Character Analysis
Billee and Joe are just two dogs that pay the price of the frozen North…with their lives.
These brothers have a hard time. Billee gets torn up by Spitz, loses an ear to the feral dogs, and dies by getting beaten with a club to the head. Joe, who we all thought had the survivalist (or maybe just the lucky) genes in the family, falls through the ice to his death.
The lesson to be learned from these two is that surviving the frozen North, particularly with all your limbs intact, is not an easy task—Buck is all the more impressive for pulling it off.
Billee and Joe's Timeline