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White Fang
Jack London
HarperCollins is proud to present its new range of best-loved, essential classics.‘Fear urged him to go back, but growth drove him on…‘Set in the frozen forests of the Yukon Territory, Canada, during the Klondike Gold Rush of the 1890s, ‘White Fang’ tells the story of a young wolf-dog’s journey from the wild into human territory. As White Fang learns that civilisation is every bit as vicious and violent as nature – and that survival is only awarded to the fittest – we too see how instinct, sensation and emotion drive every one of us.Published in 1906 to wide and instant acclaim, this is a remarkable and moving look at the timeless relationship between man and dog.
WHITE FANG
Jack London
Copyright (#ulink_2df89b93-95b6-546b-91d7-5a4518c09107)
William Collins
An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers
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This eBook edition published by William Collins in 2014
Life & Times section © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd
Gerard Cheshire asserts his moral right as author of the Life & Times section
Classic Literature: Words and Phrases adapted from Collins English Dictionary
Cover by e-Digital Design
Cover images: Wolf © Vasily Smirnov/iStock.
Landscape © Estate of Stephen Laurence Strathdee/iStock
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
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Source ISBN: 9780007558124
Ebook Edition © August 2014 ISBN: 9780007558131
Version: 2014-07-30
History of Collins (#ulink_395a1872-9b40-5831-829c-1fd79e1706c1)
In 1819, millworker William Collins from Glasgow, Scotland, set up a company for printing and publishing pamphlets, sermons, hymn books, and prayer books. That company was Collins and was to mark the birth of HarperCollins Publishers as we know it today. The long tradition of Collins dictionary publishing can be traced back to the first dictionary William published in 1824, Greek and English Lexicon. Indeed, from 1840 onwards, he began to produce illustrated dictionaries and even obtained a licence to print and publish the Bible.
Soon after, William published the first Collins novel, Ready Reckoner; however, it was the time of the Long Depression, where harvests were poor, prices were high, potato crops had failed, and violence was erupting in Europe. As a result, many factories across the country were forced to close down and William chose to retire in 1846, partly due to the hardships he was facing.
Aged 30, William’s son, William II, took over the business. A keen humanitarian with a warm heart and a generous spirit, William II was truly “Victorian” in his outlook. He introduced new, up-to-date steam presses and published affordable editions of Shakespeare’s works and ThePilgrim’s Progress, making them available to the masses for the first time. A new demand for educational books meant that success came with the publication of travel books, scientific books, encyclopedias, and dictionaries. This demand to be educated led to the later publication of atlases, and Collins also held the monopoly on scripture writing at the time.
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HarperCollins is and has always been a champion of the classics, and the current Collins Classics series follows in this tradition – publishing classical literature that is affordable and available to all. Beautifully packaged, highly collectible, and intended to be reread and enjoyed at every opportunity.
Life & Times (#ulink_7d1705df-d8bd-5515-90f1-6d7405ec6f00)
Animals in Literature
The literary establishment has always tended to consign novels about animals to children’s fiction, mainly because of the more imaginative and open nature of a young audience. The appeal of the animal kingdom and the anthropomorphism of creatures has always been something that delights children and is perhaps less likely to excite an adult reader.
The anthropomorphism of animals has a long tradition in literature, and can be dated back to Aesop, a Greek storyteller from the 6th century BC. The many fables attributed to Aesop are moralistic stories that often feature animals as their protagonists, such as the well-known tale of The Tortoise and the Hare. It is almost certainly easier for children to access these stories because of the imaginative use of animals, but it is also a useful device for adults because it pares down or simplifies any characterization, and therefore the characters lose the complexity of human personality. This enables the storyteller, or novelist, to focus on the issue at hand, rather than becoming bogged down by intricate character analyses.
There have been numerous popular novels that feature an animal as the central character. Perhaps the best known example is Anna Sewell’s Black Beauty (1877), which tells the story of a horse from a quasi-equine point of view and drew attention to the notion of animal mistreatment in the Victorian age. In 1893 came a similar book titled Beautiful Joe, by Margaret Marshall Saunders, this time from a quasi-canine perspective. Saunders’ writing was heavily influenced by Sewell’s Black Beauty. Jack London’s The Call of the Wild (1903) also tells the story of a dog, although it is written in the third person, rather than the first.
The Call of the Wild is about a German Shepherd named Buck who finds himself being taken from his wealthy original owners to join a sled team in Yukon, Canada, during the Klondike gold rush of 1897–8. Buck is maltreated by his inexperienced new owners, only to be saved by John Thornton, an outdoors man who duly nurses the dog back to health. Thornton is then killed in a raid by Native Americans leaving Buck alone to fend for himself. He joins a wolf pack, eventually giving in to his wild and primitive instincts and becoming pack leader, but never forgets the kindness shown to him by Thornton.
