Short Story: The Law of Life

Overview
Jack London’s “The Law of Life” follows an aged Indigenous man of the Far North, Old Koskoosh, who is left behind by his migrating tribe to die according to custom. The story distills a harsh, impersonal rule that governs all living things: individuals must yield so the group and the species can endure. Through Koskoosh’s memories and sensory impressions as he sits beside a dwindling fire, London builds a meditation on mortality, necessity, and the indifference of nature.

Setting and Characters
The tale unfolds on a frozen, treeless plain amid winter’s glare. A nomadic hunting band readies its sleds and dogs to push on after scarce game. Koskoosh, once a chief, is now nearly blind and too frail to travel. His son has assumed leadership; a young woman briefly tends the old man, piling a little wood beside him, then departs with the others. The environment is both stage and antagonist, cold, hunger, and distance shape every choice.

Plot Summary
After the last jingling trace and sled creak fade, Koskoosh listens to the silence and the small hiss of his fire. He understands why he has been left: the tribe cannot risk delay or wasted strength during famine and travel. As the cold presses in, he drifts through memories that trace the same law at work across a lifetime. He recalls lean seasons when the people boiled their moccasins for broth; the time the tribe abandoned the infirm to preserve the healthy; the passing of his own leadership; the pleasures of youth and the steady thinning of vigor.

One image dominates his recollection: a great moose he once watched driven to exhaustion by wolves. The moose, proud and powerful in its prime, became slow and spent; when it faltered, the pack closed in. That scene, vivid and unembellished, mirrors his condition by the fire. He does not rage at the custom that leaves him; he recognizes it as the same logic guiding the wolves, the weather, the hunt, and the tribe’s migration. Life pushes forward; the individual falls away.

Sounds from the distance, faint cries, a dog’s whine, the whisper of wind on snow, mark time as his fire shrinks. At last, stealthy steps encircle him. A coyote-like shadow resolves into wolves, first one scout, then others. Koskoosh gropes for a burning stick and brandishes it, but his strength ebbs. The fire drops to embers, the circle tightens, and the story ends at the brink of the inevitable.

Themes
The central theme is natural law: the impersonal, recurring cycle in which birth, struggle, reproduction, and death sustain the group at the cost of the individual. London’s naturalism denies sentimental exceptions; culture’s custom of leaving the old behind is not cruelty so much as alignment with environmental necessity. The story also explores dignity in submission versus defiance. Koskoosh’s acceptance, grounded in memory and observation, contrasts with any romantic gesture of revolt. There is an austere humaneness in acknowledging limits. Memory, too, becomes a theme: his inner life swells as outer life recedes, suggesting that consciousness finds meaning even as the body fails.

Style and Symbolism
London’s style is spare, sensory, and rhythmic, built on repeated images of heat and cold, motion and stillness, circle and line. The fire symbolizes life’s dwindling store of energy; the wolves embody nature’s selection; the moose stands as a double for Koskoosh and, more broadly, for all creatures who must cede the trail to the young. The soundscape, sled-bells fading, snow’s hush, the soft pad of paws, structures the narrative as a slow diminuendo to silence.

Ending and Significance
The conclusion, Koskoosh facing the wolves with a failing brand, seals the story’s argument without melodrama. There is no rescue, no special justice, only the steady working of the law of life. By placing cultural custom, animal predation, and personal memory on the same plane, London reveals a universe where survival is collective and time wears down every separate flame.