Tracking Song and The Call of the Wild

Roy C. Lackey · 10 Jun 2007, 06:37 · from 2007-June.txt.gz

This is the message as the crawl holds it, before anything here touched it. What the conversation shows has been through ingest: transfer encodings decoded, attachments dropped, quote markers repaired, and the archiver’s ? resolved into quotation marks and dashes. Those repairs are judgements and some of them are wrong, which is what this page is for. Email addresses are obscured here as they are everywhere else on the site, so it is before our repairs rather than byte for byte.

From: rclackey at stic.net (Roy C. Lackey)
Date: Sun, 10 Jun 2007 01:37:37 -0500
Subject: (urth) Tracking Song and The Call of the Wild
Message-ID: <000c01c7ab29$e2d70660$c4c95a42 at rclackey.stic.net>

Matthew Groves wrote:
>Yes, Cutthroat has knowledge and devices from the Great Sleigh. He is a
>*Sleigh dog*. (Which may be the source of his "birthmark.")  Whatever may
be
>its biblical significance, "Tracking Song" is above all an homage to Jack
>London's _The Call of the Wild_.  Does that illuminate Cutthroat's crime?

Disclaimer: I have not read _The Call of the Wild_, and I'm not going to
just to analyze this story.

But I've read a synopsis, and that was more than enough to convince me that
whomever first made the connection between it and TS is absolutely right.
I'm a bit surprised that so much ink was expended on this story here in the
past without an early consensus being reached on at least that much. I even
learned the significance of the number fourteen -- it was the original
number of dogs in a sled team of which only five survived.

Of course, knowing that TS was inspired by _The Call of the Wild_ doesn't
explain Wolfe's spin on it -- and it's been spun all to hell. And there
ain't no one gonna convince me that Cutthroat was ever pulling the Great
Sleigh. <g> My ignorance of the original inspiration prevents me from
carrying this exposition any further, but I look forward to someone who has
read it to expound on TS mightily.

-Roy

An unofficial mirror of a public mailing list · about & removal requests · download the archive · before the list · original archive at urth.net