Jack London and his Work
Jack London was a proactive socialist as well as a writer. His work is allegorical in the sense that The Call of the Wild may be interpreted as a treatise on moral and ethical conduct, along with it being an exploration of love and loyalty. Perhaps unsurprisingly, he was also a dog lover. The Call of the Wild shows how dogs have evolved as pack animals, learning to bond and obey within a group. In the wild, wolves learn to curry favour within their pack in order to survive and therefore breed with the pack females, thus passing their genes on to the next generation. These inclinations are so strongly imprinted that domestic dogs express them in their behaviour towards human owners, and dog owners interpret this natural instinct as love and affection.
London was accused of plagiarism by another writer, named Egerton R. Young who had published a book titled My Dogs in the Northland in 1902. London acknowledged that he had used Young’s book as a point of reference for his research, but had not taken anything from the story. He also claimed to have written to Young by way of thanks, but Young wrote to the New York Times in 1907 stating that he had never received a letter from London. Factually, the stories are quite different from one another, even though they are both played out in the same region and involve dog sleds. One major difference is that Young’s story is told in the first person from the point of view of a human.
The Call of the Wild has been adapted into various films and television series – it is a tale that translates so well to different media because it is both straightforward and emotive. The audience can easily tell who the good people are and who London intends for us to view as bad people, and the story is imbued throughout with pathos. After experiencing genuine kindness from John Thornton and then losing him, Buck returns to the wild and London’s message seems to be that love, warmth and contentment should be appreciated as it is often short-lived. He also shows that the struggle for survival is instinctual – as the story draws to an end, Buck has recovered his ancestral, primitive behaviour and fully detached himself from the civilized world that he knew.
White Fang
First serialized in an American magazine and then published in 1906, the novel White Fang focuses on the domestication of a wild beast, a plotline which reverses the theme of Jack London’s previous book, The Call of the Wild (1903). Set during the Klondike Gold Rush of the 1890s, one of the story’s strengths is the author’s ability to capture the brutal reality of survival in the wilds of the Yukon, Canada.
The eponymous main ‘character’ is part wolf, part dog, and he eventually finds himself living among humans where his lot is only marginally better than in the harsh wilderness. A sense of alienation surrounds White Fang, who is persecuted by wolves for being part dog and then by dogs for being part wolf. He becomes so toughened by the hostility of the world around him that he transforms into a vicious killer, an inevitable consequence of his instinct to survive.
Jack London anthropomorphized White Fang and the other animal characters – giving them human personality traits and voices – so that he could reflect on society and its failures without being overly moralistic, which would have been a natural consequence of using human, rather than animal, characters. Its social commentary aside, White Fang remains a well-loved tale, comprising many twists and turns, highs and lows, friends and foes.
Contents
Cover (#u3ff1f86a-28c0-5497-a677-5a8ee624414a)
Title Page (#u1682c70b-ca53-5040-aa02-93594ecd0fca)
Copyright (#u9545aafa-ec8b-5385-90a7-9004c3104dd7)
History of Collins (#u3e8a6bb2-6e43-5653-b44b-f36026491857)
Life & Times (#u35b58328-c302-5663-9b55-bf6e10e103f6)
Part One (#u39259d0c-ddef-5264-91cb-9e826ec9f293)
Chapter 1: The Trail of the Meat (#ubec6363b-ed3f-5c8d-a6d0-c7d397fb2e60)
Chapter 2: The She-Wolf (#u9d2b8d45-07bf-51fd-b980-21ab91f0d70b)
Chapter 3: The Hunger Cry (#u25d39fc4-c5c0-5c52-9f3d-ac2f3b8535f6)
Part Two (#ud9eeb100-8cd7-5e76-996f-e88760863f29)
Chapter 1: The Battle of the Fangs (#ub113b42c-6dfc-59dd-a4d2-50cb85a232b3)
Chapter 2: The Lair (#ufbbe19c4-4a6c-5517-a57b-a9f3b510c3c1)
Chapter 3: The Grey Cub (#u29cdda55-9489-511b-be36-96f2862d37c8)
Chapter 4: The Wall of the World (#uca988e6d-6acd-5dc2-86c9-c1135cdbe969)
Chapter 5: The Law of Meat (#litres_trial_promo)
Part Three (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 1: The Makers of Fire (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 2: The Bondage (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 3: The Outcast (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 4: The Trail of the Gods (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 5: The Covenant (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 6: The Famine (#litres_trial_promo)
Part Four (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 1: The Enemy of His Kind (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 2: The Mad God (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 3: The Reign of Hate (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 4: The Clinging Death (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 5: The Indomitable (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 6: The Love-Master (#litres_trial_promo)
Part Five (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 1: The Long Trail (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 2: The Southland (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 3: The God’s Domain (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 4: The Call of Kind (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 5: The Sleeping Wolf (#litres_trial_promo)
CLASSIC LITERATURE: WORDS AND PHRASES adapted from the Collins English Dictionary (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)
PART ONE (#ulink_ca4c9707-218d-5706-9d4b-26b6842f673d)
CHAPTER 1 (#ulink_9b564700-6caa-51c1-bf49-0658d6d4ac5e)
The Trail of the Meat (#ulink_9b564700-6caa-51c1-bf49-0658d6d4ac5e)
Dark spruce forest frowned on either side the frozen waterway. The trees had been stripped by a recent wind of their white covering of frost, and they seemed to lean towards each other, black and ominous, in the fading light. 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.
