call of the wild

Kerry JAyApril 1, 1997Call of the Wild Jack London. 104 pages, fiction
book.The Call of the Wild has a very interesting plot. It is centered
around a St. Bernard and Scotch Shepherd mix, named Buck. At home,
which was a large house in the sun, he ruled over all dogs. Buck was
Judge Miller's inseparable companion, until a man named Manuel, who
was the one of the gardener's helpers, committed a treacherous act.
Manuel, to cover his Chinese lottery gambling debts, stole Buck from his
sound sleep and brought him to a flag station called College Park. There,
the exchanging of money took place. It was simple. Manuel needed
money to pay off his gambling debts, and Buck was a prime candidate.
Buck was loaded onto an express car to Seattle. When he got there, he
was bought by two men named Perrault and Francois. He was loaded
onto a ship called the Narwhal and taken to the Yukon, where he was to
be trained as a sled dog. There were other sled dogs that Buck came to
know well, each with their own unique personality. After only a short time
of training, Buck was a sled dog, traveling with the team of huskies and
mix breeds from Dyea Beach, to the town of Dawson. After several trips
with Perrault and Francois, Buck was traded to a gold seeking family.
They knew nothing, or hardly nothing, about managing a sled team.
There trip began with a very bad start. The family had loaded up their
wagon with too much unneeded baggage, and it was top heavy. As the
dogs began to pull away and pull around a curve, the baggage tipped
over along with the sled and thus the unnecessary baggage was
discarded, and the trip was barely completed because of harsh weather,
wrong supplies, and poor management skills of the dog handlers. All
except a man that went by the name of John Thornton, perhaps the only
sane one in the group. After one of the men repeatedly beat on a dog,
Thornton became enraged. He threatened to kill the man. A few minutes
later, the rest of the family that left Thornton behind fell through some
cracked ice and drowned. That left Buck and Thornton to fend for
themselves. The time of this book is in the great gold rush era in the

Yukon and Alaska. The rest of the book concludes what happens to
Buck and John Thornton and some of the great and strange times they
have together.I enjoyed this book because it tells about the goods and
bads of wilderness life. It doesn't just lean to one side.