Tracking Song and The Call of the Wild

Roy C. Lackey · 14 Jun 2007, 18:12 · from 2007-June.txt.gz

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From: rclackey at stic.net (Roy C. Lackey)
Date: Thu, 14 Jun 2007 13:12:49 -0500
Subject: (urth) Tracking Song and The Call of the Wild
Message-ID: <000c01c7aeaf$a0de9500$5acb5a42 at rclackey.stic.net>

Some scattered, even contradictory thoughts.

Daniel D Jones wrote:
>I've never read either CotW or WF.  London has long been on my list of
authors
>to Get Around To Someday.  This thread inspired me order a collected works
>which includes both stories.  I plan to read both of them, then re-read
>_Tracking Song_.  I'll post any observations I have when I'm done.

Good. I relented and read CotW, not a book I could honestly recommend to
anyone much past puberty. But there can be no doubt it influenced TS. Still,
as I said before, it doesn't come close to explaining Wolfe's story. If I
may make a suggestion, I think it might be a good idea to shrug off the
whole crime-and-punishment, Cain-and-Abel idea when you read TS again. It
has colored my view of the story for so long that it's hard to shake, and
I'm not sure that it's really valid. After all, such moral/ethical
considerations have nothing to do with a dog like London's Buck.

That leads back to the unspecified prelude to TS; how Cutthroat came to be
separated from the Great Sleigh and the presumed link to his amnesia. There
is another point of correspondence Matthew G. didn't mention, Buck's
"dreams". He had impossible dreams (impossible unless you grant some sort of
collective, ancestral, Jungian archetype) of lying near a fire where some
caveman-type fretted in the night. This happened to Buck late in the story,
when he was very near to being completely feral. As Buck regressed from
domesticated dog to wild animal, his instincts came to the fore and he all
but forgot his tranquil California past.

Something similar happened with Cutthroat's memory: "I have no memory. But
there is something behind the no-memory. I know words for many things I
cannot remember ever having seen. I think of a certain thing, and begin to
look for it, and then I realize that I have never possessed such a thing --
that the shelves and cabinets and drawers I find in my mind do not exist. I
think of other people around me; but they are not there." He spoke this to
the Min. Cutthroat forgot his past with the Sleigh people and his canine
instincts took over to insure his survival, but his "ancestral" *human*
memories were still there, just below the surface. They arrested his slide
toward the animal part of himself; he started acting more like a man and
less like a wild dog.

His pursuit of kidnapped Cim violated the first law of survival as expressed
in both CotW and TS. Roughly stated, it says that to survive *at all costs*
is the individual's first duty. Niceties such as of who or what to eat are a
distant second, along with tribal dos and don'ts.

There's another point of correspondence between CotW and TS. Buck and the
other dogs dug holes in the snow to keep warm at night. Cutthroat tried that
one night and almost froze to death.

This leads to another question: Since Cutthroat is clearly not native to the
planet and came to be there by way of the beings on the Sleigh, is he the
same type of being as they or is he not? If he is not -- if he is a dogman,
then the same sort of genetic tinkering has been going on elsewhere that
produced the local beastmen. (I had the distinct impression in the Urth
Cycle that the Increate frowned on Man 'improving' on Creation.) Be that as
it may, if Cutthroat is a type of being subservient to Man and on a lower
moral plane, and if the beings operating the Great Sleigh are indeed men (as
God made them in _Genesis_), then where do they get off punishing a dog for
acting like a dog and not like a man, particularly if they have been
*treating* him like a dog? That is, *if* he was being punished.

This reading does not explain why the Min and machines recognized Cutthroat
as a true man. And it makes the ending farcical. If Cutthroat is a dogman
and the winged man is any sort of angelic being, then why is the angel
there? To keep Cutthroat from returning to the Sleigh? That's swatting a fly
with a sledgehammer and completely unnecessary; he was clearly dying and the
Sleigh people had already kicked him out. To carry him to Hell? That seems
excessive. To carry him off to Heaven because he learned his lesson and
became such a good dogman?

Each of the tribes of "people" Cutthroat encountered started out as some
species of animal, but each type apparently looked far closer to human than
animal, so much so that Cim was mistaken as true human until she was seen
without her "tunic". We don't know exactly which physical animal traits each
species retained, but in the warmth of the cave Cutthroat bared himself to
the waist, which act did not betray him as being other than true man and
which act he regarded as "extremely important". So his animal parts must
have been below the waist. For whatever that's worth.

I said before that I didn't think the winged man was just another type of
beastman, but maybe I was wrong. He might be a large eater of carrion, and
the joke is on Cutthroat.

-Roy

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