Summary
Deep in the forest a call was sounding,
and . . . he felt compelled to turn his back upon the fire, and
to plunge into the forest.
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Buck slowly gets his strength back. John Thornton, it
turns out, had frozen his feet during the previous winter, and he
and his dogs are now waiting for the river to melt and for a raft
to take them down to Dawson. With Thornton, Buck experiences love
for the first time, developing a strong affection for the man who
saved his life and who proves an ideal master. Thornton treats his
dogs as if they are his own children, and Buck responds with adoration
and obeys all commands. Once, to test Buck, Thornton tells him to
jump off a cliff; Buck begins to obey before Thornton stops him.
Even though Buck is happy with Thornton, his wild instincts
still remain strong, and he fights as fiercely as ever. Now, however,
he fights in defense of Thornton. In Dawson, Thornton steps in to
stop a fight in a bar, and one of the combatants lashes out at him.
Immediately, Buck hurls himself at the man’s throat; the man narrowly escapes
having his throat ripped open when he throws up his hand, though
Buck succeeds in partially ripping it open with his second try.
A meeting is called on the spot to decide what to do with Buck, and
the miners rule that his aggressive behavior was justified, since he
acted in defense of Thornton. Soon, Buck has earned a reputation throughout
Alaska for loyalty and fercocity.
Buck saves Thornton’s life again when Thornton is thrown
out of a boat and gets caught in fierce rapids. Buck swims to the
slick rock where Thornton clings for his life, and the other men
attach a rope to Buck’s neck and shoulders. After several failed
attempts, Thornton grabs onto his neck, and the two are pulled back
to safety.
That winter, on a strange whim, Thornton boasts that Buck
can start a sled with a thousand pounds loaded on it. Other men
challenge his claim, betting that Buck cannot perform that task
before their eyes. A man named Matthewson, who has grown rich in
the gold rush, bets a thousand dollars that Buck cannot pull his
sled—which is outside, loaded with a thousand pounds of flour. Thornton himself
doubts it, but he makes the bet anyway, borrowing the money from
a friend to cover the wager. Several hundred men come to watch,
giving odds—first two to one, then three to one when the terms of
the bet are clarified—that Buck cannot break out the sled, and a
confident Matthewson throws on another $600 at
those odds. Once Buck is harnessed in, he first breaks the sled
free of the ice, then pulls it a hundred yards. The crowd of men
cheers in amazement, with even Matthewson joining in the applause.
Analysis
For the time being, Buck’s slowly developing identity
as a wild animal is quelled by his new devotion to John Thornton
and, through him, to the man-dog relationship. If the terrible trio
of Hal, Charles, and Mercedes comprises the worst master possible
for an animal, then Thornton may be the best. His relationship with
Buck is founded on mutual protection and affection—he saves Buck’s
life, and then Buck not only does the same for him, but also bears
out Thornton’s faith in him by winning a seemingly impossible wager. This
is the first time, London emphasizes, that Buck has actually felt love
for a human being—perhaps because it is the first time that he is
neither a pampered pet nor a drudge, toiling away to pull a sled. Whatever
the cause, this love is presented as being profoundly physi-cal—Thornton
shakes him and wrestles with him, and Buck has a way of biting his
master’s hand that, without drawing blood, is strong enough to leave
the marks of his teeth in Thornton’s flesh.
Thornton’s relationship to Buck seems to be the fulfillment
of Buck’s mystical vision of primitive man, a vision that recurs
in Chapter VII. The relationship of man to
dog, the novel suggests, is not a creation of civilization—rather,
it is a much more primal bond that can survive even in a dog like
Buck, whose civilized veneer is almost entirely scraped away to
expose the wild animal beneath. Buck is no longer a pet or a slave,
but he still has a master. He has not yet become an animal of the
wild.
