The Call of the Wild

A big ranch dog is stolen out of a Santa Clara valley and sold north to haul sledges in the Klondike, where the law is a club in one hand and the teeth of the other dogs. London had gone north himself at twenty-one and came home with scurvy and no gold, but with this. It is a hundred pages long, was written in a month, and has not been out of print since. Forty-five plates of northern light and hard travelling, from Winslow Homer to Albert Bierstadt, follow the dog's road from the valley to the snow.