1240 1903english Classics1240 The Call Of The Wild By Jack London

Author : Jack London
Publisher :
ISBN 13 :
Total Pages : 151 pages
Book Rating : 4.6/5 (23 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!

Download or read book The Call of the Wild : Complete with Original Illustrations written by Jack London and published by . This book was released on 2020-03-02 with total page 151 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Call of the Wild is a short adventure novel by Jack London, published in 1903 and set in Yukon, Canada, during the 1890s Klondike Gold Rush, when strong sled dogs were in high demand. The central character of the novel is a dog named Buck. The story opens at a ranch in Santa Clara Valley, California, when Buck is stolen from his home and sold into service as a sled dog in Alaska. He becomes progressively feral in the harsh environment, where he is forced to fight to survive and dominate other dogs. By the end, he sheds the veneer of civilization, and relies on primordial instinct and learned experience to emerge as a leader in the wild.London spent almost a year in the Yukon, and his observations form much of the material for the book. The story was serialized in The Saturday Evening Post in the summer of 1903 and was published a month later in book form. The book's great popularity and success made a reputation for London. As early as 1923, the story was adapted to film, and it has since seen several more cinematic adaptations.The story opens with Buck, a powerful 140-pound St. Bernard-Scotch Collie mix,[1][2] living happily in California's Santa Clara Valley as the pampered pet of rich Judge Miller and his family. However, the secretive assistant gardener Manuel, in desperate need of money to finance his Chinese lottery addiction, steals Buck and sells him for a large, lucrative amount of cash. Buck is shipped to Seattle. Put in a crate, he is starved and ill-treated. When released, he attacks his overseer, known only as of the "man in the red sweater" but this man teaches the "law of the club", hitting Buck until he is sufficiently cowed (but the man shows some kindness after Buck stops). Buck is then sold to a pair of French-Canadian dispatchers from the Canadian government, François and Perrault, who take him with them to Alaska. There, they train him as a sled dog, and drive him through the Klondike region of Canada. From his teammates, he quickly learns to adapt to survive cold winter nights and the pack society. A rivalry develops between Buck and the lead dog, Spitz, a vicious and quarrelsome white husky. Buck eventually beats Spitz in a fight and kills him, and then becomes the team's new lead dog.When François and Perrault complete the round-trip of the Yukon Trail in record time--returning to Skagway with their dispatches--and are given new orders from the Canadian government, their team is then sold to a "Scotch half-breed" man, who is also working the mail service. The dogs must now carry heavy loads to the mining areas, and the journeys they make are tiresome and long. During this run of the trail, Buck seems to have memories of his canine ancestor hanging out with a short-legged "hairy man". Meanwhile, the weary dogs become weak, and one of the team, Dave, a morose husky, becomes terminally sick and is eventually shot.Buck's next owners are a trio of stampeders from the American Southland (present-day contiguous the United States)--a spoiled woman called Mercedes, her sheepish husband Charles, and her arrogant brother Hal--who are inexperienced at surviving in the Northern wilderness. They struggle to control the sled and ignore helpful advice from others--in particular, the warnings that the spring melt poses dangers. When Mercedes is told her sled is too heavy, she dumps out crucial supplies in favor of fashion objects. They also foolishly create a team of 14 dogs, erroneously thinking they can go faster with more dogs. They overfeed the over-worked dogs and then are forced to starve them when the food supply becomes low. Most dogs on the team die from either weakness, neglect, or sickness--leaving only five dogs when they pull into White River.