The Call of the Wild and White Fang - Jack London [141]
Then came the day when the last bandage and the last plaster cast were taken off. It was a gala day. All Sierra Vista was gathered around. The master rubbed his ears, and he crooned his love-growl. The master’s wife called him the “Blessed Wolf,” which name was taken up with acclaim and all the women called him the Blessed Wolf.
He tried to rise to his feet, and after several attempts fell down from weakness. He had lain so long that his muscles had lost their cunning, and all the strength had gone out of them. He felt a little shame because of his weakness, as though, forsooth, he were failing the gods in the service he owed them. Because of this he made heroic efforts to arise, and at last he stood on his four legs, tottering and swaying back and forth.
“The Blessed Wolf!” chorused the women.
Judge Scott surveyed them triumphantly.
“Out of your own mouths be it,” he said. “Just as I contended right along. No mere dog could have done what he did. He’s a wolf.”
“A Blessed Wolf,” amended the Judge’s wife.
“Yes, Blessed Wolf,” agreed the Judge. “And henceforth that shall be my name for him.”
“He’ll have to learn to walk again,” said the surgeon; “so he might as well start in right now. It won’t hurt him. Take him outside.”
And outside he went, like a king, with all Sierra Vista about him and tending on him. He was very weak, and when he reached the lawn he lay down and rested for a while.
Then the procession started on, little spurts of strength coming into White Fang’s muscles as he used them and the blood began to surge through them. The stables were reached, and there in the doorway lay Collie, a half-dozen pudgy puppies playing about her in the sun.
White Fang looked on with a wondering eye.
Collie snarled warningly at him, and he was careful to keep his distance. The master with his toe helped one sprawling puppy toward him. He bristled suspiciously, but the master warned him that all was well. Collie, clasped in the arms of one of the women, watched him jealously and with a snarl warned him that all was not well.
The puppy sprawled in front of him. He cocked his ears and watched it curiously. Then their noses touched, and he felt the warm little tongue of the puppy on his jowl. White Fang’s tongue went out, he knew not why, and he licked the puppy’s face.
Hand-clapping and pleased cries from the gods greeted the performance. He was surprised, and looked at them in a puzzled way. Then his weakness asserted itself, and he lay down, his ears cocked, his head on one side, as he watched the puppy. The other puppies came sprawling toward him, to Collie’s great disgust; and he gravely permitted them to clamber and tumble over him. At first, amid the applause of the gods, he betrayed a trifle of his old self-consciousness and awkwardness. This passed away as the puppies’ antics and mauling continued, and he lay with half-shut, patient eyes, drowsing in the sun.
Endnotes
The Call of the Wild
Chapter I
1 . (p. 5) Old longings ... strain: These lines are from the first stanza of John M. O’Hara’s poem “Atavism,” which was first published in 1902 in The Bookman, a popular periodical. Biologists use the term atavism to describe the reappearance in an individual of certain characteristics of a distant ancestor that have been absent in intervening generations. Buck exhibits atavistic characteristics when his instincts and memories of an impossibly distant past “call” him and reassert themselves into his behavior.
2 . (p. 5) Northland: George Washington Carmack discovered gold in the Klondike in 1896. News of his Bonanza River strike reached the United States in 1897. Approximately 250,000 gold miners left for the Northland during the two big years of the Gold Rush that followed. London left for the Klondike on July 25, 1897, saying about his adventure “I had let career go hang, and was on the adventure path again in quest of fortune.”
3 . (p. 5) Buck: London based many of his canine characters on dogs he met in the Klondike. Buck, for instance, is modeled after Jack, a St. Bernard-collie mix who came from California to the Klondike with a miner named Lois Bond. Other dogs, like Curly and Koona, are based on animals London read about in Egerton Young