Love of Life Summary – Jack London

Jack London’s Love of Life, first published in 1905, is a survival story about an exhausted traveler abandoned in the northern wilderness who fights hunger, exhaustion, and a dying wolf to stay alive.

Love of Life Main Characters analysis

• The unnamed traveler — The central character of the story. Exhausted, injured, starving, and abandoned by his companion Bill, he struggles across the wilderness and survives through sheer determination.
• Bill — The traveler’s companion who abandons him after he injures his ankle. The traveler later discovers what happened to Bill.
• The wolf — A starving and dying animal that follows the traveler, hoping that the man will die first so it can feed on him.
• The scientists aboard the Bedford — Members of a scientific expedition who discover the nearly lifeless traveler on the shore and rescue him.

Love of Life Summary

Two exhausted men were walking along a hillside in the north. They were carrying heavy packs and rifles. The man walking behind complained that they did not even have two cartridges left.

The first man said nothing and began crossing a small river without even taking off his boots. The second man followed him but slipped on the stones. He stopped and called to his companion, telling him that he had twisted his ankle. But Bill did not turn around or stop. He simply continued walking slowly away.

The man who had been left behind watched his companion disappear for a long time. Then he awkwardly began hopping after him, trying not to pay attention to the pain in his injured leg. He climbed the hillside and found himself among the marshes. He did not lose his sense of direction and knew that if he kept going, he would eventually reach the Dease River, where he and Bill had made a hidden supply cache. There he could find cartridges, fishing equipment, and a little food.

The man believed that Bill would be waiting for him there and that together they would travel down the river toward the south. He had no choice but to believe this. Otherwise, he could simply lie down and die.

The exhausted and hungry traveler stubbornly made his way toward the river. He stopped to boil water, counted his matches, and rested for short periods. He was hungry and walking was difficult, but it was even harder for him to believe that Bill had abandoned him. He had not eaten for two days. The only food he had found along the way was watery berries that could not satisfy his hunger.

That evening he examined his boots and socks. They were in terrible condition. He tore strips from his blanket and wrapped them around his feet. Finally, he fell asleep. When he woke, everything around him was gray. He saw a deer, grabbed his rifle, and fired. But the rifle had been out of ammunition for a long time, and the deer disappeared.

He had to continue his journey. Even getting to his feet was extremely difficult. He climbed a hill, looked around, and realized that he was lost.

As he gathered his few belongings, he wondered whether he should throw away the little pouch of gold that weighed almost as much as the other half of his load. But he did not throw it away and continued carrying the burden.

He walked without stopping. His feet hurt, but hunger tormented him even more. Twice he came across game, including ptarmigans and deer, but he could not catch any of them. This made him angry.

By evening, he began eating reeds, but they did not satisfy his hunger either. The traveler searched every pool he came across, hoping to find at least a frog or a worm, but there was nothing. Finally, he saw a minnow in one of the pools. At first, he tried to catch it with his hands, but the water became cloudy. Realizing that he had to act differently, he began draining the water from the pool. When almost no water remained, he saw that the fish had escaped through a crack. In despair, he began to sob.

At one point he found something resembling a bulb and quickly ate it. Then the pangs of hunger became so severe that the traveler even forgot where he was going. He simply wandered forward. That evening, for the first time, he did not make a fire or boil water.

He stopped for the night. In the morning, he discovered that it had snowed during the night. He continued walking. He no longer cared where he was going. He had only one desire: food. He ate berries and reeds and found some other sour grass, but it was not enough.

The following night he had neither a fire nor water. The snow turned into rain, and the falling drops constantly woke him. When he finally woke for good, he was suffering less from hunger. Only the pain in his stomach remained. He began thinking about the hidden cache again.

He had to keep going. He wrapped strips of the blanket around his feet and once again thought about whether he should carry the pouch of gold with him, but decided not to abandon it yet.

The rain melted the snow, and the sun came out. He used the position of the sun to determine which direction he should take.

The dull pain in his stomach gradually disappeared, but the traveler became extremely weak. He stopped feeling hungry. At one point, he caught two small minnows and ate them. By evening, he caught three more. He knew that he had to eat in order to stay alive. He saved one minnow for breakfast.

Each day he covered less and less distance. His stomach no longer ached, and his nerves and senses had become dull.

The next day, hunger awakened in him again. He grew weaker and often fell. Once, he fell onto a ptarmigan’s nest. There were four chicks inside, and he ate them alive. He wanted to catch the mother bird as well and began hunting her. During the chase, he noticed some tracks, but he had no time to investigate them. The hunt failed anyway. He fell and remained there until morning.

He had used half of his blanket for foot wrappings and finally threw away the gold. He did not find Bill’s tracks, but that no longer mattered. He wanted only to eat.

