Be that as it may, the quintessential Jack London is in the on-rushing compulsiveness of his northern stories. Few men have more convincingly examined the connection between the creative powers of the individual writer and the unconscious drive to breed and to survive, found in the natural world.

 

—James Dickey

A Note on the Text

The text of this edition follows the texts of the first book editions of “Bâtard,” published in The Faith of Men and Other Stories by the Macmillan Company in April 1904; of The Call of the Wild, published by the Macmillan Company in July 1903; of “Love of Life,” published in Love of Life and Other Stories by the Macmillan Company in September 1907; and of White Fang, published by the Macmillan Company in September 1906. Jack London tended not to revise what he had first written for magazine publication, but he relied a great deal on the typing and editing of his second wife, Charmian Kittredge London, and on George Brett, his editor at the Macmillan Company. Brett actually bought The Call of the Wild outright for two thousand dollars because Jack London wanted to buy an old sloop for sailing. The editor recognized its potential and supervised it through the press. It made London’s international reputation, as Brett promised that it would.

Very few corrections have been made in this edition, and only when London’s use of archaisms or inversion makes the text unintelligible to the modern reader. Similarly, there have been very few changes in spelling or punctuation, for London was a master at the rhythms and halts of his prose style. As the discriminating H. L. Mencken wrote of him, “No other popular writer of his time did any better writing than you will find in The Call of the Wild.... Here, indeed, are all the elements of sound fiction: clear thinking, a sense of character, the dramatic instinct, and, above all, the adept putting together of words—words charming and slyly significant, words arranged, in a French phrase, for the respiration and the ear.”

BÂTARD

Bâtard was a devil. This was recognized throughout the Northland. “Hell’s Spawn” he was called by many men, but his master, Black Leclère, chose for him the shameful name “Bâtard.” Now Black Leclère was also a devil, and the twain were well matched. There is a saying that when two devils come together, hell is to pay. This is to be expected, and this certainly was to be expected when Bâtard and Black Leclère came together. The first time they met, Bâtard was a part-grown puppy, lean and hungry, with bitter eyes; and they met with a snap and snarl, and wicked looks, for Leclère’s upper lip had a wolfish way of lifting and showing the white, cruel teeth. And it lifted then, and his eyes glinted viciously, as he reached for Bâtard and dragged him out from the squirming litter. It was certain that they divined each other, for on the instant Bâtard had buried his puppy fangs in Leclère’s hand, and Leclère, thumb and finger, was coolly choking his young life out of him.

“Sacredam,” the Frenchman said softly, flirting the quick blood from his bitten hand and gazing down on the little puppy choking and gasping in the snow.

Leclère turned to John Hamlin, storekeeper of the Sixty Mile Post. “Dat fo‘ w’at Ah lak heem. ‘Ow moch, eh, you, M’sieu‘? ’Ow moch? Ah buy heem, now; Ah buy heem queek.”

And because he hated him with an exceeding bitter hate, Leclère bought Bâtard and gave him his shameful name. And for five years the twain adventured across the Northland, from St. Michael’s and the Yukon delta to the head-reaches of the Pelly and even so far as the Peace River, Athabasca, and the Great Slave. And they acquired a reputation for uncompromising wickedness, the like of which never before attached itself to man and dog.

Bâtard did not know his father,—hence his name, —but, as John Hamlin knew, his father was a great gray timber wolf. But the mother of Bâtard, as he dimly remembered her, was snarling, bickering, obscene, husky, full-fronted and heavy-chested, with a malign eye, a cat-like grip on life, and a genius for trickery and evil. There was neither faith nor trust in her. Her treachery alone could be relied upon, and her wild-wood amours attested her general depravity. Much of evil and much of strength were there in these, Bâtard’s progenitors, and, bone and flesh of their bone and flesh, he had inherited it all. And then came Black Leclère, to lay his heavy hand on the bit of pulsating puppy life, to press and prod and mould till it became a big bristling beast, acute in knavery, overspilling with hate, sinister, malignant, diabolical. With a proper master Bâtard might have made an ordinary, fairly efficient sled-dog. He never got the chance: Leclère but confirmed him in his congenital iniquity.

The history of Bâtard and Leclère is a history of war—of five cruel, relentless years, of which their first meeting is fit summary.