Today's offering is one of my favourite canine-related books, The Call of the Wild.
From The Snow Palace:Severus took one of the novels from the book case. He opened it, as if he knew what he was looking for. '
With the aurora borealis flaming coldly overhead,' Severus read aloud, 'or the stars leaping in the frost dance, and the land numb and frozen under its pall of snow, this song of the huskies might have been the defiance of life, only it was pitched in minor key, with long-drawn wailings and half-sobs, and was more the pleading of life, the articulate travail of existence.
It was an old song, old as the breed itself - one of the first songs of the younger world in a day when songs were sad. It was invested with the woe of unnumbered generations, this plaint by which Buck was so strangely stirred. When he moaned and sobbed, it was with the pain of living that was of old the pain of his wild fathers, and the fear and mystery of the cold and dark that was to them fear and mystery. And that he should be stirred by it marked the completeness with which he harked back through the ages of fire and roof to the raw beginnings of life in the howling ages.' Severus put the book down, quietly.
The world stood still for a moment, everything was silent, it was as if the air was electric. Remus could hardly breathe.
'You know it?' Remus asked, almost inaudibly. 'You know it well enough to find that passage so easily?' It was Remus' favourite passage. It echoed the sadness, the pain, and the loneliness he so often felt; it described the longing for completion: the merging of the world and wolf and the peace Remus knew he could never have.
Severus didn't reply. He just sat there; the vast black eyes, dark as the winter's darkest night, intense and shining with a cold light.
Download Jack London's The Call of the Wild here.
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