“Severe toil like this lays a man naked to the very roots of his soul,” writes London, and Weatherbee and Cuthfert do n’t look so good naked. they ’re the last ones up in the morning, the first to turn in at night, and in between lift nary a voluntary finger to help. Their halfbreed guide calls them the “babies.” When the guide calculates they ’ve got another 400 miles up river and over snow before they reach the Yukon and 500 beyond that to Dawson, eight out of the ten men remaining decide they can still make it as long as they do n’t have to carry the “Incapables.”

They leave Weatherbee and Cuthfert in an abandoned cabin, well-stocked with provisions and wood, to survive the winter and find their own way out come spring. But the cabin is tiny, and the sub-zero air outside traps them as though the door were bolted. Here is where London starts pumping the bellows to stoke the conflict. “[Weatherbee] was too obtuse to appreciate the clever shaping of thought, and this waste of ammunition irritated Cuthfert. He had been used to blinding people by his brilliancy…. [Weatherbee] was as sensuous as Cuthfert was aesthetic, and his love adventures, told at great length and chiefly coined from his imagination, affected the supersensitive master of arts in the same way as so many whiffs of sewer gas…. A great wonder sprang up in the breast of each, as to how God had ever come to create the other.”

Eventually, Weatherbee hallucinates with the heebie-jeebies, ghosts from the tombstones outside the cabin crawling into his bed; Cuthfert fixates on the stillness of the weather vane until the stillness, nothing moves, crushes his sanity. They watch their toes freeze and fall off, their gums turn yellow, and the purple rash of scurvy creep across their skin, but their disdain for each other, rising like a crescendo, reaches such heights that each ignores his own condition to delight in the misfortunes of the other. The story rapidly approaches the gory climax when one suspects the other has stolen a spoonful of sugar.

When I was 18, taking freshman English at the University of Florida, I had one of the two professors from college I still remember. He had us read Joseph Heller’s Catch 22, and we talked about “symbolism.” Someone in the class said that when Heller wrote about those little white mushrooms lining the path down to the water, he meant for them to symbolize little white crosses and all the men who had needlessly died in war. I thought to myself, What if Heller meant the little white mushrooms to be … little white mushrooms? What if he had seen little white mushrooms when he was in Italy and was simply recalling the setting? Why did an author have to “mean” something other than what he had written? I have often wondered what authors would say about their own work if we dug them up and asked them questions like, “What did you mean when you wrote, ‘their garments would have disgusted a ragpicker’?” London did n’t mean anything; he was just taking notes, writing about what he saw, and enjoying himself. I think.

Actually, I would like to exhume the guy for a beer and ask him a few questions. For example, the ordeal of Weatherbee and Cuthfert is not the only time he mixes humor with horror, and I’m curious: I can’t tell if he’s trying to lighten the horror of what’s happening, or if he’s using the horror as some kind of counter-something-or-other to make the scenes even funnier.

“Jack,” I might say, “what were you thinking when you wrote “Keesh, the Son of Keesh”? Are you just having a good time, or did you actually see Indians who looked like that?”

In “Keesh” we ’re in a circle around the fire when Keesh, the chief of one arctic tribe, asks for the hand of Su-Su, daughter of the chief of another arctic tribe. A couple of young bucks, both brothers of Su-Su, do n’t like the idea. London describes the brothers: “Makamuk came to his feet. A long face-scar lifted his upper lip into a perpetual grin which belied the glowing ferocity of his eyes.” Next is brother Nossabok. “The young fellow was slender and graceful, with the strong aquiline nose and high brows of his type; but from some nervous affliction the lid of one eye drooped at odd times in a suggestive wink.” Picture them side by side, like two jack-o’-lanterns.

But London does n’t stop with these two protesting. Su-Su also has her doubts. She wants a brave who’s big and strong, “a hunter and fighter of beasts and men, well able to win meat when I should eat for two.” She thinks that Keesh has spent too much time with the whites and has become soft. She tells him that before she can find him worthy, he must first bring her not the scalps but the whole heads of two men. You can probably see where this is going already.

For a while, Keesh tries to live the life of a good Christian, as he has been taught by the local reverend, until he hears that a new suitor has bid for the hand of the fair Su-Su. Now Keesh disappears. A short while later he shows up at the lodge of Su-Su, sporting a moose-hide sack, dripping red. He dumps the sack and out roll not two but four heads, one belonging to Su-Su’s father, one to the unfortunate suitor, and here’s London’s description of the other two: “Makamuk, grinning at her with his lifted upper lip; and lastly, Nossabok, his eyelid, up to its old trick, drooped on his girlish cheek in a suggestive wink.”

“Jack,” I want to say to him, “I know there’s nothing mystical about writing, you just do it, and sometimes it works, and sometimes it does n’t. Sometimes little thoughts fly in like meteors, and we do n’t even know what galaxy they ’re from. But still, Makamuk and Nossabok?”

In another story, “The Son of the Wolf,” one incensed brave tries to incite the others over his frustration with the white men, the “Wolves,” cherry-picking all of their young and delectable maidens. There’s not much left for a nice brave to choose from.

“‘There is Gugkla!’ he cried, brutally pointing out one of the women, who was a cripple. ‘Her legs are bent like the ribs of a birch canoe.