Jack London’s “To Build a Fire” (1908) must rate as one of the bleakest short stories ever written, a kind of Winterreise gone wrong that wears its air of resolute determinism like a Red Sox sweatshirt. A tenderfoot, accompanied by a wolfish dog, is making his way along the Yukon Trail. It is 75 degrees below — too cold to be out, so cold that spittle freezes in the air before it reaches the ground — but the newcomer marches on regardless. And then, all too foreseeably, disaster strikes: Our man fails to notice the sinister, candy-textured surface of the ground beneath him, and, without warning, his feet plunge through the ice into an underground stream.
There follows a dreadful race against time. The tenderfoot, watched all the while by the puzzled dog, knows that only heat will save his chilled extremities. Alas, being unversed in London’s ways of the wild, he builds…
