![]() ![]() He pushes through temperatures of 40 below zero, 50 below … 55 below? Unimaginable cold and its effects on man (fatal) and dog (incidental) are brought alive as London’s hiker surmounts hazards, one, then another, then … why spoil the climax? Suffice it to say that the dog, the less unlovable of the two characters, trots off at the ending. The dog in “To Build a Fire,” an unnamed Husky, is the observer/chronicler of the attempt by an also-unnamed man, a sturdy but unthinking fellow, to walk through the sunless dead of Alaskan winter. I spotted a gently used book at Watershed Books on Brookville’s Main Street, inviting me to re-read “Call of the Wild” and “White Fang,” London’s plainspoken narratives of dogs as heroic protagonists. ![]() Then the connection faded, leaving me a residual appreciation of London’s brawny man-vs.-nature confrontations.īut I had never taken the 20 minutes to read “To Build a Fire,” London’s matter-of-fact short story saga of how quickly and quietly the implacable Arctic winter can reduce us humans to frost-frozen corpses. ![]()
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