"On every hand stretched the forest primeval, -- the home of noisy comedy and silent tragedy. Here the struggle for survival continued to wage with all its ancient brutality. Briton and Russian were still to overlap in the Land of the Rainbow's End -- and this was the very heart of it -- nor had Yankee gold yet purchased its vast domain. The wolf-pack still clung to the flank of the cariboo-herd, singling out the weak and the big with calf, and pulling them down as remorselessly as were it a thousand, thousand generations into the past."

-- From "The God of His Fathers"

This collection is London's second (the first being The Sun of the Wolf) and was first published in 1901. In London's dedication he says: "These tales have appeared in McClure's, Ainslee's, Outing, the Overland Monthly, the Wave, the National, and the San Francisco Examiner. To the kindness of the various editors is due their reappearance in more permanent form."