The Cremation of Sam McGee

Much as in the naturalist fiction of Jack London, a contemporary writer whose adventure tales of the Yukon enthralled Robert W. Service, animals know more than people. As the poem opens, Cap and Sam are “mushing” (Line 11), a transportation method that uses dogs to pull a sled—in this poem, the dogs pulling Cap’s sled are huskies. The huskies are mentioned three times in the poem—and each time they are more in tune with the conditions in the Yukon than they are with the unfolding drama of the cremation of Sam McGee. The huskies that pull Cap’s sled understand only survival.

As the narrative unfolds and Cap makes increasingly clear his intention to fulfill his foolish promise, the huskies symbolize the sublime indifference of nature itself. Throughout the ordeal of Sam McGee’s death and then the arduous journey across miles of open tundra to cremate a body, the dogs stay indifferent to such emotional and psychological urgencies, unavailable to the implications of mortality or to the test of character integrity implied by the speaker’s promise and his determination to keep his word. For the huskies, moving steadily, unerringly across the wilderness waste is just and only that. The huskies eat when they are hungry, burrow deep into the snow drifts to maintain body heat, howl when they feel the need, and pull the sled bearing the corpse without emotion, without reaction, indifferent to the speaker’s journey, as noble as it is foolhardy. Like the stars in the night sky, like the midnight sun, like the forever-whorling snow, the huskies care little about the petty tragicomedies of humanity.