God of his Fathers & Other Stories

God of his Fathers & Other Stories Synopsis

Tales from Northland.THE GOD OF HIS FATHERS (excerpt)On every hand stretched the forest primeval,-thehome of noisy comedy and silent tragedy. Here the struggle forsurvival continued to wage with all its ancient brutality. Briton andRussian were still to overlap in the Land of the Rainbow's End-andthis was the very heart of it-nor had Yankee gold yet purchased itsvast domain. The wolf-pack still clung to the flank of thecariboo-herd, singling out the weak and the big with calf, andpulling them down as remorselessly as were it a thousand, thousandgenerations into the past. The sparse aborigines still acknowledgedthe rule of their chiefs and medicine men, drove out bad spirits,burned their witches, fought their neighbors, and ate their enemieswith a relish which spoke well of their bellies. But it was at themoment when the stone age was drawing to a close. Already, overunknown trails and chartless wildernesses, were the harbingers of thesteel arriving,-fair-faced, blue-eyed, indomitable men,incarnations of the unrest of their race. By accident or design,single-handed and in twos and threes, they came from no one knewwhither, and fought, or died, or passed on, no one knew whence. Thepriests raged against them, the chiefs called forth their fightingmen, and stone clashed with steel; but to little purpose. Like waterseeping from some mighty reservoir, they trickled through the darkforests and mountain passes, threading the highways in bark canoes,or with their moccasined feet breaking trail for the wolf-dogs. Theycame of a great breed, and their mothers were many; but the fur-claddenizens of the Northland had this yet to learn. So many an unsungwanderer fought his last and died under the cold fire of the aurora,as did his brothers in burning sands and reeking jungles, and as theyshall continue to do till in the fulness of time the destiny of theirrace be achieved.It was near twelve. Along the northern horizon arosy glow, fading to the west and deepening to the east, marked theunseen dip of the midnight sun. The gloaming and the dawn were socommingled that there was no night,-simply a wedding of day withday, a scarcely perceptible blending of two circles of the sun. Akildee timidly chirped good-night; the full, rich throat of a robinproclaimed good-morrow. From an island on the breast of the Yukon acolony of wild fowl voiced its interminable wrongs, while a loonlaughed mockingly back across a still stretch of river...About Jack London:Jack London (1876-1916), was an American author and a pioneer in the then-burgeoning world of commercial magazine fiction. He was one of the first Americans to make a lucrative career exclusively from writing. London was self-educated. He taught himself in the public library, mainly just by reading books. In 1898, he began struggling seriously to break into print, a struggle memorably described in his novel, Martin Eden (1909). Jack London was fortunate in the timing of his writing career. He started just as new printing technologies enabled lower-cost production of magazines. This resulted in a boom in popular magazines aimed at a wide public, and a strong market for short fiction. In 1900, he made $2,500 in writing, the equivalent of about $75,000 today. His career was well under way. Among his famous works are: Children of the Frost (1902), The Call of the Wild (1903), The Sea Wolf (1904), The Game (1905), White Fang (1906), The Road (1907), Before Adam (1907), Adventure (1911), and The Scarlet Plague (1912).