Has it ever crossed your mind how birds complete their migration south every year without a single wrong turn, or how a cat always manages to find his way home without one misstep? We as man do not use our instincts to reach our destination, instead turning to computers, maps and other human devised forms of navigation filled with errors and mishaps, as all human creations are bound to be. The way animals use their natural instincts to travel without fail has proven to be a far more reliable form of navigation than any man made contraption, and in the classic Jack London story To Build A Fire, letting instincts guide the way instead of letting human ignorance override them is the difference between life and death, illustrating the importance of respecting nature and that human knowledge, though it has advantages, is no substitute for our primal instincts.
             It is ' exceedingly cold and gray' as a logger, referred to as simply 'the man', and his dog are traveling on a small trail in the vast wilderness of the Yukon. From the beginning, foreshadowing is used in the story, telling there is "an intangible pall over the face of things, a subtle gloom that made the day dark". To the man this is not a potentially dangerous situation that should be taken with caution, because the man only sees it as a fact that the sun is absent from the sky, nothing more. 'He was quick and alert in the things, of life, but only in the things and not in the significances', a statement reinforced by the man's attitude toward the temperature, which was seventy-five degrees below zero. It never occurred to him that by attempting to complete his long trek through the Yukon in these treacherous conditions, he was in fact trying to defy the limitations of his species in which he could survive. Seventy five below zero to the man was just another number on the scale of temperature, a
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