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+The Project Gutenberg eBook of White Fang, by Jack London
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and
+most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions
+whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms
+of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at
+www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States, you
+will have to check the laws of the country where you are located before
+using this eBook.
+
+Title: White Fang
+
+Author: Jack London
+
+Release Date: May 13, 1997 [eBook #910]
+[Most recently updated: November 10, 2021]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: UTF-8
+
+Produced by: David Price
+
+*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK WHITE FANG ***
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+
+
+WHITE FANG
+
+by Jack London
+
+
+Contents
+
+ PART I
+ CHAPTER I THE TRAIL OF THE MEAT
+ CHAPTER II THE SHE-WOLF
+ CHAPTER III THE HUNGER CRY
+
+ PART II
+ CHAPTER I THE BATTLE OF THE FANGS
+ CHAPTER II THE LAIR
+ CHAPTER III THE GREY CUB
+ CHAPTER IV THE WALL OF THE WORLD
+ CHAPTER V THE LAW OF MEAT
+
+ PART III
+ CHAPTER I THE MAKERS OF FIRE
+ CHAPTER II THE BONDAGE
+ CHAPTER III THE OUTCAST
+ CHAPTER IV THE TRAIL OF THE GODS
+ CHAPTER V THE COVENANT
+ CHAPTER VI THE FAMINE
+
+ PART IV
+ CHAPTER I THE ENEMY OF HIS KIND
+ CHAPTER II THE MAD GOD
+ CHAPTER III THE REIGN OF HATE
+ CHAPTER IV THE CLINGING DEATH
+ CHAPTER V THE INDOMITABLE
+ CHAPTER VI THE LOVE-MASTER
+
+ PART V
+ CHAPTER I THE LONG TRAIL
+ CHAPTER II THE SOUTHLAND
+ CHAPTER III THE GOD’S DOMAIN
+ CHAPTER IV THE CALL OF KIND
+ CHAPTER V THE SLEEPING WOLF
+
+
+
+
+PART I
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I
+THE TRAIL OF THE MEAT
+
+
+Dark spruce forest frowned on either side the frozen waterway. The
+trees had been stripped by a recent wind of their white covering of
+frost, and they seemed to lean towards each other, black and ominous,
+in the fading light. A vast silence reigned over the land. The land
+itself was a desolation, lifeless, without movement, so lone and cold
+that the spirit of it was not even that of sadness. There was a hint in
+it of laughter, but of a laughter more terrible than any sadness—a
+laughter that was mirthless as the smile of the sphinx, a laughter cold
+as the frost and partaking of the grimness of infallibility. It was the
+masterful and incommunicable wisdom of eternity laughing at the
+futility of life and the effort of life. It was the Wild, the savage,
+frozen-hearted Northland Wild.
+
+But there _was_ life, abroad in the land and defiant. Down the frozen
+waterway toiled a string of wolfish dogs. Their bristly fur was rimed
+with frost. Their breath froze in the air as it left their mouths,
+spouting forth in spumes of vapour that settled upon the hair of their
+bodies and formed into crystals of frost. Leather harness was on the
+dogs, and leather traces attached them to a sled which dragged along
+behind. The sled was without runners. It was made of stout birch-bark,
+and its full surface rested on the snow. The front end of the sled was
+turned up, like a scroll, in order to force down and under the bore of
+soft snow that surged like a wave before it. On the sled, securely
+lashed, was a long and narrow oblong box. There were other things on
+the sled—blankets, an axe, and a coffee-pot and frying-pan; but
+prominent, occupying most of the space, was the long and narrow oblong
+box.
+
+In advance of the dogs, on wide snowshoes, toiled a man. At the rear of
+the sled toiled a second man. On the sled, in the box, lay a third man
+whose toil was over,—a man whom the Wild had conquered and beaten down
+until he would never move nor struggle again. It is not the way of the
+Wild to like movement. Life is an offence to it, for life is movement;
+and the Wild aims always to destroy movement. It freezes the water to
+prevent it running to the sea; it drives the sap out of the trees till
+they are frozen to their mighty hearts; and most ferociously and
+terribly of all does the Wild harry and crush into submission man—man
+who is the most restless of life, ever in revolt against the dictum
+that all movement must in the end come to the cessation of movement.
+
+But at front and rear, unawed and indomitable, toiled the two men who
+were not yet dead. Their bodies were covered with fur and soft-tanned
+leather. Eyelashes and cheeks and lips were so coated with the crystals
+from their frozen breath that their faces were not discernible. This
+gave them the seeming of ghostly masques, undertakers in a spectral
+world at the funeral of some ghost. But under it all they were men,
+penetrating the land of desolation and mockery and silence, puny
+adventurers bent on colossal adventure, pitting themselves against the
+might of a world as remote and alien and pulseless as the abysses of
+space.
+
+They travelled on without speech, saving their breath for the work of
+their bodies. On every side was the silence, pressing upon them with a
+tangible presence. It affected their minds as the many atmospheres of
+deep water affect the body of the diver. It crushed them with the
+weight of unending vastness and unalterable decree. It crushed them
+into the remotest recesses of their own minds, pressing out of them,
+like juices from the grape, all the false ardours and exaltations and
+undue self-values of the human soul, until they perceived themselves
+finite and small, specks and motes, moving with weak cunning and little
+wisdom amidst the play and inter-play of the great blind elements and
+forces.
+
+An hour went by, and a second hour. The pale light of the short sunless
+day was beginning to fade, when a faint far cry arose on the still air.
+It soared upward with a swift rush, till it reached its topmost note,
+where it persisted, palpitant and tense, and then slowly died away. It
+might have been a lost soul wailing, had it not been invested with a
+certain sad fierceness and hungry eagerness. The front man turned his
+head until his eyes met the eyes of the man behind. And then, across
+the narrow oblong box, each nodded to the other.
+
+A second cry arose, piercing the silence with needle-like shrillness.
+Both men located the sound. It was to the rear, somewhere in the snow
+expanse they had just traversed. A third and answering cry arose, also
+to the rear and to the left of the second cry.
+
+“They’re after us, Bill,” said the man at the front.
+
+His voice sounded hoarse and unreal, and he had spoken with apparent
+effort.
+
+“Meat is scarce,” answered his comrade. “I ain’t seen a rabbit sign for
+days.”
+
+Thereafter they spoke no more, though their ears were keen for the
+hunting-cries that continued to rise behind them.
+
+At the fall of darkness they swung the dogs into a cluster of spruce
+trees on the edge of the waterway and made a camp. The coffin, at the
+side of the fire, served for seat and table. The wolf-dogs, clustered
+on the far side of the fire, snarled and bickered among themselves, but
+evinced no inclination to stray off into the darkness.
+
+“Seems to me, Henry, they’re stayin’ remarkable close to camp,” Bill
+commented.
+
+Henry, squatting over the fire and settling the pot of coffee with a
+piece of ice, nodded. Nor did he speak till he had taken his seat on
+the coffin and begun to eat.
+
+“They know where their hides is safe,” he said. “They’d sooner eat grub
+than be grub. They’re pretty wise, them dogs.”
+
+Bill shook his head. “Oh, I don’t know.”
+
+His comrade looked at him curiously. “First time I ever heard you say
+anything about their not bein’ wise.”
+
+“Henry,” said the other, munching with deliberation the beans he was
+eating, “did you happen to notice the way them dogs kicked up when I
+was a-feedin’ ’em?”
+
+“They did cut up more’n usual,” Henry acknowledged.
+
+“How many dogs ’ve we got, Henry?”
+
+“Six.”
+
+“Well, Henry . . . ” Bill stopped for a moment, in order that his words
+might gain greater significance. “As I was sayin’, Henry, we’ve got six
+dogs. I took six fish out of the bag. I gave one fish to each dog, an’,
+Henry, I was one fish short.”
+
+“You counted wrong.”
+
+“We’ve got six dogs,” the other reiterated dispassionately. “I took out
+six fish. One Ear didn’t get no fish. I came back to the bag afterward
+an’ got ’m his fish.”
+
+“We’ve only got six dogs,” Henry said.
+
+“Henry,” Bill went on. “I won’t say they was all dogs, but there was
+seven of ’m that got fish.”
+
+Henry stopped eating to glance across the fire and count the dogs.
+
+“There’s only six now,” he said.
+
+“I saw the other one run off across the snow,” Bill announced with cool
+positiveness. “I saw seven.”
+
+Henry looked at him commiseratingly, and said, “I’ll be almighty glad
+when this trip’s over.”
+
+“What d’ye mean by that?” Bill demanded.
+
+“I mean that this load of ourn is gettin’ on your nerves, an’ that
+you’re beginnin’ to see things.”
+
+“I thought of that,” Bill answered gravely. “An’ so, when I saw it run
+off across the snow, I looked in the snow an’ saw its tracks. Then I
+counted the dogs an’ there was still six of ’em. The tracks is there in
+the snow now. D’ye want to look at ’em? I’ll show ’em to you.”
+
+Henry did not reply, but munched on in silence, until, the meal
+finished, he topped it with a final cup of coffee. He wiped his mouth
+with the back of his hand and said:
+
+“Then you’re thinkin’ as it was—”
+
+A long wailing cry, fiercely sad, from somewhere in the darkness, had
+interrupted him. He stopped to listen to it, then he finished his
+sentence with a wave of his hand toward the sound of the cry, “—one of
+them?”
+
+Bill nodded. “I’d a blame sight sooner think that than anything else.
+You noticed yourself the row the dogs made.”
+
+Cry after cry, and answering cries, were turning the silence into a
+bedlam. From every side the cries arose, and the dogs betrayed their
+fear by huddling together and so close to the fire that their hair was
+scorched by the heat. Bill threw on more wood, before lighting his
+pipe.
+
+“I’m thinking you’re down in the mouth some,” Henry said.
+
+“Henry . . . ” He sucked meditatively at his pipe for some time before
+he went on. “Henry, I was a-thinkin’ what a blame sight luckier he is
+than you an’ me’ll ever be.”
+
+He indicated the third person by a downward thrust of the thumb to the
+box on which they sat.
+
+“You an’ me, Henry, when we die, we’ll be lucky if we get enough stones
+over our carcases to keep the dogs off of us.”
+
+“But we ain’t got people an’ money an’ all the rest, like him,” Henry
+rejoined. “Long-distance funerals is somethin’ you an’ me can’t exactly
+afford.”
+
+“What gets me, Henry, is what a chap like this, that’s a lord or
+something in his own country, and that’s never had to bother about grub
+nor blankets; why he comes a-buttin’ round the Godforsaken ends of the
+earth—that’s what I can’t exactly see.”
+
+“He might have lived to a ripe old age if he’d stayed at home,” Henry
+agreed.
+
+Bill opened his mouth to speak, but changed his mind. Instead, he
+pointed towards the wall of darkness that pressed about them from every
+side. There was no suggestion of form in the utter blackness; only
+could be seen a pair of eyes gleaming like live coals. Henry indicated
+with his head a second pair, and a third. A circle of the gleaming eyes
+had drawn about their camp. Now and again a pair of eyes moved, or
+disappeared to appear again a moment later.
+
+The unrest of the dogs had been increasing, and they stampeded, in a
+surge of sudden fear, to the near side of the fire, cringing and
+crawling about the legs of the men. In the scramble one of the dogs had
+been overturned on the edge of the fire, and it had yelped with pain
+and fright as the smell of its singed coat possessed the air. The
+commotion caused the circle of eyes to shift restlessly for a moment
+and even to withdraw a bit, but it settled down again as the dogs
+became quiet.
+
+“Henry, it’s a blame misfortune to be out of ammunition.”
+
+Bill had finished his pipe and was helping his companion to spread the
+bed of fur and blanket upon the spruce boughs which he had laid over
+the snow before supper. Henry grunted, and began unlacing his
+moccasins.
+
+“How many cartridges did you say you had left?” he asked.
+
+“Three,” came the answer. “An’ I wisht ’twas three hundred. Then I’d
+show ’em what for, damn ’em!”
+
+He shook his fist angrily at the gleaming eyes, and began securely to
+prop his moccasins before the fire.
+
+“An’ I wisht this cold snap’d break,” he went on. “It’s ben fifty below
+for two weeks now. An’ I wisht I’d never started on this trip, Henry. I
+don’t like the looks of it. I don’t feel right, somehow. An’ while I’m
+wishin’, I wisht the trip was over an’ done with, an’ you an’ me
+a-sittin’ by the fire in Fort McGurry just about now an’ playing
+cribbage—that’s what I wisht.”
+
+Henry grunted and crawled into bed. As he dozed off he was aroused by
+his comrade’s voice.
+
+“Say, Henry, that other one that come in an’ got a fish—why didn’t the
+dogs pitch into it? That’s what’s botherin’ me.”
+
+“You’re botherin’ too much, Bill,” came the sleepy response. “You was
+never like this before. You jes’ shut up now, an’ go to sleep, an’
+you’ll be all hunkydory in the mornin’. Your stomach’s sour, that’s
+what’s botherin’ you.”
+
+The men slept, breathing heavily, side by side, under the one covering.
+The fire died down, and the gleaming eyes drew closer the circle they
+had flung about the camp. The dogs clustered together in fear, now and
+again snarling menacingly as a pair of eyes drew close. Once their
+uproar became so loud that Bill woke up. He got out of bed carefully,
+so as not to disturb the sleep of his comrade, and threw more wood on
+the fire. As it began to flame up, the circle of eyes drew farther
+back. He glanced casually at the huddling dogs. He rubbed his eyes and
+looked at them more sharply. Then he crawled back into the blankets.
+
+“Henry,” he said. “Oh, Henry.”
+
+Henry groaned as he passed from sleep to waking, and demanded, “What’s
+wrong now?”
+
+“Nothin’,” came the answer; “only there’s seven of ’em again. I just
+counted.”
+
+Henry acknowledged receipt of the information with a grunt that slid
+into a snore as he drifted back into sleep.
+
+In the morning it was Henry who awoke first and routed his companion
+out of bed. Daylight was yet three hours away, though it was already
+six o’clock; and in the darkness Henry went about preparing breakfast,
+while Bill rolled the blankets and made the sled ready for lashing.
+
+“Say, Henry,” he asked suddenly, “how many dogs did you say we had?”
+
+“Six.”
+
+“Wrong,” Bill proclaimed triumphantly.
+
+“Seven again?” Henry queried.
+
+“No, five; one’s gone.”
+
+“The hell!” Henry cried in wrath, leaving the cooking to come and count
+the dogs.
+
+“You’re right, Bill,” he concluded. “Fatty’s gone.”
+
+“An’ he went like greased lightnin’ once he got started. Couldn’t ’ve
+seen ’m for smoke.”
+
+“No chance at all,” Henry concluded. “They jes’ swallowed ’m alive. I
+bet he was yelpin’ as he went down their throats, damn ’em!”
+
+“He always was a fool dog,” said Bill.
+
+“But no fool dog ought to be fool enough to go off an’ commit suicide
+that way.” He looked over the remainder of the team with a speculative
+eye that summed up instantly the salient traits of each animal. “I bet
+none of the others would do it.”
+
+“Couldn’t drive ’em away from the fire with a club,” Bill agreed. “I
+always did think there was somethin’ wrong with Fatty anyway.”
+
+And this was the epitaph of a dead dog on the Northland trail—less
+scant than the epitaph of many another dog, of many a man.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II
+THE SHE-WOLF
+
+
+Breakfast eaten and the slim camp-outfit lashed to the sled, the men
+turned their backs on the cheery fire and launched out into the
+darkness. At once began to rise the cries that were fiercely sad—cries
+that called through the darkness and cold to one another and answered
+back. Conversation ceased. Daylight came at nine o’clock. At midday the
+sky to the south warmed to rose-colour, and marked where the bulge of
+the earth intervened between the meridian sun and the northern world.
+But the rose-colour swiftly faded. The grey light of day that remained
+lasted until three o’clock, when it, too, faded, and the pall of the
+Arctic night descended upon the lone and silent land.
+
+As darkness came on, the hunting-cries to right and left and rear drew
+closer—so close that more than once they sent surges of fear through
+the toiling dogs, throwing them into short-lived panics.
+
+At the conclusion of one such panic, when he and Henry had got the dogs
+back in the traces, Bill said:
+
+“I wisht they’d strike game somewheres, an’ go away an’ leave us
+alone.”
+
+“They do get on the nerves horrible,” Henry sympathised.
+
+They spoke no more until camp was made.
+
+Henry was bending over and adding ice to the babbling pot of beans when
+he was startled by the sound of a blow, an exclamation from Bill, and a
+sharp snarling cry of pain from among the dogs. He straightened up in
+time to see a dim form disappearing across the snow into the shelter of
+the dark. Then he saw Bill, standing amid the dogs, half triumphant,
+half crestfallen, in one hand a stout club, in the other the tail and
+part of the body of a sun-cured salmon.
+
+“It got half of it,” he announced; “but I got a whack at it jes’ the
+same. D’ye hear it squeal?”
+
+“What’d it look like?” Henry asked.
+
+“Couldn’t see. But it had four legs an’ a mouth an’ hair an’ looked
+like any dog.”
+
+“Must be a tame wolf, I reckon.”
+
+“It’s damned tame, whatever it is, comin’ in here at feedin’ time an’
+gettin’ its whack of fish.”
+
+That night, when supper was finished and they sat on the oblong box and
+pulled at their pipes, the circle of gleaming eyes drew in even closer
+than before.
+
+“I wisht they’d spring up a bunch of moose or something, an’ go away
+an’ leave us alone,” Bill said.
+
+Henry grunted with an intonation that was not all sympathy, and for a
+quarter of an hour they sat on in silence, Henry staring at the fire,
+and Bill at the circle of eyes that burned in the darkness just beyond
+the firelight.
+
+“I wisht we was pullin’ into McGurry right now,” he began again.
+
+“Shut up your wishin’ and your croakin’,” Henry burst out angrily.
+“Your stomach’s sour. That’s what’s ailin’ you. Swallow a spoonful of
+sody, an’ you’ll sweeten up wonderful an’ be more pleasant company.”
+
+In the morning Henry was aroused by fervid blasphemy that proceeded
+from the mouth of Bill. Henry propped himself up on an elbow and looked
+to see his comrade standing among the dogs beside the replenished fire,
+his arms raised in objurgation, his face distorted with passion.
+
+“Hello!” Henry called. “What’s up now?”
+
+“Frog’s gone,” came the answer.
+
+“No.”
+
+“I tell you yes.”
+
+Henry leaped out of the blankets and to the dogs. He counted them with
+care, and then joined his partner in cursing the power of the Wild that
+had robbed them of another dog.
+
+“Frog was the strongest dog of the bunch,” Bill pronounced finally.
+
+“An’ he was no fool dog neither,” Henry added.
+
+And so was recorded the second epitaph in two days.
+
+A gloomy breakfast was eaten, and the four remaining dogs were
+harnessed to the sled. The day was a repetition of the days that had
+gone before. The men toiled without speech across the face of the
+frozen world. The silence was unbroken save by the cries of their
+pursuers, that, unseen, hung upon their rear. With the coming of night
+in the mid-afternoon, the cries sounded closer as the pursuers drew in
+according to their custom; and the dogs grew excited and frightened,
+and were guilty of panics that tangled the traces and further depressed
+the two men.
+
+“There, that’ll fix you fool critters,” Bill said with satisfaction
+that night, standing erect at completion of his task.
+
+Henry left the cooking to come and see. Not only had his partner tied
+the dogs up, but he had tied them, after the Indian fashion, with
+sticks. About the neck of each dog he had fastened a leather thong. To
+this, and so close to the neck that the dog could not get his teeth to
+it, he had tied a stout stick four or five feet in length. The other
+end of the stick, in turn, was made fast to a stake in the ground by
+means of a leather thong. The dog was unable to gnaw through the
+leather at his own end of the stick. The stick prevented him from
+getting at the leather that fastened the other end.
+
+Henry nodded his head approvingly.
+
+“It’s the only contraption that’ll ever hold One Ear,” he said. “He can
+gnaw through leather as clean as a knife an’ jes’ about half as quick.
+They all’ll be here in the mornin’ hunkydory.”
+
+“You jes’ bet they will,” Bill affirmed. “If one of em’ turns up
+missin’, I’ll go without my coffee.”
+
+“They jes’ know we ain’t loaded to kill,” Henry remarked at bed-time,
+indicating the gleaming circle that hemmed them in. “If we could put a
+couple of shots into ’em, they’d be more respectful. They come closer
+every night. Get the firelight out of your eyes an’ look hard—there!
+Did you see that one?”
+
+For some time the two men amused themselves with watching the movement
+of vague forms on the edge of the firelight. By looking closely and
+steadily at where a pair of eyes burned in the darkness, the form of
+the animal would slowly take shape. They could even see these forms
+move at times.
+
+A sound among the dogs attracted the men’s attention. One Ear was
+uttering quick, eager whines, lunging at the length of his stick toward
+the darkness, and desisting now and again in order to make frantic
+attacks on the stick with his teeth.
+
+“Look at that, Bill,” Henry whispered.
+
+Full into the firelight, with a stealthy, sidelong movement, glided a
+doglike animal. It moved with commingled mistrust and daring,
+cautiously observing the men, its attention fixed on the dogs. One Ear
+strained the full length of the stick toward the intruder and whined
+with eagerness.
+
+“That fool One Ear don’t seem scairt much,” Bill said in a low tone.
+
+“It’s a she-wolf,” Henry whispered back, “an’ that accounts for Fatty
+an’ Frog. She’s the decoy for the pack. She draws out the dog an’ then
+all the rest pitches in an’ eats ’m up.”
+
+The fire crackled. A log fell apart with a loud spluttering noise. At
+the sound of it the strange animal leaped back into the darkness.
+
+“Henry, I’m a-thinkin’,” Bill announced.
+
+“Thinkin’ what?”
+
+“I’m a-thinkin’ that was the one I lambasted with the club.”
+
+“Ain’t the slightest doubt in the world,” was Henry’s response.
+
+“An’ right here I want to remark,” Bill went on, “that that animal’s
+familyarity with campfires is suspicious an’ immoral.”
+
+“It knows for certain more’n a self-respectin’ wolf ought to know,”
+Henry agreed. “A wolf that knows enough to come in with the dogs at
+feedin’ time has had experiences.”
+
+“Ol’ Villan had a dog once that run away with the wolves,” Bill
+cogitates aloud. “I ought to know. I shot it out of the pack in a moose
+pasture over ‘on Little Stick. An’ Ol’ Villan cried like a baby. Hadn’t
+seen it for three years, he said. Ben with the wolves all that time.”
+
+“I reckon you’ve called the turn, Bill. That wolf’s a dog, an’ it’s
+eaten fish many’s the time from the hand of man.”
+
+“An if I get a chance at it, that wolf that’s a dog’ll be jes’ meat,”
+Bill declared. “We can’t afford to lose no more animals.”
+
+“But you’ve only got three cartridges,” Henry objected.
+
+“I’ll wait for a dead sure shot,” was the reply.
+
+In the morning Henry renewed the fire and cooked breakfast to the
+accompaniment of his partner’s snoring.
+
+“You was sleepin’ jes’ too comfortable for anything,” Henry told him,
+as he routed him out for breakfast. “I hadn’t the heart to rouse you.”
+
+Bill began to eat sleepily. He noticed that his cup was empty and
+started to reach for the pot. But the pot was beyond arm’s length and
+beside Henry.
+
+“Say, Henry,” he chided gently, “ain’t you forgot somethin’?”
+
+Henry looked about with great carefulness and shook his head. Bill held
+up the empty cup.
+
+“You don’t get no coffee,” Henry announced.
+
+“Ain’t run out?” Bill asked anxiously.
+
+“Nope.”
+
+“Ain’t thinkin’ it’ll hurt my digestion?”
+
+“Nope.”
+
+A flush of angry blood pervaded Bill’s face.
+
+“Then it’s jes’ warm an’ anxious I am to be hearin’ you explain
+yourself,” he said.
+
+“Spanker’s gone,” Henry answered.
+
+Without haste, with the air of one resigned to misfortune Bill turned
+his head, and from where he sat counted the dogs.
+
+“How’d it happen?” he asked apathetically.
+
+Henry shrugged his shoulders. “Don’t know. Unless One Ear gnawed ’m
+loose. He couldn’t a-done it himself, that’s sure.”
+
+“The darned cuss.” Bill spoke gravely and slowly, with no hint of the
+anger that was raging within. “Jes’ because he couldn’t chew himself
+loose, he chews Spanker loose.”
+
+“Well, Spanker’s troubles is over anyway; I guess he’s digested by this
+time an’ cavortin’ over the landscape in the bellies of twenty
+different wolves,” was Henry’s epitaph on this, the latest lost dog.
+“Have some coffee, Bill.”
+
+But Bill shook his head.
+
+“Go on,” Henry pleaded, elevating the pot.
+
+Bill shoved his cup aside. “I’ll be ding-dong-danged if I do. I said I
+wouldn’t if ary dog turned up missin’, an’ I won’t.”
+
+“It’s darn good coffee,” Henry said enticingly.
+
+But Bill was stubborn, and he ate a dry breakfast washed down with
+mumbled curses at One Ear for the trick he had played.
+
+“I’ll tie ’em up out of reach of each other to-night,” Bill said, as
+they took the trail.
+
+They had travelled little more than a hundred yards, when Henry, who
+was in front, bent down and picked up something with which his snowshoe
+had collided. It was dark, and he could not see it, but he recognised
+it by the touch. He flung it back, so that it struck the sled and
+bounced along until it fetched up on Bill’s snowshoes.
+
+“Mebbe you’ll need that in your business,” Henry said.
+
+Bill uttered an exclamation. It was all that was left of Spanker—the
+stick with which he had been tied.
+
+“They ate ’m hide an’ all,” Bill announced. “The stick’s as clean as a
+whistle. They’ve ate the leather offen both ends. They’re damn hungry,
+Henry, an’ they’ll have you an’ me guessin’ before this trip’s over.”
+
+Henry laughed defiantly. “I ain’t been trailed this way by wolves
+before, but I’ve gone through a whole lot worse an’ kept my health.
+Takes more’n a handful of them pesky critters to do for yours truly,
+Bill, my son.”
+
+“I don’t know, I don’t know,” Bill muttered ominously.
+
+“Well, you’ll know all right when we pull into McGurry.”
+
+“I ain’t feelin’ special enthusiastic,” Bill persisted.
+
+“You’re off colour, that’s what’s the matter with you,” Henry
+dogmatised. “What you need is quinine, an’ I’m goin’ to dose you up
+stiff as soon as we make McGurry.”
+
+Bill grunted his disagreement with the diagnosis, and lapsed into
+silence. The day was like all the days. Light came at nine o’clock. At
+twelve o’clock the southern horizon was warmed by the unseen sun; and
+then began the cold grey of afternoon that would merge, three hours
+later, into night.
+
+It was just after the sun’s futile effort to appear, that Bill slipped
+the rifle from under the sled-lashings and said:
+
+“You keep right on, Henry, I’m goin’ to see what I can see.”
+
+“You’d better stick by the sled,” his partner protested. “You’ve only
+got three cartridges, an’ there’s no tellin’ what might happen.”
+
+“Who’s croaking now?” Bill demanded triumphantly.
+
+Henry made no reply, and plodded on alone, though often he cast anxious
+glances back into the grey solitude where his partner had disappeared.
+An hour later, taking advantage of the cut-offs around which the sled
+had to go, Bill arrived.
+
+“They’re scattered an’ rangin’ along wide,” he said: “keeping up with
+us an’ lookin’ for game at the same time. You see, they’re sure of us,
+only they know they’ve got to wait to get us. In the meantime they’re
+willin’ to pick up anything eatable that comes handy.”
+
+“You mean they _think_ they’re sure of us,” Henry objected pointedly.
+
+But Bill ignored him. “I seen some of them. They’re pretty thin. They
+ain’t had a bite in weeks I reckon, outside of Fatty an’ Frog an’
+Spanker; an’ there’s so many of ’em that that didn’t go far. They’re
+remarkable thin. Their ribs is like wash-boards, an’ their stomachs is
+right up against their backbones. They’re pretty desperate, I can tell
+you. They’ll be goin’ mad, yet, an’ then watch out.”
+
+A few minutes later, Henry, who was now travelling behind the sled,
+emitted a low, warning whistle. Bill turned and looked, then quietly
+stopped the dogs. To the rear, from around the last bend and plainly
+into view, on the very trail they had just covered, trotted a furry,
+slinking form. Its nose was to the trail, and it trotted with a
+peculiar, sliding, effortless gait. When they halted, it halted,
+throwing up its head and regarding them steadily with nostrils that
+twitched as it caught and studied the scent of them.
+
+“It’s the she-wolf,” Bill answered.
+
+The dogs had lain down in the snow, and he walked past them to join his
+partner in the sled. Together they watched the strange animal that had
+pursued them for days and that had already accomplished the destruction
+of half their dog-team.
+
+After a searching scrutiny, the animal trotted forward a few steps.
+This it repeated several times, till it was a short hundred yards away.
+It paused, head up, close by a clump of spruce trees, and with sight
+and scent studied the outfit of the watching men. It looked at them in
+a strangely wistful way, after the manner of a dog; but in its
+wistfulness there was none of the dog affection. It was a wistfulness
+bred of hunger, as cruel as its own fangs, as merciless as the frost
+itself.
+
+It was large for a wolf, its gaunt frame advertising the lines of an
+animal that was among the largest of its kind.
+
+“Stands pretty close to two feet an’ a half at the shoulders,” Henry
+commented. “An’ I’ll bet it ain’t far from five feet long.”
+
+“Kind of strange colour for a wolf,” was Bill’s criticism. “I never
+seen a red wolf before. Looks almost cinnamon to me.”
+
+The animal was certainly not cinnamon-coloured. Its coat was the true
+wolf-coat. The dominant colour was grey, and yet there was to it a
+faint reddish hue—a hue that was baffling, that appeared and
+disappeared, that was more like an illusion of the vision, now grey,
+distinctly grey, and again giving hints and glints of a vague redness
+of colour not classifiable in terms of ordinary experience.
+
+“Looks for all the world like a big husky sled-dog,” Bill said. “I
+wouldn’t be s’prised to see it wag its tail.”
+
+“Hello, you husky!” he called. “Come here, you whatever-your-name-is.”
+
+“Ain’t a bit scairt of you,” Henry laughed.
+
+Bill waved his hand at it threateningly and shouted loudly; but the
+animal betrayed no fear. The only change in it that they could notice
+was an accession of alertness. It still regarded them with the
+merciless wistfulness of hunger. They were meat, and it was hungry; and
+it would like to go in and eat them if it dared.
+
+“Look here, Henry,” Bill said, unconsciously lowering his voice to a
+whisper because of what he imitated. “We’ve got three cartridges. But
+it’s a dead shot. Couldn’t miss it. It’s got away with three of our
+dogs, an’ we oughter put a stop to it. What d’ye say?”
+
+Henry nodded his consent. Bill cautiously slipped the gun from under
+the sled-lashing. The gun was on the way to his shoulder, but it never
+got there. For in that instant the she-wolf leaped sidewise from the
+trail into the clump of spruce trees and disappeared.
+
+The two men looked at each other. Henry whistled long and
+comprehendingly.
+
+“I might have knowed it,” Bill chided himself aloud as he replaced the
+gun. “Of course a wolf that knows enough to come in with the dogs at
+feedin’ time, ’d know all about shooting-irons. I tell you right now,
+Henry, that critter’s the cause of all our trouble. We’d have six dogs
+at the present time, ’stead of three, if it wasn’t for her. An’ I tell
+you right now, Henry, I’m goin’ to get her. She’s too smart to be shot
+in the open. But I’m goin’ to lay for her. I’ll bushwhack her as sure
+as my name is Bill.”
+
+“You needn’t stray off too far in doin’ it,” his partner admonished.
+“If that pack ever starts to jump you, them three cartridges’d be wuth
+no more’n three whoops in hell. Them animals is damn hungry, an’ once
+they start in, they’ll sure get you, Bill.”
+
+They camped early that night. Three dogs could not drag the sled so
+fast nor for so long hours as could six, and they were showing
+unmistakable signs of playing out. And the men went early to bed, Bill
+first seeing to it that the dogs were tied out of gnawing-reach of one
+another.
+
+But the wolves were growing bolder, and the men were aroused more than
+once from their sleep. So near did the wolves approach, that the dogs
+became frantic with terror, and it was necessary to replenish the fire
+from time to time in order to keep the adventurous marauders at safer
+distance.
+
+“I’ve hearn sailors talk of sharks followin’ a ship,” Bill remarked, as
+he crawled back into the blankets after one such replenishing of the
+fire. “Well, them wolves is land sharks. They know their business
+better’n we do, an’ they ain’t a-holdin’ our trail this way for their
+health. They’re goin’ to get us. They’re sure goin’ to get us, Henry.”
+
+“They’ve half got you a’ready, a-talkin’ like that,” Henry retorted
+sharply. “A man’s half licked when he says he is. An’ you’re half eaten
+from the way you’re goin’ on about it.”
+
+“They’ve got away with better men than you an’ me,” Bill answered.
+
+“Oh, shet up your croakin’. You make me all-fired tired.”
+
+Henry rolled over angrily on his side, but was surprised that Bill made
+no similar display of temper. This was not Bill’s way, for he was
+easily angered by sharp words. Henry thought long over it before he
+went to sleep, and as his eyelids fluttered down and he dozed off, the
+thought in his mind was: “There’s no mistakin’ it, Bill’s almighty
+blue. I’ll have to cheer him up to-morrow.”
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III
+THE HUNGER CRY
+
+
+The day began auspiciously. They had lost no dogs during the night, and
+they swung out upon the trail and into the silence, the darkness, and
+the cold with spirits that were fairly light. Bill seemed to have
+forgotten his forebodings of the previous night, and even waxed
+facetious with the dogs when, at midday, they overturned the sled on a
+bad piece of trail.
+
+It was an awkward mix-up. The sled was upside down and jammed between a
+tree-trunk and a huge rock, and they were forced to unharness the dogs
+in order to straighten out the tangle. The two men were bent over the
+sled and trying to right it, when Henry observed One Ear sidling away.
+
+“Here, you, One Ear!” he cried, straightening up and turning around on
+the dog.
+
+But One Ear broke into a run across the snow, his traces trailing
+behind him. And there, out in the snow of their back track, was the
+she-wolf waiting for him. As he neared her, he became suddenly
+cautious. He slowed down to an alert and mincing walk and then stopped.
+He regarded her carefully and dubiously, yet desirefully. She seemed to
+smile at him, showing her teeth in an ingratiating rather than a
+menacing way. She moved toward him a few steps, playfully, and then
+halted. One Ear drew near to her, still alert and cautious, his tail
+and ears in the air, his head held high.
+
+He tried to sniff noses with her, but she retreated playfully and
+coyly. Every advance on his part was accompanied by a corresponding
+retreat on her part. Step by step she was luring him away from the
+security of his human companionship. Once, as though a warning had in
+vague ways flitted through his intelligence, he turned his head and
+looked back at the overturned sled, at his team-mates, and at the two
+men who were calling to him.
+
+But whatever idea was forming in his mind, was dissipated by the
+she-wolf, who advanced upon him, sniffed noses with him for a fleeting
+instant, and then resumed her coy retreat before his renewed advances.
+
+In the meantime, Bill had bethought himself of the rifle. But it was
+jammed beneath the overturned sled, and by the time Henry had helped
+him to right the load, One Ear and the she-wolf were too close together
+and the distance too great to risk a shot.
+
+Too late One Ear learned his mistake. Before they saw the cause, the
+two men saw him turn and start to run back toward them. Then,
+approaching at right angles to the trail and cutting off his retreat
+they saw a dozen wolves, lean and grey, bounding across the snow. On
+the instant, the she-wolf’s coyness and playfulness disappeared. With a
+snarl she sprang upon One Ear. He thrust her off with his shoulder,
+and, his retreat cut off and still intent on regaining the sled, he
+altered his course in an attempt to circle around to it. More wolves
+were appearing every moment and joining in the chase. The she-wolf was
+one leap behind One Ear and holding her own.
+
+“Where are you goin’?” Henry suddenly demanded, laying his hand on his
+partner’s arm.
+
+Bill shook it off. “I won’t stand it,” he said. “They ain’t a-goin’ to
+get any more of our dogs if I can help it.”
+
+Gun in hand, he plunged into the underbrush that lined the side of the
+trail. His intention was apparent enough. Taking the sled as the centre
+of the circle that One Ear was making, Bill planned to tap that circle
+at a point in advance of the pursuit. With his rifle, in the broad
+daylight, it might be possible for him to awe the wolves and save the
+dog.
+
+“Say, Bill!” Henry called after him. “Be careful! Don’t take no
+chances!”
+
+Henry sat down on the sled and watched. There was nothing else for him
+to do. Bill had already gone from sight; but now and again, appearing
+and disappearing amongst the underbrush and the scattered clumps of
+spruce, could be seen One Ear. Henry judged his case to be hopeless.
+The dog was thoroughly alive to its danger, but it was running on the
+outer circle while the wolf-pack was running on the inner and shorter
+circle. It was vain to think of One Ear so outdistancing his pursuers
+as to be able to cut across their circle in advance of them and to
+regain the sled.
+
+The different lines were rapidly approaching a point. Somewhere out
+there in the snow, screened from his sight by trees and thickets, Henry
+knew that the wolf-pack, One Ear, and Bill were coming together. All
+too quickly, far more quickly than he had expected, it happened. He
+heard a shot, then two shots, in rapid succession, and he knew that
+Bill’s ammunition was gone. Then he heard a great outcry of snarls and
+yelps. He recognised One Ear’s yell of pain and terror, and he heard a
+wolf-cry that bespoke a stricken animal. And that was all. The snarls
+ceased. The yelping died away. Silence settled down again over the
+lonely land.
+
+He sat for a long while upon the sled. There was no need for him to go
+and see what had happened. He knew it as though it had taken place
+before his eyes. Once, he roused with a start and hastily got the axe
+out from underneath the lashings. But for some time longer he sat and
+brooded, the two remaining dogs crouching and trembling at his feet.
+
+At last he arose in a weary manner, as though all the resilience had
+gone out of his body, and proceeded to fasten the dogs to the sled. He
+passed a rope over his shoulder, a man-trace, and pulled with the dogs.
+He did not go far. At the first hint of darkness he hastened to make a
+camp, and he saw to it that he had a generous supply of firewood. He
+fed the dogs, cooked and ate his supper, and made his bed close to the
+fire.
+
+But he was not destined to enjoy that bed. Before his eyes closed the
+wolves had drawn too near for safety. It no longer required an effort
+of the vision to see them. They were all about him and the fire, in a
+narrow circle, and he could see them plainly in the firelight lying
+down, sitting up, crawling forward on their bellies, or slinking back
+and forth. They even slept. Here and there he could see one curled up
+in the snow like a dog, taking the sleep that was now denied himself.
+
+He kept the fire brightly blazing, for he knew that it alone intervened
+between the flesh of his body and their hungry fangs. His two dogs
+stayed close by him, one on either side, leaning against him for
+protection, crying and whimpering, and at times snarling desperately
+when a wolf approached a little closer than usual. At such moments,
+when his dogs snarled, the whole circle would be agitated, the wolves
+coming to their feet and pressing tentatively forward, a chorus of
+snarls and eager yelps rising about him. Then the circle would lie down
+again, and here and there a wolf would resume its broken nap.
+
+But this circle had a continuous tendency to draw in upon him. Bit by
+bit, an inch at a time, with here a wolf bellying forward, and there a
+wolf bellying forward, the circle would narrow until the brutes were
+almost within springing distance. Then he would seize brands from the
+fire and hurl them into the pack. A hasty drawing back always resulted,
+accompanied by angry yelps and frightened snarls when a well-aimed
+brand struck and scorched a too daring animal.
+
+Morning found the man haggard and worn, wide-eyed from want of sleep.
+He cooked breakfast in the darkness, and at nine o’clock, when, with
+the coming of daylight, the wolf-pack drew back, he set about the task
+he had planned through the long hours of the night. Chopping down young
+saplings, he made them cross-bars of a scaffold by lashing them high up
+to the trunks of standing trees. Using the sled-lashing for a heaving
+rope, and with the aid of the dogs, he hoisted the coffin to the top of
+the scaffold.
+
+“They got Bill, an’ they may get me, but they’ll sure never get you,
+young man,” he said, addressing the dead body in its tree-sepulchre.
+
+Then he took the trail, the lightened sled bounding along behind the
+willing dogs; for they, too, knew that safety lay open in the gaining
+of Fort McGurry. The wolves were now more open in their pursuit,
+trotting sedately behind and ranging along on either side, their red
+tongues lolling out, their lean sides showing the undulating ribs with
+every movement. They were very lean, mere skin-bags stretched over bony
+frames, with strings for muscles—so lean that Henry found it in his
+mind to marvel that they still kept their feet and did not collapse
+forthright in the snow.
+
+He did not dare travel until dark. At midday, not only did the sun warm
+the southern horizon, but it even thrust its upper rim, pale and
+golden, above the sky-line. He received it as a sign. The days were
+growing longer. The sun was returning. But scarcely had the cheer of
+its light departed, than he went into camp. There were still several
+hours of grey daylight and sombre twilight, and he utilised them in
+chopping an enormous supply of fire-wood.
+
+With night came horror. Not only were the starving wolves growing
+bolder, but lack of sleep was telling upon Henry. He dozed despite
+himself, crouching by the fire, the blankets about his shoulders, the
+axe between his knees, and on either side a dog pressing close against
+him. He awoke once and saw in front of him, not a dozen feet away, a
+big grey wolf, one of the largest of the pack. And even as he looked,
+the brute deliberately stretched himself after the manner of a lazy
+dog, yawning full in his face and looking upon him with a possessive
+eye, as if, in truth, he were merely a delayed meal that was soon to be
+eaten.
+
+This certitude was shown by the whole pack. Fully a score he could
+count, staring hungrily at him or calmly sleeping in the snow. They
+reminded him of children gathered about a spread table and awaiting
+permission to begin to eat. And he was the food they were to eat! He
+wondered how and when the meal would begin.
+
+As he piled wood on the fire he discovered an appreciation of his own
+body which he had never felt before. He watched his moving muscles and
+was interested in the cunning mechanism of his fingers. By the light of
+the fire he crooked his fingers slowly and repeatedly now one at a
+time, now all together, spreading them wide or making quick gripping
+movements. He studied the nail-formation, and prodded the finger-tips,
+now sharply, and again softly, gauging the while the nerve-sensations
+produced. It fascinated him, and he grew suddenly fond of this subtle
+flesh of his that worked so beautifully and smoothly and delicately.
+Then he would cast a glance of fear at the wolf-circle drawn
+expectantly about him, and like a blow the realisation would strike him
+that this wonderful body of his, this living flesh, was no more than so
+much meat, a quest of ravenous animals, to be torn and slashed by their
+hungry fangs, to be sustenance to them as the moose and the rabbit had
+often been sustenance to him.
+
+He came out of a doze that was half nightmare, to see the red-hued
+she-wolf before him. She was not more than half a dozen feet away
+sitting in the snow and wistfully regarding him. The two dogs were
+whimpering and snarling at his feet, but she took no notice of them.
+She was looking at the man, and for some time he returned her look.
+There was nothing threatening about her. She looked at him merely with
+a great wistfulness, but he knew it to be the wistfulness of an equally
+great hunger. He was the food, and the sight of him excited in her the
+gustatory sensations. Her mouth opened, the saliva drooled forth, and
+she licked her chops with the pleasure of anticipation.
+
+A spasm of fear went through him. He reached hastily for a brand to
+throw at her. But even as he reached, and before his fingers had closed
+on the missile, she sprang back into safety; and he knew that she was
+used to having things thrown at her. She had snarled as she sprang
+away, baring her white fangs to their roots, all her wistfulness
+vanishing, being replaced by a carnivorous malignity that made him
+shudder. He glanced at the hand that held the brand, noticing the
+cunning delicacy of the fingers that gripped it, how they adjusted
+themselves to all the inequalities of the surface, curling over and
+under and about the rough wood, and one little finger, too close to the
+burning portion of the brand, sensitively and automatically writhing
+back from the hurtful heat to a cooler gripping-place; and in the same
+instant he seemed to see a vision of those same sensitive and delicate
+fingers being crushed and torn by the white teeth of the she-wolf.
+Never had he been so fond of this body of his as now when his tenure of
+it was so precarious.
+
+All night, with burning brands, he fought off the hungry pack. When he
+dozed despite himself, the whimpering and snarling of the dogs aroused
+him. Morning came, but for the first time the light of day failed to
+scatter the wolves. The man waited in vain for them to go. They
+remained in a circle about him and his fire, displaying an arrogance of
+possession that shook his courage born of the morning light.
+
+He made one desperate attempt to pull out on the trail. But the moment
+he left the protection of the fire, the boldest wolf leaped for him,
+but leaped short. He saved himself by springing back, the jaws snapping
+together a scant six inches from his thigh. The rest of the pack was
+now up and surging upon him, and a throwing of firebrands right and
+left was necessary to drive them back to a respectful distance.
+
+Even in the daylight he did not dare leave the fire to chop fresh wood.
+Twenty feet away towered a huge dead spruce. He spent half the day
+extending his campfire to the tree, at any moment a half dozen burning
+faggots ready at hand to fling at his enemies. Once at the tree, he
+studied the surrounding forest in order to fell the tree in the
+direction of the most firewood.
+
+The night was a repetition of the night before, save that the need for
+sleep was becoming overpowering. The snarling of his dogs was losing
+its efficacy. Besides, they were snarling all the time, and his
+benumbed and drowsy senses no longer took note of changing pitch and
+intensity. He awoke with a start. The she-wolf was less than a yard
+from him. Mechanically, at short range, without letting go of it, he
+thrust a brand full into her open and snarling mouth. She sprang away,
+yelling with pain, and while he took delight in the smell of burning
+flesh and hair, he watched her shaking her head and growling wrathfully
+a score of feet away.
+
+But this time, before he dozed again, he tied a burning pine-knot to
+his right hand. His eyes were closed but few minutes when the burn of
+the flame on his flesh awakened him. For several hours he adhered to
+this programme. Every time he was thus awakened he drove back the
+wolves with flying brands, replenished the fire, and rearranged the
+pine-knot on his hand. All worked well, but there came a time when he
+fastened the pine-knot insecurely. As his eyes closed it fell away from
+his hand.
+
+He dreamed. It seemed to him that he was in Fort McGurry. It was warm
+and comfortable, and he was playing cribbage with the Factor. Also, it
+seemed to him that the fort was besieged by wolves. They were howling
+at the very gates, and sometimes he and the Factor paused from the game
+to listen and laugh at the futile efforts of the wolves to get in. And
+then, so strange was the dream, there was a crash. The door was burst
+open. He could see the wolves flooding into the big living-room of the
+fort. They were leaping straight for him and the Factor. With the
+bursting open of the door, the noise of their howling had increased
+tremendously. This howling now bothered him. His dream was merging into
+something else—he knew not what; but through it all, following him,
+persisted the howling.
+
+And then he awoke to find the howling real. There was a great snarling
+and yelping. The wolves were rushing him. They were all about him and
+upon him. The teeth of one had closed upon his arm. Instinctively he
+leaped into the fire, and as he leaped, he felt the sharp slash of
+teeth that tore through the flesh of his leg. Then began a fire fight.
+His stout mittens temporarily protected his hands, and he scooped live
+coals into the air in all directions, until the campfire took on the
+semblance of a volcano.
+
+But it could not last long. His face was blistering in the heat, his
+eyebrows and lashes were singed off, and the heat was becoming
+unbearable to his feet. With a flaming brand in each hand, he sprang to
+the edge of the fire. The wolves had been driven back. On every side,
+wherever the live coals had fallen, the snow was sizzling, and every
+little while a retiring wolf, with wild leap and snort and snarl,
+announced that one such live coal had been stepped upon.
+
+Flinging his brands at the nearest of his enemies, the man thrust his
+smouldering mittens into the snow and stamped about to cool his feet.
+His two dogs were missing, and he well knew that they had served as a
+course in the protracted meal which had begun days before with Fatty,
+the last course of which would likely be himself in the days to follow.
+
+“You ain’t got me yet!” he cried, savagely shaking his fist at the
+hungry beasts; and at the sound of his voice the whole circle was
+agitated, there was a general snarl, and the she-wolf slid up close to
+him across the snow and watched him with hungry wistfulness.
+
+He set to work to carry out a new idea that had come to him. He
+extended the fire into a large circle. Inside this circle he crouched,
+his sleeping outfit under him as a protection against the melting snow.
+When he had thus disappeared within his shelter of flame, the whole
+pack came curiously to the rim of the fire to see what had become of
+him. Hitherto they had been denied access to the fire, and they now
+settled down in a close-drawn circle, like so many dogs, blinking and
+yawning and stretching their lean bodies in the unaccustomed warmth.
+Then the she-wolf sat down, pointed her nose at a star, and began to
+howl. One by one the wolves joined her, till the whole pack, on
+haunches, with noses pointed skyward, was howling its hunger cry.
+
+Dawn came, and daylight. The fire was burning low. The fuel had run
+out, and there was need to get more. The man attempted to step out of
+his circle of flame, but the wolves surged to meet him. Burning brands
+made them spring aside, but they no longer sprang back. In vain he
+strove to drive them back. As he gave up and stumbled inside his
+circle, a wolf leaped for him, missed, and landed with all four feet in
+the coals. It cried out with terror, at the same time snarling, and
+scrambled back to cool its paws in the snow.
+
+The man sat down on his blankets in a crouching position. His body
+leaned forward from the hips. His shoulders, relaxed and drooping, and
+his head on his knees advertised that he had given up the struggle. Now
+and again he raised his head to note the dying down of the fire. The
+circle of flame and coals was breaking into segments with openings in
+between. These openings grew in size, the segments diminished.
+
+“I guess you can come an’ get me any time,” he mumbled. “Anyway, I’m
+goin’ to sleep.”
+
+Once he awakened, and in an opening in the circle, directly in front of
+him, he saw the she-wolf gazing at him.
+
+Again he awakened, a little later, though it seemed hours to him. A
+mysterious change had taken place—so mysterious a change that he was
+shocked wider awake. Something had happened. He could not understand at
+first. Then he discovered it. The wolves were gone. Remained only the
+trampled snow to show how closely they had pressed him. Sleep was
+welling up and gripping him again, his head was sinking down upon his
+knees, when he roused with a sudden start.
+
+There were cries of men, and churn of sleds, the creaking of harnesses,
+and the eager whimpering of straining dogs. Four sleds pulled in from
+the river bed to the camp among the trees. Half a dozen men were about
+the man who crouched in the centre of the dying fire. They were shaking
+and prodding him into consciousness. He looked at them like a drunken
+man and maundered in strange, sleepy speech.
+
+“Red she-wolf. . . . Come in with the dogs at feedin’ time. . . . First
+she ate the dog-food. . . . Then she ate the dogs. . . . An’ after that
+she ate Bill. . . . ”
+
+“Where’s Lord Alfred?” one of the men bellowed in his ear, shaking him
+roughly.
+
+He shook his head slowly. “No, she didn’t eat him. . . . He’s roostin’
+in a tree at the last camp.”
+
+“Dead?” the man shouted.
+
+“An’ in a box,” Henry answered. He jerked his shoulder petulantly away
+from the grip of his questioner. “Say, you lemme alone. . . . I’m jes’
+plump tuckered out. . . . Goo’ night, everybody.”
+
+His eyes fluttered and went shut. His chin fell forward on his chest.
+And even as they eased him down upon the blankets his snores were
+rising on the frosty air.
+
+But there was another sound. Far and faint it was, in the remote
+distance, the cry of the hungry wolf-pack as it took the trail of other
+meat than the man it had just missed.
+
+
+
+
+PART II
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I
+THE BATTLE OF THE FANGS
+
+
+It was the she-wolf who had first caught the sound of men’s voices and
+the whining of the sled-dogs; and it was the she-wolf who was first to
+spring away from the cornered man in his circle of dying flame. The
+pack had been loath to forego the kill it had hunted down, and it
+lingered for several minutes, making sure of the sounds, and then it,
+too, sprang away on the trail made by the she-wolf.
+
+Running at the forefront of the pack was a large grey wolf—one of its
+several leaders. It was he who directed the pack’s course on the heels
+of the she-wolf. It was he who snarled warningly at the younger members
+of the pack or slashed at them with his fangs when they ambitiously
+tried to pass him. And it was he who increased the pace when he sighted
+the she-wolf, now trotting slowly across the snow.
+
+She dropped in alongside by him, as though it were her appointed
+position, and took the pace of the pack. He did not snarl at her, nor
+show his teeth, when any leap of hers chanced to put her in advance of
+him. On the contrary, he seemed kindly disposed toward her—too kindly
+to suit her, for he was prone to run near to her, and when he ran too
+near it was she who snarled and showed her teeth. Nor was she above
+slashing his shoulder sharply on occasion. At such times he betrayed no
+anger. He merely sprang to the side and ran stiffly ahead for several
+awkward leaps, in carriage and conduct resembling an abashed country
+swain.
+
+This was his one trouble in the running of the pack; but she had other
+troubles. On her other side ran a gaunt old wolf, grizzled and marked
+with the scars of many battles. He ran always on her right side. The
+fact that he had but one eye, and that the left eye, might account for
+this. He, also, was addicted to crowding her, to veering toward her
+till his scarred muzzle touched her body, or shoulder, or neck. As with
+the running mate on the left, she repelled these attentions with her
+teeth; but when both bestowed their attentions at the same time she was
+roughly jostled, being compelled, with quick snaps to either side, to
+drive both lovers away and at the same time to maintain her forward
+leap with the pack and see the way of her feet before her. At such
+times her running mates flashed their teeth and growled threateningly
+across at each other. They might have fought, but even wooing and its
+rivalry waited upon the more pressing hunger-need of the pack.
+
+After each repulse, when the old wolf sheered abruptly away from the
+sharp-toothed object of his desire, he shouldered against a young
+three-year-old that ran on his blind right side. This young wolf had
+attained his full size; and, considering the weak and famished
+condition of the pack, he possessed more than the average vigour and
+spirit. Nevertheless, he ran with his head even with the shoulder of
+his one-eyed elder. When he ventured to run abreast of the older wolf
+(which was seldom), a snarl and a snap sent him back even with the
+shoulder again. Sometimes, however, he dropped cautiously and slowly
+behind and edged in between the old leader and the she-wolf. This was
+doubly resented, even triply resented. When she snarled her
+displeasure, the old leader would whirl on the three-year-old.
+Sometimes she whirled with him. And sometimes the young leader on the
+left whirled, too.
+
+At such times, confronted by three sets of savage teeth, the young wolf
+stopped precipitately, throwing himself back on his haunches, with
+fore-legs stiff, mouth menacing, and mane bristling. This confusion in
+the front of the moving pack always caused confusion in the rear. The
+wolves behind collided with the young wolf and expressed their
+displeasure by administering sharp nips on his hind-legs and flanks. He
+was laying up trouble for himself, for lack of food and short tempers
+went together; but with the boundless faith of youth he persisted in
+repeating the manoeuvre every little while, though it never succeeded
+in gaining anything for him but discomfiture.
+
+Had there been food, love-making and fighting would have gone on apace,
+and the pack-formation would have been broken up. But the situation of
+the pack was desperate. It was lean with long-standing hunger. It ran
+below its ordinary speed. At the rear limped the weak members, the very
+young and the very old. At the front were the strongest. Yet all were
+more like skeletons than full-bodied wolves. Nevertheless, with the
+exception of the ones that limped, the movements of the animals were
+effortless and tireless. Their stringy muscles seemed founts of
+inexhaustible energy. Behind every steel-like contraction of a muscle,
+lay another steel-like contraction, and another, and another,
+apparently without end.
+
+They ran many miles that day. They ran through the night. And the next
+day found them still running. They were running over the surface of a
+world frozen and dead. No life stirred. They alone moved through the
+vast inertness. They alone were alive, and they sought for other things
+that were alive in order that they might devour them and continue to
+live.
+
+They crossed low divides and ranged a dozen small streams in a
+lower-lying country before their quest was rewarded. Then they came
+upon moose. It was a big bull they first found. Here was meat and life,
+and it was guarded by no mysterious fires nor flying missiles of flame.
+Splay hoofs and palmated antlers they knew, and they flung their
+customary patience and caution to the wind. It was a brief fight and
+fierce. The big bull was beset on every side. He ripped them open or
+split their skulls with shrewdly driven blows of his great hoofs. He
+crushed them and broke them on his large horns. He stamped them into
+the snow under him in the wallowing struggle. But he was foredoomed,
+and he went down with the she-wolf tearing savagely at his throat, and
+with other teeth fixed everywhere upon him, devouring him alive, before
+ever his last struggles ceased or his last damage had been wrought.
+
+There was food in plenty. The bull weighed over eight hundred
+pounds—fully twenty pounds of meat per mouth for the forty-odd wolves
+of the pack. But if they could fast prodigiously, they could feed
+prodigiously, and soon a few scattered bones were all that remained of
+the splendid live brute that had faced the pack a few hours before.
+
+There was now much resting and sleeping. With full stomachs, bickering
+and quarrelling began among the younger males, and this continued
+through the few days that followed before the breaking-up of the pack.
+The famine was over. The wolves were now in the country of game, and
+though they still hunted in pack, they hunted more cautiously, cutting
+out heavy cows or crippled old bulls from the small moose-herds they
+ran across.
+
+There came a day, in this land of plenty, when the wolf-pack split in
+half and went in different directions. The she-wolf, the young leader
+on her left, and the one-eyed elder on her right, led their half of the
+pack down to the Mackenzie River and across into the lake country to
+the east. Each day this remnant of the pack dwindled. Two by two, male
+and female, the wolves were deserting. Occasionally a solitary male was
+driven out by the sharp teeth of his rivals. In the end there remained
+only four: the she-wolf, the young leader, the one-eyed one, and the
+ambitious three-year-old.
+
+The she-wolf had by now developed a ferocious temper. Her three suitors
+all bore the marks of her teeth. Yet they never replied in kind, never
+defended themselves against her. They turned their shoulders to her
+most savage slashes, and with wagging tails and mincing steps strove to
+placate her wrath. But if they were all mildness toward her, they were
+all fierceness toward one another. The three-year-old grew too
+ambitious in his fierceness. He caught the one-eyed elder on his blind
+side and ripped his ear into ribbons. Though the grizzled old fellow
+could see only on one side, against the youth and vigour of the other
+he brought into play the wisdom of long years of experience. His lost
+eye and his scarred muzzle bore evidence to the nature of his
+experience. He had survived too many battles to be in doubt for a
+moment about what to do.
+
+The battle began fairly, but it did not end fairly. There was no
+telling what the outcome would have been, for the third wolf joined the
+elder, and together, old leader and young leader, they attacked the
+ambitious three-year-old and proceeded to destroy him. He was beset on
+either side by the merciless fangs of his erstwhile comrades. Forgotten
+were the days they had hunted together, the game they had pulled down,
+the famine they had suffered. That business was a thing of the past.
+The business of love was at hand—ever a sterner and crueller business
+than that of food-getting.
+
+And in the meanwhile, the she-wolf, the cause of it all, sat down
+contentedly on her haunches and watched. She was even pleased. This was
+her day—and it came not often—when manes bristled, and fang smote fang
+or ripped and tore the yielding flesh, all for the possession of her.
+
+And in the business of love the three-year-old, who had made this his
+first adventure upon it, yielded up his life. On either side of his
+body stood his two rivals. They were gazing at the she-wolf, who sat
+smiling in the snow. But the elder leader was wise, very wise, in love
+even as in battle. The younger leader turned his head to lick a wound
+on his shoulder. The curve of his neck was turned toward his rival.
+With his one eye the elder saw the opportunity. He darted in low and
+closed with his fangs. It was a long, ripping slash, and deep as well.
+His teeth, in passing, burst the wall of the great vein of the throat.
+Then he leaped clear.
+
+The young leader snarled terribly, but his snarl broke midmost into a
+tickling cough. Bleeding and coughing, already stricken, he sprang at
+the elder and fought while life faded from him, his legs going weak
+beneath him, the light of day dulling on his eyes, his blows and
+springs falling shorter and shorter.
+
+And all the while the she-wolf sat on her haunches and smiled. She was
+made glad in vague ways by the battle, for this was the love-making of
+the Wild, the sex-tragedy of the natural world that was tragedy only to
+those that died. To those that survived it was not tragedy, but
+realisation and achievement.
+
+When the young leader lay in the snow and moved no more, One Eye
+stalked over to the she-wolf. His carriage was one of mingled triumph
+and caution. He was plainly expectant of a rebuff, and he was just as
+plainly surprised when her teeth did not flash out at him in anger. For
+the first time she met him with a kindly manner. She sniffed noses with
+him, and even condescended to leap about and frisk and play with him in
+quite puppyish fashion. And he, for all his grey years and sage
+experience, behaved quite as puppyishly and even a little more
+foolishly.
+
+Forgotten already were the vanquished rivals and the love-tale
+red-written on the snow. Forgotten, save once, when old One Eye stopped
+for a moment to lick his stiffening wounds. Then it was that his lips
+half writhed into a snarl, and the hair of his neck and shoulders
+involuntarily bristled, while he half crouched for a spring, his claws
+spasmodically clutching into the snow-surface for firmer footing. But
+it was all forgotten the next moment, as he sprang after the she-wolf,
+who was coyly leading him a chase through the woods.
+
+After that they ran side by side, like good friends who have come to an
+understanding. The days passed by, and they kept together, hunting
+their meat and killing and eating it in common. After a time the
+she-wolf began to grow restless. She seemed to be searching for
+something that she could not find. The hollows under fallen trees
+seemed to attract her, and she spent much time nosing about among the
+larger snow-piled crevices in the rocks and in the caves of overhanging
+banks. Old One Eye was not interested at all, but he followed her
+good-naturedly in her quest, and when her investigations in particular
+places were unusually protracted, he would lie down and wait until she
+was ready to go on.
+
+They did not remain in one place, but travelled across country until
+they regained the Mackenzie River, down which they slowly went, leaving
+it often to hunt game along the small streams that entered it, but
+always returning to it again. Sometimes they chanced upon other wolves,
+usually in pairs; but there was no friendliness of intercourse
+displayed on either side, no gladness at meeting, no desire to return
+to the pack-formation. Several times they encountered solitary wolves.
+These were always males, and they were pressingly insistent on joining
+with One Eye and his mate. This he resented, and when she stood
+shoulder to shoulder with him, bristling and showing her teeth, the
+aspiring solitary ones would back off, turn-tail, and continue on their
+lonely way.
+
+One moonlight night, running through the quiet forest, One Eye suddenly
+halted. His muzzle went up, his tail stiffened, and his nostrils
+dilated as he scented the air. One foot also he held up, after the
+manner of a dog. He was not satisfied, and he continued to smell the
+air, striving to understand the message borne upon it to him. One
+careless sniff had satisfied his mate, and she trotted on to reassure
+him. Though he followed her, he was still dubious, and he could not
+forbear an occasional halt in order more carefully to study the
+warning.
+
+She crept out cautiously on the edge of a large open space in the midst
+of the trees. For some time she stood alone. Then One Eye, creeping and
+crawling, every sense on the alert, every hair radiating infinite
+suspicion, joined her. They stood side by side, watching and listening
+and smelling.
+
+To their ears came the sounds of dogs wrangling and scuffling, the
+guttural cries of men, the sharper voices of scolding women, and once
+the shrill and plaintive cry of a child. With the exception of the huge
+bulks of the skin-lodges, little could be seen save the flames of the
+fire, broken by the movements of intervening bodies, and the smoke
+rising slowly on the quiet air. But to their nostrils came the myriad
+smells of an Indian camp, carrying a story that was largely
+incomprehensible to One Eye, but every detail of which the she-wolf
+knew.
+
+She was strangely stirred, and sniffed and sniffed with an increasing
+delight. But old One Eye was doubtful. He betrayed his apprehension,
+and started tentatively to go. She turned and touched his neck with her
+muzzle in a reassuring way, then regarded the camp again. A new
+wistfulness was in her face, but it was not the wistfulness of hunger.
+She was thrilling to a desire that urged her to go forward, to be in
+closer to that fire, to be squabbling with the dogs, and to be avoiding
+and dodging the stumbling feet of men.
+
+One Eye moved impatiently beside her; her unrest came back upon her,
+and she knew again her pressing need to find the thing for which she
+searched. She turned and trotted back into the forest, to the great
+relief of One Eye, who trotted a little to the fore until they were
+well within the shelter of the trees.
+
+As they slid along, noiseless as shadows, in the moonlight, they came
+upon a run-way. Both noses went down to the footprints in the snow.
+These footprints were very fresh. One Eye ran ahead cautiously, his
+mate at his heels. The broad pads of their feet were spread wide and in
+contact with the snow were like velvet. One Eye caught sight of a dim
+movement of white in the midst of the white. His sliding gait had been
+deceptively swift, but it was as nothing to the speed at which he now
+ran. Before him was bounding the faint patch of white he had
+discovered.
+
+They were running along a narrow alley flanked on either side by a
+growth of young spruce. Through the trees the mouth of the alley could
+be seen, opening out on a moonlit glade. Old One Eye was rapidly
+overhauling the fleeing shape of white. Bound by bound he gained. Now
+he was upon it. One leap more and his teeth would be sinking into it.
+But that leap was never made. High in the air, and straight up, soared
+the shape of white, now a struggling snowshoe rabbit that leaped and
+bounded, executing a fantastic dance there above him in the air and
+never once returning to earth.
+
+One Eye sprang back with a snort of sudden fright, then shrank down to
+the snow and crouched, snarling threats at this thing of fear he did
+not understand. But the she-wolf coolly thrust past him. She poised for
+a moment, then sprang for the dancing rabbit. She, too, soared high,
+but not so high as the quarry, and her teeth clipped emptily together
+with a metallic snap. She made another leap, and another.
+
+Her mate had slowly relaxed from his crouch and was watching her. He
+now evinced displeasure at her repeated failures, and himself made a
+mighty spring upward. His teeth closed upon the rabbit, and he bore it
+back to earth with him. But at the same time there was a suspicious
+crackling movement beside him, and his astonished eye saw a young
+spruce sapling bending down above him to strike him. His jaws let go
+their grip, and he leaped backward to escape this strange danger, his
+lips drawn back from his fangs, his throat snarling, every hair
+bristling with rage and fright. And in that moment the sapling reared
+its slender length upright and the rabbit soared dancing in the air
+again.
+
+The she-wolf was angry. She sank her fangs into her mate’s shoulder in
+reproof; and he, frightened, unaware of what constituted this new
+onslaught, struck back ferociously and in still greater fright, ripping
+down the side of the she-wolf’s muzzle. For him to resent such reproof
+was equally unexpected to her, and she sprang upon him in snarling
+indignation. Then he discovered his mistake and tried to placate her.
+But she proceeded to punish him roundly, until he gave over all
+attempts at placation, and whirled in a circle, his head away from her,
+his shoulders receiving the punishment of her teeth.
+
+In the meantime the rabbit danced above them in the air. The she-wolf
+sat down in the snow, and old One Eye, now more in fear of his mate
+than of the mysterious sapling, again sprang for the rabbit. As he sank
+back with it between his teeth, he kept his eye on the sapling. As
+before, it followed him back to earth. He crouched down under the
+impending blow, his hair bristling, but his teeth still keeping tight
+hold of the rabbit. But the blow did not fall. The sapling remained
+bent above him. When he moved it moved, and he growled at it through
+his clenched jaws; when he remained still, it remained still, and he
+concluded it was safer to continue remaining still. Yet the warm blood
+of the rabbit tasted good in his mouth.
+
+It was his mate who relieved him from the quandary in which he found
+himself. She took the rabbit from him, and while the sapling swayed and
+teetered threateningly above her she calmly gnawed off the rabbit’s
+head. At once the sapling shot up, and after that gave no more trouble,
+remaining in the decorous and perpendicular position in which nature
+had intended it to grow. Then, between them, the she-wolf and One Eye
+devoured the game which the mysterious sapling had caught for them.
+
+There were other run-ways and alleys where rabbits were hanging in the
+air, and the wolf-pair prospected them all, the she-wolf leading the
+way, old One Eye following and observant, learning the method of
+robbing snares—a knowledge destined to stand him in good stead in the
+days to come.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II
+THE LAIR
+
+
+For two days the she-wolf and One Eye hung about the Indian camp. He
+was worried and apprehensive, yet the camp lured his mate and she was
+loath to depart. But when, one morning, the air was rent with the
+report of a rifle close at hand, and a bullet smashed against a tree
+trunk several inches from One Eye’s head, they hesitated no more, but
+went off on a long, swinging lope that put quick miles between them and
+the danger.
+
+They did not go far—a couple of days’ journey. The she-wolf’s need to
+find the thing for which she searched had now become imperative. She
+was getting very heavy, and could run but slowly. Once, in the pursuit
+of a rabbit, which she ordinarily would have caught with ease, she gave
+over and lay down and rested. One Eye came to her; but when he touched
+her neck gently with his muzzle she snapped at him with such quick
+fierceness that he tumbled over backward and cut a ridiculous figure in
+his effort to escape her teeth. Her temper was now shorter than ever;
+but he had become more patient than ever and more solicitous.
+
+And then she found the thing for which she sought. It was a few miles
+up a small stream that in the summer time flowed into the Mackenzie,
+but that then was frozen over and frozen down to its rocky bottom—a
+dead stream of solid white from source to mouth. The she-wolf was
+trotting wearily along, her mate well in advance, when she came upon
+the overhanging, high clay-bank. She turned aside and trotted over to
+it. The wear and tear of spring storms and melting snows had
+underwashed the bank and in one place had made a small cave out of a
+narrow fissure.
+
+She paused at the mouth of the cave and looked the wall over carefully.
+Then, on one side and the other, she ran along the base of the wall to
+where its abrupt bulk merged from the softer-lined landscape. Returning
+to the cave, she entered its narrow mouth. For a short three feet she
+was compelled to crouch, then the walls widened and rose higher in a
+little round chamber nearly six feet in diameter. The roof barely
+cleared her head. It was dry and cosey. She inspected it with
+painstaking care, while One Eye, who had returned, stood in the
+entrance and patiently watched her. She dropped her head, with her nose
+to the ground and directed toward a point near to her closely bunched
+feet, and around this point she circled several times; then, with a
+tired sigh that was almost a grunt, she curled her body in, relaxed her
+legs, and dropped down, her head toward the entrance. One Eye, with
+pointed, interested ears, laughed at her, and beyond, outlined against
+the white light, she could see the brush of his tail waving
+good-naturedly. Her own ears, with a snuggling movement, laid their
+sharp points backward and down against the head for a moment, while her
+mouth opened and her tongue lolled peaceably out, and in this way she
+expressed that she was pleased and satisfied.
+
+One Eye was hungry. Though he lay down in the entrance and slept, his
+sleep was fitful. He kept awaking and cocking his ears at the bright
+world without, where the April sun was blazing across the snow. When he
+dozed, upon his ears would steal the faint whispers of hidden trickles
+of running water, and he would rouse and listen intently. The sun had
+come back, and all the awakening Northland world was calling to him.
+Life was stirring. The feel of spring was in the air, the feel of
+growing life under the snow, of sap ascending in the trees, of buds
+bursting the shackles of the frost.
+
+He cast anxious glances at his mate, but she showed no desire to get
+up. He looked outside, and half a dozen snow-birds fluttered across his
+field of vision. He started to get up, then looked back to his mate
+again, and settled down and dozed. A shrill and minute singing stole
+upon his hearing. Once, and twice, he sleepily brushed his nose with
+his paw. Then he woke up. There, buzzing in the air at the tip of his
+nose, was a lone mosquito. It was a full-grown mosquito, one that had
+lain frozen in a dry log all winter and that had now been thawed out by
+the sun. He could resist the call of the world no longer. Besides, he
+was hungry.
+
+He crawled over to his mate and tried to persuade her to get up. But
+she only snarled at him, and he walked out alone into the bright
+sunshine to find the snow-surface soft under foot and the travelling
+difficult. He went up the frozen bed of the stream, where the snow,
+shaded by the trees, was yet hard and crystalline. He was gone eight
+hours, and he came back through the darkness hungrier than when he had
+started. He had found game, but he had not caught it. He had broken
+through the melting snow crust, and wallowed, while the snowshoe
+rabbits had skimmed along on top lightly as ever.
+
+He paused at the mouth of the cave with a sudden shock of suspicion.
+Faint, strange sounds came from within. They were sounds not made by
+his mate, and yet they were remotely familiar. He bellied cautiously
+inside and was met by a warning snarl from the she-wolf. This he
+received without perturbation, though he obeyed it by keeping his
+distance; but he remained interested in the other sounds—faint, muffled
+sobbings and slubberings.
+
+His mate warned him irritably away, and he curled up and slept in the
+entrance. When morning came and a dim light pervaded the lair, he again
+sought after the source of the remotely familiar sounds. There was a
+new note in his mate’s warning snarl. It was a jealous note, and he was
+very careful in keeping a respectful distance. Nevertheless, he made
+out, sheltering between her legs against the length of her body, five
+strange little bundles of life, very feeble, very helpless, making tiny
+whimpering noises, with eyes that did not open to the light. He was
+surprised. It was not the first time in his long and successful life
+that this thing had happened. It had happened many times, yet each time
+it was as fresh a surprise as ever to him.
+
+His mate looked at him anxiously. Every little while she emitted a low
+growl, and at times, when it seemed to her he approached too near, the
+growl shot up in her throat to a sharp snarl. Of her own experience she
+had no memory of the thing happening; but in her instinct, which was
+the experience of all the mothers of wolves, there lurked a memory of
+fathers that had eaten their new-born and helpless progeny. It
+manifested itself as a fear strong within her, that made her prevent
+One Eye from more closely inspecting the cubs he had fathered.
+
+But there was no danger. Old One Eye was feeling the urge of an
+impulse, that was, in turn, an instinct that had come down to him from
+all the fathers of wolves. He did not question it, nor puzzle over it.
+It was there, in the fibre of his being; and it was the most natural
+thing in the world that he should obey it by turning his back on his
+new-born family and by trotting out and away on the meat-trail whereby
+he lived.
+
+Five or six miles from the lair, the stream divided, its forks going
+off among the mountains at a right angle. Here, leading up the left
+fork, he came upon a fresh track. He smelled it and found it so recent
+that he crouched swiftly, and looked in the direction in which it
+disappeared. Then he turned deliberately and took the right fork. The
+footprint was much larger than the one his own feet made, and he knew
+that in the wake of such a trail there was little meat for him.
+
+Half a mile up the right fork, his quick ears caught the sound of
+gnawing teeth. He stalked the quarry and found it to be a porcupine,
+standing upright against a tree and trying his teeth on the bark. One
+Eye approached carefully but hopelessly. He knew the breed, though he
+had never met it so far north before; and never in his long life had
+porcupine served him for a meal. But he had long since learned that
+there was such a thing as Chance, or Opportunity, and he continued to
+draw near. There was never any telling what might happen, for with live
+things events were somehow always happening differently.
+
+The porcupine rolled itself into a ball, radiating long, sharp needles
+in all directions that defied attack. In his youth One Eye had once
+sniffed too near a similar, apparently inert ball of quills, and had
+the tail flick out suddenly in his face. One quill he had carried away
+in his muzzle, where it had remained for weeks, a rankling flame, until
+it finally worked out. So he lay down, in a comfortable crouching
+position, his nose fully a foot away, and out of the line of the tail.
+Thus he waited, keeping perfectly quiet. There was no telling.
+Something might happen. The porcupine might unroll. There might be
+opportunity for a deft and ripping thrust of paw into the tender,
+unguarded belly.
+
+But at the end of half an hour he arose, growled wrathfully at the
+motionless ball, and trotted on. He had waited too often and futilely
+in the past for porcupines to unroll, to waste any more time. He
+continued up the right fork. The day wore along, and nothing rewarded
+his hunt.
+
+The urge of his awakened instinct of fatherhood was strong upon him. He
+must find meat. In the afternoon he blundered upon a ptarmigan. He came
+out of a thicket and found himself face to face with the slow-witted
+bird. It was sitting on a log, not a foot beyond the end of his nose.
+Each saw the other. The bird made a startled rise, but he struck it
+with his paw, and smashed it down to earth, then pounced upon it, and
+caught it in his teeth as it scuttled across the snow trying to rise in
+the air again. As his teeth crunched through the tender flesh and
+fragile bones, he began naturally to eat. Then he remembered, and,
+turning on the back-track, started for home, carrying the ptarmigan in
+his mouth.
+
+A mile above the forks, running velvet-footed as was his custom, a
+gliding shadow that cautiously prospected each new vista of the trail,
+he came upon later imprints of the large tracks he had discovered in
+the early morning. As the track led his way, he followed, prepared to
+meet the maker of it at every turn of the stream.
+
+He slid his head around a corner of rock, where began an unusually
+large bend in the stream, and his quick eyes made out something that
+sent him crouching swiftly down. It was the maker of the track, a large
+female lynx. She was crouching as he had crouched once that day, in
+front of her the tight-rolled ball of quills. If he had been a gliding
+shadow before, he now became the ghost of such a shadow, as he crept
+and circled around, and came up well to leeward of the silent,
+motionless pair.
+
+He lay down in the snow, depositing the ptarmigan beside him, and with
+eyes peering through the needles of a low-growing spruce he watched the
+play of life before him—the waiting lynx and the waiting porcupine,
+each intent on life; and, such was the curiousness of the game, the way
+of life for one lay in the eating of the other, and the way of life for
+the other lay in being not eaten. While old One Eye, the wolf crouching
+in the covert, played his part, too, in the game, waiting for some
+strange freak of Chance, that might help him on the meat-trail which
+was his way of life.
+
+Half an hour passed, an hour; and nothing happened. The ball of quills
+might have been a stone for all it moved; the lynx might have been
+frozen to marble; and old One Eye might have been dead. Yet all three
+animals were keyed to a tenseness of living that was almost painful,
+and scarcely ever would it come to them to be more alive than they were
+then in their seeming petrifaction.
+
+One Eye moved slightly and peered forth with increased eagerness.
+Something was happening. The porcupine had at last decided that its
+enemy had gone away. Slowly, cautiously, it was unrolling its ball of
+impregnable armour. It was agitated by no tremor of anticipation.
+Slowly, slowly, the bristling ball straightened out and lengthened. One
+Eye watching, felt a sudden moistness in his mouth and a drooling of
+saliva, involuntary, excited by the living meat that was spreading
+itself like a repast before him.
+
+Not quite entirely had the porcupine unrolled when it discovered its
+enemy. In that instant the lynx struck. The blow was like a flash of
+light. The paw, with rigid claws curving like talons, shot under the
+tender belly and came back with a swift ripping movement. Had the
+porcupine been entirely unrolled, or had it not discovered its enemy a
+fraction of a second before the blow was struck, the paw would have
+escaped unscathed; but a side-flick of the tail sank sharp quills into
+it as it was withdrawn.
+
+Everything had happened at once—the blow, the counter-blow, the squeal
+of agony from the porcupine, the big cat’s squall of sudden hurt and
+astonishment. One Eye half arose in his excitement, his ears up, his
+tail straight out and quivering behind him. The lynx’s bad temper got
+the best of her. She sprang savagely at the thing that had hurt her.
+But the porcupine, squealing and grunting, with disrupted anatomy
+trying feebly to roll up into its ball-protection, flicked out its tail
+again, and again the big cat squalled with hurt and astonishment. Then
+she fell to backing away and sneezing, her nose bristling with quills
+like a monstrous pin-cushion. She brushed her nose with her paws,
+trying to dislodge the fiery darts, thrust it into the snow, and rubbed
+it against twigs and branches, and all the time leaping about, ahead,
+sidewise, up and down, in a frenzy of pain and fright.
+
+She sneezed continually, and her stub of a tail was doing its best
+toward lashing about by giving quick, violent jerks. She quit her
+antics, and quieted down for a long minute. One Eye watched. And even
+he could not repress a start and an involuntary bristling of hair along
+his back when she suddenly leaped, without warning, straight up in the
+air, at the same time emitting a long and most terrible squall. Then
+she sprang away, up the trail, squalling with every leap she made.
+
+It was not until her racket had faded away in the distance and died out
+that One Eye ventured forth. He walked as delicately as though all the
+snow were carpeted with porcupine quills, erect and ready to pierce the
+soft pads of his feet. The porcupine met his approach with a furious
+squealing and a clashing of its long teeth. It had managed to roll up
+in a ball again, but it was not quite the old compact ball; its muscles
+were too much torn for that. It had been ripped almost in half, and was
+still bleeding profusely.
+
+One Eye scooped out mouthfuls of the blood-soaked snow, and chewed and
+tasted and swallowed. This served as a relish, and his hunger increased
+mightily; but he was too old in the world to forget his caution. He
+waited. He lay down and waited, while the porcupine grated its teeth
+and uttered grunts and sobs and occasional sharp little squeals. In a
+little while, One Eye noticed that the quills were drooping and that a
+great quivering had set up. The quivering came to an end suddenly.
+There was a final defiant clash of the long teeth. Then all the quills
+drooped quite down, and the body relaxed and moved no more.
+
+With a nervous, shrinking paw, One Eye stretched out the porcupine to
+its full length and turned it over on its back. Nothing had happened.
+It was surely dead. He studied it intently for a moment, then took a
+careful grip with his teeth and started off down the stream, partly
+carrying, partly dragging the porcupine, with head turned to the side
+so as to avoid stepping on the prickly mass. He recollected something,
+dropped the burden, and trotted back to where he had left the
+ptarmigan. He did not hesitate a moment. He knew clearly what was to be
+done, and this he did by promptly eating the ptarmigan. Then he
+returned and took up his burden.
+
+When he dragged the result of his day’s hunt into the cave, the
+she-wolf inspected it, turned her muzzle to him, and lightly licked him
+on the neck. But the next instant she was warning him away from the
+cubs with a snarl that was less harsh than usual and that was more
+apologetic than menacing. Her instinctive fear of the father of her
+progeny was toning down. He was behaving as a wolf-father should, and
+manifesting no unholy desire to devour the young lives she had brought
+into the world.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III
+THE GREY CUB
+
+
+He was different from his brothers and sisters. Their hair already
+betrayed the reddish hue inherited from their mother, the she-wolf;
+while he alone, in this particular, took after his father. He was the
+one little grey cub of the litter. He had bred true to the straight
+wolf-stock—in fact, he had bred true to old One Eye himself,
+physically, with but a single exception, and that was he had two eyes
+to his father’s one.
+
+The grey cub’s eyes had not been open long, yet already he could see
+with steady clearness. And while his eyes were still closed, he had
+felt, tasted, and smelled. He knew his two brothers and his two sisters
+very well. He had begun to romp with them in a feeble, awkward way, and
+even to squabble, his little throat vibrating with a queer rasping
+noise (the forerunner of the growl), as he worked himself into a
+passion. And long before his eyes had opened he had learned by touch,
+taste, and smell to know his mother—a fount of warmth and liquid food
+and tenderness. She possessed a gentle, caressing tongue that soothed
+him when it passed over his soft little body, and that impelled him to
+snuggle close against her and to doze off to sleep.
+
+Most of the first month of his life had been passed thus in sleeping;
+but now he could see quite well, and he stayed awake for longer periods
+of time, and he was coming to learn his world quite well. His world was
+gloomy; but he did not know that, for he knew no other world. It was
+dim-lighted; but his eyes had never had to adjust themselves to any
+other light. His world was very small. Its limits were the walls of the
+lair; but as he had no knowledge of the wide world outside, he was
+never oppressed by the narrow confines of his existence.
+
+But he had early discovered that one wall of his world was different
+from the rest. This was the mouth of the cave and the source of light.
+He had discovered that it was different from the other walls long
+before he had any thoughts of his own, any conscious volitions. It had
+been an irresistible attraction before ever his eyes opened and looked
+upon it. The light from it had beat upon his sealed lids, and the eyes
+and the optic nerves had pulsated to little, sparklike flashes,
+warm-coloured and strangely pleasing. The life of his body, and of
+every fibre of his body, the life that was the very substance of his
+body and that was apart from his own personal life, had yearned toward
+this light and urged his body toward it in the same way that the
+cunning chemistry of a plant urges it toward the sun.
+
+Always, in the beginning, before his conscious life dawned, he had
+crawled toward the mouth of the cave. And in this his brothers and
+sisters were one with him. Never, in that period, did any of them crawl
+toward the dark corners of the back-wall. The light drew them as if
+they were plants; the chemistry of the life that composed them demanded
+the light as a necessity of being; and their little puppet-bodies
+crawled blindly and chemically, like the tendrils of a vine. Later on,
+when each developed individuality and became personally conscious of
+impulsions and desires, the attraction of the light increased. They
+were always crawling and sprawling toward it, and being driven back
+from it by their mother.
+
+It was in this way that the grey cub learned other attributes of his
+mother than the soft, soothing, tongue. In his insistent crawling
+toward the light, he discovered in her a nose that with a sharp nudge
+administered rebuke, and later, a paw, that crushed him down and rolled
+him over and over with swift, calculating stroke. Thus he learned hurt;
+and on top of it he learned to avoid hurt, first, by not incurring the
+risk of it; and second, when he had incurred the risk, by dodging and
+by retreating. These were conscious actions, and were the results of
+his first generalisations upon the world. Before that he had recoiled
+automatically from hurt, as he had crawled automatically toward the
+light. After that he recoiled from hurt because he _knew_ that it was
+hurt.
+
+He was a fierce little cub. So were his brothers and sisters. It was to
+be expected. He was a carnivorous animal. He came of a breed of
+meat-killers and meat-eaters. His father and mother lived wholly upon
+meat. The milk he had sucked with his first flickering life, was milk
+transformed directly from meat, and now, at a month old, when his eyes
+had been open for but a week, he was beginning himself to eat meat—meat
+half-digested by the she-wolf and disgorged for the five growing cubs
+that already made too great demand upon her breast.
+
+But he was, further, the fiercest of the litter. He could make a louder
+rasping growl than any of them. His tiny rages were much more terrible
+than theirs. It was he that first learned the trick of rolling a
+fellow-cub over with a cunning paw-stroke. And it was he that first
+gripped another cub by the ear and pulled and tugged and growled
+through jaws tight-clenched. And certainly it was he that caused the
+mother the most trouble in keeping her litter from the mouth of the
+cave.
+
+The fascination of the light for the grey cub increased from day to
+day. He was perpetually departing on yard-long adventures toward the
+cave’s entrance, and as perpetually being driven back. Only he did not
+know it for an entrance. He did not know anything about
+entrances—passages whereby one goes from one place to another place. He
+did not know any other place, much less of a way to get there. So to
+him the entrance of the cave was a wall—a wall of light. As the sun was
+to the outside dweller, this wall was to him the sun of his world. It
+attracted him as a candle attracts a moth. He was always striving to
+attain it. The life that was so swiftly expanding within him, urged him
+continually toward the wall of light. The life that was within him knew
+that it was the one way out, the way he was predestined to tread. But
+he himself did not know anything about it. He did not know there was
+any outside at all.
+
+There was one strange thing about this wall of light. His father (he
+had already come to recognise his father as the one other dweller in
+the world, a creature like his mother, who slept near the light and was
+a bringer of meat)—his father had a way of walking right into the white
+far wall and disappearing. The grey cub could not understand this.
+Though never permitted by his mother to approach that wall, he had
+approached the other walls, and encountered hard obstruction on the end
+of his tender nose. This hurt. And after several such adventures, he
+left the walls alone. Without thinking about it, he accepted this
+disappearing into the wall as a peculiarity of his father, as milk and
+half-digested meat were peculiarities of his mother.
+
+In fact, the grey cub was not given to thinking—at least, to the kind
+of thinking customary of men. His brain worked in dim ways. Yet his
+conclusions were as sharp and distinct as those achieved by men. He had
+a method of accepting things, without questioning the why and
+wherefore. In reality, this was the act of classification. He was never
+disturbed over why a thing happened. How it happened was sufficient for
+him. Thus, when he had bumped his nose on the back-wall a few times, he
+accepted that he would not disappear into walls. In the same way he
+accepted that his father could disappear into walls. But he was not in
+the least disturbed by desire to find out the reason for the difference
+between his father and himself. Logic and physics were no part of his
+mental make-up.
+
+Like most creatures of the Wild, he early experienced famine. There
+came a time when not only did the meat-supply cease, but the milk no
+longer came from his mother’s breast. At first, the cubs whimpered and
+cried, but for the most part they slept. It was not long before they
+were reduced to a coma of hunger. There were no more spats and
+squabbles, no more tiny rages nor attempts at growling; while the
+adventures toward the far white wall ceased altogether. The cubs slept,
+while the life that was in them flickered and died down.
+
+One Eye was desperate. He ranged far and wide, and slept but little in
+the lair that had now become cheerless and miserable. The she-wolf,
+too, left her litter and went out in search of meat. In the first days
+after the birth of the cubs, One Eye had journeyed several times back
+to the Indian camp and robbed the rabbit snares; but, with the melting
+of the snow and the opening of the streams, the Indian camp had moved
+away, and that source of supply was closed to him.
+
+When the grey cub came back to life and again took interest in the far
+white wall, he found that the population of his world had been reduced.
+Only one sister remained to him. The rest were gone. As he grew
+stronger, he found himself compelled to play alone, for the sister no
+longer lifted her head nor moved about. His little body rounded out
+with the meat he now ate; but the food had come too late for her. She
+slept continuously, a tiny skeleton flung round with skin in which the
+flame flickered lower and lower and at last went out.
+
+Then there came a time when the grey cub no longer saw his father
+appearing and disappearing in the wall nor lying down asleep in the
+entrance. This had happened at the end of a second and less severe
+famine. The she-wolf knew why One Eye never came back, but there was no
+way by which she could tell what she had seen to the grey cub. Hunting
+herself for meat, up the left fork of the stream where lived the lynx,
+she had followed a day-old trail of One Eye. And she had found him, or
+what remained of him, at the end of the trail. There were many signs of
+the battle that had been fought, and of the lynx’s withdrawal to her
+lair after having won the victory. Before she went away, the she-wolf
+had found this lair, but the signs told her that the lynx was inside,
+and she had not dared to venture in.
+
+After that, the she-wolf in her hunting avoided the left fork. For she
+knew that in the lynx’s lair was a litter of kittens, and she knew the
+lynx for a fierce, bad-tempered creature and a terrible fighter. It was
+all very well for half a dozen wolves to drive a lynx, spitting and
+bristling, up a tree; but it was quite a different matter for a lone
+wolf to encounter a lynx—especially when the lynx was known to have a
+litter of hungry kittens at her back.
+
+But the Wild is the Wild, and motherhood is motherhood, at all times
+fiercely protective whether in the Wild or out of it; and the time was
+to come when the she-wolf, for her grey cub’s sake, would venture the
+left fork, and the lair in the rocks, and the lynx’s wrath.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV
+THE WALL OF THE WORLD
+
+
+By the time his mother began leaving the cave on hunting expeditions,
+the cub had learned well the law that forbade his approaching the
+entrance. Not only had this law been forcibly and many times impressed
+on him by his mother’s nose and paw, but in him the instinct of fear
+was developing. Never, in his brief cave-life, had he encountered
+anything of which to be afraid. Yet fear was in him. It had come down
+to him from a remote ancestry through a thousand thousand lives. It was
+a heritage he had received directly from One Eye and the she-wolf; but
+to them, in turn, it had been passed down through all the generations
+of wolves that had gone before. Fear!—that legacy of the Wild which no
+animal may escape nor exchange for pottage.
+
+So the grey cub knew fear, though he knew not the stuff of which fear
+was made. Possibly he accepted it as one of the restrictions of life.
+For he had already learned that there were such restrictions. Hunger he
+had known; and when he could not appease his hunger he had felt
+restriction. The hard obstruction of the cave-wall, the sharp nudge of
+his mother’s nose, the smashing stroke of her paw, the hunger
+unappeased of several famines, had borne in upon him that all was not
+freedom in the world, that to life there was limitations and
+restraints. These limitations and restraints were laws. To be obedient
+to them was to escape hurt and make for happiness.
+
+He did not reason the question out in this man fashion. He merely
+classified the things that hurt and the things that did not hurt. And
+after such classification he avoided the things that hurt, the
+restrictions and restraints, in order to enjoy the satisfactions and
+the remunerations of life.
+
+Thus it was that in obedience to the law laid down by his mother, and
+in obedience to the law of that unknown and nameless thing, fear, he
+kept away from the mouth of the cave. It remained to him a white wall
+of light. When his mother was absent, he slept most of the time, while
+during the intervals that he was awake he kept very quiet, suppressing
+the whimpering cries that tickled in his throat and strove for noise.
+
+Once, lying awake, he heard a strange sound in the white wall. He did
+not know that it was a wolverine, standing outside, all a-trembling
+with its own daring, and cautiously scenting out the contents of the
+cave. The cub knew only that the sniff was strange, a something
+unclassified, therefore unknown and terrible—for the unknown was one of
+the chief elements that went into the making of fear.
+
+The hair bristled upon the grey cub’s back, but it bristled silently.
+How was he to know that this thing that sniffed was a thing at which to
+bristle? It was not born of any knowledge of his, yet it was the
+visible expression of the fear that was in him, and for which, in his
+own life, there was no accounting. But fear was accompanied by another
+instinct—that of concealment. The cub was in a frenzy of terror, yet he
+lay without movement or sound, frozen, petrified into immobility, to
+all appearances dead. His mother, coming home, growled as she smelt the
+wolverine’s track, and bounded into the cave and licked and nozzled him
+with undue vehemence of affection. And the cub felt that somehow he had
+escaped a great hurt.
+
+But there were other forces at work in the cub, the greatest of which
+was growth. Instinct and law demanded of him obedience. But growth
+demanded disobedience. His mother and fear impelled him to keep away
+from the white wall. Growth is life, and life is for ever destined to
+make for light. So there was no damming up the tide of life that was
+rising within him—rising with every mouthful of meat he swallowed, with
+every breath he drew. In the end, one day, fear and obedience were
+swept away by the rush of life, and the cub straddled and sprawled
+toward the entrance.
+
+Unlike any other wall with which he had had experience, this wall
+seemed to recede from him as he approached. No hard surface collided
+with the tender little nose he thrust out tentatively before him. The
+substance of the wall seemed as permeable and yielding as light. And as
+condition, in his eyes, had the seeming of form, so he entered into
+what had been wall to him and bathed in the substance that composed it.
+
+It was bewildering. He was sprawling through solidity. And ever the
+light grew brighter. Fear urged him to go back, but growth drove him
+on. Suddenly he found himself at the mouth of the cave. The wall,
+inside which he had thought himself, as suddenly leaped back before him
+to an immeasurable distance. The light had become painfully bright. He
+was dazzled by it. Likewise he was made dizzy by this abrupt and
+tremendous extension of space. Automatically, his eyes were adjusting
+themselves to the brightness, focusing themselves to meet the increased
+distance of objects. At first, the wall had leaped beyond his vision.
+He now saw it again; but it had taken upon itself a remarkable
+remoteness. Also, its appearance had changed. It was now a variegated
+wall, composed of the trees that fringed the stream, the opposing
+mountain that towered above the trees, and the sky that out-towered the
+mountain.
+
+A great fear came upon him. This was more of the terrible unknown. He
+crouched down on the lip of the cave and gazed out on the world. He was
+very much afraid. Because it was unknown, it was hostile to him.
+Therefore the hair stood up on end along his back and his lips wrinkled
+weakly in an attempt at a ferocious and intimidating snarl. Out of his
+puniness and fright he challenged and menaced the whole wide world.
+
+Nothing happened. He continued to gaze, and in his interest he forgot
+to snarl. Also, he forgot to be afraid. For the time, fear had been
+routed by growth, while growth had assumed the guise of curiosity. He
+began to notice near objects—an open portion of the stream that flashed
+in the sun, the blasted pine-tree that stood at the base of the slope,
+and the slope itself, that ran right up to him and ceased two feet
+beneath the lip of the cave on which he crouched.
+
+Now the grey cub had lived all his days on a level floor. He had never
+experienced the hurt of a fall. He did not know what a fall was. So he
+stepped boldly out upon the air. His hind-legs still rested on the
+cave-lip, so he fell forward head downward. The earth struck him a
+harsh blow on the nose that made him yelp. Then he began rolling down
+the slope, over and over. He was in a panic of terror. The unknown had
+caught him at last. It had gripped savagely hold of him and was about
+to wreak upon him some terrific hurt. Growth was now routed by fear,
+and he ki-yi’d like any frightened puppy.
+
+The unknown bore him on he knew not to what frightful hurt, and he
+yelped and ki-yi’d unceasingly. This was a different proposition from
+crouching in frozen fear while the unknown lurked just alongside. Now
+the unknown had caught tight hold of him. Silence would do no good.
+Besides, it was not fear, but terror, that convulsed him.
+
+But the slope grew more gradual, and its base was grass-covered. Here
+the cub lost momentum. When at last he came to a stop, he gave one last
+agonised yell and then a long, whimpering wail. Also, and quite as a
+matter of course, as though in his life he had already made a thousand
+toilets, he proceeded to lick away the dry clay that soiled him.
+
+After that he sat up and gazed about him, as might the first man of the
+earth who landed upon Mars. The cub had broken through the wall of the
+world, the unknown had let go its hold of him, and here he was without
+hurt. But the first man on Mars would have experienced less
+unfamiliarity than did he. Without any antecedent knowledge, without
+any warning whatever that such existed, he found himself an explorer in
+a totally new world.
+
+Now that the terrible unknown had let go of him, he forgot that the
+unknown had any terrors. He was aware only of curiosity in all the
+things about him. He inspected the grass beneath him, the moss-berry
+plant just beyond, and the dead trunk of the blasted pine that stood on
+the edge of an open space among the trees. A squirrel, running around
+the base of the trunk, came full upon him, and gave him a great fright.
+He cowered down and snarled. But the squirrel was as badly scared. It
+ran up the tree, and from a point of safety chattered back savagely.
+
+This helped the cub’s courage, and though the woodpecker he next
+encountered gave him a start, he proceeded confidently on his way. Such
+was his confidence, that when a moose-bird impudently hopped up to him,
+he reached out at it with a playful paw. The result was a sharp peck on
+the end of his nose that made him cower down and ki-yi. The noise he
+made was too much for the moose-bird, who sought safety in flight.
+
+But the cub was learning. His misty little mind had already made an
+unconscious classification. There were live things and things not
+alive. Also, he must watch out for the live things. The things not
+alive remained always in one place, but the live things moved about,
+and there was no telling what they might do. The thing to expect of
+them was the unexpected, and for this he must be prepared.
+
+He travelled very clumsily. He ran into sticks and things. A twig that
+he thought a long way off, would the next instant hit him on the nose
+or rake along his ribs. There were inequalities of surface. Sometimes
+he overstepped and stubbed his nose. Quite as often he understepped and
+stubbed his feet. Then there were the pebbles and stones that turned
+under him when he trod upon them; and from them he came to know that
+the things not alive were not all in the same state of stable
+equilibrium as was his cave—also, that small things not alive were more
+liable than large things to fall down or turn over. But with every
+mishap he was learning. The longer he walked, the better he walked. He
+was adjusting himself. He was learning to calculate his own muscular
+movements, to know his physical limitations, to measure distances
+between objects, and between objects and himself.
+
+His was the luck of the beginner. Born to be a hunter of meat (though
+he did not know it), he blundered upon meat just outside his own
+cave-door on his first foray into the world. It was by sheer blundering
+that he chanced upon the shrewdly hidden ptarmigan nest. He fell into
+it. He had essayed to walk along the trunk of a fallen pine. The rotten
+bark gave way under his feet, and with a despairing yelp he pitched
+down the rounded crescent, smashed through the leafage and stalks of a
+small bush, and in the heart of the bush, on the ground, fetched up in
+the midst of seven ptarmigan chicks.
+
+They made noises, and at first he was frightened at them. Then he
+perceived that they were very little, and he became bolder. They moved.
+He placed his paw on one, and its movements were accelerated. This was
+a source of enjoyment to him. He smelled it. He picked it up in his
+mouth. It struggled and tickled his tongue. At the same time he was
+made aware of a sensation of hunger. His jaws closed together. There
+was a crunching of fragile bones, and warm blood ran in his mouth. The
+taste of it was good. This was meat, the same as his mother gave him,
+only it was alive between his teeth and therefore better. So he ate the
+ptarmigan. Nor did he stop till he had devoured the whole brood. Then
+he licked his chops in quite the same way his mother did, and began to
+crawl out of the bush.
+
+He encountered a feathered whirlwind. He was confused and blinded by
+the rush of it and the beat of angry wings. He hid his head between his
+paws and yelped. The blows increased. The mother ptarmigan was in a
+fury. Then he became angry. He rose up, snarling, striking out with his
+paws. He sank his tiny teeth into one of the wings and pulled and
+tugged sturdily. The ptarmigan struggled against him, showering blows
+upon him with her free wing. It was his first battle. He was elated. He
+forgot all about the unknown. He no longer was afraid of anything. He
+was fighting, tearing at a live thing that was striking at him. Also,
+this live thing was meat. The lust to kill was on him. He had just
+destroyed little live things. He would now destroy a big live thing. He
+was too busy and happy to know that he was happy. He was thrilling and
+exulting in ways new to him and greater to him than any he had known
+before.
+
+He held on to the wing and growled between his tight-clenched teeth.
+The ptarmigan dragged him out of the bush. When she turned and tried to
+drag him back into the bush’s shelter, he pulled her away from it and
+on into the open. And all the time she was making outcry and striking
+with her free wing, while feathers were flying like a snow-fall. The
+pitch to which he was aroused was tremendous. All the fighting blood of
+his breed was up in him and surging through him. This was living,
+though he did not know it. He was realising his own meaning in the
+world; he was doing that for which he was made—killing meat and
+battling to kill it. He was justifying his existence, than which life
+can do no greater; for life achieves its summit when it does to the
+uttermost that which it was equipped to do.
+
+After a time, the ptarmigan ceased her struggling. He still held her by
+the wing, and they lay on the ground and looked at each other. He tried
+to growl threateningly, ferociously. She pecked on his nose, which by
+now, what of previous adventures was sore. He winced but held on. She
+pecked him again and again. From wincing he went to whimpering. He
+tried to back away from her, oblivious to the fact that by his hold on
+her he dragged her after him. A rain of pecks fell on his ill-used
+nose. The flood of fight ebbed down in him, and, releasing his prey, he
+turned tail and scampered on across the open in inglorious retreat.
+
+He lay down to rest on the other side of the open, near the edge of the
+bushes, his tongue lolling out, his chest heaving and panting, his nose
+still hurting him and causing him to continue his whimper. But as he
+lay there, suddenly there came to him a feeling as of something
+terrible impending. The unknown with all its terrors rushed upon him,
+and he shrank back instinctively into the shelter of the bush. As he
+did so, a draught of air fanned him, and a large, winged body swept
+ominously and silently past. A hawk, driving down out of the blue, had
+barely missed him.
+
+While he lay in the bush, recovering from his fright and peering
+fearfully out, the mother-ptarmigan on the other side of the open space
+fluttered out of the ravaged nest. It was because of her loss that she
+paid no attention to the winged bolt of the sky. But the cub saw, and
+it was a warning and a lesson to him—the swift downward swoop of the
+hawk, the short skim of its body just above the ground, the strike of
+its talons in the body of the ptarmigan, the ptarmigan’s squawk of
+agony and fright, and the hawk’s rush upward into the blue, carrying
+the ptarmigan away with it.
+
+It was a long time before the cub left its shelter. He had learned
+much. Live things were meat. They were good to eat. Also, live things
+when they were large enough, could give hurt. It was better to eat
+small live things like ptarmigan chicks, and to let alone large live
+things like ptarmigan hens. Nevertheless he felt a little prick of
+ambition, a sneaking desire to have another battle with that ptarmigan
+hen—only the hawk had carried her away. May be there were other
+ptarmigan hens. He would go and see.
+
+He came down a shelving bank to the stream. He had never seen water
+before. The footing looked good. There were no inequalities of surface.
+He stepped boldly out on it; and went down, crying with fear, into the
+embrace of the unknown. It was cold, and he gasped, breathing quickly.
+The water rushed into his lungs instead of the air that had always
+accompanied his act of breathing. The suffocation he experienced was
+like the pang of death. To him it signified death. He had no conscious
+knowledge of death, but like every animal of the Wild, he possessed the
+instinct of death. To him it stood as the greatest of hurts. It was the
+very essence of the unknown; it was the sum of the terrors of the
+unknown, the one culminating and unthinkable catastrophe that could
+happen to him, about which he knew nothing and about which he feared
+everything.
+
+He came to the surface, and the sweet air rushed into his open mouth.
+He did not go down again. Quite as though it had been a
+long-established custom of his he struck out with all his legs and
+began to swim. The near bank was a yard away; but he had come up with
+his back to it, and the first thing his eyes rested upon was the
+opposite bank, toward which he immediately began to swim. The stream
+was a small one, but in the pool it widened out to a score of feet.
+
+Midway in the passage, the current picked up the cub and swept him
+downstream. He was caught in the miniature rapid at the bottom of the
+pool. Here was little chance for swimming. The quiet water had become
+suddenly angry. Sometimes he was under, sometimes on top. At all times
+he was in violent motion, now being turned over or around, and again,
+being smashed against a rock. And with every rock he struck, he yelped.
+His progress was a series of yelps, from which might have been adduced
+the number of rocks he encountered.
+
+Below the rapid was a second pool, and here, captured by the eddy, he
+was gently borne to the bank, and as gently deposited on a bed of
+gravel. He crawled frantically clear of the water and lay down. He had
+learned some more about the world. Water was not alive. Yet it moved.
+Also, it looked as solid as the earth, but was without any solidity at
+all. His conclusion was that things were not always what they appeared
+to be. The cub’s fear of the unknown was an inherited distrust, and it
+had now been strengthened by experience. Thenceforth, in the nature of
+things, he would possess an abiding distrust of appearances. He would
+have to learn the reality of a thing before he could put his faith into
+it.
+
+One other adventure was destined for him that day. He had recollected
+that there was such a thing in the world as his mother. And then there
+came to him a feeling that he wanted her more than all the rest of the
+things in the world. Not only was his body tired with the adventures it
+had undergone, but his little brain was equally tired. In all the days
+he had lived it had not worked so hard as on this one day. Furthermore,
+he was sleepy. So he started out to look for the cave and his mother,
+feeling at the same time an overwhelming rush of loneliness and
+helplessness.
+
+He was sprawling along between some bushes, when he heard a sharp
+intimidating cry. There was a flash of yellow before his eyes. He saw a
+weasel leaping swiftly away from him. It was a small live thing, and he
+had no fear. Then, before him, at his feet, he saw an extremely small
+live thing, only several inches long, a young weasel, that, like
+himself, had disobediently gone out adventuring. It tried to retreat
+before him. He turned it over with his paw. It made a queer, grating
+noise. The next moment the flash of yellow reappeared before his eyes.
+He heard again the intimidating cry, and at the same instant received a
+sharp blow on the side of the neck and felt the sharp teeth of the
+mother-weasel cut into his flesh.
+
+While he yelped and ki-yi’d and scrambled backward, he saw the
+mother-weasel leap upon her young one and disappear with it into the
+neighbouring thicket. The cut of her teeth in his neck still hurt, but
+his feelings were hurt more grievously, and he sat down and weakly
+whimpered. This mother-weasel was so small and so savage. He was yet to
+learn that for size and weight the weasel was the most ferocious,
+vindictive, and terrible of all the killers of the Wild. But a portion
+of this knowledge was quickly to be his.
+
+He was still whimpering when the mother-weasel reappeared. She did not
+rush him, now that her young one was safe. She approached more
+cautiously, and the cub had full opportunity to observe her lean,
+snakelike body, and her head, erect, eager, and snake-like itself. Her
+sharp, menacing cry sent the hair bristling along his back, and he
+snarled warningly at her. She came closer and closer. There was a leap,
+swifter than his unpractised sight, and the lean, yellow body
+disappeared for a moment out of the field of his vision. The next
+moment she was at his throat, her teeth buried in his hair and flesh.
+
+At first he snarled and tried to fight; but he was very young, and this
+was only his first day in the world, and his snarl became a whimper,
+his fight a struggle to escape. The weasel never relaxed her hold. She
+hung on, striving to press down with her teeth to the great vein where
+his life-blood bubbled. The weasel was a drinker of blood, and it was
+ever her preference to drink from the throat of life itself.
+
+The grey cub would have died, and there would have been no story to
+write about him, had not the she-wolf come bounding through the bushes.
+The weasel let go the cub and flashed at the she-wolf’s throat,
+missing, but getting a hold on the jaw instead. The she-wolf flirted
+her head like the snap of a whip, breaking the weasel’s hold and
+flinging it high in the air. And, still in the air, the she-wolf’s jaws
+closed on the lean, yellow body, and the weasel knew death between the
+crunching teeth.
+
+The cub experienced another access of affection on the part of his
+mother. Her joy at finding him seemed even greater than his joy at
+being found. She nozzled him and caressed him and licked the cuts made
+in him by the weasel’s teeth. Then, between them, mother and cub, they
+ate the blood-drinker, and after that went back to the cave and slept.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V
+THE LAW OF MEAT
+
+
+The cub’s development was rapid. He rested for two days, and then
+ventured forth from the cave again. It was on this adventure that he
+found the young weasel whose mother he had helped eat, and he saw to it
+that the young weasel went the way of its mother. But on this trip he
+did not get lost. When he grew tired, he found his way back to the cave
+and slept. And every day thereafter found him out and ranging a wider
+area.
+
+He began to get accurate measurement of his strength and his weakness,
+and to know when to be bold and when to be cautious. He found it
+expedient to be cautious all the time, except for the rare moments,
+when, assured of his own intrepidity, he abandoned himself to petty
+rages and lusts.
+
+He was always a little demon of fury when he chanced upon a stray
+ptarmigan. Never did he fail to respond savagely to the chatter of the
+squirrel he had first met on the blasted pine. While the sight of a
+moose-bird almost invariably put him into the wildest of rages; for he
+never forgot the peck on the nose he had received from the first of
+that ilk he encountered.
+
+But there were times when even a moose-bird failed to affect him, and
+those were times when he felt himself to be in danger from some other
+prowling meat hunter. He never forgot the hawk, and its moving shadow
+always sent him crouching into the nearest thicket. He no longer
+sprawled and straddled, and already he was developing the gait of his
+mother, slinking and furtive, apparently without exertion, yet sliding
+along with a swiftness that was as deceptive as it was imperceptible.
+
+In the matter of meat, his luck had been all in the beginning. The
+seven ptarmigan chicks and the baby weasel represented the sum of his
+killings. His desire to kill strengthened with the days, and he
+cherished hungry ambitions for the squirrel that chattered so volubly
+and always informed all wild creatures that the wolf-cub was
+approaching. But as birds flew in the air, squirrels could climb trees,
+and the cub could only try to crawl unobserved upon the squirrel when
+it was on the ground.
+
+The cub entertained a great respect for his mother. She could get meat,
+and she never failed to bring him his share. Further, she was unafraid
+of things. It did not occur to him that this fearlessness was founded
+upon experience and knowledge. Its effect on him was that of an
+impression of power. His mother represented power; and as he grew older
+he felt this power in the sharper admonishment of her paw; while the
+reproving nudge of her nose gave place to the slash of her fangs. For
+this, likewise, he respected his mother. She compelled obedience from
+him, and the older he grew the shorter grew her temper.
+
+Famine came again, and the cub with clearer consciousness knew once
+more the bite of hunger. The she-wolf ran herself thin in the quest for
+meat. She rarely slept any more in the cave, spending most of her time
+on the meat-trail, and spending it vainly. This famine was not a long
+one, but it was severe while it lasted. The cub found no more milk in
+his mother’s breast, nor did he get one mouthful of meat for himself.
+
+Before, he had hunted in play, for the sheer joyousness of it; now he
+hunted in deadly earnestness, and found nothing. Yet the failure of it
+accelerated his development. He studied the habits of the squirrel with
+greater carefulness, and strove with greater craft to steal upon it and
+surprise it. He studied the wood-mice and tried to dig them out of
+their burrows; and he learned much about the ways of moose-birds and
+woodpeckers. And there came a day when the hawk’s shadow did not drive
+him crouching into the bushes. He had grown stronger and wiser, and
+more confident. Also, he was desperate. So he sat on his haunches,
+conspicuously in an open space, and challenged the hawk down out of the
+sky. For he knew that there, floating in the blue above him, was meat,
+the meat his stomach yearned after so insistently. But the hawk refused
+to come down and give battle, and the cub crawled away into a thicket
+and whimpered his disappointment and hunger.
+
+The famine broke. The she-wolf brought home meat. It was strange meat,
+different from any she had ever brought before. It was a lynx kitten,
+partly grown, like the cub, but not so large. And it was all for him.
+His mother had satisfied her hunger elsewhere; though he did not know
+that it was the rest of the lynx litter that had gone to satisfy her.
+Nor did he know the desperateness of her deed. He knew only that the
+velvet-furred kitten was meat, and he ate and waxed happier with every
+mouthful.
+
+A full stomach conduces to inaction, and the cub lay in the cave,
+sleeping against his mother’s side. He was aroused by her snarling.
+Never had he heard her snarl so terribly. Possibly in her whole life it
+was the most terrible snarl she ever gave. There was reason for it, and
+none knew it better than she. A lynx’s lair is not despoiled with
+impunity. In the full glare of the afternoon light, crouching in the
+entrance of the cave, the cub saw the lynx-mother. The hair rippled up
+along his back at the sight. Here was fear, and it did not require his
+instinct to tell him of it. And if sight alone were not sufficient, the
+cry of rage the intruder gave, beginning with a snarl and rushing
+abruptly upward into a hoarse screech, was convincing enough in itself.
+
+The cub felt the prod of the life that was in him, and stood up and
+snarled valiantly by his mother’s side. But she thrust him
+ignominiously away and behind her. Because of the low-roofed entrance
+the lynx could not leap in, and when she made a crawling rush of it the
+she-wolf sprang upon her and pinned her down. The cub saw little of the
+battle. There was a tremendous snarling and spitting and screeching.
+The two animals threshed about, the lynx ripping and tearing with her
+claws and using her teeth as well, while the she-wolf used her teeth
+alone.
+
+Once, the cub sprang in and sank his teeth into the hind leg of the
+lynx. He clung on, growling savagely. Though he did not know it, by the
+weight of his body he clogged the action of the leg and thereby saved
+his mother much damage. A change in the battle crushed him under both
+their bodies and wrenched loose his hold. The next moment the two
+mothers separated, and, before they rushed together again, the lynx
+lashed out at the cub with a huge fore-paw that ripped his shoulder
+open to the bone and sent him hurtling sidewise against the wall. Then
+was added to the uproar the cub’s shrill yelp of pain and fright. But
+the fight lasted so long that he had time to cry himself out and to
+experience a second burst of courage; and the end of the battle found
+him again clinging to a hind-leg and furiously growling between his
+teeth.
+
+The lynx was dead. But the she-wolf was very weak and sick. At first
+she caressed the cub and licked his wounded shoulder; but the blood she
+had lost had taken with it her strength, and for all of a day and a
+night she lay by her dead foe’s side, without movement, scarcely
+breathing. For a week she never left the cave, except for water, and
+then her movements were slow and painful. At the end of that time the
+lynx was devoured, while the she-wolf’s wounds had healed sufficiently
+to permit her to take the meat-trail again.
+
+The cub’s shoulder was stiff and sore, and for some time he limped from
+the terrible slash he had received. But the world now seemed changed.
+He went about in it with greater confidence, with a feeling of prowess
+that had not been his in the days before the battle with the lynx. He
+had looked upon life in a more ferocious aspect; he had fought; he had
+buried his teeth in the flesh of a foe; and he had survived. And
+because of all this, he carried himself more boldly, with a touch of
+defiance that was new in him. He was no longer afraid of minor things,
+and much of his timidity had vanished, though the unknown never ceased
+to press upon him with its mysteries and terrors, intangible and
+ever-menacing.
+
+He began to accompany his mother on the meat-trail, and he saw much of
+the killing of meat and began to play his part in it. And in his own
+dim way he learned the law of meat. There were two kinds of life—his
+own kind and the other kind. His own kind included his mother and
+himself. The other kind included all live things that moved. But the
+other kind was divided. One portion was what his own kind killed and
+ate. This portion was composed of the non-killers and the small
+killers. The other portion killed and ate his own kind, or was killed
+and eaten by his own kind. And out of this classification arose the
+law. The aim of life was meat. Life itself was meat. Life lived on
+life. There were the eaters and the eaten. The law was: EAT OR BE
+EATEN. He did not formulate the law in clear, set terms and moralise
+about it. He did not even think the law; he merely lived the law
+without thinking about it at all.
+
+He saw the law operating around him on every side. He had eaten the
+ptarmigan chicks. The hawk had eaten the ptarmigan-mother. The hawk
+would also have eaten him. Later, when he had grown more formidable, he
+wanted to eat the hawk. He had eaten the lynx kitten. The lynx-mother
+would have eaten him had she not herself been killed and eaten. And so
+it went. The law was being lived about him by all live things, and he
+himself was part and parcel of the law. He was a killer. His only food
+was meat, live meat, that ran away swiftly before him, or flew into the
+air, or climbed trees, or hid in the ground, or faced him and fought
+with him, or turned the tables and ran after him.
+
+Had the cub thought in man-fashion, he might have epitomised life as a
+voracious appetite and the world as a place wherein ranged a multitude
+of appetites, pursuing and being pursued, hunting and being hunted,
+eating and being eaten, all in blindness and confusion, with violence
+and disorder, a chaos of gluttony and slaughter, ruled over by chance,
+merciless, planless, endless.
+
+But the cub did not think in man-fashion. He did not look at things
+with wide vision. He was single-purposed, and entertained but one
+thought or desire at a time. Besides the law of meat, there were a
+myriad other and lesser laws for him to learn and obey. The world was
+filled with surprise. The stir of the life that was in him, the play of
+his muscles, was an unending happiness. To run down meat was to
+experience thrills and elations. His rages and battles were pleasures.
+Terror itself, and the mystery of the unknown, led to his living.
+
+And there were easements and satisfactions. To have a full stomach, to
+doze lazily in the sunshine—such things were remuneration in full for
+his ardours and toils, while his ardours and tolls were in themselves
+self-remunerative. They were expressions of life, and life is always
+happy when it is expressing itself. So the cub had no quarrel with his
+hostile environment. He was very much alive, very happy, and very proud
+of himself.
+
+
+
+
+PART III
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I
+THE MAKERS OF FIRE
+
+
+The cub came upon it suddenly. It was his own fault. He had been
+careless. He had left the cave and run down to the stream to drink. It
+might have been that he took no notice because he was heavy with sleep.
+(He had been out all night on the meat-trail, and had but just then
+awakened.) And his carelessness might have been due to the familiarity
+of the trail to the pool. He had travelled it often, and nothing had
+ever happened on it.
+
+He went down past the blasted pine, crossed the open space, and trotted
+in amongst the trees. Then, at the same instant, he saw and smelt.
+Before him, sitting silently on their haunches, were five live things,
+the like of which he had never seen before. It was his first glimpse of
+mankind. But at the sight of him the five men did not spring to their
+feet, nor show their teeth, nor snarl. They did not move, but sat
+there, silent and ominous.
+
+Nor did the cub move. Every instinct of his nature would have impelled
+him to dash wildly away, had there not suddenly and for the first time
+arisen in him another and counter instinct. A great awe descended upon
+him. He was beaten down to movelessness by an overwhelming sense of his
+own weakness and littleness. Here was mastery and power, something far
+and away beyond him.
+
+The cub had never seen man, yet the instinct concerning man was his. In
+dim ways he recognised in man the animal that had fought itself to
+primacy over the other animals of the Wild. Not alone out of his own
+eyes, but out of the eyes of all his ancestors was the cub now looking
+upon man—out of eyes that had circled in the darkness around countless
+winter camp-fires, that had peered from safe distances and from the
+hearts of thickets at the strange, two-legged animal that was lord over
+living things. The spell of the cub’s heritage was upon him, the fear
+and the respect born of the centuries of struggle and the accumulated
+experience of the generations. The heritage was too compelling for a
+wolf that was only a cub. Had he been full-grown, he would have run
+away. As it was, he cowered down in a paralysis of fear, already half
+proffering the submission that his kind had proffered from the first
+time a wolf came in to sit by man’s fire and be made warm.
+
+One of the Indians arose and walked over to him and stooped above him.
+The cub cowered closer to the ground. It was the unknown, objectified
+at last, in concrete flesh and blood, bending over him and reaching
+down to seize hold of him. His hair bristled involuntarily; his lips
+writhed back and his little fangs were bared. The hand, poised like
+doom above him, hesitated, and the man spoke laughing, “_Wabam wabisca
+ip pit tah_.” (“Look! The white fangs!”)
+
+The other Indians laughed loudly, and urged the man on to pick up the
+cub. As the hand descended closer and closer, there raged within the
+cub a battle of the instincts. He experienced two great impulsions—to
+yield and to fight. The resulting action was a compromise. He did both.
+He yielded till the hand almost touched him. Then he fought, his teeth
+flashing in a snap that sank them into the hand. The next moment he
+received a clout alongside the head that knocked him over on his side.
+Then all fight fled out of him. His puppyhood and the instinct of
+submission took charge of him. He sat up on his haunches and ki-yi’d.
+But the man whose hand he had bitten was angry. The cub received a
+clout on the other side of his head. Whereupon he sat up and ki-yi’d
+louder than ever.
+
+The four Indians laughed more loudly, while even the man who had been
+bitten began to laugh. They surrounded the cub and laughed at him,
+while he wailed out his terror and his hurt. In the midst of it, he
+heard something. The Indians heard it too. But the cub knew what it
+was, and with a last, long wail that had in it more of triumph than
+grief, he ceased his noise and waited for the coming of his mother, of
+his ferocious and indomitable mother who fought and killed all things
+and was never afraid. She was snarling as she ran. She had heard the
+cry of her cub and was dashing to save him.
+
+She bounded in amongst them, her anxious and militant motherhood making
+her anything but a pretty sight. But to the cub the spectacle of her
+protective rage was pleasing. He uttered a glad little cry and bounded
+to meet her, while the man-animals went back hastily several steps. The
+she-wolf stood over against her cub, facing the men, with bristling
+hair, a snarl rumbling deep in her throat. Her face was distorted and
+malignant with menace, even the bridge of the nose wrinkling from tip
+to eyes so prodigious was her snarl.
+
+Then it was that a cry went up from one of the men. “Kiche!” was what
+he uttered. It was an exclamation of surprise. The cub felt his mother
+wilting at the sound.
+
+“Kiche!” the man cried again, this time with sharpness and authority.
+
+And then the cub saw his mother, the she-wolf, the fearless one,
+crouching down till her belly touched the ground, whimpering, wagging
+her tail, making peace signs. The cub could not understand. He was
+appalled. The awe of man rushed over him again. His instinct had been
+true. His mother verified it. She, too, rendered submission to the
+man-animals.
+
+The man who had spoken came over to her. He put his hand upon her head,
+and she only crouched closer. She did not snap, nor threaten to snap.
+The other men came up, and surrounded her, and felt her, and pawed her,
+which actions she made no attempt to resent. They were greatly excited,
+and made many noises with their mouths. These noises were not
+indication of danger, the cub decided, as he crouched near his mother
+still bristling from time to time but doing his best to submit.
+
+“It is not strange,” an Indian was saying. “Her father was a wolf. It
+is true, her mother was a dog; but did not my brother tie her out in
+the woods all of three nights in the mating season? Therefore was the
+father of Kiche a wolf.”
+
+“It is a year, Grey Beaver, since she ran away,” spoke a second Indian.
+
+“It is not strange, Salmon Tongue,” Grey Beaver answered. “It was the
+time of the famine, and there was no meat for the dogs.”
+
+“She has lived with the wolves,” said a third Indian.
+
+“So it would seem, Three Eagles,” Grey Beaver answered, laying his hand
+on the cub; “and this be the sign of it.”
+
+The cub snarled a little at the touch of the hand, and the hand flew
+back to administer a clout. Whereupon the cub covered its fangs, and
+sank down submissively, while the hand, returning, rubbed behind his
+ears, and up and down his back.
+
+“This be the sign of it,” Grey Beaver went on. “It is plain that his
+mother is Kiche. But his father was a wolf. Wherefore is there in him
+little dog and much wolf. His fangs be white, and White Fang shall be
+his name. I have spoken. He is my dog. For was not Kiche my brother’s
+dog? And is not my brother dead?”
+
+The cub, who had thus received a name in the world, lay and watched.
+For a time the man-animals continued to make their mouth-noises. Then
+Grey Beaver took a knife from a sheath that hung around his neck, and
+went into the thicket and cut a stick. White Fang watched him. He
+notched the stick at each end and in the notches fastened strings of
+raw-hide. One string he tied around the throat of Kiche. Then he led
+her to a small pine, around which he tied the other string.
+
+White Fang followed and lay down beside her. Salmon Tongue’s hand
+reached out to him and rolled him over on his back. Kiche looked on
+anxiously. White Fang felt fear mounting in him again. He could not
+quite suppress a snarl, but he made no offer to snap. The hand, with
+fingers crooked and spread apart, rubbed his stomach in a playful way
+and rolled him from side to side. It was ridiculous and ungainly, lying
+there on his back with legs sprawling in the air. Besides, it was a
+position of such utter helplessness that White Fang’s whole nature
+revolted against it. He could do nothing to defend himself. If this
+man-animal intended harm, White Fang knew that he could not escape it.
+How could he spring away with his four legs in the air above him? Yet
+submission made him master his fear, and he only growled softly. This
+growl he could not suppress; nor did the man-animal resent it by giving
+him a blow on the head. And furthermore, such was the strangeness of
+it, White Fang experienced an unaccountable sensation of pleasure as
+the hand rubbed back and forth. When he was rolled on his side he
+ceased to growl, when the fingers pressed and prodded at the base of
+his ears the pleasurable sensation increased; and when, with a final
+rub and scratch, the man left him alone and went away, all fear had
+died out of White Fang. He was to know fear many times in his dealing
+with man; yet it was a token of the fearless companionship with man
+that was ultimately to be his.
+
+After a time, White Fang heard strange noises approaching. He was quick
+in his classification, for he knew them at once for man-animal noises.
+A few minutes later the remainder of the tribe, strung out as it was on
+the march, trailed in. There were more men and many women and children,
+forty souls of them, and all heavily burdened with camp equipage and
+outfit. Also there were many dogs; and these, with the exception of the
+part-grown puppies, were likewise burdened with camp outfit. On their
+backs, in bags that fastened tightly around underneath, the dogs
+carried from twenty to thirty pounds of weight.
+
+White Fang had never seen dogs before, but at sight of them he felt
+that they were his own kind, only somehow different. But they displayed
+little difference from the wolf when they discovered the cub and his
+mother. There was a rush. White Fang bristled and snarled and snapped
+in the face of the open-mouthed oncoming wave of dogs, and went down
+and under them, feeling the sharp slash of teeth in his body, himself
+biting and tearing at the legs and bellies above him. There was a great
+uproar. He could hear the snarl of Kiche as she fought for him; and he
+could hear the cries of the man-animals, the sound of clubs striking
+upon bodies, and the yelps of pain from the dogs so struck.
+
+Only a few seconds elapsed before he was on his feet again. He could
+now see the man-animals driving back the dogs with clubs and stones,
+defending him, saving him from the savage teeth of his kind that
+somehow was not his kind. And though there was no reason in his brain
+for a clear conception of so abstract a thing as justice, nevertheless,
+in his own way, he felt the justice of the man-animals, and he knew
+them for what they were—makers of law and executors of law. Also, he
+appreciated the power with which they administered the law. Unlike any
+animals he had ever encountered, they did not bite nor claw. They
+enforced their live strength with the power of dead things. Dead things
+did their bidding. Thus, sticks and stones, directed by these strange
+creatures, leaped through the air like living things, inflicting
+grievous hurts upon the dogs.
+
+To his mind this was power unusual, power inconceivable and beyond the
+natural, power that was godlike. White Fang, in the very nature of him,
+could never know anything about gods; at the best he could know only
+things that were beyond knowing—but the wonder and awe that he had of
+these man-animals in ways resembled what would be the wonder and awe of
+man at sight of some celestial creature, on a mountain top, hurling
+thunderbolts from either hand at an astonished world.
+
+The last dog had been driven back. The hubbub died down. And White Fang
+licked his hurts and meditated upon this, his first taste of
+pack-cruelty and his introduction to the pack. He had never dreamed
+that his own kind consisted of more than One Eye, his mother, and
+himself. They had constituted a kind apart, and here, abruptly, he had
+discovered many more creatures apparently of his own kind. And there
+was a subconscious resentment that these, his kind, at first sight had
+pitched upon him and tried to destroy him. In the same way he resented
+his mother being tied with a stick, even though it was done by the
+superior man-animals. It savoured of the trap, of bondage. Yet of the
+trap and of bondage he knew nothing. Freedom to roam and run and lie
+down at will, had been his heritage; and here it was being infringed
+upon. His mother’s movements were restricted to the length of a stick,
+and by the length of that same stick was he restricted, for he had not
+yet got beyond the need of his mother’s side.
+
+He did not like it. Nor did he like it when the man-animals arose and
+went on with their march; for a tiny man-animal took the other end of
+the stick and led Kiche captive behind him, and behind Kiche followed
+White Fang, greatly perturbed and worried by this new adventure he had
+entered upon.
+
+They went down the valley of the stream, far beyond White Fang’s widest
+ranging, until they came to the end of the valley, where the stream ran
+into the Mackenzie River. Here, where canoes were cached on poles high
+in the air and where stood fish-racks for the drying of fish, camp was
+made; and White Fang looked on with wondering eyes. The superiority of
+these man-animals increased with every moment. There was their mastery
+over all these sharp-fanged dogs. It breathed of power. But greater
+than that, to the wolf-cub, was their mastery over things not alive;
+their capacity to communicate motion to unmoving things; their capacity
+to change the very face of the world.
+
+It was this last that especially affected him. The elevation of frames
+of poles caught his eye; yet this in itself was not so remarkable,
+being done by the same creatures that flung sticks and stones to great
+distances. But when the frames of poles were made into tepees by being
+covered with cloth and skins, White Fang was astounded. It was the
+colossal bulk of them that impressed him. They arose around him, on
+every side, like some monstrous quick-growing form of life. They
+occupied nearly the whole circumference of his field of vision. He was
+afraid of them. They loomed ominously above him; and when the breeze
+stirred them into huge movements, he cowered down in fear, keeping his
+eyes warily upon them, and prepared to spring away if they attempted to
+precipitate themselves upon him.
+
+But in a short while his fear of the tepees passed away. He saw the
+women and children passing in and out of them without harm, and he saw
+the dogs trying often to get into them, and being driven away with
+sharp words and flying stones. After a time, he left Kiche’s side and
+crawled cautiously toward the wall of the nearest tepee. It was the
+curiosity of growth that urged him on—the necessity of learning and
+living and doing that brings experience. The last few inches to the
+wall of the tepee were crawled with painful slowness and precaution.
+The day’s events had prepared him for the unknown to manifest itself in
+most stupendous and unthinkable ways. At last his nose touched the
+canvas. He waited. Nothing happened. Then he smelled the strange
+fabric, saturated with the man-smell. He closed on the canvas with his
+teeth and gave a gentle tug. Nothing happened, though the adjacent
+portions of the tepee moved. He tugged harder. There was a greater
+movement. It was delightful. He tugged still harder, and repeatedly,
+until the whole tepee was in motion. Then the sharp cry of a squaw
+inside sent him scampering back to Kiche. But after that he was afraid
+no more of the looming bulks of the tepees.
+
+A moment later he was straying away again from his mother. Her stick
+was tied to a peg in the ground and she could not follow him. A
+part-grown puppy, somewhat larger and older than he, came toward him
+slowly, with ostentatious and belligerent importance. The puppy’s name,
+as White Fang was afterward to hear him called, was Lip-lip. He had had
+experience in puppy fights and was already something of a bully.
+
+Lip-lip was White Fang’s own kind, and, being only a puppy, did not
+seem dangerous; so White Fang prepared to meet him in a friendly
+spirit. But when the strangers walk became stiff-legged and his lips
+lifted clear of his teeth, White Fang stiffened too, and answered with
+lifted lips. They half circled about each other, tentatively, snarling
+and bristling. This lasted several minutes, and White Fang was
+beginning to enjoy it, as a sort of game. But suddenly, with remarkable
+swiftness, Lip-lip leaped in, delivering a slashing snap, and leaped
+away again. The snap had taken effect on the shoulder that had been
+hurt by the lynx and that was still sore deep down near the bone. The
+surprise and hurt of it brought a yelp out of White Fang; but the next
+moment, in a rush of anger, he was upon Lip-lip and snapping viciously.
+
+But Lip-lip had lived his life in camp and had fought many puppy
+fights. Three times, four times, and half a dozen times, his sharp
+little teeth scored on the newcomer, until White Fang, yelping
+shamelessly, fled to the protection of his mother. It was the first of
+the many fights he was to have with Lip-lip, for they were enemies from
+the start, born so, with natures destined perpetually to clash.
+
+Kiche licked White Fang soothingly with her tongue, and tried to
+prevail upon him to remain with her. But his curiosity was rampant, and
+several minutes later he was venturing forth on a new quest. He came
+upon one of the man-animals, Grey Beaver, who was squatting on his hams
+and doing something with sticks and dry moss spread before him on the
+ground. White Fang came near to him and watched. Grey Beaver made
+mouth-noises which White Fang interpreted as not hostile, so he came
+still nearer.
+
+Women and children were carrying more sticks and branches to Grey
+Beaver. It was evidently an affair of moment. White Fang came in until
+he touched Grey Beaver’s knee, so curious was he, and already forgetful
+that this was a terrible man-animal. Suddenly he saw a strange thing
+like mist beginning to arise from the sticks and moss beneath Grey
+Beaver’s hands. Then, amongst the sticks themselves, appeared a live
+thing, twisting and turning, of a colour like the colour of the sun in
+the sky. White Fang knew nothing about fire. It drew him as the light,
+in the mouth of the cave had drawn him in his early puppyhood. He
+crawled the several steps toward the flame. He heard Grey Beaver
+chuckle above him, and he knew the sound was not hostile. Then his nose
+touched the flame, and at the same instant his little tongue went out
+to it.
+
+For a moment he was paralysed. The unknown, lurking in the midst of the
+sticks and moss, was savagely clutching him by the nose. He scrambled
+backward, bursting out in an astonished explosion of ki-yi’s. At the
+sound, Kiche leaped snarling to the end of her stick, and there raged
+terribly because she could not come to his aid. But Grey Beaver laughed
+loudly, and slapped his thighs, and told the happening to all the rest
+of the camp, till everybody was laughing uproariously. But White Fang
+sat on his haunches and ki-yi’d and ki-yi’d, a forlorn and pitiable
+little figure in the midst of the man-animals.
+
+It was the worst hurt he had ever known. Both nose and tongue had been
+scorched by the live thing, sun-coloured, that had grown up under Grey
+Beaver’s hands. He cried and cried interminably, and every fresh wail
+was greeted by bursts of laughter on the part of the man-animals. He
+tried to soothe his nose with his tongue, but the tongue was burnt too,
+and the two hurts coming together produced greater hurt; whereupon he
+cried more hopelessly and helplessly than ever.
+
+And then shame came to him. He knew laughter and the meaning of it. It
+is not given us to know how some animals know laughter, and know when
+they are being laughed at; but it was this same way that White Fang
+knew it. And he felt shame that the man-animals should be laughing at
+him. He turned and fled away, not from the hurt of the fire, but from
+the laughter that sank even deeper, and hurt in the spirit of him. And
+he fled to Kiche, raging at the end of her stick like an animal gone
+mad—to Kiche, the one creature in the world who was not laughing at
+him.
+
+Twilight drew down and night came on, and White Fang lay by his
+mother’s side. His nose and tongue still hurt, but he was perplexed by
+a greater trouble. He was homesick. He felt a vacancy in him, a need
+for the hush and quietude of the stream and the cave in the cliff. Life
+had become too populous. There were so many of the man-animals, men,
+women, and children, all making noises and irritations. And there were
+the dogs, ever squabbling and bickering, bursting into uproars and
+creating confusions. The restful loneliness of the only life he had
+known was gone. Here the very air was palpitant with life. It hummed
+and buzzed unceasingly. Continually changing its intensity and abruptly
+variant in pitch, it impinged on his nerves and senses, made him
+nervous and restless and worried him with a perpetual imminence of
+happening.
+
+He watched the man-animals coming and going and moving about the camp.
+In fashion distantly resembling the way men look upon the gods they
+create, so looked White Fang upon the man-animals before him. They were
+superior creatures, of a verity, gods. To his dim comprehension they
+were as much wonder-workers as gods are to men. They were creatures of
+mastery, possessing all manner of unknown and impossible potencies,
+overlords of the alive and the not alive—making obey that which moved,
+imparting movement to that which did not move, and making life,
+sun-coloured and biting life, to grow out of dead moss and wood. They
+were fire-makers! They were gods.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II
+THE BONDAGE
+
+
+The days were thronged with experience for White Fang. During the time
+that Kiche was tied by the stick, he ran about over all the camp,
+inquiring, investigating, learning. He quickly came to know much of the
+ways of the man-animals, but familiarity did not breed contempt. The
+more he came to know them, the more they vindicated their superiority,
+the more they displayed their mysterious powers, the greater loomed
+their god-likeness.
+
+To man has been given the grief, often, of seeing his gods overthrown
+and his altars crumbling; but to the wolf and the wild dog that have
+come in to crouch at man’s feet, this grief has never come. Unlike man,
+whose gods are of the unseen and the overguessed, vapours and mists of
+fancy eluding the garmenture of reality, wandering wraiths of desired
+goodness and power, intangible out-croppings of self into the realm of
+spirit—unlike man, the wolf and the wild dog that have come in to the
+fire find their gods in the living flesh, solid to the touch, occupying
+earth-space and requiring time for the accomplishment of their ends and
+their existence. No effort of faith is necessary to believe in such a
+god; no effort of will can possibly induce disbelief in such a god.
+There is no getting away from it. There it stands, on its two
+hind-legs, club in hand, immensely potential, passionate and wrathful
+and loving, god and mystery and power all wrapped up and around by
+flesh that bleeds when it is torn and that is good to eat like any
+flesh.
+
+And so it was with White Fang. The man-animals were gods unmistakable
+and unescapable. As his mother, Kiche, had rendered her allegiance to
+them at the first cry of her name, so he was beginning to render his
+allegiance. He gave them the trail as a privilege indubitably theirs.
+When they walked, he got out of their way. When they called, he came.
+When they threatened, he cowered down. When they commanded him to go,
+he went away hurriedly. For behind any wish of theirs was power to
+enforce that wish, power that hurt, power that expressed itself in
+clouts and clubs, in flying stones and stinging lashes of whips.
+
+He belonged to them as all dogs belonged to them. His actions were
+theirs to command. His body was theirs to maul, to stamp upon, to
+tolerate. Such was the lesson that was quickly borne in upon him. It
+came hard, going as it did, counter to much that was strong and
+dominant in his own nature; and, while he disliked it in the learning
+of it, unknown to himself he was learning to like it. It was a placing
+of his destiny in another’s hands, a shifting of the responsibilities
+of existence. This in itself was compensation, for it is always easier
+to lean upon another than to stand alone.
+
+But it did not all happen in a day, this giving over of himself, body
+and soul, to the man-animals. He could not immediately forego his wild
+heritage and his memories of the Wild. There were days when he crept to
+the edge of the forest and stood and listened to something calling him
+far and away. And always he returned, restless and uncomfortable, to
+whimper softly and wistfully at Kiche’s side and to lick her face with
+eager, questioning tongue.
+
+White Fang learned rapidly the ways of the camp. He knew the injustice
+and greediness of the older dogs when meat or fish was thrown out to be
+eaten. He came to know that men were more just, children more cruel,
+and women more kindly and more likely to toss him a bit of meat or
+bone. And after two or three painful adventures with the mothers of
+part-grown puppies, he came into the knowledge that it was always good
+policy to let such mothers alone, to keep away from them as far as
+possible, and to avoid them when he saw them coming.
+
+But the bane of his life was Lip-lip. Larger, older, and stronger,
+Lip-lip had selected White Fang for his special object of persecution.
+White Fang fought willingly enough, but he was outclassed. His enemy
+was too big. Lip-lip became a nightmare to him. Whenever he ventured
+away from his mother, the bully was sure to appear, trailing at his
+heels, snarling at him, picking upon him, and watchful of an
+opportunity, when no man-animal was near, to spring upon him and force
+a fight. As Lip-lip invariably won, he enjoyed it hugely. It became his
+chief delight in life, as it became White Fang’s chief torment.
+
+But the effect upon White Fang was not to cow him. Though he suffered
+most of the damage and was always defeated, his spirit remained
+unsubdued. Yet a bad effect was produced. He became malignant and
+morose. His temper had been savage by birth, but it became more savage
+under this unending persecution. The genial, playful, puppyish side of
+him found little expression. He never played and gambolled about with
+the other puppies of the camp. Lip-lip would not permit it. The moment
+White Fang appeared near them, Lip-lip was upon him, bullying and
+hectoring him, or fighting with him until he had driven him away.
+
+The effect of all this was to rob White Fang of much of his puppyhood
+and to make him in his comportment older than his age. Denied the
+outlet, through play, of his energies, he recoiled upon himself and
+developed his mental processes. He became cunning; he had idle time in
+which to devote himself to thoughts of trickery. Prevented from
+obtaining his share of meat and fish when a general feed was given to
+the camp-dogs, he became a clever thief. He had to forage for himself,
+and he foraged well, though he was oft-times a plague to the squaws in
+consequence. He learned to sneak about camp, to be crafty, to know what
+was going on everywhere, to see and to hear everything and to reason
+accordingly, and successfully to devise ways and means of avoiding his
+implacable persecutor.
+
+It was early in the days of his persecution that he played his first
+really big crafty game and got there from his first taste of revenge.
+As Kiche, when with the wolves, had lured out to destruction dogs from
+the camps of men, so White Fang, in manner somewhat similar, lured
+Lip-lip into Kiche’s avenging jaws. Retreating before Lip-lip, White
+Fang made an indirect flight that led in and out and around the various
+tepees of the camp. He was a good runner, swifter than any puppy of his
+size, and swifter than Lip-lip. But he did not run his best in this
+chase. He barely held his own, one leap ahead of his pursuer.
+
+Lip-lip, excited by the chase and by the persistent nearness of his
+victim, forgot caution and locality. When he remembered locality, it
+was too late. Dashing at top speed around a tepee, he ran full tilt
+into Kiche lying at the end of her stick. He gave one yelp of
+consternation, and then her punishing jaws closed upon him. She was
+tied, but he could not get away from her easily. She rolled him off his
+legs so that he could not run, while she repeatedly ripped and slashed
+him with her fangs.
+
+When at last he succeeded in rolling clear of her, he crawled to his
+feet, badly dishevelled, hurt both in body and in spirit. His hair was
+standing out all over him in tufts where her teeth had mauled. He stood
+where he had arisen, opened his mouth, and broke out the long,
+heart-broken puppy wail. But even this he was not allowed to complete.
+In the middle of it, White Fang, rushing in, sank his teeth into
+Lip-lip’s hind leg. There was no fight left in Lip-lip, and he ran away
+shamelessly, his victim hot on his heels and worrying him all the way
+back to his own tepee. Here the squaws came to his aid, and White Fang,
+transformed into a raging demon, was finally driven off only by a
+fusillade of stones.
+
+Came the day when Grey Beaver, deciding that the liability of her
+running away was past, released Kiche. White Fang was delighted with
+his mother’s freedom. He accompanied her joyfully about the camp; and,
+so long as he remained close by her side, Lip-lip kept a respectful
+distance. White-Fang even bristled up to him and walked stiff-legged,
+but Lip-lip ignored the challenge. He was no fool himself, and whatever
+vengeance he desired to wreak, he could wait until he caught White Fang
+alone.
+
+Later on that day, Kiche and White Fang strayed into the edge of the
+woods next to the camp. He had led his mother there, step by step, and
+now when she stopped, he tried to inveigle her farther. The stream, the
+lair, and the quiet woods were calling to him, and he wanted her to
+come. He ran on a few steps, stopped, and looked back. She had not
+moved. He whined pleadingly, and scurried playfully in and out of the
+underbrush. He ran back to her, licked her face, and ran on again. And
+still she did not move. He stopped and regarded her, all of an
+intentness and eagerness, physically expressed, that slowly faded out
+of him as she turned her head and gazed back at the camp.
+
+There was something calling to him out there in the open. His mother
+heard it too. But she heard also that other and louder call, the call
+of the fire and of man—the call which has been given alone of all
+animals to the wolf to answer, to the wolf and the wild-dog, who are
+brothers.
+
+Kiche turned and slowly trotted back toward camp. Stronger than the
+physical restraint of the stick was the clutch of the camp upon her.
+Unseen and occultly, the gods still gripped with their power and would
+not let her go. White Fang sat down in the shadow of a birch and
+whimpered softly. There was a strong smell of pine, and subtle wood
+fragrances filled the air, reminding him of his old life of freedom
+before the days of his bondage. But he was still only a part-grown
+puppy, and stronger than the call either of man or of the Wild was the
+call of his mother. All the hours of his short life he had depended
+upon her. The time was yet to come for independence. So he arose and
+trotted forlornly back to camp, pausing once, and twice, to sit down
+and whimper and to listen to the call that still sounded in the depths
+of the forest.
+
+In the Wild the time of a mother with her young is short; but under the
+dominion of man it is sometimes even shorter. Thus it was with White
+Fang. Grey Beaver was in the debt of Three Eagles. Three Eagles was
+going away on a trip up the Mackenzie to the Great Slave Lake. A strip
+of scarlet cloth, a bearskin, twenty cartridges, and Kiche, went to pay
+the debt. White Fang saw his mother taken aboard Three Eagles’ canoe,
+and tried to follow her. A blow from Three Eagles knocked him backward
+to the land. The canoe shoved off. He sprang into the water and swam
+after it, deaf to the sharp cries of Grey Beaver to return. Even a
+man-animal, a god, White Fang ignored, such was the terror he was in of
+losing his mother.
+
+But gods are accustomed to being obeyed, and Grey Beaver wrathfully
+launched a canoe in pursuit. When he overtook White Fang, he reached
+down and by the nape of the neck lifted him clear of the water. He did
+not deposit him at once in the bottom of the canoe. Holding him
+suspended with one hand, with the other hand he proceeded to give him a
+beating. And it _was_ a beating. His hand was heavy. Every blow was
+shrewd to hurt; and he delivered a multitude of blows.
+
+Impelled by the blows that rained upon him, now from this side, now
+from that, White Fang swung back and forth like an erratic and jerky
+pendulum. Varying were the emotions that surged through him. At first,
+he had known surprise. Then came a momentary fear, when he yelped
+several times to the impact of the hand. But this was quickly followed
+by anger. His free nature asserted itself, and he showed his teeth and
+snarled fearlessly in the face of the wrathful god. This but served to
+make the god more wrathful. The blows came faster, heavier, more shrewd
+to hurt.
+
+Grey Beaver continued to beat, White Fang continued to snarl. But this
+could not last for ever. One or the other must give over, and that one
+was White Fang. Fear surged through him again. For the first time he
+was being really man-handled. The occasional blows of sticks and stones
+he had previously experienced were as caresses compared with this. He
+broke down and began to cry and yelp. For a time each blow brought a
+yelp from him; but fear passed into terror, until finally his yelps
+were voiced in unbroken succession, unconnected with the rhythm of the
+punishment.
+
+At last Grey Beaver withheld his hand. White Fang, hanging limply,
+continued to cry. This seemed to satisfy his master, who flung him down
+roughly in the bottom of the canoe. In the meantime the canoe had
+drifted down the stream. Grey Beaver picked up the paddle. White Fang
+was in his way. He spurned him savagely with his foot. In that moment
+White Fang’s free nature flashed forth again, and he sank his teeth
+into the moccasined foot.
+
+The beating that had gone before was as nothing compared with the
+beating he now received. Grey Beaver’s wrath was terrible; likewise was
+White Fang’s fright. Not only the hand, but the hard wooden paddle was
+used upon him; and he was bruised and sore in all his small body when
+he was again flung down in the canoe. Again, and this time with
+purpose, did Grey Beaver kick him. White Fang did not repeat his attack
+on the foot. He had learned another lesson of his bondage. Never, no
+matter what the circumstance, must he dare to bite the god who was lord
+and master over him; the body of the lord and master was sacred, not to
+be defiled by the teeth of such as he. That was evidently the crime of
+crimes, the one offence there was no condoning nor overlooking.
+
+When the canoe touched the shore, White Fang lay whimpering and
+motionless, waiting the will of Grey Beaver. It was Grey Beaver’s will
+that he should go ashore, for ashore he was flung, striking heavily on
+his side and hurting his bruises afresh. He crawled tremblingly to his
+feet and stood whimpering. Lip-lip, who had watched the whole
+proceeding from the bank, now rushed upon him, knocking him over and
+sinking his teeth into him. White Fang was too helpless to defend
+himself, and it would have gone hard with him had not Grey Beaver’s
+foot shot out, lifting Lip-lip into the air with its violence so that
+he smashed down to earth a dozen feet away. This was the man-animal’s
+justice; and even then, in his own pitiable plight, White Fang
+experienced a little grateful thrill. At Grey Beaver’s heels he limped
+obediently through the village to the tepee. And so it came that White
+Fang learned that the right to punish was something the gods reserved
+for themselves and denied to the lesser creatures under them.
+
+That night, when all was still, White Fang remembered his mother and
+sorrowed for her. He sorrowed too loudly and woke up Grey Beaver, who
+beat him. After that he mourned gently when the gods were around. But
+sometimes, straying off to the edge of the woods by himself, he gave
+vent to his grief, and cried it out with loud whimperings and wailings.
+
+It was during this period that he might have harkened to the memories
+of the lair and the stream and run back to the Wild. But the memory of
+his mother held him. As the hunting man-animals went out and came back,
+so she would come back to the village some time. So he remained in his
+bondage waiting for her.
+
+But it was not altogether an unhappy bondage. There was much to
+interest him. Something was always happening. There was no end to the
+strange things these gods did, and he was always curious to see.
+Besides, he was learning how to get along with Grey Beaver. Obedience,
+rigid, undeviating obedience, was what was exacted of him; and in
+return he escaped beatings and his existence was tolerated.
+
+Nay, Grey Beaver himself sometimes tossed him a piece of meat, and
+defended him against the other dogs in the eating of it. And such a
+piece of meat was of value. It was worth more, in some strange way,
+then a dozen pieces of meat from the hand of a squaw. Grey Beaver never
+petted nor caressed. Perhaps it was the weight of his hand, perhaps his
+justice, perhaps the sheer power of him, and perhaps it was all these
+things that influenced White Fang; for a certain tie of attachment was
+forming between him and his surly lord.
+
+Insidiously, and by remote ways, as well as by the power of stick and
+stone and clout of hand, were the shackles of White Fang’s bondage
+being riveted upon him. The qualities in his kind that in the beginning
+made it possible for them to come in to the fires of men, were
+qualities capable of development. They were developing in him, and the
+camp-life, replete with misery as it was, was secretly endearing itself
+to him all the time. But White Fang was unaware of it. He knew only
+grief for the loss of Kiche, hope for her return, and a hungry yearning
+for the free life that had been his.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III
+THE OUTCAST
+
+
+Lip-lip continued so to darken his days that White Fang became wickeder
+and more ferocious than it was his natural right to be. Savageness was
+a part of his make-up, but the savageness thus developed exceeded his
+make-up. He acquired a reputation for wickedness amongst the
+man-animals themselves. Wherever there was trouble and uproar in camp,
+fighting and squabbling or the outcry of a squaw over a bit of stolen
+meat, they were sure to find White Fang mixed up in it and usually at
+the bottom of it. They did not bother to look after the causes of his
+conduct. They saw only the effects, and the effects were bad. He was a
+sneak and a thief, a mischief-maker, a fomenter of trouble; and irate
+squaws told him to his face, the while he eyed them alert and ready to
+dodge any quick-flung missile, that he was a wolf and worthless and
+bound to come to an evil end.
+
+He found himself an outcast in the midst of the populous camp. All the
+young dogs followed Lip-lip’s lead. There was a difference between
+White Fang and them. Perhaps they sensed his wild-wood breed, and
+instinctively felt for him the enmity that the domestic dog feels for
+the wolf. But be that as it may, they joined with Lip-lip in the
+persecution. And, once declared against him, they found good reason to
+continue declared against him. One and all, from time to time, they
+felt his teeth; and to his credit, he gave more than he received. Many
+of them he could whip in single fight; but single fight was denied him.
+The beginning of such a fight was a signal for all the young dogs in
+camp to come running and pitch upon him.
+
+Out of this pack-persecution he learned two important things: how to
+take care of himself in a mass-fight against him—and how, on a single
+dog, to inflict the greatest amount of damage in the briefest space of
+time. To keep one’s feet in the midst of the hostile mass meant life,
+and this he learnt well. He became cat-like in his ability to stay on
+his feet. Even grown dogs might hurtle him backward or sideways with
+the impact of their heavy bodies; and backward or sideways he would go,
+in the air or sliding on the ground, but always with his legs under him
+and his feet downward to the mother earth.
+
+When dogs fight, there are usually preliminaries to the actual
+combat—snarlings and bristlings and stiff-legged struttings. But White
+Fang learned to omit these preliminaries. Delay meant the coming
+against him of all the young dogs. He must do his work quickly and get
+away. So he learnt to give no warning of his intention. He rushed in
+and snapped and slashed on the instant, without notice, before his foe
+could prepare to meet him. Thus he learned how to inflict quick and
+severe damage. Also he learned the value of surprise. A dog, taken off
+its guard, its shoulder slashed open or its ear ripped in ribbons
+before it knew what was happening, was a dog half whipped.
+
+Furthermore, it was remarkably easy to overthrow a dog taken by
+surprise; while a dog, thus overthrown, invariably exposed for a moment
+the soft underside of its neck—the vulnerable point at which to strike
+for its life. White Fang knew this point. It was a knowledge bequeathed
+to him directly from the hunting generation of wolves. So it was that
+White Fang’s method when he took the offensive, was: first to find a
+young dog alone; second, to surprise it and knock it off its feet; and
+third, to drive in with his teeth at the soft throat.
+
+Being but partly grown his jaws had not yet become large enough nor
+strong enough to make his throat-attack deadly; but many a young dog
+went around camp with a lacerated throat in token of White Fang’s
+intention. And one day, catching one of his enemies alone on the edge
+of the woods, he managed, by repeatedly overthrowing him and attacking
+the throat, to cut the great vein and let out the life. There was a
+great row that night. He had been observed, the news had been carried
+to the dead dog’s master, the squaws remembered all the instances of
+stolen meat, and Grey Beaver was beset by many angry voices. But he
+resolutely held the door of his tepee, inside which he had placed the
+culprit, and refused to permit the vengeance for which his tribespeople
+clamoured.
+
+White Fang became hated by man and dog. During this period of his
+development he never knew a moment’s security. The tooth of every dog
+was against him, the hand of every man. He was greeted with snarls by
+his kind, with curses and stones by his gods. He lived tensely. He was
+always keyed up, alert for attack, wary of being attacked, with an eye
+for sudden and unexpected missiles, prepared to act precipitately and
+coolly, to leap in with a flash of teeth, or to leap away with a
+menacing snarl.
+
+As for snarling he could snarl more terribly than any dog, young or
+old, in camp. The intent of the snarl is to warn or frighten, and
+judgment is required to know when it should be used. White Fang knew
+how to make it and when to make it. Into his snarl he incorporated all
+that was vicious, malignant, and horrible. With nose serrulated by
+continuous spasms, hair bristling in recurrent waves, tongue whipping
+out like a red snake and whipping back again, ears flattened down, eyes
+gleaming hatred, lips wrinkled back, and fangs exposed and dripping, he
+could compel a pause on the part of almost any assailant. A temporary
+pause, when taken off his guard, gave him the vital moment in which to
+think and determine his action. But often a pause so gained lengthened
+out until it evolved into a complete cessation from the attack. And
+before more than one of the grown dogs White Fang’s snarl enabled him
+to beat an honourable retreat.
+
+An outcast himself from the pack of the part-grown dogs, his sanguinary
+methods and remarkable efficiency made the pack pay for its persecution
+of him. Not permitted himself to run with the pack, the curious state
+of affairs obtained that no member of the pack could run outside the
+pack. White Fang would not permit it. What of his bushwhacking and
+waylaying tactics, the young dogs were afraid to run by themselves.
+With the exception of Lip-lip, they were compelled to hunch together
+for mutual protection against the terrible enemy they had made. A puppy
+alone by the river bank meant a puppy dead or a puppy that aroused the
+camp with its shrill pain and terror as it fled back from the wolf-cub
+that had waylaid it.
+
+But White Fang’s reprisals did not cease, even when the young dogs had
+learned thoroughly that they must stay together. He attacked them when
+he caught them alone, and they attacked him when they were bunched. The
+sight of him was sufficient to start them rushing after him, at which
+times his swiftness usually carried him into safety. But woe the dog
+that outran his fellows in such pursuit! White Fang had learned to turn
+suddenly upon the pursuer that was ahead of the pack and thoroughly to
+rip him up before the pack could arrive. This occurred with great
+frequency, for, once in full cry, the dogs were prone to forget
+themselves in the excitement of the chase, while White Fang never
+forgot himself. Stealing backward glances as he ran, he was always
+ready to whirl around and down the overzealous pursuer that outran his
+fellows.
+
+Young dogs are bound to play, and out of the exigencies of the
+situation they realised their play in this mimic warfare. Thus it was
+that the hunt of White Fang became their chief game—a deadly game,
+withal, and at all times a serious game. He, on the other hand, being
+the fastest-footed, was unafraid to venture anywhere. During the period
+that he waited vainly for his mother to come back, he led the pack many
+a wild chase through the adjacent woods. But the pack invariably lost
+him. Its noise and outcry warned him of its presence, while he ran
+alone, velvet-footed, silently, a moving shadow among the trees after
+the manner of his father and mother before him. Further he was more
+directly connected with the Wild than they; and he knew more of its
+secrets and stratagems. A favourite trick of his was to lose his trail
+in running water and then lie quietly in a near-by thicket while their
+baffled cries arose around him.
+
+Hated by his kind and by mankind, indomitable, perpetually warred upon
+and himself waging perpetual war, his development was rapid and
+one-sided. This was no soil for kindliness and affection to blossom in.
+Of such things he had not the faintest glimmering. The code he learned
+was to obey the strong and to oppress the weak. Grey Beaver was a god,
+and strong. Therefore White Fang obeyed him. But the dog younger or
+smaller than himself was weak, a thing to be destroyed. His development
+was in the direction of power. In order to face the constant danger of
+hurt and even of destruction, his predatory and protective faculties
+were unduly developed. He became quicker of movement than the other
+dogs, swifter of foot, craftier, deadlier, more lithe, more lean with
+ironlike muscle and sinew, more enduring, more cruel, more ferocious,
+and more intelligent. He had to become all these things, else he would
+not have held his own nor survive the hostile environment in which he
+found himself.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV
+THE TRAIL OF THE GODS
+
+
+In the fall of the year, when the days were shortening and the bite of
+the frost was coming into the air, White Fang got his chance for
+liberty. For several days there had been a great hubbub in the village.
+The summer camp was being dismantled, and the tribe, bag and baggage,
+was preparing to go off to the fall hunting. White Fang watched it all
+with eager eyes, and when the tepees began to come down and the canoes
+were loading at the bank, he understood. Already the canoes were
+departing, and some had disappeared down the river.
+
+Quite deliberately he determined to stay behind. He waited his
+opportunity to slink out of camp to the woods. Here, in the running
+stream where ice was beginning to form, he hid his trail. Then he
+crawled into the heart of a dense thicket and waited. The time passed
+by, and he slept intermittently for hours. Then he was aroused by Grey
+Beaver’s voice calling him by name. There were other voices. White Fang
+could hear Grey Beaver’s squaw taking part in the search, and Mit-sah,
+who was Grey Beaver’s son.
+
+White Fang trembled with fear, and though the impulse came to crawl out
+of his hiding-place, he resisted it. After a time the voices died away,
+and some time after that he crept out to enjoy the success of his
+undertaking. Darkness was coming on, and for a while he played about
+among the trees, pleasuring in his freedom. Then, and quite suddenly,
+he became aware of loneliness. He sat down to consider, listening to
+the silence of the forest and perturbed by it. That nothing moved nor
+sounded, seemed ominous. He felt the lurking of danger, unseen and
+unguessed. He was suspicious of the looming bulks of the trees and of
+the dark shadows that might conceal all manner of perilous things.
+
+Then it was cold. Here was no warm side of a tepee against which to
+snuggle. The frost was in his feet, and he kept lifting first one
+fore-foot and then the other. He curved his bushy tail around to cover
+them, and at the same time he saw a vision. There was nothing strange
+about it. Upon his inward sight was impressed a succession of
+memory-pictures. He saw the camp again, the tepees, and the blaze of
+the fires. He heard the shrill voices of the women, the gruff basses of
+the men, and the snarling of the dogs. He was hungry, and he remembered
+pieces of meat and fish that had been thrown him. Here was no meat,
+nothing but a threatening and inedible silence.
+
+His bondage had softened him. Irresponsibility had weakened him. He had
+forgotten how to shift for himself. The night yawned about him. His
+senses, accustomed to the hum and bustle of the camp, used to the
+continuous impact of sights and sounds, were now left idle. There was
+nothing to do, nothing to see nor hear. They strained to catch some
+interruption of the silence and immobility of nature. They were
+appalled by inaction and by the feel of something terrible impending.
+
+He gave a great start of fright. A colossal and formless something was
+rushing across the field of his vision. It was a tree-shadow flung by
+the moon, from whose face the clouds had been brushed away. Reassured,
+he whimpered softly; then he suppressed the whimper for fear that it
+might attract the attention of the lurking dangers.
+
+A tree, contracting in the cool of the night, made a loud noise. It was
+directly above him. He yelped in his fright. A panic seized him, and he
+ran madly toward the village. He knew an overpowering desire for the
+protection and companionship of man. In his nostrils was the smell of
+the camp-smoke. In his ears the camp-sounds and cries were ringing
+loud. He passed out of the forest and into the moonlit open where were
+no shadows nor darknesses. But no village greeted his eyes. He had
+forgotten. The village had gone away.
+
+His wild flight ceased abruptly. There was no place to which to flee.
+He slunk forlornly through the deserted camp, smelling the
+rubbish-heaps and the discarded rags and tags of the gods. He would
+have been glad for the rattle of stones about him, flung by an angry
+squaw, glad for the hand of Grey Beaver descending upon him in wrath;
+while he would have welcomed with delight Lip-lip and the whole
+snarling, cowardly pack.
+
+He came to where Grey Beaver’s tepee had stood. In the centre of the
+space it had occupied, he sat down. He pointed his nose at the moon.
+His throat was afflicted by rigid spasms, his mouth opened, and in a
+heart-broken cry bubbled up his loneliness and fear, his grief for
+Kiche, all his past sorrows and miseries as well as his apprehension of
+sufferings and dangers to come. It was the long wolf-howl,
+full-throated and mournful, the first howl he had ever uttered.
+
+The coming of daylight dispelled his fears but increased his
+loneliness. The naked earth, which so shortly before had been so
+populous; thrust his loneliness more forcibly upon him. It did not take
+him long to make up his mind. He plunged into the forest and followed
+the river bank down the stream. All day he ran. He did not rest. He
+seemed made to run on for ever. His iron-like body ignored fatigue. And
+even after fatigue came, his heritage of endurance braced him to
+endless endeavour and enabled him to drive his complaining body onward.
+
+Where the river swung in against precipitous bluffs, he climbed the
+high mountains behind. Rivers and streams that entered the main river
+he forded or swam. Often he took to the rim-ice that was beginning to
+form, and more than once he crashed through and struggled for life in
+the icy current. Always he was on the lookout for the trail of the gods
+where it might leave the river and proceed inland.
+
+White Fang was intelligent beyond the average of his kind; yet his
+mental vision was not wide enough to embrace the other bank of the
+Mackenzie. What if the trail of the gods led out on that side? It never
+entered his head. Later on, when he had travelled more and grown older
+and wiser and come to know more of trails and rivers, it might be that
+he could grasp and apprehend such a possibility. But that mental power
+was yet in the future. Just now he ran blindly, his own bank of the
+Mackenzie alone entering into his calculations.
+
+All night he ran, blundering in the darkness into mishaps and obstacles
+that delayed but did not daunt. By the middle of the second day he had
+been running continuously for thirty hours, and the iron of his flesh
+was giving out. It was the endurance of his mind that kept him going.
+He had not eaten in forty hours, and he was weak with hunger. The
+repeated drenchings in the icy water had likewise had their effect on
+him. His handsome coat was draggled. The broad pads of his feet were
+bruised and bleeding. He had begun to limp, and this limp increased
+with the hours. To make it worse, the light of the sky was obscured and
+snow began to fall—a raw, moist, melting, clinging snow, slippery under
+foot, that hid from him the landscape he traversed, and that covered
+over the inequalities of the ground so that the way of his feet was
+more difficult and painful.
+
+Grey Beaver had intended camping that night on the far bank of the
+Mackenzie, for it was in that direction that the hunting lay. But on
+the near bank, shortly before dark, a moose coming down to drink, had
+been espied by Kloo-kooch, who was Grey Beaver’s squaw. Now, had not
+the moose come down to drink, had not Mit-sah been steering out of the
+course because of the snow, had not Kloo-kooch sighted the moose, and
+had not Grey Beaver killed it with a lucky shot from his rifle, all
+subsequent things would have happened differently. Grey Beaver would
+not have camped on the near side of the Mackenzie, and White Fang would
+have passed by and gone on, either to die or to find his way to his
+wild brothers and become one of them—a wolf to the end of his days.
+
+Night had fallen. The snow was flying more thickly, and White Fang,
+whimpering softly to himself as he stumbled and limped along, came upon
+a fresh trail in the snow. So fresh was it that he knew it immediately
+for what it was. Whining with eagerness, he followed back from the
+river bank and in among the trees. The camp-sounds came to his ears. He
+saw the blaze of the fire, Kloo-kooch cooking, and Grey Beaver
+squatting on his hams and mumbling a chunk of raw tallow. There was
+fresh meat in camp!
+
+White Fang expected a beating. He crouched and bristled a little at the
+thought of it. Then he went forward again. He feared and disliked the
+beating he knew to be waiting for him. But he knew, further, that the
+comfort of the fire would be his, the protection of the gods, the
+companionship of the dogs—the last, a companionship of enmity, but none
+the less a companionship and satisfying to his gregarious needs.
+
+He came cringing and crawling into the firelight. Grey Beaver saw him,
+and stopped munching the tallow. White Fang crawled slowly, cringing
+and grovelling in the abjectness of his abasement and submission. He
+crawled straight toward Grey Beaver, every inch of his progress
+becoming slower and more painful. At last he lay at the master’s feet,
+into whose possession he now surrendered himself, voluntarily, body and
+soul. Of his own choice, he came in to sit by man’s fire and to be
+ruled by him. White Fang trembled, waiting for the punishment to fall
+upon him. There was a movement of the hand above him. He cringed
+involuntarily under the expected blow. It did not fall. He stole a
+glance upward. Grey Beaver was breaking the lump of tallow in half!
+Grey Beaver was offering him one piece of the tallow! Very gently and
+somewhat suspiciously, he first smelled the tallow and then proceeded
+to eat it. Grey Beaver ordered meat to be brought to him, and guarded
+him from the other dogs while he ate. After that, grateful and content,
+White Fang lay at Grey Beaver’s feet, gazing at the fire that warmed
+him, blinking and dozing, secure in the knowledge that the morrow would
+find him, not wandering forlorn through bleak forest-stretches, but in
+the camp of the man-animals, with the gods to whom he had given himself
+and upon whom he was now dependent.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V
+THE COVENANT
+
+
+When December was well along, Grey Beaver went on a journey up the
+Mackenzie. Mit-sah and Kloo-kooch went with him. One sled he drove
+himself, drawn by dogs he had traded for or borrowed. A second and
+smaller sled was driven by Mit-sah, and to this was harnessed a team of
+puppies. It was more of a toy affair than anything else, yet it was the
+delight of Mit-sah, who felt that he was beginning to do a man’s work
+in the world. Also, he was learning to drive dogs and to train dogs;
+while the puppies themselves were being broken in to the harness.
+Furthermore, the sled was of some service, for it carried nearly two
+hundred pounds of outfit and food.
+
+White Fang had seen the camp-dogs toiling in the harness, so that he
+did not resent overmuch the first placing of the harness upon himself.
+About his neck was put a moss-stuffed collar, which was connected by
+two pulling-traces to a strap that passed around his chest and over his
+back. It was to this that was fastened the long rope by which he pulled
+at the sled.
+
+There were seven puppies in the team. The others had been born earlier
+in the year and were nine and ten months old, while White Fang was only
+eight months old. Each dog was fastened to the sled by a single rope.
+No two ropes were of the same length, while the difference in length
+between any two ropes was at least that of a dog’s body. Every rope was
+brought to a ring at the front end of the sled. The sled itself was
+without runners, being a birch-bark toboggan, with upturned forward end
+to keep it from ploughing under the snow. This construction enabled the
+weight of the sled and load to be distributed over the largest
+snow-surface; for the snow was crystal-powder and very soft. Observing
+the same principle of widest distribution of weight, the dogs at the
+ends of their ropes radiated fan-fashion from the nose of the sled, so
+that no dog trod in another’s footsteps.
+
+There was, furthermore, another virtue in the fan-formation. The ropes
+of varying length prevented the dogs attacking from the rear those that
+ran in front of them. For a dog to attack another, it would have to
+turn upon one at a shorter rope. In which case it would find itself
+face to face with the dog attacked, and also it would find itself
+facing the whip of the driver. But the most peculiar virtue of all lay
+in the fact that the dog that strove to attack one in front of him must
+pull the sled faster, and that the faster the sled travelled, the
+faster could the dog attacked run away. Thus, the dog behind could
+never catch up with the one in front. The faster he ran, the faster ran
+the one he was after, and the faster ran all the dogs. Incidentally,
+the sled went faster, and thus, by cunning indirection, did man
+increase his mastery over the beasts.
+
+Mit-sah resembled his father, much of whose grey wisdom he possessed.
+In the past he had observed Lip-lip’s persecution of White Fang; but at
+that time Lip-lip was another man’s dog, and Mit-sah had never dared
+more than to shy an occasional stone at him. But now Lip-lip was his
+dog, and he proceeded to wreak his vengeance on him by putting him at
+the end of the longest rope. This made Lip-lip the leader, and was
+apparently an honour! but in reality it took away from him all honour,
+and instead of being bully and master of the pack, he now found himself
+hated and persecuted by the pack.
+
+Because he ran at the end of the longest rope, the dogs had always the
+view of him running away before them. All that they saw of him was his
+bushy tail and fleeing hind legs—a view far less ferocious and
+intimidating than his bristling mane and gleaming fangs. Also, dogs
+being so constituted in their mental ways, the sight of him running
+away gave desire to run after him and a feeling that he ran away from
+them.
+
+The moment the sled started, the team took after Lip-lip in a chase
+that extended throughout the day. At first he had been prone to turn
+upon his pursuers, jealous of his dignity and wrathful; but at such
+times Mit-sah would throw the stinging lash of the thirty-foot
+cariboo-gut whip into his face and compel him to turn tail and run on.
+Lip-lip might face the pack, but he could not face that whip, and all
+that was left him to do was to keep his long rope taut and his flanks
+ahead of the teeth of his mates.
+
+But a still greater cunning lurked in the recesses of the Indian mind.
+To give point to unending pursuit of the leader, Mit-sah favoured him
+over the other dogs. These favours aroused in them jealousy and hatred.
+In their presence Mit-sah would give him meat and would give it to him
+only. This was maddening to them. They would rage around just outside
+the throwing-distance of the whip, while Lip-lip devoured the meat and
+Mit-sah protected him. And when there was no meat to give, Mit-sah
+would keep the team at a distance and make believe to give meat to
+Lip-lip.
+
+White Fang took kindly to the work. He had travelled a greater distance
+than the other dogs in the yielding of himself to the rule of the gods,
+and he had learned more thoroughly the futility of opposing their will.
+In addition, the persecution he had suffered from the pack had made the
+pack less to him in the scheme of things, and man more. He had not
+learned to be dependent on his kind for companionship. Besides, Kiche
+was well-nigh forgotten; and the chief outlet of expression that
+remained to him was in the allegiance he tendered the gods he had
+accepted as masters. So he worked hard, learned discipline, and was
+obedient. Faithfulness and willingness characterised his toil. These
+are essential traits of the wolf and the wild-dog when they have become
+domesticated, and these traits White Fang possessed in unusual measure.
+
+A companionship did exist between White Fang and the other dogs, but it
+was one of warfare and enmity. He had never learned to play with them.
+He knew only how to fight, and fight with them he did, returning to
+them a hundred-fold the snaps and slashes they had given him in the
+days when Lip-lip was leader of the pack. But Lip-lip was no longer
+leader—except when he fled away before his mates at the end of his
+rope, the sled bounding along behind. In camp he kept close to Mit-sah
+or Grey Beaver or Kloo-kooch. He did not dare venture away from the
+gods, for now the fangs of all dogs were against him, and he tasted to
+the dregs the persecution that had been White Fang’s.
+
+With the overthrow of Lip-lip, White Fang could have become leader of
+the pack. But he was too morose and solitary for that. He merely
+thrashed his team-mates. Otherwise he ignored them. They got out of his
+way when he came along; nor did the boldest of them ever dare to rob
+him of his meat. On the contrary, they devoured their own meat
+hurriedly, for fear that he would take it away from them. White Fang
+knew the law well: _to oppress the weak and obey the strong_. He ate
+his share of meat as rapidly as he could. And then woe the dog that had
+not yet finished! A snarl and a flash of fangs, and that dog would wail
+his indignation to the uncomforting stars while White Fang finished his
+portion for him.
+
+Every little while, however, one dog or another would flame up in
+revolt and be promptly subdued. Thus White Fang was kept in training.
+He was jealous of the isolation in which he kept himself in the midst
+of the pack, and he fought often to maintain it. But such fights were
+of brief duration. He was too quick for the others. They were slashed
+open and bleeding before they knew what had happened, were whipped
+almost before they had begun to fight.
+
+As rigid as the sled-discipline of the gods, was the discipline
+maintained by White Fang amongst his fellows. He never allowed them any
+latitude. He compelled them to an unremitting respect for him. They
+might do as they pleased amongst themselves. That was no concern of
+his. But it _was_ his concern that they leave him alone in his
+isolation, get out of his way when he elected to walk among them, and
+at all times acknowledge his mastery over them. A hint of
+stiff-leggedness on their part, a lifted lip or a bristle of hair, and
+he would be upon them, merciless and cruel, swiftly convincing them of
+the error of their way.
+
+He was a monstrous tyrant. His mastery was rigid as steel. He oppressed
+the weak with a vengeance. Not for nothing had he been exposed to the
+pitiless struggles for life in the day of his cubhood, when his mother
+and he, alone and unaided, held their own and survived in the ferocious
+environment of the Wild. And not for nothing had he learned to walk
+softly when superior strength went by. He oppressed the weak, but he
+respected the strong. And in the course of the long journey with Grey
+Beaver he walked softly indeed amongst the full-grown dogs in the camps
+of the strange man-animals they encountered.
+
+The months passed by. Still continued the journey of Grey Beaver. White
+Fang’s strength was developed by the long hours on trail and the steady
+toil at the sled; and it would have seemed that his mental development
+was well-nigh complete. He had come to know quite thoroughly the world
+in which he lived. His outlook was bleak and materialistic. The world
+as he saw it was a fierce and brutal world, a world without warmth, a
+world in which caresses and affection and the bright sweetnesses of the
+spirit did not exist.
+
+He had no affection for Grey Beaver. True, he was a god, but a most
+savage god. White Fang was glad to acknowledge his lordship, but it was
+a lordship based upon superior intelligence and brute strength. There
+was something in the fibre of White Fang’s being that made his lordship
+a thing to be desired, else he would not have come back from the Wild
+when he did to tender his allegiance. There were deeps in his nature
+which had never been sounded. A kind word, a caressing touch of the
+hand, on the part of Grey Beaver, might have sounded these deeps; but
+Grey Beaver did not caress, nor speak kind words. It was not his way.
+His primacy was savage, and savagely he ruled, administering justice
+with a club, punishing transgression with the pain of a blow, and
+rewarding merit, not by kindness, but by withholding a blow.
+
+So White Fang knew nothing of the heaven a man’s hand might contain for
+him. Besides, he did not like the hands of the man-animals. He was
+suspicious of them. It was true that they sometimes gave meat, but more
+often they gave hurt. Hands were things to keep away from. They hurled
+stones, wielded sticks and clubs and whips, administered slaps and
+clouts, and, when they touched him, were cunning to hurt with pinch and
+twist and wrench. In strange villages he had encountered the hands of
+the children and learned that they were cruel to hurt. Also, he had
+once nearly had an eye poked out by a toddling papoose. From these
+experiences he became suspicious of all children. He could not tolerate
+them. When they came near with their ominous hands, he got up.
+
+It was in a village at the Great Slave Lake, that, in the course of
+resenting the evil of the hands of the man-animals, he came to modify
+the law that he had learned from Grey Beaver: namely, that the
+unpardonable crime was to bite one of the gods. In this village, after
+the custom of all dogs in all villages, White Fang went foraging, for
+food. A boy was chopping frozen moose-meat with an axe, and the chips
+were flying in the snow. White Fang, sliding by in quest of meat,
+stopped and began to eat the chips. He observed the boy lay down the
+axe and take up a stout club. White Fang sprang clear, just in time to
+escape the descending blow. The boy pursued him, and he, a stranger in
+the village, fled between two tepees to find himself cornered against a
+high earth bank.
+
+There was no escape for White Fang. The only way out was between the
+two tepees, and this the boy guarded. Holding his club prepared to
+strike, he drew in on his cornered quarry. White Fang was furious. He
+faced the boy, bristling and snarling, his sense of justice outraged.
+He knew the law of forage. All the wastage of meat, such as the frozen
+chips, belonged to the dog that found it. He had done no wrong, broken
+no law, yet here was this boy preparing to give him a beating. White
+Fang scarcely knew what happened. He did it in a surge of rage. And he
+did it so quickly that the boy did not know either. All the boy knew
+was that he had in some unaccountable way been overturned into the
+snow, and that his club-hand had been ripped wide open by White Fang’s
+teeth.
+
+But White Fang knew that he had broken the law of the gods. He had
+driven his teeth into the sacred flesh of one of them, and could expect
+nothing but a most terrible punishment. He fled away to Grey Beaver,
+behind whose protecting legs he crouched when the bitten boy and the
+boy’s family came, demanding vengeance. But they went away with
+vengeance unsatisfied. Grey Beaver defended White Fang. So did Mit-sah
+and Kloo-kooch. White Fang, listening to the wordy war and watching the
+angry gestures, knew that his act was justified. And so it came that he
+learned there were gods and gods. There were his gods, and there were
+other gods, and between them there was a difference. Justice or
+injustice, it was all the same, he must take all things from the hands
+of his own gods. But he was not compelled to take injustice from the
+other gods. It was his privilege to resent it with his teeth. And this
+also was a law of the gods.
+
+Before the day was out, White Fang was to learn more about this law.
+Mit-sah, alone, gathering firewood in the forest, encountered the boy
+that had been bitten. With him were other boys. Hot words passed. Then
+all the boys attacked Mit-sah. It was going hard with him. Blows were
+raining upon him from all sides. White Fang looked on at first. This
+was an affair of the gods, and no concern of his. Then he realised that
+this was Mit-sah, one of his own particular gods, who was being
+maltreated. It was no reasoned impulse that made White Fang do what he
+then did. A mad rush of anger sent him leaping in amongst the
+combatants. Five minutes later the landscape was covered with fleeing
+boys, many of whom dripped blood upon the snow in token that White
+Fang’s teeth had not been idle. When Mit-sah told the story in camp,
+Grey Beaver ordered meat to be given to White Fang. He ordered much
+meat to be given, and White Fang, gorged and sleepy by the fire, knew
+that the law had received its verification.
+
+It was in line with these experiences that White Fang came to learn the
+law of property and the duty of the defence of property. From the
+protection of his god’s body to the protection of his god’s possessions
+was a step, and this step he made. What was his god’s was to be
+defended against all the world—even to the extent of biting other gods.
+Not only was such an act sacrilegious in its nature, but it was fraught
+with peril. The gods were all-powerful, and a dog was no match against
+them; yet White Fang learned to face them, fiercely belligerent and
+unafraid. Duty rose above fear, and thieving gods learned to leave Grey
+Beaver’s property alone.
+
+One thing, in this connection, White Fang quickly learnt, and that was
+that a thieving god was usually a cowardly god and prone to run away at
+the sounding of the alarm. Also, he learned that but brief time elapsed
+between his sounding of the alarm and Grey Beaver coming to his aid. He
+came to know that it was not fear of him that drove the thief away, but
+fear of Grey Beaver. White Fang did not give the alarm by barking. He
+never barked. His method was to drive straight at the intruder, and to
+sink his teeth in if he could. Because he was morose and solitary,
+having nothing to do with the other dogs, he was unusually fitted to
+guard his master’s property; and in this he was encouraged and trained
+by Grey Beaver. One result of this was to make White Fang more
+ferocious and indomitable, and more solitary.
+
+The months went by, binding stronger and stronger the covenant between
+dog and man. This was the ancient covenant that the first wolf that
+came in from the Wild entered into with man. And, like all succeeding
+wolves and wild dogs that had done likewise, White Fang worked the
+covenant out for himself. The terms were simple. For the possession of
+a flesh-and-blood god, he exchanged his own liberty. Food and fire,
+protection and companionship, were some of the things he received from
+the god. In return, he guarded the god’s property, defended his body,
+worked for him, and obeyed him.
+
+The possession of a god implies service. White Fang’s was a service of
+duty and awe, but not of love. He did not know what love was. He had no
+experience of love. Kiche was a remote memory. Besides, not only had he
+abandoned the Wild and his kind when he gave himself up to man, but the
+terms of the covenant were such that if ever he met Kiche again he
+would not desert his god to go with her. His allegiance to man seemed
+somehow a law of his being greater than the love of liberty, of kind
+and kin.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI
+THE FAMINE
+
+
+The spring of the year was at hand when Grey Beaver finished his long
+journey. It was April, and White Fang was a year old when he pulled
+into the home villages and was loosed from the harness by Mit-sah.
+Though a long way from his full growth, White Fang, next to Lip-lip,
+was the largest yearling in the village. Both from his father, the
+wolf, and from Kiche, he had inherited stature and strength, and
+already he was measuring up alongside the full-grown dogs. But he had
+not yet grown compact. His body was slender and rangy, and his strength
+more stringy than massive, His coat was the true wolf-grey, and to all
+appearances he was true wolf himself. The quarter-strain of dog he had
+inherited from Kiche had left no mark on him physically, though it had
+played its part in his mental make-up.
+
+He wandered through the village, recognising with staid satisfaction
+the various gods he had known before the long journey. Then there were
+the dogs, puppies growing up like himself, and grown dogs that did not
+look so large and formidable as the memory pictures he retained of
+them. Also, he stood less in fear of them than formerly, stalking among
+them with a certain careless ease that was as new to him as it was
+enjoyable.
+
+There was Baseek, a grizzled old fellow that in his younger days had
+but to uncover his fangs to send White Fang cringing and crouching to
+the right about. From him White Fang had learned much of his own
+insignificance; and from him he was now to learn much of the change and
+development that had taken place in himself. While Baseek had been
+growing weaker with age, White Fang had been growing stronger with
+youth.
+
+It was at the cutting-up of a moose, fresh-killed, that White Fang
+learned of the changed relations in which he stood to the dog-world. He
+had got for himself a hoof and part of the shin-bone, to which quite a
+bit of meat was attached. Withdrawn from the immediate scramble of the
+other dogs—in fact out of sight behind a thicket—he was devouring his
+prize, when Baseek rushed in upon him. Before he knew what he was
+doing, he had slashed the intruder twice and sprung clear. Baseek was
+surprised by the other’s temerity and swiftness of attack. He stood,
+gazing stupidly across at White Fang, the raw, red shin-bone between
+them.
+
+Baseek was old, and already he had come to know the increasing valour
+of the dogs it had been his wont to bully. Bitter experiences these,
+which, perforce, he swallowed, calling upon all his wisdom to cope with
+them. In the old days he would have sprung upon White Fang in a fury of
+righteous wrath. But now his waning powers would not permit such a
+course. He bristled fiercely and looked ominously across the shin-bone
+at White Fang. And White Fang, resurrecting quite a deal of the old
+awe, seemed to wilt and to shrink in upon himself and grow small, as he
+cast about in his mind for a way to beat a retreat not too inglorious.
+
+And right here Baseek erred. Had he contented himself with looking
+fierce and ominous, all would have been well. White Fang, on the verge
+of retreat, would have retreated, leaving the meat to him. But Baseek
+did not wait. He considered the victory already his and stepped forward
+to the meat. As he bent his head carelessly to smell it, White Fang
+bristled slightly. Even then it was not too late for Baseek to retrieve
+the situation. Had he merely stood over the meat, head up and
+glowering, White Fang would ultimately have slunk away. But the fresh
+meat was strong in Baseek’s nostrils, and greed urged him to take a
+bite of it.
+
+This was too much for White Fang. Fresh upon his months of mastery over
+his own team-mates, it was beyond his self-control to stand idly by
+while another devoured the meat that belonged to him. He struck, after
+his custom, without warning. With the first slash, Baseek’s right ear
+was ripped into ribbons. He was astounded at the suddenness of it. But
+more things, and most grievous ones, were happening with equal
+suddenness. He was knocked off his feet. His throat was bitten. While
+he was struggling to his feet the young dog sank teeth twice into his
+shoulder. The swiftness of it was bewildering. He made a futile rush at
+White Fang, clipping the empty air with an outraged snap. The next
+moment his nose was laid open, and he was staggering backward away from
+the meat.
+
+The situation was now reversed. White Fang stood over the shin-bone,
+bristling and menacing, while Baseek stood a little way off, preparing
+to retreat. He dared not risk a fight with this young lightning-flash,
+and again he knew, and more bitterly, the enfeeblement of oncoming age.
+His attempt to maintain his dignity was heroic. Calmly turning his back
+upon young dog and shin-bone, as though both were beneath his notice
+and unworthy of his consideration, he stalked grandly away. Nor, until
+well out of sight, did he stop to lick his bleeding wounds.
+
+The effect on White Fang was to give him a greater faith in himself,
+and a greater pride. He walked less softly among the grown dogs; his
+attitude toward them was less compromising. Not that he went out of his
+way looking for trouble. Far from it. But upon his way he demanded
+consideration. He stood upon his right to go his way unmolested and to
+give trail to no dog. He had to be taken into account, that was all. He
+was no longer to be disregarded and ignored, as was the lot of puppies,
+and as continued to be the lot of the puppies that were his team-mates.
+They got out of the way, gave trail to the grown dogs, and gave up meat
+to them under compulsion. But White Fang, uncompanionable, solitary,
+morose, scarcely looking to right or left, redoubtable, forbidding of
+aspect, remote and alien, was accepted as an equal by his puzzled
+elders. They quickly learned to leave him alone, neither venturing
+hostile acts nor making overtures of friendliness. If they left him
+alone, he left them alone—a state of affairs that they found, after a
+few encounters, to be pre-eminently desirable.
+
+In midsummer White Fang had an experience. Trotting along in his silent
+way to investigate a new tepee which had been erected on the edge of
+the village while he was away with the hunters after moose, he came
+full upon Kiche. He paused and looked at her. He remembered her
+vaguely, but he _remembered_ her, and that was more than could be said
+for her. She lifted her lip at him in the old snarl of menace, and his
+memory became clear. His forgotten cubhood, all that was associated
+with that familiar snarl, rushed back to him. Before he had known the
+gods, she had been to him the centre-pin of the universe. The old
+familiar feelings of that time came back upon him, surged up within
+him. He bounded towards her joyously, and she met him with shrewd fangs
+that laid his cheek open to the bone. He did not understand. He backed
+away, bewildered and puzzled.
+
+But it was not Kiche’s fault. A wolf-mother was not made to remember
+her cubs of a year or so before. So she did not remember White Fang. He
+was a strange animal, an intruder; and her present litter of puppies
+gave her the right to resent such intrusion.
+
+One of the puppies sprawled up to White Fang. They were half-brothers,
+only they did not know it. White Fang sniffed the puppy curiously,
+whereupon Kiche rushed upon him, gashing his face a second time. He
+backed farther away. All the old memories and associations died down
+again and passed into the grave from which they had been resurrected.
+He looked at Kiche licking her puppy and stopping now and then to snarl
+at him. She was without value to him. He had learned to get along
+without her. Her meaning was forgotten. There was no place for her in
+his scheme of things, as there was no place for him in hers.
+
+He was still standing, stupid and bewildered, the memories forgotten,
+wondering what it was all about, when Kiche attacked him a third time,
+intent on driving him away altogether from the vicinity. And White Fang
+allowed himself to be driven away. This was a female of his kind, and
+it was a law of his kind that the males must not fight the females. He
+did not know anything about this law, for it was no generalisation of
+the mind, not a something acquired by experience of the world. He knew
+it as a secret prompting, as an urge of instinct—of the same instinct
+that made him howl at the moon and stars of nights, and that made him
+fear death and the unknown.
+
+The months went by. White Fang grew stronger, heavier, and more
+compact, while his character was developing along the lines laid down
+by his heredity and his environment. His heredity was a life-stuff that
+may be likened to clay. It possessed many possibilities, was capable of
+being moulded into many different forms. Environment served to model
+the clay, to give it a particular form. Thus, had White Fang never come
+in to the fires of man, the Wild would have moulded him into a true
+wolf. But the gods had given him a different environment, and he was
+moulded into a dog that was rather wolfish, but that was a dog and not
+a wolf.
+
+And so, according to the clay of his nature and the pressure of his
+surroundings, his character was being moulded into a certain particular
+shape. There was no escaping it. He was becoming more morose, more
+uncompanionable, more solitary, more ferocious; while the dogs were
+learning more and more that it was better to be at peace with him than
+at war, and Grey Beaver was coming to prize him more greatly with the
+passage of each day.
+
+White Fang, seeming to sum up strength in all his qualities,
+nevertheless suffered from one besetting weakness. He could not stand
+being laughed at. The laughter of men was a hateful thing. They might
+laugh among themselves about anything they pleased except himself, and
+he did not mind. But the moment laughter was turned upon him he would
+fly into a most terrible rage. Grave, dignified, sombre, a laugh made
+him frantic to ridiculousness. It so outraged him and upset him that
+for hours he would behave like a demon. And woe to the dog that at such
+times ran foul of him. He knew the law too well to take it out of Grey
+Beaver; behind Grey Beaver were a club and godhead. But behind the dogs
+there was nothing but space, and into this space they flew when White
+Fang came on the scene, made mad by laughter.
+
+In the third year of his life there came a great famine to the
+Mackenzie Indians. In the summer the fish failed. In the winter the
+cariboo forsook their accustomed track. Moose were scarce, the rabbits
+almost disappeared, hunting and preying animals perished. Denied their
+usual food-supply, weakened by hunger, they fell upon and devoured one
+another. Only the strong survived. White Fang’s gods were always
+hunting animals. The old and the weak of them died of hunger. There was
+wailing in the village, where the women and children went without in
+order that what little they had might go into the bellies of the lean
+and hollow-eyed hunters who trod the forest in the vain pursuit of
+meat.
+
+To such extremity were the gods driven that they ate the soft-tanned
+leather of their mocassins and mittens, while the dogs ate the
+harnesses off their backs and the very whip-lashes. Also, the dogs ate
+one another, and also the gods ate the dogs. The weakest and the more
+worthless were eaten first. The dogs that still lived, looked on and
+understood. A few of the boldest and wisest forsook the fires of the
+gods, which had now become a shambles, and fled into the forest, where,
+in the end, they starved to death or were eaten by wolves.
+
+In this time of misery, White Fang, too, stole away into the woods. He
+was better fitted for the life than the other dogs, for he had the
+training of his cubhood to guide him. Especially adept did he become in
+stalking small living things. He would lie concealed for hours,
+following every movement of a cautious tree-squirrel, waiting, with a
+patience as huge as the hunger he suffered from, until the squirrel
+ventured out upon the ground. Even then, White Fang was not premature.
+He waited until he was sure of striking before the squirrel could gain
+a tree-refuge. Then, and not until then, would he flash from his
+hiding-place, a grey projectile, incredibly swift, never failing its
+mark—the fleeing squirrel that fled not fast enough.
+
+Successful as he was with squirrels, there was one difficulty that
+prevented him from living and growing fat on them. There were not
+enough squirrels. So he was driven to hunt still smaller things. So
+acute did his hunger become at times that he was not above rooting out
+wood-mice from their burrows in the ground. Nor did he scorn to do
+battle with a weasel as hungry as himself and many times more
+ferocious.
+
+In the worst pinches of the famine he stole back to the fires of the
+gods. But he did not go into the fires. He lurked in the forest,
+avoiding discovery and robbing the snares at the rare intervals when
+game was caught. He even robbed Grey Beaver’s snare of a rabbit at a
+time when Grey Beaver staggered and tottered through the forest,
+sitting down often to rest, what of weakness and of shortness of
+breath.
+
+One day While Fang encountered a young wolf, gaunt and scrawny,
+loose-jointed with famine. Had he not been hungry himself, White Fang
+might have gone with him and eventually found his way into the pack
+amongst his wild brethren. As it was, he ran the young wolf down and
+killed and ate him.
+
+Fortune seemed to favour him. Always, when hardest pressed for food, he
+found something to kill. Again, when he was weak, it was his luck that
+none of the larger preying animals chanced upon him. Thus, he was
+strong from the two days’ eating a lynx had afforded him when the
+hungry wolf-pack ran full tilt upon him. It was a long, cruel chase,
+but he was better nourished than they, and in the end outran them. And
+not only did he outrun them, but, circling widely back on his track, he
+gathered in one of his exhausted pursuers.
+
+After that he left that part of the country and journeyed over to the
+valley wherein he had been born. Here, in the old lair, he encountered
+Kiche. Up to her old tricks, she, too, had fled the inhospitable fires
+of the gods and gone back to her old refuge to give birth to her young.
+Of this litter but one remained alive when White Fang came upon the
+scene, and this one was not destined to live long. Young life had
+little chance in such a famine.
+
+Kiche’s greeting of her grown son was anything but affectionate. But
+White Fang did not mind. He had outgrown his mother. So he turned tail
+philosophically and trotted on up the stream. At the forks he took the
+turning to the left, where he found the lair of the lynx with whom his
+mother and he had fought long before. Here, in the abandoned lair, he
+settled down and rested for a day.
+
+During the early summer, in the last days of the famine, he met
+Lip-lip, who had likewise taken to the woods, where he had eked out a
+miserable existence.
+
+White Fang came upon him unexpectedly. Trotting in opposite directions
+along the base of a high bluff, they rounded a corner of rock and found
+themselves face to face. They paused with instant alarm, and looked at
+each other suspiciously.
+
+White Fang was in splendid condition. His hunting had been good, and
+for a week he had eaten his fill. He was even gorged from his latest
+kill. But in the moment he looked at Lip-lip his hair rose on end all
+along his back. It was an involuntary bristling on his part, the
+physical state that in the past had always accompanied the mental state
+produced in him by Lip-lip’s bullying and persecution. As in the past
+he had bristled and snarled at sight of Lip-lip, so now, and
+automatically, he bristled and snarled. He did not waste any time. The
+thing was done thoroughly and with despatch. Lip-lip essayed to back
+away, but White Fang struck him hard, shoulder to shoulder. Lip-lip was
+overthrown and rolled upon his back. White Fang’s teeth drove into the
+scrawny throat. There was a death-struggle, during which White Fang
+walked around, stiff-legged and observant. Then he resumed his course
+and trotted on along the base of the bluff.
+
+One day, not long after, he came to the edge of the forest, where a
+narrow stretch of open land sloped down to the Mackenzie. He had been
+over this ground before, when it was bare, but now a village occupied
+it. Still hidden amongst the trees, he paused to study the situation.
+Sights and sounds and scents were familiar to him. It was the old
+village changed to a new place. But sights and sounds and smells were
+different from those he had last had when he fled away from it. There
+was no whimpering nor wailing. Contented sounds saluted his ear, and
+when he heard the angry voice of a woman he knew it to be the anger
+that proceeds from a full stomach. And there was a smell in the air of
+fish. There was food. The famine was gone. He came out boldly from the
+forest and trotted into camp straight to Grey Beaver’s tepee. Grey
+Beaver was not there; but Kloo-kooch welcomed him with glad cries and
+the whole of a fresh-caught fish, and he lay down to wait Grey Beaver’s
+coming.
+
+
+
+
+PART IV
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I
+THE ENEMY OF HIS KIND
+
+
+Had there been in White Fang’s nature any possibility, no matter how
+remote, of his ever coming to fraternise with his kind, such
+possibility was irretrievably destroyed when he was made leader of the
+sled-team. For now the dogs hated him—hated him for the extra meat
+bestowed upon him by Mit-sah; hated him for all the real and fancied
+favours he received; hated him for that he fled always at the head of
+the team, his waving brush of a tail and his perpetually retreating
+hind-quarters for ever maddening their eyes.
+
+And White Fang just as bitterly hated them back. Being sled-leader was
+anything but gratifying to him. To be compelled to run away before the
+yelling pack, every dog of which, for three years, he had thrashed and
+mastered, was almost more than he could endure. But endure it he must,
+or perish, and the life that was in him had no desire to perish out.
+The moment Mit-sah gave his order for the start, that moment the whole
+team, with eager, savage cries, sprang forward at White Fang.
+
+There was no defence for him. If he turned upon them, Mit-sah would
+throw the stinging lash of the whip into his face. Only remained to him
+to run away. He could not encounter that howling horde with his tail
+and hind-quarters. These were scarcely fit weapons with which to meet
+the many merciless fangs. So run away he did, violating his own nature
+and pride with every leap he made, and leaping all day long.
+
+One cannot violate the promptings of one’s nature without having that
+nature recoil upon itself. Such a recoil is like that of a hair, made
+to grow out from the body, turning unnaturally upon the direction of
+its growth and growing into the body—a rankling, festering thing of
+hurt. And so with White Fang. Every urge of his being impelled him to
+spring upon the pack that cried at his heels, but it was the will of
+the gods that this should not be; and behind the will, to enforce it,
+was the whip of cariboo-gut with its biting thirty-foot lash. So White
+Fang could only eat his heart in bitterness and develop a hatred and
+malice commensurate with the ferocity and indomitability of his nature.
+
+If ever a creature was the enemy of its kind, White Fang was that
+creature. He asked no quarter, gave none. He was continually marred and
+scarred by the teeth of the pack, and as continually he left his own
+marks upon the pack. Unlike most leaders, who, when camp was made and
+the dogs were unhitched, huddled near to the gods for protection, White
+Fang disdained such protection. He walked boldly about the camp,
+inflicting punishment in the night for what he had suffered in the day.
+In the time before he was made leader of the team, the pack had learned
+to get out of his way. But now it was different. Excited by the
+day-long pursuit of him, swayed subconsciously by the insistent
+iteration on their brains of the sight of him fleeing away, mastered by
+the feeling of mastery enjoyed all day, the dogs could not bring
+themselves to give way to him. When he appeared amongst them, there was
+always a squabble. His progress was marked by snarl and snap and growl.
+The very atmosphere he breathed was surcharged with hatred and malice,
+and this but served to increase the hatred and malice within him.
+
+When Mit-sah cried out his command for the team to stop, White Fang
+obeyed. At first this caused trouble for the other dogs. All of them
+would spring upon the hated leader only to find the tables turned.
+Behind him would be Mit-sah, the great whip singing in his hand. So the
+dogs came to understand that when the team stopped by order, White Fang
+was to be let alone. But when White Fang stopped without orders, then
+it was allowed them to spring upon him and destroy him if they could.
+After several experiences, White Fang never stopped without orders. He
+learned quickly. It was in the nature of things, that he must learn
+quickly if he were to survive the unusually severe conditions under
+which life was vouchsafed him.
+
+But the dogs could never learn the lesson to leave him alone in camp.
+Each day, pursuing him and crying defiance at him, the lesson of the
+previous night was erased, and that night would have to be learned over
+again, to be as immediately forgotten. Besides, there was a greater
+consistence in their dislike of him. They sensed between themselves and
+him a difference of kind—cause sufficient in itself for hostility. Like
+him, they were domesticated wolves. But they had been domesticated for
+generations. Much of the Wild had been lost, so that to them the Wild
+was the unknown, the terrible, the ever-menacing and ever warring. But
+to him, in appearance and action and impulse, still clung the Wild. He
+symbolised it, was its personification: so that when they showed their
+teeth to him they were defending themselves against the powers of
+destruction that lurked in the shadows of the forest and in the dark
+beyond the camp-fire.
+
+But there was one lesson the dogs did learn, and that was to keep
+together. White Fang was too terrible for any of them to face
+single-handed. They met him with the mass-formation, otherwise he would
+have killed them, one by one, in a night. As it was, he never had a
+chance to kill them. He might roll a dog off its feet, but the pack
+would be upon him before he could follow up and deliver the deadly
+throat-stroke. At the first hint of conflict, the whole team drew
+together and faced him. The dogs had quarrels among themselves, but
+these were forgotten when trouble was brewing with White Fang.
+
+On the other hand, try as they would, they could not kill White Fang.
+He was too quick for them, too formidable, too wise. He avoided tight
+places and always backed out of it when they bade fair to surround him.
+While, as for getting him off his feet, there was no dog among them
+capable of doing the trick. His feet clung to the earth with the same
+tenacity that he clung to life. For that matter, life and footing were
+synonymous in this unending warfare with the pack, and none knew it
+better than White Fang.
+
+So he became the enemy of his kind, domesticated wolves that they were,
+softened by the fires of man, weakened in the sheltering shadow of
+man’s strength. White Fang was bitter and implacable. The clay of him
+was so moulded. He declared a vendetta against all dogs. And so
+terribly did he live this vendetta that Grey Beaver, fierce savage
+himself, could not but marvel at White Fang’s ferocity. Never, he
+swore, had there been the like of this animal; and the Indians in
+strange villages swore likewise when they considered the tale of his
+killings amongst their dogs.
+
+When White Fang was nearly five years old, Grey Beaver took him on
+another great journey, and long remembered was the havoc he worked
+amongst the dogs of the many villages along the Mackenzie, across the
+Rockies, and down the Porcupine to the Yukon. He revelled in the
+vengeance he wreaked upon his kind. They were ordinary, unsuspecting
+dogs. They were not prepared for his swiftness and directness, for his
+attack without warning. They did not know him for what he was, a
+lightning-flash of slaughter. They bristled up to him, stiff-legged and
+challenging, while he, wasting no time on elaborate preliminaries,
+snapping into action like a steel spring, was at their throats and
+destroying them before they knew what was happening and while they were
+yet in the throes of surprise.
+
+He became an adept at fighting. He economised. He never wasted his
+strength, never tussled. He was in too quickly for that, and, if he
+missed, was out again too quickly. The dislike of the wolf for close
+quarters was his to an unusual degree. He could not endure a prolonged
+contact with another body. It smacked of danger. It made him frantic.
+He must be away, free, on his own legs, touching no living thing. It
+was the Wild still clinging to him, asserting itself through him. This
+feeling had been accentuated by the Ishmaelite life he had led from his
+puppyhood. Danger lurked in contacts. It was the trap, ever the trap,
+the fear of it lurking deep in the life of him, woven into the fibre of
+him.
+
+In consequence, the strange dogs he encountered had no chance against
+him. He eluded their fangs. He got them, or got away, himself untouched
+in either event. In the natural course of things there were exceptions
+to this. There were times when several dogs, pitching on to him,
+punished him before he could get away; and there were times when a
+single dog scored deeply on him. But these were accidents. In the main,
+so efficient a fighter had he become, he went his way unscathed.
+
+Another advantage he possessed was that of correctly judging time and
+distance. Not that he did this consciously, however. He did not
+calculate such things. It was all automatic. His eyes saw correctly,
+and the nerves carried the vision correctly to his brain. The parts of
+him were better adjusted than those of the average dog. They worked
+together more smoothly and steadily. His was a better, far better,
+nervous, mental, and muscular co-ordination. When his eyes conveyed to
+his brain the moving image of an action, his brain without conscious
+effort, knew the space that limited that action and the time required
+for its completion. Thus, he could avoid the leap of another dog, or
+the drive of its fangs, and at the same moment could seize the
+infinitesimal fraction of time in which to deliver his own attack. Body
+and brain, his was a more perfected mechanism. Not that he was to be
+praised for it. Nature had been more generous to him than to the
+average animal, that was all.
+
+It was in the summer that White Fang arrived at Fort Yukon. Grey Beaver
+had crossed the great watershed between Mackenzie and the Yukon in the
+late winter, and spent the spring in hunting among the western outlying
+spurs of the Rockies. Then, after the break-up of the ice on the
+Porcupine, he had built a canoe and paddled down that stream to where
+it effected its junction with the Yukon just under the Artic circle.
+Here stood the old Hudson’s Bay Company fort; and here were many
+Indians, much food, and unprecedented excitement. It was the summer of
+1898, and thousands of gold-hunters were going up the Yukon to Dawson
+and the Klondike. Still hundreds of miles from their goal, nevertheless
+many of them had been on the way for a year, and the least any of them
+had travelled to get that far was five thousand miles, while some had
+come from the other side of the world.
+
+Here Grey Beaver stopped. A whisper of the gold-rush had reached his
+ears, and he had come with several bales of furs, and another of
+gut-sewn mittens and moccasins. He would not have ventured so long a
+trip had he not expected generous profits. But what he had expected was
+nothing to what he realised. His wildest dreams had not exceeded a
+hundred per cent. profit; he made a thousand per cent. And like a true
+Indian, he settled down to trade carefully and slowly, even if it took
+all summer and the rest of the winter to dispose of his goods.
+
+It was at Fort Yukon that White Fang saw his first white men. As
+compared with the Indians he had known, they were to him another race
+of beings, a race of superior gods. They impressed him as possessing
+superior power, and it is on power that godhead rests. White Fang did
+not reason it out, did not in his mind make the sharp generalisation
+that the white gods were more powerful. It was a feeling, nothing more,
+and yet none the less potent. As, in his puppyhood, the looming bulks
+of the tepees, man-reared, had affected him as manifestations of power,
+so was he affected now by the houses and the huge fort all of massive
+logs. Here was power. Those white gods were strong. They possessed
+greater mastery over matter than the gods he had known, most powerful
+among which was Grey Beaver. And yet Grey Beaver was as a child-god
+among these white-skinned ones.
+
+To be sure, White Fang only felt these things. He was not conscious of
+them. Yet it is upon feeling, more often than thinking, that animals
+act; and every act White Fang now performed was based upon the feeling
+that the white men were the superior gods. In the first place he was
+very suspicious of them. There was no telling what unknown terrors were
+theirs, what unknown hurts they could administer. He was curious to
+observe them, fearful of being noticed by them. For the first few hours
+he was content with slinking around and watching them from a safe
+distance. Then he saw that no harm befell the dogs that were near to
+them, and he came in closer.
+
+In turn he was an object of great curiosity to them. His wolfish
+appearance caught their eyes at once, and they pointed him out to one
+another. This act of pointing put White Fang on his guard, and when
+they tried to approach him he showed his teeth and backed away. Not one
+succeeded in laying a hand on him, and it was well that they did not.
+
+White Fang soon learned that very few of these gods—not more than a
+dozen—lived at this place. Every two or three days a steamer (another
+and colossal manifestation of power) came into the bank and stopped for
+several hours. The white men came from off these steamers and went away
+on them again. There seemed untold numbers of these white men. In the
+first day or so, he saw more of them than he had seen Indians in all
+his life; and as the days went by they continued to come up the river,
+stop, and then go on up the river out of sight.
+
+But if the white gods were all-powerful, their dogs did not amount to
+much. This White Fang quickly discovered by mixing with those that came
+ashore with their masters. They were irregular shapes and sizes. Some
+were short-legged—too short; others were long-legged—too long. They had
+hair instead of fur, and a few had very little hair at that. And none
+of them knew how to fight.
+
+As an enemy of his kind, it was in White Fang’s province to fight with
+them. This he did, and he quickly achieved for them a mighty contempt.
+They were soft and helpless, made much noise, and floundered around
+clumsily trying to accomplish by main strength what he accomplished by
+dexterity and cunning. They rushed bellowing at him. He sprang to the
+side. They did not know what had become of him; and in that moment he
+struck them on the shoulder, rolling them off their feet and delivering
+his stroke at the throat.
+
+Sometimes this stroke was successful, and a stricken dog rolled in the
+dirt, to be pounced upon and torn to pieces by the pack of Indian dogs
+that waited. White Fang was wise. He had long since learned that the
+gods were made angry when their dogs were killed. The white men were no
+exception to this. So he was content, when he had overthrown and
+slashed wide the throat of one of their dogs, to drop back and let the
+pack go in and do the cruel finishing work. It was then that the white
+men rushed in, visiting their wrath heavily on the pack, while White
+Fang went free. He would stand off at a little distance and look on,
+while stones, clubs, axes, and all sorts of weapons fell upon his
+fellows. White Fang was very wise.
+
+But his fellows grew wise in their own way; and in this White Fang grew
+wise with them. They learned that it was when a steamer first tied to
+the bank that they had their fun. After the first two or three strange
+dogs had been downed and destroyed, the white men hustled their own
+animals back on board and wrecked savage vengeance on the offenders.
+One white man, having seen his dog, a setter, torn to pieces before his
+eyes, drew a revolver. He fired rapidly, six times, and six of the pack
+lay dead or dying—another manifestation of power that sank deep into
+White Fang’s consciousness.
+
+White Fang enjoyed it all. He did not love his kind, and he was shrewd
+enough to escape hurt himself. At first, the killing of the white men’s
+dogs had been a diversion. After a time it became his occupation. There
+was no work for him to do. Grey Beaver was busy trading and getting
+wealthy. So White Fang hung around the landing with the disreputable
+gang of Indian dogs, waiting for steamers. With the arrival of a
+steamer the fun began. After a few minutes, by the time the white men
+had got over their surprise, the gang scattered. The fun was over until
+the next steamer should arrive.
+
+But it can scarcely be said that White Fang was a member of the gang.
+He did not mingle with it, but remained aloof, always himself, and was
+even feared by it. It is true, he worked with it. He picked the quarrel
+with the strange dog while the gang waited. And when he had overthrown
+the strange dog the gang went in to finish it. But it is equally true
+that he then withdrew, leaving the gang to receive the punishment of
+the outraged gods.
+
+It did not require much exertion to pick these quarrels. All he had to
+do, when the strange dogs came ashore, was to show himself. When they
+saw him they rushed for him. It was their instinct. He was the Wild—the
+unknown, the terrible, the ever-menacing, the thing that prowled in the
+darkness around the fires of the primeval world when they, cowering
+close to the fires, were reshaping their instincts, learning to fear
+the Wild out of which they had come, and which they had deserted and
+betrayed. Generation by generation, down all the generations, had this
+fear of the Wild been stamped into their natures. For centuries the
+Wild had stood for terror and destruction. And during all this time
+free licence had been theirs, from their masters, to kill the things of
+the Wild. In doing this they had protected both themselves and the gods
+whose companionship they shared.
