The Brothers Grimm vilified wolves in their fairy tales, and the full moon brings the fear of the hybrid werewolf. Settlers hunted wolves to near extinction in the lower United States from the first moment of contact, and even recent wolf recovery programs are hampered by deep prejudice against the species. In myth and in reality, wolves are despised and persecuted. Yet the wolf also represents the initial bridge between the ancient human community and the larger nonhuman world. This willingness of the ancient wolf to come into the human home scene hints at the deep, inarticulate, yet ultimately expressible love that London’s dog and human characters exhibit for each other. The wolf, as the human community’s first animal companion, coevolved with it and became the domestic dog; as a result, dogs have long been considered part of the family. We love them because they offer us unconditional love ; we love them because the “Wild” in them has been tamed. By making them part of our home space, we have truly domesticated them. But don’t we, at the same time, perhaps feel a little bad that we have bred that wild nature out of these creatures?

London and His Dogs

The complicated relationship of humans to dogs is what makes Buck and White Fang’s narratives so profound. Buck, in particular, has become the representative Dog. He has been described as an archetype of the collective unconscious, as a “supercanine” (in the vein of Nietzsche’s Übermensch), and as the mythic “Hero,” but also as a lowly mail carrier. He is said to devolve in the text, to evolve into myth, and to represent the yearning of man to free himself from his bonds. Only occasionally do critics speak about Buck (and White Fang, by extension) as a dog. And he is, indeed, a dog, as are all of London’s canine protagonists: Batard, Buck, White Fang, Husky, Brown Wolf, and That Spot.

But the question remains: What is it about the dog and the relationship between the human and the dog that is so powerful? The Call of the Wild and White Fang are not simply narrative expositions of instances of struggles in the natural world. Nor can London’s obvious reliance on the then-popular literary conventions of naturalism and realism—the desire to represent the “real,” unmediated experience of an individual in the environment—explain the overwhelming appeal of these books. London’s “dog-loving public” simply devoured them. The first edition of 10,000 copies of The Call of the Wild sold out in the first day, and the book remains one of the most popular novels by an American author in the world.

The normally loquacious London himself had a hard time articulating the impulse that led to the creation of The Call of the Wild. Material facts are easy to come by: London both wanted to capitalize on the popularity generated by other recently published dog books, notably Egerton Young’s My Dogs in the Northland, and to write a companion piece to his previously published short story “Bâtard.” But in letters to Brett and his close friend Anna Strunsky, London reveals that The Call of the Wild exerted a strange pull on him. To Brett, he wrote, “On my return from England I sat down to write it into a 4000 word yarn, but it got away from me & I was forced to expand it to its present length.” He reiterates the point to Strunsky and adds, “it got away from me, & Instead of 4000 words it ran to 32000 before I could call a halt.” (Labor, pp. 351, 352). As these statements suggest, some inexplicable quality of the story he was telling compelled him to continue writing; in relating this moment to his friends, London seems to wonder at the cause of it. Something about the story of a dog who thrives, despite being torn from an overcivilized world and thrust into an undercivilized (or precivilized) one enthralls him. In a way, the story, like Buck at the end of the narrative, escapes the control of the author.

Despite the fact that Buck’s story grew almost organically from the author’s pen, London did not realize the huge best-seller he had just completed. After the Saturday Evening Post serialized The Call of the Wild (June-July 1903), London sold the rights to the book to Brett outright for two thousand dollars. London imagined Buck simply as a counterpart to the dog character he had created in “Bâtard,” which was first published in Cosmopolitan magazine in June 1902. This powerful tale details the “exceeding bitter hate” that existed between the evil sled driver, Black Leclère, and his equally evil dog, Bâtard (“Bâtard, ” p. 387). Dog and man, drawn together by some inexplicable force and tied together by their mutual hatred, are products of biology and environment. Like Buck and White Fang, B ^atard is a mixed breed—the son of a “great gray timber wolf” and a “snarling, bickering, obscene, husky, full-fronted and heavy-chested, with a malign eye, a cat-like grip on life, and a genius for trickery” (“Bâtard,” pp. 387—388).

Leclère, himself the product of violence, fosters Bâtard’s innate evil until “the very breath each drew was a challenge and a menace to the other.