walk again,” said the surgeon; “so he might as well start in right now. It won’t hurt him. Take him outside.”
And outside he went, like a king, with all Sierra Vista about him and tending on him. He was very weak, and when he reached the lawn he lay down and rested for a while.
Then the procession started on, little spurts of strength coming into White Fang’s muscles as he used them and the blood began to surge through them. The stables were reached, and there in the doorway lay Collie, a half-dozen pudgy puppies playing about her in the sun.
White Fang looked on with a wondering eye.
Collie snarled warningly at him, and he was careful to keep his distance. The master with his toe helped one sprawling puppy toward him. He bristled suspiciously, but the master warned him that all was well. Collie, clasped in the arms of one of the women, watched him jealously and with a snarl warned him that all was not well.
The puppy sprawled in front of him. He cocked his ears and watched it curiously. Then their noses touched, and he felt the warm little tongue of the puppy on his jowl. White Fang’s tongue went out, he knew not why, and he licked the puppy’s face.
Hand-clapping and pleased cries from the gods greeted the performance. He was surprised, and looked at them in a puzzled way. Then his weakness asserted itself, and he lay down, his ears cocked, his head on one side, as he watched the puppy. The other puppies came sprawling toward him, to Collie’s great disgust; and he gravely permitted them to clamber and tumble over him. At first, amid the applause of the gods, he betrayed a trifle of his old self-consciousness and awkwardness. This passed away as the puppies’ antics and mauling continued, and he lay with half-shut, patient eyes, drowsing in the sun.
Endnotes
The Call of the Wild
Chapter I
1 . (p. 5) Old longings ... strain: These lines are from the first stanza of John M. O’Hara’s poem “Atavism,” which was first published in 1902 in The Bookman, a popular periodical. Biologists use the term atavism to describe the reappearance in an individual of certain characteristics of a distant ancestor that have been absent in intervening generations. Buck exhibits atavistic characteristics when his instincts and memories of an impossibly distant past “call” him and reassert themselves into his behavior.
2 . (p. 5) Northland: George Washington Carmack discovered gold in the Klondike in 1896. News of his Bonanza River strike reached the United States in 1897. Approximately 250,000 gold miners left for the Northland during the two big years of the Gold Rush that followed. London left for the Klondike on July 25, 1897, saying about his adventure “I had let career go hang, and was on the adventure path again in quest of fortune.”
3 . (p. 5) Buck: London based many of his canine characters on dogs he met in the Klondike. Buck, for instance, is modeled after Jack, a St. Bernard-collie mix who came from California to the Klondike with a miner named Lois Bond. Other dogs, like Curly and Koona, are based on animals London read about in Egerton Young’s My Dogs in the Northland.
4 . (p. 7) Chinese lottery: The reference is to a popular but illegal game of chance (now called keno) that Chinese immigrants brought to the United States.
5 . (p. 13) Narwhal: This small, white-gray whale inhabits the waters of the eastern Arctic Ocean and is known for its “tusk,” a singular tooth that is three to seven feet long and projects from its blunt nose. Native peoples often use the meat of the whale to feed sled dogs.
6 . (p. 13) half-breed: This term broadly connotes a person born of parents of different races. In the United States, it is often applied to children of whites or blacks and Native Americans.
Chapter II
1 . (p. 15) Dyea beach: This beach was the arrival point for Klondikers (gold miners) coming from the south and the departure point for those returning south from the gold fields. Dyea had no wharves or harbor, and its thirty-foot tide often left boats stranded on the shore.
2 . (p. 20) Canon ... Sheep Camp ... Scales ... Chilcoot Divide: These are places along the Dyea trail, one of the two most popular routes to Dawson. The other was the Skaguay trail. The trails met at Lake Bennett.
/> Chapter III
1 . (p. 23) Lake Le Barge: On modern maps, the name of this lake is given as Lake Laberge.
2 . (p. 27) Hootalinqua: This river is also known as the Teslin River.
3 . (p. 27) Five Fingers: These dangerous rapids on the Upper Yukon River posed a great hazard to miners traveling downstream to Dawson City. The rapids were formed by five giant rocks that thrust up out of the water and divided the river into six smaller channels.