+
+And so, fresh from the soft southern world, these dogs, trotting down
+the gang-plank and out upon the Yukon shore had but to see White Fang
+to experience the irresistible impulse to rush upon him and destroy
+him. They might be town-reared dogs, but the instinctive fear of the
+Wild was theirs just the same. Not alone with their own eyes did they
+see the wolfish creature in the clear light of day, standing before
+them. They saw him with the eyes of their ancestors, and by their
+inherited memory they knew White Fang for the wolf, and they remembered
+the ancient feud.
+
+All of which served to make White Fang’s days enjoyable. If the sight
+of him drove these strange dogs upon him, so much the better for him,
+so much the worse for them. They looked upon him as legitimate prey,
+and as legitimate prey he looked upon them.
+
+Not for nothing had he first seen the light of day in a lonely lair and
+fought his first fights with the ptarmigan, the weasel, and the lynx.
+And not for nothing had his puppyhood been made bitter by the
+persecution of Lip-lip and the whole puppy pack. It might have been
+otherwise, and he would then have been otherwise. Had Lip-lip not
+existed, he would have passed his puppyhood with the other puppies and
+grown up more doglike and with more liking for dogs. Had Grey Beaver
+possessed the plummet of affection and love, he might have sounded the
+deeps of White Fang’s nature and brought up to the surface all manner
+of kindly qualities. But these things had not been so. The clay of
+White Fang had been moulded until he became what he was, morose and
+lonely, unloving and ferocious, the enemy of all his kind.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II
+THE MAD GOD
+
+
+A small number of white men lived in Fort Yukon. These men had been
+long in the country. They called themselves Sour-doughs, and took great
+pride in so classifying themselves. For other men, new in the land,
+they felt nothing but disdain. The men who came ashore from the
+steamers were newcomers. They were known as _chechaquos_, and they
+always wilted at the application of the name. They made their bread
+with baking-powder. This was the invidious distinction between them and
+the Sour-doughs, who, forsooth, made their bread from sour-dough
+because they had no baking-powder.
+
+All of which is neither here nor there. The men in the fort disdained
+the newcomers and enjoyed seeing them come to grief. Especially did
+they enjoy the havoc worked amongst the newcomers’ dogs by White Fang
+and his disreputable gang. When a steamer arrived, the men of the fort
+made it a point always to come down to the bank and see the fun. They
+looked forward to it with as much anticipation as did the Indian dogs,
+while they were not slow to appreciate the savage and crafty part
+played by White Fang.
+
+But there was one man amongst them who particularly enjoyed the sport.
+He would come running at the first sound of a steamboat’s whistle; and
+when the last fight was over and White Fang and the pack had scattered,
+he would return slowly to the fort, his face heavy with regret.
+Sometimes, when a soft southland dog went down, shrieking its death-cry
+under the fangs of the pack, this man would be unable to contain
+himself, and would leap into the air and cry out with delight. And
+always he had a sharp and covetous eye for White Fang.
+
+This man was called “Beauty” by the other men of the fort. No one knew
+his first name, and in general he was known in the country as Beauty
+Smith. But he was anything save a beauty. To antithesis was due his
+naming. He was pre-eminently unbeautiful. Nature had been niggardly
+with him. He was a small man to begin with; and upon his meagre frame
+was deposited an even more strikingly meagre head. Its apex might be
+likened to a point. In fact, in his boyhood, before he had been named
+Beauty by his fellows, he had been called “Pinhead.”
+
+Backward, from the apex, his head slanted down to his neck and forward
+it slanted uncompromisingly to meet a low and remarkably wide forehead.
+Beginning here, as though regretting her parsimony, Nature had spread
+his features with a lavish hand. His eyes were large, and between them
+was the distance of two eyes. His face, in relation to the rest of him,
+was prodigious. In order to discover the necessary area, Nature had
+given him an enormous prognathous jaw. It was wide and heavy, and
+protruded outward and down until it seemed to rest on his chest.
+Possibly this appearance was due to the weariness of the slender neck,
+unable properly to support so great a burden.
+
+This jaw gave the impression of ferocious determination. But something
+lacked. Perhaps it was from excess. Perhaps the jaw was too large. At
+any rate, it was a lie. Beauty Smith was known far and wide as the
+weakest of weak-kneed and snivelling cowards. To complete his
+description, his teeth were large and yellow, while the two eye-teeth,
+larger than their fellows, showed under his lean lips like fangs. His
+eyes were yellow and muddy, as though Nature had run short on pigments
+and squeezed together the dregs of all her tubes. It was the same with
+his hair, sparse and irregular of growth, muddy-yellow and
+dirty-yellow, rising on his head and sprouting out of his face in
+unexpected tufts and bunches, in appearance like clumped and wind-blown
+grain.
+
+In short, Beauty Smith was a monstrosity, and the blame of it lay
+elsewhere. He was not responsible. The clay of him had been so moulded
+in the making. He did the cooking for the other men in the fort, the
+dish-washing and the drudgery. They did not despise him. Rather did
+they tolerate him in a broad human way, as one tolerates any creature
+evilly treated in the making. Also, they feared him. His cowardly rages
+made them dread a shot in the back or poison in their coffee. But
+somebody had to do the cooking, and whatever else his shortcomings,
+Beauty Smith could cook.
+
+This was the man that looked at White Fang, delighted in his ferocious
+prowess, and desired to possess him. He made overtures to White Fang
+from the first. White Fang began by ignoring him. Later on, when the
+overtures became more insistent, White Fang bristled and bared his
+teeth and backed away. He did not like the man. The feel of him was
+bad. He sensed the evil in him, and feared the extended hand and the
+attempts at soft-spoken speech. Because of all this, he hated the man.
+
+With the simpler creatures, good and bad are things simply understood.
+The good stands for all things that bring easement and satisfaction and
+surcease from pain. Therefore, the good is liked. The bad stands for
+all things that are fraught with discomfort, menace, and hurt, and is
+hated accordingly. White Fang’s feel of Beauty Smith was bad. From the
+man’s distorted body and twisted mind, in occult ways, like mists
+rising from malarial marshes, came emanations of the unhealth within.
+Not by reasoning, not by the five senses alone, but by other and
+remoter and uncharted senses, came the feeling to White Fang that the
+man was ominous with evil, pregnant with hurtfulness, and therefore a
+thing bad, and wisely to be hated.
+
+White Fang was in Grey Beaver’s camp when Beauty Smith first visited
+it. At the faint sound of his distant feet, before he came in sight,
+White Fang knew who was coming and began to bristle. He had been lying
+down in an abandon of comfort, but he arose quickly, and, as the man
+arrived, slid away in true wolf-fashion to the edge of the camp. He did
+not know what they said, but he could see the man and Grey Beaver
+talking together. Once, the man pointed at him, and White Fang snarled
+back as though the hand were just descending upon him instead of being,
+as it was, fifty feet away. The man laughed at this; and White Fang
+slunk away to the sheltering woods, his head turned to observe as he
+glided softly over the ground.
+
+Grey Beaver refused to sell the dog. He had grown rich with his trading
+and stood in need of nothing. Besides, White Fang was a valuable
+animal, the strongest sled-dog he had ever owned, and the best leader.
+Furthermore, there was no dog like him on the Mackenzie nor the Yukon.
+He could fight. He killed other dogs as easily as men killed
+mosquitoes. (Beauty Smith’s eyes lighted up at this, and he licked his
+thin lips with an eager tongue). No, White Fang was not for sale at any
+price.
+
+But Beauty Smith knew the ways of Indians. He visited Grey Beaver’s
+camp often, and hidden under his coat was always a black bottle or so.
+One of the potencies of whisky is the breeding of thirst. Grey Beaver
+got the thirst. His fevered membranes and burnt stomach began to
+clamour for more and more of the scorching fluid; while his brain,
+thrust all awry by the unwonted stimulant, permitted him to go any
+length to obtain it. The money he had received for his furs and mittens
+and moccasins began to go. It went faster and faster, and the shorter
+his money-sack grew, the shorter grew his temper.
+
+In the end his money and goods and temper were all gone. Nothing
+remained to him but his thirst, a prodigious possession in itself that
+grew more prodigious with every sober breath he drew. Then it was that
+Beauty Smith had talk with him again about the sale of White Fang; but
+this time the price offered was in bottles, not dollars, and Grey
+Beaver’s ears were more eager to hear.
+
+“You ketch um dog you take um all right,” was his last word.
+
+The bottles were delivered, but after two days. “You ketch um dog,”
+were Beauty Smith’s words to Grey Beaver.
+
+White Fang slunk into camp one evening and dropped down with a sigh of
+content. The dreaded white god was not there. For days his
+manifestations of desire to lay hands on him had been growing more
+insistent, and during that time White Fang had been compelled to avoid
+the camp. He did not know what evil was threatened by those insistent
+hands. He knew only that they did threaten evil of some sort, and that
+it was best for him to keep out of their reach.
+
+But scarcely had he lain down when Grey Beaver staggered over to him
+and tied a leather thong around his neck. He sat down beside White
+Fang, holding the end of the thong in his hand. In the other hand he
+held a bottle, which, from time to time, was inverted above his head to
+the accompaniment of gurgling noises.
+
+An hour of this passed, when the vibrations of feet in contact with the
+ground foreran the one who approached. White Fang heard it first, and
+he was bristling with recognition while Grey Beaver still nodded
+stupidly. White Fang tried to draw the thong softly out of his master’s
+hand; but the relaxed fingers closed tightly and Grey Beaver roused
+himself.
+
+Beauty Smith strode into camp and stood over White Fang. He snarled
+softly up at the thing of fear, watching keenly the deportment of the
+hands. One hand extended outward and began to descend upon his head.
+His soft snarl grew tense and harsh. The hand continued slowly to
+descend, while he crouched beneath it, eyeing it malignantly, his snarl
+growing shorter and shorter as, with quickening breath, it approached
+its culmination. Suddenly he snapped, striking with his fangs like a
+snake. The hand was jerked back, and the teeth came together emptily
+with a sharp click. Beauty Smith was frightened and angry. Grey Beaver
+clouted White Fang alongside the head, so that he cowered down close to
+the earth in respectful obedience.
+
+White Fang’s suspicious eyes followed every movement. He saw Beauty
+Smith go away and return with a stout club. Then the end of the thong
+was given over to him by Grey Beaver. Beauty Smith started to walk
+away. The thong grew taut. White Fang resisted it. Grey Beaver clouted
+him right and left to make him get up and follow. He obeyed, but with a
+rush, hurling himself upon the stranger who was dragging him away.
+Beauty Smith did not jump away. He had been waiting for this. He swung
+the club smartly, stopping the rush midway and smashing White Fang down
+upon the ground. Grey Beaver laughed and nodded approval. Beauty Smith
+tightened the thong again, and White Fang crawled limply and dizzily to
+his feet.
+
+He did not rush a second time. One smash from the club was sufficient
+to convince him that the white god knew how to handle it, and he was
+too wise to fight the inevitable. So he followed morosely at Beauty
+Smith’s heels, his tail between his legs, yet snarling softly under his
+breath. But Beauty Smith kept a wary eye on him, and the club was held
+always ready to strike.
+
+At the fort Beauty Smith left him securely tied and went in to bed.
+White Fang waited an hour. Then he applied his teeth to the thong, and
+in the space of ten seconds was free. He had wasted no time with his
+teeth. There had been no useless gnawing. The thong was cut across,
+diagonally, almost as clean as though done by a knife. White Fang
+looked up at the fort, at the same time bristling and growling. Then he
+turned and trotted back to Grey Beaver’s camp. He owed no allegiance to
+this strange and terrible god. He had given himself to Grey Beaver, and
+to Grey Beaver he considered he still belonged.
+
+But what had occurred before was repeated—with a difference. Grey
+Beaver again made him fast with a thong, and in the morning turned him
+over to Beauty Smith. And here was where the difference came in. Beauty
+Smith gave him a beating. Tied securely, White Fang could only rage
+futilely and endure the punishment. Club and whip were both used upon
+him, and he experienced the worst beating he had ever received in his
+life. Even the big beating given him in his puppyhood by Grey Beaver
+was mild compared with this.
+
+Beauty Smith enjoyed the task. He delighted in it. He gloated over his
+victim, and his eyes flamed dully, as he swung the whip or club and
+listened to White Fang’s cries of pain and to his helpless bellows and
+snarls. For Beauty Smith was cruel in the way that cowards are cruel.
+Cringing and snivelling himself before the blows or angry speech of a
+man, he revenged himself, in turn, upon creatures weaker than he. All
+life likes power, and Beauty Smith was no exception. Denied the
+expression of power amongst his own kind, he fell back upon the lesser
+creatures and there vindicated the life that was in him. But Beauty
+Smith had not created himself, and no blame was to be attached to him.
+He had come into the world with a twisted body and a brute
+intelligence. This had constituted the clay of him, and it had not been
+kindly moulded by the world.
+
+White Fang knew why he was being beaten. When Grey Beaver tied the
+thong around his neck, and passed the end of the thong into Beauty
+Smith’s keeping, White Fang knew that it was his god’s will for him to
+go with Beauty Smith. And when Beauty Smith left him tied outside the
+fort, he knew that it was Beauty Smith’s will that he should remain
+there. Therefore, he had disobeyed the will of both the gods, and
+earned the consequent punishment. He had seen dogs change owners in the
+past, and he had seen the runaways beaten as he was being beaten. He
+was wise, and yet in the nature of him there were forces greater than
+wisdom. One of these was fidelity. He did not love Grey Beaver, yet,
+even in the face of his will and his anger, he was faithful to him. He
+could not help it. This faithfulness was a quality of the clay that
+composed him. It was the quality that was peculiarly the possession of
+his kind; the quality that set apart his species from all other
+species; the quality that has enabled the wolf and the wild dog to come
+in from the open and be the companions of man.
+
+After the beating, White Fang was dragged back to the fort. But this
+time Beauty Smith left him tied with a stick. One does not give up a
+god easily, and so with White Fang. Grey Beaver was his own particular
+god, and, in spite of Grey Beaver’s will, White Fang still clung to him
+and would not give him up. Grey Beaver had betrayed and forsaken him,
+but that had no effect upon him. Not for nothing had he surrendered
+himself body and soul to Grey Beaver. There had been no reservation on
+White Fang’s part, and the bond was not to be broken easily.
+
+So, in the night, when the men in the fort were asleep, White Fang
+applied his teeth to the stick that held him. The wood was seasoned and
+dry, and it was tied so closely to his neck that he could scarcely get
+his teeth to it. It was only by the severest muscular exertion and
+neck-arching that he succeeded in getting the wood between his teeth,
+and barely between his teeth at that; and it was only by the exercise
+of an immense patience, extending through many hours, that he succeeded
+in gnawing through the stick. This was something that dogs were not
+supposed to do. It was unprecedented. But White Fang did it, trotting
+away from the fort in the early morning, with the end of the stick
+hanging to his neck.
+
+He was wise. But had he been merely wise he would not have gone back to
+Grey Beaver who had already twice betrayed him. But there was his
+faithfulness, and he went back to be betrayed yet a third time. Again
+he yielded to the tying of a thong around his neck by Grey Beaver, and
+again Beauty Smith came to claim him. And this time he was beaten even
+more severely than before.
+
+Grey Beaver looked on stolidly while the white man wielded the whip. He
+gave no protection. It was no longer his dog. When the beating was over
+White Fang was sick. A soft southland dog would have died under it, but
+not he. His school of life had been sterner, and he was himself of
+sterner stuff. He had too great vitality. His clutch on life was too
+strong. But he was very sick. At first he was unable to drag himself
+along, and Beauty Smith had to wait half-an-hour for him. And then,
+blind and reeling, he followed at Beauty Smith’s heels back to the
+fort.
+
+But now he was tied with a chain that defied his teeth, and he strove
+in vain, by lunging, to draw the staple from the timber into which it
+was driven. After a few days, sober and bankrupt, Grey Beaver departed
+up the Porcupine on his long journey to the Mackenzie. White Fang
+remained on the Yukon, the property of a man more than half mad and all
+brute. But what is a dog to know in its consciousness of madness? To
+White Fang, Beauty Smith was a veritable, if terrible, god. He was a
+mad god at best, but White Fang knew nothing of madness; he knew only
+that he must submit to the will of this new master, obey his every whim
+and fancy.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III
+THE REIGN OF HATE
+
+
+Under the tutelage of the mad god, White Fang became a fiend. He was
+kept chained in a pen at the rear of the fort, and here Beauty Smith
+teased and irritated and drove him wild with petty torments. The man
+early discovered White Fang’s susceptibility to laughter, and made it a
+point after painfully tricking him, to laugh at him. This laughter was
+uproarious and scornful, and at the same time the god pointed his
+finger derisively at White Fang. At such times reason fled from White
+Fang, and in his transports of rage he was even more mad than Beauty
+Smith.
+
+Formerly, White Fang had been merely the enemy of his kind, withal a
+ferocious enemy. He now became the enemy of all things, and more
+ferocious than ever. To such an extent was he tormented, that he hated
+blindly and without the faintest spark of reason. He hated the chain
+that bound him, the men who peered in at him through the slats of the
+pen, the dogs that accompanied the men and that snarled malignantly at
+him in his helplessness. He hated the very wood of the pen that
+confined him. And, first, last, and most of all, he hated Beauty Smith.
+
+But Beauty Smith had a purpose in all that he did to White Fang. One
+day a number of men gathered about the pen. Beauty Smith entered, club
+in hand, and took the chain off from White Fang’s neck. When his master
+had gone out, White Fang turned loose and tore around the pen, trying
+to get at the men outside. He was magnificently terrible. Fully five
+feet in length, and standing two and one-half feet at the shoulder, he
+far outweighed a wolf of corresponding size. From his mother he had
+inherited the heavier proportions of the dog, so that he weighed,
+without any fat and without an ounce of superfluous flesh, over ninety
+pounds. It was all muscle, bone, and sinew-fighting flesh in the finest
+condition.
+
+The door of the pen was being opened again. White Fang paused.
+Something unusual was happening. He waited. The door was opened wider.
+Then a huge dog was thrust inside, and the door was slammed shut behind
+him. White Fang had never seen such a dog (it was a mastiff); but the
+size and fierce aspect of the intruder did not deter him. Here was some
+thing, not wood nor iron, upon which to wreak his hate. He leaped in
+with a flash of fangs that ripped down the side of the mastiff’s neck.
+The mastiff shook his head, growled hoarsely, and plunged at White
+Fang. But White Fang was here, there, and everywhere, always evading
+and eluding, and always leaping in and slashing with his fangs and
+leaping out again in time to escape punishment.
+
+The men outside shouted and applauded, while Beauty Smith, in an
+ecstasy of delight, gloated over the ripping and mangling performed by
+White Fang. There was no hope for the mastiff from the first. He was
+too ponderous and slow. In the end, while Beauty Smith beat White Fang
+back with a club, the mastiff was dragged out by its owner. Then there
+was a payment of bets, and money clinked in Beauty Smith’s hand.
+
+White Fang came to look forward eagerly to the gathering of the men
+around his pen. It meant a fight; and this was the only way that was
+now vouchsafed him of expressing the life that was in him. Tormented,
+incited to hate, he was kept a prisoner so that there was no way of
+satisfying that hate except at the times his master saw fit to put
+another dog against him. Beauty Smith had estimated his powers well,
+for he was invariably the victor. One day, three dogs were turned in
+upon him in succession. Another day a full-grown wolf, fresh-caught
+from the Wild, was shoved in through the door of the pen. And on still
+another day two dogs were set against him at the same time. This was
+his severest fight, and though in the end he killed them both he was
+himself half killed in doing it.
+
+In the fall of the year, when the first snows were falling and mush-ice
+was running in the river, Beauty Smith took passage for himself and
+White Fang on a steamboat bound up the Yukon to Dawson. White Fang had
+now achieved a reputation in the land. As “the Fighting Wolf” he was
+known far and wide, and the cage in which he was kept on the
+steam-boat’s deck was usually surrounded by curious men. He raged and
+snarled at them, or lay quietly and studied them with cold hatred. Why
+should he not hate them? He never asked himself the question. He knew
+only hate and lost himself in the passion of it. Life had become a hell
+to him. He had not been made for the close confinement wild beasts
+endure at the hands of men. And yet it was in precisely this way that
+he was treated. Men stared at him, poked sticks between the bars to
+make him snarl, and then laughed at him.
+
+They were his environment, these men, and they were moulding the clay
+of him into a more ferocious thing than had been intended by Nature.
+Nevertheless, Nature had given him plasticity. Where many another
+animal would have died or had its spirit broken, he adjusted himself
+and lived, and at no expense of the spirit. Possibly Beauty Smith,
+arch-fiend and tormentor, was capable of breaking White Fang’s spirit,
+but as yet there were no signs of his succeeding.
+
+If Beauty Smith had in him a devil, White Fang had another; and the two
+of them raged against each other unceasingly. In the days before, White
+Fang had had the wisdom to cower down and submit to a man with a club
+in his hand; but this wisdom now left him. The mere sight of Beauty
+Smith was sufficient to send him into transports of fury. And when they
+came to close quarters, and he had been beaten back by the club, he
+went on growling and snarling, and showing his fangs. The last growl
+could never be extracted from him. No matter how terribly he was
+beaten, he had always another growl; and when Beauty Smith gave up and
+withdrew, the defiant growl followed after him, or White Fang sprang at
+the bars of the cage bellowing his hatred.
+
+When the steamboat arrived at Dawson, White Fang went ashore. But he
+still lived a public life, in a cage, surrounded by curious men. He was
+exhibited as “the Fighting Wolf,” and men paid fifty cents in gold dust
+to see him. He was given no rest. Did he lie down to sleep, he was
+stirred up by a sharp stick—so that the audience might get its money’s
+worth. In order to make the exhibition interesting, he was kept in a
+rage most of the time. But worse than all this, was the atmosphere in
+which he lived. He was regarded as the most fearful of wild beasts, and
+this was borne in to him through the bars of the cage. Every word,
+every cautious action, on the part of the men, impressed upon him his
+own terrible ferocity. It was so much added fuel to the flame of his
+fierceness. There could be but one result, and that was that his
+ferocity fed upon itself and increased. It was another instance of the
+plasticity of his clay, of his capacity for being moulded by the
+pressure of environment.
+
+In addition to being exhibited he was a professional fighting animal.
+At irregular intervals, whenever a fight could be arranged, he was
+taken out of his cage and led off into the woods a few miles from town.
+Usually this occurred at night, so as to avoid interference from the
+mounted police of the Territory. After a few hours of waiting, when
+daylight had come, the audience and the dog with which he was to fight
+arrived. In this manner it came about that he fought all sizes and
+breeds of dogs. It was a savage land, the men were savage, and the
+fights were usually to the death.
+
+Since White Fang continued to fight, it is obvious that it was the
+other dogs that died. He never knew defeat. His early training, when he
+fought with Lip-lip and the whole puppy-pack, stood him in good stead.
+There was the tenacity with which he clung to the earth. No dog could
+make him lose his footing. This was the favourite trick of the wolf
+breeds—to rush in upon him, either directly or with an unexpected
+swerve, in the hope of striking his shoulder and overthrowing him.
+Mackenzie hounds, Eskimo and Labrador dogs, huskies and Malemutes—all
+tried it on him, and all failed. He was never known to lose his
+footing. Men told this to one another, and looked each time to see it
+happen; but White Fang always disappointed them.
+
+Then there was his lightning quickness. It gave him a tremendous
+advantage over his antagonists. No matter what their fighting
+experience, they had never encountered a dog that moved so swiftly as
+he. Also to be reckoned with, was the immediateness of his attack. The
+average dog was accustomed to the preliminaries of snarling and
+bristling and growling, and the average dog was knocked off his feet
+and finished before he had begun to fight or recovered from his
+surprise. So often did this happen, that it became the custom to hold
+White Fang until the other dog went through its preliminaries, was good
+and ready, and even made the first attack.
+
+But greatest of all the advantages in White Fang’s favour, was his
+experience. He knew more about fighting than did any of the dogs that
+faced him. He had fought more fights, knew how to meet more tricks and
+methods, and had more tricks himself, while his own method was scarcely
+to be improved upon.
+
+As the time went by, he had fewer and fewer fights. Men despaired of
+matching him with an equal, and Beauty Smith was compelled to pit
+wolves against him. These were trapped by the Indians for the purpose,
+and a fight between White Fang and a wolf was always sure to draw a
+crowd. Once, a full-grown female lynx was secured, and this time White
+Fang fought for his life. Her quickness matched his; her ferocity
+equalled his; while he fought with his fangs alone, and she fought with
+her sharp-clawed feet as well.
+
+But after the lynx, all fighting ceased for White Fang. There were no
+more animals with which to fight—at least, there was none considered
+worthy of fighting with him. So he remained on exhibition until spring,
+when one Tim Keenan, a faro-dealer, arrived in the land. With him came
+the first bull-dog that had ever entered the Klondike. That this dog
+and White Fang should come together was inevitable, and for a week the
+anticipated fight was the mainspring of conversation in certain
+quarters of the town.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV
+THE CLINGING DEATH
+
+
+Beauty Smith slipped the chain from his neck and stepped back.
+
+For once White Fang did not make an immediate attack. He stood still,
+ears pricked forward, alert and curious, surveying the strange animal
+that faced him. He had never seen such a dog before. Tim Keenan shoved
+the bull-dog forward with a muttered “Go to it.” The animal waddled
+toward the centre of the circle, short and squat and ungainly. He came
+to a stop and blinked across at White Fang.
+
+There were cries from the crowd of, “Go to him, Cherokee! Sick ’m,
+Cherokee! Eat ’m up!”
+
+But Cherokee did not seem anxious to fight. He turned his head and
+blinked at the men who shouted, at the same time wagging his stump of a
+tail good-naturedly. He was not afraid, but merely lazy. Besides, it
+did not seem to him that it was intended he should fight with the dog
+he saw before him. He was not used to fighting with that kind of dog,
+and he was waiting for them to bring on the real dog.
+
+Tim Keenan stepped in and bent over Cherokee, fondling him on both
+sides of the shoulders with hands that rubbed against the grain of the
+hair and that made slight, pushing-forward movements. These were so
+many suggestions. Also, their effect was irritating, for Cherokee began
+to growl, very softly, deep down in his throat. There was a
+correspondence in rhythm between the growls and the movements of the
+man’s hands. The growl rose in the throat with the culmination of each
+forward-pushing movement, and ebbed down to start up afresh with the
+beginning of the next movement. The end of each movement was the accent
+of the rhythm, the movement ending abruptly and the growling rising
+with a jerk.
+
+This was not without its effect on White Fang. The hair began to rise
+on his neck and across the shoulders. Tim Keenan gave a final shove
+forward and stepped back again. As the impetus that carried Cherokee
+forward died down, he continued to go forward of his own volition, in a
+swift, bow-legged run. Then White Fang struck. A cry of startled
+admiration went up. He had covered the distance and gone in more like a
+cat than a dog; and with the same cat-like swiftness he had slashed
+with his fangs and leaped clear.
+
+The bull-dog was bleeding back of one ear from a rip in his thick neck.
+He gave no sign, did not even snarl, but turned and followed after
+White Fang. The display on both sides, the quickness of the one and the
+steadiness of the other, had excited the partisan spirit of the crowd,
+and the men were making new bets and increasing original bets. Again,
+and yet again, White Fang sprang in, slashed, and got away untouched,
+and still his strange foe followed after him, without too great haste,
+not slowly, but deliberately and determinedly, in a businesslike sort
+of way. There was purpose in his method—something for him to do that he
+was intent upon doing and from which nothing could distract him.
+
+His whole demeanour, every action, was stamped with this purpose. It
+puzzled White Fang. Never had he seen such a dog. It had no hair
+protection. It was soft, and bled easily. There was no thick mat of fur
+to baffle White Fang’s teeth as they were often baffled by dogs of his
+own breed. Each time that his teeth struck they sank easily into the
+yielding flesh, while the animal did not seem able to defend itself.
+Another disconcerting thing was that it made no outcry, such as he had
+been accustomed to with the other dogs he had fought. Beyond a growl or
+a grunt, the dog took its punishment silently. And never did it flag in
+its pursuit of him.
+
+Not that Cherokee was slow. He could turn and whirl swiftly enough, but
+White Fang was never there. Cherokee was puzzled, too. He had never
+fought before with a dog with which he could not close. The desire to
+close had always been mutual. But here was a dog that kept at a
+distance, dancing and dodging here and there and all about. And when it
+did get its teeth into him, it did not hold on but let go instantly and
+darted away again.
+
+But White Fang could not get at the soft underside of the throat. The
+bull-dog stood too short, while its massive jaws were an added
+protection. White Fang darted in and out unscathed, while Cherokee’s
+wounds increased. Both sides of his neck and head were ripped and
+slashed. He bled freely, but showed no signs of being disconcerted. He
+continued his plodding pursuit, though once, for the moment baffled, he
+came to a full stop and blinked at the men who looked on, at the same
+time wagging his stump of a tail as an expression of his willingness to
+fight.
+
+In that moment White Fang was in upon him and out, in passing ripping
+his trimmed remnant of an ear. With a slight manifestation of anger,
+Cherokee took up the pursuit again, running on the inside of the circle
+White Fang was making, and striving to fasten his deadly grip on White
+Fang’s throat. The bull-dog missed by a hair’s-breadth, and cries of
+praise went up as White Fang doubled suddenly out of danger in the
+opposite direction.
+
+The time went by. White Fang still danced on, dodging and doubling,
+leaping in and out, and ever inflicting damage. And still the bull-dog,
+with grim certitude, toiled after him. Sooner or later he would
+accomplish his purpose, get the grip that would win the battle. In the
+meantime, he accepted all the punishment the other could deal him. His
+tufts of ears had become tassels, his neck and shoulders were slashed
+in a score of places, and his very lips were cut and bleeding—all from
+these lightning snaps that were beyond his foreseeing and guarding.
+
+Time and again White Fang had attempted to knock Cherokee off his feet;
+but the difference in their height was too great. Cherokee was too
+squat, too close to the ground. White Fang tried the trick once too
+often. The chance came in one of his quick doublings and
+counter-circlings. He caught Cherokee with head turned away as he
+whirled more slowly. His shoulder was exposed. White Fang drove in upon
+it: but his own shoulder was high above, while he struck with such
+force that his momentum carried him on across over the other’s body.
+For the first time in his fighting history, men saw White Fang lose his
+footing. His body turned a half-somersault in the air, and he would
+have landed on his back had he not twisted, catlike, still in the air,
+in the effort to bring his feet to the earth. As it was, he struck
+heavily on his side. The next instant he was on his feet, but in that
+instant Cherokee’s teeth closed on his throat.
+
+It was not a good grip, being too low down toward the chest; but
+Cherokee held on. White Fang sprang to his feet and tore wildly around,
+trying to shake off the bull-dog’s body. It made him frantic, this
+clinging, dragging weight. It bound his movements, restricted his
+freedom. It was like the trap, and all his instinct resented it and
+revolted against it. It was a mad revolt. For several minutes he was to
+all intents insane. The basic life that was in him took charge of him.
+The will to exist of his body surged over him. He was dominated by this
+mere flesh-love of life. All intelligence was gone. It was as though he
+had no brain. His reason was unseated by the blind yearning of the
+flesh to exist and move, at all hazards to move, to continue to move,
+for movement was the expression of its existence.
+
+Round and round he went, whirling and turning and reversing, trying to
+shake off the fifty-pound weight that dragged at his throat. The
+bull-dog did little but keep his grip. Sometimes, and rarely, he
+managed to get his feet to the earth and for a moment to brace himself
+against White Fang. But the next moment his footing would be lost and
+he would be dragging around in the whirl of one of White Fang’s mad
+gyrations. Cherokee identified himself with his instinct. He knew that
+he was doing the right thing by holding on, and there came to him
+certain blissful thrills of satisfaction. At such moments he even
+closed his eyes and allowed his body to be hurled hither and thither,
+willy-nilly, careless of any hurt that might thereby come to it. That
+did not count. The grip was the thing, and the grip he kept.
+
+White Fang ceased only when he had tired himself out. He could do
+nothing, and he could not understand. Never, in all his fighting, had
+this thing happened. The dogs he had fought with did not fight that
+way. With them it was snap and slash and get away, snap and slash and
+get away. He lay partly on his side, panting for breath. Cherokee still
+holding his grip, urged against him, trying to get him over entirely on
+his side. White Fang resisted, and he could feel the jaws shifting
+their grip, slightly relaxing and coming together again in a chewing
+movement. Each shift brought the grip closer to his throat. The
+bull-dog’s method was to hold what he had, and when opportunity
+favoured to work in for more. Opportunity favoured when White Fang
+remained quiet. When White Fang struggled, Cherokee was content merely
+to hold on.
+
+The bulging back of Cherokee’s neck was the only portion of his body
+that White Fang’s teeth could reach. He got hold toward the base where
+the neck comes out from the shoulders; but he did not know the chewing
+method of fighting, nor were his jaws adapted to it. He spasmodically
+ripped and tore with his fangs for a space. Then a change in their
+position diverted him. The bull-dog had managed to roll him over on his
+back, and still hanging on to his throat, was on top of him. Like a
+cat, White Fang bowed his hind-quarters in, and, with the feet digging
+into his enemy’s abdomen above him, he began to claw with long
+tearing-strokes. Cherokee might well have been disembowelled had he not
+quickly pivoted on his grip and got his body off of White Fang’s and at
+right angles to it.
+
+There was no escaping that grip. It was like Fate itself, and as
+inexorable. Slowly it shifted up along the jugular. All that saved
+White Fang from death was the loose skin of his neck and the thick fur
+that covered it. This served to form a large roll in Cherokee’s mouth,
+the fur of which well-nigh defied his teeth. But bit by bit, whenever
+the chance offered, he was getting more of the loose skin and fur in
+his mouth. The result was that he was slowly throttling White Fang. The
+latter’s breath was drawn with greater and greater difficulty as the
+moments went by.
+
+It began to look as though the battle were over. The backers of
+Cherokee waxed jubilant and offered ridiculous odds. White Fang’s
+backers were correspondingly depressed, and refused bets of ten to one
+and twenty to one, though one man was rash enough to close a wager of
+fifty to one. This man was Beauty Smith. He took a step into the ring
+and pointed his finger at White Fang. Then he began to laugh derisively
+and scornfully. This produced the desired effect. White Fang went wild
+with rage. He called up his reserves of strength, and gained his feet.
+As he struggled around the ring, the fifty pounds of his foe ever
+dragging on his throat, his anger passed on into panic. The basic life
+of him dominated him again, and his intelligence fled before the will
+of his flesh to live. Round and round and back again, stumbling and
+falling and rising, even uprearing at times on his hind-legs and
+lifting his foe clear of the earth, he struggled vainly to shake off
+the clinging death.
+
+At last he fell, toppling backward, exhausted; and the bull-dog
+promptly shifted his grip, getting in closer, mangling more and more of
+the fur-folded flesh, throttling White Fang more severely than ever.
+Shouts of applause went up for the victor, and there were many cries of
+“Cherokee!” “Cherokee!” To this Cherokee responded by vigorous wagging
+of the stump of his tail. But the clamour of approval did not distract
+him. There was no sympathetic relation between his tail and his massive
+jaws. The one might wag, but the others held their terrible grip on
+White Fang’s throat.
+
+It was at this time that a diversion came to the spectators. There was
+a jingle of bells. Dog-mushers’ cries were heard. Everybody, save
+Beauty Smith, looked apprehensively, the fear of the police strong upon
+them. But they saw, up the trail, and not down, two men running with
+sled and dogs. They were evidently coming down the creek from some
+prospecting trip. At sight of the crowd they stopped their dogs and
+came over and joined it, curious to see the cause of the excitement.
+The dog-musher wore a moustache, but the other, a taller and younger
+man, was smooth-shaven, his skin rosy from the pounding of his blood
+and the running in the frosty air.
+
+White Fang had practically ceased struggling. Now and again he resisted
+spasmodically and to no purpose. He could get little air, and that
+little grew less and less under the merciless grip that ever tightened.
+In spite of his armour of fur, the great vein of his throat would have
+long since been torn open, had not the first grip of the bull-dog been
+so low down as to be practically on the chest. It had taken Cherokee a
+long time to shift that grip upward, and this had also tended further
+to clog his jaws with fur and skin-fold.
+
+In the meantime, the abysmal brute in Beauty Smith had been rising into
+his brain and mastering the small bit of sanity that he possessed at
+best. When he saw White Fang’s eyes beginning to glaze, he knew beyond
+doubt that the fight was lost. Then he broke loose. He sprang upon
+White Fang and began savagely to kick him. There were hisses from the
+crowd and cries of protest, but that was all. While this went on, and
+Beauty Smith continued to kick White Fang, there was a commotion in the
+crowd. The tall young newcomer was forcing his way through, shouldering
+men right and left without ceremony or gentleness. When he broke
+through into the ring, Beauty Smith was just in the act of delivering
+another kick. All his weight was on one foot, and he was in a state of
+unstable equilibrium. At that moment the newcomer’s fist landed a
+smashing blow full in his face. Beauty Smith’s remaining leg left the
+ground, and his whole body seemed to lift into the air as he turned
+over backward and struck the snow. The newcomer turned upon the crowd.
+
+“You cowards!” he cried. “You beasts!”
+
+He was in a rage himself—a sane rage. His grey eyes seemed metallic and
+steel-like as they flashed upon the crowd. Beauty Smith regained his
+feet and came toward him, sniffling and cowardly. The new-comer did not
+understand. He did not know how abject a coward the other was, and
+thought he was coming back intent on fighting. So, with a “You beast!”
+he smashed Beauty Smith over backward with a second blow in the face.
+Beauty Smith decided that the snow was the safest place for him, and
+lay where he had fallen, making no effort to get up.
+
+“Come on, Matt, lend a hand,” the newcomer called the dog-musher, who
+had followed him into the ring.
+
+Both men bent over the dogs. Matt took hold of White Fang, ready to
+pull when Cherokee’s jaws should be loosened. This the younger man
+endeavoured to accomplish by clutching the bulldog’s jaws in his hands
+and trying to spread them. It was a vain undertaking. As he pulled and
+tugged and wrenched, he kept exclaiming with every expulsion of breath,
+“Beasts!”
+
+The crowd began to grow unruly, and some of the men were protesting
+against the spoiling of the sport; but they were silenced when the
+newcomer lifted his head from his work for a moment and glared at them.
+
+“You damn beasts!” he finally exploded, and went back to his task.
+
+“It’s no use, Mr. Scott, you can’t break ’m apart that way,” Matt said
+at last.
+
+The pair paused and surveyed the locked dogs.
+
+“Ain’t bleedin’ much,” Matt announced. “Ain’t got all the way in yet.”
+
+“But he’s liable to any moment,” Scott answered. “There, did you see
+that! He shifted his grip in a bit.”
+
+The younger man’s excitement and apprehension for White Fang was
+growing. He struck Cherokee about the head savagely again and again.
+But that did not loosen the jaws. Cherokee wagged the stump of his tail
+in advertisement that he understood the meaning of the blows, but that
+he knew he was himself in the right and only doing his duty by keeping
+his grip.
+
+“Won’t some of you help?” Scott cried desperately at the crowd.
+
+But no help was offered. Instead, the crowd began sarcastically to
+cheer him on and showered him with facetious advice.
+
+“You’ll have to get a pry,” Matt counselled.
+
+The other reached into the holster at his hip, drew his revolver, and
+tried to thrust its muzzle between the bull-dog’s jaws. He shoved, and
+shoved hard, till the grating of the steel against the locked teeth
+could be distinctly heard. Both men were on their knees, bending over
+the dogs. Tim Keenan strode into the ring. He paused beside Scott and
+touched him on the shoulder, saying ominously:
+
+“Don’t break them teeth, stranger.”
+
+“Then I’ll break his neck,” Scott retorted, continuing his shoving and
+wedging with the revolver muzzle.
+
+“I said don’t break them teeth,” the faro-dealer repeated more
+ominously than before.
+
+But if it was a bluff he intended, it did not work. Scott never
+desisted from his efforts, though he looked up coolly and asked:
+
+“Your dog?”
+
+The faro-dealer grunted.
+
+“Then get in here and break this grip.”
+
+“Well, stranger,” the other drawled irritatingly, “I don’t mind telling
+you that’s something I ain’t worked out for myself. I don’t know how to
+turn the trick.”
+
+“Then get out of the way,” was the reply, “and don’t bother me. I’m
+busy.”
+
+Tim Keenan continued standing over him, but Scott took no further
+notice of his presence. He had managed to get the muzzle in between the
+jaws on one side, and was trying to get it out between the jaws on the
+other side. This accomplished, he pried gently and carefully, loosening
+the jaws a bit at a time, while Matt, a bit at a time, extricated White
+Fang’s mangled neck.
+
+“Stand by to receive your dog,” was Scott’s peremptory order to
+Cherokee’s owner.
+
+The faro-dealer stooped down obediently and got a firm hold on
+Cherokee.
+
+“Now!” Scott warned, giving the final pry.
+
+The dogs were drawn apart, the bull-dog struggling vigorously.
+
+“Take him away,” Scott commanded, and Tim Keenan dragged Cherokee back
+into the crowd.
+
+White Fang made several ineffectual efforts to get up. Once he gained
+his feet, but his legs were too weak to sustain him, and he slowly
+wilted and sank back into the snow. His eyes were half closed, and the
+surface of them was glassy. His jaws were apart, and through them the
+tongue protruded, draggled and limp. To all appearances he looked like
+a dog that had been strangled to death. Matt examined him.
+
+“Just about all in,” he announced; “but he’s breathin’ all right.”
+
+Beauty Smith had regained his feet and come over to look at White Fang.
+
+“Matt, how much is a good sled-dog worth?” Scott asked.
+
+The dog-musher, still on his knees and stooped over White Fang,
+calculated for a moment.
+
+“Three hundred dollars,” he answered.
+
+“And how much for one that’s all chewed up like this one?” Scott asked,
+nudging White Fang with his foot.
+
+“Half of that,” was the dog-musher’s judgment. Scott turned upon Beauty
+Smith.
+
+“Did you hear, Mr. Beast? I’m going to take your dog from you, and I’m
+going to give you a hundred and fifty for him.”
+
+He opened his pocket-book and counted out the bills.
+
+Beauty Smith put his hands behind his back, refusing to touch the
+proffered money.
+
+“I ain’t a-sellin’,” he said.
+
+“Oh, yes you are,” the other assured him. “Because I’m buying. Here’s
+your money. The dog’s mine.”
+
+Beauty Smith, his hands still behind him, began to back away.
+
+Scott sprang toward him, drawing his fist back to strike. Beauty Smith
+cowered down in anticipation of the blow.
+
+“I’ve got my rights,” he whimpered.
+
+“You’ve forfeited your rights to own that dog,” was the rejoinder. “Are
+you going to take the money? or do I have to hit you again?”
+
+“All right,” Beauty Smith spoke up with the alacrity of fear. “But I
+take the money under protest,” he added. “The dog’s a mint. I ain’t
+a-goin’ to be robbed. A man’s got his rights.”
+
+“Correct,” Scott answered, passing the money over to him. “A man’s got
+his rights. But you’re not a man. You’re a beast.”
+
+“Wait till I get back to Dawson,” Beauty Smith threatened. “I’ll have
+the law on you.”
+
+“If you open your mouth when you get back to Dawson, I’ll have you run
+out of town. Understand?”
+
+Beauty Smith replied with a grunt.
+
+“Understand?” the other thundered with abrupt fierceness.
+
+“Yes,” Beauty Smith grunted, shrinking away.
+
+“Yes what?”
+
+“Yes, sir,” Beauty Smith snarled.
+
+“Look out! He’ll bite!” some one shouted, and a guffaw of laughter went
+up.
+
+Scott turned his back on him, and returned to help the dog-musher, who
+was working over White Fang.
+
+Some of the men were already departing; others stood in groups, looking
+on and talking. Tim Keenan joined one of the groups.
+
+“Who’s that mug?” he asked.
+
+“Weedon Scott,” some one answered.
+
+“And who in hell is Weedon Scott?” the faro-dealer demanded.
+
+“Oh, one of them crackerjack minin’ experts. He’s in with all the big
+bugs. If you want to keep out of trouble, you’ll steer clear of him,
+that’s my talk. He’s all hunky with the officials. The Gold
+Commissioner’s a special pal of his.”
+
+“I thought he must be somebody,” was the faro-dealer’s comment. “That’s
+why I kept my hands offen him at the start.”
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V
+THE INDOMITABLE
+
+
+“It’s hopeless,” Weedon Scott confessed.
+
+He sat on the step of his cabin and stared at the dog-musher, who
+responded with a shrug that was equally hopeless.
+
+Together they looked at White Fang at the end of his stretched chain,
+bristling, snarling, ferocious, straining to get at the sled-dogs.
+Having received sundry lessons from Matt, said lessons being imparted
+by means of a club, the sled-dogs had learned to leave White Fang
+alone; and even then they were lying down at a distance, apparently
+oblivious of his existence.
+
+“It’s a wolf and there’s no taming it,” Weedon Scott announced.
+
+“Oh, I don’t know about that,” Matt objected. “Might be a lot of dog in
+’m, for all you can tell. But there’s one thing I know sure, an’ that
+there’s no gettin’ away from.”
+
+The dog-musher paused and nodded his head confidentially at Moosehide
+Mountain.
+
+“Well, don’t be a miser with what you know,” Scott said sharply, after
+waiting a suitable length of time. “Spit it out. What is it?”
+
+The dog-musher indicated White Fang with a backward thrust of his
+thumb.
+
+“Wolf or dog, it’s all the same—he’s ben tamed ’ready.”
+
+“No!”
+
+“I tell you yes, an’ broke to harness. Look close there. D’ye see them
+marks across the chest?”
+
+“You’re right, Matt. He was a sled-dog before Beauty Smith got hold of
+him.”
+
+“And there’s not much reason against his bein’ a sled-dog again.”
+
+“What d’ye think?” Scott queried eagerly. Then the hope died down as he
+added, shaking his head, “We’ve had him two weeks now, and if anything
+he’s wilder than ever at the present moment.”
+
+“Give ’m a chance,” Matt counselled. “Turn ’m loose for a spell.”
+
+The other looked at him incredulously.
+
+“Yes,” Matt went on, “I know you’ve tried to, but you didn’t take a
+club.”
+
+“You try it then.”
+
+The dog-musher secured a club and went over to the chained animal.
+White Fang watched the club after the manner of a caged lion watching
+the whip of its trainer.
+
+“See ’m keep his eye on that club,” Matt said. “That’s a good sign.
+He’s no fool. Don’t dast tackle me so long as I got that club handy.
+He’s not clean crazy, sure.”
+
+As the man’s hand approached his neck, White Fang bristled and snarled
+and crouched down. But while he eyed the approaching hand, he at the
+same time contrived to keep track of the club in the other hand,
+suspended threateningly above him. Matt unsnapped the chain from the
+collar and stepped back.
+
+White Fang could scarcely realise that he was free. Many months had
+gone by since he passed into the possession of Beauty Smith, and in all
+that period he had never known a moment of freedom except at the times
+he had been loosed to fight with other dogs. Immediately after such
+fights he had always been imprisoned again.
+
+He did not know what to make of it. Perhaps some new devilry of the
+gods was about to be perpetrated on him. He walked slowly and
+cautiously, prepared to be assailed at any moment. He did not know what
+to do, it was all so unprecedented. He took the precaution to sheer off
+from the two watching gods, and walked carefully to the corner of the
+cabin. Nothing happened. He was plainly perplexed, and he came back
+again, pausing a dozen feet away and regarding the two men intently.
+
+“Won’t he run away?” his new owner asked.
+
+Matt shrugged his shoulders. “Got to take a gamble. Only way to find
+out is to find out.”
+
+“Poor devil,” Scott murmured pityingly. “What he needs is some show of
+human kindness,” he added, turning and going into the cabin.
+
+He came out with a piece of meat, which he tossed to White Fang. He
+sprang away from it, and from a distance studied it suspiciously.
+
+“Hi-yu, Major!” Matt shouted warningly, but too late.
+
+Major had made a spring for the meat. At the instant his jaws closed on
+it, White Fang struck him. He was overthrown. Matt rushed in, but
+quicker than he was White Fang. Major staggered to his feet, but the
+blood spouting from his throat reddened the snow in a widening path.
+
+“It’s too bad, but it served him right,” Scott said hastily.
+
+But Matt’s foot had already started on its way to kick White Fang.
+There was a leap, a flash of teeth, a sharp exclamation. White Fang,
+snarling fiercely, scrambled backward for several yards, while Matt
+stooped and investigated his leg.
+
+“He got me all right,” he announced, pointing to the torn trousers and
+undercloths, and the growing stain of red.
+
+“I told you it was hopeless, Matt,” Scott said in a discouraged voice.
+“I’ve thought about it off and on, while not wanting to think of it.
+But we’ve come to it now. It’s the only thing to do.”
+
+As he talked, with reluctant movements he drew his revolver, threw open
+the cylinder, and assured himself of its contents.
+
+“Look here, Mr. Scott,” Matt objected; “that dog’s ben through hell.
+You can’t expect ’m to come out a white an’ shinin’ angel. Give ’m
+time.”
+
+“Look at Major,” the other rejoined.
+
+The dog-musher surveyed the stricken dog. He had sunk down on the snow
+in the circle of his blood and was plainly in the last gasp.
+
+“Served ’m right. You said so yourself, Mr. Scott. He tried to take
+White Fang’s meat, an’ he’s dead-O. That was to be expected. I wouldn’t
+give two whoops in hell for a dog that wouldn’t fight for his own
+meat.”
+
+“But look at yourself, Matt. It’s all right about the dogs, but we must
+draw the line somewhere.”
+
+“Served me right,” Matt argued stubbornly. “What’d I want to kick ’m
+for? You said yourself that he’d done right. Then I had no right to
+kick ’m.”
+
+“It would be a mercy to kill him,” Scott insisted. “He’s untamable.”
+
+“Now look here, Mr. Scott, give the poor devil a fightin’ chance. He
+ain’t had no chance yet. He’s just come through hell, an’ this is the
+first time he’s ben loose. Give ’m a fair chance, an’ if he don’t
+deliver the goods, I’ll kill ’m myself. There!”
+
+“God knows I don’t want to kill him or have him killed,” Scott
+answered, putting away the revolver. “We’ll let him run loose and see
+what kindness can do for him. And here’s a try at it.”
+
+He walked over to White Fang and began talking to him gently and
+soothingly.
+
+“Better have a club handy,” Matt warned.
+
+Scott shook his head and went on trying to win White Fang’s confidence.
+
+White Fang was suspicious. Something was impending. He had killed this
+god’s dog, bitten his companion god, and what else was to be expected
+than some terrible punishment? But in the face of it he was
+indomitable. He bristled and showed his teeth, his eyes vigilant, his
+whole body wary and prepared for anything. The god had no club, so he
+suffered him to approach quite near. The god’s hand had come out and
+was descending upon his head. White Fang shrank together and grew tense
+as he crouched under it. Here was danger, some treachery or something.
+He knew the hands of the gods, their proved mastery, their cunning to
+hurt. Besides, there was his old antipathy to being touched. He snarled
+more menacingly, crouched still lower, and still the hand descended. He
+did not want to bite the hand, and he endured the peril of it until his
+instinct surged up in him, mastering him with its insatiable yearning
+for life.
+
+Weedon Scott had believed that he was quick enough to avoid any snap or
+slash. But he had yet to learn the remarkable quickness of White Fang,
+who struck with the certainty and swiftness of a coiled snake.
+
+Scott cried out sharply with surprise, catching his torn hand and
+holding it tightly in his other hand. Matt uttered a great oath and
+sprang to his side. White Fang crouched down, and backed away,
+bristling, showing his fangs, his eyes malignant with menace. Now he
+could expect a beating as fearful as any he had received from Beauty
+Smith.
+
+“Here! What are you doing?” Scott cried suddenly.
+
+Matt had dashed into the cabin and come out with a rifle.
+
+“Nothin’,” he said slowly, with a careless calmness that was assumed,
+“only goin’ to keep that promise I made. I reckon it’s up to me to kill
+’m as I said I’d do.”
+
+“No you don’t!”
+
+“Yes I do. Watch me.”
+
+As Matt had pleaded for White Fang when he had been bitten, it was now
+Weedon Scott’s turn to plead.
+
+“You said to give him a chance. Well, give it to him. We’ve only just
+started, and we can’t quit at the beginning. It served me right, this
+time. And—look at him!”
+
+White Fang, near the corner of the cabin and forty feet away, was
+snarling with blood-curdling viciousness, not at Scott, but at the
+dog-musher.
+
+“Well, I’ll be everlastingly gosh-swoggled!” was the dog-musher’s
+expression of astonishment.
+
+“Look at the intelligence of him,” Scott went on hastily. “He knows the
+meaning of firearms as well as you do. He’s got intelligence and we’ve
+got to give that intelligence a chance. Put up the gun.”
+
+“All right, I’m willin’,” Matt agreed, leaning the rifle against the
+woodpile.
+
+“But will you look at that!” he exclaimed the next moment.
+
+White Fang had quieted down and ceased snarling. “This is worth
+investigatin’. Watch.”
+
+Matt, reached for the rifle, and at the same moment White Fang snarled.
+He stepped away from the rifle, and White Fang’s lifted lips descended,
+covering his teeth.
+
+“Now, just for fun.”
+
+Matt took the rifle and began slowly to raise it to his shoulder. White
+Fang’s snarling began with the movement, and increased as the movement
+approached its culmination. But the moment before the rifle came to a
+level on him, he leaped sidewise behind the corner of the cabin. Matt
+stood staring along the sights at the empty space of snow which had
+been occupied by White Fang.
+
+The dog-musher put the rifle down solemnly, then turned and looked at
+his employer.
+
+“I agree with you, Mr. Scott. That dog’s too intelligent to kill.”
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI
+THE LOVE-MASTER
+
+
+As White Fang watched Weedon Scott approach, he bristled and snarled to
+advertise that he would not submit to punishment. Twenty-four hours had
+passed since he had slashed open the hand that was now bandaged and
+held up by a sling to keep the blood out of it. In the past White Fang
+had experienced delayed punishments, and he apprehended that such a one
+was about to befall him. How could it be otherwise? He had committed
+what was to him sacrilege, sunk his fangs into the holy flesh of a god,
+and of a white-skinned superior god at that. In the nature of things,
+and of intercourse with gods, something terrible awaited him.
+
+The god sat down several feet away. White Fang could see nothing
+dangerous in that. When the gods administered punishment they stood on
+their legs. Besides, this god had no club, no whip, no firearm. And
+furthermore, he himself was free. No chain nor stick bound him. He
+could escape into safety while the god was scrambling to his feet. In
+the meantime he would wait and see.
+
+The god remained quiet, made no movement; and White Fang’s snarl slowly
+dwindled to a growl that ebbed down in his throat and ceased. Then the
+god spoke, and at the first sound of his voice, the hair rose on White
+Fang’s neck and the growl rushed up in his throat. But the god made no
+hostile movement, and went on calmly talking. For a time White Fang
+growled in unison with him, a correspondence of rhythm being
+established between growl and voice. But the god talked on
+interminably. He talked to White Fang as White Fang had never been
+talked to before. He talked softly and soothingly, with a gentleness
+that somehow, somewhere, touched White Fang. In spite of himself and
+all the pricking warnings of his instinct, White Fang began to have
+confidence in this god. He had a feeling of security that was belied by
+all his experience with men.
+
+After a long time, the god got up and went into the cabin. White Fang
+scanned him apprehensively when he came out. He had neither whip nor
+club nor weapon. Nor was his uninjured hand behind his back hiding
+something. He sat down as before, in the same spot, several feet away.
+He held out a small piece of meat. White Fang pricked his ears and
+investigated it suspiciously, managing to look at the same time both at
+the meat and the god, alert for any overt act, his body tense and ready
+to spring away at the first sign of hostility.
+
+Still the punishment delayed. The god merely held near to his nose a
+piece of meat. And about the meat there seemed nothing wrong. Still
+White Fang suspected; and though the meat was proffered to him with
+short inviting thrusts of the hand, he refused to touch it. The gods
+were all-wise, and there was no telling what masterful treachery lurked
+behind that apparently harmless piece of meat. In past experience,
+especially in dealing with squaws, meat and punishment had often been
+disastrously related.
+
+In the end, the god tossed the meat on the snow at White Fang’s feet.
+He smelled the meat carefully; but he did not look at it. While he
+smelled it he kept his eyes on the god. Nothing happened. He took the
+meat into his mouth and swallowed it. Still nothing happened. The god
+was actually offering him another piece of meat. Again he refused to
+take it from the hand, and again it was tossed to him. This was
+repeated a number of times. But there came a time when the god refused
+to toss it. He kept it in his hand and steadfastly proffered it.
+
+The meat was good meat, and White Fang was hungry. Bit by bit,
+infinitely cautious, he approached the hand. At last the time came that
+he decided to eat the meat from the hand. He never took his eyes from
+the god, thrusting his head forward with ears flattened back and hair
+involuntarily rising and cresting on his neck. Also a low growl rumbled
+in his throat as warning that he was not to be trifled with. He ate the
+meat, and nothing happened. Piece by piece, he ate all the meat, and
+nothing happened. Still the punishment delayed.
+
+He licked his chops and waited. The god went on talking. In his voice
+was kindness—something of which White Fang had no experience whatever.
+And within him it aroused feelings which he had likewise never
+experienced before. He was aware of a certain strange satisfaction, as
+though some need were being gratified, as though some void in his being
+were being filled. Then again came the prod of his instinct and the
+warning of past experience. The gods were ever crafty, and they had
+unguessed ways of attaining their ends.
+
+Ah, he had thought so! There it came now, the god’s hand, cunning to
+hurt, thrusting out at him, descending upon his head. But the god went
+on talking. His voice was soft and soothing. In spite of the menacing
+hand, the voice inspired confidence. And in spite of the assuring
+voice, the hand inspired distrust. White Fang was torn by conflicting
+feelings, impulses. It seemed he would fly to pieces, so terrible was
+the control he was exerting, holding together by an unwonted indecision
+the counter-forces that struggled within him for mastery.
+
+He compromised. He snarled and bristled and flattened his ears. But he
+neither snapped nor sprang away. The hand descended. Nearer and nearer
+it came. It touched the ends of his upstanding hair. He shrank down
+under it. It followed down after him, pressing more closely against
+him. Shrinking, almost shivering, he still managed to hold himself
+together. It was a torment, this hand that touched him and violated his
+instinct. He could not forget in a day all the evil that had been
+wrought him at the hands of men. But it was the will of the god, and he
+strove to submit.
+
+The hand lifted and descended again in a patting, caressing movement.
+This continued, but every time the hand lifted, the hair lifted under
+it. And every time the hand descended, the ears flattened down and a
+cavernous growl surged in his throat. White Fang growled and growled
+with insistent warning. By this means he announced that he was prepared
+to retaliate for any hurt he might receive. There was no telling when
+the god’s ulterior motive might be disclosed. At any moment that soft,
+confidence-inspiring voice might break forth in a roar of wrath, that
+gentle and caressing hand transform itself into a vice-like grip to
+hold him helpless and administer punishment.
+
+But the god talked on softly, and ever the hand rose and fell with
+non-hostile pats. White Fang experienced dual feelings. It was
+distasteful to his instinct. It restrained him, opposed the will of him
+toward personal liberty. And yet it was not physically painful. On the
+contrary, it was even pleasant, in a physical way. The patting movement
+slowly and carefully changed to a rubbing of the ears about their
+bases, and the physical pleasure even increased a little. Yet he
+continued to fear, and he stood on guard, expectant of unguessed evil,
+alternately suffering and enjoying as one feeling or the other came
+uppermost and swayed him.
+
+“Well, I’ll be gosh-swoggled!”
+
+So spoke Matt, coming out of the cabin, his sleeves rolled up, a pan of
+dirty dish-water in his hands, arrested in the act of emptying the pan
+by the sight of Weedon Scott patting White Fang.
+
+At the instant his voice broke the silence, White Fang leaped back,
+snarling savagely at him.
+
+Matt regarded his employer with grieved disapproval.
+
+“If you don’t mind my expressin’ my feelin’s, Mr. Scott, I’ll make free
+to say you’re seventeen kinds of a damn fool an’ all of ’em different,
+an’ then some.”
+
+Weedon Scott smiled with a superior air, gained his feet, and walked
+over to White Fang. He talked soothingly to him, but not for long, then
+slowly put out his hand, rested it on White Fang’s head, and resumed
+the interrupted patting. White Fang endured it, keeping his eyes fixed
+suspiciously, not upon the man that patted him, but upon the man that
+stood in the doorway.
+
+“You may be a number one, tip-top minin’ expert, all right all right,”
+the dog-musher delivered himself oracularly, “but you missed the chance
+of your life when you was a boy an’ didn’t run off an’ join a circus.”
+
+White Fang snarled at the sound of his voice, but this time did not
+leap away from under the hand that was caressing his head and the back
+of his neck with long, soothing strokes.
+
+It was the beginning of the end for White Fang—the ending of the old
+life and the reign of hate. A new and incomprehensibly fairer life was
+dawning. It required much thinking and endless patience on the part of
+Weedon Scott to accomplish this. And on the part of White Fang it
+required nothing less than a revolution. He had to ignore the urges and
+promptings of instinct and reason, defy experience, give the lie to
+life itself.
+
+Life, as he had known it, not only had had no place in it for much that
+he now did; but all the currents had gone counter to those to which he
+now abandoned himself. In short, when all things were considered, he
+had to achieve an orientation far vaster than the one he had achieved
+at the time he came voluntarily in from the Wild and accepted Grey
+Beaver as his lord. At that time he was a mere puppy, soft from the
+making, without form, ready for the thumb of circumstance to begin its
+work upon him. But now it was different. The thumb of circumstance had
+done its work only too well. By it he had been formed and hardened into
+the Fighting Wolf, fierce and implacable, unloving and unlovable. To
+accomplish the change was like a reflux of being, and this when the
+plasticity of youth was no longer his; when the fibre of him had become
+tough and knotty; when the warp and the woof of him had made of him an
+adamantine texture, harsh and unyielding; when the face of his spirit
+had become iron and all his instincts and axioms had crystallised into
+set rules, cautions, dislikes, and desires.
+
+Yet again, in this new orientation, it was the thumb of circumstance
+that pressed and prodded him, softening that which had become hard and
+remoulding it into fairer form. Weedon Scott was in truth this thumb.
+He had gone to the roots of White Fang’s nature, and with kindness
+touched to life potencies that had languished and well-nigh perished.
+One such potency was _love_. It took the place of _like_, which latter
+had been the highest feeling that thrilled him in his intercourse with
+the gods.
+
+But this love did not come in a day. It began with _like_ and out of it
+slowly developed. White Fang did not run away, though he was allowed to
+remain loose, because he liked this new god. This was certainly better
+than the life he had lived in the cage of Beauty Smith, and it was
+necessary that he should have some god. The lordship of man was a need
+of his nature. The seal of his dependence on man had been set upon him
+in that early day when he turned his back on the Wild and crawled to
+Grey Beaver’s feet to receive the expected beating. This seal had been
+stamped upon him again, and ineradicably, on his second return from the
+Wild, when the long famine was over and there was fish once more in the
+village of Grey Beaver.
+
+And so, because he needed a god and because he preferred Weedon Scott
+to Beauty Smith, White Fang remained. In acknowledgment of fealty, he
+proceeded to take upon himself the guardianship of his master’s
+property. He prowled about the cabin while the sled-dogs slept, and the
+first night-visitor to the cabin fought him off with a club until
+Weedon Scott came to the rescue. But White Fang soon learned to
+differentiate between thieves and honest men, to appraise the true
+value of step and carriage. The man who travelled, loud-stepping, the
+direct line to the cabin door, he let alone—though he watched him
+vigilantly until the door opened and he received the endorsement of the
+master. But the man who went softly, by circuitous ways, peering with
+caution, seeking after secrecy—that was the man who received no
+suspension of judgment from White Fang, and who went away abruptly,
+hurriedly, and without dignity.
+
+Weedon Scott had set himself the task of redeeming White Fang—or
+rather, of redeeming mankind from the wrong it had done White Fang. It
+was a matter of principle and conscience. He felt that the ill done
+White Fang was a debt incurred by man and that it must be paid. So he
+went out of his way to be especially kind to the Fighting Wolf. Each
+day he made it a point to caress and pet White Fang, and to do it at
+length.
+
+At first suspicious and hostile, White Fang grew to like this petting.
+But there was one thing that he never outgrew—his growling. Growl he
+would, from the moment the petting began till it ended. But it was a
+growl with a new note in it. A stranger could not hear this note, and
+to such a stranger the growling of White Fang was an exhibition of
+primordial savagery, nerve-racking and blood-curdling. But White Fang’s
+throat had become harsh-fibred from the making of ferocious sounds
+through the many years since his first little rasp of anger in the lair
+of his cubhood, and he could not soften the sounds of that throat now
+to express the gentleness he felt. Nevertheless, Weedon Scott’s ear and
+sympathy were fine enough to catch the new note all but drowned in the
+fierceness—the note that was the faintest hint of a croon of content
+and that none but he could hear.
+
+As the days went by, the evolution of _like_ into _love_ was
+accelerated. White Fang himself began to grow aware of it, though in
+his consciousness he knew not what love was. It manifested itself to
+him as a void in his being—a hungry, aching, yearning void that
+clamoured to be filled. It was a pain and an unrest; and it received
+easement only by the touch of the new god’s presence. At such times
+love was joy to him, a wild, keen-thrilling satisfaction. But when away
+from his god, the pain and the unrest returned; the void in him sprang
+up and pressed against him with its emptiness, and the hunger gnawed
+and gnawed unceasingly.
+
+White Fang was in the process of finding himself. In spite of the
+maturity of his years and of the savage rigidity of the mould that had
+formed him, his nature was undergoing an expansion. There was a
+burgeoning within him of strange feelings and unwonted impulses. His
+old code of conduct was changing. In the past he had liked comfort and
+surcease from pain, disliked discomfort and pain, and he had adjusted
+his actions accordingly. But now it was different. Because of this new
+feeling within him, he ofttimes elected discomfort and pain for the
+sake of his god. Thus, in the early morning, instead of roaming and
+foraging, or lying in a sheltered nook, he would wait for hours on the
+cheerless cabin-stoop for a sight of the god’s face. At night, when the
+god returned home, White Fang would leave the warm sleeping-place he
+had burrowed in the snow in order to receive the friendly snap of
+fingers and the word of greeting. Meat, even meat itself, he would
+forego to be with his god, to receive a caress from him or to accompany
+him down into the town.
+
+_Like_ had been replaced by _love_. And love was the plummet dropped
+down into the deeps of him where like had never gone. And responsive
+out of his deeps had come the new thing—love. That which was given unto
+him did he return. This was a god indeed, a love-god, a warm and
+radiant god, in whose light White Fang’s nature expanded as a flower
+expands under the sun.
+
+But White Fang was not demonstrative. He was too old, too firmly
+moulded, to become adept at expressing himself in new ways. He was too
+self-possessed, too strongly poised in his own isolation. Too long had
+he cultivated reticence, aloofness, and moroseness. He had never barked
+in his life, and he could not now learn to bark a welcome when his god
+approached. He was never in the way, never extravagant nor foolish in
+the expression of his love. He never ran to meet his god. He waited at
+a distance; but he always waited, was always there. His love partook of
+the nature of worship, dumb, inarticulate, a silent adoration. Only by
+the steady regard of his eyes did he express his love, and by the
+unceasing following with his eyes of his god’s every movement. Also, at
+times, when his god looked at him and spoke to him, he betrayed an
+awkward self-consciousness, caused by the struggle of his love to
+express itself and his physical inability to express it.
+
+He learned to adjust himself in many ways to his new mode of life. It
+was borne in upon him that he must let his master’s dogs alone. Yet his
+dominant nature asserted itself, and he had first to thrash them into
+an acknowledgment of his superiority and leadership. This accomplished,
+he had little trouble with them. They gave trail to him when he came
+and went or walked among them, and when he asserted his will they
+obeyed.
+
+In the same way, he came to tolerate Matt—as a possession of his
+master. His master rarely fed him. Matt did that, it was his business;
+yet White Fang divined that it was his master’s food he ate and that it
+was his master who thus fed him vicariously. Matt it was who tried to
+put him into the harness and make him haul sled with the other dogs.
+But Matt failed. It was not until Weedon Scott put the harness on White
+Fang and worked him, that he understood. He took it as his master’s
+will that Matt should drive him and work him just as he drove and
+worked his master’s other dogs.
+
+Different from the Mackenzie toboggans were the Klondike sleds with
+runners under them. And different was the method of driving the dogs.
+There was no fan-formation of the team. The dogs worked in single file,
+one behind another, hauling on double traces. And here, in the
+Klondike, the leader was indeed the leader. The wisest as well as
+strongest dog was the leader, and the team obeyed him and feared him.
+That White Fang should quickly gain this post was inevitable. He could
+not be satisfied with less, as Matt learned after much inconvenience
+and trouble. White Fang picked out the post for himself, and Matt
+backed his judgment with strong language after the experiment had been
+tried. But, though he worked in the sled in the day, White Fang did not
+forego the guarding of his master’s property in the night. Thus he was
+on duty all the time, ever vigilant and faithful, the most valuable of
+all the dogs.
+
+“Makin’ free to spit out what’s in me,” Matt said one day, “I beg to
+state that you was a wise guy all right when you paid the price you did
+for that dog. You clean swindled Beauty Smith on top of pushin’ his
+face in with your fist.”
+
+A recrudescence of anger glinted in Weedon Scott’s grey eyes, and he
+muttered savagely, “The beast!”
+
+In the late spring a great trouble came to White Fang. Without warning,
+the love-master disappeared. There had been warning, but White Fang was
+unversed in such things and did not understand the packing of a grip.
+He remembered afterwards that his packing had preceded the master’s
+disappearance; but at the time he suspected nothing. That night he
+waited for the master to return. At midnight the chill wind that blew
+drove him to shelter at the rear of the cabin. There he drowsed, only
+half asleep, his ears keyed for the first sound of the familiar step.
+But, at two in the morning, his anxiety drove him out to the cold front
+stoop, where he crouched, and waited.
+
+But no master came. In the morning the door opened and Matt stepped
+outside. White Fang gazed at him wistfully. There was no common speech
+by which he might learn what he wanted to know. The days came and went,
+but never the master. White Fang, who had never known sickness in his
+life, became sick. He became very sick, so sick that Matt was finally
+compelled to bring him inside the cabin. Also, in writing to his
+employer, Matt devoted a postscript to White Fang.
+
+Weedon Scott reading the letter down in Circle City, came upon the
+following:
+
+“That dam wolf won’t work. Won’t eat. Aint got no spunk left. All the
+dogs is licking him. Wants to know what has become of you, and I don’t
+know how to tell him. Mebbe he is going to die.”
+
+It was as Matt had said. White Fang had ceased eating, lost heart, and
+allowed every dog of the team to thrash him. In the cabin he lay on the
+floor near the stove, without interest in food, in Matt, nor in life.
+Matt might talk gently to him or swear at him, it was all the same; he
+never did more than turn his dull eyes upon the man, then drop his head
+back to its customary position on his fore-paws.
+
+And then, one night, Matt, reading to himself with moving lips and
+mumbled sounds, was startled by a low whine from White Fang. He had got
+upon his feet, his ears cocked towards the door, and he was listening
+intently. A moment later, Matt heard a footstep. The door opened, and
+Weedon Scott stepped in. The two men shook hands. Then Scott looked
+around the room.
+
+“Where’s the wolf?” he asked.
+
+Then he discovered him, standing where he had been lying, near to the
+stove. He had not rushed forward after the manner of other dogs. He
+stood, watching and waiting.
+
+“Holy smoke!” Matt exclaimed. “Look at ’m wag his tail!”
+
+Weedon Scott strode half across the room toward him, at the same time
+calling him. White Fang came to him, not with a great bound, yet
+quickly. He was awakened from self-consciousness, but as he drew near,
+his eyes took on a strange expression. Something, an incommunicable
+vastness of feeling, rose up into his eyes as a light and shone forth.
+
+“He never looked at me that way all the time you was gone!” Matt
+commented.
+
+Weedon Scott did not hear. He was squatting down on his heels, face to
+face with White Fang and petting him—rubbing at the roots of the ears,
+making long caressing strokes down the neck to the shoulders, tapping
+the spine gently with the balls of his fingers. And White Fang was
+growling responsively, the crooning note of the growl more pronounced
+than ever.
+
+But that was not all. What of his joy, the great love in him, ever
+surging and struggling to express itself, succeeded in finding a new
+mode of expression. He suddenly thrust his head forward and nudged his
+way in between the master’s arm and body. And here, confined, hidden
+from view all except his ears, no longer growling, he continued to
+nudge and snuggle.
+
+The two men looked at each other. Scott’s eyes were shining.
+
+“Gosh!” said Matt in an awe-stricken voice.
+
+A moment later, when he had recovered himself, he said, “I always
+insisted that wolf was a dog. Look at ’m!”
+
+With the return of the love-master, White Fang’s recovery was rapid.
+Two nights and a day he spent in the cabin. Then he sallied forth. The
+sled-dogs had forgotten his prowess. They remembered only the latest,
+which was his weakness and sickness. At the sight of him as he came out
+of the cabin, they sprang upon him.
+
+“Talk about your rough-houses,” Matt murmured gleefully, standing in
+the doorway and looking on.
+
+“Give ’m hell, you wolf! Give ’m hell!—an’ then some!”
+
+White Fang did not need the encouragement. The return of the
+love-master was enough. Life was flowing through him again, splendid
+and indomitable. He fought from sheer joy, finding in it an expression
+of much that he felt and that otherwise was without speech. There could
+be but one ending. The team dispersed in ignominious defeat, and it was
+not until after dark that the dogs came sneaking back, one by one, by
+meekness and humility signifying their fealty to White Fang.
+
+Having learned to snuggle, White Fang was guilty of it often. It was
+the final word. He could not go beyond it. The one thing of which he
+had always been particularly jealous was his head. He had always
+disliked to have it touched. It was the Wild in him, the fear of hurt
+and of the trap, that had given rise to the panicky impulses to avoid
+contacts. It was the mandate of his instinct that that head must be
+free. And now, with the love-master, his snuggling was the deliberate
+act of putting himself into a position of hopeless helplessness. It was
+an expression of perfect confidence, of absolute self-surrender, as
+though he said: “I put myself into thy hands. Work thou thy will with
+me.”
+
+One night, not long after the return, Scott and Matt sat at a game of
+cribbage preliminary to going to bed. “Fifteen-two, fifteen-four an’ a
+pair makes six,” Mat was pegging up, when there was an outcry and sound
+of snarling without. They looked at each other as they started to rise
+to their feet.
+
+“The wolf’s nailed somebody,” Matt said.
+
+A wild scream of fear and anguish hastened them.
+
+“Bring a light!” Scott shouted, as he sprang outside.
+
+Matt followed with the lamp, and by its light they saw a man lying on
+his back in the snow. His arms were folded, one above the other, across
+his face and throat. Thus he was trying to shield himself from White
+Fang’s teeth. And there was need for it. White Fang was in a rage,
+wickedly making his attack on the most vulnerable spot. From shoulder
+to wrist of the crossed arms, the coat-sleeve, blue flannel shirt and
+undershirt were ripped in rags, while the arms themselves were terribly
+slashed and streaming blood.
+
+All this the two men saw in the first instant. The next instant Weedon
+Scott had White Fang by the throat and was dragging him clear. White
+Fang struggled and snarled, but made no attempt to bite, while he
+quickly quieted down at a sharp word from the master.
+
+Matt helped the man to his feet. As he arose he lowered his crossed
+arms, exposing the bestial face of Beauty Smith. The dog-musher let go
+of him precipitately, with action similar to that of a man who has
+picked up live fire. Beauty Smith blinked in the lamplight and looked
+about him. He caught sight of White Fang and terror rushed into his
+face.
+
+At the same moment Matt noticed two objects lying in the snow. He held
+the lamp close to them, indicating them with his toe for his employer’s
+benefit—a steel dog-chain and a stout club.
+
+Weedon Scott saw and nodded. Not a word was spoken. The dog-musher laid
+his hand on Beauty Smith’s shoulder and faced him to the right about.
+No word needed to be spoken. Beauty Smith started.
+
+In the meantime the love-master was patting White Fang and talking to
+him.
+
+“Tried to steal you, eh? And you wouldn’t have it! Well, well, he made
+a mistake, didn’t he?”
+
+“Must ‘a’ thought he had hold of seventeen devils,” the dog-musher
+sniggered.
+
+White Fang, still wrought up and bristling, growled and growled, the
+hair slowly lying down, the crooning note remote and dim, but growing
+in his throat.
+
+
+
+
+PART V
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I
+THE LONG TRAIL
+
+
+It was in the air. White Fang sensed the coming calamity, even before
+there was tangible evidence of it. In vague ways it was borne in upon
+him that a change was impending. He knew not how nor why, yet he got
+his feel of the oncoming event from the gods themselves. In ways
+subtler than they knew, they betrayed their intentions to the wolf-dog
+that haunted the cabin-stoop, and that, though he never came inside the
+cabin, knew what went on inside their brains.
+
+“Listen to that, will you!” the dog-musher exclaimed at supper one
+night.
+
+Weedon Scott listened. Through the door came a low, anxious whine, like
+a sobbing under the breath that had just grown audible. Then came the
+long sniff, as White Fang reassured himself that his god was still
+inside and had not yet taken himself off in mysterious and solitary
+flight.
+
+“I do believe that wolf’s on to you,” the dog-musher said.
+
+Weedon Scott looked across at his companion with eyes that almost
+pleaded, though this was given the lie by his words.
+
+“What the devil can I do with a wolf in California?” he demanded.
+
+“That’s what I say,” Matt answered. “What the devil can you do with a
+wolf in California?”
+
+But this did not satisfy Weedon Scott. The other seemed to be judging
+him in a non-committal sort of way.
+
+“White man’s dogs would have no show against him,” Scott went on. “He’d
+kill them on sight. If he didn’t bankrupt me with damaged suits, the
+authorities would take him away from me and electrocute him.”
+
+“He’s a downright murderer, I know,” was the dog-musher’s comment.
+
+Weedon Scott looked at him suspiciously.
+
+“It would never do,” he said decisively.
+
+“It would never do!” Matt concurred. “Why you’d have to hire a man
+’specially to take care of ’m.”
+
+The other suspicion was allayed. He nodded cheerfully. In the silence
+that followed, the low, half-sobbing whine was heard at the door and
+then the long, questing sniff.
+
+“There’s no denyin’ he thinks a hell of a lot of you,” Matt said.
+
+The other glared at him in sudden wrath. “Damn it all, man! I know my
+own mind and what’s best!”
+
+“I’m agreein’ with you, only . . . ”
+
+“Only what?” Scott snapped out.
+
+“Only . . . ” the dog-musher began softly, then changed his mind and
+betrayed a rising anger of his own. “Well, you needn’t get so all-fired
+het up about it. Judgin’ by your actions one’d think you didn’t know
+your own mind.”
+
+Weedon Scott debated with himself for a while, and then said more
+gently: “You are right, Matt. I don’t know my own mind, and that’s
+what’s the trouble.”
+
+“Why, it would be rank ridiculousness for me to take that dog along,”
+he broke out after another pause.
+
+“I’m agreein’ with you,” was Matt’s answer, and again his employer was
+not quite satisfied with him.
+
+“But how in the name of the great Sardanapolis he knows you’re goin’ is
+what gets me,” the dog-musher continued innocently.
+
+“It’s beyond me, Matt,” Scott answered, with a mournful shake of the
+head.
+
+Then came the day when, through the open cabin door, White Fang saw the
+fatal grip on the floor and the love-master packing things into it.
+Also, there were comings and goings, and the erstwhile placid
+atmosphere of the cabin was vexed with strange perturbations and
+unrest. Here was indubitable evidence. White Fang had already scented
+it. He now reasoned it. His god was preparing for another flight. And
+since he had not taken him with him before, so, now, he could look to
+be left behind.
+
+That night he lifted the long wolf-howl. As he had howled, in his puppy
+days, when he fled back from the Wild to the village to find it
+vanished and naught but a rubbish-heap to mark the site of Grey
+Beaver’s tepee, so now he pointed his muzzle to the cold stars and told
+to them his woe.
+
+Inside the cabin the two men had just gone to bed.
+
+“He’s gone off his food again,” Matt remarked from his bunk.
+
+There was a grunt from Weedon Scott’s bunk, and a stir of blankets.
+
+“From the way he cut up the other time you went away, I wouldn’t wonder
+this time but what he died.”
+
+The blankets in the other bunk stirred irritably.
+
+“Oh, shut up!” Scott cried out through the darkness. “You nag worse
+than a woman.”
+
+“I’m agreein’ with you,” the dog-musher answered, and Weedon Scott was
+not quite sure whether or not the other had snickered.
+
+The next day White Fang’s anxiety and restlessness were even more
+pronounced. He dogged his master’s heels whenever he left the cabin,
+and haunted the front stoop when he remained inside. Through the open
+door he could catch glimpses of the luggage on the floor. The grip had
+been joined by two large canvas bags and a box. Matt was rolling the
+master’s blankets and fur robe inside a small tarpaulin. White Fang
+whined as he watched the operation.
+
+Later on two Indians arrived. He watched them closely as they
+shouldered the luggage and were led off down the hill by Matt, who
+carried the bedding and the grip. But White Fang did not follow them.
+The master was still in the cabin. After a time, Matt returned. The
+master came to the door and called White Fang inside.
+
+“You poor devil,” he said gently, rubbing White Fang’s ears and tapping
+his spine. “I’m hitting the long trail, old man, where you cannot
+follow. Now give me a growl—the last, good, good-bye growl.”
+
+But White Fang refused to growl. Instead, and after a wistful,
+searching look, he snuggled in, burrowing his head out of sight between
+the master’s arm and body.
+
+“There she blows!” Matt cried. From the Yukon arose the hoarse
+bellowing of a river steamboat. “You’ve got to cut it short. Be sure
+and lock the front door. I’ll go out the back. Get a move on!”
+
+The two doors slammed at the same moment, and Weedon Scott waited for
+Matt to come around to the front. From inside the door came a low
+whining and sobbing. Then there were long, deep-drawn sniffs.
+
+“You must take good care of him, Matt,” Scott said, as they started
+down the hill. “Write and let me know how he gets along.”
+
+“Sure,” the dog-musher answered. “But listen to that, will you!”
+
+Both men stopped. White Fang was howling as dogs howl when their
+masters lie dead. He was voicing an utter woe, his cry bursting upward
+in great heart-breaking rushes, dying down into quavering misery, and
+bursting upward again with a rush upon rush of grief.
+
+The _Aurora_ was the first steamboat of the year for the Outside, and
+her decks were jammed with prosperous adventurers and broken gold
+seekers, all equally as mad to get to the Outside as they had been
+originally to get to the Inside. Near the gang-plank, Scott was shaking
+hands with Matt, who was preparing to go ashore. But Matt’s hand went
+limp in the other’s grasp as his gaze shot past and remained fixed on
+something behind him. Scott turned to see. Sitting on the deck several
+feet away and watching wistfully was White Fang.
+
+The dog-musher swore softly, in awe-stricken accents. Scott could only
+look in wonder.
+
+“Did you lock the front door?” Matt demanded. The other nodded, and
+asked, “How about the back?”
+
+“You just bet I did,” was the fervent reply.
+
+White Fang flattened his ears ingratiatingly, but remained where he
+was, making no attempt to approach.
+
+“I’ll have to take ’m ashore with me.”
+
+Matt made a couple of steps toward White Fang, but the latter slid away
+from him. The dog-musher made a rush of it, and White Fang dodged
+between the legs of a group of men. Ducking, turning, doubling, he slid
+about the deck, eluding the other’s efforts to capture him.
+
+But when the love-master spoke, White Fang came to him with prompt
+obedience.
+
+“Won’t come to the hand that’s fed ’m all these months,” the dog-musher
+muttered resentfully. “And you—you ain’t never fed ’m after them first
+days of gettin’ acquainted. I’m blamed if I can see how he works it out
+that you’re the boss.”
+
+Scott, who had been patting White Fang, suddenly bent closer and
+pointed out fresh-made cuts on his muzzle, and a gash between the eyes.
+
+Matt bent over and passed his hand along White Fang’s belly.
+
+“We plump forgot the window. He’s all cut an’ gouged underneath. Must
+‘a’ butted clean through it, b’gosh!”
+
+But Weedon Scott was not listening. He was thinking rapidly. The
+_Aurora’s_ whistle hooted a final announcement of departure. Men were
+scurrying down the gang-plank to the shore. Matt loosened the bandana
+from his own neck and started to put it around White Fang’s. Scott
+grasped the dog-musher’s hand.
+
+“Good-bye, Matt, old man. About the wolf—you needn’t write. You see,
+I’ve . . . !”
+
+“What!” the dog-musher exploded. “You don’t mean to say . . .?”
+
+“The very thing I mean. Here’s your bandana. I’ll write to you about
+him.”
+
+Matt paused halfway down the gang-plank.
+
+“He’ll never stand the climate!” he shouted back. “Unless you clip ’m
+in warm weather!”
+
+The gang-plank was hauled in, and the _Aurora_ swung out from the bank.
+Weedon Scott waved a last good-bye. Then he turned and bent over White
+Fang, standing by his side.
+
+“Now growl, damn you, growl,” he said, as he patted the responsive head
+and rubbed the flattening ears.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II
+THE SOUTHLAND
+
+
+White Fang landed from the steamer in San Francisco. He was appalled.
+Deep in him, below any reasoning process or act of consciousness, he
+had associated power with godhead. And never had the white men seemed
+such marvellous gods as now, when he trod the slimy pavement of San
+Francisco. The log cabins he had known were replaced by towering
+buildings. The streets were crowded with perils—waggons, carts,
+automobiles; great, straining horses pulling huge trucks; and monstrous
+cable and electric cars hooting and clanging through the midst,
+screeching their insistent menace after the manner of the lynxes he had
+known in the northern woods.
+
+All this was the manifestation of power. Through it all, behind it all,
+was man, governing and controlling, expressing himself, as of old, by
+his mastery over matter. It was colossal, stunning. White Fang was
+awed. Fear sat upon him. As in his cubhood he had been made to feel his
+smallness and puniness on the day he first came in from the Wild to the
+village of Grey Beaver, so now, in his full-grown stature and pride of
+strength, he was made to feel small and puny. And there were so many
+gods! He was made dizzy by the swarming of them. The thunder of the
+streets smote upon his ears. He was bewildered by the tremendous and
+endless rush and movement of things. As never before, he felt his
+dependence on the love-master, close at whose heels he followed, no
+matter what happened never losing sight of him.
+
+But White Fang was to have no more than a nightmare vision of the
+city—an experience that was like a bad dream, unreal and terrible, that
+haunted him for long after in his dreams. He was put into a baggage-car
+by the master, chained in a corner in the midst of heaped trunks and
+valises. Here a squat and brawny god held sway, with much noise,
+hurling trunks and boxes about, dragging them in through the door and
+tossing them into the piles, or flinging them out of the door, smashing
+and crashing, to other gods who awaited them.
+
+And here, in this inferno of luggage, was White Fang deserted by the
+master. Or at least White Fang thought he was deserted, until he
+smelled out the master’s canvas clothes-bags alongside of him, and
+proceeded to mount guard over them.
+
+“’Bout time you come,” growled the god of the car, an hour later, when
+Weedon Scott appeared at the door. “That dog of yourn won’t let me lay
+a finger on your stuff.”
+
+White Fang emerged from the car. He was astonished. The nightmare city
+was gone. The car had been to him no more than a room in a house, and
+when he had entered it the city had been all around him. In the
+interval the city had disappeared. The roar of it no longer dinned upon
+his ears. Before him was smiling country, streaming with sunshine, lazy
+with quietude. But he had little time to marvel at the transformation.
+He accepted it as he accepted all the unaccountable doings and
+manifestations of the gods. It was their way.
+
+There was a carriage waiting. A man and a woman approached the master.
+The woman’s arms went out and clutched the master around the neck—a
+hostile act! The next moment Weedon Scott had torn loose from the
+embrace and closed with White Fang, who had become a snarling, raging
+demon.
+
+“It’s all right, mother,” Scott was saying as he kept tight hold of
+White Fang and placated him. “He thought you were going to injure me,
+and he wouldn’t stand for it. It’s all right. It’s all right. He’ll
+learn soon enough.”
+
+“And in the meantime I may be permitted to love my son when his dog is
+not around,” she laughed, though she was pale and weak from the fright.
+
+She looked at White Fang, who snarled and bristled and glared
+malevolently.
+
+“He’ll have to learn, and he shall, without postponement,” Scott said.
+
+He spoke softly to White Fang until he had quieted him, then his voice
+became firm.
+
+“Down, sir! Down with you!”
+
+This had been one of the things taught him by the master, and White
+Fang obeyed, though he lay down reluctantly and sullenly.
+
+“Now, mother.”
+
+Scott opened his arms to her, but kept his eyes on White Fang.
+
+“Down!” he warned. “Down!”
+
+White Fang, bristling silently, half-crouching as he rose, sank back
+and watched the hostile act repeated. But no harm came of it, nor of
+the embrace from the strange man-god that followed. Then the
+clothes-bags were taken into the carriage, the strange gods and the
+love-master followed, and White Fang pursued, now running vigilantly
+behind, now bristling up to the running horses and warning them that he
+was there to see that no harm befell the god they dragged so swiftly
+across the earth.
+
+At the end of fifteen minutes, the carriage swung in through a stone
+gateway and on between a double row of arched and interlacing walnut
+trees. On either side stretched lawns, their broad sweep broken here
+and there by great sturdy-limbed oaks. In the near distance, in
+contrast with the young-green of the tended grass, sunburnt hay-fields
+showed tan and gold; while beyond were the tawny hills and upland
+pastures. From the head of the lawn, on the first soft swell from the
+valley-level, looked down the deep-porched, many-windowed house.
+
+Little opportunity was given White Fang to see all this. Hardly had the
+carriage entered the grounds, when he was set upon by a sheep-dog,
+bright-eyed, sharp-muzzled, righteously indignant and angry. It was
+between him and the master, cutting him off. White Fang snarled no
+warning, but his hair bristled as he made his silent and deadly rush.
+This rush was never completed. He halted with awkward abruptness, with
+stiff fore-legs bracing himself against his momentum, almost sitting
+down on his haunches, so desirous was he of avoiding contact with the
+dog he was in the act of attacking. It was a female, and the law of his
+kind thrust a barrier between. For him to attack her would require
+nothing less than a violation of his instinct.
+
+But with the sheep-dog it was otherwise. Being a female, she possessed
+no such instinct. On the other hand, being a sheep-dog, her instinctive
+fear of the Wild, and especially of the wolf, was unusually keen. White
+Fang was to her a wolf, the hereditary marauder who had preyed upon her
+flocks from the time sheep were first herded and guarded by some dim
+ancestor of hers. And so, as he abandoned his rush at her and braced
+himself to avoid the contact, she sprang upon him. He snarled
+involuntarily as he felt her teeth in his shoulder, but beyond this
+made no offer to hurt her. He backed away, stiff-legged with
+self-consciousness, and tried to go around her. He dodged this way and
+that, and curved and turned, but to no purpose. She remained always
+between him and the way he wanted to go.
+
+“Here, Collie!” called the strange man in the carriage.
+
+Weedon Scott laughed.
+
+“Never mind, father. It is good discipline. White Fang will have to
+learn many things, and it’s just as well that he begins now. He’ll
+adjust himself all right.”
+
+The carriage drove on, and still Collie blocked White Fang’s way. He
+tried to outrun her by leaving the drive and circling across the lawn
+but she ran on the inner and smaller circle, and was always there,
+facing him with her two rows of gleaming teeth. Back he circled, across
+the drive to the other lawn, and again she headed him off.
+
+The carriage was bearing the master away. White Fang caught glimpses of
+it disappearing amongst the trees. The situation was desperate. He
+essayed another circle. She followed, running swiftly. And then,
+suddenly, he turned upon her. It was his old fighting trick. Shoulder
+to shoulder, he struck her squarely. Not only was she overthrown. So
+fast had she been running that she rolled along, now on her back, now
+on her side, as she struggled to stop, clawing gravel with her feet and
+crying shrilly her hurt pride and indignation.
+
+White Fang did not wait. The way was clear, and that was all he had
+wanted. She took after him, never ceasing her outcry. It was the
+straightaway now, and when it came to real running, White Fang could
+teach her things. She ran frantically, hysterically, straining to the
+utmost, advertising the effort she was making with every leap: and all
+the time White Fang slid smoothly away from her silently, without
+effort, gliding like a ghost over the ground.
+
+As he rounded the house to the _porte-cochère_, he came upon the
+carriage. It had stopped, and the master was alighting. At this moment,
+still running at top speed, White Fang became suddenly aware of an
+attack from the side. It was a deer-hound rushing upon him. White Fang
+tried to face it. But he was going too fast, and the hound was too
+close. It struck him on the side; and such was his forward momentum and
+the unexpectedness of it, White Fang was hurled to the ground and
+rolled clear over. He came out of the tangle a spectacle of malignancy,
+ears flattened back, lips writhing, nose wrinkling, his teeth clipping
+together as the fangs barely missed the hound’s soft throat.
+
+The master was running up, but was too far away; and it was Collie that
+saved the hound’s life. Before White Fang could spring in and deliver
+the fatal stroke, and just as he was in the act of springing in, Collie
+arrived. She had been out-manoeuvred and out-run, to say nothing of her
+having been unceremoniously tumbled in the gravel, and her arrival was
+like that of a tornado—made up of offended dignity, justifiable wrath,
+and instinctive hatred for this marauder from the Wild. She struck
+White Fang at right angles in the midst of his spring, and again he was
+knocked off his feet and rolled over.
+
+The next moment the master arrived, and with one hand held White Fang,
+while the father called off the dogs.
+
+“I say, this is a pretty warm reception for a poor lone wolf from the
+Arctic,” the master said, while White Fang calmed down under his
+caressing hand. “In all his life he’s only been known once to go off
+his feet, and here he’s been rolled twice in thirty seconds.”
+
+The carriage had driven away, and other strange gods had appeared from
+out the house. Some of these stood respectfully at a distance; but two
+of them, women, perpetrated the hostile act of clutching the master
+around the neck. White Fang, however, was beginning to tolerate this
+act. No harm seemed to come of it, while the noises the gods made were
+certainly not threatening. These gods also made overtures to White
+Fang, but he warned them off with a snarl, and the master did likewise
+with word of mouth. At such times White Fang leaned in close against
+the master’s legs and received reassuring pats on the head.
+
+The hound, under the command, “Dick! Lie down, sir!” had gone up the
+steps and lain down to one side of the porch, still growling and
+keeping a sullen watch on the intruder. Collie had been taken in charge
+by one of the woman-gods, who held arms around her neck and petted and
+caressed her; but Collie was very much perplexed and worried, whining
+and restless, outraged by the permitted presence of this wolf and
+confident that the gods were making a mistake.
+
+All the gods started up the steps to enter the house. White Fang
+followed closely at the master’s heels. Dick, on the porch, growled,
+and White Fang, on the steps, bristled and growled back.
+
+“Take Collie inside and leave the two of them to fight it out,”
+suggested Scott’s father. “After that they’ll be friends.”
+
+“Then White Fang, to show his friendship, will have to be chief mourner
+at the funeral,” laughed the master.
+
+The elder Scott looked incredulously, first at White Fang, then at
+Dick, and finally at his son.
+
+“You mean . . .?”
+
+Weedon nodded his head. “I mean just that. You’d have a dead Dick
+inside one minute—two minutes at the farthest.”
+
+He turned to White Fang. “Come on, you wolf. It’s you that’ll have to
+come inside.”
+
+White Fang walked stiff-legged up the steps and across the porch, with
+tail rigidly erect, keeping his eyes on Dick to guard against a flank
+attack, and at the same time prepared for whatever fierce manifestation
+of the unknown that might pounce out upon him from the interior of the
+house. But no thing of fear pounced out, and when he had gained the
+inside he scouted carefully around, looking at it and finding it not.
+Then he lay down with a contented grunt at the master’s feet, observing
+all that went on, ever ready to spring to his feet and fight for life
+with the terrors he felt must lurk under the trap-roof of the dwelling.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III
+THE GOD’S DOMAIN
+
+
+Not only was White Fang adaptable by nature, but he had travelled much,
+and knew the meaning and necessity of adjustment. Here, in Sierra
+Vista, which was the name of Judge Scott’s place, White Fang quickly
+began to make himself at home. He had no further serious trouble with
+the dogs. They knew more about the ways of the Southland gods than did
+he, and in their eyes he had qualified when he accompanied the gods
+inside the house. Wolf that he was, and unprecedented as it was, the
+gods had sanctioned his presence, and they, the dogs of the gods, could
+only recognise this sanction.
+
+Dick, perforce, had to go through a few stiff formalities at first,
+after which he calmly accepted White Fang as an addition to the
+premises. Had Dick had his way, they would have been good friends. All
+but White Fang was averse to friendship. All he asked of other dogs was
+to be let alone. His whole life he had kept aloof from his kind, and he
+still desired to keep aloof. Dick’s overtures bothered him, so he
+snarled Dick away. In the north he had learned the lesson that he must
+let the master’s dogs alone, and he did not forget that lesson now. But
+he insisted on his own privacy and self-seclusion, and so thoroughly
+ignored Dick that that good-natured creature finally gave him up and
+scarcely took as much interest in him as in the hitching-post near the
+stable.
+
+Not so with Collie. While she accepted him because it was the mandate
+of the gods, that was no reason that she should leave him in peace.
+Woven into her being was the memory of countless crimes he and his had
+perpetrated against her ancestry. Not in a day nor a generation were
+the ravaged sheepfolds to be forgotten. All this was a spur to her,
+pricking her to retaliation. She could not fly in the face of the gods
+who permitted him, but that did not prevent her from making life
+miserable for him in petty ways. A feud, ages old, was between them,
+and she, for one, would see to it that he was reminded.
+
+So Collie took advantage of her sex to pick upon White Fang and
+maltreat him. His instinct would not permit him to attack her, while
+her persistence would not permit him to ignore her. When she rushed at
+him he turned his fur-protected shoulder to her sharp teeth and walked
+away stiff-legged and stately. When she forced him too hard, he was
+compelled to go about in a circle, his shoulder presented to her, his
+head turned from her, and on his face and in his eyes a patient and
+bored expression. Sometimes, however, a nip on his hind-quarters
+hastened his retreat and made it anything but stately. But as a rule he
+managed to maintain a dignity that was almost solemnity. He ignored her
+existence whenever it was possible, and made it a point to keep out of
+her way. When he saw or heard her coming, he got up and walked off.
+
+There was much in other matters for White Fang to learn. Life in the
+Northland was simplicity itself when compared with the complicated
+affairs of Sierra Vista. First of all, he had to learn the family of
+the master. In a way he was prepared to do this. As Mit-sah and
+Kloo-kooch had belonged to Grey Beaver, sharing his food, his fire, and
+his blankets, so now, at Sierra Vista, belonged to the love-master all
+the denizens of the house.
+
+But in this matter there was a difference, and many differences. Sierra
+Vista was a far vaster affair than the tepee of Grey Beaver. There were
+many persons to be considered. There was Judge Scott, and there was his
+wife. There were the master’s two sisters, Beth and Mary. There was his
+wife, Alice, and then there were his children, Weedon and Maud,
+toddlers of four and six. There was no way for anybody to tell him
+about all these people, and of blood-ties and relationship he knew
+nothing whatever and never would be capable of knowing. Yet he quickly
+worked it out that all of them belonged to the master. Then, by
+observation, whenever opportunity offered, by study of action, speech,
+and the very intonations of the voice, he slowly learned the intimacy
+and the degree of favour they enjoyed with the master. And by this
+ascertained standard, White Fang treated them accordingly. What was of
+value to the master he valued; what was dear to the master was to be
+cherished by White Fang and guarded carefully.
+
+Thus it was with the two children. All his life he had disliked
+children. He hated and feared their hands. The lessons were not tender
+that he had learned of their tyranny and cruelty in the days of the
+Indian villages. When Weedon and Maud had first approached him, he
+growled warningly and looked malignant. A cuff from the master and a
+sharp word had then compelled him to permit their caresses, though he
+growled and growled under their tiny hands, and in the growl there was
+no crooning note. Later, he observed that the boy and girl were of
+great value in the master’s eyes. Then it was that no cuff nor sharp
+word was necessary before they could pat him.
+
+Yet White Fang was never effusively affectionate. He yielded to the
+master’s children with an ill but honest grace, and endured their
+fooling as one would endure a painful operation. When he could no
+longer endure, he would get up and stalk determinedly away from them.
+But after a time, he grew even to like the children. Still he was not
+demonstrative. He would not go up to them. On the other hand, instead
+of walking away at sight of them, he waited for them to come to him.
+And still later, it was noticed that a pleased light came into his eyes
+when he saw them approaching, and that he looked after them with an
+appearance of curious regret when they left him for other amusements.
+
+All this was a matter of development, and took time. Next in his
+regard, after the children, was Judge Scott. There were two reasons,
+possibly, for this. First, he was evidently a valuable possession of
+the master’s, and next, he was undemonstrative. White Fang liked to lie
+at his feet on the wide porch when he read the newspaper, from time to
+time favouring White Fang with a look or a word—untroublesome tokens
+that he recognised White Fang’s presence and existence. But this was
+only when the master was not around. When the master appeared, all
+other beings ceased to exist so far as White Fang was concerned.
+
+White Fang allowed all the members of the family to pet him and make
+much of him; but he never gave to them what he gave to the master. No
+caress of theirs could put the love-croon into his throat, and, try as
+they would, they could never persuade him into snuggling against them.
+This expression of abandon and surrender, of absolute trust, he
+reserved for the master alone. In fact, he never regarded the members
+of the family in any other light than possessions of the love-master.
+
+Also White Fang had early come to differentiate between the family and
+the servants of the household. The latter were afraid of him, while he
+merely refrained from attacking them. This because he considered that
+they were likewise possessions of the master. Between White Fang and
+them existed a neutrality and no more. They cooked for the master and
+washed the dishes and did other things just as Matt had done up in the
+Klondike. They were, in short, appurtenances of the household.
+
+Outside the household there was even more for White Fang to learn. The
+master’s domain was wide and complex, yet it had its metes and bounds.
+The land itself ceased at the county road. Outside was the common
+domain of all gods—the roads and streets. Then inside other fences were
+the particular domains of other gods. A myriad laws governed all these
+things and determined conduct; yet he did not know the speech of the
+gods, nor was there any way for him to learn save by experience. He
+obeyed his natural impulses until they ran him counter to some law.
+When this had been done a few times, he learned the law and after that
+observed it.
+
+But most potent in his education was the cuff of the master’s hand, the
+censure of the master’s voice. Because of White Fang’s very great love,
+a cuff from the master hurt him far more than any beating Grey Beaver
+or Beauty Smith had ever given him. They had hurt only the flesh of
+him; beneath the flesh the spirit had still raged, splendid and
+invincible. But with the master the cuff was always too light to hurt
+the flesh. Yet it went deeper. It was an expression of the master’s
+disapproval, and White Fang’s spirit wilted under it.
+
+In point of fact, the cuff was rarely administered. The master’s voice
+was sufficient. By it White Fang knew whether he did right or not. By
+it he trimmed his conduct and adjusted his actions. It was the compass
+by which he steered and learned to chart the manners of a new land and
+life.
+
+In the Northland, the only domesticated animal was the dog. All other
+animals lived in the Wild, and were, when not too formidable, lawful
+spoil for any dog. All his days White Fang had foraged among the live
+things for food. It did not enter his head that in the Southland it was
+otherwise. But this he was to learn early in his residence in Santa
+Clara Valley. Sauntering around the corner of the house in the early
+morning, he came upon a chicken that had escaped from the chicken-yard.
+White Fang’s natural impulse was to eat it. A couple of bounds, a flash
+of teeth and a frightened squawk, and he had scooped in the adventurous
+fowl. It was farm-bred and fat and tender; and White Fang licked his
+chops and decided that such fare was good.
+
+Later in the day, he chanced upon another stray chicken near the
+stables. One of the grooms ran to the rescue. He did not know White
+Fang’s breed, so for weapon he took a light buggy-whip. At the first
+cut of the whip, White Fang left the chicken for the man. A club might
+have stopped White Fang, but not a whip. Silently, without flinching,
+he took a second cut in his forward rush, and as he leaped for the
+throat the groom cried out, “My God!” and staggered backward. He
+dropped the whip and shielded his throat with his arms. In consequence,
+his forearm was ripped open to the bone.
+
+The man was badly frightened. It was not so much White Fang’s ferocity
+as it was his silence that unnerved the groom. Still protecting his
+throat and face with his torn and bleeding arm, he tried to retreat to
+the barn. And it would have gone hard with him had not Collie appeared
+on the scene. As she had saved Dick’s life, she now saved the groom’s.
+She rushed upon White Fang in frenzied wrath. She had been right. She
+had known better than the blundering gods. All her suspicions were
+justified. Here was the ancient marauder up to his old tricks again.
+
+The groom escaped into the stables, and White Fang backed away before
+Collie’s wicked teeth, or presented his shoulder to them and circled
+round and round. But Collie did not give over, as was her wont, after a
+decent interval of chastisement. On the contrary, she grew more excited
+and angry every moment, until, in the end, White Fang flung dignity to
+the winds and frankly fled away from her across the fields.
+
+“He’ll learn to leave chickens alone,” the master said. “But I can’t
+give him the lesson until I catch him in the act.”
+
+Two nights later came the act, but on a more generous scale than the
+master had anticipated. White Fang had observed closely the
+chicken-yards and the habits of the chickens. In the night-time, after
+they had gone to roost, he climbed to the top of a pile of newly hauled
+lumber. From there he gained the roof of a chicken-house, passed over
+the ridgepole and dropped to the ground inside. A moment later he was
+inside the house, and the slaughter began.
+
+In the morning, when the master came out on to the porch, fifty white
+Leghorn hens, laid out in a row by the groom, greeted his eyes. He
+whistled to himself, softly, first with surprise, and then, at the end,
+with admiration. His eyes were likewise greeted by White Fang, but
+about the latter there were no signs of shame nor guilt. He carried
+himself with pride, as though, forsooth, he had achieved a deed
+praiseworthy and meritorious. There was about him no consciousness of
+sin. The master’s lips tightened as he faced the disagreeable task.
+Then he talked harshly to the unwitting culprit, and in his voice there
+was nothing but godlike wrath. Also, he held White Fang’s nose down to
+the slain hens, and at the same time cuffed him soundly.
+
+White Fang never raided a chicken-roost again. It was against the law,
+and he had learned it. Then the master took him into the chicken-yards.
+White Fang’s natural impulse, when he saw the live food fluttering
+about him and under his very nose, was to spring upon it. He obeyed the
+impulse, but was checked by the master’s voice. They continued in the
+yards for half an hour. Time and again the impulse surged over White
+Fang, and each time, as he yielded to it, he was checked by the
+master’s voice. Thus it was he learned the law, and ere he left the
+domain of the chickens, he had learned to ignore their existence.
+
+“You can never cure a chicken-killer.” Judge Scott shook his head sadly
+at luncheon table, when his son narrated the lesson he had given White
+Fang. “Once they’ve got the habit and the taste of blood . . .” Again
+he shook his head sadly.
+
+But Weedon Scott did not agree with his father. “I’ll tell you what
+I’ll do,” he challenged finally. “I’ll lock White Fang in with the
+chickens all afternoon.”
+
+“But think of the chickens,” objected the judge.
+
+“And furthermore,” the son went on, “for every chicken he kills, I’ll
+pay you one dollar gold coin of the realm.”
+
+“But you should penalise father, too,” interpose Beth.
+
+Her sister seconded her, and a chorus of approval arose from around the
+table. Judge Scott nodded his head in agreement.
+
+“All right.” Weedon Scott pondered for a moment. “And if, at the end of
+the afternoon White Fang hasn’t harmed a chicken, for every ten minutes
+of the time he has spent in the yard, you will have to say to him,
+gravely and with deliberation, just as if you were sitting on the bench
+and solemnly passing judgment, ‘White Fang, you are smarter than I
+thought.’”
+
+From hidden points of vantage the family watched the performance. But
+it was a fizzle. Locked in the yard and there deserted by the master,
+White Fang lay down and went to sleep. Once he got up and walked over
+to the trough for a drink of water. The chickens he calmly ignored. So
+far as he was concerned they did not exist. At four o’clock he executed
+a running jump, gained the roof of the chicken-house and leaped to the
+ground outside, whence he sauntered gravely to the house. He had
+learned the law. And on the porch, before the delighted family, Judge
+Scott, face to face with White Fang, said slowly and solemnly, sixteen
+times, “White Fang, you are smarter than I thought.”
+
+But it was the multiplicity of laws that befuddled White Fang and often
+brought him into disgrace. He had to learn that he must not touch the
+chickens that belonged to other gods. Then there were cats, and
+rabbits, and turkeys; all these he must let alone. In fact, when he had
+but partly learned the law, his impression was that he must leave all
+live things alone. Out in the back-pasture, a quail could flutter up
+under his nose unharmed. All tense and trembling with eagerness and
+desire, he mastered his instinct and stood still. He was obeying the
+will of the gods.
+
+And then, one day, again out in the back-pasture, he saw Dick start a
+jackrabbit and run it. The master himself was looking on and did not
+interfere. Nay, he encouraged White Fang to join in the chase. And thus
+he learned that there was no taboo on jackrabbits. In the end he worked
+out the complete law. Between him and all domestic animals there must
+be no hostilities. If not amity, at least neutrality must obtain. But
+the other animals—the squirrels, and quail, and cottontails, were
+creatures of the Wild who had never yielded allegiance to man. They
+were the lawful prey of any dog. It was only the tame that the gods
+protected, and between the tame deadly strife was not permitted. The
+gods held the power of life and death over their subjects, and the gods
+were jealous of their power.
+
+Life was complex in the Santa Clara Valley after the simplicities of
+the Northland. And the chief thing demanded by these intricacies of
+civilisation was control, restraint—a poise of self that was as
+delicate as the fluttering of gossamer wings and at the same time as
+rigid as steel. Life had a thousand faces, and White Fang found he must
+meet them all—thus, when he went to town, in to San Jose, running
+behind the carriage or loafing about the streets when the carriage
+stopped. Life flowed past him, deep and wide and varied, continually
+impinging upon his senses, demanding of him instant and endless
+adjustments and correspondences, and compelling him, almost always, to
+suppress his natural impulses.
+
+There were butcher-shops where meat hung within reach. This meat he
+must not touch. There were cats at the houses the master visited that
+must be let alone. And there were dogs everywhere that snarled at him
+and that he must not attack. And then, on the crowded sidewalks there
+were persons innumerable whose attention he attracted. They would stop
+and look at him, point him out to one another, examine him, talk of
+him, and, worst of all, pat him. And these perilous contacts from all
+these strange hands he must endure. Yet this endurance he achieved.
+Furthermore, he got over being awkward and self-conscious. In a lofty
+way he received the attentions of the multitudes of strange gods. With
+condescension he accepted their condescension. On the other hand, there
+was something about him that prevented great familiarity. They patted
+him on the head and passed on, contented and pleased with their own
+daring.
+
+But it was not all easy for White Fang. Running behind the carriage in
+the outskirts of San Jose, he encountered certain small boys who made a
+practice of flinging stones at him. Yet he knew that it was not
+permitted him to pursue and drag them down. Here he was compelled to
+violate his instinct of self-preservation, and violate it he did, for
+he was becoming tame and qualifying himself for civilisation.
+
+Nevertheless, White Fang was not quite satisfied with the arrangement.
+He had no abstract ideas about justice and fair play. But there is a
+certain sense of equity that resides in life, and it was this sense in
+him that resented the unfairness of his being permitted no defence
+against the stone-throwers. He forgot that in the covenant entered into
+between him and the gods they were pledged to care for him and defend
+him. But one day the master sprang from the carriage, whip in hand, and
+gave the stone-throwers a thrashing. After that they threw stones no
+more, and White Fang understood and was satisfied.
+
+One other experience of similar nature was his. On the way to town,
+hanging around the saloon at the cross-roads, were three dogs that made
+a practice of rushing out upon him when he went by. Knowing his deadly
+method of fighting, the master had never ceased impressing upon White
+Fang the law that he must not fight. As a result, having learned the
+lesson well, White Fang was hard put whenever he passed the cross-roads
+saloon. After the first rush, each time, his snarl kept the three dogs
+at a distance but they trailed along behind, yelping and bickering and
+insulting him. This endured for some time. The men at the saloon even
+urged the dogs on to attack White Fang. One day they openly sicked the
+dogs on him. The master stopped the carriage.
+
+“Go to it,” he said to White Fang.
+
+But White Fang could not believe. He looked at the master, and he
+looked at the dogs. Then he looked back eagerly and questioningly at
+the master.
+
+The master nodded his head. “Go to them, old fellow. Eat them up.”
+
+White Fang no longer hesitated. He turned and leaped silently among his
+enemies. All three faced him. There was a great snarling and growling,
+a clashing of teeth and a flurry of bodies. The dust of the road arose
+in a cloud and screened the battle. But at the end of several minutes
+two dogs were struggling in the dirt and the third was in full flight.
+He leaped a ditch, went through a rail fence, and fled across a field.
+White Fang followed, sliding over the ground in wolf fashion and with
+wolf speed, swiftly and without noise, and in the centre of the field
+he dragged down and slew the dog.
+
+With this triple killing his main troubles with dogs ceased. The word
+went up and down the valley, and men saw to it that their dogs did not
+molest the Fighting Wolf.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV
+THE CALL OF KIND
+
+
+The months came and went. There was plenty of food and no work in the
+Southland, and White Fang lived fat and prosperous and happy. Not alone
+was he in the geographical Southland, for he was in the Southland of
+life. Human kindness was like a sun shining upon him, and he flourished
+like a flower planted in good soil.
+
+And yet he remained somehow different from other dogs. He knew the law
+even better than did the dogs that had known no other life, and he
+observed the law more punctiliously; but still there was about him a
+suggestion of lurking ferocity, as though the Wild still lingered in
+him and the wolf in him merely slept.
+
+He never chummed with other dogs. Lonely he had lived, so far as his
+kind was concerned, and lonely he would continue to live. In his
+puppyhood, under the persecution of Lip-lip and the puppy-pack, and in
+his fighting days with Beauty Smith, he had acquired a fixed aversion
+for dogs. The natural course of his life had been diverted, and,
+recoiling from his kind, he had clung to the human.
+
+Besides, all Southland dogs looked upon him with suspicion. He aroused
+in them their instinctive fear of the Wild, and they greeted him always
+with snarl and growl and belligerent hatred. He, on the other hand,
+learned that it was not necessary to use his teeth upon them. His naked
+fangs and writhing lips were uniformly efficacious, rarely failing to
+send a bellowing on-rushing dog back on its haunches.
+
+But there was one trial in White Fang’s life—Collie. She never gave him
+a moment’s peace. She was not so amenable to the law as he. She defied
+all efforts of the master to make her become friends with White Fang.
+Ever in his ears was sounding her sharp and nervous snarl. She had
+never forgiven him the chicken-killing episode, and persistently held
+to the belief that his intentions were bad. She found him guilty before
+the act, and treated him accordingly. She became a pest to him, like a
+policeman following him around the stable and the hounds, and, if he
+even so much as glanced curiously at a pigeon or chicken, bursting into
+an outcry of indignation and wrath. His favourite way of ignoring her
+was to lie down, with his head on his fore-paws, and pretend sleep.
+This always dumfounded and silenced her.
+
+With the exception of Collie, all things went well with White Fang. He
+had learned control and poise, and he knew the law. He achieved a
+staidness, and calmness, and philosophic tolerance. He no longer lived
+in a hostile environment. Danger and hurt and death did not lurk
+everywhere about him. In time, the unknown, as a thing of terror and
+menace ever impending, faded away. Life was soft and easy. It flowed
+along smoothly, and neither fear nor foe lurked by the way.
+
+He missed the snow without being aware of it. “An unduly long summer,”
+would have been his thought had he thought about it; as it was, he
+merely missed the snow in a vague, subconscious way. In the same
+fashion, especially in the heat of summer when he suffered from the
+sun, he experienced faint longings for the Northland. Their only effect
+upon him, however, was to make him uneasy and restless without his
+knowing what was the matter.
+
+White Fang had never been very demonstrative. Beyond his snuggling and
+the throwing of a crooning note into his love-growl, he had no way of
+expressing his love. Yet it was given him to discover a third way. He
+had always been susceptible to the laughter of the gods. Laughter had
+affected him with madness, made him frantic with rage. But he did not
+have it in him to be angry with the love-master, and when that god
+elected to laugh at him in a good-natured, bantering way, he was
+nonplussed. He could feel the pricking and stinging of the old anger as
+it strove to rise up in him, but it strove against love. He could not
+be angry; yet he had to do something. At first he was dignified, and
+the master laughed the harder. Then he tried to be more dignified, and
+the master laughed harder than before. In the end, the master laughed
+him out of his dignity. His jaws slightly parted, his lips lifted a
+little, and a quizzical expression that was more love than humour came
+into his eyes. He had learned to laugh.
+
+Likewise he learned to romp with the master, to be tumbled down and
+rolled over, and be the victim of innumerable rough tricks. In return
+he feigned anger, bristling and growling ferociously, and clipping his
+teeth together in snaps that had all the seeming of deadly intention.
+But he never forgot himself. Those snaps were always delivered on the
+empty air. At the end of such a romp, when blow and cuff and snap and
+snarl were fast and furious, they would break off suddenly and stand
+several feet apart, glaring at each other. And then, just as suddenly,
+like the sun rising on a stormy sea, they would begin to laugh. This
+would always culminate with the master’s arms going around White Fang’s
+neck and shoulders while the latter crooned and growled his love-song.
+
+But nobody else ever romped with White Fang. He did not permit it. He
+stood on his dignity, and when they attempted it, his warning snarl and
+bristling mane were anything but playful. That he allowed the master
+these liberties was no reason that he should be a common dog, loving
+here and loving there, everybody’s property for a romp and good time.
+He loved with single heart and refused to cheapen himself or his love.
+
+The master went out on horseback a great deal, and to accompany him was
+one of White Fang’s chief duties in life. In the Northland he had
+evidenced his fealty by toiling in the harness; but there were no sleds
+in the Southland, nor did dogs pack burdens on their backs. So he
+rendered fealty in the new way, by running with the master’s horse. The
+longest day never played White Fang out. His was the gait of the wolf,
+smooth, tireless and effortless, and at the end of fifty miles he would
+come in jauntily ahead of the horse.
+
+It was in connection with the riding, that White Fang achieved one
+other mode of expression—remarkable in that he did it but twice in all
+his life. The first time occurred when the master was trying to teach a
+spirited thoroughbred the method of opening and closing gates without
+the rider’s dismounting. Time and again and many times he ranged the
+horse up to the gate in the effort to close it and each time the horse
+became frightened and backed and plunged away. It grew more nervous and
+excited every moment. When it reared, the master put the spurs to it
+and made it drop its fore-legs back to earth, whereupon it would begin
+kicking with its hind-legs. White Fang watched the performance with
+increasing anxiety until he could contain himself no longer, when he
+sprang in front of the horse and barked savagely and warningly.
+
+Though he often tried to bark thereafter, and the master encouraged
+him, he succeeded only once, and then it was not in the master’s
+presence. A scamper across the pasture, a jackrabbit rising suddenly
+under the horse’s feet, a violent sheer, a stumble, a fall to earth,
+and a broken leg for the master, was the cause of it. White Fang sprang
+in a rage at the throat of the offending horse, but was checked by the
+master’s voice.
+
+“Home! Go home!” the master commanded when he had ascertained his
+injury.
+
+White Fang was disinclined to desert him. The master thought of writing
+a note, but searched his pockets vainly for pencil and paper. Again he
+commanded White Fang to go home.
+
+The latter regarded him wistfully, started away, then returned and
+whined softly. The master talked to him gently but seriously, and he
+cocked his ears, and listened with painful intentness.
+
+“That’s all right, old fellow, you just run along home,” ran the talk.
+“Go on home and tell them what’s happened to me. Home with you, you
+wolf. Get along home!”
+
+White Fang knew the meaning of “home,” and though he did not understand
+the remainder of the master’s language, he knew it was his will that he
+should go home. He turned and trotted reluctantly away. Then he
+stopped, undecided, and looked back over his shoulder.
+
+“Go home!” came the sharp command, and this time he obeyed.
+
+The family was on the porch, taking the cool of the afternoon, when
+White Fang arrived. He came in among them, panting, covered with dust.
+
+“Weedon’s back,” Weedon’s mother announced.
+
+The children welcomed White Fang with glad cries and ran to meet him.
+He avoided them and passed down the porch, but they cornered him
+against a rocking-chair and the railing. He growled and tried to push
+by them. Their mother looked apprehensively in their direction.
+
+“I confess, he makes me nervous around the children,” she said. “I have
+a dread that he will turn upon them unexpectedly some day.”
+
+Growling savagely, White Fang sprang out of the corner, overturning the
+boy and the girl. The mother called them to her and comforted them,
+telling them not to bother White Fang.
+
+“A wolf is a wolf!” commented Judge Scott. “There is no trusting one.”
+
+“But he is not all wolf,” interposed Beth, standing for her brother in
+his absence.
+
+“You have only Weedon’s opinion for that,” rejoined the judge. “He
+merely surmises that there is some strain of dog in White Fang; but as
+he will tell you himself, he knows nothing about it. As for his
+appearance—”
+
+He did not finish his sentence. White Fang stood before him, growling
+fiercely.
+
+“Go away! Lie down, sir!” Judge Scott commanded.
+
+White Fang turned to the love-master’s wife. She screamed with fright
+as he seized her dress in his teeth and dragged on it till the frail
+fabric tore away. By this time he had become the centre of interest.
+
+He had ceased from his growling and stood, head up, looking into their
+faces. His throat worked spasmodically, but made no sound, while he
+struggled with all his body, convulsed with the effort to rid himself
+of the incommunicable something that strained for utterance.
+
+“I hope he is not going mad,” said Weedon’s mother. “I told Weedon that
+I was afraid the warm climate would not agree with an Arctic animal.”
+
+“He’s trying to speak, I do believe,” Beth announced.
+
+At this moment speech came to White Fang, rushing up in a great burst
+of barking.
+
+“Something has happened to Weedon,” his wife said decisively.
+
+They were all on their feet now, and White Fang ran down the steps,
+looking back for them to follow. For the second and last time in his
+life he had barked and made himself understood.
+
+After this event he found a warmer place in the hearts of the Sierra
+Vista people, and even the groom whose arm he had slashed admitted that
+he was a wise dog even if he was a wolf. Judge Scott still held to the
+same opinion, and proved it to everybody’s dissatisfaction by
+measurements and descriptions taken from the encyclopaedia and various
+works on natural history.
+
+The days came and went, streaming their unbroken sunshine over the
+Santa Clara Valley. But as they grew shorter and White Fang’s second
+winter in the Southland came on, he made a strange discovery. Collie’s
+teeth were no longer sharp. There was a playfulness about her nips and
+a gentleness that prevented them from really hurting him. He forgot
+that she had made life a burden to him, and when she disported herself
+around him he responded solemnly, striving to be playful and becoming
+no more than ridiculous.
+
+One day she led him off on a long chase through the back-pasture land
+into the woods. It was the afternoon that the master was to ride, and
+White Fang knew it. The horse stood saddled and waiting at the door.
+White Fang hesitated. But there was that in him deeper than all the law
+he had learned, than the customs that had moulded him, than his love
+for the master, than the very will to live of himself; and when, in the
+moment of his indecision, Collie nipped him and scampered off, he
+turned and followed after. The master rode alone that day; and in the
+woods, side by side, White Fang ran with Collie, as his mother, Kiche,
+and old One Eye had run long years before in the silent Northland
+forest.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V
+THE SLEEPING WOLF
+
+
+It was about this time that the newspapers were full of the daring
+escape of a convict from San Quentin prison. He was a ferocious man. He
+had been ill-made in the making. He had not been born right, and he had
+not been helped any by the moulding he had received at the hands of
+society. The hands of society are harsh, and this man was a striking
+sample of its handiwork. He was a beast—a human beast, it is true, but
+nevertheless so terrible a beast that he can best be characterised as
+carnivorous.
+
+In San Quentin prison he had proved incorrigible. Punishment failed to
+break his spirit. He could die dumb-mad and fighting to the last, but
+he could not live and be beaten. The more fiercely he fought, the more
+harshly society handled him, and the only effect of harshness was to
+make him fiercer. Strait-jackets, starvation, and beatings and
+clubbings were the wrong treatment for Jim Hall; but it was the
+treatment he received. It was the treatment he had received from the
+time he was a little pulpy boy in a San Francisco slum—soft clay in the
+hands of society and ready to be formed into something.
+
+It was during Jim Hall’s third term in prison that he encountered a
+guard that was almost as great a beast as he. The guard treated him
+unfairly, lied about him to the warden, lost his credits, persecuted
+him. The difference between them was that the guard carried a bunch of
+keys and a revolver. Jim Hall had only his naked hands and his teeth.
+But he sprang upon the guard one day and used his teeth on the other’s
+throat just like any jungle animal.
+
+After this, Jim Hall went to live in the incorrigible cell. He lived
+there three years. The cell was of iron, the floor, the walls, the
+roof. He never left this cell. He never saw the sky nor the sunshine.
+Day was a twilight and night was a black silence. He was in an iron
+tomb, buried alive. He saw no human face, spoke to no human thing. When
+his food was shoved in to him, he growled like a wild animal. He hated
+all things. For days and nights he bellowed his rage at the universe.
+For weeks and months he never made a sound, in the black silence eating
+his very soul. He was a man and a monstrosity, as fearful a thing of
+fear as ever gibbered in the visions of a maddened brain.
+
+And then, one night, he escaped. The warders said it was impossible,
+but nevertheless the cell was empty, and half in half out of it lay the
+body of a dead guard. Two other dead guards marked his trail through
+the prison to the outer walls, and he had killed with his hands to
+avoid noise.
+
+He was armed with the weapons of the slain guards—a live arsenal that
+fled through the hills pursued by the organised might of society. A
+heavy price of gold was upon his head. Avaricious farmers hunted him
+with shot-guns. His blood might pay off a mortgage or send a son to
+college. Public-spirited citizens took down their rifles and went out
+after him. A pack of bloodhounds followed the way of his bleeding feet.
+And the sleuth-hounds of the law, the paid fighting animals of society,
+with telephone, and telegraph, and special train, clung to his trail
+night and day.
+
+Sometimes they came upon him, and men faced him like heroes, or
+stampeded through barbed-wire fences to the delight of the commonwealth
+reading the account at the breakfast table. It was after such
+encounters that the dead and wounded were carted back to the towns, and
+their places filled by men eager for the man-hunt.
+
+And then Jim Hall disappeared. The bloodhounds vainly quested on the
+lost trail. Inoffensive ranchers in remote valleys were held up by
+armed men and compelled to identify themselves. While the remains of
+Jim Hall were discovered on a dozen mountain-sides by greedy claimants
+for blood-money.
+
+In the meantime the newspapers were read at Sierra Vista, not so much
+with interest as with anxiety. The women were afraid. Judge Scott
+pooh-poohed and laughed, but not with reason, for it was in his last
+days on the bench that Jim Hall had stood before him and received
+sentence. And in open court-room, before all men, Jim Hall had
+proclaimed that the day would come when he would wreak vengeance on the
+Judge that sentenced him.
+
+For once, Jim Hall was right. He was innocent of the crime for which he
+was sentenced. It was a case, in the parlance of thieves and police, of
+“rail-roading.” Jim Hall was being “rail-roaded” to prison for a crime
+he had not committed. Because of the two prior convictions against him,
+Judge Scott imposed upon him a sentence of fifty years.
+
+Judge Scott did not know all things, and he did not know that he was
+party to a police conspiracy, that the evidence was hatched and
+perjured, that Jim Hall was guiltless of the crime charged. And Jim
+Hall, on the other hand, did not know that Judge Scott was merely
+ignorant. Jim Hall believed that the judge knew all about it and was
+hand in glove with the police in the perpetration of the monstrous
+injustice. So it was, when the doom of fifty years of living death was
+uttered by Judge Scott, that Jim Hall, hating all things in the society
+that misused him, rose up and raged in the court-room until dragged
+down by half a dozen of his blue-coated enemies. To him, Judge Scott
+was the keystone in the arch of injustice, and upon Judge Scott he
+emptied the vials of his wrath and hurled the threats of his revenge
+yet to come. Then Jim Hall went to his living death . . . and escaped.
+
+Of all this White Fang knew nothing. But between him and Alice, the
+master’s wife, there existed a secret. Each night, after Sierra Vista
+had gone to bed, she rose and let in White Fang to sleep in the big
+hall. Now White Fang was not a house-dog, nor was he permitted to sleep
+in the house; so each morning, early, she slipped down and let him out
+before the family was awake.
+
+On one such night, while all the house slept, White Fang awoke and lay
+very quietly. And very quietly he smelled the air and read the message
+it bore of a strange god’s presence. And to his ears came sounds of the
+strange god’s movements. White Fang burst into no furious outcry. It
+was not his way. The strange god walked softly, but more softly walked
+White Fang, for he had no clothes to rub against the flesh of his body.
+He followed silently. In the Wild he had hunted live meat that was
+infinitely timid, and he knew the advantage of surprise.
+
+The strange god paused at the foot of the great staircase and listened,
+and White Fang was as dead, so without movement was he as he watched
+and waited. Up that staircase the way led to the love-master and to the
+love-master’s dearest possessions. White Fang bristled, but waited. The
+strange god’s foot lifted. He was beginning the ascent.
+
+Then it was that White Fang struck. He gave no warning, with no snarl
+anticipated his own action. Into the air he lifted his body in the
+spring that landed him on the strange god’s back. White Fang clung with
+his fore-paws to the man’s shoulders, at the same time burying his
+fangs into the back of the man’s neck. He clung on for a moment, long
+enough to drag the god over backward. Together they crashed to the
+floor. White Fang leaped clear, and, as the man struggled to rise, was
+in again with the slashing fangs.
+
+Sierra Vista awoke in alarm. The noise from downstairs was as that of a
+score of battling fiends. There were revolver shots. A man’s voice
+screamed once in horror and anguish. There was a great snarling and
+growling, and over all arose a smashing and crashing of furniture and
+glass.
+
+But almost as quickly as it had arisen, the commotion died away. The
+struggle had not lasted more than three minutes. The frightened
+household clustered at the top of the stairway. From below, as from out
+an abyss of blackness, came up a gurgling sound, as of air bubbling
+through water. Sometimes this gurgle became sibilant, almost a whistle.
+But this, too, quickly died down and ceased. Then naught came up out of
+the blackness save a heavy panting of some creature struggling sorely
+for air.
+
+Weedon Scott pressed a button, and the staircase and downstairs hall
+were flooded with light. Then he and Judge Scott, revolvers in hand,
+cautiously descended. There was no need for this caution. White Fang
+had done his work. In the midst of the wreckage of overthrown and
+smashed furniture, partly on his side, his face hidden by an arm, lay a
+man. Weedon Scott bent over, removed the arm and turned the man’s face
+upward. A gaping throat explained the manner of his death.
+
+“Jim Hall,” said Judge Scott, and father and son looked significantly
+at each other.
+
+Then they turned to White Fang. He, too, was lying on his side. His
+eyes were closed, but the lids slightly lifted in an effort to look at
+them as they bent over him, and the tail was perceptibly agitated in a
+vain effort to wag. Weedon Scott patted him, and his throat rumbled an
+acknowledging growl. But it was a weak growl at best, and it quickly
+ceased. His eyelids drooped and went shut, and his whole body seemed to
+relax and flatten out upon the floor.
+
+“He’s all in, poor devil,” muttered the master.
+
+“We’ll see about that,” asserted the Judge, as he started for the
+telephone.
+
+“Frankly, he has one chance in a thousand,” announced the surgeon,
+after he had worked an hour and a half on White Fang.
+
+Dawn was breaking through the windows and dimming the electric lights.
+With the exception of the children, the whole family was gathered about
+the surgeon to hear his verdict.
+
+“One broken hind-leg,” he went on. “Three broken ribs, one at least of
+which has pierced the lungs. He has lost nearly all the blood in his
+body. There is a large likelihood of internal injuries. He must have
+been jumped upon. To say nothing of three bullet holes clear through
+him. One chance in a thousand is really optimistic. He hasn’t a chance
+in ten thousand.”
+
+“But he mustn’t lose any chance that might be of help to him,” Judge
+Scott exclaimed. “Never mind expense. Put him under the X-ray—anything.
+Weedon, telegraph at once to San Francisco for Doctor Nichols. No
+reflection on you, doctor, you understand; but he must have the
+advantage of every chance.”
+
+The surgeon smiled indulgently. “Of course I understand. He deserves
+all that can be done for him. He must be nursed as you would nurse a
+human being, a sick child. And don’t forget what I told you about
+temperature. I’ll be back at ten o’clock again.”
+
+White Fang received the nursing. Judge Scott’s suggestion of a trained
+nurse was indignantly clamoured down by the girls, who themselves
+undertook the task. And White Fang won out on the one chance in ten
+thousand denied him by the surgeon.
+
+The latter was not to be censured for his misjudgment. All his life he
+had tended and operated on the soft humans of civilisation, who lived
+sheltered lives and had descended out of many sheltered generations.
+Compared with White Fang, they were frail and flabby, and clutched life
+without any strength in their grip. White Fang had come straight from
+the Wild, where the weak perish early and shelter is vouchsafed to
+none. In neither his father nor his mother was there any weakness, nor
+in the generations before them. A constitution of iron and the vitality
+of the Wild were White Fang’s inheritance, and he clung to life, the
+whole of him and every part of him, in spirit and in flesh, with the
+tenacity that of old belonged to all creatures.
+
+Bound down a prisoner, denied even movement by the plaster casts and
+bandages, White Fang lingered out the weeks. He slept long hours and
+dreamed much, and through his mind passed an unending pageant of
+Northland visions. All the ghosts of the past arose and were with him.
+Once again he lived in the lair with Kiche, crept trembling to the
+knees of Grey Beaver to tender his allegiance, ran for his life before
+Lip-lip and all the howling bedlam of the puppy-pack.
+
+He ran again through the silence, hunting his living food through the
+months of famine; and again he ran at the head of the team, the
+gut-whips of Mit-sah and Grey Beaver snapping behind, their voices
+crying “Ra! Raa!” when they came to a narrow passage and the team
+closed together like a fan to go through. He lived again all his days
+with Beauty Smith and the fights he had fought. At such times he
+whimpered and snarled in his sleep, and they that looked on said that
+his dreams were bad.
+
+But there was one particular nightmare from which he suffered—the
+clanking, clanging monsters of electric cars that were to him colossal
+screaming lynxes. He would lie in a screen of bushes, watching for a
+squirrel to venture far enough out on the ground from its tree-refuge.
+Then, when he sprang out upon it, it would transform itself into an
+electric car, menacing and terrible, towering over him like a mountain,
+screaming and clanging and spitting fire at him. It was the same when
+he challenged the hawk down out of the sky. Down out of the blue it
+would rush, as it dropped upon him changing itself into the ubiquitous
+electric car. Or again, he would be in the pen of Beauty Smith. Outside
+the pen, men would be gathering, and he knew that a fight was on. He
+watched the door for his antagonist to enter. The door would open, and
+thrust in upon him would come the awful electric car. A thousand times
+this occurred, and each time the terror it inspired was as vivid and
+great as ever.
+
+Then came the day when the last bandage and the last plaster cast were
+taken off. It was a gala day. All Sierra Vista was gathered around. The
+master rubbed his ears, and he crooned his love-growl. The master’s
+wife called him the “Blessed Wolf,” which name was taken up with
+acclaim and all the women called him the Blessed Wolf.
+
+He tried to rise to his feet, and after several attempts fell down from
+weakness. He had lain so long that his muscles had lost their cunning,
+and all the strength had gone out of them. He felt a little shame
+because of his weakness, as though, forsooth, he were failing the gods
+in the service he owed them. Because of this he made heroic efforts to
+arise and at last he stood on his four legs, tottering and swaying back
+and forth.
+
+“The Blessed Wolf!” chorused the women.
+
+Judge Scott surveyed them triumphantly.
+
+“Out of your own mouths be it,” he said. “Just as I contended right
+along. No mere dog could have done what he did. He’s a wolf.”
+
+“A Blessed Wolf,” amended the Judge’s wife.
+
+“Yes, Blessed Wolf,” agreed the Judge. “And henceforth that shall be my
+name for him.”
+
+“He’ll have to learn to walk again,” said the surgeon; “so he might as
+well start in right now. It won’t hurt him. Take him outside.”
+
+And outside he went, like a king, with all Sierra Vista about him and
+tending on him. He was very weak, and when he reached the lawn he lay
+down and rested for a while.
+
+Then the procession started on, little spurts of strength coming into
+White Fang’s muscles as he used them and the blood began to surge
+through them. The stables were reached, and there in the doorway, lay
+Collie, a half-dozen pudgy puppies playing about her in the sun.
+
+White Fang looked on with a wondering eye. Collie snarled warningly at
+him, and he was careful to keep his distance. The master with his toe
+helped one sprawling puppy toward him. He bristled suspiciously, but
+the master warned him that all was well. Collie, clasped in the arms of
+one of the women, watched him jealously and with a snarl warned him
+that all was not well.
+
+The puppy sprawled in front of him. He cocked his ears and watched it
+curiously. Then their noses touched, and he felt the warm little tongue
+of the puppy on his jowl. White Fang’s tongue went out, he knew not
+why, and he licked the puppy’s face.
+
+Hand-clapping and pleased cries from the gods greeted the performance.
+He was surprised, and looked at them in a puzzled way. Then his
+weakness asserted itself, and he lay down, his ears cocked, his head on
+one side, as he watched the puppy. The other puppies came sprawling
+toward him, to Collie’s great disgust; and he gravely permitted them to
+clamber and tumble over him. At first, amid the applause of the gods,
+he betrayed a trifle of his old self-consciousness and awkwardness.
+This passed away as the puppies’ antics and mauling continued, and he
+lay with half-shut patient eyes, drowsing in the sun.
+
+
+
+
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+
+<div style='text-align:center; font-size:1.2em; font-weight:bold'>The Project Gutenberg eBook of White Fang, by Jack London</div>
+<div style='display:block; margin:1em 0'>
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and
+most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions
+whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms
+of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online
+at <a href="https://www.gutenberg.org">www.gutenberg.org</a>. If you
+are not located in the United States, you will have to check the laws of the
+country where you are located before using this eBook.
+</div>
+<div style='display:block; margin-top:1em; margin-bottom:1em; margin-left:2em; text-indent:-2em'>Title: White Fang</div>
+<div style='display:block; margin-top:1em; margin-bottom:1em; margin-left:2em; text-indent:-2em'>Author: Jack London</div>
+<div style='display:block; margin:1em 0'>Release Date: May 13, 1997 [eBook #910]<br />
+[Most recently updated: November 10, 2021]</div>
+<div style='display:block; margin:1em 0'>Language: English</div>
+<div style='display:block; margin:1em 0'>Character set encoding: UTF-8</div>
+<div style='display:block; margin-left:2em; text-indent:-2em'>Produced by: David Price</div>
+<div style='margin-top:2em; margin-bottom:4em'>*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK WHITE FANG ***</div>
+
+<div class="fig" style="width:55%;">
+<img src="images/cover.jpg" style="width:100%;" alt="[Illustration]" />
+</div>
+
+<h1>WHITE FANG</h1>
+
+<h2 class="no-break">by Jack London</h2>
+
+<hr />
+
+<h2>Contents</h2>
+
+<table summary="" style="">
+
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#part01"><b>PART I</b></a></td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#chap01">CHAPTER I THE TRAIL OF THE MEAT</a></td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#chap02">CHAPTER II THE SHE-WOLF</a></td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#chap03">CHAPTER III THE HUNGER CRY</a><br /><br /></td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#part02"><b>PART II</b></a></td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#chap04">CHAPTER I THE BATTLE OF THE FANGS</a></td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#chap05">CHAPTER II THE LAIR</a></td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#chap06">CHAPTER III THE GREY CUB</a></td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#chap07">CHAPTER IV THE WALL OF THE WORLD</a></td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#chap08">CHAPTER V THE LAW OF MEAT</a><br /><br /></td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#part03"><b>PART III</b></a></td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#chap09">CHAPTER I THE MAKERS OF FIRE</a></td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#chap10">CHAPTER II THE BONDAGE</a></td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#chap11">CHAPTER III THE OUTCAST</a></td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#chap12">CHAPTER IV THE TRAIL OF THE GODS</a></td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#chap13">CHAPTER V THE COVENANT</a></td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#chap14">CHAPTER VI THE FAMINE</a><br /><br /></td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#part04"><b>PART IV</b></a></td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#chap15">CHAPTER I THE ENEMY OF HIS KIND</a></td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#chap16">CHAPTER II THE MAD GOD</a></td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#chap17">CHAPTER III THE REIGN OF HATE</a></td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#chap18">CHAPTER IV THE CLINGING DEATH</a></td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#chap19">CHAPTER V THE INDOMITABLE</a></td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#chap20">CHAPTER VI THE LOVE-MASTER</a><br /><br /></td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#part05"><b>PART V</b></a></td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#chap21">CHAPTER I THE LONG TRAIL</a></td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#chap22">CHAPTER II THE SOUTHLAND</a></td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#chap23">CHAPTER III THE GOD&rsquo;S DOMAIN</a></td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#chap24">CHAPTER IV THE CALL OF KIND</a></td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#chap25">CHAPTER V THE SLEEPING WOLF</a></td>
+</tr>
+
+</table>
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<h2><a name="part01"></a>PART I</h2>
+
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<h3><a name="chap01"></a>CHAPTER I<br/>
+THE TRAIL OF THE MEAT</h3>
+
+<p>
+Dark spruce forest frowned on either side the frozen waterway. The trees had
+been stripped by a recent wind of their white covering of frost, and they
+seemed to lean towards each other, black and ominous, in the fading light. A
+vast silence reigned over the land. The land itself was a desolation, lifeless,
+without movement, so lone and cold that the spirit of it was not even that of
+sadness. There was a hint in it of laughter, but of a laughter more terrible
+than any sadness&mdash;a laughter that was mirthless as the smile of the
+sphinx, a laughter cold as the frost and partaking of the grimness of
+infallibility. It was the masterful and incommunicable wisdom of eternity
+laughing at the futility of life and the effort of life. It was the Wild, the
+savage, frozen-hearted Northland Wild.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But there <i>was</i> life, abroad in the land and defiant. Down the frozen
+waterway toiled a string of wolfish dogs. Their bristly fur was rimed with
+frost. Their breath froze in the air as it left their mouths, spouting forth in
+spumes of vapour that settled upon the hair of their bodies and formed into
+crystals of frost. Leather harness was on the dogs, and leather traces attached
+them to a sled which dragged along behind. The sled was without runners. It was
+made of stout birch-bark, and its full surface rested on the snow. The front
+end of the sled was turned up, like a scroll, in order to force down and under
+the bore of soft snow that surged like a wave before it. On the sled, securely
+lashed, was a long and narrow oblong box. There were other things on the
+sled&mdash;blankets, an axe, and a coffee-pot and frying-pan; but prominent,
+occupying most of the space, was the long and narrow oblong box.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+In advance of the dogs, on wide snowshoes, toiled a man. At the rear of the
+sled toiled a second man. On the sled, in the box, lay a third man whose toil
+was over,&mdash;a man whom the Wild had conquered and beaten down until he
+would never move nor struggle again. It is not the way of the Wild to like
+movement. Life is an offence to it, for life is movement; and the Wild aims
+always to destroy movement. It freezes the water to prevent it running to the
+sea; it drives the sap out of the trees till they are frozen to their mighty
+hearts; and most ferociously and terribly of all does the Wild harry and crush
+into submission man&mdash;man who is the most restless of life, ever in revolt
+against the dictum that all movement must in the end come to the cessation of
+movement.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But at front and rear, unawed and indomitable, toiled the two men who were not
+yet dead. Their bodies were covered with fur and soft-tanned leather. Eyelashes
+and cheeks and lips were so coated with the crystals from their frozen breath
+that their faces were not discernible. This gave them the seeming of ghostly
+masques, undertakers in a spectral world at the funeral of some ghost. But
+under it all they were men, penetrating the land of desolation and mockery and
+silence, puny adventurers bent on colossal adventure, pitting themselves
+against the might of a world as remote and alien and pulseless as the abysses
+of space.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+They travelled on without speech, saving their breath for the work of their
+bodies. On every side was the silence, pressing upon them with a tangible
+presence. It affected their minds as the many atmospheres of deep water affect
+the body of the diver. It crushed them with the weight of unending vastness and
+unalterable decree. It crushed them into the remotest recesses of their own
+minds, pressing out of them, like juices from the grape, all the false ardours
+and exaltations and undue self-values of the human soul, until they perceived
+themselves finite and small, specks and motes, moving with weak cunning and
+little wisdom amidst the play and inter-play of the great blind elements and
+forces.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+An hour went by, and a second hour. The pale light of the short sunless day was
+beginning to fade, when a faint far cry arose on the still air. It soared
+upward with a swift rush, till it reached its topmost note, where it persisted,
+palpitant and tense, and then slowly died away. It might have been a lost soul
+wailing, had it not been invested with a certain sad fierceness and hungry
+eagerness. The front man turned his head until his eyes met the eyes of the man
+behind. And then, across the narrow oblong box, each nodded to the other.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+A second cry arose, piercing the silence with needle-like shrillness. Both men
+located the sound. It was to the rear, somewhere in the snow expanse they had
+just traversed. A third and answering cry arose, also to the rear and to the
+left of the second cry.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;They&rsquo;re after us, Bill,&rdquo; said the man at the front.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+His voice sounded hoarse and unreal, and he had spoken with apparent effort.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Meat is scarce,&rdquo; answered his comrade. &ldquo;I ain&rsquo;t seen a
+rabbit sign for days.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Thereafter they spoke no more, though their ears were keen for the
+hunting-cries that continued to rise behind them.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+At the fall of darkness they swung the dogs into a cluster of spruce trees on
+the edge of the waterway and made a camp. The coffin, at the side of the fire,
+served for seat and table. The wolf-dogs, clustered on the far side of the
+fire, snarled and bickered among themselves, but evinced no inclination to
+stray off into the darkness.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Seems to me, Henry, they&rsquo;re stayin&rsquo; remarkable close to
+camp,&rdquo; Bill commented.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Henry, squatting over the fire and settling the pot of coffee with a piece of
+ice, nodded. Nor did he speak till he had taken his seat on the coffin and
+begun to eat.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;They know where their hides is safe,&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;They&rsquo;d
+sooner eat grub than be grub. They&rsquo;re pretty wise, them dogs.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Bill shook his head. &ldquo;Oh, I don&rsquo;t know.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+His comrade looked at him curiously. &ldquo;First time I ever heard you say
+anything about their not bein&rsquo; wise.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Henry,&rdquo; said the other, munching with deliberation the beans he
+was eating, &ldquo;did you happen to notice the way them dogs kicked up when I
+was a-feedin&rsquo; &rsquo;em?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;They did cut up more&rsquo;n usual,&rdquo; Henry acknowledged.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;How many dogs &rsquo;ve we got, Henry?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Six.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Well, Henry . . . &rdquo; Bill stopped for a moment, in order that his
+words might gain greater significance. &ldquo;As I was sayin&rsquo;, Henry,
+we&rsquo;ve got six dogs. I took six fish out of the bag. I gave one fish to
+each dog, an&rsquo;, Henry, I was one fish short.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;You counted wrong.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;We&rsquo;ve got six dogs,&rdquo; the other reiterated dispassionately.
+&ldquo;I took out six fish. One Ear didn&rsquo;t get no fish. I came back to
+the bag afterward an&rsquo; got &rsquo;m his fish.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;We&rsquo;ve only got six dogs,&rdquo; Henry said.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Henry,&rdquo; Bill went on. &ldquo;I won&rsquo;t say they was all dogs,
+but there was seven of &rsquo;m that got fish.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Henry stopped eating to glance across the fire and count the dogs.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;There&rsquo;s only six now,&rdquo; he said.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I saw the other one run off across the snow,&rdquo; Bill announced with
+cool positiveness. &ldquo;I saw seven.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Henry looked at him commiseratingly, and said, &ldquo;I&rsquo;ll be almighty
+glad when this trip&rsquo;s over.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;What d&rsquo;ye mean by that?&rdquo; Bill demanded.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I mean that this load of ourn is gettin&rsquo; on your nerves, an&rsquo;
+that you&rsquo;re beginnin&rsquo; to see things.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I thought of that,&rdquo; Bill answered gravely. &ldquo;An&rsquo; so,
+when I saw it run off across the snow, I looked in the snow an&rsquo; saw its
+tracks. Then I counted the dogs an&rsquo; there was still six of &rsquo;em. The
+tracks is there in the snow now. D&rsquo;ye want to look at &rsquo;em?
+I&rsquo;ll show &rsquo;em to you.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Henry did not reply, but munched on in silence, until, the meal finished, he
+topped it with a final cup of coffee. He wiped his mouth with the back of his
+hand and said:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Then you&rsquo;re thinkin&rsquo; as it was&mdash;&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+A long wailing cry, fiercely sad, from somewhere in the darkness, had
+interrupted him. He stopped to listen to it, then he finished his sentence with
+a wave of his hand toward the sound of the cry, &ldquo;&mdash;one of
+them?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Bill nodded. &ldquo;I&rsquo;d a blame sight sooner think that than anything
+else. You noticed yourself the row the dogs made.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Cry after cry, and answering cries, were turning the silence into a bedlam.
+From every side the cries arose, and the dogs betrayed their fear by huddling
+together and so close to the fire that their hair was scorched by the heat.
+Bill threw on more wood, before lighting his pipe.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I&rsquo;m thinking you&rsquo;re down in the mouth some,&rdquo; Henry
+said.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Henry . . . &rdquo; He sucked meditatively at his pipe for some time
+before he went on. &ldquo;Henry, I was a-thinkin&rsquo; what a blame sight
+luckier he is than you an&rsquo; me&rsquo;ll ever be.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He indicated the third person by a downward thrust of the thumb to the box on
+which they sat.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;You an&rsquo; me, Henry, when we die, we&rsquo;ll be lucky if we get
+enough stones over our carcases to keep the dogs off of us.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;But we ain&rsquo;t got people an&rsquo; money an&rsquo; all the rest,
+like him,&rdquo; Henry rejoined. &ldquo;Long-distance funerals is
+somethin&rsquo; you an&rsquo; me can&rsquo;t exactly afford.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;What gets me, Henry, is what a chap like this, that&rsquo;s a lord or
+something in his own country, and that&rsquo;s never had to bother about grub
+nor blankets; why he comes a-buttin&rsquo; round the Godforsaken ends of the
+earth&mdash;that&rsquo;s what I can&rsquo;t exactly see.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;He might have lived to a ripe old age if he&rsquo;d stayed at
+home,&rdquo; Henry agreed.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Bill opened his mouth to speak, but changed his mind. Instead, he pointed
+towards the wall of darkness that pressed about them from every side. There was
+no suggestion of form in the utter blackness; only could be seen a pair of eyes
+gleaming like live coals. Henry indicated with his head a second pair, and a
+third. A circle of the gleaming eyes had drawn about their camp. Now and again
+a pair of eyes moved, or disappeared to appear again a moment later.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The unrest of the dogs had been increasing, and they stampeded, in a surge of
+sudden fear, to the near side of the fire, cringing and crawling about the legs
+of the men. In the scramble one of the dogs had been overturned on the edge of
+the fire, and it had yelped with pain and fright as the smell of its singed
+coat possessed the air. The commotion caused the circle of eyes to shift
+restlessly for a moment and even to withdraw a bit, but it settled down again
+as the dogs became quiet.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Henry, it&rsquo;s a blame misfortune to be out of ammunition.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Bill had finished his pipe and was helping his companion to spread the bed of
+fur and blanket upon the spruce boughs which he had laid over the snow before
+supper. Henry grunted, and began unlacing his moccasins.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;How many cartridges did you say you had left?&rdquo; he asked.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Three,&rdquo; came the answer. &ldquo;An&rsquo; I wisht &rsquo;twas
+three hundred. Then I&rsquo;d show &rsquo;em what for, damn &rsquo;em!&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He shook his fist angrily at the gleaming eyes, and began securely to prop his
+moccasins before the fire.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;An&rsquo; I wisht this cold snap&rsquo;d break,&rdquo; he went on.
+&ldquo;It&rsquo;s ben fifty below for two weeks now. An&rsquo; I wisht
+I&rsquo;d never started on this trip, Henry. I don&rsquo;t like the looks of
+it. I don&rsquo;t feel right, somehow. An&rsquo; while I&rsquo;m wishin&rsquo;,
+I wisht the trip was over an&rsquo; done with, an&rsquo; you an&rsquo; me
+a-sittin&rsquo; by the fire in Fort McGurry just about now an&rsquo; playing
+cribbage&mdash;that&rsquo;s what I wisht.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Henry grunted and crawled into bed. As he dozed off he was aroused by his
+comrade&rsquo;s voice.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Say, Henry, that other one that come in an&rsquo; got a fish&mdash;why
+didn&rsquo;t the dogs pitch into it? That&rsquo;s what&rsquo;s botherin&rsquo;
+me.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;You&rsquo;re botherin&rsquo; too much, Bill,&rdquo; came the sleepy
+response. &ldquo;You was never like this before. You jes&rsquo; shut up now,
+an&rsquo; go to sleep, an&rsquo; you&rsquo;ll be all hunkydory in the
+mornin&rsquo;. Your stomach&rsquo;s sour, that&rsquo;s what&rsquo;s
+botherin&rsquo; you.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The men slept, breathing heavily, side by side, under the one covering. The
+fire died down, and the gleaming eyes drew closer the circle they had flung
+about the camp. The dogs clustered together in fear, now and again snarling
+menacingly as a pair of eyes drew close. Once their uproar became so loud that
+Bill woke up. He got out of bed carefully, so as not to disturb the sleep of
+his comrade, and threw more wood on the fire. As it began to flame up, the
+circle of eyes drew farther back. He glanced casually at the huddling dogs. He
+rubbed his eyes and looked at them more sharply. Then he crawled back into the
+blankets.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Henry,&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;Oh, Henry.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Henry groaned as he passed from sleep to waking, and demanded,
+&ldquo;What&rsquo;s wrong now?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Nothin&rsquo;,&rdquo; came the answer; &ldquo;only there&rsquo;s seven
+of &rsquo;em again. I just counted.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Henry acknowledged receipt of the information with a grunt that slid into a
+snore as he drifted back into sleep.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+In the morning it was Henry who awoke first and routed his companion out of
+bed. Daylight was yet three hours away, though it was already six
+o&rsquo;clock; and in the darkness Henry went about preparing breakfast, while
+Bill rolled the blankets and made the sled ready for lashing.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Say, Henry,&rdquo; he asked suddenly, &ldquo;how many dogs did you say
+we had?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Six.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Wrong,&rdquo; Bill proclaimed triumphantly.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Seven again?&rdquo; Henry queried.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;No, five; one&rsquo;s gone.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;The hell!&rdquo; Henry cried in wrath, leaving the cooking to come and
+count the dogs.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;You&rsquo;re right, Bill,&rdquo; he concluded. &ldquo;Fatty&rsquo;s
+gone.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;An&rsquo; he went like greased lightnin&rsquo; once he got started.
+Couldn&rsquo;t &rsquo;ve seen &rsquo;m for smoke.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;No chance at all,&rdquo; Henry concluded. &ldquo;They jes&rsquo;
+swallowed &rsquo;m alive. I bet he was yelpin&rsquo; as he went down their
+throats, damn &rsquo;em!&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;He always was a fool dog,&rdquo; said Bill.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;But no fool dog ought to be fool enough to go off an&rsquo; commit
+suicide that way.&rdquo; He looked over the remainder of the team with a
+speculative eye that summed up instantly the salient traits of each animal.
+&ldquo;I bet none of the others would do it.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Couldn&rsquo;t drive &rsquo;em away from the fire with a club,&rdquo;
+Bill agreed. &ldquo;I always did think there was somethin&rsquo; wrong with
+Fatty anyway.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And this was the epitaph of a dead dog on the Northland trail&mdash;less scant
+than the epitaph of many another dog, of many a man.
+</p>
+
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<h3><a name="chap02"></a>CHAPTER II<br/>
+THE SHE-WOLF</h3>
+
+<p>
+Breakfast eaten and the slim camp-outfit lashed to the sled, the men turned
+their backs on the cheery fire and launched out into the darkness. At once
+began to rise the cries that were fiercely sad&mdash;cries that called through
+the darkness and cold to one another and answered back. Conversation ceased.
+Daylight came at nine o&rsquo;clock. At midday the sky to the south warmed to
+rose-colour, and marked where the bulge of the earth intervened between the
+meridian sun and the northern world. But the rose-colour swiftly faded. The
+grey light of day that remained lasted until three o&rsquo;clock, when it, too,
+faded, and the pall of the Arctic night descended upon the lone and silent
+land.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+As darkness came on, the hunting-cries to right and left and rear drew
+closer&mdash;so close that more than once they sent surges of fear through the
+toiling dogs, throwing them into short-lived panics.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+At the conclusion of one such panic, when he and Henry had got the dogs back in
+the traces, Bill said:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I wisht they&rsquo;d strike game somewheres, an&rsquo; go away an&rsquo;
+leave us alone.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;They do get on the nerves horrible,&rdquo; Henry sympathised.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+They spoke no more until camp was made.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Henry was bending over and adding ice to the babbling pot of beans when he was
+startled by the sound of a blow, an exclamation from Bill, and a sharp snarling
+cry of pain from among the dogs. He straightened up in time to see a dim form
+disappearing across the snow into the shelter of the dark. Then he saw Bill,
+standing amid the dogs, half triumphant, half crestfallen, in one hand a stout
+club, in the other the tail and part of the body of a sun-cured salmon.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;It got half of it,&rdquo; he announced; &ldquo;but I got a whack at it
+jes&rsquo; the same. D&rsquo;ye hear it squeal?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;What&rsquo;d it look like?&rdquo; Henry asked.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Couldn&rsquo;t see. But it had four legs an&rsquo; a mouth an&rsquo;
+hair an&rsquo; looked like any dog.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Must be a tame wolf, I reckon.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;It&rsquo;s damned tame, whatever it is, comin&rsquo; in here at
+feedin&rsquo; time an&rsquo; gettin&rsquo; its whack of fish.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+That night, when supper was finished and they sat on the oblong box and pulled
+at their pipes, the circle of gleaming eyes drew in even closer than before.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I wisht they&rsquo;d spring up a bunch of moose or something, an&rsquo;
+go away an&rsquo; leave us alone,&rdquo; Bill said.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Henry grunted with an intonation that was not all sympathy, and for a quarter
+of an hour they sat on in silence, Henry staring at the fire, and Bill at the
+circle of eyes that burned in the darkness just beyond the firelight.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I wisht we was pullin&rsquo; into McGurry right now,&rdquo; he began
+again.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Shut up your wishin&rsquo; and your croakin&rsquo;,&rdquo; Henry burst
+out angrily. &ldquo;Your stomach&rsquo;s sour. That&rsquo;s what&rsquo;s
+ailin&rsquo; you. Swallow a spoonful of sody, an&rsquo; you&rsquo;ll sweeten up
+wonderful an&rsquo; be more pleasant company.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+In the morning Henry was aroused by fervid blasphemy that proceeded from the
+mouth of Bill. Henry propped himself up on an elbow and looked to see his
+comrade standing among the dogs beside the replenished fire, his arms raised in
+objurgation, his face distorted with passion.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Hello!&rdquo; Henry called. &ldquo;What&rsquo;s up now?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Frog&rsquo;s gone,&rdquo; came the answer.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;No.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I tell you yes.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Henry leaped out of the blankets and to the dogs. He counted them with care,
+and then joined his partner in cursing the power of the Wild that had robbed
+them of another dog.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Frog was the strongest dog of the bunch,&rdquo; Bill pronounced finally.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;An&rsquo; he was no fool dog neither,&rdquo; Henry added.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And so was recorded the second epitaph in two days.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+A gloomy breakfast was eaten, and the four remaining dogs were harnessed to the
+sled. The day was a repetition of the days that had gone before. The men toiled
+without speech across the face of the frozen world. The silence was unbroken
+save by the cries of their pursuers, that, unseen, hung upon their rear. With
+the coming of night in the mid-afternoon, the cries sounded closer as the
+pursuers drew in according to their custom; and the dogs grew excited and
+frightened, and were guilty of panics that tangled the traces and further
+depressed the two men.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;There, that&rsquo;ll fix you fool critters,&rdquo; Bill said with
+satisfaction that night, standing erect at completion of his task.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Henry left the cooking to come and see. Not only had his partner tied the dogs
+up, but he had tied them, after the Indian fashion, with sticks. About the neck
+of each dog he had fastened a leather thong. To this, and so close to the neck
+that the dog could not get his teeth to it, he had tied a stout stick four or
+five feet in length. The other end of the stick, in turn, was made fast to a
+stake in the ground by means of a leather thong. The dog was unable to gnaw
+through the leather at his own end of the stick. The stick prevented him from
+getting at the leather that fastened the other end.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Henry nodded his head approvingly.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;It&rsquo;s the only contraption that&rsquo;ll ever hold One Ear,&rdquo;
+he said. &ldquo;He can gnaw through leather as clean as a knife an&rsquo;
+jes&rsquo; about half as quick. They all&rsquo;ll be here in the mornin&rsquo;
+hunkydory.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;You jes&rsquo; bet they will,&rdquo; Bill affirmed. &ldquo;If one of
+em&rsquo; turns up missin&rsquo;, I&rsquo;ll go without my coffee.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;They jes&rsquo; know we ain&rsquo;t loaded to kill,&rdquo; Henry
+remarked at bed-time, indicating the gleaming circle that hemmed them in.
+&ldquo;If we could put a couple of shots into &rsquo;em, they&rsquo;d be more
+respectful. They come closer every night. Get the firelight out of your eyes
+an&rsquo; look hard&mdash;there! Did you see that one?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+For some time the two men amused themselves with watching the movement of vague
+forms on the edge of the firelight. By looking closely and steadily at where a
+pair of eyes burned in the darkness, the form of the animal would slowly take
+shape. They could even see these forms move at times.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+A sound among the dogs attracted the men&rsquo;s attention. One Ear was
+uttering quick, eager whines, lunging at the length of his stick toward the
+darkness, and desisting now and again in order to make frantic attacks on the
+stick with his teeth.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Look at that, Bill,&rdquo; Henry whispered.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Full into the firelight, with a stealthy, sidelong movement, glided a doglike
+animal. It moved with commingled mistrust and daring, cautiously observing the
+men, its attention fixed on the dogs. One Ear strained the full length of the
+stick toward the intruder and whined with eagerness.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;That fool One Ear don&rsquo;t seem scairt much,&rdquo; Bill said in a
+low tone.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;It&rsquo;s a she-wolf,&rdquo; Henry whispered back, &ldquo;an&rsquo;
+that accounts for Fatty an&rsquo; Frog. She&rsquo;s the decoy for the pack. She
+draws out the dog an&rsquo; then all the rest pitches in an&rsquo; eats
+&rsquo;m up.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The fire crackled. A log fell apart with a loud spluttering noise. At the sound
+of it the strange animal leaped back into the darkness.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Henry, I&rsquo;m a-thinkin&rsquo;,&rdquo; Bill announced.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Thinkin&rsquo; what?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I&rsquo;m a-thinkin&rsquo; that was the one I lambasted with the
+club.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Ain&rsquo;t the slightest doubt in the world,&rdquo; was Henry&rsquo;s
+response.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;An&rsquo; right here I want to remark,&rdquo; Bill went on, &ldquo;that
+that animal&rsquo;s familyarity with campfires is suspicious an&rsquo;
+immoral.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;It knows for certain more&rsquo;n a self-respectin&rsquo; wolf ought to
+know,&rdquo; Henry agreed. &ldquo;A wolf that knows enough to come in with the
+dogs at feedin&rsquo; time has had experiences.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Ol&rsquo; Villan had a dog once that run away with the wolves,&rdquo;
+Bill cogitates aloud. &ldquo;I ought to know. I shot it out of the pack in a
+moose pasture over &lsquo;on Little Stick. An&rsquo; Ol&rsquo; Villan cried
+like a baby. Hadn&rsquo;t seen it for three years, he said. Ben with the wolves
+all that time.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I reckon you&rsquo;ve called the turn, Bill. That wolf&rsquo;s a dog,
+an&rsquo; it&rsquo;s eaten fish many&rsquo;s the time from the hand of
+man.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;An if I get a chance at it, that wolf that&rsquo;s a dog&rsquo;ll be
+jes&rsquo; meat,&rdquo; Bill declared. &ldquo;We can&rsquo;t afford to lose no
+more animals.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;But you&rsquo;ve only got three cartridges,&rdquo; Henry objected.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I&rsquo;ll wait for a dead sure shot,&rdquo; was the reply.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+In the morning Henry renewed the fire and cooked breakfast to the accompaniment
+of his partner&rsquo;s snoring.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;You was sleepin&rsquo; jes&rsquo; too comfortable for anything,&rdquo;
+Henry told him, as he routed him out for breakfast. &ldquo;I hadn&rsquo;t the
+heart to rouse you.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Bill began to eat sleepily. He noticed that his cup was empty and started to
+reach for the pot. But the pot was beyond arm&rsquo;s length and beside Henry.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Say, Henry,&rdquo; he chided gently, &ldquo;ain&rsquo;t you forgot
+somethin&rsquo;?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Henry looked about with great carefulness and shook his head. Bill held up the
+empty cup.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;You don&rsquo;t get no coffee,&rdquo; Henry announced.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Ain&rsquo;t run out?&rdquo; Bill asked anxiously.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Nope.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Ain&rsquo;t thinkin&rsquo; it&rsquo;ll hurt my digestion?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Nope.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+A flush of angry blood pervaded Bill&rsquo;s face.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Then it&rsquo;s jes&rsquo; warm an&rsquo; anxious I am to be
+hearin&rsquo; you explain yourself,&rdquo; he said.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Spanker&rsquo;s gone,&rdquo; Henry answered.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Without haste, with the air of one resigned to misfortune Bill turned his head,
+and from where he sat counted the dogs.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;How&rsquo;d it happen?&rdquo; he asked apathetically.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Henry shrugged his shoulders. &ldquo;Don&rsquo;t know. Unless One Ear gnawed
+&rsquo;m loose. He couldn&rsquo;t a-done it himself, that&rsquo;s sure.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;The darned cuss.&rdquo; Bill spoke gravely and slowly, with no hint of
+the anger that was raging within. &ldquo;Jes&rsquo; because he couldn&rsquo;t
+chew himself loose, he chews Spanker loose.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Well, Spanker&rsquo;s troubles is over anyway; I guess he&rsquo;s
+digested by this time an&rsquo; cavortin&rsquo; over the landscape in the
+bellies of twenty different wolves,&rdquo; was Henry&rsquo;s epitaph on this,
+the latest lost dog. &ldquo;Have some coffee, Bill.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But Bill shook his head.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Go on,&rdquo; Henry pleaded, elevating the pot.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Bill shoved his cup aside. &ldquo;I&rsquo;ll be ding-dong-danged if I do. I
+said I wouldn&rsquo;t if ary dog turned up missin&rsquo;, an&rsquo; I
+won&rsquo;t.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;It&rsquo;s darn good coffee,&rdquo; Henry said enticingly.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But Bill was stubborn, and he ate a dry breakfast washed down with mumbled
+curses at One Ear for the trick he had played.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I&rsquo;ll tie &rsquo;em up out of reach of each other to-night,&rdquo;
+Bill said, as they took the trail.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+They had travelled little more than a hundred yards, when Henry, who was in
+front, bent down and picked up something with which his snowshoe had collided.
+It was dark, and he could not see it, but he recognised it by the touch. He
+flung it back, so that it struck the sled and bounced along until it fetched up
+on Bill&rsquo;s snowshoes.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Mebbe you&rsquo;ll need that in your business,&rdquo; Henry said.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Bill uttered an exclamation. It was all that was left of Spanker&mdash;the
+stick with which he had been tied.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;They ate &rsquo;m hide an&rsquo; all,&rdquo; Bill announced. &ldquo;The
+stick&rsquo;s as clean as a whistle. They&rsquo;ve ate the leather offen both
+ends. They&rsquo;re damn hungry, Henry, an&rsquo; they&rsquo;ll have you
+an&rsquo; me guessin&rsquo; before this trip&rsquo;s over.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Henry laughed defiantly. &ldquo;I ain&rsquo;t been trailed this way by wolves
+before, but I&rsquo;ve gone through a whole lot worse an&rsquo; kept my health.
+Takes more&rsquo;n a handful of them pesky critters to do for yours truly,
+Bill, my son.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I don&rsquo;t know, I don&rsquo;t know,&rdquo; Bill muttered ominously.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Well, you&rsquo;ll know all right when we pull into McGurry.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I ain&rsquo;t feelin&rsquo; special enthusiastic,&rdquo; Bill persisted.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;You&rsquo;re off colour, that&rsquo;s what&rsquo;s the matter with
+you,&rdquo; Henry dogmatised. &ldquo;What you need is quinine, an&rsquo;
+I&rsquo;m goin&rsquo; to dose you up stiff as soon as we make McGurry.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Bill grunted his disagreement with the diagnosis, and lapsed into silence. The
+day was like all the days. Light came at nine o&rsquo;clock. At twelve
+o&rsquo;clock the southern horizon was warmed by the unseen sun; and then began
+the cold grey of afternoon that would merge, three hours later, into night.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+It was just after the sun&rsquo;s futile effort to appear, that Bill slipped
+the rifle from under the sled-lashings and said:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;You keep right on, Henry, I&rsquo;m goin&rsquo; to see what I can
+see.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;You&rsquo;d better stick by the sled,&rdquo; his partner protested.
+&ldquo;You&rsquo;ve only got three cartridges, an&rsquo; there&rsquo;s no
+tellin&rsquo; what might happen.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Who&rsquo;s croaking now?&rdquo; Bill demanded triumphantly.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Henry made no reply, and plodded on alone, though often he cast anxious glances
+back into the grey solitude where his partner had disappeared. An hour later,
+taking advantage of the cut-offs around which the sled had to go, Bill arrived.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;They&rsquo;re scattered an&rsquo; rangin&rsquo; along wide,&rdquo; he
+said: &ldquo;keeping up with us an&rsquo; lookin&rsquo; for game at the same
+time. You see, they&rsquo;re sure of us, only they know they&rsquo;ve got to
+wait to get us. In the meantime they&rsquo;re willin&rsquo; to pick up anything
+eatable that comes handy.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;You mean they <i>think</i> they&rsquo;re sure of us,&rdquo; Henry
+objected pointedly.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But Bill ignored him. &ldquo;I seen some of them. They&rsquo;re pretty thin.
+They ain&rsquo;t had a bite in weeks I reckon, outside of Fatty an&rsquo; Frog
+an&rsquo; Spanker; an&rsquo; there&rsquo;s so many of &rsquo;em that that
+didn&rsquo;t go far. They&rsquo;re remarkable thin. Their ribs is like
+wash-boards, an&rsquo; their stomachs is right up against their backbones.
+They&rsquo;re pretty desperate, I can tell you. They&rsquo;ll be goin&rsquo;
+mad, yet, an&rsquo; then watch out.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+A few minutes later, Henry, who was now travelling behind the sled, emitted a
+low, warning whistle. Bill turned and looked, then quietly stopped the dogs. To
+the rear, from around the last bend and plainly into view, on the very trail
+they had just covered, trotted a furry, slinking form. Its nose was to the
+trail, and it trotted with a peculiar, sliding, effortless gait. When they
+halted, it halted, throwing up its head and regarding them steadily with
+nostrils that twitched as it caught and studied the scent of them.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;It&rsquo;s the she-wolf,&rdquo; Bill answered.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The dogs had lain down in the snow, and he walked past them to join his partner
+in the sled. Together they watched the strange animal that had pursued them for
+days and that had already accomplished the destruction of half their dog-team.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+After a searching scrutiny, the animal trotted forward a few steps. This it
+repeated several times, till it was a short hundred yards away. It paused, head
+up, close by a clump of spruce trees, and with sight and scent studied the
+outfit of the watching men. It looked at them in a strangely wistful way, after
+the manner of a dog; but in its wistfulness there was none of the dog
+affection. It was a wistfulness bred of hunger, as cruel as its own fangs, as
+merciless as the frost itself.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+It was large for a wolf, its gaunt frame advertising the lines of an animal
+that was among the largest of its kind.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Stands pretty close to two feet an&rsquo; a half at the
+shoulders,&rdquo; Henry commented. &ldquo;An&rsquo; I&rsquo;ll bet it
+ain&rsquo;t far from five feet long.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Kind of strange colour for a wolf,&rdquo; was Bill&rsquo;s criticism.
+&ldquo;I never seen a red wolf before. Looks almost cinnamon to me.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The animal was certainly not cinnamon-coloured. Its coat was the true
+wolf-coat. The dominant colour was grey, and yet there was to it a faint
+reddish hue&mdash;a hue that was baffling, that appeared and disappeared, that
+was more like an illusion of the vision, now grey, distinctly grey, and again
+giving hints and glints of a vague redness of colour not classifiable in terms
+of ordinary experience.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Looks for all the world like a big husky sled-dog,&rdquo; Bill said.
+&ldquo;I wouldn&rsquo;t be s&rsquo;prised to see it wag its tail.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Hello, you husky!&rdquo; he called. &ldquo;Come here, you
+whatever-your-name-is.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Ain&rsquo;t a bit scairt of you,&rdquo; Henry laughed.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Bill waved his hand at it threateningly and shouted loudly; but the animal
+betrayed no fear. The only change in it that they could notice was an accession
+of alertness. It still regarded them with the merciless wistfulness of hunger.
+They were meat, and it was hungry; and it would like to go in and eat them if
+it dared.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Look here, Henry,&rdquo; Bill said, unconsciously lowering his voice to
+a whisper because of what he imitated. &ldquo;We&rsquo;ve got three cartridges.
+But it&rsquo;s a dead shot. Couldn&rsquo;t miss it. It&rsquo;s got away with
+three of our dogs, an&rsquo; we oughter put a stop to it. What d&rsquo;ye
+say?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Henry nodded his consent. Bill cautiously slipped the gun from under the
+sled-lashing. The gun was on the way to his shoulder, but it never got there.
+For in that instant the she-wolf leaped sidewise from the trail into the clump
+of spruce trees and disappeared.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The two men looked at each other. Henry whistled long and comprehendingly.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I might have knowed it,&rdquo; Bill chided himself aloud as he replaced
+the gun. &ldquo;Of course a wolf that knows enough to come in with the dogs at
+feedin&rsquo; time, &rsquo;d know all about shooting-irons. I tell you right
+now, Henry, that critter&rsquo;s the cause of all our trouble. We&rsquo;d have
+six dogs at the present time, &rsquo;stead of three, if it wasn&rsquo;t for
+her. An&rsquo; I tell you right now, Henry, I&rsquo;m goin&rsquo; to get her.
+She&rsquo;s too smart to be shot in the open. But I&rsquo;m goin&rsquo; to lay
+for her. I&rsquo;ll bushwhack her as sure as my name is Bill.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;You needn&rsquo;t stray off too far in doin&rsquo; it,&rdquo; his
+partner admonished. &ldquo;If that pack ever starts to jump you, them three
+cartridges&rsquo;d be wuth no more&rsquo;n three whoops in hell. Them animals
+is damn hungry, an&rsquo; once they start in, they&rsquo;ll sure get you,
+Bill.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+They camped early that night. Three dogs could not drag the sled so fast nor
+for so long hours as could six, and they were showing unmistakable signs of
+playing out. And the men went early to bed, Bill first seeing to it that the
+dogs were tied out of gnawing-reach of one another.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But the wolves were growing bolder, and the men were aroused more than once
+from their sleep. So near did the wolves approach, that the dogs became frantic
+with terror, and it was necessary to replenish the fire from time to time in
+order to keep the adventurous marauders at safer distance.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I&rsquo;ve hearn sailors talk of sharks followin&rsquo; a ship,&rdquo;
+Bill remarked, as he crawled back into the blankets after one such replenishing
+of the fire. &ldquo;Well, them wolves is land sharks. They know their business
+better&rsquo;n we do, an&rsquo; they ain&rsquo;t a-holdin&rsquo; our trail this
+way for their health. They&rsquo;re goin&rsquo; to get us. They&rsquo;re sure
+goin&rsquo; to get us, Henry.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;They&rsquo;ve half got you a&rsquo;ready, a-talkin&rsquo; like
+that,&rdquo; Henry retorted sharply. &ldquo;A man&rsquo;s half licked when he
+says he is. An&rsquo; you&rsquo;re half eaten from the way you&rsquo;re
+goin&rsquo; on about it.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;They&rsquo;ve got away with better men than you an&rsquo; me,&rdquo;
+Bill answered.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Oh, shet up your croakin&rsquo;. You make me all-fired tired.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Henry rolled over angrily on his side, but was surprised that Bill made no
+similar display of temper. This was not Bill&rsquo;s way, for he was easily
+angered by sharp words. Henry thought long over it before he went to sleep, and
+as his eyelids fluttered down and he dozed off, the thought in his mind was:
+&ldquo;There&rsquo;s no mistakin&rsquo; it, Bill&rsquo;s almighty blue.
+I&rsquo;ll have to cheer him up to-morrow.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<h3><a name="chap03"></a>CHAPTER III<br/>
+THE HUNGER CRY</h3>
+
+<p>
+The day began auspiciously. They had lost no dogs during the night, and they
+swung out upon the trail and into the silence, the darkness, and the cold with
+spirits that were fairly light. Bill seemed to have forgotten his forebodings
+of the previous night, and even waxed facetious with the dogs when, at midday,
+they overturned the sled on a bad piece of trail.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+It was an awkward mix-up. The sled was upside down and jammed between a
+tree-trunk and a huge rock, and they were forced to unharness the dogs in order
+to straighten out the tangle. The two men were bent over the sled and trying to
+right it, when Henry observed One Ear sidling away.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Here, you, One Ear!&rdquo; he cried, straightening up and turning around
+on the dog.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But One Ear broke into a run across the snow, his traces trailing behind him.
+And there, out in the snow of their back track, was the she-wolf waiting for
+him. As he neared her, he became suddenly cautious. He slowed down to an alert
+and mincing walk and then stopped. He regarded her carefully and dubiously, yet
+desirefully. She seemed to smile at him, showing her teeth in an ingratiating
+rather than a menacing way. She moved toward him a few steps, playfully, and
+then halted. One Ear drew near to her, still alert and cautious, his tail and
+ears in the air, his head held high.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He tried to sniff noses with her, but she retreated playfully and coyly. Every
+advance on his part was accompanied by a corresponding retreat on her part.
+Step by step she was luring him away from the security of his human
+companionship. Once, as though a warning had in vague ways flitted through his
+intelligence, he turned his head and looked back at the overturned sled, at his
+team-mates, and at the two men who were calling to him.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But whatever idea was forming in his mind, was dissipated by the she-wolf, who
+advanced upon him, sniffed noses with him for a fleeting instant, and then
+resumed her coy retreat before his renewed advances.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+In the meantime, Bill had bethought himself of the rifle. But it was jammed
+beneath the overturned sled, and by the time Henry had helped him to right the
+load, One Ear and the she-wolf were too close together and the distance too
+great to risk a shot.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Too late One Ear learned his mistake. Before they saw the cause, the two men
+saw him turn and start to run back toward them. Then, approaching at right
+angles to the trail and cutting off his retreat they saw a dozen wolves, lean
+and grey, bounding across the snow. On the instant, the she-wolf&rsquo;s
+coyness and playfulness disappeared. With a snarl she sprang upon One Ear. He
+thrust her off with his shoulder, and, his retreat cut off and still intent on
+regaining the sled, he altered his course in an attempt to circle around to it.
+More wolves were appearing every moment and joining in the chase. The she-wolf
+was one leap behind One Ear and holding her own.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Where are you goin&rsquo;?&rdquo; Henry suddenly demanded, laying his
+hand on his partner&rsquo;s arm.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Bill shook it off. &ldquo;I won&rsquo;t stand it,&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;They
+ain&rsquo;t a-goin&rsquo; to get any more of our dogs if I can help it.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Gun in hand, he plunged into the underbrush that lined the side of the trail.
+His intention was apparent enough. Taking the sled as the centre of the circle
+that One Ear was making, Bill planned to tap that circle at a point in advance
+of the pursuit. With his rifle, in the broad daylight, it might be possible for
+him to awe the wolves and save the dog.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Say, Bill!&rdquo; Henry called after him. &ldquo;Be careful! Don&rsquo;t
+take no chances!&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Henry sat down on the sled and watched. There was nothing else for him to do.
+Bill had already gone from sight; but now and again, appearing and disappearing
+amongst the underbrush and the scattered clumps of spruce, could be seen One
+Ear. Henry judged his case to be hopeless. The dog was thoroughly alive to its
+danger, but it was running on the outer circle while the wolf-pack was running
+on the inner and shorter circle. It was vain to think of One Ear so
+outdistancing his pursuers as to be able to cut across their circle in advance
+of them and to regain the sled.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The different lines were rapidly approaching a point. Somewhere out there in
+the snow, screened from his sight by trees and thickets, Henry knew that the
+wolf-pack, One Ear, and Bill were coming together. All too quickly, far more
+quickly than he had expected, it happened. He heard a shot, then two shots, in
+rapid succession, and he knew that Bill&rsquo;s ammunition was gone. Then he
+heard a great outcry of snarls and yelps. He recognised One Ear&rsquo;s yell of
+pain and terror, and he heard a wolf-cry that bespoke a stricken animal. And
+that was all. The snarls ceased. The yelping died away. Silence settled down
+again over the lonely land.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He sat for a long while upon the sled. There was no need for him to go and see
+what had happened. He knew it as though it had taken place before his eyes.
+Once, he roused with a start and hastily got the axe out from underneath the
+lashings. But for some time longer he sat and brooded, the two remaining dogs
+crouching and trembling at his feet.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+At last he arose in a weary manner, as though all the resilience had gone out
+of his body, and proceeded to fasten the dogs to the sled. He passed a rope
+over his shoulder, a man-trace, and pulled with the dogs. He did not go far. At
+the first hint of darkness he hastened to make a camp, and he saw to it that he
+had a generous supply of firewood. He fed the dogs, cooked and ate his supper,
+and made his bed close to the fire.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But he was not destined to enjoy that bed. Before his eyes closed the wolves
+had drawn too near for safety. It no longer required an effort of the vision to
+see them. They were all about him and the fire, in a narrow circle, and he
+could see them plainly in the firelight lying down, sitting up, crawling
+forward on their bellies, or slinking back and forth. They even slept. Here and
+there he could see one curled up in the snow like a dog, taking the sleep that
+was now denied himself.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He kept the fire brightly blazing, for he knew that it alone intervened between
+the flesh of his body and their hungry fangs. His two dogs stayed close by him,
+one on either side, leaning against him for protection, crying and whimpering,
+and at times snarling desperately when a wolf approached a little closer than
+usual. At such moments, when his dogs snarled, the whole circle would be
+agitated, the wolves coming to their feet and pressing tentatively forward, a
+chorus of snarls and eager yelps rising about him. Then the circle would lie
+down again, and here and there a wolf would resume its broken nap.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But this circle had a continuous tendency to draw in upon him. Bit by bit, an
+inch at a time, with here a wolf bellying forward, and there a wolf bellying
+forward, the circle would narrow until the brutes were almost within springing
+distance. Then he would seize brands from the fire and hurl them into the pack.
+A hasty drawing back always resulted, accompanied by angry yelps and frightened
+snarls when a well-aimed brand struck and scorched a too daring animal.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Morning found the man haggard and worn, wide-eyed from want of sleep. He cooked
+breakfast in the darkness, and at nine o&rsquo;clock, when, with the coming of
+daylight, the wolf-pack drew back, he set about the task he had planned through
+the long hours of the night. Chopping down young saplings, he made them
+cross-bars of a scaffold by lashing them high up to the trunks of standing
+trees. Using the sled-lashing for a heaving rope, and with the aid of the dogs,
+he hoisted the coffin to the top of the scaffold.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;They got Bill, an&rsquo; they may get me, but they&rsquo;ll sure never
+get you, young man,&rdquo; he said, addressing the dead body in its
+tree-sepulchre.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Then he took the trail, the lightened sled bounding along behind the willing
+dogs; for they, too, knew that safety lay open in the gaining of Fort McGurry.
+The wolves were now more open in their pursuit, trotting sedately behind and
+ranging along on either side, their red tongues lolling out, their lean sides
+showing the undulating ribs with every movement. They were very lean, mere
+skin-bags stretched over bony frames, with strings for muscles&mdash;so lean
+that Henry found it in his mind to marvel that they still kept their feet and
+did not collapse forthright in the snow.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He did not dare travel until dark. At midday, not only did the sun warm the
+southern horizon, but it even thrust its upper rim, pale and golden, above the
+sky-line. He received it as a sign. The days were growing longer. The sun was
+returning. But scarcely had the cheer of its light departed, than he went into
+camp. There were still several hours of grey daylight and sombre twilight, and
+he utilised them in chopping an enormous supply of fire-wood.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+With night came horror. Not only were the starving wolves growing bolder, but
+lack of sleep was telling upon Henry. He dozed despite himself, crouching by
+the fire, the blankets about his shoulders, the axe between his knees, and on
+either side a dog pressing close against him. He awoke once and saw in front of
+him, not a dozen feet away, a big grey wolf, one of the largest of the pack.
+And even as he looked, the brute deliberately stretched himself after the
+manner of a lazy dog, yawning full in his face and looking upon him with a
+possessive eye, as if, in truth, he were merely a delayed meal that was soon to
+be eaten.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+This certitude was shown by the whole pack. Fully a score he could count,
+staring hungrily at him or calmly sleeping in the snow. They reminded him of
+children gathered about a spread table and awaiting permission to begin to eat.
+And he was the food they were to eat! He wondered how and when the meal would
+begin.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+As he piled wood on the fire he discovered an appreciation of his own body
+which he had never felt before. He watched his moving muscles and was
+interested in the cunning mechanism of his fingers. By the light of the fire he
+crooked his fingers slowly and repeatedly now one at a time, now all together,
+spreading them wide or making quick gripping movements. He studied the
+nail-formation, and prodded the finger-tips, now sharply, and again softly,
+gauging the while the nerve-sensations produced. It fascinated him, and he grew
+suddenly fond of this subtle flesh of his that worked so beautifully and
+smoothly and delicately. Then he would cast a glance of fear at the wolf-circle
+drawn expectantly about him, and like a blow the realisation would strike him
+that this wonderful body of his, this living flesh, was no more than so much
+meat, a quest of ravenous animals, to be torn and slashed by their hungry
+fangs, to be sustenance to them as the moose and the rabbit had often been
+sustenance to him.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He came out of a doze that was half nightmare, to see the red-hued she-wolf
+before him. She was not more than half a dozen feet away sitting in the snow
+and wistfully regarding him. The two dogs were whimpering and snarling at his
+feet, but she took no notice of them. She was looking at the man, and for some
+time he returned her look. There was nothing threatening about her. She looked
+at him merely with a great wistfulness, but he knew it to be the wistfulness of
+an equally great hunger. He was the food, and the sight of him excited in her
+the gustatory sensations. Her mouth opened, the saliva drooled forth, and she
+licked her chops with the pleasure of anticipation.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+A spasm of fear went through him. He reached hastily for a brand to throw at
+her. But even as he reached, and before his fingers had closed on the missile,
+she sprang back into safety; and he knew that she was used to having things
+thrown at her. She had snarled as she sprang away, baring her white fangs to
+their roots, all her wistfulness vanishing, being replaced by a carnivorous
+malignity that made him shudder. He glanced at the hand that held the brand,
+noticing the cunning delicacy of the fingers that gripped it, how they adjusted
+themselves to all the inequalities of the surface, curling over and under and
+about the rough wood, and one little finger, too close to the burning portion
+of the brand, sensitively and automatically writhing back from the hurtful heat
+to a cooler gripping-place; and in the same instant he seemed to see a vision
+of those same sensitive and delicate fingers being crushed and torn by the
+white teeth of the she-wolf. Never had he been so fond of this body of his as
+now when his tenure of it was so precarious.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+All night, with burning brands, he fought off the hungry pack. When he dozed
+despite himself, the whimpering and snarling of the dogs aroused him. Morning
+came, but for the first time the light of day failed to scatter the wolves. The
+man waited in vain for them to go. They remained in a circle about him and his
+fire, displaying an arrogance of possession that shook his courage born of the
+morning light.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He made one desperate attempt to pull out on the trail. But the moment he left
+the protection of the fire, the boldest wolf leaped for him, but leaped short.
+He saved himself by springing back, the jaws snapping together a scant six
+inches from his thigh. The rest of the pack was now up and surging upon him,
+and a throwing of firebrands right and left was necessary to drive them back to
+a respectful distance.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Even in the daylight he did not dare leave the fire to chop fresh wood. Twenty
+feet away towered a huge dead spruce. He spent half the day extending his
+campfire to the tree, at any moment a half dozen burning faggots ready at hand
+to fling at his enemies. Once at the tree, he studied the surrounding forest in
+order to fell the tree in the direction of the most firewood.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The night was a repetition of the night before, save that the need for sleep
+was becoming overpowering. The snarling of his dogs was losing its efficacy.
+Besides, they were snarling all the time, and his benumbed and drowsy senses no
+longer took note of changing pitch and intensity. He awoke with a start. The
+she-wolf was less than a yard from him. Mechanically, at short range, without
+letting go of it, he thrust a brand full into her open and snarling mouth. She
+sprang away, yelling with pain, and while he took delight in the smell of
+burning flesh and hair, he watched her shaking her head and growling wrathfully
+a score of feet away.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But this time, before he dozed again, he tied a burning pine-knot to his right
+hand. His eyes were closed but few minutes when the burn of the flame on his
+flesh awakened him. For several hours he adhered to this programme. Every time
+he was thus awakened he drove back the wolves with flying brands, replenished
+the fire, and rearranged the pine-knot on his hand. All worked well, but there
+came a time when he fastened the pine-knot insecurely. As his eyes closed it
+fell away from his hand.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He dreamed. It seemed to him that he was in Fort McGurry. It was warm and
+comfortable, and he was playing cribbage with the Factor. Also, it seemed to
+him that the fort was besieged by wolves. They were howling at the very gates,
+and sometimes he and the Factor paused from the game to listen and laugh at the
+futile efforts of the wolves to get in. And then, so strange was the dream,
+there was a crash. The door was burst open. He could see the wolves flooding
+into the big living-room of the fort. They were leaping straight for him and
+the Factor. With the bursting open of the door, the noise of their howling had
+increased tremendously. This howling now bothered him. His dream was merging
+into something else&mdash;he knew not what; but through it all, following him,
+persisted the howling.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And then he awoke to find the howling real. There was a great snarling and
+yelping. The wolves were rushing him. They were all about him and upon him. The
+teeth of one had closed upon his arm. Instinctively he leaped into the fire,
+and as he leaped, he felt the sharp slash of teeth that tore through the flesh
+of his leg. Then began a fire fight. His stout mittens temporarily protected
+his hands, and he scooped live coals into the air in all directions, until the
+campfire took on the semblance of a volcano.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But it could not last long. His face was blistering in the heat, his eyebrows
+and lashes were singed off, and the heat was becoming unbearable to his feet.
+With a flaming brand in each hand, he sprang to the edge of the fire. The
+wolves had been driven back. On every side, wherever the live coals had fallen,
+the snow was sizzling, and every little while a retiring wolf, with wild leap
+and snort and snarl, announced that one such live coal had been stepped upon.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Flinging his brands at the nearest of his enemies, the man thrust his
+smouldering mittens into the snow and stamped about to cool his feet. His two
+dogs were missing, and he well knew that they had served as a course in the
+protracted meal which had begun days before with Fatty, the last course of
+which would likely be himself in the days to follow.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;You ain&rsquo;t got me yet!&rdquo; he cried, savagely shaking his fist
+at the hungry beasts; and at the sound of his voice the whole circle was
+agitated, there was a general snarl, and the she-wolf slid up close to him
+across the snow and watched him with hungry wistfulness.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He set to work to carry out a new idea that had come to him. He extended the
+fire into a large circle. Inside this circle he crouched, his sleeping outfit
+under him as a protection against the melting snow. When he had thus
+disappeared within his shelter of flame, the whole pack came curiously to the
+rim of the fire to see what had become of him. Hitherto they had been denied
+access to the fire, and they now settled down in a close-drawn circle, like so
+many dogs, blinking and yawning and stretching their lean bodies in the
+unaccustomed warmth. Then the she-wolf sat down, pointed her nose at a star,
+and began to howl. One by one the wolves joined her, till the whole pack, on
+haunches, with noses pointed skyward, was howling its hunger cry.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Dawn came, and daylight. The fire was burning low. The fuel had run out, and
+there was need to get more. The man attempted to step out of his circle of
+flame, but the wolves surged to meet him. Burning brands made them spring
+aside, but they no longer sprang back. In vain he strove to drive them back. As
+he gave up and stumbled inside his circle, a wolf leaped for him, missed, and
+landed with all four feet in the coals. It cried out with terror, at the same
+time snarling, and scrambled back to cool its paws in the snow.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The man sat down on his blankets in a crouching position. His body leaned
+forward from the hips. His shoulders, relaxed and drooping, and his head on his
+knees advertised that he had given up the struggle. Now and again he raised his
+head to note the dying down of the fire. The circle of flame and coals was
+breaking into segments with openings in between. These openings grew in size,
+the segments diminished.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I guess you can come an&rsquo; get me any time,&rdquo; he mumbled.
+&ldquo;Anyway, I&rsquo;m goin&rsquo; to sleep.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Once he awakened, and in an opening in the circle, directly in front of him, he
+saw the she-wolf gazing at him.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Again he awakened, a little later, though it seemed hours to him. A mysterious
+change had taken place&mdash;so mysterious a change that he was shocked wider
+awake. Something had happened. He could not understand at first. Then he
+discovered it. The wolves were gone. Remained only the trampled snow to show
+how closely they had pressed him. Sleep was welling up and gripping him again,
+his head was sinking down upon his knees, when he roused with a sudden start.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+There were cries of men, and churn of sleds, the creaking of harnesses, and the
+eager whimpering of straining dogs. Four sleds pulled in from the river bed to
+the camp among the trees. Half a dozen men were about the man who crouched in
+the centre of the dying fire. They were shaking and prodding him into
+consciousness. He looked at them like a drunken man and maundered in strange,
+sleepy speech.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Red she-wolf. . . . Come in with the dogs at feedin&rsquo; time. . . .
+First she ate the dog-food. . . . Then she ate the dogs. . . . An&rsquo; after
+that she ate Bill. . . . &rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Where&rsquo;s Lord Alfred?&rdquo; one of the men bellowed in his ear,
+shaking him roughly.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He shook his head slowly. &ldquo;No, she didn&rsquo;t eat him. . . . He&rsquo;s
+roostin&rsquo; in a tree at the last camp.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Dead?&rdquo; the man shouted.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;An&rsquo; in a box,&rdquo; Henry answered. He jerked his shoulder
+petulantly away from the grip of his questioner. &ldquo;Say, you lemme alone. .
+. . I&rsquo;m jes&rsquo; plump tuckered out. . . . Goo&rsquo; night,
+everybody.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+His eyes fluttered and went shut. His chin fell forward on his chest. And even
+as they eased him down upon the blankets his snores were rising on the frosty
+air.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But there was another sound. Far and faint it was, in the remote distance, the
+cry of the hungry wolf-pack as it took the trail of other meat than the man it
+had just missed.
+</p>
+
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<h2><a name="part02"></a>PART II</h2>
+
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<h3><a name="chap04"></a>CHAPTER I<br/>
+THE BATTLE OF THE FANGS</h3>
+
+<p>
+It was the she-wolf who had first caught the sound of men&rsquo;s voices and
+the whining of the sled-dogs; and it was the she-wolf who was first to spring
+away from the cornered man in his circle of dying flame. The pack had been
+loath to forego the kill it had hunted down, and it lingered for several
+minutes, making sure of the sounds, and then it, too, sprang away on the trail
+made by the she-wolf.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Running at the forefront of the pack was a large grey wolf&mdash;one of its
+several leaders. It was he who directed the pack&rsquo;s course on the heels of
+the she-wolf. It was he who snarled warningly at the younger members of the
+pack or slashed at them with his fangs when they ambitiously tried to pass him.
+And it was he who increased the pace when he sighted the she-wolf, now trotting
+slowly across the snow.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She dropped in alongside by him, as though it were her appointed position, and
+took the pace of the pack. He did not snarl at her, nor show his teeth, when
+any leap of hers chanced to put her in advance of him. On the contrary, he
+seemed kindly disposed toward her&mdash;too kindly to suit her, for he was
+prone to run near to her, and when he ran too near it was she who snarled and
+showed her teeth. Nor was she above slashing his shoulder sharply on occasion.
+At such times he betrayed no anger. He merely sprang to the side and ran
+stiffly ahead for several awkward leaps, in carriage and conduct resembling an
+abashed country swain.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+This was his one trouble in the running of the pack; but she had other
+troubles. On her other side ran a gaunt old wolf, grizzled and marked with the
+scars of many battles. He ran always on her right side. The fact that he had
+but one eye, and that the left eye, might account for this. He, also, was
+addicted to crowding her, to veering toward her till his scarred muzzle touched
+her body, or shoulder, or neck. As with the running mate on the left, she
+repelled these attentions with her teeth; but when both bestowed their
+attentions at the same time she was roughly jostled, being compelled, with
+quick snaps to either side, to drive both lovers away and at the same time to
+maintain her forward leap with the pack and see the way of her feet before her.
+At such times her running mates flashed their teeth and growled threateningly
+across at each other. They might have fought, but even wooing and its rivalry
+waited upon the more pressing hunger-need of the pack.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+After each repulse, when the old wolf sheered abruptly away from the
+sharp-toothed object of his desire, he shouldered against a young
+three-year-old that ran on his blind right side. This young wolf had attained
+his full size; and, considering the weak and famished condition of the pack, he
+possessed more than the average vigour and spirit. Nevertheless, he ran with
+his head even with the shoulder of his one-eyed elder. When he ventured to run
+abreast of the older wolf (which was seldom), a snarl and a snap sent him back
+even with the shoulder again. Sometimes, however, he dropped cautiously and
+slowly behind and edged in between the old leader and the she-wolf. This was
+doubly resented, even triply resented. When she snarled her displeasure, the
+old leader would whirl on the three-year-old. Sometimes she whirled with him.
+And sometimes the young leader on the left whirled, too.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+At such times, confronted by three sets of savage teeth, the young wolf stopped
+precipitately, throwing himself back on his haunches, with fore-legs stiff,
+mouth menacing, and mane bristling. This confusion in the front of the moving
+pack always caused confusion in the rear. The wolves behind collided with the
+young wolf and expressed their displeasure by administering sharp nips on his
+hind-legs and flanks. He was laying up trouble for himself, for lack of food
+and short tempers went together; but with the boundless faith of youth he
+persisted in repeating the manoeuvre every little while, though it never
+succeeded in gaining anything for him but discomfiture.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Had there been food, love-making and fighting would have gone on apace, and the
+pack-formation would have been broken up. But the situation of the pack was
+desperate. It was lean with long-standing hunger. It ran below its ordinary
+speed. At the rear limped the weak members, the very young and the very old. At
+the front were the strongest. Yet all were more like skeletons than full-bodied
+wolves. Nevertheless, with the exception of the ones that limped, the movements
+of the animals were effortless and tireless. Their stringy muscles seemed
+founts of inexhaustible energy. Behind every steel-like contraction of a
+muscle, lay another steel-like contraction, and another, and another,
+apparently without end.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+They ran many miles that day. They ran through the night. And the next day
+found them still running. They were running over the surface of a world frozen
+and dead. No life stirred. They alone moved through the vast inertness. They
+alone were alive, and they sought for other things that were alive in order
+that they might devour them and continue to live.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+They crossed low divides and ranged a dozen small streams in a lower-lying
+country before their quest was rewarded. Then they came upon moose. It was a
+big bull they first found. Here was meat and life, and it was guarded by no
+mysterious fires nor flying missiles of flame. Splay hoofs and palmated antlers
+they knew, and they flung their customary patience and caution to the wind. It
+was a brief fight and fierce. The big bull was beset on every side. He ripped
+them open or split their skulls with shrewdly driven blows of his great hoofs.
+He crushed them and broke them on his large horns. He stamped them into the
+snow under him in the wallowing struggle. But he was foredoomed, and he went
+down with the she-wolf tearing savagely at his throat, and with other teeth
+fixed everywhere upon him, devouring him alive, before ever his last struggles
+ceased or his last damage had been wrought.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+There was food in plenty. The bull weighed over eight hundred
+pounds&mdash;fully twenty pounds of meat per mouth for the forty-odd wolves of
+the pack. But if they could fast prodigiously, they could feed prodigiously,
+and soon a few scattered bones were all that remained of the splendid live
+brute that had faced the pack a few hours before.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+There was now much resting and sleeping. With full stomachs, bickering and
+quarrelling began among the younger males, and this continued through the few
+days that followed before the breaking-up of the pack. The famine was over. The
+wolves were now in the country of game, and though they still hunted in pack,
+they hunted more cautiously, cutting out heavy cows or crippled old bulls from
+the small moose-herds they ran across.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+There came a day, in this land of plenty, when the wolf-pack split in half and
+went in different directions. The she-wolf, the young leader on her left, and
+the one-eyed elder on her right, led their half of the pack down to the
+Mackenzie River and across into the lake country to the east. Each day this
+remnant of the pack dwindled. Two by two, male and female, the wolves were
+deserting. Occasionally a solitary male was driven out by the sharp teeth of
+his rivals. In the end there remained only four: the she-wolf, the young
+leader, the one-eyed one, and the ambitious three-year-old.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The she-wolf had by now developed a ferocious temper. Her three suitors all
+bore the marks of her teeth. Yet they never replied in kind, never defended
+themselves against her. They turned their shoulders to her most savage slashes,
+and with wagging tails and mincing steps strove to placate her wrath. But if
+they were all mildness toward her, they were all fierceness toward one another.
+The three-year-old grew too ambitious in his fierceness. He caught the one-eyed
+elder on his blind side and ripped his ear into ribbons. Though the grizzled
+old fellow could see only on one side, against the youth and vigour of the
+other he brought into play the wisdom of long years of experience. His lost eye
+and his scarred muzzle bore evidence to the nature of his experience. He had
+survived too many battles to be in doubt for a moment about what to do.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The battle began fairly, but it did not end fairly. There was no telling what
+the outcome would have been, for the third wolf joined the elder, and together,
+old leader and young leader, they attacked the ambitious three-year-old and
+proceeded to destroy him. He was beset on either side by the merciless fangs of
+his erstwhile comrades. Forgotten were the days they had hunted together, the
+game they had pulled down, the famine they had suffered. That business was a
+thing of the past. The business of love was at hand&mdash;ever a sterner and
+crueller business than that of food-getting.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And in the meanwhile, the she-wolf, the cause of it all, sat down contentedly
+on her haunches and watched. She was even pleased. This was her day&mdash;and
+it came not often&mdash;when manes bristled, and fang smote fang or ripped and
+tore the yielding flesh, all for the possession of her.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And in the business of love the three-year-old, who had made this his first
+adventure upon it, yielded up his life. On either side of his body stood his
+two rivals. They were gazing at the she-wolf, who sat smiling in the snow. But
+the elder leader was wise, very wise, in love even as in battle. The younger
+leader turned his head to lick a wound on his shoulder. The curve of his neck
+was turned toward his rival. With his one eye the elder saw the opportunity. He
+darted in low and closed with his fangs. It was a long, ripping slash, and deep
+as well. His teeth, in passing, burst the wall of the great vein of the throat.
+Then he leaped clear.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The young leader snarled terribly, but his snarl broke midmost into a tickling
+cough. Bleeding and coughing, already stricken, he sprang at the elder and
+fought while life faded from him, his legs going weak beneath him, the light of
+day dulling on his eyes, his blows and springs falling shorter and shorter.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And all the while the she-wolf sat on her haunches and smiled. She was made
+glad in vague ways by the battle, for this was the love-making of the Wild, the
+sex-tragedy of the natural world that was tragedy only to those that died. To
+those that survived it was not tragedy, but realisation and achievement.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+When the young leader lay in the snow and moved no more, One Eye stalked over
+to the she-wolf. His carriage was one of mingled triumph and caution. He was
+plainly expectant of a rebuff, and he was just as plainly surprised when her
+teeth did not flash out at him in anger. For the first time she met him with a
+kindly manner. She sniffed noses with him, and even condescended to leap about
+and frisk and play with him in quite puppyish fashion. And he, for all his grey
+years and sage experience, behaved quite as puppyishly and even a little more
+foolishly.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Forgotten already were the vanquished rivals and the love-tale red-written on
+the snow. Forgotten, save once, when old One Eye stopped for a moment to lick
+his stiffening wounds. Then it was that his lips half writhed into a snarl, and
+the hair of his neck and shoulders involuntarily bristled, while he half
+crouched for a spring, his claws spasmodically clutching into the snow-surface
+for firmer footing. But it was all forgotten the next moment, as he sprang
+after the she-wolf, who was coyly leading him a chase through the woods.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+After that they ran side by side, like good friends who have come to an
+understanding. The days passed by, and they kept together, hunting their meat
+and killing and eating it in common. After a time the she-wolf began to grow
+restless. She seemed to be searching for something that she could not find. The
+hollows under fallen trees seemed to attract her, and she spent much time
+nosing about among the larger snow-piled crevices in the rocks and in the caves
+of overhanging banks. Old One Eye was not interested at all, but he followed
+her good-naturedly in her quest, and when her investigations in particular
+places were unusually protracted, he would lie down and wait until she was
+ready to go on.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+They did not remain in one place, but travelled across country until they
+regained the Mackenzie River, down which they slowly went, leaving it often to
+hunt game along the small streams that entered it, but always returning to it
+again. Sometimes they chanced upon other wolves, usually in pairs; but there
+was no friendliness of intercourse displayed on either side, no gladness at
+meeting, no desire to return to the pack-formation. Several times they
+encountered solitary wolves. These were always males, and they were pressingly
+insistent on joining with One Eye and his mate. This he resented, and when she
+stood shoulder to shoulder with him, bristling and showing her teeth, the
+aspiring solitary ones would back off, turn-tail, and continue on their lonely
+way.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+One moonlight night, running through the quiet forest, One Eye suddenly halted.
+His muzzle went up, his tail stiffened, and his nostrils dilated as he scented
+the air. One foot also he held up, after the manner of a dog. He was not
+satisfied, and he continued to smell the air, striving to understand the
+message borne upon it to him. One careless sniff had satisfied his mate, and
+she trotted on to reassure him. Though he followed her, he was still dubious,
+and he could not forbear an occasional halt in order more carefully to study
+the warning.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She crept out cautiously on the edge of a large open space in the midst of the
+trees. For some time she stood alone. Then One Eye, creeping and crawling,
+every sense on the alert, every hair radiating infinite suspicion, joined her.
+They stood side by side, watching and listening and smelling.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+To their ears came the sounds of dogs wrangling and scuffling, the guttural
+cries of men, the sharper voices of scolding women, and once the shrill and
+plaintive cry of a child. With the exception of the huge bulks of the
+skin-lodges, little could be seen save the flames of the fire, broken by the
+movements of intervening bodies, and the smoke rising slowly on the quiet air.
+But to their nostrils came the myriad smells of an Indian camp, carrying a
+story that was largely incomprehensible to One Eye, but every detail of which
+the she-wolf knew.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She was strangely stirred, and sniffed and sniffed with an increasing delight.
+But old One Eye was doubtful. He betrayed his apprehension, and started
+tentatively to go. She turned and touched his neck with her muzzle in a
+reassuring way, then regarded the camp again. A new wistfulness was in her
+face, but it was not the wistfulness of hunger. She was thrilling to a desire
+that urged her to go forward, to be in closer to that fire, to be squabbling
+with the dogs, and to be avoiding and dodging the stumbling feet of men.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+One Eye moved impatiently beside her; her unrest came back upon her, and she
+knew again her pressing need to find the thing for which she searched. She
+turned and trotted back into the forest, to the great relief of One Eye, who
+trotted a little to the fore until they were well within the shelter of the
+trees.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+As they slid along, noiseless as shadows, in the moonlight, they came upon a
+run-way. Both noses went down to the footprints in the snow. These footprints
+were very fresh. One Eye ran ahead cautiously, his mate at his heels. The broad
+pads of their feet were spread wide and in contact with the snow were like
+velvet. One Eye caught sight of a dim movement of white in the midst of the
+white. His sliding gait had been deceptively swift, but it was as nothing to
+the speed at which he now ran. Before him was bounding the faint patch of white
+he had discovered.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+They were running along a narrow alley flanked on either side by a growth of
+young spruce. Through the trees the mouth of the alley could be seen, opening
+out on a moonlit glade. Old One Eye was rapidly overhauling the fleeing shape
+of white. Bound by bound he gained. Now he was upon it. One leap more and his
+teeth would be sinking into it. But that leap was never made. High in the air,
+and straight up, soared the shape of white, now a struggling snowshoe rabbit
+that leaped and bounded, executing a fantastic dance there above him in the air
+and never once returning to earth.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+One Eye sprang back with a snort of sudden fright, then shrank down to the snow
+and crouched, snarling threats at this thing of fear he did not understand. But
+the she-wolf coolly thrust past him. She poised for a moment, then sprang for
+the dancing rabbit. She, too, soared high, but not so high as the quarry, and
+her teeth clipped emptily together with a metallic snap. She made another leap,
+and another.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Her mate had slowly relaxed from his crouch and was watching her. He now
+evinced displeasure at her repeated failures, and himself made a mighty spring
+upward. His teeth closed upon the rabbit, and he bore it back to earth with
+him. But at the same time there was a suspicious crackling movement beside him,
+and his astonished eye saw a young spruce sapling bending down above him to
+strike him. His jaws let go their grip, and he leaped backward to escape this
+strange danger, his lips drawn back from his fangs, his throat snarling, every
+hair bristling with rage and fright. And in that moment the sapling reared its
+slender length upright and the rabbit soared dancing in the air again.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The she-wolf was angry. She sank her fangs into her mate&rsquo;s shoulder in
+reproof; and he, frightened, unaware of what constituted this new onslaught,
+struck back ferociously and in still greater fright, ripping down the side of
+the she-wolf&rsquo;s muzzle. For him to resent such reproof was equally
+unexpected to her, and she sprang upon him in snarling indignation. Then he
+discovered his mistake and tried to placate her. But she proceeded to punish
+him roundly, until he gave over all attempts at placation, and whirled in a
+circle, his head away from her, his shoulders receiving the punishment of her
+teeth.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+In the meantime the rabbit danced above them in the air. The she-wolf sat down
+in the snow, and old One Eye, now more in fear of his mate than of the
+mysterious sapling, again sprang for the rabbit. As he sank back with it
+between his teeth, he kept his eye on the sapling. As before, it followed him
+back to earth. He crouched down under the impending blow, his hair bristling,
+but his teeth still keeping tight hold of the rabbit. But the blow did not
+fall. The sapling remained bent above him. When he moved it moved, and he
+growled at it through his clenched jaws; when he remained still, it remained
+still, and he concluded it was safer to continue remaining still. Yet the warm
+blood of the rabbit tasted good in his mouth.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+It was his mate who relieved him from the quandary in which he found himself.
