The Call of the Wild and Selected Stories

Table of Contents

Title Page

Copyright Page

The Call of the Wild

Diable—a Dog

An Odyssey of the North

To the Man on Trail

To Build a Fire

Love of Life

AFTERWORD

Jack London (1876-1916) spent his youth on the waters of San Francisco Bay. In 1897, when gold was discovered in the Klondike, he obtained a grubstake and spent a freezing, fruitless winter in the Far North; by spring he was ready to return home to write. In 1900, his collection of short stories The Son of the Wolf was published. Two more volumes of Yukon short stories, a juvenile novel, and a Klondike novel followed in rapid succession. Then came his bestselling novel The Call of the Wild (1903) and the beginning of the years that were to bring him wealth and worldwide popularity. The eternal traveler, London served as a correspondent in Japan and Mexico and sailed his own ketch to the Solomon Islands before his death.

Alex Kershaw, a freelance journalist, is the author of Jack London: A Life.

Tobey Hiller is the author of three books of poetry, Crossings, Certain Weathers, and Aqueduct, and the novel Charlie’s Exit. Her award-winning poems and short fiction have appeared in numerous journals and anthologies.

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Introduction copyright © Alex Kershaw, 1998

Afterword copyright © Tobey Hiller, 2009

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The Call of the Wild

“Old longings nomadic leap,
Chafing at custom’s chain;
Again from its brumal sleep
Wakens the ferine strain.”

1. INTO THE PRIMITIVE

Buck did not read the newspapers, or he would have known that trouble was brewing, not alone for himself, but for every tidewater dog, strong of muscle and with warm, long hair, from Puget Sound to San Diego. Because men, groping in the Arctic darkness, had found a yellow metal, and because steamship and transportation companies were booming the find, thousands of men were rushing into the Northland. These men wanted dogs, and the dogs they wanted were heavy dogs, with strong muscles by which to toil, and furry coats to protect them from the frost.

Buck lived at a big house in the sun-kissed Santa Clara Valley. Judge Miller’s place, it was called. It stood back from the road, half hidden among the trees, through which glimpses could be caught of the wide, cool veranda that ran around its four sides. The house was approached by graveled driveways which wound about through wide-spreading lawns and under the interlacing boughs of tall poplars. At the rear things were on even a more spacious scale than at the front. There were great stables, where a dozen grooms and boys held forth, rows of vine-clad servants’ cottages, an endless and orderly array of outhouses, long grape arbors, green pastures, orchards, and berry patches. Then there was the pumping plant for the artesian well, and the big cement tank where Judge Miller’s boys took their morning plunge and kept cool in the hot afternoon.

And over this great demesne Buck ruled. Here he was born, and here he had lived the four years of his life. It was true, there were other dogs. There could not but be other dogs on so vast a place, but they did not count. They came and went, resided in the populous kennels, or lived obscurely in the recesses of the house after the fashion of Toots, the Japanese pug, or Ysabel, the Mexican hairless—strange creatures that rarely put nose out of doors or set foot to ground. On the other hand, there were the fox terriers, a score of them at least, who yelped fearful promises at Toots and Ysabel looking out of the windows at them and protected by a legion of housemaids armed with brooms and mops.

But 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; he carried the Judge’s grandsons on his back, or rolled them in the grass, and guarded their footsteps through wild adventures down to the fountain in the stable yard, and even beyond, where the paddocks were, and the berry patches. Among the terriers he stalked imperiously, and Toots and Ysabel he utterly ignored, for he was king—king over all creeping, crawling, flying things of Judge Miller’s place, humans included.

His father, Elmo, a huge St. Bernard, had been the Judge’s inseparable companion, and Buck bid fair to follow in the way of his father.