There could not but be other dogs on so vast a place, but they did not count. Here he was born, and here he had lived the four years of his life. Then there was the pumping plant for the artesian well, and the big cement tank where Judge Miller's boys took their morning plunge and kept cool in the hot afternoon.Īnd over this great demesne Buck ruled. There were great stables, where a dozen grooms and boys held forth, rows of vine-clad servants' cottages, an endless and orderly array of outhouses, long grape arbors, green pastures, orchards, and berry patches. At the rear things were on even a more spacious scale than at the front. The house was approached by gravelled driveways which wound about through wide-spreading lawns and under the interlacing boughs of tall poplars. It stood back from the road, half hidden among the trees, throughwhich glimpses could be caught of the wide cool veranda that ran around its four sides. These men wanted dogs, and the dogs they wanted were heavy dogs, with strong muscles by which to toil, and furry coats to protect them from the frost.īuck lived at a big house in the sun-kissed Santa Clara Valley. Because men, groping in the Arctic darkness, had found a yellow metal, and because steamship and transportation companies were booming the find, thousands of men were rushing into the Northland. 'Old longings nomadic leap, Chafing at custom's chain Again from its brumal sleep Wakens the ferine strain.'īuck did not read the newspapers, or he would have known that trouble was brewing, not alone for himself, but for every tidewater dog, strong of muscle and with warm, long hair, from Puget Sound to San Diego.

The call of the wild book author