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Let us be very humble. We who are so very human are very animal ... No ... though you stand on the top of the ladder of life, you must not kick out that ladder from under your feet. You must not deny your relatives, the other animals. Their history is your history, and if you kick them to the bottom of the abyss, to the bottom of the abyss you go yourself. By them you stand or fall. What you repudiate in them you repudiate in yourself.

There is a lot at stake in this argument. The dogs in London’s world are kin to us, struggling with others to get out of the pit. London reminds humans that their success and survival depends on the success and survival of the entire system. Each must recognize its roles in the larger community, and all must work for the “general good of the community.”

Love: This is the mysterious element that compels London to write his dog stories, and it is the element that keeps people reading them. Perhaps we love Buck’s story because the pull of the wild, of “the pleading of life,” of the “song of the huskies... pitched in minor-key” is ultimately greater than the pull of the “love of a man.” Perhaps we respond to White Fang for the opposite reason. London’s companion piece does more than explain how the wolf first came into the human home. It restores an upset balance and confirms the coadapted community. Perhaps we love these dogs because they have agency, they have choice. In a world where humans have beaten nature—even wild nature—into submission, these dogs stand out. Buck wrests control of his narrative away from the human telling the tale, and in the end, he truly does “get away” from Jack London.

Tina Gianquitto received her Ph.D. from Columbia University and is an Assistant Professor of Literature at the Colorado School of Mines, where she teaches courses on literature and the environment. She specializes in the intersections of nature and science in American literature and has published on nineteenth-century women and their representations of the natural world.

The Call of the Wild

I

Into the Primitive

“Old longings nomadic leap,

Chafing at custom’s chain;

Again from its brumal sleep

Wakens the ferine strain.”1

Buck did not read the newspapers, or he would have known that trouble was brewing, not alone for himself, but for every tide-water 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.2 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 3 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 gravelled 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 idogs. 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