After White Fang and Kiche have gone to live with the Indians, White Fang hears a “call” coming from the wilderness that he and his mother have left behind. This call is an allusion to White Fang’s companion novel, The Call of the Wild, which was published three years prior.
In Part 3, Chapter 2, White Fang hears this call and attempts to convince his mother to return with him to the Wild. His mother, however, is drawn back to the Indian camp by the call of domestic life sounding deep within her, and doesn’t budge:
There was something calling to him out there in the open. His mother heard it too. But she heard also that other and louder call, the call of fire and of man—the call which has been given alone of all animals to the wolf to answer, to the wolf and the wild-dog, who are brothers.
In The Call of the Wild, the plot of White Fang is inverted: rather than following a wild wolf that becomes domesticated, it tells the story of a St. Bernard named Buck who is kidnapped from California to the Yukon wilderness where he is sold to work as a sled dog during the Klondike Gold Rush. While previously he had lived a life of comfort and ease on the Santa Clara estate of the wealthy Judge Miller, once he is brought north, he must learn to fight for his survival, eventually joining a pack of wild wolves and becoming their leader.
Nearly the same thing happens in White Fang, but in reverse. Born in the wild, White Fang is the puppy of a pack leader named Kiche. Like Buck, White Fang is a particularly strong specimen of his kind, surviving a famine that kills all of his siblings. He is then adopted by various masters, working as a sled dog and a fighting dog before being rescued by his final, wealthy master, Weedon Scott, who brings White Fang home to the comfortable and peaceful California estate of his father—also a judge—where White Fang lives out the rest of his days in luxury and repose.
The “call” in both White Fang and The Call of the Wild is represented as something ancient and deep-rooted in the minds of their protagonists. While Buck experiences the call as visions of a caveman-master who he hunts and scavenges with in the forest, White Fang’s takes the form of deep roots that connect him to his wild heritage, as well as a dim ancestral memory that humans are “gods” in their power over nature and the minds of dogs, thus worthy of obedience. Both calls allude to a primordial memory of the ancient relationship between humans and their dogs. In both novels, this speaks to the complicatedly intertwined influences of nature and civilization on domestic dogs. This can be extended to human nature as well: within all people, there is a complicated interplay of nature, connecting people to an instinctual past, and civilization, separating humans from animals. Both White Fang and The Call of the Wild invite the reader to consider this relationship within humans as well as dogs.
