"The Call of the Wild" Masculinity Parable Part Four

 

Read Part One here, Part Two here, and Part Three here.

Chapter 6: For the Love of a Man

Finding the Tribe

Under the care of John Thornton and his two dogs, Skeet and Nig, Buck was slowly nursed back to health. During his time with John Thornton, Buck discovered, for the first time, genuine connection. He had saved Buck’s life, and eventually, Buck saved his, not once, but twice. The two were inseparable. Despite this, the draw of the primitive was still alive and well within him.

In a sense, Buck had found his “tribe” with John Thornton. He felt an incredible sense of authentic bonding, which can be described as true brotherhood, with the man. Their relationship is based on trust and love, the same bonds that bonded gangs of men since the dawn of time. They share a dedication and loyalty that fills both with a strong sense of authentic contentment. John Thornton brings out the best in Buck, which is demonstrated when, on a bet, Buck manages to pull a 1,000 pound sled 100 yards. The winnings allow the pair (along with Skeet, Nig, and a few of Thornton’s friends) to undertake a grand adventure east in search of a mythical “lost cabin” and its promises of great riches.

Buck’s relationship with John Thornton exemplifies the concept of the bonds of brotherhood. They have each others’ backs. They push each other to get  better. They accompany each other on adventures. They share experiences. They have a strong mutual respect. These are the experienced men, for eons, have shared with other men.

“Thornton knelt down by Buck’s side. He took his head in his two hands and rested cheek on cheek. He did not playfully shake him, as was his wont, or murmur soft love curses; but he whispered in his ear “As you love me, Buck. As you love me.” 

 

The bonds shared between the two also highlight another important idea. There are no lone wolves in The Northland. The concept of the independent, self-reliant man operating successfully as a singular operator is a fantasy sold to men as a means of controlling them by isolation. Lone men are entirely reliant on the infrastructure of civilization constructed by rough men working in unison to tame the wilderness. When faced with real adversity, the lone wolf quickly perishes.

Of all the ideas that serve as an allegory for masculinity, the bond between Buck and John Thonton exemplifies the ideal; the place all men should yearn to reach. For without such bonds of brotherhood with a gang of men we respect and hold in high esteem, we’re nothing more than a sad, lonely, ineffective blip in the world.

Chapter Seven: The Sounding of the Call

The Adventure

Chapter seven begins with Buck, John Thornton, and crew made up of two men named Pete and Hans, Thornton’s other two dogs, and a half dozen other sled dogs embarking on an adventure eastward in search of the fabled cabin and the mysterious lost mine that promised untold riches. The journey was pure delight to Buck; he spent all day hunting, fishing, and exploring new, strange places. Unlike Charles, Hal, and Mercedes, John Thornton possessed the skills and knowledge to survive in the Northland.

“John Thornton asked little of man or nature. He was unafraid of the wild. With a handful of salt and a rife he could plunge into the wilderness and fare wherever he pleased and as long as he pleased. Being in no haste, Indian fashion, he hunted his dinner in the course of the day’s travel; and if he failed to find it, like the Indian, he kept on traveling, secure in the knowledge that sooner or later he would come to it.”

This adventure into the unknown, taken with a gang of strong, capable characters who can survive and thrive in The Northland under The Law of Club and Fang, bonded by the primal connection of true brotherhood, perfectly exemplifies how men can win the game of “Survival of the Fittest.” Throughout the novel, Buck grew and evolved with each test. He shed the softness and weakness he was born into in The Southland. Hardened through the fires of adversity and united with other hardened men who shared a deep, meaningful bond, Buck was now capable of conquering anything.

The Call of the Wild

While on their journey, Buck would continue having visions while lounging around the fire. The visions would be of the same other world and the strange, hair-covered man that represented his ancestral past. The  visions were often accompanied by a sound he heard that originated deep in the forest. This call filled him with “great unrest and strange desires” that caused him to “feel a vague, sweet gladness, and he was aware of wild yearnings and stirrings for he knew not what.” 

“Irresistible impulses seized him. He would be lying in camp, dozing lazily in the heat of the day. When suddenly his head would life and and his ears would cock up, intent and listening, and he would spring to his feet and dash away, and on and on, for hours, through the forest aisles and across dry watercourses, and to creep and spy upon the bird life in the woods. For a day at a time, he would lie in the underbrush where he could watch the partridges drumming and strutting up and down. But especially he loved to run in the dim twilight of the summer midnights, listening to the subdued and sleepy murmurs of the forest, reading signs and sounds as man may read a book, and seeking for the mysterious something, that called - called, waking or sleeping, at all times, for him to come.”

One night, a timberwolf appeared outside the camp, announcing himself with a long-drawl howl. Buck met the wolf, “every movement advertised commingled threatening and overture of friendliness; it was a menacing truce that marks the meeting of wild beasts that prey.” The wolf took off with Buck close behind. Hour after hour, they ran together through the forest. “Old memories were coming upon him fast, and he was stirring to them as of old he stirred to the realities of which they were the shadows. He had done this thing before, somewhere in that other and dimly-remembered world, and he was doing it again, now, running free in the open, the unpacked earth underfoot, th wide sky overhead.”

Buck had finally answered The Call of the Wild.

