| Sumario: | Californian author Jack London (1876-1916) published The Call of the Wild in 1903 based on his experience in the now Canadian territory of Yukon during the Klondike Gold Rush at the end of the 19th century. While numerous scholars have studied its main characters, such as Buck the dog and his last owner John Thornton, this paper attempts to shed light on "half-breed," or more properly, Métis characters whose historical importance in the "development" of the Canadian Northwest is largely dismissed when the novel is read as an American story of northward expansion. The Métis, whose ancestries typically track back to the encounter of European fur traders contracted by the Hudson Bay Company or North West Company and the Indigenous people, are part of Canada’s history. Neither London nor previous researchers put too much effort into understanding these Métis characters, however. Another focus of this paper is to examine the function of "water," which is seemingly omnipresent in the ethno-culturally hybrid characters’ travels across the water-covered northern land with their mixed-breed sled dog to allow the communication between the wild "Northland" and "the civilization". My examination of the novel through these focal points reveals that Métis and water can be considered as mutable media. The poly-ethnic Métis voyageurs, namely, François the "French-Canadian half-breed" and "the Scotch half-breed" travel between Canadian Dawson City and the major US ports of Skagway and Seattle with a Scotch Shepard/St. Bernard mixed-breed dog hero. The terrain of Alaska and Yukon they sled over is shaped by water in its various forms— sea, rivers, lakes, snow, ice, and rain, for instance—and it almost omnipotently facilitating their autumn to winter travel. Further exploration of mutable water in the natural world points to the fact that water can be found inside the bodies of these traveling animals. Jack London skillfully uses images of flowing liquid to represent vibrant lives of dogs, for instance, by employing the images of the biological mechanism of food digestion and the delivery of nutrients involving body fluids such as digestive juices and blood. In The Call of the Wild, the image of fluids gushing through the web of tracts, canals, and veins of the canine’s body, in particular, parallels to that of the geographical river system with numerous tributaries on which they travel. This parallelism of a river system and an animal body system reminds us of Astrida Neimanis’s remarks on the similarity of our bodies and the earth’s surface: both consisting of 60 to 90 percent water. As water circulates the hydrocommons in changing forms, Métis and mixedbreed characters survive their multiple "worlds" by changing their forms. Through this survival, they become the media of their own genetic codes. Thus, against the racist Jack London’s will, the survival of Métis and a mixed-breed canine in The Call of the Wild realizes their potential.
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