When the long winter nights come on and the wolves follow their meat into the lower valleys, he may be seen running at the head of the pack through the pale moonlight or glimmering borealis, leaping gigantic above his fellows, his great throat a-bellow as he sings a song of the younger world, which is the song of the pack
The Call of the Wild, p. 91
When St Bernard-Scotch shepherd mix Buck is ripped from his cosy, comfortable life in California and plunged into the icy world of the Klondike during the gold-rushes of the late nineteenth century, it is uncertain whether he will live through the ordeal. But against all odds Buck does not merely survive, but learns to thrive in this dog-eat-dog world. First a leader of dogs and eventually of wolves, Buck regains lupine instincts long forgotten but still buried deeply within his DNA. His ears awaken to the call of the wild, which he follows deeper and deeper into the forest. Reattuning himself to the collective memories of his wild ancestors, he sloughs off the chains of civilisation which shackle him to the human world, so that he can finally answer the song. Joining a pack of wolves and assuming his wild identity as their leader, Buck becomes an incomprehensible and legendary ghost-like creature to the humans who catch sight of him as he streaks through the forest at the head of his pack.
Regression or Progression? The Consequences of Answering the ‘Call of the Wild’
As we saw last time, Buck’s survival in the freezing Klondike is predicated upon him gaining – or, perhaps, regaining – his wolfishness, the reawakening of the titular ‘call of the wild’ within his soul. He divests himself of the civilising ‘coat’ he has worn for the first part of his life, discovering a primordial will and ability to survive in the wilderness running through his veins.
But Buck’s journey from dozy dog to wild wolf is not a straightforward one. His transformation is entangled with the question of whether his journey into the wild represents ‘a positive apotheosis into the natural world, or […] a sinister descent into pure, and perhaps malevolent, primitivism’ (Wiener, p. 177). London certainly invites both possibilities, suggesting that the movement from civilised to wild is complex, marked by both gain and loss.
At times, London characterises the change in Buck in negative, regressive terms. The first time Buck steals food from his human masters, for example:
marked, further, the decay or going to pieces of his moral nature, a vain thing and a handicap in the ruthless struggle for existence. It was all well enough in the Southland, under the law of love and fellowship, to respect private property and personal feelings; but in the Northland, under the law of club and fang, whoso took such things into account was a fool, and in so far as he observed them he would fail to prosper. […] the club of the man in the red sweater had beaten into him a more fundamental and primitive code. Civilized, he could have died for a moral consideration, say the defence of Judge Miller’s riding-whip; but the completeness of his decivilization was now evidenced by his ability to flee from the defence of a moral consideration and to save his hide. He did not steal for joy of it, but because of the clamor of his stomach. He did not rob openly, but stole secretly and cunningly, out of respect for club and fang. In short, the things he did were done because it was easier to do them than not to do them (p. 21).
Yet though Buck learns this trick from another of the dogs, the hunger that compels him is borne not of a stereotypical lupine ravenousness but of his privileged upbringing of plenty and satiation. While he ‘suffer[s] from perpetual hunger pangs’, the other dogs who ‘were born to […] life’ in the frozen wilds are given even less food than Buck, but still ‘manage[] to keep in good condition’ (p. 20). His civilised background is Buck’s motive to resort to thievery.
As well as learning that manners and ‘dainty eat[ing]’ (p. 20) have no place in this world, Buck’s baptism of snow features far more brutal lessons which lead him to increasingly wild behaviour. During his first day with the pack of huskies he is put to work alongside, Buck soon sees that mercy and ‘fair play’ have no place in the wild when another new dog, Curly, is left ‘limp and lifeless in the bloody, trampled snow, almost literally torn to pieces’ by the entire pack after being too friendly (p. 15). Yet horrified as he is by Curly’s fate, Buck soon becomes a mirror image of these ‘wolfish’ (p. 14) dogs that he views with ‘a bitter and deathless hatred’ (p. 15), engaging in a very similar fight to the death with his rival for head of the pack, Spitz. Far from the thrill of horror with which he had witnessed Curly’s demise, which ‘often came back to […] trouble him in his sleep’ (p. 15), Buck experiences this fight as ‘nothing new or strange’, as a ‘scene of old time’ that ‘was as though it had always been, the wonted way of things’ (p. 35).
