Jack London

The Son of the Wolf Jack London

On July 25, 1897, Jack London, a twentyoneyearold man of humble origin who made his living clandestine fishing for oysters in San Francisco Bay, decided to try his luck and embarked on the steamer Umatilla for the valley of the Klondike, in the distant Alaska, seduced by the news that some adventurers brought about the appearance of veins of gold in such an inhospitable place. As winter sets in, London and his two friends camp out in an abandoned cabin by the mouth of the Stewart River. In these lands (68th parallel, north latitude) living conditions are terribly harsh. The "white silence" is impressive, the freezing temperatures and total solitude: "Nature uses many tricks to convince man of his insignificance the incessant flow of the tides, the fury of the storm, the trembling of the earthquake, the long redoubling of the celestial artillery but the most terrible, the most incredible of all, is the passive phase of the White Silence ... The traveler, the only speck of life that crosses the ghostly wastelands of a dead world, trembles before his own audacity and perceives that his is an insect life, nothing more would write on his return to California a year later. The "son of the wolf" (as the Alaska Indians called the white man) found no gold. But the treasure of the intense experiences lived in the Great North (the eternal struggle for the survival of animals and men).