The Call of the Wild
By Jack London
The story opens in 1897 with Buck, a potent 140-pound St. Bernard–Scotch Shepherd mix, happily living in California’s Santa Clara Valley as Judge Miller’s and his family’s pampered pet. One night, assistant gardener Manuel, needing money to pay off gambling debts, steals Buck and sells him to a stranger.
Buck is shipped to Seattle, where he is confined in a crate, starved, and ill-treated. When released, Buck attacks his handler, the “man in the red sweater”, who teaches Buck the “law of club and fang”, sufficiently cowing him. The man shows some kindness after Buck demonstrates obedience. Shortly after, Buck is sold to two French-Canadian dispatchers from the Canadian government, François and Perrault, who take him to Alaska. Buck is trained as a sledgedog for the Klondike region of Canada. In addition to Buck, François and Perrault have ten dogs on their team (Spitz, Dolly, Pike, Joe, Billie, Teek, Koona, Dub, Dave, and Sol-leks).
Buck’s teammates teach him how to survive cold winter nights and about pack society. Over the next several weeks on the trail, a bitter rivalry develops between Buck and the lead dog, Spitz, a vicious and quarrelsome white husky. Buck eventually kills Spitz in a fight and becomes the new lead dog.
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Jack London
John Griffith Chaney (January 12, 1876 – November 22, 1916), better known as Jack London, was an American novelist, journalist and activist.
Biography
A pioneer of commercial fiction and American magazines, he was among the first American authors to become an international celebrity and earn a large fortune from writing. He was also an innovator in the genre later known as science fiction. London was part of the radical literary group “The Crowd” in San Francisco and a passionate advocate of animal rights, workers’ rights, and socialism. London wrote several works dealing with these topics, such as his dystopian novel The Iron Heel, his non-fiction exposé The People of the Abyss, War of the Classes, and Before Adam.
His most famous works include The Call of the Wild and White Fang, both set in Alaska and the Yukon during the Klondike Gold Rush, as well as the short stories “To Build a Fire”, “An Odyssey of the North”, and “Love of Life”. He also wrote about the South Pacific in stories such as “The Pearls of Parlay” and “The Heathen”.
Jack London
