It is very dangerous not to
listen to the signs of nature especially when you are out in the wild and you
are the only human being around. From the American writer Jack London, the short story
To
Build a Fire…
Day had broken cold and grey, exceedingly cold
and grey, when the man turned aside from the main Yukon trail and climbed the
high earth-bank, where a dim and little-travelled trail led eastward through
the fat spruce timberland. It was a steep bank, and he paused for breath
at the top, excusing the act to himself by looking at his watch. It was
nine o’clock. There was no sun nor hint of sun, though there was not a
cloud in the sky. It was a clear day, and yet there seemed an intangible dark
over the face of things, a subtle gloom that made the day dark, and that was
due to the absence of sun. This fact did not worry the man. He was
used to the lack of sun. It had been days since he had seen the sun, and
he knew that a few more days must pass before that cheerful orb, due south,
would just peep above the sky-line and dip immediately from view.
The man flung a look back
along the way he had come. The Yukon lay a mile wide and hidden under
three feet of ice. On top of this ice were as many feet of snow. It
was all pure white, rolling in gentle undulations where the ice-jams of the
freeze-up had formed. North and south, as far as his eye could see, it
was unbroken white, save for a dark hair-line that curved and twisted from
around the spruce-covered island to the south, and that curved and twisted away
into the north, where it disappeared behind another spruce-covered
island. This dark hair-line was the trail—the main trail—that led south
five hundred miles to the Chilcoot Pass, Dyea, and salt water; and that led
north seventy miles to Dawson, and
still on to the north a thousand miles to Nulato, and finally to St. Michael on
Bering Sea, a thousand miles and half a thousand more.
Foot race, 1900 |
But all this—the
mysterious, far-reaching hairline trail, the absence of sun from the sky, the
tremendous cold, and the strangeness and weirdness of it all—made no impression
on the man. It was not because he was long used to it. He was a
new-comer in the land, a chechaquo, and this was his first
winter. The trouble with him was that he was without imagination.
He was quick and alert in the things of life, but only in the things, and not
in the significances. Fifty degrees below zero meant eighty odd degrees
of frost. Such fact impressed him as being cold and uncomfortable, and
that was all. It did not lead him to meditate upon his frailty as a
creature of temperature, and upon man’s frailty in general, able only to live
within certain narrow limits of heat and cold; and from there on it did not
lead him to the conjectural field of immortality and man’s place in the
universe. Fifty degrees below zero stood for a bite of frost that hurt
and that must be guarded against by the use of mittens, ear-flaps, warm
moccasins, and thick socks. Fifty degrees below zero was to him just
precisely fifty degrees below zero. That there should be anything more to
it than that was a thought that never entered his head.
As he turned to go on, he
spat speculatively. There was a sharp, explosive crackle that startled
him. He spat again. And again, in the air, before it could fall to
the snow, the spittle crackled.
He knew that at fifty below spittle crackled on the snow, but this spittle had
crackled in the air. Undoubtedly it was colder than fifty below—how much
colder he did not know. But the temperature did not matter. He was
bound for the old claim on the left fork of Henderson Creek, where the boys
were already. They had come over across the divide from the Indian Creek
country, while he had come the roundabout way to take a look at the
possibilities of getting out logs in the spring from the islands in the
Yukon. He would be in to camp by six o’clock; a bit after dark, it was
true, but the boys would be there, a fire would be going, and a hot supper
would be ready. As for lunch, he pressed his hand against the protruding
bundle under his jacket. It was also under his shirt, wrapped up in a
handkerchief and lying against the naked skin. It was the only way to
keep the biscuits from freezing. He smiled agreeably to himself as he thought
of those biscuits, each cut open and sopped in bacon grease, and each enclosing
a generous slice of fried bacon.
He plunged in among the big
spruce trees. The trail was faint. A foot of snow had fallen since
the last sled had passed over, and he was glad he was without a sled,
travelling light. In fact, he carried nothing but the lunch wrapped in
the handkerchief. He was surprised, however, at the cold. It
certainly was cold, he concluded, as he rubbed his numbed nose and cheek-bones
with his mittened hand. He was a warm-whiskered man, but the hair on his
face did not protect the high cheek-bones and the eager nose that thrust itself
aggressively into the frosty air.