4 . (p. 29) Dawson: Dawson City, the principal departure point for the gold mines to the far north and west, was located at the point where the Klondike River empties into the Yukon River. The “city” arose out of the wilderness just a few days after prospectors found gold in the Klondike region. Dawson quickly grew into a town of considerable size, with graded streets, water service, and businesses of all kinds.
5 . (p. 30) aurora borealis: A vibrant, luminous array of electrical discharges that lights up the northern skies, the aurora borealis displays take the form of dancing patches and columns of light, in rapidly changing forms and colors (green, red, yellow, blue, and violet).
6 . (p. 30) Barracks: The reference is to the headquarters of the Northwest Mounted Police. As people rushed into the Klondike and Yukon regions, the Canadian government maintained fifty-five mounted police stations in the Yukon territory, each staffed by at least three men. In addition, the Mounties had garrisons at Dawson City and White Horse.
Chapter IV
1 . (p. 39) Skaguay: Buck and the mail sled return south via the Skaguay trail. The town of Skaguay (now called Skagway) provided better access for docking boats and soon replaced Dyea as the main departure point for gold seekers.
2 . (p. 42) Cassiar Bar: The reference is to a location between the junction of the Thirty-Mile section of the Yukon River and the Hootalinqua (Teslin) and Big Salmon rivers.
Chapter V
1 . (p. 54) White River. Thornton’s camp is at the junction of the White and Yukon rivers, upstream from Dawson.
Chapter VI
1 . (p. 61) Circle City: In 1897, this was the last stop for one of seven postal routes in Alaska.
2 . (p. 64) Bonanza King: The term “king” was reserved for a prospector who struck it rich on a claim. The Bonanza King successfully prospected on Bonanza Creek, which was the location of one of the first, and richest, gold strikes.
3 . (p. 65) Mastodon King: The reference is to a successful prospector on Mastodon Creek in the Forty-Mile mining area.
4 . (p. 66) Skookum Benches: This is an area of the Klondike gold fields named after Skookum Jim, a Native American who discovered gold on a branch of the Klondike River. A bench is a terrace formed along the base of a mountain by unequal erosion or by mining.
Chapter VII
1 . (p. 70) Hudson Bay Company: One of the largest and most profitable fur trading companies in North America, Hudson’s Bay Company (not, as London calls it, Hudson Bay Company) by the 1830s had a virtual monopoly over trade in Canada from the Atlantic to the Pacific.
White Fang
Part Four, Chapter II
1 . (p. 212) Sour-doughs: This was a nickname for miners who had spent at least one year “inside” and had experienced the perils of a winter in a Yukon or Klondike mining camp. So-called because they used a sourdough mixture to make bread instead of the hard-to-obtain yeast favored by newcomers (chechaquos) to the region. London humorously describes the process of making sourdough bread in his short narrative “Housekeeping in the Klondike.”
Part Four, Chapter IV
1 . (p. 230) skin-fold: The description in the preceding pages of the battle between a wolf-dog and a bulldog caused London a good deal of trouble with President Theodore Roosevelt, a hunter and amateur naturalist. In an interview with Everybody’s Magazine in June 1907, Roosevelt called this passage the “very sublimity of absurdity.” In doing so, he initiated London into the great “nature-faking” controversy. Participants in this debate battled over how one could determine the “real” cause (instinct or reason) of nonhuman animal behavior and, by extension, how the actions, emotions, and thoughts of those animals could be expressed in literary texts. London responded to Roosevelt’s attack in a biting essay entitled “The Other Animals.” He resolves the charge against him simply: “It is merely,” he writes, “a difference of opinion.”
Part Five, Chapter I
1 . (p. 256) Sardanapalus: London uses this term as an oath. Sardanapalus was the mythical last King of Assyria (880 B.C.) who set himself, his wife, and his kingdom’s treasures on fire rather than face defeat by a rebel army.
Inspired by The Call of the Wild
and White Fang
Film Adaptations of the Novels
The spectacle of the snow-blanketed Yukon and the fervor of the Gold Rush of 1897 translate powerfully into film. Even so, no film—and there have been many, from as far afield as Russia, Italy, and Estonia—has succeeded in capturing the majesty and simplicity of London’s two greatest novels.
