Thus, the novel opens with two men, Henry and Bill, struggling against the "Wild, the savage, frozen-hearted Northland Wild." The scene is made even more eerie by the nature of their journey — that is, they are trying to return to civilization, Fort McGurry, with the dead body of Lord Alfred, a man whom we know little about, except that his family is considerably wealthy. As the men struggle against the elements, the eerie, ghostly presence of Lord Alfred in his coffin becomes more dominant. The two men are also in serious trouble because they are being constantly pursued by a large pack of gaunt, starving wolves. The wolves are so desperate for food that they eventually venture within a few yards of the camp site. Moreover, the men are at yet another disadvantage because they have only three cartridges left for their gun, and they are thus unable to shoot at random at the wolves. Therefore, every night, the two men have to build a roaring fire, or else they will be immediately devoured by the starving, desperate wolves.
About the man in the "oblong box" — Lord Alfred — London tells us little, except that Lord Alfred was a man whom "the Wild had conquered and beaten down until he would never move nor struggle again." We are told that the reason for this is that it "is not the way of the Wild to like movement."
Each night as the two men build the campfire to keep the wolves away, they can gradually sense the wolves growing bolder and bolder as their starvation increases. Then, one night, Bill goes out with six salmon to feed the six dogs, and he comes back totally perplexed because there were seven dogs instead of six to be fed. The next morning, however, there are only five dogs waiting to be fed — two dogs have seemingly disappeared. Soon they discover, at a distance, a she-wolf that was brazen enough to lure one of the male dogs away from the camp. Then, after the dog was lured away from the protective camp site, the wolf pack attacked it and totally devoured it — all because of their intense hunger. During the mysterious disappearance of the dogs, the presence of the coffin begins to prey on the two men's active imaginations. The presence of the coffin and the desolation and the extremely harsh weather cause the men to question their own sanity — for example, if the seventh animal the night before had been a wolf, it seems only logical that the dogs would have "pitched into it." But they didn't; therefore, the seventh "dog" has to be familiar with the ways of civilized man.
