And so well did he face it, that at the end of half an hour the wolves drew back discomfited. The tongues of all were out and lolling, the white fangs showing cruelly white in the moonlight. Some were lying down with heads raised and ears pricked forward; others stood on their feet, watching him; and still others were lapping water from the pool. One wolf, long and lean and gray, advanced cautiously, in a friendly manner, and Buck recognized the wild brother with whom he had run for a night and a day. He was whining softly, and, as Buck whined, they touched noses.
Then an old wolf, gaunt and battle-scarred, came forward. Buck writhed his lips into the preliminary of a snarl, but sniffed noses with him. Whereupon the old wolf sat down, pointed nose at the moon, and broke out the long wolf howl. The others sat down and howled. And now the call came to Buck in unmistakable accents. He, too, sat down and howled. This over, he came out of his angle and the pack crowded around him, sniffing in half-friendly, half-savage manner. The leaders lifted the yelp of the pack and sprang away into the woods. The wolves swung in behind, yelping in chorus. And Buck ran with them, side by side with the wild brother, yelping as he ran.
And here may well end the story of Buck. The years were not many when the Yeehats noted a change in the breed of timber wolves; for some were seen with splashes of brown on head and muzzle, with a rift of white centring down the chest. But more remarkable than this, the Yeehats tell of a Ghost Dog that runs at the head of the pack. They are afraid of this Ghost Dog, for it has cunning greater than they, stealing from their camps in fierce winters, robbing their traps, slaying their dogs, and defying the bravest hunters.
Nay, the tale grows worse. Hunters there are who fail to return to the camp, and hunters there have been whom their tribesmen found with throats slashed cruelly open and with wolf prints about them in the snow greater than the prints of any wolf. Each fall, when the Yeehats follow the movement of the moose, there is a certain valley which they never enter. And women there are who become sad when the word goes over the fire of how the Evil Spirit came to select that valley for an abiding-place.
In the summers there is one visitor, however, to that valley, of which the Yeehats do not know. It is a great, gloriously coated wolf, like, and yet unlike, all other wolves. He crosses alone from the smiling timber land and comes down into an open space among the trees. Here a yellow stream flows from rotted moose-hide sacks and sinks into the ground, with long grasses growing though it and vegetable mould overrunning it and hiding its yellow from the sun; and here he muses for a time, howling once, long and mournfully, ere he departs.
But he is not always alone. When the long winter nights come on and the wolves follow their meat into the lower valleys, he may be seen running at the head of the pack through the pale moonlight or glimmering borealis, leaping gigantic above his fellows, his great throat a-bellow as he sings a song of the younger world, which is the song of the pack.
About the Author
Jack London was born out of wedlock in a San Francisco slum in 1876. Dropping out of school at age twelve, London became a seaman, a tramp, and a Yukon prospector. Back in Oakland, California at eighteen, he briefly reentered school, then began publishing articles and novels in rapid succession. His earliest efforts dealt with his experiences in the Alaskan wilderness and at sea. London was the highest paid writer in America. Though he spent money lavishly, London remained an ardent Socialist. His later books often pit the downtrodden masses against a powerful leader. Yet London’s popularity and wealth never wiped out the memory of his squalid beginnings. He suffered from alcoholism and committed suicide in 1916 at the age of forty.
Introduction
Jack London created a new kind of rural tale: the tale of the wild. Before him, American fiction centered on either urban life (in New York, Boston, Chicago, or Europe), the sea, or a “West” invented by Easterners such as James Fennimore Cooper. Mark Twain, raised in America’s heartland, did tell exciting adventure tales, but his heroes were primarily boys. Born on the West Coast, Jack London changed the face of literature by showing the brutality and desperation of grown men trying to survive in the wild. His focus was not the Great Plains or the Rockies, but the rugged frontier of the far West. Writing with unbridled honesty, London told true tales of the wild—tales that have not lost their power or appeal.
London was born out of wedlock in 1876. He was given his stepfather’s name when his mother, Flora Wellman Chaney, married John London, a carpenter. The London family lived in the slums of San Francisco, and life was never easy for them. Before his marriage to Flora, John London had had to place his two daughters, Eliza and Ida, in an orphanage because he could not afford to support them. London spent his youth on the streets of Oakland, his mother and stepfather inattentive. He would later say of this upbringing “My body and soul were starved when I was a child.”
In this environment, London developed a fiery determination to survive and to do so alone. From the age of fourteen until the day of his death, he was fully self-sufficient, working a variety of jobs—mostly legal. His family’s impoverishment had forced him to drop out of the eighth grade and work in a fish cannery. He refused to let this loss of schooling deter him, however; he read voraciously in the Oakland library.
After a year, he left his home and job at the cannery for the waters of the San Francisco Bay Area. He raided private oyster farms and then went to work for the “fish patrol,” helping to enforce the laws he had routinely broken. At age seventeen, he left the Bay Area as a seaman on a schooner. It was during his year on the open seas that London began to write. He primarily wrote descriptions of his environment, and one of these, a description of a typhoon, won a newspaper’s writing contest.
Once he set ashore, he spent another year working odd jobs and hoboing across the country with “Coxey’s Army of the Unemployed.” He was as independent as he had ever hoped to be, but poorer than he could bear. The year ended with a short stint in a Niagara jail for vagrancy. During his time in jail, London reflected on his life. Infuriated by his exploitation at the hands of employers, London pieced together a distinctive political outlook, a kind of Socialist Darwinism influenced by Marx and Nietzsche. He believed in equal opportunity, freedom, and the survival of the fittest. He called this philosophy socialism and even joined the Socialist party, but he rarely saw eye to eye with his fellow members.
Believing “the fittest” to be those with an education, London returned to high school as a special student. In a year, he passed the entrance exam to the University of California and enrolled. He left after a semester, due to impatience and financial constraints, and set out for the Yukon to make his fortune in the gold rush.
While there, London made no fortune. He did, however, write down what he witnessed. And in doing so, he realized that his calling in life was not the sea or the factory or the hobo’s boxcar. He was a writer, determined to tell the world what only he had noticed.
His days of wandering and scraping to survive were over. Almost immediately after deciding to write professionally, London sold one of his stories about the Yukon to an Oakland newspaper. A few months later he was published in the Atlantic Monthly. Two years after that, with the publication of The Son of the Wolf in 1900, he was hailed as the American Kipling. By 1905 he was one of the nation’s favorite authors. London approached writing like everything else in his life—with a fierce will to succeed and surpass all others. When he died at the age of 40 in 1916, he had achieved his desire, having become the best known and highest paid writer of his day.
Though London became wealthy, his prose was always informed by the hardships of his youth. While his contemporaries wrote of social mores and emotional conflicts, London explored primal concerns: the need for shelter, hunger, survival. Nowhere is his primeval voice more clear than in his Northland saga.
The Northland saga does not follow a particular character or town. Comprised of stories and novels set in or near the Yukon, it chronicles the spirit of the North, where man is pitted against nature. However, the most popular novels of the saga, Call of the Wild and White Fang, are not about men, but about a dog and a wolf.