The call of the wild
Jack London
The call of the wild
7 chapters
3.92from 486,315 ratingson Goodreads
Buck is a big, comfortable dog on a California estate until he is stolen, shipped north and sold into a sled team on the Klondike trail. Beaten into the traces and starved into cunning, he learns the law of club and fang, and something older than either starts calling to him from the timber.
About the book
Published in 1903, The Call of the Wild follows Buck, a 140-pound cross between a St Bernard and a Scotch collie, from a judge’s estate in the Santa Clara Valley to the Klondike, where a gardener’s helper sells him to pay gambling debts. A man in a red sweater with a club teaches him the first law; the traces teach him the second. He learns to steal food, to sleep under snow, and to fight the lead dog for the team. London had been in the Klondike in 1897 and came back with nothing but the material. The novel is shorter than most people remember, entirely in Buck’s point of view without ever being cute about it, and it makes its argument physically: civilisation is a thin coat over an older inheritance, and the hardest thing Buck has to give up is the one man who was kind to him.
Characters
Buck — Protagonist
A large, comfortable ranch dog, stolen and sold north, who learns the law of club and fang.
John Thornton — Buck’s last master
The prospector who saves Buck from a beating and becomes the only tie he has left to men.
Spitz — Rival
The lead dog of the team, experienced and vicious, and the fight Buck has to win to take the front.
François and Perrault — Drivers
Government couriers who run the mail team hard, fairly, and better than anyone Buck meets later.
Hal, Charles and Mercedes — Cheechakos
Inexperienced newcomers who overload the sled, starve the dogs and drive them onto rotten ice.
Curly — Newfoundland
Buck’s friend from the boat north, killed in seconds for making a friendly approach to the wrong dog.
About the author
Jack London (1876–1916) was an American novelist who left school at fourteen and worked as a cannery hand, an oyster pirate, a sealing hand in the Pacific and a tramp before he was twenty. He joined the Klondike gold rush in 1897, came home with no gold and a case of scurvy, and turned the year into the books that made him one of the first Americans to get rich by writing fiction. He was a committed socialist who wrote about the struggle for survival with an unsentimental eye, and he died at forty on the California ranch he had sunk his earnings into. His books include The Call of the Wild, White Fang and Martin Eden.