At the beginning of Chapter 2 of Part III in White Fang, London establishes the boundaries of his canid universe by stressing the stability of a naturalistic ‘theology’ against the unsettled trajectories of human religions: ‘To man has been given the grief, often, of seeing his gods overthrown and his alters crumbling; but to the wolf and the wild dog that have come in to crouch at man's feet, this grief has never come.’ These vagrant human gods are chimerical, existing merely as ‘vapors and mists of fancy eluding the garmenture of reality … intangible outcroppings of self into the realm of spirit’. In contrast to such elusive deities, dogs and wolves ‘find their [human] gods in the living flesh, solid to the touch…. No effort of faith is necessary to believe in such a god; no effort of will can possibly induce disbelief in such a god’ (NST 165).

White Fang feels no warmth or fondness for his Indian master, Gray Beaver, a ‘savage god’. Yet White Fang is ‘glad to acknowledge his lordship’, based solely on ‘superior intelligence and brute strength’ (NST 187). This natural supernaturalism in The Call of the Wild and White Fang is one way London uses a naturalistic razor to excise metaphysical vagaries and create a less impeded, more visceral encounter with the primal elements of the real world. The result is a kind of monistic rewilding that appropriates the ecstatic sensations normally associated with metaphysical religious experience. In regard to this mélange, Charmian London perceived an important aspect of London's method when she observed that her husband's ‘materialism incarnated his idealism, and his idealism consecrated and transfigured his materialism’ (The Book of Jack London i. 49).While London maintains his naturalistic emphasis, the experiences of Buck and White Fang can be as intense or rapturous as those of any pious mystic.

Jacqueline Tavernier-Courbin points out that in The Call of the Wild, ‘London's fur-coated hero allows him to say much more about the human situation than would otherwise been allowed by contemporary readers and editors, or even by modern readers’.