I've lived in Alaska for over thirty years but, ironically, have never found London's Stories of the North all that compelling. Maybe it's a case of "Escapism-Why bother? I'm already here!" But "To Build A Fire" is an exception and more than a story of the North. It's a story of cold - implacable, interstellar, and absolute.

The Arctic in winter is a mind-altering experience. The cold is sovereign at -40 degrees, and so the laws of physics change. You get frost on a door handle, for example, on the parlor side of the door. On the outside of the door, you become the handle - if you grip it ungloved.

"To Build A Fire" captures the terror of being stalked by the impersonal. The chill of realizing that without a Plan B , you cease to be. And the master touch is that the dreamy beauty of London's narrative of a horrible experience poetically matches the delusion of warmth and euphoria of a victim slipping into death by hypothermia.

Simply put, a classic must-read story.