But despite the reawakening of his old instincts, his tapping into a primordial memory, Buck is no match for Spitz on strength alone or instinct alone, leaving him injured, ‘winded’, and ‘staggering for footing’ (p. 36). Buck ultimately wins the fight by using his ‘imagination’ and his ‘head’ – markers of rationality associated with humans and civilisation. But when it comes time to strike the death blow wildness takes over once more, making Buck ‘inexorable’ and without mercy, which ‘was a thing reserved for gentler climes’ (p. 36). As the pack closes in to kill the loser, just as they had done to Curly, Buck does not recoil in horror and shock but watches on, ‘the dominant primordial beast who had made his kill and found it good’ (p. 36).
The juxtaposition between Buck’s civilised and wild selves pulls him in opposite directions throughout much of the novella. Buck both learns and ‘unlearns’ much (Wiener, p. 11), with London undecidedly characterising the change as both a ‘development (or retrogression)’ (p. 21). Despite becoming a ‘primordial beast’ who enjoys the kill, a regression from his civilised and domesticated former self, it is undeniable that Buck ‘develop[s]’ in other ways, becoming stronger, tougher, and more attuned to his surroundings:
His muscles became hard as iron, and he grew callous to all ordinary pain. He achieved an internal as well as external economy. He could eat anything, no matter how loathsome or indigestible; and, once eaten, the juices of his stomach extracted the last least particle of nutriment; and his blood carried it to the farthest reaches of his body, building it into the toughest and stoutest of tissues. Sight and scent became remarkably keen, while his hearing developed such acuteness that in his sleep he heard the faintest sound and knew whether it heralded peace or peril. He learned to bite the ice out with his teeth when it collected between his toes; and when he was thirsty and there was a thick scum of ice over the water hole, he would break it by rearing and striking it with stiff fore legs (pp. 21-22).
Buck has been untethered from a world shaped by men who are ‘degenerated and devoid of a physical sense of being’ as a result of their civilisation, unchained from the human impositions that dictated he reign in his wildness and his wild instincts (Bartosch, p. 89). The fire of wildness that was doused when he was ‘unduly civilized’ (p. 18) is rekindled, and he regains his ‘natural state’ as a wild animal (Wiener, p. 13). Buck gains as much as he loses, becoming both more as well as less, an uncivilized member of a ‘younger’ and less evolved world, but also one that is paradoxically timeless and primeval (Mexal, p. 271).
Indeed, despite the human rejection of the brutality to which Buck ‘descends’, killing is a necessary part of life in the wilderness. Wolves, after all, are predators who kill both their prey and one another, and so it is only natural that ‘the basic instinct coming to life in Buck is the instinct to kill’ (Tavernier-Courbin, ‘The Call of the Wild is a Study in Devolution’, p. 97), to ‘run[] the wild thing down, the living meat, to kill with his own teeth and wash his muzzle to the eyes in warm blood’ (p. 33), as well as to kill a rival of his own species.
In fact, it is not when he acts as a wild animal that Buck becomes his most raw, savage self. Instead, Buck truly becomes a beast because of his loyalty towards and love for a human, his final tie to the human, civilised world. When John Thornton – the only person Buck meets in the Klondike who truly respects and loves him – is murdered by Native Americans, Buck is sent into a mad fury of ‘overpowering rage’, which prompts him to pursue a very human desire: revenge. ‘Because of his great love for John Thornton’ Buck ‘los[es] his head’ (p. 87), slaughtering the tribe mercilessly as ‘a live hurricane of fury, hurling himself upon them in a frenzy to destroy’, ripping out their throats, ‘tearing, rending, destroying’ as though he is ‘the Fiend incarnate’ (pp. 87-88). He ‘drag[s]’ his victims ‘down like deer’, treating the humans as inferior, animalistic prey (p. 88). This is not the struggle for supremacy that Buck underwent with Spitz, a fight to the death to establish the natural hierarchical order demanded by life in the wild, but an act of human-like passion and rage. Paradoxically, while his love for Thornton had kept Buck tied to the human world even as he felt the pull of the ‘call of the wild’, it is this same love that ultimately drives him to become frenzied with the powerful emotion that is frequently so closely associated with humanity, such that humans themselves, by comparison, become like animals in comparison. To lose oneself in raw, unbridled emotion and become utterly bestial, London suggests, is the most human act of all.
