The one was the toil slave of the other, and the only caresses it had ever received were the caresses of the whip lash..." (London 347). The implication is the dog could have saved the man if there had been some trust between the two, which again carries out London's appreciation of the animals and the elements. This man could have learned from both, but he chose not to, and paid the ultimate price, which leads to the irony of the story, and the arrogance of the man. Each character's irony is important to the development of the story and the character. The irony with the man in the Yukon is his dog, who "knew" it was too cold to travel, and would have warned him, had the man been kinder to the dog. "So the dog made no effort to communicate its apprehension to the man" (London 347). The man had the tool for his survival with him, and was too arrogant to recognize or use it. He sealed his own fate the moment he set out on his journey, and London is ultimately commenting on this arrogance of man, who believes he can tame nature.
The man understands he should not be alone on the trail, but he is testing his skill and luck by traveling in such cold weather. "If he had only had a trail mate, he would have been in no danger now" (London 350). The dogs in many of London's fiction play the title role, and this dog is no different. Built to survive in the wilderness, he seems more like a person than the man does. London tried to put himself inside the dog's head throughout the story to de-emphasize the man's importance, which is how it really is in the natural world - man is very small and unimportant when...
While he wrote around the turn of the 20th century, conditions have not changed so much in the wilds of the Yukon and Alaska. The wilderness is still wild, and the elements are still man's biggest enemy. While man has tamed most of the natural world, in Alaska, untamed wilderness still exists, and the unrelenting cold can still kill a man. While most of his readers may never experience the elements he relates in his stories, they can still appreciate them, because they know they still exist, and someone might be braving them just at that very moment.
The story ends on a hopeful note, as the dog (the real champion of the story) proceeds toward the camp. "Then it turned and trotted up the trail in the direction of the camp it knew, where were the other food providers and fire providers" (London 357). The dog is the ultimate survivor in this story, because he understands nature and its danger, and has learned from experience how to survive. This is classic Jack London at his very best, writing with a realism that illustrates the fate of anyone silly enough to take on nature when it is at its strongest. The dog trots off into the sunset to live and hunt another day, and there is one less "chechaquo" for the grizzled natives to worry about - the "fat spruce" forest will simply swallow him up.
Works Cited
London, Jack. The Call of the Wild, White Fang, and Other Stories. Eds. Labor, Earle, and Robert C. Leitz. Oxford: Oxford University Press,…
