"The Call of the Wild" Masculinity Parable Part Three

Read Part One here, and Part Two here. 

Chapter Four: Who Has Won Mastership

Connecting with Our Primal Masculinity

Buck proved to be an excellent leader, even better than Spitz. Under Buck’s leadership, the team set record paces for their runs through the frozen tundra of The Northland. Buck and his team were eventually sold and used to haul mail.

In this chapter, London describes Buck lying next to the fire after their daily run, dreaming back to the days at Judge Miller’s place, Toots and Ysabel, the Man in the Red Sweater, Curly, the fight with Spitz, and all the things he had eaten and would like to eat. Buck wasn’t homesick, though, the memories of his past were dim and distant, and had no power over him.

What were potent, though, were the images that came to him that were imprinted in his DNA. He would see himself sitting by a different fire in a different, distant time, where he sat alongside an ancient, hairy, primitive human. Buck was connecting with his ancestral past; a force that was increasingly pulling at his soul.

Modern men work the same way. The more we engage ourselves in manly endeavors, the more we connect with our instinctual past. The masculine gender role has existed since the dawn of time, and has allowed our species to survive. The blueprint for that survival through the millennia is the blueprint each of us has within.

When men start engaging in manly pursuits with other men, a fire is ignited that connects us with our fathers from generations past. The more we engage in such activities, the greater the fire grows. This connection with the past is our biological destiny.

Duty and Making Meaningful Contributions that Matter

Also in chapter four, we learn the fate of Dave, one of the dogs who had been with the team since Buck joined. Dave begins showing symptoms of an internal injury that spas his strength. The Scotch half-breed, the man who bought the dogs from François and Perrault, take Dave out of the traces to allow him to walk behind the sled to recover, if possible. But Dave cannot tolerate being separated from the team; his team.

“Dave resented being taken out, grunting and growling while the traces were unfastened, and whimpering broken-heartedly when he saw Sol-leks in the position he had held and served so long. For the pride of trace and trail was his, and, sick unto death, he could not bear that another dog should do his work.”

He tries running alongside the sleds in the deep snow, which goes about as well as expected. Despite falling repeatedly, yelping and whining in both pain and grief, Dave continues until the next stop. With his last bit of strength, Dave flounders past the sleds to his own, where he stands alongside Sol-leks. Dave chews through Sol-leks’ traces, then replaces the other dog in his rightful position.

Relenting, Dave was harnessed in again. Throughout the trip to the next camp, Dave fell several times, once even getting a leg caught under the sled. But he made it to the next camp. A place next to the fire was prepared where he slept that night.

In the morning, he was too weak to travel. Defiantly, Dave tried crawling to his team as they were being harnessed to the sled. He never made it. As his team pulled away down the trail, Dave’s mournful howling could be heard until they passed out of sight. The train of sleds stopped. The Scottish half-breed retraced his steps back towards the camp. A few moments later, a revolver shot rang out.

The sense of duty Dave felt towards his role as part of the team is the same sense of duty that has bonded men together, all working towards a goal, since men first inhabited the Earth. This is the foundation of the masculine desire to provide and protect for those we love. Would you be willing to pay the ultimate price, to sacrifice your life, for those you love?

That sense of duty is the sense of duty that fueled Dave’s desire to be a productive member of his team. It is what defined him, and refusing him his rightful role was tortuous to his soul. Dave died doing what he loved. The rest of us should be so lucky.

Chapter Five: The Toil of Trace and Trail

Hal, Charles, and Mercedes

This chapter begins with the dog teams arriving in Skaguay, the southernmost point of the trails leading north into the wild. In the five months since Buck arrived, his team had traveled 2,500 miles of hard pulling. His weight had dropped from 140 pounds down to 115 pounds. Every fiber of the dogs’ bodies were exhausted. The drivers and the dogs were preparing for a much-needed extended period of rest and recuperation.

But alas, rest wasn’t in the cards.

Four days after arriving, the dogs and their sled was bought by three Americans. Hal, a nineteen year old who carried a large knife and Colt revolver on his hip, Charles, a middle-aged man with weak and watery eyes, and Mercedes, Charles’ wife and Hal’s sister, like so many from The Southland, had arrived to find promises of gold-hued riches in the frozen tundra.

The dogs’ experience with the Americans started with them loading an impossibly-overloaded sled with countless material possessions that provided the material comforts of their soft, comfy existence in the civilized world. Pulling the load was an impossible task, especially for the exhausted team of dogs. The attempt to move the sled resulted in it tipping and spilling the contents up and down the street. Much to Mercedes’ chagrin and the amusement of onlookers, the Americans whittled their possessions by half, which was still too much. To compensate, they purchased six more dogs, for a total of fourteen. In their ignorance, the Americans did not understand a sled could carry enough food for fourteen dogs, even without the formidable load of useless material possessions.

Their fate was sealed before they left Skaguay.

This journey, at the hands of ignorant Southlanders, proved to be a comedy of errors. The original eight dogs were clearly exhausted. The six Southland dogs that were added proved to be worthless at pulling a sled and had appetites accustomed to the luxury of their Southland upbringing. The Americans started too late in the morning, took too much time taking down their camp, made too little progress on the trail, and stopped too early in the evening.