Then the traveler began experiencing hallucinations. He repeatedly searched his rifle for the last cartridge and could not find it. An obsessive thought took hold of him that he still had one cartridge left. He checked again: there was no cartridge in the rifle, but the thought remained.

He walked almost automatically. Then suddenly he saw a horse. After rubbing his eyes, he realized that it was not a horse at all but a bear.

The man was too weak to run, so he bravely drew his knife. He was about to attack the bear when another fear overcame him — the fear that the bear would kill him. He stood still. The animal growled at him, and the man growled back. The bear stared in surprise at the strange creature before it and then walked away.

The traveler continued onward. Now he feared not only death from starvation but also a violent death. Wolves were everywhere, but they did not approach him because they seemed to fear something animal-like in him.

That evening, he came across the bones of a deer. He began wondering what would happen if soon nothing more remained of him than what was left of that deer. He did not want to die. He stopped thinking about death and began sucking on the animal’s bones. Then he started gnawing them and finally smashed them with a stone. He ate a little and carried the rest with him.

He walked whenever he could and collapsed to sleep whenever he became exhausted, without distinguishing between night and day.

“He no longer fought as men fight. It was life itself that refused to die within him and drove him forward. He no longer suffered. His nerves had grown numb. Strange visions crowded his mind.”

One morning he saw a river flowing into the sea. There was a ship on the water. He did not know what river it was or what sea it flowed into and thought that he was hallucinating.

He was still lying on the ground when he turned onto his other side and saw a wolf. But it was not a healthy animal. It was just as weak and close to death as the traveler himself.

The wolf was real, and the traveler turned onto his other side again. He thought the river would disappear, but it remained. After thinking for a while, he realized that he had lost his course and had been traveling in the wrong direction all this time. He had not been heading south but east. He had now reached the shore of the sea, where the Copper River flowed into it. The ship was a whaling vessel.

He examined his remaining belongings. There was very little left: matches and a cooking pot. Everything else had either been used up or lost. He drank some water, gathered all his remaining strength, and began crawling toward the ship.

The sick wolf crawled behind him, hoping that the man would die first. It was hungry and weak, just like the human being it followed.

Only the will to live drove the man forward. In an entire day, he covered only four miles.

During the night, the man constantly heard the wolf coughing. The animal wanted to eat him.

In the morning, he continued toward the ship.

The next day, the man came across a trail. It was the trail of a person who had been moving on all fours. Later, he saw fresh, gnawed human bones. He thought they were probably Bill’s remains, but he felt nothing. The traveler had no emotional reaction.

When he saw a small pouch of gold resembling his own, the traveler laughed at Bill and at the fact that he had refused to abandon his wealth and had died with it. He wanted to take Bill’s pouch and carry it to the ship, but then changed his mind. He thought that if Bill had found his bones and his gold, he would have sucked the marrow from his bones and taken the gold. But he would not do the same. There was still something human left inside him.

He continued onward. He saw a small pool and approached it. Then he was horrified. In the water he saw himself and what he had become. He wanted to catch minnows with his bucket, but abandoned the idea because he was afraid that exhaustion would cause him to fall into the pool and drown. For the same reason, he did not try to travel down the river on logs.

With each passing day, the traveler covered less ground, but the ship gradually came closer. The sick wolf continued dragging itself behind him. On the sixth day, the man was only four miles from the ship, but he understood that he could not crawl that distance.

A powerful love of life seized him. He did not want to become food for that horrible animal.

Once, he woke to find the wolf directly above his ear. But the man was not even frightened.

He thought that he probably would not reach the ship. Yet he did not want to die.

He tried to gather his strength. At times, nausea overwhelmed him, but through sheer willpower he managed to overcome it. He noticed that the wolf had moved closer. For half a day, he lay there fighting the nausea and keeping watch over the wolf.

He woke to the feeling that the wolf was licking his cheek. The animal tried to bite his hand, but the man decided to fight back. He sank his teeth into the wolf’s neck. After some time, the wolf was dead. The man was completely exhausted and fell asleep.

A scientific expedition was aboard the ship Bedford. One day, the expedition members saw a strange creature on the shore, blindly trying to crawl and twist its way across the sand. They went ashore and rescued it.

Three weeks later, the man regained consciousness. He cried as he told them about what he had experienced and delighted in the taste of ordinary food. The scientists noticed that the man was rapidly gaining weight and could not explain why.

It turned out that the man had been stealing crackers in case he became hungry. There were even crackers hidden inside his mattress. All the time, he had been afraid that the food on the ship would run out.

Nevertheless, the man recovered before the Bedford dropped anchor in San Francisco Bay.