Jack London – Call of the Wild (summary)

The story follows a dog, Buck, as he is taken from a comfortable California life to the cold wilds
of the Klondike during the Gold Rush, happening between 1848-1852.

Buck, a powerful dog, half St. Bernard and half sheepdog, lives on Judge Miller’s estate in
California’s Santa Clara Valley. He leads a comfortable life there, but it comes to an end when
men discover gold in the Klondike region of Canada and a great demand arises for strong dogs
to pull sleds. Buck is kidnapped by a gardener on the Miller estate and sold to dog traders, who
teach Buck to obey by beating him with a club and, subsequently, ship him north to the
Klondike.

Arriving in the chilly North, Buck is amazed by the cruelty he sees around him. As soon as
another dog from his ship, Curly, gets off the boat, a pack of huskies violently attacks and kills
her. Watching her death, Buck vows never to let the same fate befall him. Buck becomes the
property of Francois and Perrault, two mail carriers working for the Canadian government, and
begins to adjust to life as a sled dog. He recovers the instincts of his wild ancestors: he learns to
fight, scavenge for food, and sleep beneath the snow on winter nights. At the same time, he
develops a fierce rivalry with Spitz, the lead dog in the team. One of their fights is broken up
when a pack of wild dogs invades the camp, but Buck begins to undercut Spitz’s authority, and
eventually the two dogs become involved in a major fight. Buck kills Spitz and takes his place as
the lead dog.

With Buck at the head of the team, Francois and Perrault’s sled makes record time. However,
the men soon turn the team over to a mail carrier who forces the dogs to carry much heavier
loads. In the midst of a particularly arduous trip, one of the dogs becomes ill, and eventually the
driver has to shoot him. At the end of this journey, the dogs are exhausted, and the mail carrier
sells them to a group of American gold hunters—Hal, Charles, and Mercedes.

Buck’s new masters are inexperienced and out of place in the wilderness. They overload the
sled, beat the dogs, and plan poorly. Halfway through their journey, they begin to run out of
food. While the humans bicker, the dogs begin to starve, and the weaker animals soon die. Of
an original team of fourteen, only five are still alive when they limp into John Thornton’s camp,
still some distance from their destination. Thornton warns them that the ice over which they
are traveling is melting and that they may fall through it. Hal dismisses these warnings and tries
to get going immediately. The other dogs begin to move, but Buck refuses. When Hal begins to
beat him, Thornton intervenes, knocking a knife from Hal’s hand and cutting Buck loose. Hal
curses Thornton and starts the sled again, but before they have gone a quarter of a mile, the ice
breaks open, swallowing both the humans and the dogs.

Thornton becomes Buck’s master, and Buck’s devotion to him is total. He saves Thornton from
drowning in a river, attacks a man who tries to start a fight with Thornton in a bar, and, most
remarkably, wins a $1,600 wager for his new master by pulling a sled carrying a thousand-
pound load. But Buck’s love for Thornton is mixed with a growing attraction to the wild, and he
feels as if he is being called away from civilization and into the wilderness. This feeling grows
stronger when he accompanies Thornton and his friends in search of a lost mine hidden deep in
the Canadian forest.

While the men search for gold, Buck ranges far afield, befriending wolves and hunting bears
and moose. He always returns to Thornton in the end, until, one day, he comes back to camp to
find that Yeehat Indians have attacked and killed his master. Buck attacks the Indians, killing
several and scattering the rest, and then heads off into the wild, where he becomes the leader
of a pack of wolves. He becomes a legendary figure, a Ghost Dog, fathering countless cubs and
inspiring fear in the Yeehats—but every year he returns to the place where Thornton died, to
mourn his master before returning to his life in the wild.