To compensate for their slow progress, Charles doubled the rations for the dogs, which didn’t remedy the problem. No amount of food could makeup for the exhaustion of the veteran dogs and incompetence of the new dogs. By the time they reached a quarter of their journey, they had consumed half of their food. Rations were cut to half, which caused all six of the new dogs to starve to death.

“Buck felt vaguely that there was no depending upon these two men and this woman. They did not know how to do anything, and as the days went by it became apparent they could not learn, They were slack in all things, without order of discipline, It took them half the night to pitch a slovenly camp and half the morning to break that camp and get the sled loaded in fashion so slovenly that for the rest of the day they were occupied in stopping and rearranging the load.”

There are two lessons to be learned from the incompetence of Hal, Charles, and Mercedes. First, the behaviors and attitudes of The Southland, when stripped of the safety and luxury of civilization, cannot survive. Second, material possessions have no place outside the comfort of The Southland.

To the first point, the fate that befell the trio is the same fate met by men who have never experienced real struggle and adversity, get thrust into more challenging situations, and fail to quickly learn. Worse, their own lack of preparation made them callous to the suffering of their dogs, for whom they relied upon for survival.

“Hal’s theory, which he practiced on others, was that one must get hardened. He had started out preaching it to his sister and brother-in-law. Failing there, he hammered it into the dogs with a club.”

How often do we see this scenario play out? Weak men acting like strong men, devoid of masculine virtues, demanding others toughen up without any recognition of the bitter irony of their own sad, weak constitution. Men like Hal exist because they give other weak men devoid of masculine virtues a surge of pride, a false pride that has not been earned or tested among other men of virtue.

The Law of Love and Fellowship makes men soft because the manly virtues of strength, honor, courage, mastery, and brotherhood are not necessary in that world. Men who have spent their entire existence in that cushy world have two choices - occasionally forego that comfort to build those masculine virtues, or develop the ability to learn and apply those virtues in an extremely short time under decidedly harsh conditions.

To the second point, the trio arrived in The Northland completely unprepared for the feeling of discomfort. They needed their tent, blankets, dishes, and other stuff that served as an anchor that slowed their progress to a crawl. They were unable to separate themselves from their possessions not only because of a need to avoid discomfort, but also because they had an emotional connection to stuff.

We see this same emotional connection to stuff among men in our modern world. That which we own defines us. We drive particular cars, dress in particular clothes, eat at particular restaurants, use particular brands of cell phones… modern men are really nothing more than brand whores. Why? Because the brands we use are a convenient way to signal the persona we want to communicate to the world.

Instead of working hard and earning status among men we respect, as is the way of men, we buy status symbols. Then we get caught up in maintaining these status symbols. The movie “Fight Club” offers up some superb wisdom on the matter:

“The things you own end up owning you.”

“Do you know what a duvet is? It’s a blanket. Just a blanket. Now why do guys like you and me know what a duvet is? Is this essential to our survival, in the hunter-gatherer sense of the word? No. What are we then? We are consumers. We’re the byproducts of a lifestyle obsession.”

“Man, I see in Fight Club the strongest and smartest men who’ve ever lived. I see all this potential, and I see squandering. Goddammit, an entire generation pumping gas, waiting tables—slaves with white collars. Advertising has us chasing cars and clothes, working jobs we hate so we can buy shit we don’t need. We’re the middle children of history, man: No purpose or place. We have no Great War. No Great Depression. Our Great War’s a spiritual war; our Great Depression is our lives. We’ve all been raised on television to believe that one day we’d all be millionaires, and movie gods, and rock stars. But we won’t. And we’re slowly learning that fact. And we’re very, very pissed off.”

The End of the Road for The Southlanders

Hal, Charles, and Mercedes’ demise is inevitable. The iciness of winter was giving way to the warmth and blossoming of life of spring. After running out of food and trading Hal’s pistol for a frozen horse hide to feed to the starving dogs, the trio reach John Thornton’s camp at White River. John Thornton, upon seeing the skeletons of the dogs that had dropped in place as soon as the sled stopped, offered a warning:

“The bottom’s likely to drop out at any moment. Only fools, with the blind luck of fools, could have made it. I’ll tell you straight, I wouldn’t risk my carcass on that ice for all the gold in Alaska.”

“That's because you’re not a fool, I suppose” Hal replied. “All the same, we’ll go on to Dawson.”

Hal uncoiled his whip and started cracking it on the backs of the dogs. One by one, the dogs gingerly got to their feet.

Except Buck.

Lash after lash of the whip did not move him. Hal exchanged the whip for the club. 

 

“He refused to stir. So greatly had he suffered, and so far gone was he, that the blows did not hurt much. And as they continued to fall upon him, the spark of life within flickered and went down. It was nearly out. He felt strangely numb. As though from a great distance, he was aware that he was being beaten. The last sensations of pain left him. He no longer felt anything, though very faintly he could hear the impact of the club upon his body. But it was no longer his body, it seemed so far away.”

It was at this point, having seen enough, John Thornton leapt to Buck’s defense. “If you strike that dog again, I’ll kill you.” Hal drew his hunting knife, which was summarily knocked from his hand by Thornton, who picked up the knife and cut Buck from the traces. 

 

In a spat of anger and realizing the nearly-dead Buck was of no use, the trio took off across the ice. A quarter mile away, Buck and John Thornton watched as the ice gave way and dogs and humans disappeared. 

~Jason

 

***