To Build A Fire

The scariest story I’ve ever read was written over a hundred years ago by Jack London. It’s called “To Build a Fire.” This story has very few hallmarks of your typical horror writing. There’s only one

human character and he is, generally, very sane. There are no spirits of the dead, no nightmares or hauntings, no guilt that ticks away like a time bomb. And yet, while reading “To Build a Fire,”

I feel paralyzed in a way I haven’t felt with any other written work. It is all of 16 pages long. It is about a man freezing to death.

He doesn’t start freezing though. He starts confident and decently prepared, hiking alone through the Yukon back to a logging camp. The narration even describes him as “quick and ready in the things of life.” But, as becomes immediately apparent, it only flatters him to highlight his naivete. Should he be traveling with only a dog as a companion? No he should not. Could he have worn more protective gear? Sure. But his real arrogance, the narration says, is that “he was not

able to imagine.“Fifty degrees below zero meant 80 degrees of frost. Such facts told him that it was cold and uncomfortable, and that was all. It did not lead him to consider his weaknesses

as a creature affected by temperature. Nor did he think about man’s general weakness, able to live only within narrow limits of heat and cold.” Most of us, in our day-to-day lives, live within this narrow spectrum of heat and cold, and do so relatively thoughtlessly. Although we may not enjoy being cold, although we may build our houses and societies to avoid it, true frigophobia or cryophobia, fear of the cold, isn’t a common one.

Maybe it’s because the cold feels predictable, kept in check by a calendar. Maybe it’s because we can always bundle up, just “keep putting on layers!”. Maybe it’s because, unlike spiders, or the

dark, or an unexpected noise at night, few of us have really experienced the cold. Few of us have seen how ruthlessly it will break body and mind and spirit. The cold magnifies our flaws, reveals our every imperfection. It does not forgive mistakes. In “To Build a Fire,” the air is colder than 50 degrees below zero, colder than 60 below, colder than 70. The man’s mouth is frozen closed, something he expected. The tobacco juice from the chew in his cheek forms a long yellow icicle from his lips. He feels his nose begin to freeze, although this doesn’t bother him too much. Many short stories, particularly horror ones, are made by their twist endings. It’s not until the twist, the last paragraph or even last sentence, that we truly understand what’s going on. That’s not the case in “To Build a Fire.” We know, almost as soon as it starts, that this man is going to die. The paralyzing

magnetism of the story comes from finding out where, exactly, it becomes inevitable. Probably, the answer is “before the day even started.” There was no way this man was ever going to survive a hike across the Yukon in 100 degrees of frost. But the arc of the story isn’t a simple, linear freeze,

it’s a horrible series of dominos that fall, one after the other. The first domino, probably, is the man plunging his leg into an icy pool just below a frozen riverbed. He had been carefully walking along this creek, he had looked for signs of hidden water, it didn’t matter. But a frozen leg

is only a death sentence if one can’t build a fire, and the man can. He sits down with

his frozen leg and patiently builds it, the way you need to build a fire, growing slowly from scraps of bark and dry grass to full size sticks.

Feeling begins to return to the man’s fingers and toes.The way London describes the feeling leaving your extremities in the cold is poetic, butnot inaccurate. He says that the blood of the man’s body shrank back from the cold, withdrew from his digits, because the blood was alive. The blood was trying to get away from the freeze. In reality, your hands will lose their warmth, lose their hot blood, within seconds. In these situations of extreme cold,the temperature of your hands will drop more than 30 degrees, from your body’s typical 98.6 to closer to 60. It will continue to fall, your blood fleeing the cold, the longer you leave yourself exposed. In “To Build a Fire,” the second domino falls just as the man starts to warm his hands and feet. His fire, his savior, becomes his downfall. The heat from the flames rises into the branches of the tree above him. The tree warms just enough that snow slips off its branches, falling to the forest floor. It falls directly on the fragile collection of kindling, smothering the flames instantly. The fire, his lifeline, is out. This is the first time in the story where the man realizes how dire a situation he’s in.

London writes that the fire being snuffed was “like hearing his own judgement of death.” But he continues to fight. He can build another fire, this time not under a tree. He gathers more dry grass and sticks, although he has trouble closing his fingers around them. He has more bark to use for kindling in his pocket, although he can no longer feel it. The dominos are falling faster now. He tries to hold the box of matches, but his deadened fingers drop it into the snow. He tries again and again to pick it up, but he can’t. In a last ditch effort he spills everything left in the box, and, against all odds, manages to strike them all at once. 70 matches blaze to life in his hands. He refuses to let them go, even when he can faintly feel them burning the flesh on his hands. In his desperation, he succeeds, he manages to light another fire- for almost 30 seconds, until he attempts to read just the pile and his hands, shaking uncontrollably, scatter the burning twigs across the snow. It’s all over by this point, and yet it keeps going. The man thinks that if he could kill the dog, his only companion, he could warm his hands in its body and build another fire, but he doesn’t have the strength. He somehow finds the energy to run, and he does, blindly, what feels like miles but was likely less than a hundred feet. He feels strangely warm, and pictures himself among the men that may one day find his body. He falls asleep.

In the heart of nature's dominion, the man's vulnerability unfolds like a tragic tapestry against the harsh canvas of the Yukon. The frigid air, indifferent to human resolve, seeps into his every pore, laying bare the limits of human endurance. His confidence, once a shield, shatters like brittle ice as nature's relentless elements expose his fragility. The biting cold becomes an unyielding adversary, rendering his efforts futile. In the desolate landscape, humanity's perceived mastery crumbles beneath the weight of nature's raw power. The man's struggles echo the universal truth that, in the grandeur of nature's theater, human beings are mere players, humbled by forces beyond their control.