The Call of the Wild — Vocabulary
Jack London
(Edited)

For the last time in his life he allowed passion to usurp cunning and reason, and it was because of his great love for John Thornton that he lost his head.p.176.5alternate pages12 more

They were all too soft, dying under the toil, the frost, and starvation. Buck was the exception. He alone endured and prospered, matching the husky in strength, savagery, and cunning.p.58.7alternate pages3 more

It is a saying of the country that an Outside dog starves to death on the ration of the huskyp.109.4alternate pages7 more

Deep in the forest a call was sounding, and as often as he heard this call, mysteriously thrilling and luring, he felt compelled to turn his back upon the fire and the beaten earth around it, and to plunge into the forest, and on and on, he knew not where or why; nor did he wonder where or why, the call sounding imperiously, deep in the forest.p.132.1alternate pages5 more

He was mastered by the sheer surging of life, the tidal wave of being, the perfect joy of each separate muscle, joint, and sinew in that it was everything that was not death...p.68.1alternate pages4 more

His cunning was wolf cunning, and wild cunning; his intelligence, shepherd intelligence and St. Bernard intelligence; and all this, plus an experience gained in the fiercest of schools, made him as formidable a creature as any that intelligence roamed the wild.p.166.5alternate pages3 more

But especially he loved to run in the dim twilight of the summer midnights, listening to the subdued and sleepy murmurs of the forest, reading signs and sounds as man may read a book, and seeking for the mysterious something that called—called, waking or sleeping, at all times, for him to come.p.159.9alternate pages4 more

For two days and nights he neither ate nor drank, and during those two days and nights of torment, he accumulated a fund of wrath that boded ill for whoever first fell foul of him.p.12.9alternate pages3 more

All was confusion and action, and every moment life and limb were in peril.p.27.6alternate pages1 more

He did not steal for joy of it, but because of the clamor of his stomach.p.41.7alternate pages1 more

There was imperative need to be constantly alert; for these dogs and men were not town dogs and men.p.27.7alternate pages1 more

That club was a revelation. It was his introduction to the reign of primitive law,p.17.9alternate pages

When the long winter nights come on and the wolves follow their meat into the lower valleys, he may be seen running at the head of the pack through the pale moonlight or glimmering borealis, leaping gigantic above his fellows, his great throat a-bellow as he sings a song of the younger world, which is the song of the pack.p.184.8alternate pages

He had been suddenly jerked from the heart of civilization and flung into the heart of things primordial.p.27.3alternate pages5 more

He saw the silent circle, with gleaming eyes, lolling tongues, and silvery breaths drifting upward, closing in upon him as he had seen similar circles close in upon beaten antagonists in the past.p.73.1alternate pages3 more

And so it went, the inexorable elimination of the superfluous.p.104.8alternate pages1 more

Even so, it was a hard fight, and it aroused the last latent remnants of Buck's ferocity.p.165.2alternate pages1 more

Kill or be killed, eat or be eaten, was the law; and this mandate, down out of the depths of Time, he obeyed.p.131.2alternate pages

Pike, the malingerer, who, in his lifetime of deceit, had often successfully feigned a hurt leg, was now limping in earnest.p.95.4alternate pages4 more

Death, as a cessation of movement, as a passing out and away from the lives of the living, he knew, and he knew John Thornton was dead.p.178.4alternate pages