Like many of us, I was given reading assignments as a high school student which, if I read, I promptly forgot. I decided to reread one of those books while working this week in Southern Sudan and thought I would remind everyone of the two following paragraphs:

“All that stirring of old instincts which at stated periods drives men out from the sounding cities to forest and plain to kill things by chemically propelled leaden pellets, the blood lust, the joy to kill – all this was Buck’s, only it was infinitely more intimate. He was ranging at the head of the pack, running the wild thing down, the living meat, to kill with his own teeth and wash his muzzle to the eyes in warm blood.

There is an ecstasy that marks the summit of life, and beyond which life cannot rise. And such is the paradox of living, this ecstasy comes when one is most alive, and it comes as a complete forgetfulness that one is alive. This ecstasy, this forgetfulness of living, comes to the artist, caught up and out of himself in a sheet of flame; it comes to the soldier, war-mad on a stricken field and refusing quarter; and it came to Buck, leading the pack, sounding the old wolf cry, straining after the food that was alive and fled swiftly before him through the moonlight. He was sounding the deeps of his nature, and of the parts of his nature that were deeper than he, going back into the womb of Time. He was mastered by the sheer surging of life, the tidal wave of being, the perfect joy of each separate muscle, joint, and sinew in that it was everything that was not death, that it was aglow and rampant, expressing itself in movement, flying exultantly under the stars and over the face of dead matter that did not move.â€

If you recognize it from Jack London’s “Call of the Wildâ€, congratulations on your powers of memory. Since dogs don’t write novels, I tend to think that in fact Jack London was talking about us. If there is a better description of the hunting instinct, please send it to me.

I recognized the words as London's when I read "Buck" and saw all the run-on sentences.

The paragraphs you've featured make me want to read him again. I can quickly think of no better description of a hunter's instincts.

Bill Quimby

I have the DVD of Jack London's Call of the Wild starring Heston. A fine movie.

and where was the film made, i wonder, yes here in Norway!!!

Clark Gable also made a "Call of the Wild" also great. much better than any of the newer ones.

I read London about every two years. Pretty good stuff for an uneducated communist paperboy.

The Biography of Jack London "A Sailor on Horseback" is a good read.

Judge Sharpe

I think it was Jack London that wrote the short story , To Build a Fire. I thought that was pretty good. Read it when I was a young boy trying to learn all I could about thr Great Northwoods and Hunting. Still sticks with me.

Hello the camp:
I remember reading "To Build a Fire" when I was in the fourth grade about 9-10 years old (right after the invented printing presses it seems.) It was my first real introduction to adventure or outdoor writting outside of True Mag. and Shooting Times (when it was a news paper type publication and The Old Man and the Boy ran each month). I could feel the cold creeping into my body as the man tried to light a fire after breaking through the ice. Cold enough that spit exploded into ice. Great reading on an Alabama summer afternoon. I cant wait to start reading these sort of stories to my grand son. He is 19 months now and loves his Beba best of all.
Judge Sharpe, AKA Will's Granddad.