What happens in Chapter 7 of The Call of the Wild?
In the novel's final chapter, Buck's journey from a domesticated dog to a wild creature comes to a powerful conclusion. Thornton's death, caused by the Yeehats—a Native American tribe Buck encounters when he returns to camp—breaks the last connection he has to human civilization. After being away on a hunt, Buck returns to a destroyed camp and finds Thornton's body in the water. Overcome with grief but also feeling a sense of freedom, he attacks the Yeehats with fierce determination, taking down several before they flee in fear. With no humans left to love or serve, Buck responds to the howling of the wolf pack that has echoed in his mind throughout the story. He joins the wolves, gains their respect, and is last seen leading them through the wild. The Yeehats begin to speak of a Ghost Dog—a mythical wolf larger than any real creature—that haunts the valley and preys on men. Each year, Buck returns alone to the spot where Thornton died, howling mournfully before vanishing back into the wild. The chapter concludes with Buck fully at home in the primal world, running at the front of the pack beneath the northern lights, finally and completely embracing the call of the wild.
Analysis
London wraps up with a chapter that serves both as an elegy and a celebration, skillfully navigating these tones without veering into sentimentality. Thornton's death is portrayed with an intentional quickness—London chooses not to dramatize it directly, allowing Buck's return to a devastated camp to convey the emotional weight. This restraint deepens the sense of grief rather than lessening it; the lack of a witnessed death echoes Buck's own experience of loss as a void.
The Yeehat attack scene marks a shift in tone: London transitions from mourning to something resembling myth. Buck's violence is described in almost ecstatic terms, and the rhythm of the prose quickens, mirroring the predatory force he represents. Here, the novel's central conflict—civilization versus instinct—resolves not through compromise but through complete rupture.
The Ghost Dog legend is one of London's most intentional narrative choices. By weaving Buck's story into Indigenous oral tradition, he transforms the tale from an adventure into a fable, granting Buck a form of immortality that goes beyond the individual. The motif of Buck's annual return to the valley where Thornton died complicates any simplistic interpretation of liberation; grief and freedom exist side by side, refusing to negate each other.
London's final image—Buck running beneath the northern lights, "his great throat a-bellow as he sings a song of the younger world"—revisits the novel's ongoing theme of primordialism. The "younger world" frames Buck's journey not as a return to the past but as a reclamation of something ancient and genuine, offering a counter-narrative to the Darwinian harshness that the novel has also candidly portrayed.
Key quotes from Chapter 7
“He was sounding the deeps of his nature, and of the parts of his nature that were deeper than he, going back into the womb of Time.”
London uses this line as Buck fully joins the wolf pack, framing his surrender to instinct as a return to evolutionary origins rather than a simple loss of self.
“When the long winter nights come on and the wolves follow their meat into the lower valleys, he may be seen running at the head of the pack through the pale moonlight or glimmering borealis, leaping gigantic above his fellows, his great throat a-bellow as he sings a song of the younger world.”
The novel's closing image, rendered in present tense to suggest Buck's story has become myth, enduring beyond the narrative's own timeline.
“He had killed man, the noblest game of all, and he had killed in the face of the law of club and fang.”
After routing the Yeehats, London frames Buck's violence not as savagery but as a sovereign act, inverting the civilized hierarchies that governed the novel's opening chapters.
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Create an accountSign inVocabulary in Chapter 7
- sounding
- The act of a call being heard or resonating outward; here it suggests the wild's deep, echoing summons finally reaching and claiming the protagonist fully.
- aurora borealis
- The northern lights — shimmering, colorful curtains of light visible in the night sky at high latitudes, used here to evoke the wild, otherworldly beauty of the Yukon.
- marauder
- One who roams and raids, attacking and plundering; used to describe wolves or rival dogs that move through the wilderness preying on whatever they can find.