The Law of Life

Over the course of his career, Jack London worked within genres ranging from journalism to science fiction. Today, however, he is likely best known for adventure stories like The Call of the Wild and White Fang, as well as other pieces set in the far north, including his short story “To Build a Fire.” “The Law of Life” is both a part of this tradition and distinct from it; like other stories in The Children of Frost, it’s unusual not so much in that it takes the Arctic or subarctic for its setting, but rather in that it features a protagonist indigenous to the region. Of course, the extent to which London depicts Koskoosh and his tribe accurately is debatable. The cultural practice on which the story is premised—the voluntary suicide of an aging tribe member—is one associated with the Inuit, but the region in which the story is set was historically inhabited by subarctic tribes like the Gwich’in and Hän. Perhaps more importantly, there is considerable disagreement as to whether the Inuit or other Arctic peoples widely practiced this kind of abandonment or self-sacrifice; at the very least, it does not seem to have been mandated in the way that London describes.