Northland Stories Read Online Free PDF Page A

patriarchal order in the Northland. In its ambitious anatomizing of the regulatory function of the State, the story also harkens back to London’s earliest public role as “Boy Socialist of Oakland” (in 1895-96), as well as looking forward to his powerful depiction of class warfare in The Iron Heel (1908). No wonder London himself once deemed “The League of the Old Men” his favorite story.
    After “The League” London would continue to publish other tales set in the Klondike, including “Love of Life” (1905) and his most famous short story of all, “To Build a Fire” (1908). In addition to these well-known tales of survival, this present edition reprints “The Sun-Dog Trail” (first published in 1905)—a brilliant, austere narrative that again takes up the question of writing/ reading in its depiction of an obsessive pursuit through ice and snow with no apparent object. By way of such Northland trailing, London explores the relationship between artistic production and interpretation; although the story would seem to have little to do with race, it is noteworthy that this quest narrative is told by Sitka Charley, appearing for the final time in London’s fiction. The “white” native’s role as an illiterate mailman and trail guide—an entrepreneur for hire—significantly sheds light on London’s self-perception as a writer engaged in his own strenuous pursuit of signs.
    The pointed illiteracy of the Indians Imber and Charley also gives us a crucial clue as to what would subsequently become of the question of race in London’s Northland. Early in Imber’s mythic account of the white man’s invasion of his tribe’s land, he remarks that the first Wolf brought with him an equally strange hairless dog, who begins breeding with the Indians’ own wolf-like dogs to produce a new stock of dog, “big-headed, thick-jawed, and short-haired, and helpless” in the wilderness. The miscegenation between “Wolf” and “Raven” clans is thus matched by an analogous miscegenation of their animals, whose offspring bears a striking resemblance to London’s most famous creation of all: Buck in The Call of the Wild (1903), which London began composing two months after Children of the Frost was published. As a mail carrier in the wild, learning how to deliver letters without being able to read them, London’s animal protagonist closely follows in the footsteps of Imber and carries on the hard work of Charley. The dog’s link to Northland natives is reinforced by his very name; showing up in a number of these tales, including “Where the Trail Forks” (which ends with a passage about animal interbreeding), the word “buck” at the turn of the century was common slang for an Indian male. As an intelligent beast, not a noble savage, Buck further enables London to treat racial crossing in terms of a naturalist parable of survival. Transforming concepts of race into the concept of species, London at once naturalizes the cultural categories of “white” and “red” at the same time that he literalizes his quest for the status of “Wolf.” By the end of The Call of the Wild, Buck has actually turned into a wolf—the very creature that London’s men in the Northland could only approximate through totemic identification. Working like a dog, Buck lets his author Jack completely realize the “Wolf” in him: to become in effect his own self-sufficient father.
    The Call of the Wild remains London’s most enduring fiction. Readers over the years have attributed the narrative’s power to its lyrical mythopoetic structure—a universal quest-romance celebrating a hero’s initiation, courage, education, survival, and eventual apotheosis. Yet situating the novel in relation to London’s first three collections of Northland tales, seeing it as a logical