For the Love of Your Brothers

Eventually, Buck remembered John Thornton. Buck sat down. The wolf approached and they touched their noses. Buck turned around and slowly started backtracking towards camp with the wolf by his side. After an hour, “the wolf sat down, pointed his nose upward, and howled. It was a mournful howl, and as Buck held steadily on his way he heard it grow faint and fainter until it was lost in the distance.”

All men, no matter how domesticated we become from the comforts of The Southland, have primal drives and desires. The desire for adventure and risk-taking, engaging in activities where we can use our physical strength, to compete, to dominate, to provide and to protect those we love, to earn status and recognition from other men we respect, to surround ourselves with like-minded men we trust…  all of this is imprinted in our DNA. This desire to do manly stuff is our Call of the Wild.

Like Buck following the wolf into the wilderness, sometimes we need to follow these innate desires. All too often, men in today’s technology-driven world attempt to satisfy these desires with poor substitutes. Drugs, alcohol, materialism, porn, video games… whatever. These surrogates for manhood give us a little rush of adrenaline and dopamine in the moment, but ultimately leave us feeling empty and incomplete. This absence of authentic experiences leads men, good men, to live lives of silent desperation, slowly marching towards their graves without ever really living.

The Birth of the Ghost Dog

The final chapter ends with tragedy as John Thornton and the rest of the crew are murdered by the Yeehats, a local Indian tribe, which happens when Buck is out of camp exploring. He returns to find the Yeehats still in camp.

“A gust of overpowering rage swept over him. He did not know that he growled, but he growled aloud with a terrible ferocity. For the last time in his life he allowed passion to usurp cunning and reason, and it was because of his great love for John Thornton that he lost his head.

The Yeehats were dancing about the wreckage of the spruce-bough lodge when they heard a fearful roaring and saw rushing upon them an animal the like of which they had never seen before. It was Buck, a live hurricane of fury, hurling himself upon them in a frenzy to destroy. He sprang at the foremost man (it was the chief of the Yeehats), ripping the throat wide open till the rent jugular spouted a fountain of blood. He did not pause to worry the victim, but ripped in passing, with the next bound tearing wide the throat of a second man. There was no withstanding him. He plunged about in their very midst, tearing, rending, destroying, in constant and terrific motion which defied the arrows they discharged at him. In fact, so inconceivably rapid were his movements, and so closely were the Indians tangled together, that they shot one another with the arrows; and one young hunter, hurling a spear at Buck in mid air, drove it through the chest of another hunter with such force that the point broke through the skin of the back and stood out beyond. Then a panic seized the Yeehats, and they fled in terror to the woods, proclaiming as they fled the advent of the Evil Spirit.

And truly Buck was the Fiend incarnate, raging at their heels and dragging them down like deer as they raced through the trees. It was a fateful day for the Yeehats. They scattered far and wide over the country, and it was not till a week later that the last of the survivors gathered together in a lower valley and counted their losses. As for Buck, wearying of the pursuit, he returned to the desolated camp. He found Pete where he had been killed in his blankets in the first moment of surprise. Thornton’s desperate struggle was fresh-written on the earth, and Buck scented every detail of it down to the edge of a deep pool. By the edge, head and fore feet in the water, lay Skeet, faithful to the last. The pool itself, muddy and discolored from the sluice boxes, effectually hid what it contained, and it contained John Thornton; for Buck followed his trace into the water, from which no trace led away.

All day Buck brooded by the pool or roamed restlessly about the camp. Death, as a cessation of movement, as a passing out and away from the lives of the living, he knew, and he knew John Thornton was dead. It left a great void in him, somewhat akin to hunger, but a void which ached and ached, and which food could not fill, At times, when he paused to contemplate the carcasses of the Yeehats, he forgot the pain of it; and at such times he was aware of a great pride in himself,—a pride greater than any he had yet experienced. He had killed man, the noblest game of all, and he had killed in the face of the law of club and fang. He sniffed the bodies curiously. They had died so easily. It was harder to kill a husky dog than them. They were no match at all, were it not for their arrows and spears and clubs. Thenceforward he would be unafraid of them except when they bore in their hands their arrows, spears, and clubs.”

In the destruction of his tribe and, more importantly, John Thornton, Buck lost that which had given his life completeness. But in the process, he passed his final test. He had killed man, which he thought an impossible task.

In the aftermath and after a fight for dominance, Buck joins the wolves and assumes the role as their leader. Buck proceeds to haunt the Yeehat, who call him the “Ghost Dog.”

 

“They are afraid of the Ghost Dog, for it has cunning greater than they, stealing from their camps in the fierce winters, robbing their traps, slaying their dogs, and defying their bravest hunters.

Nay, the tale grows worse. Hunters there are who fail to return to the camp, and hunters there have been whom their tribesmen found with throats slashed cruelly open and with wolf prints about them in the snow greater than the prints of any wolf. Each fall, when the Yeehats follow the movement of the moose, there is a certain valley which they never enter. And women there are who become sad when the word goes over the fire of how the Evil Spirit came to select that valley for an abiding-place.”

Buck’s journey from a pampered, tamed, civilized dog in The Southland, born under The Law of Love and Fellowship, to the Ghost Dog that conquered all the trials and tribulations of The Northland under The Law of Club and Fang, is an allegory for the challenge each of us, as men, are destined to assume.

~Jason

 

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