Chilling Tale

This morning I shoveled another six inches from my driveway (another two fell before I left for work). I think the total since Christmas hangs around thirty inches or so. As I worked under the giant fir tree hanging over my driveway, one of the lower branches decided it was too exhausted and dumped its burden down the back of my neck, the powdery cold reaching all the way down to my socks, extinguishing any exuberance I had when starting my shoveling ordeal. In that vein, I decided that the story for today would be Jack London's classic "To Build a Fire." I first encountered this tale in Ms. Ortiz's 7th grade English class--it and the poem "The Cremation of Sam McGee" by Robert Service served as a precursor to London's novel Call of the Wild. More recently, my son read the story in his 8th grade English class, and was excited to talk about it with me. I read it several times in school and a few more on my own. If you haven't read it, you should. If you have, you will probably never forget it, even if you slept more than read in your English classes.

Illustration from story To Build a Fire. First published in The Century Magazine, v.76, August, 1908

P.S. There's a movie for this story, too.