But there was life, abroad in the land and defiant. 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 vapour that settled upon the hair of their bodies and formed into crystals of frost. Leather harness was on the dogs, and leather traces attached them to a sled which dragged along behind. The sled was without runners. It was made of stout birch-bark, and its full surface rested on the snow. The front end of the sled was turned up, like a scroll, in order to force down and under the bore of soft snow that surged like a wave before it. On the sled, securely lashed, was a long and narrow oblong box. There were other things on the sled—blankets, an axe, and a coffee-pot and frying-pan; but prominent, occupying most of the space, was the long and narrow oblong box.
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. Life is an offence to it, for life is movement; and the Wild aims always to destroy movement. It freezes the water to prevent it running to the sea; it drives the sap out of the trees till they are frozen to their mighty hearts; and most ferociously and terribly of all does the Wild harry and crush into submission man—man who is the most restless of life, ever in revolt against the dictum that all movement must in the end come to the cessation of movement.
But at front and rear, unawed and indomitable, toiled the two men who were not yet dead. Their bodies were covered with fur and soft-tanned leather. Eyelashes and cheeks and lips were so coated with the crystals from their frozen breath that their faces were not discernible. This gave them the seeming of ghostly masques, undertakers in a spectral world at the funeral of some ghost. But under it all they were men, penetrating the land of desolation and mockery and silence, puny adventurers bent on colossal adventure, pitting themselves against the might of a world as remote and alien and pulseless as the abysses of space.
They travelled on without speech, saving their breath for the work of their bodies. On every side was the silence, pressing upon them with a tangible presence. It affected their minds as the many atmospheres of deep water affect the body of the diver. It crushed them with the weight of unending vastness and unalterable decree. It crushed them into the remotest recesses of their own minds, pressing out of them, like juices from the grape, all the false ardours and exaltations and undue self-values of the human soul, until they perceived themselves finite and small, specks and motes, moving with weak cunning and little wisdom amidst the play and inter-play of the great blind elements and forces.
An hour went by, and a second hour. The pale light of the short sunless day was beginning to fade, when a faint far cry arose on the still air. It soared upward with a swift rush, till it reached its topmost note, where it persisted, palpitant and tense, and then slowly died away. It might have been a lost soul wailing, had it not been invested with a certain sad fierceness and hungry eagerness. The front man turned his head until his eyes met the eyes of the man behind. And then, across the narrow oblong box, each nodded to the other.
A second cry arose, piercing the silence with needle-like shrillness. Both men located the sound. It was to the rear, somewhere in the snow expanse they had just traversed. A third and answering cry arose, also to the rear and to the left of the second cry.
“They’re after us, Bill,” said the man at the front.
His voice sounded hoarse and unreal, and he had spoken with apparent effort.
“Meat is scarce,” answered his comrade. “I ain’t seen a rabbit sign for days.”
Thereafter they spoke no more, though their ears were keen for the hunting-cries that continued to rise behind them.
At the fall of darkness they swung the dogs into a cluster of spruce trees on the edge of the waterway and made a camp. The coffin, at the side of the fire, served for seat and table. The wolf-dogs, clustered on the far side of the fire, snarled and bickered among themselves, but evinced no inclination to stray off into the darkness.
“Seems to me, Henry, they’re stayin’ remarkable close to camp,” Bill commented.
Henry, squatting over the fire and settling the pot of coffee with a piece of ice, nodded. Nor did he speak till he had taken his seat on the coffin and begun to eat.
“They know where their hides is safe,” he said. “They’d sooner eat grub than be grub. They’re pretty wise, them dogs.”
Bill shook his head. “Oh, I don’t know.”
His comrade looked at him curiously. “First time I ever heard you say anything about their not bein’ wise.”