Yet while it is love that ultimately causes Buck to entirely lose control to his wild emotions – which marks ‘the last time in his life’ that Buck ‘allow[s] passion to usurp cunning and reason’ (p. 87) – Buck simultaneously attains a great freedom in regaining his wildness:
There is an ecstasy that marks the summit of life, and beyond which life cannot rise. And such is the paradox of living, this ecstasy comes when one is most alive, and it comes as a complete forgetfulness that one is alive. This ecstasy, this forgetfulness of living, […] came to Buck, leading the pack, sounding the old wolf-cry, straining after the food that was alive and that fled swiftly before him through the moonlight. He was sounding the deeps of his nature, and of the parts of his nature that were deeper than he, going back into the womb of Time. He was mastered by the sheer surging of life, the tidal wave of being, the perfect joy of each separate muscle, joint, and sinew in that it was everything that was not death, that it was aglow and rampant, expressing itself in movement, flying exultantly under the stars and over the face of dead matter that did not move.
Buck finds freedom in attuning himself to the world and allowing wildness to take him over, to surge through him like a dam released, washing away conscious thought in a sea of happiness as he becomes not an individual but a part of nature, subordinate to no one but the vast wilderness itself.
Buck’s simultaneous ‘progression’ and ‘retrogression’, his identity that is in constant flux between tamed dog and wild wolf, is reminiscent of Aesop’s fable of ‘The Wolf, the Dog, and the Collar’:
A comfortably plump dog happened to run into a wolf. The wolf asked the dog where he had been finding enough food to get so big and fat. ‘It is a man,’ said the dog, ‘who gives me all this food to eat.’ The wolf then asked him, ‘And what about that bare spot there on your neck?’ The dog replied, ‘My skin has been rubbed bare by the iron collar which my master forged and placed upon my neck.’ The wolf then jeered at the dog and said, ‘Keep your luxury to yourself then! I don’t want anything to do with it, if my neck will have to chafe against a chain of iron!’ (Gibbs, p. 5).
Like the wolf of this fable, Buck learns that the cost of civilisation – the metaphorical and literal ‘chains’ of civilisation: the ‘yoke of domestication’ (Arnds, p. 63) and the friendship and loyalty that bind him to his last human companion – is sometimes too great. Though freedom comes with its own costs and sacrifices – the struggle to survive in the wilderness and to find one’s own way in the world, and the loss of his ‘moral nature’ (p. 21) – for Buck it is a price worth paying.
The price, for the reader, is that Buck ultimately ventures where we cannot follow. As we turn towards the end of the novel Buck slowly but surely begins to leave us, the humans who intrude upon his world, behind, as he ventures ever further away from civilisation and deeper into the wilderness. When, at the novel’s conclusion, he answers the call of the wild and escapes to a wilderness beyond the realms of human understanding, we cease to see the world through his eyes. Like Buck, we have been ‘unduly civilized’, and though we can venture to the Klondike and live at the freezing frontier, the threads that tie us to civilisation are wound too tightly. We cannot follow the call of the wild to that ‘certain valley’ in the wilderness, where Buck sings his ‘song of the younger world’ (p. 91).
Instead, we get only a final, fleeting glimpse into the world of this ‘Ghost Dog’:
In the summers there is one visitor, however, to that valley, of which the Yeehats do not know. It is a great, gloriously coated wolf, like, and yet unlike, all other wolves. He crosses alone from the smiling timber land and comes down into an open space among the trees. […]
But he is not always alone. When the long winter nights come on and the wolves follow their meat into the lower valleys, he may be seen running at the head of the pack through the pale moonlight or glimmering borealis, leaping gigantic above his fellows, his great throat a-bellow as he sings a song of the younger world, which is the song of the pack (p. 91).