+She took the rabbit from him, and while the sapling swayed and teetered
+threateningly above her she calmly gnawed off the rabbit&rsquo;s head. At once
+the sapling shot up, and after that gave no more trouble, remaining in the
+decorous and perpendicular position in which nature had intended it to grow.
+Then, between them, the she-wolf and One Eye devoured the game which the
+mysterious sapling had caught for them.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+There were other run-ways and alleys where rabbits were hanging in the air, and
+the wolf-pair prospected them all, the she-wolf leading the way, old One Eye
+following and observant, learning the method of robbing snares&mdash;a
+knowledge destined to stand him in good stead in the days to come.
+</p>
+
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<h3><a name="chap05"></a>CHAPTER II<br/>
+THE LAIR</h3>
+
+<p>
+For two days the she-wolf and One Eye hung about the Indian camp. He was
+worried and apprehensive, yet the camp lured his mate and she was loath to
+depart. But when, one morning, the air was rent with the report of a rifle
+close at hand, and a bullet smashed against a tree trunk several inches from
+One Eye&rsquo;s head, they hesitated no more, but went off on a long, swinging
+lope that put quick miles between them and the danger.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+They did not go far&mdash;a couple of days&rsquo; journey. The she-wolf&rsquo;s
+need to find the thing for which she searched had now become imperative. She
+was getting very heavy, and could run but slowly. Once, in the pursuit of a
+rabbit, which she ordinarily would have caught with ease, she gave over and lay
+down and rested. One Eye came to her; but when he touched her neck gently with
+his muzzle she snapped at him with such quick fierceness that he tumbled over
+backward and cut a ridiculous figure in his effort to escape her teeth. Her
+temper was now shorter than ever; but he had become more patient than ever and
+more solicitous.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And then she found the thing for which she sought. It was a few miles up a
+small stream that in the summer time flowed into the Mackenzie, but that then
+was frozen over and frozen down to its rocky bottom&mdash;a dead stream of
+solid white from source to mouth. The she-wolf was trotting wearily along, her
+mate well in advance, when she came upon the overhanging, high clay-bank. She
+turned aside and trotted over to it. The wear and tear of spring storms and
+melting snows had underwashed the bank and in one place had made a small cave
+out of a narrow fissure.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She paused at the mouth of the cave and looked the wall over carefully. Then,
+on one side and the other, she ran along the base of the wall to where its
+abrupt bulk merged from the softer-lined landscape. Returning to the cave, she
+entered its narrow mouth. For a short three feet she was compelled to crouch,
+then the walls widened and rose higher in a little round chamber nearly six
+feet in diameter. The roof barely cleared her head. It was dry and cosey. She
+inspected it with painstaking care, while One Eye, who had returned, stood in
+the entrance and patiently watched her. She dropped her head, with her nose to
+the ground and directed toward a point near to her closely bunched feet, and
+around this point she circled several times; then, with a tired sigh that was
+almost a grunt, she curled her body in, relaxed her legs, and dropped down, her
+head toward the entrance. One Eye, with pointed, interested ears, laughed at
+her, and beyond, outlined against the white light, she could see the brush of
+his tail waving good-naturedly. Her own ears, with a snuggling movement, laid
+their sharp points backward and down against the head for a moment, while her
+mouth opened and her tongue lolled peaceably out, and in this way she expressed
+that she was pleased and satisfied.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+One Eye was hungry. Though he lay down in the entrance and slept, his sleep was
+fitful. He kept awaking and cocking his ears at the bright world without, where
+the April sun was blazing across the snow. When he dozed, upon his ears would
+steal the faint whispers of hidden trickles of running water, and he would
+rouse and listen intently. The sun had come back, and all the awakening
+Northland world was calling to him. Life was stirring. The feel of spring was
+in the air, the feel of growing life under the snow, of sap ascending in the
+trees, of buds bursting the shackles of the frost.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He cast anxious glances at his mate, but she showed no desire to get up. He
+looked outside, and half a dozen snow-birds fluttered across his field of
+vision. He started to get up, then looked back to his mate again, and settled
+down and dozed. A shrill and minute singing stole upon his hearing. Once, and
+twice, he sleepily brushed his nose with his paw. Then he woke up. There,
+buzzing in the air at the tip of his nose, was a lone mosquito. It was a
+full-grown mosquito, one that had lain frozen in a dry log all winter and that
+had now been thawed out by the sun. He could resist the call of the world no
+longer. Besides, he was hungry.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He crawled over to his mate and tried to persuade her to get up. But she only
+snarled at him, and he walked out alone into the bright sunshine to find the
+snow-surface soft under foot and the travelling difficult. He went up the
+frozen bed of the stream, where the snow, shaded by the trees, was yet hard and
+crystalline. He was gone eight hours, and he came back through the darkness
+hungrier than when he had started. He had found game, but he had not caught it.
+He had broken through the melting snow crust, and wallowed, while the snowshoe
+rabbits had skimmed along on top lightly as ever.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He paused at the mouth of the cave with a sudden shock of suspicion. Faint,
+strange sounds came from within. They were sounds not made by his mate, and yet
+they were remotely familiar. He bellied cautiously inside and was met by a
+warning snarl from the she-wolf. This he received without perturbation, though
+he obeyed it by keeping his distance; but he remained interested in the other
+sounds&mdash;faint, muffled sobbings and slubberings.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+His mate warned him irritably away, and he curled up and slept in the entrance.
+When morning came and a dim light pervaded the lair, he again sought after the
+source of the remotely familiar sounds. There was a new note in his
+mate&rsquo;s warning snarl. It was a jealous note, and he was very careful in
+keeping a respectful distance. Nevertheless, he made out, sheltering between
+her legs against the length of her body, five strange little bundles of life,
+very feeble, very helpless, making tiny whimpering noises, with eyes that did
+not open to the light. He was surprised. It was not the first time in his long
+and successful life that this thing had happened. It had happened many times,
+yet each time it was as fresh a surprise as ever to him.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+His mate looked at him anxiously. Every little while she emitted a low growl,
+and at times, when it seemed to her he approached too near, the growl shot up
+in her throat to a sharp snarl. Of her own experience she had no memory of the
+thing happening; but in her instinct, which was the experience of all the
+mothers of wolves, there lurked a memory of fathers that had eaten their
+new-born and helpless progeny. It manifested itself as a fear strong within
+her, that made her prevent One Eye from more closely inspecting the cubs he had
+fathered.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But there was no danger. Old One Eye was feeling the urge of an impulse, that
+was, in turn, an instinct that had come down to him from all the fathers of
+wolves. He did not question it, nor puzzle over it. It was there, in the fibre
+of his being; and it was the most natural thing in the world that he should
+obey it by turning his back on his new-born family and by trotting out and away
+on the meat-trail whereby he lived.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Five or six miles from the lair, the stream divided, its forks going off among
+the mountains at a right angle. Here, leading up the left fork, he came upon a
+fresh track. He smelled it and found it so recent that he crouched swiftly, and
+looked in the direction in which it disappeared. Then he turned deliberately
+and took the right fork. The footprint was much larger than the one his own
+feet made, and he knew that in the wake of such a trail there was little meat
+for him.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Half a mile up the right fork, his quick ears caught the sound of gnawing
+teeth. He stalked the quarry and found it to be a porcupine, standing upright
+against a tree and trying his teeth on the bark. One Eye approached carefully
+but hopelessly. He knew the breed, though he had never met it so far north
+before; and never in his long life had porcupine served him for a meal. But he
+had long since learned that there was such a thing as Chance, or Opportunity,
+and he continued to draw near. There was never any telling what might happen,
+for with live things events were somehow always happening differently.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The porcupine rolled itself into a ball, radiating long, sharp needles in all
+directions that defied attack. In his youth One Eye had once sniffed too near a
+similar, apparently inert ball of quills, and had the tail flick out suddenly
+in his face. One quill he had carried away in his muzzle, where it had remained
+for weeks, a rankling flame, until it finally worked out. So he lay down, in a
+comfortable crouching position, his nose fully a foot away, and out of the line
+of the tail. Thus he waited, keeping perfectly quiet. There was no telling.
+Something might happen. The porcupine might unroll. There might be opportunity
+for a deft and ripping thrust of paw into the tender, unguarded belly.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But at the end of half an hour he arose, growled wrathfully at the motionless
+ball, and trotted on. He had waited too often and futilely in the past for
+porcupines to unroll, to waste any more time. He continued up the right fork.
+The day wore along, and nothing rewarded his hunt.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The urge of his awakened instinct of fatherhood was strong upon him. He must
+find meat. In the afternoon he blundered upon a ptarmigan. He came out of a
+thicket and found himself face to face with the slow-witted bird. It was
+sitting on a log, not a foot beyond the end of his nose. Each saw the other.
+The bird made a startled rise, but he struck it with his paw, and smashed it
+down to earth, then pounced upon it, and caught it in his teeth as it scuttled
+across the snow trying to rise in the air again. As his teeth crunched through
+the tender flesh and fragile bones, he began naturally to eat. Then he
+remembered, and, turning on the back-track, started for home, carrying the
+ptarmigan in his mouth.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+A mile above the forks, running velvet-footed as was his custom, a gliding
+shadow that cautiously prospected each new vista of the trail, he came upon
+later imprints of the large tracks he had discovered in the early morning. As
+the track led his way, he followed, prepared to meet the maker of it at every
+turn of the stream.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He slid his head around a corner of rock, where began an unusually large bend
+in the stream, and his quick eyes made out something that sent him crouching
+swiftly down. It was the maker of the track, a large female lynx. She was
+crouching as he had crouched once that day, in front of her the tight-rolled
+ball of quills. If he had been a gliding shadow before, he now became the ghost
+of such a shadow, as he crept and circled around, and came up well to leeward
+of the silent, motionless pair.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He lay down in the snow, depositing the ptarmigan beside him, and with eyes
+peering through the needles of a low-growing spruce he watched the play of life
+before him&mdash;the waiting lynx and the waiting porcupine, each intent on
+life; and, such was the curiousness of the game, the way of life for one lay in
+the eating of the other, and the way of life for the other lay in being not
+eaten. While old One Eye, the wolf crouching in the covert, played his part,
+too, in the game, waiting for some strange freak of Chance, that might help him
+on the meat-trail which was his way of life.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Half an hour passed, an hour; and nothing happened. The ball of quills might
+have been a stone for all it moved; the lynx might have been frozen to marble;
+and old One Eye might have been dead. Yet all three animals were keyed to a
+tenseness of living that was almost painful, and scarcely ever would it come to
+them to be more alive than they were then in their seeming petrifaction.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+One Eye moved slightly and peered forth with increased eagerness. Something was
+happening. The porcupine had at last decided that its enemy had gone away.
+Slowly, cautiously, it was unrolling its ball of impregnable armour. It was
+agitated by no tremor of anticipation. Slowly, slowly, the bristling ball
+straightened out and lengthened. One Eye watching, felt a sudden moistness in
+his mouth and a drooling of saliva, involuntary, excited by the living meat
+that was spreading itself like a repast before him.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Not quite entirely had the porcupine unrolled when it discovered its enemy. In
+that instant the lynx struck. The blow was like a flash of light. The paw, with
+rigid claws curving like talons, shot under the tender belly and came back with
+a swift ripping movement. Had the porcupine been entirely unrolled, or had it
+not discovered its enemy a fraction of a second before the blow was struck, the
+paw would have escaped unscathed; but a side-flick of the tail sank sharp
+quills into it as it was withdrawn.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Everything had happened at once&mdash;the blow, the counter-blow, the squeal of
+agony from the porcupine, the big cat&rsquo;s squall of sudden hurt and
+astonishment. One Eye half arose in his excitement, his ears up, his tail
+straight out and quivering behind him. The lynx&rsquo;s bad temper got the best
+of her. She sprang savagely at the thing that had hurt her. But the porcupine,
+squealing and grunting, with disrupted anatomy trying feebly to roll up into
+its ball-protection, flicked out its tail again, and again the big cat squalled
+with hurt and astonishment. Then she fell to backing away and sneezing, her
+nose bristling with quills like a monstrous pin-cushion. She brushed her nose
+with her paws, trying to dislodge the fiery darts, thrust it into the snow, and
+rubbed it against twigs and branches, and all the time leaping about, ahead,
+sidewise, up and down, in a frenzy of pain and fright.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She sneezed continually, and her stub of a tail was doing its best toward
+lashing about by giving quick, violent jerks. She quit her antics, and quieted
+down for a long minute. One Eye watched. And even he could not repress a start
+and an involuntary bristling of hair along his back when she suddenly leaped,
+without warning, straight up in the air, at the same time emitting a long and
+most terrible squall. Then she sprang away, up the trail, squalling with every
+leap she made.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+It was not until her racket had faded away in the distance and died out that
+One Eye ventured forth. He walked as delicately as though all the snow were
+carpeted with porcupine quills, erect and ready to pierce the soft pads of his
+feet. The porcupine met his approach with a furious squealing and a clashing of
+its long teeth. It had managed to roll up in a ball again, but it was not quite
+the old compact ball; its muscles were too much torn for that. It had been
+ripped almost in half, and was still bleeding profusely.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+One Eye scooped out mouthfuls of the blood-soaked snow, and chewed and tasted
+and swallowed. This served as a relish, and his hunger increased mightily; but
+he was too old in the world to forget his caution. He waited. He lay down and
+waited, while the porcupine grated its teeth and uttered grunts and sobs and
+occasional sharp little squeals. In a little while, One Eye noticed that the
+quills were drooping and that a great quivering had set up. The quivering came
+to an end suddenly. There was a final defiant clash of the long teeth. Then all
+the quills drooped quite down, and the body relaxed and moved no more.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+With a nervous, shrinking paw, One Eye stretched out the porcupine to its full
+length and turned it over on its back. Nothing had happened. It was surely
+dead. He studied it intently for a moment, then took a careful grip with his
+teeth and started off down the stream, partly carrying, partly dragging the
+porcupine, with head turned to the side so as to avoid stepping on the prickly
+mass. He recollected something, dropped the burden, and trotted back to where
+he had left the ptarmigan. He did not hesitate a moment. He knew clearly what
+was to be done, and this he did by promptly eating the ptarmigan. Then he
+returned and took up his burden.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+When he dragged the result of his day&rsquo;s hunt into the cave, the she-wolf
+inspected it, turned her muzzle to him, and lightly licked him on the neck. But
+the next instant she was warning him away from the cubs with a snarl that was
+less harsh than usual and that was more apologetic than menacing. Her
+instinctive fear of the father of her progeny was toning down. He was behaving
+as a wolf-father should, and manifesting no unholy desire to devour the young
+lives she had brought into the world.
+</p>
+
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<h3><a name="chap06"></a>CHAPTER III<br/>
+THE GREY CUB</h3>
+
+<p>
+He was different from his brothers and sisters. Their hair already betrayed the
+reddish hue inherited from their mother, the she-wolf; while he alone, in this
+particular, took after his father. He was the one little grey cub of the
+litter. He had bred true to the straight wolf-stock&mdash;in fact, he had bred
+true to old One Eye himself, physically, with but a single exception, and that
+was he had two eyes to his father&rsquo;s one.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The grey cub&rsquo;s eyes had not been open long, yet already he could see with
+steady clearness. And while his eyes were still closed, he had felt, tasted,
+and smelled. He knew his two brothers and his two sisters very well. He had
+begun to romp with them in a feeble, awkward way, and even to squabble, his
+little throat vibrating with a queer rasping noise (the forerunner of the
+growl), as he worked himself into a passion. And long before his eyes had
+opened he had learned by touch, taste, and smell to know his mother&mdash;a
+fount of warmth and liquid food and tenderness. She possessed a gentle,
+caressing tongue that soothed him when it passed over his soft little body, and
+that impelled him to snuggle close against her and to doze off to sleep.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Most of the first month of his life had been passed thus in sleeping; but now
+he could see quite well, and he stayed awake for longer periods of time, and he
+was coming to learn his world quite well. His world was gloomy; but he did not
+know that, for he knew no other world. It was dim-lighted; but his eyes had
+never had to adjust themselves to any other light. His world was very small.
+Its limits were the walls of the lair; but as he had no knowledge of the wide
+world outside, he was never oppressed by the narrow confines of his existence.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But he had early discovered that one wall of his world was different from the
+rest. This was the mouth of the cave and the source of light. He had discovered
+that it was different from the other walls long before he had any thoughts of
+his own, any conscious volitions. It had been an irresistible attraction before
+ever his eyes opened and looked upon it. The light from it had beat upon his
+sealed lids, and the eyes and the optic nerves had pulsated to little,
+sparklike flashes, warm-coloured and strangely pleasing. The life of his body,
+and of every fibre of his body, the life that was the very substance of his
+body and that was apart from his own personal life, had yearned toward this
+light and urged his body toward it in the same way that the cunning chemistry
+of a plant urges it toward the sun.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Always, in the beginning, before his conscious life dawned, he had crawled
+toward the mouth of the cave. And in this his brothers and sisters were one
+with him. Never, in that period, did any of them crawl toward the dark corners
+of the back-wall. The light drew them as if they were plants; the chemistry of
+the life that composed them demanded the light as a necessity of being; and
+their little puppet-bodies crawled blindly and chemically, like the tendrils of
+a vine. Later on, when each developed individuality and became personally
+conscious of impulsions and desires, the attraction of the light increased.
+They were always crawling and sprawling toward it, and being driven back from
+it by their mother.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+It was in this way that the grey cub learned other attributes of his mother
+than the soft, soothing, tongue. In his insistent crawling toward the light, he
+discovered in her a nose that with a sharp nudge administered rebuke, and
+later, a paw, that crushed him down and rolled him over and over with swift,
+calculating stroke. Thus he learned hurt; and on top of it he learned to avoid
+hurt, first, by not incurring the risk of it; and second, when he had incurred
+the risk, by dodging and by retreating. These were conscious actions, and were
+the results of his first generalisations upon the world. Before that he had
+recoiled automatically from hurt, as he had crawled automatically toward the
+light. After that he recoiled from hurt because he <i>knew</i> that it was
+hurt.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He was a fierce little cub. So were his brothers and sisters. It was to be
+expected. He was a carnivorous animal. He came of a breed of meat-killers and
+meat-eaters. His father and mother lived wholly upon meat. The milk he had
+sucked with his first flickering life, was milk transformed directly from meat,
+and now, at a month old, when his eyes had been open for but a week, he was
+beginning himself to eat meat&mdash;meat half-digested by the she-wolf and
+disgorged for the five growing cubs that already made too great demand upon her
+breast.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But he was, further, the fiercest of the litter. He could make a louder rasping
+growl than any of them. His tiny rages were much more terrible than theirs. It
+was he that first learned the trick of rolling a fellow-cub over with a cunning
+paw-stroke. And it was he that first gripped another cub by the ear and pulled
+and tugged and growled through jaws tight-clenched. And certainly it was he
+that caused the mother the most trouble in keeping her litter from the mouth of
+the cave.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The fascination of the light for the grey cub increased from day to day. He was
+perpetually departing on yard-long adventures toward the cave&rsquo;s entrance,
+and as perpetually being driven back. Only he did not know it for an entrance.
+He did not know anything about entrances&mdash;passages whereby one goes from
+one place to another place. He did not know any other place, much less of a way
+to get there. So to him the entrance of the cave was a wall&mdash;a wall of
+light. As the sun was to the outside dweller, this wall was to him the sun of
+his world. It attracted him as a candle attracts a moth. He was always striving
+to attain it. The life that was so swiftly expanding within him, urged him
+continually toward the wall of light. The life that was within him knew that it
+was the one way out, the way he was predestined to tread. But he himself did
+not know anything about it. He did not know there was any outside at all.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+There was one strange thing about this wall of light. His father (he had
+already come to recognise his father as the one other dweller in the world, a
+creature like his mother, who slept near the light and was a bringer of
+meat)&mdash;his father had a way of walking right into the white far wall and
+disappearing. The grey cub could not understand this. Though never permitted by
+his mother to approach that wall, he had approached the other walls, and
+encountered hard obstruction on the end of his tender nose. This hurt. And
+after several such adventures, he left the walls alone. Without thinking about
+it, he accepted this disappearing into the wall as a peculiarity of his father,
+as milk and half-digested meat were peculiarities of his mother.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+In fact, the grey cub was not given to thinking&mdash;at least, to the kind of
+thinking customary of men. His brain worked in dim ways. Yet his conclusions
+were as sharp and distinct as those achieved by men. He had a method of
+accepting things, without questioning the why and wherefore. In reality, this
+was the act of classification. He was never disturbed over why a thing
+happened. How it happened was sufficient for him. Thus, when he had bumped his
+nose on the back-wall a few times, he accepted that he would not disappear into
+walls. In the same way he accepted that his father could disappear into walls.
+But he was not in the least disturbed by desire to find out the reason for the
+difference between his father and himself. Logic and physics were no part of
+his mental make-up.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Like most creatures of the Wild, he early experienced famine. There came a time
+when not only did the meat-supply cease, but the milk no longer came from his
+mother&rsquo;s breast. At first, the cubs whimpered and cried, but for the most
+part they slept. It was not long before they were reduced to a coma of hunger.
+There were no more spats and squabbles, no more tiny rages nor attempts at
+growling; while the adventures toward the far white wall ceased altogether. The
+cubs slept, while the life that was in them flickered and died down.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+One Eye was desperate. He ranged far and wide, and slept but little in the lair
+that had now become cheerless and miserable. The she-wolf, too, left her litter
+and went out in search of meat. In the first days after the birth of the cubs,
+One Eye had journeyed several times back to the Indian camp and robbed the
+rabbit snares; but, with the melting of the snow and the opening of the
+streams, the Indian camp had moved away, and that source of supply was closed
+to him.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+When the grey cub came back to life and again took interest in the far white
+wall, he found that the population of his world had been reduced. Only one
+sister remained to him. The rest were gone. As he grew stronger, he found
+himself compelled to play alone, for the sister no longer lifted her head nor
+moved about. His little body rounded out with the meat he now ate; but the food
+had come too late for her. She slept continuously, a tiny skeleton flung round
+with skin in which the flame flickered lower and lower and at last went out.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Then there came a time when the grey cub no longer saw his father appearing and
+disappearing in the wall nor lying down asleep in the entrance. This had
+happened at the end of a second and less severe famine. The she-wolf knew why
+One Eye never came back, but there was no way by which she could tell what she
+had seen to the grey cub. Hunting herself for meat, up the left fork of the
+stream where lived the lynx, she had followed a day-old trail of One Eye. And
+she had found him, or what remained of him, at the end of the trail. There were
+many signs of the battle that had been fought, and of the lynx&rsquo;s
+withdrawal to her lair after having won the victory. Before she went away, the
+she-wolf had found this lair, but the signs told her that the lynx was inside,
+and she had not dared to venture in.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+After that, the she-wolf in her hunting avoided the left fork. For she knew
+that in the lynx&rsquo;s lair was a litter of kittens, and she knew the lynx
+for a fierce, bad-tempered creature and a terrible fighter. It was all very
+well for half a dozen wolves to drive a lynx, spitting and bristling, up a
+tree; but it was quite a different matter for a lone wolf to encounter a
+lynx&mdash;especially when the lynx was known to have a litter of hungry
+kittens at her back.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But the Wild is the Wild, and motherhood is motherhood, at all times fiercely
+protective whether in the Wild or out of it; and the time was to come when the
+she-wolf, for her grey cub&rsquo;s sake, would venture the left fork, and the
+lair in the rocks, and the lynx&rsquo;s wrath.
+</p>
+
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<h3><a name="chap07"></a>CHAPTER IV<br/>
+THE WALL OF THE WORLD</h3>
+
+<p>
+By the time his mother began leaving the cave on hunting expeditions, the cub
+had learned well the law that forbade his approaching the entrance. Not only
+had this law been forcibly and many times impressed on him by his
+mother&rsquo;s nose and paw, but in him the instinct of fear was developing.
+Never, in his brief cave-life, had he encountered anything of which to be
+afraid. Yet fear was in him. It had come down to him from a remote ancestry
+through a thousand thousand lives. It was a heritage he had received directly
+from One Eye and the she-wolf; but to them, in turn, it had been passed down
+through all the generations of wolves that had gone before. Fear!&mdash;that
+legacy of the Wild which no animal may escape nor exchange for pottage.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+So the grey cub knew fear, though he knew not the stuff of which fear was made.
+Possibly he accepted it as one of the restrictions of life. For he had already
+learned that there were such restrictions. Hunger he had known; and when he
+could not appease his hunger he had felt restriction. The hard obstruction of
+the cave-wall, the sharp nudge of his mother&rsquo;s nose, the smashing stroke
+of her paw, the hunger unappeased of several famines, had borne in upon him
+that all was not freedom in the world, that to life there was limitations and
+restraints. These limitations and restraints were laws. To be obedient to them
+was to escape hurt and make for happiness.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He did not reason the question out in this man fashion. He merely classified
+the things that hurt and the things that did not hurt. And after such
+classification he avoided the things that hurt, the restrictions and
+restraints, in order to enjoy the satisfactions and the remunerations of life.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Thus it was that in obedience to the law laid down by his mother, and in
+obedience to the law of that unknown and nameless thing, fear, he kept away
+from the mouth of the cave. It remained to him a white wall of light. When his
+mother was absent, he slept most of the time, while during the intervals that
+he was awake he kept very quiet, suppressing the whimpering cries that tickled
+in his throat and strove for noise.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Once, lying awake, he heard a strange sound in the white wall. He did not know
+that it was a wolverine, standing outside, all a-trembling with its own daring,
+and cautiously scenting out the contents of the cave. The cub knew only that
+the sniff was strange, a something unclassified, therefore unknown and
+terrible&mdash;for the unknown was one of the chief elements that went into the
+making of fear.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The hair bristled upon the grey cub&rsquo;s back, but it bristled silently. How
+was he to know that this thing that sniffed was a thing at which to bristle? It
+was not born of any knowledge of his, yet it was the visible expression of the
+fear that was in him, and for which, in his own life, there was no accounting.
+But fear was accompanied by another instinct&mdash;that of concealment. The cub
+was in a frenzy of terror, yet he lay without movement or sound, frozen,
+petrified into immobility, to all appearances dead. His mother, coming home,
+growled as she smelt the wolverine&rsquo;s track, and bounded into the cave and
+licked and nozzled him with undue vehemence of affection. And the cub felt that
+somehow he had escaped a great hurt.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But there were other forces at work in the cub, the greatest of which was
+growth. Instinct and law demanded of him obedience. But growth demanded
+disobedience. His mother and fear impelled him to keep away from the white
+wall. Growth is life, and life is for ever destined to make for light. So there
+was no damming up the tide of life that was rising within him&mdash;rising with
+every mouthful of meat he swallowed, with every breath he drew. In the end, one
+day, fear and obedience were swept away by the rush of life, and the cub
+straddled and sprawled toward the entrance.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Unlike any other wall with which he had had experience, this wall seemed to
+recede from him as he approached. No hard surface collided with the tender
+little nose he thrust out tentatively before him. The substance of the wall
+seemed as permeable and yielding as light. And as condition, in his eyes, had
+the seeming of form, so he entered into what had been wall to him and bathed in
+the substance that composed it.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+It was bewildering. He was sprawling through solidity. And ever the light grew
+brighter. Fear urged him to go back, but growth drove him on. Suddenly he found
+himself at the mouth of the cave. The wall, inside which he had thought
+himself, as suddenly leaped back before him to an immeasurable distance. The
+light had become painfully bright. He was dazzled by it. Likewise he was made
+dizzy by this abrupt and tremendous extension of space. Automatically, his eyes
+were adjusting themselves to the brightness, focusing themselves to meet the
+increased distance of objects. At first, the wall had leaped beyond his vision.
+He now saw it again; but it had taken upon itself a remarkable remoteness.
+Also, its appearance had changed. It was now a variegated wall, composed of the
+trees that fringed the stream, the opposing mountain that towered above the
+trees, and the sky that out-towered the mountain.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+A great fear came upon him. This was more of the terrible unknown. He crouched
+down on the lip of the cave and gazed out on the world. He was very much
+afraid. Because it was unknown, it was hostile to him. Therefore the hair stood
+up on end along his back and his lips wrinkled weakly in an attempt at a
+ferocious and intimidating snarl. Out of his puniness and fright he challenged
+and menaced the whole wide world.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Nothing happened. He continued to gaze, and in his interest he forgot to snarl.
+Also, he forgot to be afraid. For the time, fear had been routed by growth,
+while growth had assumed the guise of curiosity. He began to notice near
+objects&mdash;an open portion of the stream that flashed in the sun, the
+blasted pine-tree that stood at the base of the slope, and the slope itself,
+that ran right up to him and ceased two feet beneath the lip of the cave on
+which he crouched.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Now the grey cub had lived all his days on a level floor. He had never
+experienced the hurt of a fall. He did not know what a fall was. So he stepped
+boldly out upon the air. His hind-legs still rested on the cave-lip, so he fell
+forward head downward. The earth struck him a harsh blow on the nose that made
+him yelp. Then he began rolling down the slope, over and over. He was in a
+panic of terror. The unknown had caught him at last. It had gripped savagely
+hold of him and was about to wreak upon him some terrific hurt. Growth was now
+routed by fear, and he ki-yi&rsquo;d like any frightened puppy.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The unknown bore him on he knew not to what frightful hurt, and he yelped and
+ki-yi&rsquo;d unceasingly. This was a different proposition from crouching in
+frozen fear while the unknown lurked just alongside. Now the unknown had caught
+tight hold of him. Silence would do no good. Besides, it was not fear, but
+terror, that convulsed him.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But the slope grew more gradual, and its base was grass-covered. Here the cub
+lost momentum. When at last he came to a stop, he gave one last agonised yell
+and then a long, whimpering wail. Also, and quite as a matter of course, as
+though in his life he had already made a thousand toilets, he proceeded to lick
+away the dry clay that soiled him.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+After that he sat up and gazed about him, as might the first man of the earth
+who landed upon Mars. The cub had broken through the wall of the world, the
+unknown had let go its hold of him, and here he was without hurt. But the first
+man on Mars would have experienced less unfamiliarity than did he. Without any
+antecedent knowledge, without any warning whatever that such existed, he found
+himself an explorer in a totally new world.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Now that the terrible unknown had let go of him, he forgot that the unknown had
+any terrors. He was aware only of curiosity in all the things about him. He
+inspected the grass beneath him, the moss-berry plant just beyond, and the dead
+trunk of the blasted pine that stood on the edge of an open space among the
+trees. A squirrel, running around the base of the trunk, came full upon him,
+and gave him a great fright. He cowered down and snarled. But the squirrel was
+as badly scared. It ran up the tree, and from a point of safety chattered back
+savagely.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+This helped the cub&rsquo;s courage, and though the woodpecker he next
+encountered gave him a start, he proceeded confidently on his way. Such was his
+confidence, that when a moose-bird impudently hopped up to him, he reached out
+at it with a playful paw. The result was a sharp peck on the end of his nose
+that made him cower down and ki-yi. The noise he made was too much for the
+moose-bird, who sought safety in flight.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But the cub was learning. His misty little mind had already made an unconscious
+classification. There were live things and things not alive. Also, he must
+watch out for the live things. The things not alive remained always in one
+place, but the live things moved about, and there was no telling what they
+might do. The thing to expect of them was the unexpected, and for this he must
+be prepared.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He travelled very clumsily. He ran into sticks and things. A twig that he
+thought a long way off, would the next instant hit him on the nose or rake
+along his ribs. There were inequalities of surface. Sometimes he overstepped
+and stubbed his nose. Quite as often he understepped and stubbed his feet. Then
+there were the pebbles and stones that turned under him when he trod upon them;
+and from them he came to know that the things not alive were not all in the
+same state of stable equilibrium as was his cave&mdash;also, that small things
+not alive were more liable than large things to fall down or turn over. But
+with every mishap he was learning. The longer he walked, the better he walked.
+He was adjusting himself. He was learning to calculate his own muscular
+movements, to know his physical limitations, to measure distances between
+objects, and between objects and himself.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+His was the luck of the beginner. Born to be a hunter of meat (though he did
+not know it), he blundered upon meat just outside his own cave-door on his
+first foray into the world. It was by sheer blundering that he chanced upon the
+shrewdly hidden ptarmigan nest. He fell into it. He had essayed to walk along
+the trunk of a fallen pine. The rotten bark gave way under his feet, and with a
+despairing yelp he pitched down the rounded crescent, smashed through the
+leafage and stalks of a small bush, and in the heart of the bush, on the
+ground, fetched up in the midst of seven ptarmigan chicks.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+They made noises, and at first he was frightened at them. Then he perceived
+that they were very little, and he became bolder. They moved. He placed his paw
+on one, and its movements were accelerated. This was a source of enjoyment to
+him. He smelled it. He picked it up in his mouth. It struggled and tickled his
+tongue. At the same time he was made aware of a sensation of hunger. His jaws
+closed together. There was a crunching of fragile bones, and warm blood ran in
+his mouth. The taste of it was good. This was meat, the same as his mother gave
+him, only it was alive between his teeth and therefore better. So he ate the
+ptarmigan. Nor did he stop till he had devoured the whole brood. Then he licked
+his chops in quite the same way his mother did, and began to crawl out of the
+bush.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He encountered a feathered whirlwind. He was confused and blinded by the rush
+of it and the beat of angry wings. He hid his head between his paws and yelped.
+The blows increased. The mother ptarmigan was in a fury. Then he became angry.
+He rose up, snarling, striking out with his paws. He sank his tiny teeth into
+one of the wings and pulled and tugged sturdily. The ptarmigan struggled
+against him, showering blows upon him with her free wing. It was his first
+battle. He was elated. He forgot all about the unknown. He no longer was afraid
+of anything. He was fighting, tearing at a live thing that was striking at him.
+Also, this live thing was meat. The lust to kill was on him. He had just
+destroyed little live things. He would now destroy a big live thing. He was too
+busy and happy to know that he was happy. He was thrilling and exulting in ways
+new to him and greater to him than any he had known before.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He held on to the wing and growled between his tight-clenched teeth. The
+ptarmigan dragged him out of the bush. When she turned and tried to drag him
+back into the bush&rsquo;s shelter, he pulled her away from it and on into the
+open. And all the time she was making outcry and striking with her free wing,
+while feathers were flying like a snow-fall. The pitch to which he was aroused
+was tremendous. All the fighting blood of his breed was up in him and surging
+through him. This was living, though he did not know it. He was realising his
+own meaning in the world; he was doing that for which he was made&mdash;killing
+meat and battling to kill it. He was justifying his existence, than which life
+can do no greater; for life achieves its summit when it does to the uttermost
+that which it was equipped to do.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+After a time, the ptarmigan ceased her struggling. He still held her by the
+wing, and they lay on the ground and looked at each other. He tried to growl
+threateningly, ferociously. She pecked on his nose, which by now, what of
+previous adventures was sore. He winced but held on. She pecked him again and
+again. From wincing he went to whimpering. He tried to back away from her,
+oblivious to the fact that by his hold on her he dragged her after him. A rain
+of pecks fell on his ill-used nose. The flood of fight ebbed down in him, and,
+releasing his prey, he turned tail and scampered on across the open in
+inglorious retreat.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He lay down to rest on the other side of the open, near the edge of the bushes,
+his tongue lolling out, his chest heaving and panting, his nose still hurting
+him and causing him to continue his whimper. But as he lay there, suddenly
+there came to him a feeling as of something terrible impending. The unknown
+with all its terrors rushed upon him, and he shrank back instinctively into the
+shelter of the bush. As he did so, a draught of air fanned him, and a large,
+winged body swept ominously and silently past. A hawk, driving down out of the
+blue, had barely missed him.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+While he lay in the bush, recovering from his fright and peering fearfully out,
+the mother-ptarmigan on the other side of the open space fluttered out of the
+ravaged nest. It was because of her loss that she paid no attention to the
+winged bolt of the sky. But the cub saw, and it was a warning and a lesson to
+him&mdash;the swift downward swoop of the hawk, the short skim of its body just
+above the ground, the strike of its talons in the body of the ptarmigan, the
+ptarmigan&rsquo;s squawk of agony and fright, and the hawk&rsquo;s rush upward
+into the blue, carrying the ptarmigan away with it.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+It was a long time before the cub left its shelter. He had learned much. Live
+things were meat. They were good to eat. Also, live things when they were large
+enough, could give hurt. It was better to eat small live things like ptarmigan
+chicks, and to let alone large live things like ptarmigan hens. Nevertheless he
+felt a little prick of ambition, a sneaking desire to have another battle with
+that ptarmigan hen&mdash;only the hawk had carried her away. May be there were
+other ptarmigan hens. He would go and see.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He came down a shelving bank to the stream. He had never seen water before. The
+footing looked good. There were no inequalities of surface. He stepped boldly
+out on it; and went down, crying with fear, into the embrace of the unknown. It
+was cold, and he gasped, breathing quickly. The water rushed into his lungs
+instead of the air that had always accompanied his act of breathing. The
+suffocation he experienced was like the pang of death. To him it signified
+death. He had no conscious knowledge of death, but like every animal of the
+Wild, he possessed the instinct of death. To him it stood as the greatest of
+hurts. It was the very essence of the unknown; it was the sum of the terrors of
+the unknown, the one culminating and unthinkable catastrophe that could happen
+to him, about which he knew nothing and about which he feared everything.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He came to the surface, and the sweet air rushed into his open mouth. He did
+not go down again. Quite as though it had been a long-established custom of his
+he struck out with all his legs and began to swim. The near bank was a yard
+away; but he had come up with his back to it, and the first thing his eyes
+rested upon was the opposite bank, toward which he immediately began to swim.
+The stream was a small one, but in the pool it widened out to a score of feet.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Midway in the passage, the current picked up the cub and swept him downstream.
+He was caught in the miniature rapid at the bottom of the pool. Here was little
+chance for swimming. The quiet water had become suddenly angry. Sometimes he
+was under, sometimes on top. At all times he was in violent motion, now being
+turned over or around, and again, being smashed against a rock. And with every
+rock he struck, he yelped. His progress was a series of yelps, from which might
+have been adduced the number of rocks he encountered.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Below the rapid was a second pool, and here, captured by the eddy, he was
+gently borne to the bank, and as gently deposited on a bed of gravel. He
+crawled frantically clear of the water and lay down. He had learned some more
+about the world. Water was not alive. Yet it moved. Also, it looked as solid as
+the earth, but was without any solidity at all. His conclusion was that things
+were not always what they appeared to be. The cub&rsquo;s fear of the unknown
+was an inherited distrust, and it had now been strengthened by experience.
+Thenceforth, in the nature of things, he would possess an abiding distrust of
+appearances. He would have to learn the reality of a thing before he could put
+his faith into it.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+One other adventure was destined for him that day. He had recollected that
+there was such a thing in the world as his mother. And then there came to him a
+feeling that he wanted her more than all the rest of the things in the world.
+Not only was his body tired with the adventures it had undergone, but his
+little brain was equally tired. In all the days he had lived it had not worked
+so hard as on this one day. Furthermore, he was sleepy. So he started out to
+look for the cave and his mother, feeling at the same time an overwhelming rush
+of loneliness and helplessness.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He was sprawling along between some bushes, when he heard a sharp intimidating
+cry. There was a flash of yellow before his eyes. He saw a weasel leaping
+swiftly away from him. It was a small live thing, and he had no fear. Then,
+before him, at his feet, he saw an extremely small live thing, only several
+inches long, a young weasel, that, like himself, had disobediently gone out
+adventuring. It tried to retreat before him. He turned it over with his paw. It
+made a queer, grating noise. The next moment the flash of yellow reappeared
+before his eyes. He heard again the intimidating cry, and at the same instant
+received a sharp blow on the side of the neck and felt the sharp teeth of the
+mother-weasel cut into his flesh.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+While he yelped and ki-yi&rsquo;d and scrambled backward, he saw the
+mother-weasel leap upon her young one and disappear with it into the
+neighbouring thicket. The cut of her teeth in his neck still hurt, but his
+feelings were hurt more grievously, and he sat down and weakly whimpered. This
+mother-weasel was so small and so savage. He was yet to learn that for size and
+weight the weasel was the most ferocious, vindictive, and terrible of all the
+killers of the Wild. But a portion of this knowledge was quickly to be his.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He was still whimpering when the mother-weasel reappeared. She did not rush
+him, now that her young one was safe. She approached more cautiously, and the
+cub had full opportunity to observe her lean, snakelike body, and her head,
+erect, eager, and snake-like itself. Her sharp, menacing cry sent the hair
+bristling along his back, and he snarled warningly at her. She came closer and
+closer. There was a leap, swifter than his unpractised sight, and the lean,
+yellow body disappeared for a moment out of the field of his vision. The next
+moment she was at his throat, her teeth buried in his hair and flesh.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+At first he snarled and tried to fight; but he was very young, and this was
+only his first day in the world, and his snarl became a whimper, his fight a
+struggle to escape. The weasel never relaxed her hold. She hung on, striving to
+press down with her teeth to the great vein where his life-blood bubbled. The
+weasel was a drinker of blood, and it was ever her preference to drink from the
+throat of life itself.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The grey cub would have died, and there would have been no story to write about
+him, had not the she-wolf come bounding through the bushes. The weasel let go
+the cub and flashed at the she-wolf&rsquo;s throat, missing, but getting a hold
+on the jaw instead. The she-wolf flirted her head like the snap of a whip,
+breaking the weasel&rsquo;s hold and flinging it high in the air. And, still in
+the air, the she-wolf&rsquo;s jaws closed on the lean, yellow body, and the
+weasel knew death between the crunching teeth.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The cub experienced another access of affection on the part of his mother. Her
+joy at finding him seemed even greater than his joy at being found. She nozzled
+him and caressed him and licked the cuts made in him by the weasel&rsquo;s
+teeth. Then, between them, mother and cub, they ate the blood-drinker, and
+after that went back to the cave and slept.
+</p>
+
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<h3><a name="chap08"></a>CHAPTER V<br/>
+THE LAW OF MEAT</h3>
+
+<p>
+The cub&rsquo;s development was rapid. He rested for two days, and then
+ventured forth from the cave again. It was on this adventure that he found the
+young weasel whose mother he had helped eat, and he saw to it that the young
+weasel went the way of its mother. But on this trip he did not get lost. When
+he grew tired, he found his way back to the cave and slept. And every day
+thereafter found him out and ranging a wider area.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He began to get accurate measurement of his strength and his weakness, and to
+know when to be bold and when to be cautious. He found it expedient to be
+cautious all the time, except for the rare moments, when, assured of his own
+intrepidity, he abandoned himself to petty rages and lusts.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He was always a little demon of fury when he chanced upon a stray ptarmigan.
+Never did he fail to respond savagely to the chatter of the squirrel he had
+first met on the blasted pine. While the sight of a moose-bird almost
+invariably put him into the wildest of rages; for he never forgot the peck on
+the nose he had received from the first of that ilk he encountered.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But there were times when even a moose-bird failed to affect him, and those
+were times when he felt himself to be in danger from some other prowling meat
+hunter. He never forgot the hawk, and its moving shadow always sent him
+crouching into the nearest thicket. He no longer sprawled and straddled, and
+already he was developing the gait of his mother, slinking and furtive,
+apparently without exertion, yet sliding along with a swiftness that was as
+deceptive as it was imperceptible.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+In the matter of meat, his luck had been all in the beginning. The seven
+ptarmigan chicks and the baby weasel represented the sum of his killings. His
+desire to kill strengthened with the days, and he cherished hungry ambitions
+for the squirrel that chattered so volubly and always informed all wild
+creatures that the wolf-cub was approaching. But as birds flew in the air,
+squirrels could climb trees, and the cub could only try to crawl unobserved
+upon the squirrel when it was on the ground.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The cub entertained a great respect for his mother. She could get meat, and she
+never failed to bring him his share. Further, she was unafraid of things. It
+did not occur to him that this fearlessness was founded upon experience and
+knowledge. Its effect on him was that of an impression of power. His mother
+represented power; and as he grew older he felt this power in the sharper
+admonishment of her paw; while the reproving nudge of her nose gave place to
+the slash of her fangs. For this, likewise, he respected his mother. She
+compelled obedience from him, and the older he grew the shorter grew her
+temper.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Famine came again, and the cub with clearer consciousness knew once more the
+bite of hunger. The she-wolf ran herself thin in the quest for meat. She rarely
+slept any more in the cave, spending most of her time on the meat-trail, and
+spending it vainly. This famine was not a long one, but it was severe while it
+lasted. The cub found no more milk in his mother&rsquo;s breast, nor did he get
+one mouthful of meat for himself.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Before, he had hunted in play, for the sheer joyousness of it; now he hunted in
+deadly earnestness, and found nothing. Yet the failure of it accelerated his
+development. He studied the habits of the squirrel with greater carefulness,
+and strove with greater craft to steal upon it and surprise it. He studied the
+wood-mice and tried to dig them out of their burrows; and he learned much about
+the ways of moose-birds and woodpeckers. And there came a day when the
+hawk&rsquo;s shadow did not drive him crouching into the bushes. He had grown
+stronger and wiser, and more confident. Also, he was desperate. So he sat on
+his haunches, conspicuously in an open space, and challenged the hawk down out
+of the sky. For he knew that there, floating in the blue above him, was meat,
+the meat his stomach yearned after so insistently. But the hawk refused to come
+down and give battle, and the cub crawled away into a thicket and whimpered his
+disappointment and hunger.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The famine broke. The she-wolf brought home meat. It was strange meat,
+different from any she had ever brought before. It was a lynx kitten, partly
+grown, like the cub, but not so large. And it was all for him. His mother had
+satisfied her hunger elsewhere; though he did not know that it was the rest of
+the lynx litter that had gone to satisfy her. Nor did he know the desperateness
+of her deed. He knew only that the velvet-furred kitten was meat, and he ate
+and waxed happier with every mouthful.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+A full stomach conduces to inaction, and the cub lay in the cave, sleeping
+against his mother&rsquo;s side. He was aroused by her snarling. Never had he
+heard her snarl so terribly. Possibly in her whole life it was the most
+terrible snarl she ever gave. There was reason for it, and none knew it better
+than she. A lynx&rsquo;s lair is not despoiled with impunity. In the full glare
+of the afternoon light, crouching in the entrance of the cave, the cub saw the
+lynx-mother. The hair rippled up along his back at the sight. Here was fear,
+and it did not require his instinct to tell him of it. And if sight alone were
+not sufficient, the cry of rage the intruder gave, beginning with a snarl and
+rushing abruptly upward into a hoarse screech, was convincing enough in itself.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The cub felt the prod of the life that was in him, and stood up and snarled
+valiantly by his mother&rsquo;s side. But she thrust him ignominiously away and
+behind her. Because of the low-roofed entrance the lynx could not leap in, and
+when she made a crawling rush of it the she-wolf sprang upon her and pinned her
+down. The cub saw little of the battle. There was a tremendous snarling and
+spitting and screeching. The two animals threshed about, the lynx ripping and
+tearing with her claws and using her teeth as well, while the she-wolf used her
+teeth alone.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Once, the cub sprang in and sank his teeth into the hind leg of the lynx. He
+clung on, growling savagely. Though he did not know it, by the weight of his
+body he clogged the action of the leg and thereby saved his mother much damage.
+A change in the battle crushed him under both their bodies and wrenched loose
+his hold. The next moment the two mothers separated, and, before they rushed
+together again, the lynx lashed out at the cub with a huge fore-paw that ripped
+his shoulder open to the bone and sent him hurtling sidewise against the wall.
+Then was added to the uproar the cub&rsquo;s shrill yelp of pain and fright.
+But the fight lasted so long that he had time to cry himself out and to
+experience a second burst of courage; and the end of the battle found him again
+clinging to a hind-leg and furiously growling between his teeth.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The lynx was dead. But the she-wolf was very weak and sick. At first she
+caressed the cub and licked his wounded shoulder; but the blood she had lost
+had taken with it her strength, and for all of a day and a night she lay by her
+dead foe&rsquo;s side, without movement, scarcely breathing. For a week she
+never left the cave, except for water, and then her movements were slow and
+painful. At the end of that time the lynx was devoured, while the
+she-wolf&rsquo;s wounds had healed sufficiently to permit her to take the
+meat-trail again.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The cub&rsquo;s shoulder was stiff and sore, and for some time he limped from
+the terrible slash he had received. But the world now seemed changed. He went
+about in it with greater confidence, with a feeling of prowess that had not
+been his in the days before the battle with the lynx. He had looked upon life
+in a more ferocious aspect; he had fought; he had buried his teeth in the flesh
+of a foe; and he had survived. And because of all this, he carried himself more
+boldly, with a touch of defiance that was new in him. He was no longer afraid
+of minor things, and much of his timidity had vanished, though the unknown
+never ceased to press upon him with its mysteries and terrors, intangible and
+ever-menacing.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He began to accompany his mother on the meat-trail, and he saw much of the
+killing of meat and began to play his part in it. And in his own dim way he
+learned the law of meat. There were two kinds of life&mdash;his own kind and
+the other kind. His own kind included his mother and himself. The other kind
+included all live things that moved. But the other kind was divided. One
+portion was what his own kind killed and ate. This portion was composed of the
+non-killers and the small killers. The other portion killed and ate his own
+kind, or was killed and eaten by his own kind. And out of this classification
+arose the law. The aim of life was meat. Life itself was meat. Life lived on
+life. There were the eaters and the eaten. The law was: EAT OR BE EATEN. He did
+not formulate the law in clear, set terms and moralise about it. He did not
+even think the law; he merely lived the law without thinking about it at all.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He saw the law operating around him on every side. He had eaten the ptarmigan
+chicks. The hawk had eaten the ptarmigan-mother. The hawk would also have eaten
+him. Later, when he had grown more formidable, he wanted to eat the hawk. He
+had eaten the lynx kitten. The lynx-mother would have eaten him had she not
+herself been killed and eaten. And so it went. The law was being lived about
+him by all live things, and he himself was part and parcel of the law. He was a
+killer. His only food was meat, live meat, that ran away swiftly before him, or
+flew into the air, or climbed trees, or hid in the ground, or faced him and
+fought with him, or turned the tables and ran after him.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Had the cub thought in man-fashion, he might have epitomised life as a
+voracious appetite and the world as a place wherein ranged a multitude of
+appetites, pursuing and being pursued, hunting and being hunted, eating and
+being eaten, all in blindness and confusion, with violence and disorder, a
+chaos of gluttony and slaughter, ruled over by chance, merciless, planless,
+endless.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But the cub did not think in man-fashion. He did not look at things with wide
+vision. He was single-purposed, and entertained but one thought or desire at a
+time. Besides the law of meat, there were a myriad other and lesser laws for
+him to learn and obey. The world was filled with surprise. The stir of the life
+that was in him, the play of his muscles, was an unending happiness. To run
+down meat was to experience thrills and elations. His rages and battles were
+pleasures. Terror itself, and the mystery of the unknown, led to his living.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And there were easements and satisfactions. To have a full stomach, to doze
+lazily in the sunshine&mdash;such things were remuneration in full for his
+ardours and toils, while his ardours and tolls were in themselves
+self-remunerative. They were expressions of life, and life is always happy when
+it is expressing itself. So the cub had no quarrel with his hostile
+environment. He was very much alive, very happy, and very proud of himself.
+</p>
+
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<h2><a name="part03"></a>PART III</h2>
+
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<h3><a name="chap09"></a>CHAPTER I<br/>
+THE MAKERS OF FIRE</h3>
+
+<p>
+The cub came upon it suddenly. It was his own fault. He had been careless. He
+had left the cave and run down to the stream to drink. It might have been that
+he took no notice because he was heavy with sleep. (He had been out all night
+on the meat-trail, and had but just then awakened.) And his carelessness might
+have been due to the familiarity of the trail to the pool. He had travelled it
+often, and nothing had ever happened on it.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He went down past the blasted pine, crossed the open space, and trotted in
+amongst the trees. Then, at the same instant, he saw and smelt. Before him,
+sitting silently on their haunches, were five live things, the like of which he
+had never seen before. It was his first glimpse of mankind. But at the sight of
+him the five men did not spring to their feet, nor show their teeth, nor snarl.
+They did not move, but sat there, silent and ominous.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Nor did the cub move. Every instinct of his nature would have impelled him to
+dash wildly away, had there not suddenly and for the first time arisen in him
+another and counter instinct. A great awe descended upon him. He was beaten
+down to movelessness by an overwhelming sense of his own weakness and
+littleness. Here was mastery and power, something far and away beyond him.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The cub had never seen man, yet the instinct concerning man was his. In dim
+ways he recognised in man the animal that had fought itself to primacy over the
+other animals of the Wild. Not alone out of his own eyes, but out of the eyes
+of all his ancestors was the cub now looking upon man&mdash;out of eyes that
+had circled in the darkness around countless winter camp-fires, that had peered
+from safe distances and from the hearts of thickets at the strange, two-legged
+animal that was lord over living things. The spell of the cub&rsquo;s heritage
+was upon him, the fear and the respect born of the centuries of struggle and
+the accumulated experience of the generations. The heritage was too compelling
+for a wolf that was only a cub. Had he been full-grown, he would have run away.
+As it was, he cowered down in a paralysis of fear, already half proffering the
+submission that his kind had proffered from the first time a wolf came in to
+sit by man&rsquo;s fire and be made warm.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+One of the Indians arose and walked over to him and stooped above him. The cub
+cowered closer to the ground. It was the unknown, objectified at last, in
+concrete flesh and blood, bending over him and reaching down to seize hold of
+him. His hair bristled involuntarily; his lips writhed back and his little
+fangs were bared. The hand, poised like doom above him, hesitated, and the man
+spoke laughing, &ldquo;<i>Wabam wabisca ip pit tah</i>.&rdquo; (&ldquo;Look!
+The white fangs!&rdquo;)
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The other Indians laughed loudly, and urged the man on to pick up the cub. As
+the hand descended closer and closer, there raged within the cub a battle of
+the instincts. He experienced two great impulsions&mdash;to yield and to fight.
+The resulting action was a compromise. He did both. He yielded till the hand
+almost touched him. Then he fought, his teeth flashing in a snap that sank them
+into the hand. The next moment he received a clout alongside the head that
+knocked him over on his side. Then all fight fled out of him. His puppyhood and
+the instinct of submission took charge of him. He sat up on his haunches and
+ki-yi&rsquo;d. But the man whose hand he had bitten was angry. The cub received
+a clout on the other side of his head. Whereupon he sat up and ki-yi&rsquo;d
+louder than ever.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The four Indians laughed more loudly, while even the man who had been bitten
+began to laugh. They surrounded the cub and laughed at him, while he wailed out
+his terror and his hurt. In the midst of it, he heard something. The Indians
+heard it too. But the cub knew what it was, and with a last, long wail that had
+in it more of triumph than grief, he ceased his noise and waited for the coming
+of his mother, of his ferocious and indomitable mother who fought and killed
+all things and was never afraid. She was snarling as she ran. She had heard the
+cry of her cub and was dashing to save him.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She bounded in amongst them, her anxious and militant motherhood making her
+anything but a pretty sight. But to the cub the spectacle of her protective
+rage was pleasing. He uttered a glad little cry and bounded to meet her, while
+the man-animals went back hastily several steps. The she-wolf stood over
+against her cub, facing the men, with bristling hair, a snarl rumbling deep in
+her throat. Her face was distorted and malignant with menace, even the bridge
+of the nose wrinkling from tip to eyes so prodigious was her snarl.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Then it was that a cry went up from one of the men. &ldquo;Kiche!&rdquo; was
+what he uttered. It was an exclamation of surprise. The cub felt his mother
+wilting at the sound.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Kiche!&rdquo; the man cried again, this time with sharpness and
+authority.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And then the cub saw his mother, the she-wolf, the fearless one, crouching down
+till her belly touched the ground, whimpering, wagging her tail, making peace
+signs. The cub could not understand. He was appalled. The awe of man rushed
+over him again. His instinct had been true. His mother verified it. She, too,
+rendered submission to the man-animals.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The man who had spoken came over to her. He put his hand upon her head, and she
+only crouched closer. She did not snap, nor threaten to snap. The other men
+came up, and surrounded her, and felt her, and pawed her, which actions she
+made no attempt to resent. They were greatly excited, and made many noises with
+their mouths. These noises were not indication of danger, the cub decided, as
+he crouched near his mother still bristling from time to time but doing his
+best to submit.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;It is not strange,&rdquo; an Indian was saying. &ldquo;Her father was a
+wolf. It is true, her mother was a dog; but did not my brother tie her out in
+the woods all of three nights in the mating season? Therefore was the father of
+Kiche a wolf.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;It is a year, Grey Beaver, since she ran away,&rdquo; spoke a second
+Indian.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;It is not strange, Salmon Tongue,&rdquo; Grey Beaver answered. &ldquo;It
+was the time of the famine, and there was no meat for the dogs.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;She has lived with the wolves,&rdquo; said a third Indian.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;So it would seem, Three Eagles,&rdquo; Grey Beaver answered, laying his
+hand on the cub; &ldquo;and this be the sign of it.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The cub snarled a little at the touch of the hand, and the hand flew back to
+administer a clout. Whereupon the cub covered its fangs, and sank down
+submissively, while the hand, returning, rubbed behind his ears, and up and
+down his back.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;This be the sign of it,&rdquo; Grey Beaver went on. &ldquo;It is plain
+that his mother is Kiche. But his father was a wolf. Wherefore is there in him
+little dog and much wolf. His fangs be white, and White Fang shall be his name.
+I have spoken. He is my dog. For was not Kiche my brother&rsquo;s dog? And is
+not my brother dead?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The cub, who had thus received a name in the world, lay and watched. For a time
+the man-animals continued to make their mouth-noises. Then Grey Beaver took a
+knife from a sheath that hung around his neck, and went into the thicket and
+cut a stick. White Fang watched him. He notched the stick at each end and in
+the notches fastened strings of raw-hide. One string he tied around the throat
+of Kiche. Then he led her to a small pine, around which he tied the other
+string.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+White Fang followed and lay down beside her. Salmon Tongue&rsquo;s hand reached
+out to him and rolled him over on his back. Kiche looked on anxiously. White
+Fang felt fear mounting in him again. He could not quite suppress a snarl, but
+he made no offer to snap. The hand, with fingers crooked and spread apart,
+rubbed his stomach in a playful way and rolled him from side to side. It was
+ridiculous and ungainly, lying there on his back with legs sprawling in the
+air. Besides, it was a position of such utter helplessness that White
+Fang&rsquo;s whole nature revolted against it. He could do nothing to defend
+himself. If this man-animal intended harm, White Fang knew that he could not
+escape it. How could he spring away with his four legs in the air above him?
+Yet submission made him master his fear, and he only growled softly. This growl
+he could not suppress; nor did the man-animal resent it by giving him a blow on
+the head. And furthermore, such was the strangeness of it, White Fang
+experienced an unaccountable sensation of pleasure as the hand rubbed back and
+forth. When he was rolled on his side he ceased to growl, when the fingers
+pressed and prodded at the base of his ears the pleasurable sensation
+increased; and when, with a final rub and scratch, the man left him alone and
+went away, all fear had died out of White Fang. He was to know fear many times
+in his dealing with man; yet it was a token of the fearless companionship with
+man that was ultimately to be his.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+After a time, White Fang heard strange noises approaching. He was quick in his
+classification, for he knew them at once for man-animal noises. A few minutes
+later the remainder of the tribe, strung out as it was on the march, trailed
+in. There were more men and many women and children, forty souls of them, and
+all heavily burdened with camp equipage and outfit. Also there were many dogs;
+and these, with the exception of the part-grown puppies, were likewise burdened
+with camp outfit. On their backs, in bags that fastened tightly around
+underneath, the dogs carried from twenty to thirty pounds of weight.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+White Fang had never seen dogs before, but at sight of them he felt that they
+were his own kind, only somehow different. But they displayed little difference
+from the wolf when they discovered the cub and his mother. There was a rush.
+White Fang bristled and snarled and snapped in the face of the open-mouthed
+oncoming wave of dogs, and went down and under them, feeling the sharp slash of
+teeth in his body, himself biting and tearing at the legs and bellies above
+him. There was a great uproar. He could hear the snarl of Kiche as she fought
+for him; and he could hear the cries of the man-animals, the sound of clubs
+striking upon bodies, and the yelps of pain from the dogs so struck.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Only a few seconds elapsed before he was on his feet again. He could now see
+the man-animals driving back the dogs with clubs and stones, defending him,
+saving him from the savage teeth of his kind that somehow was not his kind. And
+though there was no reason in his brain for a clear conception of so abstract a
+thing as justice, nevertheless, in his own way, he felt the justice of the
+man-animals, and he knew them for what they were&mdash;makers of law and
+executors of law. Also, he appreciated the power with which they administered
+the law. Unlike any animals he had ever encountered, they did not bite nor
+claw. They enforced their live strength with the power of dead things. Dead
+things did their bidding. Thus, sticks and stones, directed by these strange
+creatures, leaped through the air like living things, inflicting grievous hurts
+upon the dogs.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+To his mind this was power unusual, power inconceivable and beyond the natural,
+power that was godlike. White Fang, in the very nature of him, could never know
+anything about gods; at the best he could know only things that were beyond
+knowing&mdash;but the wonder and awe that he had of these man-animals in ways
+resembled what would be the wonder and awe of man at sight of some celestial
+creature, on a mountain top, hurling thunderbolts from either hand at an
+astonished world.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The last dog had been driven back. The hubbub died down. And White Fang licked
+his hurts and meditated upon this, his first taste of pack-cruelty and his
+introduction to the pack. He had never dreamed that his own kind consisted of
+more than One Eye, his mother, and himself. They had constituted a kind apart,
+and here, abruptly, he had discovered many more creatures apparently of his own
+kind. And there was a subconscious resentment that these, his kind, at first
+sight had pitched upon him and tried to destroy him. In the same way he
+resented his mother being tied with a stick, even though it was done by the
+superior man-animals. It savoured of the trap, of bondage. Yet of the trap and
+of bondage he knew nothing. Freedom to roam and run and lie down at will, had
+been his heritage; and here it was being infringed upon. His mother&rsquo;s
+movements were restricted to the length of a stick, and by the length of that
+same stick was he restricted, for he had not yet got beyond the need of his
+mother&rsquo;s side.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He did not like it. Nor did he like it when the man-animals arose and went on
+with their march; for a tiny man-animal took the other end of the stick and led
+Kiche captive behind him, and behind Kiche followed White Fang, greatly
+perturbed and worried by this new adventure he had entered upon.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+They went down the valley of the stream, far beyond White Fang&rsquo;s widest
+ranging, until they came to the end of the valley, where the stream ran into
+the Mackenzie River. Here, where canoes were cached on poles high in the air
+and where stood fish-racks for the drying of fish, camp was made; and White
+Fang looked on with wondering eyes. The superiority of these man-animals
+increased with every moment. There was their mastery over all these
+sharp-fanged dogs. It breathed of power. But greater than that, to the
+wolf-cub, was their mastery over things not alive; their capacity to
+communicate motion to unmoving things; their capacity to change the very face
+of the world.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+It was this last that especially affected him. The elevation of frames of poles
+caught his eye; yet this in itself was not so remarkable, being done by the
+same creatures that flung sticks and stones to great distances. But when the
+frames of poles were made into tepees by being covered with cloth and skins,
+White Fang was astounded. It was the colossal bulk of them that impressed him.
+They arose around him, on every side, like some monstrous quick-growing form of
+life. They occupied nearly the whole circumference of his field of vision. He
+was afraid of them. They loomed ominously above him; and when the breeze
+stirred them into huge movements, he cowered down in fear, keeping his eyes
+warily upon them, and prepared to spring away if they attempted to precipitate
+themselves upon him.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But in a short while his fear of the tepees passed away. He saw the women and
+children passing in and out of them without harm, and he saw the dogs trying
+often to get into them, and being driven away with sharp words and flying
+stones. After a time, he left Kiche&rsquo;s side and crawled cautiously toward
+the wall of the nearest tepee. It was the curiosity of growth that urged him
+on&mdash;the necessity of learning and living and doing that brings experience.
+The last few inches to the wall of the tepee were crawled with painful slowness
+and precaution. The day&rsquo;s events had prepared him for the unknown to
+manifest itself in most stupendous and unthinkable ways. At last his nose
+touched the canvas. He waited. Nothing happened. Then he smelled the strange
+fabric, saturated with the man-smell. He closed on the canvas with his teeth
+and gave a gentle tug. Nothing happened, though the adjacent portions of the
+tepee moved. He tugged harder. There was a greater movement. It was delightful.
+He tugged still harder, and repeatedly, until the whole tepee was in motion.
+Then the sharp cry of a squaw inside sent him scampering back to Kiche. But
+after that he was afraid no more of the looming bulks of the tepees.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+A moment later he was straying away again from his mother. Her stick was tied
+to a peg in the ground and she could not follow him. A part-grown puppy,
+somewhat larger and older than he, came toward him slowly, with ostentatious
+and belligerent importance. The puppy&rsquo;s name, as White Fang was afterward
+to hear him called, was Lip-lip. He had had experience in puppy fights and was
+already something of a bully.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Lip-lip was White Fang&rsquo;s own kind, and, being only a puppy, did not seem
+dangerous; so White Fang prepared to meet him in a friendly spirit. But when
+the strangers walk became stiff-legged and his lips lifted clear of his teeth,
+White Fang stiffened too, and answered with lifted lips. They half circled
+about each other, tentatively, snarling and bristling. This lasted several
+minutes, and White Fang was beginning to enjoy it, as a sort of game. But
+suddenly, with remarkable swiftness, Lip-lip leaped in, delivering a slashing
+snap, and leaped away again. The snap had taken effect on the shoulder that had
+been hurt by the lynx and that was still sore deep down near the bone. The
+surprise and hurt of it brought a yelp out of White Fang; but the next moment,
+in a rush of anger, he was upon Lip-lip and snapping viciously.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But Lip-lip had lived his life in camp and had fought many puppy fights. Three
+times, four times, and half a dozen times, his sharp little teeth scored on the
+newcomer, until White Fang, yelping shamelessly, fled to the protection of his
+mother. It was the first of the many fights he was to have with Lip-lip, for
+they were enemies from the start, born so, with natures destined perpetually to
+clash.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Kiche licked White Fang soothingly with her tongue, and tried to prevail upon
+him to remain with her. But his curiosity was rampant, and several minutes
+later he was venturing forth on a new quest. He came upon one of the
+man-animals, Grey Beaver, who was squatting on his hams and doing something
+with sticks and dry moss spread before him on the ground. White Fang came near
+to him and watched. Grey Beaver made mouth-noises which White Fang interpreted
+as not hostile, so he came still nearer.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Women and children were carrying more sticks and branches to Grey Beaver. It
+was evidently an affair of moment. White Fang came in until he touched Grey
+Beaver&rsquo;s knee, so curious was he, and already forgetful that this was a
+terrible man-animal. Suddenly he saw a strange thing like mist beginning to
+arise from the sticks and moss beneath Grey Beaver&rsquo;s hands. Then, amongst
+the sticks themselves, appeared a live thing, twisting and turning, of a colour
+like the colour of the sun in the sky. White Fang knew nothing about fire. It
+drew him as the light, in the mouth of the cave had drawn him in his early
+puppyhood. He crawled the several steps toward the flame. He heard Grey Beaver
+chuckle above him, and he knew the sound was not hostile. Then his nose touched
+the flame, and at the same instant his little tongue went out to it.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+For a moment he was paralysed. The unknown, lurking in the midst of the sticks
+and moss, was savagely clutching him by the nose. He scrambled backward,
+bursting out in an astonished explosion of ki-yi&rsquo;s. At the sound, Kiche
+leaped snarling to the end of her stick, and there raged terribly because she
+could not come to his aid. But Grey Beaver laughed loudly, and slapped his
+thighs, and told the happening to all the rest of the camp, till everybody was
+laughing uproariously. But White Fang sat on his haunches and ki-yi&rsquo;d and
+ki-yi&rsquo;d, a forlorn and pitiable little figure in the midst of the
+man-animals.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+It was the worst hurt he had ever known. Both nose and tongue had been scorched
+by the live thing, sun-coloured, that had grown up under Grey Beaver&rsquo;s
+hands. He cried and cried interminably, and every fresh wail was greeted by
+bursts of laughter on the part of the man-animals. He tried to soothe his nose
+with his tongue, but the tongue was burnt too, and the two hurts coming
+together produced greater hurt; whereupon he cried more hopelessly and
+helplessly than ever.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And then shame came to him. He knew laughter and the meaning of it. It is not
+given us to know how some animals know laughter, and know when they are being
+laughed at; but it was this same way that White Fang knew it. And he felt shame
+that the man-animals should be laughing at him. He turned and fled away, not
+from the hurt of the fire, but from the laughter that sank even deeper, and
+hurt in the spirit of him. And he fled to Kiche, raging at the end of her stick
+like an animal gone mad&mdash;to Kiche, the one creature in the world who was
+not laughing at him.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Twilight drew down and night came on, and White Fang lay by his mother&rsquo;s
+side. His nose and tongue still hurt, but he was perplexed by a greater
+trouble. He was homesick. He felt a vacancy in him, a need for the hush and
+quietude of the stream and the cave in the cliff. Life had become too populous.
+There were so many of the man-animals, men, women, and children, all making
+noises and irritations. And there were the dogs, ever squabbling and bickering,
+bursting into uproars and creating confusions. The restful loneliness of the
+only life he had known was gone. Here the very air was palpitant with life. It
+hummed and buzzed unceasingly. Continually changing its intensity and abruptly
+variant in pitch, it impinged on his nerves and senses, made him nervous and
+restless and worried him with a perpetual imminence of happening.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He watched the man-animals coming and going and moving about the camp. In
+fashion distantly resembling the way men look upon the gods they create, so
+looked White Fang upon the man-animals before him. They were superior
+creatures, of a verity, gods. To his dim comprehension they were as much
+wonder-workers as gods are to men. They were creatures of mastery, possessing
+all manner of unknown and impossible potencies, overlords of the alive and the
+not alive&mdash;making obey that which moved, imparting movement to that which
+did not move, and making life, sun-coloured and biting life, to grow out of
+dead moss and wood. They were fire-makers! They were gods.
+</p>
+
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<h3><a name="chap10"></a>CHAPTER II<br/>
+THE BONDAGE</h3>
+
+<p>
+The days were thronged with experience for White Fang. During the time that
+Kiche was tied by the stick, he ran about over all the camp, inquiring,
+investigating, learning. He quickly came to know much of the ways of the
+man-animals, but familiarity did not breed contempt. The more he came to know
+them, the more they vindicated their superiority, the more they displayed their
+mysterious powers, the greater loomed their god-likeness.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+To man has been given the grief, often, of seeing his gods overthrown and his
+altars crumbling; but to the wolf and the wild dog that have come in to crouch
+at man&rsquo;s feet, this grief has never come. Unlike man, whose gods are of
+the unseen and the overguessed, vapours and mists of fancy eluding the
+garmenture of reality, wandering wraiths of desired goodness and power,
+intangible out-croppings of self into the realm of spirit&mdash;unlike man, the
+wolf and the wild dog that have come in to the fire find their gods in the
+living flesh, solid to the touch, occupying earth-space and requiring time for
+the accomplishment of their ends and their existence. No effort of faith is
+necessary to believe in such a god; no effort of will can possibly induce
+disbelief in such a god. There is no getting away from it. There it stands, on
+its two hind-legs, club in hand, immensely potential, passionate and wrathful
+and loving, god and mystery and power all wrapped up and around by flesh that
+bleeds when it is torn and that is good to eat like any flesh.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And so it was with White Fang. The man-animals were gods unmistakable and
+unescapable. As his mother, Kiche, had rendered her allegiance to them at the
+first cry of her name, so he was beginning to render his allegiance. He gave
+them the trail as a privilege indubitably theirs. When they walked, he got out
+of their way. When they called, he came. When they threatened, he cowered down.
+When they commanded him to go, he went away hurriedly. For behind any wish of
+theirs was power to enforce that wish, power that hurt, power that expressed
+itself in clouts and clubs, in flying stones and stinging lashes of whips.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He belonged to them as all dogs belonged to them. His actions were theirs to
+command. His body was theirs to maul, to stamp upon, to tolerate. Such was the
+lesson that was quickly borne in upon him. It came hard, going as it did,
+counter to much that was strong and dominant in his own nature; and, while he
+disliked it in the learning of it, unknown to himself he was learning to like
+it. It was a placing of his destiny in another&rsquo;s hands, a shifting of the
+responsibilities of existence. This in itself was compensation, for it is
+always easier to lean upon another than to stand alone.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But it did not all happen in a day, this giving over of himself, body and soul,
+to the man-animals. He could not immediately forego his wild heritage and his
+memories of the Wild. There were days when he crept to the edge of the forest
+and stood and listened to something calling him far and away. And always he
+returned, restless and uncomfortable, to whimper softly and wistfully at
+Kiche&rsquo;s side and to lick her face with eager, questioning tongue.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+White Fang learned rapidly the ways of the camp. He knew the injustice and
+greediness of the older dogs when meat or fish was thrown out to be eaten. He
+came to know that men were more just, children more cruel, and women more
+kindly and more likely to toss him a bit of meat or bone. And after two or
+three painful adventures with the mothers of part-grown puppies, he came into
+the knowledge that it was always good policy to let such mothers alone, to keep
+away from them as far as possible, and to avoid them when he saw them coming.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But the bane of his life was Lip-lip. Larger, older, and stronger, Lip-lip had
+selected White Fang for his special object of persecution. White Fang fought
+willingly enough, but he was outclassed. His enemy was too big. Lip-lip became
+a nightmare to him. Whenever he ventured away from his mother, the bully was
+sure to appear, trailing at his heels, snarling at him, picking upon him, and
+watchful of an opportunity, when no man-animal was near, to spring upon him and
+force a fight. As Lip-lip invariably won, he enjoyed it hugely. It became his
+chief delight in life, as it became White Fang&rsquo;s chief torment.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But the effect upon White Fang was not to cow him. Though he suffered most of
+the damage and was always defeated, his spirit remained unsubdued. Yet a bad
+effect was produced. He became malignant and morose. His temper had been savage
+by birth, but it became more savage under this unending persecution. The
+genial, playful, puppyish side of him found little expression. He never played
+and gambolled about with the other puppies of the camp. Lip-lip would not
+permit it. The moment White Fang appeared near them, Lip-lip was upon him,
+bullying and hectoring him, or fighting with him until he had driven him away.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The effect of all this was to rob White Fang of much of his puppyhood and to
+make him in his comportment older than his age. Denied the outlet, through
+play, of his energies, he recoiled upon himself and developed his mental
+processes. He became cunning; he had idle time in which to devote himself to
+thoughts of trickery. Prevented from obtaining his share of meat and fish when
+a general feed was given to the camp-dogs, he became a clever thief. He had to
+forage for himself, and he foraged well, though he was oft-times a plague to
+the squaws in consequence. He learned to sneak about camp, to be crafty, to
+know what was going on everywhere, to see and to hear everything and to reason
+accordingly, and successfully to devise ways and means of avoiding his
+implacable persecutor.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+It was early in the days of his persecution that he played his first really big
+crafty game and got there from his first taste of revenge. As Kiche, when with
+the wolves, had lured out to destruction dogs from the camps of men, so White
+Fang, in manner somewhat similar, lured Lip-lip into Kiche&rsquo;s avenging
+jaws. Retreating before Lip-lip, White Fang made an indirect flight that led in
+and out and around the various tepees of the camp. He was a good runner,
+swifter than any puppy of his size, and swifter than Lip-lip. But he did not
+run his best in this chase. He barely held his own, one leap ahead of his
+pursuer.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Lip-lip, excited by the chase and by the persistent nearness of his victim,
+forgot caution and locality. When he remembered locality, it was too late.
+Dashing at top speed around a tepee, he ran full tilt into Kiche lying at the
+end of her stick. He gave one yelp of consternation, and then her punishing
+jaws closed upon him. She was tied, but he could not get away from her easily.
+She rolled him off his legs so that he could not run, while she repeatedly
+ripped and slashed him with her fangs.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+When at last he succeeded in rolling clear of her, he crawled to his feet,
+badly dishevelled, hurt both in body and in spirit. His hair was standing out
+all over him in tufts where her teeth had mauled. He stood where he had arisen,
+opened his mouth, and broke out the long, heart-broken puppy wail. But even
+this he was not allowed to complete. In the middle of it, White Fang, rushing
+in, sank his teeth into Lip-lip&rsquo;s hind leg. There was no fight left in
+Lip-lip, and he ran away shamelessly, his victim hot on his heels and worrying
+him all the way back to his own tepee. Here the squaws came to his aid, and
+White Fang, transformed into a raging demon, was finally driven off only by a
+fusillade of stones.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Came the day when Grey Beaver, deciding that the liability of her running away
+was past, released Kiche. White Fang was delighted with his mother&rsquo;s
+freedom. He accompanied her joyfully about the camp; and, so long as he
+remained close by her side, Lip-lip kept a respectful distance. White-Fang even
+bristled up to him and walked stiff-legged, but Lip-lip ignored the challenge.
+He was no fool himself, and whatever vengeance he desired to wreak, he could
+wait until he caught White Fang alone.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Later on that day, Kiche and White Fang strayed into the edge of the woods next
+to the camp. He had led his mother there, step by step, and now when she
+stopped, he tried to inveigle her farther. The stream, the lair, and the quiet
+woods were calling to him, and he wanted her to come. He ran on a few steps,
+stopped, and looked back. She had not moved. He whined pleadingly, and scurried
+playfully in and out of the underbrush. He ran back to her, licked her face,
+and ran on again. And still she did not move. He stopped and regarded her, all
+of an intentness and eagerness, physically expressed, that slowly faded out of
+him as she turned her head and gazed back at the camp.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+There was something calling to him out there in the open. His mother heard it
+too. But she heard also that other and louder call, the call of the fire and of
+man&mdash;the call which has been given alone of all animals to the wolf to
+answer, to the wolf and the wild-dog, who are brothers.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Kiche turned and slowly trotted back toward camp. Stronger than the physical
+restraint of the stick was the clutch of the camp upon her. Unseen and
+occultly, the gods still gripped with their power and would not let her go.
+White Fang sat down in the shadow of a birch and whimpered softly. There was a
+strong smell of pine, and subtle wood fragrances filled the air, reminding him
+of his old life of freedom before the days of his bondage. But he was still
+only a part-grown puppy, and stronger than the call either of man or of the
+Wild was the call of his mother. All the hours of his short life he had
+depended upon her. The time was yet to come for independence. So he arose and
+trotted forlornly back to camp, pausing once, and twice, to sit down and
+whimper and to listen to the call that still sounded in the depths of the
+forest.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+In the Wild the time of a mother with her young is short; but under the
+dominion of man it is sometimes even shorter. Thus it was with White Fang. Grey
+Beaver was in the debt of Three Eagles. Three Eagles was going away on a trip
+up the Mackenzie to the Great Slave Lake. A strip of scarlet cloth, a bearskin,
+twenty cartridges, and Kiche, went to pay the debt. White Fang saw his mother
+taken aboard Three Eagles&rsquo; canoe, and tried to follow her. A blow from
+Three Eagles knocked him backward to the land. The canoe shoved off. He sprang
+into the water and swam after it, deaf to the sharp cries of Grey Beaver to
+return. Even a man-animal, a god, White Fang ignored, such was the terror he
+was in of losing his mother.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But gods are accustomed to being obeyed, and Grey Beaver wrathfully launched a
+canoe in pursuit. When he overtook White Fang, he reached down and by the nape
+of the neck lifted him clear of the water. He did not deposit him at once in
+the bottom of the canoe. Holding him suspended with one hand, with the other
+hand he proceeded to give him a beating. And it <i>was</i> a beating. His hand
+was heavy. Every blow was shrewd to hurt; and he delivered a multitude of
+blows.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Impelled by the blows that rained upon him, now from this side, now from that,
+White Fang swung back and forth like an erratic and jerky pendulum. Varying
+were the emotions that surged through him. At first, he had known surprise.
+Then came a momentary fear, when he yelped several times to the impact of the
+hand. But this was quickly followed by anger. His free nature asserted itself,
+and he showed his teeth and snarled fearlessly in the face of the wrathful god.
+This but served to make the god more wrathful. The blows came faster, heavier,
+more shrewd to hurt.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Grey Beaver continued to beat, White Fang continued to snarl. But this could
+not last for ever. One or the other must give over, and that one was White
+Fang. Fear surged through him again. For the first time he was being really
+man-handled. The occasional blows of sticks and stones he had previously
+experienced were as caresses compared with this. He broke down and began to cry
+and yelp. For a time each blow brought a yelp from him; but fear passed into
+terror, until finally his yelps were voiced in unbroken succession, unconnected
+with the rhythm of the punishment.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+At last Grey Beaver withheld his hand. White Fang, hanging limply, continued to
+cry. This seemed to satisfy his master, who flung him down roughly in the
+bottom of the canoe. In the meantime the canoe had drifted down the stream.
+Grey Beaver picked up the paddle. White Fang was in his way. He spurned him
+savagely with his foot. In that moment White Fang&rsquo;s free nature flashed
+forth again, and he sank his teeth into the moccasined foot.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The beating that had gone before was as nothing compared with the beating he
+now received. Grey Beaver&rsquo;s wrath was terrible; likewise was White
+Fang&rsquo;s fright. Not only the hand, but the hard wooden paddle was used
+upon him; and he was bruised and sore in all his small body when he was again
+flung down in the canoe. Again, and this time with purpose, did Grey Beaver
+kick him. White Fang did not repeat his attack on the foot. He had learned
+another lesson of his bondage. Never, no matter what the circumstance, must he
+dare to bite the god who was lord and master over him; the body of the lord and
+master was sacred, not to be defiled by the teeth of such as he. That was
+evidently the crime of crimes, the one offence there was no condoning nor
+overlooking.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+When the canoe touched the shore, White Fang lay whimpering and motionless,
+waiting the will of Grey Beaver. It was Grey Beaver&rsquo;s will that he should
+go ashore, for ashore he was flung, striking heavily on his side and hurting
+his bruises afresh. He crawled tremblingly to his feet and stood whimpering.
+Lip-lip, who had watched the whole proceeding from the bank, now rushed upon
+him, knocking him over and sinking his teeth into him. White Fang was too
+helpless to defend himself, and it would have gone hard with him had not Grey
+Beaver&rsquo;s foot shot out, lifting Lip-lip into the air with its violence so
+that he smashed down to earth a dozen feet away. This was the
+man-animal&rsquo;s justice; and even then, in his own pitiable plight, White
+Fang experienced a little grateful thrill. At Grey Beaver&rsquo;s heels he
+limped obediently through the village to the tepee. And so it came that White
+Fang learned that the right to punish was something the gods reserved for
+themselves and denied to the lesser creatures under them.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+That night, when all was still, White Fang remembered his mother and sorrowed
+for her. He sorrowed too loudly and woke up Grey Beaver, who beat him. After
+that he mourned gently when the gods were around. But sometimes, straying off
+to the edge of the woods by himself, he gave vent to his grief, and cried it
+out with loud whimperings and wailings.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+It was during this period that he might have harkened to the memories of the
+lair and the stream and run back to the Wild. But the memory of his mother held
+him. As the hunting man-animals went out and came back, so she would come back
+to the village some time. So he remained in his bondage waiting for her.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But it was not altogether an unhappy bondage. There was much to interest him.
+Something was always happening. There was no end to the strange things these
+gods did, and he was always curious to see. Besides, he was learning how to get
+along with Grey Beaver. Obedience, rigid, undeviating obedience, was what was
+exacted of him; and in return he escaped beatings and his existence was
+tolerated.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Nay, Grey Beaver himself sometimes tossed him a piece of meat, and defended him
+against the other dogs in the eating of it. And such a piece of meat was of
+value. It was worth more, in some strange way, then a dozen pieces of meat from
+the hand of a squaw. Grey Beaver never petted nor caressed. Perhaps it was the
+weight of his hand, perhaps his justice, perhaps the sheer power of him, and
+perhaps it was all these things that influenced White Fang; for a certain tie
+of attachment was forming between him and his surly lord.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Insidiously, and by remote ways, as well as by the power of stick and stone and
+clout of hand, were the shackles of White Fang&rsquo;s bondage being riveted
+upon him. The qualities in his kind that in the beginning made it possible for
+them to come in to the fires of men, were qualities capable of development.
+They were developing in him, and the camp-life, replete with misery as it was,
+was secretly endearing itself to him all the time. But White Fang was unaware
+of it. He knew only grief for the loss of Kiche, hope for her return, and a
+hungry yearning for the free life that had been his.
+</p>
+
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<h3><a name="chap11"></a>CHAPTER III<br/>
+THE OUTCAST</h3>
+
+<p>
+Lip-lip continued so to darken his days that White Fang became wickeder and
+more ferocious than it was his natural right to be. Savageness was a part of
+his make-up, but the savageness thus developed exceeded his make-up. He
+acquired a reputation for wickedness amongst the man-animals themselves.
+Wherever there was trouble and uproar in camp, fighting and squabbling or the
+outcry of a squaw over a bit of stolen meat, they were sure to find White Fang
+mixed up in it and usually at the bottom of it. They did not bother to look
+after the causes of his conduct. They saw only the effects, and the effects
+were bad. He was a sneak and a thief, a mischief-maker, a fomenter of trouble;
+and irate squaws told him to his face, the while he eyed them alert and ready
+to dodge any quick-flung missile, that he was a wolf and worthless and bound to
+come to an evil end.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He found himself an outcast in the midst of the populous camp. All the young
+dogs followed Lip-lip&rsquo;s lead. There was a difference between White Fang
+and them. Perhaps they sensed his wild-wood breed, and instinctively felt for
+him the enmity that the domestic dog feels for the wolf. But be that as it may,
+they joined with Lip-lip in the persecution. And, once declared against him,
+they found good reason to continue declared against him. One and all, from time
+to time, they felt his teeth; and to his credit, he gave more than he received.
+Many of them he could whip in single fight; but single fight was denied him.
+The beginning of such a fight was a signal for all the young dogs in camp to
+come running and pitch upon him.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Out of this pack-persecution he learned two important things: how to take care
+of himself in a mass-fight against him&mdash;and how, on a single dog, to
+inflict the greatest amount of damage in the briefest space of time. To keep
+one&rsquo;s feet in the midst of the hostile mass meant life, and this he
+learnt well. He became cat-like in his ability to stay on his feet. Even grown
+dogs might hurtle him backward or sideways with the impact of their heavy
+bodies; and backward or sideways he would go, in the air or sliding on the
+ground, but always with his legs under him and his feet downward to the mother
+earth.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+When dogs fight, there are usually preliminaries to the actual
+combat&mdash;snarlings and bristlings and stiff-legged struttings. But White
+Fang learned to omit these preliminaries. Delay meant the coming against him of
+all the young dogs. He must do his work quickly and get away. So he learnt to
+give no warning of his intention. He rushed in and snapped and slashed on the
+instant, without notice, before his foe could prepare to meet him. Thus he
+learned how to inflict quick and severe damage. Also he learned the value of
+surprise. A dog, taken off its guard, its shoulder slashed open or its ear
+ripped in ribbons before it knew what was happening, was a dog half whipped.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Furthermore, it was remarkably easy to overthrow a dog taken by surprise; while
+a dog, thus overthrown, invariably exposed for a moment the soft underside of
+its neck&mdash;the vulnerable point at which to strike for its life. White Fang
+knew this point. It was a knowledge bequeathed to him directly from the hunting
+generation of wolves. So it was that White Fang&rsquo;s method when he took the
+offensive, was: first to find a young dog alone; second, to surprise it and
+knock it off its feet; and third, to drive in with his teeth at the soft
+throat.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Being but partly grown his jaws had not yet become large enough nor strong
+enough to make his throat-attack deadly; but many a young dog went around camp
+with a lacerated throat in token of White Fang&rsquo;s intention. And one day,
+catching one of his enemies alone on the edge of the woods, he managed, by
+repeatedly overthrowing him and attacking the throat, to cut the great vein and
+let out the life. There was a great row that night. He had been observed, the
+news had been carried to the dead dog&rsquo;s master, the squaws remembered all
+the instances of stolen meat, and Grey Beaver was beset by many angry voices.
+But he resolutely held the door of his tepee, inside which he had placed the
+culprit, and refused to permit the vengeance for which his tribespeople
+clamoured.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+White Fang became hated by man and dog. During this period of his development
+he never knew a moment&rsquo;s security. The tooth of every dog was against
+him, the hand of every man. He was greeted with snarls by his kind, with curses
+and stones by his gods. He lived tensely. He was always keyed up, alert for
+attack, wary of being attacked, with an eye for sudden and unexpected missiles,
+prepared to act precipitately and coolly, to leap in with a flash of teeth, or
+to leap away with a menacing snarl.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+As for snarling he could snarl more terribly than any dog, young or old, in
+camp. The intent of the snarl is to warn or frighten, and judgment is required
+to know when it should be used. White Fang knew how to make it and when to make
+it. Into his snarl he incorporated all that was vicious, malignant, and
+horrible. With nose serrulated by continuous spasms, hair bristling in
+recurrent waves, tongue whipping out like a red snake and whipping back again,
+ears flattened down, eyes gleaming hatred, lips wrinkled back, and fangs
+exposed and dripping, he could compel a pause on the part of almost any
+assailant. A temporary pause, when taken off his guard, gave him the vital
+moment in which to think and determine his action. But often a pause so gained
+lengthened out until it evolved into a complete cessation from the attack. And
+before more than one of the grown dogs White Fang&rsquo;s snarl enabled him to
+beat an honourable retreat.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+An outcast himself from the pack of the part-grown dogs, his sanguinary methods
+and remarkable efficiency made the pack pay for its persecution of him. Not
+permitted himself to run with the pack, the curious state of affairs obtained
+that no member of the pack could run outside the pack. White Fang would not
+permit it. What of his bushwhacking and waylaying tactics, the young dogs were
+afraid to run by themselves. With the exception of Lip-lip, they were compelled
+to hunch together for mutual protection against the terrible enemy they had
+made. A puppy alone by the river bank meant a puppy dead or a puppy that
+aroused the camp with its shrill pain and terror as it fled back from the
+wolf-cub that had waylaid it.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But White Fang&rsquo;s reprisals did not cease, even when the young dogs had
+learned thoroughly that they must stay together. He attacked them when he
+caught them alone, and they attacked him when they were bunched. The sight of
+him was sufficient to start them rushing after him, at which times his
+swiftness usually carried him into safety. But woe the dog that outran his
+fellows in such pursuit! White Fang had learned to turn suddenly upon the
+pursuer that was ahead of the pack and thoroughly to rip him up before the pack
+could arrive. This occurred with great frequency, for, once in full cry, the
+dogs were prone to forget themselves in the excitement of the chase, while
+White Fang never forgot himself. Stealing backward glances as he ran, he was
+always ready to whirl around and down the overzealous pursuer that outran his
+fellows.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Young dogs are bound to play, and out of the exigencies of the situation they
+realised their play in this mimic warfare. Thus it was that the hunt of White
+Fang became their chief game&mdash;a deadly game, withal, and at all times a
+serious game. He, on the other hand, being the fastest-footed, was unafraid to
+venture anywhere. During the period that he waited vainly for his mother to
+come back, he led the pack many a wild chase through the adjacent woods. But
+the pack invariably lost him. Its noise and outcry warned him of its presence,
+while he ran alone, velvet-footed, silently, a moving shadow among the trees
+after the manner of his father and mother before him. Further he was more
+directly connected with the Wild than they; and he knew more of its secrets and
+stratagems. A favourite trick of his was to lose his trail in running water and
+then lie quietly in a near-by thicket while their baffled cries arose around
+him.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Hated by his kind and by mankind, indomitable, perpetually warred upon and
+himself waging perpetual war, his development was rapid and one-sided. This was
+no soil for kindliness and affection to blossom in. Of such things he had not
+the faintest glimmering. The code he learned was to obey the strong and to
+oppress the weak. Grey Beaver was a god, and strong. Therefore White Fang
+obeyed him. But the dog younger or smaller than himself was weak, a thing to be
+destroyed. His development was in the direction of power. In order to face the
+constant danger of hurt and even of destruction, his predatory and protective
+faculties were unduly developed. He became quicker of movement than the other
+dogs, swifter of foot, craftier, deadlier, more lithe, more lean with ironlike
+muscle and sinew, more enduring, more cruel, more ferocious, and more
+intelligent. He had to become all these things, else he would not have held his
+own nor survive the hostile environment in which he found himself.
+</p>
+
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<h3><a name="chap12"></a>CHAPTER IV<br/>
+THE TRAIL OF THE GODS</h3>
+
+<p>
+In the fall of the year, when the days were shortening and the bite of the
+frost was coming into the air, White Fang got his chance for liberty. For
+several days there had been a great hubbub in the village. The summer camp was
+being dismantled, and the tribe, bag and baggage, was preparing to go off to
+the fall hunting. White Fang watched it all with eager eyes, and when the
+tepees began to come down and the canoes were loading at the bank, he
+understood. Already the canoes were departing, and some had disappeared down
+the river.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Quite deliberately he determined to stay behind. He waited his opportunity to
+slink out of camp to the woods. Here, in the running stream where ice was
+beginning to form, he hid his trail. Then he crawled into the heart of a dense
+thicket and waited. The time passed by, and he slept intermittently for hours.
+Then he was aroused by Grey Beaver&rsquo;s voice calling him by name. There
+were other voices. White Fang could hear Grey Beaver&rsquo;s squaw taking part
+in the search, and Mit-sah, who was Grey Beaver&rsquo;s son.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+White Fang trembled with fear, and though the impulse came to crawl out of his
+hiding-place, he resisted it. After a time the voices died away, and some time
+after that he crept out to enjoy the success of his undertaking. Darkness was
+coming on, and for a while he played about among the trees, pleasuring in his
+freedom. Then, and quite suddenly, he became aware of loneliness. He sat down
+to consider, listening to the silence of the forest and perturbed by it. That
+nothing moved nor sounded, seemed ominous. He felt the lurking of danger,
+unseen and unguessed. He was suspicious of the looming bulks of the trees and
+of the dark shadows that might conceal all manner of perilous things.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Then it was cold. Here was no warm side of a tepee against which to snuggle.
+The frost was in his feet, and he kept lifting first one fore-foot and then the
+other. He curved his bushy tail around to cover them, and at the same time he
+saw a vision. There was nothing strange about it. Upon his inward sight was
+impressed a succession of memory-pictures. He saw the camp again, the tepees,
+and the blaze of the fires. He heard the shrill voices of the women, the gruff
+basses of the men, and the snarling of the dogs. He was hungry, and he
+remembered pieces of meat and fish that had been thrown him. Here was no meat,
+nothing but a threatening and inedible silence.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+His bondage had softened him. Irresponsibility had weakened him. He had
+forgotten how to shift for himself. The night yawned about him. His senses,
+accustomed to the hum and bustle of the camp, used to the continuous impact of
+sights and sounds, were now left idle. There was nothing to do, nothing to see
+nor hear. They strained to catch some interruption of the silence and
+immobility of nature. They were appalled by inaction and by the feel of
+something terrible impending.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He gave a great start of fright. A colossal and formless something was rushing
+across the field of his vision. It was a tree-shadow flung by the moon, from
+whose face the clouds had been brushed away. Reassured, he whimpered softly;
+then he suppressed the whimper for fear that it might attract the attention of
+the lurking dangers.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+A tree, contracting in the cool of the night, made a loud noise. It was
+directly above him. He yelped in his fright. A panic seized him, and he ran
+madly toward the village. He knew an overpowering desire for the protection and
+companionship of man. In his nostrils was the smell of the camp-smoke. In his
+ears the camp-sounds and cries were ringing loud. He passed out of the forest
+and into the moonlit open where were no shadows nor darknesses. But no village
+greeted his eyes. He had forgotten. The village had gone away.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+His wild flight ceased abruptly. There was no place to which to flee. He slunk
+forlornly through the deserted camp, smelling the rubbish-heaps and the
+discarded rags and tags of the gods. He would have been glad for the rattle of
+stones about him, flung by an angry squaw, glad for the hand of Grey Beaver
+descending upon him in wrath; while he would have welcomed with delight Lip-lip
+and the whole snarling, cowardly pack.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He came to where Grey Beaver&rsquo;s tepee had stood. In the centre of the
+space it had occupied, he sat down. He pointed his nose at the moon. His throat
+was afflicted by rigid spasms, his mouth opened, and in a heart-broken cry
+bubbled up his loneliness and fear, his grief for Kiche, all his past sorrows
+and miseries as well as his apprehension of sufferings and dangers to come. It
+was the long wolf-howl, full-throated and mournful, the first howl he had ever
+uttered.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The coming of daylight dispelled his fears but increased his loneliness. The
+naked earth, which so shortly before had been so populous; thrust his
+loneliness more forcibly upon him. It did not take him long to make up his
+mind. He plunged into the forest and followed the river bank down the stream.
+All day he ran. He did not rest. He seemed made to run on for ever. His
+iron-like body ignored fatigue. And even after fatigue came, his heritage of
+endurance braced him to endless endeavour and enabled him to drive his
+complaining body onward.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Where the river swung in against precipitous bluffs, he climbed the high
+mountains behind. Rivers and streams that entered the main river he forded or
+swam. Often he took to the rim-ice that was beginning to form, and more than
+once he crashed through and struggled for life in the icy current. Always he
+was on the lookout for the trail of the gods where it might leave the river and
+proceed inland.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+White Fang was intelligent beyond the average of his kind; yet his mental
+vision was not wide enough to embrace the other bank of the Mackenzie. What if
+the trail of the gods led out on that side? It never entered his head. Later
+on, when he had travelled more and grown older and wiser and come to know more
+of trails and rivers, it might be that he could grasp and apprehend such a
+possibility. But that mental power was yet in the future. Just now he ran
+blindly, his own bank of the Mackenzie alone entering into his calculations.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+All night he ran, blundering in the darkness into mishaps and obstacles that
+delayed but did not daunt. By the middle of the second day he had been running
+continuously for thirty hours, and the iron of his flesh was giving out. It was
+the endurance of his mind that kept him going. He had not eaten in forty hours,
+and he was weak with hunger. The repeated drenchings in the icy water had
+likewise had their effect on him. His handsome coat was draggled. The broad
+pads of his feet were bruised and bleeding. He had begun to limp, and this limp
+increased with the hours. To make it worse, the light of the sky was obscured
+and snow began to fall&mdash;a raw, moist, melting, clinging snow, slippery
+under foot, that hid from him the landscape he traversed, and that covered over
+the inequalities of the ground so that the way of his feet was more difficult
+and painful.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Grey Beaver had intended camping that night on the far bank of the Mackenzie,
+for it was in that direction that the hunting lay. But on the near bank,
+shortly before dark, a moose coming down to drink, had been espied by
+Kloo-kooch, who was Grey Beaver&rsquo;s squaw. Now, had not the moose come down
+to drink, had not Mit-sah been steering out of the course because of the snow,
+had not Kloo-kooch sighted the moose, and had not Grey Beaver killed it with a
+lucky shot from his rifle, all subsequent things would have happened
+differently. Grey Beaver would not have camped on the near side of the
+Mackenzie, and White Fang would have passed by and gone on, either to die or to
+find his way to his wild brothers and become one of them&mdash;a wolf to the
+end of his days.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Night had fallen. The snow was flying more thickly, and White Fang, whimpering
+softly to himself as he stumbled and limped along, came upon a fresh trail in
+the snow. So fresh was it that he knew it immediately for what it was. Whining
+with eagerness, he followed back from the river bank and in among the trees.
+The camp-sounds came to his ears. He saw the blaze of the fire, Kloo-kooch
+cooking, and Grey Beaver squatting on his hams and mumbling a chunk of raw
+tallow. There was fresh meat in camp!
+</p>
+
+<p>
+White Fang expected a beating. He crouched and bristled a little at the thought
+of it. Then he went forward again. He feared and disliked the beating he knew
+to be waiting for him. But he knew, further, that the comfort of the fire would
+be his, the protection of the gods, the companionship of the dogs&mdash;the
+last, a companionship of enmity, but none the less a companionship and
+satisfying to his gregarious needs.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He came cringing and crawling into the firelight. Grey Beaver saw him, and
+stopped munching the tallow. White Fang crawled slowly, cringing and grovelling
+in the abjectness of his abasement and submission. He crawled straight toward
+Grey Beaver, every inch of his progress becoming slower and more painful. At
+last he lay at the master&rsquo;s feet, into whose possession he now
+surrendered himself, voluntarily, body and soul. Of his own choice, he came in
+to sit by man&rsquo;s fire and to be ruled by him. White Fang trembled, waiting
+for the punishment to fall upon him. There was a movement of the hand above
+him. He cringed involuntarily under the expected blow. It did not fall. He
+stole a glance upward. Grey Beaver was breaking the lump of tallow in half!
+Grey Beaver was offering him one piece of the tallow! Very gently and somewhat
+suspiciously, he first smelled the tallow and then proceeded to eat it. Grey
+Beaver ordered meat to be brought to him, and guarded him from the other dogs
+while he ate. After that, grateful and content, White Fang lay at Grey
+Beaver&rsquo;s feet, gazing at the fire that warmed him, blinking and dozing,
+secure in the knowledge that the morrow would find him, not wandering forlorn
+through bleak forest-stretches, but in the camp of the man-animals, with the
+gods to whom he had given himself and upon whom he was now dependent.
+</p>
+
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<h3><a name="chap13"></a>CHAPTER V<br/>
+THE COVENANT</h3>
+
+<p>
+When December was well along, Grey Beaver went on a journey up the Mackenzie.
+Mit-sah and Kloo-kooch went with him. One sled he drove himself, drawn by dogs
+he had traded for or borrowed. A second and smaller sled was driven by Mit-sah,
+and to this was harnessed a team of puppies. It was more of a toy affair than
+anything else, yet it was the delight of Mit-sah, who felt that he was
+beginning to do a man&rsquo;s work in the world. Also, he was learning to drive
+dogs and to train dogs; while the puppies themselves were being broken in to
+the harness. Furthermore, the sled was of some service, for it carried nearly
+two hundred pounds of outfit and food.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+White Fang had seen the camp-dogs toiling in the harness, so that he did not
+resent overmuch the first placing of the harness upon himself. About his neck
+was put a moss-stuffed collar, which was connected by two pulling-traces to a
+strap that passed around his chest and over his back. It was to this that was
+fastened the long rope by which he pulled at the sled.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+There were seven puppies in the team. The others had been born earlier in the
+year and were nine and ten months old, while White Fang was only eight months
+old. Each dog was fastened to the sled by a single rope. No two ropes were of
+the same length, while the difference in length between any two ropes was at
+least that of a dog&rsquo;s body. Every rope was brought to a ring at the front
+end of the sled. The sled itself was without runners, being a birch-bark
+toboggan, with upturned forward end to keep it from ploughing under the snow.
+This construction enabled the weight of the sled and load to be distributed
+over the largest snow-surface; for the snow was crystal-powder and very soft.
+Observing the same principle of widest distribution of weight, the dogs at the
+ends of their ropes radiated fan-fashion from the nose of the sled, so that no
+dog trod in another&rsquo;s footsteps.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+There was, furthermore, another virtue in the fan-formation. The ropes of
+varying length prevented the dogs attacking from the rear those that ran in
+front of them. For a dog to attack another, it would have to turn upon one at a
+shorter rope. In which case it would find itself face to face with the dog
+attacked, and also it would find itself facing the whip of the driver. But the
+most peculiar virtue of all lay in the fact that the dog that strove to attack
+one in front of him must pull the sled faster, and that the faster the sled
+travelled, the faster could the dog attacked run away. Thus, the dog behind
+could never catch up with the one in front. The faster he ran, the faster ran
+the one he was after, and the faster ran all the dogs. Incidentally, the sled
+went faster, and thus, by cunning indirection, did man increase his mastery
+over the beasts.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Mit-sah resembled his father, much of whose grey wisdom he possessed. In the
+past he had observed Lip-lip&rsquo;s persecution of White Fang; but at that
+time Lip-lip was another man&rsquo;s dog, and Mit-sah had never dared more than
+to shy an occasional stone at him. But now Lip-lip was his dog, and he
+proceeded to wreak his vengeance on him by putting him at the end of the
+longest rope. This made Lip-lip the leader, and was apparently an honour! but
+in reality it took away from him all honour, and instead of being bully and
+master of the pack, he now found himself hated and persecuted by the pack.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Because he ran at the end of the longest rope, the dogs had always the view of
+him running away before them. All that they saw of him was his bushy tail and
+fleeing hind legs&mdash;a view far less ferocious and intimidating than his
+bristling mane and gleaming fangs. Also, dogs being so constituted in their
+mental ways, the sight of him running away gave desire to run after him and a
+feeling that he ran away from them.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The moment the sled started, the team took after Lip-lip in a chase that
+extended throughout the day. At first he had been prone to turn upon his
+pursuers, jealous of his dignity and wrathful; but at such times Mit-sah would
+throw the stinging lash of the thirty-foot cariboo-gut whip into his face and
+compel him to turn tail and run on. Lip-lip might face the pack, but he could
+not face that whip, and all that was left him to do was to keep his long rope
+taut and his flanks ahead of the teeth of his mates.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But a still greater cunning lurked in the recesses of the Indian mind. To give
+point to unending pursuit of the leader, Mit-sah favoured him over the other
+dogs. These favours aroused in them jealousy and hatred. In their presence
+Mit-sah would give him meat and would give it to him only. This was maddening
+to them. They would rage around just outside the throwing-distance of the whip,
+while Lip-lip devoured the meat and Mit-sah protected him. And when there was
+no meat to give, Mit-sah would keep the team at a distance and make believe to
+give meat to Lip-lip.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+White Fang took kindly to the work. He had travelled a greater distance than
+the other dogs in the yielding of himself to the rule of the gods, and he had
+learned more thoroughly the futility of opposing their will. In addition, the
+persecution he had suffered from the pack had made the pack less to him in the
+scheme of things, and man more. He had not learned to be dependent on his kind
+for companionship. Besides, Kiche was well-nigh forgotten; and the chief outlet
+of expression that remained to him was in the allegiance he tendered the gods
+he had accepted as masters. So he worked hard, learned discipline, and was
+obedient. Faithfulness and willingness characterised his toil. These are
+essential traits of the wolf and the wild-dog when they have become
+domesticated, and these traits White Fang possessed in unusual measure.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+A companionship did exist between White Fang and the other dogs, but it was one
+of warfare and enmity. He had never learned to play with them. He knew only how
+to fight, and fight with them he did, returning to them a hundred-fold the
+snaps and slashes they had given him in the days when Lip-lip was leader of the
+pack. But Lip-lip was no longer leader&mdash;except when he fled away before
+his mates at the end of his rope, the sled bounding along behind. In camp he
+kept close to Mit-sah or Grey Beaver or Kloo-kooch. He did not dare venture
+away from the gods, for now the fangs of all dogs were against him, and he
+tasted to the dregs the persecution that had been White Fang&rsquo;s.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+With the overthrow of Lip-lip, White Fang could have become leader of the pack.
+But he was too morose and solitary for that. He merely thrashed his team-mates.
+Otherwise he ignored them. They got out of his way when he came along; nor did
+the boldest of them ever dare to rob him of his meat. On the contrary, they
+devoured their own meat hurriedly, for fear that he would take it away from
+them. White Fang knew the law well: <i>to oppress the weak and obey the
+strong</i>. He ate his share of meat as rapidly as he could. And then woe the
+dog that had not yet finished! A snarl and a flash of fangs, and that dog would
+wail his indignation to the uncomforting stars while White Fang finished his
+portion for him.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Every little while, however, one dog or another would flame up in revolt and be
+promptly subdued. Thus White Fang was kept in training. He was jealous of the
+isolation in which he kept himself in the midst of the pack, and he fought
+often to maintain it. But such fights were of brief duration. He was too quick
+for the others. They were slashed open and bleeding before they knew what had
+happened, were whipped almost before they had begun to fight.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+As rigid as the sled-discipline of the gods, was the discipline maintained by
+White Fang amongst his fellows. He never allowed them any latitude. He
+compelled them to an unremitting respect for him. They might do as they pleased
+amongst themselves. That was no concern of his. But it <i>was</i> his concern
+that they leave him alone in his isolation, get out of his way when he elected
+to walk among them, and at all times acknowledge his mastery over them. A hint
+of stiff-leggedness on their part, a lifted lip or a bristle of hair, and he
+would be upon them, merciless and cruel, swiftly convincing them of the error
+of their way.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He was a monstrous tyrant. His mastery was rigid as steel. He oppressed the
+weak with a vengeance. Not for nothing had he been exposed to the pitiless
+struggles for life in the day of his cubhood, when his mother and he, alone and
+unaided, held their own and survived in the ferocious environment of the Wild.
+And not for nothing had he learned to walk softly when superior strength went
+by. He oppressed the weak, but he respected the strong. And in the course of
+the long journey with Grey Beaver he walked softly indeed amongst the
+full-grown dogs in the camps of the strange man-animals they encountered.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The months passed by. Still continued the journey of Grey Beaver. White
+Fang&rsquo;s strength was developed by the long hours on trail and the steady
+toil at the sled; and it would have seemed that his mental development was
+well-nigh complete. He had come to know quite thoroughly the world in which he
+lived. His outlook was bleak and materialistic. The world as he saw it was a
+fierce and brutal world, a world without warmth, a world in which caresses and
+affection and the bright sweetnesses of the spirit did not exist.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He had no affection for Grey Beaver. True, he was a god, but a most savage god.
+White Fang was glad to acknowledge his lordship, but it was a lordship based
+upon superior intelligence and brute strength. There was something in the fibre
+of White Fang&rsquo;s being that made his lordship a thing to be desired, else
+he would not have come back from the Wild when he did to tender his allegiance.
+There were deeps in his nature which had never been sounded. A kind word, a
+caressing touch of the hand, on the part of Grey Beaver, might have sounded
+these deeps; but Grey Beaver did not caress, nor speak kind words. It was not
+his way. His primacy was savage, and savagely he ruled, administering justice
+with a club, punishing transgression with the pain of a blow, and rewarding
+merit, not by kindness, but by withholding a blow.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+So White Fang knew nothing of the heaven a man&rsquo;s hand might contain for
+him. Besides, he did not like the hands of the man-animals. He was suspicious
+of them. It was true that they sometimes gave meat, but more often they gave
+hurt. Hands were things to keep away from. They hurled stones, wielded sticks
+and clubs and whips, administered slaps and clouts, and, when they touched him,
+were cunning to hurt with pinch and twist and wrench. In strange villages he
+had encountered the hands of the children and learned that they were cruel to
+hurt. Also, he had once nearly had an eye poked out by a toddling papoose. From
+these experiences he became suspicious of all children. He could not tolerate
+them. When they came near with their ominous hands, he got up.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+It was in a village at the Great Slave Lake, that, in the course of resenting
+the evil of the hands of the man-animals, he came to modify the law that he had
+learned from Grey Beaver: namely, that the unpardonable crime was to bite one
+of the gods. In this village, after the custom of all dogs in all villages,
+White Fang went foraging, for food. A boy was chopping frozen moose-meat with
+an axe, and the chips were flying in the snow. White Fang, sliding by in quest
+of meat, stopped and began to eat the chips. He observed the boy lay down the
+axe and take up a stout club. White Fang sprang clear, just in time to escape
+the descending blow. The boy pursued him, and he, a stranger in the village,
+fled between two tepees to find himself cornered against a high earth bank.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+There was no escape for White Fang. The only way out was between the two
+tepees, and this the boy guarded. Holding his club prepared to strike, he drew
+in on his cornered quarry. White Fang was furious. He faced the boy, bristling
+and snarling, his sense of justice outraged. He knew the law of forage. All the
+wastage of meat, such as the frozen chips, belonged to the dog that found it.
+He had done no wrong, broken no law, yet here was this boy preparing to give
+him a beating. White Fang scarcely knew what happened. He did it in a surge of
+rage. And he did it so quickly that the boy did not know either. All the boy
+knew was that he had in some unaccountable way been overturned into the snow,
+and that his club-hand had been ripped wide open by White Fang&rsquo;s teeth.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But White Fang knew that he had broken the law of the gods. He had driven his
+teeth into the sacred flesh of one of them, and could expect nothing but a most
+terrible punishment. He fled away to Grey Beaver, behind whose protecting legs
+he crouched when the bitten boy and the boy&rsquo;s family came, demanding
+vengeance. But they went away with vengeance unsatisfied. Grey Beaver defended
+White Fang. So did Mit-sah and Kloo-kooch. White Fang, listening to the wordy
+war and watching the angry gestures, knew that his act was justified. And so it
+came that he learned there were gods and gods. There were his gods, and there
+were other gods, and between them there was a difference. Justice or injustice,
+it was all the same, he must take all things from the hands of his own gods.
+But he was not compelled to take injustice from the other gods. It was his
+privilege to resent it with his teeth. And this also was a law of the gods.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Before the day was out, White Fang was to learn more about this law. Mit-sah,
+alone, gathering firewood in the forest, encountered the boy that had been
+bitten. With him were other boys. Hot words passed. Then all the boys attacked
+Mit-sah. It was going hard with him. Blows were raining upon him from all
+sides. White Fang looked on at first. This was an affair of the gods, and no
+concern of his. Then he realised that this was Mit-sah, one of his own
+particular gods, who was being maltreated. It was no reasoned impulse that made
+White Fang do what he then did. A mad rush of anger sent him leaping in amongst
+the combatants. Five minutes later the landscape was covered with fleeing boys,
+many of whom dripped blood upon the snow in token that White Fang&rsquo;s teeth
+had not been idle. When Mit-sah told the story in camp, Grey Beaver ordered
+meat to be given to White Fang. He ordered much meat to be given, and White
+Fang, gorged and sleepy by the fire, knew that the law had received its
+verification.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+It was in line with these experiences that White Fang came to learn the law of
+property and the duty of the defence of property. From the protection of his
+god&rsquo;s body to the protection of his god&rsquo;s possessions was a step,
+and this step he made. What was his god&rsquo;s was to be defended against all
+the world&mdash;even to the extent of biting other gods. Not only was such an
+act sacrilegious in its nature, but it was fraught with peril. The gods were
+all-powerful, and a dog was no match against them; yet White Fang learned to
+face them, fiercely belligerent and unafraid. Duty rose above fear, and
+thieving gods learned to leave Grey Beaver&rsquo;s property alone.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+One thing, in this connection, White Fang quickly learnt, and that was that a
+thieving god was usually a cowardly god and prone to run away at the sounding
+of the alarm. Also, he learned that but brief time elapsed between his sounding
+of the alarm and Grey Beaver coming to his aid. He came to know that it was not
+fear of him that drove the thief away, but fear of Grey Beaver. White Fang did
+not give the alarm by barking. He never barked. His method was to drive
+straight at the intruder, and to sink his teeth in if he could. Because he was
+morose and solitary, having nothing to do with the other dogs, he was unusually
+fitted to guard his master&rsquo;s property; and in this he was encouraged and
+trained by Grey Beaver. One result of this was to make White Fang more
+ferocious and indomitable, and more solitary.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The months went by, binding stronger and stronger the covenant between dog and
+man. This was the ancient covenant that the first wolf that came in from the
+Wild entered into with man. And, like all succeeding wolves and wild dogs that
+had done likewise, White Fang worked the covenant out for himself. The terms
+were simple. For the possession of a flesh-and-blood god, he exchanged his own
+liberty. Food and fire, protection and companionship, were some of the things
+he received from the god. In return, he guarded the god&rsquo;s property,
+defended his body, worked for him, and obeyed him.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The possession of a god implies service. White Fang&rsquo;s was a service of
+duty and awe, but not of love. He did not know what love was. He had no
+experience of love. Kiche was a remote memory. Besides, not only had he
+abandoned the Wild and his kind when he gave himself up to man, but the terms
+of the covenant were such that if ever he met Kiche again he would not desert
+his god to go with her. His allegiance to man seemed somehow a law of his being
+greater than the love of liberty, of kind and kin.
+</p>
+
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<h3><a name="chap14"></a>CHAPTER VI<br/>
+THE FAMINE</h3>
+
+<p>
+The spring of the year was at hand when Grey Beaver finished his long journey.
+It was April, and White Fang was a year old when he pulled into the home
+villages and was loosed from the harness by Mit-sah. Though a long way from his
+full growth, White Fang, next to Lip-lip, was the largest yearling in the
+village. Both from his father, the wolf, and from Kiche, he had inherited
+stature and strength, and already he was measuring up alongside the full-grown
+dogs. But he had not yet grown compact. His body was slender and rangy, and his
+strength more stringy than massive, His coat was the true wolf-grey, and to all
+appearances he was true wolf himself. The quarter-strain of dog he had
+inherited from Kiche had left no mark on him physically, though it had played
+its part in his mental make-up.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He wandered through the village, recognising with staid satisfaction the
+various gods he had known before the long journey. Then there were the dogs,
+puppies growing up like himself, and grown dogs that did not look so large and
+formidable as the memory pictures he retained of them. Also, he stood less in
+fear of them than formerly, stalking among them with a certain careless ease
+that was as new to him as it was enjoyable.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+There was Baseek, a grizzled old fellow that in his younger days had but to
+uncover his fangs to send White Fang cringing and crouching to the right about.
+From him White Fang had learned much of his own insignificance; and from him he
+was now to learn much of the change and development that had taken place in
+himself. While Baseek had been growing weaker with age, White Fang had been
+growing stronger with youth.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+It was at the cutting-up of a moose, fresh-killed, that White Fang learned of
+the changed relations in which he stood to the dog-world. He had got for
+himself a hoof and part of the shin-bone, to which quite a bit of meat was
+attached. Withdrawn from the immediate scramble of the other dogs&mdash;in fact
+out of sight behind a thicket&mdash;he was devouring his prize, when Baseek
+rushed in upon him. Before he knew what he was doing, he had slashed the
+intruder twice and sprung clear. Baseek was surprised by the other&rsquo;s
+temerity and swiftness of attack. He stood, gazing stupidly across at White
+Fang, the raw, red shin-bone between them.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Baseek was old, and already he had come to know the increasing valour of the
+dogs it had been his wont to bully. Bitter experiences these, which, perforce,
+he swallowed, calling upon all his wisdom to cope with them. In the old days he
+would have sprung upon White Fang in a fury of righteous wrath. But now his
+waning powers would not permit such a course. He bristled fiercely and looked
+ominously across the shin-bone at White Fang. And White Fang, resurrecting
+quite a deal of the old awe, seemed to wilt and to shrink in upon himself and
+grow small, as he cast about in his mind for a way to beat a retreat not too
+inglorious.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And right here Baseek erred. Had he contented himself with looking fierce and
+ominous, all would have been well. White Fang, on the verge of retreat, would
+have retreated, leaving the meat to him. But Baseek did not wait. He considered
+the victory already his and stepped forward to the meat. As he bent his head
+carelessly to smell it, White Fang bristled slightly. Even then it was not too
+late for Baseek to retrieve the situation. Had he merely stood over the meat,
+head up and glowering, White Fang would ultimately have slunk away. But the
+fresh meat was strong in Baseek&rsquo;s nostrils, and greed urged him to take a
+bite of it.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+This was too much for White Fang. Fresh upon his months of mastery over his own
+team-mates, it was beyond his self-control to stand idly by while another
+devoured the meat that belonged to him. He struck, after his custom, without
+warning. With the first slash, Baseek&rsquo;s right ear was ripped into
+ribbons. He was astounded at the suddenness of it. But more things, and most
+grievous ones, were happening with equal suddenness. He was knocked off his
+feet. His throat was bitten. While he was struggling to his feet the young dog
+sank teeth twice into his shoulder. The swiftness of it was bewildering. He
+made a futile rush at White Fang, clipping the empty air with an outraged snap.
+The next moment his nose was laid open, and he was staggering backward away
+from the meat.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The situation was now reversed. White Fang stood over the shin-bone, bristling
+and menacing, while Baseek stood a little way off, preparing to retreat. He
+dared not risk a fight with this young lightning-flash, and again he knew, and
+more bitterly, the enfeeblement of oncoming age. His attempt to maintain his
+dignity was heroic. Calmly turning his back upon young dog and shin-bone, as
+though both were beneath his notice and unworthy of his consideration, he
+stalked grandly away. Nor, until well out of sight, did he stop to lick his
+bleeding wounds.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The effect on White Fang was to give him a greater faith in himself, and a
+greater pride. He walked less softly among the grown dogs; his attitude toward
+them was less compromising. Not that he went out of his way looking for
+trouble. Far from it. But upon his way he demanded consideration. He stood upon
+his right to go his way unmolested and to give trail to no dog. He had to be
+taken into account, that was all. He was no longer to be disregarded and
+ignored, as was the lot of puppies, and as continued to be the lot of the
+puppies that were his team-mates. They got out of the way, gave trail to the
+grown dogs, and gave up meat to them under compulsion. But White Fang,
+uncompanionable, solitary, morose, scarcely looking to right or left,
+redoubtable, forbidding of aspect, remote and alien, was accepted as an equal
+by his puzzled elders. They quickly learned to leave him alone, neither
+venturing hostile acts nor making overtures of friendliness. If they left him
+alone, he left them alone&mdash;a state of affairs that they found, after a few
+encounters, to be pre-eminently desirable.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+In midsummer White Fang had an experience. Trotting along in his silent way to
+investigate a new tepee which had been erected on the edge of the village while
+he was away with the hunters after moose, he came full upon Kiche. He paused
+and looked at her. He remembered her vaguely, but he <i>remembered</i> her, and
+that was more than could be said for her. She lifted her lip at him in the old
+snarl of menace, and his memory became clear. His forgotten cubhood, all that
+was associated with that familiar snarl, rushed back to him. Before he had
+known the gods, she had been to him the centre-pin of the universe. The old
+familiar feelings of that time came back upon him, surged up within him. He
+bounded towards her joyously, and she met him with shrewd fangs that laid his
+cheek open to the bone. He did not understand. He backed away, bewildered and
+puzzled.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But it was not Kiche&rsquo;s fault. A wolf-mother was not made to remember her
+cubs of a year or so before. So she did not remember White Fang. He was a
+strange animal, an intruder; and her present litter of puppies gave her the
+right to resent such intrusion.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+One of the puppies sprawled up to White Fang. They were half-brothers, only
+they did not know it. White Fang sniffed the puppy curiously, whereupon Kiche
+rushed upon him, gashing his face a second time. He backed farther away. All
+the old memories and associations died down again and passed into the grave
+from which they had been resurrected. He looked at Kiche licking her puppy and
+stopping now and then to snarl at him. She was without value to him. He had
+learned to get along without her. Her meaning was forgotten. There was no place
+for her in his scheme of things, as there was no place for him in hers.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He was still standing, stupid and bewildered, the memories forgotten, wondering
+what it was all about, when Kiche attacked him a third time, intent on driving
+him away altogether from the vicinity. And White Fang allowed himself to be
+driven away. This was a female of his kind, and it was a law of his kind that
+the males must not fight the females. He did not know anything about this law,
+for it was no generalisation of the mind, not a something acquired by
+experience of the world. He knew it as a secret prompting, as an urge of
+instinct&mdash;of the same instinct that made him howl at the moon and stars of
+nights, and that made him fear death and the unknown.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The months went by. White Fang grew stronger, heavier, and more compact, while
+his character was developing along the lines laid down by his heredity and his
+environment. His heredity was a life-stuff that may be likened to clay. It
+possessed many possibilities, was capable of being moulded into many different
+forms. Environment served to model the clay, to give it a particular form.
+Thus, had White Fang never come in to the fires of man, the Wild would have
+moulded him into a true wolf. But the gods had given him a different
+environment, and he was moulded into a dog that was rather wolfish, but that
+was a dog and not a wolf.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And so, according to the clay of his nature and the pressure of his
+surroundings, his character was being moulded into a certain particular shape.
+There was no escaping it. He was becoming more morose, more uncompanionable,
+more solitary, more ferocious; while the dogs were learning more and more that
+it was better to be at peace with him than at war, and Grey Beaver was coming
+to prize him more greatly with the passage of each day.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+White Fang, seeming to sum up strength in all his qualities, nevertheless
+suffered from one besetting weakness. He could not stand being laughed at. The
+laughter of men was a hateful thing. They might laugh among themselves about
+anything they pleased except himself, and he did not mind. But the moment
+laughter was turned upon him he would fly into a most terrible rage. Grave,
+dignified, sombre, a laugh made him frantic to ridiculousness. It so outraged
+him and upset him that for hours he would behave like a demon. And woe to the
+dog that at such times ran foul of him. He knew the law too well to take it out
+of Grey Beaver; behind Grey Beaver were a club and godhead. But behind the dogs
+there was nothing but space, and into this space they flew when White Fang came
+on the scene, made mad by laughter.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+In the third year of his life there came a great famine to the Mackenzie
+Indians. In the summer the fish failed. In the winter the cariboo forsook their
+accustomed track. Moose were scarce, the rabbits almost disappeared, hunting
+and preying animals perished. Denied their usual food-supply, weakened by
+hunger, they fell upon and devoured one another. Only the strong survived.
+White Fang&rsquo;s gods were always hunting animals. The old and the weak of
+them died of hunger. There was wailing in the village, where the women and
+children went without in order that what little they had might go into the
+bellies of the lean and hollow-eyed hunters who trod the forest in the vain
+pursuit of meat.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+To such extremity were the gods driven that they ate the soft-tanned leather of
+their mocassins and mittens, while the dogs ate the harnesses off their backs
+and the very whip-lashes. Also, the dogs ate one another, and also the gods ate
+the dogs. The weakest and the more worthless were eaten first. The dogs that
+still lived, looked on and understood. A few of the boldest and wisest forsook
+the fires of the gods, which had now become a shambles, and fled into the
+forest, where, in the end, they starved to death or were eaten by wolves.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+In this time of misery, White Fang, too, stole away into the woods. He was
+better fitted for the life than the other dogs, for he had the training of his
+cubhood to guide him. Especially adept did he become in stalking small living
+things. He would lie concealed for hours, following every movement of a
+cautious tree-squirrel, waiting, with a patience as huge as the hunger he
+suffered from, until the squirrel ventured out upon the ground. Even then,
+White Fang was not premature. He waited until he was sure of striking before
+the squirrel could gain a tree-refuge. Then, and not until then, would he flash
+from his hiding-place, a grey projectile, incredibly swift, never failing its
+mark&mdash;the fleeing squirrel that fled not fast enough.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Successful as he was with squirrels, there was one difficulty that prevented
+him from living and growing fat on them. There were not enough squirrels. So he
+was driven to hunt still smaller things. So acute did his hunger become at
+times that he was not above rooting out wood-mice from their burrows in the
+ground. Nor did he scorn to do battle with a weasel as hungry as himself and
+many times more ferocious.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+In the worst pinches of the famine he stole back to the fires of the gods. But
+he did not go into the fires. He lurked in the forest, avoiding discovery and
+robbing the snares at the rare intervals when game was caught. He even robbed
+Grey Beaver&rsquo;s snare of a rabbit at a time when Grey Beaver staggered and
+tottered through the forest, sitting down often to rest, what of weakness and
+of shortness of breath.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+One day While Fang encountered a young wolf, gaunt and scrawny, loose-jointed
+with famine. Had he not been hungry himself, White Fang might have gone with
+him and eventually found his way into the pack amongst his wild brethren. As it
+was, he ran the young wolf down and killed and ate him.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Fortune seemed to favour him. Always, when hardest pressed for food, he found
+something to kill. Again, when he was weak, it was his luck that none of the
+larger preying animals chanced upon him. Thus, he was strong from the two
+days&rsquo; eating a lynx had afforded him when the hungry wolf-pack ran full
+tilt upon him. It was a long, cruel chase, but he was better nourished than
+they, and in the end outran them. And not only did he outrun them, but,
+circling widely back on his track, he gathered in one of his exhausted
+pursuers.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+After that he left that part of the country and journeyed over to the valley
+wherein he had been born. Here, in the old lair, he encountered Kiche. Up to
+her old tricks, she, too, had fled the inhospitable fires of the gods and gone
+back to her old refuge to give birth to her young. Of this litter but one
+remained alive when White Fang came upon the scene, and this one was not
+destined to live long. Young life had little chance in such a famine.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Kiche&rsquo;s greeting of her grown son was anything but affectionate. But
+White Fang did not mind. He had outgrown his mother. So he turned tail
+philosophically and trotted on up the stream. At the forks he took the turning
+to the left, where he found the lair of the lynx with whom his mother and he
+had fought long before. Here, in the abandoned lair, he settled down and rested
+for a day.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+During the early summer, in the last days of the famine, he met Lip-lip, who
+had likewise taken to the woods, where he had eked out a miserable existence.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+White Fang came upon him unexpectedly. Trotting in opposite directions along
+the base of a high bluff, they rounded a corner of rock and found themselves
+face to face. They paused with instant alarm, and looked at each other
+suspiciously.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+White Fang was in splendid condition. His hunting had been good, and for a week
+he had eaten his fill. He was even gorged from his latest kill. But in the
+moment he looked at Lip-lip his hair rose on end all along his back. It was an
+involuntary bristling on his part, the physical state that in the past had
+always accompanied the mental state produced in him by Lip-lip&rsquo;s bullying
+and persecution. As in the past he had bristled and snarled at sight of
+Lip-lip, so now, and automatically, he bristled and snarled. He did not waste
+any time. The thing was done thoroughly and with despatch. Lip-lip essayed to
+back away, but White Fang struck him hard, shoulder to shoulder. Lip-lip was
+overthrown and rolled upon his back. White Fang&rsquo;s teeth drove into the
+scrawny throat. There was a death-struggle, during which White Fang walked
+around, stiff-legged and observant. Then he resumed his course and trotted on
+along the base of the bluff.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+One day, not long after, he came to the edge of the forest, where a narrow
+stretch of open land sloped down to the Mackenzie. He had been over this ground
+before, when it was bare, but now a village occupied it. Still hidden amongst
+the trees, he paused to study the situation. Sights and sounds and scents were
+familiar to him. It was the old village changed to a new place. But sights and
+sounds and smells were different from those he had last had when he fled away
+from it. There was no whimpering nor wailing. Contented sounds saluted his ear,
+and when he heard the angry voice of a woman he knew it to be the anger that
+proceeds from a full stomach. And there was a smell in the air of fish. There
+was food. The famine was gone. He came out boldly from the forest and trotted
+into camp straight to Grey Beaver&rsquo;s tepee. Grey Beaver was not there; but
+Kloo-kooch welcomed him with glad cries and the whole of a fresh-caught fish,
+and he lay down to wait Grey Beaver&rsquo;s coming.
+</p>
+
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<h2><a name="part04"></a>PART IV</h2>
+
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<h3><a name="chap15"></a>CHAPTER I<br/>
+THE ENEMY OF HIS KIND</h3>
+
+<p>
+Had there been in White Fang&rsquo;s nature any possibility, no matter how
+remote, of his ever coming to fraternise with his kind, such possibility was
+irretrievably destroyed when he was made leader of the sled-team. For now the
+dogs hated him&mdash;hated him for the extra meat bestowed upon him by Mit-sah;
+hated him for all the real and fancied favours he received; hated him for that
+he fled always at the head of the team, his waving brush of a tail and his
+perpetually retreating hind-quarters for ever maddening their eyes.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And White Fang just as bitterly hated them back. Being sled-leader was anything
+but gratifying to him. To be compelled to run away before the yelling pack,
+every dog of which, for three years, he had thrashed and mastered, was almost
+more than he could endure. But endure it he must, or perish, and the life that
+was in him had no desire to perish out. The moment Mit-sah gave his order for
+the start, that moment the whole team, with eager, savage cries, sprang forward
+at White Fang.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+There was no defence for him. If he turned upon them, Mit-sah would throw the
+stinging lash of the whip into his face. Only remained to him to run away. He
+could not encounter that howling horde with his tail and hind-quarters. These
+were scarcely fit weapons with which to meet the many merciless fangs. So run
+away he did, violating his own nature and pride with every leap he made, and
+leaping all day long.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+One cannot violate the promptings of one&rsquo;s nature without having that
+nature recoil upon itself. Such a recoil is like that of a hair, made to grow
+out from the body, turning unnaturally upon the direction of its growth and
+growing into the body&mdash;a rankling, festering thing of hurt. And so with
+White Fang. Every urge of his being impelled him to spring upon the pack that
+cried at his heels, but it was the will of the gods that this should not be;
+and behind the will, to enforce it, was the whip of cariboo-gut with its biting
+thirty-foot lash. So White Fang could only eat his heart in bitterness and
+develop a hatred and malice commensurate with the ferocity and indomitability
+of his nature.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+If ever a creature was the enemy of its kind, White Fang was that creature. He
+asked no quarter, gave none. He was continually marred and scarred by the teeth
+of the pack, and as continually he left his own marks upon the pack. Unlike
+most leaders, who, when camp was made and the dogs were unhitched, huddled near
+to the gods for protection, White Fang disdained such protection. He walked
+boldly about the camp, inflicting punishment in the night for what he had
+suffered in the day. In the time before he was made leader of the team, the
+pack had learned to get out of his way. But now it was different. Excited by
+the day-long pursuit of him, swayed subconsciously by the insistent iteration
+on their brains of the sight of him fleeing away, mastered by the feeling of
+mastery enjoyed all day, the dogs could not bring themselves to give way to
+him. When he appeared amongst them, there was always a squabble. His progress
+was marked by snarl and snap and growl. The very atmosphere he breathed was
+surcharged with hatred and malice, and this but served to increase the hatred
+and malice within him.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+When Mit-sah cried out his command for the team to stop, White Fang obeyed. At
+first this caused trouble for the other dogs. All of them would spring upon the
+hated leader only to find the tables turned. Behind him would be Mit-sah, the
+great whip singing in his hand. So the dogs came to understand that when the
+team stopped by order, White Fang was to be let alone. But when White Fang
+stopped without orders, then it was allowed them to spring upon him and destroy
+him if they could. After several experiences, White Fang never stopped without
+orders. He learned quickly. It was in the nature of things, that he must learn
+quickly if he were to survive the unusually severe conditions under which life
+was vouchsafed him.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But the dogs could never learn the lesson to leave him alone in camp. Each day,
+pursuing him and crying defiance at him, the lesson of the previous night was
+erased, and that night would have to be learned over again, to be as
+immediately forgotten. Besides, there was a greater consistence in their
+dislike of him. They sensed between themselves and him a difference of
+kind&mdash;cause sufficient in itself for hostility. Like him, they were
+domesticated wolves. But they had been domesticated for generations. Much of
+the Wild had been lost, so that to them the Wild was the unknown, the terrible,
+the ever-menacing and ever warring. But to him, in appearance and action and
+impulse, still clung the Wild. He symbolised it, was its personification: so
+that when they showed their teeth to him they were defending themselves against
+the powers of destruction that lurked in the shadows of the forest and in the
+dark beyond the camp-fire.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But there was one lesson the dogs did learn, and that was to keep together.
+White Fang was too terrible for any of them to face single-handed. They met him
+with the mass-formation, otherwise he would have killed them, one by one, in a
+night. As it was, he never had a chance to kill them. He might roll a dog off
+its feet, but the pack would be upon him before he could follow up and deliver
+the deadly throat-stroke. At the first hint of conflict, the whole team drew
+together and faced him. The dogs had quarrels among themselves, but these were
+forgotten when trouble was brewing with White Fang.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+On the other hand, try as they would, they could not kill White Fang. He was
+too quick for them, too formidable, too wise. He avoided tight places and
+always backed out of it when they bade fair to surround him. While, as for
+getting him off his feet, there was no dog among them capable of doing the
+trick. His feet clung to the earth with the same tenacity that he clung to
+life. For that matter, life and footing were synonymous in this unending
+warfare with the pack, and none knew it better than White Fang.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+So he became the enemy of his kind, domesticated wolves that they were,
+softened by the fires of man, weakened in the sheltering shadow of man&rsquo;s
+strength. White Fang was bitter and implacable. The clay of him was so moulded.
+He declared a vendetta against all dogs. And so terribly did he live this
+vendetta that Grey Beaver, fierce savage himself, could not but marvel at White
+Fang&rsquo;s ferocity. Never, he swore, had there been the like of this animal;
+and the Indians in strange villages swore likewise when they considered the
+tale of his killings amongst their dogs.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+When White Fang was nearly five years old, Grey Beaver took him on another
+great journey, and long remembered was the havoc he worked amongst the dogs of
+the many villages along the Mackenzie, across the Rockies, and down the
+Porcupine to the Yukon. He revelled in the vengeance he wreaked upon his kind.
+They were ordinary, unsuspecting dogs. They were not prepared for his swiftness
+and directness, for his attack without warning. They did not know him for what
+he was, a lightning-flash of slaughter. They bristled up to him, stiff-legged
+and challenging, while he, wasting no time on elaborate preliminaries, snapping
+into action like a steel spring, was at their throats and destroying them
+before they knew what was happening and while they were yet in the throes of
+surprise.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He became an adept at fighting. He economised. He never wasted his strength,
+never tussled. He was in too quickly for that, and, if he missed, was out again
+too quickly. The dislike of the wolf for close quarters was his to an unusual
+degree. He could not endure a prolonged contact with another body. It smacked
+of danger. It made him frantic. He must be away, free, on his own legs,
+touching no living thing. It was the Wild still clinging to him, asserting
+itself through him. This feeling had been accentuated by the Ishmaelite life he
+had led from his puppyhood. Danger lurked in contacts. It was the trap, ever
+the trap, the fear of it lurking deep in the life of him, woven into the fibre
+of him.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+In consequence, the strange dogs he encountered had no chance against him. He
+eluded their fangs. He got them, or got away, himself untouched in either
+event. In the natural course of things there were exceptions to this. There
+were times when several dogs, pitching on to him, punished him before he could
+get away; and there were times when a single dog scored deeply on him. But
+these were accidents. In the main, so efficient a fighter had he become, he
+went his way unscathed.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Another advantage he possessed was that of correctly judging time and distance.
+Not that he did this consciously, however. He did not calculate such things. It
+was all automatic. His eyes saw correctly, and the nerves carried the vision
+correctly to his brain. The parts of him were better adjusted than those of the
+average dog. They worked together more smoothly and steadily. His was a better,
+far better, nervous, mental, and muscular co-ordination. When his eyes conveyed
+to his brain the moving image of an action, his brain without conscious effort,
+knew the space that limited that action and the time required for its
+completion. Thus, he could avoid the leap of another dog, or the drive of its
+fangs, and at the same moment could seize the infinitesimal fraction of time in
+which to deliver his own attack. Body and brain, his was a more perfected
+mechanism. Not that he was to be praised for it. Nature had been more generous
+to him than to the average animal, that was all.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+It was in the summer that White Fang arrived at Fort Yukon. Grey Beaver had
+crossed the great watershed between Mackenzie and the Yukon in the late winter,
+and spent the spring in hunting among the western outlying spurs of the
+Rockies. Then, after the break-up of the ice on the Porcupine, he had built a
+canoe and paddled down that stream to where it effected its junction with the
+Yukon just under the Artic circle. Here stood the old Hudson&rsquo;s Bay
+Company fort; and here were many Indians, much food, and unprecedented
+excitement. It was the summer of 1898, and thousands of gold-hunters were going
+up the Yukon to Dawson and the Klondike. Still hundreds of miles from their
+goal, nevertheless many of them had been on the way for a year, and the least
+any of them had travelled to get that far was five thousand miles, while some
+had come from the other side of the world.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Here Grey Beaver stopped. A whisper of the gold-rush had reached his ears, and
+he had come with several bales of furs, and another of gut-sewn mittens and
+moccasins. He would not have ventured so long a trip had he not expected
+generous profits. But what he had expected was nothing to what he realised. His
+wildest dreams had not exceeded a hundred per cent. profit; he made a thousand
+per cent. And like a true Indian, he settled down to trade carefully and
+slowly, even if it took all summer and the rest of the winter to dispose of his
+goods.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+It was at Fort Yukon that White Fang saw his first white men. As compared with
+the Indians he had known, they were to him another race of beings, a race of
+superior gods. They impressed him as possessing superior power, and it is on
+power that godhead rests. White Fang did not reason it out, did not in his mind
+make the sharp generalisation that the white gods were more powerful. It was a
+feeling, nothing more, and yet none the less potent. As, in his puppyhood, the
+looming bulks of the tepees, man-reared, had affected him as manifestations of
+power, so was he affected now by the houses and the huge fort all of massive
+logs. Here was power. Those white gods were strong. They possessed greater
+mastery over matter than the gods he had known, most powerful among which was
+Grey Beaver. And yet Grey Beaver was as a child-god among these white-skinned
+ones.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+To be sure, White Fang only felt these things. He was not conscious of them.
+Yet it is upon feeling, more often than thinking, that animals act; and every
+act White Fang now performed was based upon the feeling that the white men were
+the superior gods. In the first place he was very suspicious of them. There was
+no telling what unknown terrors were theirs, what unknown hurts they could
+administer. He was curious to observe them, fearful of being noticed by them.
+For the first few hours he was content with slinking around and watching them
+from a safe distance. Then he saw that no harm befell the dogs that were near
+to them, and he came in closer.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+In turn he was an object of great curiosity to them. His wolfish appearance
+caught their eyes at once, and they pointed him out to one another. This act of
+pointing put White Fang on his guard, and when they tried to approach him he
+showed his teeth and backed away. Not one succeeded in laying a hand on him,
+and it was well that they did not.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+White Fang soon learned that very few of these gods&mdash;not more than a
+dozen&mdash;lived at this place. Every two or three days a steamer (another and
+colossal manifestation of power) came into the bank and stopped for several
+hours. The white men came from off these steamers and went away on them again.
+There seemed untold numbers of these white men. In the first day or so, he saw
+more of them than he had seen Indians in all his life; and as the days went by
+they continued to come up the river, stop, and then go on up the river out of
+sight.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But if the white gods were all-powerful, their dogs did not amount to much.
+This White Fang quickly discovered by mixing with those that came ashore with
+their masters. They were irregular shapes and sizes. Some were
+short-legged&mdash;too short; others were long-legged&mdash;too long. They had
+hair instead of fur, and a few had very little hair at that. And none of them
+knew how to fight.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+As an enemy of his kind, it was in White Fang&rsquo;s province to fight with
+them. This he did, and he quickly achieved for them a mighty contempt. They
+were soft and helpless, made much noise, and floundered around clumsily trying
+to accomplish by main strength what he accomplished by dexterity and cunning.
+They rushed bellowing at him. He sprang to the side. They did not know what had
+become of him; and in that moment he struck them on the shoulder, rolling them
+off their feet and delivering his stroke at the throat.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Sometimes this stroke was successful, and a stricken dog rolled in the dirt, to
+be pounced upon and torn to pieces by the pack of Indian dogs that waited.
+White Fang was wise. He had long since learned that the gods were made angry
+when their dogs were killed. The white men were no exception to this. So he was
+content, when he had overthrown and slashed wide the throat of one of their
+dogs, to drop back and let the pack go in and do the cruel finishing work. It
+was then that the white men rushed in, visiting their wrath heavily on the
+pack, while White Fang went free. He would stand off at a little distance and
+look on, while stones, clubs, axes, and all sorts of weapons fell upon his
+fellows. White Fang was very wise.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But his fellows grew wise in their own way; and in this White Fang grew wise
+with them. They learned that it was when a steamer first tied to the bank that
+they had their fun. After the first two or three strange dogs had been downed
+and destroyed, the white men hustled their own animals back on board and
+wrecked savage vengeance on the offenders. One white man, having seen his dog,
+a setter, torn to pieces before his eyes, drew a revolver. He fired rapidly,
+six times, and six of the pack lay dead or dying&mdash;another manifestation of
+power that sank deep into White Fang&rsquo;s consciousness.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+White Fang enjoyed it all. He did not love his kind, and he was shrewd enough
+to escape hurt himself. At first, the killing of the white men&rsquo;s dogs had
+been a diversion. After a time it became his occupation. There was no work for
+him to do. Grey Beaver was busy trading and getting wealthy. So White Fang hung
+around the landing with the disreputable gang of Indian dogs, waiting for
+steamers. With the arrival of a steamer the fun began. After a few minutes, by
+the time the white men had got over their surprise, the gang scattered. The fun
+was over until the next steamer should arrive.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But it can scarcely be said that White Fang was a member of the gang. He did
+not mingle with it, but remained aloof, always himself, and was even feared by
+it. It is true, he worked with it. He picked the quarrel with the strange dog
+while the gang waited. And when he had overthrown the strange dog the gang went
+in to finish it. But it is equally true that he then withdrew, leaving the gang
+to receive the punishment of the outraged gods.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+It did not require much exertion to pick these quarrels. All he had to do, when
+the strange dogs came ashore, was to show himself. When they saw him they
+rushed for him. It was their instinct. He was the Wild&mdash;the unknown, the
+terrible, the ever-menacing, the thing that prowled in the darkness around the
+fires of the primeval world when they, cowering close to the fires, were
+reshaping their instincts, learning to fear the Wild out of which they had
+come, and which they had deserted and betrayed. Generation by generation, down
+all the generations, had this fear of the Wild been stamped into their natures.
+For centuries the Wild had stood for terror and destruction. And during all
+this time free licence had been theirs, from their masters, to kill the things
+of the Wild. In doing this they had protected both themselves and the gods
+whose companionship they shared.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And so, fresh from the soft southern world, these dogs, trotting down the
+gang-plank and out upon the Yukon shore had but to see White Fang to experience
+the irresistible impulse to rush upon him and destroy him. They might be
+town-reared dogs, but the instinctive fear of the Wild was theirs just the
+same. Not alone with their own eyes did they see the wolfish creature in the
+clear light of day, standing before them. They saw him with the eyes of their
+ancestors, and by their inherited memory they knew White Fang for the wolf, and
+they remembered the ancient feud.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+All of which served to make White Fang&rsquo;s days enjoyable. If the sight of
+him drove these strange dogs upon him, so much the better for him, so much the
+worse for them. They looked upon him as legitimate prey, and as legitimate prey
+he looked upon them.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Not for nothing had he first seen the light of day in a lonely lair and fought
+his first fights with the ptarmigan, the weasel, and the lynx. And not for
+nothing had his puppyhood been made bitter by the persecution of Lip-lip and
+the whole puppy pack. It might have been otherwise, and he would then have been
+otherwise. Had Lip-lip not existed, he would have passed his puppyhood with the
+other puppies and grown up more doglike and with more liking for dogs. Had Grey
+Beaver possessed the plummet of affection and love, he might have sounded the
+deeps of White Fang&rsquo;s nature and brought up to the surface all manner of
+kindly qualities. But these things had not been so. The clay of White Fang had
+been moulded until he became what he was, morose and lonely, unloving and
+ferocious, the enemy of all his kind.
+</p>
+
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<h3><a name="chap16"></a>CHAPTER II<br/>
+THE MAD GOD</h3>
+
+<p>
+A small number of white men lived in Fort Yukon. These men had been long in the
+country. They called themselves Sour-doughs, and took great pride in so
+classifying themselves. For other men, new in the land, they felt nothing but
+disdain. The men who came ashore from the steamers were newcomers. They were
+known as <i>chechaquos</i>, and they always wilted at the application of the
+name. They made their bread with baking-powder. This was the invidious
+distinction between them and the Sour-doughs, who, forsooth, made their bread
+from sour-dough because they had no baking-powder.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+All of which is neither here nor there. The men in the fort disdained the
+newcomers and enjoyed seeing them come to grief. Especially did they enjoy the
+havoc worked amongst the newcomers&rsquo; dogs by White Fang and his
+disreputable gang. When a steamer arrived, the men of the fort made it a point
+always to come down to the bank and see the fun. They looked forward to it with
+as much anticipation as did the Indian dogs, while they were not slow to
+appreciate the savage and crafty part played by White Fang.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But there was one man amongst them who particularly enjoyed the sport. He would
+come running at the first sound of a steamboat&rsquo;s whistle; and when the
+last fight was over and White Fang and the pack had scattered, he would return
+slowly to the fort, his face heavy with regret. Sometimes, when a soft
+southland dog went down, shrieking its death-cry under the fangs of the pack,
+this man would be unable to contain himself, and would leap into the air and
+cry out with delight. And always he had a sharp and covetous eye for White
+Fang.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+This man was called &ldquo;Beauty&rdquo; by the other men of the fort. No one
+knew his first name, and in general he was known in the country as Beauty
+Smith. But he was anything save a beauty. To antithesis was due his naming. He
+was pre-eminently unbeautiful. Nature had been niggardly with him. He was a
+small man to begin with; and upon his meagre frame was deposited an even more
+strikingly meagre head. Its apex might be likened to a point. In fact, in his
+boyhood, before he had been named Beauty by his fellows, he had been called
+&ldquo;Pinhead.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Backward, from the apex, his head slanted down to his neck and forward it
+slanted uncompromisingly to meet a low and remarkably wide forehead. Beginning
+here, as though regretting her parsimony, Nature had spread his features with a
+lavish hand. His eyes were large, and between them was the distance of two
+eyes. His face, in relation to the rest of him, was prodigious. In order to
+discover the necessary area, Nature had given him an enormous prognathous jaw.
+It was wide and heavy, and protruded outward and down until it seemed to rest
+on his chest. Possibly this appearance was due to the weariness of the slender
+neck, unable properly to support so great a burden.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+This jaw gave the impression of ferocious determination. But something lacked.
+Perhaps it was from excess. Perhaps the jaw was too large. At any rate, it was
+a lie. Beauty Smith was known far and wide as the weakest of weak-kneed and
+snivelling cowards. To complete his description, his teeth were large and
+yellow, while the two eye-teeth, larger than their fellows, showed under his
+lean lips like fangs. His eyes were yellow and muddy, as though Nature had run
+short on pigments and squeezed together the dregs of all her tubes. It was the
+same with his hair, sparse and irregular of growth, muddy-yellow and
+dirty-yellow, rising on his head and sprouting out of his face in unexpected
+tufts and bunches, in appearance like clumped and wind-blown grain.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+In short, Beauty Smith was a monstrosity, and the blame of it lay elsewhere. He
+was not responsible. The clay of him had been so moulded in the making. He did
+the cooking for the other men in the fort, the dish-washing and the drudgery.
+They did not despise him. Rather did they tolerate him in a broad human way, as
+one tolerates any creature evilly treated in the making. Also, they feared him.
+His cowardly rages made them dread a shot in the back or poison in their
+coffee. But somebody had to do the cooking, and whatever else his shortcomings,
+Beauty Smith could cook.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+This was the man that looked at White Fang, delighted in his ferocious prowess,
+and desired to possess him. He made overtures to White Fang from the first.
+White Fang began by ignoring him. Later on, when the overtures became more
+insistent, White Fang bristled and bared his teeth and backed away. He did not
+like the man. The feel of him was bad. He sensed the evil in him, and feared
+the extended hand and the attempts at soft-spoken speech. Because of all this,
+he hated the man.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+With the simpler creatures, good and bad are things simply understood. The good
+stands for all things that bring easement and satisfaction and surcease from
+pain. Therefore, the good is liked. The bad stands for all things that are
+fraught with discomfort, menace, and hurt, and is hated accordingly. White
+Fang&rsquo;s feel of Beauty Smith was bad. From the man&rsquo;s distorted body
+and twisted mind, in occult ways, like mists rising from malarial marshes, came
+emanations of the unhealth within. Not by reasoning, not by the five senses
+alone, but by other and remoter and uncharted senses, came the feeling to White
+Fang that the man was ominous with evil, pregnant with hurtfulness, and
+therefore a thing bad, and wisely to be hated.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+White Fang was in Grey Beaver&rsquo;s camp when Beauty Smith first visited it.
+At the faint sound of his distant feet, before he came in sight, White Fang
+knew who was coming and began to bristle. He had been lying down in an abandon
+of comfort, but he arose quickly, and, as the man arrived, slid away in true
+wolf-fashion to the edge of the camp. He did not know what they said, but he
+could see the man and Grey Beaver talking together. Once, the man pointed at
+him, and White Fang snarled back as though the hand were just descending upon
+him instead of being, as it was, fifty feet away. The man laughed at this; and
+White Fang slunk away to the sheltering woods, his head turned to observe as he
+glided softly over the ground.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Grey Beaver refused to sell the dog. He had grown rich with his trading and
+stood in need of nothing. Besides, White Fang was a valuable animal, the
+strongest sled-dog he had ever owned, and the best leader. Furthermore, there
+was no dog like him on the Mackenzie nor the Yukon. He could fight. He killed
+other dogs as easily as men killed mosquitoes. (Beauty Smith&rsquo;s eyes
+lighted up at this, and he licked his thin lips with an eager tongue). No,
+White Fang was not for sale at any price.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But Beauty Smith knew the ways of Indians. He visited Grey Beaver&rsquo;s camp
+often, and hidden under his coat was always a black bottle or so. One of the
+potencies of whisky is the breeding of thirst. Grey Beaver got the thirst. His
+fevered membranes and burnt stomach began to clamour for more and more of the
+scorching fluid; while his brain, thrust all awry by the unwonted stimulant,
+permitted him to go any length to obtain it. The money he had received for his
+furs and mittens and moccasins began to go. It went faster and faster, and the
+shorter his money-sack grew, the shorter grew his temper.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+In the end his money and goods and temper were all gone. Nothing remained to
+him but his thirst, a prodigious possession in itself that grew more prodigious
+with every sober breath he drew. Then it was that Beauty Smith had talk with
+him again about the sale of White Fang; but this time the price offered was in
+bottles, not dollars, and Grey Beaver&rsquo;s ears were more eager to hear.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;You ketch um dog you take um all right,&rdquo; was his last word.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The bottles were delivered, but after two days. &ldquo;You ketch um dog,&rdquo;
+were Beauty Smith&rsquo;s words to Grey Beaver.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+White Fang slunk into camp one evening and dropped down with a sigh of content.
+The dreaded white god was not there. For days his manifestations of desire to
+lay hands on him had been growing more insistent, and during that time White
+Fang had been compelled to avoid the camp. He did not know what evil was
+threatened by those insistent hands. He knew only that they did threaten evil
+of some sort, and that it was best for him to keep out of their reach.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But scarcely had he lain down when Grey Beaver staggered over to him and tied a
+leather thong around his neck. He sat down beside White Fang, holding the end
+of the thong in his hand. In the other hand he held a bottle, which, from time
+to time, was inverted above his head to the accompaniment of gurgling noises.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+An hour of this passed, when the vibrations of feet in contact with the ground
+foreran the one who approached. White Fang heard it first, and he was bristling
+with recognition while Grey Beaver still nodded stupidly. White Fang tried to
+draw the thong softly out of his master&rsquo;s hand; but the relaxed fingers
+closed tightly and Grey Beaver roused himself.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Beauty Smith strode into camp and stood over White Fang. He snarled softly up
+at the thing of fear, watching keenly the deportment of the hands. One hand
+extended outward and began to descend upon his head. His soft snarl grew tense
+and harsh. The hand continued slowly to descend, while he crouched beneath it,
+eyeing it malignantly, his snarl growing shorter and shorter as, with
+quickening breath, it approached its culmination. Suddenly he snapped, striking
+with his fangs like a snake. The hand was jerked back, and the teeth came
+together emptily with a sharp click. Beauty Smith was frightened and angry.
+Grey Beaver clouted White Fang alongside the head, so that he cowered down
+close to the earth in respectful obedience.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+White Fang&rsquo;s suspicious eyes followed every movement. He saw Beauty Smith
+go away and return with a stout club. Then the end of the thong was given over
+to him by Grey Beaver. Beauty Smith started to walk away. The thong grew taut.
+White Fang resisted it. Grey Beaver clouted him right and left to make him get
+up and follow. He obeyed, but with a rush, hurling himself upon the stranger
+who was dragging him away. Beauty Smith did not jump away. He had been waiting
+for this. He swung the club smartly, stopping the rush midway and smashing
+White Fang down upon the ground. Grey Beaver laughed and nodded approval.
+Beauty Smith tightened the thong again, and White Fang crawled limply and
+dizzily to his feet.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He did not rush a second time. One smash from the club was sufficient to
+convince him that the white god knew how to handle it, and he was too wise to
+fight the inevitable. So he followed morosely at Beauty Smith&rsquo;s heels,
+his tail between his legs, yet snarling softly under his breath. But Beauty
+Smith kept a wary eye on him, and the club was held always ready to strike.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+At the fort Beauty Smith left him securely tied and went in to bed. White Fang
+waited an hour. Then he applied his teeth to the thong, and in the space of ten
+seconds was free. He had wasted no time with his teeth. There had been no
+useless gnawing. The thong was cut across, diagonally, almost as clean as
+though done by a knife. White Fang looked up at the fort, at the same time
+bristling and growling. Then he turned and trotted back to Grey Beaver&rsquo;s
+camp. He owed no allegiance to this strange and terrible god. He had given
+himself to Grey Beaver, and to Grey Beaver he considered he still belonged.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But what had occurred before was repeated&mdash;with a difference. Grey Beaver
+again made him fast with a thong, and in the morning turned him over to Beauty
+Smith. And here was where the difference came in. Beauty Smith gave him a
+beating. Tied securely, White Fang could only rage futilely and endure the
+punishment. Club and whip were both used upon him, and he experienced the worst
+beating he had ever received in his life. Even the big beating given him in his
+puppyhood by Grey Beaver was mild compared with this.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Beauty Smith enjoyed the task. He delighted in it. He gloated over his victim,
+and his eyes flamed dully, as he swung the whip or club and listened to White
+Fang&rsquo;s cries of pain and to his helpless bellows and snarls. For Beauty
+Smith was cruel in the way that cowards are cruel. Cringing and snivelling
+himself before the blows or angry speech of a man, he revenged himself, in
+turn, upon creatures weaker than he. All life likes power, and Beauty Smith was
+no exception. Denied the expression of power amongst his own kind, he fell back
+upon the lesser creatures and there vindicated the life that was in him. But
+Beauty Smith had not created himself, and no blame was to be attached to him.
+He had come into the world with a twisted body and a brute intelligence. This
+had constituted the clay of him, and it had not been kindly moulded by the
+world.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+White Fang knew why he was being beaten. When Grey Beaver tied the thong around
+his neck, and passed the end of the thong into Beauty Smith&rsquo;s keeping,
+White Fang knew that it was his god&rsquo;s will for him to go with Beauty
+Smith. And when Beauty Smith left him tied outside the fort, he knew that it
+was Beauty Smith&rsquo;s will that he should remain there. Therefore, he had
+disobeyed the will of both the gods, and earned the consequent punishment. He
+had seen dogs change owners in the past, and he had seen the runaways beaten as
+he was being beaten. He was wise, and yet in the nature of him there were
+forces greater than wisdom. One of these was fidelity. He did not love Grey
+Beaver, yet, even in the face of his will and his anger, he was faithful to
+him. He could not help it. This faithfulness was a quality of the clay that
+composed him. It was the quality that was peculiarly the possession of his
+kind; the quality that set apart his species from all other species; the
+quality that has enabled the wolf and the wild dog to come in from the open and
+be the companions of man.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+After the beating, White Fang was dragged back to the fort. But this time
+Beauty Smith left him tied with a stick. One does not give up a god easily, and
+so with White Fang. Grey Beaver was his own particular god, and, in spite of
+Grey Beaver&rsquo;s will, White Fang still clung to him and would not give him
+up. Grey Beaver had betrayed and forsaken him, but that had no effect upon him.
+Not for nothing had he surrendered himself body and soul to Grey Beaver. There
+had been no reservation on White Fang&rsquo;s part, and the bond was not to be
+broken easily.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+So, in the night, when the men in the fort were asleep, White Fang applied his
+teeth to the stick that held him. The wood was seasoned and dry, and it was
+tied so closely to his neck that he could scarcely get his teeth to it. It was
+only by the severest muscular exertion and neck-arching that he succeeded in
+getting the wood between his teeth, and barely between his teeth at that; and
+it was only by the exercise of an immense patience, extending through many
+hours, that he succeeded in gnawing through the stick. This was something that
+dogs were not supposed to do. It was unprecedented. But White Fang did it,
+trotting away from the fort in the early morning, with the end of the stick
+hanging to his neck.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He was wise. But had he been merely wise he would not have gone back to Grey
+Beaver who had already twice betrayed him. But there was his faithfulness, and
+he went back to be betrayed yet a third time. Again he yielded to the tying of
+a thong around his neck by Grey Beaver, and again Beauty Smith came to claim
+him. And this time he was beaten even more severely than before.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Grey Beaver looked on stolidly while the white man wielded the whip. He gave no
+protection. It was no longer his dog. When the beating was over White Fang was
+sick. A soft southland dog would have died under it, but not he. His school of
+life had been sterner, and he was himself of sterner stuff. He had too great
+vitality. His clutch on life was too strong. But he was very sick. At first he
+was unable to drag himself along, and Beauty Smith had to wait half-an-hour for
+him. And then, blind and reeling, he followed at Beauty Smith&rsquo;s heels
+back to the fort.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But now he was tied with a chain that defied his teeth, and he strove in vain,
+by lunging, to draw the staple from the timber into which it was driven. After
+a few days, sober and bankrupt, Grey Beaver departed up the Porcupine on his
+long journey to the Mackenzie. White Fang remained on the Yukon, the property
+of a man more than half mad and all brute. But what is a dog to know in its
+consciousness of madness? To White Fang, Beauty Smith was a veritable, if
+terrible, god. He was a mad god at best, but White Fang knew nothing of
+madness; he knew only that he must submit to the will of this new master, obey
+his every whim and fancy.
+</p>
+
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<h3><a name="chap17"></a>CHAPTER III<br/>
+THE REIGN OF HATE</h3>
+
+<p>
+Under the tutelage of the mad god, White Fang became a fiend. He was kept
+chained in a pen at the rear of the fort, and here Beauty Smith teased and
+irritated and drove him wild with petty torments. The man early discovered
+White Fang&rsquo;s susceptibility to laughter, and made it a point after
+painfully tricking him, to laugh at him. This laughter was uproarious and
+scornful, and at the same time the god pointed his finger derisively at White
+Fang. At such times reason fled from White Fang, and in his transports of rage
+he was even more mad than Beauty Smith.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Formerly, White Fang had been merely the enemy of his kind, withal a ferocious
+enemy. He now became the enemy of all things, and more ferocious than ever. To
+such an extent was he tormented, that he hated blindly and without the faintest
+spark of reason. He hated the chain that bound him, the men who peered in at
+him through the slats of the pen, the dogs that accompanied the men and that
+snarled malignantly at him in his helplessness. He hated the very wood of the
+pen that confined him. And, first, last, and most of all, he hated Beauty
+Smith.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But Beauty Smith had a purpose in all that he did to White Fang. One day a
+number of men gathered about the pen. Beauty Smith entered, club in hand, and
+took the chain off from White Fang&rsquo;s neck. When his master had gone out,
+White Fang turned loose and tore around the pen, trying to get at the men
+outside. He was magnificently terrible. Fully five feet in length, and standing
+two and one-half feet at the shoulder, he far outweighed a wolf of
+corresponding size. From his mother he had inherited the heavier proportions of
+the dog, so that he weighed, without any fat and without an ounce of
+superfluous flesh, over ninety pounds. It was all muscle, bone, and
+sinew-fighting flesh in the finest condition.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The door of the pen was being opened again. White Fang paused. Something
+unusual was happening. He waited. The door was opened wider. Then a huge dog
+was thrust inside, and the door was slammed shut behind him. White Fang had
+never seen such a dog (it was a mastiff); but the size and fierce aspect of the
+intruder did not deter him. Here was some thing, not wood nor iron, upon which
+to wreak his hate. He leaped in with a flash of fangs that ripped down the side
+of the mastiff&rsquo;s neck. The mastiff shook his head, growled hoarsely, and
+plunged at White Fang. But White Fang was here, there, and everywhere, always
+evading and eluding, and always leaping in and slashing with his fangs and
+leaping out again in time to escape punishment.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The men outside shouted and applauded, while Beauty Smith, in an ecstasy of
+delight, gloated over the ripping and mangling performed by White Fang. There
+was no hope for the mastiff from the first. He was too ponderous and slow. In
+the end, while Beauty Smith beat White Fang back with a club, the mastiff was
+dragged out by its owner. Then there was a payment of bets, and money clinked
+in Beauty Smith&rsquo;s hand.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+White Fang came to look forward eagerly to the gathering of the men around his
+pen. It meant a fight; and this was the only way that was now vouchsafed him of
+expressing the life that was in him. Tormented, incited to hate, he was kept a
+prisoner so that there was no way of satisfying that hate except at the times
+his master saw fit to put another dog against him. Beauty Smith had estimated
+his powers well, for he was invariably the victor. One day, three dogs were
+turned in upon him in succession. Another day a full-grown wolf, fresh-caught
+from the Wild, was shoved in through the door of the pen. And on still another
+day two dogs were set against him at the same time. This was his severest
+fight, and though in the end he killed them both he was himself half killed in
+doing it.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+In the fall of the year, when the first snows were falling and mush-ice was
+running in the river, Beauty Smith took passage for himself and White Fang on a
+steamboat bound up the Yukon to Dawson. White Fang had now achieved a
+reputation in the land. As &ldquo;the Fighting Wolf&rdquo; he was known far and
+wide, and the cage in which he was kept on the steam-boat&rsquo;s deck was
+usually surrounded by curious men. He raged and snarled at them, or lay quietly
+and studied them with cold hatred. Why should he not hate them? He never asked
+himself the question. He knew only hate and lost himself in the passion of it.
+Life had become a hell to him. He had not been made for the close confinement
+wild beasts endure at the hands of men. And yet it was in precisely this way
+that he was treated. Men stared at him, poked sticks between the bars to make
+him snarl, and then laughed at him.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+They were his environment, these men, and they were moulding the clay of him
+into a more ferocious thing than had been intended by Nature. Nevertheless,
+Nature had given him plasticity. Where many another animal would have died or
+had its spirit broken, he adjusted himself and lived, and at no expense of the
+spirit. Possibly Beauty Smith, arch-fiend and tormentor, was capable of
+breaking White Fang&rsquo;s spirit, but as yet there were no signs of his
+succeeding.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+If Beauty Smith had in him a devil, White Fang had another; and the two of them
+raged against each other unceasingly. In the days before, White Fang had had
+the wisdom to cower down and submit to a man with a club in his hand; but this
+wisdom now left him. The mere sight of Beauty Smith was sufficient to send him
+into transports of fury. And when they came to close quarters, and he had been
+beaten back by the club, he went on growling and snarling, and showing his
+fangs. The last growl could never be extracted from him. No matter how terribly
+he was beaten, he had always another growl; and when Beauty Smith gave up and
+withdrew, the defiant growl followed after him, or White Fang sprang at the
+bars of the cage bellowing his hatred.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+When the steamboat arrived at Dawson, White Fang went ashore. But he still
+lived a public life, in a cage, surrounded by curious men. He was exhibited as
+&ldquo;the Fighting Wolf,&rdquo; and men paid fifty cents in gold dust to see
+him. He was given no rest. Did he lie down to sleep, he was stirred up by a
+sharp stick&mdash;so that the audience might get its money&rsquo;s worth. In
+order to make the exhibition interesting, he was kept in a rage most of the
+time. But worse than all this, was the atmosphere in which he lived. He was
+regarded as the most fearful of wild beasts, and this was borne in to him
+through the bars of the cage. Every word, every cautious action, on the part of
+the men, impressed upon him his own terrible ferocity. It was so much added
+fuel to the flame of his fierceness. There could be but one result, and that
+was that his ferocity fed upon itself and increased. It was another instance of
+the plasticity of his clay, of his capacity for being moulded by the pressure
+of environment.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+In addition to being exhibited he was a professional fighting animal. At
+irregular intervals, whenever a fight could be arranged, he was taken out of
+his cage and led off into the woods a few miles from town. Usually this
+occurred at night, so as to avoid interference from the mounted police of the
+Territory. After a few hours of waiting, when daylight had come, the audience
+and the dog with which he was to fight arrived. In this manner it came about
+that he fought all sizes and breeds of dogs. It was a savage land, the men were
+savage, and the fights were usually to the death.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Since White Fang continued to fight, it is obvious that it was the other dogs
+that died. He never knew defeat. His early training, when he fought with
+Lip-lip and the whole puppy-pack, stood him in good stead. There was the
+tenacity with which he clung to the earth. No dog could make him lose his
+footing. This was the favourite trick of the wolf breeds&mdash;to rush in upon
+him, either directly or with an unexpected swerve, in the hope of striking his
+shoulder and overthrowing him. Mackenzie hounds, Eskimo and Labrador dogs,
+huskies and Malemutes&mdash;all tried it on him, and all failed. He was never
+known to lose his footing. Men told this to one another, and looked each time
+to see it happen; but White Fang always disappointed them.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Then there was his lightning quickness. It gave him a tremendous advantage over
+his antagonists. No matter what their fighting experience, they had never
+encountered a dog that moved so swiftly as he. Also to be reckoned with, was
+the immediateness of his attack. The average dog was accustomed to the
+preliminaries of snarling and bristling and growling, and the average dog was
+knocked off his feet and finished before he had begun to fight or recovered
+from his surprise. So often did this happen, that it became the custom to hold
+White Fang until the other dog went through its preliminaries, was good and
+ready, and even made the first attack.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But greatest of all the advantages in White Fang&rsquo;s favour, was his
+experience. He knew more about fighting than did any of the dogs that faced
+him. He had fought more fights, knew how to meet more tricks and methods, and
+had more tricks himself, while his own method was scarcely to be improved upon.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+As the time went by, he had fewer and fewer fights. Men despaired of matching
+him with an equal, and Beauty Smith was compelled to pit wolves against him.
+These were trapped by the Indians for the purpose, and a fight between White
+Fang and a wolf was always sure to draw a crowd. Once, a full-grown female lynx
+was secured, and this time White Fang fought for his life. Her quickness
+matched his; her ferocity equalled his; while he fought with his fangs alone,
+and she fought with her sharp-clawed feet as well.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But after the lynx, all fighting ceased for White Fang. There were no more
+animals with which to fight&mdash;at least, there was none considered worthy of
+fighting with him. So he remained on exhibition until spring, when one Tim
+Keenan, a faro-dealer, arrived in the land. With him came the first bull-dog
+that had ever entered the Klondike. That this dog and White Fang should come
+together was inevitable, and for a week the anticipated fight was the
+mainspring of conversation in certain quarters of the town.
+</p>
+
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<h3><a name="chap18"></a>CHAPTER IV<br/>
+THE CLINGING DEATH</h3>
+
+<p>
+Beauty Smith slipped the chain from his neck and stepped back.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+For once White Fang did not make an immediate attack. He stood still, ears
+pricked forward, alert and curious, surveying the strange animal that faced
+him. He had never seen such a dog before. Tim Keenan shoved the bull-dog
+forward with a muttered &ldquo;Go to it.&rdquo; The animal waddled toward the
+centre of the circle, short and squat and ungainly. He came to a stop and
+blinked across at White Fang.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+There were cries from the crowd of, &ldquo;Go to him, Cherokee! Sick &rsquo;m,
+Cherokee! Eat &rsquo;m up!&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But Cherokee did not seem anxious to fight. He turned his head and blinked at
+the men who shouted, at the same time wagging his stump of a tail
+good-naturedly. He was not afraid, but merely lazy. Besides, it did not seem to
+him that it was intended he should fight with the dog he saw before him. He was
+not used to fighting with that kind of dog, and he was waiting for them to
+bring on the real dog.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Tim Keenan stepped in and bent over Cherokee, fondling him on both sides of the
+shoulders with hands that rubbed against the grain of the hair and that made
+slight, pushing-forward movements. These were so many suggestions. Also, their
+effect was irritating, for Cherokee began to growl, very softly, deep down in
+his throat. There was a correspondence in rhythm between the growls and the
+movements of the man&rsquo;s hands. The growl rose in the throat with the
+culmination of each forward-pushing movement, and ebbed down to start up afresh
+with the beginning of the next movement. The end of each movement was the
+accent of the rhythm, the movement ending abruptly and the growling rising with
+a jerk.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+This was not without its effect on White Fang. The hair began to rise on his
+neck and across the shoulders. Tim Keenan gave a final shove forward and
+stepped back again. As the impetus that carried Cherokee forward died down, he
+continued to go forward of his own volition, in a swift, bow-legged run. Then
+White Fang struck. A cry of startled admiration went up. He had covered the
+distance and gone in more like a cat than a dog; and with the same cat-like
+swiftness he had slashed with his fangs and leaped clear.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The bull-dog was bleeding back of one ear from a rip in his thick neck. He gave
+no sign, did not even snarl, but turned and followed after White Fang. The
+display on both sides, the quickness of the one and the steadiness of the
+other, had excited the partisan spirit of the crowd, and the men were making
+new bets and increasing original bets. Again, and yet again, White Fang sprang
+in, slashed, and got away untouched, and still his strange foe followed after
+him, without too great haste, not slowly, but deliberately and determinedly, in
+a businesslike sort of way. There was purpose in his method&mdash;something for
+him to do that he was intent upon doing and from which nothing could distract
+him.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+His whole demeanour, every action, was stamped with this purpose. It puzzled
+White Fang. Never had he seen such a dog. It had no hair protection. It was
+soft, and bled easily. There was no thick mat of fur to baffle White
+Fang&rsquo;s teeth as they were often baffled by dogs of his own breed. Each
+time that his teeth struck they sank easily into the yielding flesh, while the
+animal did not seem able to defend itself. Another disconcerting thing was that
+it made no outcry, such as he had been accustomed to with the other dogs he had
+fought. Beyond a growl or a grunt, the dog took its punishment silently. And
+never did it flag in its pursuit of him.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Not that Cherokee was slow. He could turn and whirl swiftly enough, but White
+Fang was never there. Cherokee was puzzled, too. He had never fought before
+with a dog with which he could not close. The desire to close had always been
+mutual. But here was a dog that kept at a distance, dancing and dodging here
+and there and all about. And when it did get its teeth into him, it did not
+hold on but let go instantly and darted away again.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But White Fang could not get at the soft underside of the throat. The bull-dog
+stood too short, while its massive jaws were an added protection. White Fang
+darted in and out unscathed, while Cherokee&rsquo;s wounds increased. Both
+sides of his neck and head were ripped and slashed. He bled freely, but showed
+no signs of being disconcerted. He continued his plodding pursuit, though once,
+for the moment baffled, he came to a full stop and blinked at the men who
+looked on, at the same time wagging his stump of a tail as an expression of his
+willingness to fight.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+In that moment White Fang was in upon him and out, in passing ripping his
+trimmed remnant of an ear. With a slight manifestation of anger, Cherokee took
+up the pursuit again, running on the inside of the circle White Fang was
+making, and striving to fasten his deadly grip on White Fang&rsquo;s throat.
+The bull-dog missed by a hair&rsquo;s-breadth, and cries of praise went up as
+White Fang doubled suddenly out of danger in the opposite direction.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The time went by. White Fang still danced on, dodging and doubling, leaping in
+and out, and ever inflicting damage. And still the bull-dog, with grim
+certitude, toiled after him. Sooner or later he would accomplish his purpose,
+get the grip that would win the battle. In the meantime, he accepted all the
+punishment the other could deal him. His tufts of ears had become tassels, his
+neck and shoulders were slashed in a score of places, and his very lips were
+cut and bleeding&mdash;all from these lightning snaps that were beyond his
+foreseeing and guarding.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Time and again White Fang had attempted to knock Cherokee off his feet; but the
+difference in their height was too great. Cherokee was too squat, too close to
+the ground. White Fang tried the trick once too often. The chance came in one
+of his quick doublings and counter-circlings. He caught Cherokee with head
+turned away as he whirled more slowly. His shoulder was exposed. White Fang
+drove in upon it: but his own shoulder was high above, while he struck with
+such force that his momentum carried him on across over the other&rsquo;s body.
+For the first time in his fighting history, men saw White Fang lose his
+footing. His body turned a half-somersault in the air, and he would have landed
+on his back had he not twisted, catlike, still in the air, in the effort to
+bring his feet to the earth. As it was, he struck heavily on his side. The next
+instant he was on his feet, but in that instant Cherokee&rsquo;s teeth closed
+on his throat.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+It was not a good grip, being too low down toward the chest; but Cherokee held
+on. White Fang sprang to his feet and tore wildly around, trying to shake off
+the bull-dog&rsquo;s body. It made him frantic, this clinging, dragging weight.
+It bound his movements, restricted his freedom. It was like the trap, and all
+his instinct resented it and revolted against it. It was a mad revolt. For
+several minutes he was to all intents insane. The basic life that was in him
+took charge of him. The will to exist of his body surged over him. He was
+dominated by this mere flesh-love of life. All intelligence was gone. It was as
+though he had no brain. His reason was unseated by the blind yearning of the
+flesh to exist and move, at all hazards to move, to continue to move, for
+movement was the expression of its existence.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Round and round he went, whirling and turning and reversing, trying to shake
+off the fifty-pound weight that dragged at his throat. The bull-dog did little
+but keep his grip. Sometimes, and rarely, he managed to get his feet to the
+earth and for a moment to brace himself against White Fang. But the next moment
+his footing would be lost and he would be dragging around in the whirl of one
+of White Fang&rsquo;s mad gyrations. Cherokee identified himself with his
+instinct. He knew that he was doing the right thing by holding on, and there
+came to him certain blissful thrills of satisfaction. At such moments he even
+closed his eyes and allowed his body to be hurled hither and thither,
+willy-nilly, careless of any hurt that might thereby come to it. That did not
+count. The grip was the thing, and the grip he kept.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+White Fang ceased only when he had tired himself out. He could do nothing, and
+he could not understand. Never, in all his fighting, had this thing happened.
+The dogs he had fought with did not fight that way. With them it was snap and
+slash and get away, snap and slash and get away. He lay partly on his side,
+panting for breath. Cherokee still holding his grip, urged against him, trying
+to get him over entirely on his side. White Fang resisted, and he could feel
+the jaws shifting their grip, slightly relaxing and coming together again in a
+chewing movement. Each shift brought the grip closer to his throat. The
+bull-dog&rsquo;s method was to hold what he had, and when opportunity favoured
+to work in for more. Opportunity favoured when White Fang remained quiet. When
+White Fang struggled, Cherokee was content merely to hold on.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The bulging back of Cherokee&rsquo;s neck was the only portion of his body that
+White Fang&rsquo;s teeth could reach. He got hold toward the base where the
+neck comes out from the shoulders; but he did not know the chewing method of
+fighting, nor were his jaws adapted to it. He spasmodically ripped and tore
+with his fangs for a space. Then a change in their position diverted him. The
+bull-dog had managed to roll him over on his back, and still hanging on to his
+throat, was on top of him. Like a cat, White Fang bowed his hind-quarters in,
+and, with the feet digging into his enemy&rsquo;s abdomen above him, he began
+to claw with long tearing-strokes. Cherokee might well have been disembowelled
+had he not quickly pivoted on his grip and got his body off of White
+Fang&rsquo;s and at right angles to it.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+There was no escaping that grip. It was like Fate itself, and as inexorable.
+Slowly it shifted up along the jugular. All that saved White Fang from death
+was the loose skin of his neck and the thick fur that covered it. This served
+to form a large roll in Cherokee&rsquo;s mouth, the fur of which well-nigh
+defied his teeth. But bit by bit, whenever the chance offered, he was getting
+more of the loose skin and fur in his mouth. The result was that he was slowly
+throttling White Fang. The latter&rsquo;s breath was drawn with greater and
+greater difficulty as the moments went by.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+It began to look as though the battle were over. The backers of Cherokee waxed
+jubilant and offered ridiculous odds. White Fang&rsquo;s backers were
+correspondingly depressed, and refused bets of ten to one and twenty to one,
+though one man was rash enough to close a wager of fifty to one. This man was
+Beauty Smith. He took a step into the ring and pointed his finger at White
+Fang. Then he began to laugh derisively and scornfully. This produced the
+desired effect. White Fang went wild with rage. He called up his reserves of
+strength, and gained his feet. As he struggled around the ring, the fifty
+pounds of his foe ever dragging on his throat, his anger passed on into panic.
+The basic life of him dominated him again, and his intelligence fled before the
+will of his flesh to live. Round and round and back again, stumbling and
+falling and rising, even uprearing at times on his hind-legs and lifting his
+foe clear of the earth, he struggled vainly to shake off the clinging death.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+At last he fell, toppling backward, exhausted; and the bull-dog promptly
+shifted his grip, getting in closer, mangling more and more of the fur-folded
+flesh, throttling White Fang more severely than ever. Shouts of applause went
+up for the victor, and there were many cries of &ldquo;Cherokee!&rdquo;
+&ldquo;Cherokee!&rdquo; To this Cherokee responded by vigorous wagging of the
+stump of his tail. But the clamour of approval did not distract him. There was
+no sympathetic relation between his tail and his massive jaws. The one might
+wag, but the others held their terrible grip on White Fang&rsquo;s throat.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+It was at this time that a diversion came to the spectators. There was a jingle
+of bells. Dog-mushers&rsquo; cries were heard. Everybody, save Beauty Smith,
+looked apprehensively, the fear of the police strong upon them. But they saw,
+up the trail, and not down, two men running with sled and dogs. They were
+evidently coming down the creek from some prospecting trip. At sight of the
+crowd they stopped their dogs and came over and joined it, curious to see the
+cause of the excitement. The dog-musher wore a moustache, but the other, a
+taller and younger man, was smooth-shaven, his skin rosy from the pounding of
+his blood and the running in the frosty air.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+White Fang had practically ceased struggling. Now and again he resisted
+spasmodically and to no purpose. He could get little air, and that little grew
+less and less under the merciless grip that ever tightened. In spite of his
+armour of fur, the great vein of his throat would have long since been torn
+open, had not the first grip of the bull-dog been so low down as to be
+practically on the chest. It had taken Cherokee a long time to shift that grip
+upward, and this had also tended further to clog his jaws with fur and
+skin-fold.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+In the meantime, the abysmal brute in Beauty Smith had been rising into his
+brain and mastering the small bit of sanity that he possessed at best. When he
+saw White Fang&rsquo;s eyes beginning to glaze, he knew beyond doubt that the
+fight was lost. Then he broke loose. He sprang upon White Fang and began
+savagely to kick him. There were hisses from the crowd and cries of protest,
+but that was all. While this went on, and Beauty Smith continued to kick White
+Fang, there was a commotion in the crowd. The tall young newcomer was forcing
+his way through, shouldering men right and left without ceremony or gentleness.
+When he broke through into the ring, Beauty Smith was just in the act of
+delivering another kick. All his weight was on one foot, and he was in a state
+of unstable equilibrium. At that moment the newcomer&rsquo;s fist landed a
+smashing blow full in his face. Beauty Smith&rsquo;s remaining leg left the
+ground, and his whole body seemed to lift into the air as he turned over
+backward and struck the snow. The newcomer turned upon the crowd.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;You cowards!&rdquo; he cried. &ldquo;You beasts!&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He was in a rage himself&mdash;a sane rage. His grey eyes seemed metallic and
+steel-like as they flashed upon the crowd. Beauty Smith regained his feet and
+came toward him, sniffling and cowardly. The new-comer did not understand. He
+did not know how abject a coward the other was, and thought he was coming back
+intent on fighting. So, with a &ldquo;You beast!&rdquo; he smashed Beauty Smith
+over backward with a second blow in the face. Beauty Smith decided that the
+snow was the safest place for him, and lay where he had fallen, making no
+effort to get up.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Come on, Matt, lend a hand,&rdquo; the newcomer called the dog-musher,
+who had followed him into the ring.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Both men bent over the dogs. Matt took hold of White Fang, ready to pull when
+Cherokee&rsquo;s jaws should be loosened. This the younger man endeavoured to
+accomplish by clutching the bulldog&rsquo;s jaws in his hands and trying to
+spread them. It was a vain undertaking. As he pulled and tugged and wrenched,
+he kept exclaiming with every expulsion of breath, &ldquo;Beasts!&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The crowd began to grow unruly, and some of the men were protesting against the
+spoiling of the sport; but they were silenced when the newcomer lifted his head
+from his work for a moment and glared at them.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;You damn beasts!&rdquo; he finally exploded, and went back to his task.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;It&rsquo;s no use, Mr. Scott, you can&rsquo;t break &rsquo;m apart that
+way,&rdquo; Matt said at last.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The pair paused and surveyed the locked dogs.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Ain&rsquo;t bleedin&rsquo; much,&rdquo; Matt announced.
+&ldquo;Ain&rsquo;t got all the way in yet.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;But he&rsquo;s liable to any moment,&rdquo; Scott answered.
+&ldquo;There, did you see that! He shifted his grip in a bit.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The younger man&rsquo;s excitement and apprehension for White Fang was growing.
+He struck Cherokee about the head savagely again and again. But that did not
+loosen the jaws. Cherokee wagged the stump of his tail in advertisement that he
+understood the meaning of the blows, but that he knew he was himself in the
+right and only doing his duty by keeping his grip.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Won&rsquo;t some of you help?&rdquo; Scott cried desperately at the
+crowd.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But no help was offered. Instead, the crowd began sarcastically to cheer him on
+and showered him with facetious advice.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;You&rsquo;ll have to get a pry,&rdquo; Matt counselled.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The other reached into the holster at his hip, drew his revolver, and tried to
+thrust its muzzle between the bull-dog&rsquo;s jaws. He shoved, and shoved
+hard, till the grating of the steel against the locked teeth could be
+distinctly heard. Both men were on their knees, bending over the dogs. Tim
+Keenan strode into the ring. He paused beside Scott and touched him on the
+shoulder, saying ominously:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Don&rsquo;t break them teeth, stranger.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Then I&rsquo;ll break his neck,&rdquo; Scott retorted, continuing his
+shoving and wedging with the revolver muzzle.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I said don&rsquo;t break them teeth,&rdquo; the faro-dealer repeated
+more ominously than before.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But if it was a bluff he intended, it did not work. Scott never desisted from
+his efforts, though he looked up coolly and asked:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Your dog?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The faro-dealer grunted.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Then get in here and break this grip.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Well, stranger,&rdquo; the other drawled irritatingly, &ldquo;I
+don&rsquo;t mind telling you that&rsquo;s something I ain&rsquo;t worked out
+for myself. I don&rsquo;t know how to turn the trick.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Then get out of the way,&rdquo; was the reply, &ldquo;and don&rsquo;t
+bother me. I&rsquo;m busy.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Tim Keenan continued standing over him, but Scott took no further notice of his
+presence. He had managed to get the muzzle in between the jaws on one side, and
+was trying to get it out between the jaws on the other side. This accomplished,
+he pried gently and carefully, loosening the jaws a bit at a time, while Matt,
+a bit at a time, extricated White Fang&rsquo;s mangled neck.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Stand by to receive your dog,&rdquo; was Scott&rsquo;s peremptory order
+to Cherokee&rsquo;s owner.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The faro-dealer stooped down obediently and got a firm hold on Cherokee.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Now!&rdquo; Scott warned, giving the final pry.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The dogs were drawn apart, the bull-dog struggling vigorously.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Take him away,&rdquo; Scott commanded, and Tim Keenan dragged Cherokee
+back into the crowd.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+White Fang made several ineffectual efforts to get up. Once he gained his feet,
+but his legs were too weak to sustain him, and he slowly wilted and sank back
+into the snow. His eyes were half closed, and the surface of them was glassy.
+His jaws were apart, and through them the tongue protruded, draggled and limp.
+To all appearances he looked like a dog that had been strangled to death. Matt
+examined him.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Just about all in,&rdquo; he announced; &ldquo;but he&rsquo;s
+breathin&rsquo; all right.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Beauty Smith had regained his feet and come over to look at White Fang.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Matt, how much is a good sled-dog worth?&rdquo; Scott asked.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The dog-musher, still on his knees and stooped over White Fang, calculated for
+a moment.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Three hundred dollars,&rdquo; he answered.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;And how much for one that&rsquo;s all chewed up like this one?&rdquo;
+Scott asked, nudging White Fang with his foot.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Half of that,&rdquo; was the dog-musher&rsquo;s judgment. Scott turned
+upon Beauty Smith.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Did you hear, Mr. Beast? I&rsquo;m going to take your dog from you, and
+I&rsquo;m going to give you a hundred and fifty for him.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He opened his pocket-book and counted out the bills.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Beauty Smith put his hands behind his back, refusing to touch the proffered
+money.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I ain&rsquo;t a-sellin&rsquo;,&rdquo; he said.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Oh, yes you are,&rdquo; the other assured him. &ldquo;Because I&rsquo;m
+buying. Here&rsquo;s your money. The dog&rsquo;s mine.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Beauty Smith, his hands still behind him, began to back away.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Scott sprang toward him, drawing his fist back to strike. Beauty Smith cowered
+down in anticipation of the blow.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I&rsquo;ve got my rights,&rdquo; he whimpered.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;You&rsquo;ve forfeited your rights to own that dog,&rdquo; was the
+rejoinder. &ldquo;Are you going to take the money? or do I have to hit you
+again?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;All right,&rdquo; Beauty Smith spoke up with the alacrity of fear.
+&ldquo;But I take the money under protest,&rdquo; he added. &ldquo;The
+dog&rsquo;s a mint. I ain&rsquo;t a-goin&rsquo; to be robbed. A man&rsquo;s got
+his rights.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Correct,&rdquo; Scott answered, passing the money over to him. &ldquo;A
+man&rsquo;s got his rights. But you&rsquo;re not a man. You&rsquo;re a
+beast.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Wait till I get back to Dawson,&rdquo; Beauty Smith threatened.
+&ldquo;I&rsquo;ll have the law on you.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;If you open your mouth when you get back to Dawson, I&rsquo;ll have you
+run out of town. Understand?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Beauty Smith replied with a grunt.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Understand?&rdquo; the other thundered with abrupt fierceness.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Yes,&rdquo; Beauty Smith grunted, shrinking away.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Yes what?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Yes, sir,&rdquo; Beauty Smith snarled.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Look out! He&rsquo;ll bite!&rdquo; some one shouted, and a guffaw of
+laughter went up.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Scott turned his back on him, and returned to help the dog-musher, who was
+working over White Fang.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Some of the men were already departing; others stood in groups, looking on and
+talking. Tim Keenan joined one of the groups.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Who&rsquo;s that mug?&rdquo; he asked.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Weedon Scott,&rdquo; some one answered.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;And who in hell is Weedon Scott?&rdquo; the faro-dealer demanded.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Oh, one of them crackerjack minin&rsquo; experts. He&rsquo;s in with all
+the big bugs. If you want to keep out of trouble, you&rsquo;ll steer clear of
+him, that&rsquo;s my talk. He&rsquo;s all hunky with the officials. The Gold
+Commissioner&rsquo;s a special pal of his.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I thought he must be somebody,&rdquo; was the faro-dealer&rsquo;s
+comment. &ldquo;That&rsquo;s why I kept my hands offen him at the start.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<h3><a name="chap19"></a>CHAPTER V<br/>
+THE INDOMITABLE</h3>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;It&rsquo;s hopeless,&rdquo; Weedon Scott confessed.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He sat on the step of his cabin and stared at the dog-musher, who responded
+with a shrug that was equally hopeless.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Together they looked at White Fang at the end of his stretched chain,
+bristling, snarling, ferocious, straining to get at the sled-dogs. Having
+received sundry lessons from Matt, said lessons being imparted by means of a
+club, the sled-dogs had learned to leave White Fang alone; and even then they
+were lying down at a distance, apparently oblivious of his existence.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;It&rsquo;s a wolf and there&rsquo;s no taming it,&rdquo; Weedon Scott
+announced.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Oh, I don&rsquo;t know about that,&rdquo; Matt objected. &ldquo;Might be
+a lot of dog in &rsquo;m, for all you can tell. But there&rsquo;s one thing I
+know sure, an&rsquo; that there&rsquo;s no gettin&rsquo; away from.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The dog-musher paused and nodded his head confidentially at Moosehide Mountain.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Well, don&rsquo;t be a miser with what you know,&rdquo; Scott said
+sharply, after waiting a suitable length of time. &ldquo;Spit it out. What is
+it?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The dog-musher indicated White Fang with a backward thrust of his thumb.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Wolf or dog, it&rsquo;s all the same&mdash;he&rsquo;s ben tamed
+&rsquo;ready.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;No!&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I tell you yes, an&rsquo; broke to harness. Look close there. D&rsquo;ye
+see them marks across the chest?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;You&rsquo;re right, Matt. He was a sled-dog before Beauty Smith got hold
+of him.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;And there&rsquo;s not much reason against his bein&rsquo; a sled-dog
+again.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;What d&rsquo;ye think?&rdquo; Scott queried eagerly. Then the hope died
+down as he added, shaking his head, &ldquo;We&rsquo;ve had him two weeks now,
+and if anything he&rsquo;s wilder than ever at the present moment.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Give &rsquo;m a chance,&rdquo; Matt counselled. &ldquo;Turn &rsquo;m
+loose for a spell.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The other looked at him incredulously.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Yes,&rdquo; Matt went on, &ldquo;I know you&rsquo;ve tried to, but you
+didn&rsquo;t take a club.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;You try it then.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The dog-musher secured a club and went over to the chained animal. White Fang
+watched the club after the manner of a caged lion watching the whip of its
+trainer.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;See &rsquo;m keep his eye on that club,&rdquo; Matt said.
+&ldquo;That&rsquo;s a good sign. He&rsquo;s no fool. Don&rsquo;t dast tackle me
+so long as I got that club handy. He&rsquo;s not clean crazy, sure.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+As the man&rsquo;s hand approached his neck, White Fang bristled and snarled
+and crouched down. But while he eyed the approaching hand, he at the same time
+contrived to keep track of the club in the other hand, suspended threateningly
+above him. Matt unsnapped the chain from the collar and stepped back.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+White Fang could scarcely realise that he was free. Many months had gone by
+since he passed into the possession of Beauty Smith, and in all that period he
+had never known a moment of freedom except at the times he had been loosed to
+fight with other dogs. Immediately after such fights he had always been
+imprisoned again.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He did not know what to make of it. Perhaps some new devilry of the gods was
+about to be perpetrated on him. He walked slowly and cautiously, prepared to be
+assailed at any moment. He did not know what to do, it was all so
+unprecedented. He took the precaution to sheer off from the two watching gods,
+and walked carefully to the corner of the cabin. Nothing happened. He was
+plainly perplexed, and he came back again, pausing a dozen feet away and
+regarding the two men intently.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Won&rsquo;t he run away?&rdquo; his new owner asked.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Matt shrugged his shoulders. &ldquo;Got to take a gamble. Only way to find out
+is to find out.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Poor devil,&rdquo; Scott murmured pityingly. &ldquo;What he needs is
+some show of human kindness,&rdquo; he added, turning and going into the cabin.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He came out with a piece of meat, which he tossed to White Fang. He sprang away
+from it, and from a distance studied it suspiciously.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Hi-yu, Major!&rdquo; Matt shouted warningly, but too late.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Major had made a spring for the meat. At the instant his jaws closed on it,
+White Fang struck him. He was overthrown. Matt rushed in, but quicker than he
+was White Fang. Major staggered to his feet, but the blood spouting from his
+throat reddened the snow in a widening path.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;It&rsquo;s too bad, but it served him right,&rdquo; Scott said hastily.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But Matt&rsquo;s foot had already started on its way to kick White Fang. There
+was a leap, a flash of teeth, a sharp exclamation. White Fang, snarling
+fiercely, scrambled backward for several yards, while Matt stooped and
+investigated his leg.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;He got me all right,&rdquo; he announced, pointing to the torn trousers
+and undercloths, and the growing stain of red.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I told you it was hopeless, Matt,&rdquo; Scott said in a discouraged
+voice. &ldquo;I&rsquo;ve thought about it off and on, while not wanting to
+think of it. But we&rsquo;ve come to it now. It&rsquo;s the only thing to
+do.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+As he talked, with reluctant movements he drew his revolver, threw open the
+cylinder, and assured himself of its contents.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Look here, Mr. Scott,&rdquo; Matt objected; &ldquo;that dog&rsquo;s ben
+through hell. You can&rsquo;t expect &rsquo;m to come out a white an&rsquo;
+shinin&rsquo; angel. Give &rsquo;m time.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Look at Major,&rdquo; the other rejoined.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The dog-musher surveyed the stricken dog. He had sunk down on the snow in the
+circle of his blood and was plainly in the last gasp.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Served &rsquo;m right. You said so yourself, Mr. Scott. He tried to take
+White Fang&rsquo;s meat, an&rsquo; he&rsquo;s dead-O. That was to be expected.
+I wouldn&rsquo;t give two whoops in hell for a dog that wouldn&rsquo;t fight
+for his own meat.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;But look at yourself, Matt. It&rsquo;s all right about the dogs, but we
+must draw the line somewhere.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Served me right,&rdquo; Matt argued stubbornly. &ldquo;What&rsquo;d I
+want to kick &rsquo;m for? You said yourself that he&rsquo;d done right. Then I
+had no right to kick &rsquo;m.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;It would be a mercy to kill him,&rdquo; Scott insisted.
+&ldquo;He&rsquo;s untamable.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Now look here, Mr. Scott, give the poor devil a fightin&rsquo; chance.
+He ain&rsquo;t had no chance yet. He&rsquo;s just come through hell, an&rsquo;
+this is the first time he&rsquo;s ben loose. Give &rsquo;m a fair chance,
+an&rsquo; if he don&rsquo;t deliver the goods, I&rsquo;ll kill &rsquo;m myself.
+There!&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;God knows I don&rsquo;t want to kill him or have him killed,&rdquo;
+Scott answered, putting away the revolver. &ldquo;We&rsquo;ll let him run loose
+and see what kindness can do for him. And here&rsquo;s a try at it.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He walked over to White Fang and began talking to him gently and soothingly.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Better have a club handy,&rdquo; Matt warned.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Scott shook his head and went on trying to win White Fang&rsquo;s confidence.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+White Fang was suspicious. Something was impending. He had killed this
+god&rsquo;s dog, bitten his companion god, and what else was to be expected
+than some terrible punishment? But in the face of it he was indomitable. He
+bristled and showed his teeth, his eyes vigilant, his whole body wary and
+prepared for anything. The god had no club, so he suffered him to approach
+quite near. The god&rsquo;s hand had come out and was descending upon his head.
+White Fang shrank together and grew tense as he crouched under it. Here was
+danger, some treachery or something. He knew the hands of the gods, their
+proved mastery, their cunning to hurt. Besides, there was his old antipathy to
+being touched. He snarled more menacingly, crouched still lower, and still the
+hand descended. He did not want to bite the hand, and he endured the peril of
+it until his instinct surged up in him, mastering him with its insatiable
+yearning for life.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Weedon Scott had believed that he was quick enough to avoid any snap or slash.
+But he had yet to learn the remarkable quickness of White Fang, who struck with
+the certainty and swiftness of a coiled snake.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Scott cried out sharply with surprise, catching his torn hand and holding it
+tightly in his other hand. Matt uttered a great oath and sprang to his side.
+White Fang crouched down, and backed away, bristling, showing his fangs, his
+eyes malignant with menace. Now he could expect a beating as fearful as any he
+had received from Beauty Smith.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Here! What are you doing?&rdquo; Scott cried suddenly.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Matt had dashed into the cabin and come out with a rifle.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Nothin&rsquo;,&rdquo; he said slowly, with a careless calmness that was
+assumed, &ldquo;only goin&rsquo; to keep that promise I made. I reckon
+it&rsquo;s up to me to kill &rsquo;m as I said I&rsquo;d do.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;No you don&rsquo;t!&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Yes I do. Watch me.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+As Matt had pleaded for White Fang when he had been bitten, it was now Weedon
+Scott&rsquo;s turn to plead.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;You said to give him a chance. Well, give it to him. We&rsquo;ve only
+just started, and we can&rsquo;t quit at the beginning. It served me right,
+this time. And&mdash;look at him!&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+White Fang, near the corner of the cabin and forty feet away, was snarling with
+blood-curdling viciousness, not at Scott, but at the dog-musher.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Well, I&rsquo;ll be everlastingly gosh-swoggled!&rdquo; was the
+dog-musher&rsquo;s expression of astonishment.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Look at the intelligence of him,&rdquo; Scott went on hastily. &ldquo;He
+knows the meaning of firearms as well as you do. He&rsquo;s got intelligence
+and we&rsquo;ve got to give that intelligence a chance. Put up the gun.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;All right, I&rsquo;m willin&rsquo;,&rdquo; Matt agreed, leaning the
+rifle against the woodpile.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;But will you look at that!&rdquo; he exclaimed the next moment.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+White Fang had quieted down and ceased snarling. &ldquo;This is worth
+investigatin&rsquo;. Watch.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Matt, reached for the rifle, and at the same moment White Fang snarled. He
+stepped away from the rifle, and White Fang&rsquo;s lifted lips descended,
+covering his teeth.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Now, just for fun.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Matt took the rifle and began slowly to raise it to his shoulder. White
+Fang&rsquo;s snarling began with the movement, and increased as the movement
+approached its culmination. But the moment before the rifle came to a level on
+him, he leaped sidewise behind the corner of the cabin. Matt stood staring
+along the sights at the empty space of snow which had been occupied by White
+Fang.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The dog-musher put the rifle down solemnly, then turned and looked at his
+employer.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I agree with you, Mr. Scott. That dog&rsquo;s too intelligent to
+kill.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<h3><a name="chap20"></a>CHAPTER VI<br/>
+THE LOVE-MASTER</h3>
+
+<p>
+As White Fang watched Weedon Scott approach, he bristled and snarled to
+advertise that he would not submit to punishment. Twenty-four hours had passed
+since he had slashed open the hand that was now bandaged and held up by a sling
+to keep the blood out of it. In the past White Fang had experienced delayed
+punishments, and he apprehended that such a one was about to befall him. How
+could it be otherwise? He had committed what was to him sacrilege, sunk his
+fangs into the holy flesh of a god, and of a white-skinned superior god at
+that. In the nature of things, and of intercourse with gods, something terrible
+awaited him.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The god sat down several feet away. White Fang could see nothing dangerous in
+that. When the gods administered punishment they stood on their legs. Besides,
+this god had no club, no whip, no firearm. And furthermore, he himself was
+free. No chain nor stick bound him. He could escape into safety while the god
+was scrambling to his feet. In the meantime he would wait and see.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The god remained quiet, made no movement; and White Fang&rsquo;s snarl slowly
+dwindled to a growl that ebbed down in his throat and ceased. Then the god
+spoke, and at the first sound of his voice, the hair rose on White Fang&rsquo;s
+neck and the growl rushed up in his throat. But the god made no hostile
+movement, and went on calmly talking. For a time White Fang growled in unison
+with him, a correspondence of rhythm being established between growl and voice.
+But the god talked on interminably. He talked to White Fang as White Fang had
+never been talked to before. He talked softly and soothingly, with a gentleness
+that somehow, somewhere, touched White Fang. In spite of himself and all the
+pricking warnings of his instinct, White Fang began to have confidence in this
+god. He had a feeling of security that was belied by all his experience with
+men.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+After a long time, the god got up and went into the cabin. White Fang scanned
+him apprehensively when he came out. He had neither whip nor club nor weapon.
+Nor was his uninjured hand behind his back hiding something. He sat down as
+before, in the same spot, several feet away. He held out a small piece of meat.
+White Fang pricked his ears and investigated it suspiciously, managing to look
+at the same time both at the meat and the god, alert for any overt act, his
+body tense and ready to spring away at the first sign of hostility.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Still the punishment delayed. The god merely held near to his nose a piece of
+meat. And about the meat there seemed nothing wrong. Still White Fang
+suspected; and though the meat was proffered to him with short inviting thrusts
+of the hand, he refused to touch it. The gods were all-wise, and there was no
+telling what masterful treachery lurked behind that apparently harmless piece
+of meat. In past experience, especially in dealing with squaws, meat and
+punishment had often been disastrously related.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+In the end, the god tossed the meat on the snow at White Fang&rsquo;s feet. He
+smelled the meat carefully; but he did not look at it. While he smelled it he
+kept his eyes on the god. Nothing happened. He took the meat into his mouth and
+swallowed it. Still nothing happened. The god was actually offering him another
+piece of meat. Again he refused to take it from the hand, and again it was
+tossed to him. This was repeated a number of times. But there came a time when
+the god refused to toss it. He kept it in his hand and steadfastly proffered
+it.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The meat was good meat, and White Fang was hungry. Bit by bit, infinitely
+cautious, he approached the hand. At last the time came that he decided to eat
+the meat from the hand. He never took his eyes from the god, thrusting his head
+forward with ears flattened back and hair involuntarily rising and cresting on
+his neck. Also a low growl rumbled in his throat as warning that he was not to
+be trifled with. He ate the meat, and nothing happened. Piece by piece, he ate
+all the meat, and nothing happened. Still the punishment delayed.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He licked his chops and waited. The god went on talking. In his voice was
+kindness&mdash;something of which White Fang had no experience whatever. And
+within him it aroused feelings which he had likewise never experienced before.
+He was aware of a certain strange satisfaction, as though some need were being
+gratified, as though some void in his being were being filled. Then again came
+the prod of his instinct and the warning of past experience. The gods were ever
+crafty, and they had unguessed ways of attaining their ends.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Ah, he had thought so! There it came now, the god&rsquo;s hand, cunning to
+hurt, thrusting out at him, descending upon his head. But the god went on
+talking. His voice was soft and soothing. In spite of the menacing hand, the
+voice inspired confidence. And in spite of the assuring voice, the hand
+inspired distrust. White Fang was torn by conflicting feelings, impulses. It
+seemed he would fly to pieces, so terrible was the control he was exerting,
+holding together by an unwonted indecision the counter-forces that struggled
+within him for mastery.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He compromised. He snarled and bristled and flattened his ears. But he neither
+snapped nor sprang away. The hand descended. Nearer and nearer it came. It
+touched the ends of his upstanding hair. He shrank down under it. It followed
+down after him, pressing more closely against him. Shrinking, almost shivering,
+he still managed to hold himself together. It was a torment, this hand that
+touched him and violated his instinct. He could not forget in a day all the
+evil that had been wrought him at the hands of men. But it was the will of the
+god, and he strove to submit.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The hand lifted and descended again in a patting, caressing movement. This
+continued, but every time the hand lifted, the hair lifted under it. And every
+time the hand descended, the ears flattened down and a cavernous growl surged
+in his throat. White Fang growled and growled with insistent warning. By this
+means he announced that he was prepared to retaliate for any hurt he might
+receive. There was no telling when the god&rsquo;s ulterior motive might be
+disclosed. At any moment that soft, confidence-inspiring voice might break
+forth in a roar of wrath, that gentle and caressing hand transform itself into
+a vice-like grip to hold him helpless and administer punishment.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But the god talked on softly, and ever the hand rose and fell with non-hostile
+pats. White Fang experienced dual feelings. It was distasteful to his instinct.
+It restrained him, opposed the will of him toward personal liberty. And yet it
+was not physically painful. On the contrary, it was even pleasant, in a
+physical way. The patting movement slowly and carefully changed to a rubbing of
+the ears about their bases, and the physical pleasure even increased a little.
+Yet he continued to fear, and he stood on guard, expectant of unguessed evil,
+alternately suffering and enjoying as one feeling or the other came uppermost
+and swayed him.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Well, I&rsquo;ll be gosh-swoggled!&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+So spoke Matt, coming out of the cabin, his sleeves rolled up, a pan of dirty
+dish-water in his hands, arrested in the act of emptying the pan by the sight
+of Weedon Scott patting White Fang.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+At the instant his voice broke the silence, White Fang leaped back, snarling
+savagely at him.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Matt regarded his employer with grieved disapproval.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;If you don&rsquo;t mind my expressin&rsquo; my feelin&rsquo;s, Mr.
+Scott, I&rsquo;ll make free to say you&rsquo;re seventeen kinds of a damn fool
+an&rsquo; all of &rsquo;em different, an&rsquo; then some.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Weedon Scott smiled with a superior air, gained his feet, and walked over to
+White Fang. He talked soothingly to him, but not for long, then slowly put out
+his hand, rested it on White Fang&rsquo;s head, and resumed the interrupted
+patting. White Fang endured it, keeping his eyes fixed suspiciously, not upon
+the man that patted him, but upon the man that stood in the doorway.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;You may be a number one, tip-top minin&rsquo; expert, all right all
+right,&rdquo; the dog-musher delivered himself oracularly, &ldquo;but you
+missed the chance of your life when you was a boy an&rsquo; didn&rsquo;t run
+off an&rsquo; join a circus.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+White Fang snarled at the sound of his voice, but this time did not leap away
+from under the hand that was caressing his head and the back of his neck with
+long, soothing strokes.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+It was the beginning of the end for White Fang&mdash;the ending of the old life
+and the reign of hate. A new and incomprehensibly fairer life was dawning. It
+required much thinking and endless patience on the part of Weedon Scott to
+accomplish this. And on the part of White Fang it required nothing less than a
+revolution. He had to ignore the urges and promptings of instinct and reason,
+defy experience, give the lie to life itself.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Life, as he had known it, not only had had no place in it for much that he now
+did; but all the currents had gone counter to those to which he now abandoned
+himself. In short, when all things were considered, he had to achieve an
+orientation far vaster than the one he had achieved at the time he came
+voluntarily in from the Wild and accepted Grey Beaver as his lord. At that time
+he was a mere puppy, soft from the making, without form, ready for the thumb of
+circumstance to begin its work upon him. But now it was different. The thumb of
+circumstance had done its work only too well. By it he had been formed and
+hardened into the Fighting Wolf, fierce and implacable, unloving and unlovable.
+To accomplish the change was like a reflux of being, and this when the
+plasticity of youth was no longer his; when the fibre of him had become tough
+and knotty; when the warp and the woof of him had made of him an adamantine
+texture, harsh and unyielding; when the face of his spirit had become iron and
+all his instincts and axioms had crystallised into set rules, cautions,
+dislikes, and desires.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Yet again, in this new orientation, it was the thumb of circumstance that
+pressed and prodded him, softening that which had become hard and remoulding it
+into fairer form. Weedon Scott was in truth this thumb. He had gone to the
+roots of White Fang&rsquo;s nature, and with kindness touched to life potencies
+that had languished and well-nigh perished. One such potency was <i>love</i>.
+It took the place of <i>like</i>, which latter had been the highest feeling
+that thrilled him in his intercourse with the gods.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But this love did not come in a day. It began with <i>like</i> and out of it
+slowly developed. White Fang did not run away, though he was allowed to remain
+loose, because he liked this new god. This was certainly better than the life
+he had lived in the cage of Beauty Smith, and it was necessary that he should
+have some god. The lordship of man was a need of his nature. The seal of his
+dependence on man had been set upon him in that early day when he turned his
+back on the Wild and crawled to Grey Beaver&rsquo;s feet to receive the
+expected beating. This seal had been stamped upon him again, and ineradicably,
+on his second return from the Wild, when the long famine was over and there was
+fish once more in the village of Grey Beaver.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And so, because he needed a god and because he preferred Weedon Scott to Beauty
+Smith, White Fang remained. In acknowledgment of fealty, he proceeded to take
+upon himself the guardianship of his master&rsquo;s property. He prowled about
+the cabin while the sled-dogs slept, and the first night-visitor to the cabin
+fought him off with a club until Weedon Scott came to the rescue. But White
+Fang soon learned to differentiate between thieves and honest men, to appraise
+the true value of step and carriage. The man who travelled, loud-stepping, the
+direct line to the cabin door, he let alone&mdash;though he watched him
+vigilantly until the door opened and he received the endorsement of the master.
