The Call of the Wild

London said it himself. He described White Fang as a companion piece to The Call of the Wild and set out to write its exact opposite: where Buck is a domesticated dog who reverts to the wild, White Fang is a wild wolfdog brought into domestication. The mirroring is deliberate all the way down. Both books move a canine protagonist across the same Klondike, by the same method of showing thought without granting speech, and each ends where the other began. Not filed same_universe: there are no shared characters and no continuity, just one author answering his own book.

London read Kipling closely and defended him in print, and the shape is shared: an animal with a genuine interior life, a pack with laws that are stated and enforced, and a protagonist moving between the human world and the wild one. Kipling's Law of the Jungle becomes London's law of club and fang, which is the same device turned pessimistic. Mowgli's law is a civilising code; Buck's is what remains once the code is stripped away. MEDIUM because London wrote about Kipling's importance in general rather than naming The Jungle Book as a source for this book.

It portrays the brutal, unyielding reality of the Klondike wilderness and a domesticated dog's regression into his raw, primal ancestral instincts.