Buck’s transformation into a wolf encapsulates the strange in-betweenness of his existence. For humans, wolves exist in a weird state between the alien and the familiar, symbolic of the untouched and pristine wilderness yet, at the same time, strangely similar and familiar with their intelligence, fierce familial bonds, and loyalty. Buck’s wolf family – who initially greet him in a tellingly contradictory manner, ‘half-friendly, half-savage’ (p. 90) – represent a ‘compromise between civilization and [the] primitive’ (Fusco, p. 64). Buck’s joining of his new lupine family ‘signif[ies] his rejection of the total primitiveness of an anarchic wilderness’ (Fusco, p. 68), and yet that family is wildness incarnate, howling the very ‘call of the wild’ to which Buck has irrevocably been drawn throughout the novella, a primordial howl that emanates from the human-free wilderness, and yet a ‘song’ from a ‘humming, singing world’ (Bartosch, p. 93). Buck is tame wildness and wild tameness, regressed and progressed to an equilibrium in which, by belonging to no single category, he transcends the dichotomy of wildness and civilization altogether.
Why read The Call of the Wild?
By characterising Buck’s change as both regression and progression, and by illustrating the harshness of life for those attempting to eke out an existence on the fronter border (and the foolishness of those civilised people who attempt to bend nature to their will), London questions notions of humanity and civilisation’s supremacy, and the prevalent idea during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries that the natural world existed and should be preserved simply for ‘the enduring good of men’, rather than for its own sake (Lundblad, p. 459, quoting Worster, p. 266). London invites us not only to think on what we have sacrificed in the process of civilisation, but to consider broader questions about the nature of the dichotomy between wilderness and civilisation itself:
‘Can wild animals and humans coexist in a civilized world?
Are wild beasts still needed to remind us of the complexity of the modern world?
Should a civilized society dedicate itself to ensuring the ongoing existence of wild animal life?’ (Wiener, p. 178)
These are some of the most pressing questions of our time which, sooner or later, whether we like it or not, we will be forced to answer.
In this age of separation between wildness and civilisation, a time in which we are greater distanced from nature than ever before, it is imperative that we to try to bridge the gap between human and animal, and nature and wilderness, whether it is through rewilding our cities, our countryside, our literature, or ourselves. Though the call of the wild is hidden within that valley where humans dare not yet go, we too were once privy to that song. Perhaps, one day, if like London we ‘accept[] the animal basis of human existence, and even revel[] in it’, (Wiener, p. 15, quoting Tavernier-Courbin, ‘The Call of the Wild and The Jungle’, p. 260), we might be able to hear the call of the wild once more.
References / further reading
London, Jack (2018). The Call of the Wild. London: Penguin
Arnds, Peter (2021). Wolves at the Door: Migration, Dehumanization, Rewilding the World. New York: Bloomsbury
Bartosch, Roman (2010). ‘Call of the Wild and the Ethics of Narrative Strategies’. Ecozona,1.2, 87-96
Fusco, Richard (2014). ‘On Primitivism in “The Call of the Wild”’, in Wildness in Jack London’s ‘The Call of the Wild’, ed. by Gary Wiener. Farmington Hills: Greenhaven Press, pp. 63-8
Gibbs, Laura (ed.) (2008). Aesop’s Fables. Oxford: Oxford University Press
Lundblad, Michael (2017). ‘A Bestiary from the Age of Jack London’, in The Oxford Handbook of Jack London, ed. by Jay Williams. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 456-70
Mexal, Stephen J. (2017). ‘Darwin’s Anachronisms: Liberalism and Conservative Temporality in The Son of the Wolf’, in The Oxford Handbook of Jack London, ed. by Jay Williams. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 259-76
Tavernier-Courbin, Jacqueline. (2014). ‘The Call of the Wild is a Study in Devolution’, in Wildness in Jack London’s ‘The Call of the Wild’, ed. by Gary Wiener. Farmington Hills: Greenhaven Press, pp. 94-101
Tavernier-Courbin, Jacqueline. (1995). ‘The Call of the Wild and The Jungle’: Jack London’s and Upton Sinclair’s Animal and Human Jungles’, in The Cambridge Companion to American Realism and Naturalism, ed. by Donald Pizer. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 236-262
Wiener, Gary (ed) (2014). Wildness in Jack London’s ‘The Call of the Wild’. Farmington Hills: Greenhaven Press.
Worster, Donald (1994). Nature’s Economy: A History of Ecological Ideas, 2nd edn. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press
Words on Wolves 