Free to read
White Fang
Jack London
Born in the northern wilderness, a wolf-dog learns the laws of hunger, violence and human ownership. White Fang's journey asks whether a life shaped by cruelty can still make room for trust.
- Language
- English
- Genre
- Adventure / Nature
- Length
- 25 chapters · About 6 hours
- First published
- 1906
- Availability
- Free
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Is this book for you?
For readers who enjoyed The Call of the Wild. Vivid animal perspective and strong narrative momentum; includes harsh treatment of animals and violent encounters.
Read it in English. This edition is free to add to your library.
Text source: Project Gutenberg. Source license and territorial terms.
THE OPENING PAGES
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Dark spruce forest frowned on either side the frozen waterway. The trees had been stripped by a recent wind of their white covering of frost, and they seemed to lean towards each other, black and ominous, in the fading light. A vast silence reigned over the land. The land itself was a desolation, lifeless, without movement, so lone and cold that the spirit of it was not even that of sadness. There was a hint in it of laughter, but of a laughter more terrible than any sadness—a laughter that was mirthless as the smile of the sphinx, a laughter cold as the frost and partaking of the grimness of infallibility. It was the masterful and incommunicable wisdom of eternity laughing at the futility of life and the effort of life. It was the Wild, the savage, frozen-hearted Northland Wild.
But there was life, abroad in the land and defiant. Down the frozen waterway toiled a string of wolfish dogs. Their bristly fur was rimed with frost. Their breath froze in the air as it left their mouths, spouting forth in spumes of vapour that settled upon the hair of their bodies and formed into crystals of frost. Leather harness was on the dogs, and leather traces attached them to a sled which dragged…Start reading this book ↗