D. W. Griffith, the director best known for his 1915 film Birth of a Nation, first brought The Call of the Wild to the screen, in 1908, and Fred Jackman directed another film adaptation, also a silent, in 1923. The first Call of the Wild “talkie” hit the screen in 1935; director William Wellman, famous for his war epic Wings, gives this film the flavor of a Western and turns it into a romance story, with sparks flying across the frozen North between Clark Gable, playing the much-expanded Jack Thornton role, and Loretta Young. The screen-play relegates Buck the German shepherd to a secondary role, and the dog’s decision to follow the “call” at the end seems incidental to the plot.
Ken Annakin’s 1972 adaptation of The Call of the Wild, filmed in the rugged wilderness of Finland, opens with the wolf pack mauling and devouring caribou and never lets up in its attempt to convey a harsh struggle for survival, as well as the vitality of nature. Humans are portrayed as cruel, insignificant, diseased with greed, and ridiculous ; only Thornton, who is played by Charlton Heston, is the exception. Buck finally gets the starring role in a 1976 shot-for-television film, directed by Jerry Jameson and written by James Dickey, author of Deliverance.
White Fang has its share of film renderings, too. Lawrence Trimble, director and well-known animal trainer, cast Silver the wolf and legendary canine actor Strongheart in his 1925 silent tribute to the Northern wilderness. Probably the most popular screen version of White Fang to date is the 1991 film Randal Kleiser directed for Disney. Ethan Hawke is the young Jack, who enjoys a perfect union with White Fang. Though the film is closer thematically to The Call of the Wild than it is to the novel on which it is based, the sentimental depiction of young man and dog manages to warm the heart—all the more so because the film is set in a harsh, beautifully photographed world of ice.
Into the Wild
Jack London’s sensibilities pervade Into the Wild (1996), by Jon Krakauer. The author weaves together letters, journals, and photographs to chronicle the real-life story of Chris McCandless, a recent college graduate from a comfortable East Coast home who finds himself disenchanted with material security and disdainful of capitalism. McCandless gives his $24,000 inheritance to charity and heads West, adopting a vigorous life of travel, random work, and steady adventure, reminiscent of a young Jack London. Finding his way to Fairbanks, Alaska, McCandless lives off the land and a ten-pound bag of rice until he succumbs to starvation. McCandless answers the “Call,” the force that impels the tamed to give up comfort in exchange for freedom. In fact, as Krakauer tells us, McCandless often spoke of his admiration for Jack London’s writings, and his death mirrors London’s story “To Build a Fire,” in that man, with his myriad follies, is no match for the might of nature. The fate of the fiercely idealistic McCandless also somewhat parallels the early death of London, a writer of Socialist convictions who never came to terms with his own financial success.
Comments & Questions
In this section, we aim to provide the reader with an array of perspectives on these texts, as
well as questions that challenge those perspectives. The commentary has been culled from sources as diverse as reviews contemporaneous with the work, letters written by the author, literary criticism of later generations, and appreciations written throughout the books’ history. Following the commentary, a series of questions seeks to filter Jack London’s The Call of the Wild and White Fang through a variety of points of view and bring about a richer understanding of these enduring works.
Comments on The Call of the Wild
SATURDAY REVIEW OF BOOKS, NEW FORK TIMES
Mr. Jack London, having made us acquainted in his previous stories with the people of the Far Northwest, proceeds in his latest and best book, “The Call of the Wild,” to introduce us to a little lower stratum of the same society—a most fascinating company of dogs, good, bad, and indifferent, of which a huge fellow, St. Bernard and collie crossed, named Buck is the bright particular star.
Unlike most stories of the kind, men and women occupy a very unimportant place in this one, and not much time or trouble is taken by the author in individualizing the few humans who are necessary to carry on the action. Better still, Mr. London’s dogs are not merely people masquerading in canine skins. At least this is true to a far greater extent than has usually been the case even with the best dogs of fiction; and during the delightful hour it takes to read this story one feels that he is really in a world in which dog standards, dog motives, and dog feelings are the subject of analysis, and that Mr. London himself has somehow penetrated a step or two behind the barrier which often seems so slight and transparent between man and “man’s best friend.”
