720 London, Jack
Bill’s sled and their dogs, tormenting them with
the inevitability of being killed, one by one. It is
ominous and judgmental, a “land of desolation and
mockery and silence” that “crushe[s]” the men on
the sled “with the weight of [its] unending vast-
ness.” Such power and immensity reinforces humans’
insignificance. Henry and Bill soon recognize their
irrelevance when they begin perceiving “themselves
[as] finite and small” and deathlike, their frozen
faces seeming like “ghostly masques.” After the
wolves attack and eat Bill, Henry begins to notice
his own body, and momentarily is bemused at the
wonder of its workings. But then he realizes that out
in nature “this living flesh . . was no more than so
much meat, a quest of ravenous animals, to be torn
and slashed by their hungry fangs, to be sustenance.”
Man is nature’s servant, and nature the ultimate
master.
Since nature is in control, it predestines all living
things—it has plans. One Eye’s “urge of an impulse”
to find a lair is an instinct passed down from his
forbears. “He did not question it, nor puzzle over it,”
he simply obeys it. Such is also the case when his
gray cub kills and eats the ptarmigan’s young and
fights off the devastated mother. During the attack,
he recognizes his destiny: With “the fighting blood
of his breed . . . up in him and surging through him,”
he realized “his own meaning in the world; he was
doing that for which he was made—killing meat
and battling to kill it. He was justifying his exis-
tence.” Nature had “equipped” him for this.
It also equips other instincts and urges, even
those that devastate the closest of relationships.
After the gray cub matures, as White Fang, he
comes upon his mother. Having been separated from
her, he bounds toward her “joyously.” But she snarls
at him and rushes him three times, laying “his cheek
open to the bone.” Such behavior is not the mother’s
fault, for “a wolf-mother was not made to remem-
ber her cubs of a year or so before. So she did not
remember White Fang. He was a strange animal, an
intruder; and her present litter of puppies gave her
the right to resent such intrusion.”
Along with plans, nature also has laws: “the
law that forbade [the cub to] . . . approach . . . the
[cave’s] entrance”; “the law of meat” (“the aim of
life,”) “eat or be eaten”; “oppress the weak and obey
the strong”; and “the law of forage,” which deemed
that all wasted meat “belonged to the dog that found
it.” Nature’s rule is so complete that each living thing
accepts these laws and each of their own motivations
without question. London elaborates on this blind
acceptance as “a method,” an “act of classification.”
As a cub, White Fang “was not in the least disturbed
by desire to find out . . . reason[s] . . . . Logic and
physics were no part of his mental makeup.” “Single-
purposed” and cruel, nature is a lonely and treacher-
ous place for its inhabitants.
Lori VermaasoppreSSion in White Fang
Soon after a male gray cub (White Fang) and his
mother come upon an Indian camp, one of the Indi-
ans, Gray Beaver, recognizes the mother as a wild dog
he recently lost. He calls out her given name, Kiche,
whereupon she immediately crouches, whimpers, and
wags her tail. Her submissive reaction impresses upon
the cub man’s more powerful, magical, even godlike
presence, one whose “mastery and power” instills in
him “an overwhelming sense of his own weakness
and littleness.” The Indians claim the cub and capture
his mother, thus initiating the cub’s oppression and,
significantly, his acceptance of it.
Gray Beaver names the cub White Fang, another
example of oppression, in that naming is an act of
ownership. The newly christened wolf slowly adjusts
to the camp’s hierarchy. With his mother tied up,
White Fang learns to defer to humans, such that
whenever “they walked, he got out of their way.
When they called, he came. When they threatened,
he cowered down.” “Such was the lesson” of his
oppression, to learn to “plac[e] . . . his destiny in
another’s hands, a shifting of the responsibilities of
existence.”
His training continues after the Indians untie
Kiche. Although submissive to humans, White
Fang is still in the early stages of accepting his sub-
ordination, and so he tries to lure his mother out
into the woods and to freedom. But so complete is
her conditioning that she stops at its edge, impart-
ing on her son another significant lesson. A dif-
ferent call has transfixed her, an “other and louder