+But the man who went softly, by circuitous ways, peering with caution, seeking
+after secrecy&mdash;that was the man who received no suspension of judgment
+from White Fang, and who went away abruptly, hurriedly, and without dignity.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Weedon Scott had set himself the task of redeeming White Fang&mdash;or rather,
+of redeeming mankind from the wrong it had done White Fang. It was a matter of
+principle and conscience. He felt that the ill done White Fang was a debt
+incurred by man and that it must be paid. So he went out of his way to be
+especially kind to the Fighting Wolf. Each day he made it a point to caress and
+pet White Fang, and to do it at length.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+At first suspicious and hostile, White Fang grew to like this petting. But
+there was one thing that he never outgrew&mdash;his growling. Growl he would,
+from the moment the petting began till it ended. But it was a growl with a new
+note in it. A stranger could not hear this note, and to such a stranger the
+growling of White Fang was an exhibition of primordial savagery, nerve-racking
+and blood-curdling. But White Fang&rsquo;s throat had become harsh-fibred from
+the making of ferocious sounds through the many years since his first little
+rasp of anger in the lair of his cubhood, and he could not soften the sounds of
+that throat now to express the gentleness he felt. Nevertheless, Weedon
+Scott&rsquo;s ear and sympathy were fine enough to catch the new note all but
+drowned in the fierceness&mdash;the note that was the faintest hint of a croon
+of content and that none but he could hear.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+As the days went by, the evolution of <i>like</i> into <i>love</i> was
+accelerated. White Fang himself began to grow aware of it, though in his
+consciousness he knew not what love was. It manifested itself to him as a void
+in his being&mdash;a hungry, aching, yearning void that clamoured to be filled.
+It was a pain and an unrest; and it received easement only by the touch of the
+new god&rsquo;s presence. At such times love was joy to him, a wild,
+keen-thrilling satisfaction. But when away from his god, the pain and the
+unrest returned; the void in him sprang up and pressed against him with its
+emptiness, and the hunger gnawed and gnawed unceasingly.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+White Fang was in the process of finding himself. In spite of the maturity of
+his years and of the savage rigidity of the mould that had formed him, his
+nature was undergoing an expansion. There was a burgeoning within him of
+strange feelings and unwonted impulses. His old code of conduct was changing.
+In the past he had liked comfort and surcease from pain, disliked discomfort
+and pain, and he had adjusted his actions accordingly. But now it was
+different. Because of this new feeling within him, he ofttimes elected
+discomfort and pain for the sake of his god. Thus, in the early morning,
+instead of roaming and foraging, or lying in a sheltered nook, he would wait
+for hours on the cheerless cabin-stoop for a sight of the god&rsquo;s face. At
+night, when the god returned home, White Fang would leave the warm
+sleeping-place he had burrowed in the snow in order to receive the friendly
+snap of fingers and the word of greeting. Meat, even meat itself, he would
+forego to be with his god, to receive a caress from him or to accompany him
+down into the town.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+<i>Like</i> had been replaced by <i>love</i>. And love was the plummet dropped
+down into the deeps of him where like had never gone. And responsive out of his
+deeps had come the new thing&mdash;love. That which was given unto him did he
+return. This was a god indeed, a love-god, a warm and radiant god, in whose
+light White Fang&rsquo;s nature expanded as a flower expands under the sun.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But White Fang was not demonstrative. He was too old, too firmly moulded, to
+become adept at expressing himself in new ways. He was too self-possessed, too
+strongly poised in his own isolation. Too long had he cultivated reticence,
+aloofness, and moroseness. He had never barked in his life, and he could not
+now learn to bark a welcome when his god approached. He was never in the way,
+never extravagant nor foolish in the expression of his love. He never ran to
+meet his god. He waited at a distance; but he always waited, was always there.
+His love partook of the nature of worship, dumb, inarticulate, a silent
+adoration. Only by the steady regard of his eyes did he express his love, and
+by the unceasing following with his eyes of his god&rsquo;s every movement.
+Also, at times, when his god looked at him and spoke to him, he betrayed an
+awkward self-consciousness, caused by the struggle of his love to express
+itself and his physical inability to express it.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He learned to adjust himself in many ways to his new mode of life. It was borne
+in upon him that he must let his master&rsquo;s dogs alone. Yet his dominant
+nature asserted itself, and he had first to thrash them into an acknowledgment
+of his superiority and leadership. This accomplished, he had little trouble
+with them. They gave trail to him when he came and went or walked among them,
+and when he asserted his will they obeyed.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+In the same way, he came to tolerate Matt&mdash;as a possession of his master.
+His master rarely fed him. Matt did that, it was his business; yet White Fang
+divined that it was his master&rsquo;s food he ate and that it was his master
+who thus fed him vicariously. Matt it was who tried to put him into the harness
+and make him haul sled with the other dogs. But Matt failed. It was not until
+Weedon Scott put the harness on White Fang and worked him, that he understood.
+He took it as his master&rsquo;s will that Matt should drive him and work him
+just as he drove and worked his master&rsquo;s other dogs.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Different from the Mackenzie toboggans were the Klondike sleds with runners
+under them. And different was the method of driving the dogs. There was no
+fan-formation of the team. The dogs worked in single file, one behind another,
+hauling on double traces. And here, in the Klondike, the leader was indeed the
+leader. The wisest as well as strongest dog was the leader, and the team obeyed
+him and feared him. That White Fang should quickly gain this post was
+inevitable. He could not be satisfied with less, as Matt learned after much
+inconvenience and trouble. White Fang picked out the post for himself, and Matt
+backed his judgment with strong language after the experiment had been tried.
+But, though he worked in the sled in the day, White Fang did not forego the
+guarding of his master&rsquo;s property in the night. Thus he was on duty all
+the time, ever vigilant and faithful, the most valuable of all the dogs.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Makin&rsquo; free to spit out what&rsquo;s in me,&rdquo; Matt said one
+day, &ldquo;I beg to state that you was a wise guy all right when you paid the
+price you did for that dog. You clean swindled Beauty Smith on top of
+pushin&rsquo; his face in with your fist.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+A recrudescence of anger glinted in Weedon Scott&rsquo;s grey eyes, and he
+muttered savagely, &ldquo;The beast!&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+In the late spring a great trouble came to White Fang. Without warning, the
+love-master disappeared. There had been warning, but White Fang was unversed in
+such things and did not understand the packing of a grip. He remembered
+afterwards that his packing had preceded the master&rsquo;s disappearance; but
+at the time he suspected nothing. That night he waited for the master to
+return. At midnight the chill wind that blew drove him to shelter at the rear
+of the cabin. There he drowsed, only half asleep, his ears keyed for the first
+sound of the familiar step. But, at two in the morning, his anxiety drove him
+out to the cold front stoop, where he crouched, and waited.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But no master came. In the morning the door opened and Matt stepped outside.
+White Fang gazed at him wistfully. There was no common speech by which he might
+learn what he wanted to know. The days came and went, but never the master.
+White Fang, who had never known sickness in his life, became sick. He became
+very sick, so sick that Matt was finally compelled to bring him inside the
+cabin. Also, in writing to his employer, Matt devoted a postscript to White
+Fang.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Weedon Scott reading the letter down in Circle City, came upon the following:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;That dam wolf won&rsquo;t work. Won&rsquo;t eat. Aint got no spunk left.
+All the dogs is licking him. Wants to know what has become of you, and I
+don&rsquo;t know how to tell him. Mebbe he is going to die.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+It was as Matt had said. White Fang had ceased eating, lost heart, and allowed
+every dog of the team to thrash him. In the cabin he lay on the floor near the
+stove, without interest in food, in Matt, nor in life. Matt might talk gently
+to him or swear at him, it was all the same; he never did more than turn his
+dull eyes upon the man, then drop his head back to its customary position on
+his fore-paws.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And then, one night, Matt, reading to himself with moving lips and mumbled
+sounds, was startled by a low whine from White Fang. He had got upon his feet,
+his ears cocked towards the door, and he was listening intently. A moment
+later, Matt heard a footstep. The door opened, and Weedon Scott stepped in. The
+two men shook hands. Then Scott looked around the room.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Where&rsquo;s the wolf?&rdquo; he asked.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Then he discovered him, standing where he had been lying, near to the stove. He
+had not rushed forward after the manner of other dogs. He stood, watching and
+waiting.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Holy smoke!&rdquo; Matt exclaimed. &ldquo;Look at &rsquo;m wag his
+tail!&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Weedon Scott strode half across the room toward him, at the same time calling
+him. White Fang came to him, not with a great bound, yet quickly. He was
+awakened from self-consciousness, but as he drew near, his eyes took on a
+strange expression. Something, an incommunicable vastness of feeling, rose up
+into his eyes as a light and shone forth.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;He never looked at me that way all the time you was gone!&rdquo; Matt
+commented.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Weedon Scott did not hear. He was squatting down on his heels, face to face
+with White Fang and petting him&mdash;rubbing at the roots of the ears, making
+long caressing strokes down the neck to the shoulders, tapping the spine gently
+with the balls of his fingers. And White Fang was growling responsively, the
+crooning note of the growl more pronounced than ever.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But that was not all. What of his joy, the great love in him, ever surging and
+struggling to express itself, succeeded in finding a new mode of expression. He
+suddenly thrust his head forward and nudged his way in between the
+master&rsquo;s arm and body. And here, confined, hidden from view all except
+his ears, no longer growling, he continued to nudge and snuggle.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The two men looked at each other. Scott&rsquo;s eyes were shining.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Gosh!&rdquo; said Matt in an awe-stricken voice.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+A moment later, when he had recovered himself, he said, &ldquo;I always
+insisted that wolf was a dog. Look at &rsquo;m!&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+With the return of the love-master, White Fang&rsquo;s recovery was rapid. Two
+nights and a day he spent in the cabin. Then he sallied forth. The sled-dogs
+had forgotten his prowess. They remembered only the latest, which was his
+weakness and sickness. At the sight of him as he came out of the cabin, they
+sprang upon him.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Talk about your rough-houses,&rdquo; Matt murmured gleefully, standing
+in the doorway and looking on.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Give &rsquo;m hell, you wolf! Give &rsquo;m hell!&mdash;an&rsquo; then
+some!&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+White Fang did not need the encouragement. The return of the love-master was
+enough. Life was flowing through him again, splendid and indomitable. He fought
+from sheer joy, finding in it an expression of much that he felt and that
+otherwise was without speech. There could be but one ending. The team dispersed
+in ignominious defeat, and it was not until after dark that the dogs came
+sneaking back, one by one, by meekness and humility signifying their fealty to
+White Fang.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Having learned to snuggle, White Fang was guilty of it often. It was the final
+word. He could not go beyond it. The one thing of which he had always been
+particularly jealous was his head. He had always disliked to have it touched.
+It was the Wild in him, the fear of hurt and of the trap, that had given rise
+to the panicky impulses to avoid contacts. It was the mandate of his instinct
+that that head must be free. And now, with the love-master, his snuggling was
+the deliberate act of putting himself into a position of hopeless helplessness.
+It was an expression of perfect confidence, of absolute self-surrender, as
+though he said: &ldquo;I put myself into thy hands. Work thou thy will with
+me.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+One night, not long after the return, Scott and Matt sat at a game of cribbage
+preliminary to going to bed. &ldquo;Fifteen-two, fifteen-four an&rsquo; a pair
+makes six,&rdquo; Mat was pegging up, when there was an outcry and sound of
+snarling without. They looked at each other as they started to rise to their
+feet.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;The wolf&rsquo;s nailed somebody,&rdquo; Matt said.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+A wild scream of fear and anguish hastened them.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Bring a light!&rdquo; Scott shouted, as he sprang outside.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Matt followed with the lamp, and by its light they saw a man lying on his back
+in the snow. His arms were folded, one above the other, across his face and
+throat. Thus he was trying to shield himself from White Fang&rsquo;s teeth. And
+there was need for it. White Fang was in a rage, wickedly making his attack on
+the most vulnerable spot. From shoulder to wrist of the crossed arms, the
+coat-sleeve, blue flannel shirt and undershirt were ripped in rags, while the
+arms themselves were terribly slashed and streaming blood.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+All this the two men saw in the first instant. The next instant Weedon Scott
+had White Fang by the throat and was dragging him clear. White Fang struggled
+and snarled, but made no attempt to bite, while he quickly quieted down at a
+sharp word from the master.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Matt helped the man to his feet. As he arose he lowered his crossed arms,
+exposing the bestial face of Beauty Smith. The dog-musher let go of him
+precipitately, with action similar to that of a man who has picked up live
+fire. Beauty Smith blinked in the lamplight and looked about him. He caught
+sight of White Fang and terror rushed into his face.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+At the same moment Matt noticed two objects lying in the snow. He held the lamp
+close to them, indicating them with his toe for his employer&rsquo;s
+benefit&mdash;a steel dog-chain and a stout club.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Weedon Scott saw and nodded. Not a word was spoken. The dog-musher laid his
+hand on Beauty Smith&rsquo;s shoulder and faced him to the right about. No word
+needed to be spoken. Beauty Smith started.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+In the meantime the love-master was patting White Fang and talking to him.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Tried to steal you, eh? And you wouldn&rsquo;t have it! Well, well, he
+made a mistake, didn&rsquo;t he?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Must &lsquo;a&rsquo; thought he had hold of seventeen devils,&rdquo; the
+dog-musher sniggered.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+White Fang, still wrought up and bristling, growled and growled, the hair
+slowly lying down, the crooning note remote and dim, but growing in his throat.
+</p>
+
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<h2><a name="part05"></a>PART V</h2>
+
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<h3><a name="chap21"></a>CHAPTER I<br/>
+THE LONG TRAIL</h3>
+
+<p>
+It was in the air. White Fang sensed the coming calamity, even before there was
+tangible evidence of it. In vague ways it was borne in upon him that a change
+was impending. He knew not how nor why, yet he got his feel of the oncoming
+event from the gods themselves. In ways subtler than they knew, they betrayed
+their intentions to the wolf-dog that haunted the cabin-stoop, and that, though
+he never came inside the cabin, knew what went on inside their brains.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Listen to that, will you!&rdquo; the dog-musher exclaimed at supper one
+night.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Weedon Scott listened. Through the door came a low, anxious whine, like a
+sobbing under the breath that had just grown audible. Then came the long sniff,
+as White Fang reassured himself that his god was still inside and had not yet
+taken himself off in mysterious and solitary flight.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I do believe that wolf&rsquo;s on to you,&rdquo; the dog-musher said.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Weedon Scott looked across at his companion with eyes that almost pleaded,
+though this was given the lie by his words.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;What the devil can I do with a wolf in California?&rdquo; he demanded.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;That&rsquo;s what I say,&rdquo; Matt answered. &ldquo;What the devil can
+you do with a wolf in California?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But this did not satisfy Weedon Scott. The other seemed to be judging him in a
+non-committal sort of way.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;White man&rsquo;s dogs would have no show against him,&rdquo; Scott went
+on. &ldquo;He&rsquo;d kill them on sight. If he didn&rsquo;t bankrupt me with
+damaged suits, the authorities would take him away from me and electrocute
+him.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;He&rsquo;s a downright murderer, I know,&rdquo; was the
+dog-musher&rsquo;s comment.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Weedon Scott looked at him suspiciously.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;It would never do,&rdquo; he said decisively.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;It would never do!&rdquo; Matt concurred. &ldquo;Why you&rsquo;d have to
+hire a man &rsquo;specially to take care of &rsquo;m.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The other suspicion was allayed. He nodded cheerfully. In the silence that
+followed, the low, half-sobbing whine was heard at the door and then the long,
+questing sniff.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;There&rsquo;s no denyin&rsquo; he thinks a hell of a lot of you,&rdquo;
+Matt said.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The other glared at him in sudden wrath. &ldquo;Damn it all, man! I know my own
+mind and what&rsquo;s best!&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I&rsquo;m agreein&rsquo; with you, only . . . &rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Only what?&rdquo; Scott snapped out.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Only . . . &rdquo; the dog-musher began softly, then changed his mind
+and betrayed a rising anger of his own. &ldquo;Well, you needn&rsquo;t get so
+all-fired het up about it. Judgin&rsquo; by your actions one&rsquo;d think you
+didn&rsquo;t know your own mind.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Weedon Scott debated with himself for a while, and then said more gently:
+&ldquo;You are right, Matt. I don&rsquo;t know my own mind, and that&rsquo;s
+what&rsquo;s the trouble.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Why, it would be rank ridiculousness for me to take that dog
+along,&rdquo; he broke out after another pause.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I&rsquo;m agreein&rsquo; with you,&rdquo; was Matt&rsquo;s answer, and
+again his employer was not quite satisfied with him.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;But how in the name of the great Sardanapolis he knows you&rsquo;re
+goin&rsquo; is what gets me,&rdquo; the dog-musher continued innocently.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;It&rsquo;s beyond me, Matt,&rdquo; Scott answered, with a mournful shake
+of the head.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Then came the day when, through the open cabin door, White Fang saw the fatal
+grip on the floor and the love-master packing things into it. Also, there were
+comings and goings, and the erstwhile placid atmosphere of the cabin was vexed
+with strange perturbations and unrest. Here was indubitable evidence. White
+Fang had already scented it. He now reasoned it. His god was preparing for
+another flight. And since he had not taken him with him before, so, now, he
+could look to be left behind.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+That night he lifted the long wolf-howl. As he had howled, in his puppy days,
+when he fled back from the Wild to the village to find it vanished and naught
+but a rubbish-heap to mark the site of Grey Beaver&rsquo;s tepee, so now he
+pointed his muzzle to the cold stars and told to them his woe.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Inside the cabin the two men had just gone to bed.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;He&rsquo;s gone off his food again,&rdquo; Matt remarked from his bunk.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+There was a grunt from Weedon Scott&rsquo;s bunk, and a stir of blankets.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;From the way he cut up the other time you went away, I wouldn&rsquo;t
+wonder this time but what he died.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The blankets in the other bunk stirred irritably.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Oh, shut up!&rdquo; Scott cried out through the darkness. &ldquo;You nag
+worse than a woman.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I&rsquo;m agreein&rsquo; with you,&rdquo; the dog-musher answered, and
+Weedon Scott was not quite sure whether or not the other had snickered.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The next day White Fang&rsquo;s anxiety and restlessness were even more
+pronounced. He dogged his master&rsquo;s heels whenever he left the cabin, and
+haunted the front stoop when he remained inside. Through the open door he could
+catch glimpses of the luggage on the floor. The grip had been joined by two
+large canvas bags and a box. Matt was rolling the master&rsquo;s blankets and
+fur robe inside a small tarpaulin. White Fang whined as he watched the
+operation.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Later on two Indians arrived. He watched them closely as they shouldered the
+luggage and were led off down the hill by Matt, who carried the bedding and the
+grip. But White Fang did not follow them. The master was still in the cabin.
+After a time, Matt returned. The master came to the door and called White Fang
+inside.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;You poor devil,&rdquo; he said gently, rubbing White Fang&rsquo;s ears
+and tapping his spine. &ldquo;I&rsquo;m hitting the long trail, old man, where
+you cannot follow. Now give me a growl&mdash;the last, good, good-bye
+growl.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But White Fang refused to growl. Instead, and after a wistful, searching look,
+he snuggled in, burrowing his head out of sight between the master&rsquo;s arm
+and body.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;There she blows!&rdquo; Matt cried. From the Yukon arose the hoarse
+bellowing of a river steamboat. &ldquo;You&rsquo;ve got to cut it short. Be
+sure and lock the front door. I&rsquo;ll go out the back. Get a move on!&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The two doors slammed at the same moment, and Weedon Scott waited for Matt to
+come around to the front. From inside the door came a low whining and sobbing.
+Then there were long, deep-drawn sniffs.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;You must take good care of him, Matt,&rdquo; Scott said, as they started
+down the hill. &ldquo;Write and let me know how he gets along.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Sure,&rdquo; the dog-musher answered. &ldquo;But listen to that, will
+you!&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Both men stopped. White Fang was howling as dogs howl when their masters lie
+dead. He was voicing an utter woe, his cry bursting upward in great
+heart-breaking rushes, dying down into quavering misery, and bursting upward
+again with a rush upon rush of grief.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The <i>Aurora</i> was the first steamboat of the year for the Outside, and her
+decks were jammed with prosperous adventurers and broken gold seekers, all
+equally as mad to get to the Outside as they had been originally to get to the
+Inside. Near the gang-plank, Scott was shaking hands with Matt, who was
+preparing to go ashore. But Matt&rsquo;s hand went limp in the other&rsquo;s
+grasp as his gaze shot past and remained fixed on something behind him. Scott
+turned to see. Sitting on the deck several feet away and watching wistfully was
+White Fang.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The dog-musher swore softly, in awe-stricken accents. Scott could only look in
+wonder.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Did you lock the front door?&rdquo; Matt demanded. The other nodded, and
+asked, &ldquo;How about the back?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;You just bet I did,&rdquo; was the fervent reply.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+White Fang flattened his ears ingratiatingly, but remained where he was, making
+no attempt to approach.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I&rsquo;ll have to take &rsquo;m ashore with me.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Matt made a couple of steps toward White Fang, but the latter slid away from
+him. The dog-musher made a rush of it, and White Fang dodged between the legs
+of a group of men. Ducking, turning, doubling, he slid about the deck, eluding
+the other&rsquo;s efforts to capture him.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But when the love-master spoke, White Fang came to him with prompt obedience.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Won&rsquo;t come to the hand that&rsquo;s fed &rsquo;m all these
+months,&rdquo; the dog-musher muttered resentfully. &ldquo;And you&mdash;you
+ain&rsquo;t never fed &rsquo;m after them first days of gettin&rsquo;
+acquainted. I&rsquo;m blamed if I can see how he works it out that you&rsquo;re
+the boss.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Scott, who had been patting White Fang, suddenly bent closer and pointed out
+fresh-made cuts on his muzzle, and a gash between the eyes.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Matt bent over and passed his hand along White Fang&rsquo;s belly.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;We plump forgot the window. He&rsquo;s all cut an&rsquo; gouged
+underneath. Must &lsquo;a&rsquo; butted clean through it, b&rsquo;gosh!&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But Weedon Scott was not listening. He was thinking rapidly. The
+<i>Aurora&rsquo;s</i> whistle hooted a final announcement of departure. Men
+were scurrying down the gang-plank to the shore. Matt loosened the bandana from
+his own neck and started to put it around White Fang&rsquo;s. Scott grasped the
+dog-musher&rsquo;s hand.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Good-bye, Matt, old man. About the wolf&mdash;you needn&rsquo;t write.
+You see, I&rsquo;ve . . . !&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;What!&rdquo; the dog-musher exploded. &ldquo;You don&rsquo;t mean to say
+. . .?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;The very thing I mean. Here&rsquo;s your bandana. I&rsquo;ll write to
+you about him.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Matt paused halfway down the gang-plank.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;He&rsquo;ll never stand the climate!&rdquo; he shouted back.
+&ldquo;Unless you clip &rsquo;m in warm weather!&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The gang-plank was hauled in, and the <i>Aurora</i> swung out from the bank.
+Weedon Scott waved a last good-bye. Then he turned and bent over White Fang,
+standing by his side.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Now growl, damn you, growl,&rdquo; he said, as he patted the responsive
+head and rubbed the flattening ears.
+</p>
+
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<h3><a name="chap22"></a>CHAPTER II<br/>
+THE SOUTHLAND</h3>
+
+<p>
+White Fang landed from the steamer in San Francisco. He was appalled. Deep in
+him, below any reasoning process or act of consciousness, he had associated
+power with godhead. And never had the white men seemed such marvellous gods as
+now, when he trod the slimy pavement of San Francisco. The log cabins he had
+known were replaced by towering buildings. The streets were crowded with
+perils&mdash;waggons, carts, automobiles; great, straining horses pulling huge
+trucks; and monstrous cable and electric cars hooting and clanging through the
+midst, screeching their insistent menace after the manner of the lynxes he had
+known in the northern woods.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+All this was the manifestation of power. Through it all, behind it all, was
+man, governing and controlling, expressing himself, as of old, by his mastery
+over matter. It was colossal, stunning. White Fang was awed. Fear sat upon him.
+As in his cubhood he had been made to feel his smallness and puniness on the
+day he first came in from the Wild to the village of Grey Beaver, so now, in
+his full-grown stature and pride of strength, he was made to feel small and
+puny. And there were so many gods! He was made dizzy by the swarming of them.
+The thunder of the streets smote upon his ears. He was bewildered by the
+tremendous and endless rush and movement of things. As never before, he felt
+his dependence on the love-master, close at whose heels he followed, no matter
+what happened never losing sight of him.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But White Fang was to have no more than a nightmare vision of the city&mdash;an
+experience that was like a bad dream, unreal and terrible, that haunted him for
+long after in his dreams. He was put into a baggage-car by the master, chained
+in a corner in the midst of heaped trunks and valises. Here a squat and brawny
+god held sway, with much noise, hurling trunks and boxes about, dragging them
+in through the door and tossing them into the piles, or flinging them out of
+the door, smashing and crashing, to other gods who awaited them.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And here, in this inferno of luggage, was White Fang deserted by the master. Or
+at least White Fang thought he was deserted, until he smelled out the
+master&rsquo;s canvas clothes-bags alongside of him, and proceeded to mount
+guard over them.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;&rsquo;Bout time you come,&rdquo; growled the god of the car, an hour
+later, when Weedon Scott appeared at the door. &ldquo;That dog of yourn
+won&rsquo;t let me lay a finger on your stuff.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+White Fang emerged from the car. He was astonished. The nightmare city was
+gone. The car had been to him no more than a room in a house, and when he had
+entered it the city had been all around him. In the interval the city had
+disappeared. The roar of it no longer dinned upon his ears. Before him was
+smiling country, streaming with sunshine, lazy with quietude. But he had little
+time to marvel at the transformation. He accepted it as he accepted all the
+unaccountable doings and manifestations of the gods. It was their way.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+There was a carriage waiting. A man and a woman approached the master. The
+woman&rsquo;s arms went out and clutched the master around the neck&mdash;a
+hostile act! The next moment Weedon Scott had torn loose from the embrace and
+closed with White Fang, who had become a snarling, raging demon.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;It&rsquo;s all right, mother,&rdquo; Scott was saying as he kept tight
+hold of White Fang and placated him. &ldquo;He thought you were going to injure
+me, and he wouldn&rsquo;t stand for it. It&rsquo;s all right. It&rsquo;s all
+right. He&rsquo;ll learn soon enough.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;And in the meantime I may be permitted to love my son when his dog is
+not around,&rdquo; she laughed, though she was pale and weak from the fright.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She looked at White Fang, who snarled and bristled and glared malevolently.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;He&rsquo;ll have to learn, and he shall, without postponement,&rdquo;
+Scott said.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He spoke softly to White Fang until he had quieted him, then his voice became
+firm.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Down, sir! Down with you!&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+This had been one of the things taught him by the master, and White Fang
+obeyed, though he lay down reluctantly and sullenly.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Now, mother.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Scott opened his arms to her, but kept his eyes on White Fang.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Down!&rdquo; he warned. &ldquo;Down!&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+White Fang, bristling silently, half-crouching as he rose, sank back and
+watched the hostile act repeated. But no harm came of it, nor of the embrace
+from the strange man-god that followed. Then the clothes-bags were taken into
+the carriage, the strange gods and the love-master followed, and White Fang
+pursued, now running vigilantly behind, now bristling up to the running horses
+and warning them that he was there to see that no harm befell the god they
+dragged so swiftly across the earth.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+At the end of fifteen minutes, the carriage swung in through a stone gateway
+and on between a double row of arched and interlacing walnut trees. On either
+side stretched lawns, their broad sweep broken here and there by great
+sturdy-limbed oaks. In the near distance, in contrast with the young-green of
+the tended grass, sunburnt hay-fields showed tan and gold; while beyond were
+the tawny hills and upland pastures. From the head of the lawn, on the first
+soft swell from the valley-level, looked down the deep-porched, many-windowed
+house.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Little opportunity was given White Fang to see all this. Hardly had the
+carriage entered the grounds, when he was set upon by a sheep-dog, bright-eyed,
+sharp-muzzled, righteously indignant and angry. It was between him and the
+master, cutting him off. White Fang snarled no warning, but his hair bristled
+as he made his silent and deadly rush. This rush was never completed. He halted
+with awkward abruptness, with stiff fore-legs bracing himself against his
+momentum, almost sitting down on his haunches, so desirous was he of avoiding
+contact with the dog he was in the act of attacking. It was a female, and the
+law of his kind thrust a barrier between. For him to attack her would require
+nothing less than a violation of his instinct.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But with the sheep-dog it was otherwise. Being a female, she possessed no such
+instinct. On the other hand, being a sheep-dog, her instinctive fear of the
+Wild, and especially of the wolf, was unusually keen. White Fang was to her a
+wolf, the hereditary marauder who had preyed upon her flocks from the time
+sheep were first herded and guarded by some dim ancestor of hers. And so, as he
+abandoned his rush at her and braced himself to avoid the contact, she sprang
+upon him. He snarled involuntarily as he felt her teeth in his shoulder, but
+beyond this made no offer to hurt her. He backed away, stiff-legged with
+self-consciousness, and tried to go around her. He dodged this way and that,
+and curved and turned, but to no purpose. She remained always between him and
+the way he wanted to go.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Here, Collie!&rdquo; called the strange man in the carriage.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Weedon Scott laughed.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Never mind, father. It is good discipline. White Fang will have to learn
+many things, and it&rsquo;s just as well that he begins now. He&rsquo;ll adjust
+himself all right.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The carriage drove on, and still Collie blocked White Fang&rsquo;s way. He
+tried to outrun her by leaving the drive and circling across the lawn but she
+ran on the inner and smaller circle, and was always there, facing him with her
+two rows of gleaming teeth. Back he circled, across the drive to the other
+lawn, and again she headed him off.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The carriage was bearing the master away. White Fang caught glimpses of it
+disappearing amongst the trees. The situation was desperate. He essayed another
+circle. She followed, running swiftly. And then, suddenly, he turned upon her.
+It was his old fighting trick. Shoulder to shoulder, he struck her squarely.
+Not only was she overthrown. So fast had she been running that she rolled
+along, now on her back, now on her side, as she struggled to stop, clawing
+gravel with her feet and crying shrilly her hurt pride and indignation.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+White Fang did not wait. The way was clear, and that was all he had wanted. She
+took after him, never ceasing her outcry. It was the straightaway now, and when
+it came to real running, White Fang could teach her things. She ran
+frantically, hysterically, straining to the utmost, advertising the effort she
+was making with every leap: and all the time White Fang slid smoothly away from
+her silently, without effort, gliding like a ghost over the ground.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+As he rounded the house to the <i>porte-cochère</i>, he came upon the carriage.
+It had stopped, and the master was alighting. At this moment, still running at
+top speed, White Fang became suddenly aware of an attack from the side. It was
+a deer-hound rushing upon him. White Fang tried to face it. But he was going
+too fast, and the hound was too close. It struck him on the side; and such was
+his forward momentum and the unexpectedness of it, White Fang was hurled to the
+ground and rolled clear over. He came out of the tangle a spectacle of
+malignancy, ears flattened back, lips writhing, nose wrinkling, his teeth
+clipping together as the fangs barely missed the hound&rsquo;s soft throat.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The master was running up, but was too far away; and it was Collie that saved
+the hound&rsquo;s life. Before White Fang could spring in and deliver the fatal
+stroke, and just as he was in the act of springing in, Collie arrived. She had
+been out-manoeuvred and out-run, to say nothing of her having been
+unceremoniously tumbled in the gravel, and her arrival was like that of a
+tornado&mdash;made up of offended dignity, justifiable wrath, and instinctive
+hatred for this marauder from the Wild. She struck White Fang at right angles
+in the midst of his spring, and again he was knocked off his feet and rolled
+over.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The next moment the master arrived, and with one hand held White Fang, while
+the father called off the dogs.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I say, this is a pretty warm reception for a poor lone wolf from the
+Arctic,&rdquo; the master said, while White Fang calmed down under his
+caressing hand. &ldquo;In all his life he&rsquo;s only been known once to go
+off his feet, and here he&rsquo;s been rolled twice in thirty seconds.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The carriage had driven away, and other strange gods had appeared from out the
+house. Some of these stood respectfully at a distance; but two of them, women,
+perpetrated the hostile act of clutching the master around the neck. White
+Fang, however, was beginning to tolerate this act. No harm seemed to come of
+it, while the noises the gods made were certainly not threatening. These gods
+also made overtures to White Fang, but he warned them off with a snarl, and the
+master did likewise with word of mouth. At such times White Fang leaned in
+close against the master&rsquo;s legs and received reassuring pats on the head.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The hound, under the command, &ldquo;Dick! Lie down, sir!&rdquo; had gone up
+the steps and lain down to one side of the porch, still growling and keeping a
+sullen watch on the intruder. Collie had been taken in charge by one of the
+woman-gods, who held arms around her neck and petted and caressed her; but
+Collie was very much perplexed and worried, whining and restless, outraged by
+the permitted presence of this wolf and confident that the gods were making a
+mistake.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+All the gods started up the steps to enter the house. White Fang followed
+closely at the master&rsquo;s heels. Dick, on the porch, growled, and White
+Fang, on the steps, bristled and growled back.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Take Collie inside and leave the two of them to fight it out,&rdquo;
+suggested Scott&rsquo;s father. &ldquo;After that they&rsquo;ll be
+friends.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Then White Fang, to show his friendship, will have to be chief mourner
+at the funeral,&rdquo; laughed the master.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The elder Scott looked incredulously, first at White Fang, then at Dick, and
+finally at his son.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;You mean . . .?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Weedon nodded his head. &ldquo;I mean just that. You&rsquo;d have a dead Dick
+inside one minute&mdash;two minutes at the farthest.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He turned to White Fang. &ldquo;Come on, you wolf. It&rsquo;s you that&rsquo;ll
+have to come inside.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+White Fang walked stiff-legged up the steps and across the porch, with tail
+rigidly erect, keeping his eyes on Dick to guard against a flank attack, and at
+the same time prepared for whatever fierce manifestation of the unknown that
+might pounce out upon him from the interior of the house. But no thing of fear
+pounced out, and when he had gained the inside he scouted carefully around,
+looking at it and finding it not. Then he lay down with a contented grunt at
+the master&rsquo;s feet, observing all that went on, ever ready to spring to
+his feet and fight for life with the terrors he felt must lurk under the
+trap-roof of the dwelling.
+</p>
+
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<h3><a name="chap23"></a>CHAPTER III<br/>
+THE GOD&rsquo;S DOMAIN</h3>
+
+<p>
+Not only was White Fang adaptable by nature, but he had travelled much, and
+knew the meaning and necessity of adjustment. Here, in Sierra Vista, which was
+the name of Judge Scott&rsquo;s place, White Fang quickly began to make himself
+at home. He had no further serious trouble with the dogs. They knew more about
+the ways of the Southland gods than did he, and in their eyes he had qualified
+when he accompanied the gods inside the house. Wolf that he was, and
+unprecedented as it was, the gods had sanctioned his presence, and they, the
+dogs of the gods, could only recognise this sanction.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Dick, perforce, had to go through a few stiff formalities at first, after which
+he calmly accepted White Fang as an addition to the premises. Had Dick had his
+way, they would have been good friends. All but White Fang was averse to
+friendship. All he asked of other dogs was to be let alone. His whole life he
+had kept aloof from his kind, and he still desired to keep aloof. Dick&rsquo;s
+overtures bothered him, so he snarled Dick away. In the north he had learned
+the lesson that he must let the master&rsquo;s dogs alone, and he did not
+forget that lesson now. But he insisted on his own privacy and self-seclusion,
+and so thoroughly ignored Dick that that good-natured creature finally gave him
+up and scarcely took as much interest in him as in the hitching-post near the
+stable.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Not so with Collie. While she accepted him because it was the mandate of the
+gods, that was no reason that she should leave him in peace. Woven into her
+being was the memory of countless crimes he and his had perpetrated against her
+ancestry. Not in a day nor a generation were the ravaged sheepfolds to be
+forgotten. All this was a spur to her, pricking her to retaliation. She could
+not fly in the face of the gods who permitted him, but that did not prevent her
+from making life miserable for him in petty ways. A feud, ages old, was between
+them, and she, for one, would see to it that he was reminded.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+So Collie took advantage of her sex to pick upon White Fang and maltreat him.
+His instinct would not permit him to attack her, while her persistence would
+not permit him to ignore her. When she rushed at him he turned his
+fur-protected shoulder to her sharp teeth and walked away stiff-legged and
+stately. When she forced him too hard, he was compelled to go about in a
+circle, his shoulder presented to her, his head turned from her, and on his
+face and in his eyes a patient and bored expression. Sometimes, however, a nip
+on his hind-quarters hastened his retreat and made it anything but stately. But
+as a rule he managed to maintain a dignity that was almost solemnity. He
+ignored her existence whenever it was possible, and made it a point to keep out
+of her way. When he saw or heard her coming, he got up and walked off.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+There was much in other matters for White Fang to learn. Life in the Northland
+was simplicity itself when compared with the complicated affairs of Sierra
+Vista. First of all, he had to learn the family of the master. In a way he was
+prepared to do this. As Mit-sah and Kloo-kooch had belonged to Grey Beaver,
+sharing his food, his fire, and his blankets, so now, at Sierra Vista, belonged
+to the love-master all the denizens of the house.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But in this matter there was a difference, and many differences. Sierra Vista
+was a far vaster affair than the tepee of Grey Beaver. There were many persons
+to be considered. There was Judge Scott, and there was his wife. There were the
+master&rsquo;s two sisters, Beth and Mary. There was his wife, Alice, and then
+there were his children, Weedon and Maud, toddlers of four and six. There was
+no way for anybody to tell him about all these people, and of blood-ties and
+relationship he knew nothing whatever and never would be capable of knowing.
+Yet he quickly worked it out that all of them belonged to the master. Then, by
+observation, whenever opportunity offered, by study of action, speech, and the
+very intonations of the voice, he slowly learned the intimacy and the degree of
+favour they enjoyed with the master. And by this ascertained standard, White
+Fang treated them accordingly. What was of value to the master he valued; what
+was dear to the master was to be cherished by White Fang and guarded carefully.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Thus it was with the two children. All his life he had disliked children. He
+hated and feared their hands. The lessons were not tender that he had learned
+of their tyranny and cruelty in the days of the Indian villages. When Weedon
+and Maud had first approached him, he growled warningly and looked malignant. A
+cuff from the master and a sharp word had then compelled him to permit their
+caresses, though he growled and growled under their tiny hands, and in the
+growl there was no crooning note. Later, he observed that the boy and girl were
+of great value in the master&rsquo;s eyes. Then it was that no cuff nor sharp
+word was necessary before they could pat him.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Yet White Fang was never effusively affectionate. He yielded to the
+master&rsquo;s children with an ill but honest grace, and endured their fooling
+as one would endure a painful operation. When he could no longer endure, he
+would get up and stalk determinedly away from them. But after a time, he grew
+even to like the children. Still he was not demonstrative. He would not go up
+to them. On the other hand, instead of walking away at sight of them, he waited
+for them to come to him. And still later, it was noticed that a pleased light
+came into his eyes when he saw them approaching, and that he looked after them
+with an appearance of curious regret when they left him for other amusements.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+All this was a matter of development, and took time. Next in his regard, after
+the children, was Judge Scott. There were two reasons, possibly, for this.
+First, he was evidently a valuable possession of the master&rsquo;s, and next,
+he was undemonstrative. White Fang liked to lie at his feet on the wide porch
+when he read the newspaper, from time to time favouring White Fang with a look
+or a word&mdash;untroublesome tokens that he recognised White Fang&rsquo;s
+presence and existence. But this was only when the master was not around. When
+the master appeared, all other beings ceased to exist so far as White Fang was
+concerned.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+White Fang allowed all the members of the family to pet him and make much of
+him; but he never gave to them what he gave to the master. No caress of theirs
+could put the love-croon into his throat, and, try as they would, they could
+never persuade him into snuggling against them. This expression of abandon and
+surrender, of absolute trust, he reserved for the master alone. In fact, he
+never regarded the members of the family in any other light than possessions of
+the love-master.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Also White Fang had early come to differentiate between the family and the
+servants of the household. The latter were afraid of him, while he merely
+refrained from attacking them. This because he considered that they were
+likewise possessions of the master. Between White Fang and them existed a
+neutrality and no more. They cooked for the master and washed the dishes and
+did other things just as Matt had done up in the Klondike. They were, in short,
+appurtenances of the household.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Outside the household there was even more for White Fang to learn. The
+master&rsquo;s domain was wide and complex, yet it had its metes and bounds.
+The land itself ceased at the county road. Outside was the common domain of all
+gods&mdash;the roads and streets. Then inside other fences were the particular
+domains of other gods. A myriad laws governed all these things and determined
+conduct; yet he did not know the speech of the gods, nor was there any way for
+him to learn save by experience. He obeyed his natural impulses until they ran
+him counter to some law. When this had been done a few times, he learned the
+law and after that observed it.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But most potent in his education was the cuff of the master&rsquo;s hand, the
+censure of the master&rsquo;s voice. Because of White Fang&rsquo;s very great
+love, a cuff from the master hurt him far more than any beating Grey Beaver or
+Beauty Smith had ever given him. They had hurt only the flesh of him; beneath
+the flesh the spirit had still raged, splendid and invincible. But with the
+master the cuff was always too light to hurt the flesh. Yet it went deeper. It
+was an expression of the master&rsquo;s disapproval, and White Fang&rsquo;s
+spirit wilted under it.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+In point of fact, the cuff was rarely administered. The master&rsquo;s voice
+was sufficient. By it White Fang knew whether he did right or not. By it he
+trimmed his conduct and adjusted his actions. It was the compass by which he
+steered and learned to chart the manners of a new land and life.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+In the Northland, the only domesticated animal was the dog. All other animals
+lived in the Wild, and were, when not too formidable, lawful spoil for any dog.
+All his days White Fang had foraged among the live things for food. It did not
+enter his head that in the Southland it was otherwise. But this he was to learn
+early in his residence in Santa Clara Valley. Sauntering around the corner of
+the house in the early morning, he came upon a chicken that had escaped from
+the chicken-yard. White Fang&rsquo;s natural impulse was to eat it. A couple of
+bounds, a flash of teeth and a frightened squawk, and he had scooped in the
+adventurous fowl. It was farm-bred and fat and tender; and White Fang licked
+his chops and decided that such fare was good.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Later in the day, he chanced upon another stray chicken near the stables. One
+of the grooms ran to the rescue. He did not know White Fang&rsquo;s breed, so
+for weapon he took a light buggy-whip. At the first cut of the whip, White Fang
+left the chicken for the man. A club might have stopped White Fang, but not a
+whip. Silently, without flinching, he took a second cut in his forward rush,
+and as he leaped for the throat the groom cried out, &ldquo;My God!&rdquo; and
+staggered backward. He dropped the whip and shielded his throat with his arms.
+In consequence, his forearm was ripped open to the bone.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The man was badly frightened. It was not so much White Fang&rsquo;s ferocity as
+it was his silence that unnerved the groom. Still protecting his throat and
+face with his torn and bleeding arm, he tried to retreat to the barn. And it
+would have gone hard with him had not Collie appeared on the scene. As she had
+saved Dick&rsquo;s life, she now saved the groom&rsquo;s. She rushed upon White
+Fang in frenzied wrath. She had been right. She had known better than the
+blundering gods. All her suspicions were justified. Here was the ancient
+marauder up to his old tricks again.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The groom escaped into the stables, and White Fang backed away before
+Collie&rsquo;s wicked teeth, or presented his shoulder to them and circled
+round and round. But Collie did not give over, as was her wont, after a decent
+interval of chastisement. On the contrary, she grew more excited and angry
+every moment, until, in the end, White Fang flung dignity to the winds and
+frankly fled away from her across the fields.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;He&rsquo;ll learn to leave chickens alone,&rdquo; the master said.
+&ldquo;But I can&rsquo;t give him the lesson until I catch him in the
+act.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Two nights later came the act, but on a more generous scale than the master had
+anticipated. White Fang had observed closely the chicken-yards and the habits
+of the chickens. In the night-time, after they had gone to roost, he climbed to
+the top of a pile of newly hauled lumber. From there he gained the roof of a
+chicken-house, passed over the ridgepole and dropped to the ground inside. A
+moment later he was inside the house, and the slaughter began.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+In the morning, when the master came out on to the porch, fifty white Leghorn
+hens, laid out in a row by the groom, greeted his eyes. He whistled to himself,
+softly, first with surprise, and then, at the end, with admiration. His eyes
+were likewise greeted by White Fang, but about the latter there were no signs
+of shame nor guilt. He carried himself with pride, as though, forsooth, he had
+achieved a deed praiseworthy and meritorious. There was about him no
+consciousness of sin. The master&rsquo;s lips tightened as he faced the
+disagreeable task. Then he talked harshly to the unwitting culprit, and in his
+voice there was nothing but godlike wrath. Also, he held White Fang&rsquo;s
+nose down to the slain hens, and at the same time cuffed him soundly.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+White Fang never raided a chicken-roost again. It was against the law, and he
+had learned it. Then the master took him into the chicken-yards. White
+Fang&rsquo;s natural impulse, when he saw the live food fluttering about him
+and under his very nose, was to spring upon it. He obeyed the impulse, but was
+checked by the master&rsquo;s voice. They continued in the yards for half an
+hour. Time and again the impulse surged over White Fang, and each time, as he
+yielded to it, he was checked by the master&rsquo;s voice. Thus it was he
+learned the law, and ere he left the domain of the chickens, he had learned to
+ignore their existence.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;You can never cure a chicken-killer.&rdquo; Judge Scott shook his head
+sadly at luncheon table, when his son narrated the lesson he had given White
+Fang. &ldquo;Once they&rsquo;ve got the habit and the taste of blood . .
+.&rdquo; Again he shook his head sadly.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But Weedon Scott did not agree with his father. &ldquo;I&rsquo;ll tell you what
+I&rsquo;ll do,&rdquo; he challenged finally. &ldquo;I&rsquo;ll lock White Fang
+in with the chickens all afternoon.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;But think of the chickens,&rdquo; objected the judge.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;And furthermore,&rdquo; the son went on, &ldquo;for every chicken he
+kills, I&rsquo;ll pay you one dollar gold coin of the realm.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;But you should penalise father, too,&rdquo; interpose Beth.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Her sister seconded her, and a chorus of approval arose from around the table.
+Judge Scott nodded his head in agreement.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;All right.&rdquo; Weedon Scott pondered for a moment. &ldquo;And if, at
+the end of the afternoon White Fang hasn&rsquo;t harmed a chicken, for every
+ten minutes of the time he has spent in the yard, you will have to say to him,
+gravely and with deliberation, just as if you were sitting on the bench and
+solemnly passing judgment, &lsquo;White Fang, you are smarter than I
+thought.&rsquo;&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+From hidden points of vantage the family watched the performance. But it was a
+fizzle. Locked in the yard and there deserted by the master, White Fang lay
+down and went to sleep. Once he got up and walked over to the trough for a
+drink of water. The chickens he calmly ignored. So far as he was concerned they
+did not exist. At four o&rsquo;clock he executed a running jump, gained the
+roof of the chicken-house and leaped to the ground outside, whence he sauntered
+gravely to the house. He had learned the law. And on the porch, before the
+delighted family, Judge Scott, face to face with White Fang, said slowly and
+solemnly, sixteen times, &ldquo;White Fang, you are smarter than I
+thought.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But it was the multiplicity of laws that befuddled White Fang and often brought
+him into disgrace. He had to learn that he must not touch the chickens that
+belonged to other gods. Then there were cats, and rabbits, and turkeys; all
+these he must let alone. In fact, when he had but partly learned the law, his
+impression was that he must leave all live things alone. Out in the
+back-pasture, a quail could flutter up under his nose unharmed. All tense and
+trembling with eagerness and desire, he mastered his instinct and stood still.
+He was obeying the will of the gods.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And then, one day, again out in the back-pasture, he saw Dick start a
+jackrabbit and run it. The master himself was looking on and did not interfere.
+Nay, he encouraged White Fang to join in the chase. And thus he learned that
+there was no taboo on jackrabbits. In the end he worked out the complete law.
+Between him and all domestic animals there must be no hostilities. If not
+amity, at least neutrality must obtain. But the other animals&mdash;the
+squirrels, and quail, and cottontails, were creatures of the Wild who had never
+yielded allegiance to man. They were the lawful prey of any dog. It was only
+the tame that the gods protected, and between the tame deadly strife was not
+permitted. The gods held the power of life and death over their subjects, and
+the gods were jealous of their power.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Life was complex in the Santa Clara Valley after the simplicities of the
+Northland. And the chief thing demanded by these intricacies of civilisation
+was control, restraint&mdash;a poise of self that was as delicate as the
+fluttering of gossamer wings and at the same time as rigid as steel. Life had a
+thousand faces, and White Fang found he must meet them all&mdash;thus, when he
+went to town, in to San Jose, running behind the carriage or loafing about the
+streets when the carriage stopped. Life flowed past him, deep and wide and
+varied, continually impinging upon his senses, demanding of him instant and
+endless adjustments and correspondences, and compelling him, almost always, to
+suppress his natural impulses.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+There were butcher-shops where meat hung within reach. This meat he must not
+touch. There were cats at the houses the master visited that must be let alone.
+And there were dogs everywhere that snarled at him and that he must not attack.
+And then, on the crowded sidewalks there were persons innumerable whose
+attention he attracted. They would stop and look at him, point him out to one
+another, examine him, talk of him, and, worst of all, pat him. And these
+perilous contacts from all these strange hands he must endure. Yet this
+endurance he achieved. Furthermore, he got over being awkward and
+self-conscious. In a lofty way he received the attentions of the multitudes of
+strange gods. With condescension he accepted their condescension. On the other
+hand, there was something about him that prevented great familiarity. They
+patted him on the head and passed on, contented and pleased with their own
+daring.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But it was not all easy for White Fang. Running behind the carriage in the
+outskirts of San Jose, he encountered certain small boys who made a practice of
+flinging stones at him. Yet he knew that it was not permitted him to pursue and
+drag them down. Here he was compelled to violate his instinct of
+self-preservation, and violate it he did, for he was becoming tame and
+qualifying himself for civilisation.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Nevertheless, White Fang was not quite satisfied with the arrangement. He had
+no abstract ideas about justice and fair play. But there is a certain sense of
+equity that resides in life, and it was this sense in him that resented the
+unfairness of his being permitted no defence against the stone-throwers. He
+forgot that in the covenant entered into between him and the gods they were
+pledged to care for him and defend him. But one day the master sprang from the
+carriage, whip in hand, and gave the stone-throwers a thrashing. After that
+they threw stones no more, and White Fang understood and was satisfied.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+One other experience of similar nature was his. On the way to town, hanging
+around the saloon at the cross-roads, were three dogs that made a practice of
+rushing out upon him when he went by. Knowing his deadly method of fighting,
+the master had never ceased impressing upon White Fang the law that he must not
+fight. As a result, having learned the lesson well, White Fang was hard put
+whenever he passed the cross-roads saloon. After the first rush, each time, his
+snarl kept the three dogs at a distance but they trailed along behind, yelping
+and bickering and insulting him. This endured for some time. The men at the
+saloon even urged the dogs on to attack White Fang. One day they openly sicked
+the dogs on him. The master stopped the carriage.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Go to it,&rdquo; he said to White Fang.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But White Fang could not believe. He looked at the master, and he looked at the
+dogs. Then he looked back eagerly and questioningly at the master.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The master nodded his head. &ldquo;Go to them, old fellow. Eat them up.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+White Fang no longer hesitated. He turned and leaped silently among his
+enemies. All three faced him. There was a great snarling and growling, a
+clashing of teeth and a flurry of bodies. The dust of the road arose in a cloud
+and screened the battle. But at the end of several minutes two dogs were
+struggling in the dirt and the third was in full flight. He leaped a ditch,
+went through a rail fence, and fled across a field. White Fang followed,
+sliding over the ground in wolf fashion and with wolf speed, swiftly and
+without noise, and in the centre of the field he dragged down and slew the dog.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+With this triple killing his main troubles with dogs ceased. The word went up
+and down the valley, and men saw to it that their dogs did not molest the
+Fighting Wolf.
+</p>
+
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<h3><a name="chap24"></a>CHAPTER IV<br/>
+THE CALL OF KIND</h3>
+
+<p>
+The months came and went. There was plenty of food and no work in the
+Southland, and White Fang lived fat and prosperous and happy. Not alone was he
+in the geographical Southland, for he was in the Southland of life. Human
+kindness was like a sun shining upon him, and he flourished like a flower
+planted in good soil.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And yet he remained somehow different from other dogs. He knew the law even
+better than did the dogs that had known no other life, and he observed the law
+more punctiliously; but still there was about him a suggestion of lurking
+ferocity, as though the Wild still lingered in him and the wolf in him merely
+slept.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He never chummed with other dogs. Lonely he had lived, so far as his kind was
+concerned, and lonely he would continue to live. In his puppyhood, under the
+persecution of Lip-lip and the puppy-pack, and in his fighting days with Beauty
+Smith, he had acquired a fixed aversion for dogs. The natural course of his
+life had been diverted, and, recoiling from his kind, he had clung to the
+human.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Besides, all Southland dogs looked upon him with suspicion. He aroused in them
+their instinctive fear of the Wild, and they greeted him always with snarl and
+growl and belligerent hatred. He, on the other hand, learned that it was not
+necessary to use his teeth upon them. His naked fangs and writhing lips were
+uniformly efficacious, rarely failing to send a bellowing on-rushing dog back
+on its haunches.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But there was one trial in White Fang&rsquo;s life&mdash;Collie. She never gave
+him a moment&rsquo;s peace. She was not so amenable to the law as he. She
+defied all efforts of the master to make her become friends with White Fang.
+Ever in his ears was sounding her sharp and nervous snarl. She had never
+forgiven him the chicken-killing episode, and persistently held to the belief
+that his intentions were bad. She found him guilty before the act, and treated
+him accordingly. She became a pest to him, like a policeman following him
+around the stable and the hounds, and, if he even so much as glanced curiously
+at a pigeon or chicken, bursting into an outcry of indignation and wrath. His
+favourite way of ignoring her was to lie down, with his head on his fore-paws,
+and pretend sleep. This always dumfounded and silenced her.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+With the exception of Collie, all things went well with White Fang. He had
+learned control and poise, and he knew the law. He achieved a staidness, and
+calmness, and philosophic tolerance. He no longer lived in a hostile
+environment. Danger and hurt and death did not lurk everywhere about him. In
+time, the unknown, as a thing of terror and menace ever impending, faded away.
+Life was soft and easy. It flowed along smoothly, and neither fear nor foe
+lurked by the way.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He missed the snow without being aware of it. &ldquo;An unduly long
+summer,&rdquo; would have been his thought had he thought about it; as it was,
+he merely missed the snow in a vague, subconscious way. In the same fashion,
+especially in the heat of summer when he suffered from the sun, he experienced
+faint longings for the Northland. Their only effect upon him, however, was to
+make him uneasy and restless without his knowing what was the matter.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+White Fang had never been very demonstrative. Beyond his snuggling and the
+throwing of a crooning note into his love-growl, he had no way of expressing
+his love. Yet it was given him to discover a third way. He had always been
+susceptible to the laughter of the gods. Laughter had affected him with
+madness, made him frantic with rage. But he did not have it in him to be angry
+with the love-master, and when that god elected to laugh at him in a
+good-natured, bantering way, he was nonplussed. He could feel the pricking and
+stinging of the old anger as it strove to rise up in him, but it strove against
+love. He could not be angry; yet he had to do something. At first he was
+dignified, and the master laughed the harder. Then he tried to be more
+dignified, and the master laughed harder than before. In the end, the master
+laughed him out of his dignity. His jaws slightly parted, his lips lifted a
+little, and a quizzical expression that was more love than humour came into his
+eyes. He had learned to laugh.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Likewise he learned to romp with the master, to be tumbled down and rolled
+over, and be the victim of innumerable rough tricks. In return he feigned
+anger, bristling and growling ferociously, and clipping his teeth together in
+snaps that had all the seeming of deadly intention. But he never forgot
+himself. Those snaps were always delivered on the empty air. At the end of such
+a romp, when blow and cuff and snap and snarl were fast and furious, they would
+break off suddenly and stand several feet apart, glaring at each other. And
+then, just as suddenly, like the sun rising on a stormy sea, they would begin
+to laugh. This would always culminate with the master&rsquo;s arms going around
+White Fang&rsquo;s neck and shoulders while the latter crooned and growled his
+love-song.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But nobody else ever romped with White Fang. He did not permit it. He stood on
+his dignity, and when they attempted it, his warning snarl and bristling mane
+were anything but playful. That he allowed the master these liberties was no
+reason that he should be a common dog, loving here and loving there,
+everybody&rsquo;s property for a romp and good time. He loved with single heart
+and refused to cheapen himself or his love.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The master went out on horseback a great deal, and to accompany him was one of
+White Fang&rsquo;s chief duties in life. In the Northland he had evidenced his
+fealty by toiling in the harness; but there were no sleds in the Southland, nor
+did dogs pack burdens on their backs. So he rendered fealty in the new way, by
+running with the master&rsquo;s horse. The longest day never played White Fang
+out. His was the gait of the wolf, smooth, tireless and effortless, and at the
+end of fifty miles he would come in jauntily ahead of the horse.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+It was in connection with the riding, that White Fang achieved one other mode
+of expression&mdash;remarkable in that he did it but twice in all his life. The
+first time occurred when the master was trying to teach a spirited thoroughbred
+the method of opening and closing gates without the rider&rsquo;s dismounting.
+Time and again and many times he ranged the horse up to the gate in the effort
+to close it and each time the horse became frightened and backed and plunged
+away. It grew more nervous and excited every moment. When it reared, the master
+put the spurs to it and made it drop its fore-legs back to earth, whereupon it
+would begin kicking with its hind-legs. White Fang watched the performance with
+increasing anxiety until he could contain himself no longer, when he sprang in
+front of the horse and barked savagely and warningly.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Though he often tried to bark thereafter, and the master encouraged him, he
+succeeded only once, and then it was not in the master&rsquo;s presence. A
+scamper across the pasture, a jackrabbit rising suddenly under the
+horse&rsquo;s feet, a violent sheer, a stumble, a fall to earth, and a broken
+leg for the master, was the cause of it. White Fang sprang in a rage at the
+throat of the offending horse, but was checked by the master&rsquo;s voice.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Home! Go home!&rdquo; the master commanded when he had ascertained his
+injury.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+White Fang was disinclined to desert him. The master thought of writing a note,
+but searched his pockets vainly for pencil and paper. Again he commanded White
+Fang to go home.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The latter regarded him wistfully, started away, then returned and whined
+softly. The master talked to him gently but seriously, and he cocked his ears,
+and listened with painful intentness.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;That&rsquo;s all right, old fellow, you just run along home,&rdquo; ran
+the talk. &ldquo;Go on home and tell them what&rsquo;s happened to me. Home
+with you, you wolf. Get along home!&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+White Fang knew the meaning of &ldquo;home,&rdquo; and though he did not
+understand the remainder of the master&rsquo;s language, he knew it was his
+will that he should go home. He turned and trotted reluctantly away. Then he
+stopped, undecided, and looked back over his shoulder.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Go home!&rdquo; came the sharp command, and this time he obeyed.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The family was on the porch, taking the cool of the afternoon, when White Fang
+arrived. He came in among them, panting, covered with dust.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Weedon&rsquo;s back,&rdquo; Weedon&rsquo;s mother announced.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The children welcomed White Fang with glad cries and ran to meet him. He
+avoided them and passed down the porch, but they cornered him against a
+rocking-chair and the railing. He growled and tried to push by them. Their
+mother looked apprehensively in their direction.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I confess, he makes me nervous around the children,&rdquo; she said.
+&ldquo;I have a dread that he will turn upon them unexpectedly some day.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Growling savagely, White Fang sprang out of the corner, overturning the boy and
+the girl. The mother called them to her and comforted them, telling them not to
+bother White Fang.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;A wolf is a wolf!&rdquo; commented Judge Scott. &ldquo;There is no
+trusting one.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;But he is not all wolf,&rdquo; interposed Beth, standing for her brother
+in his absence.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;You have only Weedon&rsquo;s opinion for that,&rdquo; rejoined the
+judge. &ldquo;He merely surmises that there is some strain of dog in White
+Fang; but as he will tell you himself, he knows nothing about it. As for his
+appearance&mdash;&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He did not finish his sentence. White Fang stood before him, growling fiercely.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Go away! Lie down, sir!&rdquo; Judge Scott commanded.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+White Fang turned to the love-master&rsquo;s wife. She screamed with fright as
+he seized her dress in his teeth and dragged on it till the frail fabric tore
+away. By this time he had become the centre of interest.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He had ceased from his growling and stood, head up, looking into their faces.
+His throat worked spasmodically, but made no sound, while he struggled with all
+his body, convulsed with the effort to rid himself of the incommunicable
+something that strained for utterance.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I hope he is not going mad,&rdquo; said Weedon&rsquo;s mother. &ldquo;I
+told Weedon that I was afraid the warm climate would not agree with an Arctic
+animal.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;He&rsquo;s trying to speak, I do believe,&rdquo; Beth announced.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+At this moment speech came to White Fang, rushing up in a great burst of
+barking.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Something has happened to Weedon,&rdquo; his wife said decisively.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+They were all on their feet now, and White Fang ran down the steps, looking
+back for them to follow. For the second and last time in his life he had barked
+and made himself understood.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+After this event he found a warmer place in the hearts of the Sierra Vista
+people, and even the groom whose arm he had slashed admitted that he was a wise
+dog even if he was a wolf. Judge Scott still held to the same opinion, and
+proved it to everybody&rsquo;s dissatisfaction by measurements and descriptions
+taken from the encyclopaedia and various works on natural history.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The days came and went, streaming their unbroken sunshine over the Santa Clara
+Valley. But as they grew shorter and White Fang&rsquo;s second winter in the
+Southland came on, he made a strange discovery. Collie&rsquo;s teeth were no
+longer sharp. There was a playfulness about her nips and a gentleness that
+prevented them from really hurting him. He forgot that she had made life a
+burden to him, and when she disported herself around him he responded solemnly,
+striving to be playful and becoming no more than ridiculous.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+One day she led him off on a long chase through the back-pasture land into the
+woods. It was the afternoon that the master was to ride, and White Fang knew
+it. The horse stood saddled and waiting at the door. White Fang hesitated. But
+there was that in him deeper than all the law he had learned, than the customs
+that had moulded him, than his love for the master, than the very will to live
+of himself; and when, in the moment of his indecision, Collie nipped him and
+scampered off, he turned and followed after. The master rode alone that day;
+and in the woods, side by side, White Fang ran with Collie, as his mother,
+Kiche, and old One Eye had run long years before in the silent Northland
+forest.
+</p>
+
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<h3><a name="chap25"></a>CHAPTER V<br/>
+THE SLEEPING WOLF</h3>
+
+<p>
+It was about this time that the newspapers were full of the daring escape of a
+convict from San Quentin prison. He was a ferocious man. He had been ill-made
+in the making. He had not been born right, and he had not been helped any by
+the moulding he had received at the hands of society. The hands of society are
+harsh, and this man was a striking sample of its handiwork. He was a
+beast&mdash;a human beast, it is true, but nevertheless so terrible a beast
+that he can best be characterised as carnivorous.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+In San Quentin prison he had proved incorrigible. Punishment failed to break
+his spirit. He could die dumb-mad and fighting to the last, but he could not
+live and be beaten. The more fiercely he fought, the more harshly society
+handled him, and the only effect of harshness was to make him fiercer.
+Strait-jackets, starvation, and beatings and clubbings were the wrong treatment
+for Jim Hall; but it was the treatment he received. It was the treatment he had
+received from the time he was a little pulpy boy in a San Francisco
+slum&mdash;soft clay in the hands of society and ready to be formed into
+something.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+It was during Jim Hall&rsquo;s third term in prison that he encountered a guard
+that was almost as great a beast as he. The guard treated him unfairly, lied
+about him to the warden, lost his credits, persecuted him. The difference
+between them was that the guard carried a bunch of keys and a revolver. Jim
+Hall had only his naked hands and his teeth. But he sprang upon the guard one
+day and used his teeth on the other&rsquo;s throat just like any jungle animal.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+After this, Jim Hall went to live in the incorrigible cell. He lived there
+three years. The cell was of iron, the floor, the walls, the roof. He never
+left this cell. He never saw the sky nor the sunshine. Day was a twilight and
+night was a black silence. He was in an iron tomb, buried alive. He saw no
+human face, spoke to no human thing. When his food was shoved in to him, he
+growled like a wild animal. He hated all things. For days and nights he
+bellowed his rage at the universe. For weeks and months he never made a sound,
+in the black silence eating his very soul. He was a man and a monstrosity, as
+fearful a thing of fear as ever gibbered in the visions of a maddened brain.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And then, one night, he escaped. The warders said it was impossible, but
+nevertheless the cell was empty, and half in half out of it lay the body of a
+dead guard. Two other dead guards marked his trail through the prison to the
+outer walls, and he had killed with his hands to avoid noise.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He was armed with the weapons of the slain guards&mdash;a live arsenal that
+fled through the hills pursued by the organised might of society. A heavy price
+of gold was upon his head. Avaricious farmers hunted him with shot-guns. His
+blood might pay off a mortgage or send a son to college. Public-spirited
+citizens took down their rifles and went out after him. A pack of bloodhounds
+followed the way of his bleeding feet. And the sleuth-hounds of the law, the
+paid fighting animals of society, with telephone, and telegraph, and special
+train, clung to his trail night and day.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Sometimes they came upon him, and men faced him like heroes, or stampeded
+through barbed-wire fences to the delight of the commonwealth reading the
+account at the breakfast table. It was after such encounters that the dead and
+wounded were carted back to the towns, and their places filled by men eager for
+the man-hunt.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And then Jim Hall disappeared. The bloodhounds vainly quested on the lost
+trail. Inoffensive ranchers in remote valleys were held up by armed men and
+compelled to identify themselves. While the remains of Jim Hall were discovered
+on a dozen mountain-sides by greedy claimants for blood-money.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+In the meantime the newspapers were read at Sierra Vista, not so much with
+interest as with anxiety. The women were afraid. Judge Scott pooh-poohed and
+laughed, but not with reason, for it was in his last days on the bench that Jim
+Hall had stood before him and received sentence. And in open court-room, before
+all men, Jim Hall had proclaimed that the day would come when he would wreak
+vengeance on the Judge that sentenced him.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+For once, Jim Hall was right. He was innocent of the crime for which he was
+sentenced. It was a case, in the parlance of thieves and police, of
+&ldquo;rail-roading.&rdquo; Jim Hall was being &ldquo;rail-roaded&rdquo; to
+prison for a crime he had not committed. Because of the two prior convictions
+against him, Judge Scott imposed upon him a sentence of fifty years.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Judge Scott did not know all things, and he did not know that he was party to a
+police conspiracy, that the evidence was hatched and perjured, that Jim Hall
+was guiltless of the crime charged. And Jim Hall, on the other hand, did not
+know that Judge Scott was merely ignorant. Jim Hall believed that the judge
+knew all about it and was hand in glove with the police in the perpetration of
+the monstrous injustice. So it was, when the doom of fifty years of living
+death was uttered by Judge Scott, that Jim Hall, hating all things in the
+society that misused him, rose up and raged in the court-room until dragged
+down by half a dozen of his blue-coated enemies. To him, Judge Scott was the
+keystone in the arch of injustice, and upon Judge Scott he emptied the vials of
+his wrath and hurled the threats of his revenge yet to come. Then Jim Hall went
+to his living death . . . and escaped.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Of all this White Fang knew nothing. But between him and Alice, the
+master&rsquo;s wife, there existed a secret. Each night, after Sierra Vista had
+gone to bed, she rose and let in White Fang to sleep in the big hall. Now White
+Fang was not a house-dog, nor was he permitted to sleep in the house; so each
+morning, early, she slipped down and let him out before the family was awake.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+On one such night, while all the house slept, White Fang awoke and lay very
+quietly. And very quietly he smelled the air and read the message it bore of a
+strange god&rsquo;s presence. And to his ears came sounds of the strange
+god&rsquo;s movements. White Fang burst into no furious outcry. It was not his
+way. The strange god walked softly, but more softly walked White Fang, for he
+had no clothes to rub against the flesh of his body. He followed silently. In
+the Wild he had hunted live meat that was infinitely timid, and he knew the
+advantage of surprise.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The strange god paused at the foot of the great staircase and listened, and
+White Fang was as dead, so without movement was he as he watched and waited. Up
+that staircase the way led to the love-master and to the love-master&rsquo;s
+dearest possessions. White Fang bristled, but waited. The strange god&rsquo;s
+foot lifted. He was beginning the ascent.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Then it was that White Fang struck. He gave no warning, with no snarl
+anticipated his own action. Into the air he lifted his body in the spring that
+landed him on the strange god&rsquo;s back. White Fang clung with his fore-paws
+to the man&rsquo;s shoulders, at the same time burying his fangs into the back
+of the man&rsquo;s neck. He clung on for a moment, long enough to drag the god
+over backward. Together they crashed to the floor. White Fang leaped clear,
+and, as the man struggled to rise, was in again with the slashing fangs.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Sierra Vista awoke in alarm. The noise from downstairs was as that of a score
+of battling fiends. There were revolver shots. A man&rsquo;s voice screamed
+once in horror and anguish. There was a great snarling and growling, and over
+all arose a smashing and crashing of furniture and glass.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But almost as quickly as it had arisen, the commotion died away. The struggle
+had not lasted more than three minutes. The frightened household clustered at
+the top of the stairway. From below, as from out an abyss of blackness, came up
+a gurgling sound, as of air bubbling through water. Sometimes this gurgle
+became sibilant, almost a whistle. But this, too, quickly died down and ceased.
+Then naught came up out of the blackness save a heavy panting of some creature
+struggling sorely for air.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Weedon Scott pressed a button, and the staircase and downstairs hall were
+flooded with light. Then he and Judge Scott, revolvers in hand, cautiously
+descended. There was no need for this caution. White Fang had done his work. In
+the midst of the wreckage of overthrown and smashed furniture, partly on his
+side, his face hidden by an arm, lay a man. Weedon Scott bent over, removed the
+arm and turned the man&rsquo;s face upward. A gaping throat explained the
+manner of his death.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Jim Hall,&rdquo; said Judge Scott, and father and son looked
+significantly at each other.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Then they turned to White Fang. He, too, was lying on his side. His eyes were
+closed, but the lids slightly lifted in an effort to look at them as they bent
+over him, and the tail was perceptibly agitated in a vain effort to wag. Weedon
+Scott patted him, and his throat rumbled an acknowledging growl. But it was a
+weak growl at best, and it quickly ceased. His eyelids drooped and went shut,
+and his whole body seemed to relax and flatten out upon the floor.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;He&rsquo;s all in, poor devil,&rdquo; muttered the master.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;We&rsquo;ll see about that,&rdquo; asserted the Judge, as he started for
+the telephone.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Frankly, he has one chance in a thousand,&rdquo; announced the surgeon,
+after he had worked an hour and a half on White Fang.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Dawn was breaking through the windows and dimming the electric lights. With the
+exception of the children, the whole family was gathered about the surgeon to
+hear his verdict.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;One broken hind-leg,&rdquo; he went on. &ldquo;Three broken ribs, one at
+least of which has pierced the lungs. He has lost nearly all the blood in his
+body. There is a large likelihood of internal injuries. He must have been
+jumped upon. To say nothing of three bullet holes clear through him. One chance
+in a thousand is really optimistic. He hasn&rsquo;t a chance in ten
+thousand.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;But he mustn&rsquo;t lose any chance that might be of help to
+him,&rdquo; Judge Scott exclaimed. &ldquo;Never mind expense. Put him under the
+X-ray&mdash;anything. Weedon, telegraph at once to San Francisco for Doctor
+Nichols. No reflection on you, doctor, you understand; but he must have the
+advantage of every chance.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The surgeon smiled indulgently. &ldquo;Of course I understand. He deserves all
+that can be done for him. He must be nursed as you would nurse a human being, a
+sick child. And don&rsquo;t forget what I told you about temperature.
+I&rsquo;ll be back at ten o&rsquo;clock again.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+White Fang received the nursing. Judge Scott&rsquo;s suggestion of a trained
+nurse was indignantly clamoured down by the girls, who themselves undertook the
+task. And White Fang won out on the one chance in ten thousand denied him by
+the surgeon.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The latter was not to be censured for his misjudgment. All his life he had
+tended and operated on the soft humans of civilisation, who lived sheltered
+lives and had descended out of many sheltered generations. Compared with White
+Fang, they were frail and flabby, and clutched life without any strength in
+their grip. White Fang had come straight from the Wild, where the weak perish
+early and shelter is vouchsafed to none. In neither his father nor his mother
+was there any weakness, nor in the generations before them. A constitution of
+iron and the vitality of the Wild were White Fang&rsquo;s inheritance, and he
+clung to life, the whole of him and every part of him, in spirit and in flesh,
+with the tenacity that of old belonged to all creatures.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Bound down a prisoner, denied even movement by the plaster casts and bandages,
+White Fang lingered out the weeks. He slept long hours and dreamed much, and
+through his mind passed an unending pageant of Northland visions. All the
+ghosts of the past arose and were with him. Once again he lived in the lair
+with Kiche, crept trembling to the knees of Grey Beaver to tender his
+allegiance, ran for his life before Lip-lip and all the howling bedlam of the
+puppy-pack.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He ran again through the silence, hunting his living food through the months of
+famine; and again he ran at the head of the team, the gut-whips of Mit-sah and
+Grey Beaver snapping behind, their voices crying &ldquo;Ra! Raa!&rdquo; when
+they came to a narrow passage and the team closed together like a fan to go
+through. He lived again all his days with Beauty Smith and the fights he had
+fought. At such times he whimpered and snarled in his sleep, and they that
+looked on said that his dreams were bad.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But there was one particular nightmare from which he suffered&mdash;the
+clanking, clanging monsters of electric cars that were to him colossal
+screaming lynxes. He would lie in a screen of bushes, watching for a squirrel
+to venture far enough out on the ground from its tree-refuge. Then, when he
+sprang out upon it, it would transform itself into an electric car, menacing
+and terrible, towering over him like a mountain, screaming and clanging and
+spitting fire at him. It was the same when he challenged the hawk down out of
+the sky. Down out of the blue it would rush, as it dropped upon him changing
+itself into the ubiquitous electric car. Or again, he would be in the pen of
+Beauty Smith. Outside the pen, men would be gathering, and he knew that a fight
+was on. He watched the door for his antagonist to enter. The door would open,
+and thrust in upon him would come the awful electric car. A thousand times this
+occurred, and each time the terror it inspired was as vivid and great as ever.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Then came the day when the last bandage and the last plaster cast were taken
+off. It was a gala day. All Sierra Vista was gathered around. The master rubbed
+his ears, and he crooned his love-growl. The master&rsquo;s wife called him the
+&ldquo;Blessed Wolf,&rdquo; which name was taken up with acclaim and all the
+women called him the Blessed Wolf.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He tried to rise to his feet, and after several attempts fell down from
+weakness. He had lain so long that his muscles had lost their cunning, and all
+the strength had gone out of them. He felt a little shame because of his
+weakness, as though, forsooth, he were failing the gods in the service he owed
+them. Because of this he made heroic efforts to arise and at last he stood on
+his four legs, tottering and swaying back and forth.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;The Blessed Wolf!&rdquo; chorused the women.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Judge Scott surveyed them triumphantly.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Out of your own mouths be it,&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;Just as I contended
+right along. No mere dog could have done what he did. He&rsquo;s a wolf.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;A Blessed Wolf,&rdquo; amended the Judge&rsquo;s wife.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Yes, Blessed Wolf,&rdquo; agreed the Judge. &ldquo;And henceforth that
+shall be my name for him.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;He&rsquo;ll have to learn to walk again,&rdquo; said the surgeon;
+&ldquo;so he might as well start in right now. It won&rsquo;t hurt him. Take
+him outside.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And outside he went, like a king, with all Sierra Vista about him and tending
+on him. He was very weak, and when he reached the lawn he lay down and rested
+for a while.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Then the procession started on, little spurts of strength coming into White
+Fang&rsquo;s muscles as he used them and the blood began to surge through them.
+The stables were reached, and there in the doorway, lay Collie, a half-dozen
+pudgy puppies playing about her in the sun.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+White Fang looked on with a wondering eye. Collie snarled warningly at him, and
+he was careful to keep his distance. The master with his toe helped one
+sprawling puppy toward him. He bristled suspiciously, but the master warned him
+that all was well. Collie, clasped in the arms of one of the women, watched him
+jealously and with a snarl warned him that all was not well.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The puppy sprawled in front of him. He cocked his ears and watched it
+curiously. Then their noses touched, and he felt the warm little tongue of the
+puppy on his jowl. White Fang&rsquo;s tongue went out, he knew not why, and he
+licked the puppy&rsquo;s face.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Hand-clapping and pleased cries from the gods greeted the performance. He was
+surprised, and looked at them in a puzzled way. Then his weakness asserted
+itself, and he lay down, his ears cocked, his head on one side, as he watched
+the puppy. The other puppies came sprawling toward him, to Collie&rsquo;s great
+disgust; and he gravely permitted them to clamber and tumble over him. At
+first, amid the applause of the gods, he betrayed a trifle of his old
+self-consciousness and awkwardness. This passed away as the puppies&rsquo;
+antics and mauling continued, and he lay with half-shut patient eyes, drowsing
+in the sun.
+</p>
+
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+
+<div style='display:block; margin-top:4em'>*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK WHITE FANG ***</div>
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diff --git a/old/910.txt b/old/910.txt
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--- /dev/null
+++ b/old/910.txt
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+The Project Gutenberg eBook, White Fang, by Jack London
+
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+
+
+
+Title: White Fang
+
+Author: Jack London
+
+Release Date: March 16, 2005  [eBook #910]
+[Last updated: March 2, 2011]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-646-US (US-ASCII)
+
+
+***START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK WHITE FANG***
+
+
+
+
+
+Transcribed from the 1915 Methuen and Co edition by David Price, email
+ccx074@coventry.ac.uk.
+
+
+
+
+
+WHITE FANG
+
+
+PART I
+
+
+CHAPTER I--THE TRAIL OF THE MEAT
+
+
+Dark spruce forest frowned on either side the frozen waterway.  The trees
+had been stripped by a recent wind of their white covering of frost, and
+they seemed to lean towards each other, black and ominous, in the fading
+light.  A vast silence reigned over the land.  The land itself was a
+desolation, lifeless, without movement, so lone and cold that the spirit
+of it was not even that of sadness.  There was a hint in it of laughter,
+but of a laughter more terrible than any sadness--a laughter that was
+mirthless as the smile of the sphinx, a laughter cold as the frost and
+partaking of the grimness of infallibility.  It was the masterful and
+incommunicable wisdom of eternity laughing at the futility of life and
+the effort of life.  It was the Wild, the savage, frozen-hearted
+Northland Wild.
+
+But there _was_ life, abroad in the land and defiant.  Down the frozen
+waterway toiled a string of wolfish dogs.  Their bristly fur was rimed
+with frost.  Their breath froze in the air as it left their mouths,
+spouting forth in spumes of vapour that settled upon the hair of their
+bodies and formed into crystals of frost.  Leather harness was on the
+dogs, and leather traces attached them to a sled which dragged along
+behind.  The sled was without runners.  It was made of stout birch-bark,
+and its full surface rested on the snow.  The front end of the sled was
+turned up, like a scroll, in order to force down and under the bore of
+soft snow that surged like a wave before it.  On the sled, securely
+lashed, was a long and narrow oblong box.  There were other things on the
+sled--blankets, an axe, and a coffee-pot and frying-pan; but prominent,
+occupying most of the space, was the long and narrow oblong box.
+
+In advance of the dogs, on wide snowshoes, toiled a man.  At the rear of
+the sled toiled a second man.  On the sled, in the box, lay a third man
+whose toil was over,--a man whom the Wild had conquered and beaten down
+until he would never move nor struggle again.  It is not the way of the
+Wild to like movement.  Life is an offence to it, for life is movement;
+and the Wild aims always to destroy movement.  It freezes the water to
+prevent it running to the sea; it drives the sap out of the trees till
+they are frozen to their mighty hearts; and most ferociously and terribly
+of all does the Wild harry and crush into submission man--man who is the
+most restless of life, ever in revolt against the dictum that all
+movement must in the end come to the cessation of movement.
+
+But at front and rear, unawed and indomitable, toiled the two men who
+were not yet dead.  Their bodies were covered with fur and soft-tanned
+leather.  Eyelashes and cheeks and lips were so coated with the crystals
+from their frozen breath that their faces were not discernible.  This
+gave them the seeming of ghostly masques, undertakers in a spectral world
+at the funeral of some ghost.  But under it all they were men,
+penetrating the land of desolation and mockery and silence, puny
+adventurers bent on colossal adventure, pitting themselves against the
+might of a world as remote and alien and pulseless as the abysses of
+space.
+
+They travelled on without speech, saving their breath for the work of
+their bodies.  On every side was the silence, pressing upon them with a
+tangible presence.  It affected their minds as the many atmospheres of
+deep water affect the body of the diver.  It crushed them with the weight
+of unending vastness and unalterable decree.  It crushed them into the
+remotest recesses of their own minds, pressing out of them, like juices
+from the grape, all the false ardours and exaltations and undue
+self-values of the human soul, until they perceived themselves finite and
+small, specks and motes, moving with weak cunning and little wisdom
+amidst the play and inter-play of the great blind elements and forces.
+
+An hour went by, and a second hour.  The pale light of the short sunless
+day was beginning to fade, when a faint far cry arose on the still air.
+It soared upward with a swift rush, till it reached its topmost note,
+where it persisted, palpitant and tense, and then slowly died away.  It
+might have been a lost soul wailing, had it not been invested with a
+certain sad fierceness and hungry eagerness.  The front man turned his
+head until his eyes met the eyes of the man behind.  And then, across the
+narrow oblong box, each nodded to the other.
+
+A second cry arose, piercing the silence with needle-like shrillness.
+Both men located the sound.  It was to the rear, somewhere in the snow
+expanse they had just traversed.  A third and answering cry arose, also
+to the rear and to the left of the second cry.
+
+"They're after us, Bill," said the man at the front.
+
+His voice sounded hoarse and unreal, and he had spoken with apparent
+effort.
+
+"Meat is scarce," answered his comrade.  "I ain't seen a rabbit sign for
+days."
+
+Thereafter they spoke no more, though their ears were keen for the
+hunting-cries that continued to rise behind them.
+
+At the fall of darkness they swung the dogs into a cluster of spruce
+trees on the edge of the waterway and made a camp.  The coffin, at the
+side of the fire, served for seat and table.  The wolf-dogs, clustered on
+the far side of the fire, snarled and bickered among themselves, but
+evinced no inclination to stray off into the darkness.
+
+"Seems to me, Henry, they're stayin' remarkable close to camp," Bill
+commented.
+
+Henry, squatting over the fire and settling the pot of coffee with a
+piece of ice, nodded.  Nor did he speak till he had taken his seat on the
+coffin and begun to eat.
+
+"They know where their hides is safe," he said.  "They'd sooner eat grub
+than be grub.  They're pretty wise, them dogs."
+
+Bill shook his head.  "Oh, I don't know."
+
+His comrade looked at him curiously.  "First time I ever heard you say
+anything about their not bein' wise."
+
+"Henry," said the other, munching with deliberation the beans he was
+eating, "did you happen to notice the way them dogs kicked up when I was
+a-feedin' 'em?"
+
+"They did cut up more'n usual," Henry acknowledged.
+
+"How many dogs 've we got, Henry?"
+
+"Six."
+
+"Well, Henry . . . " Bill stopped for a moment, in order that his words
+might gain greater significance.  "As I was sayin', Henry, we've got six
+dogs.  I took six fish out of the bag.  I gave one fish to each dog, an',
+Henry, I was one fish short."
+
+"You counted wrong."
+
+"We've got six dogs," the other reiterated dispassionately.  "I took out
+six fish.  One Ear didn't get no fish.  I came back to the bag afterward
+an' got 'm his fish."
+
+"We've only got six dogs," Henry said.
+
+"Henry," Bill went on.  "I won't say they was all dogs, but there was
+seven of 'm that got fish."
+
+Henry stopped eating to glance across the fire and count the dogs.
+
+"There's only six now," he said.
+
+"I saw the other one run off across the snow," Bill announced with cool
+positiveness.  "I saw seven."
+
+Henry looked at him commiseratingly, and said, "I'll be almighty glad
+when this trip's over."
+
+"What d'ye mean by that?" Bill demanded.
+
+"I mean that this load of ourn is gettin' on your nerves, an' that you're
+beginnin' to see things."
+
+"I thought of that," Bill answered gravely.  "An' so, when I saw it run
+off across the snow, I looked in the snow an' saw its tracks.  Then I
+counted the dogs an' there was still six of 'em.  The tracks is there in
+the snow now.  D'ye want to look at 'em?  I'll show 'em to you."
+
+Henry did not reply, but munched on in silence, until, the meal finished,
+he topped it with a final cup of coffee.  He wiped his mouth with the
+back of his hand and said:
+
+"Then you're thinkin' as it was--"
+
+A long wailing cry, fiercely sad, from somewhere in the darkness, had
+interrupted him.  He stopped to listen to it, then he finished his
+sentence with a wave of his hand toward the sound of the cry, "--one of
+them?"
+
+Bill nodded.  "I'd a blame sight sooner think that than anything else.
+You noticed yourself the row the dogs made."
+
+Cry after cry, and answering cries, were turning the silence into a
+bedlam.  From every side the cries arose, and the dogs betrayed their
+fear by huddling together and so close to the fire that their hair was
+scorched by the heat.  Bill threw on more wood, before lighting his pipe.
+
+"I'm thinking you're down in the mouth some," Henry said.
+
+"Henry . . . "  He sucked meditatively at his pipe for some time before
+he went on.  "Henry, I was a-thinkin' what a blame sight luckier he is
+than you an' me'll ever be."
+
+He indicated the third person by a downward thrust of the thumb to the
+box on which they sat.
+
+"You an' me, Henry, when we die, we'll be lucky if we get enough stones
+over our carcases to keep the dogs off of us."
+
+"But we ain't got people an' money an' all the rest, like him," Henry
+rejoined.  "Long-distance funerals is somethin' you an' me can't exactly
+afford."
+
+"What gets me, Henry, is what a chap like this, that's a lord or
+something in his own country, and that's never had to bother about grub
+nor blankets; why he comes a-buttin' round the Godforsaken ends of the
+earth--that's what I can't exactly see."
+
+"He might have lived to a ripe old age if he'd stayed at home," Henry
+agreed.
+
+Bill opened his mouth to speak, but changed his mind.  Instead, he
+pointed towards the wall of darkness that pressed about them from every
+side.  There was no suggestion of form in the utter blackness; only could
+be seen a pair of eyes gleaming like live coals.  Henry indicated with
+his head a second pair, and a third.  A circle of the gleaming eyes had
+drawn about their camp.  Now and again a pair of eyes moved, or
+disappeared to appear again a moment later.
+
+The unrest of the dogs had been increasing, and they stampeded, in a
+surge of sudden fear, to the near side of the fire, cringing and crawling
+about the legs of the men.  In the scramble one of the dogs had been
+overturned on the edge of the fire, and it had yelped with pain and
+fright as the smell of its singed coat possessed the air.  The commotion
+caused the circle of eyes to shift restlessly for a moment and even to
+withdraw a bit, but it settled down again as the dogs became quiet.
+
+"Henry, it's a blame misfortune to be out of ammunition."
+
+Bill had finished his pipe and was helping his companion to spread the
+bed of fur and blanket upon the spruce boughs which he had laid over the
+snow before supper.  Henry grunted, and began unlacing his moccasins.
+
+"How many cartridges did you say you had left?" he asked.
+
+"Three," came the answer.  "An' I wisht 'twas three hundred.  Then I'd
+show 'em what for, damn 'em!"
+
+He shook his fist angrily at the gleaming eyes, and began securely to
+prop his moccasins before the fire.
+
+"An' I wisht this cold snap'd break," he went on.  "It's ben fifty below
+for two weeks now.  An' I wisht I'd never started on this trip, Henry.  I
+don't like the looks of it.  I don't feel right, somehow.  An' while I'm
+wishin', I wisht the trip was over an' done with, an' you an' me
+a-sittin' by the fire in Fort McGurry just about now an' playing
+cribbage--that's what I wisht."
+
+Henry grunted and crawled into bed.  As he dozed off he was aroused by
+his comrade's voice.
+
+"Say, Henry, that other one that come in an' got a fish--why didn't the
+dogs pitch into it?  That's what's botherin' me."
+
+"You're botherin' too much, Bill," came the sleepy response.  "You was
+never like this before.  You jes' shut up now, an' go to sleep, an'
+you'll be all hunkydory in the mornin'.  Your stomach's sour, that's
+what's botherin' you."
+
+The men slept, breathing heavily, side by side, under the one covering.
+The fire died down, and the gleaming eyes drew closer the circle they had
+flung about the camp.  The dogs clustered together in fear, now and again
+snarling menacingly as a pair of eyes drew close.  Once their uproar
+became so loud that Bill woke up.  He got out of bed carefully, so as not
+to disturb the sleep of his comrade, and threw more wood on the fire.  As
+it began to flame up, the circle of eyes drew farther back.  He glanced
+casually at the huddling dogs.  He rubbed his eyes and looked at them
+more sharply.  Then he crawled back into the blankets.
+
+"Henry," he said.  "Oh, Henry."
+
+Henry groaned as he passed from sleep to waking, and demanded, "What's
+wrong now?"
+
+"Nothin'," came the answer; "only there's seven of 'em again.  I just
+counted."
+
+Henry acknowledged receipt of the information with a grunt that slid into
+a snore as he drifted back into sleep.
+
+In the morning it was Henry who awoke first and routed his companion out
+of bed.  Daylight was yet three hours away, though it was already six
+o'clock; and in the darkness Henry went about preparing breakfast, while
+Bill rolled the blankets and made the sled ready for lashing.
+
+"Say, Henry," he asked suddenly, "how many dogs did you say we had?"
+
+"Six."
+
+"Wrong," Bill proclaimed triumphantly.
+
+"Seven again?" Henry queried.
+
+"No, five; one's gone."
+
+"The hell!"  Henry cried in wrath, leaving the cooking to come and count
+the dogs.
+
+"You're right, Bill," he concluded.  "Fatty's gone."
+
+"An' he went like greased lightnin' once he got started.  Couldn't 've
+seen 'm for smoke."
+
+"No chance at all," Henry concluded.  "They jes' swallowed 'm alive.  I
+bet he was yelpin' as he went down their throats, damn 'em!"
+
+"He always was a fool dog," said Bill.
+
+"But no fool dog ought to be fool enough to go off an' commit suicide
+that way."  He looked over the remainder of the team with a speculative
+eye that summed up instantly the salient traits of each animal.  "I bet
+none of the others would do it."
+
+"Couldn't drive 'em away from the fire with a club," Bill agreed.  "I
+always did think there was somethin' wrong with Fatty anyway."
+
+And this was the epitaph of a dead dog on the Northland trail--less scant
+than the epitaph of many another dog, of many a man.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II--THE SHE-WOLF
+
+
+Breakfast eaten and the slim camp-outfit lashed to the sled, the men
+turned their backs on the cheery fire and launched out into the darkness.
+At once began to rise the cries that were fiercely sad--cries that called
+through the darkness and cold to one another and answered back.
+Conversation ceased.  Daylight came at nine o'clock.  At midday the sky
+to the south warmed to rose-colour, and marked where the bulge of the
+earth intervened between the meridian sun and the northern world.  But
+the rose-colour swiftly faded.  The grey light of day that remained
+lasted until three o'clock, when it, too, faded, and the pall of the
+Arctic night descended upon the lone and silent land.
+
+As darkness came on, the hunting-cries to right and left and rear drew
+closer--so close that more than once they sent surges of fear through the
+toiling dogs, throwing them into short-lived panics.
+
+At the conclusion of one such panic, when he and Henry had got the dogs
+back in the traces, Bill said:
+
+"I wisht they'd strike game somewheres, an' go away an' leave us alone."
+
+"They do get on the nerves horrible,"  Henry sympathised.
+
+They spoke no more until camp was made.
+
+Henry was bending over and adding ice to the babbling pot of beans when
+he was startled by the sound of a blow, an exclamation from Bill, and a
+sharp snarling cry of pain from among the dogs.  He straightened up in
+time to see a dim form disappearing across the snow into the shelter of
+the dark.  Then he saw Bill, standing amid the dogs, half triumphant,
+half crestfallen, in one hand a stout club, in the other the tail and
+part of the body of a sun-cured salmon.
+
+"It got half of it," he announced; "but I got a whack at it jes' the
+same.  D'ye hear it squeal?"
+
+"What'd it look like?" Henry asked.
+
+"Couldn't see.  But it had four legs an' a mouth an' hair an' looked like
+any dog."
+
+"Must be a tame wolf, I reckon."
+
+"It's damned tame, whatever it is, comin' in here at feedin' time an'
+gettin' its whack of fish."
+
+That night, when supper was finished and they sat on the oblong box and
+pulled at their pipes, the circle of gleaming eyes drew in even closer
+than before.
+
+"I wisht they'd spring up a bunch of moose or something, an' go away an'
+leave us alone," Bill said.
+
+Henry grunted with an intonation that was not all sympathy, and for a
+quarter of an hour they sat on in silence, Henry staring at the fire, and
+Bill at the circle of eyes that burned in the darkness just beyond the
+firelight.
+
+"I wisht we was pullin' into McGurry right now," he began again.
+
+"Shut up your wishin' and your croakin'," Henry burst out angrily.  "Your
+stomach's sour.  That's what's ailin' you.  Swallow a spoonful of sody,
+an' you'll sweeten up wonderful an' be more pleasant company."
+
+In the morning Henry was aroused by fervid blasphemy that proceeded from
+the mouth of Bill.  Henry propped himself up on an elbow and looked to
+see his comrade standing among the dogs beside the replenished fire, his
+arms raised in objurgation, his face distorted with passion.
+
+"Hello!" Henry called.  "What's up now?"
+
+"Frog's gone," came the answer.
+
+"No."
+
+"I tell you yes."
+
+Henry leaped out of the blankets and to the dogs.  He counted them with
+care, and then joined his partner in cursing the power of the Wild that
+had robbed them of another dog.
+
+"Frog was the strongest dog of the bunch," Bill pronounced finally.
+
+"An' he was no fool dog neither," Henry added.
+
+And so was recorded the second epitaph in two days.
+
+A gloomy breakfast was eaten, and the four remaining dogs were harnessed
+to the sled.  The day was a repetition of the days that had gone before.
+The men toiled without speech across the face of the frozen world.  The
+silence was unbroken save by the cries of their pursuers, that, unseen,
+hung upon their rear.  With the coming of night in the mid-afternoon, the
+cries sounded closer as the pursuers drew in according to their custom;
+and the dogs grew excited and frightened, and were guilty of panics that
+tangled the traces and further depressed the two men.
+
+"There, that'll fix you fool critters," Bill said with satisfaction that
+night, standing erect at completion of his task.
+
+Henry left the cooking to come and see.  Not only had his partner tied
+the dogs up, but he had tied them, after the Indian fashion, with sticks.
+About the neck of each dog he had fastened a leather thong.  To this, and
+so close to the neck that the dog could not get his teeth to it, he had
+tied a stout stick four or five feet in length.  The other end of the
+stick, in turn, was made fast to a stake in the ground by means of a
+leather thong.  The dog was unable to gnaw through the leather at his own
+end of the stick.  The stick prevented him from getting at the leather
+that fastened the other end.
+
+Henry nodded his head approvingly.
+
+"It's the only contraption that'll ever hold One Ear," he said.  "He can
+gnaw through leather as clean as a knife an' jes' about half as quick.
+They all'll be here in the mornin' hunkydory."
+
+"You jes' bet they will," Bill affirmed.  "If one of em' turns up
+missin', I'll go without my coffee."
+
+"They jes' know we ain't loaded to kill," Henry remarked at bed-time,
+indicating the gleaming circle that hemmed them in.  "If we could put a
+couple of shots into 'em, they'd be more respectful.  They come closer
+every night.  Get the firelight out of your eyes an' look hard--there!
+Did you see that one?"
+
+For some time the two men amused themselves with watching the movement of
+vague forms on the edge of the firelight.  By looking closely and
+steadily at where a pair of eyes burned in the darkness, the form of the
+animal would slowly take shape.  They could even see these forms move at
+times.
+
+A sound among the dogs attracted the men's attention.  One Ear was
+uttering quick, eager whines, lunging at the length of his stick toward
+the darkness, and desisting now and again in order to make frantic
+attacks on the stick with his teeth.
+
+"Look at that, Bill," Henry whispered.
+
+Full into the firelight, with a stealthy, sidelong movement, glided a
+doglike animal.  It moved with commingled mistrust and daring, cautiously
+observing the men, its attention fixed on the dogs.  One Ear strained the
+full length of the stick toward the intruder and whined with eagerness.
+
+"That fool One Ear don't seem scairt much," Bill said in a low tone.
+
+"It's a she-wolf," Henry whispered back, "an' that accounts for Fatty an'
+Frog.  She's the decoy for the pack.  She draws out the dog an' then all
+the rest pitches in an' eats 'm up."
+
+The fire crackled.  A log fell apart with a loud spluttering noise.  At
+the sound of it the strange animal leaped back into the darkness.
+
+"Henry, I'm a-thinkin'," Bill announced.
+
+"Thinkin' what?"
+
+"I'm a-thinkin' that was the one I lambasted with the club."
+
+"Ain't the slightest doubt in the world," was Henry's response.
+
+"An' right here I want to remark," Bill went on, "that that animal's
+familyarity with campfires is suspicious an' immoral."
+
+"It knows for certain more'n a self-respectin' wolf ought to know," Henry
+agreed.  "A wolf that knows enough to come in with the dogs at feedin'
+time has had experiences."
+
+"Ol' Villan had a dog once that run away with the wolves," Bill cogitates
+aloud.  "I ought to know.  I shot it out of the pack in a moose pasture
+over 'on Little Stick.  An' Ol' Villan cried like a baby.  Hadn't seen it
+for three years, he said.  Ben with the wolves all that time."
+
+"I reckon you've called the turn, Bill.  That wolf's a dog, an' it's
+eaten fish many's the time from the hand of man."
+
+"An if I get a chance at it, that wolf that's a dog'll be jes' meat,"
+Bill declared.  "We can't afford to lose no more animals."
+
+"But you've only got three cartridges," Henry objected.
+
+"I'll wait for a dead sure shot," was the reply.
+
+In the morning Henry renewed the fire and cooked breakfast to the
+accompaniment of his partner's snoring.
+
+"You was sleepin' jes' too comfortable for anything," Henry told him, as
+he routed him out for breakfast.  "I hadn't the heart to rouse you."
+
+Bill began to eat sleepily.  He noticed that his cup was empty and
+started to reach for the pot.  But the pot was beyond arm's length and
+beside Henry.
+
+"Say, Henry," he chided gently, "ain't you forgot somethin'?"
+
+Henry looked about with great carefulness and shook his head.  Bill held
+up the empty cup.
+
+"You don't get no coffee," Henry announced.
+
+"Ain't run out?" Bill asked anxiously.
+
+"Nope."
+
+"Ain't thinkin' it'll hurt my digestion?"
+
+"Nope."
+
+A flush of angry blood pervaded Bill's face.
+
+"Then it's jes' warm an' anxious I am to be hearin' you explain
+yourself," he said.
+
+"Spanker's gone," Henry answered.
+
+Without haste, with the air of one resigned to misfortune Bill turned his
+head, and from where he sat counted the dogs.
+
+"How'd it happen?" he asked apathetically.
+
+Henry shrugged his shoulders.  "Don't know.  Unless One Ear gnawed 'm
+loose.  He couldn't a-done it himself, that's sure."
+
+"The darned cuss."  Bill spoke gravely and slowly, with no hint of the
+anger that was raging within.  "Jes' because he couldn't chew himself
+loose, he chews Spanker loose."
+
+"Well, Spanker's troubles is over anyway; I guess he's digested by this
+time an' cavortin' over the landscape in the bellies of twenty different
+wolves," was Henry's epitaph on this, the latest lost dog.  "Have some
+coffee, Bill."
+
+But Bill shook his head.
+
+"Go on," Henry pleaded, elevating the pot.
+
+Bill shoved his cup aside.  "I'll be ding-dong-danged if I do.  I said I
+wouldn't if ary dog turned up missin', an' I won't."
+
+"It's darn good coffee," Henry said enticingly.
+
+But Bill was stubborn, and he ate a dry breakfast washed down with
+mumbled curses at One Ear for the trick he had played.
+
+"I'll tie 'em up out of reach of each other to-night," Bill said, as they
+took the trail.
+
+They had travelled little more than a hundred yards, when Henry, who was
+in front, bent down and picked up something with which his snowshoe had
+collided.  It was dark, and he could not see it, but he recognised it by
+the touch.  He flung it back, so that it struck the sled and bounced
+along until it fetched up on Bill's snowshoes.
+
+"Mebbe you'll need that in your business," Henry said.
+
+Bill uttered an exclamation.  It was all that was left of Spanker--the
+stick with which he had been tied.
+
+"They ate 'm hide an' all," Bill announced.  "The stick's as clean as a
+whistle.  They've ate the leather offen both ends.  They're damn hungry,
+Henry, an' they'll have you an' me guessin' before this trip's over."
+
+Henry laughed defiantly.  "I ain't been trailed this way by wolves
+before, but I've gone through a whole lot worse an' kept my health.  Takes
+more'n a handful of them pesky critters to do for yours truly, Bill, my
+son."
+
+"I don't know, I don't know," Bill muttered ominously.
+
+"Well, you'll know all right when we pull into McGurry."
+
+"I ain't feelin' special enthusiastic," Bill persisted.
+
+"You're off colour, that's what's the matter with you," Henry dogmatised.
+"What you need is quinine, an' I'm goin' to dose you up stiff as soon as
+we make McGurry."
+
+Bill grunted his disagreement with the diagnosis, and lapsed into
+silence.  The day was like all the days.  Light came at nine o'clock.  At
+twelve o'clock the southern horizon was warmed by the unseen sun; and
+then began the cold grey of afternoon that would merge, three hours
+later, into night.
+
+It was just after the sun's futile effort to appear, that Bill slipped
+the rifle from under the sled-lashings and said:
+
+"You keep right on, Henry, I'm goin' to see what I can see."
+
+"You'd better stick by the sled," his partner protested.  "You've only
+got three cartridges, an' there's no tellin' what might happen."
+
+"Who's croaking now?" Bill demanded triumphantly.
+
+Henry made no reply, and plodded on alone, though often he cast anxious
+glances back into the grey solitude where his partner had disappeared.  An
+hour later, taking advantage of the cut-offs around which the sled had to
+go, Bill arrived.
+
+"They're scattered an' rangin' along wide," he said: "keeping up with us
+an' lookin' for game at the same time.  You see, they're sure of us, only
+they know they've got to wait to get us.  In the meantime they're willin'
+to pick up anything eatable that comes handy."
+
+"You mean they _think_ they're sure of us," Henry objected pointedly.
+
+But Bill ignored him.  "I seen some of them.  They're pretty thin.  They
+ain't had a bite in weeks I reckon, outside of Fatty an' Frog an'
+Spanker; an' there's so many of 'em that that didn't go far.  They're
+remarkable thin.  Their ribs is like wash-boards, an' their stomachs is
+right up against their backbones.  They're pretty desperate, I can tell
+you.  They'll be goin' mad, yet, an' then watch out."
+
+A few minutes later, Henry, who was now travelling behind the sled,
+emitted a low, warning whistle.  Bill turned and looked, then quietly
+stopped the dogs.  To the rear, from around the last bend and plainly
+into view, on the very trail they had just covered, trotted a furry,
+slinking form.  Its nose was to the trail, and it trotted with a
+peculiar, sliding, effortless gait.  When they halted, it halted,
+throwing up its head and regarding them steadily with nostrils that
+twitched as it caught and studied the scent of them.
+
+"It's the she-wolf," Bill answered.
+
+The dogs had lain down in the snow, and he walked past them to join his
+partner in the sled.  Together they watched the strange animal that had
+pursued them for days and that had already accomplished the destruction
+of half their dog-team.
+
+After a searching scrutiny, the animal trotted forward a few steps.  This
+it repeated several times, till it was a short hundred yards away.  It
+paused, head up, close by a clump of spruce trees, and with sight and
+scent studied the outfit of the watching men.  It looked at them in a
+strangely wistful way, after the manner of a dog; but in its wistfulness
+there was none of the dog affection.  It was a wistfulness bred of
+hunger, as cruel as its own fangs, as merciless as the frost itself.
+
+It was large for a wolf, its gaunt frame advertising the lines of an
+animal that was among the largest of its kind.
+
+"Stands pretty close to two feet an' a half at the shoulders," Henry
+commented.  "An' I'll bet it ain't far from five feet long."
+
+"Kind of strange colour for a wolf," was Bill's criticism.  "I never seen
+a red wolf before.  Looks almost cinnamon to me."
+
+The animal was certainly not cinnamon-coloured.  Its coat was the true
+wolf-coat.  The dominant colour was grey, and yet there was to it a faint
+reddish hue--a hue that was baffling, that appeared and disappeared, that
+was more like an illusion of the vision, now grey, distinctly grey, and
+again giving hints and glints of a vague redness of colour not
+classifiable in terms of ordinary experience.
+
+"Looks for all the world like a big husky sled-dog," Bill said.  "I
+wouldn't be s'prised to see it wag its tail."
+
+"Hello, you husky!" he called.  "Come here, you whatever-your-name-is."
+
+"Ain't a bit scairt of you," Henry laughed.
+
+Bill waved his hand at it threateningly and shouted loudly; but the
+animal betrayed no fear.  The only change in it that they could notice
+was an accession of alertness.  It still regarded them with the merciless
+wistfulness of hunger.  They were meat, and it was hungry; and it would
+like to go in and eat them if it dared.
+
+"Look here, Henry," Bill said, unconsciously lowering his voice to a
+whisper because of what he imitated.  "We've got three cartridges.  But
+it's a dead shot.  Couldn't miss it.  It's got away with three of our
+dogs, an' we oughter put a stop to it.  What d'ye say?"
+
+Henry nodded his consent.  Bill cautiously slipped the gun from under the
+sled-lashing.  The gun was on the way to his shoulder, but it never got
+there.  For in that instant the she-wolf leaped sidewise from the trail
+into the clump of spruce trees and disappeared.
+
+The two men looked at each other.  Henry whistled long and
+comprehendingly.
+
+"I might have knowed it," Bill chided himself aloud as he replaced the
+gun.  "Of course a wolf that knows enough to come in with the dogs at
+feedin' time, 'd know all about shooting-irons.  I tell you right now,
+Henry, that critter's the cause of all our trouble.  We'd have six dogs
+at the present time, 'stead of three, if it wasn't for her.  An' I tell
+you right now, Henry, I'm goin' to get her.  She's too smart to be shot
+in the open.  But I'm goin' to lay for her.  I'll bushwhack her as sure
+as my name is Bill."
+
+"You needn't stray off too far in doin' it," his partner admonished.  "If
+that pack ever starts to jump you, them three cartridges'd be wuth no
+more'n three whoops in hell.  Them animals is damn hungry, an' once they
+start in, they'll sure get you, Bill."
+
+They camped early that night.  Three dogs could not drag the sled so fast
+nor for so long hours as could six, and they were showing unmistakable
+signs of playing out.  And the men went early to bed, Bill first seeing
+to it that the dogs were tied out of gnawing-reach of one another.
+
+But the wolves were growing bolder, and the men were aroused more than
+once from their sleep.  So near did the wolves approach, that the dogs
+became frantic with terror, and it was necessary to replenish the fire
+from time to time in order to keep the adventurous marauders at safer
+distance.
+
+"I've hearn sailors talk of sharks followin' a ship," Bill remarked, as
+he crawled back into the blankets after one such replenishing of the
+fire.  "Well, them wolves is land sharks.  They know their business
+better'n we do, an' they ain't a-holdin' our trail this way for their
+health.  They're goin' to get us.  They're sure goin' to get us, Henry."
+
+"They've half got you a'ready, a-talkin' like that," Henry retorted
+sharply.  "A man's half licked when he says he is.  An' you're half eaten
+from the way you're goin' on about it."
+
+"They've got away with better men than you an' me," Bill answered.
+
+"Oh, shet up your croakin'.  You make me all-fired tired."
+
+Henry rolled over angrily on his side, but was surprised that Bill made
+no similar display of temper.  This was not Bill's way, for he was easily
+angered by sharp words.  Henry thought long over it before he went to
+sleep, and as his eyelids fluttered down and he dozed off, the thought in
+his mind was: "There's no mistakin' it, Bill's almighty blue.  I'll have
+to cheer him up to-morrow."
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III--THE HUNGER CRY
+
+
+The day began auspiciously.  They had lost no dogs during the night, and
+they swung out upon the trail and into the silence, the darkness, and the
+cold with spirits that were fairly light.  Bill seemed to have forgotten
+his forebodings of the previous night, and even waxed facetious with the
+dogs when, at midday, they overturned the sled on a bad piece of trail.
+
+It was an awkward mix-up.  The sled was upside down and jammed between a
+tree-trunk and a huge rock, and they were forced to unharness the dogs in
+order to straighten out the tangle.  The two men were bent over the sled
+and trying to right it, when Henry observed One Ear sidling away.
+
+"Here, you, One Ear!" he cried, straightening up and turning around on
+the dog.
+
+But One Ear broke into a run across the snow, his traces trailing behind
+him.  And there, out in the snow of their back track, was the she-wolf
+waiting for him.  As he neared her, he became suddenly cautious.  He
+slowed down to an alert and mincing walk and then stopped.  He regarded
+her carefully and dubiously, yet desirefully.  She seemed to smile at
+him, showing her teeth in an ingratiating rather than a menacing way.  She
+moved toward him a few steps, playfully, and then halted.  One Ear drew
+near to her, still alert and cautious, his tail and ears in the air, his
+head held high.
+
+He tried to sniff noses with her, but she retreated playfully and coyly.
+Every advance on his part was accompanied by a corresponding retreat on
+her part.  Step by step she was luring him away from the security of his
+human companionship.  Once, as though a warning had in vague ways flitted
+through his intelligence, he turned his head and looked back at the
+overturned sled, at his team-mates, and at the two men who were calling
+to him.
+
+But whatever idea was forming in his mind, was dissipated by the
+she-wolf, who advanced upon him, sniffed noses with him for a fleeting
+instant, and then resumed her coy retreat before his renewed advances.
+
+In the meantime, Bill had bethought himself of the rifle.  But it was
+jammed beneath the overturned sled, and by the time Henry had helped him
+to right the load, One Ear and the she-wolf were too close together and
+the distance too great to risk a shot.
+
+Too late One Ear learned his mistake.  Before they saw the cause, the two
+men saw him turn and start to run back toward them.  Then, approaching at
+right angles to the trail and cutting off his retreat they saw a dozen
+wolves, lean and grey, bounding across the snow.  On the instant, the she-
+wolf's coyness and playfulness disappeared.  With a snarl she sprang upon
+One Ear.  He thrust her off with his shoulder, and, his retreat cut off
+and still intent on regaining the sled, he altered his course in an
+attempt to circle around to it.  More wolves were appearing every moment
+and joining in the chase.  The she-wolf was one leap behind One Ear and
+holding her own.
+
+"Where are you goin'?" Henry suddenly demanded, laying his hand on his
+partner's arm.
+
+Bill shook it off.  "I won't stand it," he said.  "They ain't a-goin' to
+get any more of our dogs if I can help it."
+
+Gun in hand, he plunged into the underbrush that lined the side of the
+trail.  His intention was apparent enough.  Taking the sled as the centre
+of the circle that One Ear was making, Bill planned to tap that circle at
+a point in advance of the pursuit.  With his rifle, in the broad
+daylight, it might be possible for him to awe the wolves and save the
+dog.
+
+"Say, Bill!" Henry called after him.  "Be careful!  Don't take no
+chances!"
+
+Henry sat down on the sled and watched.  There was nothing else for him
+to do.  Bill had already gone from sight; but now and again, appearing
+and disappearing amongst the underbrush and the scattered clumps of
+spruce, could be seen One Ear.  Henry judged his case to be hopeless.  The
+dog was thoroughly alive to its danger, but it was running on the outer
+circle while the wolf-pack was running on the inner and shorter circle.
+It was vain to think of One Ear so outdistancing his pursuers as to be
+able to cut across their circle in advance of them and to regain the
+sled.
+
+The different lines were rapidly approaching a point.  Somewhere out
+there in the snow, screened from his sight by trees and thickets, Henry
+knew that the wolf-pack, One Ear, and Bill were coming together.  All too
+quickly, far more quickly than he had expected, it happened.  He heard a
+shot, then two shots, in rapid succession, and he knew that Bill's
+ammunition was gone.  Then he heard a great outcry of snarls and yelps.
+He recognised One Ear's yell of pain and terror, and he heard a wolf-cry
+that bespoke a stricken animal.  And that was all.  The snarls ceased.
+The yelping died away.  Silence settled down again over the lonely land.
+
+He sat for a long while upon the sled.  There was no need for him to go
+and see what had happened.  He knew it as though it had taken place
+before his eyes.  Once, he roused with a start and hastily got the axe
+out from underneath the lashings.  But for some time longer he sat and
+brooded, the two remaining dogs crouching and trembling at his feet.
+
+At last he arose in a weary manner, as though all the resilience had gone
+out of his body, and proceeded to fasten the dogs to the sled.  He passed
+a rope over his shoulder, a man-trace, and pulled with the dogs.  He did
+not go far.  At the first hint of darkness he hastened to make a camp,
+and he saw to it that he had a generous supply of firewood.  He fed the
+dogs, cooked and ate his supper, and made his bed close to the fire.
+
+But he was not destined to enjoy that bed.  Before his eyes closed the
+wolves had drawn too near for safety.  It no longer required an effort of
+the vision to see them.  They were all about him and the fire, in a
+narrow circle, and he could see them plainly in the firelight lying down,
+sitting up, crawling forward on their bellies, or slinking back and
+forth.  They even slept.  Here and there he could see one curled up in
+the snow like a dog, taking the sleep that was now denied himself.
+
+He kept the fire brightly blazing, for he knew that it alone intervened
+between the flesh of his body and their hungry fangs.  His two dogs
+stayed close by him, one on either side, leaning against him for
+protection, crying and whimpering, and at times snarling desperately when
+a wolf approached a little closer than usual.  At such moments, when his
+dogs snarled, the whole circle would be agitated, the wolves coming to
+their feet and pressing tentatively forward, a chorus of snarls and eager
+yelps rising about him.  Then the circle would lie down again, and here
+and there a wolf would resume its broken nap.
+
+But this circle had a continuous tendency to draw in upon him.  Bit by
+bit, an inch at a time, with here a wolf bellying forward, and there a
+wolf bellying forward, the circle would narrow until the brutes were
+almost within springing distance.  Then he would seize brands from the
+fire and hurl them into the pack.  A hasty drawing back always resulted,
+accompanied by angry yelps and frightened snarls when a well-aimed brand
+struck and scorched a too daring animal.
+
+Morning found the man haggard and worn, wide-eyed from want of sleep.  He
+cooked breakfast in the darkness, and at nine o'clock, when, with the
+coming of daylight, the wolf-pack drew back, he set about the task he had
+planned through the long hours of the night.  Chopping down young
+saplings, he made them cross-bars of a scaffold by lashing them high up
+to the trunks of standing trees.  Using the sled-lashing for a heaving
+rope, and with the aid of the dogs, he hoisted the coffin to the top of
+the scaffold.
+
+"They got Bill, an' they may get me, but they'll sure never get you,
+young man," he said, addressing the dead body in its tree-sepulchre.
+
+Then he took the trail, the lightened sled bounding along behind the
+willing dogs; for they, too, knew that safety lay open in the gaining of
+Fort McGurry.  The wolves were now more open in their pursuit, trotting
+sedately behind and ranging along on either side, their red tongues
+lolling out, their lean sides showing the undulating ribs with every
+movement.  They were very lean, mere skin-bags stretched over bony
+frames, with strings for muscles--so lean that Henry found it in his mind
+to marvel that they still kept their feet and did not collapse forthright
+in the snow.
+
+He did not dare travel until dark.  At midday, not only did the sun warm
+the southern horizon, but it even thrust its upper rim, pale and golden,
+above the sky-line.  He received it as a sign.  The days were growing
+longer.  The sun was returning.  But scarcely had the cheer of its light
+departed, than he went into camp.  There were still several hours of grey
+daylight and sombre twilight, and he utilised them in chopping an
+enormous supply of fire-wood.
+
+With night came horror.  Not only were the starving wolves growing
+bolder, but lack of sleep was telling upon Henry.  He dozed despite
+himself, crouching by the fire, the blankets about his shoulders, the axe
+between his knees, and on either side a dog pressing close against him.
+He awoke once and saw in front of him, not a dozen feet away, a big grey
+wolf, one of the largest of the pack.  And even as he looked, the brute
+deliberately stretched himself after the manner of a lazy dog, yawning
+full in his face and looking upon him with a possessive eye, as if, in
+truth, he were merely a delayed meal that was soon to be eaten.
+
+This certitude was shown by the whole pack.  Fully a score he could
+count, staring hungrily at him or calmly sleeping in the snow.  They
+reminded him of children gathered about a spread table and awaiting
+permission to begin to eat.  And he was the food they were to eat!  He
+wondered how and when the meal would begin.
+
+As he piled wood on the fire he discovered an appreciation of his own
+body which he had never felt before.  He watched his moving muscles and
+was interested in the cunning mechanism of his fingers.  By the light of
+the fire he crooked his fingers slowly and repeatedly now one at a time,
+now all together, spreading them wide or making quick gripping movements.
+He studied the nail-formation, and prodded the finger-tips, now sharply,
+and again softly, gauging the while the nerve-sensations produced.  It
+fascinated him, and he grew suddenly fond of this subtle flesh of his
+that worked so beautifully and smoothly and delicately.  Then he would
+cast a glance of fear at the wolf-circle drawn expectantly about him, and
+like a blow the realisation would strike him that this wonderful body of
+his, this living flesh, was no more than so much meat, a quest of
+ravenous animals, to be torn and slashed by their hungry fangs, to be
+sustenance to them as the moose and the rabbit had often been sustenance
+to him.
+
+He came out of a doze that was half nightmare, to see the red-hued she-
+wolf before him.  She was not more than half a dozen feet away sitting in
+the snow and wistfully regarding him.  The two dogs were whimpering and
+snarling at his feet, but she took no notice of them.  She was looking at
+the man, and for some time he returned her look.  There was nothing
+threatening about her.  She looked at him merely with a great
+wistfulness, but he knew it to be the wistfulness of an equally great
+hunger.  He was the food, and the sight of him excited in her the
+gustatory sensations.  Her mouth opened, the saliva drooled forth, and
+she licked her chops with the pleasure of anticipation.
+
+A spasm of fear went through him.  He reached hastily for a brand to
+throw at her.  But even as he reached, and before his fingers had closed
+on the missile, she sprang back into safety; and he knew that she was
+used to having things thrown at her.  She had snarled as she sprang away,
+baring her white fangs to their roots, all her wistfulness vanishing,
+being replaced by a carnivorous malignity that made him shudder.  He
+glanced at the hand that held the brand, noticing the cunning delicacy of
+the fingers that gripped it, how they adjusted themselves to all the
+inequalities of the surface, curling over and under and about the rough
+wood, and one little finger, too close to the burning portion of the
+brand, sensitively and automatically writhing back from the hurtful heat
+to a cooler gripping-place; and in the same instant he seemed to see a
+vision of those same sensitive and delicate fingers being crushed and
+torn by the white teeth of the she-wolf.  Never had he been so fond of
+this body of his as now when his tenure of it was so precarious.
+
+All night, with burning brands, he fought off the hungry pack.  When he
+dozed despite himself, the whimpering and snarling of the dogs aroused
+him.  Morning came, but for the first time the light of day failed to
+scatter the wolves.  The man waited in vain for them to go.  They
+remained in a circle about him and his fire, displaying an arrogance of
+possession that shook his courage born of the morning light.
+
+He made one desperate attempt to pull out on the trail.  But the moment
+he left the protection of the fire, the boldest wolf leaped for him, but
+leaped short.  He saved himself by springing back, the jaws snapping
+together a scant six inches from his thigh.  The rest of the pack was now
+up and surging upon him, and a throwing of firebrands right and left was
+necessary to drive them back to a respectful distance.
+
+Even in the daylight he did not dare leave the fire to chop fresh wood.
+Twenty feet away towered a huge dead spruce.  He spent half the day
+extending his campfire to the tree, at any moment a half dozen burning
+faggots ready at hand to fling at his enemies.  Once at the tree, he
+studied the surrounding forest in order to fell the tree in the direction
+of the most firewood.
+
+The night was a repetition of the night before, save that the need for
+sleep was becoming overpowering.  The snarling of his dogs was losing its
+efficacy.  Besides, they were snarling all the time, and his benumbed and
+drowsy senses no longer took note of changing pitch and intensity.  He
+awoke with a start.  The she-wolf was less than a yard from him.
+Mechanically, at short range, without letting go of it, he thrust a brand
+full into her open and snarling mouth.  She sprang away, yelling with
+pain, and while he took delight in the smell of burning flesh and hair,
+he watched her shaking her head and growling wrathfully a score of feet
+away.
+
+But this time, before he dozed again, he tied a burning pine-knot to his
+right hand.  His eyes were closed but few minutes when the burn of the
+flame on his flesh awakened him.  For several hours he adhered to this
+programme.  Every time he was thus awakened he drove back the wolves with
+flying brands, replenished the fire, and rearranged the pine-knot on his
+hand.  All worked well, but there came a time when he fastened the pine-
+knot insecurely.  As his eyes closed it fell away from his hand.
+
+He dreamed.  It seemed to him that he was in Fort McGurry.  It was warm
+and comfortable, and he was playing cribbage with the Factor.  Also, it
+seemed to him that the fort was besieged by wolves.  They were howling at
+the very gates, and sometimes he and the Factor paused from the game to
+listen and laugh at the futile efforts of the wolves to get in.  And
+then, so strange was the dream, there was a crash.  The door was burst
+open.  He could see the wolves flooding into the big living-room of the
+fort.  They were leaping straight for him and the Factor.  With the
+bursting open of the door, the noise of their howling had increased
+tremendously.  This howling now bothered him.  His dream was merging into
+something else--he knew not what; but through it all, following him,
+persisted the howling.
+
+And then he awoke to find the howling real.  There was a great snarling
+and yelping.  The wolves were rushing him.  They were all about him and
+upon him.  The teeth of one had closed upon his arm.  Instinctively he
+leaped into the fire, and as he leaped, he felt the sharp slash of teeth
+that tore through the flesh of his leg.  Then began a fire fight.  His
+stout mittens temporarily protected his hands, and he scooped live coals
+into the air in all directions, until the campfire took on the semblance
+of a volcano.
+
+But it could not last long.  His face was blistering in the heat, his
+eyebrows and lashes were singed off, and the heat was becoming unbearable
+to his feet.  With a flaming brand in each hand, he sprang to the edge of
+the fire.  The wolves had been driven back.  On every side, wherever the
+live coals had fallen, the snow was sizzling, and every little while a
+retiring wolf, with wild leap and snort and snarl, announced that one
+such live coal had been stepped upon.
+
+Flinging his brands at the nearest of his enemies, the man thrust his
+smouldering mittens into the snow and stamped about to cool his feet.  His
+two dogs were missing, and he well knew that they had served as a course
+in the protracted meal which had begun days before with Fatty, the last
+course of which would likely be himself in the days to follow.
+
+"You ain't got me yet!" he cried, savagely shaking his fist at the hungry
+beasts; and at the sound of his voice the whole circle was agitated,
+there was a general snarl, and the she-wolf slid up close to him across
+the snow and watched him with hungry wistfulness.
+
+He set to work to carry out a new idea that had come to him.  He extended
+the fire into a large circle.  Inside this circle he crouched, his
+sleeping outfit under him as a protection against the melting snow.  When
+he had thus disappeared within his shelter of flame, the whole pack came
+curiously to the rim of the fire to see what had become of him.  Hitherto
+they had been denied access to the fire, and they now settled down in a
+close-drawn circle, like so many dogs, blinking and yawning and
+stretching their lean bodies in the unaccustomed warmth.  Then the she-
+wolf sat down, pointed her nose at a star, and began to howl.  One by one
+the wolves joined her, till the whole pack, on haunches, with noses
+pointed skyward, was howling its hunger cry.
+
+Dawn came, and daylight.  The fire was burning low.  The fuel had run
+out, and there was need to get more.  The man attempted to step out of
+his circle of flame, but the wolves surged to meet him.  Burning brands
+made them spring aside, but they no longer sprang back.  In vain he
+strove to drive them back.  As he gave up and stumbled inside his circle,
+a wolf leaped for him, missed, and landed with all four feet in the
+coals.  It cried out with terror, at the same time snarling, and
+scrambled back to cool its paws in the snow.
+
+The man sat down on his blankets in a crouching position.  His body
+leaned forward from the hips.  His shoulders, relaxed and drooping, and
+his head on his knees advertised that he had given up the struggle.  Now
+and again he raised his head to note the dying down of the fire.  The
+circle of flame and coals was breaking into segments with openings in
+between.  These openings grew in size, the segments diminished.
+
+"I guess you can come an' get me any time," he mumbled.  "Anyway, I'm
+goin' to sleep."
+
+Once he awakened, and in an opening in the circle, directly in front of
+him, he saw the she-wolf gazing at him.
+
+Again he awakened, a little later, though it seemed hours to him.  A
+mysterious change had taken place--so mysterious a change that he was
+shocked wider awake.  Something had happened.  He could not understand at
+first.  Then he discovered it.  The wolves were gone.  Remained only the
+trampled snow to show how closely they had pressed him.  Sleep was
+welling up and gripping him again, his head was sinking down upon his
+knees, when he roused with a sudden start.
+
+There were cries of men, and churn of sleds, the creaking of harnesses,
+and the eager whimpering of straining dogs.  Four sleds pulled in from
+the river bed to the camp among the trees.  Half a dozen men were about
+the man who crouched in the centre of the dying fire.  They were shaking
+and prodding him into consciousness.  He looked at them like a drunken
+man and maundered in strange, sleepy speech.
+
+"Red she-wolf. . . . Come in with the dogs at feedin' time. . . . First
+she ate the dog-food. . . . Then she ate the dogs. . . . An' after that
+she ate Bill. . . . "
+
+"Where's Lord Alfred?" one of the men bellowed in his ear, shaking him
+roughly.
+
+He shook his head slowly.  "No, she didn't eat him. . . . He's roostin'
+in a tree at the last camp."
+
+"Dead?" the man shouted.
+
+"An' in a box," Henry answered.  He jerked his shoulder petulantly away
+from the grip of his questioner.  "Say, you lemme alone. . . . I'm jes'
+plump tuckered out. . . . Goo' night, everybody."
+
+His eyes fluttered and went shut.  His chin fell forward on his chest.
+And even as they eased him down upon the blankets his snores were rising
+on the frosty air.
+
+But there was another sound.  Far and faint it was, in the remote
+distance, the cry of the hungry wolf-pack as it took the trail of other
+meat than the man it had just missed.
+
+
+
+
+PART II
+
+
+CHAPTER I--THE BATTLE OF THE FANGS
+
+
+It was the she-wolf who had first caught the sound of men's voices and
+the whining of the sled-dogs; and it was the she-wolf who was first to
+spring away from the cornered man in his circle of dying flame.  The pack
+had been loath to forego the kill it had hunted down, and it lingered for
+several minutes, making sure of the sounds, and then it, too, sprang away
+on the trail made by the she-wolf.
+
+Running at the forefront of the pack was a large grey wolf--one of its
+several leaders.  It was he who directed the pack's course on the heels
+of the she-wolf.  It was he who snarled warningly at the younger members
+of the pack or slashed at them with his fangs when they ambitiously tried
+to pass him.  And it was he who increased the pace when he sighted the
+she-wolf, now trotting slowly across the snow.
+
+She dropped in alongside by him, as though it were her appointed
+position, and took the pace of the pack.  He did not snarl at her, nor
+show his teeth, when any leap of hers chanced to put her in advance of
+him.  On the contrary, he seemed kindly disposed toward her--too kindly
+to suit her, for he was prone to run near to her, and when he ran too
+near it was she who snarled and showed her teeth.  Nor was she above
+slashing his shoulder sharply on occasion.  At such times he betrayed no
+anger.  He merely sprang to the side and ran stiffly ahead for several
+awkward leaps, in carriage and conduct resembling an abashed country
+swain.
+
+This was his one trouble in the running of the pack; but she had other
+troubles.  On her other side ran a gaunt old wolf, grizzled and marked
+with the scars of many battles.  He ran always on her right side.  The
+fact that he had but one eye, and that the left eye, might account for
+this.  He, also, was addicted to crowding her, to veering toward her till
+his scarred muzzle touched her body, or shoulder, or neck.  As with the
+running mate on the left, she repelled these attentions with her teeth;
+but when both bestowed their attentions at the same time she was roughly
+jostled, being compelled, with quick snaps to either side, to drive both
+lovers away and at the same time to maintain her forward leap with the
+pack and see the way of her feet before her.  At such times her running
+mates flashed their teeth and growled threateningly across at each other.
+They might have fought, but even wooing and its rivalry waited upon the
+more pressing hunger-need of the pack.
+
+After each repulse, when the old wolf sheered abruptly away from the
+sharp-toothed object of his desire, he shouldered against a young three-
+year-old that ran on his blind right side.  This young wolf had attained
+his full size; and, considering the weak and famished condition of the
+pack, he possessed more than the average vigour and spirit.  Nevertheless,
+he ran with his head even with the shoulder of his one-eyed elder.  When
+he ventured to run abreast of the older wolf (which was seldom), a snarl
+and a snap sent him back even with the shoulder again.  Sometimes,
+however, he dropped cautiously and slowly behind and edged in between the
+old leader and the she-wolf.  This was doubly resented, even triply
+resented.  When she snarled her displeasure, the old leader would whirl
+on the three-year-old.  Sometimes she whirled with him.  And sometimes
+the young leader on the left whirled, too.
+
+At such times, confronted by three sets of savage teeth, the young wolf
+stopped precipitately, throwing himself back on his haunches, with fore-
+legs stiff, mouth menacing, and mane bristling.  This confusion in the
+front of the moving pack always caused confusion in the rear.  The wolves
+behind collided with the young wolf and expressed their displeasure by
+administering sharp nips on his hind-legs and flanks.  He was laying up
+trouble for himself, for lack of food and short tempers went together;
+but with the boundless faith of youth he persisted in repeating the
+manoeuvre every little while, though it never succeeded in gaining
+anything for him but discomfiture.
+
+Had there been food, love-making and fighting would have gone on apace,
+and the pack-formation would have been broken up.  But the situation of
+the pack was desperate.  It was lean with long-standing hunger.  It ran
+below its ordinary speed.  At the rear limped the weak members, the very
+young and the very old.  At the front were the strongest.  Yet all were
+more like skeletons than full-bodied wolves.  Nevertheless, with the
+exception of the ones that limped, the movements of the animals were
+effortless and tireless.  Their stringy muscles seemed founts of
+inexhaustible energy.  Behind every steel-like contraction of a muscle,
+lay another steel-like contraction, and another, and another, apparently
+without end.
+
+They ran many miles that day.  They ran through the night.  And the next
+day found them still running.  They were running over the surface of a
+world frozen and dead.  No life stirred.  They alone moved through the
+vast inertness.  They alone were alive, and they sought for other things
+that were alive in order that they might devour them and continue to
+live.
+
+They crossed low divides and ranged a dozen small streams in a
+lower-lying country before their quest was rewarded.  Then they came upon
+moose.  It was a big bull they first found.  Here was meat and life, and
+it was guarded by no mysterious fires nor flying missiles of flame.  Splay
+hoofs and palmated antlers they knew, and they flung their customary
+patience and caution to the wind.  It was a brief fight and fierce.  The
+big bull was beset on every side.  He ripped them open or split their
+skulls with shrewdly driven blows of his great hoofs.  He crushed them
+and broke them on his large horns.  He stamped them into the snow under
+him in the wallowing struggle.  But he was foredoomed, and he went down
+with the she-wolf tearing savagely at his throat, and with other teeth
+fixed everywhere upon him, devouring him alive, before ever his last
+struggles ceased or his last damage had been wrought.
+
+There was food in plenty.  The bull weighed over eight hundred
+pounds--fully twenty pounds of meat per mouth for the forty-odd wolves of
+the pack.  But if they could fast prodigiously, they could feed
+prodigiously, and soon a few scattered bones were all that remained of
+the splendid live brute that had faced the pack a few hours before.
+
+There was now much resting and sleeping.  With full stomachs, bickering
+and quarrelling began among the younger males, and this continued through
+the few days that followed before the breaking-up of the pack.  The
+famine was over.  The wolves were now in the country of game, and though
+they still hunted in pack, they hunted more cautiously, cutting out heavy
+cows or crippled old bulls from the small moose-herds they ran across.
+
+There came a day, in this land of plenty, when the wolf-pack split in
+half and went in different directions.  The she-wolf, the young leader on
+her left, and the one-eyed elder on her right, led their half of the pack
+down to the Mackenzie River and across into the lake country to the east.
+Each day this remnant of the pack dwindled.  Two by two, male and female,
+the wolves were deserting.  Occasionally a solitary male was driven out
+by the sharp teeth of his rivals.  In the end there remained only four:
+the she-wolf, the young leader, the one-eyed one, and the ambitious three-
+year-old.
+
+The she-wolf had by now developed a ferocious temper.  Her three suitors
+all bore the marks of her teeth.  Yet they never replied in kind, never
+defended themselves against her.  They turned their shoulders to her most
+savage slashes, and with wagging tails and mincing steps strove to
+placate her wrath.  But if they were all mildness toward her, they were
+all fierceness toward one another.  The three-year-old grew too ambitious
+in his fierceness.  He caught the one-eyed elder on his blind side and
+ripped his ear into ribbons.  Though the grizzled old fellow could see
+only on one side, against the youth and vigour of the other he brought
+into play the wisdom of long years of experience.  His lost eye and his
+scarred muzzle bore evidence to the nature of his experience.  He had
+survived too many battles to be in doubt for a moment about what to do.
+
+The battle began fairly, but it did not end fairly.  There was no telling
+what the outcome would have been, for the third wolf joined the elder,
+and together, old leader and young leader, they attacked the ambitious
+three-year-old and proceeded to destroy him.  He was beset on either side
+by the merciless fangs of his erstwhile comrades.  Forgotten were the
+days they had hunted together, the game they had pulled down, the famine
+they had suffered.  That business was a thing of the past.  The business
+of love was at hand--ever a sterner and crueller business than that of
+food-getting.
+
+And in the meanwhile, the she-wolf, the cause of it all, sat down
+contentedly on her haunches and watched.  She was even pleased.  This was
+her day--and it came not often--when manes bristled, and fang smote fang
+or ripped and tore the yielding flesh, all for the possession of her.
+
+And in the business of love the three-year-old, who had made this his
+first adventure upon it, yielded up his life.  On either side of his body
+stood his two rivals.  They were gazing at the she-wolf, who sat smiling
+in the snow.  But the elder leader was wise, very wise, in love even as
+in battle.  The younger leader turned his head to lick a wound on his
+shoulder.  The curve of his neck was turned toward his rival.  With his
+one eye the elder saw the opportunity.  He darted in low and closed with
+his fangs.  It was a long, ripping slash, and deep as well.  His teeth,
+in passing, burst the wall of the great vein of the throat.  Then he
+leaped clear.
+
+The young leader snarled terribly, but his snarl broke midmost into a
+tickling cough.  Bleeding and coughing, already stricken, he sprang at
+the elder and fought while life faded from him, his legs going weak
+beneath him, the light of day dulling on his eyes, his blows and springs
+falling shorter and shorter.
+
+And all the while the she-wolf sat on her haunches and smiled.  She was
+made glad in vague ways by the battle, for this was the love-making of
+the Wild, the sex-tragedy of the natural world that was tragedy only to
+those that died.  To those that survived it was not tragedy, but
+realisation and achievement.
+
+When the young leader lay in the snow and moved no more, One Eye stalked
+over to the she-wolf.  His carriage was one of mingled triumph and
+caution.  He was plainly expectant of a rebuff, and he was just as
+plainly surprised when her teeth did not flash out at him in anger.  For
+the first time she met him with a kindly manner.  She sniffed noses with
+him, and even condescended to leap about and frisk and play with him in
+quite puppyish fashion.  And he, for all his grey years and sage
+experience, behaved quite as puppyishly and even a little more foolishly.
+
+Forgotten already were the vanquished rivals and the love-tale
+red-written on the snow.  Forgotten, save once, when old One Eye stopped
+for a moment to lick his stiffening wounds.  Then it was that his lips
+half writhed into a snarl, and the hair of his neck and shoulders
+involuntarily bristled, while he half crouched for a spring, his claws
+spasmodically clutching into the snow-surface for firmer footing.  But it
+was all forgotten the next moment, as he sprang after the she-wolf, who
+was coyly leading him a chase through the woods.
+
+After that they ran side by side, like good friends who have come to an
+understanding.  The days passed by, and they kept together, hunting their
+meat and killing and eating it in common.  After a time the she-wolf
+began to grow restless.  She seemed to be searching for something that
+she could not find.  The hollows under fallen trees seemed to attract
+her, and she spent much time nosing about among the larger snow-piled
+crevices in the rocks and in the caves of overhanging banks.  Old One Eye
+was not interested at all, but he followed her good-naturedly in her
+quest, and when her investigations in particular places were unusually
+protracted, he would lie down and wait until she was ready to go on.
+
+They did not remain in one place, but travelled across country until they
+regained the Mackenzie River, down which they slowly went, leaving it
+often to hunt game along the small streams that entered it, but always
+returning to it again.  Sometimes they chanced upon other wolves, usually
+in pairs; but there was no friendliness of intercourse displayed on
+either side, no gladness at meeting, no desire to return to the
+pack-formation.  Several times they encountered solitary wolves.  These
+were always males, and they were pressingly insistent on joining with One
+Eye and his mate.  This he resented, and when she stood shoulder to
+shoulder with him, bristling and showing her teeth, the aspiring solitary
+ones would back off, turn-tail, and continue on their lonely way.
+
+One moonlight night, running through the quiet forest, One Eye suddenly
+halted.  His muzzle went up, his tail stiffened, and his nostrils dilated
+as he scented the air.  One foot also he held up, after the manner of a
+dog.  He was not satisfied, and he continued to smell the air, striving
+to understand the message borne upon it to him.  One careless sniff had
+satisfied his mate, and she trotted on to reassure him.  Though he
+followed her, he was still dubious, and he could not forbear an
+occasional halt in order more carefully to study the warning.
+
+She crept out cautiously on the edge of a large open space in the midst
+of the trees.  For some time she stood alone.  Then One Eye, creeping and
+crawling, every sense on the alert, every hair radiating infinite
+suspicion, joined her.  They stood side by side, watching and listening
+and smelling.
+
+To their ears came the sounds of dogs wrangling and scuffling, the
+guttural cries of men, the sharper voices of scolding women, and once the
+shrill and plaintive cry of a child.  With the exception of the huge
+bulks of the skin-lodges, little could be seen save the flames of the
+fire, broken by the movements of intervening bodies, and the smoke rising
+slowly on the quiet air.  But to their nostrils came the myriad smells of
+an Indian camp, carrying a story that was largely incomprehensible to One
+Eye, but every detail of which the she-wolf knew.
+
+She was strangely stirred, and sniffed and sniffed with an increasing
+delight.  But old One Eye was doubtful.  He betrayed his apprehension,
+and started tentatively to go.  She turned and touched his neck with her
+muzzle in a reassuring way, then regarded the camp again.  A new
+wistfulness was in her face, but it was not the wistfulness of hunger.
+She was thrilling to a desire that urged her to go forward, to be in
+closer to that fire, to be squabbling with the dogs, and to be avoiding
+and dodging the stumbling feet of men.
+
+One Eye moved impatiently beside her; her unrest came back upon her, and
+she knew again her pressing need to find the thing for which she
+searched.  She turned and trotted back into the forest, to the great
+relief of One Eye, who trotted a little to the fore until they were well
+within the shelter of the trees.
+
+As they slid along, noiseless as shadows, in the moonlight, they came
+upon a run-way.  Both noses went down to the footprints in the snow.
+These footprints were very fresh.  One Eye ran ahead cautiously, his mate
+at his heels.  The broad pads of their feet were spread wide and in
+contact with the snow were like velvet.  One Eye caught sight of a dim
+movement of white in the midst of the white.  His sliding gait had been
+deceptively swift, but it was as nothing to the speed at which he now
+ran.  Before him was bounding the faint patch of white he had discovered.
+
+They were running along a narrow alley flanked on either side by a growth
+of young spruce.  Through the trees the mouth of the alley could be seen,
+opening out on a moonlit glade.  Old One Eye was rapidly overhauling the
+fleeing shape of white.  Bound by bound he gained.  Now he was upon it.
+One leap more and his teeth would be sinking into it.  But that leap was
+never made.  High in the air, and straight up, soared the shape of white,
+now a struggling snowshoe rabbit that leaped and bounded, executing a
+fantastic dance there above him in the air and never once returning to
+earth.
+
+One Eye sprang back with a snort of sudden fright, then shrank down to
+the snow and crouched, snarling threats at this thing of fear he did not
+understand.  But the she-wolf coolly thrust past him.  She poised for a
+moment, then sprang for the dancing rabbit.  She, too, soared high, but
+not so high as the quarry, and her teeth clipped emptily together with a
+metallic snap.  She made another leap, and another.
+
+Her mate had slowly relaxed from his crouch and was watching her.  He now
+evinced displeasure at her repeated failures, and himself made a mighty
+spring upward.  His teeth closed upon the rabbit, and he bore it back to
+earth with him.  But at the same time there was a suspicious crackling
+movement beside him, and his astonished eye saw a young spruce sapling
+bending down above him to strike him.  His jaws let go their grip, and he
+leaped backward to escape this strange danger, his lips drawn back from
+his fangs, his throat snarling, every hair bristling with rage and
+fright.  And in that moment the sapling reared its slender length upright
+and the rabbit soared dancing in the air again.
+
+The she-wolf was angry.  She sank her fangs into her mate's shoulder in
+reproof; and he, frightened, unaware of what constituted this new
+onslaught, struck back ferociously and in still greater fright, ripping
+down the side of the she-wolf's muzzle.  For him to resent such reproof
+was equally unexpected to her, and she sprang upon him in snarling
+indignation.  Then he discovered his mistake and tried to placate her.
+But she proceeded to punish him roundly, until he gave over all attempts
+at placation, and whirled in a circle, his head away from her, his
+shoulders receiving the punishment of her teeth.
+
+In the meantime the rabbit danced above them in the air.  The she-wolf
+sat down in the snow, and old One Eye, now more in fear of his mate than
+of the mysterious sapling, again sprang for the rabbit.  As he sank back
+with it between his teeth, he kept his eye on the sapling.  As before, it
+followed him back to earth.  He crouched down under the impending blow,
+his hair bristling, but his teeth still keeping tight hold of the rabbit.
+But the blow did not fall.  The sapling remained bent above him.  When he
+moved it moved, and he growled at it through his clenched jaws; when he
+remained still, it remained still, and he concluded it was safer to
+continue remaining still.  Yet the warm blood of the rabbit tasted good
+in his mouth.
+
+It was his mate who relieved him from the quandary in which he found
+himself.  She took the rabbit from him, and while the sapling swayed and
+teetered threateningly above her she calmly gnawed off the rabbit's head.
+At once the sapling shot up, and after that gave no more trouble,
+remaining in the decorous and perpendicular position in which nature had
+intended it to grow.  Then, between them, the she-wolf and One Eye
+devoured the game which the mysterious sapling had caught for them.
+
+There were other run-ways and alleys where rabbits were hanging in the
+air, and the wolf-pair prospected them all, the she-wolf leading the way,
+old One Eye following and observant, learning the method of robbing
+snares--a knowledge destined to stand him in good stead in the days to
+come.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II--THE LAIR
+
+
+For two days the she-wolf and One Eye hung about the Indian camp.  He was
+worried and apprehensive, yet the camp lured his mate and she was loath
+to depart.  But when, one morning, the air was rent with the report of a
+rifle close at hand, and a bullet smashed against a tree trunk several
+inches from One Eye's head, they hesitated no more, but went off on a
+long, swinging lope that put quick miles between them and the danger.
+
+They did not go far--a couple of days' journey.  The she-wolf's need to
+find the thing for which she searched had now become imperative.  She was
+getting very heavy, and could run but slowly.  Once, in the pursuit of a
+rabbit, which she ordinarily would have caught with ease, she gave over
+and lay down and rested.  One Eye came to her; but when he touched her
+neck gently with his muzzle she snapped at him with such quick fierceness
+that he tumbled over backward and cut a ridiculous figure in his effort
+to escape her teeth.  Her temper was now shorter than ever; but he had
+become more patient than ever and more solicitous.
+
+And then she found the thing for which she sought.  It was a few miles up
+a small stream that in the summer time flowed into the Mackenzie, but
+that then was frozen over and frozen down to its rocky bottom--a dead
+stream of solid white from source to mouth.  The she-wolf was trotting
+wearily along, her mate well in advance, when she came upon the
+overhanging, high clay-bank.  She turned aside and trotted over to it.
+The wear and tear of spring storms and melting snows had underwashed the
+bank and in one place had made a small cave out of a narrow fissure.
+
+She paused at the mouth of the cave and looked the wall over carefully.
+Then, on one side and the other, she ran along the base of the wall to
+where its abrupt bulk merged from the softer-lined landscape.  Returning
+to the cave, she entered its narrow mouth.  For a short three feet she
+was compelled to crouch, then the walls widened and rose higher in a
+little round chamber nearly six feet in diameter.  The roof barely
+cleared her head.  It was dry and cosey.  She inspected it with
+painstaking care, while One Eye, who had returned, stood in the entrance
+and patiently watched her.  She dropped her head, with her nose to the
+ground and directed toward a point near to her closely bunched feet, and
+around this point she circled several times; then, with a tired sigh that
+was almost a grunt, she curled her body in, relaxed her legs, and dropped
+down, her head toward the entrance.  One Eye, with pointed, interested
+ears, laughed at her, and beyond, outlined against the white light, she
+could see the brush of his tail waving good-naturedly.  Her own ears,
+with a snuggling movement, laid their sharp points backward and down
+against the head for a moment, while her mouth opened and her tongue
+lolled peaceably out, and in this way she expressed that she was pleased
+and satisfied.
+
+One Eye was hungry.  Though he lay down in the entrance and slept, his
+sleep was fitful.  He kept awaking and cocking his ears at the bright
+world without, where the April sun was blazing across the snow.  When he
+dozed, upon his ears would steal the faint whispers of hidden trickles of
+running water, and he would rouse and listen intently.  The sun had come
+back, and all the awakening Northland world was calling to him.  Life was
+stirring.  The feel of spring was in the air, the feel of growing life
+under the snow, of sap ascending in the trees, of buds bursting the
+shackles of the frost.
+
+He cast anxious glances at his mate, but she showed no desire to get up.
+He looked outside, and half a dozen snow-birds fluttered across his field
+of vision.  He started to get up, then looked back to his mate again, and
+settled down and dozed.  A shrill and minute singing stole upon his
+hearing.  Once, and twice, he sleepily brushed his nose with his paw.
+Then he woke up.  There, buzzing in the air at the tip of his nose, was a
+lone mosquito.  It was a full-grown mosquito, one that had lain frozen in
+a dry log all winter and that had now been thawed out by the sun.  He
+could resist the call of the world no longer.  Besides, he was hungry.
+
+He crawled over to his mate and tried to persuade her to get up.  But she
+only snarled at him, and he walked out alone into the bright sunshine to
+find the snow-surface soft under foot and the travelling difficult.  He
+went up the frozen bed of the stream, where the snow, shaded by the
+trees, was yet hard and crystalline.  He was gone eight hours, and he
+came back through the darkness hungrier than when he had started.  He had
+found game, but he had not caught it.  He had broken through the melting
+snow crust, and wallowed, while the snowshoe rabbits had skimmed along on
+top lightly as ever.
+
+He paused at the mouth of the cave with a sudden shock of suspicion.
+Faint, strange sounds came from within.  They were sounds not made by his
+mate, and yet they were remotely familiar.  He bellied cautiously inside
+and was met by a warning snarl from the she-wolf.  This he received
+without perturbation, though he obeyed it by keeping his distance; but he
+remained interested in the other sounds--faint, muffled sobbings and
+slubberings.
+
+His mate warned him irritably away, and he curled up and slept in the
+entrance.  When morning came and a dim light pervaded the lair, he again
+sought after the source of the remotely familiar sounds.  There was a new
+note in his mate's warning snarl.  It was a jealous note, and he was very
+careful in keeping a respectful distance.  Nevertheless, he made out,
+sheltering between her legs against the length of her body, five strange
+little bundles of life, very feeble, very helpless, making tiny
+whimpering noises, with eyes that did not open to the light.  He was
+surprised.  It was not the first time in his long and successful life
+that this thing had happened.  It had happened many times, yet each time
+it was as fresh a surprise as ever to him.
+
+His mate looked at him anxiously.  Every little while she emitted a low
+growl, and at times, when it seemed to her he approached too near, the
+growl shot up in her throat to a sharp snarl.  Of her own experience she
+had no memory of the thing happening; but in her instinct, which was the
+experience of all the mothers of wolves, there lurked a memory of fathers
+that had eaten their new-born and helpless progeny.  It manifested itself
+as a fear strong within her, that made her prevent One Eye from more
+closely inspecting the cubs he had fathered.
+
+But there was no danger.  Old One Eye was feeling the urge of an impulse,
+that was, in turn, an instinct that had come down to him from all the
+fathers of wolves.  He did not question it, nor puzzle over it.  It was
+there, in the fibre of his being; and it was the most natural thing in
+the world that he should obey it by turning his back on his new-born
+family and by trotting out and away on the meat-trail whereby he lived.
+
+Five or six miles from the lair, the stream divided, its forks going off
+among the mountains at a right angle.  Here, leading up the left fork, he
+came upon a fresh track.  He smelled it and found it so recent that he
+crouched swiftly, and looked in the direction in which it disappeared.
+Then he turned deliberately and took the right fork.  The footprint was
+much larger than the one his own feet made, and he knew that in the wake
+of such a trail there was little meat for him.
+
+Half a mile up the right fork, his quick ears caught the sound of gnawing
+teeth.  He stalked the quarry and found it to be a porcupine, standing
+upright against a tree and trying his teeth on the bark.  One Eye
+approached carefully but hopelessly.  He knew the breed, though he had
+never met it so far north before; and never in his long life had
+porcupine served him for a meal.  But he had long since learned that
+there was such a thing as Chance, or Opportunity, and he continued to
+draw near.  There was never any telling what might happen, for with live
+things events were somehow always happening differently.
+
+The porcupine rolled itself into a ball, radiating long, sharp needles in
+all directions that defied attack.  In his youth One Eye had once sniffed
+too near a similar, apparently inert ball of quills, and had the tail
+flick out suddenly in his face.  One quill he had carried away in his
+muzzle, where it had remained for weeks, a rankling flame, until it
+finally worked out.  So he lay down, in a comfortable crouching position,
+his nose fully a foot away, and out of the line of the tail.  Thus he
+waited, keeping perfectly quiet.  There was no telling.  Something might
+happen.  The porcupine might unroll.  There might be opportunity for a
+deft and ripping thrust of paw into the tender, unguarded belly.
+
+But at the end of half an hour he arose, growled wrathfully at the
+motionless ball, and trotted on.  He had waited too often and futilely in
+the past for porcupines to unroll, to waste any more time.  He continued
+up the right fork.  The day wore along, and nothing rewarded his hunt.
+
+The urge of his awakened instinct of fatherhood was strong upon him.  He
+must find meat.  In the afternoon he blundered upon a ptarmigan.  He came
+out of a thicket and found himself face to face with the slow-witted
+bird.  It was sitting on a log, not a foot beyond the end of his nose.
+Each saw the other.  The bird made a startled rise, but he struck it with
+his paw, and smashed it down to earth, then pounced upon it, and caught
+it in his teeth as it scuttled across the snow trying to rise in the air
+again.  As his teeth crunched through the tender flesh and fragile bones,
+he began naturally to eat.  Then he remembered, and, turning on the back-
+track, started for home, carrying the ptarmigan in his mouth.
+
+A mile above the forks, running velvet-footed as was his custom, a
+gliding shadow that cautiously prospected each new vista of the trail, he
+came upon later imprints of the large tracks he had discovered in the
+early morning.  As the track led his way, he followed, prepared to meet
+the maker of it at every turn of the stream.
+
+He slid his head around a corner of rock, where began an unusually large
+bend in the stream, and his quick eyes made out something that sent him
+crouching swiftly down.  It was the maker of the track, a large female
+lynx.  She was crouching as he had crouched once that day, in front of
+her the tight-rolled ball of quills.  If he had been a gliding shadow
+before, he now became the ghost of such a shadow, as he crept and circled
+around, and came up well to leeward of the silent, motionless pair.
+
+He lay down in the snow, depositing the ptarmigan beside him, and with
+eyes peering through the needles of a low-growing spruce he watched the
+play of life before him--the waiting lynx and the waiting porcupine, each
+intent on life; and, such was the curiousness of the game, the way of
+life for one lay in the eating of the other, and the way of life for the
+other lay in being not eaten.  While old One Eye, the wolf crouching in
+the covert, played his part, too, in the game, waiting for some strange
+freak of Chance, that might help him on the meat-trail which was his way
+of life.
+
+Half an hour passed, an hour; and nothing happened.  The ball of quills
+might have been a stone for all it moved; the lynx might have been frozen
+to marble; and old One Eye might have been dead.  Yet all three animals
+were keyed to a tenseness of living that was almost painful, and scarcely
+ever would it come to them to be more alive than they were then in their
+seeming petrifaction.
+
+One Eye moved slightly and peered forth with increased eagerness.
+Something was happening.  The porcupine had at last decided that its
+enemy had gone away.  Slowly, cautiously, it was unrolling its ball of
+impregnable armour.  It was agitated by no tremor of anticipation.
+Slowly, slowly, the bristling ball straightened out and lengthened.  One
+Eye watching, felt a sudden moistness in his mouth and a drooling of
+saliva, involuntary, excited by the living meat that was spreading itself
+like a repast before him.
+
+Not quite entirely had the porcupine unrolled when it discovered its
+enemy.  In that instant the lynx struck.  The blow was like a flash of
+light.  The paw, with rigid claws curving like talons, shot under the
+tender belly and came back with a swift ripping movement.  Had the
+porcupine been entirely unrolled, or had it not discovered its enemy a
+fraction of a second before the blow was struck, the paw would have
+escaped unscathed; but a side-flick of the tail sank sharp quills into it
+as it was withdrawn.
+
+Everything had happened at once--the blow, the counter-blow, the squeal
+of agony from the porcupine, the big cat's squall of sudden hurt and
+astonishment.  One Eye half arose in his excitement, his ears up, his
+tail straight out and quivering behind him.  The lynx's bad temper got
+the best of her.  She sprang savagely at the thing that had hurt her.  But
+the porcupine, squealing and grunting, with disrupted anatomy trying
+feebly to roll up into its ball-protection, flicked out its tail again,
+and again the big cat squalled with hurt and astonishment.  Then she fell
+to backing away and sneezing, her nose bristling with quills like a
+monstrous pin-cushion.  She brushed her nose with her paws, trying to
+dislodge the fiery darts, thrust it into the snow, and rubbed it against
+twigs and branches, and all the time leaping about, ahead, sidewise, up
+and down, in a frenzy of pain and fright.
+
+She sneezed continually, and her stub of a tail was doing its best toward
+lashing about by giving quick, violent jerks.  She quit her antics, and
+quieted down for a long minute.  One Eye watched.  And even he could not
+repress a start and an involuntary bristling of hair along his back when
+she suddenly leaped, without warning, straight up in the air, at the same
+time emitting a long and most terrible squall.  Then she sprang away, up
+the trail, squalling with every leap she made.
+
+It was not until her racket had faded away in the distance and died out
+that One Eye ventured forth.  He walked as delicately as though all the
+snow were carpeted with porcupine quills, erect and ready to pierce the
+soft pads of his feet.  The porcupine met his approach with a furious
+squealing and a clashing of its long teeth.  It had managed to roll up in
+a ball again, but it was not quite the old compact ball; its muscles were
+too much torn for that.  It had been ripped almost in half, and was still
+bleeding profusely.
+
+One Eye scooped out mouthfuls of the blood-soaked snow, and chewed and
+tasted and swallowed.  This served as a relish, and his hunger increased
+mightily; but he was too old in the world to forget his caution.  He
+waited.  He lay down and waited, while the porcupine grated its teeth and
+uttered grunts and sobs and occasional sharp little squeals.  In a little
+while, One Eye noticed that the quills were drooping and that a great
+quivering had set up.  The quivering came to an end suddenly.  There was
+a final defiant clash of the long teeth.  Then all the quills drooped
+quite down, and the body relaxed and moved no more.
+
+With a nervous, shrinking paw, One Eye stretched out the porcupine to its
+full length and turned it over on its back.  Nothing had happened.  It
+was surely dead.  He studied it intently for a moment, then took a
+careful grip with his teeth and started off down the stream, partly
+carrying, partly dragging the porcupine, with head turned to the side so
+as to avoid stepping on the prickly mass.  He recollected something,
+dropped the burden, and trotted back to where he had left the ptarmigan.
+He did not hesitate a moment.  He knew clearly what was to be done, and
+this he did by promptly eating the ptarmigan.  Then he returned and took
+up his burden.
+
+When he dragged the result of his day's hunt into the cave, the she-wolf
+inspected it, turned her muzzle to him, and lightly licked him on the
+neck.  But the next instant she was warning him away from the cubs with a
+snarl that was less harsh than usual and that was more apologetic than
+menacing.  Her instinctive fear of the father of her progeny was toning
+down.  He was behaving as a wolf-father should, and manifesting no unholy
+desire to devour the young lives she had brought into the world.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III--THE GREY CUB
+
+
+He was different from his brothers and sisters.  Their hair already
+betrayed the reddish hue inherited from their mother, the she-wolf; while
+he alone, in this particular, took after his father.  He was the one
+little grey cub of the litter.  He had bred true to the straight wolf-
+stock--in fact, he had bred true to old One Eye himself, physically, with
+but a single exception, and that was he had two eyes to his father's one.
+
+The grey cub's eyes had not been open long, yet already he could see with
+steady clearness.  And while his eyes were still closed, he had felt,
+tasted, and smelled.  He knew his two brothers and his two sisters very
+well.  He had begun to romp with them in a feeble, awkward way, and even
+to squabble, his little throat vibrating with a queer rasping noise (the
+forerunner of the growl), as he worked himself into a passion.  And long
+before his eyes had opened he had learned by touch, taste, and smell to
+know his mother--a fount of warmth and liquid food and tenderness.  She
+possessed a gentle, caressing tongue that soothed him when it passed over
+his soft little body, and that impelled him to snuggle close against her
+and to doze off to sleep.
+
+Most of the first month of his life had been passed thus in sleeping; but
+now he could see quite well, and he stayed awake for longer periods of
+time, and he was coming to learn his world quite well.  His world was
+gloomy; but he did not know that, for he knew no other world.  It was dim-
+lighted; but his eyes had never had to adjust themselves to any other
+light.  His world was very small.  Its limits were the walls of the lair;
+but as he had no knowledge of the wide world outside, he was never
+oppressed by the narrow confines of his existence.
+
+But he had early discovered that one wall of his world was different from
+the rest.  This was the mouth of the cave and the source of light.  He
+had discovered that it was different from the other walls long before he
+had any thoughts of his own, any conscious volitions.  It had been an
+irresistible attraction before ever his eyes opened and looked upon it.
+The light from it had beat upon his sealed lids, and the eyes and the
+optic nerves had pulsated to little, sparklike flashes, warm-coloured and
+strangely pleasing.  The life of his body, and of every fibre of his
+body, the life that was the very substance of his body and that was apart
+from his own personal life, had yearned toward this light and urged his
+body toward it in the same way that the cunning chemistry of a plant
+urges it toward the sun.
+
+Always, in the beginning, before his conscious life dawned, he had
+crawled toward the mouth of the cave.  And in this his brothers and
+sisters were one with him.  Never, in that period, did any of them crawl
+toward the dark corners of the back-wall.  The light drew them as if they
+were plants; the chemistry of the life that composed them demanded the
+light as a necessity of being; and their little puppet-bodies crawled
+blindly and chemically, like the tendrils of a vine.  Later on, when each
+developed individuality and became personally conscious of impulsions and
+desires, the attraction of the light increased.  They were always
+crawling and sprawling toward it, and being driven back from it by their
+mother.
+
+It was in this way that the grey cub learned other attributes of his
+mother than the soft, soothing tongue.  In his insistent crawling toward
+the light, he discovered in her a nose that with a sharp nudge
+administered rebuke, and later, a paw, that crushed him down and rolled
+him over and over with swift, calculating stroke.  Thus he learned hurt;
+and on top of it he learned to avoid hurt, first, by not incurring the
+risk of it; and second, when he had incurred the risk, by dodging and by
+retreating.  These were conscious actions, and were the results of his
+first generalisations upon the world.  Before that he had recoiled
+automatically from hurt, as he had crawled automatically toward the
+light.  After that he recoiled from hurt because he _knew_ that it was
+hurt.
+
+He was a fierce little cub.  So were his brothers and sisters.  It was to
+be expected.  He was a carnivorous animal.  He came of a breed of meat-
+killers and meat-eaters.  His father and mother lived wholly upon meat.
+The milk he had sucked with his first flickering life, was milk
+transformed directly from meat, and now, at a month old, when his eyes
+had been open for but a week, he was beginning himself to eat meat--meat
+half-digested by the she-wolf and disgorged for the five growing cubs
+that already made too great demand upon her breast.
+
+But he was, further, the fiercest of the litter.  He could make a louder
+rasping growl than any of them.  His tiny rages were much more terrible
+than theirs.  It was he that first learned the trick of rolling a fellow-
+cub over with a cunning paw-stroke.  And it was he that first gripped
+another cub by the ear and pulled and tugged and growled through jaws
+tight-clenched.  And certainly it was he that caused the mother the most
+trouble in keeping her litter from the mouth of the cave.
+
+The fascination of the light for the grey cub increased from day to day.
+He was perpetually departing on yard-long adventures toward the cave's
+entrance, and as perpetually being driven back.  Only he did not know it
+for an entrance.  He did not know anything about entrances--passages
+whereby one goes from one place to another place.  He did not know any
+other place, much less of a way to get there.  So to him the entrance of
+the cave was a wall--a wall of light.  As the sun was to the outside
+dweller, this wall was to him the sun of his world.  It attracted him as
+a candle attracts a moth.  He was always striving to attain it.  The life
+that was so swiftly expanding within him, urged him continually toward
+the wall of light.  The life that was within him knew that it was the one
+way out, the way he was predestined to tread.  But he himself did not
+know anything about it.  He did not know there was any outside at all.
+
+There was one strange thing about this wall of light.  His father (he had
+already come to recognise his father as the one other dweller in the
+world, a creature like his mother, who slept near the light and was a
+bringer of meat)--his father had a way of walking right into the white
+far wall and disappearing.  The grey cub could not understand this.
+Though never permitted by his mother to approach that wall, he had
+approached the other walls, and encountered hard obstruction on the end
+of his tender nose.  This hurt.  And after several such adventures, he
+left the walls alone.  Without thinking about it, he accepted this
+disappearing into the wall as a peculiarity of his father, as milk and
+half-digested meat were peculiarities of his mother.
+
+In fact, the grey cub was not given to thinking--at least, to the kind of
+thinking customary of men.  His brain worked in dim ways.  Yet his
+conclusions were as sharp and distinct as those achieved by men.  He had
+a method of accepting things, without questioning the why and wherefore.
+In reality, this was the act of classification.  He was never disturbed
+over why a thing happened.  How it happened was sufficient for him.  Thus,
+when he had bumped his nose on the back-wall a few times, he accepted
+that he would not disappear into walls.  In the same way he accepted that
+his father could disappear into walls.  But he was not in the least
+disturbed by desire to find out the reason for the difference between his
+father and himself.  Logic and physics were no part of his mental make-
+up.
+
+Like most creatures of the Wild, he early experienced famine.  There came
+a time when not only did the meat-supply cease, but the milk no longer
+came from his mother's breast.  At first, the cubs whimpered and cried,
+but for the most part they slept.  It was not long before they were
+reduced to a coma of hunger.  There were no more spats and squabbles, no
+more tiny rages nor attempts at growling; while the adventures toward the
+far white wall ceased altogether.  The cubs slept, while the life that
+was in them flickered and died down.
+
+One Eye was desperate.  He ranged far and wide, and slept but little in
+the lair that had now become cheerless and miserable.  The she-wolf, too,
+left her litter and went out in search of meat.  In the first days after
+the birth of the cubs, One Eye had journeyed several times back to the
+Indian camp and robbed the rabbit snares; but, with the melting of the
+snow and the opening of the streams, the Indian camp had moved away, and
+that source of supply was closed to him.
+
+When the grey cub came back to life and again took interest in the far
+white wall, he found that the population of his world had been reduced.
+Only one sister remained to him.  The rest were gone.  As he grew
+stronger, he found himself compelled to play alone, for the sister no
+longer lifted her head nor moved about.  His little body rounded out with
+the meat he now ate; but the food had come too late for her.  She slept
+continuously, a tiny skeleton flung round with skin in which the flame
+flickered lower and lower and at last went out.
+
+Then there came a time when the grey cub no longer saw his father
+appearing and disappearing in the wall nor lying down asleep in the
+entrance.  This had happened at the end of a second and less severe
+famine.  The she-wolf knew why One Eye never came back, but there was no
+way by which she could tell what she had seen to the grey cub.  Hunting
+herself for meat, up the left fork of the stream where lived the lynx,
+she had followed a day-old trail of One Eye.  And she had found him, or
+what remained of him, at the end of the trail.  There were many signs of
+the battle that had been fought, and of the lynx's withdrawal to her lair
+after having won the victory.  Before she went away, the she-wolf had
+found this lair, but the signs told her that the lynx was inside, and she
+had not dared to venture in.
+
+After that, the she-wolf in her hunting avoided the left fork.  For she
+knew that in the lynx's lair was a litter of kittens, and she knew the
+lynx for a fierce, bad-tempered creature and a terrible fighter.  It was
+all very well for half a dozen wolves to drive a lynx, spitting and
+bristling, up a tree; but it was quite a different matter for a lone wolf
+to encounter a lynx--especially when the lynx was known to have a litter
+of hungry kittens at her back.
+
+But the Wild is the Wild, and motherhood is motherhood, at all times
+fiercely protective whether in the Wild or out of it; and the time was to
+come when the she-wolf, for her grey cub's sake, would venture the left
+fork, and the lair in the rocks, and the lynx's wrath.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV--THE WALL OF THE WORLD
+
+
+By the time his mother began leaving the cave on hunting expeditions, the
+cub had learned well the law that forbade his approaching the entrance.
+Not only had this law been forcibly and many times impressed on him by
+his mother's nose and paw, but in him the instinct of fear was
+developing.  Never, in his brief cave-life, had he encountered anything
+of which to be afraid.  Yet fear was in him.  It had come down to him
+from a remote ancestry through a thousand thousand lives.  It was a
+heritage he had received directly from One Eye and the she-wolf; but to
+them, in turn, it had been passed down through all the generations of
+wolves that had gone before.  Fear!--that legacy of the Wild which no
+animal may escape nor exchange for pottage.
+
+So the grey cub knew fear, though he knew not the stuff of which fear was
+made.  Possibly he accepted it as one of the restrictions of life.  For
+he had already learned that there were such restrictions.  Hunger he had
+known; and when he could not appease his hunger he had felt restriction.
+The hard obstruction of the cave-wall, the sharp nudge of his mother's
+nose, the smashing stroke of her paw, the hunger unappeased of several
+famines, had borne in upon him that all was not freedom in the world,
+that to life there were limitations and restraints.  These limitations and
+restraints were laws.  To be obedient to them was to escape hurt and make
+for happiness.
+
+He did not reason the question out in this man fashion.  He merely
+classified the things that hurt and the things that did not hurt.  And
+after such classification he avoided the things that hurt, the
+restrictions and restraints, in order to enjoy the satisfactions and the
+remunerations of life.
+
+Thus it was that in obedience to the law laid down by his mother, and in
+obedience to the law of that unknown and nameless thing, fear, he kept
+away from the mouth of the cave.  It remained to him a white wall of
+light.  When his mother was absent, he slept most of the time, while
+during the intervals that he was awake he kept very quiet, suppressing
+the whimpering cries that tickled in his throat and strove for noise.
+
+Once, lying awake, he heard a strange sound in the white wall.  He did
+not know that it was a wolverine, standing outside, all a-trembling with
+its own daring, and cautiously scenting out the contents of the cave.  The
+cub knew only that the sniff was strange, a something unclassified,
+therefore unknown and terrible--for the unknown was one of the chief
+elements that went into the making of fear.
+
+The hair bristled upon the grey cub's back, but it bristled silently.  How
+was he to know that this thing that sniffed was a thing at which to
+bristle?  It was not born of any knowledge of his, yet it was the visible
+expression of the fear that was in him, and for which, in his own life,
+there was no accounting.  But fear was accompanied by another
+instinct--that of concealment.  The cub was in a frenzy of terror, yet he
+lay without movement or sound, frozen, petrified into immobility, to all
+appearances dead.  His mother, coming home, growled as she smelt the
+wolverine's track, and bounded into the cave and licked and nozzled him
+with undue vehemence of affection.  And the cub felt that somehow he had
+escaped a great hurt.
+
+But there were other forces at work in the cub, the greatest of which was
+growth.  Instinct and law demanded of him obedience.  But growth demanded
+disobedience.  His mother and fear impelled him to keep away from the
+white wall.  Growth is life, and life is for ever destined to make for
+light.  So there was no damming up the tide of life that was rising
+within him--rising with every mouthful of meat he swallowed, with every
+breath he drew.  In the end, one day, fear and obedience were swept away
+by the rush of life, and the cub straddled and sprawled toward the
+entrance.
+
+Unlike any other wall with which he had had experience, this wall seemed
+to recede from him as he approached.  No hard surface collided with the
+tender little nose he thrust out tentatively before him.  The substance
+of the wall seemed as permeable and yielding as light.  And as condition,
+in his eyes, had the seeming of form, so he entered into what had been
+wall to him and bathed in the substance that composed it.
+
+It was bewildering.  He was sprawling through solidity.  And ever the
+light grew brighter.  Fear urged him to go back, but growth drove him on.
+Suddenly he found himself at the mouth of the cave.  The wall, inside
+which he had thought himself, as suddenly leaped back before him to an
+immeasurable distance.  The light had become painfully bright.  He was
+dazzled by it.  Likewise he was made dizzy by this abrupt and tremendous
+extension of space.  Automatically, his eyes were adjusting themselves to
+the brightness, focusing themselves to meet the increased distance of
+objects.  At first, the wall had leaped beyond his vision.  He now saw it
+again; but it had taken upon itself a remarkable remoteness.  Also, its
+appearance had changed.  It was now a variegated wall, composed of the
+trees that fringed the stream, the opposing mountain that towered above
+the trees, and the sky that out-towered the mountain.
+
+A great fear came upon him.  This was more of the terrible unknown.  He
+crouched down on the lip of the cave and gazed out on the world.  He was
+very much afraid.  Because it was unknown, it was hostile to him.
+Therefore the hair stood up on end along his back and his lips wrinkled
+weakly in an attempt at a ferocious and intimidating snarl.  Out of his
+puniness and fright he challenged and menaced the whole wide world.
+
+Nothing happened.  He continued to gaze, and in his interest he forgot to
+snarl.  Also, he forgot to be afraid.  For the time, fear had been routed
+by growth, while growth had assumed the guise of curiosity.  He began to
+notice near objects--an open portion of the stream that flashed in the
+sun, the blasted pine-tree that stood at the base of the slope, and the
+slope itself, that ran right up to him and ceased two feet beneath the
+lip of the cave on which he crouched.
+
+Now the grey cub had lived all his days on a level floor.  He had never
+experienced the hurt of a fall.  He did not know what a fall was.  So he
+stepped boldly out upon the air.  His hind-legs still rested on the cave-
+lip, so he fell forward head downward.  The earth struck him a harsh blow
+on the nose that made him yelp.  Then he began rolling down the slope,
+over and over.  He was in a panic of terror.  The unknown had caught him
+at last.  It had gripped savagely hold of him and was about to wreak upon
+him some terrific hurt.  Growth was now routed by fear, and he ki-yi'd
+like any frightened puppy.
+
+The unknown bore him on he knew not to what frightful hurt, and he yelped
+and ki-yi'd unceasingly.  This was a different proposition from crouching
+in frozen fear while the unknown lurked just alongside.  Now the unknown
+had caught tight hold of him.  Silence would do no good.  Besides, it was
+not fear, but terror, that convulsed him.
+
+But the slope grew more gradual, and its base was grass-covered.  Here
+the cub lost momentum.  When at last he came to a stop, he gave one last
+agonised yell and then a long, whimpering wail.  Also, and quite as a
+matter of course, as though in his life he had already made a thousand
+toilets, he proceeded to lick away the dry clay that soiled him.
+
+After that he sat up and gazed about him, as might the first man of the
+earth who landed upon Mars.  The cub had broken through the wall of the
+world, the unknown had let go its hold of him, and here he was without
+hurt.  But the first man on Mars would have experienced less
+unfamiliarity than did he.  Without any antecedent knowledge, without any
+warning whatever that such existed, he found himself an explorer in a
+totally new world.
+
+Now that the terrible unknown had let go of him, he forgot that the
+unknown had any terrors.  He was aware only of curiosity in all the
+things about him.  He inspected the grass beneath him, the moss-berry
+plant just beyond, and the dead trunk of the blasted pine that stood on
+the edge of an open space among the trees.  A squirrel, running around
+the base of the trunk, came full upon him, and gave him a great fright.
+He cowered down and snarled.  But the squirrel was as badly scared.  It
+ran up the tree, and from a point of safety chattered back savagely.
+
+This helped the cub's courage, and though the woodpecker he next
+encountered gave him a start, he proceeded confidently on his way.  Such
+was his confidence, that when a moose-bird impudently hopped up to him,
+he reached out at it with a playful paw.  The result was a sharp peck on
+the end of his nose that made him cower down and ki-yi.  The noise he
+made was too much for the moose-bird, who sought safety in flight.
+
+But the cub was learning.  His misty little mind had already made an
+unconscious classification.  There were live things and things not alive.
+Also, he must watch out for the live things.  The things not alive
+remained always in one place, but the live things moved about, and there
+was no telling what they might do.  The thing to expect of them was the
+unexpected, and for this he must be prepared.
+
+He travelled very clumsily.  He ran into sticks and things.  A twig that
+he thought a long way off, would the next instant hit him on the nose or
+rake along his ribs.  There were inequalities of surface.  Sometimes he
+overstepped and stubbed his nose.  Quite as often he understepped and
+stubbed his feet.  Then there were the pebbles and stones that turned
+under him when he trod upon them; and from them he came to know that the
+things not alive were not all in the same state of stable equilibrium as
+was his cave--also, that small things not alive were more liable than
+large things to fall down or turn over.  But with every mishap he was
+learning.  The longer he walked, the better he walked.  He was adjusting
+himself.  He was learning to calculate his own muscular movements, to
+know his physical limitations, to measure distances between objects, and
+between objects and himself.
+
+His was the luck of the beginner.  Born to be a hunter of meat (though he
+did not know it), he blundered upon meat just outside his own cave-door
+on his first foray into the world.  It was by sheer blundering that he
+chanced upon the shrewdly hidden ptarmigan nest.  He fell into it.  He
+had essayed to walk along the trunk of a fallen pine.  The rotten bark
+gave way under his feet, and with a despairing yelp he pitched down the
+rounded crescent, smashed through the leafage and stalks of a small bush,
+and in the heart of the bush, on the ground, fetched up in the midst of
+seven ptarmigan chicks.
+
+They made noises, and at first he was frightened at them.  Then he
+perceived that they were very little, and he became bolder.  They moved.
+He placed his paw on one, and its movements were accelerated.  This was a
+source of enjoyment to him.  He smelled it.  He picked it up in his
+mouth.  It struggled and tickled his tongue.  At the same time he was
+made aware of a sensation of hunger.  His jaws closed together.  There
+was a crunching of fragile bones, and warm blood ran in his mouth.  The
+taste of it was good.  This was meat, the same as his mother gave him,
+only it was alive between his teeth and therefore better.  So he ate the
+ptarmigan.  Nor did he stop till he had devoured the whole brood.  Then
+he licked his chops in quite the same way his mother did, and began to
+crawl out of the bush.
+
+He encountered a feathered whirlwind.  He was confused and blinded by the
+rush of it and the beat of angry wings.  He hid his head between his paws
+and yelped.  The blows increased.  The mother ptarmigan was in a fury.
+Then he became angry.  He rose up, snarling, striking out with his paws.
+He sank his tiny teeth into one of the wings and pulled and tugged
+sturdily.  The ptarmigan struggled against him, showering blows upon him
+with her free wing.  It was his first battle.  He was elated.  He forgot
+all about the unknown.  He no longer was afraid of anything.  He was
+fighting, tearing at a live thing that was striking at him.  Also, this
+live thing was meat.  The lust to kill was on him.  He had just destroyed
+little live things.  He would now destroy a big live thing.  He was too
+busy and happy to know that he was happy.  He was thrilling and exulting
+in ways new to him and greater to him than any he had known before.
+
+He held on to the wing and growled between his tight-clenched teeth.  The
+ptarmigan dragged him out of the bush.  When she turned and tried to drag
+him back into the bush's shelter, he pulled her away from it and on into
+the open.  And all the time she was making outcry and striking with her
+free wing, while feathers were flying like a snow-fall.  The pitch to
+which he was aroused was tremendous.  All the fighting blood of his breed
+was up in him and surging through him.  This was living, though he did
+not know it.  He was realising his own meaning in the world; he was doing
+that for which he was made--killing meat and battling to kill it.  He was
+justifying his existence, than which life can do no greater; for life
+achieves its summit when it does to the uttermost that which it was
+equipped to do.
+
+After a time, the ptarmigan ceased her struggling.  He still held her by
+the wing, and they lay on the ground and looked at each other.  He tried
+to growl threateningly, ferociously.  She pecked on his nose, which by
+now, what of previous adventures was sore.  He winced but held on.  She
+pecked him again and again.  From wincing he went to whimpering.  He
+tried to back away from her, oblivious to the fact that by his hold on
+her he dragged her after him.  A rain of pecks fell on his ill-used nose.
+The flood of fight ebbed down in him, and, releasing his prey, he turned
+tail and scampered on across the open in inglorious retreat.
+
+He lay down to rest on the other side of the open, near the edge of the
+bushes, his tongue lolling out, his chest heaving and panting, his nose
+still hurting him and causing him to continue his whimper.  But as he lay
+there, suddenly there came to him a feeling as of something terrible
+impending.  The unknown with all its terrors rushed upon him, and he
+shrank back instinctively into the shelter of the bush.  As he did so, a
+draught of air fanned him, and a large, winged body swept ominously and
+silently past.  A hawk, driving down out of the blue, had barely missed
+him.
+
+While he lay in the bush, recovering from his fright and peering
+fearfully out, the mother-ptarmigan on the other side of the open space
+fluttered out of the ravaged nest.  It was because of her loss that she
+paid no attention to the winged bolt of the sky.  But the cub saw, and it
+was a warning and a lesson to him--the swift downward swoop of the hawk,
+the short skim of its body just above the ground, the strike of its
+talons in the body of the ptarmigan, the ptarmigan's squawk of agony and
+fright, and the hawk's rush upward into the blue, carrying the ptarmigan
+away with it
+
+It was a long time before the cub left its shelter.  He had learned much.
+Live things were meat.  They were good to eat.  Also, live things when
+they were large enough, could give hurt.  It was better to eat small live
+things like ptarmigan chicks, and to let alone large live things like
+ptarmigan hens.  Nevertheless he felt a little prick of ambition, a
+sneaking desire to have another battle with that ptarmigan hen--only the
+hawk had carried her away.  Maybe there were other ptarmigan hens.  He
+would go and see.
+
+He came down a shelving bank to the stream.  He had never seen water
+before.  The footing looked good.  There were no inequalities of surface.
+He stepped boldly out on it; and went down, crying with fear, into the
+embrace of the unknown.  It was cold, and he gasped, breathing quickly.
+The water rushed into his lungs instead of the air that had always
+accompanied his act of breathing.  The suffocation he experienced was
+like the pang of death.  To him it signified death.  He had no conscious
+knowledge of death, but like every animal of the Wild, he possessed the
+instinct of death.  To him it stood as the greatest of hurts.  It was the
+very essence of the unknown; it was the sum of the terrors of the
+unknown, the one culminating and unthinkable catastrophe that could
+happen to him, about which he knew nothing and about which he feared
+everything.
+
+He came to the surface, and the sweet air rushed into his open mouth.  He
+did not go down again.  Quite as though it had been a long-established
+custom of his he struck out with all his legs and began to swim.  The
+near bank was a yard away; but he had come up with his back to it, and
+the first thing his eyes rested upon was the opposite bank, toward which
+he immediately began to swim.  The stream was a small one, but in the
+pool it widened out to a score of feet.
+
+Midway in the passage, the current picked up the cub and swept him
+downstream.  He was caught in the miniature rapid at the bottom of the
+pool.  Here was little chance for swimming.  The quiet water had become
+suddenly angry.  Sometimes he was under, sometimes on top.  At all times
+he was in violent motion, now being turned over or around, and again,
+being smashed against a rock.  And with every rock he struck, he yelped.
+His progress was a series of yelps, from which might have been adduced
+the number of rocks he encountered.
+
+Below the rapid was a second pool, and here, captured by the eddy, he was
+gently borne to the bank, and as gently deposited on a bed of gravel.  He
+crawled frantically clear of the water and lay down.  He had learned some
+more about the world.  Water was not alive.  Yet it moved.  Also, it
+looked as solid as the earth, but was without any solidity at all.  His
+conclusion was that things were not always what they appeared to be.  The
+cub's fear of the unknown was an inherited distrust, and it had now been
+strengthened by experience.  Thenceforth, in the nature of things, he
+would possess an abiding distrust of appearances.  He would have to learn
+the reality of a thing before he could put his faith into it.
+
+One other adventure was destined for him that day.  He had recollected
+that there was such a thing in the world as his mother.  And then there
+came to him a feeling that he wanted her more than all the rest of the
+things in the world.  Not only was his body tired with the adventures it
+had undergone, but his little brain was equally tired.  In all the days
+he had lived it had not worked so hard as on this one day.  Furthermore,
+he was sleepy.  So he started out to look for the cave and his mother,
+feeling at the same time an overwhelming rush of loneliness and
+helplessness.
+
+He was sprawling along between some bushes, when he heard a sharp
+intimidating cry.  There was a flash of yellow before his eyes.  He saw a
+weasel leaping swiftly away from him.  It was a small live thing, and he
+had no fear.  Then, before him, at his feet, he saw an extremely small
+live thing, only several inches long, a young weasel, that, like himself,
+had disobediently gone out adventuring.  It tried to retreat before him.
+He turned it over with his paw.  It made a queer, grating noise.  The
+next moment the flash of yellow reappeared before his eyes.  He heard
+again the intimidating cry, and at the same instant received a sharp blow
+on the side of the neck and felt the sharp teeth of the mother-weasel cut
+into his flesh.
+
+While he yelped and ki-yi'd and scrambled backward, he saw the mother-
+weasel leap upon her young one and disappear with it into the
+neighbouring thicket.  The cut of her teeth in his neck still hurt, but
+his feelings were hurt more grievously, and he sat down and weakly
+whimpered.  This mother-weasel was so small and so savage.  He was yet to
+learn that for size and weight the weasel was the most ferocious,
+vindictive, and terrible of all the killers of the Wild.  But a portion
+of this knowledge was quickly to be his.
+
+He was still whimpering when the mother-weasel reappeared.  She did not
+rush him, now that her young one was safe.  She approached more
+cautiously, and the cub had full opportunity to observe her lean,
+snakelike body, and her head, erect, eager, and snake-like itself.  Her
+sharp, menacing cry sent the hair bristling along his back, and he
+snarled warningly at her.  She came closer and closer.  There was a leap,
+swifter than his unpractised sight, and the lean, yellow body disappeared
+for a moment out of the field of his vision.  The next moment she was at
+his throat, her teeth buried in his hair and flesh.
+
+At first he snarled and tried to fight; but he was very young, and this
+was only his first day in the world, and his snarl became a whimper, his
+fight a struggle to escape.  The weasel never relaxed her hold.  She hung
+on, striving to press down with her teeth to the great vein where his
+life-blood bubbled.  The weasel was a drinker of blood, and it was ever
+her preference to drink from the throat of life itself.
+
+The grey cub would have died, and there would have been no story to write
+about him, had not the she-wolf come bounding through the bushes.  The
+weasel let go the cub and flashed at the she-wolf's throat, missing, but
+getting a hold on the jaw instead.  The she-wolf flirted her head like
+the snap of a whip, breaking the weasel's hold and flinging it high in
+the air.  And, still in the air, the she-wolf's jaws closed on the lean,
+yellow body, and the weasel knew death between the crunching teeth.
+
+The cub experienced another access of affection on the part of his
+mother.  Her joy at finding him seemed even greater than his joy at being
+found.  She nozzled him and caressed him and licked the cuts made in him
+by the weasel's teeth.  Then, between them, mother and cub, they ate the
+blood-drinker, and after that went back to the cave and slept.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V--THE LAW OF MEAT
+
+
+The cub's development was rapid.  He rested for two days, and then
+ventured forth from the cave again.  It was on this adventure that he
+found the young weasel whose mother he had helped eat, and he saw to it
+that the young weasel went the way of its mother.  But on this trip he
+did not get lost.  When he grew tired, he found his way back to the cave
+and slept.  And every day thereafter found him out and ranging a wider
+area.
+
+He began to get accurate measurement of his strength and his weakness,
+and to know when to be bold and when to be cautious.  He found it
+expedient to be cautious all the time, except for the rare moments, when,
+assured of his own intrepidity, he abandoned himself to petty rages and
+lusts.
+
+He was always a little demon of fury when he chanced upon a stray
+ptarmigan.  Never did he fail to respond savagely to the chatter of the
+squirrel he had first met on the blasted pine.  While the sight of a
+moose-bird almost invariably put him into the wildest of rages; for he
+never forgot the peck on the nose he had received from the first of that
+ilk he encountered.
+
+But there were times when even a moose-bird failed to affect him, and
+those were times when he felt himself to be in danger from some other
+prowling meat hunter.  He never forgot the hawk, and its moving shadow
+always sent him crouching into the nearest thicket.  He no longer
+sprawled and straddled, and already he was developing the gait of his
+mother, slinking and furtive, apparently without exertion, yet sliding
+along with a swiftness that was as deceptive as it was imperceptible.
+
+In the matter of meat, his luck had been all in the beginning.  The seven
+ptarmigan chicks and the baby weasel represented the sum of his killings.
+His desire to kill strengthened with the days, and he cherished hungry
+ambitions for the squirrel that chattered so volubly and always informed
+all wild creatures that the wolf-cub was approaching.  But as birds flew
+in the air, squirrels could climb trees, and the cub could only try to
+crawl unobserved upon the squirrel when it was on the ground.
+
+The cub entertained a great respect for his mother.  She could get meat,
+and she never failed to bring him his share.  Further, she was unafraid
+of things.  It did not occur to him that this fearlessness was founded
+upon experience and knowledge.  Its effect on him was that of an
+impression of power.  His mother represented power; and as he grew older
+he felt this power in the sharper admonishment of her paw; while the
+reproving nudge of her nose gave place to the slash of her fangs.  For
+this, likewise, he respected his mother.  She compelled obedience from
+him, and the older he grew the shorter grew her temper.
+
+Famine came again, and the cub with clearer consciousness knew once more
+the bite of hunger.  The she-wolf ran herself thin in the quest for meat.
+She rarely slept any more in the cave, spending most of her time on the
+meat-trail, and spending it vainly.  This famine was not a long one, but
+it was severe while it lasted.  The cub found no more milk in his
+mother's breast, nor did he get one mouthful of meat for himself.
+
+Before, he had hunted in play, for the sheer joyousness of it; now he
+hunted in deadly earnestness, and found nothing.  Yet the failure of it
+accelerated his development.  He studied the habits of the squirrel with
+greater carefulness, and strove with greater craft to steal upon it and
+surprise it.  He studied the wood-mice and tried to dig them out of their
+burrows; and he learned much about the ways of moose-birds and
+woodpeckers.  And there came a day when the hawk's shadow did not drive
+him crouching into the bushes.  He had grown stronger and wiser, and more
+confident.  Also, he was desperate.  So he sat on his haunches,
+conspicuously in an open space, and challenged the hawk down out of the
+sky.  For he knew that there, floating in the blue above him, was meat,
+the meat his stomach yearned after so insistently.  But the hawk refused
+to come down and give battle, and the cub crawled away into a thicket and
+whimpered his disappointment and hunger.
+
+The famine broke.  The she-wolf brought home meat.  It was strange meat,
+different from any she had ever brought before.  It was a lynx kitten,
+partly grown, like the cub, but not so large.  And it was all for him.
+His mother had satisfied her hunger elsewhere; though he did not know
+that it was the rest of the lynx litter that had gone to satisfy her.  Nor
+did he know the desperateness of her deed.  He knew only that the velvet-
+furred kitten was meat, and he ate and waxed happier with every mouthful.
+
+A full stomach conduces to inaction, and the cub lay in the cave,
+sleeping against his mother's side.  He was aroused by her snarling.
+Never had he heard her snarl so terribly.  Possibly in her whole life it
+was the most terrible snarl she ever gave.  There was reason for it, and
+none knew it better than she.  A lynx's lair is not despoiled with
+impunity.  In the full glare of the afternoon light, crouching in the
+entrance of the cave, the cub saw the lynx-mother.  The hair rippled up
+along his back at the sight.  Here was fear, and it did not require his
+instinct to tell him of it.  And if sight alone were not sufficient, the
+cry of rage the intruder gave, beginning with a snarl and rushing
+abruptly upward into a hoarse screech, was convincing enough in itself.
+
+The cub felt the prod of the life that was in him, and stood up and
+snarled valiantly by his mother's side.  But she thrust him ignominiously
+away and behind her.  Because of the low-roofed entrance the lynx could
+not leap in, and when she made a crawling rush of it the she-wolf sprang
+upon her and pinned her down.  The cub saw little of the battle.  There
+was a tremendous snarling and spitting and screeching.  The two animals
+threshed about, the lynx ripping and tearing with her claws and using her
+teeth as well, while the she-wolf used her teeth alone.
+
+Once, the cub sprang in and sank his teeth into the hind leg of the lynx.
+He clung on, growling savagely.  Though he did not know it, by the weight
+of his body he clogged the action of the leg and thereby saved his mother
+much damage.  A change in the battle crushed him under both their bodies
+and wrenched loose his hold.  The next moment the two mothers separated,
+and, before they rushed together again, the lynx lashed out at the cub
+with a huge fore-paw that ripped his shoulder open to the bone and sent
+him hurtling sidewise against the wall.  Then was added to the uproar the
+cub's shrill yelp of pain and fright.  But the fight lasted so long that
+he had time to cry himself out and to experience a second burst of
+courage; and the end of the battle found him again clinging to a hind-leg
+and furiously growling between his teeth.
+
+The lynx was dead.  But the she-wolf was very weak and sick.  At first
+she caressed the cub and licked his wounded shoulder; but the blood she
+had lost had taken with it her strength, and for all of a day and a night
+she lay by her dead foe's side, without movement, scarcely breathing.  For
+a week she never left the cave, except for water, and then her movements
+were slow and painful.  At the end of that time the lynx was devoured,
+while the she-wolf's wounds had healed sufficiently to permit her to take
+the meat-trail again.
+
+The cub's shoulder was stiff and sore, and for some time he limped from
+the terrible slash he had received.  But the world now seemed changed.  He
+went about in it with greater confidence, with a feeling of prowess that
+had not been his in the days before the battle with the lynx.  He had
+looked upon life in a more ferocious aspect; he had fought; he had buried
+his teeth in the flesh of a foe; and he had survived.  And because of all
+this, he carried himself more boldly, with a touch of defiance that was
+new in him.  He was no longer afraid of minor things, and much of his
+timidity had vanished, though the unknown never ceased to press upon him
+with its mysteries and terrors, intangible and ever-menacing.
+
+He began to accompany his mother on the meat-trail, and he saw much of
+the killing of meat and began to play his part in it.  And in his own dim
+way he learned the law of meat.  There were two kinds of life--his own
+kind and the other kind.  His own kind included his mother and himself.
+The other kind included all live things that moved.  But the other kind
+was divided.  One portion was what his own kind killed and ate.  This
+portion was composed of the non-killers and the small killers.  The other
+portion killed and ate his own kind, or was killed and eaten by his own
+kind.  And out of this classification arose the law.  The aim of life was
+meat.  Life itself was meat.  Life lived on life.  There were the eaters
+and the eaten.  The law was: EAT OR BE EATEN.  He did not formulate the
+law in clear, set terms and moralise about it.  He did not even think the
+law; he merely lived the law without thinking about it at all.
+
+He saw the law operating around him on every side.  He had eaten the
+ptarmigan chicks.  The hawk had eaten the ptarmigan-mother.  The hawk
+would also have eaten him.  Later, when he had grown more formidable, he
+wanted to eat the hawk.  He had eaten the lynx kitten.  The lynx-mother
+would have eaten him had she not herself been killed and eaten.  And so
+it went.  The law was being lived about him by all live things, and he
+himself was part and parcel of the law.  He was a killer.  His only food
+was meat, live meat, that ran away swiftly before him, or flew into the
+air, or climbed trees, or hid in the ground, or faced him and fought with
+him, or turned the tables and ran after him.
+
+Had the cub thought in man-fashion, he might have epitomised life as a
+voracious appetite and the world as a place wherein ranged a multitude of
+appetites, pursuing and being pursued, hunting and being hunted, eating
+and being eaten, all in blindness and confusion, with violence and
+disorder, a chaos of gluttony and slaughter, ruled over by chance,
+merciless, planless, endless.
+
+But the cub did not think in man-fashion.  He did not look at things with
+wide vision.  He was single-purposed, and entertained but one thought or
+desire at a time.  Besides the law of meat, there were a myriad other and
+lesser laws for him to learn and obey.  The world was filled with
+surprise.  The stir of the life that was in him, the play of his muscles,
+was an unending happiness.  To run down meat was to experience thrills
+and elations.  His rages and battles were pleasures.  Terror itself, and
+the mystery of the unknown, led to his living.
+
+And there were easements and satisfactions.  To have a full stomach, to
+doze lazily in the sunshine--such things were remuneration in full for
+his ardours and toils, while his ardours and tolls were in themselves
+self-remunerative.  They were expressions of life, and life is always
+happy when it is expressing itself.  So the cub had no quarrel with his
+hostile environment.  He was very much alive, very happy, and very proud
+of himself.
+
+
+
+
+PART III
+
+
+CHAPTER I--THE MAKERS OF FIRE
+
+
+The cub came upon it suddenly.  It was his own fault.  He had been
+careless.  He had left the cave and run down to the stream to drink.  It
+might have been that he took no notice because he was heavy with sleep.
+(He had been out all night on the meat-trail, and had but just then
+awakened.)  And his carelessness might have been due to the familiarity
+of the trail to the pool.  He had travelled it often, and nothing had
+ever happened on it.
+
+He went down past the blasted pine, crossed the open space, and trotted
+in amongst the trees.  Then, at the same instant, he saw and smelt.
+Before him, sitting silently on their haunches, were five live things,
+the like of which he had never seen before.  It was his first glimpse of
+mankind.  But at the sight of him the five men did not spring to their
+feet, nor show their teeth, nor snarl.  They did not move, but sat there,
+silent and ominous.
+
+Nor did the cub move.  Every instinct of his nature would have impelled
+him to dash wildly away, had there not suddenly and for the first time
+arisen in him another and counter instinct.  A great awe descended upon
+him.  He was beaten down to movelessness by an overwhelming sense of his
+own weakness and littleness.  Here was mastery and power, something far
+and away beyond him.
+
+The cub had never seen man, yet the instinct concerning man was his.  In
+dim ways he recognised in man the animal that had fought itself to
+primacy over the other animals of the Wild.  Not alone out of his own
+eyes, but out of the eyes of all his ancestors was the cub now looking
+upon man--out of eyes that had circled in the darkness around countless
+winter camp-fires, that had peered from safe distances and from the
+hearts of thickets at the strange, two-legged animal that was lord over
+living things.  The spell of the cub's heritage was upon him, the fear
+and the respect born of the centuries of struggle and the accumulated
+experience of the generations.  The heritage was too compelling for a
+wolf that was only a cub.  Had he been full-grown, he would have run
+away.  As it was, he cowered down in a paralysis of fear, already half
+proffering the submission that his kind had proffered from the first time
+a wolf came in to sit by man's fire and be made warm.
+
+One of the Indians arose and walked over to him and stooped above him.
+The cub cowered closer to the ground.  It was the unknown, objectified at
+last, in concrete flesh and blood, bending over him and reaching down to
+seize hold of him.  His hair bristled involuntarily; his lips writhed
+back and his little fangs were bared.  The hand, poised like doom above
+him, hesitated, and the man spoke laughing, "_Wabam wabisca ip pit tah_."
+("Look!  The white fangs!")
+
+The other Indians laughed loudly, and urged the man on to pick up the
+cub.  As the hand descended closer and closer, there raged within the cub
+a battle of the instincts.  He experienced two great impulsions--to yield
+and to fight.  The resulting action was a compromise.  He did both.  He
+yielded till the hand almost touched him.  Then he fought, his teeth
+flashing in a snap that sank them into the hand.  The next moment he
+received a clout alongside the head that knocked him over on his side.
+Then all fight fled out of him.  His puppyhood and the instinct of
+submission took charge of him.  He sat up on his haunches and ki-yi'd.
+But the man whose hand he had bitten was angry.  The cub received a clout
+on the other side of his head.  Whereupon he sat up and ki-yi'd louder
+than ever.
+
+The four Indians laughed more loudly, while even the man who had been
+bitten began to laugh.  They surrounded the cub and laughed at him, while
+he wailed out his terror and his hurt.  In the midst of it, he heard
+something.  The Indians heard it too.  But the cub knew what it was, and
+with a last, long wail that had in it more of triumph than grief, he
+ceased his noise and waited for the coming of his mother, of his
+ferocious and indomitable mother who fought and killed all things and was
+never afraid.  She was snarling as she ran.  She had heard the cry of her
+cub and was dashing to save him.
+
+She bounded in amongst them, her anxious and militant motherhood making
+her anything but a pretty sight.  But to the cub the spectacle of her
+protective rage was pleasing.  He uttered a glad little cry and bounded
+to meet her, while the man-animals went back hastily several steps.  The
+she-wolf stood over against her cub, facing the men, with bristling hair,
+a snarl rumbling deep in her throat.  Her face was distorted and
+malignant with menace, even the bridge of the nose wrinkling from tip to
+eyes so prodigious was her snarl.
+
+Then it was that a cry went up from one of the men.  "Kiche!" was what he
+uttered.  It was an exclamation of surprise.  The cub felt his mother
+wilting at the sound.
+
+"Kiche!" the man cried again, this time with sharpness and authority.
+
+And then the cub saw his mother, the she-wolf, the fearless one,
+crouching down till her belly touched the ground, whimpering, wagging her
+tail, making peace signs.  The cub could not understand.  He was
+appalled.  The awe of man rushed over him again.  His instinct had been
+true.  His mother verified it.  She, too, rendered submission to the man-
+animals.
+
+The man who had spoken came over to her.  He put his hand upon her head,
+and she only crouched closer.  She did not snap, nor threaten to snap.
+The other men came up, and surrounded her, and felt her, and pawed her,
+which actions she made no attempt to resent.  They were greatly excited,
+and made many noises with their mouths.  These noises were not indication
+of danger, the cub decided, as he crouched near his mother still
+bristling from time to time but doing his best to submit.
+
+"It is not strange," an Indian was saying.  "Her father was a wolf.  It
+is true, her mother was a dog; but did not my brother tie her out in the
+woods all of three nights in the mating season?  Therefore was the father
+of Kiche a wolf."
+
+"It is a year, Grey Beaver, since she ran away," spoke a second Indian.
+
+"It is not strange, Salmon Tongue," Grey Beaver answered.  "It was the
+time of the famine, and there was no meat for the dogs."
+
+"She has lived with the wolves," said a third Indian.
+
+"So it would seem, Three Eagles," Grey Beaver answered, laying his hand
+on the cub; "and this be the sign of it."
+
+The cub snarled a little at the touch of the hand, and the hand flew back
+to administer a clout.  Whereupon the cub covered its fangs, and sank
+down submissively, while the hand, returning, rubbed behind his ears, and
+up and down his back.
+
+"This be the sign of it," Grey Beaver went on.  "It is plain that his
+mother is Kiche.  But his father was a wolf.  Wherefore is there in him
+little dog and much wolf.  His fangs be white, and White Fang shall be
+his name.  I have spoken.  He is my dog.  For was not Kiche my brother's
+dog?  And is not my brother dead?"
+
+The cub, who had thus received a name in the world, lay and watched.  For
+a time the man-animals continued to make their mouth-noises.  Then Grey
+Beaver took a knife from a sheath that hung around his neck, and went
+into the thicket and cut a stick.  White Fang watched him.  He notched
+the stick at each end and in the notches fastened strings of raw-hide.
+One string he tied around the throat of Kiche.  Then he led her to a
+small pine, around which he tied the other string.
+
+White Fang followed and lay down beside her.  Salmon Tongue's hand
+reached out to him and rolled him over on his back.  Kiche looked on
+anxiously.  White Fang felt fear mounting in him again.  He could not
+quite suppress a snarl, but he made no offer to snap.  The hand, with
+fingers crooked and spread apart, rubbed his stomach in a playful way and
+rolled him from side to side.  It was ridiculous and ungainly, lying
+there on his back with legs sprawling in the air.  Besides, it was a
+position of such utter helplessness that White Fang's whole nature
+revolted against it.  He could do nothing to defend himself.  If this man-
+animal intended harm, White Fang knew that he could not escape it.  How
+could he spring away with his four legs in the air above him?  Yet
+submission made him master his fear, and he only growled softly.  This
+growl he could not suppress; nor did the man-animal resent it by giving
+him a blow on the head.  And furthermore, such was the strangeness of it,
+White Fang experienced an unaccountable sensation of pleasure as the hand
+rubbed back and forth.  When he was rolled on his side he ceased to
+growl, when the fingers pressed and prodded at the base of his ears the
+pleasurable sensation increased; and when, with a final rub and scratch,
+the man left him alone and went away, all fear had died out of White
+Fang.  He was to know fear many times in his dealing with man; yet it was
+a token of the fearless companionship with man that was ultimately to be
+his.
+
+After a time, White Fang heard strange noises approaching.  He was quick
+in his classification, for he knew them at once for man-animal noises.  A
+few minutes later the remainder of the tribe, strung out as it was on the
+march, trailed in.  There were more men and many women and children,
+forty souls of them, and all heavily burdened with camp equipage and
+outfit.  Also there were many dogs; and these, with the exception of the
+part-grown puppies, were likewise burdened with camp outfit.  On their
+backs, in bags that fastened tightly around underneath, the dogs carried
+from twenty to thirty pounds of weight.
+
+White Fang had never seen dogs before, but at sight of them he felt that
+they were his own kind, only somehow different.  But they displayed
+little difference from the wolf when they discovered the cub and his
+mother.  There was a rush.  White Fang bristled and snarled and snapped
+in the face of the open-mouthed oncoming wave of dogs, and went down and
+under them, feeling the sharp slash of teeth in his body, himself biting
+and tearing at the legs and bellies above him.  There was a great uproar.
+He could hear the snarl of Kiche as she fought for him; and he could hear
+the cries of the man-animals, the sound of clubs striking upon bodies,
+and the yelps of pain from the dogs so struck.
+
+Only a few seconds elapsed before he was on his feet again.  He could now
+see the man-animals driving back the dogs with clubs and stones,
+defending him, saving him from the savage teeth of his kind that somehow
+was not his kind.  And though there was no reason in his brain for a
+clear conception of so abstract a thing as justice, nevertheless, in his
+own way, he felt the justice of the man-animals, and he knew them for
+what they were--makers of law and executors of law.  Also, he appreciated
+the power with which they administered the law.  Unlike any animals he
+had ever encountered, they did not bite nor claw.  They enforced their
+live strength with the power of dead things.  Dead things did their
+bidding.  Thus, sticks and stones, directed by these strange creatures,
+leaped through the air like living things, inflicting grievous hurts upon
+the dogs.
+
+To his mind this was power unusual, power inconceivable and beyond the
+natural, power that was godlike.  White Fang, in the very nature of him,
+could never know anything about gods; at the best he could know only
+things that were beyond knowing--but the wonder and awe that he had of
+these man-animals in ways resembled what would be the wonder and awe of
+man at sight of some celestial creature, on a mountain top, hurling
+thunderbolts from either hand at an astonished world.
+
+The last dog had been driven back.  The hubbub died down.  And White Fang
+licked his hurts and meditated upon this, his first taste of pack-cruelty
+and his introduction to the pack.  He had never dreamed that his own kind
+consisted of more than One Eye, his mother, and himself.  They had
+constituted a kind apart, and here, abruptly, he had discovered many more
+creatures apparently of his own kind.  And there was a subconscious
+resentment that these, his kind, at first sight had pitched upon him and
+tried to destroy him.  In the same way he resented his mother being tied
+with a stick, even though it was done by the superior man-animals.  It
+savoured of the trap, of bondage.  Yet of the trap and of bondage he knew
+nothing.  Freedom to roam and run and lie down at will, had been his
+heritage; and here it was being infringed upon.  His mother's movements
+were restricted to the length of a stick, and by the length of that same
+stick was he restricted, for he had not yet got beyond the need of his
+mother's side.
+
+He did not like it.  Nor did he like it when the man-animals arose and
+went on with their march; for a tiny man-animal took the other end of the
+stick and led Kiche captive behind him, and behind Kiche followed White
+Fang, greatly perturbed and worried by this new adventure he had entered
+upon.
+
+They went down the valley of the stream, far beyond White Fang's widest
+ranging, until they came to the end of the valley, where the stream ran
+into the Mackenzie River.  Here, where canoes were cached on poles high
+in the air and where stood fish-racks for the drying of fish, camp was
+made; and White Fang looked on with wondering eyes.  The superiority of
+these man-animals increased with every moment.  There was their mastery
+over all these sharp-fanged dogs.  It breathed of power.  But greater
+than that, to the wolf-cub, was their mastery over things not alive;
+their capacity to communicate motion to unmoving things; their capacity
+to change the very face of the world.
+
+It was this last that especially affected him.  The elevation of frames
+of poles caught his eye; yet this in itself was not so remarkable, being
+done by the same creatures that flung sticks and stones to great
+distances.  But when the frames of poles were made into tepees by being
+covered with cloth and skins, White Fang was astounded.  It was the
+colossal bulk of them that impressed him.  They arose around him, on
+every side, like some monstrous quick-growing form of life.  They
+occupied nearly the whole circumference of his field of vision.  He was
+afraid of them.  They loomed ominously above him; and when the breeze
+stirred them into huge movements, he cowered down in fear, keeping his
+eyes warily upon them, and prepared to spring away if they attempted to
+precipitate themselves upon him.
+
+But in a short while his fear of the tepees passed away.  He saw the
+women and children passing in and out of them without harm, and he saw
+the dogs trying often to get into them, and being driven away with sharp
+words and flying stones.  After a time, he left Kiche's side and crawled
+cautiously toward the wall of the nearest tepee.  It was the curiosity of
+growth that urged him on--the necessity of learning and living and doing
+that brings experience.  The last few inches to the wall of the tepee
+were crawled with painful slowness and precaution.  The day's events had
+prepared him for the unknown to manifest itself in most stupendous and
+unthinkable ways.  At last his nose touched the canvas.  He waited.
+Nothing happened.  Then he smelled the strange fabric, saturated with the
+man-smell.  He closed on the canvas with his teeth and gave a gentle tug.
+Nothing happened, though the adjacent portions of the tepee moved.  He
+tugged harder.  There was a greater movement.  It was delightful.  He
+tugged still harder, and repeatedly, until the whole tepee was in motion.
+Then the sharp cry of a squaw inside sent him scampering back to Kiche.
+But after that he was afraid no more of the looming bulks of the tepees.
+
+A moment later he was straying away again from his mother.  Her stick was
+tied to a peg in the ground and she could not follow him.  A part-grown
+puppy, somewhat larger and older than he, came toward him slowly, with
+ostentatious and belligerent importance.  The puppy's name, as White Fang
+was afterward to hear him called, was Lip-lip.  He had had experience in
+puppy fights and was already something of a bully.
+
+Lip-lip was White Fang's own kind, and, being only a puppy, did not seem
+dangerous; so White Fang prepared to meet him in a friendly spirit.  But
+when the stranger's walk became stiff-legged and his lips lifted clear of
+his teeth, White Fang stiffened too, and answered with lifted lips.  They
+half circled about each other, tentatively, snarling and bristling.  This
+lasted several minutes, and White Fang was beginning to enjoy it, as a
+sort of game.  But suddenly, with remarkable swiftness, Lip-lip leaped
+in, delivering a slashing snap, and leaped away again.  The snap had
+taken effect on the shoulder that had been hurt by the lynx and that was
+still sore deep down near the bone.  The surprise and hurt of it brought
+a yelp out of White Fang; but the next moment, in a rush of anger, he was
+upon Lip-lip and snapping viciously.
+
+But Lip-lip had lived his life in camp and had fought many puppy fights.
+Three times, four times, and half a dozen times, his sharp little teeth
+scored on the newcomer, until White Fang, yelping shamelessly, fled to
+the protection of his mother.  It was the first of the many fights he was
+to have with Lip-lip, for they were enemies from the start, born so, with
+natures destined perpetually to clash.
+
+Kiche licked White Fang soothingly with her tongue, and tried to prevail
+upon him to remain with her.  But his curiosity was rampant, and several
+minutes later he was venturing forth on a new quest.  He came upon one of
+the man-animals, Grey Beaver, who was squatting on his hams and doing
+something with sticks and dry moss spread before him on the ground.  White
+Fang came near to him and watched.  Grey Beaver made mouth-noises which
+White Fang interpreted as not hostile, so he came still nearer.
+
+Women and children were carrying more sticks and branches to Grey Beaver.
+It was evidently an affair of moment.  White Fang came in until he
+touched Grey Beaver's knee, so curious was he, and already forgetful that
+this was a terrible man-animal.  Suddenly he saw a strange thing like
+mist beginning to arise from the sticks and moss beneath Grey Beaver's
+hands.  Then, amongst the sticks themselves, appeared a live thing,
+twisting and turning, of a colour like the colour of the sun in the sky.
+White Fang knew nothing about fire.  It drew him as the light, in the
+mouth of the cave had drawn him in his early puppyhood.  He crawled the
+several steps toward the flame.  He heard Grey Beaver chuckle above him,
+and he knew the sound was not hostile.  Then his nose touched the flame,
+and at the same instant his little tongue went out to it.
+
+For a moment he was paralysed.  The unknown, lurking in the midst of the
+sticks and moss, was savagely clutching him by the nose.  He scrambled
+backward, bursting out in an astonished explosion of ki-yi's.  At the
+sound, Kiche leaped snarling to the end of her stick, and there raged
+terribly because she could not come to his aid.  But Grey Beaver laughed
+loudly, and slapped his thighs, and told the happening to all the rest of
+the camp, till everybody was laughing uproariously.  But White Fang sat
+on his haunches and ki-yi'd and ki-yi'd, a forlorn and pitiable little
+figure in the midst of the man-animals.
