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Jack London’s short story “To Build a Fire,” tells of a man and his wolf dog struggling to survive in the frozen Yukon. Written in 1908, just after the Klondike Gold Rush, the tale exemplifies naturalism as a literary movement. Naturalism presents both the social and natural environments as indifferent and harsh to their inhabitants; humans have no free will, and keen instinct rather than civilized intellect is necessary for survival.
Told in the third-person point of view, the story opens with a nameless man traveling with a wolf-dog in the icy, snowy tundra of Alaska. It is morning and he plans to meet his friends by six o'clock at an old claim at Henderson Creek over ten miles away. The man turns off from the main trail to explore the possibility of logging in the coming spring. It grows colder than fifty degrees below zero and he realizes his unprotected cheekbones will freeze.
As the man meanders along a creek trail, he is mindful of the dangerous, concealed springs. He pushes the reluctant dog forward to investigate. The Husky's feet get wet, and it instinctively licks and bites at the ice that forms between its toes. The man helps the animal, briefly removing his mitten in the numbing cold.
Around noon, when the man’s frozen beard and numb fingers prevent him from eating lunch, he builds a fire. He remembers an old timer from Sulphur Creek who had warned him about the dangers of the Klondike weather. He thaws his face and eats his bacon and biscuits, unconcerned about the extreme cold as the dog warms himself.
The man continues up a fork in the creek. The dog follows, although its instinct was to remain by the fire. The man falls through the snow, getting wet up to his shins. He curses his luck; starting a fire and drying his foot-gear will delay him at least an hour. His feet and fingers are numb, but he manages to start the fire. He again remembers the old-timer’s warning not to travel in temperatures colder than fifty degrees below zero.
The man tries to untie his icy moccasins, but before he can cut the frozen strings on them, clumps of snow from the spruce tree above fall down and snuff out the fire.
Frightened now, the man tries to make another fire, aware that he will lose a few toes from frostbite. His fingers are so numb that he must bite a match and light it on his leg; it goes out when he coughs from the smoke. Finally, he grabs all seventy matches and lights them simultaneously, setting fire to his hands and then a piece of bark which drops in the snow. With his hands frostbitten and burned, he makes a clumsy attempt to stoke the small fire but it eventually goes out again.
The man decides to kill the dog and put his hands inside its warm body to restore his circulation. The man calls to the suspicious Husky who tentatively draws closer. He then grabs it in his arms but is unable to pull out his knife or even throttle the struggling animal, so he lets it go.
Panicking in the face of freezing to death, the man runs along the creek trail, trying to restore circulation with the dog keeping pace at his heels. Exhausted and overwhelmed by the cold, he runs and falls several times in a panic as the dog helplessly watches his foolishness as twilight closes in.
Finally, the man decides to meet death with dignity, by sitting down and falling into a deep sleep. As he dies, he imagines his friends finding his body the next day.
Patiently waiting nearby, the dog does not understand why the man is sitting in the snow without making a fire. As the night falls, it detects death in the man's scent. It whines, then runs away instinctively in the direction of the camp where there are food and fire-providers.