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Copyright
William Collins
An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers
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Hammersmith, London W6 8JB
WilliamCollinsBooks.com
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.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.
Source ISBN: 9780007558124
Ebook Edition © August 2014 ISBN: 9780007558131
Version: 2014-07-30
History of Collins
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 The Pilgrim’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.
In the 1860s Collins began to expand and diversify and the idea of “books for the millions” was developed. Affordable editions of classical literature were published, and in 1903 Collins introduced 10 titles in their Collins Handy Illustrated Pocket Novels. These proved so popular that a few years later this had increased to an output of 50 volumes, selling nearly half a million in their year of publication. In the same year, The Everyman’s Library was also instituted, with the idea of publishing an affordable library of the most important classical works, biographies, religious and philosophical treatments, plays, poems, travel, and adventure. This series eclipsed all competition at the time, and the introduction of paperback books in the 1950s helped to open that market and marked a high point in the industry.
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
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
Title Page
Copyright
History of Collins
Life & Times
Part One
Chapter 1: The Trail of the Meat
Chapter 2: The She-Wolf
Chapter 3: The Hunger Cry
Part Two
Chapter 1: The Battle of the Fangs
Chapter 2: The Lair
Chapter 3: The Grey Cub
Chapter 4: The Wall of the World
Chapter 5: The Law of Meat
Part Three
Chapter 1: The Makers of Fire
Chapter 2: The Bondage
Chapter 3: The Outcast
Chapter 4: The Trail of the Gods
Chapter 5: The Covenant
Chapter 6: The Famine
Part Four
Chapter 1: The Enemy of His Kind
Chapter 2: The Mad God
Chapter 3: The Reign of Hate
Chapter 4: The Clinging Death
Chapter 5: The Indomitable
Chapter 6: The Love-Master
Part Five
Chapter 1: The Long Trail
Chapter 2: The Southland
Chapter 3: The God’s Domain
Chapter 4: The Call of Kind
Chapter 5: The Sleeping Wolf
CLASSIC LITERATURE: WORDS AND PHRASES adapted from the Collins English Dictionary
About the Publisher
CHAPTER 1
The Trail of the Meat
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.”
“Henry,” said the other, munching with deliberation the beans he was eating, “did you happen to notice the way them dogs kicked up when I was a-feedin’ ’em?”
“They did cut up more’n usual,” Henry acknowledged.
“How many dogs ’ve we got, Henry?”
“Six.”
“Well, Henry …” Bill stopped for a moment, in order that his words might gain greater significance. “As I was sayin’, Henry, we’ve got six dogs. I took six fish out of the bag. I gave one fish to each dog, an’, Henry, I was one fish short.”
“You counted wrong.”
“We’ve got six dogs,” the other reiterated dispassionately. “I took out six fish. One Ear didn’t get no fish. I came back to the bag afterward an’ got ’m his fish.”
“We’ve only got six dogs,” Henry said.
“Henry,” Bill went on. “I won’t say they was all dogs, but there was seven of ’m that got fish.”
Henry stopped eating to glance across the fire and count the dogs.
“There’s only six now,” he said.
“I saw the other one run off across the snow,” Bill announced with cool positiveness. “I saw seven.”
Henry looked at him commiseratingly, and said, “I’ll be almighty glad when this trip’s over.”
“What d’ye mean by that?” Bill demanded.
“I mean that this load of ourn is gettin’ on your nerves, an’ that you’re beginnin’ to see things.”
“I thought of that,” Bill answered gravely. “An’ so, when I saw it run off across the snow, I looked in the snow an’ saw its tracks. Then I counted the dogs an’ there was still six of ’em. The tracks is there in the snow now. D’ye want to look at ’em? I’ll show ’em to you.”
Henry did not reply, but munched on in silence, until, the meal finished, he topped it with a final cup of coffee. He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand and said:
“Then you’re thinkin’ as it was—”
A long wailing cry, fiercely sad, from somewhere in the darkness, had interrupted him. He stopped to listen to it, then he finished his sentence with a wave of his hand toward the sound of the cry, “—one of them?”