At the man’s heels trotted
a dog, a big native husky, the proper wolf-dog, grey-coated and without any
visible or temperamental difference from its brother, the wild wolf. The
animal was depressed by the tremendous cold. It knew that it was no time
for travelling. Its instinct told it a truer tale than was told to the
man by the man’s judgment. In reality, it was not merely colder than
fifty below zero; it was colder than sixty below, than seventy below. It
was seventy-five below zero. Since the freezing-point is thirty-two above
zero, it meant that one hundred and seven degrees of frost obtained. The
dog did not know anything about thermometers. Possibly in its brain there
was no sharp consciousness of a condition of very cold such as was in the man’s
brain. But the brute had its instinct. It experienced a vague but
menacing apprehension that subdued it and made it creep along at the
man’s heels, and that made it question eagerly every singular movement
of the man as if expecting him to go into camp or to seek shelter somewhere and
build a fire. The dog had learned fire, and it wanted fire, or else to hide
under the snow and cuddle its warmth away from the air.
The frozen moisture of its
breathing had settled on its fur in a fine powder of frost, and especially were
its jowls, muzzle, and eyelashes
whitened by its crystalled breath. The man’s red beard and moustache were
likewise frosted, but more solidly, the deposit taking the form of ice and
increasing with every warm, moist breath he exhaled. Also, the man was
chewing tobacco, and the muzzle of ice held his lips so rigidly that he was
unable to clear his chin when he expelled the juice. The result was that
a crystal beard of the colour and solidity of amber was increasing its length
on his chin. If he fell down it would shatter itself, like glass, into fragile
fragments. But he did not mind the appendage. It was the penalty
all tobacco-chewers paid in that country, and he had been out before in two
cold snaps. They had not been
so cold as this, he knew, but by the spirit thermometer at Sixty Mile he knew
they had been registered at fifty below and at fifty-five… (Párrafos del
original To Build a Fire de Jack London)
Vocabulario
Dawson: Dawson
City es una ciudad en Yukón, Canadá. El censo de 2011 arrojó una población de
1.319 personas. Fue fundada por Joseph
Ladue y nombrada en honor del geólogo George Dawson, quien exploró la región en
1887. Dawson City fue el centro de la fiebre del oro de 1896 que la convirtió
en una pujante ciudad de más de 40.000 personas.
Construida
en madera, desolada e insalubre, Dawson sufrió incendios, altos precios y
epidemias. Sin embargo, los buscadores de oro más ricos gastaron escandalosamente
en el juego y la bebida en los “saloons”. Los nativos Han sufrieron las
consecuencias siendo trasladados a reservas para hacer lugar a los migrantes.
En 1898
el 8 por ciento de los que vivían en el territorio era mujeres. Muchas mujeres
llegaron con sus familias pero otras viajaron solas atraídas por el dinero. Se enfatizaba
el uso de largas faldas y corsés. En un grupo se esperaba que las mujeres estuvieran
encargadas de la cocina.
Crackled: hacía ruidos
Jowl: quijada
Snaps: períodos
Vocabulario reemplazado
pall slink unwonted burrow brittle
El cuento
To Build a Fire (Hacer un fuego) es el título de dos historias de Jack London
publicadas en 1902 y 1908. Las dos historias son similares aunque tienen finales
diferentes. La versión de 1908 es un ejemplo del movimiento naturalista que
describe la lucha entre el hombre y la naturaleza. También refleja lo que
London aprendió en el Yukón.
Otros cuentos de Jack London
"Bâtard" (1902),
"The Dream of Debs" (1909), "The Law of Life" (1901), "The
Leopard Man's Story" (1903), "The Mexican" (1911), "Moon-Face"
(1902), "A Piece of Steak" (1909), "The Red One" (1918), "The
South of the Slot" (1909), "A Thousand Deaths (1899)
Artículo relacionado
Hacer un fuego
Artículo relacionado
Hacer un fuego
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