- In Chapter 1, we met another alpha dog named Spitz. Know what happens when two alpha dogs are thrown together? Yeah, exactly.
- Spitz, who's sort of running the show among the dogs, laughs when another dog, Curly, is violently (and explicitly) attacked by a mass of huskies.
- Buck musters up some resolve.
- Meanwhile, Buck's learning to be part of a sled-pulling team of dogs traveling vast distances.
- We meet the rest of the cast, like Billee (nice and friendly), Joe (borderline evil), and Sol-leks (keeps to himself). Sol-leks also has a scar across one eye that makes him partially blind.
- Life starts to not be so great. The weather's freezing and Buck's getting minimal amounts of food.
- So he adapts—his body gets leaner and stronger and we see this idea of "law of club and fang." Basically that means that things are really primitive; brute force dictates superiority.
- Something's stirring in Buck, and since he isn’t eating enough, it’s not dinner. It’s his primitive instincts.