Jack London owes a lot of his popularity to the brutally honest telling of stories involving an unforgiving mother nature and the animals that thrived in it. If The Call of the Wild was about an Alaskan sledge dog, then White Fang can be described as a biography of an Alaskan wolf.
The story begins with a wolf pack, led by a canny she-wolf, hunting down a pair of men transporting a dead body to the nearest town. After the culmination of the chase, the female wolf finds a mate, and gives birth to cubs. Only one survives the harsh winter, a gray-white cub that falls into the hands of a cruel Indian. He learns that man is his master , to be feared and respected. His master, Gray Beaver, then sells him to a man who uses him to fight other dogs for a wager. He gradually turns into a cunning killer, winning all his fights, till he encounters a mastiff which comes out on top in their fight.
A white man, Weedon Smith, sees White Fang choking to death in the jaws of the bull mastiff and rescues him. Once he realizes how intelligent White Fang is, he sets out to win him over with love and eventually takes him along when he returns home to California. All the members of his family and their pets are flabbergasted when faced with a full grown wild wolf. How White Fang changes their preconceptions of him as a killer and wins them over to his side forms the rest of the story.
London uses a narrative style for most of the book, with the reader seeing things from White Fang’s point of view. It makes for refreshing reading. If you feel squeamish about parts of the book, remember that this was how things were nearly a hundred years ago in the wild Alaskan frontier. This is an un-put-downable book, if you love nature stories.