to compare this idea of wolves and packs in your teachers and our friends guattari et deleuze
to the novel by Jack London:
White fang
Here is the first page:
"
PART I
CHAPTER I--THE TRAIL OF THE MEAT
PART I
CHAPTER I--THE TRAIL OF THE MEAT
Dark spruce forest frowned on either side the frozen waterway. The trees
had been stripped by a recent wind of their white covering of frost, and
they seemed to lean towards each other, black and ominous, in the fading
light. A vast silence reigned over the land. The land itself was a
desolation, lifeless, without movement, so lone and cold that the spirit
of it was not even that of sadness. There was a hint in it of laughter,
but of a laughter more terrible than any sadness--a laughter that was
mirthless as the smile of the sphinx, a laughter cold as the frost and
partaking of the grimness of infallibility. It was the masterful and
incommunicable wisdom of eternity laughing at the futility of life and
the effort of life. It was the Wild, the savage, frozen-hearted
Northland Wild.
But there _was_ life, abroad in the land and defiant. Down the frozen
waterway toiled a string of wolfish dogs. Their bristly fur was rimed
with frost. Their breath froze in the air as it left their mouths,
spouting forth in spumes of vapour that settled upon the hair of their
bodies and formed into crystals of frost. Leather harness was on the
dogs, and leather traces attached them to a sled which dragged along
behind. The sled was without runners. It was made of stout birch-bark,
and its full surface rested on the snow. The front end of the sled was
turned up, like a scroll, in order to force down and under the bore of
soft snow that surged like a wave before it. On the sled, securely
lashed, was a long and narrow oblong box. There were other things on the
sled--blankets, an axe, and a coffee-pot and frying-pan; but prominent,
occupying most of the space, was the long and narrow oblong box.
In advance of the dogs, on wide snowshoes, toiled a man. At the rear of
the sled toiled a second man. On the sled, in the box, lay a third man
whose toil was over,--a man whom the Wild had conquered and beaten down
until he would never move nor struggle again. It is not the way of the
Wild to like movement. Life is an offence to it, for life is movement;
and the Wild aims always to destroy movement. It freezes the water to
prevent it running to the sea; it drives the sap out of the trees till
they are frozen to their mighty hearts; and most ferociously and terribly
of all does the Wild harry and crush into submission man--man who is the
most restless of life, ever in revolt against the dictum that all
movement must in the end come to the cessation of movement.
But at front and rear, unawed and indomitable, toiled the two men who
were not yet dead. Their bodies were covered with fur and soft-tanned
leather. Eyelashes and cheeks and lips were so coated with the crystals
from their frozen breath that their faces were not discernible. This
gave them the seeming of ghostly masques, undertakers in a spectral world
at the funeral of some ghost. But under it all they were men,
penetrating the land of desolation and mockery and silence, puny
adventurers bent on colossal adventure, pitting themselves against the
might of a world as remote and alien and pulseless as the abysses of
space.
They travelled on without speech, saving their breath for the work of
their bodies. On every side was the silence, pressing upon them with a
tangible presence. It affected their minds as the many atmospheres of
deep water affect the body of the diver. It crushed them with the weight
of unending vastness and unalterable decree. It crushed them into the
remotest recesses of their own minds, pressing out of them, like juices
from the grape, all the false ardours and exaltations and undue
self-values of the human soul, until they perceived themselves finite and
small, specks and motes, moving with weak cunning and little wisdom
amidst the play and inter-play of the great blind elements and forces.
An hour went by, and a second hour. The pale light of the short sunless
day was beginning to fade, when a faint far cry arose on the still air.
It soared upward with a swift rush, till it reached its topmost note,
where it persisted, palpitant and tense, and then slowly died away. It
might have been a lost soul wailing, had it not been invested with a
certain sad fierceness and hungry eagerness. The front man turned his
head until his eyes met the eyes of the man behind. And then, across the
narrow oblong box, each nodded to the other.
A second cry arose, piercing the silence with needle-like shrillness.
Both men located the sound. It was to the rear, somewhere in the snow
expanse they had just traversed. A third and answering cry arose, also
to the rear and to the left of the second cry.
"They're after us, Bill," said the man at the front.
His voice sounded hoarse and unreal, and he had spoken with apparent
effort.
"Meat is scarce," answered his comrade. "I ain't seen a rabbit sign for
days."
Thereafter they spoke no more, though their ears were keen for the
hunting-cries that continued to rise behind them.
At the fall of darkness they swung the dogs into a cluster of spruce
trees on the edge of the waterway and made a camp. The coffin, at the
side of the fire, served for seat and table. The wolf-dogs, clustered on
the far side of the fire, snarled and bickered among themselves, but
evinced no inclination to stray off into the darkness.