+
+It was the worst hurt he had ever known.  Both nose and tongue had been
+scorched by the live thing, sun-coloured, that had grown up under Grey
+Beaver's hands.  He cried and cried interminably, and every fresh wail
+was greeted by bursts of laughter on the part of the man-animals.  He
+tried to soothe his nose with his tongue, but the tongue was burnt too,
+and the two hurts coming together produced greater hurt; whereupon he
+cried more hopelessly and helplessly than ever.
+
+And then shame came to him.  He knew laughter and the meaning of it.  It
+is not given us to know how some animals know laughter, and know when
+they are being laughed at; but it was this same way that White Fang knew
+it.  And he felt shame that the man-animals should be laughing at him.  He
+turned and fled away, not from the hurt of the fire, but from the
+laughter that sank even deeper, and hurt in the spirit of him.  And he
+fled to Kiche, raging at the end of her stick like an animal gone mad--to
+Kiche, the one creature in the world who was not laughing at him.
+
+Twilight drew down and night came on, and White Fang lay by his mother's
+side.  His nose and tongue still hurt, but he was perplexed by a greater
+trouble.  He was homesick.  He felt a vacancy in him, a need for the hush
+and quietude of the stream and the cave in the cliff.  Life had become
+too populous.  There were so many of the man-animals, men, women, and
+children, all making noises and irritations.  And there were the dogs,
+ever squabbling and bickering, bursting into uproars and creating
+confusions.  The restful loneliness of the only life he had known was
+gone.  Here the very air was palpitant with life.  It hummed and buzzed
+unceasingly.  Continually changing its intensity and abruptly variant in
+pitch, it impinged on his nerves and senses, made him nervous and
+restless and worried him with a perpetual imminence of happening.
+
+He watched the man-animals coming and going and moving about the camp.  In
+fashion distantly resembling the way men look upon the gods they create,
+so looked White Fang upon the man-animals before him.  They were superior
+creatures, of a verity, gods.  To his dim comprehension they were as much
+wonder-workers as gods are to men.  They were creatures of mastery,
+possessing all manner of unknown and impossible potencies, overlords of
+the alive and the not alive--making obey that which moved, imparting
+movement to that which did not move, and making life, sun-coloured and
+biting life, to grow out of dead moss and wood.  They were fire-makers!
+They were gods.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II--THE BONDAGE
+
+
+The days were thronged with experience for White Fang.  During the time
+that Kiche was tied by the stick, he ran about over all the camp,
+inquiring, investigating, learning.  He quickly came to know much of the
+ways of the man-animals, but familiarity did not breed contempt.  The
+more he came to know them, the more they vindicated their superiority,
+the more they displayed their mysterious powers, the greater loomed their
+god-likeness.
+
+To man has been given the grief, often, of seeing his gods overthrown and
+his altars crumbling; but to the wolf and the wild dog that have come in
+to crouch at man's feet, this grief has never come.  Unlike man, whose
+gods are of the unseen and the overguessed, vapours and mists of fancy
+eluding the garmenture of reality, wandering wraiths of desired goodness
+and power, intangible out-croppings of self into the realm of
+spirit--unlike man, the wolf and the wild dog that have come in to the
+fire find their gods in the living flesh, solid to the touch, occupying
+earth-space and requiring time for the accomplishment of their ends and
+their existence.  No effort of faith is necessary to believe in such a
+god; no effort of will can possibly induce disbelief in such a god.  There
+is no getting away from it.  There it stands, on its two hind-legs, club
+in hand, immensely potential, passionate and wrathful and loving, god and
+mystery and power all wrapped up and around by flesh that bleeds when it
+is torn and that is good to eat like any flesh.
+
+And so it was with White Fang.  The man-animals were gods unmistakable
+and unescapable.  As his mother, Kiche, had rendered her allegiance to
+them at the first cry of her name, so he was beginning to render his
+allegiance.  He gave them the trail as a privilege indubitably theirs.
+When they walked, he got out of their way.  When they called, he came.
+When they threatened, he cowered down.  When they commanded him to go, he
+went away hurriedly.  For behind any wish of theirs was power to enforce
+that wish, power that hurt, power that expressed itself in clouts and
+clubs, in flying stones and stinging lashes of whips.
+
+He belonged to them as all dogs belonged to them.  His actions were
+theirs to command.  His body was theirs to maul, to stamp upon, to
+tolerate.  Such was the lesson that was quickly borne in upon him.  It
+came hard, going as it did, counter to much that was strong and dominant
+in his own nature; and, while he disliked it in the learning of it,
+unknown to himself he was learning to like it.  It was a placing of his
+destiny in another's hands, a shifting of the responsibilities of
+existence.  This in itself was compensation, for it is always easier to
+lean upon another than to stand alone.
+
+But it did not all happen in a day, this giving over of himself, body and
+soul, to the man-animals.  He could not immediately forego his wild
+heritage and his memories of the Wild.  There were days when he crept to
+the edge of the forest and stood and listened to something calling him
+far and away.  And always he returned, restless and uncomfortable, to
+whimper softly and wistfully at Kiche's side and to lick her face with
+eager, questioning tongue.
+
+White Fang learned rapidly the ways of the camp.  He knew the injustice
+and greediness of the older dogs when meat or fish was thrown out to be
+eaten.  He came to know that men were more just, children more cruel, and
+women more kindly and more likely to toss him a bit of meat or bone.  And
+after two or three painful adventures with the mothers of part-grown
+puppies, he came into the knowledge that it was always good policy to let
+such mothers alone, to keep away from them as far as possible, and to
+avoid them when he saw them coming.
+
+But the bane of his life was Lip-lip.  Larger, older, and stronger, Lip-
+lip had selected White Fang for his special object of persecution.  While
+Fang fought willingly enough, but he was outclassed.  His enemy was too
+big.  Lip-lip became a nightmare to him.  Whenever he ventured away from
+his mother, the bully was sure to appear, trailing at his heels, snarling
+at him, picking upon him, and watchful of an opportunity, when no man-
+animal was near, to spring upon him and force a fight.  As Lip-lip
+invariably won, he enjoyed it hugely.  It became his chief delight in
+life, as it became White Fang's chief torment.
+
+But the effect upon White Fang was not to cow him.  Though he suffered
+most of the damage and was always defeated, his spirit remained
+unsubdued.  Yet a bad effect was produced.  He became malignant and
+morose.  His temper had been savage by birth, but it became more savage
+under this unending persecution.  The genial, playful, puppyish side of
+him found little expression.  He never played and gambolled about with
+the other puppies of the camp.  Lip-lip would not permit it.  The moment
+White Fang appeared near them, Lip-lip was upon him, bullying and
+hectoring him, or fighting with him until he had driven him away.
+
+The effect of all this was to rob White Fang of much of his puppyhood and
+to make him in his comportment older than his age.  Denied the outlet,
+through play, of his energies, he recoiled upon himself and developed his
+mental processes.  He became cunning; he had idle time in which to devote
+himself to thoughts of trickery.  Prevented from obtaining his share of
+meat and fish when a general feed was given to the camp-dogs, he became a
+clever thief.  He had to forage for himself, and he foraged well, though
+he was oft-times a plague to the squaws in consequence.  He learned to
+sneak about camp, to be crafty, to know what was going on everywhere, to
+see and to hear everything and to reason accordingly, and successfully to
+devise ways and means of avoiding his implacable persecutor.
+
+It was early in the days of his persecution that he played his first
+really big crafty game and got therefrom his first taste of revenge.  As
+Kiche, when with the wolves, had lured out to destruction dogs from the
+camps of men, so White Fang, in manner somewhat similar, lured Lip-lip
+into Kiche's avenging jaws.  Retreating before Lip-lip, White Fang made
+an indirect flight that led in and out and around the various tepees of
+the camp.  He was a good runner, swifter than any puppy of his size, and
+swifter than Lip-lip.  But he did not run his best in this chase.  He
+barely held his own, one leap ahead of his pursuer.
+
+Lip-lip, excited by the chase and by the persistent nearness of his
+victim, forgot caution and locality.  When he remembered locality, it was
+too late.  Dashing at top speed around a tepee, he ran full tilt into
+Kiche lying at the end of her stick.  He gave one yelp of consternation,
+and then her punishing jaws closed upon him.  She was tied, but he could
+not get away from her easily.  She rolled him off his legs so that he
+could not run, while she repeatedly ripped and slashed him with her
+fangs.
+
+When at last he succeeded in rolling clear of her, he crawled to his
+feet, badly dishevelled, hurt both in body and in spirit.  His hair was
+standing out all over him in tufts where her teeth had mauled.  He stood
+where he had arisen, opened his mouth, and broke out the long,
+heart-broken puppy wail.  But even this he was not allowed to complete.
+In the middle of it, White Fang, rushing in, sank his teeth into
+Lip-lip's hind leg.  There was no fight left in Lip-lip, and he ran away
+shamelessly, his victim hot on his heels and worrying him all the way
+back to his own tepee.  Here the squaws came to his aid, and White Fang,
+transformed into a raging demon, was finally driven off only by a
+fusillade of stones.
+
+Came the day when Grey Beaver, deciding that the liability of her running
+away was past, released Kiche.  White Fang was delighted with his
+mother's freedom.  He accompanied her joyfully about the camp; and, so
+long as he remained close by her side, Lip-lip kept a respectful
+distance.  White Fang even bristled up to him and walked stiff-legged,
+but Lip-lip ignored the challenge.  He was no fool himself, and whatever
+vengeance he desired to wreak, he could wait until he caught White Fang
+alone.
+
+Later on that day, Kiche and White Fang strayed into the edge of the
+woods next to the camp.  He had led his mother there, step by step, and
+now when she stopped, he tried to inveigle her farther.  The stream, the
+lair, and the quiet woods were calling to him, and he wanted her to come.
+He ran on a few steps, stopped, and looked back.  She had not moved.  He
+whined pleadingly, and scurried playfully in and out of the underbrush.
+He ran back to her, licked her face, and ran on again.  And still she did
+not move.  He stopped and regarded her, all of an intentness and
+eagerness, physically expressed, that slowly faded out of him as she
+turned her head and gazed back at the camp.
+
+There was something calling to him out there in the open.  His mother
+heard it too.  But she heard also that other and louder call, the call of
+the fire and of man--the call which has been given alone of all animals
+to the wolf to answer, to the wolf and the wild-dog, who are brothers.
+
+Kiche turned and slowly trotted back toward camp.  Stronger than the
+physical restraint of the stick was the clutch of the camp upon her.
+Unseen and occultly, the gods still gripped with their power and would
+not let her go.  White Fang sat down in the shadow of a birch and
+whimpered softly.  There was a strong smell of pine, and subtle wood
+fragrances filled the air, reminding him of his old life of freedom
+before the days of his bondage.  But he was still only a part-grown
+puppy, and stronger than the call either of man or of the Wild was the
+call of his mother.  All the hours of his short life he had depended upon
+her.  The time was yet to come for independence.  So he arose and trotted
+forlornly back to camp, pausing once, and twice, to sit down and whimper
+and to listen to the call that still sounded in the depths of the forest.
+
+In the Wild the time of a mother with her young is short; but under the
+dominion of man it is sometimes even shorter.  Thus it was with White
+Fang.  Grey Beaver was in the debt of Three Eagles.  Three Eagles was
+going away on a trip up the Mackenzie to the Great Slave Lake.  A strip
+of scarlet cloth, a bearskin, twenty cartridges, and Kiche, went to pay
+the debt.  White Fang saw his mother taken aboard Three Eagles' canoe,
+and tried to follow her.  A blow from Three Eagles knocked him backward
+to the land.  The canoe shoved off.  He sprang into the water and swam
+after it, deaf to the sharp cries of Grey Beaver to return.  Even a man-
+animal, a god, White Fang ignored, such was the terror he was in of
+losing his mother.
+
+But gods are accustomed to being obeyed, and Grey Beaver wrathfully
+launched a canoe in pursuit.  When he overtook White Fang, he reached
+down and by the nape of the neck lifted him clear of the water.  He did
+not deposit him at once in the bottom of the canoe.  Holding him
+suspended with one hand, with the other hand he proceeded to give him a
+beating.  And it _was_ a beating.  His hand was heavy.  Every blow was
+shrewd to hurt; and he delivered a multitude of blows.
+
+Impelled by the blows that rained upon him, now from this side, now from
+that, White Fang swung back and forth like an erratic and jerky pendulum.
+Varying were the emotions that surged through him.  At first, he had
+known surprise.  Then came a momentary fear, when he yelped several times
+to the impact of the hand.  But this was quickly followed by anger.  His
+free nature asserted itself, and he showed his teeth and snarled
+fearlessly in the face of the wrathful god.  This but served to make the
+god more wrathful.  The blows came faster, heavier, more shrewd to hurt.
+
+Grey Beaver continued to beat, White Fang continued to snarl.  But this
+could not last for ever.  One or the other must give over, and that one
+was White Fang.  Fear surged through him again.  For the first time he
+was being really man-handled.  The occasional blows of sticks and stones
+he had previously experienced were as caresses compared with this.  He
+broke down and began to cry and yelp.  For a time each blow brought a
+yelp from him; but fear passed into terror, until finally his yelps were
+voiced in unbroken succession, unconnected with the rhythm of the
+punishment.
+
+At last Grey Beaver withheld his hand.  White Fang, hanging limply,
+continued to cry.  This seemed to satisfy his master, who flung him down
+roughly in the bottom of the canoe.  In the meantime the canoe had
+drifted down the stream.  Grey Beaver picked up the paddle.  White Fang
+was in his way.  He spurned him savagely with his foot.  In that moment
+White Fang's free nature flashed forth again, and he sank his teeth into
+the moccasined foot.
+
+The beating that had gone before was as nothing compared with the beating
+he now received.  Grey Beaver's wrath was terrible; likewise was White
+Fang's fright.  Not only the hand, but the hard wooden paddle was used
+upon him; and he was bruised and sore in all his small body when he was
+again flung down in the canoe.  Again, and this time with purpose, did
+Grey Beaver kick him.  White Fang did not repeat his attack on the foot.
+He had learned another lesson of his bondage.  Never, no matter what the
+circumstance, must he dare to bite the god who was lord and master over
+him; the body of the lord and master was sacred, not to be defiled by the
+teeth of such as he.  That was evidently the crime of crimes, the one
+offence there was no condoning nor overlooking.
+
+When the canoe touched the shore, White Fang lay whimpering and
+motionless, waiting the will of Grey Beaver.  It was Grey Beaver's will
+that he should go ashore, for ashore he was flung, striking heavily on
+his side and hurting his bruises afresh.  He crawled tremblingly to his
+feet and stood whimpering.  Lip-lip, who had watched the whole proceeding
+from the bank, now rushed upon him, knocking him over and sinking his
+teeth into him.  White Fang was too helpless to defend himself, and it
+would have gone hard with him had not Grey Beaver's foot shot out,
+lifting Lip-lip into the air with its violence so that he smashed down to
+earth a dozen feet away.  This was the man-animal's justice; and even
+then, in his own pitiable plight, White Fang experienced a little
+grateful thrill.  At Grey Beaver's heels he limped obediently through the
+village to the tepee.  And so it came that White Fang learned that the
+right to punish was something the gods reserved for themselves and denied
+to the lesser creatures under them.
+
+That night, when all was still, White Fang remembered his mother and
+sorrowed for her.  He sorrowed too loudly and woke up Grey Beaver, who
+beat him.  After that he mourned gently when the gods were around.  But
+sometimes, straying off to the edge of the woods by himself, he gave vent
+to his grief, and cried it out with loud whimperings and wailings.
+
+It was during this period that he might have harkened to the memories of
+the lair and the stream and run back to the Wild.  But the memory of his
+mother held him.  As the hunting man-animals went out and came back, so
+she would come back to the village some time.  So he remained in his
+bondage waiting for her.
+
+But it was not altogether an unhappy bondage.  There was much to interest
+him.  Something was always happening.  There was no end to the strange
+things these gods did, and he was always curious to see.  Besides, he was
+learning how to get along with Grey Beaver.  Obedience, rigid,
+undeviating obedience, was what was exacted of him; and in return he
+escaped beatings and his existence was tolerated.
+
+Nay, Grey Beaver himself sometimes tossed him a piece of meat, and
+defended him against the other dogs in the eating of it.  And such a
+piece of meat was of value.  It was worth more, in some strange way, then
+a dozen pieces of meat from the hand of a squaw.  Grey Beaver never
+petted nor caressed.  Perhaps it was the weight of his hand, perhaps his
+justice, perhaps the sheer power of him, and perhaps it was all these
+things that influenced White Fang; for a certain tie of attachment was
+forming between him and his surly lord.
+
+Insidiously, and by remote ways, as well as by the power of stick and
+stone and clout of hand, were the shackles of White Fang's bondage being
+riveted upon him.  The qualities in his kind that in the beginning made
+it possible for them to come in to the fires of men, were qualities
+capable of development.  They were developing in him, and the camp-life,
+replete with misery as it was, was secretly endearing itself to him all
+the time.  But White Fang was unaware of it.  He knew only grief for the
+loss of Kiche, hope for her return, and a hungry yearning for the free
+life that had been his.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III--THE OUTCAST
+
+
+Lip-lip continued so to darken his days that White Fang became wickeder
+and more ferocious than it was his natural right to be.  Savageness was a
+part of his make-up, but the savageness thus developed exceeded his make-
+up.  He acquired a reputation for wickedness amongst the man-animals
+themselves.  Wherever there was trouble and uproar in camp, fighting and
+squabbling or the outcry of a squaw over a bit of stolen meat, they were
+sure to find White Fang mixed up in it and usually at the bottom of it.
+They did not bother to look after the causes of his conduct.  They saw
+only the effects, and the effects were bad.  He was a sneak and a thief,
+a mischief-maker, a fomenter of trouble; and irate squaws told him to his
+face, the while he eyed them alert and ready to dodge any quick-flung
+missile, that he was a wolf and worthless and bound to come to an evil
+end.
+
+He found himself an outcast in the midst of the populous camp.  All the
+young dogs followed Lip-lip's lead.  There was a difference between White
+Fang and them.  Perhaps they sensed his wild-wood breed, and
+instinctively felt for him the enmity that the domestic dog feels for the
+wolf.  But be that as it may, they joined with Lip-lip in the
+persecution.  And, once declared against him, they found good reason to
+continue declared against him.  One and all, from time to time, they felt
+his teeth; and to his credit, he gave more than he received.  Many of
+them he could whip in single fight; but single fight was denied him.  The
+beginning of such a fight was a signal for all the young dogs in camp to
+come running and pitch upon him.
+
+Out of this pack-persecution he learned two important things: how to take
+care of himself in a mass-fight against him--and how, on a single dog, to
+inflict the greatest amount of damage in the briefest space of time.  To
+keep one's feet in the midst of the hostile mass meant life, and this he
+learnt well.  He became cat-like in his ability to stay on his feet.  Even
+grown dogs might hurtle him backward or sideways with the impact of their
+heavy bodies; and backward or sideways he would go, in the air or sliding
+on the ground, but always with his legs under him and his feet downward
+to the mother earth.
+
+When dogs fight, there are usually preliminaries to the actual
+combat--snarlings and bristlings and stiff-legged struttings.  But White
+Fang learned to omit these preliminaries.  Delay meant the coming against
+him of all the young dogs.  He must do his work quickly and get away.  So
+he learnt to give no warning of his intention.  He rushed in and snapped
+and slashed on the instant, without notice, before his foe could prepare
+to meet him.  Thus he learned how to inflict quick and severe damage.
+Also he learned the value of surprise.  A dog, taken off its guard, its
+shoulder slashed open or its ear ripped in ribbons before it knew what
+was happening, was a dog half whipped.
+
+Furthermore, it was remarkably easy to overthrow a dog taken by surprise;
+while a dog, thus overthrown, invariably exposed for a moment the soft
+underside of its neck--the vulnerable point at which to strike for its
+life.  White Fang knew this point.  It was a knowledge bequeathed to him
+directly from the hunting generation of wolves.  So it was that White
+Fang's method when he took the offensive, was: first to find a young dog
+alone; second, to surprise it and knock it off its feet; and third, to
+drive in with his teeth at the soft throat.
+
+Being but partly grown his jaws had not yet become large enough nor
+strong enough to make his throat-attack deadly; but many a young dog went
+around camp with a lacerated throat in token of White Fang's intention.
+And one day, catching one of his enemies alone on the edge of the woods,
+he managed, by repeatedly overthrowing him and attacking the throat, to
+cut the great vein and let out the life.  There was a great row that
+night.  He had been observed, the news had been carried to the dead dog's
+master, the squaws remembered all the instances of stolen meat, and Grey
+Beaver was beset by many angry voices.  But he resolutely held the door
+of his tepee, inside which he had placed the culprit, and refused to
+permit the vengeance for which his tribespeople clamoured.
+
+White Fang became hated by man and dog.  During this period of his
+development he never knew a moment's security.  The tooth of every dog
+was against him, the hand of every man.  He was greeted with snarls by
+his kind, with curses and stones by his gods.  He lived tensely.  He was
+always keyed up, alert for attack, wary of being attacked, with an eye
+for sudden and unexpected missiles, prepared to act precipitately and
+coolly, to leap in with a flash of teeth, or to leap away with a menacing
+snarl.
+
+As for snarling he could snarl more terribly than any dog, young or old,
+in camp.  The intent of the snarl is to warn or frighten, and judgment is
+required to know when it should be used.  White Fang knew how to make it
+and when to make it.  Into his snarl he incorporated all that was
+vicious, malignant, and horrible.  With nose serrulated by continuous
+spasms, hair bristling in recurrent waves, tongue whipping out like a red
+snake and whipping back again, ears flattened down, eyes gleaming hatred,
+lips wrinkled back, and fangs exposed and dripping, he could compel a
+pause on the part of almost any assailant.  A temporary pause, when taken
+off his guard, gave him the vital moment in which to think and determine
+his action.  But often a pause so gained lengthened out until it evolved
+into a complete cessation from the attack.  And before more than one of
+the grown dogs White Fang's snarl enabled him to beat an honourable
+retreat.
+
+An outcast himself from the pack of the part-grown dogs, his sanguinary
+methods and remarkable efficiency made the pack pay for its persecution
+of him.  Not permitted himself to run with the pack, the curious state of
+affairs obtained that no member of the pack could run outside the pack.
+White Fang would not permit it.  What of his bushwhacking and waylaying
+tactics, the young dogs were afraid to run by themselves.  With the
+exception of Lip-lip, they were compelled to hunch together for mutual
+protection against the terrible enemy they had made.  A puppy alone by
+the river bank meant a puppy dead or a puppy that aroused the camp with
+its shrill pain and terror as it fled back from the wolf-cub that had
+waylaid it.
+
+But White Fang's reprisals did not cease, even when the young dogs had
+learned thoroughly that they must stay together.  He attacked them when
+he caught them alone, and they attacked him when they were bunched.  The
+sight of him was sufficient to start them rushing after him, at which
+times his swiftness usually carried him into safety.  But woe the dog
+that outran his fellows in such pursuit!  White Fang had learned to turn
+suddenly upon the pursuer that was ahead of the pack and thoroughly to
+rip him up before the pack could arrive.  This occurred with great
+frequency, for, once in full cry, the dogs were prone to forget
+themselves in the excitement of the chase, while White Fang never forgot
+himself.  Stealing backward glances as he ran, he was always ready to
+whirl around and down the overzealous pursuer that outran his fellows.
+
+Young dogs are bound to play, and out of the exigencies of the situation
+they realised their play in this mimic warfare.  Thus it was that the
+hunt of White Fang became their chief game--a deadly game, withal, and at
+all times a serious game.  He, on the other hand, being the
+fastest-footed, was unafraid to venture anywhere.  During the period that
+he waited vainly for his mother to come back, he led the pack many a wild
+chase through the adjacent woods.  But the pack invariably lost him.  Its
+noise and outcry warned him of its presence, while he ran alone, velvet-
+footed, silently, a moving shadow among the trees after the manner of his
+father and mother before him.  Further he was more directly connected
+with the Wild than they; and he knew more of its secrets and stratagems.
+A favourite trick of his was to lose his trail in running water and then
+lie quietly in a near-by thicket while their baffled cries arose around
+him.
+
+Hated by his kind and by mankind, indomitable, perpetually warred upon
+and himself waging perpetual war, his development was rapid and
+one-sided.  This was no soil for kindliness and affection to blossom in.
+Of such things he had not the faintest glimmering.  The code he learned
+was to obey the strong and to oppress the weak.  Grey Beaver was a god,
+and strong.  Therefore White Fang obeyed him.  But the dog younger or
+smaller than himself was weak, a thing to be destroyed.  His development
+was in the direction of power.  In order to face the constant danger of
+hurt and even of destruction, his predatory and protective faculties were
+unduly developed.  He became quicker of movement than the other dogs,
+swifter of foot, craftier, deadlier, more lithe, more lean with ironlike
+muscle and sinew, more enduring, more cruel, more ferocious, and more
+intelligent.  He had to become all these things, else he would not have
+held his own nor survive the hostile environment in which he found
+himself.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV--THE TRAIL OF THE GODS
+
+
+In the fall of the year, when the days were shortening and the bite of
+the frost was coming into the air, White Fang got his chance for liberty.
+For several days there had been a great hubbub in the village.  The
+summer camp was being dismantled, and the tribe, bag and baggage, was
+preparing to go off to the fall hunting.  White Fang watched it all with
+eager eyes, and when the tepees began to come down and the canoes were
+loading at the bank, he understood.  Already the canoes were departing,
+and some had disappeared down the river.
+
+Quite deliberately he determined to stay behind.  He waited his
+opportunity to slink out of camp to the woods.  Here, in the running
+stream where ice was beginning to form, he hid his trail.  Then he
+crawled into the heart of a dense thicket and waited.  The time passed
+by, and he slept intermittently for hours.  Then he was aroused by Grey
+Beaver's voice calling him by name.  There were other voices.  White Fang
+could hear Grey Beaver's squaw taking part in the search, and Mit-sah,
+who was Grey Beaver's son.
+
+White Fang trembled with fear, and though the impulse came to crawl out
+of his hiding-place, he resisted it.  After a time the voices died away,
+and some time after that he crept out to enjoy the success of his
+undertaking.  Darkness was coming on, and for a while he played about
+among the trees, pleasuring in his freedom.  Then, and quite suddenly, he
+became aware of loneliness.  He sat down to consider, listening to the
+silence of the forest and perturbed by it.  That nothing moved nor
+sounded, seemed ominous.  He felt the lurking of danger, unseen and
+unguessed.  He was suspicious of the looming bulks of the trees and of
+the dark shadows that might conceal all manner of perilous things.
+
+Then it was cold.  Here was no warm side of a tepee against which to
+snuggle.  The frost was in his feet, and he kept lifting first one fore-
+foot and then the other.  He curved his bushy tail around to cover them,
+and at the same time he saw a vision.  There was nothing strange about
+it.  Upon his inward sight was impressed a succession of memory-pictures.
+He saw the camp again, the tepees, and the blaze of the fires.  He heard
+the shrill voices of the women, the gruff basses of the men, and the
+snarling of the dogs.  He was hungry, and he remembered pieces of meat
+and fish that had been thrown him.  Here was no meat, nothing but a
+threatening and inedible silence.
+
+His bondage had softened him.  Irresponsibility had weakened him.  He had
+forgotten how to shift for himself.  The night yawned about him.  His
+senses, accustomed to the hum and bustle of the camp, used to the
+continuous impact of sights and sounds, were now left idle.  There was
+nothing to do, nothing to see nor hear.  They strained to catch some
+interruption of the silence and immobility of nature.  They were appalled
+by inaction and by the feel of something terrible impending.
+
+He gave a great start of fright.  A colossal and formless something was
+rushing across the field of his vision.  It was a tree-shadow flung by
+the moon, from whose face the clouds had been brushed away.  Reassured,
+he whimpered softly; then he suppressed the whimper for fear that it
+might attract the attention of the lurking dangers.
+
+A tree, contracting in the cool of the night, made a loud noise.  It was
+directly above him.  He yelped in his fright.  A panic seized him, and he
+ran madly toward the village.  He knew an overpowering desire for the
+protection and companionship of man.  In his nostrils was the smell of
+the camp-smoke.  In his ears the camp-sounds and cries were ringing loud.
+He passed out of the forest and into the moonlit open where were no
+shadows nor darknesses.  But no village greeted his eyes.  He had
+forgotten.  The village had gone away.
+
+His wild flight ceased abruptly.  There was no place to which to flee.  He
+slunk forlornly through the deserted camp, smelling the rubbish-heaps and
+the discarded rags and tags of the gods.  He would have been glad for the
+rattle of stones about him, flung by an angry squaw, glad for the hand of
+Grey Beaver descending upon him in wrath; while he would have welcomed
+with delight Lip-lip and the whole snarling, cowardly pack.
+
+He came to where Grey Beaver's tepee had stood.  In the centre of the
+space it had occupied, he sat down.  He pointed his nose at the moon.  His
+throat was afflicted by rigid spasms, his mouth opened, and in a heart-
+broken cry bubbled up his loneliness and fear, his grief for Kiche, all
+his past sorrows and miseries as well as his apprehension of sufferings
+and dangers to come.  It was the long wolf-howl, full-throated and
+mournful, the first howl he had ever uttered.
+
+The coming of daylight dispelled his fears but increased his loneliness.
+The naked earth, which so shortly before had been so populous, thrust his
+loneliness more forcibly upon him.  It did not take him long to make up
+his mind.  He plunged into the forest and followed the river bank down
+the stream.  All day he ran.  He did not rest.  He seemed made to run on
+forever.  His iron-like body ignored fatigue.  And even after fatigue
+came, his heritage of endurance braced him to endless endeavour and
+enabled him to drive his complaining body onward.
+
+Where the river swung in against precipitous bluffs, he climbed the high
+mountains behind.  Rivers and streams that entered the main river he
+forded or swam.  Often he took to the rim-ice that was beginning to form,
+and more than once he crashed through and struggled for life in the icy
+current.  Always he was on the lookout for the trail of the gods where it
+might leave the river and proceed inland.
+
+White Fang was intelligent beyond the average of his kind; yet his mental
+vision was not wide enough to embrace the other bank of the Mackenzie.
+What if the trail of the gods led out on that side?  It never entered his
+head.  Later on, when he had travelled more and grown older and wiser and
+come to know more of trails and rivers, it might be that he could grasp
+and apprehend such a possibility.  But that mental power was yet in the
+future.  Just now he ran blindly, his own bank of the Mackenzie alone
+entering into his calculations.
+
+All night he ran, blundering in the darkness into mishaps and obstacles
+that delayed but did not daunt.  By the middle of the second day he had
+been running continuously for thirty hours, and the iron of his flesh was
+giving out.  It was the endurance of his mind that kept him going.  He
+had not eaten in forty hours, and he was weak with hunger.  The repeated
+drenchings in the icy water had likewise had their effect on him.  His
+handsome coat was draggled.  The broad pads of his feet were bruised and
+bleeding.  He had begun to limp, and this limp increased with the hours.
+To make it worse, the light of the sky was obscured and snow began to
+fall--a raw, moist, melting, clinging snow, slippery under foot, that hid
+from him the landscape he traversed, and that covered over the
+inequalities of the ground so that the way of his feet was more difficult
+and painful.
+
+Grey Beaver had intended camping that night on the far bank of the
+Mackenzie, for it was in that direction that the hunting lay.  But on the
+near bank, shortly before dark, a moose coming down to drink, had been
+espied by Kloo-kooch, who was Grey Beaver's squaw.  Now, had not the
+moose come down to drink, had not Mit-sah been steering out of the course
+because of the snow, had not Kloo-kooch sighted the moose, and had not
+Grey Beaver killed it with a lucky shot from his rifle, all subsequent
+things would have happened differently.  Grey Beaver would not have
+camped on the near side of the Mackenzie, and White Fang would have
+passed by and gone on, either to die or to find his way to his wild
+brothers and become one of them--a wolf to the end of his days.
+
+Night had fallen.  The snow was flying more thickly, and White Fang,
+whimpering softly to himself as he stumbled and limped along, came upon a
+fresh trail in the snow.  So fresh was it that he knew it immediately for
+what it was.  Whining with eagerness, he followed back from the river
+bank and in among the trees.  The camp-sounds came to his ears.  He saw
+the blaze of the fire, Kloo-kooch cooking, and Grey Beaver squatting on
+his hams and mumbling a chunk of raw tallow.  There was fresh meat in
+camp!
+
+White Fang expected a beating.  He crouched and bristled a little at the
+thought of it.  Then he went forward again.  He feared and disliked the
+beating he knew to be waiting for him.  But he knew, further, that the
+comfort of the fire would be his, the protection of the gods, the
+companionship of the dogs--the last, a companionship of enmity, but none
+the less a companionship and satisfying to his gregarious needs.
+
+He came cringing and crawling into the firelight.  Grey Beaver saw him,
+and stopped munching the tallow.  White Fang crawled slowly, cringing and
+grovelling in the abjectness of his abasement and submission.  He crawled
+straight toward Grey Beaver, every inch of his progress becoming slower
+and more painful.  At last he lay at the master's feet, into whose
+possession he now surrendered himself, voluntarily, body and soul.  Of
+his own choice, he came in to sit by man's fire and to be ruled by him.
+White Fang trembled, waiting for the punishment to fall upon him.  There
+was a movement of the hand above him.  He cringed involuntarily under the
+expected blow.  It did not fall.  He stole a glance upward.  Grey Beaver
+was breaking the lump of tallow in half!  Grey Beaver was offering him
+one piece of the tallow!  Very gently and somewhat suspiciously, he first
+smelled the tallow and then proceeded to eat it.  Grey Beaver ordered
+meat to be brought to him, and guarded him from the other dogs while he
+ate.  After that, grateful and content, White Fang lay at Grey Beaver's
+feet, gazing at the fire that warmed him, blinking and dozing, secure in
+the knowledge that the morrow would find him, not wandering forlorn
+through bleak forest-stretches, but in the camp of the man-animals, with
+the gods to whom he had given himself and upon whom he was now dependent.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V--THE COVENANT
+
+
+When December was well along, Grey Beaver went on a journey up the
+Mackenzie.  Mit-sah and Kloo-kooch went with him.  One sled he drove
+himself, drawn by dogs he had traded for or borrowed.  A second and
+smaller sled was driven by Mit-sah, and to this was harnessed a team of
+puppies.  It was more of a toy affair than anything else, yet it was the
+delight of Mit-sah, who felt that he was beginning to do a man's work in
+the world.  Also, he was learning to drive dogs and to train dogs; while
+the puppies themselves were being broken in to the harness.  Furthermore,
+the sled was of some service, for it carried nearly two hundred pounds of
+outfit and food.
+
+White Fang had seen the camp-dogs toiling in the harness, so that he did
+not resent overmuch the first placing of the harness upon himself.  About
+his neck was put a moss-stuffed collar, which was connected by two
+pulling-traces to a strap that passed around his chest and over his back.
+It was to this that was fastened the long rope by which he pulled at the
+sled.
+
+There were seven puppies in the team.  The others had been born earlier
+in the year and were nine and ten months old, while White Fang was only
+eight months old.  Each dog was fastened to the sled by a single rope.  No
+two ropes were of the same length, while the difference in length between
+any two ropes was at least that of a dog's body.  Every rope was brought
+to a ring at the front end of the sled.  The sled itself was without
+runners, being a birch-bark toboggan, with upturned forward end to keep
+it from ploughing under the snow.  This construction enabled the weight
+of the sled and load to be distributed over the largest snow-surface; for
+the snow was crystal-powder and very soft.  Observing the same principle
+of widest distribution of weight, the dogs at the ends of their ropes
+radiated fan-fashion from the nose of the sled, so that no dog trod in
+another's footsteps.
+
+There was, furthermore, another virtue in the fan-formation.  The ropes
+of varying length prevented the dogs attacking from the rear those that
+ran in front of them.  For a dog to attack another, it would have to turn
+upon one at a shorter rope.  In which case it would find itself face to
+face with the dog attacked, and also it would find itself facing the whip
+of the driver.  But the most peculiar virtue of all lay in the fact that
+the dog that strove to attack one in front of him must pull the sled
+faster, and that the faster the sled travelled, the faster could the dog
+attacked run away.  Thus, the dog behind could never catch up with the
+one in front.  The faster he ran, the faster ran the one he was after,
+and the faster ran all the dogs.  Incidentally, the sled went faster, and
+thus, by cunning indirection, did man increase his mastery over the
+beasts.
+
+Mit-sah resembled his father, much of whose grey wisdom he possessed.  In
+the past he had observed Lip-lip's persecution of White Fang; but at that
+time Lip-lip was another man's dog, and Mit-sah had never dared more than
+to shy an occasional stone at him.  But now Lip-lip was his dog, and he
+proceeded to wreak his vengeance on him by putting him at the end of the
+longest rope.  This made Lip-lip the leader, and was apparently an
+honour! but in reality it took away from him all honour, and instead of
+being bully and master of the pack, he now found himself hated and
+persecuted by the pack.
+
+Because he ran at the end of the longest rope, the dogs had always the
+view of him running away before them.  All that they saw of him was his
+bushy tail and fleeing hind legs--a view far less ferocious and
+intimidating than his bristling mane and gleaming fangs.  Also, dogs
+being so constituted in their mental ways, the sight of him running away
+gave desire to run after him and a feeling that he ran away from them.
+
+The moment the sled started, the team took after Lip-lip in a chase that
+extended throughout the day.  At first he had been prone to turn upon his
+pursuers, jealous of his dignity and wrathful; but at such times Mit-sah
+would throw the stinging lash of the thirty-foot cariboo-gut whip into
+his face and compel him to turn tail and run on.  Lip-lip might face the
+pack, but he could not face that whip, and all that was left him to do
+was to keep his long rope taut and his flanks ahead of the teeth of his
+mates.
+
+But a still greater cunning lurked in the recesses of the Indian mind.  To
+give point to unending pursuit of the leader, Mit-sah favoured him over
+the other dogs.  These favours aroused in them jealousy and hatred.  In
+their presence Mit-sah would give him meat and would give it to him only.
+This was maddening to them.  They would rage around just outside the
+throwing-distance of the whip, while Lip-lip devoured the meat and Mit-
+sah protected him.  And when there was no meat to give, Mit-sah would
+keep the team at a distance and make believe to give meat to Lip-lip.
+
+White Fang took kindly to the work.  He had travelled a greater distance
+than the other dogs in the yielding of himself to the rule of the gods,
+and he had learned more thoroughly the futility of opposing their will.
+In addition, the persecution he had suffered from the pack had made the
+pack less to him in the scheme of things, and man more.  He had not
+learned to be dependent on his kind for companionship.  Besides, Kiche
+was well-nigh forgotten; and the chief outlet of expression that remained
+to him was in the allegiance he tendered the gods he had accepted as
+masters.  So he worked hard, learned discipline, and was obedient.
+Faithfulness and willingness characterised his toil.  These are essential
+traits of the wolf and the wild-dog when they have become domesticated,
+and these traits White Fang possessed in unusual measure.
+
+A companionship did exist between White Fang and the other dogs, but it
+was one of warfare and enmity.  He had never learned to play with them.
+He knew only how to fight, and fight with them he did, returning to them
+a hundred-fold the snaps and slashes they had given him in the days when
+Lip-lip was leader of the pack.  But Lip-lip was no longer leader--except
+when he fled away before his mates at the end of his rope, the sled
+bounding along behind.  In camp he kept close to Mit-sah or Grey Beaver
+or Kloo-kooch.  He did not dare venture away from the gods, for now the
+fangs of all dogs were against him, and he tasted to the dregs the
+persecution that had been White Fang's.
+
+With the overthrow of Lip-lip, White Fang could have become leader of the
+pack.  But he was too morose and solitary for that.  He merely thrashed
+his team-mates.  Otherwise he ignored them.  They got out of his way when
+he came along; nor did the boldest of them ever dare to rob him of his
+meat.  On the contrary, they devoured their own meat hurriedly, for fear
+that he would take it away from them.  White Fang knew the law well: _to
+oppress the weak and obey the strong_.  He ate his share of meat as
+rapidly as he could.  And then woe the dog that had not yet finished!  A
+snarl and a flash of fangs, and that dog would wail his indignation to
+the uncomforting stars while White Fang finished his portion for him.
+
+Every little while, however, one dog or another would flame up in revolt
+and be promptly subdued.  Thus White Fang was kept in training.  He was
+jealous of the isolation in which he kept himself in the midst of the
+pack, and he fought often to maintain it.  But such fights were of brief
+duration.  He was too quick for the others.  They were slashed open and
+bleeding before they knew what had happened, were whipped almost before
+they had begun to fight.
+
+As rigid as the sled-discipline of the gods, was the discipline
+maintained by White Fang amongst his fellows.  He never allowed them any
+latitude.  He compelled them to an unremitting respect for him.  They
+might do as they pleased amongst themselves.  That was no concern of his.
+But it _was_ his concern that they leave him alone in his isolation, get
+out of his way when he elected to walk among them, and at all times
+acknowledge his mastery over them.  A hint of stiff-leggedness on their
+part, a lifted lip or a bristle of hair, and he would be upon them,
+merciless and cruel, swiftly convincing them of the error of their way.
+
+He was a monstrous tyrant.  His mastery was rigid as steel.  He oppressed
+the weak with a vengeance.  Not for nothing had he been exposed to the
+pitiless struggles for life in the day of his cubhood, when his mother
+and he, alone and unaided, held their own and survived in the ferocious
+environment of the Wild.  And not for nothing had he learned to walk
+softly when superior strength went by.  He oppressed the weak, but he
+respected the strong.  And in the course of the long journey with Grey
+Beaver he walked softly indeed amongst the full-grown dogs in the camps
+of the strange man-animals they encountered.
+
+The months passed by.  Still continued the journey of Grey Beaver.  White
+Fang's strength was developed by the long hours on trail and the steady
+toil at the sled; and it would have seemed that his mental development
+was well-nigh complete.  He had come to know quite thoroughly the world
+in which he lived.  His outlook was bleak and materialistic.  The world
+as he saw it was a fierce and brutal world, a world without warmth, a
+world in which caresses and affection and the bright sweetnesses of the
+spirit did not exist.
+
+He had no affection for Grey Beaver.  True, he was a god, but a most
+savage god.  White Fang was glad to acknowledge his lordship, but it was
+a lordship based upon superior intelligence and brute strength.  There
+was something in the fibre of White Fang's being that made his lordship a
+thing to be desired, else he would not have come back from the Wild when
+he did to tender his allegiance.  There were deeps in his nature which
+had never been sounded.  A kind word, a caressing touch of the hand, on
+the part of Grey Beaver, might have sounded these deeps; but Grey Beaver
+did not caress, nor speak kind words.  It was not his way.  His primacy
+was savage, and savagely he ruled, administering justice with a club,
+punishing transgression with the pain of a blow, and rewarding merit, not
+by kindness, but by withholding a blow.
+
+So White Fang knew nothing of the heaven a man's hand might contain for
+him.  Besides, he did not like the hands of the man-animals.  He was
+suspicious of them.  It was true that they sometimes gave meat, but more
+often they gave hurt.  Hands were things to keep away from.  They hurled
+stones, wielded sticks and clubs and whips, administered slaps and
+clouts, and, when they touched him, were cunning to hurt with pinch and
+twist and wrench.  In strange villages he had encountered the hands of
+the children and learned that they were cruel to hurt.  Also, he had once
+nearly had an eye poked out by a toddling papoose.  From these
+experiences he became suspicious of all children.  He could not tolerate
+them.  When they came near with their ominous hands, he got up.
+
+It was in a village at the Great Slave Lake, that, in the course of
+resenting the evil of the hands of the man-animals, he came to modify the
+law that he had learned from Grey Beaver: namely, that the unpardonable
+crime was to bite one of the gods.  In this village, after the custom of
+all dogs in all villages, White Fang went foraging, for food.  A boy was
+chopping frozen moose-meat with an axe, and the chips were flying in the
+snow.  White Fang, sliding by in quest of meat, stopped and began to eat
+the chips.  He observed the boy lay down the axe and take up a stout
+club.  White Fang sprang clear, just in time to escape the descending
+blow.  The boy pursued him, and he, a stranger in the village, fled
+between two tepees to find himself cornered against a high earth bank.
+
+There was no escape for White Fang.  The only way out was between the two
+tepees, and this the boy guarded.  Holding his club prepared to strike,
+he drew in on his cornered quarry.  White Fang was furious.  He faced the
+boy, bristling and snarling, his sense of justice outraged.  He knew the
+law of forage.  All the wastage of meat, such as the frozen chips,
+belonged to the dog that found it.  He had done no wrong, broken no law,
+yet here was this boy preparing to give him a beating.  White Fang
+scarcely knew what happened.  He did it in a surge of rage.  And he did
+it so quickly that the boy did not know either.  All the boy knew was
+that he had in some unaccountable way been overturned into the snow, and
+that his club-hand had been ripped wide open by White Fang's teeth.
+
+But White Fang knew that he had broken the law of the gods.  He had
+driven his teeth into the sacred flesh of one of them, and could expect
+nothing but a most terrible punishment.  He fled away to Grey Beaver,
+behind whose protecting legs he crouched when the bitten boy and the
+boy's family came, demanding vengeance.  But they went away with
+vengeance unsatisfied.  Grey Beaver defended White Fang.  So did Mit-sah
+and Kloo-kooch.  White Fang, listening to the wordy war and watching the
+angry gestures, knew that his act was justified.  And so it came that he
+learned there were gods and gods.  There were his gods, and there were
+other gods, and between them there was a difference.  Justice or
+injustice, it was all the same, he must take all things from the hands of
+his own gods.  But he was not compelled to take injustice from the other
+gods.  It was his privilege to resent it with his teeth.  And this also
+was a law of the gods.
+
+Before the day was out, White Fang was to learn more about this law.  Mit-
+sah, alone, gathering firewood in the forest, encountered the boy that
+had been bitten.  With him were other boys.  Hot words passed.  Then all
+the boys attacked Mit-sah.  It was going hard with him.  Blows were
+raining upon him from all sides.  White Fang looked on at first.  This
+was an affair of the gods, and no concern of his.  Then he realised that
+this was Mit-sah, one of his own particular gods, who was being
+maltreated.  It was no reasoned impulse that made White Fang do what he
+then did.  A mad rush of anger sent him leaping in amongst the
+combatants.  Five minutes later the landscape was covered with fleeing
+boys, many of whom dripped blood upon the snow in token that White Fang's
+teeth had not been idle.  When Mit-sah told the story in camp, Grey
+Beaver ordered meat to be given to White Fang.  He ordered much meat to
+be given, and White Fang, gorged and sleepy by the fire, knew that the
+law had received its verification.
+
+It was in line with these experiences that White Fang came to learn the
+law of property and the duty of the defence of property.  From the
+protection of his god's body to the protection of his god's possessions
+was a step, and this step he made.  What was his god's was to be defended
+against all the world--even to the extent of biting other gods.  Not only
+was such an act sacrilegious in its nature, but it was fraught with
+peril.  The gods were all-powerful, and a dog was no match against them;
+yet White Fang learned to face them, fiercely belligerent and unafraid.
+Duty rose above fear, and thieving gods learned to leave Grey Beaver's
+property alone.
+
+One thing, in this connection, White Fang quickly learnt, and that was
+that a thieving god was usually a cowardly god and prone to run away at
+the sounding of the alarm.  Also, he learned that but brief time elapsed
+between his sounding of the alarm and Grey Beaver coming to his aid.  He
+came to know that it was not fear of him that drove the thief away, but
+fear of Grey Beaver.  White Fang did not give the alarm by barking.  He
+never barked.  His method was to drive straight at the intruder, and to
+sink his teeth in if he could.  Because he was morose and solitary,
+having nothing to do with the other dogs, he was unusually fitted to
+guard his master's property; and in this he was encouraged and trained by
+Grey Beaver.  One result of this was to make White Fang more ferocious
+and indomitable, and more solitary.
+
+The months went by, binding stronger and stronger the covenant between
+dog and man.  This was the ancient covenant that the first wolf that came
+in from the Wild entered into with man.  And, like all succeeding wolves
+and wild dogs that had done likewise, White Fang worked the covenant out
+for himself.  The terms were simple.  For the possession of a flesh-and-
+blood god, he exchanged his own liberty.  Food and fire, protection and
+companionship, were some of the things he received from the god.  In
+return, he guarded the god's property, defended his body, worked for him,
+and obeyed him.
+
+The possession of a god implies service.  White Fang's was a service of
+duty and awe, but not of love.  He did not know what love was.  He had no
+experience of love.  Kiche was a remote memory.  Besides, not only had he
+abandoned the Wild and his kind when he gave himself up to man, but the
+terms of the covenant were such that if ever he met Kiche again he would
+not desert his god to go with her.  His allegiance to man seemed somehow
+a law of his being greater than the love of liberty, of kind and kin.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI--THE FAMINE
+
+
+The spring of the year was at hand when Grey Beaver finished his long
+journey.  It was April, and White Fang was a year old when he pulled into
+the home villages and was loosed from the harness by Mit-sah.  Though a
+long way from his full growth, White Fang, next to Lip-lip, was the
+largest yearling in the village.  Both from his father, the wolf, and
+from Kiche, he had inherited stature and strength, and already he was
+measuring up alongside the full-grown dogs.  But he had not yet grown
+compact.  His body was slender and rangy, and his strength more stringy
+than massive. His coat was the true wolf-grey, and to all appearances he
+was true wolf himself.  The quarter-strain of dog he had inherited from
+Kiche had left no mark on him physically, though it had played its part
+in his mental make-up.
+
+He wandered through the village, recognising with staid satisfaction the
+various gods he had known before the long journey.  Then there were the
+dogs, puppies growing up like himself, and grown dogs that did not look
+so large and formidable as the memory pictures he retained of them.  Also,
+he stood less in fear of them than formerly, stalking among them with a
+certain careless ease that was as new to him as it was enjoyable.
+
+There was Baseek, a grizzled old fellow that in his younger days had but
+to uncover his fangs to send White Fang cringing and crouching to the
+right about.  From him White Fang had learned much of his own
+insignificance; and from him he was now to learn much of the change and
+development that had taken place in himself.  While Baseek had been
+growing weaker with age, White Fang had been growing stronger with youth.
+
+It was at the cutting-up of a moose, fresh-killed, that White Fang
+learned of the changed relations in which he stood to the dog-world.  He
+had got for himself a hoof and part of the shin-bone, to which quite a
+bit of meat was attached.  Withdrawn from the immediate scramble of the
+other dogs--in fact out of sight behind a thicket--he was devouring his
+prize, when Baseek rushed in upon him.  Before he knew what he was doing,
+he had slashed the intruder twice and sprung clear.  Baseek was surprised
+by the other's temerity and swiftness of attack.  He stood, gazing
+stupidly across at White Fang, the raw, red shin-bone between them.
+
+Baseek was old, and already he had come to know the increasing valour of
+the dogs it had been his wont to bully.  Bitter experiences these, which,
+perforce, he swallowed, calling upon all his wisdom to cope with them.  In
+the old days he would have sprung upon White Fang in a fury of righteous
+wrath.  But now his waning powers would not permit such a course.  He
+bristled fiercely and looked ominously across the shin-bone at White
+Fang.  And White Fang, resurrecting quite a deal of the old awe, seemed
+to wilt and to shrink in upon himself and grow small, as he cast about in
+his mind for a way to beat a retreat not too inglorious.
+
+And right here Baseek erred.  Had he contented himself with looking
+fierce and ominous, all would have been well.  White Fang, on the verge
+of retreat, would have retreated, leaving the meat to him.  But Baseek
+did not wait.  He considered the victory already his and stepped forward
+to the meat.  As he bent his head carelessly to smell it, White Fang
+bristled slightly.  Even then it was not too late for Baseek to retrieve
+the situation.  Had he merely stood over the meat, head up and glowering,
+White Fang would ultimately have slunk away.  But the fresh meat was
+strong in Baseek's nostrils, and greed urged him to take a bite of it.
+
+This was too much for White Fang.  Fresh upon his months of mastery over
+his own team-mates, it was beyond his self-control to stand idly by while
+another devoured the meat that belonged to him.  He struck, after his
+custom, without warning.  With the first slash, Baseek's right ear was
+ripped into ribbons.  He was astounded at the suddenness of it.  But more
+things, and most grievous ones, were happening with equal suddenness.  He
+was knocked off his feet.  His throat was bitten.  While he was
+struggling to his feet the young dog sank teeth twice into his shoulder.
+The swiftness of it was bewildering.  He made a futile rush at White
+Fang, clipping the empty air with an outraged snap.  The next moment his
+nose was laid open, and he was staggering backward away from the meat.
+
+The situation was now reversed.  White Fang stood over the shin-bone,
+bristling and menacing, while Baseek stood a little way off, preparing to
+retreat.  He dared not risk a fight with this young lightning-flash, and
+again he knew, and more bitterly, the enfeeblement of oncoming age.  His
+attempt to maintain his dignity was heroic.  Calmly turning his back upon
+young dog and shin-bone, as though both were beneath his notice and
+unworthy of his consideration, he stalked grandly away.  Nor, until well
+out of sight, did he stop to lick his bleeding wounds.
+
+The effect on White Fang was to give him a greater faith in himself, and
+a greater pride.  He walked less softly among the grown dogs; his
+attitude toward them was less compromising.  Not that he went out of his
+way looking for trouble.  Far from it.  But upon his way he demanded
+consideration.  He stood upon his right to go his way unmolested and to
+give trail to no dog.  He had to be taken into account, that was all.  He
+was no longer to be disregarded and ignored, as was the lot of puppies,
+and as continued to be the lot of the puppies that were his team-mates.
+They got out of the way, gave trail to the grown dogs, and gave up meat
+to them under compulsion.  But White Fang, uncompanionable, solitary,
+morose, scarcely looking to right or left, redoubtable, forbidding of
+aspect, remote and alien, was accepted as an equal by his puzzled elders.
+They quickly learned to leave him alone, neither venturing hostile acts
+nor making overtures of friendliness.  If they left him alone, he left
+them alone--a state of affairs that they found, after a few encounters,
+to be pre-eminently desirable.
+
+In midsummer White Fang had an experience.  Trotting along in his silent
+way to investigate a new tepee which had been erected on the edge of the
+village while he was away with the hunters after moose, he came full upon
+Kiche.  He paused and looked at her.  He remembered her vaguely, but he
+_remembered_ her, and that was more than could be said for her.  She
+lifted her lip at him in the old snarl of menace, and his memory became
+clear.  His forgotten cubhood, all that was associated with that familiar
+snarl, rushed back to him.  Before he had known the gods, she had been to
+him the centre-pin of the universe.  The old familiar feelings of that
+time came back upon him, surged up within him.  He bounded towards her
+joyously, and she met him with shrewd fangs that laid his cheek open to
+the bone.  He did not understand.  He backed away, bewildered and
+puzzled.
+
+But it was not Kiche's fault.  A wolf-mother was not made to remember her
+cubs of a year or so before.  So she did not remember White Fang.  He was
+a strange animal, an intruder; and her present litter of puppies gave her
+the right to resent such intrusion.
+
+One of the puppies sprawled up to White Fang.  They were half-brothers,
+only they did not know it.  White Fang sniffed the puppy curiously,
+whereupon Kiche rushed upon him, gashing his face a second time.  He
+backed farther away.  All the old memories and associations died down
+again and passed into the grave from which they had been resurrected.  He
+looked at Kiche licking her puppy and stopping now and then to snarl at
+him.  She was without value to him.  He had learned to get along without
+her.  Her meaning was forgotten.  There was no place for her in his
+scheme of things, as there was no place for him in hers.
+
+He was still standing, stupid and bewildered, the memories forgotten,
+wondering what it was all about, when Kiche attacked him a third time,
+intent on driving him away altogether from the vicinity.  And White Fang
+allowed himself to be driven away.  This was a female of his kind, and it
+was a law of his kind that the males must not fight the females.  He did
+not know anything about this law, for it was no generalisation of the
+mind, not a something acquired by experience of the world.  He knew it as
+a secret prompting, as an urge of instinct--of the same instinct that
+made him howl at the moon and stars of nights, and that made him fear
+death and the unknown.
+
+The months went by.  White Fang grew stronger, heavier, and more compact,
+while his character was developing along the lines laid down by his
+heredity and his environment.  His heredity was a life-stuff that may be
+likened to clay.  It possessed many possibilities, was capable of being
+moulded into many different forms.  Environment served to model the clay,
+to give it a particular form.  Thus, had White Fang never come in to the
+fires of man, the Wild would have moulded him into a true wolf.  But the
+gods had given him a different environment, and he was moulded into a dog
+that was rather wolfish, but that was a dog and not a wolf.
+
+And so, according to the clay of his nature and the pressure of his
+surroundings, his character was being moulded into a certain particular
+shape.  There was no escaping it.  He was becoming more morose, more
+uncompanionable, more solitary, more ferocious; while the dogs were
+learning more and more that it was better to be at peace with him than at
+war, and Grey Beaver was coming to prize him more greatly with the
+passage of each day.
+
+White Fang, seeming to sum up strength in all his qualities, nevertheless
+suffered from one besetting weakness.  He could not stand being laughed
+at.  The laughter of men was a hateful thing.  They might laugh among
+themselves about anything they pleased except himself, and he did not
+mind.  But the moment laughter was turned upon him he would fly into a
+most terrible rage.  Grave, dignified, sombre, a laugh made him frantic
+to ridiculousness.  It so outraged him and upset him that for hours he
+would behave like a demon.  And woe to the dog that at such times ran
+foul of him.  He knew the law too well to take it out of Grey Beaver;
+behind Grey Beaver were a club and godhead.  But behind the dogs there
+was nothing but space, and into this space they flew when White Fang came
+on the scene, made mad by laughter.
+
+In the third year of his life there came a great famine to the Mackenzie
+Indians.  In the summer the fish failed.  In the winter the cariboo
+forsook their accustomed track.  Moose were scarce, the rabbits almost
+disappeared, hunting and preying animals perished.  Denied their usual
+food-supply, weakened by hunger, they fell upon and devoured one another.
+Only the strong survived.  White Fang's gods were always hunting animals.
+The old and the weak of them died of hunger.  There was wailing in the
+village, where the women and children went without in order that what
+little they had might go into the bellies of the lean and hollow-eyed
+hunters who trod the forest in the vain pursuit of meat.
+
+To such extremity were the gods driven that they ate the soft-tanned
+leather of their mocassins and mittens, while the dogs ate the harnesses
+off their backs and the very whip-lashes.  Also, the dogs ate one
+another, and also the gods ate the dogs.  The weakest and the more
+worthless were eaten first.  The dogs that still lived, looked on and
+understood.  A few of the boldest and wisest forsook the fires of the
+gods, which had now become a shambles, and fled into the forest, where,
+in the end, they starved to death or were eaten by wolves.
+
+In this time of misery, White Fang, too, stole away into the woods.  He
+was better fitted for the life than the other dogs, for he had the
+training of his cubhood to guide him.  Especially adept did he become in
+stalking small living things.  He would lie concealed for hours,
+following every movement of a cautious tree-squirrel, waiting, with a
+patience as huge as the hunger he suffered from, until the squirrel
+ventured out upon the ground.  Even then, White Fang was not premature.
+He waited until he was sure of striking before the squirrel could gain a
+tree-refuge.  Then, and not until then, would he flash from his hiding-
+place, a grey projectile, incredibly swift, never failing its mark--the
+fleeing squirrel that fled not fast enough.
+
+Successful as he was with squirrels, there was one difficulty that
+prevented him from living and growing fat on them.  There were not enough
+squirrels.  So he was driven to hunt still smaller things.  So acute did
+his hunger become at times that he was not above rooting out wood-mice
+from their burrows in the ground.  Nor did he scorn to do battle with a
+weasel as hungry as himself and many times more ferocious.
+
+In the worst pinches of the famine he stole back to the fires of the
+gods.  But he did not go into the fires.  He lurked in the forest,
+avoiding discovery and robbing the snares at the rare intervals when game
+was caught.  He even robbed Grey Beaver's snare of a rabbit at a time
+when Grey Beaver staggered and tottered through the forest, sitting down
+often to rest, what of weakness and of shortness of breath.
+
+One day White Fang encountered a young wolf, gaunt and scrawny, loose-
+jointed with famine.  Had he not been hungry himself, White Fang might
+have gone with him and eventually found his way into the pack amongst his
+wild brethren.  As it was, he ran the young wolf down and killed and ate
+him.
+
+Fortune seemed to favour him.  Always, when hardest pressed for food, he
+found something to kill.  Again, when he was weak, it was his luck that
+none of the larger preying animals chanced upon him.  Thus, he was strong
+from the two days' eating a lynx had afforded him when the hungry wolf-
+pack ran full tilt upon him.  It was a long, cruel chase, but he was
+better nourished than they, and in the end outran them.  And not only did
+he outrun them, but, circling widely back on his track, he gathered in
+one of his exhausted pursuers.
+
+After that he left that part of the country and journeyed over to the
+valley wherein he had been born.  Here, in the old lair, he encountered
+Kiche.  Up to her old tricks, she, too, had fled the inhospitable fires
+of the gods and gone back to her old refuge to give birth to her young.
+Of this litter but one remained alive when White Fang came upon the
+scene, and this one was not destined to live long.  Young life had little
+chance in such a famine.
+
+Kiche's greeting of her grown son was anything but affectionate.  But
+White Fang did not mind.  He had outgrown his mother.  So he turned tail
+philosophically and trotted on up the stream.  At the forks he took the
+turning to the left, where he found the lair of the lynx with whom his
+mother and he had fought long before.  Here, in the abandoned lair, he
+settled down and rested for a day.
+
+During the early summer, in the last days of the famine, he met Lip-lip,
+who had likewise taken to the woods, where he had eked out a miserable
+existence.
+
+White Fang came upon him unexpectedly.  Trotting in opposite directions
+along the base of a high bluff, they rounded a corner of rock and found
+themselves face to face.  They paused with instant alarm, and looked at
+each other suspiciously.
+
+White Fang was in splendid condition.  His hunting had been good, and for
+a week he had eaten his fill.  He was even gorged from his latest kill.
+But in the moment he looked at Lip-lip his hair rose on end all along his
+back.  It was an involuntary bristling on his part, the physical state
+that in the past had always accompanied the mental state produced in him
+by Lip-lip's bullying and persecution.  As in the past he had bristled
+and snarled at sight of Lip-lip, so now, and automatically, he bristled
+and snarled.  He did not waste any time.  The thing was done thoroughly
+and with despatch.  Lip-lip essayed to back away, but White Fang struck
+him hard, shoulder to shoulder.  Lip-lip was overthrown and rolled upon
+his back.  White Fang's teeth drove into the scrawny throat.  There was a
+death-struggle, during which White Fang walked around, stiff-legged and
+observant.  Then he resumed his course and trotted on along the base of
+the bluff.
+
+One day, not long after, he came to the edge of the forest, where a
+narrow stretch of open land sloped down to the Mackenzie.  He had been
+over this ground before, when it was bare, but now a village occupied it.
+Still hidden amongst the trees, he paused to study the situation.  Sights
+and sounds and scents were familiar to him.  It was the old village
+changed to a new place.  But sights and sounds and smells were different
+from those he had last had when he fled away from it.  There was no
+whimpering nor wailing.  Contented sounds saluted his ear, and when he
+heard the angry voice of a woman he knew it to be the anger that proceeds
+from a full stomach.  And there was a smell in the air of fish.  There
+was food.  The famine was gone.  He came out boldly from the forest and
+trotted into camp straight to Grey Beaver's tepee.  Grey Beaver was not
+there; but Kloo-kooch welcomed him with glad cries and the whole of a
+fresh-caught fish, and he lay down to wait Grey Beaver's coming.
+
+
+
+
+PART IV
+
+
+CHAPTER I--THE ENEMY OF HIS KIND
+
+
+Had there been in White Fang's nature any possibility, no matter how
+remote, of his ever coming to fraternise with his kind, such possibility
+was irretrievably destroyed when he was made leader of the sled-team.  For
+now the dogs hated him--hated him for the extra meat bestowed upon him by
+Mit-sah; hated him for all the real and fancied favours he received;
+hated him for that he fled always at the head of the team, his waving
+brush of a tail and his perpetually retreating hind-quarters for ever
+maddening their eyes.
+
+And White Fang just as bitterly hated them back.  Being sled-leader was
+anything but gratifying to him.  To be compelled to run away before the
+yelling pack, every dog of which, for three years, he had thrashed and
+mastered, was almost more than he could endure.  But endure it he must,
+or perish, and the life that was in him had no desire to perish out.  The
+moment Mit-sah gave his order for the start, that moment the whole team,
+with eager, savage cries, sprang forward at White Fang.
+
+There was no defence for him.  If he turned upon them, Mit-sah would
+throw the stinging lash of the whip into his face.  Only remained to him
+to run away.  He could not encounter that howling horde with his tail and
+hind-quarters.  These were scarcely fit weapons with which to meet the
+many merciless fangs.  So run away he did, violating his own nature and
+pride with every leap he made, and leaping all day long.
+
+One cannot violate the promptings of one's nature without having that
+nature recoil upon itself.  Such a recoil is like that of a hair, made to
+grow out from the body, turning unnaturally upon the direction of its
+growth and growing into the body--a rankling, festering thing of hurt.
+And so with White Fang.  Every urge of his being impelled him to spring
+upon the pack that cried at his heels, but it was the will of the gods
+that this should not be; and behind the will, to enforce it, was the whip
+of cariboo-gut with its biting thirty-foot lash.  So White Fang could
+only eat his heart in bitterness and develop a hatred and malice
+commensurate with the ferocity and indomitability of his nature.
+
+If ever a creature was the enemy of its kind, White Fang was that
+creature.  He asked no quarter, gave none.  He was continually marred and
+scarred by the teeth of the pack, and as continually he left his own
+marks upon the pack.  Unlike most leaders, who, when camp was made and
+the dogs were unhitched, huddled near to the gods for protection, White
+Fang disdained such protection.  He walked boldly about the camp,
+inflicting punishment in the night for what he had suffered in the day.
+In the time before he was made leader of the team, the pack had learned
+to get out of his way.  But now it was different.  Excited by the day-
+long pursuit of him, swayed subconsciously by the insistent iteration on
+their brains of the sight of him fleeing away, mastered by the feeling of
+mastery enjoyed all day, the dogs could not bring themselves to give way
+to him.  When he appeared amongst them, there was always a squabble.  His
+progress was marked by snarl and snap and growl.  The very atmosphere he
+breathed was surcharged with hatred and malice, and this but served to
+increase the hatred and malice within him.
+
+When Mit-sah cried out his command for the team to stop, White Fang
+obeyed.  At first this caused trouble for the other dogs.  All of them
+would spring upon the hated leader only to find the tables turned.  Behind
+him would be Mit-sah, the great whip singing in his hand.  So the dogs
+came to understand that when the team stopped by order, White Fang was to
+be let alone.  But when White Fang stopped without orders, then it was
+allowed them to spring upon him and destroy him if they could.  After
+several experiences, White Fang never stopped without orders.  He learned
+quickly.  It was in the nature of things, that he must learn quickly if
+he were to survive the unusually severe conditions under which life was
+vouchsafed him.
+
+But the dogs could never learn the lesson to leave him alone in camp.
+Each day, pursuing him and crying defiance at him, the lesson of the
+previous night was erased, and that night would have to be learned over
+again, to be as immediately forgotten.  Besides, there was a greater
+consistence in their dislike of him.  They sensed between themselves and
+him a difference of kind--cause sufficient in itself for hostility.  Like
+him, they were domesticated wolves.  But they had been domesticated for
+generations.  Much of the Wild had been lost, so that to them the Wild
+was the unknown, the terrible, the ever-menacing and ever warring.  But
+to him, in appearance and action and impulse, still clung the Wild.  He
+symbolised it, was its personification: so that when they showed their
+teeth to him they were defending themselves against the powers of
+destruction that lurked in the shadows of the forest and in the dark
+beyond the camp-fire.
+
+But there was one lesson the dogs did learn, and that was to keep
+together.  White Fang was too terrible for any of them to face single-
+handed.  They met him with the mass-formation, otherwise he would have
+killed them, one by one, in a night.  As it was, he never had a chance to
+kill them.  He might roll a dog off its feet, but the pack would be upon
+him before he could follow up and deliver the deadly throat-stroke.  At
+the first hint of conflict, the whole team drew together and faced him.
+The dogs had quarrels among themselves, but these were forgotten when
+trouble was brewing with White Fang.
+
+On the other hand, try as they would, they could not kill White Fang.  He
+was too quick for them, too formidable, too wise.  He avoided tight
+places and always backed out of it when they bade fair to surround him.
+While, as for getting him off his feet, there was no dog among them
+capable of doing the trick.  His feet clung to the earth with the same
+tenacity that he clung to life.  For that matter, life and footing were
+synonymous in this unending warfare with the pack, and none knew it
+better than White Fang.
+
+So he became the enemy of his kind, domesticated wolves that they were,
+softened by the fires of man, weakened in the sheltering shadow of man's
+strength.  White Fang was bitter and implacable.  The clay of him was so
+moulded.  He declared a vendetta against all dogs.  And so terribly did
+he live this vendetta that Grey Beaver, fierce savage himself, could not
+but marvel at White Fang's ferocity.  Never, he swore, had there been the
+like of this animal; and the Indians in strange villages swore likewise
+when they considered the tale of his killings amongst their dogs.
+
+When White Fang was nearly five years old, Grey Beaver took him on
+another great journey, and long remembered was the havoc he worked
+amongst the dogs of the many villages along the Mackenzie, across the
+Rockies, and down the Porcupine to the Yukon.  He revelled in the
+vengeance he wreaked upon his kind.  They were ordinary, unsuspecting
+dogs.  They were not prepared for his swiftness and directness, for his
+attack without warning.  They did not know him for what he was, a
+lightning-flash of slaughter.  They bristled up to him, stiff-legged and
+challenging, while he, wasting no time on elaborate preliminaries,
+snapping into action like a steel spring, was at their throats and
+destroying them before they knew what was happening and while they were
+yet in the throes of surprise.
+
+He became an adept at fighting.  He economised.  He never wasted his
+strength, never tussled.  He was in too quickly for that, and, if he
+missed, was out again too quickly.  The dislike of the wolf for close
+quarters was his to an unusual degree.  He could not endure a prolonged
+contact with another body.  It smacked of danger.  It made him frantic.
+He must be away, free, on his own legs, touching no living thing.  It was
+the Wild still clinging to him, asserting itself through him.  This
+feeling had been accentuated by the Ishmaelite life he had led from his
+puppyhood.  Danger lurked in contacts.  It was the trap, ever the trap,
+the fear of it lurking deep in the life of him, woven into the fibre of
+him.
+
+In consequence, the strange dogs he encountered had no chance against
+him.  He eluded their fangs.  He got them, or got away, himself untouched
+in either event.  In the natural course of things there were exceptions
+to this.  There were times when several dogs, pitching on to him,
+punished him before he could get away; and there were times when a single
+dog scored deeply on him.  But these were accidents.  In the main, so
+efficient a fighter had he become, he went his way unscathed.
+
+Another advantage he possessed was that of correctly judging time and
+distance.  Not that he did this consciously, however.  He did not
+calculate such things.  It was all automatic.  His eyes saw correctly,
+and the nerves carried the vision correctly to his brain.  The parts of
+him were better adjusted than those of the average dog.  They worked
+together more smoothly and steadily.  His was a better, far better,
+nervous, mental, and muscular co-ordination.  When his eyes conveyed to
+his brain the moving image of an action, his brain without conscious
+effort, knew the space that limited that action and the time required for
+its completion.  Thus, he could avoid the leap of another dog, or the
+drive of its fangs, and at the same moment could seize the infinitesimal
+fraction of time in which to deliver his own attack.  Body and brain, his
+was a more perfected mechanism.  Not that he was to be praised for it.
+Nature had been more generous to him than to the average animal, that was
+all.
+
+It was in the summer that White Fang arrived at Fort Yukon.  Grey Beaver
+had crossed the great watershed between Mackenzie and the Yukon in the
+late winter, and spent the spring in hunting among the western outlying
+spurs of the Rockies.  Then, after the break-up of the ice on the
+Porcupine, he had built a canoe and paddled down that stream to where it
+effected its junction with the Yukon just under the Arctic circle.  Here
+stood the old Hudson's Bay Company fort; and here were many Indians, much
+food, and unprecedented excitement.  It was the summer of 1898, and
+thousands of gold-hunters were going up the Yukon to Dawson and the
+Klondike.  Still hundreds of miles from their goal, nevertheless many of
+them had been on the way for a year, and the least any of them had
+travelled to get that far was five thousand miles, while some had come
+from the other side of the world.
+
+Here Grey Beaver stopped.  A whisper of the gold-rush had reached his
+ears, and he had come with several bales of furs, and another of gut-sewn
+mittens and moccasins.  He would not have ventured so long a trip had he
+not expected generous profits.  But what he had expected was nothing to
+what he realised.  His wildest dreams had not exceeded a hundred per
+cent. profit; he made a thousand per cent.  And like a true Indian, he
+settled down to trade carefully and slowly, even if it took all summer
+and the rest of the winter to dispose of his goods.
+
+It was at Fort Yukon that White Fang saw his first white men.  As
+compared with the Indians he had known, they were to him another race of
+beings, a race of superior gods.  They impressed him as possessing
+superior power, and it is on power that godhead rests.  White Fang did
+not reason it out, did not in his mind make the sharp generalisation that
+the white gods were more powerful.  It was a feeling, nothing more, and
+yet none the less potent.  As, in his puppyhood, the looming bulks of the
+tepees, man-reared, had affected him as manifestations of power, so was
+he affected now by the houses and the huge fort all of massive logs.  Here
+was power.  Those white gods were strong.  They possessed greater mastery
+over matter than the gods he had known, most powerful among which was
+Grey Beaver.  And yet Grey Beaver was as a child-god among these white-
+skinned ones.
+
+To be sure, White Fang only felt these things.  He was not conscious of
+them.  Yet it is upon feeling, more often than thinking, that animals
+act; and every act White Fang now performed was based upon the feeling
+that the white men were the superior gods.  In the first place he was
+very suspicious of them.  There was no telling what unknown terrors were
+theirs, what unknown hurts they could administer.  He was curious to
+observe them, fearful of being noticed by them.  For the first few hours
+he was content with slinking around and watching them from a safe
+distance.  Then he saw that no harm befell the dogs that were near to
+them, and he came in closer.
+
+In turn he was an object of great curiosity to them.  His wolfish
+appearance caught their eyes at once, and they pointed him out to one
+another.  This act of pointing put White Fang on his guard, and when they
+tried to approach him he showed his teeth and backed away.  Not one
+succeeded in laying a hand on him, and it was well that they did not.
+
+White Fang soon learned that very few of these gods--not more than a
+dozen--lived at this place.  Every two or three days a steamer (another
+and colossal manifestation of power) came into the bank and stopped for
+several hours.  The white men came from off these steamers and went away
+on them again.  There seemed untold numbers of these white men.  In the
+first day or so, he saw more of them than he had seen Indians in all his
+life; and as the days went by they continued to come up the river, stop,
+and then go on up the river out of sight.
+
+But if the white gods were all-powerful, their dogs did not amount to
+much.  This White Fang quickly discovered by mixing with those that came
+ashore with their masters.  They were irregular shapes and sizes.  Some
+were short-legged--too short; others were long-legged--too long.  They
+had hair instead of fur, and a few had very little hair at that.  And
+none of them knew how to fight.
+
+As an enemy of his kind, it was in White Fang's province to fight with
+them.  This he did, and he quickly achieved for them a mighty contempt.
+They were soft and helpless, made much noise, and floundered around
+clumsily trying to accomplish by main strength what he accomplished by
+dexterity and cunning.  They rushed bellowing at him.  He sprang to the
+side.  They did not know what had become of him; and in that moment he
+struck them on the shoulder, rolling them off their feet and delivering
+his stroke at the throat.
+
+Sometimes this stroke was successful, and a stricken dog rolled in the
+dirt, to be pounced upon and torn to pieces by the pack of Indian dogs
+that waited.  White Fang was wise.  He had long since learned that the
+gods were made angry when their dogs were killed.  The white men were no
+exception to this.  So he was content, when he had overthrown and slashed
+wide the throat of one of their dogs, to drop back and let the pack go in
+and do the cruel finishing work.  It was then that the white men rushed
+in, visiting their wrath heavily on the pack, while White Fang went free.
+He would stand off at a little distance and look on, while stones, clubs,
+axes, and all sorts of weapons fell upon his fellows.  White Fang was
+very wise.
+
+But his fellows grew wise in their own way; and in this White Fang grew
+wise with them.  They learned that it was when a steamer first tied to
+the bank that they had their fun.  After the first two or three strange
+dogs had been downed and destroyed, the white men hustled their own
+animals back on board and wreaked savage vengeance on the offenders.  One
+white man, having seen his dog, a setter, torn to pieces before his eyes,
+drew a revolver.  He fired rapidly, six times, and six of the pack lay
+dead or dying--another manifestation of power that sank deep into White
+Fang's consciousness.
+
+White Fang enjoyed it all.  He did not love his kind, and he was shrewd
+enough to escape hurt himself.  At first, the killing of the white men's
+dogs had been a diversion.  After a time it became his occupation.  There
+was no work for him to do.  Grey Beaver was busy trading and getting
+wealthy.  So White Fang hung around the landing with the disreputable
+gang of Indian dogs, waiting for steamers.  With the arrival of a steamer
+the fun began.  After a few minutes, by the time the white men had got
+over their surprise, the gang scattered.  The fun was over until the next
+steamer should arrive.
+
+But it can scarcely be said that White Fang was a member of the gang.  He
+did not mingle with it, but remained aloof, always himself, and was even
+feared by it.  It is true, he worked with it.  He picked the quarrel with
+the strange dog while the gang waited.  And when he had overthrown the
+strange dog the gang went in to finish it.  But it is equally true that
+he then withdrew, leaving the gang to receive the punishment of the
+outraged gods.
+
+It did not require much exertion to pick these quarrels.  All he had to
+do, when the strange dogs came ashore, was to show himself.  When they
+saw him they rushed for him.  It was their instinct.  He was the Wild--the
+unknown, the terrible, the ever-menacing, the thing that prowled in the
+darkness around the fires of the primeval world when they, cowering close
+to the fires, were reshaping their instincts, learning to fear the Wild
+out of which they had come, and which they had deserted and betrayed.
+Generation by generation, down all the generations, had this fear of the
+Wild been stamped into their natures.  For centuries the Wild had stood
+for terror and destruction.  And during all this time free licence had
+been theirs, from their masters, to kill the things of the Wild.  In
+doing this they had protected both themselves and the gods whose
+companionship they shared.
+
+And so, fresh from the soft southern world, these dogs, trotting down the
+gang-plank and out upon the Yukon shore had but to see White Fang to
+experience the irresistible impulse to rush upon him and destroy him.
+They might be town-reared dogs, but the instinctive fear of the Wild was
+theirs just the same.  Not alone with their own eyes did they see the
+wolfish creature in the clear light of day, standing before them.  They
+saw him with the eyes of their ancestors, and by their inherited memory
+they knew White Fang for the wolf, and they remembered the ancient feud.
+
+All of which served to make White Fang's days enjoyable.  If the sight of
+him drove these strange dogs upon him, so much the better for him, so
+much the worse for them.  They looked upon him as legitimate prey, and as
+legitimate prey he looked upon them.
+
+Not for nothing had he first seen the light of day in a lonely lair and
+fought his first fights with the ptarmigan, the weasel, and the lynx.  And
+not for nothing had his puppyhood been made bitter by the persecution of
+Lip-lip and the whole puppy pack.  It might have been otherwise, and he
+would then have been otherwise.  Had Lip-lip not existed, he would have
+passed his puppyhood with the other puppies and grown up more doglike and
+with more liking for dogs.  Had Grey Beaver possessed the plummet of
+affection and love, he might have sounded the deeps of White Fang's
+nature and brought up to the surface all manner of kindly qualities.  But
+these things had not been so.  The clay of White Fang had been moulded
+until he became what he was, morose and lonely, unloving and ferocious,
+the enemy of all his kind.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II--THE MAD GOD
+
+
+A small number of white men lived in Fort Yukon.  These men had been long
+in the country.  They called themselves Sour-doughs, and took great pride
+in so classifying themselves.  For other men, new in the land, they felt
+nothing but disdain.  The men who came ashore from the steamers were
+newcomers.  They were known as _chechaquos_, and they always wilted at
+the application of the name.  They made their bread with baking-powder.
+This was the invidious distinction between them and the Sour-doughs, who,
+forsooth, made their bread from sour-dough because they had no baking-
+powder.
+
+All of which is neither here nor there.  The men in the fort disdained
+the newcomers and enjoyed seeing them come to grief.  Especially did they
+enjoy the havoc worked amongst the newcomers' dogs by White Fang and his
+disreputable gang.  When a steamer arrived, the men of the fort made it a
+point always to come down to the bank and see the fun.  They looked
+forward to it with as much anticipation as did the Indian dogs, while
+they were not slow to appreciate the savage and crafty part played by
+White Fang.
+
+But there was one man amongst them who particularly enjoyed the sport.  He
+would come running at the first sound of a steamboat's whistle; and when
+the last fight was over and White Fang and the pack had scattered, he
+would return slowly to the fort, his face heavy with regret.  Sometimes,
+when a soft southland dog went down, shrieking its death-cry under the
+fangs of the pack, this man would be unable to contain himself, and would
+leap into the air and cry out with delight.  And always he had a sharp
+and covetous eye for White Fang.
+
+This man was called "Beauty" by the other men of the fort.  No one knew
+his first name, and in general he was known in the country as Beauty
+Smith.  But he was anything save a beauty.  To antithesis was due his
+naming.  He was pre-eminently unbeautiful.  Nature had been niggardly
+with him.  He was a small man to begin with; and upon his meagre frame
+was deposited an even more strikingly meagre head.  Its apex might be
+likened to a point.  In fact, in his boyhood, before he had been named
+Beauty by his fellows, he had been called "Pinhead."
+
+Backward, from the apex, his head slanted down to his neck and forward it
+slanted uncompromisingly to meet a low and remarkably wide forehead.
+Beginning here, as though regretting her parsimony, Nature had spread his
+features with a lavish hand.  His eyes were large, and between them was
+the distance of two eyes.  His face, in relation to the rest of him, was
+prodigious.  In order to discover the necessary area, Nature had given
+him an enormous prognathous jaw.  It was wide and heavy, and protruded
+outward and down until it seemed to rest on his chest.  Possibly this
+appearance was due to the weariness of the slender neck, unable properly
+to support so great a burden.
+
+This jaw gave the impression of ferocious determination.  But something
+lacked.  Perhaps it was from excess.  Perhaps the jaw was too large.  At
+any rate, it was a lie.  Beauty Smith was known far and wide as the
+weakest of weak-kneed and snivelling cowards.  To complete his
+description, his teeth were large and yellow, while the two eye-teeth,
+larger than their fellows, showed under his lean lips like fangs.  His
+eyes were yellow and muddy, as though Nature had run short on pigments
+and squeezed together the dregs of all her tubes.  It was the same with
+his hair, sparse and irregular of growth, muddy-yellow and dirty-yellow,
+rising on his head and sprouting out of his face in unexpected tufts and
+bunches, in appearance like clumped and wind-blown grain.
+
+In short, Beauty Smith was a monstrosity, and the blame of it lay
+elsewhere.  He was not responsible.  The clay of him had been so moulded
+in the making.  He did the cooking for the other men in the fort, the
+dish-washing and the drudgery.  They did not despise him.  Rather did
+they tolerate him in a broad human way, as one tolerates any creature
+evilly treated in the making.  Also, they feared him.  His cowardly rages
+made them dread a shot in the back or poison in their coffee.  But
+somebody had to do the cooking, and whatever else his shortcomings,
+Beauty Smith could cook.
+
+This was the man that looked at White Fang, delighted in his ferocious
+prowess, and desired to possess him.  He made overtures to White Fang
+from the first.  White Fang began by ignoring him.  Later on, when the
+overtures became more insistent, White Fang bristled and bared his teeth
+and backed away.  He did not like the man.  The feel of him was bad.  He
+sensed the evil in him, and feared the extended hand and the attempts at
+soft-spoken speech.  Because of all this, he hated the man.
+
+With the simpler creatures, good and bad are things simply understood.
+The good stands for all things that bring easement and satisfaction and
+surcease from pain.  Therefore, the good is liked.  The bad stands for
+all things that are fraught with discomfort, menace, and hurt, and is
+hated accordingly.  White Fang's feel of Beauty Smith was bad.  From the
+man's distorted body and twisted mind, in occult ways, like mists rising
+from malarial marshes, came emanations of the unhealth within.  Not by
+reasoning, not by the five senses alone, but by other and remoter and
+uncharted senses, came the feeling to White Fang that the man was ominous
+with evil, pregnant with hurtfulness, and therefore a thing bad, and
+wisely to be hated.
+
+White Fang was in Grey Beaver's camp when Beauty Smith first visited it.
+At the faint sound of his distant feet, before he came in sight, White
+Fang knew who was coming and began to bristle.  He had been lying down in
+an abandon of comfort, but he arose quickly, and, as the man arrived,
+slid away in true wolf-fashion to the edge of the camp.  He did not know
+what they said, but he could see the man and Grey Beaver talking
+together.  Once, the man pointed at him, and White Fang snarled back as
+though the hand were just descending upon him instead of being, as it
+was, fifty feet away.  The man laughed at this; and White Fang slunk away
+to the sheltering woods, his head turned to observe as he glided softly
+over the ground.
+
+Grey Beaver refused to sell the dog.  He had grown rich with his trading
+and stood in need of nothing.  Besides, White Fang was a valuable animal,
+the strongest sled-dog he had ever owned, and the best leader.
+Furthermore, there was no dog like him on the Mackenzie nor the Yukon.  He
+could fight.  He killed other dogs as easily as men killed mosquitoes.
+(Beauty Smith's eyes lighted up at this, and he licked his thin lips with
+an eager tongue).  No, White Fang was not for sale at any price.
+
+But Beauty Smith knew the ways of Indians.  He visited Grey Beaver's camp
+often, and hidden under his coat was always a black bottle or so.  One of
+the potencies of whisky is the breeding of thirst.  Grey Beaver got the
+thirst.  His fevered membranes and burnt stomach began to clamour for
+more and more of the scorching fluid; while his brain, thrust all awry by
+the unwonted stimulant, permitted him to go any length to obtain it.  The
+money he had received for his furs and mittens and moccasins began to go.
+It went faster and faster, and the shorter his money-sack grew, the
+shorter grew his temper.
+
+In the end his money and goods and temper were all gone.  Nothing
+remained to him but his thirst, a prodigious possession in itself that
+grew more prodigious with every sober breath he drew.  Then it was that
+Beauty Smith had talk with him again about the sale of White Fang; but
+this time the price offered was in bottles, not dollars, and Grey
+Beaver's ears were more eager to hear.
+
+"You ketch um dog you take um all right," was his last word.
+
+The bottles were delivered, but after two days.  "You ketch um dog," were
+Beauty Smith's words to Grey Beaver.
+
+White Fang slunk into camp one evening and dropped down with a sigh of
+content.  The dreaded white god was not there.  For days his
+manifestations of desire to lay hands on him had been growing more
+insistent, and during that time White Fang had been compelled to avoid
+the camp.  He did not know what evil was threatened by those insistent
+hands.  He knew only that they did threaten evil of some sort, and that
+it was best for him to keep out of their reach.
+
+But scarcely had he lain down when Grey Beaver staggered over to him and
+tied a leather thong around his neck.  He sat down beside White Fang,
+holding the end of the thong in his hand.  In the other hand he held a
+bottle, which, from time to time, was inverted above his head to the
+accompaniment of gurgling noises.
+
+An hour of this passed, when the vibrations of feet in contact with the
+ground foreran the one who approached.  White Fang heard it first, and he
+was bristling with recognition while Grey Beaver still nodded stupidly.
+White Fang tried to draw the thong softly out of his master's hand; but
+the relaxed fingers closed tightly and Grey Beaver roused himself.
+
+Beauty Smith strode into camp and stood over White Fang.  He snarled
+softly up at the thing of fear, watching keenly the deportment of the
+hands.  One hand extended outward and began to descend upon his head.  His
+soft snarl grew tense and harsh.  The hand continued slowly to descend,
+while he crouched beneath it, eyeing it malignantly, his snarl growing
+shorter and shorter as, with quickening breath, it approached its
+culmination.  Suddenly he snapped, striking with his fangs like a snake.
+The hand was jerked back, and the teeth came together emptily with a
+sharp click.  Beauty Smith was frightened and angry.  Grey Beaver clouted
+White Fang alongside the head, so that he cowered down close to the earth
+in respectful obedience.
+
+White Fang's suspicious eyes followed every movement.  He saw Beauty
+Smith go away and return with a stout club.  Then the end of the thong
+was given over to him by Grey Beaver.  Beauty Smith started to walk away.
+The thong grew taut.  White Fang resisted it.  Grey Beaver clouted him
+right and left to make him get up and follow.  He obeyed, but with a
+rush, hurling himself upon the stranger who was dragging him away.  Beauty
+Smith did not jump away.  He had been waiting for this.  He swung the
+club smartly, stopping the rush midway and smashing White Fang down upon
+the ground.  Grey Beaver laughed and nodded approval.  Beauty Smith
+tightened the thong again, and White Fang crawled limply and dizzily to
+his feet.
+
+He did not rush a second time.  One smash from the club was sufficient to
+convince him that the white god knew how to handle it, and he was too
+wise to fight the inevitable.  So he followed morosely at Beauty Smith's
+heels, his tail between his legs, yet snarling softly under his breath.
+But Beauty Smith kept a wary eye on him, and the club was held always
+ready to strike.
+
+At the fort Beauty Smith left him securely tied and went in to bed.  White
+Fang waited an hour.  Then he applied his teeth to the thong, and in the
+space of ten seconds was free.  He had wasted no time with his teeth.
+There had been no useless gnawing.  The thong was cut across, diagonally,
+almost as clean as though done by a knife.  White Fang looked up at the
+fort, at the same time bristling and growling.  Then he turned and
+trotted back to Grey Beaver's camp.  He owed no allegiance to this
+strange and terrible god.  He had given himself to Grey Beaver, and to
+Grey Beaver he considered he still belonged.
+
+But what had occurred before was repeated--with a difference.  Grey
+Beaver again made him fast with a thong, and in the morning turned him
+over to Beauty Smith.  And here was where the difference came in.  Beauty
+Smith gave him a beating.  Tied securely, White Fang could only rage
+futilely and endure the punishment.  Club and whip were both used upon
+him, and he experienced the worst beating he had ever received in his
+life.  Even the big beating given him in his puppyhood by Grey Beaver was
+mild compared with this.
+
+Beauty Smith enjoyed the task.  He delighted in it.  He gloated over his
+victim, and his eyes flamed dully, as he swung the whip or club and
+listened to White Fang's cries of pain and to his helpless bellows and
+snarls.  For Beauty Smith was cruel in the way that cowards are cruel.
+Cringing and snivelling himself before the blows or angry speech of a
+man, he revenged himself, in turn, upon creatures weaker than he.  All
+life likes power, and Beauty Smith was no exception.  Denied the
+expression of power amongst his own kind, he fell back upon the lesser
+creatures and there vindicated the life that was in him.  But Beauty
+Smith had not created himself, and no blame was to be attached to him.  He
+had come into the world with a twisted body and a brute intelligence.
+This had constituted the clay of him, and it had not been kindly moulded
+by the world.
+
+White Fang knew why he was being beaten.  When Grey Beaver tied the thong
+around his neck, and passed the end of the thong into Beauty Smith's
+keeping, White Fang knew that it was his god's will for him to go with
+Beauty Smith.  And when Beauty Smith left him tied outside the fort, he
+knew that it was Beauty Smith's will that he should remain there.
+Therefore, he had disobeyed the will of both the gods, and earned the
+consequent punishment.  He had seen dogs change owners in the past, and
+he had seen the runaways beaten as he was being beaten.  He was wise, and
+yet in the nature of him there were forces greater than wisdom.  One of
+these was fidelity.  He did not love Grey Beaver, yet, even in the face
+of his will and his anger, he was faithful to him.  He could not help it.
+This faithfulness was a quality of the clay that composed him.  It was
+the quality that was peculiarly the possession of his kind; the quality
+that set apart his species from all other species; the quality that has
+enabled the wolf and the wild dog to come in from the open and be the
+companions of man.
+
+After the beating, White Fang was dragged back to the fort.  But this
+time Beauty Smith left him tied with a stick.  One does not give up a god
+easily, and so with White Fang.  Grey Beaver was his own particular god,
+and, in spite of Grey Beaver's will, White Fang still clung to him and
+would not give him up.  Grey Beaver had betrayed and forsaken him, but
+that had no effect upon him.  Not for nothing had he surrendered himself
+body and soul to Grey Beaver.  There had been no reservation on White
+Fang's part, and the bond was not to be broken easily.
+
+So, in the night, when the men in the fort were asleep, White Fang
+applied his teeth to the stick that held him.  The wood was seasoned and
+dry, and it was tied so closely to his neck that he could scarcely get
+his teeth to it.  It was only by the severest muscular exertion and neck-
+arching that he succeeded in getting the wood between his teeth, and
+barely between his teeth at that; and it was only by the exercise of an
+immense patience, extending through many hours, that he succeeded in
+gnawing through the stick.  This was something that dogs were not
+supposed to do.  It was unprecedented.  But White Fang did it, trotting
+away from the fort in the early morning, with the end of the stick
+hanging to his neck.
+
+He was wise.  But had he been merely wise he would not have gone back to
+Grey Beaver who had already twice betrayed him.  But there was his
+faithfulness, and he went back to be betrayed yet a third time.  Again he
+yielded to the tying of a thong around his neck by Grey Beaver, and again
+Beauty Smith came to claim him.  And this time he was beaten even more
+severely than before.
+
+Grey Beaver looked on stolidly while the white man wielded the whip.  He
+gave no protection.  It was no longer his dog.  When the beating was over
+White Fang was sick.  A soft southland dog would have died under it, but
+not he.  His school of life had been sterner, and he was himself of
+sterner stuff.  He had too great vitality.  His clutch on life was too
+strong.  But he was very sick.  At first he was unable to drag himself
+along, and Beauty Smith had to wait half-an-hour for him.  And then,
+blind and reeling, he followed at Beauty Smith's heels back to the fort.
+
+But now he was tied with a chain that defied his teeth, and he strove in
+vain, by lunging, to draw the staple from the timber into which it was
+driven.  After a few days, sober and bankrupt, Grey Beaver departed up
+the Porcupine on his long journey to the Mackenzie.  White Fang remained
+on the Yukon, the property of a man more than half mad and all brute.  But
+what is a dog to know in its consciousness of madness?  To White Fang,
+Beauty Smith was a veritable, if terrible, god.  He was a mad god at
+best, but White Fang knew nothing of madness; he knew only that he must
+submit to the will of this new master, obey his every whim and fancy.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III--THE REIGN OF HATE
+
+
+Under the tutelage of the mad god, White Fang became a fiend.  He was
+kept chained in a pen at the rear of the fort, and here Beauty Smith
+teased and irritated and drove him wild with petty torments.  The man
+early discovered White Fang's susceptibility to laughter, and made it a
+point after painfully tricking him, to laugh at him.  This laughter was
+uproarious and scornful, and at the same time the god pointed his finger
+derisively at White Fang.  At such times reason fled from White Fang, and
+in his transports of rage he was even more mad than Beauty Smith.
+
+Formerly, White Fang had been merely the enemy of his kind, withal a
+ferocious enemy.  He now became the enemy of all things, and more
+ferocious than ever.  To such an extent was he tormented, that he hated
+blindly and without the faintest spark of reason.  He hated the chain
+that bound him, the men who peered in at him through the slats of the
+pen, the dogs that accompanied the men and that snarled malignantly at
+him in his helplessness.  He hated the very wood of the pen that confined
+him.  And, first, last, and most of all, he hated Beauty Smith.
+
+But Beauty Smith had a purpose in all that he did to White Fang.  One day
+a number of men gathered about the pen.  Beauty Smith entered, club in
+hand, and took the chain off from White Fang's neck.  When his master had
+gone out, White Fang turned loose and tore around the pen, trying to get
+at the men outside.  He was magnificently terrible.  Fully five feet in
+length, and standing two and one-half feet at the shoulder, he far
+outweighed a wolf of corresponding size.  From his mother he had
+inherited the heavier proportions of the dog, so that he weighed, without
+any fat and without an ounce of superfluous flesh, over ninety pounds.  It
+was all muscle, bone, and sinew-fighting flesh in the finest condition.
+
+The door of the pen was being opened again.  White Fang paused.  Something
+unusual was happening.  He waited.  The door was opened wider.  Then a
+huge dog was thrust inside, and the door was slammed shut behind him.
+White Fang had never seen such a dog (it was a mastiff); but the size and
+fierce aspect of the intruder did not deter him.  Here was some thing,
+not wood nor iron, upon which to wreak his hate.  He leaped in with a
+flash of fangs that ripped down the side of the mastiff's neck.  The
+mastiff shook his head, growled hoarsely, and plunged at White Fang.  But
+White Fang was here, there, and everywhere, always evading and eluding,
+and always leaping in and slashing with his fangs and leaping out again
+in time to escape punishment.
+
+The men outside shouted and applauded, while Beauty Smith, in an ecstasy
+of delight, gloated over the ripping and mangling performed by White
+Fang.  There was no hope for the mastiff from the first.  He was too
+ponderous and slow.  In the end, while Beauty Smith beat White Fang back
+with a club, the mastiff was dragged out by its owner.  Then there was a
+payment of bets, and money clinked in Beauty Smith's hand.
+
+White Fang came to look forward eagerly to the gathering of the men
+around his pen.  It meant a fight; and this was the only way that was now
+vouchsafed him of expressing the life that was in him.  Tormented,
+incited to hate, he was kept a prisoner so that there was no way of
+satisfying that hate except at the times his master saw fit to put
+another dog against him.  Beauty Smith had estimated his powers well, for
+he was invariably the victor.  One day, three dogs were turned in upon
+him in succession.  Another day a full-grown wolf, fresh-caught from the
+Wild, was shoved in through the door of the pen.  And on still another
+day two dogs were set against him at the same time.  This was his
+severest fight, and though in the end he killed them both he was himself
+half killed in doing it.
+
+In the fall of the year, when the first snows were falling and mush-ice
+was running in the river, Beauty Smith took passage for himself and White
+Fang on a steamboat bound up the Yukon to Dawson.  White Fang had now
+achieved a reputation in the land.  As "the Fighting Wolf" he was known
+far and wide, and the cage in which he was kept on the steam-boat's deck
+was usually surrounded by curious men.  He raged and snarled at them, or
+lay quietly and studied them with cold hatred.  Why should he not hate
+them?  He never asked himself the question.  He knew only hate and lost
+himself in the passion of it.  Life had become a hell to him.  He had not
+been made for the close confinement wild beasts endure at the hands of
+men.  And yet it was in precisely this way that he was treated.  Men
+stared at him, poked sticks between the bars to make him snarl, and then
+laughed at him.
+
+They were his environment, these men, and they were moulding the clay of
+him into a more ferocious thing than had been intended by Nature.
+Nevertheless, Nature had given him plasticity.  Where many another animal
+would have died or had its spirit broken, he adjusted himself and lived,
+and at no expense of the spirit.  Possibly Beauty Smith, arch-fiend and
+tormentor, was capable of breaking White Fang's spirit, but as yet there
+were no signs of his succeeding.
+
+If Beauty Smith had in him a devil, White Fang had another; and the two
+of them raged against each other unceasingly.  In the days before, White
+Fang had had the wisdom to cower down and submit to a man with a club in
+his hand; but this wisdom now left him.  The mere sight of Beauty Smith
+was sufficient to send him into transports of fury.  And when they came
+to close quarters, and he had been beaten back by the club, he went on
+growling and snarling, and showing his fangs.  The last growl could never
+be extracted from him.  No matter how terribly he was beaten, he had
+always another growl; and when Beauty Smith gave up and withdrew, the
+defiant growl followed after him, or White Fang sprang at the bars of the
+cage bellowing his hatred.
+
+When the steamboat arrived at Dawson, White Fang went ashore.  But he
+still lived a public life, in a cage, surrounded by curious men.  He was
+exhibited as "the Fighting Wolf," and men paid fifty cents in gold dust
+to see him.  He was given no rest.  Did he lie down to sleep, he was
+stirred up by a sharp stick--so that the audience might get its money's
+worth.  In order to make the exhibition interesting, he was kept in a
+rage most of the time.  But worse than all this, was the atmosphere in
+which he lived.  He was regarded as the most fearful of wild beasts, and
+this was borne in to him through the bars of the cage.  Every word, every
+cautious action, on the part of the men, impressed upon him his own
+terrible ferocity.  It was so much added fuel to the flame of his
+fierceness.  There could be but one result, and that was that his
+ferocity fed upon itself and increased.  It was another instance of the
+plasticity of his clay, of his capacity for being moulded by the pressure
+of environment.
+
+In addition to being exhibited he was a professional fighting animal.  At
+irregular intervals, whenever a fight could be arranged, he was taken out
+of his cage and led off into the woods a few miles from town.  Usually
+this occurred at night, so as to avoid interference from the mounted
+police of the Territory.  After a few hours of waiting, when daylight had
+come, the audience and the dog with which he was to fight arrived.  In
+this manner it came about that he fought all sizes and breeds of dogs.  It
+was a savage land, the men were savage, and the fights were usually to
+the death.
+
+Since White Fang continued to fight, it is obvious that it was the other
+dogs that died.  He never knew defeat.  His early training, when he
+fought with Lip-lip and the whole puppy-pack, stood him in good stead.
+There was the tenacity with which he clung to the earth.  No dog could
+make him lose his footing.  This was the favourite trick of the wolf
+breeds--to rush in upon him, either directly or with an unexpected
+swerve, in the hope of striking his shoulder and overthrowing him.
+Mackenzie hounds, Eskimo and Labrador dogs, huskies and Malemutes--all
+tried it on him, and all failed.  He was never known to lose his footing.
+Men told this to one another, and looked each time to see it happen; but
+White Fang always disappointed them.
+
+Then there was his lightning quickness.  It gave him a tremendous
+advantage over his antagonists.  No matter what their fighting
+experience, they had never encountered a dog that moved so swiftly as he.
+Also to be reckoned with, was the immediateness of his attack.  The
+average dog was accustomed to the preliminaries of snarling and bristling
+and growling, and the average dog was knocked off his feet and finished
+before he had begun to fight or recovered from his surprise.  So often
+did this happen, that it became the custom to hold White Fang until the
+other dog went through its preliminaries, was good and ready, and even
+made the first attack.
+
+But greatest of all the advantages in White Fang's favour, was his
+experience.  He knew more about fighting than did any of the dogs that
+faced him.  He had fought more fights, knew how to meet more tricks and
+methods, and had more tricks himself, while his own method was scarcely
+to be improved upon.
+
+As the time went by, he had fewer and fewer fights.  Men despaired of
+matching him with an equal, and Beauty Smith was compelled to pit wolves
+against him.  These were trapped by the Indians for the purpose, and a
+fight between White Fang and a wolf was always sure to draw a crowd.
+Once, a full-grown female lynx was secured, and this time White Fang
+fought for his life.  Her quickness matched his; her ferocity equalled
+his; while he fought with his fangs alone, and she fought with her sharp-
+clawed feet as well.
+
+But after the lynx, all fighting ceased for White Fang.  There were no
+more animals with which to fight--at least, there was none considered
+worthy of fighting with him.  So he remained on exhibition until spring,
+when one Tim Keenan, a faro-dealer, arrived in the land.  With him came
+the first bull-dog that had ever entered the Klondike.  That this dog and
+White Fang should come together was inevitable, and for a week the
+anticipated fight was the mainspring of conversation in certain quarters
+of the town.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV--THE CLINGING DEATH
+
+
+Beauty Smith slipped the chain from his neck and stepped back.
+
+For once White Fang did not make an immediate attack.  He stood still,
+ears pricked forward, alert and curious, surveying the strange animal
+that faced him.  He had never seen such a dog before.  Tim Keenan shoved
+the bull-dog forward with a muttered "Go to it."  The animal waddled
+toward the centre of the circle, short and squat and ungainly.  He came
+to a stop and blinked across at White Fang.
+
+There were cries from the crowd of, "Go to him, Cherokee!  Sick 'm,
+Cherokee!  Eat 'm up!"
+
+But Cherokee did not seem anxious to fight.  He turned his head and
+blinked at the men who shouted, at the same time wagging his stump of a
+tail good-naturedly.  He was not afraid, but merely lazy.  Besides, it
+did not seem to him that it was intended he should fight with the dog he
+saw before him.  He was not used to fighting with that kind of dog, and
+he was waiting for them to bring on the real dog.
+
+Tim Keenan stepped in and bent over Cherokee, fondling him on both sides
+of the shoulders with hands that rubbed against the grain of the hair and
+that made slight, pushing-forward movements.  These were so many
+suggestions.  Also, their effect was irritating, for Cherokee began to
+growl, very softly, deep down in his throat.  There was a correspondence
+in rhythm between the growls and the movements of the man's hands.  The
+growl rose in the throat with the culmination of each forward-pushing
+movement, and ebbed down to start up afresh with the beginning of the
+next movement.  The end of each movement was the accent of the rhythm,
+the movement ending abruptly and the growling rising with a jerk.
+
+This was not without its effect on White Fang.  The hair began to rise on
+his neck and across the shoulders.  Tim Keenan gave a final shove forward
+and stepped back again.  As the impetus that carried Cherokee forward
+died down, he continued to go forward of his own volition, in a swift,
+bow-legged run.  Then White Fang struck.  A cry of startled admiration
+went up.  He had covered the distance and gone in more like a cat than a
+dog; and with the same cat-like swiftness he had slashed with his fangs
+and leaped clear.
+
+The bull-dog was bleeding back of one ear from a rip in his thick neck.
+He gave no sign, did not even snarl, but turned and followed after White
+Fang.  The display on both sides, the quickness of the one and the
+steadiness of the other, had excited the partisan spirit of the crowd,
+and the men were making new bets and increasing original bets.  Again,
+and yet again, White Fang sprang in, slashed, and got away untouched, and
+still his strange foe followed after him, without too great haste, not
+slowly, but deliberately and determinedly, in a businesslike sort of way.
+There was purpose in his method--something for him to do that he was
+intent upon doing and from which nothing could distract him.
+
+His whole demeanour, every action, was stamped with this purpose.  It
+puzzled White Fang.  Never had he seen such a dog.  It had no hair
+protection.  It was soft, and bled easily.  There was no thick mat of fur
+to baffle White Fang's teeth as they were often baffled by dogs of his
+own breed.  Each time that his teeth struck they sank easily into the
+yielding flesh, while the animal did not seem able to defend itself.
+Another disconcerting thing was that it made no outcry, such as he had
+been accustomed to with the other dogs he had fought.  Beyond a growl or
+a grunt, the dog took its punishment silently.  And never did it flag in
+its pursuit of him.
+
+Not that Cherokee was slow.  He could turn and whirl swiftly enough, but
+White Fang was never there.  Cherokee was puzzled, too.  He had never
+fought before with a dog with which he could not close.  The desire to
+close had always been mutual.  But here was a dog that kept at a
+distance, dancing and dodging here and there and all about.  And when it
+did get its teeth into him, it did not hold on but let go instantly and
+darted away again.
+
+But White Fang could not get at the soft underside of the throat.  The
+bull-dog stood too short, while its massive jaws were an added
+protection.  White Fang darted in and out unscathed, while Cherokee's
+wounds increased.  Both sides of his neck and head were ripped and
+slashed.  He bled freely, but showed no signs of being disconcerted.  He
+continued his plodding pursuit, though once, for the moment baffled, he
+came to a full stop and blinked at the men who looked on, at the same
+time wagging his stump of a tail as an expression of his willingness to
+fight.
+
+In that moment White Fang was in upon him and out, in passing ripping his
+trimmed remnant of an ear.  With a slight manifestation of anger,
+Cherokee took up the pursuit again, running on the inside of the circle
+White Fang was making, and striving to fasten his deadly grip on White
+Fang's throat.  The bull-dog missed by a hair's-breadth, and cries of
+praise went up as White Fang doubled suddenly out of danger in the
+opposite direction.
+
+The time went by.  White Fang still danced on, dodging and doubling,
+leaping in and out, and ever inflicting damage.  And still the bull-dog,
+with grim certitude, toiled after him.  Sooner or later he would
+accomplish his purpose, get the grip that would win the battle.  In the
+meantime, he accepted all the punishment the other could deal him.  His
+tufts of ears had become tassels, his neck and shoulders were slashed in
+a score of places, and his very lips were cut and bleeding--all from
+these lightning snaps that were beyond his foreseeing and guarding.
+
+Time and again White Fang had attempted to knock Cherokee off his feet;
+but the difference in their height was too great.  Cherokee was too
+squat, too close to the ground.  White Fang tried the trick once too
+often.  The chance came in one of his quick doublings and
+counter-circlings.  He caught Cherokee with head turned away as he
+whirled more slowly.  His shoulder was exposed.  White Fang drove in upon
+it: but his own shoulder was high above, while he struck with such force
+that his momentum carried him on across over the other's body.  For the
+first time in his fighting history, men saw White Fang lose his footing.
+His body turned a half-somersault in the air, and he would have landed on
+his back had he not twisted, catlike, still in the air, in the effort to
+bring his feet to the earth.  As it was, he struck heavily on his side.
+The next instant he was on his feet, but in that instant Cherokee's teeth
+closed on his throat.
+
+It was not a good grip, being too low down toward the chest; but Cherokee
+held on.  White Fang sprang to his feet and tore wildly around, trying to
+shake off the bull-dog's body.  It made him frantic, this clinging,
+dragging weight.  It bound his movements, restricted his freedom.  It was
+like the trap, and all his instinct resented it and revolted against it.
+It was a mad revolt.  For several minutes he was to all intents insane.
+The basic life that was in him took charge of him.  The will to exist of
+his body surged over him.  He was dominated by this mere flesh-love of
+life.  All intelligence was gone.  It was as though he had no brain.  His
+reason was unseated by the blind yearning of the flesh to exist and move,
+at all hazards to move, to continue to move, for movement was the
+expression of its existence.
+
+Round and round he went, whirling and turning and reversing, trying to
+shake off the fifty-pound weight that dragged at his throat.  The bull-
+dog did little but keep his grip.  Sometimes, and rarely, he managed to
+get his feet to the earth and for a moment to brace himself against White
+Fang.  But the next moment his footing would be lost and he would be
+dragging around in the whirl of one of White Fang's mad gyrations.
+Cherokee identified himself with his instinct.  He knew that he was doing
+the right thing by holding on, and there came to him certain blissful
+thrills of satisfaction.  At such moments he even closed his eyes and
+allowed his body to be hurled hither and thither, willy-nilly, careless
+of any hurt that might thereby come to it.  That did not count.  The grip
+was the thing, and the grip he kept.
+
+White Fang ceased only when he had tired himself out.  He could do
+nothing, and he could not understand.  Never, in all his fighting, had
+this thing happened.  The dogs he had fought with did not fight that way.
+With them it was snap and slash and get away, snap and slash and get
+away.  He lay partly on his side, panting for breath.  Cherokee still
+holding his grip, urged against him, trying to get him over entirely on
+his side.  White Fang resisted, and he could feel the jaws shifting their
+grip, slightly relaxing and coming together again in a chewing movement.
+Each shift brought the grip closer to his throat.  The bull-dog's method
+was to hold what he had, and when opportunity favoured to work in for
+more.  Opportunity favoured when White Fang remained quiet.  When White
+Fang struggled, Cherokee was content merely to hold on.
+
+The bulging back of Cherokee's neck was the only portion of his body that
+White Fang's teeth could reach.  He got hold toward the base where the
+neck comes out from the shoulders; but he did not know the chewing method
+of fighting, nor were his jaws adapted to it.  He spasmodically ripped
+and tore with his fangs for a space.  Then a change in their position
+diverted him.  The bull-dog had managed to roll him over on his back, and
+still hanging on to his throat, was on top of him.  Like a cat, White
+Fang bowed his hind-quarters in, and, with the feet digging into his
+enemy's abdomen above him, he began to claw with long tearing-strokes.
+Cherokee might well have been disembowelled had he not quickly pivoted on
+his grip and got his body off of White Fang's and at right angles to it.
+
+There was no escaping that grip.  It was like Fate itself, and as
+inexorable.  Slowly it shifted up along the jugular.  All that saved
+White Fang from death was the loose skin of his neck and the thick fur
+that covered it.  This served to form a large roll in Cherokee's mouth,
+the fur of which well-nigh defied his teeth.  But bit by bit, whenever
+the chance offered, he was getting more of the loose skin and fur in his
+mouth.  The result was that he was slowly throttling White Fang.  The
+latter's breath was drawn with greater and greater difficulty as the
+moments went by.
+
+It began to look as though the battle were over.  The backers of Cherokee
+waxed jubilant and offered ridiculous odds.  White Fang's backers were
+correspondingly depressed, and refused bets of ten to one and twenty to
+one, though one man was rash enough to close a wager of fifty to one.
+This man was Beauty Smith.  He took a step into the ring and pointed his
+finger at White Fang.  Then he began to laugh derisively and scornfully.
+This produced the desired effect.  White Fang went wild with rage.  He
+called up his reserves of strength, and gained his feet.  As he struggled
+around the ring, the fifty pounds of his foe ever dragging on his throat,
+his anger passed on into panic.  The basic life of him dominated him
+again, and his intelligence fled before the will of his flesh to live.
+Round and round and back again, stumbling and falling and rising, even
+uprearing at times on his hind-legs and lifting his foe clear of the
+earth, he struggled vainly to shake off the clinging death.
+
+At last he fell, toppling backward, exhausted; and the bull-dog promptly
+shifted his grip, getting in closer, mangling more and more of the fur-
+folded flesh, throttling White Fang more severely than ever.  Shouts of
+applause went up for the victor, and there were many cries of "Cherokee!"
+"Cherokee!"  To this Cherokee responded by vigorous wagging of the stump
+of his tail.  But the clamour of approval did not distract him.  There
+was no sympathetic relation between his tail and his massive jaws.  The
+one might wag, but the others held their terrible grip on White Fang's
+throat.
+
+It was at this time that a diversion came to the spectators.  There was a
+jingle of bells.  Dog-mushers' cries were heard.  Everybody, save Beauty
+Smith, looked apprehensively, the fear of the police strong upon them.
+But they saw, up the trail, and not down, two men running with sled and
+dogs.  They were evidently coming down the creek from some prospecting
+trip.  At sight of the crowd they stopped their dogs and came over and
+joined it, curious to see the cause of the excitement.  The dog-musher
+wore a moustache, but the other, a taller and younger man, was smooth-
+shaven, his skin rosy from the pounding of his blood and the running in
+the frosty air.
+
+White Fang had practically ceased struggling.  Now and again he resisted
+spasmodically and to no purpose.  He could get little air, and that
+little grew less and less under the merciless grip that ever tightened.
+In spite of his armour of fur, the great vein of his throat would have
+long since been torn open, had not the first grip of the bull-dog been so
+low down as to be practically on the chest.  It had taken Cherokee a long
+time to shift that grip upward, and this had also tended further to clog
+his jaws with fur and skin-fold.
+
+In the meantime, the abysmal brute in Beauty Smith had been rising into
+his brain and mastering the small bit of sanity that he possessed at
+best.  When he saw White Fang's eyes beginning to glaze, he knew beyond
+doubt that the fight was lost.  Then he broke loose.  He sprang upon
+White Fang and began savagely to kick him.  There were hisses from the
+crowd and cries of protest, but that was all.  While this went on, and
+Beauty Smith continued to kick White Fang, there was a commotion in the
+crowd.  The tall young newcomer was forcing his way through, shouldering
+men right and left without ceremony or gentleness.  When he broke through
+into the ring, Beauty Smith was just in the act of delivering another
+kick.  All his weight was on one foot, and he was in a state of unstable
+equilibrium.  At that moment the newcomer's fist landed a smashing blow
+full in his face.  Beauty Smith's remaining leg left the ground, and his
+whole body seemed to lift into the air as he turned over backward and
+struck the snow.  The newcomer turned upon the crowd.
+
+"You cowards!" he cried.  "You beasts!"
+
+He was in a rage himself--a sane rage.  His grey eyes seemed metallic and
+steel-like as they flashed upon the crowd.  Beauty Smith regained his
+feet and came toward him, sniffling and cowardly.  The new-comer did not
+understand.  He did not know how abject a coward the other was, and
+thought he was coming back intent on fighting.  So, with a "You beast!"
+he smashed Beauty Smith over backward with a second blow in the face.
+Beauty Smith decided that the snow was the safest place for him, and lay
+where he had fallen, making no effort to get up.
+
+"Come on, Matt, lend a hand," the newcomer called the dog-musher, who had
+followed him into the ring.
+
+Both men bent over the dogs.  Matt took hold of White Fang, ready to pull
+when Cherokee's jaws should be loosened.  This the younger man
+endeavoured to accomplish by clutching the bulldog's jaws in his hands
+and trying to spread them.  It was a vain undertaking.  As he pulled and
+tugged and wrenched, he kept exclaiming with every expulsion of breath,
+"Beasts!"
+
+The crowd began to grow unruly, and some of the men were protesting
+against the spoiling of the sport; but they were silenced when the
+newcomer lifted his head from his work for a moment and glared at them.
+
+"You damn beasts!" he finally exploded, and went back to his task.
+
+"It's no use, Mr. Scott, you can't break 'm apart that way," Matt said at
+last.
+
+The pair paused and surveyed the locked dogs.
+
+"Ain't bleedin' much," Matt announced.  "Ain't got all the way in yet."
+
+"But he's liable to any moment," Scott answered.  "There, did you see
+that!  He shifted his grip in a bit."
+
+The younger man's excitement and apprehension for White Fang was growing.
+He struck Cherokee about the head savagely again and again.  But that did
+not loosen the jaws.  Cherokee wagged the stump of his tail in
+advertisement that he understood the meaning of the blows, but that he
+knew he was himself in the right and only doing his duty by keeping his
+grip.
+
+"Won't some of you help?" Scott cried desperately at the crowd.
+
+But no help was offered.  Instead, the crowd began sarcastically to cheer
+him on and showered him with facetious advice.
+
+"You'll have to get a pry," Matt counselled.
+
+The other reached into the holster at his hip, drew his revolver, and
+tried to thrust its muzzle between the bull-dog's jaws.  He shoved, and
+shoved hard, till the grating of the steel against the locked teeth could
+be distinctly heard.  Both men were on their knees, bending over the
+dogs.  Tim Keenan strode into the ring.  He paused beside Scott and
+touched him on the shoulder, saying ominously:
+
+"Don't break them teeth, stranger."
+
+"Then I'll break his neck," Scott retorted, continuing his shoving and
+wedging with the revolver muzzle.
+
+"I said don't break them teeth," the faro-dealer repeated more ominously
+than before.
+
+But if it was a bluff he intended, it did not work.  Scott never desisted
+from his efforts, though he looked up coolly and asked:
+
+"Your dog?"
+
+The faro-dealer grunted.
+
+"Then get in here and break this grip."
+
+"Well, stranger," the other drawled irritatingly, "I don't mind telling
+you that's something I ain't worked out for myself.  I don't know how to
+turn the trick."
+
+"Then get out of the way," was the reply, "and don't bother me.  I'm
+busy."
+
+Tim Keenan continued standing over him, but Scott took no further notice
+of his presence.  He had managed to get the muzzle in between the jaws on
+one side, and was trying to get it out between the jaws on the other
+side.  This accomplished, he pried gently and carefully, loosening the
+jaws a bit at a time, while Matt, a bit at a time, extricated White
+Fang's mangled neck.
+
+"Stand by to receive your dog," was Scott's peremptory order to
+Cherokee's owner.
+
+The faro-dealer stooped down obediently and got a firm hold on Cherokee.
+
+"Now!" Scott warned, giving the final pry.
+
+The dogs were drawn apart, the bull-dog struggling vigorously.
+
+"Take him away," Scott commanded, and Tim Keenan dragged Cherokee back
+into the crowd.
+
+White Fang made several ineffectual efforts to get up.  Once he gained
+his feet, but his legs were too weak to sustain him, and he slowly wilted
+and sank back into the snow.  His eyes were half closed, and the surface
+of them was glassy.  His jaws were apart, and through them the tongue
+protruded, draggled and limp.  To all appearances he looked like a dog
+that had been strangled to death.  Matt examined him.
+
+"Just about all in," he announced; "but he's breathin' all right."
+
+Beauty Smith had regained his feet and come over to look at White Fang.
+
+"Matt, how much is a good sled-dog worth?" Scott asked.
+
+The dog-musher, still on his knees and stooped over White Fang,
+calculated for a moment.
+
+"Three hundred dollars," he answered.
+
+"And how much for one that's all chewed up like this one?" Scott asked,
+nudging White Fang with his foot.
+
+"Half of that," was the dog-musher's judgment.  Scott turned upon Beauty
+Smith.
+
+"Did you hear, Mr. Beast?  I'm going to take your dog from you, and I'm
+going to give you a hundred and fifty for him."
+
+He opened his pocket-book and counted out the bills.
+
+Beauty Smith put his hands behind his back, refusing to touch the
+proffered money.
+
+"I ain't a-sellin'," he said.
+
+"Oh, yes you are," the other assured him.  "Because I'm buying.  Here's
+your money.  The dog's mine."
+
+Beauty Smith, his hands still behind him, began to back away.
+
+Scott sprang toward him, drawing his fist back to strike.  Beauty Smith
+cowered down in anticipation of the blow.
+
+"I've got my rights," he whimpered.
+
+"You've forfeited your rights to own that dog," was the rejoinder.  "Are
+you going to take the money? or do I have to hit you again?"
+
+"All right," Beauty Smith spoke up with the alacrity of fear.  "But I
+take the money under protest," he added.  "The dog's a mint.  I ain't a-
+goin' to be robbed.  A man's got his rights."
+
+"Correct," Scott answered, passing the money over to him.  "A man's got
+his rights.  But you're not a man.  You're a beast."
+
+"Wait till I get back to Dawson," Beauty Smith threatened.  "I'll have
+the law on you."
+
+"If you open your mouth when you get back to Dawson, I'll have you run
+out of town.  Understand?"
+
+Beauty Smith replied with a grunt.
+
+"Understand?" the other thundered with abrupt fierceness.
+
+"Yes," Beauty Smith grunted, shrinking away.
+
+"Yes what?"
+
+"Yes, sir," Beauty Smith snarled.
+
+"Look out!  He'll bite!" some one shouted, and a guffaw of laughter went
+up.
+
+Scott turned his back on him, and returned to help the dog-musher, who
+was working over White Fang.
+
+Some of the men were already departing; others stood in groups, looking
+on and talking.  Tim Keenan joined one of the groups.
+
+"Who's that mug?" he asked.
+
+"Weedon Scott," some one answered.
+
+"And who in hell is Weedon Scott?" the faro-dealer demanded.
+
+"Oh, one of them crackerjack minin' experts.  He's in with all the big
+bugs.  If you want to keep out of trouble, you'll steer clear of him,
+that's my talk.  He's all hunky with the officials.  The Gold
+Commissioner's a special pal of his."
+
+"I thought he must be somebody," was the faro-dealer's comment.  "That's
+why I kept my hands offen him at the start."
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V--THE INDOMITABLE
+
+
+"It's hopeless," Weedon Scott confessed.
+
+He sat on the step of his cabin and stared at the dog-musher, who
+responded with a shrug that was equally hopeless.
+
+Together they looked at White Fang at the end of his stretched chain,
+bristling, snarling, ferocious, straining to get at the sled-dogs.  Having
+received sundry lessons from Matt, said lessons being imparted by means
+of a club, the sled-dogs had learned to leave White Fang alone; and even
+then they were lying down at a distance, apparently oblivious of his
+existence.
+
+"It's a wolf and there's no taming it," Weedon Scott announced.
+
+"Oh, I don't know about that," Matt objected.  "Might be a lot of dog in
+'m, for all you can tell.  But there's one thing I know sure, an' that
+there's no gettin' away from."
+
+The dog-musher paused and nodded his head confidentially at Moosehide
+Mountain.
+
+"Well, don't be a miser with what you know," Scott said sharply, after
+waiting a suitable length of time.  "Spit it out.  What is it?"
+
+The dog-musher indicated White Fang with a backward thrust of his thumb.
+
+"Wolf or dog, it's all the same--he's ben tamed 'ready."
+
+"No!"
+
+"I tell you yes, an' broke to harness.  Look close there.  D'ye see them
+marks across the chest?"
+
+"You're right, Matt.  He was a sled-dog before Beauty Smith got hold of
+him."
+
+"And there's not much reason against his bein' a sled-dog again."
+
+"What d'ye think?" Scott queried eagerly.  Then the hope died down as he
+added, shaking his head, "We've had him two weeks now, and if anything
+he's wilder than ever at the present moment."
+
+"Give 'm a chance," Matt counselled.  "Turn 'm loose for a spell."
+
+The other looked at him incredulously.
+
+"Yes," Matt went on, "I know you've tried to, but you didn't take a
+club."
+
+"You try it then."
+
+The dog-musher secured a club and went over to the chained animal.  White
+Fang watched the club after the manner of a caged lion watching the whip
+of its trainer.
+
+"See 'm keep his eye on that club," Matt said.  "That's a good sign.  He's
+no fool.  Don't dast tackle me so long as I got that club handy.  He's
+not clean crazy, sure."
+
+As the man's hand approached his neck, White Fang bristled and snarled
+and crouched down.  But while he eyed the approaching hand, he at the
+same time contrived to keep track of the club in the other hand,
+suspended threateningly above him.  Matt unsnapped the chain from the
+collar and stepped back.
+
+White Fang could scarcely realise that he was free.  Many months had gone
+by since he passed into the possession of Beauty Smith, and in all that
+period he had never known a moment of freedom except at the times he had
+been loosed to fight with other dogs.  Immediately after such fights he
+had always been imprisoned again.
+
+He did not know what to make of it.  Perhaps some new devilry of the gods
+was about to be perpetrated on him.  He walked slowly and cautiously,
+prepared to be assailed at any moment.  He did not know what to do, it
+was all so unprecedented.  He took the precaution to sheer off from the
+two watching gods, and walked carefully to the corner of the cabin.
+Nothing happened.  He was plainly perplexed, and he came back again,
+pausing a dozen feet away and regarding the two men intently.
+
+"Won't he run away?" his new owner asked.
+
+Matt shrugged his shoulders.  "Got to take a gamble.  Only way to find
+out is to find out."
+
+"Poor devil," Scott murmured pityingly.  "What he needs is some show of
+human kindness," he added, turning and going into the cabin.
+
+He came out with a piece of meat, which he tossed to White Fang.  He
+sprang away from it, and from a distance studied it suspiciously.
+
+"Hi-yu, Major!" Matt shouted warningly, but too late.
+
+Major had made a spring for the meat.  At the instant his jaws closed on
+it, White Fang struck him.  He was overthrown.  Matt rushed in, but
+quicker than he was White Fang.  Major staggered to his feet, but the
+blood spouting from his throat reddened the snow in a widening path.
+
+"It's too bad, but it served him right," Scott said hastily.
+
+But Matt's foot had already started on its way to kick White Fang.  There
+was a leap, a flash of teeth, a sharp exclamation.  White Fang, snarling
+fiercely, scrambled backward for several yards, while Matt stooped and
+investigated his leg.
+
+"He got me all right," he announced, pointing to the torn trousers and
+undercloths, and the growing stain of red.
+
+"I told you it was hopeless, Matt," Scott said in a discouraged voice.
+"I've thought about it off and on, while not wanting to think of it.  But
+we've come to it now.  It's the only thing to do."
+
+As he talked, with reluctant movements he drew his revolver, threw open
+the cylinder, and assured himself of its contents.
+
+"Look here, Mr. Scott," Matt objected; "that dog's ben through hell.  You
+can't expect 'm to come out a white an' shinin' angel.  Give 'm time."
+
+"Look at Major," the other rejoined.
+
+The dog-musher surveyed the stricken dog.  He had sunk down on the snow
+in the circle of his blood and was plainly in the last gasp.
+
+"Served 'm right.  You said so yourself, Mr. Scott.  He tried to take
+White Fang's meat, an' he's dead-O.  That was to be expected.  I wouldn't
+give two whoops in hell for a dog that wouldn't fight for his own meat."
+
+"But look at yourself, Matt.  It's all right about the dogs, but we must
+draw the line somewhere."
+
+"Served me right," Matt argued stubbornly.  "What'd I want to kick 'm
+for?  You said yourself that he'd done right.  Then I had no right to
+kick 'm."
+
+"It would be a mercy to kill him," Scott insisted.  "He's untamable."
+
+"Now look here, Mr. Scott, give the poor devil a fightin' chance.  He
+ain't had no chance yet.  He's just come through hell, an' this is the
+first time he's ben loose.  Give 'm a fair chance, an' if he don't
+deliver the goods, I'll kill 'm myself.  There!"
+
+"God knows I don't want to kill him or have him killed," Scott answered,
+putting away the revolver.  "We'll let him run loose and see what
+kindness can do for him.  And here's a try at it."
+
+He walked over to White Fang and began talking to him gently and
+soothingly.
+
+"Better have a club handy," Matt warned.
+
+Scott shook his head and went on trying to win White Fang's confidence.
+
+White Fang was suspicious.  Something was impending.  He had killed this
+god's dog, bitten his companion god, and what else was to be expected
+than some terrible punishment?  But in the face of it he was indomitable.
+He bristled and showed his teeth, his eyes vigilant, his whole body wary
+and prepared for anything.  The god had no club, so he suffered him to
+approach quite near.  The god's hand had come out and was descending upon
+his head.  White Fang shrank together and grew tense as he crouched under
+it.  Here was danger, some treachery or something.  He knew the hands of
+the gods, their proved mastery, their cunning to hurt.  Besides, there
+was his old antipathy to being touched.  He snarled more menacingly,
+crouched still lower, and still the hand descended.  He did not want to
+bite the hand, and he endured the peril of it until his instinct surged
+up in him, mastering him with its insatiable yearning for life.
+
+Weedon Scott had believed that he was quick enough to avoid any snap or
+slash.  But he had yet to learn the remarkable quickness of White Fang,
+who struck with the certainty and swiftness of a coiled snake.
+
+Scott cried out sharply with surprise, catching his torn hand and holding
+it tightly in his other hand.  Matt uttered a great oath and sprang to
+his side.  White Fang crouched down, and backed away, bristling, showing
+his fangs, his eyes malignant with menace.  Now he could expect a beating
+as fearful as any he had received from Beauty Smith.
+
+"Here!  What are you doing?" Scott cried suddenly.
+
+Matt had dashed into the cabin and come out with a rifle.
+
+"Nothin'," he said slowly, with a careless calmness that was assumed,
+"only goin' to keep that promise I made.  I reckon it's up to me to kill
+'m as I said I'd do."
+
+"No you don't!"
+
+"Yes I do.  Watch me."
+
+As Matt had pleaded for White Fang when he had been bitten, it was now
+Weedon Scott's turn to plead.
+
+"You said to give him a chance.  Well, give it to him.  We've only just
+started, and we can't quit at the beginning.  It served me right, this
+time.  And--look at him!"
+
+White Fang, near the corner of the cabin and forty feet away, was
+snarling with blood-curdling viciousness, not at Scott, but at the dog-
+musher.
+
+"Well, I'll be everlastingly gosh-swoggled!" was the dog-musher's
+expression of astonishment.
+
+"Look at the intelligence of him," Scott went on hastily.  "He knows the
+meaning of firearms as well as you do.  He's got intelligence and we've
+got to give that intelligence a chance.  Put up the gun."
+
+"All right, I'm willin'," Matt agreed, leaning the rifle against the
+woodpile.
+
+"But will you look at that!" he exclaimed the next moment.
+
+White Fang had quieted down and ceased snarling.  "This is worth
+investigatin'.  Watch."
+
+Matt, reached for the rifle, and at the same moment White Fang snarled.
+He stepped away from the rifle, and White Fang's lifted lips descended,
+covering his teeth.
+
+"Now, just for fun."
+
+Matt took the rifle and began slowly to raise it to his shoulder.  White
+Fang's snarling began with the movement, and increased as the movement
+approached its culmination.  But the moment before the rifle came to a
+level on him, he leaped sidewise behind the corner of the cabin.  Matt
+stood staring along the sights at the empty space of snow which had been
+occupied by White Fang.
+
+The dog-musher put the rifle down solemnly, then turned and looked at his
+employer.
+
+"I agree with you, Mr. Scott.  That dog's too intelligent to kill."
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI--THE LOVE-MASTER
+
+
+As White Fang watched Weedon Scott approach, he bristled and snarled to
+advertise that he would not submit to punishment.  Twenty-four hours had
+passed since he had slashed open the hand that was now bandaged and held
+up by a sling to keep the blood out of it.  In the past White Fang had
+experienced delayed punishments, and he apprehended that such a one was
+about to befall him.  How could it be otherwise?  He had committed what
+was to him sacrilege, sunk his fangs into the holy flesh of a god, and of
+a white-skinned superior god at that.  In the nature of things, and of
+intercourse with gods, something terrible awaited him.
+
+The god sat down several feet away.  White Fang could see nothing
+dangerous in that.  When the gods administered punishment they stood on
+their legs.  Besides, this god had no club, no whip, no firearm.  And
+furthermore, he himself was free.  No chain nor stick bound him.  He
+could escape into safety while the god was scrambling to his feet.  In
+the meantime he would wait and see.
+
+The god remained quiet, made no movement; and White Fang's snarl slowly
+dwindled to a growl that ebbed down in his throat and ceased.  Then the
+god spoke, and at the first sound of his voice, the hair rose on White
+Fang's neck and the growl rushed up in his throat.  But the god made no
+hostile movement, and went on calmly talking.  For a time White Fang
+growled in unison with him, a correspondence of rhythm being established
+between growl and voice.  But the god talked on interminably.  He talked
+to White Fang as White Fang had never been talked to before.  He talked
+softly and soothingly, with a gentleness that somehow, somewhere, touched
+White Fang.  In spite of himself and all the pricking warnings of his
+instinct, White Fang began to have confidence in this god.  He had a
+feeling of security that was belied by all his experience with men.
+
+After a long time, the god got up and went into the cabin.  White Fang
+scanned him apprehensively when he came out.  He had neither whip nor
+club nor weapon.  Nor was his uninjured hand behind his back hiding
+something.  He sat down as before, in the same spot, several feet away.
+He held out a small piece of meat.  White Fang pricked his ears and
+investigated it suspiciously, managing to look at the same time both at
+the meat and the god, alert for any overt act, his body tense and ready
+to spring away at the first sign of hostility.
+
+Still the punishment delayed.  The god merely held near to his nose a
+piece of meat.  And about the meat there seemed nothing wrong.  Still
+White Fang suspected; and though the meat was proffered to him with short
+inviting thrusts of the hand, he refused to touch it.  The gods were all-
+wise, and there was no telling what masterful treachery lurked behind
+that apparently harmless piece of meat.  In past experience, especially
+in dealing with squaws, meat and punishment had often been disastrously
+related.
+
+In the end, the god tossed the meat on the snow at White Fang's feet.  He
+smelled the meat carefully; but he did not look at it.  While he smelled
+it he kept his eyes on the god.  Nothing happened.  He took the meat into
+his mouth and swallowed it.  Still nothing happened.  The god was
+actually offering him another piece of meat.  Again he refused to take it
+from the hand, and again it was tossed to him.  This was repeated a
+number of times.  But there came a time when the god refused to toss it.
+He kept it in his hand and steadfastly proffered it.
+
+The meat was good meat, and White Fang was hungry.  Bit by bit,
+infinitely cautious, he approached the hand.  At last the time came that
+he decided to eat the meat from the hand.  He never took his eyes from
+the god, thrusting his head forward with ears flattened back and hair
+involuntarily rising and cresting on his neck.  Also a low growl rumbled
+in his throat as warning that he was not to be trifled with.  He ate the
+meat, and nothing happened.  Piece by piece, he ate all the meat, and
+nothing happened.  Still the punishment delayed.
+
+He licked his chops and waited.  The god went on talking.  In his voice
+was kindness--something of which White Fang had no experience whatever.
+And within him it aroused feelings which he had likewise never
+experienced before.  He was aware of a certain strange satisfaction, as
+though some need were being gratified, as though some void in his being
+were being filled.  Then again came the prod of his instinct and the
+warning of past experience.  The gods were ever crafty, and they had
+unguessed ways of attaining their ends.
+
+Ah, he had thought so!  There it came now, the god's hand, cunning to
+hurt, thrusting out at him, descending upon his head.  But the god went
+on talking.  His voice was soft and soothing.  In spite of the menacing
+hand, the voice inspired confidence.  And in spite of the assuring voice,
+the hand inspired distrust.  White Fang was torn by conflicting feelings,
+impulses.  It seemed he would fly to pieces, so terrible was the control
+he was exerting, holding together by an unwonted indecision the counter-
+forces that struggled within him for mastery.
+
+He compromised.  He snarled and bristled and flattened his ears.  But he
+neither snapped nor sprang away.  The hand descended.  Nearer and nearer
+it came.  It touched the ends of his upstanding hair.  He shrank down
+under it.  It followed down after him, pressing more closely against him.
+Shrinking, almost shivering, he still managed to hold himself together.
+It was a torment, this hand that touched him and violated his instinct.
+He could not forget in a day all the evil that had been wrought him at
+the hands of men.  But it was the will of the god, and he strove to
+submit.
+
+The hand lifted and descended again in a patting, caressing movement.
+This continued, but every time the hand lifted, the hair lifted under it.
+And every time the hand descended, the ears flattened down and a
+cavernous growl surged in his throat.  White Fang growled and growled
+with insistent warning.  By this means he announced that he was prepared
+to retaliate for any hurt he might receive.  There was no telling when
+the god's ulterior motive might be disclosed.  At any moment that soft,
+confidence-inspiring voice might break forth in a roar of wrath, that
+gentle and caressing hand transform itself into a vice-like grip to hold
+him helpless and administer punishment.
+
+But the god talked on softly, and ever the hand rose and fell with non-
+hostile pats.  White Fang experienced dual feelings.  It was distasteful
+to his instinct.  It restrained him, opposed the will of him toward
+personal liberty.  And yet it was not physically painful.  On the
+contrary, it was even pleasant, in a physical way.  The patting movement
+slowly and carefully changed to a rubbing of the ears about their bases,
+and the physical pleasure even increased a little.  Yet he continued to
+fear, and he stood on guard, expectant of unguessed evil, alternately
+suffering and enjoying as one feeling or the other came uppermost and
+swayed him.
+
+"Well, I'll be gosh-swoggled!"
+
+So spoke Matt, coming out of the cabin, his sleeves rolled up, a pan of
+dirty dish-water in his hands, arrested in the act of emptying the pan by
+the sight of Weedon Scott patting White Fang.
+
+At the instant his voice broke the silence, White Fang leaped back,
+snarling savagely at him.
+
+Matt regarded his employer with grieved disapproval.
+
+"If you don't mind my expressin' my feelin's, Mr. Scott, I'll make free
+to say you're seventeen kinds of a damn fool an' all of 'em different,
+an' then some."
+
+Weedon Scott smiled with a superior air, gained his feet, and walked over
+to White Fang.  He talked soothingly to him, but not for long, then
+slowly put out his hand, rested it on White Fang's head, and resumed the
+interrupted patting.  White Fang endured it, keeping his eyes fixed
+suspiciously, not upon the man that patted him, but upon the man that
+stood in the doorway.
+
+"You may be a number one, tip-top minin' expert, all right all right,"
+the dog-musher delivered himself oracularly, "but you missed the chance
+of your life when you was a boy an' didn't run off an' join a circus."
+
+White Fang snarled at the sound of his voice, but this time did not leap
+away from under the hand that was caressing his head and the back of his
+neck with long, soothing strokes.
+
+It was the beginning of the end for White Fang--the ending of the old
+life and the reign of hate.  A new and incomprehensibly fairer life was
+dawning.  It required much thinking and endless patience on the part of
+Weedon Scott to accomplish this.  And on the part of White Fang it
+required nothing less than a revolution.  He had to ignore the urges and
+promptings of instinct and reason, defy experience, give the lie to life
+itself.
+
+Life, as he had known it, not only had had no place in it for much that
+he now did; but all the currents had gone counter to those to which he
+now abandoned himself.  In short, when all things were considered, he had
+to achieve an orientation far vaster than the one he had achieved at the
+time he came voluntarily in from the Wild and accepted Grey Beaver as his
+lord.  At that time he was a mere puppy, soft from the making, without
+form, ready for the thumb of circumstance to begin its work upon him.  But
+now it was different.  The thumb of circumstance had done its work only
+too well.  By it he had been formed and hardened into the Fighting Wolf,
+fierce and implacable, unloving and unlovable.  To accomplish the change
+was like a reflux of being, and this when the plasticity of youth was no
+longer his; when the fibre of him had become tough and knotty; when the
+warp and the woof of him had made of him an adamantine texture, harsh and
+unyielding; when the face of his spirit had become iron and all his
+instincts and axioms had crystallised into set rules, cautions, dislikes,
+and desires.
+
+Yet again, in this new orientation, it was the thumb of circumstance that
+pressed and prodded him, softening that which had become hard and
+remoulding it into fairer form.  Weedon Scott was in truth this thumb.  He
+had gone to the roots of White Fang's nature, and with kindness touched
+to life potencies that had languished and well-nigh perished.  One such
+potency was _love_.  It took the place of _like_, which latter had been
+the highest feeling that thrilled him in his intercourse with the gods.
+
+But this love did not come in a day.  It began with _like_ and out of it
+slowly developed.  White Fang did not run away, though he was allowed to
+remain loose, because he liked this new god.  This was certainly better
+than the life he had lived in the cage of Beauty Smith, and it was
+necessary that he should have some god.  The lordship of man was a need
+of his nature.  The seal of his dependence on man had been set upon him
+in that early day when he turned his back on the Wild and crawled to Grey
+Beaver's feet to receive the expected beating.  This seal had been
+stamped upon him again, and ineradicably, on his second return from the
+Wild, when the long famine was over and there was fish once more in the
+village of Grey Beaver.
+
+And so, because he needed a god and because he preferred Weedon Scott to
+Beauty Smith, White Fang remained.  In acknowledgment of fealty, he
+proceeded to take upon himself the guardianship of his master's property.
+He prowled about the cabin while the sled-dogs slept, and the first night-
+visitor to the cabin fought him off with a club until Weedon Scott came
+to the rescue.  But White Fang soon learned to differentiate between
+thieves and honest men, to appraise the true value of step and carriage.
+The man who travelled, loud-stepping, the direct line to the cabin door,
+he let alone--though he watched him vigilantly until the door opened and
+he received the endorsement of the master.  But the man who went softly,
+by circuitous ways, peering with caution, seeking after secrecy--that was
+the man who received no suspension of judgment from White Fang, and who
+went away abruptly, hurriedly, and without dignity.
+
+Weedon Scott had set himself the task of redeeming White Fang--or rather,
+of redeeming mankind from the wrong it had done White Fang.  It was a
+matter of principle and conscience.  He felt that the ill done White Fang
+was a debt incurred by man and that it must be paid.  So he went out of
+his way to be especially kind to the Fighting Wolf.  Each day he made it
+a point to caress and pet White Fang, and to do it at length.
+
+At first suspicious and hostile, White Fang grew to like this petting.
+But there was one thing that he never outgrew--his growling.  Growl he
+would, from the moment the petting began till it ended.  But it was a
+growl with a new note in it.  A stranger could not hear this note, and to
+such a stranger the growling of White Fang was an exhibition of
+primordial savagery, nerve-racking and blood-curdling.  But White Fang's
+throat had become harsh-fibred from the making of ferocious sounds
+through the many years since his first little rasp of anger in the lair
+of his cubhood, and he could not soften the sounds of that throat now to
+express the gentleness he felt.  Nevertheless, Weedon Scott's ear and
+sympathy were fine enough to catch the new note all but drowned in the
+fierceness--the note that was the faintest hint of a croon of content and
+that none but he could hear.
+
+As the days went by, the evolution of _like_ into _love_ was accelerated.
+White Fang himself began to grow aware of it, though in his consciousness
+he knew not what love was.  It manifested itself to him as a void in his
+being--a hungry, aching, yearning void that clamoured to be filled.  It
+was a pain and an unrest; and it received easement only by the touch of
+the new god's presence.  At such times love was joy to him, a wild, keen-
+thrilling satisfaction.  But when away from his god, the pain and the
+unrest returned; the void in him sprang up and pressed against him with
+its emptiness, and the hunger gnawed and gnawed unceasingly.
+
+White Fang was in the process of finding himself.  In spite of the
+maturity of his years and of the savage rigidity of the mould that had
+formed him, his nature was undergoing an expansion.  There was a
+burgeoning within him of strange feelings and unwonted impulses.  His old
+code of conduct was changing.  In the past he had liked comfort and
+surcease from pain, disliked discomfort and pain, and he had adjusted his
+actions accordingly.  But now it was different.  Because of this new
+feeling within him, he ofttimes elected discomfort and pain for the sake
+of his god.  Thus, in the early morning, instead of roaming and foraging,
+or lying in a sheltered nook, he would wait for hours on the cheerless
+cabin-stoop for a sight of the god's face.  At night, when the god
+returned home, White Fang would leave the warm sleeping-place he had
+burrowed in the snow in order to receive the friendly snap of fingers and
+the word of greeting.  Meat, even meat itself, he would forego to be with
+his god, to receive a caress from him or to accompany him down into the
+town.
+
+_Like_ had been replaced by _love_.  And love was the plummet dropped
+down into the deeps of him where like had never gone.  And responsive out
+of his deeps had come the new thing--love.  That which was given unto him
+did he return.  This was a god indeed, a love-god, a warm and radiant
+god, in whose light White Fang's nature expanded as a flower expands
+under the sun.
+
+But White Fang was not demonstrative.  He was too old, too firmly
+moulded, to become adept at expressing himself in new ways.  He was too
+self-possessed, too strongly poised in his own isolation.  Too long had
+he cultivated reticence, aloofness, and moroseness.  He had never barked
+in his life, and he could not now learn to bark a welcome when his god
+approached.  He was never in the way, never extravagant nor foolish in
+the expression of his love.  He never ran to meet his god.  He waited at
+a distance; but he always waited, was always there.  His love partook of
+the nature of worship, dumb, inarticulate, a silent adoration.  Only by
+the steady regard of his eyes did he express his love, and by the
+unceasing following with his eyes of his god's every movement.  Also, at
+times, when his god looked at him and spoke to him, he betrayed an
+awkward self-consciousness, caused by the struggle of his love to express
+itself and his physical inability to express it.
+
+He learned to adjust himself in many ways to his new mode of life.  It
+was borne in upon him that he must let his master's dogs alone.  Yet his
+dominant nature asserted itself, and he had first to thrash them into an
+acknowledgment of his superiority and leadership.  This accomplished, he
+had little trouble with them.  They gave trail to him when he came and
+went or walked among them, and when he asserted his will they obeyed.
+
+In the same way, he came to tolerate Matt--as a possession of his master.
+His master rarely fed him.  Matt did that, it was his business; yet White
+Fang divined that it was his master's food he ate and that it was his
+master who thus fed him vicariously.  Matt it was who tried to put him
+into the harness and make him haul sled with the other dogs.  But Matt
+failed.  It was not until Weedon Scott put the harness on White Fang and
+worked him, that he understood.  He took it as his master's will that
+Matt should drive him and work him just as he drove and worked his
+master's other dogs.
+
+Different from the Mackenzie toboggans were the Klondike sleds with
+runners under them.  And different was the method of driving the dogs.
+There was no fan-formation of the team.  The dogs worked in single file,
+one behind another, hauling on double traces.  And here, in the Klondike,
+the leader was indeed the leader.  The wisest as well as strongest dog
+was the leader, and the team obeyed him and feared him.  That White Fang
+should quickly gain this post was inevitable.  He could not be satisfied
+with less, as Matt learned after much inconvenience and trouble.  White
+Fang picked out the post for himself, and Matt backed his judgment with
+strong language after the experiment had been tried.  But, though he
+worked in the sled in the day, White Fang did not forego the guarding of
+his master's property in the night.  Thus he was on duty all the time,
+ever vigilant and faithful, the most valuable of all the dogs.
+
+"Makin' free to spit out what's in me," Matt said one day, "I beg to
+state that you was a wise guy all right when you paid the price you did
+for that dog.  You clean swindled Beauty Smith on top of pushin' his face
+in with your fist."
+
+A recrudescence of anger glinted in Weedon Scott's grey eyes, and he
+muttered savagely, "The beast!"
+
+In the late spring a great trouble came to White Fang.  Without warning,
+the love-master disappeared.  There had been warning, but White Fang was
+unversed in such things and did not understand the packing of a grip.  He
+remembered afterwards that his packing had preceded the master's
+disappearance; but at the time he suspected nothing.  That night he
+waited for the master to return.  At midnight the chill wind that blew
+drove him to shelter at the rear of the cabin.  There he drowsed, only
+half asleep, his ears keyed for the first sound of the familiar step.
+But, at two in the morning, his anxiety drove him out to the cold front
+stoop, where he crouched, and waited.
+
+But no master came.  In the morning the door opened and Matt stepped
+outside.  White Fang gazed at him wistfully.  There was no common speech
+by which he might learn what he wanted to know.  The days came and went,
+but never the master.  White Fang, who had never known sickness in his
+life, became sick.  He became very sick, so sick that Matt was finally
+compelled to bring him inside the cabin.  Also, in writing to his
+employer, Matt devoted a postscript to White Fang.
+
+Weedon Scott reading the letter down in Circle City, came upon the
+following:
+
+"That dam wolf won't work.  Won't eat.  Aint got no spunk left.  All the
+dogs is licking him.  Wants to know what has become of you, and I don't
+know how to tell him.  Mebbe he is going to die."
+
+It was as Matt had said.  White Fang had ceased eating, lost heart, and
+allowed every dog of the team to thrash him.  In the cabin he lay on the
+floor near the stove, without interest in food, in Matt, nor in life.
+Matt might talk gently to him or swear at him, it was all the same; he
+never did more than turn his dull eyes upon the man, then drop his head
+back to its customary position on his fore-paws.
+
+And then, one night, Matt, reading to himself with moving lips and
+mumbled sounds, was startled by a low whine from White Fang.  He had got
+upon his feet, his ears cocked towards the door, and he was listening
+intently.  A moment later, Matt heard a footstep.  The door opened, and
+Weedon Scott stepped in.  The two men shook hands.  Then Scott looked
+around the room.
+
+"Where's the wolf?" he asked.
+
+Then he discovered him, standing where he had been lying, near to the
+stove.  He had not rushed forward after the manner of other dogs.  He
+stood, watching and waiting.
+
+"Holy smoke!" Matt exclaimed.  "Look at 'm wag his tail!"
+
+Weedon Scott strode half across the room toward him, at the same time
+calling him.  White Fang came to him, not with a great bound, yet
+quickly.  He was awakened from self-consciousness, but as he drew near,
+his eyes took on a strange expression.  Something, an incommunicable
+vastness of feeling, rose up into his eyes as a light and shone forth.
+
+"He never looked at me that way all the time you was gone!" Matt
+commented.
+
+Weedon Scott did not hear.  He was squatting down on his heels, face to
+face with White Fang and petting him--rubbing at the roots of the ears,
+making long caressing strokes down the neck to the shoulders, tapping the
+spine gently with the balls of his fingers.  And White Fang was growling
+responsively, the crooning note of the growl more pronounced than ever.
+
+But that was not all.  What of his joy, the great love in him, ever
+surging and struggling to express itself, succeeded in finding a new
+mode of expression.  He suddenly thrust his head forward and nudged his
+way in between the master's arm and body.  And here, confined, hidden
+from view all except his ears, no longer growling, he continued to nudge
+and snuggle.
+
+The two men looked at each other.  Scott's eyes were shining.
+
+"Gosh!" said Matt in an awe-stricken voice.
+
+A moment later, when he had recovered himself, he said, "I always
+insisted that wolf was a dog.  Look at 'm!"
+
+With the return of the love-master, White Fang's recovery was rapid.  Two
+nights and a day he spent in the cabin.  Then he sallied forth.  The sled-
+dogs had forgotten his prowess.  They remembered only the latest, which
+was his weakness and sickness.  At the sight of him as he came out of the
+cabin, they sprang upon him.
+
+"Talk about your rough-houses," Matt murmured gleefully, standing in the
+doorway and looking on.
+
+"Give 'm hell, you wolf!  Give 'm hell!--an' then some!"
+
+White Fang did not need the encouragement.  The return of the love-master
+was enough.  Life was flowing through him again, splendid and
+indomitable.  He fought from sheer joy, finding in it an expression of
+much that he felt and that otherwise was without speech.  There could be
+but one ending.  The team dispersed in ignominious defeat, and it was not
+until after dark that the dogs came sneaking back, one by one, by
+meekness and humility signifying their fealty to White Fang.
+
+Having learned to snuggle, White Fang was guilty of it often.  It was the
+final word.  He could not go beyond it.  The one thing of which he had
+always been particularly jealous was his head.  He had always disliked to
+have it touched.  It was the Wild in him, the fear of hurt and of the
+trap, that had given rise to the panicky impulses to avoid contacts.  It
+was the mandate of his instinct that that head must be free.  And now,
+with the love-master, his snuggling was the deliberate act of putting
+himself into a position of hopeless helplessness.  It was an expression
+of perfect confidence, of absolute self-surrender, as though he said: "I
+put myself into thy hands.  Work thou thy will with me."
+
+One night, not long after the return, Scott and Matt sat at a game of
+cribbage preliminary to going to bed.  "Fifteen-two, fifteen-four an' a
+pair makes six," Matt was pegging up, when there was an outcry and sound
+of snarling without.  They looked at each other as they started to rise
+to their feet.
+
+"The wolf's nailed somebody," Matt said.
+
+A wild scream of fear and anguish hastened them.
+
+"Bring a light!" Scott shouted, as he sprang outside.
+
+Matt followed with the lamp, and by its light they saw a man lying on his
+back in the snow.  His arms were folded, one above the other, across his
+face and throat.  Thus he was trying to shield himself from White Fang's
+teeth.  And there was need for it.  White Fang was in a rage, wickedly
+making his attack on the most vulnerable spot.  From shoulder to wrist of
+the crossed arms, the coat-sleeve, blue flannel shirt and undershirt were
+ripped in rags, while the arms themselves were terribly slashed and
+streaming blood.
+
+All this the two men saw in the first instant.  The next instant Weedon
+Scott had White Fang by the throat and was dragging him clear.  White
+Fang struggled and snarled, but made no attempt to bite, while he quickly
+quieted down at a sharp word from the master.
+
+Matt helped the man to his feet.  As he arose he lowered his crossed
+arms, exposing the bestial face of Beauty Smith.  The dog-musher let go
+of him precipitately, with action similar to that of a man who has picked
+up live fire.  Beauty Smith blinked in the lamplight and looked about
+him.  He caught sight of White Fang and terror rushed into his face.
+
+At the same moment Matt noticed two objects lying in the snow.  He held
+the lamp close to them, indicating them with his toe for his employer's
+benefit--a steel dog-chain and a stout club.
+
+Weedon Scott saw and nodded.  Not a word was spoken.  The dog-musher laid
+his hand on Beauty Smith's shoulder and faced him to the right about.  No
+word needed to be spoken.  Beauty Smith started.
+
+In the meantime the love-master was patting White Fang and talking to
+him.
+
+"Tried to steal you, eh?  And you wouldn't have it!  Well, well, he made
+a mistake, didn't he?"
+
+"Must 'a' thought he had hold of seventeen devils," the dog-musher
+sniggered.
+
+White Fang, still wrought up and bristling, growled and growled, the hair
+slowly lying down, the crooning note remote and dim, but growing in his
+throat.
+
+
+
+
+PART V
+
+
+CHAPTER I--THE LONG TRAIL
+
+
+It was in the air.  White Fang sensed the coming calamity, even before
+there was tangible evidence of it.  In vague ways it was borne in upon
+him that a change was impending.  He knew not how nor why, yet he got his
+feel of the oncoming event from the gods themselves.  In ways subtler
+than they knew, they betrayed their intentions to the wolf-dog that
+haunted the cabin-stoop, and that, though he never came inside the cabin,
+knew what went on inside their brains.
+
+"Listen to that, will you!" the dog-musher exclaimed at supper one night.
+
+Weedon Scott listened.  Through the door came a low, anxious whine, like
+a sobbing under the breath that had just grown audible.  Then came the
+long sniff, as White Fang reassured himself that his god was still inside
+and had not yet taken himself off in mysterious and solitary flight.
+
+"I do believe that wolf's on to you," the dog-musher said.
+
+Weedon Scott looked across at his companion with eyes that almost
+pleaded, though this was given the lie by his words.
+
+"What the devil can I do with a wolf in California?" he demanded.
+
+"That's what I say," Matt answered.  "What the devil can you do with a
+wolf in California?"
+
+But this did not satisfy Weedon Scott.  The other seemed to be judging
+him in a non-committal sort of way.
+
+"White man's dogs would have no show against him," Scott went on.  "He'd
+kill them on sight.  If he didn't bankrupt me with damage suits, the
+authorities would take him away from me and electrocute him."
+
+"He's a downright murderer, I know," was the dog-musher's comment.
+
+Weedon Scott looked at him suspiciously.
+
+"It would never do," he said decisively.
+
+"It would never do!" Matt concurred.  "Why you'd have to hire a man
+'specially to take care of 'm."
+
+The other's suspicion was allayed.  He nodded cheerfully.  In the silence
+that followed, the low, half-sobbing whine was heard at the door and then
+the long, questing sniff.
+
+"There's no denyin' he thinks a hell of a lot of you," Matt said.
+
+The other glared at him in sudden wrath.  "Damn it all, man!  I know my
+own mind and what's best!"
+
+"I'm agreein' with you, only . . . "
+
+"Only what?" Scott snapped out.
+
+"Only . . . " the dog-musher began softly, then changed his mind and
+betrayed a rising anger of his own.  "Well, you needn't get so all-fired
+het up about it.  Judgin' by your actions one'd think you didn't know
+your own mind."
+
+Weedon Scott debated with himself for a while, and then said more gently:
+"You are right, Matt.  I don't know my own mind, and that's what's the
+trouble."
+
+"Why, it would be rank ridiculousness for me to take that dog along," he
+broke out after another pause.
+
+"I'm agreein' with you," was Matt's answer, and again his employer was
+not quite satisfied with him.
+
+"But how in the name of the great Sardanapolis he knows you're goin' is
+what gets me," the dog-musher continued innocently.
+
+"It's beyond me, Matt," Scott answered, with a mournful shake of the
+head.
+
+Then came the day when, through the open cabin door, White Fang saw the
+fatal grip on the floor and the love-master packing things into it.  Also,
+there were comings and goings, and the erstwhile placid atmosphere of the
+cabin was vexed with strange perturbations and unrest.  Here was
+indubitable evidence.  White Fang had already scented it.  He now
+reasoned it.  His god was preparing for another flight.  And since he had
+not taken him with him before, so, now, he could look to be left behind.
+
+That night he lifted the long wolf-howl.  As he had howled, in his puppy
+days, when he fled back from the Wild to the village to find it vanished
+and naught but a rubbish-heap to mark the site of Grey Beaver's tepee, so
+now he pointed his muzzle to the cold stars and told to them his woe.
+
+Inside the cabin the two men had just gone to bed.
+
+"He's gone off his food again," Matt remarked from his bunk.
+
+There was a grunt from Weedon Scott's bunk, and a stir of blankets.
+
+"From the way he cut up the other time you went away, I wouldn't wonder
+this time but what he died."
+
+The blankets in the other bunk stirred irritably.
+
+"Oh, shut up!" Scott cried out through the darkness.  "You nag worse than
+a woman."
+
+"I'm agreein' with you," the dog-musher answered, and Weedon Scott was
+not quite sure whether or not the other had snickered.
+
+The next day White Fang's anxiety and restlessness were even more
+pronounced.  He dogged his master's heels whenever he left the cabin, and
+haunted the front stoop when he remained inside.  Through the open door
+he could catch glimpses of the luggage on the floor.  The grip had been
+joined by two large canvas bags and a box.  Matt was rolling the master's
+blankets and fur robe inside a small tarpaulin.  White Fang whined as he
+watched the operation.
+
+Later on two Indians arrived.  He watched them closely as they shouldered
+the luggage and were led off down the hill by Matt, who carried the
+bedding and the grip.  But White Fang did not follow them.  The master
+was still in the cabin.  After a time, Matt returned.  The master came to
+the door and called White Fang inside.
+
+"You poor devil," he said gently, rubbing White Fang's ears and tapping
+his spine.  "I'm hitting the long trail, old man, where you cannot
+follow.  Now give me a growl--the last, good, good-bye growl."
+
+But White Fang refused to growl.  Instead, and after a wistful, searching
+look, he snuggled in, burrowing his head out of sight between the
+master's arm and body.
+
+"There she blows!" Matt cried.  From the Yukon arose the hoarse bellowing
+of a river steamboat.  "You've got to cut it short.  Be sure and lock the
+front door.  I'll go out the back.  Get a move on!"
+
+The two doors slammed at the same moment, and Weedon Scott waited for
+Matt to come around to the front.  From inside the door came a low
+whining and sobbing.  Then there were long, deep-drawn sniffs.
+
+"You must take good care of him, Matt," Scott said, as they started down
+the hill.  "Write and let me know how he gets along."
+
+"Sure," the dog-musher answered.  "But listen to that, will you!"
+
+Both men stopped.  White Fang was howling as dogs howl when their masters
+lie dead.  He was voicing an utter woe, his cry bursting upward in great
+heart-breaking rushes, dying down into quavering misery, and bursting
+upward again with a rush upon rush of grief.
+
+The _Aurora_ was the first steamboat of the year for the Outside, and her
+decks were jammed with prosperous adventurers and broken gold seekers,
+all equally as mad to get to the Outside as they had been originally to
+get to the Inside.  Near the gang-plank, Scott was shaking hands with
+Matt, who was preparing to go ashore.  But Matt's hand went limp in the
+other's grasp as his gaze shot past and remained fixed on something
+behind him.  Scott turned to see.  Sitting on the deck several feet away
+and watching wistfully was White Fang.
+
+The dog-musher swore softly, in awe-stricken accents.  Scott could only
+look in wonder.
+
+"Did you lock the front door?" Matt demanded.  The other nodded, and
+asked, "How about the back?"
+
+"You just bet I did," was the fervent reply.
+
+White Fang flattened his ears ingratiatingly, but remained where he was,
+making no attempt to approach.
+
+"I'll have to take 'm ashore with me."
+
+Matt made a couple of steps toward White Fang, but the latter slid away
+from him.  The dog-musher made a rush of it, and White Fang dodged
+between the legs of a group of men.  Ducking, turning, doubling, he slid
+about the deck, eluding the other's efforts to capture him.
+
+But when the love-master spoke, White Fang came to him with prompt
+obedience.
+
+"Won't come to the hand that's fed 'm all these months," the dog-musher
+muttered resentfully.  "And you--you ain't never fed 'm after them first
+days of gettin' acquainted.  I'm blamed if I can see how he works it out
+that you're the boss."
+
+Scott, who had been patting White Fang, suddenly bent closer and pointed
+out fresh-made cuts on his muzzle, and a gash between the eyes.
+
+Matt bent over and passed his hand along White Fang's belly.
+
+"We plumb forgot the window.  He's all cut an' gouged underneath.  Must
+'a' butted clean through it, b'gosh!"
+
+But Weedon Scott was not listening.  He was thinking rapidly.  The
+_Aurora's_ whistle hooted a final announcement of departure.  Men were
+scurrying down the gang-plank to the shore.  Matt loosened the bandana
+from his own neck and started to put it around White Fang's.  Scott
+grasped the dog-musher's hand.
+
+"Good-bye, Matt, old man.  About the wolf--you needn't write.  You see,
+I've . . . !"
+
+"What!" the dog-musher exploded.  "You don't mean to say . . .?"
+
+"The very thing I mean.  Here's your bandana.  I'll write to you about
+him."
+
+Matt paused halfway down the gang-plank.
+
+"He'll never stand the climate!" he shouted back.  "Unless you clip 'm in
+warm weather!"
+
+The gang-plank was hauled in, and the _Aurora_ swung out from the bank.
+Weedon Scott waved a last good-bye.  Then he turned and bent over White
+Fang, standing by his side.
+
+"Now growl, damn you, growl," he said, as he patted the responsive head
+and rubbed the flattening ears.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II--THE SOUTHLAND
+
+
+White Fang landed from the steamer in San Francisco.  He was appalled.
+Deep in him, below any reasoning process or act of consciousness, he had
+associated power with godhead.  And never had the white men seemed such
+marvellous gods as now, when he trod the slimy pavement of San Francisco.
+The log cabins he had known were replaced by towering buildings.  The
+streets were crowded with perils--waggons, carts, automobiles; great,
+straining horses pulling huge trucks; and monstrous cable and electric
+cars hooting and clanging through the midst, screeching their insistent
+menace after the manner of the lynxes he had known in the northern woods.
+
+All this was the manifestation of power.  Through it all, behind it all,
+was man, governing and controlling, expressing himself, as of old, by his
+mastery over matter.  It was colossal, stunning.  White Fang was awed.
+Fear sat upon him.  As in his cubhood he had been made to feel his
+smallness and puniness on the day he first came in from the Wild to the
+village of Grey Beaver, so now, in his full-grown stature and pride of
+strength, he was made to feel small and puny.  And there were so many
+gods!  He was made dizzy by the swarming of them.  The thunder of the
+streets smote upon his ears.  He was bewildered by the tremendous and
+endless rush and movement of things.  As never before, he felt his
+dependence on the love-master, close at whose heels he followed, no
+matter what happened never losing sight of him.
+
+But White Fang was to have no more than a nightmare vision of the city--an
+experience that was like a bad dream, unreal and terrible, that haunted
+him for long after in his dreams.  He was put into a baggage-car by the
+master, chained in a corner in the midst of heaped trunks and valises.
+Here a squat and brawny god held sway, with much noise, hurling trunks
+and boxes about, dragging them in through the door and tossing them into
+the piles, or flinging them out of the door, smashing and crashing, to
+other gods who awaited them.
+
+And here, in this inferno of luggage, was White Fang deserted by the
+master.  Or at least White Fang thought he was deserted, until he smelled
+out the master's canvas clothes-bags alongside of him, and proceeded to
+mount guard over them.
+
+"'Bout time you come," growled the god of the car, an hour later, when
+Weedon Scott appeared at the door.  "That dog of yourn won't let me lay a
+finger on your stuff."
+
+White Fang emerged from the car.  He was astonished.  The nightmare city
+was gone.  The car had been to him no more than a room in a house, and
+when he had entered it the city had been all around him.  In the interval
+the city had disappeared.  The roar of it no longer dinned upon his ears.
+Before him was smiling country, streaming with sunshine, lazy with
+quietude.  But he had little time to marvel at the transformation.  He
+accepted it as he accepted all the unaccountable doings and
+manifestations of the gods.  It was their way.
+
+There was a carriage waiting.  A man and a woman approached the master.
+The woman's arms went out and clutched the master around the neck--a
+hostile act!  The next moment Weedon Scott had torn loose from the
+embrace and closed with White Fang, who had become a snarling, raging
+demon.
+
+"It's all right, mother," Scott was saying as he kept tight hold of White
+Fang and placated him.  "He thought you were going to injure me, and he
+wouldn't stand for it.  It's all right.  It's all right.  He'll learn
+soon enough."
+
+"And in the meantime I may be permitted to love my son when his dog is
+not around," she laughed, though she was pale and weak from the fright.
+
+She looked at White Fang, who snarled and bristled and glared
+malevolently.
+
+"He'll have to learn, and he shall, without postponement," Scott said.
+
+He spoke softly to White Fang until he had quieted him, then his voice
+became firm.
+
+"Down, sir!  Down with you!"
+
+This had been one of the things taught him by the master, and White Fang
+obeyed, though he lay down reluctantly and sullenly.
+
+"Now, mother."
+
+Scott opened his arms to her, but kept his eyes on White Fang.
+
+"Down!" he warned.  "Down!"
+
+White Fang, bristling silently, half-crouching as he rose, sank back and
+watched the hostile act repeated.  But no harm came of it, nor of the
+embrace from the strange man-god that followed.  Then the clothes-bags
+were taken into the carriage, the strange gods and the love-master
+followed, and White Fang pursued, now running vigilantly behind, now
+bristling up to the running horses and warning them that he was there to
+see that no harm befell the god they dragged so swiftly across the earth.
+
+At the end of fifteen minutes, the carriage swung in through a stone
+gateway and on between a double row of arched and interlacing walnut
+trees.  On either side stretched lawns, their broad sweep broken here and
+there by great sturdy-limbed oaks.  In the near distance, in contrast
+with the young-green of the tended grass, sunburnt hay-fields showed tan
+and gold; while beyond were the tawny hills and upland pastures.  From
+the head of the lawn, on the first soft swell from the valley-level,
+looked down the deep-porched, many-windowed house.
+
+Little opportunity was given White Fang to see all this.  Hardly had the
+carriage entered the grounds, when he was set upon by a sheep-dog, bright-
+eyed, sharp-muzzled, righteously indignant and angry.  It was between him
+and the master, cutting him off.  White Fang snarled no warning, but his
+hair bristled as he made his silent and deadly rush.  This rush was never
+completed.  He halted with awkward abruptness, with stiff fore-legs
+bracing himself against his momentum, almost sitting down on his
+haunches, so desirous was he of avoiding contact with the dog he was in
+the act of attacking.  It was a female, and the law of his kind thrust a
+barrier between.  For him to attack her would require nothing less than a
+violation of his instinct.
+
+But with the sheep-dog it was otherwise.  Being a female, she possessed
+no such instinct.  On the other hand, being a sheep-dog, her instinctive
+fear of the Wild, and especially of the wolf, was unusually keen.  White
+Fang was to her a wolf, the hereditary marauder who had preyed upon her
+flocks from the time sheep were first herded and guarded by some dim
+ancestor of hers.  And so, as he abandoned his rush at her and braced
+himself to avoid the contact, she sprang upon him.  He snarled
+involuntarily as he felt her teeth in his shoulder, but beyond this made
+no offer to hurt her.  He backed away, stiff-legged with
+self-consciousness, and tried to go around her.  He dodged this way and
+that, and curved and turned, but to no purpose.  She remained always
+between him and the way he wanted to go.
+
+"Here, Collie!" called the strange man in the carriage.
+
+Weedon Scott laughed.
+
+"Never mind, father.  It is good discipline.  White Fang will have to
+learn many things, and it's just as well that he begins now.  He'll
+adjust himself all right."
+
+The carriage drove on, and still Collie blocked White Fang's way.  He
+tried to outrun her by leaving the drive and circling across the lawn but
+she ran on the inner and smaller circle, and was always there, facing him
+with her two rows of gleaming teeth.  Back he circled, across the drive
+to the other lawn, and again she headed him off.
+
+The carriage was bearing the master away.  White Fang caught glimpses of
+it disappearing amongst the trees.  The situation was desperate.  He
+essayed another circle.  She followed, running swiftly.  And then,
+suddenly, he turned upon her.  It was his old fighting trick.  Shoulder
+to shoulder, he struck her squarely.  Not only was she overthrown.  So
+fast had she been running that she rolled along, now on her back, now on
+her side, as she struggled to stop, clawing gravel with her feet and
+crying shrilly her hurt pride and indignation.
+
+White Fang did not wait.  The way was clear, and that was all he had
+wanted.  She took after him, never ceasing her outcry.  It was the
+straightaway now, and when it came to real running, White Fang could
+teach her things.  She ran frantically, hysterically, straining to the
+utmost, advertising the effort she was making with every leap: and all
+the time White Fang slid smoothly away from her silently, without effort,
+gliding like a ghost over the ground.
+
+As he rounded the house to the _porte-cochere_, he came upon the
+carriage.  It had stopped, and the master was alighting.  At this moment,
+still running at top speed, White Fang became suddenly aware of an attack
+from the side.  It was a deer-hound rushing upon him.  White Fang tried
+to face it.  But he was going too fast, and the hound was too close.  It
+struck him on the side; and such was his forward momentum and the
+unexpectedness of it, White Fang was hurled to the ground and rolled
+clear over.  He came out of the tangle a spectacle of malignancy, ears
+flattened back, lips writhing, nose wrinkling, his teeth clipping
+together as the fangs barely missed the hound's soft throat.
+
+The master was running up, but was too far away; and it was Collie that
+saved the hound's life.  Before White Fang could spring in and deliver
+the fatal stroke, and just as he was in the act of springing in, Collie
+arrived.  She had been out-manoeuvred and out-run, to say nothing of her
+having been unceremoniously tumbled in the gravel, and her arrival was
+like that of a tornado--made up of offended dignity, justifiable wrath,
+and instinctive hatred for this marauder from the Wild.  She struck White
+Fang at right angles in the midst of his spring, and again he was knocked
+off his feet and rolled over.
+
+The next moment the master arrived, and with one hand held White Fang,
+while the father called off the dogs.
+
+"I say, this is a pretty warm reception for a poor lone wolf from the
+Arctic," the master said, while White Fang calmed down under his
+caressing hand.  "In all his life he's only been known once to go off his
+feet, and here he's been rolled twice in thirty seconds."
+
+The carriage had driven away, and other strange gods had appeared from
+out the house.  Some of these stood respectfully at a distance; but two
+of them, women, perpetrated the hostile act of clutching the master
+around the neck.  White Fang, however, was beginning to tolerate this
+act.  No harm seemed to come of it, while the noises the gods made were
+certainly not threatening.  These gods also made overtures to White Fang,
+but he warned them off with a snarl, and the master did likewise with
+word of mouth.  At such times White Fang leaned in close against the
+master's legs and received reassuring pats on the head.
+
+The hound, under the command, "Dick!  Lie down, sir!" had gone up the
+steps and lain down to one side of the porch, still growling and keeping
+a sullen watch on the intruder.  Collie had been taken in charge by one
+of the woman-gods, who held arms around her neck and petted and caressed
+her; but Collie was very much perplexed and worried, whining and
+restless, outraged by the permitted presence of this wolf and confident
+that the gods were making a mistake.
+
+All the gods started up the steps to enter the house.  White Fang
+followed closely at the master's heels.  Dick, on the porch, growled, and
+White Fang, on the steps, bristled and growled back.
+
+"Take Collie inside and leave the two of them to fight it out," suggested
+Scott's father.  "After that they'll be friends."
+
+"Then White Fang, to show his friendship, will have to be chief mourner
+at the funeral," laughed the master.
+
+The elder Scott looked incredulously, first at White Fang, then at Dick,
+and finally at his son.
+
+"You mean . . .?"
+
+Weedon nodded his head.  "I mean just that.  You'd have a dead Dick
+inside one minute--two minutes at the farthest."
+
+He turned to White Fang.  "Come on, you wolf.  It's you that'll have to
+come inside."
+
+White Fang walked stiff-legged up the steps and across the porch, with
+tail rigidly erect, keeping his eyes on Dick to guard against a flank
+attack, and at the same time prepared for whatever fierce manifestation
+of the unknown that might pounce out upon him from the interior of the
+house.  But no thing of fear pounced out, and when he had gained the
+inside he scouted carefully around, looking at it and finding it not.
+Then he lay down with a contented grunt at the master's feet, observing
+all that went on, ever ready to spring to his feet and fight for life
+with the terrors he felt must lurk under the trap-roof of the dwelling.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III--THE GOD'S DOMAIN
+
+
+Not only was White Fang adaptable by nature, but he had travelled much,
+and knew the meaning and necessity of adjustment.  Here, in Sierra Vista,
+which was the name of Judge Scott's place, White Fang quickly began to
+make himself at home.  He had no further serious trouble with the dogs.
+They knew more about the ways of the Southland gods than did he, and in
+their eyes he had qualified when he accompanied the gods inside the
+house.  Wolf that he was, and unprecedented as it was, the gods had
+sanctioned his presence, and they, the dogs of the gods, could only
+recognise this sanction.
+
+Dick, perforce, had to go through a few stiff formalities at first, after
+which he calmly accepted White Fang as an addition to the premises.  Had
+Dick had his way, they would have been good friends; but White Fang
+was averse to friendship.  All he asked of other dogs was to be let
+alone.  His whole life he had kept aloof from his kind, and he still
+desired to keep aloof.  Dick's overtures bothered him, so he snarled Dick
+away.  In the north he had learned the lesson that he must let the
+master's dogs alone, and he did not forget that lesson now.  But he
+insisted on his own privacy and self-seclusion, and so thoroughly ignored
+Dick that that good-natured creature finally gave him up and scarcely
+took as much interest in him as in the hitching-post near the stable.
+
+Not so with Collie.  While she accepted him because it was the mandate of
+the gods, that was no reason that she should leave him in peace.  Woven
+into her being was the memory of countless crimes he and his had
+perpetrated against her ancestry.  Not in a day nor a generation were the
+ravaged sheepfolds to be forgotten.  All this was a spur to her, pricking
+her to retaliation.  She could not fly in the face of the gods who
+permitted him, but that did not prevent her from making life miserable
+for him in petty ways.  A feud, ages old, was between them, and she, for
+one, would see to it that he was reminded.
+
+So Collie took advantage of her sex to pick upon White Fang and maltreat
+him.  His instinct would not permit him to attack her, while her
+persistence would not permit him to ignore her.  When she rushed at him
+he turned his fur-protected shoulder to her sharp teeth and walked away
+stiff-legged and stately.  When she forced him too hard, he was compelled
+to go about in a circle, his shoulder presented to her, his head turned
+from her, and on his face and in his eyes a patient and bored expression.
+Sometimes, however, a nip on his hind-quarters hastened his retreat and
+made it anything but stately.  But as a rule he managed to maintain a
+dignity that was almost solemnity.  He ignored her existence whenever it
+was possible, and made it a point to keep out of her way.  When he saw or
+heard her coming, he got up and walked off.
+
+There was much in other matters for White Fang to learn.  Life in the
+Northland was simplicity itself when compared with the complicated
+affairs of Sierra Vista.  First of all, he had to learn the family of the
+master.  In a way he was prepared to do this.  As Mit-sah and Kloo-kooch
+had belonged to Grey Beaver, sharing his food, his fire, and his
+blankets, so now, at Sierra Vista, belonged to the love-master all the
+denizens of the house.
+
+But in this matter there was a difference, and many differences.  Sierra
+Vista was a far vaster affair than the tepee of Grey Beaver.  There were
+many persons to be considered.  There was Judge Scott, and there was his
+wife.  There were the master's two sisters, Beth and Mary.  There was his
+wife, Alice, and then there were his children, Weedon and Maud, toddlers
+of four and six.  There was no way for anybody to tell him about all
+these people, and of blood-ties and relationship he knew nothing whatever
+and never would be capable of knowing.  Yet he quickly worked it out that
+all of them belonged to the master.  Then, by observation, whenever
+opportunity offered, by study of action, speech, and the very intonations
+of the voice, he slowly learned the intimacy and the degree of favour
+they enjoyed with the master.  And by this ascertained standard, White
+Fang treated them accordingly.  What was of value to the master he
+valued; what was dear to the master was to be cherished by White Fang and
+guarded carefully.
+
+Thus it was with the two children.  All his life he had disliked
+children.  He hated and feared their hands.  The lessons were not tender
+that he had learned of their tyranny and cruelty in the days of the
+Indian villages.  When Weedon and Maud had first approached him, he
+growled warningly and looked malignant.  A cuff from the master and a
+sharp word had then compelled him to permit their caresses, though he
+growled and growled under their tiny hands, and in the growl there was no
+crooning note.  Later, he observed that the boy and girl were of great
+value in the master's eyes.  Then it was that no cuff nor sharp word was
+necessary before they could pat him.
+
+Yet White Fang was never effusively affectionate.  He yielded to the
+master's children with an ill but honest grace, and endured their fooling
+as one would endure a painful operation.  When he could no longer endure,
+he would get up and stalk determinedly away from them.  But after a time,
+he grew even to like the children.  Still he was not demonstrative.  He
+would not go up to them.  On the other hand, instead of walking away at
+sight of them, he waited for them to come to him.  And still later, it
+was noticed that a pleased light came into his eyes when he saw them
+approaching, and that he looked after them with an appearance of curious
+regret when they left him for other amusements.
+
+All this was a matter of development, and took time.  Next in his regard,
+after the children, was Judge Scott.  There were two reasons, possibly,
+for this.  First, he was evidently a valuable possession of the master's,
+and next, he was undemonstrative.  White Fang liked to lie at his feet on
+the wide porch when he read the newspaper, from time to time favouring
+White Fang with a look or a word--untroublesome tokens that he recognised
+White Fang's presence and existence.  But this was only when the master
+was not around.  When the master appeared, all other beings ceased to
+exist so far as White Fang was concerned.
+
+White Fang allowed all the members of the family to pet him and make much
+of him; but he never gave to them what he gave to the master.  No caress
+of theirs could put the love-croon into his throat, and, try as they
+would, they could never persuade him into snuggling against them.  This
+expression of abandon and surrender, of absolute trust, he reserved for
+the master alone.  In fact, he never regarded the members of the family
+in any other light than possessions of the love-master.
+
+Also White Fang had early come to differentiate between the family and
+the servants of the household.  The latter were afraid of him, while he
+merely refrained from attacking them.  This because he considered that
+they were likewise possessions of the master.  Between White Fang and
+them existed a neutrality and no more.  They cooked for the master and
+washed the dishes and did other things just as Matt had done up in the
+Klondike.  They were, in short, appurtenances of the household.
+
+Outside the household there was even more for White Fang to learn.  The
+master's domain was wide and complex, yet it had its metes and bounds.
+The land itself ceased at the county road.  Outside was the common domain
+of all gods--the roads and streets.  Then inside other fences were the
+particular domains of other gods.  A myriad laws governed all these
+things and determined conduct; yet he did not know the speech of the
+gods, nor was there any way for him to learn save by experience.  He
+obeyed his natural impulses until they ran him counter to some law.  When
+this had been done a few times, he learned the law and after that
+observed it.
+
+But most potent in his education was the cuff of the master's hand, the
+censure of the master's voice.  Because of White Fang's very great love,
+a cuff from the master hurt him far more than any beating Grey Beaver or
+Beauty Smith had ever given him.  They had hurt only the flesh of him;
+beneath the flesh the spirit had still raged, splendid and invincible.
+But with the master the cuff was always too light to hurt the flesh.  Yet
+it went deeper.  It was an expression of the master's disapproval, and
+White Fang's spirit wilted under it.
+
+In point of fact, the cuff was rarely administered.  The master's voice
+was sufficient.  By it White Fang knew whether he did right or not.  By
+it he trimmed his conduct and adjusted his actions.  It was the compass
+by which he steered and learned to chart the manners of a new land and
+life.
+
+In the Northland, the only domesticated animal was the dog.  All other
+animals lived in the Wild, and were, when not too formidable, lawful
+spoil for any dog.  All his days White Fang had foraged among the live
+things for food.  It did not enter his head that in the Southland it was
+otherwise.  But this he was to learn early in his residence in Santa
+Clara Valley.  Sauntering around the corner of the house in the early
+morning, he came upon a chicken that had escaped from the chicken-yard.
+White Fang's natural impulse was to eat it.  A couple of bounds, a flash
+of teeth and a frightened squawk, and he had scooped in the adventurous
+fowl.  It was farm-bred and fat and tender; and White Fang licked his
+chops and decided that such fare was good.
+
+Later in the day, he chanced upon another stray chicken near the stables.
+One of the grooms ran to the rescue.  He did not know White Fang's breed,
+so for weapon he took a light buggy-whip.  At the first cut of the whip,
+White Fang left the chicken for the man.  A club might have stopped White
+Fang, but not a whip.  Silently, without flinching, he took a second cut
+in his forward rush, and as he leaped for the throat the groom cried out,
+"My God!" and staggered backward.  He dropped the whip and shielded his
+throat with his arms.  In consequence, his forearm was ripped open to the
+bone.
+
+The man was badly frightened.  It was not so much White Fang's ferocity
+as it was his silence that unnerved the groom.  Still protecting his
+throat and face with his torn and bleeding arm, he tried to retreat to
+the barn.  And it would have gone hard with him had not Collie appeared
+on the scene.  As she had saved Dick's life, she now saved the groom's.
+She rushed upon White Fang in frenzied wrath.  She had been right.  She
+had known better than the blundering gods.  All her suspicions were
+justified.  Here was the ancient marauder up to his old tricks again.
+
+The groom escaped into the stables, and White Fang backed away before
+Collie's wicked teeth, or presented his shoulder to them and circled
+round and round.  But Collie did not give over, as was her wont, after a
+decent interval of chastisement.  On the contrary, she grew more excited
+and angry every moment, until, in the end, White Fang flung dignity to
+the winds and frankly fled away from her across the fields.
+
+"He'll learn to leave chickens alone," the master said.  "But I can't
+give him the lesson until I catch him in the act."
+
+Two nights later came the act, but on a more generous scale than the
+master had anticipated.  White Fang had observed closely the
+chicken-yards and the habits of the chickens.  In the night-time, after
+they had gone to roost, he climbed to the top of a pile of newly hauled
+lumber.  From there he gained the roof of a chicken-house, passed over
+the ridgepole and dropped to the ground inside.  A moment later he was
+inside the house, and the slaughter began.
+
+In the morning, when the master came out on to the porch, fifty white
+Leghorn hens, laid out in a row by the groom, greeted his eyes.  He
+whistled to himself, softly, first with surprise, and then, at the end,
+with admiration.  His eyes were likewise greeted by White Fang, but about
+the latter there were no signs of shame nor guilt.  He carried himself
+with pride, as though, forsooth, he had achieved a deed praiseworthy and
+meritorious.  There was about him no consciousness of sin.  The master's
+lips tightened as he faced the disagreeable task.  Then he talked harshly
+to the unwitting culprit, and in his voice there was nothing but godlike
+wrath.  Also, he held White Fang's nose down to the slain hens, and at
+the same time cuffed him soundly.
+
+White Fang never raided a chicken-roost again.  It was against the law,
+and he had learned it.  Then the master took him into the chicken-yards.
+White Fang's natural impulse, when he saw the live food fluttering about
+him and under his very nose, was to spring upon it.  He obeyed the
+impulse, but was checked by the master's voice.  They continued in the
+yards for half an hour.  Time and again the impulse surged over White
+Fang, and each time, as he yielded to it, he was checked by the master's
+voice.  Thus it was he learned the law, and ere he left the domain of the
+chickens, he had learned to ignore their existence.
+
+"You can never cure a chicken-killer."  Judge Scott shook his head sadly
+at luncheon table, when his son narrated the lesson he had given White
+Fang.  "Once they've got the habit and the taste of blood . . ."  Again
+he shook his head sadly.
+
+But Weedon Scott did not agree with his father.  "I'll tell you what I'll
+do," he challenged finally.  "I'll lock White Fang in with the chickens
+all afternoon."
+
+"But think of the chickens," objected the judge.
+
+"And furthermore," the son went on, "for every chicken he kills, I'll pay
+you one dollar gold coin of the realm."
+
+"But you should penalise father, too," interpose Beth.
+
+Her sister seconded her, and a chorus of approval arose from around the
+table.  Judge Scott nodded his head in agreement.
+
+"All right." Weedon Scott pondered for a moment.  "And if, at the end of
+the afternoon White Fang hasn't harmed a chicken, for every ten minutes
+of the time he has spent in the yard, you will have to say to him,
+gravely and with deliberation, just as if you were sitting on the bench
+and solemnly passing judgment, 'White Fang, you are smarter than I
+thought.'"
+
+From hidden points of vantage the family watched the performance.  But it
+was a fizzle.  Locked in the yard and there deserted by the master, White
+Fang lay down and went to sleep.  Once he got up and walked over to the
+trough for a drink of water.  The chickens he calmly ignored.  So far as
+he was concerned they did not exist.  At four o'clock he executed a
+running jump, gained the roof of the chicken-house and leaped to the
+ground outside, whence he sauntered gravely to the house.  He had learned
+the law.  And on the porch, before the delighted family, Judge Scott,
+face to face with White Fang, said slowly and solemnly, sixteen times,
+"White Fang, you are smarter than I thought."
+
+But it was the multiplicity of laws that befuddled White Fang and often
+brought him into disgrace.  He had to learn that he must not touch the
+chickens that belonged to other gods.  Then there were cats, and rabbits,
+and turkeys; all these he must let alone.  In fact, when he had but
+partly learned the law, his impression was that he must leave all live
+things alone.  Out in the back-pasture, a quail could flutter up under
+his nose unharmed.  All tense and trembling with eagerness and desire, he
+mastered his instinct and stood still.  He was obeying the will of the
+gods.
+
+And then, one day, again out in the back-pasture, he saw Dick start a
+jackrabbit and run it.  The master himself was looking on and did not
+interfere.  Nay, he encouraged White Fang to join in the chase.  And thus
+he learned that there was no taboo on jackrabbits.  In the end he worked
+out the complete law.  Between him and all domestic animals there must be
+no hostilities.  If not amity, at least neutrality must obtain.  But the
+other animals--the squirrels, and quail, and cottontails, were creatures
+of the Wild who had never yielded allegiance to man.  They were the
+lawful prey of any dog.  It was only the tame that the gods protected,
+and between the tame deadly strife was not permitted.  The gods held the
+power of life and death over their subjects, and the gods were jealous of
+their power.
+
+Life was complex in the Santa Clara Valley after the simplicities of the
+Northland.  And the chief thing demanded by these intricacies of
+civilisation was control, restraint--a poise of self that was as delicate
+as the fluttering of gossamer wings and at the same time as rigid as
+steel.  Life had a thousand faces, and White Fang found he must meet them
+all--thus, when he went to town, in to San Jose, running behind the
+carriage or loafing about the streets when the carriage stopped.  Life
+flowed past him, deep and wide and varied, continually impinging upon his
+senses, demanding of him instant and endless adjustments and
+correspondences, and compelling him, almost always, to suppress his
+natural impulses.
+
+There were butcher-shops where meat hung within reach.  This meat he must
+not touch.  There were cats at the houses the master visited that must be
+let alone.  And there were dogs everywhere that snarled at him and that
+he must not attack.  And then, on the crowded sidewalks there were
+persons innumerable whose attention he attracted.  They would stop and
+look at him, point him out to one another, examine him, talk of him, and,
+worst of all, pat him.  And these perilous contacts from all these
+strange hands he must endure.  Yet this endurance he achieved.
+Furthermore, he got over being awkward and self-conscious.  In a lofty
+way he received the attentions of the multitudes of strange gods.  With
+condescension he accepted their condescension.  On the other hand, there
+was something about him that prevented great familiarity.  They patted
+him on the head and passed on, contented and pleased with their own
+daring.
+
+But it was not all easy for White Fang.  Running behind the carriage in
+the outskirts of San Jose, he encountered certain small boys who made a
+practice of flinging stones at him.  Yet he knew that it was not
+permitted him to pursue and drag them down.  Here he was compelled to
+violate his instinct of self-preservation, and violate it he did, for he
+was becoming tame and qualifying himself for civilisation.
+
+Nevertheless, White Fang was not quite satisfied with the arrangement.  He
+had no abstract ideas about justice and fair play.  But there is a
+certain sense of equity that resides in life, and it was this sense in
+him that resented the unfairness of his being permitted no defence
+against the stone-throwers.  He forgot that in the covenant entered into
+between him and the gods they were pledged to care for him and defend
+him.  But one day the master sprang from the carriage, whip in hand, and
+gave the stone-throwers a thrashing.  After that they threw stones no
+more, and White Fang understood and was satisfied.
+
+One other experience of similar nature was his.  On the way to town,
+hanging around the saloon at the cross-roads, were three dogs that made a
+practice of rushing out upon him when he went by.  Knowing his deadly
+method of fighting, the master had never ceased impressing upon White
+Fang the law that he must not fight.  As a result, having learned the
+lesson well, White Fang was hard put whenever he passed the cross-roads
+saloon.  After the first rush, each time, his snarl kept the three dogs
+at a distance but they trailed along behind, yelping and bickering and
+insulting him.  This endured for some time.  The men at the saloon even
+urged the dogs on to attack White Fang.  One day they openly sicked the
+dogs on him.  The master stopped the carriage.
+
+"Go to it," he said to White Fang.
+
+But White Fang could not believe.  He looked at the master, and he looked
+at the dogs.  Then he looked back eagerly and questioningly at the
+master.
+
+The master nodded his head.  "Go to them, old fellow.  Eat them up."
+
+White Fang no longer hesitated.  He turned and leaped silently among his
+enemies.  All three faced him.  There was a great snarling and growling,
+a clashing of teeth and a flurry of bodies.  The dust of the road arose
+in a cloud and screened the battle.  But at the end of several minutes
+two dogs were struggling in the dirt and the third was in full flight.  He
+leaped a ditch, went through a rail fence, and fled across a field.  White
+Fang followed, sliding over the ground in wolf fashion and with wolf
+speed, swiftly and without noise, and in the centre of the field he
+dragged down and slew the dog.
+
+With this triple killing his main troubles with dogs ceased.  The word
+went up and down the valley, and men saw to it that their dogs did not
+molest the Fighting Wolf.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV--THE CALL OF KIND
+
+
+The months came and went.  There was plenty of food and no work in the
+Southland, and White Fang lived fat and prosperous and happy.  Not alone
+was he in the geographical Southland, for he was in the Southland of
+life.  Human kindness was like a sun shining upon him, and he flourished
+like a flower planted in good soil.
+
+And yet he remained somehow different from other dogs.  He knew the law
+even better than did the dogs that had known no other life, and he
+observed the law more punctiliously; but still there was about him a
+suggestion of lurking ferocity, as though the Wild still lingered in him
+and the wolf in him merely slept.
+
+He never chummed with other dogs.  Lonely he had lived, so far as his
+kind was concerned, and lonely he would continue to live.  In his
+puppyhood, under the persecution of Lip-lip and the puppy-pack, and in
+his fighting days with Beauty Smith, he had acquired a fixed aversion for
+dogs.  The natural course of his life had been diverted, and, recoiling
+from his kind, he had clung to the human.
+
+Besides, all Southland dogs looked upon him with suspicion.  He aroused
+in them their instinctive fear of the Wild, and they greeted him always
+with snarl and growl and belligerent hatred.  He, on the other hand,
+learned that it was not necessary to use his teeth upon them.  His naked
+fangs and writhing lips were uniformly efficacious, rarely failing to
+send a bellowing on-rushing dog back on its haunches.
+
+But there was one trial in White Fang's life--Collie.  She never gave him
+a moment's peace.  She was not so amenable to the law as he.  She defied
+all efforts of the master to make her become friends with White Fang.
+Ever in his ears was sounding her sharp and nervous snarl.  She had never
+forgiven him the chicken-killing episode, and persistently held to the
+belief that his intentions were bad.  She found him guilty before the
+act, and treated him accordingly.  She became a pest to him, like a
+policeman following him around the stable and the hounds, and, if he even
+so much as glanced curiously at a pigeon or chicken, bursting into an
+outcry of indignation and wrath.  His favourite way of ignoring her was
+to lie down, with his head on his fore-paws, and pretend sleep.  This
+always dumfounded and silenced her.
+
+With the exception of Collie, all things went well with White Fang.  He
+had learned control and poise, and he knew the law.  He achieved a
+staidness, and calmness, and philosophic tolerance.  He no longer lived
+in a hostile environment.  Danger and hurt and death did not lurk
+everywhere about him.  In time, the unknown, as a thing of terror and
+menace ever impending, faded away.  Life was soft and easy.  It flowed
+along smoothly, and neither fear nor foe lurked by the way.
+
+He missed the snow without being aware of it.  "An unduly long summer,"
+would have been his thought had he thought about it; as it was, he merely
+missed the snow in a vague, subconscious way.  In the same fashion,
+especially in the heat of summer when he suffered from the sun, he
+experienced faint longings for the Northland.  Their only effect upon
+him, however, was to make him uneasy and restless without his knowing
+what was the matter.
+
+White Fang had never been very demonstrative.  Beyond his snuggling and
+the throwing of a crooning note into his love-growl, he had no way of
+expressing his love.  Yet it was given him to discover a third way.  He
+had always been susceptible to the laughter of the gods.  Laughter had
+affected him with madness, made him frantic with rage.  But he did not
+have it in him to be angry with the love-master, and when that god
+elected to laugh at him in a good-natured, bantering way, he was
+nonplussed.  He could feel the pricking and stinging of the old anger as
+it strove to rise up in him, but it strove against love.  He could not be
+angry; yet he had to do something.  At first he was dignified, and the
+master laughed the harder.  Then he tried to be more dignified, and the
+master laughed harder than before.  In the end, the master laughed him
+out of his dignity.  His jaws slightly parted, his lips lifted a little,
+and a quizzical expression that was more love than humour came into his
+eyes.  He had learned to laugh.
+
+Likewise he learned to romp with the master, to be tumbled down and
+rolled over, and be the victim of innumerable rough tricks.  In return he
+feigned anger, bristling and growling ferociously, and clipping his teeth
+together in snaps that had all the seeming of deadly intention.  But he
+never forgot himself.  Those snaps were always delivered on the empty
+air.  At the end of such a romp, when blow and cuff and snap and snarl
+were fast and furious, they would break off suddenly and stand several
+feet apart, glaring at each other.  And then, just as suddenly, like the
+sun rising on a stormy sea, they would begin to laugh.  This would always
+culminate with the master's arms going around White Fang's neck and
+shoulders while the latter crooned and growled his love-song.
+
+But nobody else ever romped with White Fang.  He did not permit it.  He
+stood on his dignity, and when they attempted it, his warning snarl and
+bristling mane were anything but playful.  That he allowed the master
+these liberties was no reason that he should be a common dog, loving here
+and loving there, everybody's property for a romp and good time.  He
+loved with single heart and refused to cheapen himself or his love.
+
+The master went out on horseback a great deal, and to accompany him was
+one of White Fang's chief duties in life.  In the Northland he had
+evidenced his fealty by toiling in the harness; but there were no sleds
+in the Southland, nor did dogs pack burdens on their backs.  So he
+rendered fealty in the new way, by running with the master's horse.  The
+longest day never played White Fang out.  His was the gait of the wolf,
+smooth, tireless and effortless, and at the end of fifty miles he would
+come in jauntily ahead of the horse.
+
+It was in connection with the riding, that White Fang achieved one other
+mode of expression--remarkable in that he did it but twice in all his
+life.  The first time occurred when the master was trying to teach a
+spirited thoroughbred the method of opening and closing gates without the
+rider's dismounting.  Time and again and many times he ranged the horse
+up to the gate in the effort to close it and each time the horse became
+frightened and backed and plunged away.  It grew more nervous and excited
+every moment.  When it reared, the master put the spurs to it and made it
+drop its fore-legs back to earth, whereupon it would begin kicking with
+its hind-legs.  White Fang watched the performance with increasing
+anxiety until he could contain himself no longer, when he sprang in front
+of the horse and barked savagely and warningly.
+
+Though he often tried to bark thereafter, and the master encouraged him,
+he succeeded only once, and then it was not in the master's presence.  A
+scamper across the pasture, a jackrabbit rising suddenly under the
+horse's feet, a violent sheer, a stumble, a fall to earth, and a broken
+leg for the master, was the cause of it.  White Fang sprang in a rage at
+the throat of the offending horse, but was checked by the master's voice.
+
+"Home!  Go home!" the master commanded when he had ascertained his
+injury.
+
+White Fang was disinclined to desert him.  The master thought of writing
+a note, but searched his pockets vainly for pencil and paper.  Again he
+commanded White Fang to go home.
+
+The latter regarded him wistfully, started away, then returned and whined
+softly.  The master talked to him gently but seriously, and he cocked his
+ears, and listened with painful intentness.
+
+"That's all right, old fellow, you just run along home," ran the talk.
+"Go on home and tell them what's happened to me.  Home with you, you
+wolf.  Get along home!"
+
+White Fang knew the meaning of "home," and though he did not understand
+the remainder of the master's language, he knew it was his will that he
+should go home.  He turned and trotted reluctantly away.  Then he
+stopped, undecided, and looked back over his shoulder.
+
+"Go home!" came the sharp command, and this time he obeyed.
+
+The family was on the porch, taking the cool of the afternoon, when White
+Fang arrived.  He came in among them, panting, covered with dust.
+
+"Weedon's back," Weedon's mother announced.
+
+The children welcomed White Fang with glad cries and ran to meet him.  He
+avoided them and passed down the porch, but they cornered him against a
+rocking-chair and the railing.  He growled and tried to push by them.
+Their mother looked apprehensively in their direction.
+
+"I confess, he makes me nervous around the children," she said.  "I have
+a dread that he will turn upon them unexpectedly some day."
+
+Growling savagely, White Fang sprang out of the corner, overturning the
+boy and the girl.  The mother called them to her and comforted them,
+telling them not to bother White Fang.
+
+"A wolf is a wolf!" commented Judge Scott.  "There is no trusting one."
+
+"But he is not all wolf," interposed Beth, standing for her brother in
+his absence.
+
+"You have only Weedon's opinion for that," rejoined the judge.  "He
+merely surmises that there is some strain of dog in White Fang; but as he
+will tell you himself, he knows nothing about it.  As for his
+appearance--"
+
+He did not finish his sentence.  White Fang stood before him, growling
+fiercely.
+
+"Go away!  Lie down, sir!" Judge Scott commanded.
+
+White Fang turned to the love-master's wife.  She screamed with fright as
+he seized her dress in his teeth and dragged on it till the frail fabric
+tore away.  By this time he had become the centre of interest.
+
+He had ceased from his growling and stood, head up, looking into their
+faces.  His throat worked spasmodically, but made no sound, while he
+struggled with all his body, convulsed with the effort to rid himself of
+the incommunicable something that strained for utterance.
+
+"I hope he is not going mad," said Weedon's mother.  "I told Weedon that
+I was afraid the warm climate would not agree with an Arctic animal."
+
+"He's trying to speak, I do believe," Beth announced.
+
+At this moment speech came to White Fang, rushing up in a great burst of
+barking.
+
+"Something has happened to Weedon," his wife said decisively.
+
+They were all on their feet now, and White Fang ran down the steps,
+looking back for them to follow.  For the second and last time in his
+life he had barked and made himself understood.
+
+After this event he found a warmer place in the hearts of the Sierra
+Vista people, and even the groom whose arm he had slashed admitted that
+he was a wise dog even if he was a wolf.  Judge Scott still held to the
+same opinion, and proved it to everybody's dissatisfaction by
+measurements and descriptions taken from the encyclopaedia and various
+works on natural history.
+
+The days came and went, streaming their unbroken sunshine over the Santa
+Clara Valley.  But as they grew shorter and White Fang's second winter in
+the Southland came on, he made a strange discovery.  Collie's teeth were
+no longer sharp.  There was a playfulness about her nips and a gentleness
+that prevented them from really hurting him.  He forgot that she had made
+life a burden to him, and when she disported herself around him he
+responded solemnly, striving to be playful and becoming no more than
+ridiculous.
+
+One day she led him off on a long chase through the back-pasture land
+into the woods.  It was the afternoon that the master was to ride, and
+White Fang knew it.  The horse stood saddled and waiting at the door.
+White Fang hesitated.  But there was that in him deeper than all the law
+he had learned, than the customs that had moulded him, than his love for
+the master, than the very will to live of himself; and when, in the
+moment of his indecision, Collie nipped him and scampered off, he turned
+and followed after.  The master rode alone that day; and in the woods,
+side by side, White Fang ran with Collie, as his mother, Kiche, and old
+One Eye had run long years before in the silent Northland forest.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V--THE SLEEPING WOLF
+
+
+It was about this time that the newspapers were full of the daring escape
+of a convict from San Quentin prison.  He was a ferocious man.  He had
+been ill-made in the making.  He had not been born right, and he had not
+been helped any by the moulding he had received at the hands of society.
+The hands of society are harsh, and this man was a striking sample of its
+handiwork.  He was a beast--a human beast, it is true, but nevertheless
+so terrible a beast that he can best be characterised as carnivorous.
+
+In San Quentin prison he had proved incorrigible.  Punishment failed to
+break his spirit.  He could die dumb-mad and fighting to the last, but he
+could not live and be beaten.  The more fiercely he fought, the more
+harshly society handled him, and the only effect of harshness was to make
+him fiercer.  Strait-jackets, starvation, and beatings and clubbings
+were the wrong treatment for Jim Hall; but it was the treatment he
+received.  It was the treatment he had received from the time he was a
+little pulpy boy in a San Francisco slum--soft clay in the hands of
+society and ready to be formed into something.
+
+It was during Jim Hall's third term in prison that he encountered a guard
+that was almost as great a beast as he.  The guard treated him unfairly,
+lied about him to the warden, lost his credits, persecuted him.  The
+difference between them was that the guard carried a bunch of keys and a
+revolver.  Jim Hall had only his naked hands and his teeth.  But he
+sprang upon the guard one day and used his teeth on the other's throat
+just like any jungle animal.
+
+After this, Jim Hall went to live in the incorrigible cell.  He lived
+there three years.  The cell was of iron, the floor, the walls, the roof.
+He never left this cell.  He never saw the sky nor the sunshine.  Day was
+a twilight and night was a black silence.  He was in an iron tomb, buried
+alive.  He saw no human face, spoke to no human thing.  When his food was
+shoved in to him, he growled like a wild animal.  He hated all things.
+For days and nights he bellowed his rage at the universe.  For weeks and
+months he never made a sound, in the black silence eating his very soul.
+He was a man and a monstrosity, as fearful a thing of fear as ever
+gibbered in the visions of a maddened brain.
+
+And then, one night, he escaped.  The warders said it was impossible, but
+nevertheless the cell was empty, and half in half out of it lay the body
+of a dead guard.  Two other dead guards marked his trail through the
+prison to the outer walls, and he had killed with his hands to avoid
+noise.
+
+He was armed with the weapons of the slain guards--a live arsenal that
+fled through the hills pursued by the organised might of society.  A
+heavy price of gold was upon his head.  Avaricious farmers hunted him
+with shot-guns.  His blood might pay off a mortgage or send a son to
+college.  Public-spirited citizens took down their rifles and went out
+after him.  A pack of bloodhounds followed the way of his bleeding feet.
+And the sleuth-hounds of the law, the paid fighting animals of society,
+with telephone, and telegraph, and special train, clung to his trail
+night and day.
+
+Sometimes they came upon him, and men faced him like heroes, or stampeded
+through barbed-wire fences to the delight of the commonwealth reading the
+account at the breakfast table.  It was after such encounters that the
+dead and wounded were carted back to the towns, and their places filled
+by men eager for the man-hunt.
+
+And then Jim Hall disappeared.  The bloodhounds vainly quested on the
+lost trail.  Inoffensive ranchers in remote valleys were held up by armed
+men and compelled to identify themselves.  While the remains of Jim Hall
+were discovered on a dozen mountain-sides by greedy claimants for blood-
+money.
+
+In the meantime the newspapers were read at Sierra Vista, not so much
+with interest as with anxiety.  The women were afraid.  Judge Scott pooh-
+poohed and laughed, but not with reason, for it was in his last days on
+the bench that Jim Hall had stood before him and received sentence.  And
+in open court-room, before all men, Jim Hall had proclaimed that the day
+would come when he would wreak vengeance on the Judge that sentenced him.
+
+For once, Jim Hall was right.  He was innocent of the crime for which he
+was sentenced.  It was a case, in the parlance of thieves and police, of
+"rail-roading."  Jim Hall was being "rail-roaded" to prison for a crime
+he had not committed.  Because of the two prior convictions against him,
+Judge Scott imposed upon him a sentence of fifty years.
+
+Judge Scott did not know all things, and he did not know that he was
+party to a police conspiracy, that the evidence was hatched and perjured,
+that Jim Hall was guiltless of the crime charged.  And Jim Hall, on the
+other hand, did not know that Judge Scott was merely ignorant.  Jim Hall
+believed that the judge knew all about it and was hand in glove with the
+police in the perpetration of the monstrous injustice.  So it was, when
+the doom of fifty years of living death was uttered by Judge Scott, that
+Jim Hall, hating all things in the society that misused him, rose up and
+raged in the court-room until dragged down by half a dozen of his blue-
+coated enemies.  To him, Judge Scott was the keystone in the arch of
+injustice, and upon Judge Scott he emptied the vials of his wrath and
+hurled the threats of his revenge yet to come.  Then Jim Hall went to his
+living death . . . and escaped.
+
+Of all this White Fang knew nothing.  But between him and Alice, the
+master's wife, there existed a secret.  Each night, after Sierra Vista
+had gone to bed, she rose and let in White Fang to sleep in the big hall.
+Now White Fang was not a house-dog, nor was he permitted to sleep in the
+house; so each morning, early, she slipped down and let him out before
+the family was awake.
+
+On one such night, while all the house slept, White Fang awoke and lay
+very quietly.  And very quietly he smelled the air and read the message
+it bore of a strange god's presence.  And to his ears came sounds of the
+strange god's movements.  White Fang burst into no furious outcry.  It
+was not his way.  The strange god walked softly, but more softly walked
+White Fang, for he had no clothes to rub against the flesh of his body.
+He followed silently.  In the Wild he had hunted live meat that was
+infinitely timid, and he knew the advantage of surprise.
+
+The strange god paused at the foot of the great staircase and listened,
+and White Fang was as dead, so without movement was he as he watched and
+waited.  Up that staircase the way led to the love-master and to the love-
+master's dearest possessions.  White Fang bristled, but waited.  The
+strange god's foot lifted.  He was beginning the ascent.
+
+Then it was that White Fang struck.  He gave no warning, with no snarl
+anticipated his own action.  Into the air he lifted his body in the
+spring that landed him on the strange god's back.  White Fang clung with
+his fore-paws to the man's shoulders, at the same time burying his fangs
+into the back of the man's neck.  He clung on for a moment, long enough
+to drag the god over backward.  Together they crashed to the floor.  White
+Fang leaped clear, and, as the man struggled to rise, was in again with
+the slashing fangs.
+
+Sierra Vista awoke in alarm.  The noise from downstairs was as that of a
+score of battling fiends.  There were revolver shots.  A man's voice
+screamed once in horror and anguish.  There was a great snarling and
+growling, and over all arose a smashing and crashing of furniture and
+glass.
+
+But almost as quickly as it had arisen, the commotion died away.  The
+struggle had not lasted more than three minutes.  The frightened
+household clustered at the top of the stairway.  From below, as from out
+an abyss of blackness, came up a gurgling sound, as of air bubbling
+through water.  Sometimes this gurgle became sibilant, almost a whistle.
+But this, too, quickly died down and ceased.  Then naught came up out of
+the blackness save a heavy panting of some creature struggling sorely for
+air.
+
+Weedon Scott pressed a button, and the staircase and downstairs hall were
+flooded with light.  Then he and Judge Scott, revolvers in hand,
+cautiously descended.  There was no need for this caution.  White Fang
+had done his work.  In the midst of the wreckage of overthrown and
+smashed furniture, partly on his side, his face hidden by an arm, lay a
+man.  Weedon Scott bent over, removed the arm and turned the man's face
+upward.  A gaping throat explained the manner of his death.
+
+"Jim Hall," said Judge Scott, and father and son looked significantly at
+each other.
