The Call of the Wild.

Buck, a huge, four-year-old half-Saint Bernard and half-Scottish shepherd dog, is living a life of civilized ease in California's Santa Clara Valley in the home of Judge Miller. It seems to be the best of all possible worlds, for Buck is the most prized animal that the Judge owns. Around this time, however, gold is discovered in the great North, and large dogs suddenly become tremendously valuable because these types of dogs are needed to haul the heavy sleds through the deep snow fields. Tragically, for Buck, one of the Judge's servants (an addictive gambler) steals Buck and sells him to a ring of thieves who are making a great deal of money by buying and selling dogs to northern traders. Buck's spirit, however, does not adapt as easily as do some of the other docile big dogs. Buck cannot tolerate being tied up and beaten; he fights against his cruel new master, but all of his efforts to escape are futile. Thus, Buck learns the new concept of "master," even though he learns it reluctantly: a man with a club is a master and must, at all costs be obeyed. After days of travel on both train and boat, Buck discovers that he is in the primitive North, and there he rapidly learns to conform to the laws of the primitive new world. For example, he encounters such problems as how to work as a member of a dog team pulling a sled, how to burrow into a hole in the snow in which to sleep, how to survive perpetual hunger pains, and how to rely on his native intelligence and his animal instincts Buck also soon learns that the dominant primordial bestial instinct is very strong in him, and he learns just as quickly that when he is attacked, he must take the offensive immediately in order to survive; as a result of this type of living adjustment, Buck also learns that he has to live a life of almost continual alertness, as well as in almost continual pain and discomfort. Yet Buck has one advantage: his size makes him fearful to the other dogs. Still, however, all is far from