Bill nodded. “I’d a blame sight sooner think that than anything else. You noticed yourself the row the dogs made.”
Cry after cry, and answering cries, were turning the silence into a bedlam. From every side the cries arose, and the dogs betrayed their fear by huddling together and so close to the fire that their hair was scorched by the heat. Bill threw on more wood, before lighting his pipe.
“I’m thinking you’re down in the mouth some,” Henry said.
“Henry …” He sucked meditatively at his pipe for some time before he went on. “Henry, I was a-thinkin’ what a blame sight luckier he is than you an’ me’ll ever be.”
He indicated the third person by a downward thrust of the thumb to the box on which they sat.
“You an’ me, Henry, when we die, we’ll be lucky if we get enough stones over our carcases to keep the dogs off of us.”
“But we ain’t got people an’ money an’ all the rest, like him,” Henry rejoined. “Long-distance funerals is somethin’ you an’ me can’t exactly afford.”
“What gets me, Henry, is what a chap like this, that’s a lord or something in his own country, and that’s never had to bother about grub nor blankets; why he comes a-buttin’ round the Godforsaken ends of the earth—that’s what I can’t exactly see.”
“He might have lived to a ripe old age if he’d stayed at home,” Henry agreed.
Bill opened his mouth to speak, but changed his mind. Instead, he pointed towards the wall of darkness that pressed about them from every side. There was no suggestion of form in the utter blackness; only could be seen a pair of eyes gleaming like live coals. Henry indicated with his head a second pair, and a third. A circle of the gleaming eyes had drawn about their camp. Now and again a pair of eyes moved, or disappeared to appear again a moment later.
The unrest of the dogs had been increasing, and they stampeded, in a surge of sudden fear, to the near side of the fire, cringing and crawling about the legs of the men. In the scramble one of the dogs had been overturned on the edge of the fire, and it had yelped with pain and fright as the smell of its singed coat possessed the air. The commotion caused the circle of eyes to shift restlessly for a moment and even to withdraw a bit, but it settled down again as the dogs became quiet.
“Henry, it’s a blame misfortune to be out of ammunition.”
Bill had finished his pipe and was helping his companion to spread the bed of fur and blanket upon the spruce boughs which he had laid over the snow before supper. Henry grunted, and began unlacing his moccasins.
“How many cartridges did you say you had left?” he asked.
“Three,” came the answer. “An’ I wisht ’twas three hundred. Then I’d show ’em what for, damn ’em!”
He shook his fist angrily at the gleaming eyes, and began securely to prop his moccasins before the fire.
“An’ I wisht this cold snap’d break,” he went on. “It’s ben fifty below for two weeks now. An’ I wisht I’d never started on this trip, Henry. I don’t like the looks of it. I don’t feel right, somehow. An’ while I’m wishin’, I wisht the trip was over an’ done with, an’ you an’ me a-sittin’ by the fire in Fort McGurry just about now an’ playing cribbage—that’s what I wisht.”
Henry grunted and crawled into bed. As he dozed off he was aroused by his comrade’s voice.
“Say, Henry, that other one that come in an’ got a fish—why didn’t the dogs pitch into it? That’s what’s botherin’ me.”
“You’re botherin’ too much, Bill,” came the sleepy response. “You was never like this before. You jes’ shut up now, an’ go to sleep, an’ you’ll be all hunkydory in the mornin’. Your stomach’s sour, that’s what’s botherin’ you.”
The men slept, breathing heavily, side by side, under the one covering. The fire died down, and the gleaming eyes drew closer the circle they had flung about the camp. The dogs clustered together in fear, now and again snarling menacingly as a pair of eyes drew close. Once their uproar became so loud that Bill woke up. He got out of bed carefully, so as not to disturb the sleep of his comrade, and threw more wood on the fire. As it began to flame up, the circle of eyes drew farther back. He glanced casually at the huddling dogs. He rubbed his eyes and looked at them more sharply. Then he crawled back into the blankets.