+
+Then they turned to White Fang.  He, too, was lying on his side.  His
+eyes were closed, but the lids slightly lifted in an effort to look at
+them as they bent over him, and the tail was perceptibly agitated in a
+vain effort to wag.  Weedon Scott patted him, and his throat rumbled an
+acknowledging growl.  But it was a weak growl at best, and it quickly
+ceased.  His eyelids drooped and went shut, and his whole body seemed to
+relax and flatten out upon the floor.
+
+"He's all in, poor devil," muttered the master.
+
+"We'll see about that," asserted the Judge, as he started for the
+telephone.
+
+"Frankly, he has one chance in a thousand," announced the surgeon, after
+he had worked an hour and a half on White Fang.
+
+Dawn was breaking through the windows and dimming the electric lights.
+With the exception of the children, the whole family was gathered about
+the surgeon to hear his verdict.
+
+"One broken hind-leg," he went on.  "Three broken ribs, one at least of
+which has pierced the lungs.  He has lost nearly all the blood in his
+body.  There is a large likelihood of internal injuries.  He must have
+been jumped upon.  To say nothing of three bullet holes clear through
+him.  One chance in a thousand is really optimistic.  He hasn't a chance
+in ten thousand."
+
+"But he mustn't lose any chance that might be of help to him," Judge
+Scott exclaimed.  "Never mind expense.  Put him under the X-ray--anything.
+Weedon, telegraph at once to San Francisco for Doctor Nichols.  No
+reflection on you, doctor, you understand; but he must have the advantage
+of every chance."
+
+The surgeon smiled indulgently.  "Of course I understand.  He deserves
+all that can be done for him.  He must be nursed as you would nurse a
+human being, a sick child.  And don't forget what I told you about
+temperature.  I'll be back at ten o'clock again."
+
+White Fang received the nursing.  Judge Scott's suggestion of a trained
+nurse was indignantly clamoured down by the girls, who themselves
+undertook the task.  And White Fang won out on the one chance in ten
+thousand denied him by the surgeon.
+
+The latter was not to be censured for his misjudgment.  All his life he
+had tended and operated on the soft humans of civilisation, who lived
+sheltered lives and had descended out of many sheltered generations.
+Compared with White Fang, they were frail and flabby, and clutched life
+without any strength in their grip.  White Fang had come straight from
+the Wild, where the weak perish early and shelter is vouchsafed to none.
+In neither his father nor his mother was there any weakness, nor in the
+generations before them.  A constitution of iron and the vitality of the
+Wild were White Fang's inheritance, and he clung to life, the whole of
+him and every part of him, in spirit and in flesh, with the tenacity that
+of old belonged to all creatures.
+
+Bound down a prisoner, denied even movement by the plaster casts and
+bandages, White Fang lingered out the weeks.  He slept long hours and
+dreamed much, and through his mind passed an unending pageant of
+Northland visions.  All the ghosts of the past arose and were with him.
+Once again he lived in the lair with Kiche, crept trembling to the knees
+of Grey Beaver to tender his allegiance, ran for his life before Lip-lip
+and all the howling bedlam of the puppy-pack.
+
+He ran again through the silence, hunting his living food through the
+months of famine; and again he ran at the head of the team, the gut-whips
+of Mit-sah and Grey Beaver snapping behind, their voices crying "Ra!
+Raa!" when they came to a narrow passage and the team closed together
+like a fan to go through.  He lived again all his days with Beauty Smith
+and the fights he had fought.  At such times he whimpered and snarled in
+his sleep, and they that looked on said that his dreams were bad.
+
+But there was one particular nightmare from which he suffered--the
+clanking, clanging monsters of electric cars that were to him colossal
+screaming lynxes.  He would lie in a screen of bushes, watching for a
+squirrel to venture far enough out on the ground from its tree-refuge.
+Then, when he sprang out upon it, it would transform itself into an
+electric car, menacing and terrible, towering over him like a mountain,
+screaming and clanging and spitting fire at him.  It was the same when he
+challenged the hawk down out of the sky.  Down out of the blue it would
+rush, as it dropped upon him changing itself into the ubiquitous electric
+car.  Or again, he would be in the pen of Beauty Smith.  Outside the pen,
+men would be gathering, and he knew that a fight was on.  He watched the
+door for his antagonist to enter.  The door would open, and thrust in
+upon him would come the awful electric car.  A thousand times this
+occurred, and each time the terror it inspired was as vivid and great as
+ever.
+
+Then came the day when the last bandage and the last plaster cast were
+taken off.  It was a gala day.  All Sierra Vista was gathered around.  The
+master rubbed his ears, and he crooned his love-growl.  The master's wife
+called him the "Blessed Wolf," which name was taken up with acclaim and
+all the women called him the Blessed Wolf.
+
+He tried to rise to his feet, and after several attempts fell down from
+weakness.  He had lain so long that his muscles had lost their cunning,
+and all the strength had gone out of them.  He felt a little shame
+because of his weakness, as though, forsooth, he were failing the gods in
+the service he owed them.  Because of this he made heroic efforts to
+arise and at last he stood on his four legs, tottering and swaying back
+and forth.
+
+"The Blessed Wolf!" chorused the women.
+
+Judge Scott surveyed them triumphantly.
+
+"Out of your own mouths be it," he said.  "Just as I contended right
+along.  No mere dog could have done what he did.  He's a wolf."
+
+"A Blessed Wolf," amended the Judge's wife.
+
+"Yes, Blessed Wolf," agreed the Judge.  "And henceforth that shall be my
+name for him."
+
+"He'll have to learn to walk again," said the surgeon; "so he might as
+well start in right now.  It won't hurt him.  Take him outside."
+
+And outside he went, like a king, with all Sierra Vista about him and
+tending on him.  He was very weak, and when he reached the lawn he lay
+down and rested for a while.
+
+Then the procession started on, little spurts of strength coming into
+White Fang's muscles as he used them and the blood began to surge through
+them.  The stables were reached, and there in the doorway, lay Collie, a
+half-dozen pudgy puppies playing about her in the sun.
+
+White Fang looked on with a wondering eye.  Collie snarled warningly at
+him, and he was careful to keep his distance.  The master with his toe
+helped one sprawling puppy toward him.  He bristled suspiciously, but the
+master warned him that all was well.  Collie, clasped in the arms of one
+of the women, watched him jealously and with a snarl warned him that all
+was not well.
+
+The puppy sprawled in front of him.  He cocked his ears and watched it
+curiously.  Then their noses touched, and he felt the warm little tongue
+of the puppy on his jowl.  White Fang's tongue went out, he knew not why,
+and he licked the puppy's face.
+
+Hand-clapping and pleased cries from the gods greeted the performance.  He
+was surprised, and looked at them in a puzzled way.  Then his weakness
+asserted itself, and he lay down, his ears cocked, his head on one side,
+as he watched the puppy.  The other puppies came sprawling toward him, to
+Collie's great disgust; and he gravely permitted them to clamber and
+tumble over him.  At first, amid the applause of the gods, he betrayed a
+trifle of his old self-consciousness and awkwardness.  This passed away
+as the puppies' antics and mauling continued, and he lay with half-shut
+patient eyes, drowsing in the sun.
+
+
+
+***END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK WHITE FANG***
+
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+The Project Gutenberg eBook of White Fang, by Jack London
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and
+most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions
+whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms
+of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at
+www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States, you
+will have to check the laws of the country where you are located before
+using this eBook.
+
+Title: White Fang
+
+Author: Jack London
+
+Release Date: May 13, 1997 [eBook #910]
+[Most recently updated: November 10, 2021]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: UTF-8
+
+Produced by: David Price
+
+*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK WHITE FANG ***
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+
+
+WHITE FANG
+
+by Jack London
+
+
+Contents
+
+ PART I
+ CHAPTER I THE TRAIL OF THE MEAT
+ CHAPTER II THE SHE-WOLF
+ CHAPTER III THE HUNGER CRY
+
+ PART II
+ CHAPTER I THE BATTLE OF THE FANGS
+ CHAPTER II THE LAIR
+ CHAPTER III THE GREY CUB
+ CHAPTER IV THE WALL OF THE WORLD
+ CHAPTER V THE LAW OF MEAT
+
+ PART III
+ CHAPTER I THE MAKERS OF FIRE
+ CHAPTER II THE BONDAGE
+ CHAPTER III THE OUTCAST
+ CHAPTER IV THE TRAIL OF THE GODS
+ CHAPTER V THE COVENANT
+ CHAPTER VI THE FAMINE
+
+ PART IV
+ CHAPTER I THE ENEMY OF HIS KIND
+ CHAPTER II THE MAD GOD
+ CHAPTER III THE REIGN OF HATE
+ CHAPTER IV THE CLINGING DEATH
+ CHAPTER V THE INDOMITABLE
+ CHAPTER VI THE LOVE-MASTER
+
+ PART V
+ CHAPTER I THE LONG TRAIL
+ CHAPTER II THE SOUTHLAND
+ CHAPTER III THE GOD’S DOMAIN
+ CHAPTER IV THE CALL OF KIND
+ CHAPTER V THE SLEEPING WOLF
+
+
+
+
+PART I
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I
+THE TRAIL OF THE MEAT
+
+
+Dark spruce forest frowned on either side the frozen waterway. The
+trees had been stripped by a recent wind of their white covering of
+frost, and they seemed to lean towards each other, black and ominous,
+in the fading light. A vast silence reigned over the land. The land
+itself was a desolation, lifeless, without movement, so lone and cold
+that the spirit of it was not even that of sadness. There was a hint in
+it of laughter, but of a laughter more terrible than any sadness—a
+laughter that was mirthless as the smile of the sphinx, a laughter cold
+as the frost and partaking of the grimness of infallibility. It was the
+masterful and incommunicable wisdom of eternity laughing at the
+futility of life and the effort of life. It was the Wild, the savage,
+frozen-hearted Northland Wild.
+
+But there _was_ life, abroad in the land and defiant. Down the frozen
+waterway toiled a string of wolfish dogs. Their bristly fur was rimed
+with frost. Their breath froze in the air as it left their mouths,
+spouting forth in spumes of vapour that settled upon the hair of their
+bodies and formed into crystals of frost. Leather harness was on the
+dogs, and leather traces attached them to a sled which dragged along
+behind. The sled was without runners. It was made of stout birch-bark,
+and its full surface rested on the snow. The front end of the sled was
+turned up, like a scroll, in order to force down and under the bore of
+soft snow that surged like a wave before it. On the sled, securely
+lashed, was a long and narrow oblong box. There were other things on
+the sled—blankets, an axe, and a coffee-pot and frying-pan; but
+prominent, occupying most of the space, was the long and narrow oblong
+box.
+
+In advance of the dogs, on wide snowshoes, toiled a man. At the rear of
+the sled toiled a second man. On the sled, in the box, lay a third man
+whose toil was over,—a man whom the Wild had conquered and beaten down
+until he would never move nor struggle again. It is not the way of the
+Wild to like movement. Life is an offence to it, for life is movement;
+and the Wild aims always to destroy movement. It freezes the water to
+prevent it running to the sea; it drives the sap out of the trees till
+they are frozen to their mighty hearts; and most ferociously and
+terribly of all does the Wild harry and crush into submission man—man
+who is the most restless of life, ever in revolt against the dictum
+that all movement must in the end come to the cessation of movement.
+
+But at front and rear, unawed and indomitable, toiled the two men who
+were not yet dead. Their bodies were covered with fur and soft-tanned
+leather. Eyelashes and cheeks and lips were so coated with the crystals
+from their frozen breath that their faces were not discernible. This
+gave them the seeming of ghostly masques, undertakers in a spectral
+world at the funeral of some ghost. But under it all they were men,
+penetrating the land of desolation and mockery and silence, puny
+adventurers bent on colossal adventure, pitting themselves against the
+might of a world as remote and alien and pulseless as the abysses of
+space.
+
+They travelled on without speech, saving their breath for the work of
+their bodies. On every side was the silence, pressing upon them with a
+tangible presence. It affected their minds as the many atmospheres of
+deep water affect the body of the diver. It crushed them with the
+weight of unending vastness and unalterable decree. It crushed them
+into the remotest recesses of their own minds, pressing out of them,
+like juices from the grape, all the false ardours and exaltations and
+undue self-values of the human soul, until they perceived themselves
+finite and small, specks and motes, moving with weak cunning and little
+wisdom amidst the play and inter-play of the great blind elements and
+forces.
+
+An hour went by, and a second hour. The pale light of the short sunless
+day was beginning to fade, when a faint far cry arose on the still air.
+It soared upward with a swift rush, till it reached its topmost note,
+where it persisted, palpitant and tense, and then slowly died away. It
+might have been a lost soul wailing, had it not been invested with a
+certain sad fierceness and hungry eagerness. The front man turned his
+head until his eyes met the eyes of the man behind. And then, across
+the narrow oblong box, each nodded to the other.
+
+A second cry arose, piercing the silence with needle-like shrillness.
+Both men located the sound. It was to the rear, somewhere in the snow
+expanse they had just traversed. A third and answering cry arose, also
+to the rear and to the left of the second cry.
+
+“They’re after us, Bill,” said the man at the front.
+
+His voice sounded hoarse and unreal, and he had spoken with apparent
+effort.
+
+“Meat is scarce,” answered his comrade. “I ain’t seen a rabbit sign for
+days.”
+
+Thereafter they spoke no more, though their ears were keen for the
+hunting-cries that continued to rise behind them.
+
+At the fall of darkness they swung the dogs into a cluster of spruce
+trees on the edge of the waterway and made a camp. The coffin, at the
+side of the fire, served for seat and table. The wolf-dogs, clustered
+on the far side of the fire, snarled and bickered among themselves, but
+evinced no inclination to stray off into the darkness.
+
+“Seems to me, Henry, they’re stayin’ remarkable close to camp,” Bill
+commented.
+
+Henry, squatting over the fire and settling the pot of coffee with a
+piece of ice, nodded. Nor did he speak till he had taken his seat on
+the coffin and begun to eat.
+
+“They know where their hides is safe,” he said. “They’d sooner eat grub
+than be grub. They’re pretty wise, them dogs.”
+
+Bill shook his head. “Oh, I don’t know.”
+
+His comrade looked at him curiously. “First time I ever heard you say
+anything about their not bein’ wise.”
+
+“Henry,” said the other, munching with deliberation the beans he was
+eating, “did you happen to notice the way them dogs kicked up when I
+was a-feedin’ ’em?”
+
+“They did cut up more’n usual,” Henry acknowledged.
+
+“How many dogs ’ve we got, Henry?”
+
+“Six.”
+
+“Well, Henry . . . ” Bill stopped for a moment, in order that his words
+might gain greater significance. “As I was sayin’, Henry, we’ve got six
+dogs. I took six fish out of the bag. I gave one fish to each dog, an’,
+Henry, I was one fish short.”
+
+“You counted wrong.”
+
+“We’ve got six dogs,” the other reiterated dispassionately. “I took out
+six fish. One Ear didn’t get no fish. I came back to the bag afterward
+an’ got ’m his fish.”
+
+“We’ve only got six dogs,” Henry said.
+
+“Henry,” Bill went on. “I won’t say they was all dogs, but there was
+seven of ’m that got fish.”
+
+Henry stopped eating to glance across the fire and count the dogs.
+
+“There’s only six now,” he said.
+
+“I saw the other one run off across the snow,” Bill announced with cool
+positiveness. “I saw seven.”
+
+Henry looked at him commiseratingly, and said, “I’ll be almighty glad
+when this trip’s over.”
+
+“What d’ye mean by that?” Bill demanded.
+
+“I mean that this load of ourn is gettin’ on your nerves, an’ that
+you’re beginnin’ to see things.”
+
+“I thought of that,” Bill answered gravely. “An’ so, when I saw it run
+off across the snow, I looked in the snow an’ saw its tracks. Then I
+counted the dogs an’ there was still six of ’em. The tracks is there in
+the snow now. D’ye want to look at ’em? I’ll show ’em to you.”
+
+Henry did not reply, but munched on in silence, until, the meal
+finished, he topped it with a final cup of coffee. He wiped his mouth
+with the back of his hand and said:
+
+“Then you’re thinkin’ as it was—”
+
+A long wailing cry, fiercely sad, from somewhere in the darkness, had
+interrupted him. He stopped to listen to it, then he finished his
+sentence with a wave of his hand toward the sound of the cry, “—one of
+them?”
+
+Bill nodded. “I’d a blame sight sooner think that than anything else.
+You noticed yourself the row the dogs made.”
+
+Cry after cry, and answering cries, were turning the silence into a
+bedlam. From every side the cries arose, and the dogs betrayed their
+fear by huddling together and so close to the fire that their hair was
+scorched by the heat. Bill threw on more wood, before lighting his
+pipe.
+
+“I’m thinking you’re down in the mouth some,” Henry said.
+
+“Henry . . . ” He sucked meditatively at his pipe for some time before
+he went on. “Henry, I was a-thinkin’ what a blame sight luckier he is
+than you an’ me’ll ever be.”
+
+He indicated the third person by a downward thrust of the thumb to the
+box on which they sat.
+
+“You an’ me, Henry, when we die, we’ll be lucky if we get enough stones
+over our carcases to keep the dogs off of us.”
+
+“But we ain’t got people an’ money an’ all the rest, like him,” Henry
+rejoined. “Long-distance funerals is somethin’ you an’ me can’t exactly
+afford.”
+
+“What gets me, Henry, is what a chap like this, that’s a lord or
+something in his own country, and that’s never had to bother about grub
+nor blankets; why he comes a-buttin’ round the Godforsaken ends of the
+earth—that’s what I can’t exactly see.”
+
+“He might have lived to a ripe old age if he’d stayed at home,” Henry
+agreed.
+
+Bill opened his mouth to speak, but changed his mind. Instead, he
+pointed towards the wall of darkness that pressed about them from every
+side. There was no suggestion of form in the utter blackness; only
+could be seen a pair of eyes gleaming like live coals. Henry indicated
+with his head a second pair, and a third. A circle of the gleaming eyes
+had drawn about their camp. Now and again a pair of eyes moved, or
+disappeared to appear again a moment later.
+
+The unrest of the dogs had been increasing, and they stampeded, in a
+surge of sudden fear, to the near side of the fire, cringing and
+crawling about the legs of the men. In the scramble one of the dogs had
+been overturned on the edge of the fire, and it had yelped with pain
+and fright as the smell of its singed coat possessed the air. The
+commotion caused the circle of eyes to shift restlessly for a moment
+and even to withdraw a bit, but it settled down again as the dogs
+became quiet.
+
+“Henry, it’s a blame misfortune to be out of ammunition.”
+
+Bill had finished his pipe and was helping his companion to spread the
+bed of fur and blanket upon the spruce boughs which he had laid over
+the snow before supper. Henry grunted, and began unlacing his
+moccasins.
+
+“How many cartridges did you say you had left?” he asked.
+
+“Three,” came the answer. “An’ I wisht ’twas three hundred. Then I’d
+show ’em what for, damn ’em!”
+
+He shook his fist angrily at the gleaming eyes, and began securely to
+prop his moccasins before the fire.
+
+“An’ I wisht this cold snap’d break,” he went on. “It’s ben fifty below
+for two weeks now. An’ I wisht I’d never started on this trip, Henry. I
+don’t like the looks of it. I don’t feel right, somehow. An’ while I’m
+wishin’, I wisht the trip was over an’ done with, an’ you an’ me
+a-sittin’ by the fire in Fort McGurry just about now an’ playing
+cribbage—that’s what I wisht.”
+
+Henry grunted and crawled into bed. As he dozed off he was aroused by
+his comrade’s voice.
+
+“Say, Henry, that other one that come in an’ got a fish—why didn’t the
+dogs pitch into it? That’s what’s botherin’ me.”
+
+“You’re botherin’ too much, Bill,” came the sleepy response. “You was
+never like this before. You jes’ shut up now, an’ go to sleep, an’
+you’ll be all hunkydory in the mornin’. Your stomach’s sour, that’s
+what’s botherin’ you.”
+
+The men slept, breathing heavily, side by side, under the one covering.
+The fire died down, and the gleaming eyes drew closer the circle they
+had flung about the camp. The dogs clustered together in fear, now and
+again snarling menacingly as a pair of eyes drew close. Once their
+uproar became so loud that Bill woke up. He got out of bed carefully,
+so as not to disturb the sleep of his comrade, and threw more wood on
+the fire. As it began to flame up, the circle of eyes drew farther
+back. He glanced casually at the huddling dogs. He rubbed his eyes and
+looked at them more sharply. Then he crawled back into the blankets.
+
+“Henry,” he said. “Oh, Henry.”
+
+Henry groaned as he passed from sleep to waking, and demanded, “What’s
+wrong now?”
+
+“Nothin’,” came the answer; “only there’s seven of ’em again. I just
+counted.”
+
+Henry acknowledged receipt of the information with a grunt that slid
+into a snore as he drifted back into sleep.
+
+In the morning it was Henry who awoke first and routed his companion
+out of bed. Daylight was yet three hours away, though it was already
+six o’clock; and in the darkness Henry went about preparing breakfast,
+while Bill rolled the blankets and made the sled ready for lashing.
+
+“Say, Henry,” he asked suddenly, “how many dogs did you say we had?”
+
+“Six.”
+
+“Wrong,” Bill proclaimed triumphantly.
+
+“Seven again?” Henry queried.
+
+“No, five; one’s gone.”
+
+“The hell!” Henry cried in wrath, leaving the cooking to come and count
+the dogs.
+
+“You’re right, Bill,” he concluded. “Fatty’s gone.”
+
+“An’ he went like greased lightnin’ once he got started. Couldn’t ’ve
+seen ’m for smoke.”
+
+“No chance at all,” Henry concluded. “They jes’ swallowed ’m alive. I
+bet he was yelpin’ as he went down their throats, damn ’em!”
+
+“He always was a fool dog,” said Bill.
+
+“But no fool dog ought to be fool enough to go off an’ commit suicide
+that way.” He looked over the remainder of the team with a speculative
+eye that summed up instantly the salient traits of each animal. “I bet
+none of the others would do it.”
+
+“Couldn’t drive ’em away from the fire with a club,” Bill agreed. “I
+always did think there was somethin’ wrong with Fatty anyway.”
+
+And this was the epitaph of a dead dog on the Northland trail—less
+scant than the epitaph of many another dog, of many a man.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II
+THE SHE-WOLF
+
+
+Breakfast eaten and the slim camp-outfit lashed to the sled, the men
+turned their backs on the cheery fire and launched out into the
+darkness. At once began to rise the cries that were fiercely sad—cries
+that called through the darkness and cold to one another and answered
+back. Conversation ceased. Daylight came at nine o’clock. At midday the
+sky to the south warmed to rose-colour, and marked where the bulge of
+the earth intervened between the meridian sun and the northern world.
+But the rose-colour swiftly faded. The grey light of day that remained
+lasted until three o’clock, when it, too, faded, and the pall of the
+Arctic night descended upon the lone and silent land.
+
+As darkness came on, the hunting-cries to right and left and rear drew
+closer—so close that more than once they sent surges of fear through
+the toiling dogs, throwing them into short-lived panics.
+
+At the conclusion of one such panic, when he and Henry had got the dogs
+back in the traces, Bill said:
+
+“I wisht they’d strike game somewheres, an’ go away an’ leave us
+alone.”
+
+“They do get on the nerves horrible,” Henry sympathised.
+
+They spoke no more until camp was made.
+
+Henry was bending over and adding ice to the babbling pot of beans when
+he was startled by the sound of a blow, an exclamation from Bill, and a
+sharp snarling cry of pain from among the dogs. He straightened up in
+time to see a dim form disappearing across the snow into the shelter of
+the dark. Then he saw Bill, standing amid the dogs, half triumphant,
+half crestfallen, in one hand a stout club, in the other the tail and
+part of the body of a sun-cured salmon.
+
+“It got half of it,” he announced; “but I got a whack at it jes’ the
+same. D’ye hear it squeal?”
+
+“What’d it look like?” Henry asked.
+
+“Couldn’t see. But it had four legs an’ a mouth an’ hair an’ looked
+like any dog.”
+
+“Must be a tame wolf, I reckon.”
+
+“It’s damned tame, whatever it is, comin’ in here at feedin’ time an’
+gettin’ its whack of fish.”
+
+That night, when supper was finished and they sat on the oblong box and
+pulled at their pipes, the circle of gleaming eyes drew in even closer
+than before.
+
+“I wisht they’d spring up a bunch of moose or something, an’ go away
+an’ leave us alone,” Bill said.
+
+Henry grunted with an intonation that was not all sympathy, and for a
+quarter of an hour they sat on in silence, Henry staring at the fire,
+and Bill at the circle of eyes that burned in the darkness just beyond
+the firelight.
+
+“I wisht we was pullin’ into McGurry right now,” he began again.
+
+“Shut up your wishin’ and your croakin’,” Henry burst out angrily.
+“Your stomach’s sour. That’s what’s ailin’ you. Swallow a spoonful of
+sody, an’ you’ll sweeten up wonderful an’ be more pleasant company.”
+
+In the morning Henry was aroused by fervid blasphemy that proceeded
+from the mouth of Bill. Henry propped himself up on an elbow and looked
+to see his comrade standing among the dogs beside the replenished fire,
+his arms raised in objurgation, his face distorted with passion.
+
+“Hello!” Henry called. “What’s up now?”
+
+“Frog’s gone,” came the answer.
+
+“No.”
+
+“I tell you yes.”
+
+Henry leaped out of the blankets and to the dogs. He counted them with
+care, and then joined his partner in cursing the power of the Wild that
+had robbed them of another dog.
+
+“Frog was the strongest dog of the bunch,” Bill pronounced finally.
+
+“An’ he was no fool dog neither,” Henry added.
+
+And so was recorded the second epitaph in two days.
+
+A gloomy breakfast was eaten, and the four remaining dogs were
+harnessed to the sled. The day was a repetition of the days that had
+gone before. The men toiled without speech across the face of the
+frozen world. The silence was unbroken save by the cries of their
+pursuers, that, unseen, hung upon their rear. With the coming of night
+in the mid-afternoon, the cries sounded closer as the pursuers drew in
+according to their custom; and the dogs grew excited and frightened,
+and were guilty of panics that tangled the traces and further depressed
+the two men.
+
+“There, that’ll fix you fool critters,” Bill said with satisfaction
+that night, standing erect at completion of his task.
+
+Henry left the cooking to come and see. Not only had his partner tied
+the dogs up, but he had tied them, after the Indian fashion, with
+sticks. About the neck of each dog he had fastened a leather thong. To
+this, and so close to the neck that the dog could not get his teeth to
+it, he had tied a stout stick four or five feet in length. The other
+end of the stick, in turn, was made fast to a stake in the ground by
+means of a leather thong. The dog was unable to gnaw through the
+leather at his own end of the stick. The stick prevented him from
+getting at the leather that fastened the other end.
+
+Henry nodded his head approvingly.
+
+“It’s the only contraption that’ll ever hold One Ear,” he said. “He can
+gnaw through leather as clean as a knife an’ jes’ about half as quick.
+They all’ll be here in the mornin’ hunkydory.”
+
+“You jes’ bet they will,” Bill affirmed. “If one of em’ turns up
+missin’, I’ll go without my coffee.”
+
+“They jes’ know we ain’t loaded to kill,” Henry remarked at bed-time,
+indicating the gleaming circle that hemmed them in. “If we could put a
+couple of shots into ’em, they’d be more respectful. They come closer
+every night. Get the firelight out of your eyes an’ look hard—there!
+Did you see that one?”
+
+For some time the two men amused themselves with watching the movement
+of vague forms on the edge of the firelight. By looking closely and
+steadily at where a pair of eyes burned in the darkness, the form of
+the animal would slowly take shape. They could even see these forms
+move at times.
+
+A sound among the dogs attracted the men’s attention. One Ear was
+uttering quick, eager whines, lunging at the length of his stick toward
+the darkness, and desisting now and again in order to make frantic
+attacks on the stick with his teeth.
+
+“Look at that, Bill,” Henry whispered.
+
+Full into the firelight, with a stealthy, sidelong movement, glided a
+doglike animal. It moved with commingled mistrust and daring,
+cautiously observing the men, its attention fixed on the dogs. One Ear
+strained the full length of the stick toward the intruder and whined
+with eagerness.
+
+“That fool One Ear don’t seem scairt much,” Bill said in a low tone.
+
+“It’s a she-wolf,” Henry whispered back, “an’ that accounts for Fatty
+an’ Frog. She’s the decoy for the pack. She draws out the dog an’ then
+all the rest pitches in an’ eats ’m up.”
+
+The fire crackled. A log fell apart with a loud spluttering noise. At
+the sound of it the strange animal leaped back into the darkness.
+
+“Henry, I’m a-thinkin’,” Bill announced.
+
+“Thinkin’ what?”
+
+“I’m a-thinkin’ that was the one I lambasted with the club.”
+
+“Ain’t the slightest doubt in the world,” was Henry’s response.
+
+“An’ right here I want to remark,” Bill went on, “that that animal’s
+familyarity with campfires is suspicious an’ immoral.”
+
+“It knows for certain more’n a self-respectin’ wolf ought to know,”
+Henry agreed. “A wolf that knows enough to come in with the dogs at
+feedin’ time has had experiences.”
+
+“Ol’ Villan had a dog once that run away with the wolves,” Bill
+cogitates aloud. “I ought to know. I shot it out of the pack in a moose
+pasture over ‘on Little Stick. An’ Ol’ Villan cried like a baby. Hadn’t
+seen it for three years, he said. Ben with the wolves all that time.”
+
+“I reckon you’ve called the turn, Bill. That wolf’s a dog, an’ it’s
+eaten fish many’s the time from the hand of man.”
+
+“An if I get a chance at it, that wolf that’s a dog’ll be jes’ meat,”
+Bill declared. “We can’t afford to lose no more animals.”
+
+“But you’ve only got three cartridges,” Henry objected.
+
+“I’ll wait for a dead sure shot,” was the reply.
+
+In the morning Henry renewed the fire and cooked breakfast to the
+accompaniment of his partner’s snoring.
+
+“You was sleepin’ jes’ too comfortable for anything,” Henry told him,
+as he routed him out for breakfast. “I hadn’t the heart to rouse you.”
+
+Bill began to eat sleepily. He noticed that his cup was empty and
+started to reach for the pot. But the pot was beyond arm’s length and
+beside Henry.
+
+“Say, Henry,” he chided gently, “ain’t you forgot somethin’?”
+
+Henry looked about with great carefulness and shook his head. Bill held
+up the empty cup.
+
+“You don’t get no coffee,” Henry announced.
+
+“Ain’t run out?” Bill asked anxiously.
+
+“Nope.”
+
+“Ain’t thinkin’ it’ll hurt my digestion?”
+
+“Nope.”
+
+A flush of angry blood pervaded Bill’s face.
+
+“Then it’s jes’ warm an’ anxious I am to be hearin’ you explain
+yourself,” he said.
+
+“Spanker’s gone,” Henry answered.
+
+Without haste, with the air of one resigned to misfortune Bill turned
+his head, and from where he sat counted the dogs.
+
+“How’d it happen?” he asked apathetically.
+
+Henry shrugged his shoulders. “Don’t know. Unless One Ear gnawed ’m
+loose. He couldn’t a-done it himself, that’s sure.”
+
+“The darned cuss.” Bill spoke gravely and slowly, with no hint of the
+anger that was raging within. “Jes’ because he couldn’t chew himself
+loose, he chews Spanker loose.”
+
+“Well, Spanker’s troubles is over anyway; I guess he’s digested by this
+time an’ cavortin’ over the landscape in the bellies of twenty
+different wolves,” was Henry’s epitaph on this, the latest lost dog.
+“Have some coffee, Bill.”
+
+But Bill shook his head.
+
+“Go on,” Henry pleaded, elevating the pot.
+
+Bill shoved his cup aside. “I’ll be ding-dong-danged if I do. I said I
+wouldn’t if ary dog turned up missin’, an’ I won’t.”
+
+“It’s darn good coffee,” Henry said enticingly.
+
+But Bill was stubborn, and he ate a dry breakfast washed down with
+mumbled curses at One Ear for the trick he had played.
+
+“I’ll tie ’em up out of reach of each other to-night,” Bill said, as
+they took the trail.
+
+They had travelled little more than a hundred yards, when Henry, who
+was in front, bent down and picked up something with which his snowshoe
+had collided. It was dark, and he could not see it, but he recognised
+it by the touch. He flung it back, so that it struck the sled and
+bounced along until it fetched up on Bill’s snowshoes.
+
+“Mebbe you’ll need that in your business,” Henry said.
+
+Bill uttered an exclamation. It was all that was left of Spanker—the
+stick with which he had been tied.
+
+“They ate ’m hide an’ all,” Bill announced. “The stick’s as clean as a
+whistle. They’ve ate the leather offen both ends. They’re damn hungry,
+Henry, an’ they’ll have you an’ me guessin’ before this trip’s over.”
+
+Henry laughed defiantly. “I ain’t been trailed this way by wolves
+before, but I’ve gone through a whole lot worse an’ kept my health.
+Takes more’n a handful of them pesky critters to do for yours truly,
+Bill, my son.”
+
+“I don’t know, I don’t know,” Bill muttered ominously.
+
+“Well, you’ll know all right when we pull into McGurry.”
+
+“I ain’t feelin’ special enthusiastic,” Bill persisted.
+
+“You’re off colour, that’s what’s the matter with you,” Henry
+dogmatised. “What you need is quinine, an’ I’m goin’ to dose you up
+stiff as soon as we make McGurry.”
+
+Bill grunted his disagreement with the diagnosis, and lapsed into
+silence. The day was like all the days. Light came at nine o’clock. At
+twelve o’clock the southern horizon was warmed by the unseen sun; and
+then began the cold grey of afternoon that would merge, three hours
+later, into night.
+
+It was just after the sun’s futile effort to appear, that Bill slipped
+the rifle from under the sled-lashings and said:
+
+“You keep right on, Henry, I’m goin’ to see what I can see.”
+
+“You’d better stick by the sled,” his partner protested. “You’ve only
+got three cartridges, an’ there’s no tellin’ what might happen.”
+
+“Who’s croaking now?” Bill demanded triumphantly.
+
+Henry made no reply, and plodded on alone, though often he cast anxious
+glances back into the grey solitude where his partner had disappeared.
+An hour later, taking advantage of the cut-offs around which the sled
+had to go, Bill arrived.
+
+“They’re scattered an’ rangin’ along wide,” he said: “keeping up with
+us an’ lookin’ for game at the same time. You see, they’re sure of us,
+only they know they’ve got to wait to get us. In the meantime they’re
+willin’ to pick up anything eatable that comes handy.”
+
+“You mean they _think_ they’re sure of us,” Henry objected pointedly.
+
+But Bill ignored him. “I seen some of them. They’re pretty thin. They
+ain’t had a bite in weeks I reckon, outside of Fatty an’ Frog an’
+Spanker; an’ there’s so many of ’em that that didn’t go far. They’re
+remarkable thin. Their ribs is like wash-boards, an’ their stomachs is
+right up against their backbones. They’re pretty desperate, I can tell
+you. They’ll be goin’ mad, yet, an’ then watch out.”
+
+A few minutes later, Henry, who was now travelling behind the sled,
+emitted a low, warning whistle. Bill turned and looked, then quietly
+stopped the dogs. To the rear, from around the last bend and plainly
+into view, on the very trail they had just covered, trotted a furry,
+slinking form. Its nose was to the trail, and it trotted with a
+peculiar, sliding, effortless gait. When they halted, it halted,
+throwing up its head and regarding them steadily with nostrils that
+twitched as it caught and studied the scent of them.
+
+“It’s the she-wolf,” Bill answered.
+
+The dogs had lain down in the snow, and he walked past them to join his
+partner in the sled. Together they watched the strange animal that had
+pursued them for days and that had already accomplished the destruction
+of half their dog-team.
+
+After a searching scrutiny, the animal trotted forward a few steps.
+This it repeated several times, till it was a short hundred yards away.
+It paused, head up, close by a clump of spruce trees, and with sight
+and scent studied the outfit of the watching men. It looked at them in
+a strangely wistful way, after the manner of a dog; but in its
+wistfulness there was none of the dog affection. It was a wistfulness
+bred of hunger, as cruel as its own fangs, as merciless as the frost
+itself.
+
+It was large for a wolf, its gaunt frame advertising the lines of an
+animal that was among the largest of its kind.
+
+“Stands pretty close to two feet an’ a half at the shoulders,” Henry
+commented. “An’ I’ll bet it ain’t far from five feet long.”
+
+“Kind of strange colour for a wolf,” was Bill’s criticism. “I never
+seen a red wolf before. Looks almost cinnamon to me.”
+
+The animal was certainly not cinnamon-coloured. Its coat was the true
+wolf-coat. The dominant colour was grey, and yet there was to it a
+faint reddish hue—a hue that was baffling, that appeared and
+disappeared, that was more like an illusion of the vision, now grey,
+distinctly grey, and again giving hints and glints of a vague redness
+of colour not classifiable in terms of ordinary experience.
+
+“Looks for all the world like a big husky sled-dog,” Bill said. “I
+wouldn’t be s’prised to see it wag its tail.”
+
+“Hello, you husky!” he called. “Come here, you whatever-your-name-is.”
+
+“Ain’t a bit scairt of you,” Henry laughed.
+
+Bill waved his hand at it threateningly and shouted loudly; but the
+animal betrayed no fear. The only change in it that they could notice
+was an accession of alertness. It still regarded them with the
+merciless wistfulness of hunger. They were meat, and it was hungry; and
+it would like to go in and eat them if it dared.
+
+“Look here, Henry,” Bill said, unconsciously lowering his voice to a
+whisper because of what he imitated. “We’ve got three cartridges. But
+it’s a dead shot. Couldn’t miss it. It’s got away with three of our
+dogs, an’ we oughter put a stop to it. What d’ye say?”
+
+Henry nodded his consent. Bill cautiously slipped the gun from under
+the sled-lashing. The gun was on the way to his shoulder, but it never
+got there. For in that instant the she-wolf leaped sidewise from the
+trail into the clump of spruce trees and disappeared.
+
+The two men looked at each other. Henry whistled long and
+comprehendingly.
+
+“I might have knowed it,” Bill chided himself aloud as he replaced the
+gun. “Of course a wolf that knows enough to come in with the dogs at
+feedin’ time, ’d know all about shooting-irons. I tell you right now,
+Henry, that critter’s the cause of all our trouble. We’d have six dogs
+at the present time, ’stead of three, if it wasn’t for her. An’ I tell
+you right now, Henry, I’m goin’ to get her. She’s too smart to be shot
+in the open. But I’m goin’ to lay for her. I’ll bushwhack her as sure
+as my name is Bill.”
+
+“You needn’t stray off too far in doin’ it,” his partner admonished.
+“If that pack ever starts to jump you, them three cartridges’d be wuth
+no more’n three whoops in hell. Them animals is damn hungry, an’ once
+they start in, they’ll sure get you, Bill.”
+
+They camped early that night. Three dogs could not drag the sled so
+fast nor for so long hours as could six, and they were showing
+unmistakable signs of playing out. And the men went early to bed, Bill
+first seeing to it that the dogs were tied out of gnawing-reach of one
+another.
+
+But the wolves were growing bolder, and the men were aroused more than
+once from their sleep. So near did the wolves approach, that the dogs
+became frantic with terror, and it was necessary to replenish the fire
+from time to time in order to keep the adventurous marauders at safer
+distance.
+
+“I’ve hearn sailors talk of sharks followin’ a ship,” Bill remarked, as
+he crawled back into the blankets after one such replenishing of the
+fire. “Well, them wolves is land sharks. They know their business
+better’n we do, an’ they ain’t a-holdin’ our trail this way for their
+health. They’re goin’ to get us. They’re sure goin’ to get us, Henry.”
+
+“They’ve half got you a’ready, a-talkin’ like that,” Henry retorted
+sharply. “A man’s half licked when he says he is. An’ you’re half eaten
+from the way you’re goin’ on about it.”
+
+“They’ve got away with better men than you an’ me,” Bill answered.
+
+“Oh, shet up your croakin’. You make me all-fired tired.”
+
+Henry rolled over angrily on his side, but was surprised that Bill made
+no similar display of temper. This was not Bill’s way, for he was
+easily angered by sharp words. Henry thought long over it before he
+went to sleep, and as his eyelids fluttered down and he dozed off, the
+thought in his mind was: “There’s no mistakin’ it, Bill’s almighty
+blue. I’ll have to cheer him up to-morrow.”
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III
+THE HUNGER CRY
+
+
+The day began auspiciously. They had lost no dogs during the night, and
+they swung out upon the trail and into the silence, the darkness, and
+the cold with spirits that were fairly light. Bill seemed to have
+forgotten his forebodings of the previous night, and even waxed
+facetious with the dogs when, at midday, they overturned the sled on a
+bad piece of trail.
+
+It was an awkward mix-up. The sled was upside down and jammed between a
+tree-trunk and a huge rock, and they were forced to unharness the dogs
+in order to straighten out the tangle. The two men were bent over the
+sled and trying to right it, when Henry observed One Ear sidling away.
+
+“Here, you, One Ear!” he cried, straightening up and turning around on
+the dog.
+
+But One Ear broke into a run across the snow, his traces trailing
+behind him. And there, out in the snow of their back track, was the
+she-wolf waiting for him. As he neared her, he became suddenly
+cautious. He slowed down to an alert and mincing walk and then stopped.
+He regarded her carefully and dubiously, yet desirefully. She seemed to
+smile at him, showing her teeth in an ingratiating rather than a
+menacing way. She moved toward him a few steps, playfully, and then
+halted. One Ear drew near to her, still alert and cautious, his tail
+and ears in the air, his head held high.
+
+He tried to sniff noses with her, but she retreated playfully and
+coyly. Every advance on his part was accompanied by a corresponding
+retreat on her part. Step by step she was luring him away from the
+security of his human companionship. Once, as though a warning had in
+vague ways flitted through his intelligence, he turned his head and
+looked back at the overturned sled, at his team-mates, and at the two
+men who were calling to him.
+
+But whatever idea was forming in his mind, was dissipated by the
+she-wolf, who advanced upon him, sniffed noses with him for a fleeting
+instant, and then resumed her coy retreat before his renewed advances.
+
+In the meantime, Bill had bethought himself of the rifle. But it was
+jammed beneath the overturned sled, and by the time Henry had helped
+him to right the load, One Ear and the she-wolf were too close together
+and the distance too great to risk a shot.
+
+Too late One Ear learned his mistake. Before they saw the cause, the
+two men saw him turn and start to run back toward them. Then,
+approaching at right angles to the trail and cutting off his retreat
+they saw a dozen wolves, lean and grey, bounding across the snow. On
+the instant, the she-wolf’s coyness and playfulness disappeared. With a
+snarl she sprang upon One Ear. He thrust her off with his shoulder,
+and, his retreat cut off and still intent on regaining the sled, he
+altered his course in an attempt to circle around to it. More wolves
+were appearing every moment and joining in the chase. The she-wolf was
+one leap behind One Ear and holding her own.
+
+“Where are you goin’?” Henry suddenly demanded, laying his hand on his
+partner’s arm.
+
+Bill shook it off. “I won’t stand it,” he said. “They ain’t a-goin’ to
+get any more of our dogs if I can help it.”
+
+Gun in hand, he plunged into the underbrush that lined the side of the
+trail. His intention was apparent enough. Taking the sled as the centre
+of the circle that One Ear was making, Bill planned to tap that circle
+at a point in advance of the pursuit. With his rifle, in the broad
+daylight, it might be possible for him to awe the wolves and save the
+dog.
+
+“Say, Bill!” Henry called after him. “Be careful! Don’t take no
+chances!”
+
+Henry sat down on the sled and watched. There was nothing else for him
+to do. Bill had already gone from sight; but now and again, appearing
+and disappearing amongst the underbrush and the scattered clumps of
+spruce, could be seen One Ear. Henry judged his case to be hopeless.
+The dog was thoroughly alive to its danger, but it was running on the
+outer circle while the wolf-pack was running on the inner and shorter
+circle. It was vain to think of One Ear so outdistancing his pursuers
+as to be able to cut across their circle in advance of them and to
+regain the sled.
+
+The different lines were rapidly approaching a point. Somewhere out
+there in the snow, screened from his sight by trees and thickets, Henry
+knew that the wolf-pack, One Ear, and Bill were coming together. All
+too quickly, far more quickly than he had expected, it happened. He
+heard a shot, then two shots, in rapid succession, and he knew that
+Bill’s ammunition was gone. Then he heard a great outcry of snarls and
+yelps. He recognised One Ear’s yell of pain and terror, and he heard a
+wolf-cry that bespoke a stricken animal. And that was all. The snarls
+ceased. The yelping died away. Silence settled down again over the
+lonely land.
+
+He sat for a long while upon the sled. There was no need for him to go
+and see what had happened. He knew it as though it had taken place
+before his eyes. Once, he roused with a start and hastily got the axe
+out from underneath the lashings. But for some time longer he sat and
+brooded, the two remaining dogs crouching and trembling at his feet.
+
+At last he arose in a weary manner, as though all the resilience had
+gone out of his body, and proceeded to fasten the dogs to the sled. He
+passed a rope over his shoulder, a man-trace, and pulled with the dogs.
+He did not go far. At the first hint of darkness he hastened to make a
+camp, and he saw to it that he had a generous supply of firewood. He
+fed the dogs, cooked and ate his supper, and made his bed close to the
+fire.
+
+But he was not destined to enjoy that bed. Before his eyes closed the
+wolves had drawn too near for safety. It no longer required an effort
+of the vision to see them. They were all about him and the fire, in a
+narrow circle, and he could see them plainly in the firelight lying
+down, sitting up, crawling forward on their bellies, or slinking back
+and forth. They even slept. Here and there he could see one curled up
+in the snow like a dog, taking the sleep that was now denied himself.
+
+He kept the fire brightly blazing, for he knew that it alone intervened
+between the flesh of his body and their hungry fangs. His two dogs
+stayed close by him, one on either side, leaning against him for
+protection, crying and whimpering, and at times snarling desperately
+when a wolf approached a little closer than usual. At such moments,
+when his dogs snarled, the whole circle would be agitated, the wolves
+coming to their feet and pressing tentatively forward, a chorus of
+snarls and eager yelps rising about him. Then the circle would lie down
+again, and here and there a wolf would resume its broken nap.
+
+But this circle had a continuous tendency to draw in upon him. Bit by
+bit, an inch at a time, with here a wolf bellying forward, and there a
+wolf bellying forward, the circle would narrow until the brutes were
+almost within springing distance. Then he would seize brands from the
+fire and hurl them into the pack. A hasty drawing back always resulted,
+accompanied by angry yelps and frightened snarls when a well-aimed
+brand struck and scorched a too daring animal.
+
+Morning found the man haggard and worn, wide-eyed from want of sleep.
+He cooked breakfast in the darkness, and at nine o’clock, when, with
+the coming of daylight, the wolf-pack drew back, he set about the task
+he had planned through the long hours of the night. Chopping down young
+saplings, he made them cross-bars of a scaffold by lashing them high up
+to the trunks of standing trees. Using the sled-lashing for a heaving
+rope, and with the aid of the dogs, he hoisted the coffin to the top of
+the scaffold.
+
+“They got Bill, an’ they may get me, but they’ll sure never get you,
+young man,” he said, addressing the dead body in its tree-sepulchre.
+
+Then he took the trail, the lightened sled bounding along behind the
+willing dogs; for they, too, knew that safety lay open in the gaining
+of Fort McGurry. The wolves were now more open in their pursuit,
+trotting sedately behind and ranging along on either side, their red
+tongues lolling out, their lean sides showing the undulating ribs with
+every movement. They were very lean, mere skin-bags stretched over bony
+frames, with strings for muscles—so lean that Henry found it in his
+mind to marvel that they still kept their feet and did not collapse
+forthright in the snow.
+
+He did not dare travel until dark. At midday, not only did the sun warm
+the southern horizon, but it even thrust its upper rim, pale and
+golden, above the sky-line. He received it as a sign. The days were
+growing longer. The sun was returning. But scarcely had the cheer of
+its light departed, than he went into camp. There were still several
+hours of grey daylight and sombre twilight, and he utilised them in
+chopping an enormous supply of fire-wood.
+
+With night came horror. Not only were the starving wolves growing
+bolder, but lack of sleep was telling upon Henry. He dozed despite
+himself, crouching by the fire, the blankets about his shoulders, the
+axe between his knees, and on either side a dog pressing close against
+him. He awoke once and saw in front of him, not a dozen feet away, a
+big grey wolf, one of the largest of the pack. And even as he looked,
+the brute deliberately stretched himself after the manner of a lazy
+dog, yawning full in his face and looking upon him with a possessive
+eye, as if, in truth, he were merely a delayed meal that was soon to be
+eaten.
+
+This certitude was shown by the whole pack. Fully a score he could
+count, staring hungrily at him or calmly sleeping in the snow. They
+reminded him of children gathered about a spread table and awaiting
+permission to begin to eat. And he was the food they were to eat! He
+wondered how and when the meal would begin.
+
+As he piled wood on the fire he discovered an appreciation of his own
+body which he had never felt before. He watched his moving muscles and
+was interested in the cunning mechanism of his fingers. By the light of
+the fire he crooked his fingers slowly and repeatedly now one at a
+time, now all together, spreading them wide or making quick gripping
+movements. He studied the nail-formation, and prodded the finger-tips,
+now sharply, and again softly, gauging the while the nerve-sensations
+produced. It fascinated him, and he grew suddenly fond of this subtle
+flesh of his that worked so beautifully and smoothly and delicately.
+Then he would cast a glance of fear at the wolf-circle drawn
+expectantly about him, and like a blow the realisation would strike him
+that this wonderful body of his, this living flesh, was no more than so
+much meat, a quest of ravenous animals, to be torn and slashed by their
+hungry fangs, to be sustenance to them as the moose and the rabbit had
+often been sustenance to him.
+
+He came out of a doze that was half nightmare, to see the red-hued
+she-wolf before him. She was not more than half a dozen feet away
+sitting in the snow and wistfully regarding him. The two dogs were
+whimpering and snarling at his feet, but she took no notice of them.
+She was looking at the man, and for some time he returned her look.
+There was nothing threatening about her. She looked at him merely with
+a great wistfulness, but he knew it to be the wistfulness of an equally
+great hunger. He was the food, and the sight of him excited in her the
+gustatory sensations. Her mouth opened, the saliva drooled forth, and
+she licked her chops with the pleasure of anticipation.
+
+A spasm of fear went through him. He reached hastily for a brand to
+throw at her. But even as he reached, and before his fingers had closed
+on the missile, she sprang back into safety; and he knew that she was
+used to having things thrown at her. She had snarled as she sprang
+away, baring her white fangs to their roots, all her wistfulness
+vanishing, being replaced by a carnivorous malignity that made him
+shudder. He glanced at the hand that held the brand, noticing the
+cunning delicacy of the fingers that gripped it, how they adjusted
+themselves to all the inequalities of the surface, curling over and
+under and about the rough wood, and one little finger, too close to the
+burning portion of the brand, sensitively and automatically writhing
+back from the hurtful heat to a cooler gripping-place; and in the same
+instant he seemed to see a vision of those same sensitive and delicate
+fingers being crushed and torn by the white teeth of the she-wolf.
+Never had he been so fond of this body of his as now when his tenure of
+it was so precarious.
+
+All night, with burning brands, he fought off the hungry pack. When he
+dozed despite himself, the whimpering and snarling of the dogs aroused
+him. Morning came, but for the first time the light of day failed to
+scatter the wolves. The man waited in vain for them to go. They
+remained in a circle about him and his fire, displaying an arrogance of
+possession that shook his courage born of the morning light.
+
+He made one desperate attempt to pull out on the trail. But the moment
+he left the protection of the fire, the boldest wolf leaped for him,
+but leaped short. He saved himself by springing back, the jaws snapping
+together a scant six inches from his thigh. The rest of the pack was
+now up and surging upon him, and a throwing of firebrands right and
+left was necessary to drive them back to a respectful distance.
+
+Even in the daylight he did not dare leave the fire to chop fresh wood.
+Twenty feet away towered a huge dead spruce. He spent half the day
+extending his campfire to the tree, at any moment a half dozen burning
+faggots ready at hand to fling at his enemies. Once at the tree, he
+studied the surrounding forest in order to fell the tree in the
+direction of the most firewood.
+
+The night was a repetition of the night before, save that the need for
+sleep was becoming overpowering. The snarling of his dogs was losing
+its efficacy. Besides, they were snarling all the time, and his
+benumbed and drowsy senses no longer took note of changing pitch and
+intensity. He awoke with a start. The she-wolf was less than a yard
+from him. Mechanically, at short range, without letting go of it, he
+thrust a brand full into her open and snarling mouth. She sprang away,
+yelling with pain, and while he took delight in the smell of burning
+flesh and hair, he watched her shaking her head and growling wrathfully
+a score of feet away.
+
+But this time, before he dozed again, he tied a burning pine-knot to
+his right hand. His eyes were closed but few minutes when the burn of
+the flame on his flesh awakened him. For several hours he adhered to
+this programme. Every time he was thus awakened he drove back the
+wolves with flying brands, replenished the fire, and rearranged the
+pine-knot on his hand. All worked well, but there came a time when he
+fastened the pine-knot insecurely. As his eyes closed it fell away from
+his hand.
+
+He dreamed. It seemed to him that he was in Fort McGurry. It was warm
+and comfortable, and he was playing cribbage with the Factor. Also, it
+seemed to him that the fort was besieged by wolves. They were howling
+at the very gates, and sometimes he and the Factor paused from the game
+to listen and laugh at the futile efforts of the wolves to get in. And
+then, so strange was the dream, there was a crash. The door was burst
+open. He could see the wolves flooding into the big living-room of the
+fort. They were leaping straight for him and the Factor. With the
+bursting open of the door, the noise of their howling had increased
+tremendously. This howling now bothered him. His dream was merging into
+something else—he knew not what; but through it all, following him,
+persisted the howling.
+
+And then he awoke to find the howling real. There was a great snarling
+and yelping. The wolves were rushing him. They were all about him and
+upon him. The teeth of one had closed upon his arm. Instinctively he
+leaped into the fire, and as he leaped, he felt the sharp slash of
+teeth that tore through the flesh of his leg. Then began a fire fight.
+His stout mittens temporarily protected his hands, and he scooped live
+coals into the air in all directions, until the campfire took on the
+semblance of a volcano.
+
+But it could not last long. His face was blistering in the heat, his
+eyebrows and lashes were singed off, and the heat was becoming
+unbearable to his feet. With a flaming brand in each hand, he sprang to
+the edge of the fire. The wolves had been driven back. On every side,
+wherever the live coals had fallen, the snow was sizzling, and every
+little while a retiring wolf, with wild leap and snort and snarl,
+announced that one such live coal had been stepped upon.
+
+Flinging his brands at the nearest of his enemies, the man thrust his
+smouldering mittens into the snow and stamped about to cool his feet.
+His two dogs were missing, and he well knew that they had served as a
+course in the protracted meal which had begun days before with Fatty,
+the last course of which would likely be himself in the days to follow.
+
+“You ain’t got me yet!” he cried, savagely shaking his fist at the
+hungry beasts; and at the sound of his voice the whole circle was
+agitated, there was a general snarl, and the she-wolf slid up close to
+him across the snow and watched him with hungry wistfulness.
+
+He set to work to carry out a new idea that had come to him. He
+extended the fire into a large circle. Inside this circle he crouched,
+his sleeping outfit under him as a protection against the melting snow.
+When he had thus disappeared within his shelter of flame, the whole
+pack came curiously to the rim of the fire to see what had become of
+him. Hitherto they had been denied access to the fire, and they now
+settled down in a close-drawn circle, like so many dogs, blinking and
+yawning and stretching their lean bodies in the unaccustomed warmth.
+Then the she-wolf sat down, pointed her nose at a star, and began to
+howl. One by one the wolves joined her, till the whole pack, on
+haunches, with noses pointed skyward, was howling its hunger cry.
+
+Dawn came, and daylight. The fire was burning low. The fuel had run
+out, and there was need to get more. The man attempted to step out of
+his circle of flame, but the wolves surged to meet him. Burning brands
+made them spring aside, but they no longer sprang back. In vain he
+strove to drive them back. As he gave up and stumbled inside his
+circle, a wolf leaped for him, missed, and landed with all four feet in
+the coals. It cried out with terror, at the same time snarling, and
+scrambled back to cool its paws in the snow.
+
+The man sat down on his blankets in a crouching position. His body
+leaned forward from the hips. His shoulders, relaxed and drooping, and
+his head on his knees advertised that he had given up the struggle. Now
+and again he raised his head to note the dying down of the fire. The
+circle of flame and coals was breaking into segments with openings in
+between. These openings grew in size, the segments diminished.
+
+“I guess you can come an’ get me any time,” he mumbled. “Anyway, I’m
+goin’ to sleep.”
+
+Once he awakened, and in an opening in the circle, directly in front of
+him, he saw the she-wolf gazing at him.
+
+Again he awakened, a little later, though it seemed hours to him. A
+mysterious change had taken place—so mysterious a change that he was
+shocked wider awake. Something had happened. He could not understand at
+first. Then he discovered it. The wolves were gone. Remained only the
+trampled snow to show how closely they had pressed him. Sleep was
+welling up and gripping him again, his head was sinking down upon his
+knees, when he roused with a sudden start.
+
+There were cries of men, and churn of sleds, the creaking of harnesses,
+and the eager whimpering of straining dogs. Four sleds pulled in from
+the river bed to the camp among the trees. Half a dozen men were about
+the man who crouched in the centre of the dying fire. They were shaking
+and prodding him into consciousness. He looked at them like a drunken
+man and maundered in strange, sleepy speech.
+
+“Red she-wolf. . . . Come in with the dogs at feedin’ time. . . . First
+she ate the dog-food. . . . Then she ate the dogs. . . . An’ after that
+she ate Bill. . . . ”
+
+“Where’s Lord Alfred?” one of the men bellowed in his ear, shaking him
+roughly.
+
+He shook his head slowly. “No, she didn’t eat him. . . . He’s roostin’
+in a tree at the last camp.”
+
+“Dead?” the man shouted.
+
+“An’ in a box,” Henry answered. He jerked his shoulder petulantly away
+from the grip of his questioner. “Say, you lemme alone. . . . I’m jes’
+plump tuckered out. . . . Goo’ night, everybody.”
+
+His eyes fluttered and went shut. His chin fell forward on his chest.
+And even as they eased him down upon the blankets his snores were
+rising on the frosty air.
+
+But there was another sound. Far and faint it was, in the remote
+distance, the cry of the hungry wolf-pack as it took the trail of other
+meat than the man it had just missed.
+
+
+
+
+PART II
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I
+THE BATTLE OF THE FANGS
+
+
+It was the she-wolf who had first caught the sound of men’s voices and
+the whining of the sled-dogs; and it was the she-wolf who was first to
+spring away from the cornered man in his circle of dying flame. The
+pack had been loath to forego the kill it had hunted down, and it
+lingered for several minutes, making sure of the sounds, and then it,
+too, sprang away on the trail made by the she-wolf.
+
+Running at the forefront of the pack was a large grey wolf—one of its
+several leaders. It was he who directed the pack’s course on the heels
+of the she-wolf. It was he who snarled warningly at the younger members
+of the pack or slashed at them with his fangs when they ambitiously
+tried to pass him. And it was he who increased the pace when he sighted
+the she-wolf, now trotting slowly across the snow.
+
+She dropped in alongside by him, as though it were her appointed
+position, and took the pace of the pack. He did not snarl at her, nor
+show his teeth, when any leap of hers chanced to put her in advance of
+him. On the contrary, he seemed kindly disposed toward her—too kindly
+to suit her, for he was prone to run near to her, and when he ran too
+near it was she who snarled and showed her teeth. Nor was she above
+slashing his shoulder sharply on occasion. At such times he betrayed no
+anger. He merely sprang to the side and ran stiffly ahead for several
+awkward leaps, in carriage and conduct resembling an abashed country
+swain.
+
+This was his one trouble in the running of the pack; but she had other
+troubles. On her other side ran a gaunt old wolf, grizzled and marked
+with the scars of many battles. He ran always on her right side. The
+fact that he had but one eye, and that the left eye, might account for
+this. He, also, was addicted to crowding her, to veering toward her
+till his scarred muzzle touched her body, or shoulder, or neck. As with
+the running mate on the left, she repelled these attentions with her
+teeth; but when both bestowed their attentions at the same time she was
+roughly jostled, being compelled, with quick snaps to either side, to
+drive both lovers away and at the same time to maintain her forward
+leap with the pack and see the way of her feet before her. At such
+times her running mates flashed their teeth and growled threateningly
+across at each other. They might have fought, but even wooing and its
+rivalry waited upon the more pressing hunger-need of the pack.
+
+After each repulse, when the old wolf sheered abruptly away from the
+sharp-toothed object of his desire, he shouldered against a young
+three-year-old that ran on his blind right side. This young wolf had
+attained his full size; and, considering the weak and famished
+condition of the pack, he possessed more than the average vigour and
+spirit. Nevertheless, he ran with his head even with the shoulder of
+his one-eyed elder. When he ventured to run abreast of the older wolf
+(which was seldom), a snarl and a snap sent him back even with the
+shoulder again. Sometimes, however, he dropped cautiously and slowly
+behind and edged in between the old leader and the she-wolf. This was
+doubly resented, even triply resented. When she snarled her
+displeasure, the old leader would whirl on the three-year-old.
+Sometimes she whirled with him. And sometimes the young leader on the
+left whirled, too.
+
+At such times, confronted by three sets of savage teeth, the young wolf
+stopped precipitately, throwing himself back on his haunches, with
+fore-legs stiff, mouth menacing, and mane bristling. This confusion in
+the front of the moving pack always caused confusion in the rear. The
+wolves behind collided with the young wolf and expressed their
+displeasure by administering sharp nips on his hind-legs and flanks. He
+was laying up trouble for himself, for lack of food and short tempers
+went together; but with the boundless faith of youth he persisted in
+repeating the manoeuvre every little while, though it never succeeded
+in gaining anything for him but discomfiture.
+
+Had there been food, love-making and fighting would have gone on apace,
+and the pack-formation would have been broken up. But the situation of
+the pack was desperate. It was lean with long-standing hunger. It ran
+below its ordinary speed. At the rear limped the weak members, the very
+young and the very old. At the front were the strongest. Yet all were
+more like skeletons than full-bodied wolves. Nevertheless, with the
+exception of the ones that limped, the movements of the animals were
+effortless and tireless. Their stringy muscles seemed founts of
+inexhaustible energy. Behind every steel-like contraction of a muscle,
+lay another steel-like contraction, and another, and another,
+apparently without end.
+
+They ran many miles that day. They ran through the night. And the next
+day found them still running. They were running over the surface of a
+world frozen and dead. No life stirred. They alone moved through the
+vast inertness. They alone were alive, and they sought for other things
+that were alive in order that they might devour them and continue to
+live.
+
+They crossed low divides and ranged a dozen small streams in a
+lower-lying country before their quest was rewarded. Then they came
+upon moose. It was a big bull they first found. Here was meat and life,
+and it was guarded by no mysterious fires nor flying missiles of flame.
+Splay hoofs and palmated antlers they knew, and they flung their
+customary patience and caution to the wind. It was a brief fight and
+fierce. The big bull was beset on every side. He ripped them open or
+split their skulls with shrewdly driven blows of his great hoofs. He
+crushed them and broke them on his large horns. He stamped them into
+the snow under him in the wallowing struggle. But he was foredoomed,
+and he went down with the she-wolf tearing savagely at his throat, and
+with other teeth fixed everywhere upon him, devouring him alive, before
+ever his last struggles ceased or his last damage had been wrought.
+
+There was food in plenty. The bull weighed over eight hundred
+pounds—fully twenty pounds of meat per mouth for the forty-odd wolves
+of the pack. But if they could fast prodigiously, they could feed
+prodigiously, and soon a few scattered bones were all that remained of
+the splendid live brute that had faced the pack a few hours before.
+
+There was now much resting and sleeping. With full stomachs, bickering
+and quarrelling began among the younger males, and this continued
+through the few days that followed before the breaking-up of the pack.
+The famine was over. The wolves were now in the country of game, and
+though they still hunted in pack, they hunted more cautiously, cutting
+out heavy cows or crippled old bulls from the small moose-herds they
+ran across.
+
+There came a day, in this land of plenty, when the wolf-pack split in
+half and went in different directions. The she-wolf, the young leader
+on her left, and the one-eyed elder on her right, led their half of the
+pack down to the Mackenzie River and across into the lake country to
+the east. Each day this remnant of the pack dwindled. Two by two, male
+and female, the wolves were deserting. Occasionally a solitary male was
+driven out by the sharp teeth of his rivals. In the end there remained
+only four: the she-wolf, the young leader, the one-eyed one, and the
+ambitious three-year-old.
+
+The she-wolf had by now developed a ferocious temper. Her three suitors
+all bore the marks of her teeth. Yet they never replied in kind, never
+defended themselves against her. They turned their shoulders to her
+most savage slashes, and with wagging tails and mincing steps strove to
+placate her wrath. But if they were all mildness toward her, they were
+all fierceness toward one another. The three-year-old grew too
+ambitious in his fierceness. He caught the one-eyed elder on his blind
+side and ripped his ear into ribbons. Though the grizzled old fellow
+could see only on one side, against the youth and vigour of the other
+he brought into play the wisdom of long years of experience. His lost
+eye and his scarred muzzle bore evidence to the nature of his
+experience. He had survived too many battles to be in doubt for a
+moment about what to do.
+
+The battle began fairly, but it did not end fairly. There was no
+telling what the outcome would have been, for the third wolf joined the
+elder, and together, old leader and young leader, they attacked the
+ambitious three-year-old and proceeded to destroy him. He was beset on
+either side by the merciless fangs of his erstwhile comrades. Forgotten
+were the days they had hunted together, the game they had pulled down,
+the famine they had suffered. That business was a thing of the past.
+The business of love was at hand—ever a sterner and crueller business
+than that of food-getting.
+
+And in the meanwhile, the she-wolf, the cause of it all, sat down
+contentedly on her haunches and watched. She was even pleased. This was
+her day—and it came not often—when manes bristled, and fang smote fang
+or ripped and tore the yielding flesh, all for the possession of her.
+
+And in the business of love the three-year-old, who had made this his
+first adventure upon it, yielded up his life. On either side of his
+body stood his two rivals. They were gazing at the she-wolf, who sat
+smiling in the snow. But the elder leader was wise, very wise, in love
+even as in battle. The younger leader turned his head to lick a wound
+on his shoulder. The curve of his neck was turned toward his rival.
+With his one eye the elder saw the opportunity. He darted in low and
+closed with his fangs. It was a long, ripping slash, and deep as well.
+His teeth, in passing, burst the wall of the great vein of the throat.
+Then he leaped clear.
+
+The young leader snarled terribly, but his snarl broke midmost into a
+tickling cough. Bleeding and coughing, already stricken, he sprang at
+the elder and fought while life faded from him, his legs going weak
+beneath him, the light of day dulling on his eyes, his blows and
+springs falling shorter and shorter.
+
+And all the while the she-wolf sat on her haunches and smiled. She was
+made glad in vague ways by the battle, for this was the love-making of
+the Wild, the sex-tragedy of the natural world that was tragedy only to
+those that died. To those that survived it was not tragedy, but
+realisation and achievement.
+
+When the young leader lay in the snow and moved no more, One Eye
+stalked over to the she-wolf. His carriage was one of mingled triumph
+and caution. He was plainly expectant of a rebuff, and he was just as
+plainly surprised when her teeth did not flash out at him in anger. For
+the first time she met him with a kindly manner. She sniffed noses with
+him, and even condescended to leap about and frisk and play with him in
+quite puppyish fashion. And he, for all his grey years and sage
+experience, behaved quite as puppyishly and even a little more
+foolishly.
+
+Forgotten already were the vanquished rivals and the love-tale
+red-written on the snow. Forgotten, save once, when old One Eye stopped
+for a moment to lick his stiffening wounds. Then it was that his lips
+half writhed into a snarl, and the hair of his neck and shoulders
+involuntarily bristled, while he half crouched for a spring, his claws
+spasmodically clutching into the snow-surface for firmer footing. But
+it was all forgotten the next moment, as he sprang after the she-wolf,
+who was coyly leading him a chase through the woods.
+
+After that they ran side by side, like good friends who have come to an
+understanding. The days passed by, and they kept together, hunting
+their meat and killing and eating it in common. After a time the
+she-wolf began to grow restless. She seemed to be searching for
+something that she could not find. The hollows under fallen trees
+seemed to attract her, and she spent much time nosing about among the
+larger snow-piled crevices in the rocks and in the caves of overhanging
+banks. Old One Eye was not interested at all, but he followed her
+good-naturedly in her quest, and when her investigations in particular
+places were unusually protracted, he would lie down and wait until she
+was ready to go on.
+
+They did not remain in one place, but travelled across country until
+they regained the Mackenzie River, down which they slowly went, leaving
+it often to hunt game along the small streams that entered it, but
+always returning to it again. Sometimes they chanced upon other wolves,
+usually in pairs; but there was no friendliness of intercourse
+displayed on either side, no gladness at meeting, no desire to return
+to the pack-formation. Several times they encountered solitary wolves.
+These were always males, and they were pressingly insistent on joining
+with One Eye and his mate. This he resented, and when she stood
+shoulder to shoulder with him, bristling and showing her teeth, the
+aspiring solitary ones would back off, turn-tail, and continue on their
+lonely way.
+
+One moonlight night, running through the quiet forest, One Eye suddenly
+halted. His muzzle went up, his tail stiffened, and his nostrils
+dilated as he scented the air. One foot also he held up, after the
+manner of a dog. He was not satisfied, and he continued to smell the
+air, striving to understand the message borne upon it to him. One
+careless sniff had satisfied his mate, and she trotted on to reassure
+him. Though he followed her, he was still dubious, and he could not
+forbear an occasional halt in order more carefully to study the
+warning.
+
+She crept out cautiously on the edge of a large open space in the midst
+of the trees. For some time she stood alone. Then One Eye, creeping and
+crawling, every sense on the alert, every hair radiating infinite
+suspicion, joined her. They stood side by side, watching and listening
+and smelling.
+
+To their ears came the sounds of dogs wrangling and scuffling, the
+guttural cries of men, the sharper voices of scolding women, and once
+the shrill and plaintive cry of a child. With the exception of the huge
+bulks of the skin-lodges, little could be seen save the flames of the
+fire, broken by the movements of intervening bodies, and the smoke
+rising slowly on the quiet air. But to their nostrils came the myriad
+smells of an Indian camp, carrying a story that was largely
+incomprehensible to One Eye, but every detail of which the she-wolf
+knew.
+
+She was strangely stirred, and sniffed and sniffed with an increasing
+delight. But old One Eye was doubtful. He betrayed his apprehension,
+and started tentatively to go. She turned and touched his neck with her
+muzzle in a reassuring way, then regarded the camp again. A new
+wistfulness was in her face, but it was not the wistfulness of hunger.
+She was thrilling to a desire that urged her to go forward, to be in
+closer to that fire, to be squabbling with the dogs, and to be avoiding
+and dodging the stumbling feet of men.
+
+One Eye moved impatiently beside her; her unrest came back upon her,
+and she knew again her pressing need to find the thing for which she
+searched. She turned and trotted back into the forest, to the great
+relief of One Eye, who trotted a little to the fore until they were
+well within the shelter of the trees.
+
+As they slid along, noiseless as shadows, in the moonlight, they came
+upon a run-way. Both noses went down to the footprints in the snow.
+These footprints were very fresh. One Eye ran ahead cautiously, his
+mate at his heels. The broad pads of their feet were spread wide and in
+contact with the snow were like velvet. One Eye caught sight of a dim
+movement of white in the midst of the white. His sliding gait had been
+deceptively swift, but it was as nothing to the speed at which he now
+ran. Before him was bounding the faint patch of white he had
+discovered.
+
+They were running along a narrow alley flanked on either side by a
+growth of young spruce. Through the trees the mouth of the alley could
+be seen, opening out on a moonlit glade. Old One Eye was rapidly
+overhauling the fleeing shape of white. Bound by bound he gained. Now
+he was upon it. One leap more and his teeth would be sinking into it.
+But that leap was never made. High in the air, and straight up, soared
+the shape of white, now a struggling snowshoe rabbit that leaped and
+bounded, executing a fantastic dance there above him in the air and
+never once returning to earth.
+
+One Eye sprang back with a snort of sudden fright, then shrank down to
+the snow and crouched, snarling threats at this thing of fear he did
+not understand. But the she-wolf coolly thrust past him. She poised for
+a moment, then sprang for the dancing rabbit. She, too, soared high,
+but not so high as the quarry, and her teeth clipped emptily together
+with a metallic snap. She made another leap, and another.
+
+Her mate had slowly relaxed from his crouch and was watching her. He
+now evinced displeasure at her repeated failures, and himself made a
+mighty spring upward. His teeth closed upon the rabbit, and he bore it
+back to earth with him. But at the same time there was a suspicious
+crackling movement beside him, and his astonished eye saw a young
+spruce sapling bending down above him to strike him. His jaws let go
+their grip, and he leaped backward to escape this strange danger, his
+lips drawn back from his fangs, his throat snarling, every hair
+bristling with rage and fright. And in that moment the sapling reared
+its slender length upright and the rabbit soared dancing in the air
+again.
+
+The she-wolf was angry. She sank her fangs into her mate’s shoulder in
+reproof; and he, frightened, unaware of what constituted this new
+onslaught, struck back ferociously and in still greater fright, ripping
+down the side of the she-wolf’s muzzle. For him to resent such reproof
+was equally unexpected to her, and she sprang upon him in snarling
+indignation. Then he discovered his mistake and tried to placate her.
+But she proceeded to punish him roundly, until he gave over all
+attempts at placation, and whirled in a circle, his head away from her,
+his shoulders receiving the punishment of her teeth.
+
+In the meantime the rabbit danced above them in the air. The she-wolf
+sat down in the snow, and old One Eye, now more in fear of his mate
+than of the mysterious sapling, again sprang for the rabbit. As he sank
+back with it between his teeth, he kept his eye on the sapling. As
+before, it followed him back to earth. He crouched down under the
+impending blow, his hair bristling, but his teeth still keeping tight
+hold of the rabbit. But the blow did not fall. The sapling remained
+bent above him. When he moved it moved, and he growled at it through
+his clenched jaws; when he remained still, it remained still, and he
+concluded it was safer to continue remaining still. Yet the warm blood
+of the rabbit tasted good in his mouth.
+
+It was his mate who relieved him from the quandary in which he found
+himself. She took the rabbit from him, and while the sapling swayed and
+teetered threateningly above her she calmly gnawed off the rabbit’s
+head. At once the sapling shot up, and after that gave no more trouble,
+remaining in the decorous and perpendicular position in which nature
+had intended it to grow. Then, between them, the she-wolf and One Eye
+devoured the game which the mysterious sapling had caught for them.
+
+There were other run-ways and alleys where rabbits were hanging in the
+air, and the wolf-pair prospected them all, the she-wolf leading the
+way, old One Eye following and observant, learning the method of
+robbing snares—a knowledge destined to stand him in good stead in the
+days to come.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II
+THE LAIR
+
+
+For two days the she-wolf and One Eye hung about the Indian camp. He
+was worried and apprehensive, yet the camp lured his mate and she was
+loath to depart. But when, one morning, the air was rent with the
+report of a rifle close at hand, and a bullet smashed against a tree
+trunk several inches from One Eye’s head, they hesitated no more, but
+went off on a long, swinging lope that put quick miles between them and
+the danger.
+
+They did not go far—a couple of days’ journey. The she-wolf’s need to
+find the thing for which she searched had now become imperative. She
+was getting very heavy, and could run but slowly. Once, in the pursuit
+of a rabbit, which she ordinarily would have caught with ease, she gave
+over and lay down and rested. One Eye came to her; but when he touched
+her neck gently with his muzzle she snapped at him with such quick
+fierceness that he tumbled over backward and cut a ridiculous figure in
+his effort to escape her teeth. Her temper was now shorter than ever;
+but he had become more patient than ever and more solicitous.
+
+And then she found the thing for which she sought. It was a few miles
+up a small stream that in the summer time flowed into the Mackenzie,
+but that then was frozen over and frozen down to its rocky bottom—a
+dead stream of solid white from source to mouth. The she-wolf was
+trotting wearily along, her mate well in advance, when she came upon
+the overhanging, high clay-bank. She turned aside and trotted over to
+it. The wear and tear of spring storms and melting snows had
+underwashed the bank and in one place had made a small cave out of a
+narrow fissure.
+
+She paused at the mouth of the cave and looked the wall over carefully.
+Then, on one side and the other, she ran along the base of the wall to
+where its abrupt bulk merged from the softer-lined landscape. Returning
+to the cave, she entered its narrow mouth. For a short three feet she
+was compelled to crouch, then the walls widened and rose higher in a
+little round chamber nearly six feet in diameter. The roof barely
+cleared her head. It was dry and cosey. She inspected it with
+painstaking care, while One Eye, who had returned, stood in the
+entrance and patiently watched her. She dropped her head, with her nose
+to the ground and directed toward a point near to her closely bunched
+feet, and around this point she circled several times; then, with a
+tired sigh that was almost a grunt, she curled her body in, relaxed her
+legs, and dropped down, her head toward the entrance. One Eye, with
+pointed, interested ears, laughed at her, and beyond, outlined against
+the white light, she could see the brush of his tail waving
+good-naturedly. Her own ears, with a snuggling movement, laid their
+sharp points backward and down against the head for a moment, while her
+mouth opened and her tongue lolled peaceably out, and in this way she
+expressed that she was pleased and satisfied.
+
+One Eye was hungry. Though he lay down in the entrance and slept, his
+sleep was fitful. He kept awaking and cocking his ears at the bright
+world without, where the April sun was blazing across the snow. When he
+dozed, upon his ears would steal the faint whispers of hidden trickles
+of running water, and he would rouse and listen intently. The sun had
+come back, and all the awakening Northland world was calling to him.
+Life was stirring. The feel of spring was in the air, the feel of
+growing life under the snow, of sap ascending in the trees, of buds
+bursting the shackles of the frost.
+
+He cast anxious glances at his mate, but she showed no desire to get
+up. He looked outside, and half a dozen snow-birds fluttered across his
+field of vision. He started to get up, then looked back to his mate
+again, and settled down and dozed. A shrill and minute singing stole
+upon his hearing. Once, and twice, he sleepily brushed his nose with
+his paw. Then he woke up. There, buzzing in the air at the tip of his
+nose, was a lone mosquito. It was a full-grown mosquito, one that had
+lain frozen in a dry log all winter and that had now been thawed out by
+the sun. He could resist the call of the world no longer. Besides, he
+was hungry.
+
+He crawled over to his mate and tried to persuade her to get up. But
+she only snarled at him, and he walked out alone into the bright
+sunshine to find the snow-surface soft under foot and the travelling
+difficult. He went up the frozen bed of the stream, where the snow,
+shaded by the trees, was yet hard and crystalline. He was gone eight
+hours, and he came back through the darkness hungrier than when he had
+started. He had found game, but he had not caught it. He had broken
+through the melting snow crust, and wallowed, while the snowshoe
+rabbits had skimmed along on top lightly as ever.
+
+He paused at the mouth of the cave with a sudden shock of suspicion.
+Faint, strange sounds came from within. They were sounds not made by
+his mate, and yet they were remotely familiar. He bellied cautiously
+inside and was met by a warning snarl from the she-wolf. This he
+received without perturbation, though he obeyed it by keeping his
+distance; but he remained interested in the other sounds—faint, muffled
+sobbings and slubberings.
+
+His mate warned him irritably away, and he curled up and slept in the
+entrance. When morning came and a dim light pervaded the lair, he again
+sought after the source of the remotely familiar sounds. There was a
+new note in his mate’s warning snarl. It was a jealous note, and he was
+very careful in keeping a respectful distance. Nevertheless, he made
+out, sheltering between her legs against the length of her body, five
+strange little bundles of life, very feeble, very helpless, making tiny
+whimpering noises, with eyes that did not open to the light. He was
+surprised. It was not the first time in his long and successful life
+that this thing had happened. It had happened many times, yet each time
+it was as fresh a surprise as ever to him.
+
+His mate looked at him anxiously. Every little while she emitted a low
+growl, and at times, when it seemed to her he approached too near, the
+growl shot up in her throat to a sharp snarl. Of her own experience she
+had no memory of the thing happening; but in her instinct, which was
+the experience of all the mothers of wolves, there lurked a memory of
+fathers that had eaten their new-born and helpless progeny. It
+manifested itself as a fear strong within her, that made her prevent
+One Eye from more closely inspecting the cubs he had fathered.
+
+But there was no danger. Old One Eye was feeling the urge of an
+impulse, that was, in turn, an instinct that had come down to him from
+all the fathers of wolves. He did not question it, nor puzzle over it.
+It was there, in the fibre of his being; and it was the most natural
+thing in the world that he should obey it by turning his back on his
+new-born family and by trotting out and away on the meat-trail whereby
+he lived.
+
+Five or six miles from the lair, the stream divided, its forks going
+off among the mountains at a right angle. Here, leading up the left
+fork, he came upon a fresh track. He smelled it and found it so recent
+that he crouched swiftly, and looked in the direction in which it
+disappeared. Then he turned deliberately and took the right fork. The
+footprint was much larger than the one his own feet made, and he knew
+that in the wake of such a trail there was little meat for him.
+
+Half a mile up the right fork, his quick ears caught the sound of
+gnawing teeth. He stalked the quarry and found it to be a porcupine,
+standing upright against a tree and trying his teeth on the bark. One
+Eye approached carefully but hopelessly. He knew the breed, though he
+had never met it so far north before; and never in his long life had
+porcupine served him for a meal. But he had long since learned that
+there was such a thing as Chance, or Opportunity, and he continued to
+draw near. There was never any telling what might happen, for with live
+things events were somehow always happening differently.
+
+The porcupine rolled itself into a ball, radiating long, sharp needles
+in all directions that defied attack. In his youth One Eye had once
+sniffed too near a similar, apparently inert ball of quills, and had
+the tail flick out suddenly in his face. One quill he had carried away
+in his muzzle, where it had remained for weeks, a rankling flame, until
+it finally worked out. So he lay down, in a comfortable crouching
+position, his nose fully a foot away, and out of the line of the tail.
+Thus he waited, keeping perfectly quiet. There was no telling.
+Something might happen. The porcupine might unroll. There might be
+opportunity for a deft and ripping thrust of paw into the tender,
+unguarded belly.
+
+But at the end of half an hour he arose, growled wrathfully at the
+motionless ball, and trotted on. He had waited too often and futilely
+in the past for porcupines to unroll, to waste any more time. He
+continued up the right fork. The day wore along, and nothing rewarded
+his hunt.
+
+The urge of his awakened instinct of fatherhood was strong upon him. He
+must find meat. In the afternoon he blundered upon a ptarmigan. He came
+out of a thicket and found himself face to face with the slow-witted
+bird. It was sitting on a log, not a foot beyond the end of his nose.
+Each saw the other. The bird made a startled rise, but he struck it
+with his paw, and smashed it down to earth, then pounced upon it, and
+caught it in his teeth as it scuttled across the snow trying to rise in
+the air again. As his teeth crunched through the tender flesh and
+fragile bones, he began naturally to eat. Then he remembered, and,
+turning on the back-track, started for home, carrying the ptarmigan in
+his mouth.
+
+A mile above the forks, running velvet-footed as was his custom, a
+gliding shadow that cautiously prospected each new vista of the trail,
+he came upon later imprints of the large tracks he had discovered in
+the early morning. As the track led his way, he followed, prepared to
+meet the maker of it at every turn of the stream.
+
+He slid his head around a corner of rock, where began an unusually
+large bend in the stream, and his quick eyes made out something that
+sent him crouching swiftly down. It was the maker of the track, a large
+female lynx. She was crouching as he had crouched once that day, in
+front of her the tight-rolled ball of quills. If he had been a gliding
+shadow before, he now became the ghost of such a shadow, as he crept
+and circled around, and came up well to leeward of the silent,
+motionless pair.
+
+He lay down in the snow, depositing the ptarmigan beside him, and with
+eyes peering through the needles of a low-growing spruce he watched the
+play of life before him—the waiting lynx and the waiting porcupine,
+each intent on life; and, such was the curiousness of the game, the way
+of life for one lay in the eating of the other, and the way of life for
+the other lay in being not eaten. While old One Eye, the wolf crouching
+in the covert, played his part, too, in the game, waiting for some
+strange freak of Chance, that might help him on the meat-trail which
+was his way of life.
+
+Half an hour passed, an hour; and nothing happened. The ball of quills
+might have been a stone for all it moved; the lynx might have been
+frozen to marble; and old One Eye might have been dead. Yet all three
+animals were keyed to a tenseness of living that was almost painful,
+and scarcely ever would it come to them to be more alive than they were
+then in their seeming petrifaction.
+
+One Eye moved slightly and peered forth with increased eagerness.
+Something was happening. The porcupine had at last decided that its
+enemy had gone away. Slowly, cautiously, it was unrolling its ball of
+impregnable armour. It was agitated by no tremor of anticipation.
+Slowly, slowly, the bristling ball straightened out and lengthened. One
+Eye watching, felt a sudden moistness in his mouth and a drooling of
+saliva, involuntary, excited by the living meat that was spreading
+itself like a repast before him.
+
+Not quite entirely had the porcupine unrolled when it discovered its
+enemy. In that instant the lynx struck. The blow was like a flash of
+light. The paw, with rigid claws curving like talons, shot under the
+tender belly and came back with a swift ripping movement. Had the
+porcupine been entirely unrolled, or had it not discovered its enemy a
+fraction of a second before the blow was struck, the paw would have
+escaped unscathed; but a side-flick of the tail sank sharp quills into
+it as it was withdrawn.
+
+Everything had happened at once—the blow, the counter-blow, the squeal
+of agony from the porcupine, the big cat’s squall of sudden hurt and
+astonishment. One Eye half arose in his excitement, his ears up, his
+tail straight out and quivering behind him. The lynx’s bad temper got
+the best of her. She sprang savagely at the thing that had hurt her.
+But the porcupine, squealing and grunting, with disrupted anatomy
+trying feebly to roll up into its ball-protection, flicked out its tail
+again, and again the big cat squalled with hurt and astonishment. Then
+she fell to backing away and sneezing, her nose bristling with quills
+like a monstrous pin-cushion. She brushed her nose with her paws,
+trying to dislodge the fiery darts, thrust it into the snow, and rubbed
+it against twigs and branches, and all the time leaping about, ahead,
+sidewise, up and down, in a frenzy of pain and fright.
+
+She sneezed continually, and her stub of a tail was doing its best
+toward lashing about by giving quick, violent jerks. She quit her
+antics, and quieted down for a long minute. One Eye watched. And even
+he could not repress a start and an involuntary bristling of hair along
+his back when she suddenly leaped, without warning, straight up in the
+air, at the same time emitting a long and most terrible squall. Then
+she sprang away, up the trail, squalling with every leap she made.
+
+It was not until her racket had faded away in the distance and died out
+that One Eye ventured forth. He walked as delicately as though all the
+snow were carpeted with porcupine quills, erect and ready to pierce the
+soft pads of his feet. The porcupine met his approach with a furious
+squealing and a clashing of its long teeth. It had managed to roll up
+in a ball again, but it was not quite the old compact ball; its muscles
+were too much torn for that. It had been ripped almost in half, and was
+still bleeding profusely.
+
+One Eye scooped out mouthfuls of the blood-soaked snow, and chewed and
+tasted and swallowed. This served as a relish, and his hunger increased
+mightily; but he was too old in the world to forget his caution. He
+waited. He lay down and waited, while the porcupine grated its teeth
+and uttered grunts and sobs and occasional sharp little squeals. In a
+little while, One Eye noticed that the quills were drooping and that a
+great quivering had set up. The quivering came to an end suddenly.
+There was a final defiant clash of the long teeth. Then all the quills
+drooped quite down, and the body relaxed and moved no more.
+
+With a nervous, shrinking paw, One Eye stretched out the porcupine to
+its full length and turned it over on its back. Nothing had happened.
+It was surely dead. He studied it intently for a moment, then took a
+careful grip with his teeth and started off down the stream, partly
+carrying, partly dragging the porcupine, with head turned to the side
+so as to avoid stepping on the prickly mass. He recollected something,
+dropped the burden, and trotted back to where he had left the
+ptarmigan. He did not hesitate a moment. He knew clearly what was to be
+done, and this he did by promptly eating the ptarmigan. Then he
+returned and took up his burden.
+
+When he dragged the result of his day’s hunt into the cave, the
+she-wolf inspected it, turned her muzzle to him, and lightly licked him
+on the neck. But the next instant she was warning him away from the
+cubs with a snarl that was less harsh than usual and that was more
+apologetic than menacing. Her instinctive fear of the father of her
+progeny was toning down. He was behaving as a wolf-father should, and
+manifesting no unholy desire to devour the young lives she had brought
+into the world.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III
+THE GREY CUB
+
+
+He was different from his brothers and sisters. Their hair already
+betrayed the reddish hue inherited from their mother, the she-wolf;
+while he alone, in this particular, took after his father. He was the
+one little grey cub of the litter. He had bred true to the straight
+wolf-stock—in fact, he had bred true to old One Eye himself,
+physically, with but a single exception, and that was he had two eyes
+to his father’s one.
+
+The grey cub’s eyes had not been open long, yet already he could see
+with steady clearness. And while his eyes were still closed, he had
+felt, tasted, and smelled. He knew his two brothers and his two sisters
+very well. He had begun to romp with them in a feeble, awkward way, and
+even to squabble, his little throat vibrating with a queer rasping
+noise (the forerunner of the growl), as he worked himself into a
+passion. And long before his eyes had opened he had learned by touch,
+taste, and smell to know his mother—a fount of warmth and liquid food
+and tenderness. She possessed a gentle, caressing tongue that soothed
+him when it passed over his soft little body, and that impelled him to
+snuggle close against her and to doze off to sleep.
+
+Most of the first month of his life had been passed thus in sleeping;
+but now he could see quite well, and he stayed awake for longer periods
+of time, and he was coming to learn his world quite well. His world was
+gloomy; but he did not know that, for he knew no other world. It was
+dim-lighted; but his eyes had never had to adjust themselves to any
+other light. His world was very small. Its limits were the walls of the
+lair; but as he had no knowledge of the wide world outside, he was
+never oppressed by the narrow confines of his existence.
+
+But he had early discovered that one wall of his world was different
+from the rest. This was the mouth of the cave and the source of light.
+He had discovered that it was different from the other walls long
+before he had any thoughts of his own, any conscious volitions. It had
+been an irresistible attraction before ever his eyes opened and looked
+upon it. The light from it had beat upon his sealed lids, and the eyes
+and the optic nerves had pulsated to little, sparklike flashes,
+warm-coloured and strangely pleasing. The life of his body, and of
+every fibre of his body, the life that was the very substance of his
+body and that was apart from his own personal life, had yearned toward
+this light and urged his body toward it in the same way that the
+cunning chemistry of a plant urges it toward the sun.
+
+Always, in the beginning, before his conscious life dawned, he had
+crawled toward the mouth of the cave. And in this his brothers and
+sisters were one with him. Never, in that period, did any of them crawl
+toward the dark corners of the back-wall. The light drew them as if
+they were plants; the chemistry of the life that composed them demanded
+the light as a necessity of being; and their little puppet-bodies
+crawled blindly and chemically, like the tendrils of a vine. Later on,
+when each developed individuality and became personally conscious of
+impulsions and desires, the attraction of the light increased. They
+were always crawling and sprawling toward it, and being driven back
+from it by their mother.
+
+It was in this way that the grey cub learned other attributes of his
+mother than the soft, soothing, tongue. In his insistent crawling
+toward the light, he discovered in her a nose that with a sharp nudge
+administered rebuke, and later, a paw, that crushed him down and rolled
+him over and over with swift, calculating stroke. Thus he learned hurt;
+and on top of it he learned to avoid hurt, first, by not incurring the
+risk of it; and second, when he had incurred the risk, by dodging and
+by retreating. These were conscious actions, and were the results of
+his first generalisations upon the world. Before that he had recoiled
+automatically from hurt, as he had crawled automatically toward the
+light. After that he recoiled from hurt because he _knew_ that it was
+hurt.
+
+He was a fierce little cub. So were his brothers and sisters. It was to
+be expected. He was a carnivorous animal. He came of a breed of
+meat-killers and meat-eaters. His father and mother lived wholly upon
+meat. The milk he had sucked with his first flickering life, was milk
+transformed directly from meat, and now, at a month old, when his eyes
+had been open for but a week, he was beginning himself to eat meat—meat
+half-digested by the she-wolf and disgorged for the five growing cubs
+that already made too great demand upon her breast.
+
+But he was, further, the fiercest of the litter. He could make a louder
+rasping growl than any of them. His tiny rages were much more terrible
+than theirs. It was he that first learned the trick of rolling a
+fellow-cub over with a cunning paw-stroke. And it was he that first
+gripped another cub by the ear and pulled and tugged and growled
+through jaws tight-clenched. And certainly it was he that caused the
+mother the most trouble in keeping her litter from the mouth of the
+cave.
+
+The fascination of the light for the grey cub increased from day to
+day. He was perpetually departing on yard-long adventures toward the
+cave’s entrance, and as perpetually being driven back. Only he did not
+know it for an entrance. He did not know anything about
+entrances—passages whereby one goes from one place to another place. He
+did not know any other place, much less of a way to get there. So to
+him the entrance of the cave was a wall—a wall of light. As the sun was
+to the outside dweller, this wall was to him the sun of his world. It
+attracted him as a candle attracts a moth. He was always striving to
+attain it. The life that was so swiftly expanding within him, urged him
+continually toward the wall of light. The life that was within him knew
+that it was the one way out, the way he was predestined to tread. But
+he himself did not know anything about it. He did not know there was
+any outside at all.
+
+There was one strange thing about this wall of light. His father (he
+had already come to recognise his father as the one other dweller in
+the world, a creature like his mother, who slept near the light and was
+a bringer of meat)—his father had a way of walking right into the white
+far wall and disappearing. The grey cub could not understand this.
+Though never permitted by his mother to approach that wall, he had
+approached the other walls, and encountered hard obstruction on the end
+of his tender nose. This hurt. And after several such adventures, he
+left the walls alone. Without thinking about it, he accepted this
+disappearing into the wall as a peculiarity of his father, as milk and
+half-digested meat were peculiarities of his mother.
+
+In fact, the grey cub was not given to thinking—at least, to the kind
+of thinking customary of men. His brain worked in dim ways. Yet his
+conclusions were as sharp and distinct as those achieved by men. He had
+a method of accepting things, without questioning the why and
+wherefore. In reality, this was the act of classification. He was never
+disturbed over why a thing happened. How it happened was sufficient for
+him. Thus, when he had bumped his nose on the back-wall a few times, he
+accepted that he would not disappear into walls. In the same way he
+accepted that his father could disappear into walls. But he was not in
+the least disturbed by desire to find out the reason for the difference
+between his father and himself. Logic and physics were no part of his
+mental make-up.
+
+Like most creatures of the Wild, he early experienced famine. There
+came a time when not only did the meat-supply cease, but the milk no
+longer came from his mother’s breast. At first, the cubs whimpered and
+cried, but for the most part they slept. It was not long before they
+were reduced to a coma of hunger. There were no more spats and
+squabbles, no more tiny rages nor attempts at growling; while the
+adventures toward the far white wall ceased altogether. The cubs slept,
+while the life that was in them flickered and died down.
+
+One Eye was desperate. He ranged far and wide, and slept but little in
+the lair that had now become cheerless and miserable. The she-wolf,
+too, left her litter and went out in search of meat. In the first days
+after the birth of the cubs, One Eye had journeyed several times back
+to the Indian camp and robbed the rabbit snares; but, with the melting
+of the snow and the opening of the streams, the Indian camp had moved
+away, and that source of supply was closed to him.
+
+When the grey cub came back to life and again took interest in the far
+white wall, he found that the population of his world had been reduced.
+Only one sister remained to him. The rest were gone. As he grew
+stronger, he found himself compelled to play alone, for the sister no
+longer lifted her head nor moved about. His little body rounded out
+with the meat he now ate; but the food had come too late for her. She
+slept continuously, a tiny skeleton flung round with skin in which the
+flame flickered lower and lower and at last went out.
+
+Then there came a time when the grey cub no longer saw his father
+appearing and disappearing in the wall nor lying down asleep in the
+entrance. This had happened at the end of a second and less severe
+famine. The she-wolf knew why One Eye never came back, but there was no
+way by which she could tell what she had seen to the grey cub. Hunting
+herself for meat, up the left fork of the stream where lived the lynx,
+she had followed a day-old trail of One Eye. And she had found him, or
+what remained of him, at the end of the trail. There were many signs of
+the battle that had been fought, and of the lynx’s withdrawal to her
+lair after having won the victory. Before she went away, the she-wolf
+had found this lair, but the signs told her that the lynx was inside,
+and she had not dared to venture in.
+
+After that, the she-wolf in her hunting avoided the left fork. For she
+knew that in the lynx’s lair was a litter of kittens, and she knew the
+lynx for a fierce, bad-tempered creature and a terrible fighter. It was
+all very well for half a dozen wolves to drive a lynx, spitting and
+bristling, up a tree; but it was quite a different matter for a lone
+wolf to encounter a lynx—especially when the lynx was known to have a
+litter of hungry kittens at her back.
+
+But the Wild is the Wild, and motherhood is motherhood, at all times
+fiercely protective whether in the Wild or out of it; and the time was
+to come when the she-wolf, for her grey cub’s sake, would venture the
+left fork, and the lair in the rocks, and the lynx’s wrath.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV
+THE WALL OF THE WORLD
+
+
+By the time his mother began leaving the cave on hunting expeditions,
+the cub had learned well the law that forbade his approaching the
+entrance. Not only had this law been forcibly and many times impressed
+on him by his mother’s nose and paw, but in him the instinct of fear
+was developing. Never, in his brief cave-life, had he encountered
+anything of which to be afraid. Yet fear was in him. It had come down
+to him from a remote ancestry through a thousand thousand lives. It was
+a heritage he had received directly from One Eye and the she-wolf; but
+to them, in turn, it had been passed down through all the generations
+of wolves that had gone before. Fear!—that legacy of the Wild which no
+animal may escape nor exchange for pottage.
+
+So the grey cub knew fear, though he knew not the stuff of which fear
+was made. Possibly he accepted it as one of the restrictions of life.
+For he had already learned that there were such restrictions. Hunger he
+had known; and when he could not appease his hunger he had felt
+restriction. The hard obstruction of the cave-wall, the sharp nudge of
+his mother’s nose, the smashing stroke of her paw, the hunger
+unappeased of several famines, had borne in upon him that all was not
+freedom in the world, that to life there was limitations and
+restraints. These limitations and restraints were laws. To be obedient
+to them was to escape hurt and make for happiness.
+
+He did not reason the question out in this man fashion. He merely
+classified the things that hurt and the things that did not hurt. And
+after such classification he avoided the things that hurt, the
+restrictions and restraints, in order to enjoy the satisfactions and
+the remunerations of life.
+
+Thus it was that in obedience to the law laid down by his mother, and
+in obedience to the law of that unknown and nameless thing, fear, he
+kept away from the mouth of the cave. It remained to him a white wall
+of light. When his mother was absent, he slept most of the time, while
+during the intervals that he was awake he kept very quiet, suppressing
+the whimpering cries that tickled in his throat and strove for noise.
+
+Once, lying awake, he heard a strange sound in the white wall. He did
+not know that it was a wolverine, standing outside, all a-trembling
+with its own daring, and cautiously scenting out the contents of the
+cave. The cub knew only that the sniff was strange, a something
+unclassified, therefore unknown and terrible—for the unknown was one of
+the chief elements that went into the making of fear.
+
+The hair bristled upon the grey cub’s back, but it bristled silently.
+How was he to know that this thing that sniffed was a thing at which to
+bristle? It was not born of any knowledge of his, yet it was the
+visible expression of the fear that was in him, and for which, in his
+own life, there was no accounting. But fear was accompanied by another
+instinct—that of concealment. The cub was in a frenzy of terror, yet he
+lay without movement or sound, frozen, petrified into immobility, to
+all appearances dead. His mother, coming home, growled as she smelt the
+wolverine’s track, and bounded into the cave and licked and nozzled him
+with undue vehemence of affection. And the cub felt that somehow he had
+escaped a great hurt.
+
+But there were other forces at work in the cub, the greatest of which
+was growth. Instinct and law demanded of him obedience. But growth
+demanded disobedience. His mother and fear impelled him to keep away
+from the white wall. Growth is life, and life is for ever destined to
+make for light. So there was no damming up the tide of life that was
+rising within him—rising with every mouthful of meat he swallowed, with
+every breath he drew. In the end, one day, fear and obedience were
+swept away by the rush of life, and the cub straddled and sprawled
+toward the entrance.
+
+Unlike any other wall with which he had had experience, this wall
+seemed to recede from him as he approached. No hard surface collided
+with the tender little nose he thrust out tentatively before him. The
+substance of the wall seemed as permeable and yielding as light. And as
+condition, in his eyes, had the seeming of form, so he entered into
+what had been wall to him and bathed in the substance that composed it.
+
+It was bewildering. He was sprawling through solidity. And ever the
+light grew brighter. Fear urged him to go back, but growth drove him
+on. Suddenly he found himself at the mouth of the cave. The wall,
+inside which he had thought himself, as suddenly leaped back before him
+to an immeasurable distance. The light had become painfully bright. He
+was dazzled by it. Likewise he was made dizzy by this abrupt and
+tremendous extension of space. Automatically, his eyes were adjusting
+themselves to the brightness, focusing themselves to meet the increased
+distance of objects. At first, the wall had leaped beyond his vision.
+He now saw it again; but it had taken upon itself a remarkable
+remoteness. Also, its appearance had changed. It was now a variegated
+wall, composed of the trees that fringed the stream, the opposing
+mountain that towered above the trees, and the sky that out-towered the
+mountain.
+
+A great fear came upon him. This was more of the terrible unknown. He
+crouched down on the lip of the cave and gazed out on the world. He was
+very much afraid. Because it was unknown, it was hostile to him.
+Therefore the hair stood up on end along his back and his lips wrinkled
+weakly in an attempt at a ferocious and intimidating snarl. Out of his
+puniness and fright he challenged and menaced the whole wide world.
+
+Nothing happened. He continued to gaze, and in his interest he forgot
+to snarl. Also, he forgot to be afraid. For the time, fear had been
+routed by growth, while growth had assumed the guise of curiosity. He
+began to notice near objects—an open portion of the stream that flashed
+in the sun, the blasted pine-tree that stood at the base of the slope,
+and the slope itself, that ran right up to him and ceased two feet
+beneath the lip of the cave on which he crouched.
+
+Now the grey cub had lived all his days on a level floor. He had never
+experienced the hurt of a fall. He did not know what a fall was. So he
+stepped boldly out upon the air. His hind-legs still rested on the
+cave-lip, so he fell forward head downward. The earth struck him a
+harsh blow on the nose that made him yelp. Then he began rolling down
+the slope, over and over. He was in a panic of terror. The unknown had
+caught him at last. It had gripped savagely hold of him and was about
+to wreak upon him some terrific hurt. Growth was now routed by fear,
+and he ki-yi’d like any frightened puppy.
+
+The unknown bore him on he knew not to what frightful hurt, and he
+yelped and ki-yi’d unceasingly. This was a different proposition from
+crouching in frozen fear while the unknown lurked just alongside. Now
+the unknown had caught tight hold of him. Silence would do no good.
+Besides, it was not fear, but terror, that convulsed him.
+
+But the slope grew more gradual, and its base was grass-covered. Here
+the cub lost momentum. When at last he came to a stop, he gave one last
+agonised yell and then a long, whimpering wail. Also, and quite as a
+matter of course, as though in his life he had already made a thousand
+toilets, he proceeded to lick away the dry clay that soiled him.
+
+After that he sat up and gazed about him, as might the first man of the
+earth who landed upon Mars. The cub had broken through the wall of the
+world, the unknown had let go its hold of him, and here he was without
+hurt. But the first man on Mars would have experienced less
+unfamiliarity than did he. Without any antecedent knowledge, without
+any warning whatever that such existed, he found himself an explorer in
+a totally new world.
+
+Now that the terrible unknown had let go of him, he forgot that the
+unknown had any terrors. He was aware only of curiosity in all the
+things about him. He inspected the grass beneath him, the moss-berry
+plant just beyond, and the dead trunk of the blasted pine that stood on
+the edge of an open space among the trees. A squirrel, running around
+the base of the trunk, came full upon him, and gave him a great fright.
+He cowered down and snarled. But the squirrel was as badly scared. It
+ran up the tree, and from a point of safety chattered back savagely.
+
+This helped the cub’s courage, and though the woodpecker he next
+encountered gave him a start, he proceeded confidently on his way. Such
+was his confidence, that when a moose-bird impudently hopped up to him,
+he reached out at it with a playful paw. The result was a sharp peck on
+the end of his nose that made him cower down and ki-yi. The noise he
+made was too much for the moose-bird, who sought safety in flight.
+
+But the cub was learning. His misty little mind had already made an
+unconscious classification. There were live things and things not
+alive. Also, he must watch out for the live things. The things not
+alive remained always in one place, but the live things moved about,
+and there was no telling what they might do. The thing to expect of
+them was the unexpected, and for this he must be prepared.
+
+He travelled very clumsily. He ran into sticks and things. A twig that
+he thought a long way off, would the next instant hit him on the nose
+or rake along his ribs. There were inequalities of surface. Sometimes
+he overstepped and stubbed his nose. Quite as often he understepped and
+stubbed his feet. Then there were the pebbles and stones that turned
+under him when he trod upon them; and from them he came to know that
+the things not alive were not all in the same state of stable
+equilibrium as was his cave—also, that small things not alive were more
+liable than large things to fall down or turn over. But with every
+mishap he was learning. The longer he walked, the better he walked. He
+was adjusting himself. He was learning to calculate his own muscular
+movements, to know his physical limitations, to measure distances
+between objects, and between objects and himself.
+
+His was the luck of the beginner. Born to be a hunter of meat (though
+he did not know it), he blundered upon meat just outside his own
+cave-door on his first foray into the world. It was by sheer blundering
+that he chanced upon the shrewdly hidden ptarmigan nest. He fell into
+it. He had essayed to walk along the trunk of a fallen pine. The rotten
+bark gave way under his feet, and with a despairing yelp he pitched
+down the rounded crescent, smashed through the leafage and stalks of a
+small bush, and in the heart of the bush, on the ground, fetched up in
+the midst of seven ptarmigan chicks.
+
+They made noises, and at first he was frightened at them. Then he
+perceived that they were very little, and he became bolder. They moved.
+He placed his paw on one, and its movements were accelerated. This was
+a source of enjoyment to him. He smelled it. He picked it up in his
+mouth. It struggled and tickled his tongue. At the same time he was
+made aware of a sensation of hunger. His jaws closed together. There
+was a crunching of fragile bones, and warm blood ran in his mouth. The
+taste of it was good. This was meat, the same as his mother gave him,
+only it was alive between his teeth and therefore better. So he ate the
+ptarmigan. Nor did he stop till he had devoured the whole brood. Then
+he licked his chops in quite the same way his mother did, and began to
+crawl out of the bush.
+
+He encountered a feathered whirlwind. He was confused and blinded by
+the rush of it and the beat of angry wings. He hid his head between his
+paws and yelped. The blows increased. The mother ptarmigan was in a
+fury. Then he became angry. He rose up, snarling, striking out with his
+paws. He sank his tiny teeth into one of the wings and pulled and
+tugged sturdily. The ptarmigan struggled against him, showering blows
+upon him with her free wing. It was his first battle. He was elated. He
+forgot all about the unknown. He no longer was afraid of anything. He
+was fighting, tearing at a live thing that was striking at him. Also,
+this live thing was meat. The lust to kill was on him. He had just
+destroyed little live things. He would now destroy a big live thing. He
+was too busy and happy to know that he was happy. He was thrilling and
+exulting in ways new to him and greater to him than any he had known
+before.
+
+He held on to the wing and growled between his tight-clenched teeth.
+The ptarmigan dragged him out of the bush. When she turned and tried to
+drag him back into the bush’s shelter, he pulled her away from it and
+on into the open. And all the time she was making outcry and striking
+with her free wing, while feathers were flying like a snow-fall. The
+pitch to which he was aroused was tremendous. All the fighting blood of
+his breed was up in him and surging through him. This was living,
+though he did not know it. He was realising his own meaning in the
+world; he was doing that for which he was made—killing meat and
+battling to kill it. He was justifying his existence, than which life
+can do no greater; for life achieves its summit when it does to the
+uttermost that which it was equipped to do.
+
+After a time, the ptarmigan ceased her struggling. He still held her by
+the wing, and they lay on the ground and looked at each other. He tried
+to growl threateningly, ferociously. She pecked on his nose, which by
+now, what of previous adventures was sore. He winced but held on. She
+pecked him again and again. From wincing he went to whimpering. He
+tried to back away from her, oblivious to the fact that by his hold on
+her he dragged her after him. A rain of pecks fell on his ill-used
+nose. The flood of fight ebbed down in him, and, releasing his prey, he
+turned tail and scampered on across the open in inglorious retreat.
+
+He lay down to rest on the other side of the open, near the edge of the
+bushes, his tongue lolling out, his chest heaving and panting, his nose
+still hurting him and causing him to continue his whimper. But as he
+lay there, suddenly there came to him a feeling as of something
+terrible impending. The unknown with all its terrors rushed upon him,
+and he shrank back instinctively into the shelter of the bush. As he
+did so, a draught of air fanned him, and a large, winged body swept
+ominously and silently past. A hawk, driving down out of the blue, had
+barely missed him.
+
+While he lay in the bush, recovering from his fright and peering
+fearfully out, the mother-ptarmigan on the other side of the open space
+fluttered out of the ravaged nest. It was because of her loss that she
+paid no attention to the winged bolt of the sky. But the cub saw, and
+it was a warning and a lesson to him—the swift downward swoop of the
+hawk, the short skim of its body just above the ground, the strike of
+its talons in the body of the ptarmigan, the ptarmigan’s squawk of
+agony and fright, and the hawk’s rush upward into the blue, carrying
+the ptarmigan away with it.
+
+It was a long time before the cub left its shelter. He had learned
+much. Live things were meat. They were good to eat. Also, live things
+when they were large enough, could give hurt. It was better to eat
+small live things like ptarmigan chicks, and to let alone large live
+things like ptarmigan hens. Nevertheless he felt a little prick of
+ambition, a sneaking desire to have another battle with that ptarmigan
+hen—only the hawk had carried her away. May be there were other
+ptarmigan hens. He would go and see.
+
+He came down a shelving bank to the stream. He had never seen water
+before. The footing looked good. There were no inequalities of surface.
+He stepped boldly out on it; and went down, crying with fear, into the
+embrace of the unknown. It was cold, and he gasped, breathing quickly.
+The water rushed into his lungs instead of the air that had always
+accompanied his act of breathing. The suffocation he experienced was
+like the pang of death. To him it signified death. He had no conscious
+knowledge of death, but like every animal of the Wild, he possessed the
+instinct of death. To him it stood as the greatest of hurts. It was the
+very essence of the unknown; it was the sum of the terrors of the
+unknown, the one culminating and unthinkable catastrophe that could
+happen to him, about which he knew nothing and about which he feared
+everything.
+
+He came to the surface, and the sweet air rushed into his open mouth.
+He did not go down again. Quite as though it had been a
+long-established custom of his he struck out with all his legs and
+began to swim. The near bank was a yard away; but he had come up with
+his back to it, and the first thing his eyes rested upon was the
+opposite bank, toward which he immediately began to swim. The stream
+was a small one, but in the pool it widened out to a score of feet.
+
+Midway in the passage, the current picked up the cub and swept him
+downstream. He was caught in the miniature rapid at the bottom of the
+pool. Here was little chance for swimming. The quiet water had become
+suddenly angry. Sometimes he was under, sometimes on top. At all times
+he was in violent motion, now being turned over or around, and again,
+being smashed against a rock. And with every rock he struck, he yelped.
+His progress was a series of yelps, from which might have been adduced
+the number of rocks he encountered.
+
+Below the rapid was a second pool, and here, captured by the eddy, he
+was gently borne to the bank, and as gently deposited on a bed of
+gravel. He crawled frantically clear of the water and lay down. He had
+learned some more about the world. Water was not alive. Yet it moved.
+Also, it looked as solid as the earth, but was without any solidity at
+all. His conclusion was that things were not always what they appeared
+to be. The cub’s fear of the unknown was an inherited distrust, and it
+had now been strengthened by experience. Thenceforth, in the nature of
+things, he would possess an abiding distrust of appearances. He would
+have to learn the reality of a thing before he could put his faith into
+it.
+
+One other adventure was destined for him that day. He had recollected
+that there was such a thing in the world as his mother. And then there
+came to him a feeling that he wanted her more than all the rest of the
+things in the world. Not only was his body tired with the adventures it
+had undergone, but his little brain was equally tired. In all the days
+he had lived it had not worked so hard as on this one day. Furthermore,
+he was sleepy. So he started out to look for the cave and his mother,
+feeling at the same time an overwhelming rush of loneliness and
+helplessness.
+
+He was sprawling along between some bushes, when he heard a sharp
+intimidating cry. There was a flash of yellow before his eyes. He saw a
+weasel leaping swiftly away from him. It was a small live thing, and he
+had no fear. Then, before him, at his feet, he saw an extremely small
+live thing, only several inches long, a young weasel, that, like
+himself, had disobediently gone out adventuring. It tried to retreat
+before him. He turned it over with his paw. It made a queer, grating
+noise. The next moment the flash of yellow reappeared before his eyes.
+He heard again the intimidating cry, and at the same instant received a
+sharp blow on the side of the neck and felt the sharp teeth of the
+mother-weasel cut into his flesh.
+
+While he yelped and ki-yi’d and scrambled backward, he saw the
+mother-weasel leap upon her young one and disappear with it into the
+neighbouring thicket. The cut of her teeth in his neck still hurt, but
+his feelings were hurt more grievously, and he sat down and weakly
+whimpered. This mother-weasel was so small and so savage. He was yet to
+learn that for size and weight the weasel was the most ferocious,
+vindictive, and terrible of all the killers of the Wild. But a portion
+of this knowledge was quickly to be his.
+
+He was still whimpering when the mother-weasel reappeared. She did not
+rush him, now that her young one was safe. She approached more
+cautiously, and the cub had full opportunity to observe her lean,
+snakelike body, and her head, erect, eager, and snake-like itself. Her
+sharp, menacing cry sent the hair bristling along his back, and he
+snarled warningly at her. She came closer and closer. There was a leap,
+swifter than his unpractised sight, and the lean, yellow body
+disappeared for a moment out of the field of his vision. The next
+moment she was at his throat, her teeth buried in his hair and flesh.
+
+At first he snarled and tried to fight; but he was very young, and this
+was only his first day in the world, and his snarl became a whimper,
+his fight a struggle to escape. The weasel never relaxed her hold. She
+hung on, striving to press down with her teeth to the great vein where
+his life-blood bubbled. The weasel was a drinker of blood, and it was
+ever her preference to drink from the throat of life itself.
+
+The grey cub would have died, and there would have been no story to
+write about him, had not the she-wolf come bounding through the bushes.
+The weasel let go the cub and flashed at the she-wolf’s throat,
+missing, but getting a hold on the jaw instead. The she-wolf flirted
+her head like the snap of a whip, breaking the weasel’s hold and
+flinging it high in the air. And, still in the air, the she-wolf’s jaws
+closed on the lean, yellow body, and the weasel knew death between the
+crunching teeth.
+
+The cub experienced another access of affection on the part of his
+mother. Her joy at finding him seemed even greater than his joy at
+being found. She nozzled him and caressed him and licked the cuts made
+in him by the weasel’s teeth. Then, between them, mother and cub, they
+ate the blood-drinker, and after that went back to the cave and slept.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V
+THE LAW OF MEAT
+
+
+The cub’s development was rapid. He rested for two days, and then
+ventured forth from the cave again. It was on this adventure that he
+found the young weasel whose mother he had helped eat, and he saw to it
+that the young weasel went the way of its mother. But on this trip he
+did not get lost. When he grew tired, he found his way back to the cave
+and slept. And every day thereafter found him out and ranging a wider
+area.
+
+He began to get accurate measurement of his strength and his weakness,
+and to know when to be bold and when to be cautious. He found it
+expedient to be cautious all the time, except for the rare moments,
+when, assured of his own intrepidity, he abandoned himself to petty
+rages and lusts.
+
+He was always a little demon of fury when he chanced upon a stray
+ptarmigan. Never did he fail to respond savagely to the chatter of the
+squirrel he had first met on the blasted pine. While the sight of a
+moose-bird almost invariably put him into the wildest of rages; for he
+never forgot the peck on the nose he had received from the first of
+that ilk he encountered.
+
+But there were times when even a moose-bird failed to affect him, and
+those were times when he felt himself to be in danger from some other
+prowling meat hunter. He never forgot the hawk, and its moving shadow
+always sent him crouching into the nearest thicket. He no longer
+sprawled and straddled, and already he was developing the gait of his
+mother, slinking and furtive, apparently without exertion, yet sliding
+along with a swiftness that was as deceptive as it was imperceptible.
+
+In the matter of meat, his luck had been all in the beginning. The
+seven ptarmigan chicks and the baby weasel represented the sum of his
+killings. His desire to kill strengthened with the days, and he
+cherished hungry ambitions for the squirrel that chattered so volubly
+and always informed all wild creatures that the wolf-cub was
+approaching. But as birds flew in the air, squirrels could climb trees,
+and the cub could only try to crawl unobserved upon the squirrel when
+it was on the ground.
+
+The cub entertained a great respect for his mother. She could get meat,
+and she never failed to bring him his share. Further, she was unafraid
+of things. It did not occur to him that this fearlessness was founded
+upon experience and knowledge. Its effect on him was that of an
+impression of power. His mother represented power; and as he grew older
+he felt this power in the sharper admonishment of her paw; while the
+reproving nudge of her nose gave place to the slash of her fangs. For
+this, likewise, he respected his mother. She compelled obedience from
+him, and the older he grew the shorter grew her temper.
+
+Famine came again, and the cub with clearer consciousness knew once
+more the bite of hunger. The she-wolf ran herself thin in the quest for
+meat. She rarely slept any more in the cave, spending most of her time
+on the meat-trail, and spending it vainly. This famine was not a long
+one, but it was severe while it lasted. The cub found no more milk in
+his mother’s breast, nor did he get one mouthful of meat for himself.
+
+Before, he had hunted in play, for the sheer joyousness of it; now he
+hunted in deadly earnestness, and found nothing. Yet the failure of it
+accelerated his development. He studied the habits of the squirrel with
+greater carefulness, and strove with greater craft to steal upon it and
+surprise it. He studied the wood-mice and tried to dig them out of
+their burrows; and he learned much about the ways of moose-birds and
+woodpeckers. And there came a day when the hawk’s shadow did not drive
+him crouching into the bushes. He had grown stronger and wiser, and
+more confident. Also, he was desperate. So he sat on his haunches,
+conspicuously in an open space, and challenged the hawk down out of the
+sky. For he knew that there, floating in the blue above him, was meat,
+the meat his stomach yearned after so insistently. But the hawk refused
+to come down and give battle, and the cub crawled away into a thicket
+and whimpered his disappointment and hunger.
+
+The famine broke. The she-wolf brought home meat. It was strange meat,
+different from any she had ever brought before. It was a lynx kitten,
+partly grown, like the cub, but not so large. And it was all for him.
+His mother had satisfied her hunger elsewhere; though he did not know
+that it was the rest of the lynx litter that had gone to satisfy her.
+Nor did he know the desperateness of her deed. He knew only that the
+velvet-furred kitten was meat, and he ate and waxed happier with every
+mouthful.
+
+A full stomach conduces to inaction, and the cub lay in the cave,
+sleeping against his mother’s side. He was aroused by her snarling.
+Never had he heard her snarl so terribly. Possibly in her whole life it
+was the most terrible snarl she ever gave. There was reason for it, and
+none knew it better than she. A lynx’s lair is not despoiled with
+impunity. In the full glare of the afternoon light, crouching in the
+entrance of the cave, the cub saw the lynx-mother. The hair rippled up
+along his back at the sight. Here was fear, and it did not require his
+instinct to tell him of it. And if sight alone were not sufficient, the
+cry of rage the intruder gave, beginning with a snarl and rushing
+abruptly upward into a hoarse screech, was convincing enough in itself.
+
+The cub felt the prod of the life that was in him, and stood up and
+snarled valiantly by his mother’s side. But she thrust him
+ignominiously away and behind her. Because of the low-roofed entrance
+the lynx could not leap in, and when she made a crawling rush of it the
+she-wolf sprang upon her and pinned her down. The cub saw little of the
+battle. There was a tremendous snarling and spitting and screeching.
+The two animals threshed about, the lynx ripping and tearing with her
+claws and using her teeth as well, while the she-wolf used her teeth
+alone.
+
+Once, the cub sprang in and sank his teeth into the hind leg of the
+lynx. He clung on, growling savagely. Though he did not know it, by the
+weight of his body he clogged the action of the leg and thereby saved
+his mother much damage. A change in the battle crushed him under both
+their bodies and wrenched loose his hold. The next moment the two
+mothers separated, and, before they rushed together again, the lynx
+lashed out at the cub with a huge fore-paw that ripped his shoulder
+open to the bone and sent him hurtling sidewise against the wall. Then
+was added to the uproar the cub’s shrill yelp of pain and fright. But
+the fight lasted so long that he had time to cry himself out and to
+experience a second burst of courage; and the end of the battle found
+him again clinging to a hind-leg and furiously growling between his
+teeth.
+
+The lynx was dead. But the she-wolf was very weak and sick. At first
+she caressed the cub and licked his wounded shoulder; but the blood she
+had lost had taken with it her strength, and for all of a day and a
+night she lay by her dead foe’s side, without movement, scarcely
+breathing. For a week she never left the cave, except for water, and
+then her movements were slow and painful. At the end of that time the
+lynx was devoured, while the she-wolf’s wounds had healed sufficiently
+to permit her to take the meat-trail again.
+
+The cub’s shoulder was stiff and sore, and for some time he limped from
+the terrible slash he had received. But the world now seemed changed.
+He went about in it with greater confidence, with a feeling of prowess
+that had not been his in the days before the battle with the lynx. He
+had looked upon life in a more ferocious aspect; he had fought; he had
+buried his teeth in the flesh of a foe; and he had survived. And
+because of all this, he carried himself more boldly, with a touch of
+defiance that was new in him. He was no longer afraid of minor things,
+and much of his timidity had vanished, though the unknown never ceased
+to press upon him with its mysteries and terrors, intangible and
+ever-menacing.
+
+He began to accompany his mother on the meat-trail, and he saw much of
+the killing of meat and began to play his part in it. And in his own
+dim way he learned the law of meat. There were two kinds of life—his
+own kind and the other kind. His own kind included his mother and
+himself. The other kind included all live things that moved. But the
+other kind was divided. One portion was what his own kind killed and
+ate. This portion was composed of the non-killers and the small
+killers. The other portion killed and ate his own kind, or was killed
+and eaten by his own kind. And out of this classification arose the
+law. The aim of life was meat. Life itself was meat. Life lived on
+life. There were the eaters and the eaten. The law was: EAT OR BE
+EATEN. He did not formulate the law in clear, set terms and moralise
+about it. He did not even think the law; he merely lived the law
+without thinking about it at all.
+
+He saw the law operating around him on every side. He had eaten the
+ptarmigan chicks. The hawk had eaten the ptarmigan-mother. The hawk
+would also have eaten him. Later, when he had grown more formidable, he
+wanted to eat the hawk. He had eaten the lynx kitten. The lynx-mother
+would have eaten him had she not herself been killed and eaten. And so
+it went. The law was being lived about him by all live things, and he
+himself was part and parcel of the law. He was a killer. His only food
+was meat, live meat, that ran away swiftly before him, or flew into the
+air, or climbed trees, or hid in the ground, or faced him and fought
+with him, or turned the tables and ran after him.
+
+Had the cub thought in man-fashion, he might have epitomised life as a
+voracious appetite and the world as a place wherein ranged a multitude
+of appetites, pursuing and being pursued, hunting and being hunted,
+eating and being eaten, all in blindness and confusion, with violence
+and disorder, a chaos of gluttony and slaughter, ruled over by chance,
+merciless, planless, endless.
+
+But the cub did not think in man-fashion. He did not look at things
+with wide vision. He was single-purposed, and entertained but one
+thought or desire at a time. Besides the law of meat, there were a
+myriad other and lesser laws for him to learn and obey. The world was
+filled with surprise. The stir of the life that was in him, the play of
+his muscles, was an unending happiness. To run down meat was to
+experience thrills and elations. His rages and battles were pleasures.
+Terror itself, and the mystery of the unknown, led to his living.
+
+And there were easements and satisfactions. To have a full stomach, to
+doze lazily in the sunshine—such things were remuneration in full for
+his ardours and toils, while his ardours and tolls were in themselves
+self-remunerative. They were expressions of life, and life is always
+happy when it is expressing itself. So the cub had no quarrel with his
+hostile environment. He was very much alive, very happy, and very proud
+of himself.
+
+
+
+
+PART III
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I
+THE MAKERS OF FIRE
+
+
+The cub came upon it suddenly. It was his own fault. He had been
+careless. He had left the cave and run down to the stream to drink. It
+might have been that he took no notice because he was heavy with sleep.
+(He had been out all night on the meat-trail, and had but just then
+awakened.) And his carelessness might have been due to the familiarity
+of the trail to the pool. He had travelled it often, and nothing had
+ever happened on it.
+
+He went down past the blasted pine, crossed the open space, and trotted
+in amongst the trees. Then, at the same instant, he saw and smelt.
+Before him, sitting silently on their haunches, were five live things,
+the like of which he had never seen before. It was his first glimpse of
+mankind. But at the sight of him the five men did not spring to their
+feet, nor show their teeth, nor snarl. They did not move, but sat
+there, silent and ominous.
+
+Nor did the cub move. Every instinct of his nature would have impelled
+him to dash wildly away, had there not suddenly and for the first time
+arisen in him another and counter instinct. A great awe descended upon
+him. He was beaten down to movelessness by an overwhelming sense of his
+own weakness and littleness. Here was mastery and power, something far
+and away beyond him.
+
+The cub had never seen man, yet the instinct concerning man was his. In
+dim ways he recognised in man the animal that had fought itself to
+primacy over the other animals of the Wild. Not alone out of his own
+eyes, but out of the eyes of all his ancestors was the cub now looking
+upon man—out of eyes that had circled in the darkness around countless
+winter camp-fires, that had peered from safe distances and from the
+hearts of thickets at the strange, two-legged animal that was lord over
+living things. The spell of the cub’s heritage was upon him, the fear
+and the respect born of the centuries of struggle and the accumulated
+experience of the generations. The heritage was too compelling for a
+wolf that was only a cub. Had he been full-grown, he would have run
+away. As it was, he cowered down in a paralysis of fear, already half
+proffering the submission that his kind had proffered from the first
+time a wolf came in to sit by man’s fire and be made warm.
+
+One of the Indians arose and walked over to him and stooped above him.
+The cub cowered closer to the ground. It was the unknown, objectified
+at last, in concrete flesh and blood, bending over him and reaching
+down to seize hold of him. His hair bristled involuntarily; his lips
+writhed back and his little fangs were bared. The hand, poised like
+doom above him, hesitated, and the man spoke laughing, “_Wabam wabisca
+ip pit tah_.” (“Look! The white fangs!”)
+
+The other Indians laughed loudly, and urged the man on to pick up the
+cub. As the hand descended closer and closer, there raged within the
+cub a battle of the instincts. He experienced two great impulsions—to
+yield and to fight. The resulting action was a compromise. He did both.
+He yielded till the hand almost touched him. Then he fought, his teeth
+flashing in a snap that sank them into the hand. The next moment he
+received a clout alongside the head that knocked him over on his side.
+Then all fight fled out of him. His puppyhood and the instinct of
+submission took charge of him. He sat up on his haunches and ki-yi’d.
+But the man whose hand he had bitten was angry. The cub received a
+clout on the other side of his head. Whereupon he sat up and ki-yi’d
+louder than ever.
+
+The four Indians laughed more loudly, while even the man who had been
+bitten began to laugh. They surrounded the cub and laughed at him,
+while he wailed out his terror and his hurt. In the midst of it, he
+heard something. The Indians heard it too. But the cub knew what it
+was, and with a last, long wail that had in it more of triumph than
+grief, he ceased his noise and waited for the coming of his mother, of
+his ferocious and indomitable mother who fought and killed all things
+and was never afraid. She was snarling as she ran. She had heard the
+cry of her cub and was dashing to save him.
+
+She bounded in amongst them, her anxious and militant motherhood making
+her anything but a pretty sight. But to the cub the spectacle of her
+protective rage was pleasing. He uttered a glad little cry and bounded
+to meet her, while the man-animals went back hastily several steps. The
+she-wolf stood over against her cub, facing the men, with bristling
+hair, a snarl rumbling deep in her throat. Her face was distorted and
+malignant with menace, even the bridge of the nose wrinkling from tip
+to eyes so prodigious was her snarl.
+
+Then it was that a cry went up from one of the men. “Kiche!” was what
+he uttered. It was an exclamation of surprise. The cub felt his mother
+wilting at the sound.
+
+“Kiche!” the man cried again, this time with sharpness and authority.
+
+And then the cub saw his mother, the she-wolf, the fearless one,
+crouching down till her belly touched the ground, whimpering, wagging
+her tail, making peace signs. The cub could not understand. He was
+appalled. The awe of man rushed over him again. His instinct had been
+true. His mother verified it. She, too, rendered submission to the
+man-animals.
+
+The man who had spoken came over to her. He put his hand upon her head,
+and she only crouched closer. She did not snap, nor threaten to snap.
+The other men came up, and surrounded her, and felt her, and pawed her,
+which actions she made no attempt to resent. They were greatly excited,
+and made many noises with their mouths. These noises were not
+indication of danger, the cub decided, as he crouched near his mother
+still bristling from time to time but doing his best to submit.
+
+“It is not strange,” an Indian was saying. “Her father was a wolf. It
+is true, her mother was a dog; but did not my brother tie her out in
+the woods all of three nights in the mating season? Therefore was the
+father of Kiche a wolf.”
+
+“It is a year, Grey Beaver, since she ran away,” spoke a second Indian.
+
+“It is not strange, Salmon Tongue,” Grey Beaver answered. “It was the
+time of the famine, and there was no meat for the dogs.”
+
+“She has lived with the wolves,” said a third Indian.
+
+“So it would seem, Three Eagles,” Grey Beaver answered, laying his hand
+on the cub; “and this be the sign of it.”
+
+The cub snarled a little at the touch of the hand, and the hand flew
+back to administer a clout. Whereupon the cub covered its fangs, and
+sank down submissively, while the hand, returning, rubbed behind his
+ears, and up and down his back.
+
+“This be the sign of it,” Grey Beaver went on. “It is plain that his
+mother is Kiche. But his father was a wolf. Wherefore is there in him
+little dog and much wolf. His fangs be white, and White Fang shall be
+his name. I have spoken. He is my dog. For was not Kiche my brother’s
+dog? And is not my brother dead?”
+
+The cub, who had thus received a name in the world, lay and watched.
+For a time the man-animals continued to make their mouth-noises. Then
+Grey Beaver took a knife from a sheath that hung around his neck, and
+went into the thicket and cut a stick. White Fang watched him. He
+notched the stick at each end and in the notches fastened strings of
+raw-hide. One string he tied around the throat of Kiche. Then he led
+her to a small pine, around which he tied the other string.
+
+White Fang followed and lay down beside her. Salmon Tongue’s hand
+reached out to him and rolled him over on his back. Kiche looked on
+anxiously. White Fang felt fear mounting in him again. He could not
+quite suppress a snarl, but he made no offer to snap. The hand, with
+fingers crooked and spread apart, rubbed his stomach in a playful way
+and rolled him from side to side. It was ridiculous and ungainly, lying
+there on his back with legs sprawling in the air. Besides, it was a
+position of such utter helplessness that White Fang’s whole nature
+revolted against it. He could do nothing to defend himself. If this
+man-animal intended harm, White Fang knew that he could not escape it.
+How could he spring away with his four legs in the air above him? Yet
+submission made him master his fear, and he only growled softly. This
+growl he could not suppress; nor did the man-animal resent it by giving
+him a blow on the head. And furthermore, such was the strangeness of
+it, White Fang experienced an unaccountable sensation of pleasure as
+the hand rubbed back and forth. When he was rolled on his side he
+ceased to growl, when the fingers pressed and prodded at the base of
+his ears the pleasurable sensation increased; and when, with a final
+rub and scratch, the man left him alone and went away, all fear had
+died out of White Fang. He was to know fear many times in his dealing
+with man; yet it was a token of the fearless companionship with man
+that was ultimately to be his.
+
+After a time, White Fang heard strange noises approaching. He was quick
+in his classification, for he knew them at once for man-animal noises.
+A few minutes later the remainder of the tribe, strung out as it was on
+the march, trailed in. There were more men and many women and children,
+forty souls of them, and all heavily burdened with camp equipage and
+outfit. Also there were many dogs; and these, with the exception of the
+part-grown puppies, were likewise burdened with camp outfit. On their
+backs, in bags that fastened tightly around underneath, the dogs
+carried from twenty to thirty pounds of weight.
+
+White Fang had never seen dogs before, but at sight of them he felt
+that they were his own kind, only somehow different. But they displayed
+little difference from the wolf when they discovered the cub and his
+mother. There was a rush. White Fang bristled and snarled and snapped
+in the face of the open-mouthed oncoming wave of dogs, and went down
+and under them, feeling the sharp slash of teeth in his body, himself
+biting and tearing at the legs and bellies above him. There was a great
+uproar. He could hear the snarl of Kiche as she fought for him; and he
+could hear the cries of the man-animals, the sound of clubs striking
+upon bodies, and the yelps of pain from the dogs so struck.
+
+Only a few seconds elapsed before he was on his feet again. He could
+now see the man-animals driving back the dogs with clubs and stones,
+defending him, saving him from the savage teeth of his kind that
+somehow was not his kind. And though there was no reason in his brain
+for a clear conception of so abstract a thing as justice, nevertheless,
+in his own way, he felt the justice of the man-animals, and he knew
+them for what they were—makers of law and executors of law. Also, he
+appreciated the power with which they administered the law. Unlike any
+animals he had ever encountered, they did not bite nor claw. They
+enforced their live strength with the power of dead things. Dead things
+did their bidding. Thus, sticks and stones, directed by these strange
+creatures, leaped through the air like living things, inflicting
+grievous hurts upon the dogs.
+
+To his mind this was power unusual, power inconceivable and beyond the
+natural, power that was godlike. White Fang, in the very nature of him,
+could never know anything about gods; at the best he could know only
+things that were beyond knowing—but the wonder and awe that he had of
+these man-animals in ways resembled what would be the wonder and awe of
+man at sight of some celestial creature, on a mountain top, hurling
+thunderbolts from either hand at an astonished world.
+
+The last dog had been driven back. The hubbub died down. And White Fang
+licked his hurts and meditated upon this, his first taste of
+pack-cruelty and his introduction to the pack. He had never dreamed
+that his own kind consisted of more than One Eye, his mother, and
+himself. They had constituted a kind apart, and here, abruptly, he had
+discovered many more creatures apparently of his own kind. And there
+was a subconscious resentment that these, his kind, at first sight had
+pitched upon him and tried to destroy him. In the same way he resented
+his mother being tied with a stick, even though it was done by the
+superior man-animals. It savoured of the trap, of bondage. Yet of the
+trap and of bondage he knew nothing. Freedom to roam and run and lie
+down at will, had been his heritage; and here it was being infringed
+upon. His mother’s movements were restricted to the length of a stick,
+and by the length of that same stick was he restricted, for he had not
+yet got beyond the need of his mother’s side.
+
+He did not like it. Nor did he like it when the man-animals arose and
+went on with their march; for a tiny man-animal took the other end of
+the stick and led Kiche captive behind him, and behind Kiche followed
+White Fang, greatly perturbed and worried by this new adventure he had
+entered upon.
+
+They went down the valley of the stream, far beyond White Fang’s widest
+ranging, until they came to the end of the valley, where the stream ran
+into the Mackenzie River. Here, where canoes were cached on poles high
+in the air and where stood fish-racks for the drying of fish, camp was
+made; and White Fang looked on with wondering eyes. The superiority of
+these man-animals increased with every moment. There was their mastery
+over all these sharp-fanged dogs. It breathed of power. But greater
+than that, to the wolf-cub, was their mastery over things not alive;
+their capacity to communicate motion to unmoving things; their capacity
+to change the very face of the world.
+
+It was this last that especially affected him. The elevation of frames
+of poles caught his eye; yet this in itself was not so remarkable,
+being done by the same creatures that flung sticks and stones to great
+distances. But when the frames of poles were made into tepees by being
+covered with cloth and skins, White Fang was astounded. It was the
+colossal bulk of them that impressed him. They arose around him, on
+every side, like some monstrous quick-growing form of life. They
+occupied nearly the whole circumference of his field of vision. He was
+afraid of them. They loomed ominously above him; and when the breeze
+stirred them into huge movements, he cowered down in fear, keeping his
+eyes warily upon them, and prepared to spring away if they attempted to
+precipitate themselves upon him.
+
+But in a short while his fear of the tepees passed away. He saw the
+women and children passing in and out of them without harm, and he saw
+the dogs trying often to get into them, and being driven away with
+sharp words and flying stones. After a time, he left Kiche’s side and
+crawled cautiously toward the wall of the nearest tepee. It was the
+curiosity of growth that urged him on—the necessity of learning and
+living and doing that brings experience. The last few inches to the
+wall of the tepee were crawled with painful slowness and precaution.
+The day’s events had prepared him for the unknown to manifest itself in
+most stupendous and unthinkable ways. At last his nose touched the
+canvas. He waited. Nothing happened. Then he smelled the strange
+fabric, saturated with the man-smell. He closed on the canvas with his
+teeth and gave a gentle tug. Nothing happened, though the adjacent
+portions of the tepee moved. He tugged harder. There was a greater
+movement. It was delightful. He tugged still harder, and repeatedly,
+until the whole tepee was in motion. Then the sharp cry of a squaw
+inside sent him scampering back to Kiche. But after that he was afraid
+no more of the looming bulks of the tepees.
+
+A moment later he was straying away again from his mother. Her stick
+was tied to a peg in the ground and she could not follow him. A
+part-grown puppy, somewhat larger and older than he, came toward him
+slowly, with ostentatious and belligerent importance. The puppy’s name,
+as White Fang was afterward to hear him called, was Lip-lip. He had had
+experience in puppy fights and was already something of a bully.
+
+Lip-lip was White Fang’s own kind, and, being only a puppy, did not
+seem dangerous; so White Fang prepared to meet him in a friendly
+spirit. But when the strangers walk became stiff-legged and his lips
+lifted clear of his teeth, White Fang stiffened too, and answered with
+lifted lips. They half circled about each other, tentatively, snarling
+and bristling. This lasted several minutes, and White Fang was
+beginning to enjoy it, as a sort of game. But suddenly, with remarkable
+swiftness, Lip-lip leaped in, delivering a slashing snap, and leaped
+away again. The snap had taken effect on the shoulder that had been
+hurt by the lynx and that was still sore deep down near the bone. The
+surprise and hurt of it brought a yelp out of White Fang; but the next
+moment, in a rush of anger, he was upon Lip-lip and snapping viciously.
+
+But Lip-lip had lived his life in camp and had fought many puppy
+fights. Three times, four times, and half a dozen times, his sharp
+little teeth scored on the newcomer, until White Fang, yelping
+shamelessly, fled to the protection of his mother. It was the first of
+the many fights he was to have with Lip-lip, for they were enemies from
+the start, born so, with natures destined perpetually to clash.
+
+Kiche licked White Fang soothingly with her tongue, and tried to
+prevail upon him to remain with her. But his curiosity was rampant, and
+several minutes later he was venturing forth on a new quest. He came
+upon one of the man-animals, Grey Beaver, who was squatting on his hams
+and doing something with sticks and dry moss spread before him on the
+ground. White Fang came near to him and watched. Grey Beaver made
+mouth-noises which White Fang interpreted as not hostile, so he came
+still nearer.
+
+Women and children were carrying more sticks and branches to Grey
+Beaver. It was evidently an affair of moment. White Fang came in until
+he touched Grey Beaver’s knee, so curious was he, and already forgetful
+that this was a terrible man-animal. Suddenly he saw a strange thing
+like mist beginning to arise from the sticks and moss beneath Grey
+Beaver’s hands. Then, amongst the sticks themselves, appeared a live
+thing, twisting and turning, of a colour like the colour of the sun in
+the sky. White Fang knew nothing about fire. It drew him as the light,
+in the mouth of the cave had drawn him in his early puppyhood. He
+crawled the several steps toward the flame. He heard Grey Beaver
+chuckle above him, and he knew the sound was not hostile. Then his nose
+touched the flame, and at the same instant his little tongue went out
+to it.
+
+For a moment he was paralysed. The unknown, lurking in the midst of the
+sticks and moss, was savagely clutching him by the nose. He scrambled
+backward, bursting out in an astonished explosion of ki-yi’s. At the
+sound, Kiche leaped snarling to the end of her stick, and there raged
+terribly because she could not come to his aid. But Grey Beaver laughed
+loudly, and slapped his thighs, and told the happening to all the rest
+of the camp, till everybody was laughing uproariously. But White Fang
+sat on his haunches and ki-yi’d and ki-yi’d, a forlorn and pitiable
+little figure in the midst of the man-animals.
+
+It was the worst hurt he had ever known. Both nose and tongue had been
+scorched by the live thing, sun-coloured, that had grown up under Grey
+Beaver’s hands. He cried and cried interminably, and every fresh wail
+was greeted by bursts of laughter on the part of the man-animals. He
+tried to soothe his nose with his tongue, but the tongue was burnt too,
+and the two hurts coming together produced greater hurt; whereupon he
+cried more hopelessly and helplessly than ever.
+
+And then shame came to him. He knew laughter and the meaning of it. It
+is not given us to know how some animals know laughter, and know when
+they are being laughed at; but it was this same way that White Fang
+knew it. And he felt shame that the man-animals should be laughing at
+him. He turned and fled away, not from the hurt of the fire, but from
+the laughter that sank even deeper, and hurt in the spirit of him. And
+he fled to Kiche, raging at the end of her stick like an animal gone
+mad—to Kiche, the one creature in the world who was not laughing at
+him.
+
+Twilight drew down and night came on, and White Fang lay by his
+mother’s side. His nose and tongue still hurt, but he was perplexed by
+a greater trouble. He was homesick. He felt a vacancy in him, a need
+for the hush and quietude of the stream and the cave in the cliff. Life
+had become too populous. There were so many of the man-animals, men,
+women, and children, all making noises and irritations. And there were
+the dogs, ever squabbling and bickering, bursting into uproars and
+creating confusions. The restful loneliness of the only life he had
+known was gone. Here the very air was palpitant with life. It hummed
+and buzzed unceasingly. Continually changing its intensity and abruptly
+variant in pitch, it impinged on his nerves and senses, made him
+nervous and restless and worried him with a perpetual imminence of
+happening.
+
+He watched the man-animals coming and going and moving about the camp.
+In fashion distantly resembling the way men look upon the gods they
+create, so looked White Fang upon the man-animals before him. They were
+superior creatures, of a verity, gods. To his dim comprehension they
+were as much wonder-workers as gods are to men. They were creatures of
+mastery, possessing all manner of unknown and impossible potencies,
+overlords of the alive and the not alive—making obey that which moved,
+imparting movement to that which did not move, and making life,
+sun-coloured and biting life, to grow out of dead moss and wood. They
+were fire-makers! They were gods.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II
+THE BONDAGE
+
+
+The days were thronged with experience for White Fang. During the time
+that Kiche was tied by the stick, he ran about over all the camp,
+inquiring, investigating, learning. He quickly came to know much of the
+ways of the man-animals, but familiarity did not breed contempt. The
+more he came to know them, the more they vindicated their superiority,
+the more they displayed their mysterious powers, the greater loomed
+their god-likeness.
+
+To man has been given the grief, often, of seeing his gods overthrown
+and his altars crumbling; but to the wolf and the wild dog that have
+come in to crouch at man’s feet, this grief has never come. Unlike man,
+whose gods are of the unseen and the overguessed, vapours and mists of
+fancy eluding the garmenture of reality, wandering wraiths of desired
+goodness and power, intangible out-croppings of self into the realm of
+spirit—unlike man, the wolf and the wild dog that have come in to the
+fire find their gods in the living flesh, solid to the touch, occupying
+earth-space and requiring time for the accomplishment of their ends and
+their existence. No effort of faith is necessary to believe in such a
+god; no effort of will can possibly induce disbelief in such a god.
+There is no getting away from it. There it stands, on its two
+hind-legs, club in hand, immensely potential, passionate and wrathful
+and loving, god and mystery and power all wrapped up and around by
+flesh that bleeds when it is torn and that is good to eat like any
+flesh.
+
+And so it was with White Fang. The man-animals were gods unmistakable
+and unescapable. As his mother, Kiche, had rendered her allegiance to
+them at the first cry of her name, so he was beginning to render his
+allegiance. He gave them the trail as a privilege indubitably theirs.
+When they walked, he got out of their way. When they called, he came.
+When they threatened, he cowered down. When they commanded him to go,
+he went away hurriedly. For behind any wish of theirs was power to
+enforce that wish, power that hurt, power that expressed itself in
+clouts and clubs, in flying stones and stinging lashes of whips.
+
+He belonged to them as all dogs belonged to them. His actions were
+theirs to command. His body was theirs to maul, to stamp upon, to
+tolerate. Such was the lesson that was quickly borne in upon him. It
+came hard, going as it did, counter to much that was strong and
+dominant in his own nature; and, while he disliked it in the learning
+of it, unknown to himself he was learning to like it. It was a placing
+of his destiny in another’s hands, a shifting of the responsibilities
+of existence. This in itself was compensation, for it is always easier
+to lean upon another than to stand alone.
+
+But it did not all happen in a day, this giving over of himself, body
+and soul, to the man-animals. He could not immediately forego his wild
+heritage and his memories of the Wild. There were days when he crept to
+the edge of the forest and stood and listened to something calling him
+far and away. And always he returned, restless and uncomfortable, to
+whimper softly and wistfully at Kiche’s side and to lick her face with
+eager, questioning tongue.
+
+White Fang learned rapidly the ways of the camp. He knew the injustice
+and greediness of the older dogs when meat or fish was thrown out to be
+eaten. He came to know that men were more just, children more cruel,
+and women more kindly and more likely to toss him a bit of meat or
+bone. And after two or three painful adventures with the mothers of
+part-grown puppies, he came into the knowledge that it was always good
+policy to let such mothers alone, to keep away from them as far as
+possible, and to avoid them when he saw them coming.
+
+But the bane of his life was Lip-lip. Larger, older, and stronger,
+Lip-lip had selected White Fang for his special object of persecution.
+White Fang fought willingly enough, but he was outclassed. His enemy
+was too big. Lip-lip became a nightmare to him. Whenever he ventured
+away from his mother, the bully was sure to appear, trailing at his
+heels, snarling at him, picking upon him, and watchful of an
+opportunity, when no man-animal was near, to spring upon him and force
+a fight. As Lip-lip invariably won, he enjoyed it hugely. It became his
+chief delight in life, as it became White Fang’s chief torment.
+
+But the effect upon White Fang was not to cow him. Though he suffered
+most of the damage and was always defeated, his spirit remained
+unsubdued. Yet a bad effect was produced. He became malignant and
+morose. His temper had been savage by birth, but it became more savage
+under this unending persecution. The genial, playful, puppyish side of
+him found little expression. He never played and gambolled about with
+the other puppies of the camp. Lip-lip would not permit it. The moment
+White Fang appeared near them, Lip-lip was upon him, bullying and
+hectoring him, or fighting with him until he had driven him away.
+
+The effect of all this was to rob White Fang of much of his puppyhood
+and to make him in his comportment older than his age. Denied the
+outlet, through play, of his energies, he recoiled upon himself and
+developed his mental processes. He became cunning; he had idle time in
+which to devote himself to thoughts of trickery. Prevented from
+obtaining his share of meat and fish when a general feed was given to
+the camp-dogs, he became a clever thief. He had to forage for himself,
+and he foraged well, though he was oft-times a plague to the squaws in
+consequence. He learned to sneak about camp, to be crafty, to know what
+was going on everywhere, to see and to hear everything and to reason
+accordingly, and successfully to devise ways and means of avoiding his
+implacable persecutor.
+
+It was early in the days of his persecution that he played his first
+really big crafty game and got there from his first taste of revenge.
+As Kiche, when with the wolves, had lured out to destruction dogs from
+the camps of men, so White Fang, in manner somewhat similar, lured
+Lip-lip into Kiche’s avenging jaws. Retreating before Lip-lip, White
+Fang made an indirect flight that led in and out and around the various
+tepees of the camp. He was a good runner, swifter than any puppy of his
+size, and swifter than Lip-lip. But he did not run his best in this
+chase. He barely held his own, one leap ahead of his pursuer.
+
+Lip-lip, excited by the chase and by the persistent nearness of his
+victim, forgot caution and locality. When he remembered locality, it
+was too late. Dashing at top speed around a tepee, he ran full tilt
+into Kiche lying at the end of her stick. He gave one yelp of
+consternation, and then her punishing jaws closed upon him. She was
+tied, but he could not get away from her easily. She rolled him off his
+legs so that he could not run, while she repeatedly ripped and slashed
+him with her fangs.
+
+When at last he succeeded in rolling clear of her, he crawled to his
+feet, badly dishevelled, hurt both in body and in spirit. His hair was
+standing out all over him in tufts where her teeth had mauled. He stood
+where he had arisen, opened his mouth, and broke out the long,
+heart-broken puppy wail. But even this he was not allowed to complete.
+In the middle of it, White Fang, rushing in, sank his teeth into
+Lip-lip’s hind leg. There was no fight left in Lip-lip, and he ran away
+shamelessly, his victim hot on his heels and worrying him all the way
+back to his own tepee. Here the squaws came to his aid, and White Fang,
+transformed into a raging demon, was finally driven off only by a
+fusillade of stones.
+
+Came the day when Grey Beaver, deciding that the liability of her
+running away was past, released Kiche. White Fang was delighted with
+his mother’s freedom. He accompanied her joyfully about the camp; and,
+so long as he remained close by her side, Lip-lip kept a respectful
+distance. White-Fang even bristled up to him and walked stiff-legged,
+but Lip-lip ignored the challenge. He was no fool himself, and whatever
+vengeance he desired to wreak, he could wait until he caught White Fang
+alone.
+
+Later on that day, Kiche and White Fang strayed into the edge of the
+woods next to the camp. He had led his mother there, step by step, and
+now when she stopped, he tried to inveigle her farther. The stream, the
+lair, and the quiet woods were calling to him, and he wanted her to
+come. He ran on a few steps, stopped, and looked back. She had not
+moved. He whined pleadingly, and scurried playfully in and out of the
+underbrush. He ran back to her, licked her face, and ran on again. And
+still she did not move. He stopped and regarded her, all of an
+intentness and eagerness, physically expressed, that slowly faded out
+of him as she turned her head and gazed back at the camp.
+
+There was something calling to him out there in the open. His mother
+heard it too. But she heard also that other and louder call, the call
+of the fire and of man—the call which has been given alone of all
+animals to the wolf to answer, to the wolf and the wild-dog, who are
+brothers.
+
+Kiche turned and slowly trotted back toward camp. Stronger than the
+physical restraint of the stick was the clutch of the camp upon her.
+Unseen and occultly, the gods still gripped with their power and would
+not let her go. White Fang sat down in the shadow of a birch and
+whimpered softly. There was a strong smell of pine, and subtle wood
+fragrances filled the air, reminding him of his old life of freedom
+before the days of his bondage. But he was still only a part-grown
+puppy, and stronger than the call either of man or of the Wild was the
+call of his mother. All the hours of his short life he had depended
+upon her. The time was yet to come for independence. So he arose and
+trotted forlornly back to camp, pausing once, and twice, to sit down
+and whimper and to listen to the call that still sounded in the depths
+of the forest.
+
+In the Wild the time of a mother with her young is short; but under the
+dominion of man it is sometimes even shorter. Thus it was with White
+Fang. Grey Beaver was in the debt of Three Eagles. Three Eagles was
+going away on a trip up the Mackenzie to the Great Slave Lake. A strip
+of scarlet cloth, a bearskin, twenty cartridges, and Kiche, went to pay
+the debt. White Fang saw his mother taken aboard Three Eagles’ canoe,
+and tried to follow her. A blow from Three Eagles knocked him backward
+to the land. The canoe shoved off. He sprang into the water and swam
+after it, deaf to the sharp cries of Grey Beaver to return. Even a
+man-animal, a god, White Fang ignored, such was the terror he was in of
+losing his mother.
+
+But gods are accustomed to being obeyed, and Grey Beaver wrathfully
+launched a canoe in pursuit. When he overtook White Fang, he reached
+down and by the nape of the neck lifted him clear of the water. He did
+not deposit him at once in the bottom of the canoe. Holding him
+suspended with one hand, with the other hand he proceeded to give him a
+beating. And it _was_ a beating. His hand was heavy. Every blow was
+shrewd to hurt; and he delivered a multitude of blows.
+
+Impelled by the blows that rained upon him, now from this side, now
+from that, White Fang swung back and forth like an erratic and jerky
+pendulum. Varying were the emotions that surged through him. At first,
+he had known surprise. Then came a momentary fear, when he yelped
+several times to the impact of the hand. But this was quickly followed
+by anger. His free nature asserted itself, and he showed his teeth and
+snarled fearlessly in the face of the wrathful god. This but served to
+make the god more wrathful. The blows came faster, heavier, more shrewd
+to hurt.
+
+Grey Beaver continued to beat, White Fang continued to snarl. But this
+could not last for ever. One or the other must give over, and that one
+was White Fang. Fear surged through him again. For the first time he
+was being really man-handled. The occasional blows of sticks and stones
+he had previously experienced were as caresses compared with this. He
+broke down and began to cry and yelp. For a time each blow brought a
+yelp from him; but fear passed into terror, until finally his yelps
+were voiced in unbroken succession, unconnected with the rhythm of the
+punishment.
+
+At last Grey Beaver withheld his hand. White Fang, hanging limply,
+continued to cry. This seemed to satisfy his master, who flung him down
+roughly in the bottom of the canoe. In the meantime the canoe had
+drifted down the stream. Grey Beaver picked up the paddle. White Fang
+was in his way. He spurned him savagely with his foot. In that moment
+White Fang’s free nature flashed forth again, and he sank his teeth
+into the moccasined foot.
+
+The beating that had gone before was as nothing compared with the
+beating he now received. Grey Beaver’s wrath was terrible; likewise was
+White Fang’s fright. Not only the hand, but the hard wooden paddle was
+used upon him; and he was bruised and sore in all his small body when
+he was again flung down in the canoe. Again, and this time with
+purpose, did Grey Beaver kick him. White Fang did not repeat his attack
+on the foot. He had learned another lesson of his bondage. Never, no
+matter what the circumstance, must he dare to bite the god who was lord
+and master over him; the body of the lord and master was sacred, not to
+be defiled by the teeth of such as he. That was evidently the crime of
+crimes, the one offence there was no condoning nor overlooking.
+
+When the canoe touched the shore, White Fang lay whimpering and
+motionless, waiting the will of Grey Beaver. It was Grey Beaver’s will
+that he should go ashore, for ashore he was flung, striking heavily on
+his side and hurting his bruises afresh. He crawled tremblingly to his
+feet and stood whimpering. Lip-lip, who had watched the whole
+proceeding from the bank, now rushed upon him, knocking him over and
+sinking his teeth into him. White Fang was too helpless to defend
+himself, and it would have gone hard with him had not Grey Beaver’s
+foot shot out, lifting Lip-lip into the air with its violence so that
+he smashed down to earth a dozen feet away. This was the man-animal’s
+justice; and even then, in his own pitiable plight, White Fang
+experienced a little grateful thrill. At Grey Beaver’s heels he limped
+obediently through the village to the tepee. And so it came that White
+Fang learned that the right to punish was something the gods reserved
+for themselves and denied to the lesser creatures under them.
+
+That night, when all was still, White Fang remembered his mother and
+sorrowed for her. He sorrowed too loudly and woke up Grey Beaver, who
+beat him. After that he mourned gently when the gods were around. But
+sometimes, straying off to the edge of the woods by himself, he gave
+vent to his grief, and cried it out with loud whimperings and wailings.
+
+It was during this period that he might have harkened to the memories
+of the lair and the stream and run back to the Wild. But the memory of
+his mother held him. As the hunting man-animals went out and came back,
+so she would come back to the village some time. So he remained in his
+bondage waiting for her.
+
+But it was not altogether an unhappy bondage. There was much to
+interest him. Something was always happening. There was no end to the
+strange things these gods did, and he was always curious to see.
+Besides, he was learning how to get along with Grey Beaver. Obedience,
+rigid, undeviating obedience, was what was exacted of him; and in
+return he escaped beatings and his existence was tolerated.
+
+Nay, Grey Beaver himself sometimes tossed him a piece of meat, and
+defended him against the other dogs in the eating of it. And such a
+piece of meat was of value. It was worth more, in some strange way,
+then a dozen pieces of meat from the hand of a squaw. Grey Beaver never
+petted nor caressed. Perhaps it was the weight of his hand, perhaps his
+justice, perhaps the sheer power of him, and perhaps it was all these
+things that influenced White Fang; for a certain tie of attachment was
+forming between him and his surly lord.
+
+Insidiously, and by remote ways, as well as by the power of stick and
+stone and clout of hand, were the shackles of White Fang’s bondage
+being riveted upon him. The qualities in his kind that in the beginning
+made it possible for them to come in to the fires of men, were
+qualities capable of development. They were developing in him, and the
+camp-life, replete with misery as it was, was secretly endearing itself
+to him all the time. But White Fang was unaware of it. He knew only
+grief for the loss of Kiche, hope for her return, and a hungry yearning
+for the free life that had been his.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III
+THE OUTCAST
+
+
+Lip-lip continued so to darken his days that White Fang became wickeder
+and more ferocious than it was his natural right to be. Savageness was
+a part of his make-up, but the savageness thus developed exceeded his
+make-up. He acquired a reputation for wickedness amongst the
+man-animals themselves. Wherever there was trouble and uproar in camp,
+fighting and squabbling or the outcry of a squaw over a bit of stolen
+meat, they were sure to find White Fang mixed up in it and usually at
+the bottom of it. They did not bother to look after the causes of his
+conduct. They saw only the effects, and the effects were bad. He was a
+sneak and a thief, a mischief-maker, a fomenter of trouble; and irate
+squaws told him to his face, the while he eyed them alert and ready to
+dodge any quick-flung missile, that he was a wolf and worthless and
+bound to come to an evil end.
+
+He found himself an outcast in the midst of the populous camp. All the
+young dogs followed Lip-lip’s lead. There was a difference between
+White Fang and them. Perhaps they sensed his wild-wood breed, and
+instinctively felt for him the enmity that the domestic dog feels for
+the wolf. But be that as it may, they joined with Lip-lip in the
+persecution. And, once declared against him, they found good reason to
+continue declared against him. One and all, from time to time, they
+felt his teeth; and to his credit, he gave more than he received. Many
+of them he could whip in single fight; but single fight was denied him.
+The beginning of such a fight was a signal for all the young dogs in
+camp to come running and pitch upon him.
+
+Out of this pack-persecution he learned two important things: how to
+take care of himself in a mass-fight against him—and how, on a single
+dog, to inflict the greatest amount of damage in the briefest space of
+time. To keep one’s feet in the midst of the hostile mass meant life,
+and this he learnt well. He became cat-like in his ability to stay on
+his feet. Even grown dogs might hurtle him backward or sideways with
+the impact of their heavy bodies; and backward or sideways he would go,
+in the air or sliding on the ground, but always with his legs under him
+and his feet downward to the mother earth.
+
+When dogs fight, there are usually preliminaries to the actual
+combat—snarlings and bristlings and stiff-legged struttings. But White
+Fang learned to omit these preliminaries. Delay meant the coming
+against him of all the young dogs. He must do his work quickly and get
+away. So he learnt to give no warning of his intention. He rushed in
+and snapped and slashed on the instant, without notice, before his foe
+could prepare to meet him. Thus he learned how to inflict quick and
+severe damage. Also he learned the value of surprise. A dog, taken off
+its guard, its shoulder slashed open or its ear ripped in ribbons
+before it knew what was happening, was a dog half whipped.
+
+Furthermore, it was remarkably easy to overthrow a dog taken by
+surprise; while a dog, thus overthrown, invariably exposed for a moment
+the soft underside of its neck—the vulnerable point at which to strike
+for its life. White Fang knew this point. It was a knowledge bequeathed
+to him directly from the hunting generation of wolves. So it was that
+White Fang’s method when he took the offensive, was: first to find a
+young dog alone; second, to surprise it and knock it off its feet; and
+third, to drive in with his teeth at the soft throat.
+
+Being but partly grown his jaws had not yet become large enough nor
+strong enough to make his throat-attack deadly; but many a young dog
+went around camp with a lacerated throat in token of White Fang’s
+intention. And one day, catching one of his enemies alone on the edge
+of the woods, he managed, by repeatedly overthrowing him and attacking
+the throat, to cut the great vein and let out the life. There was a
+great row that night. He had been observed, the news had been carried
+to the dead dog’s master, the squaws remembered all the instances of
+stolen meat, and Grey Beaver was beset by many angry voices. But he
+resolutely held the door of his tepee, inside which he had placed the
+culprit, and refused to permit the vengeance for which his tribespeople
+clamoured.
+
+White Fang became hated by man and dog. During this period of his
+development he never knew a moment’s security. The tooth of every dog
+was against him, the hand of every man. He was greeted with snarls by
+his kind, with curses and stones by his gods. He lived tensely. He was
+always keyed up, alert for attack, wary of being attacked, with an eye
+for sudden and unexpected missiles, prepared to act precipitately and
+coolly, to leap in with a flash of teeth, or to leap away with a
+menacing snarl.
+
+As for snarling he could snarl more terribly than any dog, young or
+old, in camp. The intent of the snarl is to warn or frighten, and
+judgment is required to know when it should be used. White Fang knew
+how to make it and when to make it. Into his snarl he incorporated all
+that was vicious, malignant, and horrible. With nose serrulated by
+continuous spasms, hair bristling in recurrent waves, tongue whipping
+out like a red snake and whipping back again, ears flattened down, eyes
+gleaming hatred, lips wrinkled back, and fangs exposed and dripping, he
+could compel a pause on the part of almost any assailant. A temporary
+pause, when taken off his guard, gave him the vital moment in which to
+think and determine his action. But often a pause so gained lengthened
+out until it evolved into a complete cessation from the attack. And
+before more than one of the grown dogs White Fang’s snarl enabled him
+to beat an honourable retreat.
+
+An outcast himself from the pack of the part-grown dogs, his sanguinary
+methods and remarkable efficiency made the pack pay for its persecution
+of him. Not permitted himself to run with the pack, the curious state
+of affairs obtained that no member of the pack could run outside the
+pack. White Fang would not permit it. What of his bushwhacking and
+waylaying tactics, the young dogs were afraid to run by themselves.
+With the exception of Lip-lip, they were compelled to hunch together
+for mutual protection against the terrible enemy they had made. A puppy
+alone by the river bank meant a puppy dead or a puppy that aroused the
+camp with its shrill pain and terror as it fled back from the wolf-cub
+that had waylaid it.
+
+But White Fang’s reprisals did not cease, even when the young dogs had
+learned thoroughly that they must stay together. He attacked them when
+he caught them alone, and they attacked him when they were bunched. The
+sight of him was sufficient to start them rushing after him, at which
+times his swiftness usually carried him into safety. But woe the dog
+that outran his fellows in such pursuit! White Fang had learned to turn
+suddenly upon the pursuer that was ahead of the pack and thoroughly to
+rip him up before the pack could arrive. This occurred with great
+frequency, for, once in full cry, the dogs were prone to forget
+themselves in the excitement of the chase, while White Fang never
+forgot himself. Stealing backward glances as he ran, he was always
+ready to whirl around and down the overzealous pursuer that outran his
+fellows.
+
+Young dogs are bound to play, and out of the exigencies of the
+situation they realised their play in this mimic warfare. Thus it was
+that the hunt of White Fang became their chief game—a deadly game,
+withal, and at all times a serious game. He, on the other hand, being
+the fastest-footed, was unafraid to venture anywhere. During the period
+that he waited vainly for his mother to come back, he led the pack many
+a wild chase through the adjacent woods. But the pack invariably lost
+him. Its noise and outcry warned him of its presence, while he ran
+alone, velvet-footed, silently, a moving shadow among the trees after
+the manner of his father and mother before him. Further he was more
+directly connected with the Wild than they; and he knew more of its
+secrets and stratagems. A favourite trick of his was to lose his trail
+in running water and then lie quietly in a near-by thicket while their
+baffled cries arose around him.
+
+Hated by his kind and by mankind, indomitable, perpetually warred upon
+and himself waging perpetual war, his development was rapid and
+one-sided. This was no soil for kindliness and affection to blossom in.
+Of such things he had not the faintest glimmering. The code he learned
+was to obey the strong and to oppress the weak. Grey Beaver was a god,
+and strong. Therefore White Fang obeyed him. But the dog younger or
+smaller than himself was weak, a thing to be destroyed. His development
+was in the direction of power. In order to face the constant danger of
+hurt and even of destruction, his predatory and protective faculties
+were unduly developed. He became quicker of movement than the other
+dogs, swifter of foot, craftier, deadlier, more lithe, more lean with
+ironlike muscle and sinew, more enduring, more cruel, more ferocious,
+and more intelligent. He had to become all these things, else he would
+not have held his own nor survive the hostile environment in which he
+found himself.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV
+THE TRAIL OF THE GODS
+
+
+In the fall of the year, when the days were shortening and the bite of
+the frost was coming into the air, White Fang got his chance for
+liberty. For several days there had been a great hubbub in the village.
+The summer camp was being dismantled, and the tribe, bag and baggage,
+was preparing to go off to the fall hunting. White Fang watched it all
+with eager eyes, and when the tepees began to come down and the canoes
+were loading at the bank, he understood. Already the canoes were
+departing, and some had disappeared down the river.
+
+Quite deliberately he determined to stay behind. He waited his
+opportunity to slink out of camp to the woods. Here, in the running
+stream where ice was beginning to form, he hid his trail. Then he
+crawled into the heart of a dense thicket and waited. The time passed
+by, and he slept intermittently for hours. Then he was aroused by Grey
+Beaver’s voice calling him by name. There were other voices. White Fang
+could hear Grey Beaver’s squaw taking part in the search, and Mit-sah,
+who was Grey Beaver’s son.
+
+White Fang trembled with fear, and though the impulse came to crawl out
+of his hiding-place, he resisted it. After a time the voices died away,
+and some time after that he crept out to enjoy the success of his
+undertaking. Darkness was coming on, and for a while he played about
+among the trees, pleasuring in his freedom. Then, and quite suddenly,
+he became aware of loneliness. He sat down to consider, listening to
+the silence of the forest and perturbed by it. That nothing moved nor
+sounded, seemed ominous. He felt the lurking of danger, unseen and
+unguessed. He was suspicious of the looming bulks of the trees and of
+the dark shadows that might conceal all manner of perilous things.
+
+Then it was cold. Here was no warm side of a tepee against which to
+snuggle. The frost was in his feet, and he kept lifting first one
+fore-foot and then the other. He curved his bushy tail around to cover
+them, and at the same time he saw a vision. There was nothing strange
+about it. Upon his inward sight was impressed a succession of
+memory-pictures. He saw the camp again, the tepees, and the blaze of
+the fires. He heard the shrill voices of the women, the gruff basses of
+the men, and the snarling of the dogs. He was hungry, and he remembered
+pieces of meat and fish that had been thrown him. Here was no meat,
+nothing but a threatening and inedible silence.
+
+His bondage had softened him. Irresponsibility had weakened him. He had
+forgotten how to shift for himself. The night yawned about him. His
+senses, accustomed to the hum and bustle of the camp, used to the
+continuous impact of sights and sounds, were now left idle. There was
+nothing to do, nothing to see nor hear. They strained to catch some
+interruption of the silence and immobility of nature. They were
+appalled by inaction and by the feel of something terrible impending.
+
+He gave a great start of fright. A colossal and formless something was
+rushing across the field of his vision. It was a tree-shadow flung by
+the moon, from whose face the clouds had been brushed away. Reassured,
+he whimpered softly; then he suppressed the whimper for fear that it
+might attract the attention of the lurking dangers.
+
+A tree, contracting in the cool of the night, made a loud noise. It was
+directly above him. He yelped in his fright. A panic seized him, and he
+ran madly toward the village. He knew an overpowering desire for the
+protection and companionship of man. In his nostrils was the smell of
+the camp-smoke. In his ears the camp-sounds and cries were ringing
+loud. He passed out of the forest and into the moonlit open where were
+no shadows nor darknesses. But no village greeted his eyes. He had
+forgotten. The village had gone away.
+
+His wild flight ceased abruptly. There was no place to which to flee.
+He slunk forlornly through the deserted camp, smelling the
+rubbish-heaps and the discarded rags and tags of the gods. He would
+have been glad for the rattle of stones about him, flung by an angry
+squaw, glad for the hand of Grey Beaver descending upon him in wrath;
+while he would have welcomed with delight Lip-lip and the whole
+snarling, cowardly pack.
+
+He came to where Grey Beaver’s tepee had stood. In the centre of the
+space it had occupied, he sat down. He pointed his nose at the moon.
+His throat was afflicted by rigid spasms, his mouth opened, and in a
+heart-broken cry bubbled up his loneliness and fear, his grief for
+Kiche, all his past sorrows and miseries as well as his apprehension of
+sufferings and dangers to come. It was the long wolf-howl,
+full-throated and mournful, the first howl he had ever uttered.
+
+The coming of daylight dispelled his fears but increased his
+loneliness. The naked earth, which so shortly before had been so
+populous; thrust his loneliness more forcibly upon him. It did not take
+him long to make up his mind. He plunged into the forest and followed
+the river bank down the stream. All day he ran. He did not rest. He
+seemed made to run on for ever. His iron-like body ignored fatigue. And
+even after fatigue came, his heritage of endurance braced him to
+endless endeavour and enabled him to drive his complaining body onward.
+
+Where the river swung in against precipitous bluffs, he climbed the
+high mountains behind. Rivers and streams that entered the main river
+he forded or swam. Often he took to the rim-ice that was beginning to
+form, and more than once he crashed through and struggled for life in
+the icy current. Always he was on the lookout for the trail of the gods
+where it might leave the river and proceed inland.
+
+White Fang was intelligent beyond the average of his kind; yet his
+mental vision was not wide enough to embrace the other bank of the
+Mackenzie. What if the trail of the gods led out on that side? It never
+entered his head. Later on, when he had travelled more and grown older
+and wiser and come to know more of trails and rivers, it might be that
+he could grasp and apprehend such a possibility. But that mental power
+was yet in the future. Just now he ran blindly, his own bank of the
+Mackenzie alone entering into his calculations.
+
+All night he ran, blundering in the darkness into mishaps and obstacles
+that delayed but did not daunt. By the middle of the second day he had
+been running continuously for thirty hours, and the iron of his flesh
+was giving out. It was the endurance of his mind that kept him going.
+He had not eaten in forty hours, and he was weak with hunger. The
+repeated drenchings in the icy water had likewise had their effect on
+him. His handsome coat was draggled. The broad pads of his feet were
+bruised and bleeding. He had begun to limp, and this limp increased
+with the hours. To make it worse, the light of the sky was obscured and
+snow began to fall—a raw, moist, melting, clinging snow, slippery under
+foot, that hid from him the landscape he traversed, and that covered
+over the inequalities of the ground so that the way of his feet was
+more difficult and painful.
+
+Grey Beaver had intended camping that night on the far bank of the
+Mackenzie, for it was in that direction that the hunting lay. But on
+the near bank, shortly before dark, a moose coming down to drink, had
+been espied by Kloo-kooch, who was Grey Beaver’s squaw. Now, had not
+the moose come down to drink, had not Mit-sah been steering out of the
+course because of the snow, had not Kloo-kooch sighted the moose, and
+had not Grey Beaver killed it with a lucky shot from his rifle, all
+subsequent things would have happened differently. Grey Beaver would
+not have camped on the near side of the Mackenzie, and White Fang would
+have passed by and gone on, either to die or to find his way to his
+wild brothers and become one of them—a wolf to the end of his days.
+
+Night had fallen. The snow was flying more thickly, and White Fang,
+whimpering softly to himself as he stumbled and limped along, came upon
+a fresh trail in the snow. So fresh was it that he knew it immediately
+for what it was. Whining with eagerness, he followed back from the
+river bank and in among the trees. The camp-sounds came to his ears. He
+saw the blaze of the fire, Kloo-kooch cooking, and Grey Beaver
+squatting on his hams and mumbling a chunk of raw tallow. There was
+fresh meat in camp!
+
+White Fang expected a beating. He crouched and bristled a little at the
+thought of it. Then he went forward again. He feared and disliked the
+beating he knew to be waiting for him. But he knew, further, that the
+comfort of the fire would be his, the protection of the gods, the
+companionship of the dogs—the last, a companionship of enmity, but none
+the less a companionship and satisfying to his gregarious needs.
+
+He came cringing and crawling into the firelight. Grey Beaver saw him,
+and stopped munching the tallow. White Fang crawled slowly, cringing
+and grovelling in the abjectness of his abasement and submission. He
+crawled straight toward Grey Beaver, every inch of his progress
+becoming slower and more painful. At last he lay at the master’s feet,
+into whose possession he now surrendered himself, voluntarily, body and
+soul. Of his own choice, he came in to sit by man’s fire and to be
+ruled by him. White Fang trembled, waiting for the punishment to fall
+upon him. There was a movement of the hand above him. He cringed
+involuntarily under the expected blow. It did not fall. He stole a
+glance upward. Grey Beaver was breaking the lump of tallow in half!
+Grey Beaver was offering him one piece of the tallow! Very gently and
+somewhat suspiciously, he first smelled the tallow and then proceeded
+to eat it. Grey Beaver ordered meat to be brought to him, and guarded
+him from the other dogs while he ate. After that, grateful and content,
+White Fang lay at Grey Beaver’s feet, gazing at the fire that warmed
+him, blinking and dozing, secure in the knowledge that the morrow would
+find him, not wandering forlorn through bleak forest-stretches, but in
+the camp of the man-animals, with the gods to whom he had given himself
+and upon whom he was now dependent.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V
+THE COVENANT
+
+
+When December was well along, Grey Beaver went on a journey up the
+Mackenzie. Mit-sah and Kloo-kooch went with him. One sled he drove
+himself, drawn by dogs he had traded for or borrowed. A second and
+smaller sled was driven by Mit-sah, and to this was harnessed a team of
+puppies. It was more of a toy affair than anything else, yet it was the
+delight of Mit-sah, who felt that he was beginning to do a man’s work
+in the world. Also, he was learning to drive dogs and to train dogs;
+while the puppies themselves were being broken in to the harness.
+Furthermore, the sled was of some service, for it carried nearly two
+hundred pounds of outfit and food.
+
+White Fang had seen the camp-dogs toiling in the harness, so that he
+did not resent overmuch the first placing of the harness upon himself.
+About his neck was put a moss-stuffed collar, which was connected by
+two pulling-traces to a strap that passed around his chest and over his
+back. It was to this that was fastened the long rope by which he pulled
+at the sled.
+
+There were seven puppies in the team. The others had been born earlier
+in the year and were nine and ten months old, while White Fang was only
+eight months old. Each dog was fastened to the sled by a single rope.
+No two ropes were of the same length, while the difference in length
+between any two ropes was at least that of a dog’s body. Every rope was
+brought to a ring at the front end of the sled. The sled itself was
+without runners, being a birch-bark toboggan, with upturned forward end
+to keep it from ploughing under the snow. This construction enabled the
+weight of the sled and load to be distributed over the largest
+snow-surface; for the snow was crystal-powder and very soft. Observing
+the same principle of widest distribution of weight, the dogs at the
+ends of their ropes radiated fan-fashion from the nose of the sled, so
+that no dog trod in another’s footsteps.
+
+There was, furthermore, another virtue in the fan-formation. The ropes
+of varying length prevented the dogs attacking from the rear those that
+ran in front of them. For a dog to attack another, it would have to
+turn upon one at a shorter rope. In which case it would find itself
+face to face with the dog attacked, and also it would find itself
+facing the whip of the driver. But the most peculiar virtue of all lay
+in the fact that the dog that strove to attack one in front of him must
+pull the sled faster, and that the faster the sled travelled, the
+faster could the dog attacked run away. Thus, the dog behind could
+never catch up with the one in front. The faster he ran, the faster ran
+the one he was after, and the faster ran all the dogs. Incidentally,
+the sled went faster, and thus, by cunning indirection, did man
+increase his mastery over the beasts.
+
+Mit-sah resembled his father, much of whose grey wisdom he possessed.
+In the past he had observed Lip-lip’s persecution of White Fang; but at
+that time Lip-lip was another man’s dog, and Mit-sah had never dared
+more than to shy an occasional stone at him. But now Lip-lip was his
+dog, and he proceeded to wreak his vengeance on him by putting him at
+the end of the longest rope. This made Lip-lip the leader, and was
+apparently an honour! but in reality it took away from him all honour,
+and instead of being bully and master of the pack, he now found himself
+hated and persecuted by the pack.
+
+Because he ran at the end of the longest rope, the dogs had always the
+view of him running away before them. All that they saw of him was his
+bushy tail and fleeing hind legs—a view far less ferocious and
+intimidating than his bristling mane and gleaming fangs. Also, dogs
+being so constituted in their mental ways, the sight of him running
+away gave desire to run after him and a feeling that he ran away from
+them.
+
+The moment the sled started, the team took after Lip-lip in a chase
+that extended throughout the day. At first he had been prone to turn
+upon his pursuers, jealous of his dignity and wrathful; but at such
+times Mit-sah would throw the stinging lash of the thirty-foot
+cariboo-gut whip into his face and compel him to turn tail and run on.
+Lip-lip might face the pack, but he could not face that whip, and all
+that was left him to do was to keep his long rope taut and his flanks
+ahead of the teeth of his mates.
+
+But a still greater cunning lurked in the recesses of the Indian mind.
+To give point to unending pursuit of the leader, Mit-sah favoured him
+over the other dogs. These favours aroused in them jealousy and hatred.
+In their presence Mit-sah would give him meat and would give it to him
+only. This was maddening to them. They would rage around just outside
+the throwing-distance of the whip, while Lip-lip devoured the meat and
+Mit-sah protected him. And when there was no meat to give, Mit-sah
+would keep the team at a distance and make believe to give meat to
+Lip-lip.
+
+White Fang took kindly to the work. He had travelled a greater distance
+than the other dogs in the yielding of himself to the rule of the gods,
+and he had learned more thoroughly the futility of opposing their will.
+In addition, the persecution he had suffered from the pack had made the
+pack less to him in the scheme of things, and man more. He had not
+learned to be dependent on his kind for companionship. Besides, Kiche
+was well-nigh forgotten; and the chief outlet of expression that
+remained to him was in the allegiance he tendered the gods he had
+accepted as masters. So he worked hard, learned discipline, and was
+obedient. Faithfulness and willingness characterised his toil. These
+are essential traits of the wolf and the wild-dog when they have become
+domesticated, and these traits White Fang possessed in unusual measure.
+
+A companionship did exist between White Fang and the other dogs, but it
+was one of warfare and enmity. He had never learned to play with them.
+He knew only how to fight, and fight with them he did, returning to
+them a hundred-fold the snaps and slashes they had given him in the
+days when Lip-lip was leader of the pack. But Lip-lip was no longer
+leader—except when he fled away before his mates at the end of his
+rope, the sled bounding along behind. In camp he kept close to Mit-sah
+or Grey Beaver or Kloo-kooch. He did not dare venture away from the
+gods, for now the fangs of all dogs were against him, and he tasted to
+the dregs the persecution that had been White Fang’s.
+
+With the overthrow of Lip-lip, White Fang could have become leader of
+the pack. But he was too morose and solitary for that. He merely
+thrashed his team-mates. Otherwise he ignored them. They got out of his
+way when he came along; nor did the boldest of them ever dare to rob
+him of his meat. On the contrary, they devoured their own meat
+hurriedly, for fear that he would take it away from them. White Fang
+knew the law well: _to oppress the weak and obey the strong_. He ate
+his share of meat as rapidly as he could. And then woe the dog that had
+not yet finished! A snarl and a flash of fangs, and that dog would wail
+his indignation to the uncomforting stars while White Fang finished his
+portion for him.
+
+Every little while, however, one dog or another would flame up in
+revolt and be promptly subdued. Thus White Fang was kept in training.
+He was jealous of the isolation in which he kept himself in the midst
+of the pack, and he fought often to maintain it. But such fights were
+of brief duration. He was too quick for the others. They were slashed
+open and bleeding before they knew what had happened, were whipped
+almost before they had begun to fight.
+
+As rigid as the sled-discipline of the gods, was the discipline
+maintained by White Fang amongst his fellows. He never allowed them any
+latitude. He compelled them to an unremitting respect for him. They
+might do as they pleased amongst themselves. That was no concern of
+his. But it _was_ his concern that they leave him alone in his
+isolation, get out of his way when he elected to walk among them, and
+at all times acknowledge his mastery over them. A hint of
+stiff-leggedness on their part, a lifted lip or a bristle of hair, and
+he would be upon them, merciless and cruel, swiftly convincing them of
+the error of their way.
+
+He was a monstrous tyrant. His mastery was rigid as steel. He oppressed
+the weak with a vengeance. Not for nothing had he been exposed to the
+pitiless struggles for life in the day of his cubhood, when his mother
+and he, alone and unaided, held their own and survived in the ferocious
+environment of the Wild. And not for nothing had he learned to walk
+softly when superior strength went by. He oppressed the weak, but he
+respected the strong. And in the course of the long journey with Grey
+Beaver he walked softly indeed amongst the full-grown dogs in the camps
+of the strange man-animals they encountered.
+
+The months passed by. Still continued the journey of Grey Beaver. White
+Fang’s strength was developed by the long hours on trail and the steady
+toil at the sled; and it would have seemed that his mental development
+was well-nigh complete. He had come to know quite thoroughly the world
+in which he lived. His outlook was bleak and materialistic. The world
+as he saw it was a fierce and brutal world, a world without warmth, a
+world in which caresses and affection and the bright sweetnesses of the
+spirit did not exist.
+
+He had no affection for Grey Beaver. True, he was a god, but a most
+savage god. White Fang was glad to acknowledge his lordship, but it was
+a lordship based upon superior intelligence and brute strength. There
+was something in the fibre of White Fang’s being that made his lordship
+a thing to be desired, else he would not have come back from the Wild
+when he did to tender his allegiance. There were deeps in his nature
+which had never been sounded. A kind word, a caressing touch of the
+hand, on the part of Grey Beaver, might have sounded these deeps; but
+Grey Beaver did not caress, nor speak kind words. It was not his way.
+His primacy was savage, and savagely he ruled, administering justice
+with a club, punishing transgression with the pain of a blow, and
+rewarding merit, not by kindness, but by withholding a blow.
+
+So White Fang knew nothing of the heaven a man’s hand might contain for
+him. Besides, he did not like the hands of the man-animals. He was
+suspicious of them. It was true that they sometimes gave meat, but more
+often they gave hurt. Hands were things to keep away from. They hurled
+stones, wielded sticks and clubs and whips, administered slaps and
+clouts, and, when they touched him, were cunning to hurt with pinch and
+twist and wrench. In strange villages he had encountered the hands of
+the children and learned that they were cruel to hurt. Also, he had
+once nearly had an eye poked out by a toddling papoose. From these
+experiences he became suspicious of all children. He could not tolerate
+them. When they came near with their ominous hands, he got up.
+
+It was in a village at the Great Slave Lake, that, in the course of
+resenting the evil of the hands of the man-animals, he came to modify
+the law that he had learned from Grey Beaver: namely, that the
+unpardonable crime was to bite one of the gods. In this village, after
+the custom of all dogs in all villages, White Fang went foraging, for
+food. A boy was chopping frozen moose-meat with an axe, and the chips
+were flying in the snow. White Fang, sliding by in quest of meat,
+stopped and began to eat the chips. He observed the boy lay down the
+axe and take up a stout club. White Fang sprang clear, just in time to
+escape the descending blow. The boy pursued him, and he, a stranger in
+the village, fled between two tepees to find himself cornered against a
+high earth bank.
+
+There was no escape for White Fang. The only way out was between the
+two tepees, and this the boy guarded. Holding his club prepared to
+strike, he drew in on his cornered quarry. White Fang was furious. He
+faced the boy, bristling and snarling, his sense of justice outraged.
+He knew the law of forage. All the wastage of meat, such as the frozen
+chips, belonged to the dog that found it. He had done no wrong, broken
+no law, yet here was this boy preparing to give him a beating. White
+Fang scarcely knew what happened. He did it in a surge of rage. And he
+did it so quickly that the boy did not know either. All the boy knew
+was that he had in some unaccountable way been overturned into the
+snow, and that his club-hand had been ripped wide open by White Fang’s
+teeth.
+
+But White Fang knew that he had broken the law of the gods. He had
+driven his teeth into the sacred flesh of one of them, and could expect
+nothing but a most terrible punishment. He fled away to Grey Beaver,
+behind whose protecting legs he crouched when the bitten boy and the
+boy’s family came, demanding vengeance. But they went away with
+vengeance unsatisfied. Grey Beaver defended White Fang. So did Mit-sah
+and Kloo-kooch. White Fang, listening to the wordy war and watching the
+angry gestures, knew that his act was justified. And so it came that he
+learned there were gods and gods. There were his gods, and there were
+other gods, and between them there was a difference. Justice or
+injustice, it was all the same, he must take all things from the hands
+of his own gods. But he was not compelled to take injustice from the
+other gods. It was his privilege to resent it with his teeth. And this
+also was a law of the gods.
+
+Before the day was out, White Fang was to learn more about this law.
+Mit-sah, alone, gathering firewood in the forest, encountered the boy
+that had been bitten. With him were other boys. Hot words passed. Then
+all the boys attacked Mit-sah. It was going hard with him. Blows were
+raining upon him from all sides. White Fang looked on at first. This
+was an affair of the gods, and no concern of his. Then he realised that
+this was Mit-sah, one of his own particular gods, who was being
+maltreated. It was no reasoned impulse that made White Fang do what he
+then did. A mad rush of anger sent him leaping in amongst the
+combatants. Five minutes later the landscape was covered with fleeing
+boys, many of whom dripped blood upon the snow in token that White
+Fang’s teeth had not been idle. When Mit-sah told the story in camp,
+Grey Beaver ordered meat to be given to White Fang. He ordered much
+meat to be given, and White Fang, gorged and sleepy by the fire, knew
+that the law had received its verification.
+
+It was in line with these experiences that White Fang came to learn the
+law of property and the duty of the defence of property. From the
+protection of his god’s body to the protection of his god’s possessions
+was a step, and this step he made. What was his god’s was to be
+defended against all the world—even to the extent of biting other gods.
+Not only was such an act sacrilegious in its nature, but it was fraught
+with peril. The gods were all-powerful, and a dog was no match against
+them; yet White Fang learned to face them, fiercely belligerent and
+unafraid. Duty rose above fear, and thieving gods learned to leave Grey
+Beaver’s property alone.
+
+One thing, in this connection, White Fang quickly learnt, and that was
+that a thieving god was usually a cowardly god and prone to run away at
+the sounding of the alarm. Also, he learned that but brief time elapsed
+between his sounding of the alarm and Grey Beaver coming to his aid. He
+came to know that it was not fear of him that drove the thief away, but
+fear of Grey Beaver. White Fang did not give the alarm by barking. He
+never barked. His method was to drive straight at the intruder, and to
+sink his teeth in if he could. Because he was morose and solitary,
+having nothing to do with the other dogs, he was unusually fitted to
+guard his master’s property; and in this he was encouraged and trained
+by Grey Beaver. One result of this was to make White Fang more
+ferocious and indomitable, and more solitary.
+
+The months went by, binding stronger and stronger the covenant between
+dog and man. This was the ancient covenant that the first wolf that
+came in from the Wild entered into with man. And, like all succeeding
+wolves and wild dogs that had done likewise, White Fang worked the
+covenant out for himself. The terms were simple. For the possession of
+a flesh-and-blood god, he exchanged his own liberty. Food and fire,
+protection and companionship, were some of the things he received from
+the god. In return, he guarded the god’s property, defended his body,
+worked for him, and obeyed him.
+
+The possession of a god implies service. White Fang’s was a service of
+duty and awe, but not of love. He did not know what love was. He had no
+experience of love. Kiche was a remote memory. Besides, not only had he
+abandoned the Wild and his kind when he gave himself up to man, but the
+terms of the covenant were such that if ever he met Kiche again he
+would not desert his god to go with her. His allegiance to man seemed
+somehow a law of his being greater than the love of liberty, of kind
+and kin.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI
+THE FAMINE
+
+
+The spring of the year was at hand when Grey Beaver finished his long
+journey. It was April, and White Fang was a year old when he pulled
+into the home villages and was loosed from the harness by Mit-sah.
+Though a long way from his full growth, White Fang, next to Lip-lip,
+was the largest yearling in the village. Both from his father, the
+wolf, and from Kiche, he had inherited stature and strength, and
+already he was measuring up alongside the full-grown dogs. But he had
+not yet grown compact. His body was slender and rangy, and his strength
+more stringy than massive, His coat was the true wolf-grey, and to all
+appearances he was true wolf himself. The quarter-strain of dog he had
+inherited from Kiche had left no mark on him physically, though it had
+played its part in his mental make-up.
+
+He wandered through the village, recognising with staid satisfaction
+the various gods he had known before the long journey. Then there were
+the dogs, puppies growing up like himself, and grown dogs that did not
+look so large and formidable as the memory pictures he retained of
+them. Also, he stood less in fear of them than formerly, stalking among
+them with a certain careless ease that was as new to him as it was
+enjoyable.
+
+There was Baseek, a grizzled old fellow that in his younger days had
+but to uncover his fangs to send White Fang cringing and crouching to
+the right about. From him White Fang had learned much of his own
+insignificance; and from him he was now to learn much of the change and
+development that had taken place in himself. While Baseek had been
+growing weaker with age, White Fang had been growing stronger with
+youth.
+
+It was at the cutting-up of a moose, fresh-killed, that White Fang
+learned of the changed relations in which he stood to the dog-world. He
+had got for himself a hoof and part of the shin-bone, to which quite a
+bit of meat was attached. Withdrawn from the immediate scramble of the
+other dogs—in fact out of sight behind a thicket—he was devouring his
+prize, when Baseek rushed in upon him. Before he knew what he was
+doing, he had slashed the intruder twice and sprung clear. Baseek was
+surprised by the other’s temerity and swiftness of attack. He stood,
+gazing stupidly across at White Fang, the raw, red shin-bone between
+them.
+
+Baseek was old, and already he had come to know the increasing valour
+of the dogs it had been his wont to bully. Bitter experiences these,
+which, perforce, he swallowed, calling upon all his wisdom to cope with
+them. In the old days he would have sprung upon White Fang in a fury of
+righteous wrath. But now his waning powers would not permit such a
+course. He bristled fiercely and looked ominously across the shin-bone
+at White Fang. And White Fang, resurrecting quite a deal of the old
+awe, seemed to wilt and to shrink in upon himself and grow small, as he
+cast about in his mind for a way to beat a retreat not too inglorious.
+
+And right here Baseek erred. Had he contented himself with looking
+fierce and ominous, all would have been well. White Fang, on the verge
+of retreat, would have retreated, leaving the meat to him. But Baseek
+did not wait. He considered the victory already his and stepped forward
+to the meat. As he bent his head carelessly to smell it, White Fang
+bristled slightly. Even then it was not too late for Baseek to retrieve
+the situation. Had he merely stood over the meat, head up and
+glowering, White Fang would ultimately have slunk away. But the fresh
+meat was strong in Baseek’s nostrils, and greed urged him to take a
+bite of it.
+
+This was too much for White Fang. Fresh upon his months of mastery over
+his own team-mates, it was beyond his self-control to stand idly by
+while another devoured the meat that belonged to him. He struck, after
+his custom, without warning. With the first slash, Baseek’s right ear
+was ripped into ribbons. He was astounded at the suddenness of it. But
+more things, and most grievous ones, were happening with equal
+suddenness. He was knocked off his feet. His throat was bitten. While
+he was struggling to his feet the young dog sank teeth twice into his
+shoulder. The swiftness of it was bewildering. He made a futile rush at
+White Fang, clipping the empty air with an outraged snap. The next
+moment his nose was laid open, and he was staggering backward away from
+the meat.
+
+The situation was now reversed. White Fang stood over the shin-bone,
+bristling and menacing, while Baseek stood a little way off, preparing
+to retreat. He dared not risk a fight with this young lightning-flash,
+and again he knew, and more bitterly, the enfeeblement of oncoming age.
+His attempt to maintain his dignity was heroic. Calmly turning his back
+upon young dog and shin-bone, as though both were beneath his notice
+and unworthy of his consideration, he stalked grandly away. Nor, until
+well out of sight, did he stop to lick his bleeding wounds.
+
+The effect on White Fang was to give him a greater faith in himself,
+and a greater pride. He walked less softly among the grown dogs; his
+attitude toward them was less compromising. Not that he went out of his
+way looking for trouble. Far from it. But upon his way he demanded
+consideration. He stood upon his right to go his way unmolested and to
+give trail to no dog. He had to be taken into account, that was all. He
+was no longer to be disregarded and ignored, as was the lot of puppies,
+and as continued to be the lot of the puppies that were his team-mates.
+They got out of the way, gave trail to the grown dogs, and gave up meat
+to them under compulsion. But White Fang, uncompanionable, solitary,
+morose, scarcely looking to right or left, redoubtable, forbidding of
+aspect, remote and alien, was accepted as an equal by his puzzled
+elders. They quickly learned to leave him alone, neither venturing
+hostile acts nor making overtures of friendliness. If they left him
+alone, he left them alone—a state of affairs that they found, after a
+few encounters, to be pre-eminently desirable.
+
+In midsummer White Fang had an experience. Trotting along in his silent
+way to investigate a new tepee which had been erected on the edge of
+the village while he was away with the hunters after moose, he came
+full upon Kiche. He paused and looked at her. He remembered her
+vaguely, but he _remembered_ her, and that was more than could be said
+for her. She lifted her lip at him in the old snarl of menace, and his
+memory became clear. His forgotten cubhood, all that was associated
+with that familiar snarl, rushed back to him. Before he had known the
+gods, she had been to him the centre-pin of the universe. The old
+familiar feelings of that time came back upon him, surged up within
+him. He bounded towards her joyously, and she met him with shrewd fangs
+that laid his cheek open to the bone. He did not understand. He backed
+away, bewildered and puzzled.
+
+But it was not Kiche’s fault. A wolf-mother was not made to remember
+her cubs of a year or so before. So she did not remember White Fang. He
+was a strange animal, an intruder; and her present litter of puppies
+gave her the right to resent such intrusion.
+
+One of the puppies sprawled up to White Fang. They were half-brothers,
+only they did not know it. White Fang sniffed the puppy curiously,
+whereupon Kiche rushed upon him, gashing his face a second time. He
+backed farther away. All the old memories and associations died down
+again and passed into the grave from which they had been resurrected.
+He looked at Kiche licking her puppy and stopping now and then to snarl
+at him. She was without value to him. He had learned to get along
+without her. Her meaning was forgotten. There was no place for her in
+his scheme of things, as there was no place for him in hers.
+
+He was still standing, stupid and bewildered, the memories forgotten,
+wondering what it was all about, when Kiche attacked him a third time,
+intent on driving him away altogether from the vicinity. And White Fang
+allowed himself to be driven away. This was a female of his kind, and
+it was a law of his kind that the males must not fight the females. He
+did not know anything about this law, for it was no generalisation of
+the mind, not a something acquired by experience of the world. He knew
+it as a secret prompting, as an urge of instinct—of the same instinct
+that made him howl at the moon and stars of nights, and that made him
+fear death and the unknown.
+
+The months went by. White Fang grew stronger, heavier, and more
+compact, while his character was developing along the lines laid down
+by his heredity and his environment. His heredity was a life-stuff that
+may be likened to clay. It possessed many possibilities, was capable of
+being moulded into many different forms. Environment served to model
+the clay, to give it a particular form. Thus, had White Fang never come
+in to the fires of man, the Wild would have moulded him into a true
+wolf. But the gods had given him a different environment, and he was
+moulded into a dog that was rather wolfish, but that was a dog and not
+a wolf.
+
+And so, according to the clay of his nature and the pressure of his
+surroundings, his character was being moulded into a certain particular
+shape. There was no escaping it. He was becoming more morose, more
+uncompanionable, more solitary, more ferocious; while the dogs were
+learning more and more that it was better to be at peace with him than
+at war, and Grey Beaver was coming to prize him more greatly with the
+passage of each day.
+
+White Fang, seeming to sum up strength in all his qualities,
+nevertheless suffered from one besetting weakness. He could not stand
+being laughed at. The laughter of men was a hateful thing. They might
+laugh among themselves about anything they pleased except himself, and
+he did not mind. But the moment laughter was turned upon him he would
+fly into a most terrible rage. Grave, dignified, sombre, a laugh made
+him frantic to ridiculousness. It so outraged him and upset him that
+for hours he would behave like a demon. And woe to the dog that at such
+times ran foul of him. He knew the law too well to take it out of Grey
+Beaver; behind Grey Beaver were a club and godhead. But behind the dogs
+there was nothing but space, and into this space they flew when White
+Fang came on the scene, made mad by laughter.
+
+In the third year of his life there came a great famine to the
+Mackenzie Indians. In the summer the fish failed. In the winter the
+cariboo forsook their accustomed track. Moose were scarce, the rabbits
+almost disappeared, hunting and preying animals perished. Denied their
+usual food-supply, weakened by hunger, they fell upon and devoured one
+another. Only the strong survived. White Fang’s gods were always
+hunting animals. The old and the weak of them died of hunger. There was
+wailing in the village, where the women and children went without in
+order that what little they had might go into the bellies of the lean
+and hollow-eyed hunters who trod the forest in the vain pursuit of
+meat.
+
+To such extremity were the gods driven that they ate the soft-tanned
+leather of their mocassins and mittens, while the dogs ate the
+harnesses off their backs and the very whip-lashes. Also, the dogs ate
+one another, and also the gods ate the dogs. The weakest and the more
+worthless were eaten first. The dogs that still lived, looked on and
+understood. A few of the boldest and wisest forsook the fires of the
+gods, which had now become a shambles, and fled into the forest, where,
+in the end, they starved to death or were eaten by wolves.
+
+In this time of misery, White Fang, too, stole away into the woods. He
+was better fitted for the life than the other dogs, for he had the
+training of his cubhood to guide him. Especially adept did he become in
+stalking small living things. He would lie concealed for hours,
+following every movement of a cautious tree-squirrel, waiting, with a
+patience as huge as the hunger he suffered from, until the squirrel
+ventured out upon the ground. Even then, White Fang was not premature.
+He waited until he was sure of striking before the squirrel could gain
+a tree-refuge. Then, and not until then, would he flash from his
+hiding-place, a grey projectile, incredibly swift, never failing its
+mark—the fleeing squirrel that fled not fast enough.
+
+Successful as he was with squirrels, there was one difficulty that
+prevented him from living and growing fat on them. There were not
+enough squirrels. So he was driven to hunt still smaller things. So
+acute did his hunger become at times that he was not above rooting out
+wood-mice from their burrows in the ground. Nor did he scorn to do
+battle with a weasel as hungry as himself and many times more
+ferocious.
+
+In the worst pinches of the famine he stole back to the fires of the
+gods. But he did not go into the fires. He lurked in the forest,
+avoiding discovery and robbing the snares at the rare intervals when
+game was caught. He even robbed Grey Beaver’s snare of a rabbit at a
+time when Grey Beaver staggered and tottered through the forest,
+sitting down often to rest, what of weakness and of shortness of
+breath.
+
+One day While Fang encountered a young wolf, gaunt and scrawny,
+loose-jointed with famine. Had he not been hungry himself, White Fang
+might have gone with him and eventually found his way into the pack
+amongst his wild brethren. As it was, he ran the young wolf down and
+killed and ate him.
+
+Fortune seemed to favour him. Always, when hardest pressed for food, he
+found something to kill. Again, when he was weak, it was his luck that
+none of the larger preying animals chanced upon him. Thus, he was
+strong from the two days’ eating a lynx had afforded him when the
+hungry wolf-pack ran full tilt upon him. It was a long, cruel chase,
+but he was better nourished than they, and in the end outran them. And
+not only did he outrun them, but, circling widely back on his track, he
+gathered in one of his exhausted pursuers.
+
+After that he left that part of the country and journeyed over to the
+valley wherein he had been born. Here, in the old lair, he encountered
+Kiche. Up to her old tricks, she, too, had fled the inhospitable fires
+of the gods and gone back to her old refuge to give birth to her young.
+Of this litter but one remained alive when White Fang came upon the
+scene, and this one was not destined to live long. Young life had
+little chance in such a famine.
+
+Kiche’s greeting of her grown son was anything but affectionate. But
+White Fang did not mind. He had outgrown his mother. So he turned tail
+philosophically and trotted on up the stream. At the forks he took the
+turning to the left, where he found the lair of the lynx with whom his
+mother and he had fought long before. Here, in the abandoned lair, he
+settled down and rested for a day.
+
+During the early summer, in the last days of the famine, he met
+Lip-lip, who had likewise taken to the woods, where he had eked out a
+miserable existence.
+
+White Fang came upon him unexpectedly. Trotting in opposite directions
+along the base of a high bluff, they rounded a corner of rock and found
+themselves face to face. They paused with instant alarm, and looked at
+each other suspiciously.
+
+White Fang was in splendid condition. His hunting had been good, and
+for a week he had eaten his fill. He was even gorged from his latest
+kill. But in the moment he looked at Lip-lip his hair rose on end all
+along his back. It was an involuntary bristling on his part, the
+physical state that in the past had always accompanied the mental state
+produced in him by Lip-lip’s bullying and persecution. As in the past
+he had bristled and snarled at sight of Lip-lip, so now, and
+automatically, he bristled and snarled. He did not waste any time. The
+thing was done thoroughly and with despatch. Lip-lip essayed to back
+away, but White Fang struck him hard, shoulder to shoulder. Lip-lip was
+overthrown and rolled upon his back. White Fang’s teeth drove into the
+scrawny throat. There was a death-struggle, during which White Fang
+walked around, stiff-legged and observant. Then he resumed his course
+and trotted on along the base of the bluff.
+
+One day, not long after, he came to the edge of the forest, where a
+narrow stretch of open land sloped down to the Mackenzie. He had been
+over this ground before, when it was bare, but now a village occupied
+it. Still hidden amongst the trees, he paused to study the situation.
+Sights and sounds and scents were familiar to him. It was the old
+village changed to a new place. But sights and sounds and smells were
+different from those he had last had when he fled away from it. There
+was no whimpering nor wailing. Contented sounds saluted his ear, and
+when he heard the angry voice of a woman he knew it to be the anger
+that proceeds from a full stomach. And there was a smell in the air of
+fish. There was food. The famine was gone. He came out boldly from the
+forest and trotted into camp straight to Grey Beaver’s tepee. Grey
+Beaver was not there; but Kloo-kooch welcomed him with glad cries and
+the whole of a fresh-caught fish, and he lay down to wait Grey Beaver’s
+coming.
+
+
+
+
+PART IV
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I
+THE ENEMY OF HIS KIND
+
+
+Had there been in White Fang’s nature any possibility, no matter how
+remote, of his ever coming to fraternise with his kind, such
+possibility was irretrievably destroyed when he was made leader of the
+sled-team. For now the dogs hated him—hated him for the extra meat
+bestowed upon him by Mit-sah; hated him for all the real and fancied
+favours he received; hated him for that he fled always at the head of
+the team, his waving brush of a tail and his perpetually retreating
+hind-quarters for ever maddening their eyes.
+
+And White Fang just as bitterly hated them back. Being sled-leader was
+anything but gratifying to him. To be compelled to run away before the
+yelling pack, every dog of which, for three years, he had thrashed and
+mastered, was almost more than he could endure. But endure it he must,
+or perish, and the life that was in him had no desire to perish out.
+The moment Mit-sah gave his order for the start, that moment the whole
+team, with eager, savage cries, sprang forward at White Fang.
+
+There was no defence for him. If he turned upon them, Mit-sah would
+throw the stinging lash of the whip into his face. Only remained to him
+to run away. He could not encounter that howling horde with his tail
+and hind-quarters. These were scarcely fit weapons with which to meet
+the many merciless fangs. So run away he did, violating his own nature
+and pride with every leap he made, and leaping all day long.
+
+One cannot violate the promptings of one’s nature without having that
+nature recoil upon itself. Such a recoil is like that of a hair, made
+to grow out from the body, turning unnaturally upon the direction of
+its growth and growing into the body—a rankling, festering thing of
+hurt. And so with White Fang. Every urge of his being impelled him to
+spring upon the pack that cried at his heels, but it was the will of
+the gods that this should not be; and behind the will, to enforce it,
+was the whip of cariboo-gut with its biting thirty-foot lash. So White
+Fang could only eat his heart in bitterness and develop a hatred and
+malice commensurate with the ferocity and indomitability of his nature.
+
+If ever a creature was the enemy of its kind, White Fang was that
+creature. He asked no quarter, gave none. He was continually marred and
+scarred by the teeth of the pack, and as continually he left his own
+marks upon the pack. Unlike most leaders, who, when camp was made and
+the dogs were unhitched, huddled near to the gods for protection, White
+Fang disdained such protection. He walked boldly about the camp,
+inflicting punishment in the night for what he had suffered in the day.
+In the time before he was made leader of the team, the pack had learned
+to get out of his way. But now it was different. Excited by the
+day-long pursuit of him, swayed subconsciously by the insistent
+iteration on their brains of the sight of him fleeing away, mastered by
+the feeling of mastery enjoyed all day, the dogs could not bring
+themselves to give way to him. When he appeared amongst them, there was
+always a squabble. His progress was marked by snarl and snap and growl.
+The very atmosphere he breathed was surcharged with hatred and malice,
+and this but served to increase the hatred and malice within him.
+
+When Mit-sah cried out his command for the team to stop, White Fang
+obeyed. At first this caused trouble for the other dogs. All of them
+would spring upon the hated leader only to find the tables turned.
+Behind him would be Mit-sah, the great whip singing in his hand. So the
+dogs came to understand that when the team stopped by order, White Fang
+was to be let alone. But when White Fang stopped without orders, then
+it was allowed them to spring upon him and destroy him if they could.
+After several experiences, White Fang never stopped without orders. He
+learned quickly. It was in the nature of things, that he must learn
+quickly if he were to survive the unusually severe conditions under
+which life was vouchsafed him.
+
+But the dogs could never learn the lesson to leave him alone in camp.
+Each day, pursuing him and crying defiance at him, the lesson of the
+previous night was erased, and that night would have to be learned over
+again, to be as immediately forgotten. Besides, there was a greater
+consistence in their dislike of him. They sensed between themselves and
+him a difference of kind—cause sufficient in itself for hostility. Like
+him, they were domesticated wolves. But they had been domesticated for
+generations. Much of the Wild had been lost, so that to them the Wild
+was the unknown, the terrible, the ever-menacing and ever warring. But
+to him, in appearance and action and impulse, still clung the Wild. He
+symbolised it, was its personification: so that when they showed their
+teeth to him they were defending themselves against the powers of
+destruction that lurked in the shadows of the forest and in the dark
+beyond the camp-fire.
+
+But there was one lesson the dogs did learn, and that was to keep
+together. White Fang was too terrible for any of them to face
+single-handed. They met him with the mass-formation, otherwise he would
+have killed them, one by one, in a night. As it was, he never had a
+chance to kill them. He might roll a dog off its feet, but the pack
+would be upon him before he could follow up and deliver the deadly
+throat-stroke. At the first hint of conflict, the whole team drew
+together and faced him. The dogs had quarrels among themselves, but
+these were forgotten when trouble was brewing with White Fang.
+
+On the other hand, try as they would, they could not kill White Fang.
+He was too quick for them, too formidable, too wise. He avoided tight
+places and always backed out of it when they bade fair to surround him.
+While, as for getting him off his feet, there was no dog among them
+capable of doing the trick. His feet clung to the earth with the same
+tenacity that he clung to life. For that matter, life and footing were
+synonymous in this unending warfare with the pack, and none knew it
+better than White Fang.
+
+So he became the enemy of his kind, domesticated wolves that they were,
+softened by the fires of man, weakened in the sheltering shadow of
+man’s strength. White Fang was bitter and implacable. The clay of him
+was so moulded. He declared a vendetta against all dogs. And so
+terribly did he live this vendetta that Grey Beaver, fierce savage
+himself, could not but marvel at White Fang’s ferocity. Never, he
+swore, had there been the like of this animal; and the Indians in
+strange villages swore likewise when they considered the tale of his
+killings amongst their dogs.
+
+When White Fang was nearly five years old, Grey Beaver took him on
+another great journey, and long remembered was the havoc he worked
+amongst the dogs of the many villages along the Mackenzie, across the
+Rockies, and down the Porcupine to the Yukon. He revelled in the
+vengeance he wreaked upon his kind. They were ordinary, unsuspecting
+dogs. They were not prepared for his swiftness and directness, for his
+attack without warning. They did not know him for what he was, a
+lightning-flash of slaughter. They bristled up to him, stiff-legged and
+challenging, while he, wasting no time on elaborate preliminaries,
+snapping into action like a steel spring, was at their throats and
+destroying them before they knew what was happening and while they were
+yet in the throes of surprise.
+
+He became an adept at fighting. He economised. He never wasted his
+strength, never tussled. He was in too quickly for that, and, if he
+missed, was out again too quickly. The dislike of the wolf for close
+quarters was his to an unusual degree. He could not endure a prolonged
+contact with another body. It smacked of danger. It made him frantic.
+He must be away, free, on his own legs, touching no living thing. It
+was the Wild still clinging to him, asserting itself through him. This
+feeling had been accentuated by the Ishmaelite life he had led from his
+puppyhood. Danger lurked in contacts. It was the trap, ever the trap,
+the fear of it lurking deep in the life of him, woven into the fibre of
+him.
+
+In consequence, the strange dogs he encountered had no chance against
+him. He eluded their fangs. He got them, or got away, himself untouched
+in either event. In the natural course of things there were exceptions
+to this. There were times when several dogs, pitching on to him,
+punished him before he could get away; and there were times when a
+single dog scored deeply on him. But these were accidents. In the main,
+so efficient a fighter had he become, he went his way unscathed.
+
+Another advantage he possessed was that of correctly judging time and
+distance. Not that he did this consciously, however. He did not
+calculate such things. It was all automatic. His eyes saw correctly,
+and the nerves carried the vision correctly to his brain. The parts of
+him were better adjusted than those of the average dog. They worked
+together more smoothly and steadily. His was a better, far better,
+nervous, mental, and muscular co-ordination. When his eyes conveyed to
+his brain the moving image of an action, his brain without conscious
+effort, knew the space that limited that action and the time required
+for its completion. Thus, he could avoid the leap of another dog, or
+the drive of its fangs, and at the same moment could seize the
+infinitesimal fraction of time in which to deliver his own attack. Body
+and brain, his was a more perfected mechanism. Not that he was to be
+praised for it. Nature had been more generous to him than to the
+average animal, that was all.
