The epigraph of the first chapter of American writer Jack London’s The Call of the Wild (published in 1903) sets up the story of a dog named Buck quite nicely. It goes: “Old longings nomadic leap,/ Chafing at custom’s chain;/ Again from its brumal sleep/ Wakens the ferine strain.”
In this adventure tale of human-animal conflict and its consequences in seven chapters, each one’s title is used to take the theme forward.
In the first, ‘Into the Primitive’, Buck, a St. Bernard and Scotch Shepherd mix, lives in the home of a judge in California like a “sated aristocrat”, blissfully unaware of the trouble brewing as newspapers had been reporting.
It’s the time of the Klondike gold rush of the late 1800s when thousands of people flocked to the Yukon valley in search of the yellow metal with the help of strong-muscled dogs. Buck is abducted by one of the gardeners of Judge Miller and sold to dog traders who soon send him to the frozen north to pull a sled, abused and beaten on the way. “Never in all his life had he been so vilely treated, and never in all his life had he been so angry.”
Law of club and fang
Soon, the ‘’law of club and fang’’ takes over. As Buck is forced to adapt to the harsh conditions around him, he begins to respond to his primitive instincts, and is forced into a fight to death with the leader of the group, Spitz.
The story goes, not apocryphal, that London spent close to a year in the Yukon and drew from his experiences when he was writing this short novel. Finally, when Buck refuses to undertake a dangerous river crossing, he is beaten up severely by the gold-diggers till a man they had chanced upon in a camp, John Thornton, comes to his rescue and nurses him. “...lying by the river bank through the long spring days, watching the running water, listening lazily to the songs of birds and the hum of nature, Buck slowly won back his strength.”
He saves Thornton from drowning, but when a group of Indians — London calls them Yeehats — descend on their camp and kill Thornton, Buck grows wild with grief. He kills several of them, and becomes stuff of legend with the Indians calling him “Ghost Dog”.
In Jack London, An American Life , Earle Labor writes that during his youth, he was hobnobbing with “social degenerates”, yet, by dint of “luck, pluck and sheer determination — undergirded by a rare genius...”, he escaped the “pit” and became a man of letters. He had written The Call of the Wild when he was 27 years old, and White Fang by 30. He died at 40 but by then he had made quite an impression with his short stories and novels.
The writer looks back at one classic each fortnight.
