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Daily · Classics

Love of Life, and Other Stories

Jack London · short story collection, 1907·4 hrs in the original·original at Project Gutenberg
The 30‑second version4 hrs → 50 sec
  • Bill walks away and never looks back. When the narrator sprains his ankle crossing an icy stream, Bill "staggered on through the milky water" without turning his head, and the man's cry of "Bill!" gets no reply. London gives the deserter no explanation, only the sound of his footsteps disappearing over a ridge.
  • He counts his sixty-seven matches three times. Fear makes him ration them into three hiding spots: his tobacco pouch, his hatband, and against his bare chest. He also refuses to abandon a fifteen-pound sack of gold dust even as starvation sets in, hauling it "as though the desolation were trying to rob him of it."
  • He crawls after birds like a stalking cat. With an empty rifle he stalks rock ptarmigan on hands and knees until the rocks cut his knees to blood. Once he grabs too late and keeps only three tail feathers, cursing the birds' "ker-ker-ker" cry back at them.
  • He finds what is left of Bill. Following a trail of another man crawling on all fours, he reaches only "a few fresh-picked bones" and a torn moose-hide sack matching his own. His first reaction is a hoarse, ghastly laugh before he catches himself and refuses to touch the dead man's gold.
  • A dying wolf stalks him for five straight days. Both too weak to move fast, man and sick wolf trail each other's blood until the man lies motionless for half a day, baiting it close enough to clamp his hand on its jaw and suffocate it under his own body weight, then drinks "a warm trickle" from its throat.
  • Rescued and fed, he still hoards biscuits in his mattress. Scientists aboard the whaler Bedford find him crawling blind along a beach. Weeks later, though sane and eating three meals a day, he begs sailors for sea biscuit until, in London's words, "every nook and cranny was filled with hardtack."
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•Why it earns a slot

Why it earns a slot: London strips survival fiction to its rawest mechanism, a starving man out-waiting a starving wolf, then shows the trauma does not end when the food comes back.

A prospector abandoned by his partner in the Canadian Barrens starves, crawls, and finally strangles a dying wolf with his bare hands to survive.

This distillation is written from the freely available original, which is always the better read when you have the time: Project Gutenberg.

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