The Law of Club and Fang

The Call of the Wild by Jack London.
Book Review by Michael Isenberg.

Last night I saw the new movie version of Jack London’s The Call of the Wild, starring Harrison Ford, which opens in theaters this weekend. It was good family entertainment. I was concerned, at first, to see so many children in the audience, but they behaved themselves, clearly enthralled by the various twists and turns. They gasped at the handful of instances of (very sanitized) violence and laughed at the far more numerous funny bits.

But this is Nerds who Read and we're all about the book. So today I will review the classic Call of the Wild novella, which first appeared as a serial in The Saturday Evening Post back in 1903. As it was not originally written for children, it features a lot more violence and a lot less humor than the movie.

The Call of the Wild is the biography of a dog, a St. Bernard/Scotch Shepherd mix named Buck. Although stories with animal protagonists go back to Aesop, for the most part they're fantastic and allegorical tales in which the animals are anthropomorphized, really just stand-ins for humans. They talk. They plan. They build advanced societies with written Constitutions.

But by the turn of the twentieth century, a new school of animal literature arose, a realist school, in which an animal was an animal, with all the limitations and glory that entailed. As Gerald Carson explains in his article “T.R. and the ‘nature fakers’,” these stories captured the imagination of “a generation just becoming aware of soil depletion, of the consequences of the unlimited harvesting of timber on the headwaters, the decimation of various species of wildlife, and the disappearance of the frontier.” Led by such writers as Ernest Thomas Seton, Charles G. D. Roberts, and William J. Long, and of course London himself, their works stirred bitter controversy as to just how realistic their animal realism was; the authors were attacked by no lesser luminaries of the conservation movement than John Burroughs and Teddy Roosevelt.

As The Call of the Wild opens, we find Buck living happily on the estate of one Judge Miller in the Santa Clara Valley, at the south end of San Francisco Bay:

Buck was neither house-dog nor kennel-dog. The whole realm was his. He plunged into the swimming tank or went hunting with the Judge’s sons; he escorted Mollie and Alice, the Judge’s daughters, on long twilight or early morning rambles; on wintry nights he lay at the Judge’s feet before the roaring library fire.

Alas, “because men had found a yellow metal in the North, and because Manuel was a gardener’s helper whose wages did not lap over the needs of his wife and divers small copies of himself,” Buck was not destined to remain in this idyllic life. “What a puppet thing life is.” It was 1897, the Klondike Gold Rush was in full swing, and sled dogs were in high demand. In order to fill the gap between his wages and his expenses, Manuel lured Buck away from the Miller estate on the pretext of taking him for a walk—and sold him. Buck is shipped north, first to Seattle where a man in a red sweater beats him with a club until he is broken to obedience. Only then is Buck fit to be sent to Alaska, where he begins his new life of servitude, a life governed by “The Law of Club and Fang.”

London himself—barely twenty years old at the time—had taken part in the Klondike Gold Rush, where he ended up with swollen gums and lost teeth from scurvy and a rich set of characters and experiences to draw upon for fiction. Buck changes hands several times and his masters cover the gamut of colorful characters London encountered in the Yukon. Some are strictly business, some genuinely loving. Some of the most vivid, although not particularly likable, are of a trio of newcomers to the Yukon: the pampered woman Mercedes, her husband Charles, and her brother Hal. Because of the excessive quantity of luxury items and canned goods they supplied themselves with, the dog team is unable to move the sled, so the trio “solve” this problem by adding more dogs.

And they were proud, too. They were doing the thing in style, with fourteen dogs. They had seen other sleds depart over the Pass for Dawson, or come in from Dawson, but never had they seen a sled with so many as fourteen dogs. In the nature of Arctic travel there was a reason why fourteen dogs should not drag one sled, and that was that one sled could not carry the food for fourteen dogs. But Charles and Hal did not know this. They had worked the trip out with a pencil, so much to a dog, so many dogs, so many days. Q.E.D. Mercedes looked over their shoulders and nodded comprehensively, it was all so very simple.

Reminds me of Michael Bloomberg talking about how simple farming is.

