The Call of the Wild

He walked to the cen­tre of the open space and lis­tened. It was the call, the many-noted call, sound­ing more lur­ingly and com­pellingly than ever be­fore. And as never be­fore, he was ready to obey. John Thorn­ton was dead. The last tie was bro­ken. Man and the claims of man no longer bound him.

wide-spread­ing lawns

“They told us we couldn’t make White River, and here we are.” This last with a sneer­ing ring of tri­umph in it.
“And they told you true,” John Thorn­ton an­swered. “The bot­tom’s likely to drop out at any mo­ment. Only fools, with the blind luck of fools, could have made it.

It ate away from be­neath; the sun ate from above.

way­far­ers

Thorn­ton went on whit­tling. It was idle, he knew, to get be­tween a fool and his folly

They were sim­ply so many bags of bones in which sparks of life flut­tered faintly

per­am­bu­lat­ing

It was heart­break­ing, only Buck’s heart was un­break­able. The man in the red sweater had proved that.

the Five Fingers the dog-food gave out, and a tooth­less old squaw of­fered to trade them a few pounds of frozen horse­hide for the Colt’s re­volver that kept the big hunt­ing-knife com­pany at Hal’s hip. A poor sub­sti­tute for food was this hide, just as it