"The White Silence" -- Jack London (OVERLAND MONTHLY, February 1899)

When it comes to adventures in the frozen north, no name resounds louder than that of Jack London.  It's been over a decade and a half since I read The Call of The Wild, and it's still a story I can recall in vivid detail; London's prose is as stark and grim as the Yukon he so frequently wrote of.  Having completed the "Megalomania Rules" section of The Big Book of Adventure Stories, we've entered the realm of "Man Vs. Nature," and no author is better suited to lead the charge in that regard then London.  This short story -- profoundly short, filling just six pages -- is pretty typical London, concerning itself with the harshness of the frozen north and the imprint that harshness leaves on those humans wild-hearted enough to challenge it.  The story has, I believe, entered the public domain, and can be read in its entirety here, or as part of The Son of the Wolf, a collection of London's short fiction of the north, here.

"The White Silence" tells of three travelers: Mason; his wife Ruth, a Native American woman who has left her tribe to be with him; and a character known simply as Malamute Kid.  These three have been traveling together across the ice, and supplies are running low.  Their sled-dogs are turning vicious, snapping at each other and their masters, nearly wild enough with hunger to ignore the slash of a whip across their backs.  Their journey becomes harder when Mason is crippled by a falling tree, and their struggle to survive becomes that much more desperate.

I really don't have a whole lot to say about this story, other than to note that it's a brilliant author who can make the reader, curled up in bed under enough blankets to pin him to the mattress under their weight (as I tend to be when doing my reading), shiver in sympathetic chill at the descriptions of icy deprivations suffered by the characters.  "The White Silence" is not just a story about the cold, it's a story that's cold in and of itself.

Also of interest is the definite symbiosis between man and dog in the Yukon; neither can survive without the other in the White Silence; the story opens with Mason clearing ice from between a dog's toes with his teeth to prevent frostbite, while simultaneously discussing with Malamute Kid the somber fact that with food running low, they'll likely be eating some of the dogs before the journey's end.  It makes an impressive contrast, this scene of showing utmost care and devotion to his dogs while discussing the fact that some of them will have to die to keep himself alive.