In any case, things go from bad to worse for the trio, and in one of the few humorous passages in the book, we learn,

The result was a beautiful and unending family quarrel. Starting from a dispute as to which should chop a few sticks for the fire (a dispute which concerned only Charles and Hal), presently would be lugged in the rest of the family, fathers, mothers, uncles, cousins, people thousands of miles away, and some of them dead. That Hal’s views on art, or the sort of society plays his mother’s brother wrote, should have anything to do with the chopping of a few sticks of firewood, passes comprehension; nevertheless the quarrel was as likely to tend in the direction of Charles’s political prejudices. And that Charles’s sister’s tale-bearing tongue should be relevant to the building of a Yukon fire, was apparent only to Mercedes, who disburdened herself of copious opinions upon that topic, and incidentally upon a few other traits unpleasantly peculiar to her husband’s family. In the meantime the fire remained unbuilt, the camp half pitched, and the dogs unfed.

Needless to say, things end badly for them.

Of course those unfed dogs are the real heroes of the piece, and their personalities are as varied and memorable as the humans. Given my lifelong respect for dedication and hard work, I was especially partial to Dave and Sol-leks:

They were the new dogs, utterly transformed by the harness. All passiveness and unconcern had dropped from them. They were alert and active, anxious that the work should go well, and fiercely irritable with whatever, by delay or confusion, retarded the work. The toil of the traces seemed the supreme expression of their being, and all that they lived for and the only thing in which they took delight.

In a passage that brings tears to my eyes, Dave becomes ill and can no longer pull his weight on the sled team. The driver cuts him loose and allows him to run along behind the sleds.

With the last remnant of his strength he managed to stagger along behind till the train made another stop, when he floundered past the sleds to his own, where he stood alongside Sol-leks. His driver lingered a moment to get a light for his pipe from the man behind. Then he returned and started his dogs. They swung out on the trail with remarkable lack of exertion, turned their heads uneasily, and stopped in surprise. The driver was surprised, too; the sled had not moved. He called his comrades to witness the sight. Dave had bitten through both of Sol-lek’s traces, and was standing directly in front of the sled in his proper place. He pleaded with his eyes to remain there. The driver was perplexed. His comrades talked of how a dog could break its heart through being denied the work that killed it, and recalled instances they had known, where dogs, too old for the toil, or injured, had died because they were cut out of the traces. Also, they held it a mercy, since Dave was to die anyway, that he should die in the traces, heart-easy and content. So he was harnessed in again, and proudly he pulled of old, though more than once he cried out involuntarily from the bite of his inward hurt. Several times he fell down and was dragged in the traces, and once the sled ran upon him so that he limped thereafter in one of his hind legs. But he held out till camp was reached, when his driver made a place for him by the fire. Morning found him too weak to travel. At harness-up time he tried to crawl to his driver. By convulsive efforts he got on his feet, staggered, and fell. Then he wormed his way forward slowly toward where the harnesses were being put on his mates. He would advance his fore legs and drag up his body with a sort of hitching movement, when he would advance his fore legs and hitch ahead again for a few more inches. His strength left him, and the last his mates saw of him he lay gasping in the snow and yearning toward them. But they could hear him mournfully howling till they passed out of sight behind a belt of river timber. Here the train was halted. The Scotch half-breed slowing retraced his steps to the camp they had left. The men ceased talking. A revolver-shot rang out. The man came back hurriedly. The whips snapped, the bells tinkled merrily, the sleds churned along the trail; but Buck knew, and every dog knew, what had taken place behind the belt of river trees.

Ultimately, though, this is not Dave’s story—or Mercedes’s story or Charles’s story, or Hal’s story. It’s Buck’s story. Through all his many adventures, something stirs within this noble canine. Ancestral memories come flooding back, calling to him. Hence the title. What this means for Buck, and what that tells us about London’s view of nature—a view that’s very different from what you’ll get if you watch the new movie—will be the subject on Part II of this review.

Michael Isenberg drinks bourbon and writes novels. His latest book, The Thread of Reason, is a murder mystery that takes place in Baghdad in the year 1092, and tells the story of the conflict between science and shari’ah in medieval Islam. It is available on Amazon.com Please follow Mike on Facebook and Twitter. Subscribe to Nerds who Read. Photo credit(s): Deseret, Wikipedia