The Call of the Wild and White Fang (38 page)
Read The Call of the Wild and White Fang Online
Authors: Jack London
Tags: #General, #Fiction, #Juvenile Fiction, #Classics, #Historical, #Literature: Classics, #Animals, #Wolfdogs, #All Ages, #Pet theft, #Exploration & Discovery, #Children's Books, #Sled dogs, #Feral dogs, #Klondike River Valley (Yukon), #Historical - Exploration & Discoveries, #Wolves, #Dogs
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)
Can
on ... 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.”
This has perhaps resulted in the depiction by him of less lofty and edifying scenes than have been wont to occupy the pages of dog stories, but if the truth were told those dogs generally bore about the same relation to real dogs that the children in what have come to be called “Sunday school books” bear to real children. Every dog lover is thoroughly convinced that a good dog possesses more real concentrated goodness than any other animal on earth, including his masters, but that goodness never exhibits itself in any except attractive forms. A dog was never known to be “painfully good,” or tiresomely good, for the beautifully simple reason that whenever the accustomed discipline is relaxed he immediately shows signs of those unregenerate impulses which are undoubtedly the spice of all character, and which no amount of civilizing influences can ever entirely eradicate from either man or beast.
Mr. London knows this, and, among all his dogs, there is not one that has any martyrlike propensities, still less one that could make any claim to perfection. Yet all, except a villain of a Spitz, win the reader’s affection, for one reason or another, as no angel of a lapdog ever did. Mr. London is not writing about highly civilized dogs, but about the half wild creatures that were used, when the gold digging began in the Klondike, to carry mails and merchandize from the seacoast into the interior. On the Pacific Slope in the Fall of 1897 dogs strong of build and thick of fur were much desired, scarce and high in price, and that was how Buck, who had been living a life of luxurious ease at Judge Miller’s ranch in the Santa Clara Valley, happened suddenly to find himself on the way to Dyea, treacherously sold by his friend, Manuel, the under-gardener, to a dog agent, and later one of a train of sledge dogs, carrying mail to Dawson.