Research findings to date show wolves to exhibit many of the behavioral patterns that should find favor among the more sentimentally inclined animal lovers.”

And yet London’s wolf is very much a part of the consciousness of many people, and as the wolfs habitat continues to shrink under the pressure of oil pipelines and other industrial encroachments, its mystery and its savage spirituality increase, now that vulnerability has been added. We need London’s mythical wolf almost as much as we need the wildernesses of the world, for without such ghost-animals from the depths of the human subconscious we are alone with ourselves.

That Jack London, the Klondike, the wolf, and the dog should have come together in exactly the circumstances that the gold-fever afforded seems not so much a merely fortunate conjunction of events but a situation tinged strongly with elements of predestination, of fate. Born in poverty only a little above the truly abject, London displayed almost from the beginning such a will to dominate as might have been envied by Satan himself, or for that matter, by Milton. His early years were spent as a boy criminal, specializing in the piracy of oyster beds in San Francisco Bay, as a tramp on the roads and railroads of the United States and Canada, and as a laborer—or what he called a work-beast—in various menial and humiliating jobs, which fixed his mind irrevocably in favor of the exploited working classes and against any and all forms of capitalism, at least in theory.

During his later travels and his battles for survival in the economic wilderness, he came quickly to the belief that knowledge is indeed power. In his case, knowledge was more than the simple and too-abstract word “power” implied; it was muscle, blood, teeth, and stamina; it gave the force and direction that the will must take. When he landed in the Yukon in 1897, he had already read, with virtually superhuman voraciousness, hundreds of books and articles, principally in the fields of sociology, biology, and philosophy. He was alive with ideas and a search for ultimate meaning that amounted to an obsessively personal quest, and shared with the pre-Socratic philosophers—Thales, who assumed that water is the basic substance; Anaximenes, who believed the same thing of air; Anaximander, with his space or “boundlessness”; and Heraclitus, with process and fire—a belief that the great All is single and can be known. As he moved farther into the winter wilderness of the northern latitudes, he came increasingly to the conclusion that the “white silence” of the North is the indifferently triumphant demonstration of the All, the arena where the knowable Secret could most unequivocally be apprehended and, as the conditions demanded, lived. The snowfields, mountains, forests, and enormous frozen lakes were to London only the strictest, most spectacular, and unarguable symbols of the universal abyss, the eternal mystery at the heart of nothingness, or the eternal nothingness at the heart of mystery, as Herman Melville saw it in Moby Dick.

Is it that by its [whiteness‘s] indefiniteness it shadows forth the heartless voids and immensities of the universe, and thus stabs us from behind with the thought of annihilation, when beholding the white depths of the milky way? Or is it that as in essence whiteness is not so much a color as the visible absence of color, and at the same time the concrete of all colors; is it for these reasons that there is such a dumb blankness, full of meaning, in a wide landscape of snows—a colorless, all-color of atheism from which we shrink?

London’s whiteness, though its similarities of meaning are strikingly close to Melville’s, has also some basic differences.

A vast silence reigned over the land. The land itself was a desolation, lifeless, without movement, so lone and cold that the spirit of it was not even that of sadness. There was a hint in it of laughter, but of a laughter more terrible than any sadness—a laughter that was mirthless as the smile of the Sphinx, a laughter cold as the frost and partaking of the grimness of infallibility. It was the masterful and incommunicable wisdom of eternity laughing at the futility of life and the effort of life. It was the Wild, the savage, frozen-hearted Northland Wild.

London’s scattered but deeply felt reading had so imbued him with Darwinian principles that he looked on the landscape of the Yukon as a kind of metaphysical arena in which natural selection and the survival of the fittest were enacted unendingly, illustrating (though to no perceiver but the casual) the “Law.” The North is a background that determines character and action, bringing out in men certain qualities from the psychic depths of the race of all living beings. London does not attempt, as Melville does, to strike through the “mask.” The “mask” in London’s tales is more the classic mask of the actor, the mask that each participant feels rising to his face from the setting of the drama, the frozen features that rerum natura has always reserved for it.

As George Orwell has remarked, London’s instincts “lay toward acceptance of a ‘natural aristocracy’ of strength, beauty and talent.” Few writers have dwelt with such fixation on superlatives: “the strongest,” “the biggest,” “the handsomest,” “the most cunning,” “the fiercest,” “the most ruthless.” One cannot read these stories without agreeing with Orwell that “there is something in London [that] takes a kind of pleasure in the whole cruel process. It is not so much an approval of the harshness of nature, as a mystical belief that nature is like that. ‘Nature red in tooth and claw.’ Perhaps fierceness is the price of survival. The young slay the old, the strong slay the weak, by an inexorable law.” London insists, as Melville does not, that there is a morality inherent in the twin drives of animal evolution; brute survival and the desire of the species to reproduce itself are not primary but exclusive motivations.

In this savage theater of extremes, this vast stage of indifference, where “the slightest whisper seemed sacrilege,” London felt himself to be a man speaking out of the void of cosmic neutrality and even to it and for it, wearing, really, no mask but his half-frozen face, from which issued in steam and ice the truth of existence: the way things are.

The actors are men and dogs.

Down the frozen waterway toiled a string of wolfish dogs. Their bristly fur was rimed with frost. Their breath froze in the air as it left their mouths, spouting forth in spumes of vapor that settled upon the hair of their bodies and formed into crystals of frost. Leather harness was on the dogs....

In advance of the dogs, on wide snowshoes, toiled a man. At the rear of the sled toiled a second man. On the sled, in the box, lay a third man whose toil was over—a man whom the Wild had conquered and beaten down until he would never move nor struggle again. It is not the way of the Wild to like movement.

In the Arctic and particularly in the Gold Rush Arctic, the dog was of paramount importance. Men could not cover the great distances involved, much less carry their food and equipment, on foot. There were as yet no machines, not even railroads. Horses would have bogged down hopelessly in the snow and could not have lived off the food, such as fish, that the environment supplied. The solution to the finding and mining of gold was the dog, because of its physical qualifications, its adaptability, and even its kinship to other creatures occupying the “natural” scheme of things in which it was to function.

London’s anthropomorphizing of animals is well known, and the instances in which he overindulges this tendency are frequent and sometimes absurd. He was no Rilke or Lawrence, seemingly able to project his own human point of observation into another entity, either living or inorganic, and become the contemplated Other. He could not and certainly would not have wanted to know, as Aldous Huxley said Lawrence did, “by personal experience, what it was like to be a tree or a daisy or a breaking wave or even the mysterious moon itself. He could get inside the skin of an animal and could tell you in the most convincing detail how it felt and how, dimly, inhumanly, it thought.” London had no wish to negate himself in favor of becoming an animal; the London dog or wolf is presented not as itself but as London feels that he would feel if he were embodied in the form of a dog or a wolf.