+
+It was in the summer that White Fang arrived at Fort Yukon. Grey Beaver
+had crossed the great watershed between Mackenzie and the Yukon in the
+late winter, and spent the spring in hunting among the western outlying
+spurs of the Rockies. Then, after the break-up of the ice on the
+Porcupine, he had built a canoe and paddled down that stream to where
+it effected its junction with the Yukon just under the Artic circle.
+Here stood the old Hudson’s Bay Company fort; and here were many
+Indians, much food, and unprecedented excitement. It was the summer of
+1898, and thousands of gold-hunters were going up the Yukon to Dawson
+and the Klondike. Still hundreds of miles from their goal, nevertheless
+many of them had been on the way for a year, and the least any of them
+had travelled to get that far was five thousand miles, while some had
+come from the other side of the world.
+
+Here Grey Beaver stopped. A whisper of the gold-rush had reached his
+ears, and he had come with several bales of furs, and another of
+gut-sewn mittens and moccasins. He would not have ventured so long a
+trip had he not expected generous profits. But what he had expected was
+nothing to what he realised. His wildest dreams had not exceeded a
+hundred per cent. profit; he made a thousand per cent. And like a true
+Indian, he settled down to trade carefully and slowly, even if it took
+all summer and the rest of the winter to dispose of his goods.
+
+It was at Fort Yukon that White Fang saw his first white men. As
+compared with the Indians he had known, they were to him another race
+of beings, a race of superior gods. They impressed him as possessing
+superior power, and it is on power that godhead rests. White Fang did
+not reason it out, did not in his mind make the sharp generalisation
+that the white gods were more powerful. It was a feeling, nothing more,
+and yet none the less potent. As, in his puppyhood, the looming bulks
+of the tepees, man-reared, had affected him as manifestations of power,
+so was he affected now by the houses and the huge fort all of massive
+logs. Here was power. Those white gods were strong. They possessed
+greater mastery over matter than the gods he had known, most powerful
+among which was Grey Beaver. And yet Grey Beaver was as a child-god
+among these white-skinned ones.
+
+To be sure, White Fang only felt these things. He was not conscious of
+them. Yet it is upon feeling, more often than thinking, that animals
+act; and every act White Fang now performed was based upon the feeling
+that the white men were the superior gods. In the first place he was
+very suspicious of them. There was no telling what unknown terrors were
+theirs, what unknown hurts they could administer. He was curious to
+observe them, fearful of being noticed by them. For the first few hours
+he was content with slinking around and watching them from a safe
+distance. Then he saw that no harm befell the dogs that were near to
+them, and he came in closer.
+
+In turn he was an object of great curiosity to them. His wolfish
+appearance caught their eyes at once, and they pointed him out to one
+another. This act of pointing put White Fang on his guard, and when
+they tried to approach him he showed his teeth and backed away. Not one
+succeeded in laying a hand on him, and it was well that they did not.
+
+White Fang soon learned that very few of these gods—not more than a
+dozen—lived at this place. Every two or three days a steamer (another
+and colossal manifestation of power) came into the bank and stopped for
+several hours. The white men came from off these steamers and went away
+on them again. There seemed untold numbers of these white men. In the
+first day or so, he saw more of them than he had seen Indians in all
+his life; and as the days went by they continued to come up the river,
+stop, and then go on up the river out of sight.
+
+But if the white gods were all-powerful, their dogs did not amount to
+much. This White Fang quickly discovered by mixing with those that came
+ashore with their masters. They were irregular shapes and sizes. Some
+were short-legged—too short; others were long-legged—too long. They had
+hair instead of fur, and a few had very little hair at that. And none
+of them knew how to fight.
+
+As an enemy of his kind, it was in White Fang’s province to fight with
+them. This he did, and he quickly achieved for them a mighty contempt.
+They were soft and helpless, made much noise, and floundered around
+clumsily trying to accomplish by main strength what he accomplished by
+dexterity and cunning. They rushed bellowing at him. He sprang to the
+side. They did not know what had become of him; and in that moment he
+struck them on the shoulder, rolling them off their feet and delivering
+his stroke at the throat.
+
+Sometimes this stroke was successful, and a stricken dog rolled in the
+dirt, to be pounced upon and torn to pieces by the pack of Indian dogs
+that waited. White Fang was wise. He had long since learned that the
+gods were made angry when their dogs were killed. The white men were no
+exception to this. So he was content, when he had overthrown and
+slashed wide the throat of one of their dogs, to drop back and let the
+pack go in and do the cruel finishing work. It was then that the white
+men rushed in, visiting their wrath heavily on the pack, while White
+Fang went free. He would stand off at a little distance and look on,
+while stones, clubs, axes, and all sorts of weapons fell upon his
+fellows. White Fang was very wise.
+
+But his fellows grew wise in their own way; and in this White Fang grew
+wise with them. They learned that it was when a steamer first tied to
+the bank that they had their fun. After the first two or three strange
+dogs had been downed and destroyed, the white men hustled their own
+animals back on board and wrecked savage vengeance on the offenders.
+One white man, having seen his dog, a setter, torn to pieces before his
+eyes, drew a revolver. He fired rapidly, six times, and six of the pack
+lay dead or dying—another manifestation of power that sank deep into
+White Fang’s consciousness.
+
+White Fang enjoyed it all. He did not love his kind, and he was shrewd
+enough to escape hurt himself. At first, the killing of the white men’s
+dogs had been a diversion. After a time it became his occupation. There
+was no work for him to do. Grey Beaver was busy trading and getting
+wealthy. So White Fang hung around the landing with the disreputable
+gang of Indian dogs, waiting for steamers. With the arrival of a
+steamer the fun began. After a few minutes, by the time the white men
+had got over their surprise, the gang scattered. The fun was over until
+the next steamer should arrive.
+
+But it can scarcely be said that White Fang was a member of the gang.
+He did not mingle with it, but remained aloof, always himself, and was
+even feared by it. It is true, he worked with it. He picked the quarrel
+with the strange dog while the gang waited. And when he had overthrown
+the strange dog the gang went in to finish it. But it is equally true
+that he then withdrew, leaving the gang to receive the punishment of
+the outraged gods.
+
+It did not require much exertion to pick these quarrels. All he had to
+do, when the strange dogs came ashore, was to show himself. When they
+saw him they rushed for him. It was their instinct. He was the Wild—the
+unknown, the terrible, the ever-menacing, the thing that prowled in the
+darkness around the fires of the primeval world when they, cowering
+close to the fires, were reshaping their instincts, learning to fear
+the Wild out of which they had come, and which they had deserted and
+betrayed. Generation by generation, down all the generations, had this
+fear of the Wild been stamped into their natures. For centuries the
+Wild had stood for terror and destruction. And during all this time
+free licence had been theirs, from their masters, to kill the things of
+the Wild. In doing this they had protected both themselves and the gods
+whose companionship they shared.
+
+And so, fresh from the soft southern world, these dogs, trotting down
+the gang-plank and out upon the Yukon shore had but to see White Fang
+to experience the irresistible impulse to rush upon him and destroy
+him. They might be town-reared dogs, but the instinctive fear of the
+Wild was theirs just the same. Not alone with their own eyes did they
+see the wolfish creature in the clear light of day, standing before
+them. They saw him with the eyes of their ancestors, and by their
+inherited memory they knew White Fang for the wolf, and they remembered
+the ancient feud.
+
+All of which served to make White Fang’s days enjoyable. If the sight
+of him drove these strange dogs upon him, so much the better for him,
+so much the worse for them. They looked upon him as legitimate prey,
+and as legitimate prey he looked upon them.
+
+Not for nothing had he first seen the light of day in a lonely lair and
+fought his first fights with the ptarmigan, the weasel, and the lynx.
+And not for nothing had his puppyhood been made bitter by the
+persecution of Lip-lip and the whole puppy pack. It might have been
+otherwise, and he would then have been otherwise. Had Lip-lip not
+existed, he would have passed his puppyhood with the other puppies and
+grown up more doglike and with more liking for dogs. Had Grey Beaver
+possessed the plummet of affection and love, he might have sounded the
+deeps of White Fang’s nature and brought up to the surface all manner
+of kindly qualities. But these things had not been so. The clay of
+White Fang had been moulded until he became what he was, morose and
+lonely, unloving and ferocious, the enemy of all his kind.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II
+THE MAD GOD
+
+
+A small number of white men lived in Fort Yukon. These men had been
+long in the country. They called themselves Sour-doughs, and took great
+pride in so classifying themselves. For other men, new in the land,
+they felt nothing but disdain. The men who came ashore from the
+steamers were newcomers. They were known as _chechaquos_, and they
+always wilted at the application of the name. They made their bread
+with baking-powder. This was the invidious distinction between them and
+the Sour-doughs, who, forsooth, made their bread from sour-dough
+because they had no baking-powder.
+
+All of which is neither here nor there. The men in the fort disdained
+the newcomers and enjoyed seeing them come to grief. Especially did
+they enjoy the havoc worked amongst the newcomers’ dogs by White Fang
+and his disreputable gang. When a steamer arrived, the men of the fort
+made it a point always to come down to the bank and see the fun. They
+looked forward to it with as much anticipation as did the Indian dogs,
+while they were not slow to appreciate the savage and crafty part
+played by White Fang.
+
+But there was one man amongst them who particularly enjoyed the sport.
+He would come running at the first sound of a steamboat’s whistle; and
+when the last fight was over and White Fang and the pack had scattered,
+he would return slowly to the fort, his face heavy with regret.
+Sometimes, when a soft southland dog went down, shrieking its death-cry
+under the fangs of the pack, this man would be unable to contain
+himself, and would leap into the air and cry out with delight. And
+always he had a sharp and covetous eye for White Fang.
+
+This man was called “Beauty” by the other men of the fort. No one knew
+his first name, and in general he was known in the country as Beauty
+Smith. But he was anything save a beauty. To antithesis was due his
+naming. He was pre-eminently unbeautiful. Nature had been niggardly
+with him. He was a small man to begin with; and upon his meagre frame
+was deposited an even more strikingly meagre head. Its apex might be
+likened to a point. In fact, in his boyhood, before he had been named
+Beauty by his fellows, he had been called “Pinhead.”
+
+Backward, from the apex, his head slanted down to his neck and forward
+it slanted uncompromisingly to meet a low and remarkably wide forehead.
+Beginning here, as though regretting her parsimony, Nature had spread
+his features with a lavish hand. His eyes were large, and between them
+was the distance of two eyes. His face, in relation to the rest of him,
+was prodigious. In order to discover the necessary area, Nature had
+given him an enormous prognathous jaw. It was wide and heavy, and
+protruded outward and down until it seemed to rest on his chest.
+Possibly this appearance was due to the weariness of the slender neck,
+unable properly to support so great a burden.
+
+This jaw gave the impression of ferocious determination. But something
+lacked. Perhaps it was from excess. Perhaps the jaw was too large. At
+any rate, it was a lie. Beauty Smith was known far and wide as the
+weakest of weak-kneed and snivelling cowards. To complete his
+description, his teeth were large and yellow, while the two eye-teeth,
+larger than their fellows, showed under his lean lips like fangs. His
+eyes were yellow and muddy, as though Nature had run short on pigments
+and squeezed together the dregs of all her tubes. It was the same with
+his hair, sparse and irregular of growth, muddy-yellow and
+dirty-yellow, rising on his head and sprouting out of his face in
+unexpected tufts and bunches, in appearance like clumped and wind-blown
+grain.
+
+In short, Beauty Smith was a monstrosity, and the blame of it lay
+elsewhere. He was not responsible. The clay of him had been so moulded
+in the making. He did the cooking for the other men in the fort, the
+dish-washing and the drudgery. They did not despise him. Rather did
+they tolerate him in a broad human way, as one tolerates any creature
+evilly treated in the making. Also, they feared him. His cowardly rages
+made them dread a shot in the back or poison in their coffee. But
+somebody had to do the cooking, and whatever else his shortcomings,
+Beauty Smith could cook.
+
+This was the man that looked at White Fang, delighted in his ferocious
+prowess, and desired to possess him. He made overtures to White Fang
+from the first. White Fang began by ignoring him. Later on, when the
+overtures became more insistent, White Fang bristled and bared his
+teeth and backed away. He did not like the man. The feel of him was
+bad. He sensed the evil in him, and feared the extended hand and the
+attempts at soft-spoken speech. Because of all this, he hated the man.
+
+With the simpler creatures, good and bad are things simply understood.
+The good stands for all things that bring easement and satisfaction and
+surcease from pain. Therefore, the good is liked. The bad stands for
+all things that are fraught with discomfort, menace, and hurt, and is
+hated accordingly. White Fang’s feel of Beauty Smith was bad. From the
+man’s distorted body and twisted mind, in occult ways, like mists
+rising from malarial marshes, came emanations of the unhealth within.
+Not by reasoning, not by the five senses alone, but by other and
+remoter and uncharted senses, came the feeling to White Fang that the
+man was ominous with evil, pregnant with hurtfulness, and therefore a
+thing bad, and wisely to be hated.
+
+White Fang was in Grey Beaver’s camp when Beauty Smith first visited
+it. At the faint sound of his distant feet, before he came in sight,
+White Fang knew who was coming and began to bristle. He had been lying
+down in an abandon of comfort, but he arose quickly, and, as the man
+arrived, slid away in true wolf-fashion to the edge of the camp. He did
+not know what they said, but he could see the man and Grey Beaver
+talking together. Once, the man pointed at him, and White Fang snarled
+back as though the hand were just descending upon him instead of being,
+as it was, fifty feet away. The man laughed at this; and White Fang
+slunk away to the sheltering woods, his head turned to observe as he
+glided softly over the ground.
+
+Grey Beaver refused to sell the dog. He had grown rich with his trading
+and stood in need of nothing. Besides, White Fang was a valuable
+animal, the strongest sled-dog he had ever owned, and the best leader.
+Furthermore, there was no dog like him on the Mackenzie nor the Yukon.
+He could fight. He killed other dogs as easily as men killed
+mosquitoes. (Beauty Smith’s eyes lighted up at this, and he licked his
+thin lips with an eager tongue). No, White Fang was not for sale at any
+price.
+
+But Beauty Smith knew the ways of Indians. He visited Grey Beaver’s
+camp often, and hidden under his coat was always a black bottle or so.
+One of the potencies of whisky is the breeding of thirst. Grey Beaver
+got the thirst. His fevered membranes and burnt stomach began to
+clamour for more and more of the scorching fluid; while his brain,
+thrust all awry by the unwonted stimulant, permitted him to go any
+length to obtain it. The money he had received for his furs and mittens
+and moccasins began to go. It went faster and faster, and the shorter
+his money-sack grew, the shorter grew his temper.
+
+In the end his money and goods and temper were all gone. Nothing
+remained to him but his thirst, a prodigious possession in itself that
+grew more prodigious with every sober breath he drew. Then it was that
+Beauty Smith had talk with him again about the sale of White Fang; but
+this time the price offered was in bottles, not dollars, and Grey
+Beaver’s ears were more eager to hear.
+
+“You ketch um dog you take um all right,” was his last word.
+
+The bottles were delivered, but after two days. “You ketch um dog,”
+were Beauty Smith’s words to Grey Beaver.
+
+White Fang slunk into camp one evening and dropped down with a sigh of
+content. The dreaded white god was not there. For days his
+manifestations of desire to lay hands on him had been growing more
+insistent, and during that time White Fang had been compelled to avoid
+the camp. He did not know what evil was threatened by those insistent
+hands. He knew only that they did threaten evil of some sort, and that
+it was best for him to keep out of their reach.
+
+But scarcely had he lain down when Grey Beaver staggered over to him
+and tied a leather thong around his neck. He sat down beside White
+Fang, holding the end of the thong in his hand. In the other hand he
+held a bottle, which, from time to time, was inverted above his head to
+the accompaniment of gurgling noises.
+
+An hour of this passed, when the vibrations of feet in contact with the
+ground foreran the one who approached. White Fang heard it first, and
+he was bristling with recognition while Grey Beaver still nodded
+stupidly. White Fang tried to draw the thong softly out of his master’s
+hand; but the relaxed fingers closed tightly and Grey Beaver roused
+himself.
+
+Beauty Smith strode into camp and stood over White Fang. He snarled
+softly up at the thing of fear, watching keenly the deportment of the
+hands. One hand extended outward and began to descend upon his head.
+His soft snarl grew tense and harsh. The hand continued slowly to
+descend, while he crouched beneath it, eyeing it malignantly, his snarl
+growing shorter and shorter as, with quickening breath, it approached
+its culmination. Suddenly he snapped, striking with his fangs like a
+snake. The hand was jerked back, and the teeth came together emptily
+with a sharp click. Beauty Smith was frightened and angry. Grey Beaver
+clouted White Fang alongside the head, so that he cowered down close to
+the earth in respectful obedience.
+
+White Fang’s suspicious eyes followed every movement. He saw Beauty
+Smith go away and return with a stout club. Then the end of the thong
+was given over to him by Grey Beaver. Beauty Smith started to walk
+away. The thong grew taut. White Fang resisted it. Grey Beaver clouted
+him right and left to make him get up and follow. He obeyed, but with a
+rush, hurling himself upon the stranger who was dragging him away.
+Beauty Smith did not jump away. He had been waiting for this. He swung
+the club smartly, stopping the rush midway and smashing White Fang down
+upon the ground. Grey Beaver laughed and nodded approval. Beauty Smith
+tightened the thong again, and White Fang crawled limply and dizzily to
+his feet.
+
+He did not rush a second time. One smash from the club was sufficient
+to convince him that the white god knew how to handle it, and he was
+too wise to fight the inevitable. So he followed morosely at Beauty
+Smith’s heels, his tail between his legs, yet snarling softly under his
+breath. But Beauty Smith kept a wary eye on him, and the club was held
+always ready to strike.
+
+At the fort Beauty Smith left him securely tied and went in to bed.
+White Fang waited an hour. Then he applied his teeth to the thong, and
+in the space of ten seconds was free. He had wasted no time with his
+teeth. There had been no useless gnawing. The thong was cut across,
+diagonally, almost as clean as though done by a knife. White Fang
+looked up at the fort, at the same time bristling and growling. Then he
+turned and trotted back to Grey Beaver’s camp. He owed no allegiance to
+this strange and terrible god. He had given himself to Grey Beaver, and
+to Grey Beaver he considered he still belonged.
+
+But what had occurred before was repeated—with a difference. Grey
+Beaver again made him fast with a thong, and in the morning turned him
+over to Beauty Smith. And here was where the difference came in. Beauty
+Smith gave him a beating. Tied securely, White Fang could only rage
+futilely and endure the punishment. Club and whip were both used upon
+him, and he experienced the worst beating he had ever received in his
+life. Even the big beating given him in his puppyhood by Grey Beaver
+was mild compared with this.
+
+Beauty Smith enjoyed the task. He delighted in it. He gloated over his
+victim, and his eyes flamed dully, as he swung the whip or club and
+listened to White Fang’s cries of pain and to his helpless bellows and
+snarls. For Beauty Smith was cruel in the way that cowards are cruel.
+Cringing and snivelling himself before the blows or angry speech of a
+man, he revenged himself, in turn, upon creatures weaker than he. All
+life likes power, and Beauty Smith was no exception. Denied the
+expression of power amongst his own kind, he fell back upon the lesser
+creatures and there vindicated the life that was in him. But Beauty
+Smith had not created himself, and no blame was to be attached to him.
+He had come into the world with a twisted body and a brute
+intelligence. This had constituted the clay of him, and it had not been
+kindly moulded by the world.
+
+White Fang knew why he was being beaten. When Grey Beaver tied the
+thong around his neck, and passed the end of the thong into Beauty
+Smith’s keeping, White Fang knew that it was his god’s will for him to
+go with Beauty Smith. And when Beauty Smith left him tied outside the
+fort, he knew that it was Beauty Smith’s will that he should remain
+there. Therefore, he had disobeyed the will of both the gods, and
+earned the consequent punishment. He had seen dogs change owners in the
+past, and he had seen the runaways beaten as he was being beaten. He
+was wise, and yet in the nature of him there were forces greater than
+wisdom. One of these was fidelity. He did not love Grey Beaver, yet,
+even in the face of his will and his anger, he was faithful to him. He
+could not help it. This faithfulness was a quality of the clay that
+composed him. It was the quality that was peculiarly the possession of
+his kind; the quality that set apart his species from all other
+species; the quality that has enabled the wolf and the wild dog to come
+in from the open and be the companions of man.
+
+After the beating, White Fang was dragged back to the fort. But this
+time Beauty Smith left him tied with a stick. One does not give up a
+god easily, and so with White Fang. Grey Beaver was his own particular
+god, and, in spite of Grey Beaver’s will, White Fang still clung to him
+and would not give him up. Grey Beaver had betrayed and forsaken him,
+but that had no effect upon him. Not for nothing had he surrendered
+himself body and soul to Grey Beaver. There had been no reservation on
+White Fang’s part, and the bond was not to be broken easily.
+
+So, in the night, when the men in the fort were asleep, White Fang
+applied his teeth to the stick that held him. The wood was seasoned and
+dry, and it was tied so closely to his neck that he could scarcely get
+his teeth to it. It was only by the severest muscular exertion and
+neck-arching that he succeeded in getting the wood between his teeth,
+and barely between his teeth at that; and it was only by the exercise
+of an immense patience, extending through many hours, that he succeeded
+in gnawing through the stick. This was something that dogs were not
+supposed to do. It was unprecedented. But White Fang did it, trotting
+away from the fort in the early morning, with the end of the stick
+hanging to his neck.
+
+He was wise. But had he been merely wise he would not have gone back to
+Grey Beaver who had already twice betrayed him. But there was his
+faithfulness, and he went back to be betrayed yet a third time. Again
+he yielded to the tying of a thong around his neck by Grey Beaver, and
+again Beauty Smith came to claim him. And this time he was beaten even
+more severely than before.
+
+Grey Beaver looked on stolidly while the white man wielded the whip. He
+gave no protection. It was no longer his dog. When the beating was over
+White Fang was sick. A soft southland dog would have died under it, but
+not he. His school of life had been sterner, and he was himself of
+sterner stuff. He had too great vitality. His clutch on life was too
+strong. But he was very sick. At first he was unable to drag himself
+along, and Beauty Smith had to wait half-an-hour for him. And then,
+blind and reeling, he followed at Beauty Smith’s heels back to the
+fort.
+
+But now he was tied with a chain that defied his teeth, and he strove
+in vain, by lunging, to draw the staple from the timber into which it
+was driven. After a few days, sober and bankrupt, Grey Beaver departed
+up the Porcupine on his long journey to the Mackenzie. White Fang
+remained on the Yukon, the property of a man more than half mad and all
+brute. But what is a dog to know in its consciousness of madness? To
+White Fang, Beauty Smith was a veritable, if terrible, god. He was a
+mad god at best, but White Fang knew nothing of madness; he knew only
+that he must submit to the will of this new master, obey his every whim
+and fancy.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III
+THE REIGN OF HATE
+
+
+Under the tutelage of the mad god, White Fang became a fiend. He was
+kept chained in a pen at the rear of the fort, and here Beauty Smith
+teased and irritated and drove him wild with petty torments. The man
+early discovered White Fang’s susceptibility to laughter, and made it a
+point after painfully tricking him, to laugh at him. This laughter was
+uproarious and scornful, and at the same time the god pointed his
+finger derisively at White Fang. At such times reason fled from White
+Fang, and in his transports of rage he was even more mad than Beauty
+Smith.
+
+Formerly, White Fang had been merely the enemy of his kind, withal a
+ferocious enemy. He now became the enemy of all things, and more
+ferocious than ever. To such an extent was he tormented, that he hated
+blindly and without the faintest spark of reason. He hated the chain
+that bound him, the men who peered in at him through the slats of the
+pen, the dogs that accompanied the men and that snarled malignantly at
+him in his helplessness. He hated the very wood of the pen that
+confined him. And, first, last, and most of all, he hated Beauty Smith.
+
+But Beauty Smith had a purpose in all that he did to White Fang. One
+day a number of men gathered about the pen. Beauty Smith entered, club
+in hand, and took the chain off from White Fang’s neck. When his master
+had gone out, White Fang turned loose and tore around the pen, trying
+to get at the men outside. He was magnificently terrible. Fully five
+feet in length, and standing two and one-half feet at the shoulder, he
+far outweighed a wolf of corresponding size. From his mother he had
+inherited the heavier proportions of the dog, so that he weighed,
+without any fat and without an ounce of superfluous flesh, over ninety
+pounds. It was all muscle, bone, and sinew-fighting flesh in the finest
+condition.
+
+The door of the pen was being opened again. White Fang paused.
+Something unusual was happening. He waited. The door was opened wider.
+Then a huge dog was thrust inside, and the door was slammed shut behind
+him. White Fang had never seen such a dog (it was a mastiff); but the
+size and fierce aspect of the intruder did not deter him. Here was some
+thing, not wood nor iron, upon which to wreak his hate. He leaped in
+with a flash of fangs that ripped down the side of the mastiff’s neck.
+The mastiff shook his head, growled hoarsely, and plunged at White
+Fang. But White Fang was here, there, and everywhere, always evading
+and eluding, and always leaping in and slashing with his fangs and
+leaping out again in time to escape punishment.
+
+The men outside shouted and applauded, while Beauty Smith, in an
+ecstasy of delight, gloated over the ripping and mangling performed by
+White Fang. There was no hope for the mastiff from the first. He was
+too ponderous and slow. In the end, while Beauty Smith beat White Fang
+back with a club, the mastiff was dragged out by its owner. Then there
+was a payment of bets, and money clinked in Beauty Smith’s hand.
+
+White Fang came to look forward eagerly to the gathering of the men
+around his pen. It meant a fight; and this was the only way that was
+now vouchsafed him of expressing the life that was in him. Tormented,
+incited to hate, he was kept a prisoner so that there was no way of
+satisfying that hate except at the times his master saw fit to put
+another dog against him. Beauty Smith had estimated his powers well,
+for he was invariably the victor. One day, three dogs were turned in
+upon him in succession. Another day a full-grown wolf, fresh-caught
+from the Wild, was shoved in through the door of the pen. And on still
+another day two dogs were set against him at the same time. This was
+his severest fight, and though in the end he killed them both he was
+himself half killed in doing it.
+
+In the fall of the year, when the first snows were falling and mush-ice
+was running in the river, Beauty Smith took passage for himself and
+White Fang on a steamboat bound up the Yukon to Dawson. White Fang had
+now achieved a reputation in the land. As “the Fighting Wolf” he was
+known far and wide, and the cage in which he was kept on the
+steam-boat’s deck was usually surrounded by curious men. He raged and
+snarled at them, or lay quietly and studied them with cold hatred. Why
+should he not hate them? He never asked himself the question. He knew
+only hate and lost himself in the passion of it. Life had become a hell
+to him. He had not been made for the close confinement wild beasts
+endure at the hands of men. And yet it was in precisely this way that
+he was treated. Men stared at him, poked sticks between the bars to
+make him snarl, and then laughed at him.
+
+They were his environment, these men, and they were moulding the clay
+of him into a more ferocious thing than had been intended by Nature.
+Nevertheless, Nature had given him plasticity. Where many another
+animal would have died or had its spirit broken, he adjusted himself
+and lived, and at no expense of the spirit. Possibly Beauty Smith,
+arch-fiend and tormentor, was capable of breaking White Fang’s spirit,
+but as yet there were no signs of his succeeding.
+
+If Beauty Smith had in him a devil, White Fang had another; and the two
+of them raged against each other unceasingly. In the days before, White
+Fang had had the wisdom to cower down and submit to a man with a club
+in his hand; but this wisdom now left him. The mere sight of Beauty
+Smith was sufficient to send him into transports of fury. And when they
+came to close quarters, and he had been beaten back by the club, he
+went on growling and snarling, and showing his fangs. The last growl
+could never be extracted from him. No matter how terribly he was
+beaten, he had always another growl; and when Beauty Smith gave up and
+withdrew, the defiant growl followed after him, or White Fang sprang at
+the bars of the cage bellowing his hatred.
+
+When the steamboat arrived at Dawson, White Fang went ashore. But he
+still lived a public life, in a cage, surrounded by curious men. He was
+exhibited as “the Fighting Wolf,” and men paid fifty cents in gold dust
+to see him. He was given no rest. Did he lie down to sleep, he was
+stirred up by a sharp stick—so that the audience might get its money’s
+worth. In order to make the exhibition interesting, he was kept in a
+rage most of the time. But worse than all this, was the atmosphere in
+which he lived. He was regarded as the most fearful of wild beasts, and
+this was borne in to him through the bars of the cage. Every word,
+every cautious action, on the part of the men, impressed upon him his
+own terrible ferocity. It was so much added fuel to the flame of his
+fierceness. There could be but one result, and that was that his
+ferocity fed upon itself and increased. It was another instance of the
+plasticity of his clay, of his capacity for being moulded by the
+pressure of environment.
+
+In addition to being exhibited he was a professional fighting animal.
+At irregular intervals, whenever a fight could be arranged, he was
+taken out of his cage and led off into the woods a few miles from town.
+Usually this occurred at night, so as to avoid interference from the
+mounted police of the Territory. After a few hours of waiting, when
+daylight had come, the audience and the dog with which he was to fight
+arrived. In this manner it came about that he fought all sizes and
+breeds of dogs. It was a savage land, the men were savage, and the
+fights were usually to the death.
+
+Since White Fang continued to fight, it is obvious that it was the
+other dogs that died. He never knew defeat. His early training, when he
+fought with Lip-lip and the whole puppy-pack, stood him in good stead.
+There was the tenacity with which he clung to the earth. No dog could
+make him lose his footing. This was the favourite trick of the wolf
+breeds—to rush in upon him, either directly or with an unexpected
+swerve, in the hope of striking his shoulder and overthrowing him.
+Mackenzie hounds, Eskimo and Labrador dogs, huskies and Malemutes—all
+tried it on him, and all failed. He was never known to lose his
+footing. Men told this to one another, and looked each time to see it
+happen; but White Fang always disappointed them.
+
+Then there was his lightning quickness. It gave him a tremendous
+advantage over his antagonists. No matter what their fighting
+experience, they had never encountered a dog that moved so swiftly as
+he. Also to be reckoned with, was the immediateness of his attack. The
+average dog was accustomed to the preliminaries of snarling and
+bristling and growling, and the average dog was knocked off his feet
+and finished before he had begun to fight or recovered from his
+surprise. So often did this happen, that it became the custom to hold
+White Fang until the other dog went through its preliminaries, was good
+and ready, and even made the first attack.
+
+But greatest of all the advantages in White Fang’s favour, was his
+experience. He knew more about fighting than did any of the dogs that
+faced him. He had fought more fights, knew how to meet more tricks and
+methods, and had more tricks himself, while his own method was scarcely
+to be improved upon.
+
+As the time went by, he had fewer and fewer fights. Men despaired of
+matching him with an equal, and Beauty Smith was compelled to pit
+wolves against him. These were trapped by the Indians for the purpose,
+and a fight between White Fang and a wolf was always sure to draw a
+crowd. Once, a full-grown female lynx was secured, and this time White
+Fang fought for his life. Her quickness matched his; her ferocity
+equalled his; while he fought with his fangs alone, and she fought with
+her sharp-clawed feet as well.
+
+But after the lynx, all fighting ceased for White Fang. There were no
+more animals with which to fight—at least, there was none considered
+worthy of fighting with him. So he remained on exhibition until spring,
+when one Tim Keenan, a faro-dealer, arrived in the land. With him came
+the first bull-dog that had ever entered the Klondike. That this dog
+and White Fang should come together was inevitable, and for a week the
+anticipated fight was the mainspring of conversation in certain
+quarters of the town.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV
+THE CLINGING DEATH
+
+
+Beauty Smith slipped the chain from his neck and stepped back.
+
+For once White Fang did not make an immediate attack. He stood still,
+ears pricked forward, alert and curious, surveying the strange animal
+that faced him. He had never seen such a dog before. Tim Keenan shoved
+the bull-dog forward with a muttered “Go to it.” The animal waddled
+toward the centre of the circle, short and squat and ungainly. He came
+to a stop and blinked across at White Fang.
+
+There were cries from the crowd of, “Go to him, Cherokee! Sick ’m,
+Cherokee! Eat ’m up!”
+
+But Cherokee did not seem anxious to fight. He turned his head and
+blinked at the men who shouted, at the same time wagging his stump of a
+tail good-naturedly. He was not afraid, but merely lazy. Besides, it
+did not seem to him that it was intended he should fight with the dog
+he saw before him. He was not used to fighting with that kind of dog,
+and he was waiting for them to bring on the real dog.
+
+Tim Keenan stepped in and bent over Cherokee, fondling him on both
+sides of the shoulders with hands that rubbed against the grain of the
+hair and that made slight, pushing-forward movements. These were so
+many suggestions. Also, their effect was irritating, for Cherokee began
+to growl, very softly, deep down in his throat. There was a
+correspondence in rhythm between the growls and the movements of the
+man’s hands. The growl rose in the throat with the culmination of each
+forward-pushing movement, and ebbed down to start up afresh with the
+beginning of the next movement. The end of each movement was the accent
+of the rhythm, the movement ending abruptly and the growling rising
+with a jerk.
+
+This was not without its effect on White Fang. The hair began to rise
+on his neck and across the shoulders. Tim Keenan gave a final shove
+forward and stepped back again. As the impetus that carried Cherokee
+forward died down, he continued to go forward of his own volition, in a
+swift, bow-legged run. Then White Fang struck. A cry of startled
+admiration went up. He had covered the distance and gone in more like a
+cat than a dog; and with the same cat-like swiftness he had slashed
+with his fangs and leaped clear.
+
+The bull-dog was bleeding back of one ear from a rip in his thick neck.
+He gave no sign, did not even snarl, but turned and followed after
+White Fang. The display on both sides, the quickness of the one and the
+steadiness of the other, had excited the partisan spirit of the crowd,
+and the men were making new bets and increasing original bets. Again,
+and yet again, White Fang sprang in, slashed, and got away untouched,
+and still his strange foe followed after him, without too great haste,
+not slowly, but deliberately and determinedly, in a businesslike sort
+of way. There was purpose in his method—something for him to do that he
+was intent upon doing and from which nothing could distract him.
+
+His whole demeanour, every action, was stamped with this purpose. It
+puzzled White Fang. Never had he seen such a dog. It had no hair
+protection. It was soft, and bled easily. There was no thick mat of fur
+to baffle White Fang’s teeth as they were often baffled by dogs of his
+own breed. Each time that his teeth struck they sank easily into the
+yielding flesh, while the animal did not seem able to defend itself.
+Another disconcerting thing was that it made no outcry, such as he had
+been accustomed to with the other dogs he had fought. Beyond a growl or
+a grunt, the dog took its punishment silently. And never did it flag in
+its pursuit of him.
+
+Not that Cherokee was slow. He could turn and whirl swiftly enough, but
+White Fang was never there. Cherokee was puzzled, too. He had never
+fought before with a dog with which he could not close. The desire to
+close had always been mutual. But here was a dog that kept at a
+distance, dancing and dodging here and there and all about. And when it
+did get its teeth into him, it did not hold on but let go instantly and
+darted away again.
+
+But White Fang could not get at the soft underside of the throat. The
+bull-dog stood too short, while its massive jaws were an added
+protection. White Fang darted in and out unscathed, while Cherokee’s
+wounds increased. Both sides of his neck and head were ripped and
+slashed. He bled freely, but showed no signs of being disconcerted. He
+continued his plodding pursuit, though once, for the moment baffled, he
+came to a full stop and blinked at the men who looked on, at the same
+time wagging his stump of a tail as an expression of his willingness to
+fight.
+
+In that moment White Fang was in upon him and out, in passing ripping
+his trimmed remnant of an ear. With a slight manifestation of anger,
+Cherokee took up the pursuit again, running on the inside of the circle
+White Fang was making, and striving to fasten his deadly grip on White
+Fang’s throat. The bull-dog missed by a hair’s-breadth, and cries of
+praise went up as White Fang doubled suddenly out of danger in the
+opposite direction.
+
+The time went by. White Fang still danced on, dodging and doubling,
+leaping in and out, and ever inflicting damage. And still the bull-dog,
+with grim certitude, toiled after him. Sooner or later he would
+accomplish his purpose, get the grip that would win the battle. In the
+meantime, he accepted all the punishment the other could deal him. His
+tufts of ears had become tassels, his neck and shoulders were slashed
+in a score of places, and his very lips were cut and bleeding—all from
+these lightning snaps that were beyond his foreseeing and guarding.
+
+Time and again White Fang had attempted to knock Cherokee off his feet;
+but the difference in their height was too great. Cherokee was too
+squat, too close to the ground. White Fang tried the trick once too
+often. The chance came in one of his quick doublings and
+counter-circlings. He caught Cherokee with head turned away as he
+whirled more slowly. His shoulder was exposed. White Fang drove in upon
+it: but his own shoulder was high above, while he struck with such
+force that his momentum carried him on across over the other’s body.
+For the first time in his fighting history, men saw White Fang lose his
+footing. His body turned a half-somersault in the air, and he would
+have landed on his back had he not twisted, catlike, still in the air,
+in the effort to bring his feet to the earth. As it was, he struck
+heavily on his side. The next instant he was on his feet, but in that
+instant Cherokee’s teeth closed on his throat.
+
+It was not a good grip, being too low down toward the chest; but
+Cherokee held on. White Fang sprang to his feet and tore wildly around,
+trying to shake off the bull-dog’s body. It made him frantic, this
+clinging, dragging weight. It bound his movements, restricted his
+freedom. It was like the trap, and all his instinct resented it and
+revolted against it. It was a mad revolt. For several minutes he was to
+all intents insane. The basic life that was in him took charge of him.
+The will to exist of his body surged over him. He was dominated by this
+mere flesh-love of life. All intelligence was gone. It was as though he
+had no brain. His reason was unseated by the blind yearning of the
+flesh to exist and move, at all hazards to move, to continue to move,
+for movement was the expression of its existence.
+
+Round and round he went, whirling and turning and reversing, trying to
+shake off the fifty-pound weight that dragged at his throat. The
+bull-dog did little but keep his grip. Sometimes, and rarely, he
+managed to get his feet to the earth and for a moment to brace himself
+against White Fang. But the next moment his footing would be lost and
+he would be dragging around in the whirl of one of White Fang’s mad
+gyrations. Cherokee identified himself with his instinct. He knew that
+he was doing the right thing by holding on, and there came to him
+certain blissful thrills of satisfaction. At such moments he even
+closed his eyes and allowed his body to be hurled hither and thither,
+willy-nilly, careless of any hurt that might thereby come to it. That
+did not count. The grip was the thing, and the grip he kept.
+
+White Fang ceased only when he had tired himself out. He could do
+nothing, and he could not understand. Never, in all his fighting, had
+this thing happened. The dogs he had fought with did not fight that
+way. With them it was snap and slash and get away, snap and slash and
+get away. He lay partly on his side, panting for breath. Cherokee still
+holding his grip, urged against him, trying to get him over entirely on
+his side. White Fang resisted, and he could feel the jaws shifting
+their grip, slightly relaxing and coming together again in a chewing
+movement. Each shift brought the grip closer to his throat. The
+bull-dog’s method was to hold what he had, and when opportunity
+favoured to work in for more. Opportunity favoured when White Fang
+remained quiet. When White Fang struggled, Cherokee was content merely
+to hold on.
+
+The bulging back of Cherokee’s neck was the only portion of his body
+that White Fang’s teeth could reach. He got hold toward the base where
+the neck comes out from the shoulders; but he did not know the chewing
+method of fighting, nor were his jaws adapted to it. He spasmodically
+ripped and tore with his fangs for a space. Then a change in their
+position diverted him. The bull-dog had managed to roll him over on his
+back, and still hanging on to his throat, was on top of him. Like a
+cat, White Fang bowed his hind-quarters in, and, with the feet digging
+into his enemy’s abdomen above him, he began to claw with long
+tearing-strokes. Cherokee might well have been disembowelled had he not
+quickly pivoted on his grip and got his body off of White Fang’s and at
+right angles to it.
+
+There was no escaping that grip. It was like Fate itself, and as
+inexorable. Slowly it shifted up along the jugular. All that saved
+White Fang from death was the loose skin of his neck and the thick fur
+that covered it. This served to form a large roll in Cherokee’s mouth,
+the fur of which well-nigh defied his teeth. But bit by bit, whenever
+the chance offered, he was getting more of the loose skin and fur in
+his mouth. The result was that he was slowly throttling White Fang. The
+latter’s breath was drawn with greater and greater difficulty as the
+moments went by.
+
+It began to look as though the battle were over. The backers of
+Cherokee waxed jubilant and offered ridiculous odds. White Fang’s
+backers were correspondingly depressed, and refused bets of ten to one
+and twenty to one, though one man was rash enough to close a wager of
+fifty to one. This man was Beauty Smith. He took a step into the ring
+and pointed his finger at White Fang. Then he began to laugh derisively
+and scornfully. This produced the desired effect. White Fang went wild
+with rage. He called up his reserves of strength, and gained his feet.
+As he struggled around the ring, the fifty pounds of his foe ever
+dragging on his throat, his anger passed on into panic. The basic life
+of him dominated him again, and his intelligence fled before the will
+of his flesh to live. Round and round and back again, stumbling and
+falling and rising, even uprearing at times on his hind-legs and
+lifting his foe clear of the earth, he struggled vainly to shake off
+the clinging death.
+
+At last he fell, toppling backward, exhausted; and the bull-dog
+promptly shifted his grip, getting in closer, mangling more and more of
+the fur-folded flesh, throttling White Fang more severely than ever.
+Shouts of applause went up for the victor, and there were many cries of
+“Cherokee!” “Cherokee!” To this Cherokee responded by vigorous wagging
+of the stump of his tail. But the clamour of approval did not distract
+him. There was no sympathetic relation between his tail and his massive
+jaws. The one might wag, but the others held their terrible grip on
+White Fang’s throat.
+
+It was at this time that a diversion came to the spectators. There was
+a jingle of bells. Dog-mushers’ cries were heard. Everybody, save
+Beauty Smith, looked apprehensively, the fear of the police strong upon
+them. But they saw, up the trail, and not down, two men running with
+sled and dogs. They were evidently coming down the creek from some
+prospecting trip. At sight of the crowd they stopped their dogs and
+came over and joined it, curious to see the cause of the excitement.
+The dog-musher wore a moustache, but the other, a taller and younger
+man, was smooth-shaven, his skin rosy from the pounding of his blood
+and the running in the frosty air.
+
+White Fang had practically ceased struggling. Now and again he resisted
+spasmodically and to no purpose. He could get little air, and that
+little grew less and less under the merciless grip that ever tightened.
+In spite of his armour of fur, the great vein of his throat would have
+long since been torn open, had not the first grip of the bull-dog been
+so low down as to be practically on the chest. It had taken Cherokee a
+long time to shift that grip upward, and this had also tended further
+to clog his jaws with fur and skin-fold.
+
+In the meantime, the abysmal brute in Beauty Smith had been rising into
+his brain and mastering the small bit of sanity that he possessed at
+best. When he saw White Fang’s eyes beginning to glaze, he knew beyond
+doubt that the fight was lost. Then he broke loose. He sprang upon
+White Fang and began savagely to kick him. There were hisses from the
+crowd and cries of protest, but that was all. While this went on, and
+Beauty Smith continued to kick White Fang, there was a commotion in the
+crowd. The tall young newcomer was forcing his way through, shouldering
+men right and left without ceremony or gentleness. When he broke
+through into the ring, Beauty Smith was just in the act of delivering
+another kick. All his weight was on one foot, and he was in a state of
+unstable equilibrium. At that moment the newcomer’s fist landed a
+smashing blow full in his face. Beauty Smith’s remaining leg left the
+ground, and his whole body seemed to lift into the air as he turned
+over backward and struck the snow. The newcomer turned upon the crowd.
+
+“You cowards!” he cried. “You beasts!”
+
+He was in a rage himself—a sane rage. His grey eyes seemed metallic and
+steel-like as they flashed upon the crowd. Beauty Smith regained his
+feet and came toward him, sniffling and cowardly. The new-comer did not
+understand. He did not know how abject a coward the other was, and
+thought he was coming back intent on fighting. So, with a “You beast!”
+he smashed Beauty Smith over backward with a second blow in the face.
+Beauty Smith decided that the snow was the safest place for him, and
+lay where he had fallen, making no effort to get up.
+
+“Come on, Matt, lend a hand,” the newcomer called the dog-musher, who
+had followed him into the ring.
+
+Both men bent over the dogs. Matt took hold of White Fang, ready to
+pull when Cherokee’s jaws should be loosened. This the younger man
+endeavoured to accomplish by clutching the bulldog’s jaws in his hands
+and trying to spread them. It was a vain undertaking. As he pulled and
+tugged and wrenched, he kept exclaiming with every expulsion of breath,
+“Beasts!”
+
+The crowd began to grow unruly, and some of the men were protesting
+against the spoiling of the sport; but they were silenced when the
+newcomer lifted his head from his work for a moment and glared at them.
+
+“You damn beasts!” he finally exploded, and went back to his task.
+
+“It’s no use, Mr. Scott, you can’t break ’m apart that way,” Matt said
+at last.
+
+The pair paused and surveyed the locked dogs.
+
+“Ain’t bleedin’ much,” Matt announced. “Ain’t got all the way in yet.”
+
+“But he’s liable to any moment,” Scott answered. “There, did you see
+that! He shifted his grip in a bit.”
+
+The younger man’s excitement and apprehension for White Fang was
+growing. He struck Cherokee about the head savagely again and again.
+But that did not loosen the jaws. Cherokee wagged the stump of his tail
+in advertisement that he understood the meaning of the blows, but that
+he knew he was himself in the right and only doing his duty by keeping
+his grip.
+
+“Won’t some of you help?” Scott cried desperately at the crowd.
+
+But no help was offered. Instead, the crowd began sarcastically to
+cheer him on and showered him with facetious advice.
+
+“You’ll have to get a pry,” Matt counselled.
+
+The other reached into the holster at his hip, drew his revolver, and
+tried to thrust its muzzle between the bull-dog’s jaws. He shoved, and
+shoved hard, till the grating of the steel against the locked teeth
+could be distinctly heard. Both men were on their knees, bending over
+the dogs. Tim Keenan strode into the ring. He paused beside Scott and
+touched him on the shoulder, saying ominously:
+
+“Don’t break them teeth, stranger.”
+
+“Then I’ll break his neck,” Scott retorted, continuing his shoving and
+wedging with the revolver muzzle.
+
+“I said don’t break them teeth,” the faro-dealer repeated more
+ominously than before.
+
+But if it was a bluff he intended, it did not work. Scott never
+desisted from his efforts, though he looked up coolly and asked:
+
+“Your dog?”
+
+The faro-dealer grunted.
+
+“Then get in here and break this grip.”
+
+“Well, stranger,” the other drawled irritatingly, “I don’t mind telling
+you that’s something I ain’t worked out for myself. I don’t know how to
+turn the trick.”
+
+“Then get out of the way,” was the reply, “and don’t bother me. I’m
+busy.”
+
+Tim Keenan continued standing over him, but Scott took no further
+notice of his presence. He had managed to get the muzzle in between the
+jaws on one side, and was trying to get it out between the jaws on the
+other side. This accomplished, he pried gently and carefully, loosening
+the jaws a bit at a time, while Matt, a bit at a time, extricated White
+Fang’s mangled neck.
+
+“Stand by to receive your dog,” was Scott’s peremptory order to
+Cherokee’s owner.
+
+The faro-dealer stooped down obediently and got a firm hold on
+Cherokee.
+
+“Now!” Scott warned, giving the final pry.
+
+The dogs were drawn apart, the bull-dog struggling vigorously.
+
+“Take him away,” Scott commanded, and Tim Keenan dragged Cherokee back
+into the crowd.
+
+White Fang made several ineffectual efforts to get up. Once he gained
+his feet, but his legs were too weak to sustain him, and he slowly
+wilted and sank back into the snow. His eyes were half closed, and the
+surface of them was glassy. His jaws were apart, and through them the
+tongue protruded, draggled and limp. To all appearances he looked like
+a dog that had been strangled to death. Matt examined him.
+
+“Just about all in,” he announced; “but he’s breathin’ all right.”
+
+Beauty Smith had regained his feet and come over to look at White Fang.
+
+“Matt, how much is a good sled-dog worth?” Scott asked.
+
+The dog-musher, still on his knees and stooped over White Fang,
+calculated for a moment.
+
+“Three hundred dollars,” he answered.
+
+“And how much for one that’s all chewed up like this one?” Scott asked,
+nudging White Fang with his foot.
+
+“Half of that,” was the dog-musher’s judgment. Scott turned upon Beauty
+Smith.
+
+“Did you hear, Mr. Beast? I’m going to take your dog from you, and I’m
+going to give you a hundred and fifty for him.”
+
+He opened his pocket-book and counted out the bills.
+
+Beauty Smith put his hands behind his back, refusing to touch the
+proffered money.
+
+“I ain’t a-sellin’,” he said.
+
+“Oh, yes you are,” the other assured him. “Because I’m buying. Here’s
+your money. The dog’s mine.”
+
+Beauty Smith, his hands still behind him, began to back away.
+
+Scott sprang toward him, drawing his fist back to strike. Beauty Smith
+cowered down in anticipation of the blow.
+
+“I’ve got my rights,” he whimpered.
+
+“You’ve forfeited your rights to own that dog,” was the rejoinder. “Are
+you going to take the money? or do I have to hit you again?”
+
+“All right,” Beauty Smith spoke up with the alacrity of fear. “But I
+take the money under protest,” he added. “The dog’s a mint. I ain’t
+a-goin’ to be robbed. A man’s got his rights.”
+
+“Correct,” Scott answered, passing the money over to him. “A man’s got
+his rights. But you’re not a man. You’re a beast.”
+
+“Wait till I get back to Dawson,” Beauty Smith threatened. “I’ll have
+the law on you.”
+
+“If you open your mouth when you get back to Dawson, I’ll have you run
+out of town. Understand?”
+
+Beauty Smith replied with a grunt.
+
+“Understand?” the other thundered with abrupt fierceness.
+
+“Yes,” Beauty Smith grunted, shrinking away.
+
+“Yes what?”
+
+“Yes, sir,” Beauty Smith snarled.
+
+“Look out! He’ll bite!” some one shouted, and a guffaw of laughter went
+up.
+
+Scott turned his back on him, and returned to help the dog-musher, who
+was working over White Fang.
+
+Some of the men were already departing; others stood in groups, looking
+on and talking. Tim Keenan joined one of the groups.
+
+“Who’s that mug?” he asked.
+
+“Weedon Scott,” some one answered.
+
+“And who in hell is Weedon Scott?” the faro-dealer demanded.
+
+“Oh, one of them crackerjack minin’ experts. He’s in with all the big
+bugs. If you want to keep out of trouble, you’ll steer clear of him,
+that’s my talk. He’s all hunky with the officials. The Gold
+Commissioner’s a special pal of his.”
+
+“I thought he must be somebody,” was the faro-dealer’s comment. “That’s
+why I kept my hands offen him at the start.”
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V
+THE INDOMITABLE
+
+
+“It’s hopeless,” Weedon Scott confessed.
+
+He sat on the step of his cabin and stared at the dog-musher, who
+responded with a shrug that was equally hopeless.
+
+Together they looked at White Fang at the end of his stretched chain,
+bristling, snarling, ferocious, straining to get at the sled-dogs.
+Having received sundry lessons from Matt, said lessons being imparted
+by means of a club, the sled-dogs had learned to leave White Fang
+alone; and even then they were lying down at a distance, apparently
+oblivious of his existence.
+
+“It’s a wolf and there’s no taming it,” Weedon Scott announced.
+
+“Oh, I don’t know about that,” Matt objected. “Might be a lot of dog in
+’m, for all you can tell. But there’s one thing I know sure, an’ that
+there’s no gettin’ away from.”
+
+The dog-musher paused and nodded his head confidentially at Moosehide
+Mountain.
+
+“Well, don’t be a miser with what you know,” Scott said sharply, after
+waiting a suitable length of time. “Spit it out. What is it?”
+
+The dog-musher indicated White Fang with a backward thrust of his
+thumb.
+
+“Wolf or dog, it’s all the same—he’s ben tamed ’ready.”
+
+“No!”
+
+“I tell you yes, an’ broke to harness. Look close there. D’ye see them
+marks across the chest?”
+
+“You’re right, Matt. He was a sled-dog before Beauty Smith got hold of
+him.”
+
+“And there’s not much reason against his bein’ a sled-dog again.”
+
+“What d’ye think?” Scott queried eagerly. Then the hope died down as he
+added, shaking his head, “We’ve had him two weeks now, and if anything
+he’s wilder than ever at the present moment.”
+
+“Give ’m a chance,” Matt counselled. “Turn ’m loose for a spell.”
+
+The other looked at him incredulously.
+
+“Yes,” Matt went on, “I know you’ve tried to, but you didn’t take a
+club.”
+
+“You try it then.”
+
+The dog-musher secured a club and went over to the chained animal.
+White Fang watched the club after the manner of a caged lion watching
+the whip of its trainer.
+
+“See ’m keep his eye on that club,” Matt said. “That’s a good sign.
+He’s no fool. Don’t dast tackle me so long as I got that club handy.
+He’s not clean crazy, sure.”
+
+As the man’s hand approached his neck, White Fang bristled and snarled
+and crouched down. But while he eyed the approaching hand, he at the
+same time contrived to keep track of the club in the other hand,
+suspended threateningly above him. Matt unsnapped the chain from the
+collar and stepped back.
+
+White Fang could scarcely realise that he was free. Many months had
+gone by since he passed into the possession of Beauty Smith, and in all
+that period he had never known a moment of freedom except at the times
+he had been loosed to fight with other dogs. Immediately after such
+fights he had always been imprisoned again.
+
+He did not know what to make of it. Perhaps some new devilry of the
+gods was about to be perpetrated on him. He walked slowly and
+cautiously, prepared to be assailed at any moment. He did not know what
+to do, it was all so unprecedented. He took the precaution to sheer off
+from the two watching gods, and walked carefully to the corner of the
+cabin. Nothing happened. He was plainly perplexed, and he came back
+again, pausing a dozen feet away and regarding the two men intently.
+
+“Won’t he run away?” his new owner asked.
+
+Matt shrugged his shoulders. “Got to take a gamble. Only way to find
+out is to find out.”
+
+“Poor devil,” Scott murmured pityingly. “What he needs is some show of
+human kindness,” he added, turning and going into the cabin.
+
+He came out with a piece of meat, which he tossed to White Fang. He
+sprang away from it, and from a distance studied it suspiciously.
+
+“Hi-yu, Major!” Matt shouted warningly, but too late.
+
+Major had made a spring for the meat. At the instant his jaws closed on
+it, White Fang struck him. He was overthrown. Matt rushed in, but
+quicker than he was White Fang. Major staggered to his feet, but the
+blood spouting from his throat reddened the snow in a widening path.
+
+“It’s too bad, but it served him right,” Scott said hastily.
+
+But Matt’s foot had already started on its way to kick White Fang.
+There was a leap, a flash of teeth, a sharp exclamation. White Fang,
+snarling fiercely, scrambled backward for several yards, while Matt
+stooped and investigated his leg.
+
+“He got me all right,” he announced, pointing to the torn trousers and
+undercloths, and the growing stain of red.
+
+“I told you it was hopeless, Matt,” Scott said in a discouraged voice.
+“I’ve thought about it off and on, while not wanting to think of it.
+But we’ve come to it now. It’s the only thing to do.”
+
+As he talked, with reluctant movements he drew his revolver, threw open
+the cylinder, and assured himself of its contents.
+
+“Look here, Mr. Scott,” Matt objected; “that dog’s ben through hell.
+You can’t expect ’m to come out a white an’ shinin’ angel. Give ’m
+time.”
+
+“Look at Major,” the other rejoined.
+
+The dog-musher surveyed the stricken dog. He had sunk down on the snow
+in the circle of his blood and was plainly in the last gasp.
+
+“Served ’m right. You said so yourself, Mr. Scott. He tried to take
+White Fang’s meat, an’ he’s dead-O. That was to be expected. I wouldn’t
+give two whoops in hell for a dog that wouldn’t fight for his own
+meat.”
+
+“But look at yourself, Matt. It’s all right about the dogs, but we must
+draw the line somewhere.”
+
+“Served me right,” Matt argued stubbornly. “What’d I want to kick ’m
+for? You said yourself that he’d done right. Then I had no right to
+kick ’m.”
+
+“It would be a mercy to kill him,” Scott insisted. “He’s untamable.”
+
+“Now look here, Mr. Scott, give the poor devil a fightin’ chance. He
+ain’t had no chance yet. He’s just come through hell, an’ this is the
+first time he’s ben loose. Give ’m a fair chance, an’ if he don’t
+deliver the goods, I’ll kill ’m myself. There!”
+
+“God knows I don’t want to kill him or have him killed,” Scott
+answered, putting away the revolver. “We’ll let him run loose and see
+what kindness can do for him. And here’s a try at it.”
+
+He walked over to White Fang and began talking to him gently and
+soothingly.
+
+“Better have a club handy,” Matt warned.
+
+Scott shook his head and went on trying to win White Fang’s confidence.
+
+White Fang was suspicious. Something was impending. He had killed this
+god’s dog, bitten his companion god, and what else was to be expected
+than some terrible punishment? But in the face of it he was
+indomitable. He bristled and showed his teeth, his eyes vigilant, his
+whole body wary and prepared for anything. The god had no club, so he
+suffered him to approach quite near. The god’s hand had come out and
+was descending upon his head. White Fang shrank together and grew tense
+as he crouched under it. Here was danger, some treachery or something.
+He knew the hands of the gods, their proved mastery, their cunning to
+hurt. Besides, there was his old antipathy to being touched. He snarled
+more menacingly, crouched still lower, and still the hand descended. He
+did not want to bite the hand, and he endured the peril of it until his
+instinct surged up in him, mastering him with its insatiable yearning
+for life.
+
+Weedon Scott had believed that he was quick enough to avoid any snap or
+slash. But he had yet to learn the remarkable quickness of White Fang,
+who struck with the certainty and swiftness of a coiled snake.
+
+Scott cried out sharply with surprise, catching his torn hand and
+holding it tightly in his other hand. Matt uttered a great oath and
+sprang to his side. White Fang crouched down, and backed away,
+bristling, showing his fangs, his eyes malignant with menace. Now he
+could expect a beating as fearful as any he had received from Beauty
+Smith.
+
+“Here! What are you doing?” Scott cried suddenly.
+
+Matt had dashed into the cabin and come out with a rifle.
+
+“Nothin’,” he said slowly, with a careless calmness that was assumed,
+“only goin’ to keep that promise I made. I reckon it’s up to me to kill
+’m as I said I’d do.”
+
+“No you don’t!”
+
+“Yes I do. Watch me.”
+
+As Matt had pleaded for White Fang when he had been bitten, it was now
+Weedon Scott’s turn to plead.
+
+“You said to give him a chance. Well, give it to him. We’ve only just
+started, and we can’t quit at the beginning. It served me right, this
+time. And—look at him!”
+
+White Fang, near the corner of the cabin and forty feet away, was
+snarling with blood-curdling viciousness, not at Scott, but at the
+dog-musher.
+
+“Well, I’ll be everlastingly gosh-swoggled!” was the dog-musher’s
+expression of astonishment.
+
+“Look at the intelligence of him,” Scott went on hastily. “He knows the
+meaning of firearms as well as you do. He’s got intelligence and we’ve
+got to give that intelligence a chance. Put up the gun.”
+
+“All right, I’m willin’,” Matt agreed, leaning the rifle against the
+woodpile.
+
+“But will you look at that!” he exclaimed the next moment.
+
+White Fang had quieted down and ceased snarling. “This is worth
+investigatin’. Watch.”
+
+Matt, reached for the rifle, and at the same moment White Fang snarled.
+He stepped away from the rifle, and White Fang’s lifted lips descended,
+covering his teeth.
+
+“Now, just for fun.”
+
+Matt took the rifle and began slowly to raise it to his shoulder. White
+Fang’s snarling began with the movement, and increased as the movement
+approached its culmination. But the moment before the rifle came to a
+level on him, he leaped sidewise behind the corner of the cabin. Matt
+stood staring along the sights at the empty space of snow which had
+been occupied by White Fang.
+
+The dog-musher put the rifle down solemnly, then turned and looked at
+his employer.
+
+“I agree with you, Mr. Scott. That dog’s too intelligent to kill.”
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI
+THE LOVE-MASTER
+
+
+As White Fang watched Weedon Scott approach, he bristled and snarled to
+advertise that he would not submit to punishment. Twenty-four hours had
+passed since he had slashed open the hand that was now bandaged and
+held up by a sling to keep the blood out of it. In the past White Fang
+had experienced delayed punishments, and he apprehended that such a one
+was about to befall him. How could it be otherwise? He had committed
+what was to him sacrilege, sunk his fangs into the holy flesh of a god,
+and of a white-skinned superior god at that. In the nature of things,
+and of intercourse with gods, something terrible awaited him.
+
+The god sat down several feet away. White Fang could see nothing
+dangerous in that. When the gods administered punishment they stood on
+their legs. Besides, this god had no club, no whip, no firearm. And
+furthermore, he himself was free. No chain nor stick bound him. He
+could escape into safety while the god was scrambling to his feet. In
+the meantime he would wait and see.
+
+The god remained quiet, made no movement; and White Fang’s snarl slowly
+dwindled to a growl that ebbed down in his throat and ceased. Then the
+god spoke, and at the first sound of his voice, the hair rose on White
+Fang’s neck and the growl rushed up in his throat. But the god made no
+hostile movement, and went on calmly talking. For a time White Fang
+growled in unison with him, a correspondence of rhythm being
+established between growl and voice. But the god talked on
+interminably. He talked to White Fang as White Fang had never been
+talked to before. He talked softly and soothingly, with a gentleness
+that somehow, somewhere, touched White Fang. In spite of himself and
+all the pricking warnings of his instinct, White Fang began to have
+confidence in this god. He had a feeling of security that was belied by
+all his experience with men.
+
+After a long time, the god got up and went into the cabin. White Fang
+scanned him apprehensively when he came out. He had neither whip nor
+club nor weapon. Nor was his uninjured hand behind his back hiding
+something. He sat down as before, in the same spot, several feet away.
+He held out a small piece of meat. White Fang pricked his ears and
+investigated it suspiciously, managing to look at the same time both at
+the meat and the god, alert for any overt act, his body tense and ready
+to spring away at the first sign of hostility.
+
+Still the punishment delayed. The god merely held near to his nose a
+piece of meat. And about the meat there seemed nothing wrong. Still
+White Fang suspected; and though the meat was proffered to him with
+short inviting thrusts of the hand, he refused to touch it. The gods
+were all-wise, and there was no telling what masterful treachery lurked
+behind that apparently harmless piece of meat. In past experience,
+especially in dealing with squaws, meat and punishment had often been
+disastrously related.
+
+In the end, the god tossed the meat on the snow at White Fang’s feet.
+He smelled the meat carefully; but he did not look at it. While he
+smelled it he kept his eyes on the god. Nothing happened. He took the
+meat into his mouth and swallowed it. Still nothing happened. The god
+was actually offering him another piece of meat. Again he refused to
+take it from the hand, and again it was tossed to him. This was
+repeated a number of times. But there came a time when the god refused
+to toss it. He kept it in his hand and steadfastly proffered it.
+
+The meat was good meat, and White Fang was hungry. Bit by bit,
+infinitely cautious, he approached the hand. At last the time came that
+he decided to eat the meat from the hand. He never took his eyes from
+the god, thrusting his head forward with ears flattened back and hair
+involuntarily rising and cresting on his neck. Also a low growl rumbled
+in his throat as warning that he was not to be trifled with. He ate the
+meat, and nothing happened. Piece by piece, he ate all the meat, and
+nothing happened. Still the punishment delayed.
+
+He licked his chops and waited. The god went on talking. In his voice
+was kindness—something of which White Fang had no experience whatever.
+And within him it aroused feelings which he had likewise never
+experienced before. He was aware of a certain strange satisfaction, as
+though some need were being gratified, as though some void in his being
+were being filled. Then again came the prod of his instinct and the
+warning of past experience. The gods were ever crafty, and they had
+unguessed ways of attaining their ends.
+
+Ah, he had thought so! There it came now, the god’s hand, cunning to
+hurt, thrusting out at him, descending upon his head. But the god went
+on talking. His voice was soft and soothing. In spite of the menacing
+hand, the voice inspired confidence. And in spite of the assuring
+voice, the hand inspired distrust. White Fang was torn by conflicting
+feelings, impulses. It seemed he would fly to pieces, so terrible was
+the control he was exerting, holding together by an unwonted indecision
+the counter-forces that struggled within him for mastery.
+
+He compromised. He snarled and bristled and flattened his ears. But he
+neither snapped nor sprang away. The hand descended. Nearer and nearer
+it came. It touched the ends of his upstanding hair. He shrank down
+under it. It followed down after him, pressing more closely against
+him. Shrinking, almost shivering, he still managed to hold himself
+together. It was a torment, this hand that touched him and violated his
+instinct. He could not forget in a day all the evil that had been
+wrought him at the hands of men. But it was the will of the god, and he
+strove to submit.
+
+The hand lifted and descended again in a patting, caressing movement.
+This continued, but every time the hand lifted, the hair lifted under
+it. And every time the hand descended, the ears flattened down and a
+cavernous growl surged in his throat. White Fang growled and growled
+with insistent warning. By this means he announced that he was prepared
+to retaliate for any hurt he might receive. There was no telling when
+the god’s ulterior motive might be disclosed. At any moment that soft,
+confidence-inspiring voice might break forth in a roar of wrath, that
+gentle and caressing hand transform itself into a vice-like grip to
+hold him helpless and administer punishment.
+
+But the god talked on softly, and ever the hand rose and fell with
+non-hostile pats. White Fang experienced dual feelings. It was
+distasteful to his instinct. It restrained him, opposed the will of him
+toward personal liberty. And yet it was not physically painful. On the
+contrary, it was even pleasant, in a physical way. The patting movement
+slowly and carefully changed to a rubbing of the ears about their
+bases, and the physical pleasure even increased a little. Yet he
+continued to fear, and he stood on guard, expectant of unguessed evil,
+alternately suffering and enjoying as one feeling or the other came
+uppermost and swayed him.
+
+“Well, I’ll be gosh-swoggled!”
+
+So spoke Matt, coming out of the cabin, his sleeves rolled up, a pan of
+dirty dish-water in his hands, arrested in the act of emptying the pan
+by the sight of Weedon Scott patting White Fang.
+
+At the instant his voice broke the silence, White Fang leaped back,
+snarling savagely at him.
+
+Matt regarded his employer with grieved disapproval.
+
+“If you don’t mind my expressin’ my feelin’s, Mr. Scott, I’ll make free
+to say you’re seventeen kinds of a damn fool an’ all of ’em different,
+an’ then some.”
+
+Weedon Scott smiled with a superior air, gained his feet, and walked
+over to White Fang. He talked soothingly to him, but not for long, then
+slowly put out his hand, rested it on White Fang’s head, and resumed
+the interrupted patting. White Fang endured it, keeping his eyes fixed
+suspiciously, not upon the man that patted him, but upon the man that
+stood in the doorway.
+
+“You may be a number one, tip-top minin’ expert, all right all right,”
+the dog-musher delivered himself oracularly, “but you missed the chance
+of your life when you was a boy an’ didn’t run off an’ join a circus.”
+
+White Fang snarled at the sound of his voice, but this time did not
+leap away from under the hand that was caressing his head and the back
+of his neck with long, soothing strokes.
+
+It was the beginning of the end for White Fang—the ending of the old
+life and the reign of hate. A new and incomprehensibly fairer life was
+dawning. It required much thinking and endless patience on the part of
+Weedon Scott to accomplish this. And on the part of White Fang it
+required nothing less than a revolution. He had to ignore the urges and
+promptings of instinct and reason, defy experience, give the lie to
+life itself.
+
+Life, as he had known it, not only had had no place in it for much that
+he now did; but all the currents had gone counter to those to which he
+now abandoned himself. In short, when all things were considered, he
+had to achieve an orientation far vaster than the one he had achieved
+at the time he came voluntarily in from the Wild and accepted Grey
+Beaver as his lord. At that time he was a mere puppy, soft from the
+making, without form, ready for the thumb of circumstance to begin its
+work upon him. But now it was different. The thumb of circumstance had
+done its work only too well. By it he had been formed and hardened into
+the Fighting Wolf, fierce and implacable, unloving and unlovable. To
+accomplish the change was like a reflux of being, and this when the
+plasticity of youth was no longer his; when the fibre of him had become
+tough and knotty; when the warp and the woof of him had made of him an
+adamantine texture, harsh and unyielding; when the face of his spirit
+had become iron and all his instincts and axioms had crystallised into
+set rules, cautions, dislikes, and desires.
+
+Yet again, in this new orientation, it was the thumb of circumstance
+that pressed and prodded him, softening that which had become hard and
+remoulding it into fairer form. Weedon Scott was in truth this thumb.
+He had gone to the roots of White Fang’s nature, and with kindness
+touched to life potencies that had languished and well-nigh perished.
+One such potency was _love_. It took the place of _like_, which latter
+had been the highest feeling that thrilled him in his intercourse with
+the gods.
+
+But this love did not come in a day. It began with _like_ and out of it
+slowly developed. White Fang did not run away, though he was allowed to
+remain loose, because he liked this new god. This was certainly better
+than the life he had lived in the cage of Beauty Smith, and it was
+necessary that he should have some god. The lordship of man was a need
+of his nature. The seal of his dependence on man had been set upon him
+in that early day when he turned his back on the Wild and crawled to
+Grey Beaver’s feet to receive the expected beating. This seal had been
+stamped upon him again, and ineradicably, on his second return from the
+Wild, when the long famine was over and there was fish once more in the
+village of Grey Beaver.
+
+And so, because he needed a god and because he preferred Weedon Scott
+to Beauty Smith, White Fang remained. In acknowledgment of fealty, he
+proceeded to take upon himself the guardianship of his master’s
+property. He prowled about the cabin while the sled-dogs slept, and the
+first night-visitor to the cabin fought him off with a club until
+Weedon Scott came to the rescue. But White Fang soon learned to
+differentiate between thieves and honest men, to appraise the true
+value of step and carriage. The man who travelled, loud-stepping, the
+direct line to the cabin door, he let alone—though he watched him
+vigilantly until the door opened and he received the endorsement of the
+master. But the man who went softly, by circuitous ways, peering with
+caution, seeking after secrecy—that was the man who received no
+suspension of judgment from White Fang, and who went away abruptly,
+hurriedly, and without dignity.
+
+Weedon Scott had set himself the task of redeeming White Fang—or
+rather, of redeeming mankind from the wrong it had done White Fang. It
+was a matter of principle and conscience. He felt that the ill done
+White Fang was a debt incurred by man and that it must be paid. So he
+went out of his way to be especially kind to the Fighting Wolf. Each
+day he made it a point to caress and pet White Fang, and to do it at
+length.
+
+At first suspicious and hostile, White Fang grew to like this petting.
+But there was one thing that he never outgrew—his growling. Growl he
+would, from the moment the petting began till it ended. But it was a
+growl with a new note in it. A stranger could not hear this note, and
+to such a stranger the growling of White Fang was an exhibition of
+primordial savagery, nerve-racking and blood-curdling. But White Fang’s
+throat had become harsh-fibred from the making of ferocious sounds
+through the many years since his first little rasp of anger in the lair
+of his cubhood, and he could not soften the sounds of that throat now
+to express the gentleness he felt. Nevertheless, Weedon Scott’s ear and
+sympathy were fine enough to catch the new note all but drowned in the
+fierceness—the note that was the faintest hint of a croon of content
+and that none but he could hear.
+
+As the days went by, the evolution of _like_ into _love_ was
+accelerated. White Fang himself began to grow aware of it, though in
+his consciousness he knew not what love was. It manifested itself to
+him as a void in his being—a hungry, aching, yearning void that
+clamoured to be filled. It was a pain and an unrest; and it received
+easement only by the touch of the new god’s presence. At such times
+love was joy to him, a wild, keen-thrilling satisfaction. But when away
+from his god, the pain and the unrest returned; the void in him sprang
+up and pressed against him with its emptiness, and the hunger gnawed
+and gnawed unceasingly.
+
+White Fang was in the process of finding himself. In spite of the
+maturity of his years and of the savage rigidity of the mould that had
+formed him, his nature was undergoing an expansion. There was a
+burgeoning within him of strange feelings and unwonted impulses. His
+old code of conduct was changing. In the past he had liked comfort and
+surcease from pain, disliked discomfort and pain, and he had adjusted
+his actions accordingly. But now it was different. Because of this new
+feeling within him, he ofttimes elected discomfort and pain for the
+sake of his god. Thus, in the early morning, instead of roaming and
+foraging, or lying in a sheltered nook, he would wait for hours on the
+cheerless cabin-stoop for a sight of the god’s face. At night, when the
+god returned home, White Fang would leave the warm sleeping-place he
+had burrowed in the snow in order to receive the friendly snap of
+fingers and the word of greeting. Meat, even meat itself, he would
+forego to be with his god, to receive a caress from him or to accompany
+him down into the town.
+
+_Like_ had been replaced by _love_. And love was the plummet dropped
+down into the deeps of him where like had never gone. And responsive
+out of his deeps had come the new thing—love. That which was given unto
+him did he return. This was a god indeed, a love-god, a warm and
+radiant god, in whose light White Fang’s nature expanded as a flower
+expands under the sun.
+
+But White Fang was not demonstrative. He was too old, too firmly
+moulded, to become adept at expressing himself in new ways. He was too
+self-possessed, too strongly poised in his own isolation. Too long had
+he cultivated reticence, aloofness, and moroseness. He had never barked
+in his life, and he could not now learn to bark a welcome when his god
+approached. He was never in the way, never extravagant nor foolish in
+the expression of his love. He never ran to meet his god. He waited at
+a distance; but he always waited, was always there. His love partook of
+the nature of worship, dumb, inarticulate, a silent adoration. Only by
+the steady regard of his eyes did he express his love, and by the
+unceasing following with his eyes of his god’s every movement. Also, at
+times, when his god looked at him and spoke to him, he betrayed an
+awkward self-consciousness, caused by the struggle of his love to
+express itself and his physical inability to express it.
+
+He learned to adjust himself in many ways to his new mode of life. It
+was borne in upon him that he must let his master’s dogs alone. Yet his
+dominant nature asserted itself, and he had first to thrash them into
+an acknowledgment of his superiority and leadership. This accomplished,
+he had little trouble with them. They gave trail to him when he came
+and went or walked among them, and when he asserted his will they
+obeyed.
+
+In the same way, he came to tolerate Matt—as a possession of his
+master. His master rarely fed him. Matt did that, it was his business;
+yet White Fang divined that it was his master’s food he ate and that it
+was his master who thus fed him vicariously. Matt it was who tried to
+put him into the harness and make him haul sled with the other dogs.
+But Matt failed. It was not until Weedon Scott put the harness on White
+Fang and worked him, that he understood. He took it as his master’s
+will that Matt should drive him and work him just as he drove and
+worked his master’s other dogs.
+
+Different from the Mackenzie toboggans were the Klondike sleds with
+runners under them. And different was the method of driving the dogs.
+There was no fan-formation of the team. The dogs worked in single file,
+one behind another, hauling on double traces. And here, in the
+Klondike, the leader was indeed the leader. The wisest as well as
+strongest dog was the leader, and the team obeyed him and feared him.
+That White Fang should quickly gain this post was inevitable. He could
+not be satisfied with less, as Matt learned after much inconvenience
+and trouble. White Fang picked out the post for himself, and Matt
+backed his judgment with strong language after the experiment had been
+tried. But, though he worked in the sled in the day, White Fang did not
+forego the guarding of his master’s property in the night. Thus he was
+on duty all the time, ever vigilant and faithful, the most valuable of
+all the dogs.
+
+“Makin’ free to spit out what’s in me,” Matt said one day, “I beg to
+state that you was a wise guy all right when you paid the price you did
+for that dog. You clean swindled Beauty Smith on top of pushin’ his
+face in with your fist.”
+
+A recrudescence of anger glinted in Weedon Scott’s grey eyes, and he
+muttered savagely, “The beast!”
+
+In the late spring a great trouble came to White Fang. Without warning,
+the love-master disappeared. There had been warning, but White Fang was
+unversed in such things and did not understand the packing of a grip.
+He remembered afterwards that his packing had preceded the master’s
+disappearance; but at the time he suspected nothing. That night he
+waited for the master to return. At midnight the chill wind that blew
+drove him to shelter at the rear of the cabin. There he drowsed, only
+half asleep, his ears keyed for the first sound of the familiar step.
+But, at two in the morning, his anxiety drove him out to the cold front
+stoop, where he crouched, and waited.
+
+But no master came. In the morning the door opened and Matt stepped
+outside. White Fang gazed at him wistfully. There was no common speech
+by which he might learn what he wanted to know. The days came and went,
+but never the master. White Fang, who had never known sickness in his
+life, became sick. He became very sick, so sick that Matt was finally
+compelled to bring him inside the cabin. Also, in writing to his
+employer, Matt devoted a postscript to White Fang.
+
+Weedon Scott reading the letter down in Circle City, came upon the
+following:
+
+“That dam wolf won’t work. Won’t eat. Aint got no spunk left. All the
+dogs is licking him. Wants to know what has become of you, and I don’t
+know how to tell him. Mebbe he is going to die.”
+
+It was as Matt had said. White Fang had ceased eating, lost heart, and
+allowed every dog of the team to thrash him. In the cabin he lay on the
+floor near the stove, without interest in food, in Matt, nor in life.
+Matt might talk gently to him or swear at him, it was all the same; he
+never did more than turn his dull eyes upon the man, then drop his head
+back to its customary position on his fore-paws.
+
+And then, one night, Matt, reading to himself with moving lips and
+mumbled sounds, was startled by a low whine from White Fang. He had got
+upon his feet, his ears cocked towards the door, and he was listening
+intently. A moment later, Matt heard a footstep. The door opened, and
+Weedon Scott stepped in. The two men shook hands. Then Scott looked
+around the room.
+
+“Where’s the wolf?” he asked.
+
+Then he discovered him, standing where he had been lying, near to the
+stove. He had not rushed forward after the manner of other dogs. He
+stood, watching and waiting.
+
+“Holy smoke!” Matt exclaimed. “Look at ’m wag his tail!”
+
+Weedon Scott strode half across the room toward him, at the same time
+calling him. White Fang came to him, not with a great bound, yet
+quickly. He was awakened from self-consciousness, but as he drew near,
+his eyes took on a strange expression. Something, an incommunicable
+vastness of feeling, rose up into his eyes as a light and shone forth.
+
+“He never looked at me that way all the time you was gone!” Matt
+commented.
+
+Weedon Scott did not hear. He was squatting down on his heels, face to
+face with White Fang and petting him—rubbing at the roots of the ears,
+making long caressing strokes down the neck to the shoulders, tapping
+the spine gently with the balls of his fingers. And White Fang was
+growling responsively, the crooning note of the growl more pronounced
+than ever.
+
+But that was not all. What of his joy, the great love in him, ever
+surging and struggling to express itself, succeeded in finding a new
+mode of expression. He suddenly thrust his head forward and nudged his
+way in between the master’s arm and body. And here, confined, hidden
+from view all except his ears, no longer growling, he continued to
+nudge and snuggle.
+
+The two men looked at each other. Scott’s eyes were shining.
+
+“Gosh!” said Matt in an awe-stricken voice.
+
+A moment later, when he had recovered himself, he said, “I always
+insisted that wolf was a dog. Look at ’m!”
+
+With the return of the love-master, White Fang’s recovery was rapid.
+Two nights and a day he spent in the cabin. Then he sallied forth. The
+sled-dogs had forgotten his prowess. They remembered only the latest,
+which was his weakness and sickness. At the sight of him as he came out
+of the cabin, they sprang upon him.
+
+“Talk about your rough-houses,” Matt murmured gleefully, standing in
+the doorway and looking on.
+
+“Give ’m hell, you wolf! Give ’m hell!—an’ then some!”
+
+White Fang did not need the encouragement. The return of the
+love-master was enough. Life was flowing through him again, splendid
+and indomitable. He fought from sheer joy, finding in it an expression
+of much that he felt and that otherwise was without speech. There could
+be but one ending. The team dispersed in ignominious defeat, and it was
+not until after dark that the dogs came sneaking back, one by one, by
+meekness and humility signifying their fealty to White Fang.
+
+Having learned to snuggle, White Fang was guilty of it often. It was
+the final word. He could not go beyond it. The one thing of which he
+had always been particularly jealous was his head. He had always
+disliked to have it touched. It was the Wild in him, the fear of hurt
+and of the trap, that had given rise to the panicky impulses to avoid
+contacts. It was the mandate of his instinct that that head must be
+free. And now, with the love-master, his snuggling was the deliberate
+act of putting himself into a position of hopeless helplessness. It was
+an expression of perfect confidence, of absolute self-surrender, as
+though he said: “I put myself into thy hands. Work thou thy will with
+me.”
+
+One night, not long after the return, Scott and Matt sat at a game of
+cribbage preliminary to going to bed. “Fifteen-two, fifteen-four an’ a
+pair makes six,” Mat was pegging up, when there was an outcry and sound
+of snarling without. They looked at each other as they started to rise
+to their feet.
+
+“The wolf’s nailed somebody,” Matt said.
+
+A wild scream of fear and anguish hastened them.
+
+“Bring a light!” Scott shouted, as he sprang outside.
+
+Matt followed with the lamp, and by its light they saw a man lying on
+his back in the snow. His arms were folded, one above the other, across
+his face and throat. Thus he was trying to shield himself from White
+Fang’s teeth. And there was need for it. White Fang was in a rage,
+wickedly making his attack on the most vulnerable spot. From shoulder
+to wrist of the crossed arms, the coat-sleeve, blue flannel shirt and
+undershirt were ripped in rags, while the arms themselves were terribly
+slashed and streaming blood.
+
+All this the two men saw in the first instant. The next instant Weedon
+Scott had White Fang by the throat and was dragging him clear. White
+Fang struggled and snarled, but made no attempt to bite, while he
+quickly quieted down at a sharp word from the master.
+
+Matt helped the man to his feet. As he arose he lowered his crossed
+arms, exposing the bestial face of Beauty Smith. The dog-musher let go
+of him precipitately, with action similar to that of a man who has
+picked up live fire. Beauty Smith blinked in the lamplight and looked
+about him. He caught sight of White Fang and terror rushed into his
+face.
+
+At the same moment Matt noticed two objects lying in the snow. He held
+the lamp close to them, indicating them with his toe for his employer’s
+benefit—a steel dog-chain and a stout club.
+
+Weedon Scott saw and nodded. Not a word was spoken. The dog-musher laid
+his hand on Beauty Smith’s shoulder and faced him to the right about.
+No word needed to be spoken. Beauty Smith started.
+
+In the meantime the love-master was patting White Fang and talking to
+him.
+
+“Tried to steal you, eh? And you wouldn’t have it! Well, well, he made
+a mistake, didn’t he?”
+
+“Must ‘a’ thought he had hold of seventeen devils,” the dog-musher
+sniggered.
+
+White Fang, still wrought up and bristling, growled and growled, the
+hair slowly lying down, the crooning note remote and dim, but growing
+in his throat.
+
+
+
+
+PART V
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I
+THE LONG TRAIL
+
+
+It was in the air. White Fang sensed the coming calamity, even before
+there was tangible evidence of it. In vague ways it was borne in upon
+him that a change was impending. He knew not how nor why, yet he got
+his feel of the oncoming event from the gods themselves. In ways
+subtler than they knew, they betrayed their intentions to the wolf-dog
+that haunted the cabin-stoop, and that, though he never came inside the
+cabin, knew what went on inside their brains.
+
+“Listen to that, will you!” the dog-musher exclaimed at supper one
+night.
+
+Weedon Scott listened. Through the door came a low, anxious whine, like
+a sobbing under the breath that had just grown audible. Then came the
+long sniff, as White Fang reassured himself that his god was still
+inside and had not yet taken himself off in mysterious and solitary
+flight.
+
+“I do believe that wolf’s on to you,” the dog-musher said.
+
+Weedon Scott looked across at his companion with eyes that almost
+pleaded, though this was given the lie by his words.
+
+“What the devil can I do with a wolf in California?” he demanded.
+
+“That’s what I say,” Matt answered. “What the devil can you do with a
+wolf in California?”
+
+But this did not satisfy Weedon Scott. The other seemed to be judging
+him in a non-committal sort of way.
+
+“White man’s dogs would have no show against him,” Scott went on. “He’d
+kill them on sight. If he didn’t bankrupt me with damaged suits, the
+authorities would take him away from me and electrocute him.”
+
+“He’s a downright murderer, I know,” was the dog-musher’s comment.
+
+Weedon Scott looked at him suspiciously.
+
+“It would never do,” he said decisively.
+
+“It would never do!” Matt concurred. “Why you’d have to hire a man
+’specially to take care of ’m.”
+
+The other suspicion was allayed. He nodded cheerfully. In the silence
+that followed, the low, half-sobbing whine was heard at the door and
+then the long, questing sniff.
+
+“There’s no denyin’ he thinks a hell of a lot of you,” Matt said.
+
+The other glared at him in sudden wrath. “Damn it all, man! I know my
+own mind and what’s best!”
+
+“I’m agreein’ with you, only . . . ”
+
+“Only what?” Scott snapped out.
+
+“Only . . . ” the dog-musher began softly, then changed his mind and
+betrayed a rising anger of his own. “Well, you needn’t get so all-fired
+het up about it. Judgin’ by your actions one’d think you didn’t know
+your own mind.”
+
+Weedon Scott debated with himself for a while, and then said more
+gently: “You are right, Matt. I don’t know my own mind, and that’s
+what’s the trouble.”
+
+“Why, it would be rank ridiculousness for me to take that dog along,”
+he broke out after another pause.
+
+“I’m agreein’ with you,” was Matt’s answer, and again his employer was
+not quite satisfied with him.
+
+“But how in the name of the great Sardanapolis he knows you’re goin’ is
+what gets me,” the dog-musher continued innocently.
+
+“It’s beyond me, Matt,” Scott answered, with a mournful shake of the
+head.
+
+Then came the day when, through the open cabin door, White Fang saw the
+fatal grip on the floor and the love-master packing things into it.
+Also, there were comings and goings, and the erstwhile placid
+atmosphere of the cabin was vexed with strange perturbations and
+unrest. Here was indubitable evidence. White Fang had already scented
+it. He now reasoned it. His god was preparing for another flight. And
+since he had not taken him with him before, so, now, he could look to
+be left behind.
+
+That night he lifted the long wolf-howl. As he had howled, in his puppy
+days, when he fled back from the Wild to the village to find it
+vanished and naught but a rubbish-heap to mark the site of Grey
+Beaver’s tepee, so now he pointed his muzzle to the cold stars and told
+to them his woe.
+
+Inside the cabin the two men had just gone to bed.
+
+“He’s gone off his food again,” Matt remarked from his bunk.
+
+There was a grunt from Weedon Scott’s bunk, and a stir of blankets.
+
+“From the way he cut up the other time you went away, I wouldn’t wonder
+this time but what he died.”
+
+The blankets in the other bunk stirred irritably.
+
+“Oh, shut up!” Scott cried out through the darkness. “You nag worse
+than a woman.”
+
+“I’m agreein’ with you,” the dog-musher answered, and Weedon Scott was
+not quite sure whether or not the other had snickered.
+
+The next day White Fang’s anxiety and restlessness were even more
+pronounced. He dogged his master’s heels whenever he left the cabin,
+and haunted the front stoop when he remained inside. Through the open
+door he could catch glimpses of the luggage on the floor. The grip had
+been joined by two large canvas bags and a box. Matt was rolling the
+master’s blankets and fur robe inside a small tarpaulin. White Fang
+whined as he watched the operation.
+
+Later on two Indians arrived. He watched them closely as they
+shouldered the luggage and were led off down the hill by Matt, who
+carried the bedding and the grip. But White Fang did not follow them.
+The master was still in the cabin. After a time, Matt returned. The
+master came to the door and called White Fang inside.
+
+“You poor devil,” he said gently, rubbing White Fang’s ears and tapping
+his spine. “I’m hitting the long trail, old man, where you cannot
+follow. Now give me a growl—the last, good, good-bye growl.”
+
+But White Fang refused to growl. Instead, and after a wistful,
+searching look, he snuggled in, burrowing his head out of sight between
+the master’s arm and body.
+
+“There she blows!” Matt cried. From the Yukon arose the hoarse
+bellowing of a river steamboat. “You’ve got to cut it short. Be sure
+and lock the front door. I’ll go out the back. Get a move on!”
+
+The two doors slammed at the same moment, and Weedon Scott waited for
+Matt to come around to the front. From inside the door came a low
+whining and sobbing. Then there were long, deep-drawn sniffs.
+
+“You must take good care of him, Matt,” Scott said, as they started
+down the hill. “Write and let me know how he gets along.”
+
+“Sure,” the dog-musher answered. “But listen to that, will you!”
+
+Both men stopped. White Fang was howling as dogs howl when their
+masters lie dead. He was voicing an utter woe, his cry bursting upward
+in great heart-breaking rushes, dying down into quavering misery, and
+bursting upward again with a rush upon rush of grief.
+
+The _Aurora_ was the first steamboat of the year for the Outside, and
+her decks were jammed with prosperous adventurers and broken gold
+seekers, all equally as mad to get to the Outside as they had been
+originally to get to the Inside. Near the gang-plank, Scott was shaking
+hands with Matt, who was preparing to go ashore. But Matt’s hand went
+limp in the other’s grasp as his gaze shot past and remained fixed on
+something behind him. Scott turned to see. Sitting on the deck several
+feet away and watching wistfully was White Fang.
+
+The dog-musher swore softly, in awe-stricken accents. Scott could only
+look in wonder.
+
+“Did you lock the front door?” Matt demanded. The other nodded, and
+asked, “How about the back?”
+
+“You just bet I did,” was the fervent reply.
+
+White Fang flattened his ears ingratiatingly, but remained where he
+was, making no attempt to approach.
+
+“I’ll have to take ’m ashore with me.”
+
+Matt made a couple of steps toward White Fang, but the latter slid away
+from him. The dog-musher made a rush of it, and White Fang dodged
+between the legs of a group of men. Ducking, turning, doubling, he slid
+about the deck, eluding the other’s efforts to capture him.
+
+But when the love-master spoke, White Fang came to him with prompt
+obedience.
+
+“Won’t come to the hand that’s fed ’m all these months,” the dog-musher
+muttered resentfully. “And you—you ain’t never fed ’m after them first
+days of gettin’ acquainted. I’m blamed if I can see how he works it out
+that you’re the boss.”
+
+Scott, who had been patting White Fang, suddenly bent closer and
+pointed out fresh-made cuts on his muzzle, and a gash between the eyes.
+
+Matt bent over and passed his hand along White Fang’s belly.
+
+“We plump forgot the window. He’s all cut an’ gouged underneath. Must
+‘a’ butted clean through it, b’gosh!”
+
+But Weedon Scott was not listening. He was thinking rapidly. The
+_Aurora’s_ whistle hooted a final announcement of departure. Men were
+scurrying down the gang-plank to the shore. Matt loosened the bandana
+from his own neck and started to put it around White Fang’s. Scott
+grasped the dog-musher’s hand.
+
+“Good-bye, Matt, old man. About the wolf—you needn’t write. You see,
+I’ve . . . !”
+
+“What!” the dog-musher exploded. “You don’t mean to say . . .?”
+
+“The very thing I mean. Here’s your bandana. I’ll write to you about
+him.”
+
+Matt paused halfway down the gang-plank.
+
+“He’ll never stand the climate!” he shouted back. “Unless you clip ’m
+in warm weather!”
+
+The gang-plank was hauled in, and the _Aurora_ swung out from the bank.
+Weedon Scott waved a last good-bye. Then he turned and bent over White
+Fang, standing by his side.
+
+“Now growl, damn you, growl,” he said, as he patted the responsive head
+and rubbed the flattening ears.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II
+THE SOUTHLAND
+
+
+White Fang landed from the steamer in San Francisco. He was appalled.
+Deep in him, below any reasoning process or act of consciousness, he
+had associated power with godhead. And never had the white men seemed
+such marvellous gods as now, when he trod the slimy pavement of San
+Francisco. The log cabins he had known were replaced by towering
+buildings. The streets were crowded with perils—waggons, carts,
+automobiles; great, straining horses pulling huge trucks; and monstrous
+cable and electric cars hooting and clanging through the midst,
+screeching their insistent menace after the manner of the lynxes he had
+known in the northern woods.
+
+All this was the manifestation of power. Through it all, behind it all,
+was man, governing and controlling, expressing himself, as of old, by
+his mastery over matter. It was colossal, stunning. White Fang was
+awed. Fear sat upon him. As in his cubhood he had been made to feel his
+smallness and puniness on the day he first came in from the Wild to the
+village of Grey Beaver, so now, in his full-grown stature and pride of
+strength, he was made to feel small and puny. And there were so many
+gods! He was made dizzy by the swarming of them. The thunder of the
+streets smote upon his ears. He was bewildered by the tremendous and
+endless rush and movement of things. As never before, he felt his
+dependence on the love-master, close at whose heels he followed, no
+matter what happened never losing sight of him.
+
+But White Fang was to have no more than a nightmare vision of the
+city—an experience that was like a bad dream, unreal and terrible, that
+haunted him for long after in his dreams. He was put into a baggage-car
+by the master, chained in a corner in the midst of heaped trunks and
+valises. Here a squat and brawny god held sway, with much noise,
+hurling trunks and boxes about, dragging them in through the door and
+tossing them into the piles, or flinging them out of the door, smashing
+and crashing, to other gods who awaited them.
+
+And here, in this inferno of luggage, was White Fang deserted by the
+master. Or at least White Fang thought he was deserted, until he
+smelled out the master’s canvas clothes-bags alongside of him, and
+proceeded to mount guard over them.
+
+“’Bout time you come,” growled the god of the car, an hour later, when
+Weedon Scott appeared at the door. “That dog of yourn won’t let me lay
+a finger on your stuff.”
+
+White Fang emerged from the car. He was astonished. The nightmare city
+was gone. The car had been to him no more than a room in a house, and
+when he had entered it the city had been all around him. In the
+interval the city had disappeared. The roar of it no longer dinned upon
+his ears. Before him was smiling country, streaming with sunshine, lazy
+with quietude. But he had little time to marvel at the transformation.
+He accepted it as he accepted all the unaccountable doings and
+manifestations of the gods. It was their way.
+
+There was a carriage waiting. A man and a woman approached the master.
+The woman’s arms went out and clutched the master around the neck—a
+hostile act! The next moment Weedon Scott had torn loose from the
+embrace and closed with White Fang, who had become a snarling, raging
+demon.
+
+“It’s all right, mother,” Scott was saying as he kept tight hold of
+White Fang and placated him. “He thought you were going to injure me,
+and he wouldn’t stand for it. It’s all right. It’s all right. He’ll
+learn soon enough.”
+
+“And in the meantime I may be permitted to love my son when his dog is
+not around,” she laughed, though she was pale and weak from the fright.
+
+She looked at White Fang, who snarled and bristled and glared
+malevolently.
+
+“He’ll have to learn, and he shall, without postponement,” Scott said.
+
+He spoke softly to White Fang until he had quieted him, then his voice
+became firm.
+
+“Down, sir! Down with you!”
+
+This had been one of the things taught him by the master, and White
+Fang obeyed, though he lay down reluctantly and sullenly.
+
+“Now, mother.”
+
+Scott opened his arms to her, but kept his eyes on White Fang.
+
+“Down!” he warned. “Down!”
+
+White Fang, bristling silently, half-crouching as he rose, sank back
+and watched the hostile act repeated. But no harm came of it, nor of
+the embrace from the strange man-god that followed. Then the
+clothes-bags were taken into the carriage, the strange gods and the
+love-master followed, and White Fang pursued, now running vigilantly
+behind, now bristling up to the running horses and warning them that he
+was there to see that no harm befell the god they dragged so swiftly
+across the earth.
+
+At the end of fifteen minutes, the carriage swung in through a stone
+gateway and on between a double row of arched and interlacing walnut
+trees. On either side stretched lawns, their broad sweep broken here
+and there by great sturdy-limbed oaks. In the near distance, in
+contrast with the young-green of the tended grass, sunburnt hay-fields
+showed tan and gold; while beyond were the tawny hills and upland
+pastures. From the head of the lawn, on the first soft swell from the
+valley-level, looked down the deep-porched, many-windowed house.
+
+Little opportunity was given White Fang to see all this. Hardly had the
+carriage entered the grounds, when he was set upon by a sheep-dog,
+bright-eyed, sharp-muzzled, righteously indignant and angry. It was
+between him and the master, cutting him off. White Fang snarled no
+warning, but his hair bristled as he made his silent and deadly rush.
+This rush was never completed. He halted with awkward abruptness, with
+stiff fore-legs bracing himself against his momentum, almost sitting
+down on his haunches, so desirous was he of avoiding contact with the
+dog he was in the act of attacking. It was a female, and the law of his
+kind thrust a barrier between. For him to attack her would require
+nothing less than a violation of his instinct.
+
+But with the sheep-dog it was otherwise. Being a female, she possessed
+no such instinct. On the other hand, being a sheep-dog, her instinctive
+fear of the Wild, and especially of the wolf, was unusually keen. White
+Fang was to her a wolf, the hereditary marauder who had preyed upon her
+flocks from the time sheep were first herded and guarded by some dim
+ancestor of hers. And so, as he abandoned his rush at her and braced
+himself to avoid the contact, she sprang upon him. He snarled
+involuntarily as he felt her teeth in his shoulder, but beyond this
+made no offer to hurt her. He backed away, stiff-legged with
+self-consciousness, and tried to go around her. He dodged this way and
+that, and curved and turned, but to no purpose. She remained always
+between him and the way he wanted to go.
+
+“Here, Collie!” called the strange man in the carriage.
+
+Weedon Scott laughed.
+
+“Never mind, father. It is good discipline. White Fang will have to
+learn many things, and it’s just as well that he begins now. He’ll
+adjust himself all right.”
+
+The carriage drove on, and still Collie blocked White Fang’s way. He
+tried to outrun her by leaving the drive and circling across the lawn
+but she ran on the inner and smaller circle, and was always there,
+facing him with her two rows of gleaming teeth. Back he circled, across
+the drive to the other lawn, and again she headed him off.
+
+The carriage was bearing the master away. White Fang caught glimpses of
+it disappearing amongst the trees. The situation was desperate. He
+essayed another circle. She followed, running swiftly. And then,
+suddenly, he turned upon her. It was his old fighting trick. Shoulder
+to shoulder, he struck her squarely. Not only was she overthrown. So
+fast had she been running that she rolled along, now on her back, now
+on her side, as she struggled to stop, clawing gravel with her feet and
+crying shrilly her hurt pride and indignation.
+
+White Fang did not wait. The way was clear, and that was all he had
+wanted. She took after him, never ceasing her outcry. It was the
+straightaway now, and when it came to real running, White Fang could
+teach her things. She ran frantically, hysterically, straining to the
+utmost, advertising the effort she was making with every leap: and all
+the time White Fang slid smoothly away from her silently, without
+effort, gliding like a ghost over the ground.
+
+As he rounded the house to the _porte-cochère_, he came upon the
+carriage. It had stopped, and the master was alighting. At this moment,
+still running at top speed, White Fang became suddenly aware of an
+attack from the side. It was a deer-hound rushing upon him. White Fang
+tried to face it. But he was going too fast, and the hound was too
+close. It struck him on the side; and such was his forward momentum and
+the unexpectedness of it, White Fang was hurled to the ground and
+rolled clear over. He came out of the tangle a spectacle of malignancy,
+ears flattened back, lips writhing, nose wrinkling, his teeth clipping
+together as the fangs barely missed the hound’s soft throat.
+
+The master was running up, but was too far away; and it was Collie that
+saved the hound’s life. Before White Fang could spring in and deliver
+the fatal stroke, and just as he was in the act of springing in, Collie
+arrived. She had been out-manoeuvred and out-run, to say nothing of her
+having been unceremoniously tumbled in the gravel, and her arrival was
+like that of a tornado—made up of offended dignity, justifiable wrath,
+and instinctive hatred for this marauder from the Wild. She struck
+White Fang at right angles in the midst of his spring, and again he was
+knocked off his feet and rolled over.
+
+The next moment the master arrived, and with one hand held White Fang,
+while the father called off the dogs.
+
+“I say, this is a pretty warm reception for a poor lone wolf from the
+Arctic,” the master said, while White Fang calmed down under his
+caressing hand. “In all his life he’s only been known once to go off
+his feet, and here he’s been rolled twice in thirty seconds.”
+
+The carriage had driven away, and other strange gods had appeared from
+out the house. Some of these stood respectfully at a distance; but two
+of them, women, perpetrated the hostile act of clutching the master
+around the neck. White Fang, however, was beginning to tolerate this
+act. No harm seemed to come of it, while the noises the gods made were
+certainly not threatening. These gods also made overtures to White
+Fang, but he warned them off with a snarl, and the master did likewise
+with word of mouth. At such times White Fang leaned in close against
+the master’s legs and received reassuring pats on the head.
+
+The hound, under the command, “Dick! Lie down, sir!” had gone up the
+steps and lain down to one side of the porch, still growling and
+keeping a sullen watch on the intruder. Collie had been taken in charge
+by one of the woman-gods, who held arms around her neck and petted and
+caressed her; but Collie was very much perplexed and worried, whining
+and restless, outraged by the permitted presence of this wolf and
+confident that the gods were making a mistake.
+
+All the gods started up the steps to enter the house. White Fang
+followed closely at the master’s heels. Dick, on the porch, growled,
+and White Fang, on the steps, bristled and growled back.
+
+“Take Collie inside and leave the two of them to fight it out,”
+suggested Scott’s father. “After that they’ll be friends.”
+
+“Then White Fang, to show his friendship, will have to be chief mourner
+at the funeral,” laughed the master.
+
+The elder Scott looked incredulously, first at White Fang, then at
+Dick, and finally at his son.
+
+“You mean . . .?”
+
+Weedon nodded his head. “I mean just that. You’d have a dead Dick
+inside one minute—two minutes at the farthest.”
+
+He turned to White Fang. “Come on, you wolf. It’s you that’ll have to
+come inside.”
+
+White Fang walked stiff-legged up the steps and across the porch, with
+tail rigidly erect, keeping his eyes on Dick to guard against a flank
+attack, and at the same time prepared for whatever fierce manifestation
+of the unknown that might pounce out upon him from the interior of the
+house. But no thing of fear pounced out, and when he had gained the
+inside he scouted carefully around, looking at it and finding it not.
+Then he lay down with a contented grunt at the master’s feet, observing
+all that went on, ever ready to spring to his feet and fight for life
+with the terrors he felt must lurk under the trap-roof of the dwelling.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III
+THE GOD’S DOMAIN
+
+
+Not only was White Fang adaptable by nature, but he had travelled much,
+and knew the meaning and necessity of adjustment. Here, in Sierra
+Vista, which was the name of Judge Scott’s place, White Fang quickly
+began to make himself at home. He had no further serious trouble with
+the dogs. They knew more about the ways of the Southland gods than did
+he, and in their eyes he had qualified when he accompanied the gods
+inside the house. Wolf that he was, and unprecedented as it was, the
+gods had sanctioned his presence, and they, the dogs of the gods, could
+only recognise this sanction.
+
+Dick, perforce, had to go through a few stiff formalities at first,
+after which he calmly accepted White Fang as an addition to the
+premises. Had Dick had his way, they would have been good friends. All
+but White Fang was averse to friendship. All he asked of other dogs was
+to be let alone. His whole life he had kept aloof from his kind, and he
+still desired to keep aloof. Dick’s overtures bothered him, so he
+snarled Dick away. In the north he had learned the lesson that he must
+let the master’s dogs alone, and he did not forget that lesson now. But
+he insisted on his own privacy and self-seclusion, and so thoroughly
+ignored Dick that that good-natured creature finally gave him up and
+scarcely took as much interest in him as in the hitching-post near the
+stable.
+
+Not so with Collie. While she accepted him because it was the mandate
+of the gods, that was no reason that she should leave him in peace.
+Woven into her being was the memory of countless crimes he and his had
+perpetrated against her ancestry. Not in a day nor a generation were
+the ravaged sheepfolds to be forgotten. All this was a spur to her,
+pricking her to retaliation. She could not fly in the face of the gods
+who permitted him, but that did not prevent her from making life
+miserable for him in petty ways. A feud, ages old, was between them,
+and she, for one, would see to it that he was reminded.
+
+So Collie took advantage of her sex to pick upon White Fang and
+maltreat him. His instinct would not permit him to attack her, while
+her persistence would not permit him to ignore her. When she rushed at
+him he turned his fur-protected shoulder to her sharp teeth and walked
+away stiff-legged and stately. When she forced him too hard, he was
+compelled to go about in a circle, his shoulder presented to her, his
+head turned from her, and on his face and in his eyes a patient and
+bored expression. Sometimes, however, a nip on his hind-quarters
+hastened his retreat and made it anything but stately. But as a rule he
+managed to maintain a dignity that was almost solemnity. He ignored her
+existence whenever it was possible, and made it a point to keep out of
+her way. When he saw or heard her coming, he got up and walked off.
+
+There was much in other matters for White Fang to learn. Life in the
+Northland was simplicity itself when compared with the complicated
+affairs of Sierra Vista. First of all, he had to learn the family of
+the master. In a way he was prepared to do this. As Mit-sah and
+Kloo-kooch had belonged to Grey Beaver, sharing his food, his fire, and
+his blankets, so now, at Sierra Vista, belonged to the love-master all
+the denizens of the house.
+
+But in this matter there was a difference, and many differences. Sierra
+Vista was a far vaster affair than the tepee of Grey Beaver. There were
+many persons to be considered. There was Judge Scott, and there was his
+wife. There were the master’s two sisters, Beth and Mary. There was his
+wife, Alice, and then there were his children, Weedon and Maud,
+toddlers of four and six. There was no way for anybody to tell him
+about all these people, and of blood-ties and relationship he knew
+nothing whatever and never would be capable of knowing. Yet he quickly
+worked it out that all of them belonged to the master. Then, by
+observation, whenever opportunity offered, by study of action, speech,
+and the very intonations of the voice, he slowly learned the intimacy
+and the degree of favour they enjoyed with the master. And by this
+ascertained standard, White Fang treated them accordingly. What was of
+value to the master he valued; what was dear to the master was to be
+cherished by White Fang and guarded carefully.
+
+Thus it was with the two children. All his life he had disliked
+children. He hated and feared their hands. The lessons were not tender
+that he had learned of their tyranny and cruelty in the days of the
+Indian villages. When Weedon and Maud had first approached him, he
+growled warningly and looked malignant. A cuff from the master and a
+sharp word had then compelled him to permit their caresses, though he
+growled and growled under their tiny hands, and in the growl there was
+no crooning note. Later, he observed that the boy and girl were of
+great value in the master’s eyes. Then it was that no cuff nor sharp
+word was necessary before they could pat him.
+
+Yet White Fang was never effusively affectionate. He yielded to the
+master’s children with an ill but honest grace, and endured their
+fooling as one would endure a painful operation. When he could no
+longer endure, he would get up and stalk determinedly away from them.
+But after a time, he grew even to like the children. Still he was not
+demonstrative. He would not go up to them. On the other hand, instead
+of walking away at sight of them, he waited for them to come to him.
+And still later, it was noticed that a pleased light came into his eyes
+when he saw them approaching, and that he looked after them with an
+appearance of curious regret when they left him for other amusements.
+
+All this was a matter of development, and took time. Next in his
+regard, after the children, was Judge Scott. There were two reasons,
+possibly, for this. First, he was evidently a valuable possession of
+the master’s, and next, he was undemonstrative. White Fang liked to lie
+at his feet on the wide porch when he read the newspaper, from time to
+time favouring White Fang with a look or a word—untroublesome tokens
+that he recognised White Fang’s presence and existence. But this was
+only when the master was not around. When the master appeared, all
+other beings ceased to exist so far as White Fang was concerned.
+
+White Fang allowed all the members of the family to pet him and make
+much of him; but he never gave to them what he gave to the master. No
+caress of theirs could put the love-croon into his throat, and, try as
+they would, they could never persuade him into snuggling against them.
+This expression of abandon and surrender, of absolute trust, he
+reserved for the master alone. In fact, he never regarded the members
+of the family in any other light than possessions of the love-master.
+
+Also White Fang had early come to differentiate between the family and
+the servants of the household. The latter were afraid of him, while he
+merely refrained from attacking them. This because he considered that
+they were likewise possessions of the master. Between White Fang and
+them existed a neutrality and no more. They cooked for the master and
+washed the dishes and did other things just as Matt had done up in the
+Klondike. They were, in short, appurtenances of the household.
+
+Outside the household there was even more for White Fang to learn. The
+master’s domain was wide and complex, yet it had its metes and bounds.
+The land itself ceased at the county road. Outside was the common
+domain of all gods—the roads and streets. Then inside other fences were
+the particular domains of other gods. A myriad laws governed all these
+things and determined conduct; yet he did not know the speech of the
+gods, nor was there any way for him to learn save by experience. He
+obeyed his natural impulses until they ran him counter to some law.
+When this had been done a few times, he learned the law and after that
+observed it.
+
+But most potent in his education was the cuff of the master’s hand, the
+censure of the master’s voice. Because of White Fang’s very great love,
+a cuff from the master hurt him far more than any beating Grey Beaver
+or Beauty Smith had ever given him. They had hurt only the flesh of
+him; beneath the flesh the spirit had still raged, splendid and
+invincible. But with the master the cuff was always too light to hurt
+the flesh. Yet it went deeper. It was an expression of the master’s
+disapproval, and White Fang’s spirit wilted under it.
+
+In point of fact, the cuff was rarely administered. The master’s voice
+was sufficient. By it White Fang knew whether he did right or not. By
+it he trimmed his conduct and adjusted his actions. It was the compass
+by which he steered and learned to chart the manners of a new land and
+life.
+
+In the Northland, the only domesticated animal was the dog. All other
+animals lived in the Wild, and were, when not too formidable, lawful
+spoil for any dog. All his days White Fang had foraged among the live
+things for food. It did not enter his head that in the Southland it was
+otherwise. But this he was to learn early in his residence in Santa
+Clara Valley. Sauntering around the corner of the house in the early
+morning, he came upon a chicken that had escaped from the chicken-yard.
+White Fang’s natural impulse was to eat it. A couple of bounds, a flash
+of teeth and a frightened squawk, and he had scooped in the adventurous
+fowl. It was farm-bred and fat and tender; and White Fang licked his
+chops and decided that such fare was good.
+
+Later in the day, he chanced upon another stray chicken near the
+stables. One of the grooms ran to the rescue. He did not know White
+Fang’s breed, so for weapon he took a light buggy-whip. At the first
+cut of the whip, White Fang left the chicken for the man. A club might
+have stopped White Fang, but not a whip. Silently, without flinching,
+he took a second cut in his forward rush, and as he leaped for the
+throat the groom cried out, “My God!” and staggered backward. He
+dropped the whip and shielded his throat with his arms. In consequence,
+his forearm was ripped open to the bone.
+
+The man was badly frightened. It was not so much White Fang’s ferocity
+as it was his silence that unnerved the groom. Still protecting his
+throat and face with his torn and bleeding arm, he tried to retreat to
+the barn. And it would have gone hard with him had not Collie appeared
+on the scene. As she had saved Dick’s life, she now saved the groom’s.
+She rushed upon White Fang in frenzied wrath. She had been right. She
+had known better than the blundering gods. All her suspicions were
+justified. Here was the ancient marauder up to his old tricks again.
+
+The groom escaped into the stables, and White Fang backed away before
+Collie’s wicked teeth, or presented his shoulder to them and circled
+round and round. But Collie did not give over, as was her wont, after a
+decent interval of chastisement. On the contrary, she grew more excited
+and angry every moment, until, in the end, White Fang flung dignity to
+the winds and frankly fled away from her across the fields.
+
+“He’ll learn to leave chickens alone,” the master said. “But I can’t
+give him the lesson until I catch him in the act.”
+
+Two nights later came the act, but on a more generous scale than the
+master had anticipated. White Fang had observed closely the
+chicken-yards and the habits of the chickens. In the night-time, after
+they had gone to roost, he climbed to the top of a pile of newly hauled
+lumber. From there he gained the roof of a chicken-house, passed over
+the ridgepole and dropped to the ground inside. A moment later he was
+inside the house, and the slaughter began.
+
+In the morning, when the master came out on to the porch, fifty white
+Leghorn hens, laid out in a row by the groom, greeted his eyes. He
+whistled to himself, softly, first with surprise, and then, at the end,
+with admiration. His eyes were likewise greeted by White Fang, but
+about the latter there were no signs of shame nor guilt. He carried
+himself with pride, as though, forsooth, he had achieved a deed
+praiseworthy and meritorious. There was about him no consciousness of
+sin. The master’s lips tightened as he faced the disagreeable task.
+Then he talked harshly to the unwitting culprit, and in his voice there
+was nothing but godlike wrath. Also, he held White Fang’s nose down to
+the slain hens, and at the same time cuffed him soundly.
+
+White Fang never raided a chicken-roost again. It was against the law,
+and he had learned it. Then the master took him into the chicken-yards.
+White Fang’s natural impulse, when he saw the live food fluttering
+about him and under his very nose, was to spring upon it. He obeyed the
+impulse, but was checked by the master’s voice. They continued in the
+yards for half an hour. Time and again the impulse surged over White
+Fang, and each time, as he yielded to it, he was checked by the
+master’s voice. Thus it was he learned the law, and ere he left the
+domain of the chickens, he had learned to ignore their existence.
+
+“You can never cure a chicken-killer.” Judge Scott shook his head sadly
+at luncheon table, when his son narrated the lesson he had given White
+Fang. “Once they’ve got the habit and the taste of blood . . .” Again
+he shook his head sadly.
+
+But Weedon Scott did not agree with his father. “I’ll tell you what
+I’ll do,” he challenged finally. “I’ll lock White Fang in with the
+chickens all afternoon.”
+
+“But think of the chickens,” objected the judge.
+
+“And furthermore,” the son went on, “for every chicken he kills, I’ll
+pay you one dollar gold coin of the realm.”
+
+“But you should penalise father, too,” interpose Beth.
+
+Her sister seconded her, and a chorus of approval arose from around the
+table. Judge Scott nodded his head in agreement.
+
+“All right.” Weedon Scott pondered for a moment. “And if, at the end of
+the afternoon White Fang hasn’t harmed a chicken, for every ten minutes
+of the time he has spent in the yard, you will have to say to him,
+gravely and with deliberation, just as if you were sitting on the bench
+and solemnly passing judgment, ‘White Fang, you are smarter than I
+thought.’”
+
+From hidden points of vantage the family watched the performance. But
+it was a fizzle. Locked in the yard and there deserted by the master,
+White Fang lay down and went to sleep. Once he got up and walked over
+to the trough for a drink of water. The chickens he calmly ignored. So
+far as he was concerned they did not exist. At four o’clock he executed
+a running jump, gained the roof of the chicken-house and leaped to the
+ground outside, whence he sauntered gravely to the house. He had
+learned the law. And on the porch, before the delighted family, Judge
+Scott, face to face with White Fang, said slowly and solemnly, sixteen
+times, “White Fang, you are smarter than I thought.”
+
+But it was the multiplicity of laws that befuddled White Fang and often
+brought him into disgrace. He had to learn that he must not touch the
+chickens that belonged to other gods. Then there were cats, and
+rabbits, and turkeys; all these he must let alone. In fact, when he had
+but partly learned the law, his impression was that he must leave all
+live things alone. Out in the back-pasture, a quail could flutter up
+under his nose unharmed. All tense and trembling with eagerness and
+desire, he mastered his instinct and stood still. He was obeying the
+will of the gods.
+
+And then, one day, again out in the back-pasture, he saw Dick start a
+jackrabbit and run it. The master himself was looking on and did not
+interfere. Nay, he encouraged White Fang to join in the chase. And thus
+he learned that there was no taboo on jackrabbits. In the end he worked
+out the complete law. Between him and all domestic animals there must
+be no hostilities. If not amity, at least neutrality must obtain. But
+the other animals—the squirrels, and quail, and cottontails, were
+creatures of the Wild who had never yielded allegiance to man. They
+were the lawful prey of any dog. It was only the tame that the gods
+protected, and between the tame deadly strife was not permitted. The
+gods held the power of life and death over their subjects, and the gods
+were jealous of their power.
+
+Life was complex in the Santa Clara Valley after the simplicities of
+the Northland. And the chief thing demanded by these intricacies of
+civilisation was control, restraint—a poise of self that was as
+delicate as the fluttering of gossamer wings and at the same time as
+rigid as steel. Life had a thousand faces, and White Fang found he must
+meet them all—thus, when he went to town, in to San Jose, running
+behind the carriage or loafing about the streets when the carriage
+stopped. Life flowed past him, deep and wide and varied, continually
+impinging upon his senses, demanding of him instant and endless
+adjustments and correspondences, and compelling him, almost always, to
+suppress his natural impulses.
+
+There were butcher-shops where meat hung within reach. This meat he
+must not touch. There were cats at the houses the master visited that
+must be let alone. And there were dogs everywhere that snarled at him
+and that he must not attack. And then, on the crowded sidewalks there
+were persons innumerable whose attention he attracted. They would stop
+and look at him, point him out to one another, examine him, talk of
+him, and, worst of all, pat him. And these perilous contacts from all
+these strange hands he must endure. Yet this endurance he achieved.
+Furthermore, he got over being awkward and self-conscious. In a lofty
+way he received the attentions of the multitudes of strange gods. With
+condescension he accepted their condescension. On the other hand, there
+was something about him that prevented great familiarity. They patted
+him on the head and passed on, contented and pleased with their own
+daring.
+
+But it was not all easy for White Fang. Running behind the carriage in
+the outskirts of San Jose, he encountered certain small boys who made a
+practice of flinging stones at him. Yet he knew that it was not
+permitted him to pursue and drag them down. Here he was compelled to
+violate his instinct of self-preservation, and violate it he did, for
+he was becoming tame and qualifying himself for civilisation.
+
+Nevertheless, White Fang was not quite satisfied with the arrangement.
+He had no abstract ideas about justice and fair play. But there is a
+certain sense of equity that resides in life, and it was this sense in
+him that resented the unfairness of his being permitted no defence
+against the stone-throwers. He forgot that in the covenant entered into
+between him and the gods they were pledged to care for him and defend
+him. But one day the master sprang from the carriage, whip in hand, and
+gave the stone-throwers a thrashing. After that they threw stones no
+more, and White Fang understood and was satisfied.
+
+One other experience of similar nature was his. On the way to town,
+hanging around the saloon at the cross-roads, were three dogs that made
+a practice of rushing out upon him when he went by. Knowing his deadly
+method of fighting, the master had never ceased impressing upon White
+Fang the law that he must not fight. As a result, having learned the
+lesson well, White Fang was hard put whenever he passed the cross-roads
+saloon. After the first rush, each time, his snarl kept the three dogs
+at a distance but they trailed along behind, yelping and bickering and
+insulting him. This endured for some time. The men at the saloon even
+urged the dogs on to attack White Fang. One day they openly sicked the
+dogs on him. The master stopped the carriage.
+
+“Go to it,” he said to White Fang.
+
+But White Fang could not believe. He looked at the master, and he
+looked at the dogs. Then he looked back eagerly and questioningly at
+the master.
+
+The master nodded his head. “Go to them, old fellow. Eat them up.”
+
+White Fang no longer hesitated. He turned and leaped silently among his
+enemies. All three faced him. There was a great snarling and growling,
+a clashing of teeth and a flurry of bodies. The dust of the road arose
+in a cloud and screened the battle. But at the end of several minutes
+two dogs were struggling in the dirt and the third was in full flight.
+He leaped a ditch, went through a rail fence, and fled across a field.
+White Fang followed, sliding over the ground in wolf fashion and with
+wolf speed, swiftly and without noise, and in the centre of the field
+he dragged down and slew the dog.
+
+With this triple killing his main troubles with dogs ceased. The word
+went up and down the valley, and men saw to it that their dogs did not
+molest the Fighting Wolf.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV
+THE CALL OF KIND
+
+
+The months came and went. There was plenty of food and no work in the
+Southland, and White Fang lived fat and prosperous and happy. Not alone
+was he in the geographical Southland, for he was in the Southland of
+life. Human kindness was like a sun shining upon him, and he flourished
+like a flower planted in good soil.
+
+And yet he remained somehow different from other dogs. He knew the law
+even better than did the dogs that had known no other life, and he
+observed the law more punctiliously; but still there was about him a
+suggestion of lurking ferocity, as though the Wild still lingered in
+him and the wolf in him merely slept.
+
+He never chummed with other dogs. Lonely he had lived, so far as his
+kind was concerned, and lonely he would continue to live. In his
+puppyhood, under the persecution of Lip-lip and the puppy-pack, and in
+his fighting days with Beauty Smith, he had acquired a fixed aversion
+for dogs. The natural course of his life had been diverted, and,
+recoiling from his kind, he had clung to the human.
+
+Besides, all Southland dogs looked upon him with suspicion. He aroused
+in them their instinctive fear of the Wild, and they greeted him always
+with snarl and growl and belligerent hatred. He, on the other hand,
+learned that it was not necessary to use his teeth upon them. His naked
+fangs and writhing lips were uniformly efficacious, rarely failing to
+send a bellowing on-rushing dog back on its haunches.
+
+But there was one trial in White Fang’s life—Collie. She never gave him
+a moment’s peace. She was not so amenable to the law as he. She defied
+all efforts of the master to make her become friends with White Fang.
+Ever in his ears was sounding her sharp and nervous snarl. She had
+never forgiven him the chicken-killing episode, and persistently held
+to the belief that his intentions were bad. She found him guilty before
+the act, and treated him accordingly. She became a pest to him, like a
+policeman following him around the stable and the hounds, and, if he
+even so much as glanced curiously at a pigeon or chicken, bursting into
+an outcry of indignation and wrath. His favourite way of ignoring her
+was to lie down, with his head on his fore-paws, and pretend sleep.
+This always dumfounded and silenced her.
+
+With the exception of Collie, all things went well with White Fang. He
+had learned control and poise, and he knew the law. He achieved a
+staidness, and calmness, and philosophic tolerance. He no longer lived
+in a hostile environment. Danger and hurt and death did not lurk
+everywhere about him. In time, the unknown, as a thing of terror and
+menace ever impending, faded away. Life was soft and easy. It flowed
+along smoothly, and neither fear nor foe lurked by the way.
+
+He missed the snow without being aware of it. “An unduly long summer,”
+would have been his thought had he thought about it; as it was, he
+merely missed the snow in a vague, subconscious way. In the same
+fashion, especially in the heat of summer when he suffered from the
+sun, he experienced faint longings for the Northland. Their only effect
+upon him, however, was to make him uneasy and restless without his
+knowing what was the matter.
+
+White Fang had never been very demonstrative. Beyond his snuggling and
+the throwing of a crooning note into his love-growl, he had no way of
+expressing his love. Yet it was given him to discover a third way. He
+had always been susceptible to the laughter of the gods. Laughter had
+affected him with madness, made him frantic with rage. But he did not
+have it in him to be angry with the love-master, and when that god
+elected to laugh at him in a good-natured, bantering way, he was
+nonplussed. He could feel the pricking and stinging of the old anger as
+it strove to rise up in him, but it strove against love. He could not
+be angry; yet he had to do something. At first he was dignified, and
+the master laughed the harder. Then he tried to be more dignified, and
+the master laughed harder than before. In the end, the master laughed
+him out of his dignity. His jaws slightly parted, his lips lifted a
+little, and a quizzical expression that was more love than humour came
+into his eyes. He had learned to laugh.
+
+Likewise he learned to romp with the master, to be tumbled down and
+rolled over, and be the victim of innumerable rough tricks. In return
+he feigned anger, bristling and growling ferociously, and clipping his
+teeth together in snaps that had all the seeming of deadly intention.
+But he never forgot himself. Those snaps were always delivered on the
+empty air. At the end of such a romp, when blow and cuff and snap and
+snarl were fast and furious, they would break off suddenly and stand
+several feet apart, glaring at each other. And then, just as suddenly,
+like the sun rising on a stormy sea, they would begin to laugh. This
+would always culminate with the master’s arms going around White Fang’s
+neck and shoulders while the latter crooned and growled his love-song.
+
+But nobody else ever romped with White Fang. He did not permit it. He
+stood on his dignity, and when they attempted it, his warning snarl and
+bristling mane were anything but playful. That he allowed the master
+these liberties was no reason that he should be a common dog, loving
+here and loving there, everybody’s property for a romp and good time.
+He loved with single heart and refused to cheapen himself or his love.
+
+The master went out on horseback a great deal, and to accompany him was
+one of White Fang’s chief duties in life. In the Northland he had
+evidenced his fealty by toiling in the harness; but there were no sleds
+in the Southland, nor did dogs pack burdens on their backs. So he
+rendered fealty in the new way, by running with the master’s horse. The
+longest day never played White Fang out. His was the gait of the wolf,
+smooth, tireless and effortless, and at the end of fifty miles he would
+come in jauntily ahead of the horse.
+
+It was in connection with the riding, that White Fang achieved one
+other mode of expression—remarkable in that he did it but twice in all
+his life. The first time occurred when the master was trying to teach a
+spirited thoroughbred the method of opening and closing gates without
+the rider’s dismounting. Time and again and many times he ranged the
+horse up to the gate in the effort to close it and each time the horse
+became frightened and backed and plunged away. It grew more nervous and
+excited every moment. When it reared, the master put the spurs to it
+and made it drop its fore-legs back to earth, whereupon it would begin
+kicking with its hind-legs. White Fang watched the performance with
+increasing anxiety until he could contain himself no longer, when he
+sprang in front of the horse and barked savagely and warningly.
+
+Though he often tried to bark thereafter, and the master encouraged
+him, he succeeded only once, and then it was not in the master’s
+presence. A scamper across the pasture, a jackrabbit rising suddenly
+under the horse’s feet, a violent sheer, a stumble, a fall to earth,
+and a broken leg for the master, was the cause of it. White Fang sprang
+in a rage at the throat of the offending horse, but was checked by the
+master’s voice.
+
+“Home! Go home!” the master commanded when he had ascertained his
+injury.
+
+White Fang was disinclined to desert him. The master thought of writing
+a note, but searched his pockets vainly for pencil and paper. Again he
+commanded White Fang to go home.
+
+The latter regarded him wistfully, started away, then returned and
+whined softly. The master talked to him gently but seriously, and he
+cocked his ears, and listened with painful intentness.
+
+“That’s all right, old fellow, you just run along home,” ran the talk.
+“Go on home and tell them what’s happened to me. Home with you, you
+wolf. Get along home!”
+
+White Fang knew the meaning of “home,” and though he did not understand
+the remainder of the master’s language, he knew it was his will that he
+should go home. He turned and trotted reluctantly away. Then he
+stopped, undecided, and looked back over his shoulder.
+
+“Go home!” came the sharp command, and this time he obeyed.
+
+The family was on the porch, taking the cool of the afternoon, when
+White Fang arrived. He came in among them, panting, covered with dust.
+
+“Weedon’s back,” Weedon’s mother announced.
+
+The children welcomed White Fang with glad cries and ran to meet him.
+He avoided them and passed down the porch, but they cornered him
+against a rocking-chair and the railing. He growled and tried to push
+by them. Their mother looked apprehensively in their direction.
+
+“I confess, he makes me nervous around the children,” she said. “I have
+a dread that he will turn upon them unexpectedly some day.”
+
+Growling savagely, White Fang sprang out of the corner, overturning the
+boy and the girl. The mother called them to her and comforted them,
+telling them not to bother White Fang.
+
+“A wolf is a wolf!” commented Judge Scott. “There is no trusting one.”
+
+“But he is not all wolf,” interposed Beth, standing for her brother in
+his absence.
+
+“You have only Weedon’s opinion for that,” rejoined the judge. “He
+merely surmises that there is some strain of dog in White Fang; but as
+he will tell you himself, he knows nothing about it. As for his
+appearance—”
+
+He did not finish his sentence. White Fang stood before him, growling
+fiercely.
+
+“Go away! Lie down, sir!” Judge Scott commanded.
+
+White Fang turned to the love-master’s wife. She screamed with fright
+as he seized her dress in his teeth and dragged on it till the frail
+fabric tore away. By this time he had become the centre of interest.
+
+He had ceased from his growling and stood, head up, looking into their
+faces. His throat worked spasmodically, but made no sound, while he
+struggled with all his body, convulsed with the effort to rid himself
+of the incommunicable something that strained for utterance.
+
+“I hope he is not going mad,” said Weedon’s mother. “I told Weedon that
+I was afraid the warm climate would not agree with an Arctic animal.”
+
+“He’s trying to speak, I do believe,” Beth announced.
+
+At this moment speech came to White Fang, rushing up in a great burst
+of barking.
+
+“Something has happened to Weedon,” his wife said decisively.
+
+They were all on their feet now, and White Fang ran down the steps,
+looking back for them to follow. For the second and last time in his
+life he had barked and made himself understood.
+
+After this event he found a warmer place in the hearts of the Sierra
+Vista people, and even the groom whose arm he had slashed admitted that
+he was a wise dog even if he was a wolf. Judge Scott still held to the
+same opinion, and proved it to everybody’s dissatisfaction by
+measurements and descriptions taken from the encyclopaedia and various
+works on natural history.
+
+The days came and went, streaming their unbroken sunshine over the
+Santa Clara Valley. But as they grew shorter and White Fang’s second
+winter in the Southland came on, he made a strange discovery. Collie’s
+teeth were no longer sharp. There was a playfulness about her nips and
+a gentleness that prevented them from really hurting him. He forgot
+that she had made life a burden to him, and when she disported herself
+around him he responded solemnly, striving to be playful and becoming
+no more than ridiculous.
+
+One day she led him off on a long chase through the back-pasture land
+into the woods. It was the afternoon that the master was to ride, and
+White Fang knew it. The horse stood saddled and waiting at the door.
+White Fang hesitated. But there was that in him deeper than all the law
+he had learned, than the customs that had moulded him, than his love
+for the master, than the very will to live of himself; and when, in the
+moment of his indecision, Collie nipped him and scampered off, he
+turned and followed after. The master rode alone that day; and in the
+woods, side by side, White Fang ran with Collie, as his mother, Kiche,
+and old One Eye had run long years before in the silent Northland
+forest.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V
+THE SLEEPING WOLF
+
+
+It was about this time that the newspapers were full of the daring
+escape of a convict from San Quentin prison. He was a ferocious man. He
+had been ill-made in the making. He had not been born right, and he had
+not been helped any by the moulding he had received at the hands of
+society. The hands of society are harsh, and this man was a striking
+sample of its handiwork. He was a beast—a human beast, it is true, but
+nevertheless so terrible a beast that he can best be characterised as
+carnivorous.
+
+In San Quentin prison he had proved incorrigible. Punishment failed to
+break his spirit. He could die dumb-mad and fighting to the last, but
+he could not live and be beaten. The more fiercely he fought, the more
+harshly society handled him, and the only effect of harshness was to
+make him fiercer. Strait-jackets, starvation, and beatings and
+clubbings were the wrong treatment for Jim Hall; but it was the
+treatment he received. It was the treatment he had received from the
+time he was a little pulpy boy in a San Francisco slum—soft clay in the
+hands of society and ready to be formed into something.
+
+It was during Jim Hall’s third term in prison that he encountered a
+guard that was almost as great a beast as he. The guard treated him
+unfairly, lied about him to the warden, lost his credits, persecuted
+him. The difference between them was that the guard carried a bunch of
+keys and a revolver. Jim Hall had only his naked hands and his teeth.
+But he sprang upon the guard one day and used his teeth on the other’s
+throat just like any jungle animal.
+
+After this, Jim Hall went to live in the incorrigible cell. He lived
+there three years. The cell was of iron, the floor, the walls, the
+roof. He never left this cell. He never saw the sky nor the sunshine.
+Day was a twilight and night was a black silence. He was in an iron
+tomb, buried alive. He saw no human face, spoke to no human thing. When
+his food was shoved in to him, he growled like a wild animal. He hated
+all things. For days and nights he bellowed his rage at the universe.
+For weeks and months he never made a sound, in the black silence eating
+his very soul. He was a man and a monstrosity, as fearful a thing of
+fear as ever gibbered in the visions of a maddened brain.
+
+And then, one night, he escaped. The warders said it was impossible,
+but nevertheless the cell was empty, and half in half out of it lay the
+body of a dead guard. Two other dead guards marked his trail through
+the prison to the outer walls, and he had killed with his hands to
+avoid noise.
+
+He was armed with the weapons of the slain guards—a live arsenal that
+fled through the hills pursued by the organised might of society. A
+heavy price of gold was upon his head. Avaricious farmers hunted him
+with shot-guns. His blood might pay off a mortgage or send a son to
+college. Public-spirited citizens took down their rifles and went out
+after him. A pack of bloodhounds followed the way of his bleeding feet.
+And the sleuth-hounds of the law, the paid fighting animals of society,
+with telephone, and telegraph, and special train, clung to his trail
+night and day.
+
+Sometimes they came upon him, and men faced him like heroes, or
+stampeded through barbed-wire fences to the delight of the commonwealth
+reading the account at the breakfast table. It was after such
+encounters that the dead and wounded were carted back to the towns, and
+their places filled by men eager for the man-hunt.
+
+And then Jim Hall disappeared. The bloodhounds vainly quested on the
+lost trail. Inoffensive ranchers in remote valleys were held up by
+armed men and compelled to identify themselves. While the remains of
+Jim Hall were discovered on a dozen mountain-sides by greedy claimants
+for blood-money.
+
+In the meantime the newspapers were read at Sierra Vista, not so much
+with interest as with anxiety. The women were afraid. Judge Scott
+pooh-poohed and laughed, but not with reason, for it was in his last
+days on the bench that Jim Hall had stood before him and received
+sentence. And in open court-room, before all men, Jim Hall had
+proclaimed that the day would come when he would wreak vengeance on the
+Judge that sentenced him.
+
+For once, Jim Hall was right. He was innocent of the crime for which he
+was sentenced. It was a case, in the parlance of thieves and police, of
+“rail-roading.” Jim Hall was being “rail-roaded” to prison for a crime
+he had not committed. Because of the two prior convictions against him,
+Judge Scott imposed upon him a sentence of fifty years.
+
+Judge Scott did not know all things, and he did not know that he was
+party to a police conspiracy, that the evidence was hatched and
+perjured, that Jim Hall was guiltless of the crime charged. And Jim
+Hall, on the other hand, did not know that Judge Scott was merely
+ignorant. Jim Hall believed that the judge knew all about it and was
+hand in glove with the police in the perpetration of the monstrous
+injustice. So it was, when the doom of fifty years of living death was
+uttered by Judge Scott, that Jim Hall, hating all things in the society
+that misused him, rose up and raged in the court-room until dragged
+down by half a dozen of his blue-coated enemies. To him, Judge Scott
+was the keystone in the arch of injustice, and upon Judge Scott he
+emptied the vials of his wrath and hurled the threats of his revenge
+yet to come. Then Jim Hall went to his living death . . . and escaped.
+
+Of all this White Fang knew nothing. But between him and Alice, the
+master’s wife, there existed a secret. Each night, after Sierra Vista
+had gone to bed, she rose and let in White Fang to sleep in the big
+hall. Now White Fang was not a house-dog, nor was he permitted to sleep
+in the house; so each morning, early, she slipped down and let him out
+before the family was awake.
+
+On one such night, while all the house slept, White Fang awoke and lay
+very quietly. And very quietly he smelled the air and read the message
+it bore of a strange god’s presence. And to his ears came sounds of the
+strange god’s movements. White Fang burst into no furious outcry. It
+was not his way. The strange god walked softly, but more softly walked
+White Fang, for he had no clothes to rub against the flesh of his body.
+He followed silently. In the Wild he had hunted live meat that was
+infinitely timid, and he knew the advantage of surprise.
+
+The strange god paused at the foot of the great staircase and listened,
+and White Fang was as dead, so without movement was he as he watched
+and waited. Up that staircase the way led to the love-master and to the
+love-master’s dearest possessions. White Fang bristled, but waited. The
+strange god’s foot lifted. He was beginning the ascent.
+
+Then it was that White Fang struck. He gave no warning, with no snarl
+anticipated his own action. Into the air he lifted his body in the
+spring that landed him on the strange god’s back. White Fang clung with
+his fore-paws to the man’s shoulders, at the same time burying his
+fangs into the back of the man’s neck. He clung on for a moment, long
+enough to drag the god over backward. Together they crashed to the
+floor. White Fang leaped clear, and, as the man struggled to rise, was
+in again with the slashing fangs.
+
+Sierra Vista awoke in alarm. The noise from downstairs was as that of a
+score of battling fiends. There were revolver shots. A man’s voice
+screamed once in horror and anguish. There was a great snarling and
+growling, and over all arose a smashing and crashing of furniture and
+glass.
+
+But almost as quickly as it had arisen, the commotion died away. The
+struggle had not lasted more than three minutes. The frightened
+household clustered at the top of the stairway. From below, as from out
+an abyss of blackness, came up a gurgling sound, as of air bubbling
+through water. Sometimes this gurgle became sibilant, almost a whistle.
+But this, too, quickly died down and ceased. Then naught came up out of
+the blackness save a heavy panting of some creature struggling sorely
+for air.
+
+Weedon Scott pressed a button, and the staircase and downstairs hall
+were flooded with light. Then he and Judge Scott, revolvers in hand,
+cautiously descended. There was no need for this caution. White Fang
+had done his work. In the midst of the wreckage of overthrown and
+smashed furniture, partly on his side, his face hidden by an arm, lay a
+man. Weedon Scott bent over, removed the arm and turned the man’s face
+upward. A gaping throat explained the manner of his death.
+
+“Jim Hall,” said Judge Scott, and father and son looked significantly
+at each other.
+
+Then they turned to White Fang. He, too, was lying on his side. His
+eyes were closed, but the lids slightly lifted in an effort to look at
+them as they bent over him, and the tail was perceptibly agitated in a
+vain effort to wag. Weedon Scott patted him, and his throat rumbled an
+acknowledging growl. But it was a weak growl at best, and it quickly
+ceased. His eyelids drooped and went shut, and his whole body seemed to
+relax and flatten out upon the floor.
+
+“He’s all in, poor devil,” muttered the master.
+
+“We’ll see about that,” asserted the Judge, as he started for the
+telephone.
+
+“Frankly, he has one chance in a thousand,” announced the surgeon,
+after he had worked an hour and a half on White Fang.
+
+Dawn was breaking through the windows and dimming the electric lights.
+With the exception of the children, the whole family was gathered about
+the surgeon to hear his verdict.
+
+“One broken hind-leg,” he went on. “Three broken ribs, one at least of
+which has pierced the lungs. He has lost nearly all the blood in his
+body. There is a large likelihood of internal injuries. He must have
+been jumped upon. To say nothing of three bullet holes clear through
+him. One chance in a thousand is really optimistic. He hasn’t a chance
+in ten thousand.”
+
+“But he mustn’t lose any chance that might be of help to him,” Judge
+Scott exclaimed. “Never mind expense. Put him under the X-ray—anything.
+Weedon, telegraph at once to San Francisco for Doctor Nichols. No
+reflection on you, doctor, you understand; but he must have the
+advantage of every chance.”
+
+The surgeon smiled indulgently. “Of course I understand. He deserves
+all that can be done for him. He must be nursed as you would nurse a
+human being, a sick child. And don’t forget what I told you about
+temperature. I’ll be back at ten o’clock again.”
+
+White Fang received the nursing. Judge Scott’s suggestion of a trained
+nurse was indignantly clamoured down by the girls, who themselves
+undertook the task. And White Fang won out on the one chance in ten
+thousand denied him by the surgeon.
+
+The latter was not to be censured for his misjudgment. All his life he
+had tended and operated on the soft humans of civilisation, who lived
+sheltered lives and had descended out of many sheltered generations.
+Compared with White Fang, they were frail and flabby, and clutched life
+without any strength in their grip. White Fang had come straight from
+the Wild, where the weak perish early and shelter is vouchsafed to
+none. In neither his father nor his mother was there any weakness, nor
+in the generations before them. A constitution of iron and the vitality
+of the Wild were White Fang’s inheritance, and he clung to life, the
+whole of him and every part of him, in spirit and in flesh, with the
+tenacity that of old belonged to all creatures.
+
+Bound down a prisoner, denied even movement by the plaster casts and
+bandages, White Fang lingered out the weeks. He slept long hours and
+dreamed much, and through his mind passed an unending pageant of
+Northland visions. All the ghosts of the past arose and were with him.
+Once again he lived in the lair with Kiche, crept trembling to the
+knees of Grey Beaver to tender his allegiance, ran for his life before
+Lip-lip and all the howling bedlam of the puppy-pack.
+
+He ran again through the silence, hunting his living food through the
+months of famine; and again he ran at the head of the team, the
+gut-whips of Mit-sah and Grey Beaver snapping behind, their voices
+crying “Ra! Raa!” when they came to a narrow passage and the team
+closed together like a fan to go through. He lived again all his days
+with Beauty Smith and the fights he had fought. At such times he
+whimpered and snarled in his sleep, and they that looked on said that
+his dreams were bad.
+
+But there was one particular nightmare from which he suffered—the
+clanking, clanging monsters of electric cars that were to him colossal
+screaming lynxes. He would lie in a screen of bushes, watching for a
+squirrel to venture far enough out on the ground from its tree-refuge.
+Then, when he sprang out upon it, it would transform itself into an
+electric car, menacing and terrible, towering over him like a mountain,
+screaming and clanging and spitting fire at him. It was the same when
+he challenged the hawk down out of the sky. Down out of the blue it
+would rush, as it dropped upon him changing itself into the ubiquitous
+electric car. Or again, he would be in the pen of Beauty Smith. Outside
+the pen, men would be gathering, and he knew that a fight was on. He
+watched the door for his antagonist to enter. The door would open, and
+thrust in upon him would come the awful electric car. A thousand times
+this occurred, and each time the terror it inspired was as vivid and
+great as ever.
+
+Then came the day when the last bandage and the last plaster cast were
+taken off. It was a gala day. All Sierra Vista was gathered around. The
+master rubbed his ears, and he crooned his love-growl. The master’s
+wife called him the “Blessed Wolf,” which name was taken up with
+acclaim and all the women called him the Blessed Wolf.
+
+He tried to rise to his feet, and after several attempts fell down from
+weakness. He had lain so long that his muscles had lost their cunning,
+and all the strength had gone out of them. He felt a little shame
+because of his weakness, as though, forsooth, he were failing the gods
+in the service he owed them. Because of this he made heroic efforts to
+arise and at last he stood on his four legs, tottering and swaying back
+and forth.
+
+“The Blessed Wolf!” chorused the women.
+
+Judge Scott surveyed them triumphantly.
+
+“Out of your own mouths be it,” he said. “Just as I contended right
+along. No mere dog could have done what he did. He’s a wolf.”
+
+“A Blessed Wolf,” amended the Judge’s wife.
+
+“Yes, Blessed Wolf,” agreed the Judge. “And henceforth that shall be my
+name for him.”
+
+“He’ll have to learn to walk again,” said the surgeon; “so he might as
+well start in right now. It won’t hurt him. Take him outside.”
+
+And outside he went, like a king, with all Sierra Vista about him and
+tending on him. He was very weak, and when he reached the lawn he lay
+down and rested for a while.
+
+Then the procession started on, little spurts of strength coming into
+White Fang’s muscles as he used them and the blood began to surge
+through them. The stables were reached, and there in the doorway, lay
+Collie, a half-dozen pudgy puppies playing about her in the sun.
+
+White Fang looked on with a wondering eye. Collie snarled warningly at
+him, and he was careful to keep his distance. The master with his toe
+helped one sprawling puppy toward him. He bristled suspiciously, but
+the master warned him that all was well. Collie, clasped in the arms of
+one of the women, watched him jealously and with a snarl warned him
+that all was not well.
+
+The puppy sprawled in front of him. He cocked his ears and watched it
+curiously. Then their noses touched, and he felt the warm little tongue
+of the puppy on his jowl. White Fang’s tongue went out, he knew not
+why, and he licked the puppy’s face.
+
+Hand-clapping and pleased cries from the gods greeted the performance.
+He was surprised, and looked at them in a puzzled way. Then his
+weakness asserted itself, and he lay down, his ears cocked, his head on
+one side, as he watched the puppy. The other puppies came sprawling
+toward him, to Collie’s great disgust; and he gravely permitted them to
+clamber and tumble over him. At first, amid the applause of the gods,
+he betrayed a trifle of his old self-consciousness and awkwardness.
+This passed away as the puppies’ antics and mauling continued, and he
+lay with half-shut patient eyes, drowsing in the sun.
+
+
+
+
+*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK WHITE FANG ***
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diff --git a/old/old-2024-06-27/910-0.zip b/old/old-2024-06-27/910-0.zip
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+<head>
+<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html;charset=utf-8" />
+<meta http-equiv="Content-Style-Type" content="text/css" />
+<title>The Project Gutenberg eBook of White Fang, by Jack London</title>
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+
+<div style='text-align:center; font-size:1.2em; font-weight:bold'>The Project Gutenberg eBook of White Fang, by Jack London</div>
+<div style='display:block; margin:1em 0'>
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and
+most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions
+whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms
+of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online
+at <a href="https://www.gutenberg.org">www.gutenberg.org</a>. If you
+are not located in the United States, you will have to check the laws of the
+country where you are located before using this eBook.
+</div>
+<div style='display:block; margin-top:1em; margin-bottom:1em; margin-left:2em; text-indent:-2em'>Title: White Fang</div>
+<div style='display:block; margin-top:1em; margin-bottom:1em; margin-left:2em; text-indent:-2em'>Author: Jack London</div>
+<div style='display:block; margin:1em 0'>Release Date: May 13, 1997 [eBook #910]<br />
+[Most recently updated: November 10, 2021]</div>
+<div style='display:block; margin:1em 0'>Language: English</div>
+<div style='display:block; margin:1em 0'>Character set encoding: UTF-8</div>
+<div style='display:block; margin-left:2em; text-indent:-2em'>Produced by: David Price</div>
+<div style='margin-top:2em; margin-bottom:4em'>*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK WHITE FANG ***</div>
+
+<div class="fig" style="width:55%;">
+<img src="images/cover.jpg" style="width:100%;" alt="[Illustration]" />
+</div>
+
+<h1>WHITE FANG</h1>
+
+<h2 class="no-break">by Jack London</h2>
+
+<hr />
+
+<h2>Contents</h2>
+
+<table summary="" style="">
+
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#part01"><b>PART I</b></a></td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#chap01">CHAPTER I THE TRAIL OF THE MEAT</a></td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#chap02">CHAPTER II THE SHE-WOLF</a></td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#chap03">CHAPTER III THE HUNGER CRY</a><br /><br /></td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#part02"><b>PART II</b></a></td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#chap04">CHAPTER I THE BATTLE OF THE FANGS</a></td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#chap05">CHAPTER II THE LAIR</a></td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#chap06">CHAPTER III THE GREY CUB</a></td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#chap07">CHAPTER IV THE WALL OF THE WORLD</a></td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#chap08">CHAPTER V THE LAW OF MEAT</a><br /><br /></td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#part03"><b>PART III</b></a></td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#chap09">CHAPTER I THE MAKERS OF FIRE</a></td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#chap10">CHAPTER II THE BONDAGE</a></td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#chap11">CHAPTER III THE OUTCAST</a></td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#chap12">CHAPTER IV THE TRAIL OF THE GODS</a></td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#chap13">CHAPTER V THE COVENANT</a></td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#chap14">CHAPTER VI THE FAMINE</a><br /><br /></td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#part04"><b>PART IV</b></a></td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#chap15">CHAPTER I THE ENEMY OF HIS KIND</a></td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#chap16">CHAPTER II THE MAD GOD</a></td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#chap17">CHAPTER III THE REIGN OF HATE</a></td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#chap18">CHAPTER IV THE CLINGING DEATH</a></td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#chap19">CHAPTER V THE INDOMITABLE</a></td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#chap20">CHAPTER VI THE LOVE-MASTER</a><br /><br /></td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#part05"><b>PART V</b></a></td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#chap21">CHAPTER I THE LONG TRAIL</a></td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#chap22">CHAPTER II THE SOUTHLAND</a></td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#chap23">CHAPTER III THE GOD&rsquo;S DOMAIN</a></td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#chap24">CHAPTER IV THE CALL OF KIND</a></td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#chap25">CHAPTER V THE SLEEPING WOLF</a></td>
+</tr>
+
+</table>
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<h2><a name="part01"></a>PART I</h2>
+
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<h3><a name="chap01"></a>CHAPTER I<br/>
+THE TRAIL OF THE MEAT</h3>
+
+<p>
+Dark spruce forest frowned on either side the frozen waterway. The trees had
+been stripped by a recent wind of their white covering of frost, and they
+seemed to lean towards each other, black and ominous, in the fading light. A
+vast silence reigned over the land. The land itself was a desolation, lifeless,
+without movement, so lone and cold that the spirit of it was not even that of
+sadness. There was a hint in it of laughter, but of a laughter more terrible
+than any sadness&mdash;a laughter that was mirthless as the smile of the
+sphinx, a laughter cold as the frost and partaking of the grimness of
+infallibility. It was the masterful and incommunicable wisdom of eternity
+laughing at the futility of life and the effort of life. It was the Wild, the
+savage, frozen-hearted Northland Wild.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But there <i>was</i> life, abroad in the land and defiant. Down the frozen
+waterway toiled a string of wolfish dogs. Their bristly fur was rimed with
+frost. Their breath froze in the air as it left their mouths, spouting forth in
+spumes of vapour that settled upon the hair of their bodies and formed into
+crystals of frost. Leather harness was on the dogs, and leather traces attached
+them to a sled which dragged along behind. The sled was without runners. It was
+made of stout birch-bark, and its full surface rested on the snow. The front
+end of the sled was turned up, like a scroll, in order to force down and under
+the bore of soft snow that surged like a wave before it. On the sled, securely
+lashed, was a long and narrow oblong box. There were other things on the
+sled&mdash;blankets, an axe, and a coffee-pot and frying-pan; but prominent,
+occupying most of the space, was the long and narrow oblong box.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+In advance of the dogs, on wide snowshoes, toiled a man. At the rear of the
+sled toiled a second man. On the sled, in the box, lay a third man whose toil
+was over,&mdash;a man whom the Wild had conquered and beaten down until he
+would never move nor struggle again. It is not the way of the Wild to like
+movement. Life is an offence to it, for life is movement; and the Wild aims
+always to destroy movement. It freezes the water to prevent it running to the
+sea; it drives the sap out of the trees till they are frozen to their mighty
+hearts; and most ferociously and terribly of all does the Wild harry and crush
+into submission man&mdash;man who is the most restless of life, ever in revolt
+against the dictum that all movement must in the end come to the cessation of
+movement.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But at front and rear, unawed and indomitable, toiled the two men who were not
+yet dead. Their bodies were covered with fur and soft-tanned leather. Eyelashes
+and cheeks and lips were so coated with the crystals from their frozen breath
+that their faces were not discernible. This gave them the seeming of ghostly
+masques, undertakers in a spectral world at the funeral of some ghost. But
+under it all they were men, penetrating the land of desolation and mockery and
+silence, puny adventurers bent on colossal adventure, pitting themselves
+against the might of a world as remote and alien and pulseless as the abysses
+of space.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+They travelled on without speech, saving their breath for the work of their
+bodies. On every side was the silence, pressing upon them with a tangible
+presence. It affected their minds as the many atmospheres of deep water affect
+the body of the diver. It crushed them with the weight of unending vastness and
+unalterable decree. It crushed them into the remotest recesses of their own
+minds, pressing out of them, like juices from the grape, all the false ardours
+and exaltations and undue self-values of the human soul, until they perceived
+themselves finite and small, specks and motes, moving with weak cunning and
+little wisdom amidst the play and inter-play of the great blind elements and
+forces.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+An hour went by, and a second hour. The pale light of the short sunless day was
+beginning to fade, when a faint far cry arose on the still air. It soared
+upward with a swift rush, till it reached its topmost note, where it persisted,
+palpitant and tense, and then slowly died away. It might have been a lost soul
+wailing, had it not been invested with a certain sad fierceness and hungry
+eagerness. The front man turned his head until his eyes met the eyes of the man
+behind. And then, across the narrow oblong box, each nodded to the other.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+A second cry arose, piercing the silence with needle-like shrillness. Both men
+located the sound. It was to the rear, somewhere in the snow expanse they had
+just traversed. A third and answering cry arose, also to the rear and to the
+left of the second cry.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;They&rsquo;re after us, Bill,&rdquo; said the man at the front.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+His voice sounded hoarse and unreal, and he had spoken with apparent effort.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Meat is scarce,&rdquo; answered his comrade. &ldquo;I ain&rsquo;t seen a
+rabbit sign for days.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Thereafter they spoke no more, though their ears were keen for the
+hunting-cries that continued to rise behind them.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+At the fall of darkness they swung the dogs into a cluster of spruce trees on
+the edge of the waterway and made a camp. The coffin, at the side of the fire,
+served for seat and table. The wolf-dogs, clustered on the far side of the
+fire, snarled and bickered among themselves, but evinced no inclination to
+stray off into the darkness.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Seems to me, Henry, they&rsquo;re stayin&rsquo; remarkable close to
+camp,&rdquo; Bill commented.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Henry, squatting over the fire and settling the pot of coffee with a piece of
+ice, nodded. Nor did he speak till he had taken his seat on the coffin and
+begun to eat.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;They know where their hides is safe,&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;They&rsquo;d
+sooner eat grub than be grub. They&rsquo;re pretty wise, them dogs.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Bill shook his head. &ldquo;Oh, I don&rsquo;t know.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+His comrade looked at him curiously. &ldquo;First time I ever heard you say
+anything about their not bein&rsquo; wise.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Henry,&rdquo; said the other, munching with deliberation the beans he
+was eating, &ldquo;did you happen to notice the way them dogs kicked up when I
+was a-feedin&rsquo; &rsquo;em?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;They did cut up more&rsquo;n usual,&rdquo; Henry acknowledged.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;How many dogs &rsquo;ve we got, Henry?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Six.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Well, Henry . . . &rdquo; Bill stopped for a moment, in order that his
+words might gain greater significance. &ldquo;As I was sayin&rsquo;, Henry,
+we&rsquo;ve got six dogs. I took six fish out of the bag. I gave one fish to
+each dog, an&rsquo;, Henry, I was one fish short.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;You counted wrong.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;We&rsquo;ve got six dogs,&rdquo; the other reiterated dispassionately.
+&ldquo;I took out six fish. One Ear didn&rsquo;t get no fish. I came back to
+the bag afterward an&rsquo; got &rsquo;m his fish.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;We&rsquo;ve only got six dogs,&rdquo; Henry said.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Henry,&rdquo; Bill went on. &ldquo;I won&rsquo;t say they was all dogs,
+but there was seven of &rsquo;m that got fish.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Henry stopped eating to glance across the fire and count the dogs.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;There&rsquo;s only six now,&rdquo; he said.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I saw the other one run off across the snow,&rdquo; Bill announced with
+cool positiveness. &ldquo;I saw seven.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Henry looked at him commiseratingly, and said, &ldquo;I&rsquo;ll be almighty
+glad when this trip&rsquo;s over.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;What d&rsquo;ye mean by that?&rdquo; Bill demanded.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I mean that this load of ourn is gettin&rsquo; on your nerves, an&rsquo;
+that you&rsquo;re beginnin&rsquo; to see things.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I thought of that,&rdquo; Bill answered gravely. &ldquo;An&rsquo; so,
+when I saw it run off across the snow, I looked in the snow an&rsquo; saw its
+tracks. Then I counted the dogs an&rsquo; there was still six of &rsquo;em. The
+tracks is there in the snow now. D&rsquo;ye want to look at &rsquo;em?
+I&rsquo;ll show &rsquo;em to you.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Henry did not reply, but munched on in silence, until, the meal finished, he
+topped it with a final cup of coffee. He wiped his mouth with the back of his
+hand and said:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Then you&rsquo;re thinkin&rsquo; as it was&mdash;&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+A long wailing cry, fiercely sad, from somewhere in the darkness, had
+interrupted him. He stopped to listen to it, then he finished his sentence with
+a wave of his hand toward the sound of the cry, &ldquo;&mdash;one of
+them?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Bill nodded. &ldquo;I&rsquo;d a blame sight sooner think that than anything
+else. You noticed yourself the row the dogs made.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Cry after cry, and answering cries, were turning the silence into a bedlam.
+From every side the cries arose, and the dogs betrayed their fear by huddling
+together and so close to the fire that their hair was scorched by the heat.
+Bill threw on more wood, before lighting his pipe.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I&rsquo;m thinking you&rsquo;re down in the mouth some,&rdquo; Henry
+said.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Henry . . . &rdquo; He sucked meditatively at his pipe for some time
+before he went on. &ldquo;Henry, I was a-thinkin&rsquo; what a blame sight
+luckier he is than you an&rsquo; me&rsquo;ll ever be.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He indicated the third person by a downward thrust of the thumb to the box on
+which they sat.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;You an&rsquo; me, Henry, when we die, we&rsquo;ll be lucky if we get
+enough stones over our carcases to keep the dogs off of us.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;But we ain&rsquo;t got people an&rsquo; money an&rsquo; all the rest,
+like him,&rdquo; Henry rejoined. &ldquo;Long-distance funerals is
+somethin&rsquo; you an&rsquo; me can&rsquo;t exactly afford.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;What gets me, Henry, is what a chap like this, that&rsquo;s a lord or
+something in his own country, and that&rsquo;s never had to bother about grub
+nor blankets; why he comes a-buttin&rsquo; round the Godforsaken ends of the
+earth&mdash;that&rsquo;s what I can&rsquo;t exactly see.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;He might have lived to a ripe old age if he&rsquo;d stayed at
+home,&rdquo; Henry agreed.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Bill opened his mouth to speak, but changed his mind. Instead, he pointed
+towards the wall of darkness that pressed about them from every side. There was
+no suggestion of form in the utter blackness; only could be seen a pair of eyes
+gleaming like live coals. Henry indicated with his head a second pair, and a
+third. A circle of the gleaming eyes had drawn about their camp. Now and again
+a pair of eyes moved, or disappeared to appear again a moment later.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The unrest of the dogs had been increasing, and they stampeded, in a surge of
+sudden fear, to the near side of the fire, cringing and crawling about the legs
+of the men. In the scramble one of the dogs had been overturned on the edge of
+the fire, and it had yelped with pain and fright as the smell of its singed
+coat possessed the air. The commotion caused the circle of eyes to shift
+restlessly for a moment and even to withdraw a bit, but it settled down again
+as the dogs became quiet.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Henry, it&rsquo;s a blame misfortune to be out of ammunition.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Bill had finished his pipe and was helping his companion to spread the bed of
+fur and blanket upon the spruce boughs which he had laid over the snow before
+supper. Henry grunted, and began unlacing his moccasins.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;How many cartridges did you say you had left?&rdquo; he asked.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Three,&rdquo; came the answer. &ldquo;An&rsquo; I wisht &rsquo;twas
+three hundred. Then I&rsquo;d show &rsquo;em what for, damn &rsquo;em!&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He shook his fist angrily at the gleaming eyes, and began securely to prop his
+moccasins before the fire.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;An&rsquo; I wisht this cold snap&rsquo;d break,&rdquo; he went on.
+&ldquo;It&rsquo;s ben fifty below for two weeks now. An&rsquo; I wisht
+I&rsquo;d never started on this trip, Henry. I don&rsquo;t like the looks of
+it. I don&rsquo;t feel right, somehow. An&rsquo; while I&rsquo;m wishin&rsquo;,
+I wisht the trip was over an&rsquo; done with, an&rsquo; you an&rsquo; me
+a-sittin&rsquo; by the fire in Fort McGurry just about now an&rsquo; playing
+cribbage&mdash;that&rsquo;s what I wisht.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Henry grunted and crawled into bed. As he dozed off he was aroused by his
+comrade&rsquo;s voice.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Say, Henry, that other one that come in an&rsquo; got a fish&mdash;why
+didn&rsquo;t the dogs pitch into it? That&rsquo;s what&rsquo;s botherin&rsquo;
+me.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;You&rsquo;re botherin&rsquo; too much, Bill,&rdquo; came the sleepy
+response. &ldquo;You was never like this before. You jes&rsquo; shut up now,
+an&rsquo; go to sleep, an&rsquo; you&rsquo;ll be all hunkydory in the
+mornin&rsquo;. Your stomach&rsquo;s sour, that&rsquo;s what&rsquo;s
+botherin&rsquo; you.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The men slept, breathing heavily, side by side, under the one covering. The
+fire died down, and the gleaming eyes drew closer the circle they had flung
+about the camp. The dogs clustered together in fear, now and again snarling
+menacingly as a pair of eyes drew close. Once their uproar became so loud that
+Bill woke up. He got out of bed carefully, so as not to disturb the sleep of
+his comrade, and threw more wood on the fire. As it began to flame up, the
+circle of eyes drew farther back. He glanced casually at the huddling dogs. He
+rubbed his eyes and looked at them more sharply. Then he crawled back into the
+blankets.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Henry,&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;Oh, Henry.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Henry groaned as he passed from sleep to waking, and demanded,
+&ldquo;What&rsquo;s wrong now?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Nothin&rsquo;,&rdquo; came the answer; &ldquo;only there&rsquo;s seven
+of &rsquo;em again. I just counted.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Henry acknowledged receipt of the information with a grunt that slid into a
+snore as he drifted back into sleep.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+In the morning it was Henry who awoke first and routed his companion out of
+bed. Daylight was yet three hours away, though it was already six
+o&rsquo;clock; and in the darkness Henry went about preparing breakfast, while
+Bill rolled the blankets and made the sled ready for lashing.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Say, Henry,&rdquo; he asked suddenly, &ldquo;how many dogs did you say
+we had?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Six.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Wrong,&rdquo; Bill proclaimed triumphantly.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Seven again?&rdquo; Henry queried.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;No, five; one&rsquo;s gone.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;The hell!&rdquo; Henry cried in wrath, leaving the cooking to come and
+count the dogs.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;You&rsquo;re right, Bill,&rdquo; he concluded. &ldquo;Fatty&rsquo;s
+gone.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;An&rsquo; he went like greased lightnin&rsquo; once he got started.
+Couldn&rsquo;t &rsquo;ve seen &rsquo;m for smoke.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;No chance at all,&rdquo; Henry concluded. &ldquo;They jes&rsquo;
+swallowed &rsquo;m alive. I bet he was yelpin&rsquo; as he went down their
+throats, damn &rsquo;em!&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;He always was a fool dog,&rdquo; said Bill.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;But no fool dog ought to be fool enough to go off an&rsquo; commit
+suicide that way.&rdquo; He looked over the remainder of the team with a
+speculative eye that summed up instantly the salient traits of each animal.
+&ldquo;I bet none of the others would do it.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Couldn&rsquo;t drive &rsquo;em away from the fire with a club,&rdquo;
+Bill agreed. &ldquo;I always did think there was somethin&rsquo; wrong with
+Fatty anyway.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And this was the epitaph of a dead dog on the Northland trail&mdash;less scant
+than the epitaph of many another dog, of many a man.
+</p>
+
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<h3><a name="chap02"></a>CHAPTER II<br/>
+THE SHE-WOLF</h3>
+
+<p>
+Breakfast eaten and the slim camp-outfit lashed to the sled, the men turned
+their backs on the cheery fire and launched out into the darkness. At once
+began to rise the cries that were fiercely sad&mdash;cries that called through
+the darkness and cold to one another and answered back. Conversation ceased.
+Daylight came at nine o&rsquo;clock. At midday the sky to the south warmed to
+rose-colour, and marked where the bulge of the earth intervened between the
+meridian sun and the northern world. But the rose-colour swiftly faded. The
+grey light of day that remained lasted until three o&rsquo;clock, when it, too,
+faded, and the pall of the Arctic night descended upon the lone and silent
+land.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+As darkness came on, the hunting-cries to right and left and rear drew
+closer&mdash;so close that more than once they sent surges of fear through the
+toiling dogs, throwing them into short-lived panics.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+At the conclusion of one such panic, when he and Henry had got the dogs back in
+the traces, Bill said:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I wisht they&rsquo;d strike game somewheres, an&rsquo; go away an&rsquo;
+leave us alone.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;They do get on the nerves horrible,&rdquo; Henry sympathised.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+They spoke no more until camp was made.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Henry was bending over and adding ice to the babbling pot of beans when he was
+startled by the sound of a blow, an exclamation from Bill, and a sharp snarling
+cry of pain from among the dogs. He straightened up in time to see a dim form
+disappearing across the snow into the shelter of the dark. Then he saw Bill,
+standing amid the dogs, half triumphant, half crestfallen, in one hand a stout
+club, in the other the tail and part of the body of a sun-cured salmon.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;It got half of it,&rdquo; he announced; &ldquo;but I got a whack at it
+jes&rsquo; the same. D&rsquo;ye hear it squeal?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;What&rsquo;d it look like?&rdquo; Henry asked.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Couldn&rsquo;t see. But it had four legs an&rsquo; a mouth an&rsquo;
+hair an&rsquo; looked like any dog.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Must be a tame wolf, I reckon.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;It&rsquo;s damned tame, whatever it is, comin&rsquo; in here at
+feedin&rsquo; time an&rsquo; gettin&rsquo; its whack of fish.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+That night, when supper was finished and they sat on the oblong box and pulled
+at their pipes, the circle of gleaming eyes drew in even closer than before.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I wisht they&rsquo;d spring up a bunch of moose or something, an&rsquo;
+go away an&rsquo; leave us alone,&rdquo; Bill said.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Henry grunted with an intonation that was not all sympathy, and for a quarter
+of an hour they sat on in silence, Henry staring at the fire, and Bill at the
+circle of eyes that burned in the darkness just beyond the firelight.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I wisht we was pullin&rsquo; into McGurry right now,&rdquo; he began
+again.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Shut up your wishin&rsquo; and your croakin&rsquo;,&rdquo; Henry burst
+out angrily. &ldquo;Your stomach&rsquo;s sour. That&rsquo;s what&rsquo;s
+ailin&rsquo; you. Swallow a spoonful of sody, an&rsquo; you&rsquo;ll sweeten up
+wonderful an&rsquo; be more pleasant company.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+In the morning Henry was aroused by fervid blasphemy that proceeded from the
+mouth of Bill. Henry propped himself up on an elbow and looked to see his
+comrade standing among the dogs beside the replenished fire, his arms raised in
+objurgation, his face distorted with passion.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Hello!&rdquo; Henry called. &ldquo;What&rsquo;s up now?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Frog&rsquo;s gone,&rdquo; came the answer.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;No.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I tell you yes.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Henry leaped out of the blankets and to the dogs. He counted them with care,
+and then joined his partner in cursing the power of the Wild that had robbed
+them of another dog.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Frog was the strongest dog of the bunch,&rdquo; Bill pronounced finally.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;An&rsquo; he was no fool dog neither,&rdquo; Henry added.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And so was recorded the second epitaph in two days.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+A gloomy breakfast was eaten, and the four remaining dogs were harnessed to the
+sled. The day was a repetition of the days that had gone before. The men toiled
+without speech across the face of the frozen world. The silence was unbroken
+save by the cries of their pursuers, that, unseen, hung upon their rear. With
+the coming of night in the mid-afternoon, the cries sounded closer as the
+pursuers drew in according to their custom; and the dogs grew excited and
+frightened, and were guilty of panics that tangled the traces and further
+depressed the two men.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;There, that&rsquo;ll fix you fool critters,&rdquo; Bill said with
+satisfaction that night, standing erect at completion of his task.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Henry left the cooking to come and see. Not only had his partner tied the dogs
+up, but he had tied them, after the Indian fashion, with sticks. About the neck
+of each dog he had fastened a leather thong. To this, and so close to the neck
+that the dog could not get his teeth to it, he had tied a stout stick four or
+five feet in length. The other end of the stick, in turn, was made fast to a
+stake in the ground by means of a leather thong. The dog was unable to gnaw
+through the leather at his own end of the stick. The stick prevented him from
+getting at the leather that fastened the other end.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Henry nodded his head approvingly.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;It&rsquo;s the only contraption that&rsquo;ll ever hold One Ear,&rdquo;
+he said. &ldquo;He can gnaw through leather as clean as a knife an&rsquo;
+jes&rsquo; about half as quick. They all&rsquo;ll be here in the mornin&rsquo;
+hunkydory.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;You jes&rsquo; bet they will,&rdquo; Bill affirmed. &ldquo;If one of
+em&rsquo; turns up missin&rsquo;, I&rsquo;ll go without my coffee.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;They jes&rsquo; know we ain&rsquo;t loaded to kill,&rdquo; Henry
+remarked at bed-time, indicating the gleaming circle that hemmed them in.
+&ldquo;If we could put a couple of shots into &rsquo;em, they&rsquo;d be more
+respectful. They come closer every night. Get the firelight out of your eyes
+an&rsquo; look hard&mdash;there! Did you see that one?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+For some time the two men amused themselves with watching the movement of vague
+forms on the edge of the firelight. By looking closely and steadily at where a
+pair of eyes burned in the darkness, the form of the animal would slowly take
+shape. They could even see these forms move at times.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+A sound among the dogs attracted the men&rsquo;s attention. One Ear was
+uttering quick, eager whines, lunging at the length of his stick toward the
+darkness, and desisting now and again in order to make frantic attacks on the
+stick with his teeth.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Look at that, Bill,&rdquo; Henry whispered.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Full into the firelight, with a stealthy, sidelong movement, glided a doglike
+animal. It moved with commingled mistrust and daring, cautiously observing the
+men, its attention fixed on the dogs. One Ear strained the full length of the
+stick toward the intruder and whined with eagerness.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;That fool One Ear don&rsquo;t seem scairt much,&rdquo; Bill said in a
+low tone.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;It&rsquo;s a she-wolf,&rdquo; Henry whispered back, &ldquo;an&rsquo;
+that accounts for Fatty an&rsquo; Frog. She&rsquo;s the decoy for the pack. She
+draws out the dog an&rsquo; then all the rest pitches in an&rsquo; eats
+&rsquo;m up.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The fire crackled. A log fell apart with a loud spluttering noise. At the sound
+of it the strange animal leaped back into the darkness.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Henry, I&rsquo;m a-thinkin&rsquo;,&rdquo; Bill announced.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Thinkin&rsquo; what?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I&rsquo;m a-thinkin&rsquo; that was the one I lambasted with the
+club.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Ain&rsquo;t the slightest doubt in the world,&rdquo; was Henry&rsquo;s
+response.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;An&rsquo; right here I want to remark,&rdquo; Bill went on, &ldquo;that
+that animal&rsquo;s familyarity with campfires is suspicious an&rsquo;
+immoral.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;It knows for certain more&rsquo;n a self-respectin&rsquo; wolf ought to
+know,&rdquo; Henry agreed. &ldquo;A wolf that knows enough to come in with the
+dogs at feedin&rsquo; time has had experiences.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Ol&rsquo; Villan had a dog once that run away with the wolves,&rdquo;
+Bill cogitates aloud. &ldquo;I ought to know. I shot it out of the pack in a
+moose pasture over &lsquo;on Little Stick. An&rsquo; Ol&rsquo; Villan cried
+like a baby. Hadn&rsquo;t seen it for three years, he said. Ben with the wolves
+all that time.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I reckon you&rsquo;ve called the turn, Bill. That wolf&rsquo;s a dog,
+an&rsquo; it&rsquo;s eaten fish many&rsquo;s the time from the hand of
+man.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;An if I get a chance at it, that wolf that&rsquo;s a dog&rsquo;ll be
+jes&rsquo; meat,&rdquo; Bill declared. &ldquo;We can&rsquo;t afford to lose no
+more animals.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;But you&rsquo;ve only got three cartridges,&rdquo; Henry objected.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I&rsquo;ll wait for a dead sure shot,&rdquo; was the reply.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+In the morning Henry renewed the fire and cooked breakfast to the accompaniment
+of his partner&rsquo;s snoring.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;You was sleepin&rsquo; jes&rsquo; too comfortable for anything,&rdquo;
+Henry told him, as he routed him out for breakfast. &ldquo;I hadn&rsquo;t the
+heart to rouse you.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Bill began to eat sleepily. He noticed that his cup was empty and started to
+reach for the pot. But the pot was beyond arm&rsquo;s length and beside Henry.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Say, Henry,&rdquo; he chided gently, &ldquo;ain&rsquo;t you forgot
+somethin&rsquo;?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Henry looked about with great carefulness and shook his head. Bill held up the
+empty cup.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;You don&rsquo;t get no coffee,&rdquo; Henry announced.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Ain&rsquo;t run out?&rdquo; Bill asked anxiously.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Nope.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Ain&rsquo;t thinkin&rsquo; it&rsquo;ll hurt my digestion?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Nope.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+A flush of angry blood pervaded Bill&rsquo;s face.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Then it&rsquo;s jes&rsquo; warm an&rsquo; anxious I am to be
+hearin&rsquo; you explain yourself,&rdquo; he said.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Spanker&rsquo;s gone,&rdquo; Henry answered.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Without haste, with the air of one resigned to misfortune Bill turned his head,
+and from where he sat counted the dogs.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;How&rsquo;d it happen?&rdquo; he asked apathetically.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Henry shrugged his shoulders. &ldquo;Don&rsquo;t know. Unless One Ear gnawed
+&rsquo;m loose. He couldn&rsquo;t a-done it himself, that&rsquo;s sure.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;The darned cuss.&rdquo; Bill spoke gravely and slowly, with no hint of
+the anger that was raging within. &ldquo;Jes&rsquo; because he couldn&rsquo;t
+chew himself loose, he chews Spanker loose.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Well, Spanker&rsquo;s troubles is over anyway; I guess he&rsquo;s
+digested by this time an&rsquo; cavortin&rsquo; over the landscape in the
+bellies of twenty different wolves,&rdquo; was Henry&rsquo;s epitaph on this,
+the latest lost dog. &ldquo;Have some coffee, Bill.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But Bill shook his head.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Go on,&rdquo; Henry pleaded, elevating the pot.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Bill shoved his cup aside. &ldquo;I&rsquo;ll be ding-dong-danged if I do. I
+said I wouldn&rsquo;t if ary dog turned up missin&rsquo;, an&rsquo; I
+won&rsquo;t.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;It&rsquo;s darn good coffee,&rdquo; Henry said enticingly.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But Bill was stubborn, and he ate a dry breakfast washed down with mumbled
+curses at One Ear for the trick he had played.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I&rsquo;ll tie &rsquo;em up out of reach of each other to-night,&rdquo;
+Bill said, as they took the trail.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+They had travelled little more than a hundred yards, when Henry, who was in
+front, bent down and picked up something with which his snowshoe had collided.
+It was dark, and he could not see it, but he recognised it by the touch. He
+flung it back, so that it struck the sled and bounced along until it fetched up
+on Bill&rsquo;s snowshoes.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Mebbe you&rsquo;ll need that in your business,&rdquo; Henry said.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Bill uttered an exclamation. It was all that was left of Spanker&mdash;the
+stick with which he had been tied.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;They ate &rsquo;m hide an&rsquo; all,&rdquo; Bill announced. &ldquo;The
+stick&rsquo;s as clean as a whistle. They&rsquo;ve ate the leather offen both
+ends. They&rsquo;re damn hungry, Henry, an&rsquo; they&rsquo;ll have you
+an&rsquo; me guessin&rsquo; before this trip&rsquo;s over.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Henry laughed defiantly. &ldquo;I ain&rsquo;t been trailed this way by wolves
+before, but I&rsquo;ve gone through a whole lot worse an&rsquo; kept my health.
+Takes more&rsquo;n a handful of them pesky critters to do for yours truly,
+Bill, my son.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I don&rsquo;t know, I don&rsquo;t know,&rdquo; Bill muttered ominously.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Well, you&rsquo;ll know all right when we pull into McGurry.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I ain&rsquo;t feelin&rsquo; special enthusiastic,&rdquo; Bill persisted.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;You&rsquo;re off colour, that&rsquo;s what&rsquo;s the matter with
+you,&rdquo; Henry dogmatised. &ldquo;What you need is quinine, an&rsquo;
+I&rsquo;m goin&rsquo; to dose you up stiff as soon as we make McGurry.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Bill grunted his disagreement with the diagnosis, and lapsed into silence. The
+day was like all the days. Light came at nine o&rsquo;clock. At twelve
+o&rsquo;clock the southern horizon was warmed by the unseen sun; and then began
+the cold grey of afternoon that would merge, three hours later, into night.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+It was just after the sun&rsquo;s futile effort to appear, that Bill slipped
+the rifle from under the sled-lashings and said:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;You keep right on, Henry, I&rsquo;m goin&rsquo; to see what I can
+see.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;You&rsquo;d better stick by the sled,&rdquo; his partner protested.
+&ldquo;You&rsquo;ve only got three cartridges, an&rsquo; there&rsquo;s no
+tellin&rsquo; what might happen.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Who&rsquo;s croaking now?&rdquo; Bill demanded triumphantly.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Henry made no reply, and plodded on alone, though often he cast anxious glances
+back into the grey solitude where his partner had disappeared. An hour later,
+taking advantage of the cut-offs around which the sled had to go, Bill arrived.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;They&rsquo;re scattered an&rsquo; rangin&rsquo; along wide,&rdquo; he
+said: &ldquo;keeping up with us an&rsquo; lookin&rsquo; for game at the same
+time. You see, they&rsquo;re sure of us, only they know they&rsquo;ve got to
+wait to get us. In the meantime they&rsquo;re willin&rsquo; to pick up anything
+eatable that comes handy.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;You mean they <i>think</i> they&rsquo;re sure of us,&rdquo; Henry
+objected pointedly.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But Bill ignored him. &ldquo;I seen some of them. They&rsquo;re pretty thin.
+They ain&rsquo;t had a bite in weeks I reckon, outside of Fatty an&rsquo; Frog
+an&rsquo; Spanker; an&rsquo; there&rsquo;s so many of &rsquo;em that that
+didn&rsquo;t go far. They&rsquo;re remarkable thin. Their ribs is like
+wash-boards, an&rsquo; their stomachs is right up against their backbones.
+They&rsquo;re pretty desperate, I can tell you. They&rsquo;ll be goin&rsquo;
+mad, yet, an&rsquo; then watch out.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+A few minutes later, Henry, who was now travelling behind the sled, emitted a
+low, warning whistle. Bill turned and looked, then quietly stopped the dogs. To
+the rear, from around the last bend and plainly into view, on the very trail
+they had just covered, trotted a furry, slinking form. Its nose was to the
+trail, and it trotted with a peculiar, sliding, effortless gait. When they
+halted, it halted, throwing up its head and regarding them steadily with
+nostrils that twitched as it caught and studied the scent of them.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;It&rsquo;s the she-wolf,&rdquo; Bill answered.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The dogs had lain down in the snow, and he walked past them to join his partner
+in the sled. Together they watched the strange animal that had pursued them for
+days and that had already accomplished the destruction of half their dog-team.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+After a searching scrutiny, the animal trotted forward a few steps. This it
+repeated several times, till it was a short hundred yards away. It paused, head
+up, close by a clump of spruce trees, and with sight and scent studied the
+outfit of the watching men. It looked at them in a strangely wistful way, after
+the manner of a dog; but in its wistfulness there was none of the dog
+affection. It was a wistfulness bred of hunger, as cruel as its own fangs, as
+merciless as the frost itself.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+It was large for a wolf, its gaunt frame advertising the lines of an animal
+that was among the largest of its kind.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Stands pretty close to two feet an&rsquo; a half at the
+shoulders,&rdquo; Henry commented. &ldquo;An&rsquo; I&rsquo;ll bet it
+ain&rsquo;t far from five feet long.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Kind of strange colour for a wolf,&rdquo; was Bill&rsquo;s criticism.
+&ldquo;I never seen a red wolf before. Looks almost cinnamon to me.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The animal was certainly not cinnamon-coloured. Its coat was the true
+wolf-coat. The dominant colour was grey, and yet there was to it a faint
+reddish hue&mdash;a hue that was baffling, that appeared and disappeared, that
+was more like an illusion of the vision, now grey, distinctly grey, and again
+giving hints and glints of a vague redness of colour not classifiable in terms
+of ordinary experience.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Looks for all the world like a big husky sled-dog,&rdquo; Bill said.
+&ldquo;I wouldn&rsquo;t be s&rsquo;prised to see it wag its tail.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Hello, you husky!&rdquo; he called. &ldquo;Come here, you
+whatever-your-name-is.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Ain&rsquo;t a bit scairt of you,&rdquo; Henry laughed.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Bill waved his hand at it threateningly and shouted loudly; but the animal
+betrayed no fear. The only change in it that they could notice was an accession
+of alertness. It still regarded them with the merciless wistfulness of hunger.
+They were meat, and it was hungry; and it would like to go in and eat them if
+it dared.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Look here, Henry,&rdquo; Bill said, unconsciously lowering his voice to
+a whisper because of what he imitated. &ldquo;We&rsquo;ve got three cartridges.
+But it&rsquo;s a dead shot. Couldn&rsquo;t miss it. It&rsquo;s got away with
+three of our dogs, an&rsquo; we oughter put a stop to it. What d&rsquo;ye
+say?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Henry nodded his consent. Bill cautiously slipped the gun from under the
+sled-lashing. The gun was on the way to his shoulder, but it never got there.
+For in that instant the she-wolf leaped sidewise from the trail into the clump
+of spruce trees and disappeared.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The two men looked at each other. Henry whistled long and comprehendingly.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I might have knowed it,&rdquo; Bill chided himself aloud as he replaced
+the gun. &ldquo;Of course a wolf that knows enough to come in with the dogs at
+feedin&rsquo; time, &rsquo;d know all about shooting-irons. I tell you right
+now, Henry, that critter&rsquo;s the cause of all our trouble. We&rsquo;d have
+six dogs at the present time, &rsquo;stead of three, if it wasn&rsquo;t for
+her. An&rsquo; I tell you right now, Henry, I&rsquo;m goin&rsquo; to get her.
+She&rsquo;s too smart to be shot in the open. But I&rsquo;m goin&rsquo; to lay
+for her. I&rsquo;ll bushwhack her as sure as my name is Bill.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;You needn&rsquo;t stray off too far in doin&rsquo; it,&rdquo; his
+partner admonished. &ldquo;If that pack ever starts to jump you, them three
+cartridges&rsquo;d be wuth no more&rsquo;n three whoops in hell. Them animals
+is damn hungry, an&rsquo; once they start in, they&rsquo;ll sure get you,
+Bill.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+They camped early that night. Three dogs could not drag the sled so fast nor
+for so long hours as could six, and they were showing unmistakable signs of
+playing out. And the men went early to bed, Bill first seeing to it that the
+dogs were tied out of gnawing-reach of one another.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But the wolves were growing bolder, and the men were aroused more than once
+from their sleep. So near did the wolves approach, that the dogs became frantic
+with terror, and it was necessary to replenish the fire from time to time in
+order to keep the adventurous marauders at safer distance.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I&rsquo;ve hearn sailors talk of sharks followin&rsquo; a ship,&rdquo;
+Bill remarked, as he crawled back into the blankets after one such replenishing
+of the fire. &ldquo;Well, them wolves is land sharks. They know their business
+better&rsquo;n we do, an&rsquo; they ain&rsquo;t a-holdin&rsquo; our trail this
+way for their health. They&rsquo;re goin&rsquo; to get us. They&rsquo;re sure
+goin&rsquo; to get us, Henry.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;They&rsquo;ve half got you a&rsquo;ready, a-talkin&rsquo; like
+that,&rdquo; Henry retorted sharply. &ldquo;A man&rsquo;s half licked when he
+says he is. An&rsquo; you&rsquo;re half eaten from the way you&rsquo;re
+goin&rsquo; on about it.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;They&rsquo;ve got away with better men than you an&rsquo; me,&rdquo;
+Bill answered.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Oh, shet up your croakin&rsquo;. You make me all-fired tired.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Henry rolled over angrily on his side, but was surprised that Bill made no
+similar display of temper. This was not Bill&rsquo;s way, for he was easily
+angered by sharp words. Henry thought long over it before he went to sleep, and
+as his eyelids fluttered down and he dozed off, the thought in his mind was:
+&ldquo;There&rsquo;s no mistakin&rsquo; it, Bill&rsquo;s almighty blue.
+I&rsquo;ll have to cheer him up to-morrow.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<h3><a name="chap03"></a>CHAPTER III<br/>
+THE HUNGER CRY</h3>
+
+<p>
+The day began auspiciously. They had lost no dogs during the night, and they
+swung out upon the trail and into the silence, the darkness, and the cold with
+spirits that were fairly light. Bill seemed to have forgotten his forebodings
+of the previous night, and even waxed facetious with the dogs when, at midday,
+they overturned the sled on a bad piece of trail.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+It was an awkward mix-up. The sled was upside down and jammed between a
+tree-trunk and a huge rock, and they were forced to unharness the dogs in order
+to straighten out the tangle. The two men were bent over the sled and trying to
+right it, when Henry observed One Ear sidling away.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Here, you, One Ear!&rdquo; he cried, straightening up and turning around
+on the dog.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But One Ear broke into a run across the snow, his traces trailing behind him.
+And there, out in the snow of their back track, was the she-wolf waiting for
+him. As he neared her, he became suddenly cautious. He slowed down to an alert
+and mincing walk and then stopped. He regarded her carefully and dubiously, yet
+desirefully. She seemed to smile at him, showing her teeth in an ingratiating
+rather than a menacing way. She moved toward him a few steps, playfully, and
+then halted. One Ear drew near to her, still alert and cautious, his tail and
+ears in the air, his head held high.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He tried to sniff noses with her, but she retreated playfully and coyly. Every
+advance on his part was accompanied by a corresponding retreat on her part.
+Step by step she was luring him away from the security of his human
+companionship. Once, as though a warning had in vague ways flitted through his
+intelligence, he turned his head and looked back at the overturned sled, at his
+team-mates, and at the two men who were calling to him.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But whatever idea was forming in his mind, was dissipated by the she-wolf, who
+advanced upon him, sniffed noses with him for a fleeting instant, and then
+resumed her coy retreat before his renewed advances.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+In the meantime, Bill had bethought himself of the rifle. But it was jammed
+beneath the overturned sled, and by the time Henry had helped him to right the
+load, One Ear and the she-wolf were too close together and the distance too
+great to risk a shot.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Too late One Ear learned his mistake. Before they saw the cause, the two men
+saw him turn and start to run back toward them. Then, approaching at right
+angles to the trail and cutting off his retreat they saw a dozen wolves, lean
+and grey, bounding across the snow. On the instant, the she-wolf&rsquo;s
+coyness and playfulness disappeared. With a snarl she sprang upon One Ear. He
+thrust her off with his shoulder, and, his retreat cut off and still intent on
+regaining the sled, he altered his course in an attempt to circle around to it.
+More wolves were appearing every moment and joining in the chase. The she-wolf
+was one leap behind One Ear and holding her own.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Where are you goin&rsquo;?&rdquo; Henry suddenly demanded, laying his
+hand on his partner&rsquo;s arm.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Bill shook it off. &ldquo;I won&rsquo;t stand it,&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;They
+ain&rsquo;t a-goin&rsquo; to get any more of our dogs if I can help it.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Gun in hand, he plunged into the underbrush that lined the side of the trail.
+His intention was apparent enough. Taking the sled as the centre of the circle
+that One Ear was making, Bill planned to tap that circle at a point in advance
+of the pursuit. With his rifle, in the broad daylight, it might be possible for
+him to awe the wolves and save the dog.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Say, Bill!&rdquo; Henry called after him. &ldquo;Be careful! Don&rsquo;t
+take no chances!&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Henry sat down on the sled and watched. There was nothing else for him to do.
+Bill had already gone from sight; but now and again, appearing and disappearing
+amongst the underbrush and the scattered clumps of spruce, could be seen One
+Ear. Henry judged his case to be hopeless. The dog was thoroughly alive to its
+danger, but it was running on the outer circle while the wolf-pack was running
+on the inner and shorter circle. It was vain to think of One Ear so
+outdistancing his pursuers as to be able to cut across their circle in advance
+of them and to regain the sled.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The different lines were rapidly approaching a point. Somewhere out there in
+the snow, screened from his sight by trees and thickets, Henry knew that the
+wolf-pack, One Ear, and Bill were coming together. All too quickly, far more
+quickly than he had expected, it happened. He heard a shot, then two shots, in
+rapid succession, and he knew that Bill&rsquo;s ammunition was gone. Then he
+heard a great outcry of snarls and yelps. He recognised One Ear&rsquo;s yell of
+pain and terror, and he heard a wolf-cry that bespoke a stricken animal. And
+that was all. The snarls ceased. The yelping died away. Silence settled down
+again over the lonely land.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He sat for a long while upon the sled. There was no need for him to go and see
+what had happened. He knew it as though it had taken place before his eyes.
+Once, he roused with a start and hastily got the axe out from underneath the
+lashings. But for some time longer he sat and brooded, the two remaining dogs
+crouching and trembling at his feet.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+At last he arose in a weary manner, as though all the resilience had gone out
+of his body, and proceeded to fasten the dogs to the sled. He passed a rope
+over his shoulder, a man-trace, and pulled with the dogs. He did not go far. At
+the first hint of darkness he hastened to make a camp, and he saw to it that he
+had a generous supply of firewood. He fed the dogs, cooked and ate his supper,
+and made his bed close to the fire.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But he was not destined to enjoy that bed. Before his eyes closed the wolves
+had drawn too near for safety. It no longer required an effort of the vision to
+see them. They were all about him and the fire, in a narrow circle, and he
+could see them plainly in the firelight lying down, sitting up, crawling
+forward on their bellies, or slinking back and forth. They even slept. Here and
+there he could see one curled up in the snow like a dog, taking the sleep that
+was now denied himself.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He kept the fire brightly blazing, for he knew that it alone intervened between
+the flesh of his body and their hungry fangs. His two dogs stayed close by him,
+one on either side, leaning against him for protection, crying and whimpering,
+and at times snarling desperately when a wolf approached a little closer than
+usual. At such moments, when his dogs snarled, the whole circle would be
+agitated, the wolves coming to their feet and pressing tentatively forward, a
+chorus of snarls and eager yelps rising about him. Then the circle would lie
+down again, and here and there a wolf would resume its broken nap.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But this circle had a continuous tendency to draw in upon him. Bit by bit, an
+inch at a time, with here a wolf bellying forward, and there a wolf bellying
+forward, the circle would narrow until the brutes were almost within springing
+distance. Then he would seize brands from the fire and hurl them into the pack.
+A hasty drawing back always resulted, accompanied by angry yelps and frightened
+snarls when a well-aimed brand struck and scorched a too daring animal.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Morning found the man haggard and worn, wide-eyed from want of sleep. He cooked
+breakfast in the darkness, and at nine o&rsquo;clock, when, with the coming of
+daylight, the wolf-pack drew back, he set about the task he had planned through
+the long hours of the night. Chopping down young saplings, he made them
+cross-bars of a scaffold by lashing them high up to the trunks of standing
+trees. Using the sled-lashing for a heaving rope, and with the aid of the dogs,
+he hoisted the coffin to the top of the scaffold.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;They got Bill, an&rsquo; they may get me, but they&rsquo;ll sure never
+get you, young man,&rdquo; he said, addressing the dead body in its
+tree-sepulchre.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Then he took the trail, the lightened sled bounding along behind the willing
+dogs; for they, too, knew that safety lay open in the gaining of Fort McGurry.
+The wolves were now more open in their pursuit, trotting sedately behind and
+ranging along on either side, their red tongues lolling out, their lean sides
+showing the undulating ribs with every movement. They were very lean, mere
+skin-bags stretched over bony frames, with strings for muscles&mdash;so lean
+that Henry found it in his mind to marvel that they still kept their feet and
+did not collapse forthright in the snow.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He did not dare travel until dark. At midday, not only did the sun warm the
+southern horizon, but it even thrust its upper rim, pale and golden, above the
+sky-line. He received it as a sign. The days were growing longer. The sun was
+returning. But scarcely had the cheer of its light departed, than he went into
+camp. There were still several hours of grey daylight and sombre twilight, and
+he utilised them in chopping an enormous supply of fire-wood.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+With night came horror. Not only were the starving wolves growing bolder, but
+lack of sleep was telling upon Henry. He dozed despite himself, crouching by
+the fire, the blankets about his shoulders, the axe between his knees, and on
+either side a dog pressing close against him. He awoke once and saw in front of
+him, not a dozen feet away, a big grey wolf, one of the largest of the pack.
+And even as he looked, the brute deliberately stretched himself after the
+manner of a lazy dog, yawning full in his face and looking upon him with a
+possessive eye, as if, in truth, he were merely a delayed meal that was soon to
+be eaten.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+This certitude was shown by the whole pack. Fully a score he could count,
+staring hungrily at him or calmly sleeping in the snow. They reminded him of
+children gathered about a spread table and awaiting permission to begin to eat.
+And he was the food they were to eat! He wondered how and when the meal would
+begin.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+As he piled wood on the fire he discovered an appreciation of his own body
+which he had never felt before. He watched his moving muscles and was
+interested in the cunning mechanism of his fingers. By the light of the fire he
+crooked his fingers slowly and repeatedly now one at a time, now all together,
+spreading them wide or making quick gripping movements. He studied the
+nail-formation, and prodded the finger-tips, now sharply, and again softly,
+gauging the while the nerve-sensations produced. It fascinated him, and he grew
+suddenly fond of this subtle flesh of his that worked so beautifully and
+smoothly and delicately. Then he would cast a glance of fear at the wolf-circle
+drawn expectantly about him, and like a blow the realisation would strike him
+that this wonderful body of his, this living flesh, was no more than so much
+meat, a quest of ravenous animals, to be torn and slashed by their hungry
+fangs, to be sustenance to them as the moose and the rabbit had often been
+sustenance to him.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He came out of a doze that was half nightmare, to see the red-hued she-wolf
+before him. She was not more than half a dozen feet away sitting in the snow
+and wistfully regarding him. The two dogs were whimpering and snarling at his
+feet, but she took no notice of them. She was looking at the man, and for some
+time he returned her look. There was nothing threatening about her. She looked
+at him merely with a great wistfulness, but he knew it to be the wistfulness of
+an equally great hunger. He was the food, and the sight of him excited in her
+the gustatory sensations. Her mouth opened, the saliva drooled forth, and she
+licked her chops with the pleasure of anticipation.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+A spasm of fear went through him. He reached hastily for a brand to throw at
+her. But even as he reached, and before his fingers had closed on the missile,
+she sprang back into safety; and he knew that she was used to having things
+thrown at her. She had snarled as she sprang away, baring her white fangs to
+their roots, all her wistfulness vanishing, being replaced by a carnivorous
+malignity that made him shudder. He glanced at the hand that held the brand,
+noticing the cunning delicacy of the fingers that gripped it, how they adjusted
+themselves to all the inequalities of the surface, curling over and under and
+about the rough wood, and one little finger, too close to the burning portion
+of the brand, sensitively and automatically writhing back from the hurtful heat
+to a cooler gripping-place; and in the same instant he seemed to see a vision
+of those same sensitive and delicate fingers being crushed and torn by the
+white teeth of the she-wolf. Never had he been so fond of this body of his as
+now when his tenure of it was so precarious.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+All night, with burning brands, he fought off the hungry pack. When he dozed
+despite himself, the whimpering and snarling of the dogs aroused him. Morning
+came, but for the first time the light of day failed to scatter the wolves. The
+man waited in vain for them to go. They remained in a circle about him and his
+fire, displaying an arrogance of possession that shook his courage born of the
+morning light.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He made one desperate attempt to pull out on the trail. But the moment he left
+the protection of the fire, the boldest wolf leaped for him, but leaped short.
+He saved himself by springing back, the jaws snapping together a scant six
+inches from his thigh. The rest of the pack was now up and surging upon him,
+and a throwing of firebrands right and left was necessary to drive them back to
+a respectful distance.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Even in the daylight he did not dare leave the fire to chop fresh wood. Twenty
+feet away towered a huge dead spruce. He spent half the day extending his
+campfire to the tree, at any moment a half dozen burning faggots ready at hand
+to fling at his enemies. Once at the tree, he studied the surrounding forest in
+order to fell the tree in the direction of the most firewood.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The night was a repetition of the night before, save that the need for sleep
+was becoming overpowering. The snarling of his dogs was losing its efficacy.
+Besides, they were snarling all the time, and his benumbed and drowsy senses no
+longer took note of changing pitch and intensity. He awoke with a start. The
+she-wolf was less than a yard from him. Mechanically, at short range, without
+letting go of it, he thrust a brand full into her open and snarling mouth. She
+sprang away, yelling with pain, and while he took delight in the smell of
+burning flesh and hair, he watched her shaking her head and growling wrathfully
+a score of feet away.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But this time, before he dozed again, he tied a burning pine-knot to his right
+hand. His eyes were closed but few minutes when the burn of the flame on his
+flesh awakened him. For several hours he adhered to this programme. Every time
+he was thus awakened he drove back the wolves with flying brands, replenished
+the fire, and rearranged the pine-knot on his hand. All worked well, but there
+came a time when he fastened the pine-knot insecurely. As his eyes closed it
+fell away from his hand.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He dreamed. It seemed to him that he was in Fort McGurry. It was warm and
+comfortable, and he was playing cribbage with the Factor. Also, it seemed to
+him that the fort was besieged by wolves. They were howling at the very gates,
+and sometimes he and the Factor paused from the game to listen and laugh at the
+futile efforts of the wolves to get in. And then, so strange was the dream,
+there was a crash. The door was burst open. He could see the wolves flooding
+into the big living-room of the fort. They were leaping straight for him and
+the Factor. With the bursting open of the door, the noise of their howling had
+increased tremendously. This howling now bothered him. His dream was merging
+into something else&mdash;he knew not what; but through it all, following him,
+persisted the howling.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And then he awoke to find the howling real. There was a great snarling and
+yelping. The wolves were rushing him. They were all about him and upon him. The
+teeth of one had closed upon his arm. Instinctively he leaped into the fire,
+and as he leaped, he felt the sharp slash of teeth that tore through the flesh
+of his leg. Then began a fire fight. His stout mittens temporarily protected
+his hands, and he scooped live coals into the air in all directions, until the
+campfire took on the semblance of a volcano.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But it could not last long. His face was blistering in the heat, his eyebrows
+and lashes were singed off, and the heat was becoming unbearable to his feet.
+With a flaming brand in each hand, he sprang to the edge of the fire. The
+wolves had been driven back. On every side, wherever the live coals had fallen,
+the snow was sizzling, and every little while a retiring wolf, with wild leap
+and snort and snarl, announced that one such live coal had been stepped upon.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Flinging his brands at the nearest of his enemies, the man thrust his
+smouldering mittens into the snow and stamped about to cool his feet. His two
+dogs were missing, and he well knew that they had served as a course in the
+protracted meal which had begun days before with Fatty, the last course of
+which would likely be himself in the days to follow.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;You ain&rsquo;t got me yet!&rdquo; he cried, savagely shaking his fist
+at the hungry beasts; and at the sound of his voice the whole circle was
+agitated, there was a general snarl, and the she-wolf slid up close to him
+across the snow and watched him with hungry wistfulness.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He set to work to carry out a new idea that had come to him. He extended the
+fire into a large circle. Inside this circle he crouched, his sleeping outfit
+under him as a protection against the melting snow. When he had thus
+disappeared within his shelter of flame, the whole pack came curiously to the
+rim of the fire to see what had become of him. Hitherto they had been denied
+access to the fire, and they now settled down in a close-drawn circle, like so
+many dogs, blinking and yawning and stretching their lean bodies in the
+unaccustomed warmth. Then the she-wolf sat down, pointed her nose at a star,
+and began to howl. One by one the wolves joined her, till the whole pack, on
+haunches, with noses pointed skyward, was howling its hunger cry.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Dawn came, and daylight. The fire was burning low. The fuel had run out, and
+there was need to get more. The man attempted to step out of his circle of
+flame, but the wolves surged to meet him. Burning brands made them spring
+aside, but they no longer sprang back. In vain he strove to drive them back. As
+he gave up and stumbled inside his circle, a wolf leaped for him, missed, and
+landed with all four feet in the coals. It cried out with terror, at the same
+time snarling, and scrambled back to cool its paws in the snow.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The man sat down on his blankets in a crouching position. His body leaned
+forward from the hips. His shoulders, relaxed and drooping, and his head on his
+knees advertised that he had given up the struggle. Now and again he raised his
+head to note the dying down of the fire. The circle of flame and coals was
+breaking into segments with openings in between. These openings grew in size,
+the segments diminished.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I guess you can come an&rsquo; get me any time,&rdquo; he mumbled.
+&ldquo;Anyway, I&rsquo;m goin&rsquo; to sleep.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Once he awakened, and in an opening in the circle, directly in front of him, he
+saw the she-wolf gazing at him.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Again he awakened, a little later, though it seemed hours to him. A mysterious
+change had taken place&mdash;so mysterious a change that he was shocked wider
+awake. Something had happened. He could not understand at first. Then he
+discovered it. The wolves were gone. Remained only the trampled snow to show
+how closely they had pressed him. Sleep was welling up and gripping him again,
+his head was sinking down upon his knees, when he roused with a sudden start.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+There were cries of men, and churn of sleds, the creaking of harnesses, and the
+eager whimpering of straining dogs. Four sleds pulled in from the river bed to
+the camp among the trees. Half a dozen men were about the man who crouched in
+the centre of the dying fire. They were shaking and prodding him into
+consciousness. He looked at them like a drunken man and maundered in strange,
+sleepy speech.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Red she-wolf. . . . Come in with the dogs at feedin&rsquo; time. . . .
+First she ate the dog-food. . . . Then she ate the dogs. . . . An&rsquo; after
+that she ate Bill. . . . &rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Where&rsquo;s Lord Alfred?&rdquo; one of the men bellowed in his ear,
+shaking him roughly.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He shook his head slowly. &ldquo;No, she didn&rsquo;t eat him. . . . He&rsquo;s
+roostin&rsquo; in a tree at the last camp.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Dead?&rdquo; the man shouted.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;An&rsquo; in a box,&rdquo; Henry answered. He jerked his shoulder
+petulantly away from the grip of his questioner. &ldquo;Say, you lemme alone. .
+. . I&rsquo;m jes&rsquo; plump tuckered out. . . . Goo&rsquo; night,
+everybody.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+His eyes fluttered and went shut. His chin fell forward on his chest. And even
+as they eased him down upon the blankets his snores were rising on the frosty
+air.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But there was another sound. Far and faint it was, in the remote distance, the
+cry of the hungry wolf-pack as it took the trail of other meat than the man it
+had just missed.
+</p>
+
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<h2><a name="part02"></a>PART II</h2>
+
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<h3><a name="chap04"></a>CHAPTER I<br/>
+THE BATTLE OF THE FANGS</h3>
+
+<p>
+It was the she-wolf who had first caught the sound of men&rsquo;s voices and
+the whining of the sled-dogs; and it was the she-wolf who was first to spring
+away from the cornered man in his circle of dying flame. The pack had been
+loath to forego the kill it had hunted down, and it lingered for several
+minutes, making sure of the sounds, and then it, too, sprang away on the trail
+made by the she-wolf.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Running at the forefront of the pack was a large grey wolf&mdash;one of its
+several leaders. It was he who directed the pack&rsquo;s course on the heels of
+the she-wolf. It was he who snarled warningly at the younger members of the
+pack or slashed at them with his fangs when they ambitiously tried to pass him.
+And it was he who increased the pace when he sighted the she-wolf, now trotting
+slowly across the snow.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She dropped in alongside by him, as though it were her appointed position, and
+took the pace of the pack. He did not snarl at her, nor show his teeth, when
+any leap of hers chanced to put her in advance of him. On the contrary, he
+seemed kindly disposed toward her&mdash;too kindly to suit her, for he was
+prone to run near to her, and when he ran too near it was she who snarled and
+showed her teeth. Nor was she above slashing his shoulder sharply on occasion.
+At such times he betrayed no anger. He merely sprang to the side and ran
+stiffly ahead for several awkward leaps, in carriage and conduct resembling an
+abashed country swain.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+This was his one trouble in the running of the pack; but she had other
+troubles. On her other side ran a gaunt old wolf, grizzled and marked with the
+scars of many battles. He ran always on her right side. The fact that he had
+but one eye, and that the left eye, might account for this. He, also, was
+addicted to crowding her, to veering toward her till his scarred muzzle touched
+her body, or shoulder, or neck. As with the running mate on the left, she
+repelled these attentions with her teeth; but when both bestowed their
+attentions at the same time she was roughly jostled, being compelled, with
+quick snaps to either side, to drive both lovers away and at the same time to
+maintain her forward leap with the pack and see the way of her feet before her.
+At such times her running mates flashed their teeth and growled threateningly
+across at each other. They might have fought, but even wooing and its rivalry
+waited upon the more pressing hunger-need of the pack.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+After each repulse, when the old wolf sheered abruptly away from the
+sharp-toothed object of his desire, he shouldered against a young
+three-year-old that ran on his blind right side. This young wolf had attained
+his full size; and, considering the weak and famished condition of the pack, he
+possessed more than the average vigour and spirit. Nevertheless, he ran with
+his head even with the shoulder of his one-eyed elder. When he ventured to run
+abreast of the older wolf (which was seldom), a snarl and a snap sent him back
+even with the shoulder again. Sometimes, however, he dropped cautiously and
+slowly behind and edged in between the old leader and the she-wolf. This was
+doubly resented, even triply resented. When she snarled her displeasure, the
+old leader would whirl on the three-year-old. Sometimes she whirled with him.
+And sometimes the young leader on the left whirled, too.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+At such times, confronted by three sets of savage teeth, the young wolf stopped
+precipitately, throwing himself back on his haunches, with fore-legs stiff,
+mouth menacing, and mane bristling. This confusion in the front of the moving
+pack always caused confusion in the rear. The wolves behind collided with the
+young wolf and expressed their displeasure by administering sharp nips on his
+hind-legs and flanks. He was laying up trouble for himself, for lack of food
+and short tempers went together; but with the boundless faith of youth he
+persisted in repeating the manoeuvre every little while, though it never
+succeeded in gaining anything for him but discomfiture.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Had there been food, love-making and fighting would have gone on apace, and the
+pack-formation would have been broken up. But the situation of the pack was
+desperate. It was lean with long-standing hunger. It ran below its ordinary
+speed. At the rear limped the weak members, the very young and the very old. At
+the front were the strongest. Yet all were more like skeletons than full-bodied
+wolves. Nevertheless, with the exception of the ones that limped, the movements
+of the animals were effortless and tireless. Their stringy muscles seemed
+founts of inexhaustible energy. Behind every steel-like contraction of a
+muscle, lay another steel-like contraction, and another, and another,
+apparently without end.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+They ran many miles that day. They ran through the night. And the next day
+found them still running. They were running over the surface of a world frozen
+and dead. No life stirred. They alone moved through the vast inertness. They
+alone were alive, and they sought for other things that were alive in order
+that they might devour them and continue to live.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+They crossed low divides and ranged a dozen small streams in a lower-lying
+country before their quest was rewarded. Then they came upon moose. It was a
+big bull they first found. Here was meat and life, and it was guarded by no
+mysterious fires nor flying missiles of flame. Splay hoofs and palmated antlers
+they knew, and they flung their customary patience and caution to the wind. It
+was a brief fight and fierce. The big bull was beset on every side. He ripped
+them open or split their skulls with shrewdly driven blows of his great hoofs.
+He crushed them and broke them on his large horns. He stamped them into the
+snow under him in the wallowing struggle. But he was foredoomed, and he went
+down with the she-wolf tearing savagely at his throat, and with other teeth
+fixed everywhere upon him, devouring him alive, before ever his last struggles
+ceased or his last damage had been wrought.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+There was food in plenty. The bull weighed over eight hundred
+pounds&mdash;fully twenty pounds of meat per mouth for the forty-odd wolves of
+the pack. But if they could fast prodigiously, they could feed prodigiously,
+and soon a few scattered bones were all that remained of the splendid live
+brute that had faced the pack a few hours before.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+There was now much resting and sleeping. With full stomachs, bickering and
+quarrelling began among the younger males, and this continued through the few
+days that followed before the breaking-up of the pack. The famine was over. The
+wolves were now in the country of game, and though they still hunted in pack,
+they hunted more cautiously, cutting out heavy cows or crippled old bulls from
+the small moose-herds they ran across.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+There came a day, in this land of plenty, when the wolf-pack split in half and
+went in different directions. The she-wolf, the young leader on her left, and
+the one-eyed elder on her right, led their half of the pack down to the
+Mackenzie River and across into the lake country to the east. Each day this
+remnant of the pack dwindled. Two by two, male and female, the wolves were
+deserting. Occasionally a solitary male was driven out by the sharp teeth of
+his rivals. In the end there remained only four: the she-wolf, the young
+leader, the one-eyed one, and the ambitious three-year-old.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The she-wolf had by now developed a ferocious temper. Her three suitors all
+bore the marks of her teeth. Yet they never replied in kind, never defended
+themselves against her. They turned their shoulders to her most savage slashes,
+and with wagging tails and mincing steps strove to placate her wrath. But if
+they were all mildness toward her, they were all fierceness toward one another.
+The three-year-old grew too ambitious in his fierceness. He caught the one-eyed
+elder on his blind side and ripped his ear into ribbons. Though the grizzled
+old fellow could see only on one side, against the youth and vigour of the
+other he brought into play the wisdom of long years of experience. His lost eye
+and his scarred muzzle bore evidence to the nature of his experience. He had
+survived too many battles to be in doubt for a moment about what to do.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The battle began fairly, but it did not end fairly. There was no telling what
+the outcome would have been, for the third wolf joined the elder, and together,
+old leader and young leader, they attacked the ambitious three-year-old and
+proceeded to destroy him. He was beset on either side by the merciless fangs of
+his erstwhile comrades. Forgotten were the days they had hunted together, the
+game they had pulled down, the famine they had suffered. That business was a
+thing of the past. The business of love was at hand&mdash;ever a sterner and
+crueller business than that of food-getting.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And in the meanwhile, the she-wolf, the cause of it all, sat down contentedly
+on her haunches and watched. She was even pleased. This was her day&mdash;and
+it came not often&mdash;when manes bristled, and fang smote fang or ripped and
+tore the yielding flesh, all for the possession of her.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And in the business of love the three-year-old, who had made this his first
+adventure upon it, yielded up his life. On either side of his body stood his
+two rivals. They were gazing at the she-wolf, who sat smiling in the snow. But
+the elder leader was wise, very wise, in love even as in battle. The younger
+leader turned his head to lick a wound on his shoulder. The curve of his neck
+was turned toward his rival. With his one eye the elder saw the opportunity. He
+darted in low and closed with his fangs. It was a long, ripping slash, and deep
+as well. His teeth, in passing, burst the wall of the great vein of the throat.
