Jack London is one of the first names of naturalist writers
that comes to mind upon mentioning the topic. In White
Fang, for
instance, the entirety of part one of the novel describes the harsh
realities of nature when man faces it. Henry and Bill are with a sled,
trying to get
the body of the late Lord Alfred back to civilization. Along the way,
they discover their dogs are
being enticed away by a she-wolf, and when they only have two of them
left,
Bill tries to kill her. Instead, he’s
killed, and Henry travels a short distance with the two dogs each day
before he
has to build a fire to keep the starving wolves at bay. He has no
ammunition, and can’t move as fast
as they were before to outrun the predators. He has no more wood
in the morning, and has no way to safely collect
some given the wolves are around him, and settles in for his own death.
He’s rescued by men out in the wild, however,
and then part two begins with a shift in focus. The narrative instead
goes to the she-wolf that Bill tried to kill. She and three males
travel after the famine
ends, but the dominant male, “One Eye,”
kills the other two and she has
his
cubs. When another famine kills all but
one of them, this cub learns to survive quickly, and learns the laws of
the
wild. Part three then tells the tale of
how the wolf female enters an Indian camp and is recognized, responding
to a
name given to her. Thus, the cub is
called White Fang, and he has to adjust to the new life and the other
puppies. His master takes him into town after taking
his mother away, and the vicious way that White Fang kills other dogs
gets an
ugly man to trick the owner into selling him White Fang. He does well
in the dog fighting ring until a
bulldog almost kills him, and a man named Weedon Scott saves him by
stopping
the fight, threatening the dog fighter who owns White Fang, and paying
money to
take the near-dead wolf out of the ring. He comes to love Weedon over
time, and though Weedon tries to leave him
behind when he goes to California,
White Fang follows anyway. He becomes a
domesticated animal who bravely protects his master and saves him,
despite the
wild running through his veins. This
story is quite unlike Call of the Wild, where a domesticated dog has to
learn
to become part of the wild, leaving behind all trappings of humanity to
do it.