+Then he leaped clear.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The young leader snarled terribly, but his snarl broke midmost into a tickling
+cough. Bleeding and coughing, already stricken, he sprang at the elder and
+fought while life faded from him, his legs going weak beneath him, the light of
+day dulling on his eyes, his blows and springs falling shorter and shorter.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And all the while the she-wolf sat on her haunches and smiled. She was made
+glad in vague ways by the battle, for this was the love-making of the Wild, the
+sex-tragedy of the natural world that was tragedy only to those that died. To
+those that survived it was not tragedy, but realisation and achievement.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+When the young leader lay in the snow and moved no more, One Eye stalked over
+to the she-wolf. His carriage was one of mingled triumph and caution. He was
+plainly expectant of a rebuff, and he was just as plainly surprised when her
+teeth did not flash out at him in anger. For the first time she met him with a
+kindly manner. She sniffed noses with him, and even condescended to leap about
+and frisk and play with him in quite puppyish fashion. And he, for all his grey
+years and sage experience, behaved quite as puppyishly and even a little more
+foolishly.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Forgotten already were the vanquished rivals and the love-tale red-written on
+the snow. Forgotten, save once, when old One Eye stopped for a moment to lick
+his stiffening wounds. Then it was that his lips half writhed into a snarl, and
+the hair of his neck and shoulders involuntarily bristled, while he half
+crouched for a spring, his claws spasmodically clutching into the snow-surface
+for firmer footing. But it was all forgotten the next moment, as he sprang
+after the she-wolf, who was coyly leading him a chase through the woods.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+After that they ran side by side, like good friends who have come to an
+understanding. The days passed by, and they kept together, hunting their meat
+and killing and eating it in common. After a time the she-wolf began to grow
+restless. She seemed to be searching for something that she could not find. The
+hollows under fallen trees seemed to attract her, and she spent much time
+nosing about among the larger snow-piled crevices in the rocks and in the caves
+of overhanging banks. Old One Eye was not interested at all, but he followed
+her good-naturedly in her quest, and when her investigations in particular
+places were unusually protracted, he would lie down and wait until she was
+ready to go on.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+They did not remain in one place, but travelled across country until they
+regained the Mackenzie River, down which they slowly went, leaving it often to
+hunt game along the small streams that entered it, but always returning to it
+again. Sometimes they chanced upon other wolves, usually in pairs; but there
+was no friendliness of intercourse displayed on either side, no gladness at
+meeting, no desire to return to the pack-formation. Several times they
+encountered solitary wolves. These were always males, and they were pressingly
+insistent on joining with One Eye and his mate. This he resented, and when she
+stood shoulder to shoulder with him, bristling and showing her teeth, the
+aspiring solitary ones would back off, turn-tail, and continue on their lonely
+way.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+One moonlight night, running through the quiet forest, One Eye suddenly halted.
+His muzzle went up, his tail stiffened, and his nostrils dilated as he scented
+the air. One foot also he held up, after the manner of a dog. He was not
+satisfied, and he continued to smell the air, striving to understand the
+message borne upon it to him. One careless sniff had satisfied his mate, and
+she trotted on to reassure him. Though he followed her, he was still dubious,
+and he could not forbear an occasional halt in order more carefully to study
+the warning.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She crept out cautiously on the edge of a large open space in the midst of the
+trees. For some time she stood alone. Then One Eye, creeping and crawling,
+every sense on the alert, every hair radiating infinite suspicion, joined her.
+They stood side by side, watching and listening and smelling.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+To their ears came the sounds of dogs wrangling and scuffling, the guttural
+cries of men, the sharper voices of scolding women, and once the shrill and
+plaintive cry of a child. With the exception of the huge bulks of the
+skin-lodges, little could be seen save the flames of the fire, broken by the
+movements of intervening bodies, and the smoke rising slowly on the quiet air.
+But to their nostrils came the myriad smells of an Indian camp, carrying a
+story that was largely incomprehensible to One Eye, but every detail of which
+the she-wolf knew.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She was strangely stirred, and sniffed and sniffed with an increasing delight.
+But old One Eye was doubtful. He betrayed his apprehension, and started
+tentatively to go. She turned and touched his neck with her muzzle in a
+reassuring way, then regarded the camp again. A new wistfulness was in her
+face, but it was not the wistfulness of hunger. She was thrilling to a desire
+that urged her to go forward, to be in closer to that fire, to be squabbling
+with the dogs, and to be avoiding and dodging the stumbling feet of men.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+One Eye moved impatiently beside her; her unrest came back upon her, and she
+knew again her pressing need to find the thing for which she searched. She
+turned and trotted back into the forest, to the great relief of One Eye, who
+trotted a little to the fore until they were well within the shelter of the
+trees.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+As they slid along, noiseless as shadows, in the moonlight, they came upon a
+run-way. Both noses went down to the footprints in the snow. These footprints
+were very fresh. One Eye ran ahead cautiously, his mate at his heels. The broad
+pads of their feet were spread wide and in contact with the snow were like
+velvet. One Eye caught sight of a dim movement of white in the midst of the
+white. His sliding gait had been deceptively swift, but it was as nothing to
+the speed at which he now ran. Before him was bounding the faint patch of white
+he had discovered.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+They were running along a narrow alley flanked on either side by a growth of
+young spruce. Through the trees the mouth of the alley could be seen, opening
+out on a moonlit glade. Old One Eye was rapidly overhauling the fleeing shape
+of white. Bound by bound he gained. Now he was upon it. One leap more and his
+teeth would be sinking into it. But that leap was never made. High in the air,
+and straight up, soared the shape of white, now a struggling snowshoe rabbit
+that leaped and bounded, executing a fantastic dance there above him in the air
+and never once returning to earth.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+One Eye sprang back with a snort of sudden fright, then shrank down to the snow
+and crouched, snarling threats at this thing of fear he did not understand. But
+the she-wolf coolly thrust past him. She poised for a moment, then sprang for
+the dancing rabbit. She, too, soared high, but not so high as the quarry, and
+her teeth clipped emptily together with a metallic snap. She made another leap,
+and another.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Her mate had slowly relaxed from his crouch and was watching her. He now
+evinced displeasure at her repeated failures, and himself made a mighty spring
+upward. His teeth closed upon the rabbit, and he bore it back to earth with
+him. But at the same time there was a suspicious crackling movement beside him,
+and his astonished eye saw a young spruce sapling bending down above him to
+strike him. His jaws let go their grip, and he leaped backward to escape this
+strange danger, his lips drawn back from his fangs, his throat snarling, every
+hair bristling with rage and fright. And in that moment the sapling reared its
+slender length upright and the rabbit soared dancing in the air again.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The she-wolf was angry. She sank her fangs into her mate&rsquo;s shoulder in
+reproof; and he, frightened, unaware of what constituted this new onslaught,
+struck back ferociously and in still greater fright, ripping down the side of
+the she-wolf&rsquo;s muzzle. For him to resent such reproof was equally
+unexpected to her, and she sprang upon him in snarling indignation. Then he
+discovered his mistake and tried to placate her. But she proceeded to punish
+him roundly, until he gave over all attempts at placation, and whirled in a
+circle, his head away from her, his shoulders receiving the punishment of her
+teeth.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+In the meantime the rabbit danced above them in the air. The she-wolf sat down
+in the snow, and old One Eye, now more in fear of his mate than of the
+mysterious sapling, again sprang for the rabbit. As he sank back with it
+between his teeth, he kept his eye on the sapling. As before, it followed him
+back to earth. He crouched down under the impending blow, his hair bristling,
+but his teeth still keeping tight hold of the rabbit. But the blow did not
+fall. The sapling remained bent above him. When he moved it moved, and he
+growled at it through his clenched jaws; when he remained still, it remained
+still, and he concluded it was safer to continue remaining still. Yet the warm
+blood of the rabbit tasted good in his mouth.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+It was his mate who relieved him from the quandary in which he found himself.
+She took the rabbit from him, and while the sapling swayed and teetered
+threateningly above her she calmly gnawed off the rabbit&rsquo;s head. At once
+the sapling shot up, and after that gave no more trouble, remaining in the
+decorous and perpendicular position in which nature had intended it to grow.
+Then, between them, the she-wolf and One Eye devoured the game which the
+mysterious sapling had caught for them.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+There were other run-ways and alleys where rabbits were hanging in the air, and
+the wolf-pair prospected them all, the she-wolf leading the way, old One Eye
+following and observant, learning the method of robbing snares&mdash;a
+knowledge destined to stand him in good stead in the days to come.
+</p>
+
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<h3><a name="chap05"></a>CHAPTER II<br/>
+THE LAIR</h3>
+
+<p>
+For two days the she-wolf and One Eye hung about the Indian camp. He was
+worried and apprehensive, yet the camp lured his mate and she was loath to
+depart. But when, one morning, the air was rent with the report of a rifle
+close at hand, and a bullet smashed against a tree trunk several inches from
+One Eye&rsquo;s head, they hesitated no more, but went off on a long, swinging
+lope that put quick miles between them and the danger.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+They did not go far&mdash;a couple of days&rsquo; journey. The she-wolf&rsquo;s
+need to find the thing for which she searched had now become imperative. She
+was getting very heavy, and could run but slowly. Once, in the pursuit of a
+rabbit, which she ordinarily would have caught with ease, she gave over and lay
+down and rested. One Eye came to her; but when he touched her neck gently with
+his muzzle she snapped at him with such quick fierceness that he tumbled over
+backward and cut a ridiculous figure in his effort to escape her teeth. Her
+temper was now shorter than ever; but he had become more patient than ever and
+more solicitous.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And then she found the thing for which she sought. It was a few miles up a
+small stream that in the summer time flowed into the Mackenzie, but that then
+was frozen over and frozen down to its rocky bottom&mdash;a dead stream of
+solid white from source to mouth. The she-wolf was trotting wearily along, her
+mate well in advance, when she came upon the overhanging, high clay-bank. She
+turned aside and trotted over to it. The wear and tear of spring storms and
+melting snows had underwashed the bank and in one place had made a small cave
+out of a narrow fissure.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She paused at the mouth of the cave and looked the wall over carefully. Then,
+on one side and the other, she ran along the base of the wall to where its
+abrupt bulk merged from the softer-lined landscape. Returning to the cave, she
+entered its narrow mouth. For a short three feet she was compelled to crouch,
+then the walls widened and rose higher in a little round chamber nearly six
+feet in diameter. The roof barely cleared her head. It was dry and cosey. She
+inspected it with painstaking care, while One Eye, who had returned, stood in
+the entrance and patiently watched her. She dropped her head, with her nose to
+the ground and directed toward a point near to her closely bunched feet, and
+around this point she circled several times; then, with a tired sigh that was
+almost a grunt, she curled her body in, relaxed her legs, and dropped down, her
+head toward the entrance. One Eye, with pointed, interested ears, laughed at
+her, and beyond, outlined against the white light, she could see the brush of
+his tail waving good-naturedly. Her own ears, with a snuggling movement, laid
+their sharp points backward and down against the head for a moment, while her
+mouth opened and her tongue lolled peaceably out, and in this way she expressed
+that she was pleased and satisfied.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+One Eye was hungry. Though he lay down in the entrance and slept, his sleep was
+fitful. He kept awaking and cocking his ears at the bright world without, where
+the April sun was blazing across the snow. When he dozed, upon his ears would
+steal the faint whispers of hidden trickles of running water, and he would
+rouse and listen intently. The sun had come back, and all the awakening
+Northland world was calling to him. Life was stirring. The feel of spring was
+in the air, the feel of growing life under the snow, of sap ascending in the
+trees, of buds bursting the shackles of the frost.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He cast anxious glances at his mate, but she showed no desire to get up. He
+looked outside, and half a dozen snow-birds fluttered across his field of
+vision. He started to get up, then looked back to his mate again, and settled
+down and dozed. A shrill and minute singing stole upon his hearing. Once, and
+twice, he sleepily brushed his nose with his paw. Then he woke up. There,
+buzzing in the air at the tip of his nose, was a lone mosquito. It was a
+full-grown mosquito, one that had lain frozen in a dry log all winter and that
+had now been thawed out by the sun. He could resist the call of the world no
+longer. Besides, he was hungry.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He crawled over to his mate and tried to persuade her to get up. But she only
+snarled at him, and he walked out alone into the bright sunshine to find the
+snow-surface soft under foot and the travelling difficult. He went up the
+frozen bed of the stream, where the snow, shaded by the trees, was yet hard and
+crystalline. He was gone eight hours, and he came back through the darkness
+hungrier than when he had started. He had found game, but he had not caught it.
+He had broken through the melting snow crust, and wallowed, while the snowshoe
+rabbits had skimmed along on top lightly as ever.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He paused at the mouth of the cave with a sudden shock of suspicion. Faint,
+strange sounds came from within. They were sounds not made by his mate, and yet
+they were remotely familiar. He bellied cautiously inside and was met by a
+warning snarl from the she-wolf. This he received without perturbation, though
+he obeyed it by keeping his distance; but he remained interested in the other
+sounds&mdash;faint, muffled sobbings and slubberings.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+His mate warned him irritably away, and he curled up and slept in the entrance.
+When morning came and a dim light pervaded the lair, he again sought after the
+source of the remotely familiar sounds. There was a new note in his
+mate&rsquo;s warning snarl. It was a jealous note, and he was very careful in
+keeping a respectful distance. Nevertheless, he made out, sheltering between
+her legs against the length of her body, five strange little bundles of life,
+very feeble, very helpless, making tiny whimpering noises, with eyes that did
+not open to the light. He was surprised. It was not the first time in his long
+and successful life that this thing had happened. It had happened many times,
+yet each time it was as fresh a surprise as ever to him.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+His mate looked at him anxiously. Every little while she emitted a low growl,
+and at times, when it seemed to her he approached too near, the growl shot up
+in her throat to a sharp snarl. Of her own experience she had no memory of the
+thing happening; but in her instinct, which was the experience of all the
+mothers of wolves, there lurked a memory of fathers that had eaten their
+new-born and helpless progeny. It manifested itself as a fear strong within
+her, that made her prevent One Eye from more closely inspecting the cubs he had
+fathered.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But there was no danger. Old One Eye was feeling the urge of an impulse, that
+was, in turn, an instinct that had come down to him from all the fathers of
+wolves. He did not question it, nor puzzle over it. It was there, in the fibre
+of his being; and it was the most natural thing in the world that he should
+obey it by turning his back on his new-born family and by trotting out and away
+on the meat-trail whereby he lived.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Five or six miles from the lair, the stream divided, its forks going off among
+the mountains at a right angle. Here, leading up the left fork, he came upon a
+fresh track. He smelled it and found it so recent that he crouched swiftly, and
+looked in the direction in which it disappeared. Then he turned deliberately
+and took the right fork. The footprint was much larger than the one his own
+feet made, and he knew that in the wake of such a trail there was little meat
+for him.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Half a mile up the right fork, his quick ears caught the sound of gnawing
+teeth. He stalked the quarry and found it to be a porcupine, standing upright
+against a tree and trying his teeth on the bark. One Eye approached carefully
+but hopelessly. He knew the breed, though he had never met it so far north
+before; and never in his long life had porcupine served him for a meal. But he
+had long since learned that there was such a thing as Chance, or Opportunity,
+and he continued to draw near. There was never any telling what might happen,
+for with live things events were somehow always happening differently.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The porcupine rolled itself into a ball, radiating long, sharp needles in all
+directions that defied attack. In his youth One Eye had once sniffed too near a
+similar, apparently inert ball of quills, and had the tail flick out suddenly
+in his face. One quill he had carried away in his muzzle, where it had remained
+for weeks, a rankling flame, until it finally worked out. So he lay down, in a
+comfortable crouching position, his nose fully a foot away, and out of the line
+of the tail. Thus he waited, keeping perfectly quiet. There was no telling.
+Something might happen. The porcupine might unroll. There might be opportunity
+for a deft and ripping thrust of paw into the tender, unguarded belly.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But at the end of half an hour he arose, growled wrathfully at the motionless
+ball, and trotted on. He had waited too often and futilely in the past for
+porcupines to unroll, to waste any more time. He continued up the right fork.
+The day wore along, and nothing rewarded his hunt.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The urge of his awakened instinct of fatherhood was strong upon him. He must
+find meat. In the afternoon he blundered upon a ptarmigan. He came out of a
+thicket and found himself face to face with the slow-witted bird. It was
+sitting on a log, not a foot beyond the end of his nose. Each saw the other.
+The bird made a startled rise, but he struck it with his paw, and smashed it
+down to earth, then pounced upon it, and caught it in his teeth as it scuttled
+across the snow trying to rise in the air again. As his teeth crunched through
+the tender flesh and fragile bones, he began naturally to eat. Then he
+remembered, and, turning on the back-track, started for home, carrying the
+ptarmigan in his mouth.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+A mile above the forks, running velvet-footed as was his custom, a gliding
+shadow that cautiously prospected each new vista of the trail, he came upon
+later imprints of the large tracks he had discovered in the early morning. As
+the track led his way, he followed, prepared to meet the maker of it at every
+turn of the stream.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He slid his head around a corner of rock, where began an unusually large bend
+in the stream, and his quick eyes made out something that sent him crouching
+swiftly down. It was the maker of the track, a large female lynx. She was
+crouching as he had crouched once that day, in front of her the tight-rolled
+ball of quills. If he had been a gliding shadow before, he now became the ghost
+of such a shadow, as he crept and circled around, and came up well to leeward
+of the silent, motionless pair.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He lay down in the snow, depositing the ptarmigan beside him, and with eyes
+peering through the needles of a low-growing spruce he watched the play of life
+before him&mdash;the waiting lynx and the waiting porcupine, each intent on
+life; and, such was the curiousness of the game, the way of life for one lay in
+the eating of the other, and the way of life for the other lay in being not
+eaten. While old One Eye, the wolf crouching in the covert, played his part,
+too, in the game, waiting for some strange freak of Chance, that might help him
+on the meat-trail which was his way of life.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Half an hour passed, an hour; and nothing happened. The ball of quills might
+have been a stone for all it moved; the lynx might have been frozen to marble;
+and old One Eye might have been dead. Yet all three animals were keyed to a
+tenseness of living that was almost painful, and scarcely ever would it come to
+them to be more alive than they were then in their seeming petrifaction.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+One Eye moved slightly and peered forth with increased eagerness. Something was
+happening. The porcupine had at last decided that its enemy had gone away.
+Slowly, cautiously, it was unrolling its ball of impregnable armour. It was
+agitated by no tremor of anticipation. Slowly, slowly, the bristling ball
+straightened out and lengthened. One Eye watching, felt a sudden moistness in
+his mouth and a drooling of saliva, involuntary, excited by the living meat
+that was spreading itself like a repast before him.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Not quite entirely had the porcupine unrolled when it discovered its enemy. In
+that instant the lynx struck. The blow was like a flash of light. The paw, with
+rigid claws curving like talons, shot under the tender belly and came back with
+a swift ripping movement. Had the porcupine been entirely unrolled, or had it
+not discovered its enemy a fraction of a second before the blow was struck, the
+paw would have escaped unscathed; but a side-flick of the tail sank sharp
+quills into it as it was withdrawn.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Everything had happened at once&mdash;the blow, the counter-blow, the squeal of
+agony from the porcupine, the big cat&rsquo;s squall of sudden hurt and
+astonishment. One Eye half arose in his excitement, his ears up, his tail
+straight out and quivering behind him. The lynx&rsquo;s bad temper got the best
+of her. She sprang savagely at the thing that had hurt her. But the porcupine,
+squealing and grunting, with disrupted anatomy trying feebly to roll up into
+its ball-protection, flicked out its tail again, and again the big cat squalled
+with hurt and astonishment. Then she fell to backing away and sneezing, her
+nose bristling with quills like a monstrous pin-cushion. She brushed her nose
+with her paws, trying to dislodge the fiery darts, thrust it into the snow, and
+rubbed it against twigs and branches, and all the time leaping about, ahead,
+sidewise, up and down, in a frenzy of pain and fright.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She sneezed continually, and her stub of a tail was doing its best toward
+lashing about by giving quick, violent jerks. She quit her antics, and quieted
+down for a long minute. One Eye watched. And even he could not repress a start
+and an involuntary bristling of hair along his back when she suddenly leaped,
+without warning, straight up in the air, at the same time emitting a long and
+most terrible squall. Then she sprang away, up the trail, squalling with every
+leap she made.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+It was not until her racket had faded away in the distance and died out that
+One Eye ventured forth. He walked as delicately as though all the snow were
+carpeted with porcupine quills, erect and ready to pierce the soft pads of his
+feet. The porcupine met his approach with a furious squealing and a clashing of
+its long teeth. It had managed to roll up in a ball again, but it was not quite
+the old compact ball; its muscles were too much torn for that. It had been
+ripped almost in half, and was still bleeding profusely.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+One Eye scooped out mouthfuls of the blood-soaked snow, and chewed and tasted
+and swallowed. This served as a relish, and his hunger increased mightily; but
+he was too old in the world to forget his caution. He waited. He lay down and
+waited, while the porcupine grated its teeth and uttered grunts and sobs and
+occasional sharp little squeals. In a little while, One Eye noticed that the
+quills were drooping and that a great quivering had set up. The quivering came
+to an end suddenly. There was a final defiant clash of the long teeth. Then all
+the quills drooped quite down, and the body relaxed and moved no more.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+With a nervous, shrinking paw, One Eye stretched out the porcupine to its full
+length and turned it over on its back. Nothing had happened. It was surely
+dead. He studied it intently for a moment, then took a careful grip with his
+teeth and started off down the stream, partly carrying, partly dragging the
+porcupine, with head turned to the side so as to avoid stepping on the prickly
+mass. He recollected something, dropped the burden, and trotted back to where
+he had left the ptarmigan. He did not hesitate a moment. He knew clearly what
+was to be done, and this he did by promptly eating the ptarmigan. Then he
+returned and took up his burden.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+When he dragged the result of his day&rsquo;s hunt into the cave, the she-wolf
+inspected it, turned her muzzle to him, and lightly licked him on the neck. But
+the next instant she was warning him away from the cubs with a snarl that was
+less harsh than usual and that was more apologetic than menacing. Her
+instinctive fear of the father of her progeny was toning down. He was behaving
+as a wolf-father should, and manifesting no unholy desire to devour the young
+lives she had brought into the world.
+</p>
+
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<h3><a name="chap06"></a>CHAPTER III<br/>
+THE GREY CUB</h3>
+
+<p>
+He was different from his brothers and sisters. Their hair already betrayed the
+reddish hue inherited from their mother, the she-wolf; while he alone, in this
+particular, took after his father. He was the one little grey cub of the
+litter. He had bred true to the straight wolf-stock&mdash;in fact, he had bred
+true to old One Eye himself, physically, with but a single exception, and that
+was he had two eyes to his father&rsquo;s one.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The grey cub&rsquo;s eyes had not been open long, yet already he could see with
+steady clearness. And while his eyes were still closed, he had felt, tasted,
+and smelled. He knew his two brothers and his two sisters very well. He had
+begun to romp with them in a feeble, awkward way, and even to squabble, his
+little throat vibrating with a queer rasping noise (the forerunner of the
+growl), as he worked himself into a passion. And long before his eyes had
+opened he had learned by touch, taste, and smell to know his mother&mdash;a
+fount of warmth and liquid food and tenderness. She possessed a gentle,
+caressing tongue that soothed him when it passed over his soft little body, and
+that impelled him to snuggle close against her and to doze off to sleep.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Most of the first month of his life had been passed thus in sleeping; but now
+he could see quite well, and he stayed awake for longer periods of time, and he
+was coming to learn his world quite well. His world was gloomy; but he did not
+know that, for he knew no other world. It was dim-lighted; but his eyes had
+never had to adjust themselves to any other light. His world was very small.
+Its limits were the walls of the lair; but as he had no knowledge of the wide
+world outside, he was never oppressed by the narrow confines of his existence.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But he had early discovered that one wall of his world was different from the
+rest. This was the mouth of the cave and the source of light. He had discovered
+that it was different from the other walls long before he had any thoughts of
+his own, any conscious volitions. It had been an irresistible attraction before
+ever his eyes opened and looked upon it. The light from it had beat upon his
+sealed lids, and the eyes and the optic nerves had pulsated to little,
+sparklike flashes, warm-coloured and strangely pleasing. The life of his body,
+and of every fibre of his body, the life that was the very substance of his
+body and that was apart from his own personal life, had yearned toward this
+light and urged his body toward it in the same way that the cunning chemistry
+of a plant urges it toward the sun.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Always, in the beginning, before his conscious life dawned, he had crawled
+toward the mouth of the cave. And in this his brothers and sisters were one
+with him. Never, in that period, did any of them crawl toward the dark corners
+of the back-wall. The light drew them as if they were plants; the chemistry of
+the life that composed them demanded the light as a necessity of being; and
+their little puppet-bodies crawled blindly and chemically, like the tendrils of
+a vine. Later on, when each developed individuality and became personally
+conscious of impulsions and desires, the attraction of the light increased.
+They were always crawling and sprawling toward it, and being driven back from
+it by their mother.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+It was in this way that the grey cub learned other attributes of his mother
+than the soft, soothing, tongue. In his insistent crawling toward the light, he
+discovered in her a nose that with a sharp nudge administered rebuke, and
+later, a paw, that crushed him down and rolled him over and over with swift,
+calculating stroke. Thus he learned hurt; and on top of it he learned to avoid
+hurt, first, by not incurring the risk of it; and second, when he had incurred
+the risk, by dodging and by retreating. These were conscious actions, and were
+the results of his first generalisations upon the world. Before that he had
+recoiled automatically from hurt, as he had crawled automatically toward the
+light. After that he recoiled from hurt because he <i>knew</i> that it was
+hurt.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He was a fierce little cub. So were his brothers and sisters. It was to be
+expected. He was a carnivorous animal. He came of a breed of meat-killers and
+meat-eaters. His father and mother lived wholly upon meat. The milk he had
+sucked with his first flickering life, was milk transformed directly from meat,
+and now, at a month old, when his eyes had been open for but a week, he was
+beginning himself to eat meat&mdash;meat half-digested by the she-wolf and
+disgorged for the five growing cubs that already made too great demand upon her
+breast.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But he was, further, the fiercest of the litter. He could make a louder rasping
+growl than any of them. His tiny rages were much more terrible than theirs. It
+was he that first learned the trick of rolling a fellow-cub over with a cunning
+paw-stroke. And it was he that first gripped another cub by the ear and pulled
+and tugged and growled through jaws tight-clenched. And certainly it was he
+that caused the mother the most trouble in keeping her litter from the mouth of
+the cave.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The fascination of the light for the grey cub increased from day to day. He was
+perpetually departing on yard-long adventures toward the cave&rsquo;s entrance,
+and as perpetually being driven back. Only he did not know it for an entrance.
+He did not know anything about entrances&mdash;passages whereby one goes from
+one place to another place. He did not know any other place, much less of a way
+to get there. So to him the entrance of the cave was a wall&mdash;a wall of
+light. As the sun was to the outside dweller, this wall was to him the sun of
+his world. It attracted him as a candle attracts a moth. He was always striving
+to attain it. The life that was so swiftly expanding within him, urged him
+continually toward the wall of light. The life that was within him knew that it
+was the one way out, the way he was predestined to tread. But he himself did
+not know anything about it. He did not know there was any outside at all.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+There was one strange thing about this wall of light. His father (he had
+already come to recognise his father as the one other dweller in the world, a
+creature like his mother, who slept near the light and was a bringer of
+meat)&mdash;his father had a way of walking right into the white far wall and
+disappearing. The grey cub could not understand this. Though never permitted by
+his mother to approach that wall, he had approached the other walls, and
+encountered hard obstruction on the end of his tender nose. This hurt. And
+after several such adventures, he left the walls alone. Without thinking about
+it, he accepted this disappearing into the wall as a peculiarity of his father,
+as milk and half-digested meat were peculiarities of his mother.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+In fact, the grey cub was not given to thinking&mdash;at least, to the kind of
+thinking customary of men. His brain worked in dim ways. Yet his conclusions
+were as sharp and distinct as those achieved by men. He had a method of
+accepting things, without questioning the why and wherefore. In reality, this
+was the act of classification. He was never disturbed over why a thing
+happened. How it happened was sufficient for him. Thus, when he had bumped his
+nose on the back-wall a few times, he accepted that he would not disappear into
+walls. In the same way he accepted that his father could disappear into walls.
+But he was not in the least disturbed by desire to find out the reason for the
+difference between his father and himself. Logic and physics were no part of
+his mental make-up.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Like most creatures of the Wild, he early experienced famine. There came a time
+when not only did the meat-supply cease, but the milk no longer came from his
+mother&rsquo;s breast. At first, the cubs whimpered and cried, but for the most
+part they slept. It was not long before they were reduced to a coma of hunger.
+There were no more spats and squabbles, no more tiny rages nor attempts at
+growling; while the adventures toward the far white wall ceased altogether. The
+cubs slept, while the life that was in them flickered and died down.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+One Eye was desperate. He ranged far and wide, and slept but little in the lair
+that had now become cheerless and miserable. The she-wolf, too, left her litter
+and went out in search of meat. In the first days after the birth of the cubs,
+One Eye had journeyed several times back to the Indian camp and robbed the
+rabbit snares; but, with the melting of the snow and the opening of the
+streams, the Indian camp had moved away, and that source of supply was closed
+to him.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+When the grey cub came back to life and again took interest in the far white
+wall, he found that the population of his world had been reduced. Only one
+sister remained to him. The rest were gone. As he grew stronger, he found
+himself compelled to play alone, for the sister no longer lifted her head nor
+moved about. His little body rounded out with the meat he now ate; but the food
+had come too late for her. She slept continuously, a tiny skeleton flung round
+with skin in which the flame flickered lower and lower and at last went out.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Then there came a time when the grey cub no longer saw his father appearing and
+disappearing in the wall nor lying down asleep in the entrance. This had
+happened at the end of a second and less severe famine. The she-wolf knew why
+One Eye never came back, but there was no way by which she could tell what she
+had seen to the grey cub. Hunting herself for meat, up the left fork of the
+stream where lived the lynx, she had followed a day-old trail of One Eye. And
+she had found him, or what remained of him, at the end of the trail. There were
+many signs of the battle that had been fought, and of the lynx&rsquo;s
+withdrawal to her lair after having won the victory. Before she went away, the
+she-wolf had found this lair, but the signs told her that the lynx was inside,
+and she had not dared to venture in.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+After that, the she-wolf in her hunting avoided the left fork. For she knew
+that in the lynx&rsquo;s lair was a litter of kittens, and she knew the lynx
+for a fierce, bad-tempered creature and a terrible fighter. It was all very
+well for half a dozen wolves to drive a lynx, spitting and bristling, up a
+tree; but it was quite a different matter for a lone wolf to encounter a
+lynx&mdash;especially when the lynx was known to have a litter of hungry
+kittens at her back.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But the Wild is the Wild, and motherhood is motherhood, at all times fiercely
+protective whether in the Wild or out of it; and the time was to come when the
+she-wolf, for her grey cub&rsquo;s sake, would venture the left fork, and the
+lair in the rocks, and the lynx&rsquo;s wrath.
+</p>
+
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<h3><a name="chap07"></a>CHAPTER IV<br/>
+THE WALL OF THE WORLD</h3>
+
+<p>
+By the time his mother began leaving the cave on hunting expeditions, the cub
+had learned well the law that forbade his approaching the entrance. Not only
+had this law been forcibly and many times impressed on him by his
+mother&rsquo;s nose and paw, but in him the instinct of fear was developing.
+Never, in his brief cave-life, had he encountered anything of which to be
+afraid. Yet fear was in him. It had come down to him from a remote ancestry
+through a thousand thousand lives. It was a heritage he had received directly
+from One Eye and the she-wolf; but to them, in turn, it had been passed down
+through all the generations of wolves that had gone before. Fear!&mdash;that
+legacy of the Wild which no animal may escape nor exchange for pottage.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+So the grey cub knew fear, though he knew not the stuff of which fear was made.
+Possibly he accepted it as one of the restrictions of life. For he had already
+learned that there were such restrictions. Hunger he had known; and when he
+could not appease his hunger he had felt restriction. The hard obstruction of
+the cave-wall, the sharp nudge of his mother&rsquo;s nose, the smashing stroke
+of her paw, the hunger unappeased of several famines, had borne in upon him
+that all was not freedom in the world, that to life there was limitations and
+restraints. These limitations and restraints were laws. To be obedient to them
+was to escape hurt and make for happiness.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He did not reason the question out in this man fashion. He merely classified
+the things that hurt and the things that did not hurt. And after such
+classification he avoided the things that hurt, the restrictions and
+restraints, in order to enjoy the satisfactions and the remunerations of life.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Thus it was that in obedience to the law laid down by his mother, and in
+obedience to the law of that unknown and nameless thing, fear, he kept away
+from the mouth of the cave. It remained to him a white wall of light. When his
+mother was absent, he slept most of the time, while during the intervals that
+he was awake he kept very quiet, suppressing the whimpering cries that tickled
+in his throat and strove for noise.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Once, lying awake, he heard a strange sound in the white wall. He did not know
+that it was a wolverine, standing outside, all a-trembling with its own daring,
+and cautiously scenting out the contents of the cave. The cub knew only that
+the sniff was strange, a something unclassified, therefore unknown and
+terrible&mdash;for the unknown was one of the chief elements that went into the
+making of fear.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The hair bristled upon the grey cub&rsquo;s back, but it bristled silently. How
+was he to know that this thing that sniffed was a thing at which to bristle? It
+was not born of any knowledge of his, yet it was the visible expression of the
+fear that was in him, and for which, in his own life, there was no accounting.
+But fear was accompanied by another instinct&mdash;that of concealment. The cub
+was in a frenzy of terror, yet he lay without movement or sound, frozen,
+petrified into immobility, to all appearances dead. His mother, coming home,
+growled as she smelt the wolverine&rsquo;s track, and bounded into the cave and
+licked and nozzled him with undue vehemence of affection. And the cub felt that
+somehow he had escaped a great hurt.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But there were other forces at work in the cub, the greatest of which was
+growth. Instinct and law demanded of him obedience. But growth demanded
+disobedience. His mother and fear impelled him to keep away from the white
+wall. Growth is life, and life is for ever destined to make for light. So there
+was no damming up the tide of life that was rising within him&mdash;rising with
+every mouthful of meat he swallowed, with every breath he drew. In the end, one
+day, fear and obedience were swept away by the rush of life, and the cub
+straddled and sprawled toward the entrance.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Unlike any other wall with which he had had experience, this wall seemed to
+recede from him as he approached. No hard surface collided with the tender
+little nose he thrust out tentatively before him. The substance of the wall
+seemed as permeable and yielding as light. And as condition, in his eyes, had
+the seeming of form, so he entered into what had been wall to him and bathed in
+the substance that composed it.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+It was bewildering. He was sprawling through solidity. And ever the light grew
+brighter. Fear urged him to go back, but growth drove him on. Suddenly he found
+himself at the mouth of the cave. The wall, inside which he had thought
+himself, as suddenly leaped back before him to an immeasurable distance. The
+light had become painfully bright. He was dazzled by it. Likewise he was made
+dizzy by this abrupt and tremendous extension of space. Automatically, his eyes
+were adjusting themselves to the brightness, focusing themselves to meet the
+increased distance of objects. At first, the wall had leaped beyond his vision.
+He now saw it again; but it had taken upon itself a remarkable remoteness.
+Also, its appearance had changed. It was now a variegated wall, composed of the
+trees that fringed the stream, the opposing mountain that towered above the
+trees, and the sky that out-towered the mountain.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+A great fear came upon him. This was more of the terrible unknown. He crouched
+down on the lip of the cave and gazed out on the world. He was very much
+afraid. Because it was unknown, it was hostile to him. Therefore the hair stood
+up on end along his back and his lips wrinkled weakly in an attempt at a
+ferocious and intimidating snarl. Out of his puniness and fright he challenged
+and menaced the whole wide world.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Nothing happened. He continued to gaze, and in his interest he forgot to snarl.
+Also, he forgot to be afraid. For the time, fear had been routed by growth,
+while growth had assumed the guise of curiosity. He began to notice near
+objects&mdash;an open portion of the stream that flashed in the sun, the
+blasted pine-tree that stood at the base of the slope, and the slope itself,
+that ran right up to him and ceased two feet beneath the lip of the cave on
+which he crouched.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Now the grey cub had lived all his days on a level floor. He had never
+experienced the hurt of a fall. He did not know what a fall was. So he stepped
+boldly out upon the air. His hind-legs still rested on the cave-lip, so he fell
+forward head downward. The earth struck him a harsh blow on the nose that made
+him yelp. Then he began rolling down the slope, over and over. He was in a
+panic of terror. The unknown had caught him at last. It had gripped savagely
+hold of him and was about to wreak upon him some terrific hurt. Growth was now
+routed by fear, and he ki-yi&rsquo;d like any frightened puppy.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The unknown bore him on he knew not to what frightful hurt, and he yelped and
+ki-yi&rsquo;d unceasingly. This was a different proposition from crouching in
+frozen fear while the unknown lurked just alongside. Now the unknown had caught
+tight hold of him. Silence would do no good. Besides, it was not fear, but
+terror, that convulsed him.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But the slope grew more gradual, and its base was grass-covered. Here the cub
+lost momentum. When at last he came to a stop, he gave one last agonised yell
+and then a long, whimpering wail. Also, and quite as a matter of course, as
+though in his life he had already made a thousand toilets, he proceeded to lick
+away the dry clay that soiled him.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+After that he sat up and gazed about him, as might the first man of the earth
+who landed upon Mars. The cub had broken through the wall of the world, the
+unknown had let go its hold of him, and here he was without hurt. But the first
+man on Mars would have experienced less unfamiliarity than did he. Without any
+antecedent knowledge, without any warning whatever that such existed, he found
+himself an explorer in a totally new world.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Now that the terrible unknown had let go of him, he forgot that the unknown had
+any terrors. He was aware only of curiosity in all the things about him. He
+inspected the grass beneath him, the moss-berry plant just beyond, and the dead
+trunk of the blasted pine that stood on the edge of an open space among the
+trees. A squirrel, running around the base of the trunk, came full upon him,
+and gave him a great fright. He cowered down and snarled. But the squirrel was
+as badly scared. It ran up the tree, and from a point of safety chattered back
+savagely.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+This helped the cub&rsquo;s courage, and though the woodpecker he next
+encountered gave him a start, he proceeded confidently on his way. Such was his
+confidence, that when a moose-bird impudently hopped up to him, he reached out
+at it with a playful paw. The result was a sharp peck on the end of his nose
+that made him cower down and ki-yi. The noise he made was too much for the
+moose-bird, who sought safety in flight.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But the cub was learning. His misty little mind had already made an unconscious
+classification. There were live things and things not alive. Also, he must
+watch out for the live things. The things not alive remained always in one
+place, but the live things moved about, and there was no telling what they
+might do. The thing to expect of them was the unexpected, and for this he must
+be prepared.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He travelled very clumsily. He ran into sticks and things. A twig that he
+thought a long way off, would the next instant hit him on the nose or rake
+along his ribs. There were inequalities of surface. Sometimes he overstepped
+and stubbed his nose. Quite as often he understepped and stubbed his feet. Then
+there were the pebbles and stones that turned under him when he trod upon them;
+and from them he came to know that the things not alive were not all in the
+same state of stable equilibrium as was his cave&mdash;also, that small things
+not alive were more liable than large things to fall down or turn over. But
+with every mishap he was learning. The longer he walked, the better he walked.
+He was adjusting himself. He was learning to calculate his own muscular
+movements, to know his physical limitations, to measure distances between
+objects, and between objects and himself.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+His was the luck of the beginner. Born to be a hunter of meat (though he did
+not know it), he blundered upon meat just outside his own cave-door on his
+first foray into the world. It was by sheer blundering that he chanced upon the
+shrewdly hidden ptarmigan nest. He fell into it. He had essayed to walk along
+the trunk of a fallen pine. The rotten bark gave way under his feet, and with a
+despairing yelp he pitched down the rounded crescent, smashed through the
+leafage and stalks of a small bush, and in the heart of the bush, on the
+ground, fetched up in the midst of seven ptarmigan chicks.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+They made noises, and at first he was frightened at them. Then he perceived
+that they were very little, and he became bolder. They moved. He placed his paw
+on one, and its movements were accelerated. This was a source of enjoyment to
+him. He smelled it. He picked it up in his mouth. It struggled and tickled his
+tongue. At the same time he was made aware of a sensation of hunger. His jaws
+closed together. There was a crunching of fragile bones, and warm blood ran in
+his mouth. The taste of it was good. This was meat, the same as his mother gave
+him, only it was alive between his teeth and therefore better. So he ate the
+ptarmigan. Nor did he stop till he had devoured the whole brood. Then he licked
+his chops in quite the same way his mother did, and began to crawl out of the
+bush.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He encountered a feathered whirlwind. He was confused and blinded by the rush
+of it and the beat of angry wings. He hid his head between his paws and yelped.
+The blows increased. The mother ptarmigan was in a fury. Then he became angry.
+He rose up, snarling, striking out with his paws. He sank his tiny teeth into
+one of the wings and pulled and tugged sturdily. The ptarmigan struggled
+against him, showering blows upon him with her free wing. It was his first
+battle. He was elated. He forgot all about the unknown. He no longer was afraid
+of anything. He was fighting, tearing at a live thing that was striking at him.
+Also, this live thing was meat. The lust to kill was on him. He had just
+destroyed little live things. He would now destroy a big live thing. He was too
+busy and happy to know that he was happy. He was thrilling and exulting in ways
+new to him and greater to him than any he had known before.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He held on to the wing and growled between his tight-clenched teeth. The
+ptarmigan dragged him out of the bush. When she turned and tried to drag him
+back into the bush&rsquo;s shelter, he pulled her away from it and on into the
+open. And all the time she was making outcry and striking with her free wing,
+while feathers were flying like a snow-fall. The pitch to which he was aroused
+was tremendous. All the fighting blood of his breed was up in him and surging
+through him. This was living, though he did not know it. He was realising his
+own meaning in the world; he was doing that for which he was made&mdash;killing
+meat and battling to kill it. He was justifying his existence, than which life
+can do no greater; for life achieves its summit when it does to the uttermost
+that which it was equipped to do.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+After a time, the ptarmigan ceased her struggling. He still held her by the
+wing, and they lay on the ground and looked at each other. He tried to growl
+threateningly, ferociously. She pecked on his nose, which by now, what of
+previous adventures was sore. He winced but held on. She pecked him again and
+again. From wincing he went to whimpering. He tried to back away from her,
+oblivious to the fact that by his hold on her he dragged her after him. A rain
+of pecks fell on his ill-used nose. The flood of fight ebbed down in him, and,
+releasing his prey, he turned tail and scampered on across the open in
+inglorious retreat.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He lay down to rest on the other side of the open, near the edge of the bushes,
+his tongue lolling out, his chest heaving and panting, his nose still hurting
+him and causing him to continue his whimper. But as he lay there, suddenly
+there came to him a feeling as of something terrible impending. The unknown
+with all its terrors rushed upon him, and he shrank back instinctively into the
+shelter of the bush. As he did so, a draught of air fanned him, and a large,
+winged body swept ominously and silently past. A hawk, driving down out of the
+blue, had barely missed him.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+While he lay in the bush, recovering from his fright and peering fearfully out,
+the mother-ptarmigan on the other side of the open space fluttered out of the
+ravaged nest. It was because of her loss that she paid no attention to the
+winged bolt of the sky. But the cub saw, and it was a warning and a lesson to
+him&mdash;the swift downward swoop of the hawk, the short skim of its body just
+above the ground, the strike of its talons in the body of the ptarmigan, the
+ptarmigan&rsquo;s squawk of agony and fright, and the hawk&rsquo;s rush upward
+into the blue, carrying the ptarmigan away with it.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+It was a long time before the cub left its shelter. He had learned much. Live
+things were meat. They were good to eat. Also, live things when they were large
+enough, could give hurt. It was better to eat small live things like ptarmigan
+chicks, and to let alone large live things like ptarmigan hens. Nevertheless he
+felt a little prick of ambition, a sneaking desire to have another battle with
+that ptarmigan hen&mdash;only the hawk had carried her away. May be there were
+other ptarmigan hens. He would go and see.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He came down a shelving bank to the stream. He had never seen water before. The
+footing looked good. There were no inequalities of surface. He stepped boldly
+out on it; and went down, crying with fear, into the embrace of the unknown. It
+was cold, and he gasped, breathing quickly. The water rushed into his lungs
+instead of the air that had always accompanied his act of breathing. The
+suffocation he experienced was like the pang of death. To him it signified
+death. He had no conscious knowledge of death, but like every animal of the
+Wild, he possessed the instinct of death. To him it stood as the greatest of
+hurts. It was the very essence of the unknown; it was the sum of the terrors of
+the unknown, the one culminating and unthinkable catastrophe that could happen
+to him, about which he knew nothing and about which he feared everything.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He came to the surface, and the sweet air rushed into his open mouth. He did
+not go down again. Quite as though it had been a long-established custom of his
+he struck out with all his legs and began to swim. The near bank was a yard
+away; but he had come up with his back to it, and the first thing his eyes
+rested upon was the opposite bank, toward which he immediately began to swim.
+The stream was a small one, but in the pool it widened out to a score of feet.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Midway in the passage, the current picked up the cub and swept him downstream.
+He was caught in the miniature rapid at the bottom of the pool. Here was little
+chance for swimming. The quiet water had become suddenly angry. Sometimes he
+was under, sometimes on top. At all times he was in violent motion, now being
+turned over or around, and again, being smashed against a rock. And with every
+rock he struck, he yelped. His progress was a series of yelps, from which might
+have been adduced the number of rocks he encountered.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Below the rapid was a second pool, and here, captured by the eddy, he was
+gently borne to the bank, and as gently deposited on a bed of gravel. He
+crawled frantically clear of the water and lay down. He had learned some more
+about the world. Water was not alive. Yet it moved. Also, it looked as solid as
+the earth, but was without any solidity at all. His conclusion was that things
+were not always what they appeared to be. The cub&rsquo;s fear of the unknown
+was an inherited distrust, and it had now been strengthened by experience.
+Thenceforth, in the nature of things, he would possess an abiding distrust of
+appearances. He would have to learn the reality of a thing before he could put
+his faith into it.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+One other adventure was destined for him that day. He had recollected that
+there was such a thing in the world as his mother. And then there came to him a
+feeling that he wanted her more than all the rest of the things in the world.
+Not only was his body tired with the adventures it had undergone, but his
+little brain was equally tired. In all the days he had lived it had not worked
+so hard as on this one day. Furthermore, he was sleepy. So he started out to
+look for the cave and his mother, feeling at the same time an overwhelming rush
+of loneliness and helplessness.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He was sprawling along between some bushes, when he heard a sharp intimidating
+cry. There was a flash of yellow before his eyes. He saw a weasel leaping
+swiftly away from him. It was a small live thing, and he had no fear. Then,
+before him, at his feet, he saw an extremely small live thing, only several
+inches long, a young weasel, that, like himself, had disobediently gone out
+adventuring. It tried to retreat before him. He turned it over with his paw. It
+made a queer, grating noise. The next moment the flash of yellow reappeared
+before his eyes. He heard again the intimidating cry, and at the same instant
+received a sharp blow on the side of the neck and felt the sharp teeth of the
+mother-weasel cut into his flesh.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+While he yelped and ki-yi&rsquo;d and scrambled backward, he saw the
+mother-weasel leap upon her young one and disappear with it into the
+neighbouring thicket. The cut of her teeth in his neck still hurt, but his
+feelings were hurt more grievously, and he sat down and weakly whimpered. This
+mother-weasel was so small and so savage. He was yet to learn that for size and
+weight the weasel was the most ferocious, vindictive, and terrible of all the
+killers of the Wild. But a portion of this knowledge was quickly to be his.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He was still whimpering when the mother-weasel reappeared. She did not rush
+him, now that her young one was safe. She approached more cautiously, and the
+cub had full opportunity to observe her lean, snakelike body, and her head,
+erect, eager, and snake-like itself. Her sharp, menacing cry sent the hair
+bristling along his back, and he snarled warningly at her. She came closer and
+closer. There was a leap, swifter than his unpractised sight, and the lean,
+yellow body disappeared for a moment out of the field of his vision. The next
+moment she was at his throat, her teeth buried in his hair and flesh.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+At first he snarled and tried to fight; but he was very young, and this was
+only his first day in the world, and his snarl became a whimper, his fight a
+struggle to escape. The weasel never relaxed her hold. She hung on, striving to
+press down with her teeth to the great vein where his life-blood bubbled. The
+weasel was a drinker of blood, and it was ever her preference to drink from the
+throat of life itself.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The grey cub would have died, and there would have been no story to write about
+him, had not the she-wolf come bounding through the bushes. The weasel let go
+the cub and flashed at the she-wolf&rsquo;s throat, missing, but getting a hold
+on the jaw instead. The she-wolf flirted her head like the snap of a whip,
+breaking the weasel&rsquo;s hold and flinging it high in the air. And, still in
+the air, the she-wolf&rsquo;s jaws closed on the lean, yellow body, and the
+weasel knew death between the crunching teeth.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The cub experienced another access of affection on the part of his mother. Her
+joy at finding him seemed even greater than his joy at being found. She nozzled
+him and caressed him and licked the cuts made in him by the weasel&rsquo;s
+teeth. Then, between them, mother and cub, they ate the blood-drinker, and
+after that went back to the cave and slept.
+</p>
+
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<h3><a name="chap08"></a>CHAPTER V<br/>
+THE LAW OF MEAT</h3>
+
+<p>
+The cub&rsquo;s development was rapid. He rested for two days, and then
+ventured forth from the cave again. It was on this adventure that he found the
+young weasel whose mother he had helped eat, and he saw to it that the young
+weasel went the way of its mother. But on this trip he did not get lost. When
+he grew tired, he found his way back to the cave and slept. And every day
+thereafter found him out and ranging a wider area.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He began to get accurate measurement of his strength and his weakness, and to
+know when to be bold and when to be cautious. He found it expedient to be
+cautious all the time, except for the rare moments, when, assured of his own
+intrepidity, he abandoned himself to petty rages and lusts.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He was always a little demon of fury when he chanced upon a stray ptarmigan.
+Never did he fail to respond savagely to the chatter of the squirrel he had
+first met on the blasted pine. While the sight of a moose-bird almost
+invariably put him into the wildest of rages; for he never forgot the peck on
+the nose he had received from the first of that ilk he encountered.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But there were times when even a moose-bird failed to affect him, and those
+were times when he felt himself to be in danger from some other prowling meat
+hunter. He never forgot the hawk, and its moving shadow always sent him
+crouching into the nearest thicket. He no longer sprawled and straddled, and
+already he was developing the gait of his mother, slinking and furtive,
+apparently without exertion, yet sliding along with a swiftness that was as
+deceptive as it was imperceptible.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+In the matter of meat, his luck had been all in the beginning. The seven
+ptarmigan chicks and the baby weasel represented the sum of his killings. His
+desire to kill strengthened with the days, and he cherished hungry ambitions
+for the squirrel that chattered so volubly and always informed all wild
+creatures that the wolf-cub was approaching. But as birds flew in the air,
+squirrels could climb trees, and the cub could only try to crawl unobserved
+upon the squirrel when it was on the ground.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The cub entertained a great respect for his mother. She could get meat, and she
+never failed to bring him his share. Further, she was unafraid of things. It
+did not occur to him that this fearlessness was founded upon experience and
+knowledge. Its effect on him was that of an impression of power. His mother
+represented power; and as he grew older he felt this power in the sharper
+admonishment of her paw; while the reproving nudge of her nose gave place to
+the slash of her fangs. For this, likewise, he respected his mother. She
+compelled obedience from him, and the older he grew the shorter grew her
+temper.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Famine came again, and the cub with clearer consciousness knew once more the
+bite of hunger. The she-wolf ran herself thin in the quest for meat. She rarely
+slept any more in the cave, spending most of her time on the meat-trail, and
+spending it vainly. This famine was not a long one, but it was severe while it
+lasted. The cub found no more milk in his mother&rsquo;s breast, nor did he get
+one mouthful of meat for himself.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Before, he had hunted in play, for the sheer joyousness of it; now he hunted in
+deadly earnestness, and found nothing. Yet the failure of it accelerated his
+development. He studied the habits of the squirrel with greater carefulness,
+and strove with greater craft to steal upon it and surprise it. He studied the
+wood-mice and tried to dig them out of their burrows; and he learned much about
+the ways of moose-birds and woodpeckers. And there came a day when the
+hawk&rsquo;s shadow did not drive him crouching into the bushes. He had grown
+stronger and wiser, and more confident. Also, he was desperate. So he sat on
+his haunches, conspicuously in an open space, and challenged the hawk down out
+of the sky. For he knew that there, floating in the blue above him, was meat,
+the meat his stomach yearned after so insistently. But the hawk refused to come
+down and give battle, and the cub crawled away into a thicket and whimpered his
+disappointment and hunger.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The famine broke. The she-wolf brought home meat. It was strange meat,
+different from any she had ever brought before. It was a lynx kitten, partly
+grown, like the cub, but not so large. And it was all for him. His mother had
+satisfied her hunger elsewhere; though he did not know that it was the rest of
+the lynx litter that had gone to satisfy her. Nor did he know the desperateness
+of her deed. He knew only that the velvet-furred kitten was meat, and he ate
+and waxed happier with every mouthful.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+A full stomach conduces to inaction, and the cub lay in the cave, sleeping
+against his mother&rsquo;s side. He was aroused by her snarling. Never had he
+heard her snarl so terribly. Possibly in her whole life it was the most
+terrible snarl she ever gave. There was reason for it, and none knew it better
+than she. A lynx&rsquo;s lair is not despoiled with impunity. In the full glare
+of the afternoon light, crouching in the entrance of the cave, the cub saw the
+lynx-mother. The hair rippled up along his back at the sight. Here was fear,
+and it did not require his instinct to tell him of it. And if sight alone were
+not sufficient, the cry of rage the intruder gave, beginning with a snarl and
+rushing abruptly upward into a hoarse screech, was convincing enough in itself.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The cub felt the prod of the life that was in him, and stood up and snarled
+valiantly by his mother&rsquo;s side. But she thrust him ignominiously away and
+behind her. Because of the low-roofed entrance the lynx could not leap in, and
+when she made a crawling rush of it the she-wolf sprang upon her and pinned her
+down. The cub saw little of the battle. There was a tremendous snarling and
+spitting and screeching. The two animals threshed about, the lynx ripping and
+tearing with her claws and using her teeth as well, while the she-wolf used her
+teeth alone.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Once, the cub sprang in and sank his teeth into the hind leg of the lynx. He
+clung on, growling savagely. Though he did not know it, by the weight of his
+body he clogged the action of the leg and thereby saved his mother much damage.
+A change in the battle crushed him under both their bodies and wrenched loose
+his hold. The next moment the two mothers separated, and, before they rushed
+together again, the lynx lashed out at the cub with a huge fore-paw that ripped
+his shoulder open to the bone and sent him hurtling sidewise against the wall.
+Then was added to the uproar the cub&rsquo;s shrill yelp of pain and fright.
+But the fight lasted so long that he had time to cry himself out and to
+experience a second burst of courage; and the end of the battle found him again
+clinging to a hind-leg and furiously growling between his teeth.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The lynx was dead. But the she-wolf was very weak and sick. At first she
+caressed the cub and licked his wounded shoulder; but the blood she had lost
+had taken with it her strength, and for all of a day and a night she lay by her
+dead foe&rsquo;s side, without movement, scarcely breathing. For a week she
+never left the cave, except for water, and then her movements were slow and
+painful. At the end of that time the lynx was devoured, while the
+she-wolf&rsquo;s wounds had healed sufficiently to permit her to take the
+meat-trail again.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The cub&rsquo;s shoulder was stiff and sore, and for some time he limped from
+the terrible slash he had received. But the world now seemed changed. He went
+about in it with greater confidence, with a feeling of prowess that had not
+been his in the days before the battle with the lynx. He had looked upon life
+in a more ferocious aspect; he had fought; he had buried his teeth in the flesh
+of a foe; and he had survived. And because of all this, he carried himself more
+boldly, with a touch of defiance that was new in him. He was no longer afraid
+of minor things, and much of his timidity had vanished, though the unknown
+never ceased to press upon him with its mysteries and terrors, intangible and
+ever-menacing.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He began to accompany his mother on the meat-trail, and he saw much of the
+killing of meat and began to play his part in it. And in his own dim way he
+learned the law of meat. There were two kinds of life&mdash;his own kind and
+the other kind. His own kind included his mother and himself. The other kind
+included all live things that moved. But the other kind was divided. One
+portion was what his own kind killed and ate. This portion was composed of the
+non-killers and the small killers. The other portion killed and ate his own
+kind, or was killed and eaten by his own kind. And out of this classification
+arose the law. The aim of life was meat. Life itself was meat. Life lived on
+life. There were the eaters and the eaten. The law was: EAT OR BE EATEN. He did
+not formulate the law in clear, set terms and moralise about it. He did not
+even think the law; he merely lived the law without thinking about it at all.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He saw the law operating around him on every side. He had eaten the ptarmigan
+chicks. The hawk had eaten the ptarmigan-mother. The hawk would also have eaten
+him. Later, when he had grown more formidable, he wanted to eat the hawk. He
+had eaten the lynx kitten. The lynx-mother would have eaten him had she not
+herself been killed and eaten. And so it went. The law was being lived about
+him by all live things, and he himself was part and parcel of the law. He was a
+killer. His only food was meat, live meat, that ran away swiftly before him, or
+flew into the air, or climbed trees, or hid in the ground, or faced him and
+fought with him, or turned the tables and ran after him.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Had the cub thought in man-fashion, he might have epitomised life as a
+voracious appetite and the world as a place wherein ranged a multitude of
+appetites, pursuing and being pursued, hunting and being hunted, eating and
+being eaten, all in blindness and confusion, with violence and disorder, a
+chaos of gluttony and slaughter, ruled over by chance, merciless, planless,
+endless.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But the cub did not think in man-fashion. He did not look at things with wide
+vision. He was single-purposed, and entertained but one thought or desire at a
+time. Besides the law of meat, there were a myriad other and lesser laws for
+him to learn and obey. The world was filled with surprise. The stir of the life
+that was in him, the play of his muscles, was an unending happiness. To run
+down meat was to experience thrills and elations. His rages and battles were
+pleasures. Terror itself, and the mystery of the unknown, led to his living.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And there were easements and satisfactions. To have a full stomach, to doze
+lazily in the sunshine&mdash;such things were remuneration in full for his
+ardours and toils, while his ardours and tolls were in themselves
+self-remunerative. They were expressions of life, and life is always happy when
+it is expressing itself. So the cub had no quarrel with his hostile
+environment. He was very much alive, very happy, and very proud of himself.
+</p>
+
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<h2><a name="part03"></a>PART III</h2>
+
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<h3><a name="chap09"></a>CHAPTER I<br/>
+THE MAKERS OF FIRE</h3>
+
+<p>
+The cub came upon it suddenly. It was his own fault. He had been careless. He
+had left the cave and run down to the stream to drink. It might have been that
+he took no notice because he was heavy with sleep. (He had been out all night
+on the meat-trail, and had but just then awakened.) And his carelessness might
+have been due to the familiarity of the trail to the pool. He had travelled it
+often, and nothing had ever happened on it.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He went down past the blasted pine, crossed the open space, and trotted in
+amongst the trees. Then, at the same instant, he saw and smelt. Before him,
+sitting silently on their haunches, were five live things, the like of which he
+had never seen before. It was his first glimpse of mankind. But at the sight of
+him the five men did not spring to their feet, nor show their teeth, nor snarl.
+They did not move, but sat there, silent and ominous.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Nor did the cub move. Every instinct of his nature would have impelled him to
+dash wildly away, had there not suddenly and for the first time arisen in him
+another and counter instinct. A great awe descended upon him. He was beaten
+down to movelessness by an overwhelming sense of his own weakness and
+littleness. Here was mastery and power, something far and away beyond him.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The cub had never seen man, yet the instinct concerning man was his. In dim
+ways he recognised in man the animal that had fought itself to primacy over the
+other animals of the Wild. Not alone out of his own eyes, but out of the eyes
+of all his ancestors was the cub now looking upon man&mdash;out of eyes that
+had circled in the darkness around countless winter camp-fires, that had peered
+from safe distances and from the hearts of thickets at the strange, two-legged
+animal that was lord over living things. The spell of the cub&rsquo;s heritage
+was upon him, the fear and the respect born of the centuries of struggle and
+the accumulated experience of the generations. The heritage was too compelling
+for a wolf that was only a cub. Had he been full-grown, he would have run away.
+As it was, he cowered down in a paralysis of fear, already half proffering the
+submission that his kind had proffered from the first time a wolf came in to
+sit by man&rsquo;s fire and be made warm.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+One of the Indians arose and walked over to him and stooped above him. The cub
+cowered closer to the ground. It was the unknown, objectified at last, in
+concrete flesh and blood, bending over him and reaching down to seize hold of
+him. His hair bristled involuntarily; his lips writhed back and his little
+fangs were bared. The hand, poised like doom above him, hesitated, and the man
+spoke laughing, &ldquo;<i>Wabam wabisca ip pit tah</i>.&rdquo; (&ldquo;Look!
+The white fangs!&rdquo;)
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The other Indians laughed loudly, and urged the man on to pick up the cub. As
+the hand descended closer and closer, there raged within the cub a battle of
+the instincts. He experienced two great impulsions&mdash;to yield and to fight.
+The resulting action was a compromise. He did both. He yielded till the hand
+almost touched him. Then he fought, his teeth flashing in a snap that sank them
+into the hand. The next moment he received a clout alongside the head that
+knocked him over on his side. Then all fight fled out of him. His puppyhood and
+the instinct of submission took charge of him. He sat up on his haunches and
+ki-yi&rsquo;d. But the man whose hand he had bitten was angry. The cub received
+a clout on the other side of his head. Whereupon he sat up and ki-yi&rsquo;d
+louder than ever.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The four Indians laughed more loudly, while even the man who had been bitten
+began to laugh. They surrounded the cub and laughed at him, while he wailed out
+his terror and his hurt. In the midst of it, he heard something. The Indians
+heard it too. But the cub knew what it was, and with a last, long wail that had
+in it more of triumph than grief, he ceased his noise and waited for the coming
+of his mother, of his ferocious and indomitable mother who fought and killed
+all things and was never afraid. She was snarling as she ran. She had heard the
+cry of her cub and was dashing to save him.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She bounded in amongst them, her anxious and militant motherhood making her
+anything but a pretty sight. But to the cub the spectacle of her protective
+rage was pleasing. He uttered a glad little cry and bounded to meet her, while
+the man-animals went back hastily several steps. The she-wolf stood over
+against her cub, facing the men, with bristling hair, a snarl rumbling deep in
+her throat. Her face was distorted and malignant with menace, even the bridge
+of the nose wrinkling from tip to eyes so prodigious was her snarl.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Then it was that a cry went up from one of the men. &ldquo;Kiche!&rdquo; was
+what he uttered. It was an exclamation of surprise. The cub felt his mother
+wilting at the sound.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Kiche!&rdquo; the man cried again, this time with sharpness and
+authority.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And then the cub saw his mother, the she-wolf, the fearless one, crouching down
+till her belly touched the ground, whimpering, wagging her tail, making peace
+signs. The cub could not understand. He was appalled. The awe of man rushed
+over him again. His instinct had been true. His mother verified it. She, too,
+rendered submission to the man-animals.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The man who had spoken came over to her. He put his hand upon her head, and she
+only crouched closer. She did not snap, nor threaten to snap. The other men
+came up, and surrounded her, and felt her, and pawed her, which actions she
+made no attempt to resent. They were greatly excited, and made many noises with
+their mouths. These noises were not indication of danger, the cub decided, as
+he crouched near his mother still bristling from time to time but doing his
+best to submit.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;It is not strange,&rdquo; an Indian was saying. &ldquo;Her father was a
+wolf. It is true, her mother was a dog; but did not my brother tie her out in
+the woods all of three nights in the mating season? Therefore was the father of
+Kiche a wolf.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;It is a year, Grey Beaver, since she ran away,&rdquo; spoke a second
+Indian.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;It is not strange, Salmon Tongue,&rdquo; Grey Beaver answered. &ldquo;It
+was the time of the famine, and there was no meat for the dogs.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;She has lived with the wolves,&rdquo; said a third Indian.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;So it would seem, Three Eagles,&rdquo; Grey Beaver answered, laying his
+hand on the cub; &ldquo;and this be the sign of it.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The cub snarled a little at the touch of the hand, and the hand flew back to
+administer a clout. Whereupon the cub covered its fangs, and sank down
+submissively, while the hand, returning, rubbed behind his ears, and up and
+down his back.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;This be the sign of it,&rdquo; Grey Beaver went on. &ldquo;It is plain
+that his mother is Kiche. But his father was a wolf. Wherefore is there in him
+little dog and much wolf. His fangs be white, and White Fang shall be his name.
+I have spoken. He is my dog. For was not Kiche my brother&rsquo;s dog? And is
+not my brother dead?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The cub, who had thus received a name in the world, lay and watched. For a time
+the man-animals continued to make their mouth-noises. Then Grey Beaver took a
+knife from a sheath that hung around his neck, and went into the thicket and
+cut a stick. White Fang watched him. He notched the stick at each end and in
+the notches fastened strings of raw-hide. One string he tied around the throat
+of Kiche. Then he led her to a small pine, around which he tied the other
+string.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+White Fang followed and lay down beside her. Salmon Tongue&rsquo;s hand reached
+out to him and rolled him over on his back. Kiche looked on anxiously. White
+Fang felt fear mounting in him again. He could not quite suppress a snarl, but
+he made no offer to snap. The hand, with fingers crooked and spread apart,
+rubbed his stomach in a playful way and rolled him from side to side. It was
+ridiculous and ungainly, lying there on his back with legs sprawling in the
+air. Besides, it was a position of such utter helplessness that White
+Fang&rsquo;s whole nature revolted against it. He could do nothing to defend
+himself. If this man-animal intended harm, White Fang knew that he could not
+escape it. How could he spring away with his four legs in the air above him?
+Yet submission made him master his fear, and he only growled softly. This growl
+he could not suppress; nor did the man-animal resent it by giving him a blow on
+the head. And furthermore, such was the strangeness of it, White Fang
+experienced an unaccountable sensation of pleasure as the hand rubbed back and
+forth. When he was rolled on his side he ceased to growl, when the fingers
+pressed and prodded at the base of his ears the pleasurable sensation
+increased; and when, with a final rub and scratch, the man left him alone and
+went away, all fear had died out of White Fang. He was to know fear many times
+in his dealing with man; yet it was a token of the fearless companionship with
+man that was ultimately to be his.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+After a time, White Fang heard strange noises approaching. He was quick in his
+classification, for he knew them at once for man-animal noises. A few minutes
+later the remainder of the tribe, strung out as it was on the march, trailed
+in. There were more men and many women and children, forty souls of them, and
+all heavily burdened with camp equipage and outfit. Also there were many dogs;
+and these, with the exception of the part-grown puppies, were likewise burdened
+with camp outfit. On their backs, in bags that fastened tightly around
+underneath, the dogs carried from twenty to thirty pounds of weight.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+White Fang had never seen dogs before, but at sight of them he felt that they
+were his own kind, only somehow different. But they displayed little difference
+from the wolf when they discovered the cub and his mother. There was a rush.
+White Fang bristled and snarled and snapped in the face of the open-mouthed
+oncoming wave of dogs, and went down and under them, feeling the sharp slash of
+teeth in his body, himself biting and tearing at the legs and bellies above
+him. There was a great uproar. He could hear the snarl of Kiche as she fought
+for him; and he could hear the cries of the man-animals, the sound of clubs
+striking upon bodies, and the yelps of pain from the dogs so struck.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Only a few seconds elapsed before he was on his feet again. He could now see
+the man-animals driving back the dogs with clubs and stones, defending him,
+saving him from the savage teeth of his kind that somehow was not his kind. And
+though there was no reason in his brain for a clear conception of so abstract a
+thing as justice, nevertheless, in his own way, he felt the justice of the
+man-animals, and he knew them for what they were&mdash;makers of law and
+executors of law. Also, he appreciated the power with which they administered
+the law. Unlike any animals he had ever encountered, they did not bite nor
+claw. They enforced their live strength with the power of dead things. Dead
+things did their bidding. Thus, sticks and stones, directed by these strange
+creatures, leaped through the air like living things, inflicting grievous hurts
+upon the dogs.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+To his mind this was power unusual, power inconceivable and beyond the natural,
+power that was godlike. White Fang, in the very nature of him, could never know
+anything about gods; at the best he could know only things that were beyond
+knowing&mdash;but the wonder and awe that he had of these man-animals in ways
+resembled what would be the wonder and awe of man at sight of some celestial
+creature, on a mountain top, hurling thunderbolts from either hand at an
+astonished world.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The last dog had been driven back. The hubbub died down. And White Fang licked
+his hurts and meditated upon this, his first taste of pack-cruelty and his
+introduction to the pack. He had never dreamed that his own kind consisted of
+more than One Eye, his mother, and himself. They had constituted a kind apart,
+and here, abruptly, he had discovered many more creatures apparently of his own
+kind. And there was a subconscious resentment that these, his kind, at first
+sight had pitched upon him and tried to destroy him. In the same way he
+resented his mother being tied with a stick, even though it was done by the
+superior man-animals. It savoured of the trap, of bondage. Yet of the trap and
+of bondage he knew nothing. Freedom to roam and run and lie down at will, had
+been his heritage; and here it was being infringed upon. His mother&rsquo;s
+movements were restricted to the length of a stick, and by the length of that
+same stick was he restricted, for he had not yet got beyond the need of his
+mother&rsquo;s side.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He did not like it. Nor did he like it when the man-animals arose and went on
+with their march; for a tiny man-animal took the other end of the stick and led
+Kiche captive behind him, and behind Kiche followed White Fang, greatly
+perturbed and worried by this new adventure he had entered upon.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+They went down the valley of the stream, far beyond White Fang&rsquo;s widest
+ranging, until they came to the end of the valley, where the stream ran into
+the Mackenzie River. Here, where canoes were cached on poles high in the air
+and where stood fish-racks for the drying of fish, camp was made; and White
+Fang looked on with wondering eyes. The superiority of these man-animals
+increased with every moment. There was their mastery over all these
+sharp-fanged dogs. It breathed of power. But greater than that, to the
+wolf-cub, was their mastery over things not alive; their capacity to
+communicate motion to unmoving things; their capacity to change the very face
+of the world.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+It was this last that especially affected him. The elevation of frames of poles
+caught his eye; yet this in itself was not so remarkable, being done by the
+same creatures that flung sticks and stones to great distances. But when the
+frames of poles were made into tepees by being covered with cloth and skins,
+White Fang was astounded. It was the colossal bulk of them that impressed him.
+They arose around him, on every side, like some monstrous quick-growing form of
+life. They occupied nearly the whole circumference of his field of vision. He
+was afraid of them. They loomed ominously above him; and when the breeze
+stirred them into huge movements, he cowered down in fear, keeping his eyes
+warily upon them, and prepared to spring away if they attempted to precipitate
+themselves upon him.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But in a short while his fear of the tepees passed away. He saw the women and
+children passing in and out of them without harm, and he saw the dogs trying
+often to get into them, and being driven away with sharp words and flying
+stones. After a time, he left Kiche&rsquo;s side and crawled cautiously toward
+the wall of the nearest tepee. It was the curiosity of growth that urged him
+on&mdash;the necessity of learning and living and doing that brings experience.
+The last few inches to the wall of the tepee were crawled with painful slowness
+and precaution. The day&rsquo;s events had prepared him for the unknown to
+manifest itself in most stupendous and unthinkable ways. At last his nose
+touched the canvas. He waited. Nothing happened. Then he smelled the strange
+fabric, saturated with the man-smell. He closed on the canvas with his teeth
+and gave a gentle tug. Nothing happened, though the adjacent portions of the
+tepee moved. He tugged harder. There was a greater movement. It was delightful.
+He tugged still harder, and repeatedly, until the whole tepee was in motion.
+Then the sharp cry of a squaw inside sent him scampering back to Kiche. But
+after that he was afraid no more of the looming bulks of the tepees.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+A moment later he was straying away again from his mother. Her stick was tied
+to a peg in the ground and she could not follow him. A part-grown puppy,
+somewhat larger and older than he, came toward him slowly, with ostentatious
+and belligerent importance. The puppy&rsquo;s name, as White Fang was afterward
+to hear him called, was Lip-lip. He had had experience in puppy fights and was
+already something of a bully.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Lip-lip was White Fang&rsquo;s own kind, and, being only a puppy, did not seem
+dangerous; so White Fang prepared to meet him in a friendly spirit. But when
+the strangers walk became stiff-legged and his lips lifted clear of his teeth,
+White Fang stiffened too, and answered with lifted lips. They half circled
+about each other, tentatively, snarling and bristling. This lasted several
+minutes, and White Fang was beginning to enjoy it, as a sort of game. But
+suddenly, with remarkable swiftness, Lip-lip leaped in, delivering a slashing
+snap, and leaped away again. The snap had taken effect on the shoulder that had
+been hurt by the lynx and that was still sore deep down near the bone. The
+surprise and hurt of it brought a yelp out of White Fang; but the next moment,
+in a rush of anger, he was upon Lip-lip and snapping viciously.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But Lip-lip had lived his life in camp and had fought many puppy fights. Three
+times, four times, and half a dozen times, his sharp little teeth scored on the
+newcomer, until White Fang, yelping shamelessly, fled to the protection of his
+mother. It was the first of the many fights he was to have with Lip-lip, for
+they were enemies from the start, born so, with natures destined perpetually to
+clash.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Kiche licked White Fang soothingly with her tongue, and tried to prevail upon
+him to remain with her. But his curiosity was rampant, and several minutes
+later he was venturing forth on a new quest. He came upon one of the
+man-animals, Grey Beaver, who was squatting on his hams and doing something
+with sticks and dry moss spread before him on the ground. White Fang came near
+to him and watched. Grey Beaver made mouth-noises which White Fang interpreted
+as not hostile, so he came still nearer.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Women and children were carrying more sticks and branches to Grey Beaver. It
+was evidently an affair of moment. White Fang came in until he touched Grey
+Beaver&rsquo;s knee, so curious was he, and already forgetful that this was a
+terrible man-animal. Suddenly he saw a strange thing like mist beginning to
+arise from the sticks and moss beneath Grey Beaver&rsquo;s hands. Then, amongst
+the sticks themselves, appeared a live thing, twisting and turning, of a colour
+like the colour of the sun in the sky. White Fang knew nothing about fire. It
+drew him as the light, in the mouth of the cave had drawn him in his early
+puppyhood. He crawled the several steps toward the flame. He heard Grey Beaver
+chuckle above him, and he knew the sound was not hostile. Then his nose touched
+the flame, and at the same instant his little tongue went out to it.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+For a moment he was paralysed. The unknown, lurking in the midst of the sticks
+and moss, was savagely clutching him by the nose. He scrambled backward,
+bursting out in an astonished explosion of ki-yi&rsquo;s. At the sound, Kiche
+leaped snarling to the end of her stick, and there raged terribly because she
+could not come to his aid. But Grey Beaver laughed loudly, and slapped his
+thighs, and told the happening to all the rest of the camp, till everybody was
+laughing uproariously. But White Fang sat on his haunches and ki-yi&rsquo;d and
+ki-yi&rsquo;d, a forlorn and pitiable little figure in the midst of the
+man-animals.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+It was the worst hurt he had ever known. Both nose and tongue had been scorched
+by the live thing, sun-coloured, that had grown up under Grey Beaver&rsquo;s
+hands. He cried and cried interminably, and every fresh wail was greeted by
+bursts of laughter on the part of the man-animals. He tried to soothe his nose
+with his tongue, but the tongue was burnt too, and the two hurts coming
+together produced greater hurt; whereupon he cried more hopelessly and
+helplessly than ever.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And then shame came to him. He knew laughter and the meaning of it. It is not
+given us to know how some animals know laughter, and know when they are being
+laughed at; but it was this same way that White Fang knew it. And he felt shame
+that the man-animals should be laughing at him. He turned and fled away, not
+from the hurt of the fire, but from the laughter that sank even deeper, and
+hurt in the spirit of him. And he fled to Kiche, raging at the end of her stick
+like an animal gone mad&mdash;to Kiche, the one creature in the world who was
+not laughing at him.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Twilight drew down and night came on, and White Fang lay by his mother&rsquo;s
+side. His nose and tongue still hurt, but he was perplexed by a greater
+trouble. He was homesick. He felt a vacancy in him, a need for the hush and
+quietude of the stream and the cave in the cliff. Life had become too populous.
+There were so many of the man-animals, men, women, and children, all making
+noises and irritations. And there were the dogs, ever squabbling and bickering,
+bursting into uproars and creating confusions. The restful loneliness of the
+only life he had known was gone. Here the very air was palpitant with life. It
+hummed and buzzed unceasingly. Continually changing its intensity and abruptly
+variant in pitch, it impinged on his nerves and senses, made him nervous and
+restless and worried him with a perpetual imminence of happening.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He watched the man-animals coming and going and moving about the camp. In
+fashion distantly resembling the way men look upon the gods they create, so
+looked White Fang upon the man-animals before him. They were superior
+creatures, of a verity, gods. To his dim comprehension they were as much
+wonder-workers as gods are to men. They were creatures of mastery, possessing
+all manner of unknown and impossible potencies, overlords of the alive and the
+not alive&mdash;making obey that which moved, imparting movement to that which
+did not move, and making life, sun-coloured and biting life, to grow out of
+dead moss and wood. They were fire-makers! They were gods.
+</p>
+
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<h3><a name="chap10"></a>CHAPTER II<br/>
+THE BONDAGE</h3>
+
+<p>
+The days were thronged with experience for White Fang. During the time that
+Kiche was tied by the stick, he ran about over all the camp, inquiring,
+investigating, learning. He quickly came to know much of the ways of the
+man-animals, but familiarity did not breed contempt. The more he came to know
+them, the more they vindicated their superiority, the more they displayed their
+mysterious powers, the greater loomed their god-likeness.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+To man has been given the grief, often, of seeing his gods overthrown and his
+altars crumbling; but to the wolf and the wild dog that have come in to crouch
+at man&rsquo;s feet, this grief has never come. Unlike man, whose gods are of
+the unseen and the overguessed, vapours and mists of fancy eluding the
+garmenture of reality, wandering wraiths of desired goodness and power,
+intangible out-croppings of self into the realm of spirit&mdash;unlike man, the
+wolf and the wild dog that have come in to the fire find their gods in the
+living flesh, solid to the touch, occupying earth-space and requiring time for
+the accomplishment of their ends and their existence. No effort of faith is
+necessary to believe in such a god; no effort of will can possibly induce
+disbelief in such a god. There is no getting away from it. There it stands, on
+its two hind-legs, club in hand, immensely potential, passionate and wrathful
+and loving, god and mystery and power all wrapped up and around by flesh that
+bleeds when it is torn and that is good to eat like any flesh.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And so it was with White Fang. The man-animals were gods unmistakable and
+unescapable. As his mother, Kiche, had rendered her allegiance to them at the
+first cry of her name, so he was beginning to render his allegiance. He gave
+them the trail as a privilege indubitably theirs. When they walked, he got out
+of their way. When they called, he came. When they threatened, he cowered down.
+When they commanded him to go, he went away hurriedly. For behind any wish of
+theirs was power to enforce that wish, power that hurt, power that expressed
+itself in clouts and clubs, in flying stones and stinging lashes of whips.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He belonged to them as all dogs belonged to them. His actions were theirs to
+command. His body was theirs to maul, to stamp upon, to tolerate. Such was the
+lesson that was quickly borne in upon him. It came hard, going as it did,
+counter to much that was strong and dominant in his own nature; and, while he
+disliked it in the learning of it, unknown to himself he was learning to like
+it. It was a placing of his destiny in another&rsquo;s hands, a shifting of the
+responsibilities of existence. This in itself was compensation, for it is
+always easier to lean upon another than to stand alone.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But it did not all happen in a day, this giving over of himself, body and soul,
+to the man-animals. He could not immediately forego his wild heritage and his
+memories of the Wild. There were days when he crept to the edge of the forest
+and stood and listened to something calling him far and away. And always he
+returned, restless and uncomfortable, to whimper softly and wistfully at
+Kiche&rsquo;s side and to lick her face with eager, questioning tongue.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+White Fang learned rapidly the ways of the camp. He knew the injustice and
+greediness of the older dogs when meat or fish was thrown out to be eaten. He
+came to know that men were more just, children more cruel, and women more
+kindly and more likely to toss him a bit of meat or bone. And after two or
+three painful adventures with the mothers of part-grown puppies, he came into
+the knowledge that it was always good policy to let such mothers alone, to keep
+away from them as far as possible, and to avoid them when he saw them coming.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But the bane of his life was Lip-lip. Larger, older, and stronger, Lip-lip had
+selected White Fang for his special object of persecution. White Fang fought
+willingly enough, but he was outclassed. His enemy was too big. Lip-lip became
+a nightmare to him. Whenever he ventured away from his mother, the bully was
+sure to appear, trailing at his heels, snarling at him, picking upon him, and
+watchful of an opportunity, when no man-animal was near, to spring upon him and
+force a fight. As Lip-lip invariably won, he enjoyed it hugely. It became his
+chief delight in life, as it became White Fang&rsquo;s chief torment.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But the effect upon White Fang was not to cow him. Though he suffered most of
+the damage and was always defeated, his spirit remained unsubdued. Yet a bad
+effect was produced. He became malignant and morose. His temper had been savage
+by birth, but it became more savage under this unending persecution. The
+genial, playful, puppyish side of him found little expression. He never played
+and gambolled about with the other puppies of the camp. Lip-lip would not
+permit it. The moment White Fang appeared near them, Lip-lip was upon him,
+bullying and hectoring him, or fighting with him until he had driven him away.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The effect of all this was to rob White Fang of much of his puppyhood and to
+make him in his comportment older than his age. Denied the outlet, through
+play, of his energies, he recoiled upon himself and developed his mental
+processes. He became cunning; he had idle time in which to devote himself to
+thoughts of trickery. Prevented from obtaining his share of meat and fish when
+a general feed was given to the camp-dogs, he became a clever thief. He had to
+forage for himself, and he foraged well, though he was oft-times a plague to
+the squaws in consequence. He learned to sneak about camp, to be crafty, to
+know what was going on everywhere, to see and to hear everything and to reason
+accordingly, and successfully to devise ways and means of avoiding his
+implacable persecutor.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+It was early in the days of his persecution that he played his first really big
+crafty game and got there from his first taste of revenge. As Kiche, when with
+the wolves, had lured out to destruction dogs from the camps of men, so White
+Fang, in manner somewhat similar, lured Lip-lip into Kiche&rsquo;s avenging
+jaws. Retreating before Lip-lip, White Fang made an indirect flight that led in
+and out and around the various tepees of the camp. He was a good runner,
+swifter than any puppy of his size, and swifter than Lip-lip. But he did not
+run his best in this chase. He barely held his own, one leap ahead of his
+pursuer.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Lip-lip, excited by the chase and by the persistent nearness of his victim,
+forgot caution and locality. When he remembered locality, it was too late.
+Dashing at top speed around a tepee, he ran full tilt into Kiche lying at the
+end of her stick. He gave one yelp of consternation, and then her punishing
+jaws closed upon him. She was tied, but he could not get away from her easily.
+She rolled him off his legs so that he could not run, while she repeatedly
+ripped and slashed him with her fangs.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+When at last he succeeded in rolling clear of her, he crawled to his feet,
+badly dishevelled, hurt both in body and in spirit. His hair was standing out
+all over him in tufts where her teeth had mauled. He stood where he had arisen,
+opened his mouth, and broke out the long, heart-broken puppy wail. But even
+this he was not allowed to complete. In the middle of it, White Fang, rushing
+in, sank his teeth into Lip-lip&rsquo;s hind leg. There was no fight left in
+Lip-lip, and he ran away shamelessly, his victim hot on his heels and worrying
+him all the way back to his own tepee. Here the squaws came to his aid, and
+White Fang, transformed into a raging demon, was finally driven off only by a
+fusillade of stones.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Came the day when Grey Beaver, deciding that the liability of her running away
+was past, released Kiche. White Fang was delighted with his mother&rsquo;s
+freedom. He accompanied her joyfully about the camp; and, so long as he
+remained close by her side, Lip-lip kept a respectful distance. White-Fang even
+bristled up to him and walked stiff-legged, but Lip-lip ignored the challenge.
+He was no fool himself, and whatever vengeance he desired to wreak, he could
+wait until he caught White Fang alone.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Later on that day, Kiche and White Fang strayed into the edge of the woods next
+to the camp. He had led his mother there, step by step, and now when she
+stopped, he tried to inveigle her farther. The stream, the lair, and the quiet
+woods were calling to him, and he wanted her to come. He ran on a few steps,
+stopped, and looked back. She had not moved. He whined pleadingly, and scurried
+playfully in and out of the underbrush. He ran back to her, licked her face,
+and ran on again. And still she did not move. He stopped and regarded her, all
+of an intentness and eagerness, physically expressed, that slowly faded out of
+him as she turned her head and gazed back at the camp.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+There was something calling to him out there in the open. His mother heard it
+too. But she heard also that other and louder call, the call of the fire and of
+man&mdash;the call which has been given alone of all animals to the wolf to
+answer, to the wolf and the wild-dog, who are brothers.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Kiche turned and slowly trotted back toward camp. Stronger than the physical
+restraint of the stick was the clutch of the camp upon her. Unseen and
+occultly, the gods still gripped with their power and would not let her go.
+White Fang sat down in the shadow of a birch and whimpered softly. There was a
+strong smell of pine, and subtle wood fragrances filled the air, reminding him
+of his old life of freedom before the days of his bondage. But he was still
+only a part-grown puppy, and stronger than the call either of man or of the
+Wild was the call of his mother. All the hours of his short life he had
+depended upon her. The time was yet to come for independence. So he arose and
+trotted forlornly back to camp, pausing once, and twice, to sit down and
+whimper and to listen to the call that still sounded in the depths of the
+forest.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+In the Wild the time of a mother with her young is short; but under the
+dominion of man it is sometimes even shorter. Thus it was with White Fang. Grey
+Beaver was in the debt of Three Eagles. Three Eagles was going away on a trip
+up the Mackenzie to the Great Slave Lake. A strip of scarlet cloth, a bearskin,
+twenty cartridges, and Kiche, went to pay the debt. White Fang saw his mother
+taken aboard Three Eagles&rsquo; canoe, and tried to follow her. A blow from
+Three Eagles knocked him backward to the land. The canoe shoved off. He sprang
+into the water and swam after it, deaf to the sharp cries of Grey Beaver to
+return. Even a man-animal, a god, White Fang ignored, such was the terror he
+was in of losing his mother.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But gods are accustomed to being obeyed, and Grey Beaver wrathfully launched a
+canoe in pursuit. When he overtook White Fang, he reached down and by the nape
+of the neck lifted him clear of the water. He did not deposit him at once in
+the bottom of the canoe. Holding him suspended with one hand, with the other
+hand he proceeded to give him a beating. And it <i>was</i> a beating. His hand
+was heavy. Every blow was shrewd to hurt; and he delivered a multitude of
+blows.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Impelled by the blows that rained upon him, now from this side, now from that,
+White Fang swung back and forth like an erratic and jerky pendulum. Varying
+were the emotions that surged through him. At first, he had known surprise.
+Then came a momentary fear, when he yelped several times to the impact of the
+hand. But this was quickly followed by anger. His free nature asserted itself,
+and he showed his teeth and snarled fearlessly in the face of the wrathful god.
+This but served to make the god more wrathful. The blows came faster, heavier,
+more shrewd to hurt.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Grey Beaver continued to beat, White Fang continued to snarl. But this could
+not last for ever. One or the other must give over, and that one was White
+Fang. Fear surged through him again. For the first time he was being really
+man-handled. The occasional blows of sticks and stones he had previously
+experienced were as caresses compared with this. He broke down and began to cry
+and yelp. For a time each blow brought a yelp from him; but fear passed into
+terror, until finally his yelps were voiced in unbroken succession, unconnected
+with the rhythm of the punishment.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+At last Grey Beaver withheld his hand. White Fang, hanging limply, continued to
+cry. This seemed to satisfy his master, who flung him down roughly in the
+bottom of the canoe. In the meantime the canoe had drifted down the stream.
+Grey Beaver picked up the paddle. White Fang was in his way. He spurned him
+savagely with his foot. In that moment White Fang&rsquo;s free nature flashed
+forth again, and he sank his teeth into the moccasined foot.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The beating that had gone before was as nothing compared with the beating he
+now received. Grey Beaver&rsquo;s wrath was terrible; likewise was White
+Fang&rsquo;s fright. Not only the hand, but the hard wooden paddle was used
+upon him; and he was bruised and sore in all his small body when he was again
+flung down in the canoe. Again, and this time with purpose, did Grey Beaver
+kick him. White Fang did not repeat his attack on the foot. He had learned
+another lesson of his bondage. Never, no matter what the circumstance, must he
+dare to bite the god who was lord and master over him; the body of the lord and
+master was sacred, not to be defiled by the teeth of such as he. That was
+evidently the crime of crimes, the one offence there was no condoning nor
+overlooking.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+When the canoe touched the shore, White Fang lay whimpering and motionless,
+waiting the will of Grey Beaver. It was Grey Beaver&rsquo;s will that he should
+go ashore, for ashore he was flung, striking heavily on his side and hurting
+his bruises afresh. He crawled tremblingly to his feet and stood whimpering.
+Lip-lip, who had watched the whole proceeding from the bank, now rushed upon
+him, knocking him over and sinking his teeth into him. White Fang was too
+helpless to defend himself, and it would have gone hard with him had not Grey
+Beaver&rsquo;s foot shot out, lifting Lip-lip into the air with its violence so
+that he smashed down to earth a dozen feet away. This was the
+man-animal&rsquo;s justice; and even then, in his own pitiable plight, White
+Fang experienced a little grateful thrill. At Grey Beaver&rsquo;s heels he
+limped obediently through the village to the tepee. And so it came that White
+Fang learned that the right to punish was something the gods reserved for
+themselves and denied to the lesser creatures under them.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+That night, when all was still, White Fang remembered his mother and sorrowed
+for her. He sorrowed too loudly and woke up Grey Beaver, who beat him. After
+that he mourned gently when the gods were around. But sometimes, straying off
+to the edge of the woods by himself, he gave vent to his grief, and cried it
+out with loud whimperings and wailings.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+It was during this period that he might have harkened to the memories of the
+lair and the stream and run back to the Wild. But the memory of his mother held
+him. As the hunting man-animals went out and came back, so she would come back
+to the village some time. So he remained in his bondage waiting for her.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But it was not altogether an unhappy bondage. There was much to interest him.
+Something was always happening. There was no end to the strange things these
+gods did, and he was always curious to see. Besides, he was learning how to get
+along with Grey Beaver. Obedience, rigid, undeviating obedience, was what was
+exacted of him; and in return he escaped beatings and his existence was
+tolerated.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Nay, Grey Beaver himself sometimes tossed him a piece of meat, and defended him
+against the other dogs in the eating of it. And such a piece of meat was of
+value. It was worth more, in some strange way, then a dozen pieces of meat from
+the hand of a squaw. Grey Beaver never petted nor caressed. Perhaps it was the
+weight of his hand, perhaps his justice, perhaps the sheer power of him, and
+perhaps it was all these things that influenced White Fang; for a certain tie
+of attachment was forming between him and his surly lord.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Insidiously, and by remote ways, as well as by the power of stick and stone and
+clout of hand, were the shackles of White Fang&rsquo;s bondage being riveted
+upon him. The qualities in his kind that in the beginning made it possible for
+them to come in to the fires of men, were qualities capable of development.
+They were developing in him, and the camp-life, replete with misery as it was,
+was secretly endearing itself to him all the time. But White Fang was unaware
+of it. He knew only grief for the loss of Kiche, hope for her return, and a
+hungry yearning for the free life that had been his.
+</p>
+
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<h3><a name="chap11"></a>CHAPTER III<br/>
+THE OUTCAST</h3>
+
+<p>
+Lip-lip continued so to darken his days that White Fang became wickeder and
+more ferocious than it was his natural right to be. Savageness was a part of
+his make-up, but the savageness thus developed exceeded his make-up. He
+acquired a reputation for wickedness amongst the man-animals themselves.
+Wherever there was trouble and uproar in camp, fighting and squabbling or the
+outcry of a squaw over a bit of stolen meat, they were sure to find White Fang
+mixed up in it and usually at the bottom of it. They did not bother to look
+after the causes of his conduct. They saw only the effects, and the effects
+were bad. He was a sneak and a thief, a mischief-maker, a fomenter of trouble;
+and irate squaws told him to his face, the while he eyed them alert and ready
+to dodge any quick-flung missile, that he was a wolf and worthless and bound to
+come to an evil end.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He found himself an outcast in the midst of the populous camp. All the young
+dogs followed Lip-lip&rsquo;s lead. There was a difference between White Fang
+and them. Perhaps they sensed his wild-wood breed, and instinctively felt for
+him the enmity that the domestic dog feels for the wolf. But be that as it may,
+they joined with Lip-lip in the persecution. And, once declared against him,
+they found good reason to continue declared against him. One and all, from time
+to time, they felt his teeth; and to his credit, he gave more than he received.
+Many of them he could whip in single fight; but single fight was denied him.
+The beginning of such a fight was a signal for all the young dogs in camp to
+come running and pitch upon him.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Out of this pack-persecution he learned two important things: how to take care
+of himself in a mass-fight against him&mdash;and how, on a single dog, to
+inflict the greatest amount of damage in the briefest space of time. To keep
+one&rsquo;s feet in the midst of the hostile mass meant life, and this he
+learnt well. He became cat-like in his ability to stay on his feet. Even grown
+dogs might hurtle him backward or sideways with the impact of their heavy
+bodies; and backward or sideways he would go, in the air or sliding on the
+ground, but always with his legs under him and his feet downward to the mother
+earth.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+When dogs fight, there are usually preliminaries to the actual
+combat&mdash;snarlings and bristlings and stiff-legged struttings. But White
+Fang learned to omit these preliminaries. Delay meant the coming against him of
+all the young dogs. He must do his work quickly and get away. So he learnt to
+give no warning of his intention. He rushed in and snapped and slashed on the
+instant, without notice, before his foe could prepare to meet him. Thus he
+learned how to inflict quick and severe damage. Also he learned the value of
+surprise. A dog, taken off its guard, its shoulder slashed open or its ear
+ripped in ribbons before it knew what was happening, was a dog half whipped.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Furthermore, it was remarkably easy to overthrow a dog taken by surprise; while
+a dog, thus overthrown, invariably exposed for a moment the soft underside of
+its neck&mdash;the vulnerable point at which to strike for its life. White Fang
+knew this point. It was a knowledge bequeathed to him directly from the hunting
+generation of wolves. So it was that White Fang&rsquo;s method when he took the
+offensive, was: first to find a young dog alone; second, to surprise it and
+knock it off its feet; and third, to drive in with his teeth at the soft
+throat.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Being but partly grown his jaws had not yet become large enough nor strong
+enough to make his throat-attack deadly; but many a young dog went around camp
+with a lacerated throat in token of White Fang&rsquo;s intention. And one day,
+catching one of his enemies alone on the edge of the woods, he managed, by
+repeatedly overthrowing him and attacking the throat, to cut the great vein and
+let out the life. There was a great row that night. He had been observed, the
+news had been carried to the dead dog&rsquo;s master, the squaws remembered all
+the instances of stolen meat, and Grey Beaver was beset by many angry voices.
+But he resolutely held the door of his tepee, inside which he had placed the
+culprit, and refused to permit the vengeance for which his tribespeople
+clamoured.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+White Fang became hated by man and dog. During this period of his development
+he never knew a moment&rsquo;s security. The tooth of every dog was against
+him, the hand of every man. He was greeted with snarls by his kind, with curses
+and stones by his gods. He lived tensely. He was always keyed up, alert for
+attack, wary of being attacked, with an eye for sudden and unexpected missiles,
+prepared to act precipitately and coolly, to leap in with a flash of teeth, or
+to leap away with a menacing snarl.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+As for snarling he could snarl more terribly than any dog, young or old, in
+camp. The intent of the snarl is to warn or frighten, and judgment is required
+to know when it should be used. White Fang knew how to make it and when to make
+it. Into his snarl he incorporated all that was vicious, malignant, and
+horrible. With nose serrulated by continuous spasms, hair bristling in
+recurrent waves, tongue whipping out like a red snake and whipping back again,
+ears flattened down, eyes gleaming hatred, lips wrinkled back, and fangs
+exposed and dripping, he could compel a pause on the part of almost any
+assailant. A temporary pause, when taken off his guard, gave him the vital
+moment in which to think and determine his action. But often a pause so gained
+lengthened out until it evolved into a complete cessation from the attack. And
+before more than one of the grown dogs White Fang&rsquo;s snarl enabled him to
+beat an honourable retreat.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+An outcast himself from the pack of the part-grown dogs, his sanguinary methods
+and remarkable efficiency made the pack pay for its persecution of him. Not
+permitted himself to run with the pack, the curious state of affairs obtained
+that no member of the pack could run outside the pack. White Fang would not
+permit it. What of his bushwhacking and waylaying tactics, the young dogs were
+afraid to run by themselves. With the exception of Lip-lip, they were compelled
+to hunch together for mutual protection against the terrible enemy they had
+made. A puppy alone by the river bank meant a puppy dead or a puppy that
+aroused the camp with its shrill pain and terror as it fled back from the
+wolf-cub that had waylaid it.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But White Fang&rsquo;s reprisals did not cease, even when the young dogs had
+learned thoroughly that they must stay together. He attacked them when he
+caught them alone, and they attacked him when they were bunched. The sight of
+him was sufficient to start them rushing after him, at which times his
+swiftness usually carried him into safety. But woe the dog that outran his
+fellows in such pursuit! White Fang had learned to turn suddenly upon the
+pursuer that was ahead of the pack and thoroughly to rip him up before the pack
+could arrive. This occurred with great frequency, for, once in full cry, the
+dogs were prone to forget themselves in the excitement of the chase, while
+White Fang never forgot himself. Stealing backward glances as he ran, he was
+always ready to whirl around and down the overzealous pursuer that outran his
+fellows.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Young dogs are bound to play, and out of the exigencies of the situation they
+realised their play in this mimic warfare. Thus it was that the hunt of White
+Fang became their chief game&mdash;a deadly game, withal, and at all times a
+serious game. He, on the other hand, being the fastest-footed, was unafraid to
+venture anywhere. During the period that he waited vainly for his mother to
+come back, he led the pack many a wild chase through the adjacent woods. But
+the pack invariably lost him. Its noise and outcry warned him of its presence,
+while he ran alone, velvet-footed, silently, a moving shadow among the trees
+after the manner of his father and mother before him. Further he was more
+directly connected with the Wild than they; and he knew more of its secrets and
+stratagems. A favourite trick of his was to lose his trail in running water and
+then lie quietly in a near-by thicket while their baffled cries arose around
+him.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Hated by his kind and by mankind, indomitable, perpetually warred upon and
+himself waging perpetual war, his development was rapid and one-sided. This was
+no soil for kindliness and affection to blossom in. Of such things he had not
+the faintest glimmering. The code he learned was to obey the strong and to
+oppress the weak. Grey Beaver was a god, and strong. Therefore White Fang
+obeyed him. But the dog younger or smaller than himself was weak, a thing to be
+destroyed. His development was in the direction of power. In order to face the
+constant danger of hurt and even of destruction, his predatory and protective
+faculties were unduly developed. He became quicker of movement than the other
+dogs, swifter of foot, craftier, deadlier, more lithe, more lean with ironlike
+muscle and sinew, more enduring, more cruel, more ferocious, and more
+intelligent. He had to become all these things, else he would not have held his
+own nor survive the hostile environment in which he found himself.
+</p>
+
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<h3><a name="chap12"></a>CHAPTER IV<br/>
+THE TRAIL OF THE GODS</h3>
+
+<p>
+In the fall of the year, when the days were shortening and the bite of the
+frost was coming into the air, White Fang got his chance for liberty. For
+several days there had been a great hubbub in the village. The summer camp was
+being dismantled, and the tribe, bag and baggage, was preparing to go off to
+the fall hunting. White Fang watched it all with eager eyes, and when the
+tepees began to come down and the canoes were loading at the bank, he
+understood. Already the canoes were departing, and some had disappeared down
+the river.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Quite deliberately he determined to stay behind. He waited his opportunity to
+slink out of camp to the woods. Here, in the running stream where ice was
+beginning to form, he hid his trail. Then he crawled into the heart of a dense
+thicket and waited. The time passed by, and he slept intermittently for hours.
+Then he was aroused by Grey Beaver&rsquo;s voice calling him by name. There
+were other voices. White Fang could hear Grey Beaver&rsquo;s squaw taking part
+in the search, and Mit-sah, who was Grey Beaver&rsquo;s son.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+White Fang trembled with fear, and though the impulse came to crawl out of his
+hiding-place, he resisted it. After a time the voices died away, and some time
+after that he crept out to enjoy the success of his undertaking. Darkness was
+coming on, and for a while he played about among the trees, pleasuring in his
+freedom. Then, and quite suddenly, he became aware of loneliness. He sat down
+to consider, listening to the silence of the forest and perturbed by it. That
+nothing moved nor sounded, seemed ominous. He felt the lurking of danger,
+unseen and unguessed. He was suspicious of the looming bulks of the trees and
+of the dark shadows that might conceal all manner of perilous things.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Then it was cold. Here was no warm side of a tepee against which to snuggle.
+The frost was in his feet, and he kept lifting first one fore-foot and then the
+other. He curved his bushy tail around to cover them, and at the same time he
+saw a vision. There was nothing strange about it. Upon his inward sight was
+impressed a succession of memory-pictures. He saw the camp again, the tepees,
+and the blaze of the fires. He heard the shrill voices of the women, the gruff
+basses of the men, and the snarling of the dogs. He was hungry, and he
+remembered pieces of meat and fish that had been thrown him. Here was no meat,
+nothing but a threatening and inedible silence.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+His bondage had softened him. Irresponsibility had weakened him. He had
+forgotten how to shift for himself. The night yawned about him. His senses,
+accustomed to the hum and bustle of the camp, used to the continuous impact of
+sights and sounds, were now left idle. There was nothing to do, nothing to see
+nor hear. They strained to catch some interruption of the silence and
+immobility of nature. They were appalled by inaction and by the feel of
+something terrible impending.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He gave a great start of fright. A colossal and formless something was rushing
+across the field of his vision. It was a tree-shadow flung by the moon, from
+whose face the clouds had been brushed away. Reassured, he whimpered softly;
+then he suppressed the whimper for fear that it might attract the attention of
+the lurking dangers.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+A tree, contracting in the cool of the night, made a loud noise. It was
+directly above him. He yelped in his fright. A panic seized him, and he ran
+madly toward the village. He knew an overpowering desire for the protection and
+companionship of man. In his nostrils was the smell of the camp-smoke. In his
+ears the camp-sounds and cries were ringing loud. He passed out of the forest
+and into the moonlit open where were no shadows nor darknesses. But no village
+greeted his eyes. He had forgotten. The village had gone away.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+His wild flight ceased abruptly. There was no place to which to flee. He slunk
+forlornly through the deserted camp, smelling the rubbish-heaps and the
+discarded rags and tags of the gods. He would have been glad for the rattle of
+stones about him, flung by an angry squaw, glad for the hand of Grey Beaver
+descending upon him in wrath; while he would have welcomed with delight Lip-lip
+and the whole snarling, cowardly pack.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He came to where Grey Beaver&rsquo;s tepee had stood. In the centre of the
+space it had occupied, he sat down. He pointed his nose at the moon. His throat
+was afflicted by rigid spasms, his mouth opened, and in a heart-broken cry
+bubbled up his loneliness and fear, his grief for Kiche, all his past sorrows
+and miseries as well as his apprehension of sufferings and dangers to come. It
+was the long wolf-howl, full-throated and mournful, the first howl he had ever
+uttered.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The coming of daylight dispelled his fears but increased his loneliness. The
+naked earth, which so shortly before had been so populous; thrust his
+loneliness more forcibly upon him. It did not take him long to make up his
+mind. He plunged into the forest and followed the river bank down the stream.
+All day he ran. He did not rest. He seemed made to run on for ever. His
+iron-like body ignored fatigue. And even after fatigue came, his heritage of
+endurance braced him to endless endeavour and enabled him to drive his
+complaining body onward.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Where the river swung in against precipitous bluffs, he climbed the high
+mountains behind. Rivers and streams that entered the main river he forded or
+swam. Often he took to the rim-ice that was beginning to form, and more than
+once he crashed through and struggled for life in the icy current. Always he
+was on the lookout for the trail of the gods where it might leave the river and
+proceed inland.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+White Fang was intelligent beyond the average of his kind; yet his mental
+vision was not wide enough to embrace the other bank of the Mackenzie. What if
+the trail of the gods led out on that side? It never entered his head. Later
+on, when he had travelled more and grown older and wiser and come to know more
+of trails and rivers, it might be that he could grasp and apprehend such a
+possibility. But that mental power was yet in the future. Just now he ran
+blindly, his own bank of the Mackenzie alone entering into his calculations.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+All night he ran, blundering in the darkness into mishaps and obstacles that
+delayed but did not daunt. By the middle of the second day he had been running
+continuously for thirty hours, and the iron of his flesh was giving out. It was
+the endurance of his mind that kept him going. He had not eaten in forty hours,
+and he was weak with hunger. The repeated drenchings in the icy water had
+likewise had their effect on him. His handsome coat was draggled. The broad
+pads of his feet were bruised and bleeding. He had begun to limp, and this limp
+increased with the hours. To make it worse, the light of the sky was obscured
+and snow began to fall&mdash;a raw, moist, melting, clinging snow, slippery
+under foot, that hid from him the landscape he traversed, and that covered over
+the inequalities of the ground so that the way of his feet was more difficult
+and painful.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Grey Beaver had intended camping that night on the far bank of the Mackenzie,
+for it was in that direction that the hunting lay. But on the near bank,
+shortly before dark, a moose coming down to drink, had been espied by
+Kloo-kooch, who was Grey Beaver&rsquo;s squaw. Now, had not the moose come down
+to drink, had not Mit-sah been steering out of the course because of the snow,
+had not Kloo-kooch sighted the moose, and had not Grey Beaver killed it with a
+lucky shot from his rifle, all subsequent things would have happened
+differently. Grey Beaver would not have camped on the near side of the
+Mackenzie, and White Fang would have passed by and gone on, either to die or to
+find his way to his wild brothers and become one of them&mdash;a wolf to the
+end of his days.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Night had fallen. The snow was flying more thickly, and White Fang, whimpering
+softly to himself as he stumbled and limped along, came upon a fresh trail in
+the snow. So fresh was it that he knew it immediately for what it was. Whining
+with eagerness, he followed back from the river bank and in among the trees.
+The camp-sounds came to his ears. He saw the blaze of the fire, Kloo-kooch
+cooking, and Grey Beaver squatting on his hams and mumbling a chunk of raw
+tallow. There was fresh meat in camp!
+</p>
+
+<p>
+White Fang expected a beating. He crouched and bristled a little at the thought
+of it. Then he went forward again. He feared and disliked the beating he knew
+to be waiting for him. But he knew, further, that the comfort of the fire would
+be his, the protection of the gods, the companionship of the dogs&mdash;the
+last, a companionship of enmity, but none the less a companionship and
+satisfying to his gregarious needs.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He came cringing and crawling into the firelight. Grey Beaver saw him, and
+stopped munching the tallow. White Fang crawled slowly, cringing and grovelling
+in the abjectness of his abasement and submission. He crawled straight toward
+Grey Beaver, every inch of his progress becoming slower and more painful. At
+last he lay at the master&rsquo;s feet, into whose possession he now
+surrendered himself, voluntarily, body and soul. Of his own choice, he came in
+to sit by man&rsquo;s fire and to be ruled by him. White Fang trembled, waiting
+for the punishment to fall upon him. There was a movement of the hand above
+him. He cringed involuntarily under the expected blow. It did not fall. He
+stole a glance upward. Grey Beaver was breaking the lump of tallow in half!
+Grey Beaver was offering him one piece of the tallow! Very gently and somewhat
+suspiciously, he first smelled the tallow and then proceeded to eat it. Grey
+Beaver ordered meat to be brought to him, and guarded him from the other dogs
+while he ate. After that, grateful and content, White Fang lay at Grey
+Beaver&rsquo;s feet, gazing at the fire that warmed him, blinking and dozing,
+secure in the knowledge that the morrow would find him, not wandering forlorn
+through bleak forest-stretches, but in the camp of the man-animals, with the
+gods to whom he had given himself and upon whom he was now dependent.
+</p>
+
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<h3><a name="chap13"></a>CHAPTER V<br/>
+THE COVENANT</h3>
+
+<p>
+When December was well along, Grey Beaver went on a journey up the Mackenzie.
+Mit-sah and Kloo-kooch went with him. One sled he drove himself, drawn by dogs
+he had traded for or borrowed. A second and smaller sled was driven by Mit-sah,
+and to this was harnessed a team of puppies. It was more of a toy affair than
+anything else, yet it was the delight of Mit-sah, who felt that he was
+beginning to do a man&rsquo;s work in the world. Also, he was learning to drive
+dogs and to train dogs; while the puppies themselves were being broken in to
+the harness. Furthermore, the sled was of some service, for it carried nearly
+two hundred pounds of outfit and food.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+White Fang had seen the camp-dogs toiling in the harness, so that he did not
+resent overmuch the first placing of the harness upon himself. About his neck
+was put a moss-stuffed collar, which was connected by two pulling-traces to a
+strap that passed around his chest and over his back. It was to this that was
+fastened the long rope by which he pulled at the sled.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+There were seven puppies in the team. The others had been born earlier in the
+year and were nine and ten months old, while White Fang was only eight months
+old. Each dog was fastened to the sled by a single rope. No two ropes were of
+the same length, while the difference in length between any two ropes was at
+least that of a dog&rsquo;s body. Every rope was brought to a ring at the front
+end of the sled. The sled itself was without runners, being a birch-bark
+toboggan, with upturned forward end to keep it from ploughing under the snow.
+This construction enabled the weight of the sled and load to be distributed
+over the largest snow-surface; for the snow was crystal-powder and very soft.
+Observing the same principle of widest distribution of weight, the dogs at the
+ends of their ropes radiated fan-fashion from the nose of the sled, so that no
+dog trod in another&rsquo;s footsteps.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+There was, furthermore, another virtue in the fan-formation. The ropes of
+varying length prevented the dogs attacking from the rear those that ran in
+front of them. For a dog to attack another, it would have to turn upon one at a
+shorter rope. In which case it would find itself face to face with the dog
+attacked, and also it would find itself facing the whip of the driver. But the
+most peculiar virtue of all lay in the fact that the dog that strove to attack
+one in front of him must pull the sled faster, and that the faster the sled
+travelled, the faster could the dog attacked run away. Thus, the dog behind
+could never catch up with the one in front. The faster he ran, the faster ran
+the one he was after, and the faster ran all the dogs. Incidentally, the sled
+went faster, and thus, by cunning indirection, did man increase his mastery
+over the beasts.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Mit-sah resembled his father, much of whose grey wisdom he possessed. In the
+past he had observed Lip-lip&rsquo;s persecution of White Fang; but at that
+time Lip-lip was another man&rsquo;s dog, and Mit-sah had never dared more than
+to shy an occasional stone at him. But now Lip-lip was his dog, and he
+proceeded to wreak his vengeance on him by putting him at the end of the
+longest rope. This made Lip-lip the leader, and was apparently an honour! but
+in reality it took away from him all honour, and instead of being bully and
+master of the pack, he now found himself hated and persecuted by the pack.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Because he ran at the end of the longest rope, the dogs had always the view of
+him running away before them. All that they saw of him was his bushy tail and
+fleeing hind legs&mdash;a view far less ferocious and intimidating than his
+bristling mane and gleaming fangs. Also, dogs being so constituted in their
+mental ways, the sight of him running away gave desire to run after him and a
+feeling that he ran away from them.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The moment the sled started, the team took after Lip-lip in a chase that
+extended throughout the day. At first he had been prone to turn upon his
+pursuers, jealous of his dignity and wrathful; but at such times Mit-sah would
+throw the stinging lash of the thirty-foot cariboo-gut whip into his face and
+compel him to turn tail and run on. Lip-lip might face the pack, but he could
+not face that whip, and all that was left him to do was to keep his long rope
+taut and his flanks ahead of the teeth of his mates.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But a still greater cunning lurked in the recesses of the Indian mind. To give
+point to unending pursuit of the leader, Mit-sah favoured him over the other
+dogs. These favours aroused in them jealousy and hatred. In their presence
+Mit-sah would give him meat and would give it to him only. This was maddening
+to them. They would rage around just outside the throwing-distance of the whip,
+while Lip-lip devoured the meat and Mit-sah protected him. And when there was
+no meat to give, Mit-sah would keep the team at a distance and make believe to
+give meat to Lip-lip.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+White Fang took kindly to the work. He had travelled a greater distance than
+the other dogs in the yielding of himself to the rule of the gods, and he had
+learned more thoroughly the futility of opposing their will. In addition, the
+persecution he had suffered from the pack had made the pack less to him in the
+scheme of things, and man more. He had not learned to be dependent on his kind
+for companionship. Besides, Kiche was well-nigh forgotten; and the chief outlet
+of expression that remained to him was in the allegiance he tendered the gods
+he had accepted as masters. So he worked hard, learned discipline, and was
+obedient. Faithfulness and willingness characterised his toil. These are
+essential traits of the wolf and the wild-dog when they have become
+domesticated, and these traits White Fang possessed in unusual measure.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+A companionship did exist between White Fang and the other dogs, but it was one
+of warfare and enmity. He had never learned to play with them. He knew only how
+to fight, and fight with them he did, returning to them a hundred-fold the
+snaps and slashes they had given him in the days when Lip-lip was leader of the
+pack. But Lip-lip was no longer leader&mdash;except when he fled away before
+his mates at the end of his rope, the sled bounding along behind. In camp he
+kept close to Mit-sah or Grey Beaver or Kloo-kooch. He did not dare venture
+away from the gods, for now the fangs of all dogs were against him, and he
+tasted to the dregs the persecution that had been White Fang&rsquo;s.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+With the overthrow of Lip-lip, White Fang could have become leader of the pack.
+But he was too morose and solitary for that. He merely thrashed his team-mates.
+Otherwise he ignored them. They got out of his way when he came along; nor did
+the boldest of them ever dare to rob him of his meat. On the contrary, they
+devoured their own meat hurriedly, for fear that he would take it away from
+them. White Fang knew the law well: <i>to oppress the weak and obey the
+strong</i>. He ate his share of meat as rapidly as he could. And then woe the
+dog that had not yet finished! A snarl and a flash of fangs, and that dog would
+wail his indignation to the uncomforting stars while White Fang finished his
+portion for him.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Every little while, however, one dog or another would flame up in revolt and be
+promptly subdued. Thus White Fang was kept in training. He was jealous of the
+isolation in which he kept himself in the midst of the pack, and he fought
+often to maintain it. But such fights were of brief duration. He was too quick
+for the others. They were slashed open and bleeding before they knew what had
+happened, were whipped almost before they had begun to fight.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+As rigid as the sled-discipline of the gods, was the discipline maintained by
+White Fang amongst his fellows. He never allowed them any latitude. He
+compelled them to an unremitting respect for him. They might do as they pleased
+amongst themselves. That was no concern of his. But it <i>was</i> his concern
+that they leave him alone in his isolation, get out of his way when he elected
+to walk among them, and at all times acknowledge his mastery over them. A hint
+of stiff-leggedness on their part, a lifted lip or a bristle of hair, and he
+would be upon them, merciless and cruel, swiftly convincing them of the error
+of their way.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He was a monstrous tyrant. His mastery was rigid as steel. He oppressed the
+weak with a vengeance. Not for nothing had he been exposed to the pitiless
+struggles for life in the day of his cubhood, when his mother and he, alone and
+unaided, held their own and survived in the ferocious environment of the Wild.
+And not for nothing had he learned to walk softly when superior strength went
+by. He oppressed the weak, but he respected the strong. And in the course of
+the long journey with Grey Beaver he walked softly indeed amongst the
+full-grown dogs in the camps of the strange man-animals they encountered.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The months passed by. Still continued the journey of Grey Beaver. White
+Fang&rsquo;s strength was developed by the long hours on trail and the steady
+toil at the sled; and it would have seemed that his mental development was
+well-nigh complete. He had come to know quite thoroughly the world in which he
+lived. His outlook was bleak and materialistic. The world as he saw it was a
+fierce and brutal world, a world without warmth, a world in which caresses and
+affection and the bright sweetnesses of the spirit did not exist.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He had no affection for Grey Beaver. True, he was a god, but a most savage god.
+White Fang was glad to acknowledge his lordship, but it was a lordship based
+upon superior intelligence and brute strength. There was something in the fibre
+of White Fang&rsquo;s being that made his lordship a thing to be desired, else
+he would not have come back from the Wild when he did to tender his allegiance.
+There were deeps in his nature which had never been sounded. A kind word, a
+caressing touch of the hand, on the part of Grey Beaver, might have sounded
+these deeps; but Grey Beaver did not caress, nor speak kind words. It was not
+his way. His primacy was savage, and savagely he ruled, administering justice
+with a club, punishing transgression with the pain of a blow, and rewarding
+merit, not by kindness, but by withholding a blow.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+So White Fang knew nothing of the heaven a man&rsquo;s hand might contain for
+him. Besides, he did not like the hands of the man-animals. He was suspicious
+of them. It was true that they sometimes gave meat, but more often they gave
+hurt. Hands were things to keep away from. They hurled stones, wielded sticks
+and clubs and whips, administered slaps and clouts, and, when they touched him,
+were cunning to hurt with pinch and twist and wrench. In strange villages he
+had encountered the hands of the children and learned that they were cruel to
+hurt. Also, he had once nearly had an eye poked out by a toddling papoose. From
+these experiences he became suspicious of all children. He could not tolerate
+them. When they came near with their ominous hands, he got up.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+It was in a village at the Great Slave Lake, that, in the course of resenting
+the evil of the hands of the man-animals, he came to modify the law that he had
+learned from Grey Beaver: namely, that the unpardonable crime was to bite one
+of the gods. In this village, after the custom of all dogs in all villages,
+White Fang went foraging, for food. A boy was chopping frozen moose-meat with
+an axe, and the chips were flying in the snow. White Fang, sliding by in quest
+of meat, stopped and began to eat the chips. He observed the boy lay down the
+axe and take up a stout club. White Fang sprang clear, just in time to escape
+the descending blow. The boy pursued him, and he, a stranger in the village,
+fled between two tepees to find himself cornered against a high earth bank.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+There was no escape for White Fang. The only way out was between the two
+tepees, and this the boy guarded. Holding his club prepared to strike, he drew
+in on his cornered quarry. White Fang was furious. He faced the boy, bristling
+and snarling, his sense of justice outraged. He knew the law of forage. All the
+wastage of meat, such as the frozen chips, belonged to the dog that found it.
+He had done no wrong, broken no law, yet here was this boy preparing to give
+him a beating. White Fang scarcely knew what happened. He did it in a surge of
+rage. And he did it so quickly that the boy did not know either. All the boy
+knew was that he had in some unaccountable way been overturned into the snow,
+and that his club-hand had been ripped wide open by White Fang&rsquo;s teeth.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But White Fang knew that he had broken the law of the gods. He had driven his
+teeth into the sacred flesh of one of them, and could expect nothing but a most
+terrible punishment. He fled away to Grey Beaver, behind whose protecting legs
+he crouched when the bitten boy and the boy&rsquo;s family came, demanding
+vengeance. But they went away with vengeance unsatisfied. Grey Beaver defended
+White Fang. So did Mit-sah and Kloo-kooch. White Fang, listening to the wordy
+war and watching the angry gestures, knew that his act was justified. And so it
+came that he learned there were gods and gods. There were his gods, and there
+were other gods, and between them there was a difference. Justice or injustice,
+it was all the same, he must take all things from the hands of his own gods.
+But he was not compelled to take injustice from the other gods. It was his
+privilege to resent it with his teeth. And this also was a law of the gods.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Before the day was out, White Fang was to learn more about this law. Mit-sah,
+alone, gathering firewood in the forest, encountered the boy that had been
+bitten. With him were other boys. Hot words passed. Then all the boys attacked
+Mit-sah. It was going hard with him. Blows were raining upon him from all
+sides. White Fang looked on at first. This was an affair of the gods, and no
+concern of his. Then he realised that this was Mit-sah, one of his own
+particular gods, who was being maltreated. It was no reasoned impulse that made
+White Fang do what he then did. A mad rush of anger sent him leaping in amongst
+the combatants. Five minutes later the landscape was covered with fleeing boys,
+many of whom dripped blood upon the snow in token that White Fang&rsquo;s teeth
+had not been idle. When Mit-sah told the story in camp, Grey Beaver ordered
+meat to be given to White Fang. He ordered much meat to be given, and White
+Fang, gorged and sleepy by the fire, knew that the law had received its
+verification.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+It was in line with these experiences that White Fang came to learn the law of
+property and the duty of the defence of property. From the protection of his
+god&rsquo;s body to the protection of his god&rsquo;s possessions was a step,
+and this step he made. What was his god&rsquo;s was to be defended against all
+the world&mdash;even to the extent of biting other gods. Not only was such an
+act sacrilegious in its nature, but it was fraught with peril. The gods were
+all-powerful, and a dog was no match against them; yet White Fang learned to
+face them, fiercely belligerent and unafraid. Duty rose above fear, and
+thieving gods learned to leave Grey Beaver&rsquo;s property alone.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+One thing, in this connection, White Fang quickly learnt, and that was that a
+thieving god was usually a cowardly god and prone to run away at the sounding
+of the alarm. Also, he learned that but brief time elapsed between his sounding
+of the alarm and Grey Beaver coming to his aid. He came to know that it was not
+fear of him that drove the thief away, but fear of Grey Beaver. White Fang did
+not give the alarm by barking. He never barked. His method was to drive
+straight at the intruder, and to sink his teeth in if he could. Because he was
+morose and solitary, having nothing to do with the other dogs, he was unusually
+fitted to guard his master&rsquo;s property; and in this he was encouraged and
+trained by Grey Beaver. One result of this was to make White Fang more
+ferocious and indomitable, and more solitary.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The months went by, binding stronger and stronger the covenant between dog and
+man. This was the ancient covenant that the first wolf that came in from the
+Wild entered into with man. And, like all succeeding wolves and wild dogs that
+had done likewise, White Fang worked the covenant out for himself. The terms
+were simple. For the possession of a flesh-and-blood god, he exchanged his own
+liberty. Food and fire, protection and companionship, were some of the things
+he received from the god. In return, he guarded the god&rsquo;s property,
+defended his body, worked for him, and obeyed him.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The possession of a god implies service. White Fang&rsquo;s was a service of
+duty and awe, but not of love. He did not know what love was. He had no
+experience of love. Kiche was a remote memory. Besides, not only had he
+abandoned the Wild and his kind when he gave himself up to man, but the terms
+of the covenant were such that if ever he met Kiche again he would not desert
+his god to go with her. His allegiance to man seemed somehow a law of his being
+greater than the love of liberty, of kind and kin.
+</p>
+
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<h3><a name="chap14"></a>CHAPTER VI<br/>
+THE FAMINE</h3>
+
+<p>
+The spring of the year was at hand when Grey Beaver finished his long journey.
+It was April, and White Fang was a year old when he pulled into the home
+villages and was loosed from the harness by Mit-sah. Though a long way from his
+full growth, White Fang, next to Lip-lip, was the largest yearling in the
+village. Both from his father, the wolf, and from Kiche, he had inherited
+stature and strength, and already he was measuring up alongside the full-grown
+dogs. But he had not yet grown compact. His body was slender and rangy, and his
+strength more stringy than massive, His coat was the true wolf-grey, and to all
+appearances he was true wolf himself. The quarter-strain of dog he had
+inherited from Kiche had left no mark on him physically, though it had played
+its part in his mental make-up.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He wandered through the village, recognising with staid satisfaction the
+various gods he had known before the long journey. Then there were the dogs,
+puppies growing up like himself, and grown dogs that did not look so large and
+formidable as the memory pictures he retained of them. Also, he stood less in
+fear of them than formerly, stalking among them with a certain careless ease
+that was as new to him as it was enjoyable.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+There was Baseek, a grizzled old fellow that in his younger days had but to
+uncover his fangs to send White Fang cringing and crouching to the right about.
+From him White Fang had learned much of his own insignificance; and from him he
+was now to learn much of the change and development that had taken place in
+himself. While Baseek had been growing weaker with age, White Fang had been
+growing stronger with youth.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+It was at the cutting-up of a moose, fresh-killed, that White Fang learned of
+the changed relations in which he stood to the dog-world. He had got for
+himself a hoof and part of the shin-bone, to which quite a bit of meat was
+attached. Withdrawn from the immediate scramble of the other dogs&mdash;in fact
+out of sight behind a thicket&mdash;he was devouring his prize, when Baseek
+rushed in upon him. Before he knew what he was doing, he had slashed the
+intruder twice and sprung clear. Baseek was surprised by the other&rsquo;s
+temerity and swiftness of attack. He stood, gazing stupidly across at White
+Fang, the raw, red shin-bone between them.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Baseek was old, and already he had come to know the increasing valour of the
+dogs it had been his wont to bully. Bitter experiences these, which, perforce,
+he swallowed, calling upon all his wisdom to cope with them. In the old days he
+would have sprung upon White Fang in a fury of righteous wrath. But now his
+waning powers would not permit such a course. He bristled fiercely and looked
+ominously across the shin-bone at White Fang. And White Fang, resurrecting
+quite a deal of the old awe, seemed to wilt and to shrink in upon himself and
+grow small, as he cast about in his mind for a way to beat a retreat not too
+inglorious.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And right here Baseek erred. Had he contented himself with looking fierce and
+ominous, all would have been well. White Fang, on the verge of retreat, would
+have retreated, leaving the meat to him. But Baseek did not wait. He considered
+the victory already his and stepped forward to the meat. As he bent his head
+carelessly to smell it, White Fang bristled slightly. Even then it was not too
+late for Baseek to retrieve the situation. Had he merely stood over the meat,
+head up and glowering, White Fang would ultimately have slunk away. But the
+fresh meat was strong in Baseek&rsquo;s nostrils, and greed urged him to take a
+bite of it.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+This was too much for White Fang. Fresh upon his months of mastery over his own
+team-mates, it was beyond his self-control to stand idly by while another
+devoured the meat that belonged to him. He struck, after his custom, without
+warning. With the first slash, Baseek&rsquo;s right ear was ripped into
+ribbons. He was astounded at the suddenness of it. But more things, and most
+grievous ones, were happening with equal suddenness. He was knocked off his
+feet. His throat was bitten. While he was struggling to his feet the young dog
+sank teeth twice into his shoulder. The swiftness of it was bewildering. He
+made a futile rush at White Fang, clipping the empty air with an outraged snap.
+The next moment his nose was laid open, and he was staggering backward away
+from the meat.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The situation was now reversed. White Fang stood over the shin-bone, bristling
+and menacing, while Baseek stood a little way off, preparing to retreat. He
+dared not risk a fight with this young lightning-flash, and again he knew, and
+more bitterly, the enfeeblement of oncoming age. His attempt to maintain his
+dignity was heroic. Calmly turning his back upon young dog and shin-bone, as
+though both were beneath his notice and unworthy of his consideration, he
+stalked grandly away. Nor, until well out of sight, did he stop to lick his
+bleeding wounds.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The effect on White Fang was to give him a greater faith in himself, and a
+greater pride. He walked less softly among the grown dogs; his attitude toward
+them was less compromising. Not that he went out of his way looking for
+trouble. Far from it. But upon his way he demanded consideration. He stood upon
+his right to go his way unmolested and to give trail to no dog. He had to be
+taken into account, that was all. He was no longer to be disregarded and
+ignored, as was the lot of puppies, and as continued to be the lot of the
+puppies that were his team-mates. They got out of the way, gave trail to the
+grown dogs, and gave up meat to them under compulsion. But White Fang,
+uncompanionable, solitary, morose, scarcely looking to right or left,
+redoubtable, forbidding of aspect, remote and alien, was accepted as an equal
+by his puzzled elders. They quickly learned to leave him alone, neither
+venturing hostile acts nor making overtures of friendliness. If they left him
+alone, he left them alone&mdash;a state of affairs that they found, after a few
+encounters, to be pre-eminently desirable.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+In midsummer White Fang had an experience. Trotting along in his silent way to
+investigate a new tepee which had been erected on the edge of the village while
+he was away with the hunters after moose, he came full upon Kiche. He paused
+and looked at her. He remembered her vaguely, but he <i>remembered</i> her, and
+that was more than could be said for her. She lifted her lip at him in the old
+snarl of menace, and his memory became clear. His forgotten cubhood, all that
+was associated with that familiar snarl, rushed back to him. Before he had
+known the gods, she had been to him the centre-pin of the universe. The old
+familiar feelings of that time came back upon him, surged up within him. He
+bounded towards her joyously, and she met him with shrewd fangs that laid his
+cheek open to the bone. He did not understand. He backed away, bewildered and
+puzzled.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But it was not Kiche&rsquo;s fault. A wolf-mother was not made to remember her
+cubs of a year or so before. So she did not remember White Fang. He was a
+strange animal, an intruder; and her present litter of puppies gave her the
+right to resent such intrusion.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+One of the puppies sprawled up to White Fang. They were half-brothers, only
+they did not know it. White Fang sniffed the puppy curiously, whereupon Kiche
+rushed upon him, gashing his face a second time. He backed farther away. All
+the old memories and associations died down again and passed into the grave
+from which they had been resurrected. He looked at Kiche licking her puppy and
+stopping now and then to snarl at him. She was without value to him. He had
+learned to get along without her. Her meaning was forgotten. There was no place
+for her in his scheme of things, as there was no place for him in hers.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He was still standing, stupid and bewildered, the memories forgotten, wondering
+what it was all about, when Kiche attacked him a third time, intent on driving
+him away altogether from the vicinity. And White Fang allowed himself to be
+driven away. This was a female of his kind, and it was a law of his kind that
+the males must not fight the females. He did not know anything about this law,
+for it was no generalisation of the mind, not a something acquired by
+experience of the world. He knew it as a secret prompting, as an urge of
+instinct&mdash;of the same instinct that made him howl at the moon and stars of
+nights, and that made him fear death and the unknown.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The months went by. White Fang grew stronger, heavier, and more compact, while
+his character was developing along the lines laid down by his heredity and his
+environment. His heredity was a life-stuff that may be likened to clay. It
+possessed many possibilities, was capable of being moulded into many different
+forms. Environment served to model the clay, to give it a particular form.
+Thus, had White Fang never come in to the fires of man, the Wild would have
+moulded him into a true wolf. But the gods had given him a different
+environment, and he was moulded into a dog that was rather wolfish, but that
+was a dog and not a wolf.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And so, according to the clay of his nature and the pressure of his
+surroundings, his character was being moulded into a certain particular shape.
+There was no escaping it. He was becoming more morose, more uncompanionable,
+more solitary, more ferocious; while the dogs were learning more and more that
+it was better to be at peace with him than at war, and Grey Beaver was coming
+to prize him more greatly with the passage of each day.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+White Fang, seeming to sum up strength in all his qualities, nevertheless
+suffered from one besetting weakness. He could not stand being laughed at. The
+laughter of men was a hateful thing. They might laugh among themselves about
+anything they pleased except himself, and he did not mind. But the moment
+laughter was turned upon him he would fly into a most terrible rage. Grave,
+dignified, sombre, a laugh made him frantic to ridiculousness. It so outraged
+him and upset him that for hours he would behave like a demon. And woe to the
+dog that at such times ran foul of him. He knew the law too well to take it out
+of Grey Beaver; behind Grey Beaver were a club and godhead. But behind the dogs
+there was nothing but space, and into this space they flew when White Fang came
+on the scene, made mad by laughter.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+In the third year of his life there came a great famine to the Mackenzie
+Indians. In the summer the fish failed. In the winter the cariboo forsook their
+accustomed track. Moose were scarce, the rabbits almost disappeared, hunting
+and preying animals perished. Denied their usual food-supply, weakened by
+hunger, they fell upon and devoured one another. Only the strong survived.
+White Fang&rsquo;s gods were always hunting animals. The old and the weak of
+them died of hunger. There was wailing in the village, where the women and
+children went without in order that what little they had might go into the
+bellies of the lean and hollow-eyed hunters who trod the forest in the vain
+pursuit of meat.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+To such extremity were the gods driven that they ate the soft-tanned leather of
+their mocassins and mittens, while the dogs ate the harnesses off their backs
+and the very whip-lashes. Also, the dogs ate one another, and also the gods ate
+the dogs. The weakest and the more worthless were eaten first. The dogs that
+still lived, looked on and understood. A few of the boldest and wisest forsook
+the fires of the gods, which had now become a shambles, and fled into the
+forest, where, in the end, they starved to death or were eaten by wolves.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+In this time of misery, White Fang, too, stole away into the woods. He was
+better fitted for the life than the other dogs, for he had the training of his
+cubhood to guide him. Especially adept did he become in stalking small living
+things. He would lie concealed for hours, following every movement of a
+cautious tree-squirrel, waiting, with a patience as huge as the hunger he
+suffered from, until the squirrel ventured out upon the ground. Even then,
+White Fang was not premature. He waited until he was sure of striking before
+the squirrel could gain a tree-refuge. Then, and not until then, would he flash
+from his hiding-place, a grey projectile, incredibly swift, never failing its
+mark&mdash;the fleeing squirrel that fled not fast enough.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Successful as he was with squirrels, there was one difficulty that prevented
+him from living and growing fat on them. There were not enough squirrels. So he
+was driven to hunt still smaller things. So acute did his hunger become at
+times that he was not above rooting out wood-mice from their burrows in the
+ground. Nor did he scorn to do battle with a weasel as hungry as himself and
+many times more ferocious.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+In the worst pinches of the famine he stole back to the fires of the gods. But
+he did not go into the fires. He lurked in the forest, avoiding discovery and
+robbing the snares at the rare intervals when game was caught. He even robbed
+Grey Beaver&rsquo;s snare of a rabbit at a time when Grey Beaver staggered and
+tottered through the forest, sitting down often to rest, what of weakness and
+of shortness of breath.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+One day While Fang encountered a young wolf, gaunt and scrawny, loose-jointed
+with famine. Had he not been hungry himself, White Fang might have gone with
+him and eventually found his way into the pack amongst his wild brethren. As it
+was, he ran the young wolf down and killed and ate him.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Fortune seemed to favour him. Always, when hardest pressed for food, he found
+something to kill. Again, when he was weak, it was his luck that none of the
+larger preying animals chanced upon him. Thus, he was strong from the two
+days&rsquo; eating a lynx had afforded him when the hungry wolf-pack ran full
+tilt upon him. It was a long, cruel chase, but he was better nourished than
+they, and in the end outran them. And not only did he outrun them, but,
+circling widely back on his track, he gathered in one of his exhausted
+pursuers.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+After that he left that part of the country and journeyed over to the valley
+wherein he had been born. Here, in the old lair, he encountered Kiche. Up to
+her old tricks, she, too, had fled the inhospitable fires of the gods and gone
+back to her old refuge to give birth to her young. Of this litter but one
+remained alive when White Fang came upon the scene, and this one was not
+destined to live long. Young life had little chance in such a famine.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Kiche&rsquo;s greeting of her grown son was anything but affectionate. But
+White Fang did not mind. He had outgrown his mother. So he turned tail
+philosophically and trotted on up the stream. At the forks he took the turning
+to the left, where he found the lair of the lynx with whom his mother and he
+had fought long before. Here, in the abandoned lair, he settled down and rested
+for a day.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+During the early summer, in the last days of the famine, he met Lip-lip, who
+had likewise taken to the woods, where he had eked out a miserable existence.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+White Fang came upon him unexpectedly. Trotting in opposite directions along
+the base of a high bluff, they rounded a corner of rock and found themselves
+face to face. They paused with instant alarm, and looked at each other
+suspiciously.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+White Fang was in splendid condition. His hunting had been good, and for a week
+he had eaten his fill. He was even gorged from his latest kill. But in the
+moment he looked at Lip-lip his hair rose on end all along his back. It was an
+involuntary bristling on his part, the physical state that in the past had
+always accompanied the mental state produced in him by Lip-lip&rsquo;s bullying
+and persecution. As in the past he had bristled and snarled at sight of
+Lip-lip, so now, and automatically, he bristled and snarled. He did not waste
+any time. The thing was done thoroughly and with despatch. Lip-lip essayed to
+back away, but White Fang struck him hard, shoulder to shoulder. Lip-lip was
+overthrown and rolled upon his back. White Fang&rsquo;s teeth drove into the
+scrawny throat. There was a death-struggle, during which White Fang walked
+around, stiff-legged and observant. Then he resumed his course and trotted on
+along the base of the bluff.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+One day, not long after, he came to the edge of the forest, where a narrow
+stretch of open land sloped down to the Mackenzie. He had been over this ground
+before, when it was bare, but now a village occupied it. Still hidden amongst
+the trees, he paused to study the situation. Sights and sounds and scents were
+familiar to him. It was the old village changed to a new place. But sights and
+sounds and smells were different from those he had last had when he fled away
+from it. There was no whimpering nor wailing. Contented sounds saluted his ear,
+and when he heard the angry voice of a woman he knew it to be the anger that
+proceeds from a full stomach. And there was a smell in the air of fish. There
+was food. The famine was gone. He came out boldly from the forest and trotted
+into camp straight to Grey Beaver&rsquo;s tepee. Grey Beaver was not there; but
+Kloo-kooch welcomed him with glad cries and the whole of a fresh-caught fish,
+and he lay down to wait Grey Beaver&rsquo;s coming.
+</p>
+
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<h2><a name="part04"></a>PART IV</h2>
+
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<h3><a name="chap15"></a>CHAPTER I<br/>
+THE ENEMY OF HIS KIND</h3>
+
+<p>
+Had there been in White Fang&rsquo;s nature any possibility, no matter how
+remote, of his ever coming to fraternise with his kind, such possibility was
+irretrievably destroyed when he was made leader of the sled-team. For now the
+dogs hated him&mdash;hated him for the extra meat bestowed upon him by Mit-sah;
+hated him for all the real and fancied favours he received; hated him for that
+he fled always at the head of the team, his waving brush of a tail and his
+perpetually retreating hind-quarters for ever maddening their eyes.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And White Fang just as bitterly hated them back. Being sled-leader was anything
+but gratifying to him. To be compelled to run away before the yelling pack,
+every dog of which, for three years, he had thrashed and mastered, was almost
+more than he could endure. But endure it he must, or perish, and the life that
+was in him had no desire to perish out. The moment Mit-sah gave his order for
+the start, that moment the whole team, with eager, savage cries, sprang forward
+at White Fang.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+There was no defence for him. If he turned upon them, Mit-sah would throw the
+stinging lash of the whip into his face. Only remained to him to run away. He
+could not encounter that howling horde with his tail and hind-quarters. These
+were scarcely fit weapons with which to meet the many merciless fangs. So run
+away he did, violating his own nature and pride with every leap he made, and
+leaping all day long.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+One cannot violate the promptings of one&rsquo;s nature without having that
+nature recoil upon itself. Such a recoil is like that of a hair, made to grow
+out from the body, turning unnaturally upon the direction of its growth and
+growing into the body&mdash;a rankling, festering thing of hurt. And so with
+White Fang. Every urge of his being impelled him to spring upon the pack that
+cried at his heels, but it was the will of the gods that this should not be;
+and behind the will, to enforce it, was the whip of cariboo-gut with its biting
+thirty-foot lash. So White Fang could only eat his heart in bitterness and
+develop a hatred and malice commensurate with the ferocity and indomitability
+of his nature.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+If ever a creature was the enemy of its kind, White Fang was that creature. He
+asked no quarter, gave none. He was continually marred and scarred by the teeth
+of the pack, and as continually he left his own marks upon the pack. Unlike
+most leaders, who, when camp was made and the dogs were unhitched, huddled near
+to the gods for protection, White Fang disdained such protection. He walked
+boldly about the camp, inflicting punishment in the night for what he had
+suffered in the day. In the time before he was made leader of the team, the
+pack had learned to get out of his way. But now it was different. Excited by
+the day-long pursuit of him, swayed subconsciously by the insistent iteration
+on their brains of the sight of him fleeing away, mastered by the feeling of
+mastery enjoyed all day, the dogs could not bring themselves to give way to
+him. When he appeared amongst them, there was always a squabble. His progress
+was marked by snarl and snap and growl. The very atmosphere he breathed was
+surcharged with hatred and malice, and this but served to increase the hatred
+and malice within him.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+When Mit-sah cried out his command for the team to stop, White Fang obeyed. At
+first this caused trouble for the other dogs. All of them would spring upon the
+hated leader only to find the tables turned. Behind him would be Mit-sah, the
+great whip singing in his hand. So the dogs came to understand that when the
+team stopped by order, White Fang was to be let alone. But when White Fang
+stopped without orders, then it was allowed them to spring upon him and destroy
+him if they could. After several experiences, White Fang never stopped without
+orders. He learned quickly. It was in the nature of things, that he must learn
+quickly if he were to survive the unusually severe conditions under which life
+was vouchsafed him.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But the dogs could never learn the lesson to leave him alone in camp. Each day,
+pursuing him and crying defiance at him, the lesson of the previous night was
+erased, and that night would have to be learned over again, to be as
+immediately forgotten. Besides, there was a greater consistence in their
+dislike of him. They sensed between themselves and him a difference of
+kind&mdash;cause sufficient in itself for hostility. Like him, they were
+domesticated wolves. But they had been domesticated for generations. Much of
+the Wild had been lost, so that to them the Wild was the unknown, the terrible,
+the ever-menacing and ever warring. But to him, in appearance and action and
+impulse, still clung the Wild. He symbolised it, was its personification: so
+that when they showed their teeth to him they were defending themselves against
+the powers of destruction that lurked in the shadows of the forest and in the
+dark beyond the camp-fire.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But there was one lesson the dogs did learn, and that was to keep together.
+White Fang was too terrible for any of them to face single-handed. They met him
+with the mass-formation, otherwise he would have killed them, one by one, in a
+night. As it was, he never had a chance to kill them. He might roll a dog off
+its feet, but the pack would be upon him before he could follow up and deliver
+the deadly throat-stroke. At the first hint of conflict, the whole team drew
+together and faced him. The dogs had quarrels among themselves, but these were
+forgotten when trouble was brewing with White Fang.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+On the other hand, try as they would, they could not kill White Fang. He was
+too quick for them, too formidable, too wise. He avoided tight places and
+always backed out of it when they bade fair to surround him. While, as for
+getting him off his feet, there was no dog among them capable of doing the
+trick. His feet clung to the earth with the same tenacity that he clung to
+life. For that matter, life and footing were synonymous in this unending
+warfare with the pack, and none knew it better than White Fang.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+So he became the enemy of his kind, domesticated wolves that they were,
+softened by the fires of man, weakened in the sheltering shadow of man&rsquo;s
+strength. White Fang was bitter and implacable. The clay of him was so moulded.
+He declared a vendetta against all dogs. And so terribly did he live this
+vendetta that Grey Beaver, fierce savage himself, could not but marvel at White
+Fang&rsquo;s ferocity. Never, he swore, had there been the like of this animal;
+and the Indians in strange villages swore likewise when they considered the
+tale of his killings amongst their dogs.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+When White Fang was nearly five years old, Grey Beaver took him on another
+great journey, and long remembered was the havoc he worked amongst the dogs of
+the many villages along the Mackenzie, across the Rockies, and down the
+Porcupine to the Yukon. He revelled in the vengeance he wreaked upon his kind.
+They were ordinary, unsuspecting dogs. They were not prepared for his swiftness
+and directness, for his attack without warning. They did not know him for what
+he was, a lightning-flash of slaughter. They bristled up to him, stiff-legged
+and challenging, while he, wasting no time on elaborate preliminaries, snapping
+into action like a steel spring, was at their throats and destroying them
+before they knew what was happening and while they were yet in the throes of
+surprise.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He became an adept at fighting. He economised. He never wasted his strength,
+never tussled. He was in too quickly for that, and, if he missed, was out again
+too quickly. The dislike of the wolf for close quarters was his to an unusual
+degree. He could not endure a prolonged contact with another body. It smacked
+of danger. It made him frantic. He must be away, free, on his own legs,
+touching no living thing. It was the Wild still clinging to him, asserting
+itself through him. This feeling had been accentuated by the Ishmaelite life he
+had led from his puppyhood. Danger lurked in contacts. It was the trap, ever
+the trap, the fear of it lurking deep in the life of him, woven into the fibre
+of him.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+In consequence, the strange dogs he encountered had no chance against him. He
+eluded their fangs. He got them, or got away, himself untouched in either
+event. In the natural course of things there were exceptions to this. There
+were times when several dogs, pitching on to him, punished him before he could
+get away; and there were times when a single dog scored deeply on him. But
+these were accidents. In the main, so efficient a fighter had he become, he
+went his way unscathed.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Another advantage he possessed was that of correctly judging time and distance.
+Not that he did this consciously, however. He did not calculate such things. It
+was all automatic. His eyes saw correctly, and the nerves carried the vision
+correctly to his brain. The parts of him were better adjusted than those of the
+average dog. They worked together more smoothly and steadily. His was a better,
+far better, nervous, mental, and muscular co-ordination. When his eyes conveyed
+to his brain the moving image of an action, his brain without conscious effort,
+knew the space that limited that action and the time required for its
+completion. Thus, he could avoid the leap of another dog, or the drive of its
+fangs, and at the same moment could seize the infinitesimal fraction of time in
+which to deliver his own attack. Body and brain, his was a more perfected
+mechanism. Not that he was to be praised for it. Nature had been more generous
+to him than to the average animal, that was all.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+It was in the summer that White Fang arrived at Fort Yukon. Grey Beaver had
+crossed the great watershed between Mackenzie and the Yukon in the late winter,
+and spent the spring in hunting among the western outlying spurs of the
+Rockies. Then, after the break-up of the ice on the Porcupine, he had built a
+canoe and paddled down that stream to where it effected its junction with the
+Yukon just under the Artic circle. Here stood the old Hudson&rsquo;s Bay
+Company fort; and here were many Indians, much food, and unprecedented
+excitement. It was the summer of 1898, and thousands of gold-hunters were going
+up the Yukon to Dawson and the Klondike. Still hundreds of miles from their
+goal, nevertheless many of them had been on the way for a year, and the least
+any of them had travelled to get that far was five thousand miles, while some
+had come from the other side of the world.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Here Grey Beaver stopped. A whisper of the gold-rush had reached his ears, and
+he had come with several bales of furs, and another of gut-sewn mittens and
+moccasins. He would not have ventured so long a trip had he not expected
+generous profits. But what he had expected was nothing to what he realised. His
+wildest dreams had not exceeded a hundred per cent. profit; he made a thousand
+per cent. And like a true Indian, he settled down to trade carefully and
+slowly, even if it took all summer and the rest of the winter to dispose of his
+goods.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+It was at Fort Yukon that White Fang saw his first white men. As compared with
+the Indians he had known, they were to him another race of beings, a race of
+superior gods. They impressed him as possessing superior power, and it is on
+power that godhead rests. White Fang did not reason it out, did not in his mind
+make the sharp generalisation that the white gods were more powerful. It was a
+feeling, nothing more, and yet none the less potent. As, in his puppyhood, the
+looming bulks of the tepees, man-reared, had affected him as manifestations of
+power, so was he affected now by the houses and the huge fort all of massive
+logs. Here was power. Those white gods were strong. They possessed greater
+mastery over matter than the gods he had known, most powerful among which was
+Grey Beaver. And yet Grey Beaver was as a child-god among these white-skinned
+ones.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+To be sure, White Fang only felt these things. He was not conscious of them.
+Yet it is upon feeling, more often than thinking, that animals act; and every
+act White Fang now performed was based upon the feeling that the white men were
+the superior gods. In the first place he was very suspicious of them. There was
+no telling what unknown terrors were theirs, what unknown hurts they could
+administer. He was curious to observe them, fearful of being noticed by them.
+For the first few hours he was content with slinking around and watching them
+from a safe distance. Then he saw that no harm befell the dogs that were near
+to them, and he came in closer.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+In turn he was an object of great curiosity to them. His wolfish appearance
+caught their eyes at once, and they pointed him out to one another. This act of
+pointing put White Fang on his guard, and when they tried to approach him he
+showed his teeth and backed away. Not one succeeded in laying a hand on him,
+and it was well that they did not.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+White Fang soon learned that very few of these gods&mdash;not more than a
+dozen&mdash;lived at this place. Every two or three days a steamer (another and
+colossal manifestation of power) came into the bank and stopped for several
+hours. The white men came from off these steamers and went away on them again.
+There seemed untold numbers of these white men. In the first day or so, he saw
+more of them than he had seen Indians in all his life; and as the days went by
+they continued to come up the river, stop, and then go on up the river out of
+sight.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But if the white gods were all-powerful, their dogs did not amount to much.
+This White Fang quickly discovered by mixing with those that came ashore with
+their masters. They were irregular shapes and sizes. Some were
+short-legged&mdash;too short; others were long-legged&mdash;too long. They had
+hair instead of fur, and a few had very little hair at that. And none of them
+knew how to fight.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+As an enemy of his kind, it was in White Fang&rsquo;s province to fight with
+them. This he did, and he quickly achieved for them a mighty contempt. They
+were soft and helpless, made much noise, and floundered around clumsily trying
+to accomplish by main strength what he accomplished by dexterity and cunning.
+They rushed bellowing at him. He sprang to the side. They did not know what had
+become of him; and in that moment he struck them on the shoulder, rolling them
+off their feet and delivering his stroke at the throat.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Sometimes this stroke was successful, and a stricken dog rolled in the dirt, to
+be pounced upon and torn to pieces by the pack of Indian dogs that waited.
+White Fang was wise. He had long since learned that the gods were made angry
+when their dogs were killed. The white men were no exception to this. So he was
+content, when he had overthrown and slashed wide the throat of one of their
+dogs, to drop back and let the pack go in and do the cruel finishing work. It
+was then that the white men rushed in, visiting their wrath heavily on the
+pack, while White Fang went free. He would stand off at a little distance and
+look on, while stones, clubs, axes, and all sorts of weapons fell upon his
+fellows. White Fang was very wise.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But his fellows grew wise in their own way; and in this White Fang grew wise
+with them. They learned that it was when a steamer first tied to the bank that
+they had their fun. After the first two or three strange dogs had been downed
+and destroyed, the white men hustled their own animals back on board and
+wrecked savage vengeance on the offenders. One white man, having seen his dog,
+a setter, torn to pieces before his eyes, drew a revolver. He fired rapidly,
+six times, and six of the pack lay dead or dying&mdash;another manifestation of
+power that sank deep into White Fang&rsquo;s consciousness.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+White Fang enjoyed it all. He did not love his kind, and he was shrewd enough
+to escape hurt himself. At first, the killing of the white men&rsquo;s dogs had
+been a diversion. After a time it became his occupation. There was no work for
+him to do. Grey Beaver was busy trading and getting wealthy. So White Fang hung
+around the landing with the disreputable gang of Indian dogs, waiting for
+steamers. With the arrival of a steamer the fun began. After a few minutes, by
+the time the white men had got over their surprise, the gang scattered. The fun
+was over until the next steamer should arrive.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But it can scarcely be said that White Fang was a member of the gang. He did
+not mingle with it, but remained aloof, always himself, and was even feared by
+it. It is true, he worked with it. He picked the quarrel with the strange dog
+while the gang waited. And when he had overthrown the strange dog the gang went
+in to finish it. But it is equally true that he then withdrew, leaving the gang
+to receive the punishment of the outraged gods.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+It did not require much exertion to pick these quarrels. All he had to do, when
+the strange dogs came ashore, was to show himself. When they saw him they
+rushed for him. It was their instinct. He was the Wild&mdash;the unknown, the
+terrible, the ever-menacing, the thing that prowled in the darkness around the
+fires of the primeval world when they, cowering close to the fires, were
+reshaping their instincts, learning to fear the Wild out of which they had
+come, and which they had deserted and betrayed. Generation by generation, down
+all the generations, had this fear of the Wild been stamped into their natures.
+For centuries the Wild had stood for terror and destruction. And during all
+this time free licence had been theirs, from their masters, to kill the things
+of the Wild. In doing this they had protected both themselves and the gods
+whose companionship they shared.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And so, fresh from the soft southern world, these dogs, trotting down the
+gang-plank and out upon the Yukon shore had but to see White Fang to experience
+the irresistible impulse to rush upon him and destroy him. They might be
+town-reared dogs, but the instinctive fear of the Wild was theirs just the
+same. Not alone with their own eyes did they see the wolfish creature in the
+clear light of day, standing before them. They saw him with the eyes of their
+ancestors, and by their inherited memory they knew White Fang for the wolf, and
+they remembered the ancient feud.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+All of which served to make White Fang&rsquo;s days enjoyable. If the sight of
+him drove these strange dogs upon him, so much the better for him, so much the
+worse for them. They looked upon him as legitimate prey, and as legitimate prey
+he looked upon them.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Not for nothing had he first seen the light of day in a lonely lair and fought
+his first fights with the ptarmigan, the weasel, and the lynx. And not for
+nothing had his puppyhood been made bitter by the persecution of Lip-lip and
+the whole puppy pack. It might have been otherwise, and he would then have been
+otherwise. Had Lip-lip not existed, he would have passed his puppyhood with the
+other puppies and grown up more doglike and with more liking for dogs. Had Grey
+Beaver possessed the plummet of affection and love, he might have sounded the
+deeps of White Fang&rsquo;s nature and brought up to the surface all manner of
+kindly qualities. But these things had not been so. The clay of White Fang had
+been moulded until he became what he was, morose and lonely, unloving and
+ferocious, the enemy of all his kind.
+</p>
+
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<h3><a name="chap16"></a>CHAPTER II<br/>
+THE MAD GOD</h3>
+
+<p>
+A small number of white men lived in Fort Yukon. These men had been long in the
+country. They called themselves Sour-doughs, and took great pride in so
+classifying themselves. For other men, new in the land, they felt nothing but
+disdain. The men who came ashore from the steamers were newcomers. They were
+known as <i>chechaquos</i>, and they always wilted at the application of the
+name. They made their bread with baking-powder. This was the invidious
+distinction between them and the Sour-doughs, who, forsooth, made their bread
+from sour-dough because they had no baking-powder.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+All of which is neither here nor there. The men in the fort disdained the
+newcomers and enjoyed seeing them come to grief. Especially did they enjoy the
+havoc worked amongst the newcomers&rsquo; dogs by White Fang and his
+disreputable gang. When a steamer arrived, the men of the fort made it a point
+always to come down to the bank and see the fun. They looked forward to it with
+as much anticipation as did the Indian dogs, while they were not slow to
+appreciate the savage and crafty part played by White Fang.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But there was one man amongst them who particularly enjoyed the sport. He would
+come running at the first sound of a steamboat&rsquo;s whistle; and when the
+last fight was over and White Fang and the pack had scattered, he would return
+slowly to the fort, his face heavy with regret. Sometimes, when a soft
+southland dog went down, shrieking its death-cry under the fangs of the pack,
+this man would be unable to contain himself, and would leap into the air and
+cry out with delight. And always he had a sharp and covetous eye for White
+Fang.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+This man was called &ldquo;Beauty&rdquo; by the other men of the fort. No one
+knew his first name, and in general he was known in the country as Beauty
+Smith. But he was anything save a beauty. To antithesis was due his naming. He
+was pre-eminently unbeautiful. Nature had been niggardly with him. He was a
+small man to begin with; and upon his meagre frame was deposited an even more
+strikingly meagre head. Its apex might be likened to a point. In fact, in his
+boyhood, before he had been named Beauty by his fellows, he had been called
+&ldquo;Pinhead.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Backward, from the apex, his head slanted down to his neck and forward it
+slanted uncompromisingly to meet a low and remarkably wide forehead. Beginning
+here, as though regretting her parsimony, Nature had spread his features with a
+lavish hand. His eyes were large, and between them was the distance of two
+eyes. His face, in relation to the rest of him, was prodigious. In order to
+discover the necessary area, Nature had given him an enormous prognathous jaw.
+It was wide and heavy, and protruded outward and down until it seemed to rest
+on his chest. Possibly this appearance was due to the weariness of the slender
+neck, unable properly to support so great a burden.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+This jaw gave the impression of ferocious determination. But something lacked.
+Perhaps it was from excess. Perhaps the jaw was too large. At any rate, it was
+a lie. Beauty Smith was known far and wide as the weakest of weak-kneed and
+snivelling cowards. To complete his description, his teeth were large and
+yellow, while the two eye-teeth, larger than their fellows, showed under his
+lean lips like fangs. His eyes were yellow and muddy, as though Nature had run
+short on pigments and squeezed together the dregs of all her tubes. It was the
+same with his hair, sparse and irregular of growth, muddy-yellow and
+dirty-yellow, rising on his head and sprouting out of his face in unexpected
+tufts and bunches, in appearance like clumped and wind-blown grain.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+In short, Beauty Smith was a monstrosity, and the blame of it lay elsewhere. He
+was not responsible. The clay of him had been so moulded in the making. He did
+the cooking for the other men in the fort, the dish-washing and the drudgery.
+They did not despise him. Rather did they tolerate him in a broad human way, as
+one tolerates any creature evilly treated in the making. Also, they feared him.
+His cowardly rages made them dread a shot in the back or poison in their
+coffee. But somebody had to do the cooking, and whatever else his shortcomings,
+Beauty Smith could cook.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+This was the man that looked at White Fang, delighted in his ferocious prowess,
+and desired to possess him. He made overtures to White Fang from the first.
+White Fang began by ignoring him. Later on, when the overtures became more
+insistent, White Fang bristled and bared his teeth and backed away. He did not
+like the man. The feel of him was bad. He sensed the evil in him, and feared
+the extended hand and the attempts at soft-spoken speech. Because of all this,
+he hated the man.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+With the simpler creatures, good and bad are things simply understood. The good
+stands for all things that bring easement and satisfaction and surcease from
+pain. Therefore, the good is liked. The bad stands for all things that are
+fraught with discomfort, menace, and hurt, and is hated accordingly. White
+Fang&rsquo;s feel of Beauty Smith was bad. From the man&rsquo;s distorted body
+and twisted mind, in occult ways, like mists rising from malarial marshes, came
+emanations of the unhealth within. Not by reasoning, not by the five senses
+alone, but by other and remoter and uncharted senses, came the feeling to White
+Fang that the man was ominous with evil, pregnant with hurtfulness, and
+therefore a thing bad, and wisely to be hated.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+White Fang was in Grey Beaver&rsquo;s camp when Beauty Smith first visited it.
+At the faint sound of his distant feet, before he came in sight, White Fang
+knew who was coming and began to bristle. He had been lying down in an abandon
+of comfort, but he arose quickly, and, as the man arrived, slid away in true
+wolf-fashion to the edge of the camp. He did not know what they said, but he
+could see the man and Grey Beaver talking together. Once, the man pointed at
+him, and White Fang snarled back as though the hand were just descending upon
+him instead of being, as it was, fifty feet away. The man laughed at this; and
+White Fang slunk away to the sheltering woods, his head turned to observe as he
+glided softly over the ground.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Grey Beaver refused to sell the dog. He had grown rich with his trading and
+stood in need of nothing. Besides, White Fang was a valuable animal, the
+strongest sled-dog he had ever owned, and the best leader. Furthermore, there
+was no dog like him on the Mackenzie nor the Yukon. He could fight. He killed
+other dogs as easily as men killed mosquitoes. (Beauty Smith&rsquo;s eyes
+lighted up at this, and he licked his thin lips with an eager tongue). No,
+White Fang was not for sale at any price.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But Beauty Smith knew the ways of Indians. He visited Grey Beaver&rsquo;s camp
+often, and hidden under his coat was always a black bottle or so. One of the
+potencies of whisky is the breeding of thirst. Grey Beaver got the thirst. His
+fevered membranes and burnt stomach began to clamour for more and more of the
+scorching fluid; while his brain, thrust all awry by the unwonted stimulant,
+permitted him to go any length to obtain it. The money he had received for his
+furs and mittens and moccasins began to go. It went faster and faster, and the
+shorter his money-sack grew, the shorter grew his temper.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+In the end his money and goods and temper were all gone. Nothing remained to
+him but his thirst, a prodigious possession in itself that grew more prodigious
+with every sober breath he drew. Then it was that Beauty Smith had talk with
+him again about the sale of White Fang; but this time the price offered was in
+bottles, not dollars, and Grey Beaver&rsquo;s ears were more eager to hear.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;You ketch um dog you take um all right,&rdquo; was his last word.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The bottles were delivered, but after two days. &ldquo;You ketch um dog,&rdquo;
+were Beauty Smith&rsquo;s words to Grey Beaver.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+White Fang slunk into camp one evening and dropped down with a sigh of content.
+The dreaded white god was not there. For days his manifestations of desire to
+lay hands on him had been growing more insistent, and during that time White
+Fang had been compelled to avoid the camp. He did not know what evil was
+threatened by those insistent hands. He knew only that they did threaten evil
+of some sort, and that it was best for him to keep out of their reach.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But scarcely had he lain down when Grey Beaver staggered over to him and tied a
+leather thong around his neck. He sat down beside White Fang, holding the end
+of the thong in his hand. In the other hand he held a bottle, which, from time
+to time, was inverted above his head to the accompaniment of gurgling noises.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+An hour of this passed, when the vibrations of feet in contact with the ground
+foreran the one who approached. White Fang heard it first, and he was bristling
+with recognition while Grey Beaver still nodded stupidly. White Fang tried to
+draw the thong softly out of his master&rsquo;s hand; but the relaxed fingers
+closed tightly and Grey Beaver roused himself.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Beauty Smith strode into camp and stood over White Fang. He snarled softly up
+at the thing of fear, watching keenly the deportment of the hands. One hand
+extended outward and began to descend upon his head. His soft snarl grew tense
+and harsh. The hand continued slowly to descend, while he crouched beneath it,
+eyeing it malignantly, his snarl growing shorter and shorter as, with
+quickening breath, it approached its culmination. Suddenly he snapped, striking
+with his fangs like a snake. The hand was jerked back, and the teeth came
+together emptily with a sharp click. Beauty Smith was frightened and angry.
+Grey Beaver clouted White Fang alongside the head, so that he cowered down
+close to the earth in respectful obedience.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+White Fang&rsquo;s suspicious eyes followed every movement. He saw Beauty Smith
+go away and return with a stout club. Then the end of the thong was given over
+to him by Grey Beaver. Beauty Smith started to walk away. The thong grew taut.
+White Fang resisted it. Grey Beaver clouted him right and left to make him get
+up and follow. He obeyed, but with a rush, hurling himself upon the stranger
+who was dragging him away. Beauty Smith did not jump away. He had been waiting
+for this. He swung the club smartly, stopping the rush midway and smashing
+White Fang down upon the ground. Grey Beaver laughed and nodded approval.
+Beauty Smith tightened the thong again, and White Fang crawled limply and
+dizzily to his feet.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He did not rush a second time. One smash from the club was sufficient to
+convince him that the white god knew how to handle it, and he was too wise to
+fight the inevitable. So he followed morosely at Beauty Smith&rsquo;s heels,
+his tail between his legs, yet snarling softly under his breath. But Beauty
+Smith kept a wary eye on him, and the club was held always ready to strike.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+At the fort Beauty Smith left him securely tied and went in to bed. White Fang
+waited an hour. Then he applied his teeth to the thong, and in the space of ten
+seconds was free. He had wasted no time with his teeth. There had been no
+useless gnawing. The thong was cut across, diagonally, almost as clean as
+though done by a knife. White Fang looked up at the fort, at the same time
+bristling and growling. Then he turned and trotted back to Grey Beaver&rsquo;s
+camp. He owed no allegiance to this strange and terrible god. He had given
+himself to Grey Beaver, and to Grey Beaver he considered he still belonged.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But what had occurred before was repeated&mdash;with a difference. Grey Beaver
+again made him fast with a thong, and in the morning turned him over to Beauty
+Smith. And here was where the difference came in. Beauty Smith gave him a
+beating. Tied securely, White Fang could only rage futilely and endure the
+punishment. Club and whip were both used upon him, and he experienced the worst
+beating he had ever received in his life. Even the big beating given him in his
+puppyhood by Grey Beaver was mild compared with this.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Beauty Smith enjoyed the task. He delighted in it. He gloated over his victim,
+and his eyes flamed dully, as he swung the whip or club and listened to White
+Fang&rsquo;s cries of pain and to his helpless bellows and snarls. For Beauty
+Smith was cruel in the way that cowards are cruel. Cringing and snivelling
+himself before the blows or angry speech of a man, he revenged himself, in
+turn, upon creatures weaker than he. All life likes power, and Beauty Smith was
+no exception. Denied the expression of power amongst his own kind, he fell back
+upon the lesser creatures and there vindicated the life that was in him. But
+Beauty Smith had not created himself, and no blame was to be attached to him.
+He had come into the world with a twisted body and a brute intelligence. This
+had constituted the clay of him, and it had not been kindly moulded by the
+world.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+White Fang knew why he was being beaten. When Grey Beaver tied the thong around
+his neck, and passed the end of the thong into Beauty Smith&rsquo;s keeping,
+White Fang knew that it was his god&rsquo;s will for him to go with Beauty
+Smith. And when Beauty Smith left him tied outside the fort, he knew that it
+was Beauty Smith&rsquo;s will that he should remain there. Therefore, he had
+disobeyed the will of both the gods, and earned the consequent punishment. He
+had seen dogs change owners in the past, and he had seen the runaways beaten as
+he was being beaten. He was wise, and yet in the nature of him there were
+forces greater than wisdom. One of these was fidelity. He did not love Grey
+Beaver, yet, even in the face of his will and his anger, he was faithful to
+him. He could not help it. This faithfulness was a quality of the clay that
+composed him. It was the quality that was peculiarly the possession of his
+kind; the quality that set apart his species from all other species; the
+quality that has enabled the wolf and the wild dog to come in from the open and
+be the companions of man.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+After the beating, White Fang was dragged back to the fort. But this time
+Beauty Smith left him tied with a stick. One does not give up a god easily, and
+so with White Fang. Grey Beaver was his own particular god, and, in spite of
+Grey Beaver&rsquo;s will, White Fang still clung to him and would not give him
+up. Grey Beaver had betrayed and forsaken him, but that had no effect upon him.
+Not for nothing had he surrendered himself body and soul to Grey Beaver. There
+had been no reservation on White Fang&rsquo;s part, and the bond was not to be
+broken easily.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+So, in the night, when the men in the fort were asleep, White Fang applied his
+teeth to the stick that held him. The wood was seasoned and dry, and it was
+tied so closely to his neck that he could scarcely get his teeth to it. It was
+only by the severest muscular exertion and neck-arching that he succeeded in
+getting the wood between his teeth, and barely between his teeth at that; and
+it was only by the exercise of an immense patience, extending through many
+hours, that he succeeded in gnawing through the stick. This was something that
+dogs were not supposed to do. It was unprecedented. But White Fang did it,
+trotting away from the fort in the early morning, with the end of the stick
+hanging to his neck.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He was wise. But had he been merely wise he would not have gone back to Grey
+Beaver who had already twice betrayed him. But there was his faithfulness, and
+he went back to be betrayed yet a third time. Again he yielded to the tying of
+a thong around his neck by Grey Beaver, and again Beauty Smith came to claim
+him. And this time he was beaten even more severely than before.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Grey Beaver looked on stolidly while the white man wielded the whip. He gave no
+protection. It was no longer his dog. When the beating was over White Fang was
+sick. A soft southland dog would have died under it, but not he. His school of
+life had been sterner, and he was himself of sterner stuff. He had too great
+vitality. His clutch on life was too strong. But he was very sick. At first he
+was unable to drag himself along, and Beauty Smith had to wait half-an-hour for
+him. And then, blind and reeling, he followed at Beauty Smith&rsquo;s heels
+back to the fort.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But now he was tied with a chain that defied his teeth, and he strove in vain,
+by lunging, to draw the staple from the timber into which it was driven. After
+a few days, sober and bankrupt, Grey Beaver departed up the Porcupine on his
+long journey to the Mackenzie. White Fang remained on the Yukon, the property
+of a man more than half mad and all brute. But what is a dog to know in its
+consciousness of madness? To White Fang, Beauty Smith was a veritable, if
+terrible, god. He was a mad god at best, but White Fang knew nothing of
+madness; he knew only that he must submit to the will of this new master, obey
+his every whim and fancy.
+</p>
+
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<h3><a name="chap17"></a>CHAPTER III<br/>
+THE REIGN OF HATE</h3>
+
+<p>
+Under the tutelage of the mad god, White Fang became a fiend. He was kept
+chained in a pen at the rear of the fort, and here Beauty Smith teased and
+irritated and drove him wild with petty torments. The man early discovered
+White Fang&rsquo;s susceptibility to laughter, and made it a point after
+painfully tricking him, to laugh at him. This laughter was uproarious and
+scornful, and at the same time the god pointed his finger derisively at White
+Fang. At such times reason fled from White Fang, and in his transports of rage
+he was even more mad than Beauty Smith.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Formerly, White Fang had been merely the enemy of his kind, withal a ferocious
+enemy. He now became the enemy of all things, and more ferocious than ever. To
+such an extent was he tormented, that he hated blindly and without the faintest
+spark of reason. He hated the chain that bound him, the men who peered in at
+him through the slats of the pen, the dogs that accompanied the men and that
+snarled malignantly at him in his helplessness. He hated the very wood of the
+pen that confined him. And, first, last, and most of all, he hated Beauty
+Smith.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But Beauty Smith had a purpose in all that he did to White Fang. One day a
+number of men gathered about the pen. Beauty Smith entered, club in hand, and
+took the chain off from White Fang&rsquo;s neck. When his master had gone out,
+White Fang turned loose and tore around the pen, trying to get at the men
+outside. He was magnificently terrible. Fully five feet in length, and standing
+two and one-half feet at the shoulder, he far outweighed a wolf of
+corresponding size. From his mother he had inherited the heavier proportions of
+the dog, so that he weighed, without any fat and without an ounce of
+superfluous flesh, over ninety pounds. It was all muscle, bone, and
+sinew-fighting flesh in the finest condition.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The door of the pen was being opened again. White Fang paused. Something
+unusual was happening. He waited. The door was opened wider. Then a huge dog
+was thrust inside, and the door was slammed shut behind him. White Fang had
+never seen such a dog (it was a mastiff); but the size and fierce aspect of the
+intruder did not deter him. Here was some thing, not wood nor iron, upon which
+to wreak his hate. He leaped in with a flash of fangs that ripped down the side
+of the mastiff&rsquo;s neck. The mastiff shook his head, growled hoarsely, and
+plunged at White Fang. But White Fang was here, there, and everywhere, always
+evading and eluding, and always leaping in and slashing with his fangs and
+leaping out again in time to escape punishment.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The men outside shouted and applauded, while Beauty Smith, in an ecstasy of
+delight, gloated over the ripping and mangling performed by White Fang. There
+was no hope for the mastiff from the first. He was too ponderous and slow. In
+the end, while Beauty Smith beat White Fang back with a club, the mastiff was
+dragged out by its owner. Then there was a payment of bets, and money clinked
+in Beauty Smith&rsquo;s hand.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+White Fang came to look forward eagerly to the gathering of the men around his
+pen. It meant a fight; and this was the only way that was now vouchsafed him of
+expressing the life that was in him. Tormented, incited to hate, he was kept a
+prisoner so that there was no way of satisfying that hate except at the times
+his master saw fit to put another dog against him. Beauty Smith had estimated
+his powers well, for he was invariably the victor. One day, three dogs were
+turned in upon him in succession. Another day a full-grown wolf, fresh-caught
+from the Wild, was shoved in through the door of the pen. And on still another
+day two dogs were set against him at the same time. This was his severest
+fight, and though in the end he killed them both he was himself half killed in
+doing it.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+In the fall of the year, when the first snows were falling and mush-ice was
+running in the river, Beauty Smith took passage for himself and White Fang on a
+steamboat bound up the Yukon to Dawson. White Fang had now achieved a
+reputation in the land. As &ldquo;the Fighting Wolf&rdquo; he was known far and
+wide, and the cage in which he was kept on the steam-boat&rsquo;s deck was
+usually surrounded by curious men. He raged and snarled at them, or lay quietly
+and studied them with cold hatred. Why should he not hate them? He never asked
+himself the question. He knew only hate and lost himself in the passion of it.
+Life had become a hell to him. He had not been made for the close confinement
+wild beasts endure at the hands of men. And yet it was in precisely this way
+that he was treated. Men stared at him, poked sticks between the bars to make
+him snarl, and then laughed at him.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+They were his environment, these men, and they were moulding the clay of him
+into a more ferocious thing than had been intended by Nature. Nevertheless,
+Nature had given him plasticity. Where many another animal would have died or
+had its spirit broken, he adjusted himself and lived, and at no expense of the
+spirit. Possibly Beauty Smith, arch-fiend and tormentor, was capable of
+breaking White Fang&rsquo;s spirit, but as yet there were no signs of his
+succeeding.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+If Beauty Smith had in him a devil, White Fang had another; and the two of them
+raged against each other unceasingly. In the days before, White Fang had had
+the wisdom to cower down and submit to a man with a club in his hand; but this
+wisdom now left him. The mere sight of Beauty Smith was sufficient to send him
+into transports of fury. And when they came to close quarters, and he had been
+beaten back by the club, he went on growling and snarling, and showing his
+fangs. The last growl could never be extracted from him. No matter how terribly
+he was beaten, he had always another growl; and when Beauty Smith gave up and
+withdrew, the defiant growl followed after him, or White Fang sprang at the
+bars of the cage bellowing his hatred.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+When the steamboat arrived at Dawson, White Fang went ashore. But he still
+lived a public life, in a cage, surrounded by curious men. He was exhibited as
+&ldquo;the Fighting Wolf,&rdquo; and men paid fifty cents in gold dust to see
+him. He was given no rest. Did he lie down to sleep, he was stirred up by a
+sharp stick&mdash;so that the audience might get its money&rsquo;s worth. In
+order to make the exhibition interesting, he was kept in a rage most of the
+time. But worse than all this, was the atmosphere in which he lived. He was
+regarded as the most fearful of wild beasts, and this was borne in to him
+through the bars of the cage. Every word, every cautious action, on the part of
+the men, impressed upon him his own terrible ferocity. It was so much added
+fuel to the flame of his fierceness. There could be but one result, and that
+was that his ferocity fed upon itself and increased. It was another instance of
+the plasticity of his clay, of his capacity for being moulded by the pressure
+of environment.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+In addition to being exhibited he was a professional fighting animal. At
+irregular intervals, whenever a fight could be arranged, he was taken out of
+his cage and led off into the woods a few miles from town. Usually this
+occurred at night, so as to avoid interference from the mounted police of the
+Territory. After a few hours of waiting, when daylight had come, the audience
+and the dog with which he was to fight arrived. In this manner it came about
+that he fought all sizes and breeds of dogs. It was a savage land, the men were
+savage, and the fights were usually to the death.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Since White Fang continued to fight, it is obvious that it was the other dogs
+that died. He never knew defeat. His early training, when he fought with
+Lip-lip and the whole puppy-pack, stood him in good stead. There was the
+tenacity with which he clung to the earth. No dog could make him lose his
+footing. This was the favourite trick of the wolf breeds&mdash;to rush in upon
+him, either directly or with an unexpected swerve, in the hope of striking his
+shoulder and overthrowing him. Mackenzie hounds, Eskimo and Labrador dogs,
+huskies and Malemutes&mdash;all tried it on him, and all failed. He was never
+known to lose his footing. Men told this to one another, and looked each time
+to see it happen; but White Fang always disappointed them.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Then there was his lightning quickness. It gave him a tremendous advantage over
+his antagonists. No matter what their fighting experience, they had never
+encountered a dog that moved so swiftly as he. Also to be reckoned with, was
+the immediateness of his attack. The average dog was accustomed to the
+preliminaries of snarling and bristling and growling, and the average dog was
+knocked off his feet and finished before he had begun to fight or recovered
+from his surprise. So often did this happen, that it became the custom to hold
+White Fang until the other dog went through its preliminaries, was good and
+ready, and even made the first attack.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But greatest of all the advantages in White Fang&rsquo;s favour, was his
+experience. He knew more about fighting than did any of the dogs that faced
+him. He had fought more fights, knew how to meet more tricks and methods, and
+had more tricks himself, while his own method was scarcely to be improved upon.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+As the time went by, he had fewer and fewer fights. Men despaired of matching
+him with an equal, and Beauty Smith was compelled to pit wolves against him.
+These were trapped by the Indians for the purpose, and a fight between White
+Fang and a wolf was always sure to draw a crowd. Once, a full-grown female lynx
+was secured, and this time White Fang fought for his life. Her quickness
+matched his; her ferocity equalled his; while he fought with his fangs alone,
+and she fought with her sharp-clawed feet as well.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But after the lynx, all fighting ceased for White Fang. There were no more
+animals with which to fight&mdash;at least, there was none considered worthy of
+fighting with him. So he remained on exhibition until spring, when one Tim
+Keenan, a faro-dealer, arrived in the land. With him came the first bull-dog
+that had ever entered the Klondike. That this dog and White Fang should come
+together was inevitable, and for a week the anticipated fight was the
+mainspring of conversation in certain quarters of the town.
+</p>
+
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<h3><a name="chap18"></a>CHAPTER IV<br/>
+THE CLINGING DEATH</h3>
+
+<p>
+Beauty Smith slipped the chain from his neck and stepped back.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+For once White Fang did not make an immediate attack. He stood still, ears
+pricked forward, alert and curious, surveying the strange animal that faced
+him. He had never seen such a dog before. Tim Keenan shoved the bull-dog
+forward with a muttered &ldquo;Go to it.&rdquo; The animal waddled toward the
+centre of the circle, short and squat and ungainly. He came to a stop and
+blinked across at White Fang.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+There were cries from the crowd of, &ldquo;Go to him, Cherokee! Sick &rsquo;m,
+Cherokee! Eat &rsquo;m up!&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But Cherokee did not seem anxious to fight. He turned his head and blinked at
+the men who shouted, at the same time wagging his stump of a tail
+good-naturedly. He was not afraid, but merely lazy. Besides, it did not seem to
+him that it was intended he should fight with the dog he saw before him. He was
+not used to fighting with that kind of dog, and he was waiting for them to
+bring on the real dog.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Tim Keenan stepped in and bent over Cherokee, fondling him on both sides of the
+shoulders with hands that rubbed against the grain of the hair and that made
+slight, pushing-forward movements. These were so many suggestions. Also, their
+effect was irritating, for Cherokee began to growl, very softly, deep down in
+his throat. There was a correspondence in rhythm between the growls and the
+movements of the man&rsquo;s hands. The growl rose in the throat with the
+culmination of each forward-pushing movement, and ebbed down to start up afresh
+with the beginning of the next movement. The end of each movement was the
+accent of the rhythm, the movement ending abruptly and the growling rising with
+a jerk.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+This was not without its effect on White Fang. The hair began to rise on his
+neck and across the shoulders. Tim Keenan gave a final shove forward and
+stepped back again. As the impetus that carried Cherokee forward died down, he
+continued to go forward of his own volition, in a swift, bow-legged run. Then
+White Fang struck. A cry of startled admiration went up. He had covered the
+distance and gone in more like a cat than a dog; and with the same cat-like
+swiftness he had slashed with his fangs and leaped clear.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The bull-dog was bleeding back of one ear from a rip in his thick neck. He gave
+no sign, did not even snarl, but turned and followed after White Fang. The
+display on both sides, the quickness of the one and the steadiness of the
+other, had excited the partisan spirit of the crowd, and the men were making
+new bets and increasing original bets. Again, and yet again, White Fang sprang
+in, slashed, and got away untouched, and still his strange foe followed after
+him, without too great haste, not slowly, but deliberately and determinedly, in
+a businesslike sort of way. There was purpose in his method&mdash;something for
+him to do that he was intent upon doing and from which nothing could distract
+him.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+His whole demeanour, every action, was stamped with this purpose. It puzzled
+White Fang. Never had he seen such a dog. It had no hair protection. It was
+soft, and bled easily. There was no thick mat of fur to baffle White
+Fang&rsquo;s teeth as they were often baffled by dogs of his own breed. Each
+time that his teeth struck they sank easily into the yielding flesh, while the
+animal did not seem able to defend itself. Another disconcerting thing was that
+it made no outcry, such as he had been accustomed to with the other dogs he had
+fought. Beyond a growl or a grunt, the dog took its punishment silently. And
+never did it flag in its pursuit of him.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Not that Cherokee was slow. He could turn and whirl swiftly enough, but White
+Fang was never there. Cherokee was puzzled, too. He had never fought before
+with a dog with which he could not close. The desire to close had always been
+mutual. But here was a dog that kept at a distance, dancing and dodging here
+and there and all about. And when it did get its teeth into him, it did not
+hold on but let go instantly and darted away again.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But White Fang could not get at the soft underside of the throat. The bull-dog
+stood too short, while its massive jaws were an added protection. White Fang
+darted in and out unscathed, while Cherokee&rsquo;s wounds increased. Both
+sides of his neck and head were ripped and slashed. He bled freely, but showed
+no signs of being disconcerted. He continued his plodding pursuit, though once,
+for the moment baffled, he came to a full stop and blinked at the men who
+looked on, at the same time wagging his stump of a tail as an expression of his
+willingness to fight.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+In that moment White Fang was in upon him and out, in passing ripping his
+trimmed remnant of an ear. With a slight manifestation of anger, Cherokee took
+up the pursuit again, running on the inside of the circle White Fang was
+making, and striving to fasten his deadly grip on White Fang&rsquo;s throat.
+The bull-dog missed by a hair&rsquo;s-breadth, and cries of praise went up as
+White Fang doubled suddenly out of danger in the opposite direction.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The time went by. White Fang still danced on, dodging and doubling, leaping in
+and out, and ever inflicting damage. And still the bull-dog, with grim
+certitude, toiled after him. Sooner or later he would accomplish his purpose,
+get the grip that would win the battle. In the meantime, he accepted all the
+punishment the other could deal him. His tufts of ears had become tassels, his
+neck and shoulders were slashed in a score of places, and his very lips were
+cut and bleeding&mdash;all from these lightning snaps that were beyond his
+foreseeing and guarding.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Time and again White Fang had attempted to knock Cherokee off his feet; but the
+difference in their height was too great. Cherokee was too squat, too close to
+the ground. White Fang tried the trick once too often. The chance came in one
+of his quick doublings and counter-circlings. He caught Cherokee with head
+turned away as he whirled more slowly. His shoulder was exposed. White Fang
+drove in upon it: but his own shoulder was high above, while he struck with
+such force that his momentum carried him on across over the other&rsquo;s body.
+For the first time in his fighting history, men saw White Fang lose his
+footing. His body turned a half-somersault in the air, and he would have landed
+on his back had he not twisted, catlike, still in the air, in the effort to
+bring his feet to the earth. As it was, he struck heavily on his side. The next
+instant he was on his feet, but in that instant Cherokee&rsquo;s teeth closed
+on his throat.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+It was not a good grip, being too low down toward the chest; but Cherokee held
+on. White Fang sprang to his feet and tore wildly around, trying to shake off
+the bull-dog&rsquo;s body. It made him frantic, this clinging, dragging weight.
+It bound his movements, restricted his freedom. It was like the trap, and all
+his instinct resented it and revolted against it. It was a mad revolt. For
+several minutes he was to all intents insane. The basic life that was in him
+took charge of him. The will to exist of his body surged over him. He was
+dominated by this mere flesh-love of life. All intelligence was gone. It was as
+though he had no brain. His reason was unseated by the blind yearning of the
+flesh to exist and move, at all hazards to move, to continue to move, for
+movement was the expression of its existence.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Round and round he went, whirling and turning and reversing, trying to shake
+off the fifty-pound weight that dragged at his throat. The bull-dog did little
+but keep his grip. Sometimes, and rarely, he managed to get his feet to the
+earth and for a moment to brace himself against White Fang. But the next moment
+his footing would be lost and he would be dragging around in the whirl of one
+of White Fang&rsquo;s mad gyrations. Cherokee identified himself with his
+instinct. He knew that he was doing the right thing by holding on, and there
+came to him certain blissful thrills of satisfaction. At such moments he even
+closed his eyes and allowed his body to be hurled hither and thither,
+willy-nilly, careless of any hurt that might thereby come to it. That did not
+count. The grip was the thing, and the grip he kept.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+White Fang ceased only when he had tired himself out. He could do nothing, and
+he could not understand. Never, in all his fighting, had this thing happened.
+The dogs he had fought with did not fight that way. With them it was snap and
+slash and get away, snap and slash and get away. He lay partly on his side,
+panting for breath. Cherokee still holding his grip, urged against him, trying
+to get him over entirely on his side. White Fang resisted, and he could feel
+the jaws shifting their grip, slightly relaxing and coming together again in a
+chewing movement. Each shift brought the grip closer to his throat. The
+bull-dog&rsquo;s method was to hold what he had, and when opportunity favoured
+to work in for more. Opportunity favoured when White Fang remained quiet. When
+White Fang struggled, Cherokee was content merely to hold on.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The bulging back of Cherokee&rsquo;s neck was the only portion of his body that
+White Fang&rsquo;s teeth could reach. He got hold toward the base where the
+neck comes out from the shoulders; but he did not know the chewing method of
+fighting, nor were his jaws adapted to it. He spasmodically ripped and tore
+with his fangs for a space. Then a change in their position diverted him. The
+bull-dog had managed to roll him over on his back, and still hanging on to his
+throat, was on top of him. Like a cat, White Fang bowed his hind-quarters in,
+and, with the feet digging into his enemy&rsquo;s abdomen above him, he began
+to claw with long tearing-strokes. Cherokee might well have been disembowelled
+had he not quickly pivoted on his grip and got his body off of White
+Fang&rsquo;s and at right angles to it.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+There was no escaping that grip. It was like Fate itself, and as inexorable.
+Slowly it shifted up along the jugular. All that saved White Fang from death
+was the loose skin of his neck and the thick fur that covered it. This served
+to form a large roll in Cherokee&rsquo;s mouth, the fur of which well-nigh
+defied his teeth. But bit by bit, whenever the chance offered, he was getting
+more of the loose skin and fur in his mouth. The result was that he was slowly
+throttling White Fang. The latter&rsquo;s breath was drawn with greater and
+greater difficulty as the moments went by.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+It began to look as though the battle were over. The backers of Cherokee waxed
+jubilant and offered ridiculous odds. White Fang&rsquo;s backers were
+correspondingly depressed, and refused bets of ten to one and twenty to one,
+though one man was rash enough to close a wager of fifty to one. This man was
+Beauty Smith. He took a step into the ring and pointed his finger at White
+Fang. Then he began to laugh derisively and scornfully. This produced the
+desired effect. White Fang went wild with rage. He called up his reserves of
+strength, and gained his feet. As he struggled around the ring, the fifty
+pounds of his foe ever dragging on his throat, his anger passed on into panic.
+The basic life of him dominated him again, and his intelligence fled before the
+will of his flesh to live. Round and round and back again, stumbling and
+falling and rising, even uprearing at times on his hind-legs and lifting his
+foe clear of the earth, he struggled vainly to shake off the clinging death.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+At last he fell, toppling backward, exhausted; and the bull-dog promptly
+shifted his grip, getting in closer, mangling more and more of the fur-folded
+flesh, throttling White Fang more severely than ever. Shouts of applause went
+up for the victor, and there were many cries of &ldquo;Cherokee!&rdquo;
+&ldquo;Cherokee!&rdquo; To this Cherokee responded by vigorous wagging of the
+stump of his tail. But the clamour of approval did not distract him. There was
+no sympathetic relation between his tail and his massive jaws. The one might
+wag, but the others held their terrible grip on White Fang&rsquo;s throat.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+It was at this time that a diversion came to the spectators. There was a jingle
+of bells. Dog-mushers&rsquo; cries were heard. Everybody, save Beauty Smith,
+looked apprehensively, the fear of the police strong upon them. But they saw,
+up the trail, and not down, two men running with sled and dogs. They were
+evidently coming down the creek from some prospecting trip. At sight of the
+crowd they stopped their dogs and came over and joined it, curious to see the
+cause of the excitement. The dog-musher wore a moustache, but the other, a
+taller and younger man, was smooth-shaven, his skin rosy from the pounding of
+his blood and the running in the frosty air.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+White Fang had practically ceased struggling. Now and again he resisted
+spasmodically and to no purpose. He could get little air, and that little grew
+less and less under the merciless grip that ever tightened. In spite of his
+armour of fur, the great vein of his throat would have long since been torn
+open, had not the first grip of the bull-dog been so low down as to be
+practically on the chest. It had taken Cherokee a long time to shift that grip
+upward, and this had also tended further to clog his jaws with fur and
+skin-fold.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+In the meantime, the abysmal brute in Beauty Smith had been rising into his
+brain and mastering the small bit of sanity that he possessed at best. When he
+saw White Fang&rsquo;s eyes beginning to glaze, he knew beyond doubt that the
+fight was lost. Then he broke loose. He sprang upon White Fang and began
+savagely to kick him. There were hisses from the crowd and cries of protest,
+but that was all. While this went on, and Beauty Smith continued to kick White
+Fang, there was a commotion in the crowd. The tall young newcomer was forcing
+his way through, shouldering men right and left without ceremony or gentleness.
+When he broke through into the ring, Beauty Smith was just in the act of
+delivering another kick. All his weight was on one foot, and he was in a state
+of unstable equilibrium. At that moment the newcomer&rsquo;s fist landed a
+smashing blow full in his face. Beauty Smith&rsquo;s remaining leg left the
+ground, and his whole body seemed to lift into the air as he turned over
+backward and struck the snow. The newcomer turned upon the crowd.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;You cowards!&rdquo; he cried. &ldquo;You beasts!&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He was in a rage himself&mdash;a sane rage. His grey eyes seemed metallic and
+steel-like as they flashed upon the crowd. Beauty Smith regained his feet and
+came toward him, sniffling and cowardly. The new-comer did not understand. He
+did not know how abject a coward the other was, and thought he was coming back
+intent on fighting. So, with a &ldquo;You beast!&rdquo; he smashed Beauty Smith
+over backward with a second blow in the face. Beauty Smith decided that the
+snow was the safest place for him, and lay where he had fallen, making no
+effort to get up.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Come on, Matt, lend a hand,&rdquo; the newcomer called the dog-musher,
+who had followed him into the ring.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Both men bent over the dogs. Matt took hold of White Fang, ready to pull when
+Cherokee&rsquo;s jaws should be loosened. This the younger man endeavoured to
+accomplish by clutching the bulldog&rsquo;s jaws in his hands and trying to
+spread them. It was a vain undertaking. As he pulled and tugged and wrenched,
+he kept exclaiming with every expulsion of breath, &ldquo;Beasts!&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The crowd began to grow unruly, and some of the men were protesting against the
+spoiling of the sport; but they were silenced when the newcomer lifted his head
+from his work for a moment and glared at them.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;You damn beasts!&rdquo; he finally exploded, and went back to his task.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;It&rsquo;s no use, Mr. Scott, you can&rsquo;t break &rsquo;m apart that
+way,&rdquo; Matt said at last.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The pair paused and surveyed the locked dogs.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Ain&rsquo;t bleedin&rsquo; much,&rdquo; Matt announced.
+&ldquo;Ain&rsquo;t got all the way in yet.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;But he&rsquo;s liable to any moment,&rdquo; Scott answered.
+&ldquo;There, did you see that! He shifted his grip in a bit.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The younger man&rsquo;s excitement and apprehension for White Fang was growing.
+He struck Cherokee about the head savagely again and again. But that did not
+loosen the jaws. Cherokee wagged the stump of his tail in advertisement that he
+understood the meaning of the blows, but that he knew he was himself in the
+right and only doing his duty by keeping his grip.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Won&rsquo;t some of you help?&rdquo; Scott cried desperately at the
+crowd.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But no help was offered. Instead, the crowd began sarcastically to cheer him on
+and showered him with facetious advice.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;You&rsquo;ll have to get a pry,&rdquo; Matt counselled.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The other reached into the holster at his hip, drew his revolver, and tried to
+thrust its muzzle between the bull-dog&rsquo;s jaws. He shoved, and shoved
+hard, till the grating of the steel against the locked teeth could be
+distinctly heard. Both men were on their knees, bending over the dogs. Tim
+Keenan strode into the ring. He paused beside Scott and touched him on the
+shoulder, saying ominously:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Don&rsquo;t break them teeth, stranger.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Then I&rsquo;ll break his neck,&rdquo; Scott retorted, continuing his
+shoving and wedging with the revolver muzzle.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I said don&rsquo;t break them teeth,&rdquo; the faro-dealer repeated
+more ominously than before.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But if it was a bluff he intended, it did not work. Scott never desisted from
+his efforts, though he looked up coolly and asked:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Your dog?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The faro-dealer grunted.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Then get in here and break this grip.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Well, stranger,&rdquo; the other drawled irritatingly, &ldquo;I
+don&rsquo;t mind telling you that&rsquo;s something I ain&rsquo;t worked out
+for myself. I don&rsquo;t know how to turn the trick.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Then get out of the way,&rdquo; was the reply, &ldquo;and don&rsquo;t
+bother me. I&rsquo;m busy.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Tim Keenan continued standing over him, but Scott took no further notice of his
+presence. He had managed to get the muzzle in between the jaws on one side, and
+was trying to get it out between the jaws on the other side. This accomplished,
+he pried gently and carefully, loosening the jaws a bit at a time, while Matt,
+a bit at a time, extricated White Fang&rsquo;s mangled neck.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Stand by to receive your dog,&rdquo; was Scott&rsquo;s peremptory order
+to Cherokee&rsquo;s owner.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The faro-dealer stooped down obediently and got a firm hold on Cherokee.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Now!&rdquo; Scott warned, giving the final pry.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The dogs were drawn apart, the bull-dog struggling vigorously.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Take him away,&rdquo; Scott commanded, and Tim Keenan dragged Cherokee
+back into the crowd.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+White Fang made several ineffectual efforts to get up. Once he gained his feet,
+but his legs were too weak to sustain him, and he slowly wilted and sank back
+into the snow. His eyes were half closed, and the surface of them was glassy.
+His jaws were apart, and through them the tongue protruded, draggled and limp.
+To all appearances he looked like a dog that had been strangled to death. Matt
+examined him.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Just about all in,&rdquo; he announced; &ldquo;but he&rsquo;s
+breathin&rsquo; all right.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Beauty Smith had regained his feet and come over to look at White Fang.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Matt, how much is a good sled-dog worth?&rdquo; Scott asked.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The dog-musher, still on his knees and stooped over White Fang, calculated for
+a moment.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Three hundred dollars,&rdquo; he answered.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;And how much for one that&rsquo;s all chewed up like this one?&rdquo;
+Scott asked, nudging White Fang with his foot.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Half of that,&rdquo; was the dog-musher&rsquo;s judgment. Scott turned
+upon Beauty Smith.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Did you hear, Mr. Beast? I&rsquo;m going to take your dog from you, and
+I&rsquo;m going to give you a hundred and fifty for him.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He opened his pocket-book and counted out the bills.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Beauty Smith put his hands behind his back, refusing to touch the proffered
+money.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I ain&rsquo;t a-sellin&rsquo;,&rdquo; he said.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Oh, yes you are,&rdquo; the other assured him. &ldquo;Because I&rsquo;m
+buying. Here&rsquo;s your money. The dog&rsquo;s mine.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Beauty Smith, his hands still behind him, began to back away.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Scott sprang toward him, drawing his fist back to strike. Beauty Smith cowered
+down in anticipation of the blow.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I&rsquo;ve got my rights,&rdquo; he whimpered.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;You&rsquo;ve forfeited your rights to own that dog,&rdquo; was the
+rejoinder. &ldquo;Are you going to take the money? or do I have to hit you
+again?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;All right,&rdquo; Beauty Smith spoke up with the alacrity of fear.
+&ldquo;But I take the money under protest,&rdquo; he added. &ldquo;The
+dog&rsquo;s a mint. I ain&rsquo;t a-goin&rsquo; to be robbed. A man&rsquo;s got
+his rights.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Correct,&rdquo; Scott answered, passing the money over to him. &ldquo;A
+man&rsquo;s got his rights. But you&rsquo;re not a man. You&rsquo;re a
+beast.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Wait till I get back to Dawson,&rdquo; Beauty Smith threatened.
+&ldquo;I&rsquo;ll have the law on you.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;If you open your mouth when you get back to Dawson, I&rsquo;ll have you
+run out of town. Understand?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Beauty Smith replied with a grunt.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Understand?&rdquo; the other thundered with abrupt fierceness.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Yes,&rdquo; Beauty Smith grunted, shrinking away.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Yes what?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Yes, sir,&rdquo; Beauty Smith snarled.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Look out! He&rsquo;ll bite!&rdquo; some one shouted, and a guffaw of
+laughter went up.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Scott turned his back on him, and returned to help the dog-musher, who was
+working over White Fang.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Some of the men were already departing; others stood in groups, looking on and
+talking. Tim Keenan joined one of the groups.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Who&rsquo;s that mug?&rdquo; he asked.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Weedon Scott,&rdquo; some one answered.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;And who in hell is Weedon Scott?&rdquo; the faro-dealer demanded.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Oh, one of them crackerjack minin&rsquo; experts. He&rsquo;s in with all
+the big bugs. If you want to keep out of trouble, you&rsquo;ll steer clear of
+him, that&rsquo;s my talk. He&rsquo;s all hunky with the officials. The Gold
+Commissioner&rsquo;s a special pal of his.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I thought he must be somebody,&rdquo; was the faro-dealer&rsquo;s
+comment. &ldquo;That&rsquo;s why I kept my hands offen him at the start.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<h3><a name="chap19"></a>CHAPTER V<br/>
+THE INDOMITABLE</h3>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;It&rsquo;s hopeless,&rdquo; Weedon Scott confessed.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He sat on the step of his cabin and stared at the dog-musher, who responded
+with a shrug that was equally hopeless.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Together they looked at White Fang at the end of his stretched chain,
+bristling, snarling, ferocious, straining to get at the sled-dogs. Having
+received sundry lessons from Matt, said lessons being imparted by means of a
+club, the sled-dogs had learned to leave White Fang alone; and even then they
+were lying down at a distance, apparently oblivious of his existence.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;It&rsquo;s a wolf and there&rsquo;s no taming it,&rdquo; Weedon Scott
+announced.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Oh, I don&rsquo;t know about that,&rdquo; Matt objected. &ldquo;Might be
+a lot of dog in &rsquo;m, for all you can tell. But there&rsquo;s one thing I
+know sure, an&rsquo; that there&rsquo;s no gettin&rsquo; away from.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The dog-musher paused and nodded his head confidentially at Moosehide Mountain.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Well, don&rsquo;t be a miser with what you know,&rdquo; Scott said
+sharply, after waiting a suitable length of time. &ldquo;Spit it out. What is
+it?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The dog-musher indicated White Fang with a backward thrust of his thumb.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Wolf or dog, it&rsquo;s all the same&mdash;he&rsquo;s ben tamed
+&rsquo;ready.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;No!&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I tell you yes, an&rsquo; broke to harness. Look close there. D&rsquo;ye
+see them marks across the chest?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;You&rsquo;re right, Matt. He was a sled-dog before Beauty Smith got hold
+of him.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;And there&rsquo;s not much reason against his bein&rsquo; a sled-dog
+again.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;What d&rsquo;ye think?&rdquo; Scott queried eagerly. Then the hope died
+down as he added, shaking his head, &ldquo;We&rsquo;ve had him two weeks now,
+and if anything he&rsquo;s wilder than ever at the present moment.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Give &rsquo;m a chance,&rdquo; Matt counselled. &ldquo;Turn &rsquo;m
+loose for a spell.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The other looked at him incredulously.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Yes,&rdquo; Matt went on, &ldquo;I know you&rsquo;ve tried to, but you
+didn&rsquo;t take a club.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;You try it then.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The dog-musher secured a club and went over to the chained animal. White Fang
+watched the club after the manner of a caged lion watching the whip of its
+trainer.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;See &rsquo;m keep his eye on that club,&rdquo; Matt said.
+&ldquo;That&rsquo;s a good sign. He&rsquo;s no fool. Don&rsquo;t dast tackle me
+so long as I got that club handy. He&rsquo;s not clean crazy, sure.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+As the man&rsquo;s hand approached his neck, White Fang bristled and snarled
+and crouched down. But while he eyed the approaching hand, he at the same time
+contrived to keep track of the club in the other hand, suspended threateningly
+above him. Matt unsnapped the chain from the collar and stepped back.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+White Fang could scarcely realise that he was free. Many months had gone by
+since he passed into the possession of Beauty Smith, and in all that period he
+had never known a moment of freedom except at the times he had been loosed to
+fight with other dogs. Immediately after such fights he had always been
+imprisoned again.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He did not know what to make of it. Perhaps some new devilry of the gods was
+about to be perpetrated on him. He walked slowly and cautiously, prepared to be
+assailed at any moment. He did not know what to do, it was all so
+unprecedented. He took the precaution to sheer off from the two watching gods,
+and walked carefully to the corner of the cabin. Nothing happened. He was
+plainly perplexed, and he came back again, pausing a dozen feet away and
+regarding the two men intently.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Won&rsquo;t he run away?&rdquo; his new owner asked.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Matt shrugged his shoulders. &ldquo;Got to take a gamble. Only way to find out
+is to find out.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Poor devil,&rdquo; Scott murmured pityingly. &ldquo;What he needs is
+some show of human kindness,&rdquo; he added, turning and going into the cabin.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He came out with a piece of meat, which he tossed to White Fang. He sprang away
+from it, and from a distance studied it suspiciously.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Hi-yu, Major!&rdquo; Matt shouted warningly, but too late.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Major had made a spring for the meat. At the instant his jaws closed on it,
+White Fang struck him. He was overthrown. Matt rushed in, but quicker than he
+was White Fang. Major staggered to his feet, but the blood spouting from his
+throat reddened the snow in a widening path.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;It&rsquo;s too bad, but it served him right,&rdquo; Scott said hastily.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But Matt&rsquo;s foot had already started on its way to kick White Fang. There
+was a leap, a flash of teeth, a sharp exclamation. White Fang, snarling
+fiercely, scrambled backward for several yards, while Matt stooped and
+investigated his leg.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;He got me all right,&rdquo; he announced, pointing to the torn trousers
+and undercloths, and the growing stain of red.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I told you it was hopeless, Matt,&rdquo; Scott said in a discouraged
+voice. &ldquo;I&rsquo;ve thought about it off and on, while not wanting to
+think of it. But we&rsquo;ve come to it now. It&rsquo;s the only thing to
+do.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+As he talked, with reluctant movements he drew his revolver, threw open the
+cylinder, and assured himself of its contents.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Look here, Mr. Scott,&rdquo; Matt objected; &ldquo;that dog&rsquo;s ben
+through hell. You can&rsquo;t expect &rsquo;m to come out a white an&rsquo;
+shinin&rsquo; angel. Give &rsquo;m time.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Look at Major,&rdquo; the other rejoined.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The dog-musher surveyed the stricken dog. He had sunk down on the snow in the
+circle of his blood and was plainly in the last gasp.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Served &rsquo;m right. You said so yourself, Mr. Scott. He tried to take
+White Fang&rsquo;s meat, an&rsquo; he&rsquo;s dead-O. That was to be expected.
+I wouldn&rsquo;t give two whoops in hell for a dog that wouldn&rsquo;t fight
+for his own meat.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;But look at yourself, Matt. It&rsquo;s all right about the dogs, but we
+must draw the line somewhere.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Served me right,&rdquo; Matt argued stubbornly. &ldquo;What&rsquo;d I
+want to kick &rsquo;m for? You said yourself that he&rsquo;d done right. Then I
+had no right to kick &rsquo;m.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;It would be a mercy to kill him,&rdquo; Scott insisted.
+&ldquo;He&rsquo;s untamable.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Now look here, Mr. Scott, give the poor devil a fightin&rsquo; chance.
+He ain&rsquo;t had no chance yet. He&rsquo;s just come through hell, an&rsquo;
+this is the first time he&rsquo;s ben loose. Give &rsquo;m a fair chance,
+an&rsquo; if he don&rsquo;t deliver the goods, I&rsquo;ll kill &rsquo;m myself.
+There!&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;God knows I don&rsquo;t want to kill him or have him killed,&rdquo;
+Scott answered, putting away the revolver. &ldquo;We&rsquo;ll let him run loose
+and see what kindness can do for him. And here&rsquo;s a try at it.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He walked over to White Fang and began talking to him gently and soothingly.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Better have a club handy,&rdquo; Matt warned.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Scott shook his head and went on trying to win White Fang&rsquo;s confidence.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+White Fang was suspicious. Something was impending. He had killed this
+god&rsquo;s dog, bitten his companion god, and what else was to be expected
+than some terrible punishment? But in the face of it he was indomitable. He
+bristled and showed his teeth, his eyes vigilant, his whole body wary and
+prepared for anything. The god had no club, so he suffered him to approach
+quite near. The god&rsquo;s hand had come out and was descending upon his head.
+White Fang shrank together and grew tense as he crouched under it. Here was
+danger, some treachery or something. He knew the hands of the gods, their
+proved mastery, their cunning to hurt. Besides, there was his old antipathy to
+being touched. He snarled more menacingly, crouched still lower, and still the
+hand descended. He did not want to bite the hand, and he endured the peril of
+it until his instinct surged up in him, mastering him with its insatiable
+yearning for life.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Weedon Scott had believed that he was quick enough to avoid any snap or slash.
+But he had yet to learn the remarkable quickness of White Fang, who struck with
+the certainty and swiftness of a coiled snake.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Scott cried out sharply with surprise, catching his torn hand and holding it
+tightly in his other hand. Matt uttered a great oath and sprang to his side.
+White Fang crouched down, and backed away, bristling, showing his fangs, his
+eyes malignant with menace. Now he could expect a beating as fearful as any he
+had received from Beauty Smith.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Here! What are you doing?&rdquo; Scott cried suddenly.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Matt had dashed into the cabin and come out with a rifle.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Nothin&rsquo;,&rdquo; he said slowly, with a careless calmness that was
+assumed, &ldquo;only goin&rsquo; to keep that promise I made. I reckon
+it&rsquo;s up to me to kill &rsquo;m as I said I&rsquo;d do.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;No you don&rsquo;t!&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Yes I do. Watch me.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+As Matt had pleaded for White Fang when he had been bitten, it was now Weedon
+Scott&rsquo;s turn to plead.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;You said to give him a chance. Well, give it to him. We&rsquo;ve only
+just started, and we can&rsquo;t quit at the beginning. It served me right,
+this time. And&mdash;look at him!&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+White Fang, near the corner of the cabin and forty feet away, was snarling with
+blood-curdling viciousness, not at Scott, but at the dog-musher.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Well, I&rsquo;ll be everlastingly gosh-swoggled!&rdquo; was the
+dog-musher&rsquo;s expression of astonishment.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Look at the intelligence of him,&rdquo; Scott went on hastily. &ldquo;He
+knows the meaning of firearms as well as you do. He&rsquo;s got intelligence
+and we&rsquo;ve got to give that intelligence a chance. Put up the gun.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;All right, I&rsquo;m willin&rsquo;,&rdquo; Matt agreed, leaning the
+rifle against the woodpile.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;But will you look at that!&rdquo; he exclaimed the next moment.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+White Fang had quieted down and ceased snarling. &ldquo;This is worth
+investigatin&rsquo;. Watch.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Matt, reached for the rifle, and at the same moment White Fang snarled. He
+stepped away from the rifle, and White Fang&rsquo;s lifted lips descended,
+covering his teeth.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Now, just for fun.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Matt took the rifle and began slowly to raise it to his shoulder. White
+Fang&rsquo;s snarling began with the movement, and increased as the movement
+approached its culmination. But the moment before the rifle came to a level on
+him, he leaped sidewise behind the corner of the cabin. Matt stood staring
+along the sights at the empty space of snow which had been occupied by White
+Fang.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The dog-musher put the rifle down solemnly, then turned and looked at his
+employer.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I agree with you, Mr. Scott. That dog&rsquo;s too intelligent to
+kill.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<h3><a name="chap20"></a>CHAPTER VI<br/>
+THE LOVE-MASTER</h3>
+
+<p>
+As White Fang watched Weedon Scott approach, he bristled and snarled to
+advertise that he would not submit to punishment. Twenty-four hours had passed
+since he had slashed open the hand that was now bandaged and held up by a sling
+to keep the blood out of it. In the past White Fang had experienced delayed
+punishments, and he apprehended that such a one was about to befall him. How
+could it be otherwise? He had committed what was to him sacrilege, sunk his
+fangs into the holy flesh of a god, and of a white-skinned superior god at
+that. In the nature of things, and of intercourse with gods, something terrible
+awaited him.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The god sat down several feet away. White Fang could see nothing dangerous in
+that. When the gods administered punishment they stood on their legs. Besides,
+this god had no club, no whip, no firearm. And furthermore, he himself was
+free. No chain nor stick bound him. He could escape into safety while the god
+was scrambling to his feet. In the meantime he would wait and see.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The god remained quiet, made no movement; and White Fang&rsquo;s snarl slowly
+dwindled to a growl that ebbed down in his throat and ceased. Then the god
+spoke, and at the first sound of his voice, the hair rose on White Fang&rsquo;s
+neck and the growl rushed up in his throat. But the god made no hostile
+movement, and went on calmly talking. For a time White Fang growled in unison
+with him, a correspondence of rhythm being established between growl and voice.
+But the god talked on interminably. He talked to White Fang as White Fang had
+never been talked to before. He talked softly and soothingly, with a gentleness
+that somehow, somewhere, touched White Fang. In spite of himself and all the
+pricking warnings of his instinct, White Fang began to have confidence in this
+god. He had a feeling of security that was belied by all his experience with
+men.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+After a long time, the god got up and went into the cabin. White Fang scanned
+him apprehensively when he came out. He had neither whip nor club nor weapon.
+Nor was his uninjured hand behind his back hiding something. He sat down as
+before, in the same spot, several feet away. He held out a small piece of meat.
+White Fang pricked his ears and investigated it suspiciously, managing to look
+at the same time both at the meat and the god, alert for any overt act, his
+body tense and ready to spring away at the first sign of hostility.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Still the punishment delayed. The god merely held near to his nose a piece of
+meat. And about the meat there seemed nothing wrong. Still White Fang
+suspected; and though the meat was proffered to him with short inviting thrusts
+of the hand, he refused to touch it. The gods were all-wise, and there was no
+telling what masterful treachery lurked behind that apparently harmless piece
+of meat. In past experience, especially in dealing with squaws, meat and
+punishment had often been disastrously related.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+In the end, the god tossed the meat on the snow at White Fang&rsquo;s feet. He
+smelled the meat carefully; but he did not look at it. While he smelled it he
+kept his eyes on the god. Nothing happened. He took the meat into his mouth and
+swallowed it. Still nothing happened. The god was actually offering him another
+piece of meat. Again he refused to take it from the hand, and again it was
+tossed to him. This was repeated a number of times. But there came a time when
+the god refused to toss it. He kept it in his hand and steadfastly proffered
+it.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The meat was good meat, and White Fang was hungry. Bit by bit, infinitely
+cautious, he approached the hand. At last the time came that he decided to eat
+the meat from the hand. He never took his eyes from the god, thrusting his head
+forward with ears flattened back and hair involuntarily rising and cresting on
+his neck. Also a low growl rumbled in his throat as warning that he was not to
+be trifled with. He ate the meat, and nothing happened. Piece by piece, he ate
+all the meat, and nothing happened. Still the punishment delayed.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He licked his chops and waited. The god went on talking. In his voice was
+kindness&mdash;something of which White Fang had no experience whatever. And
+within him it aroused feelings which he had likewise never experienced before.
+He was aware of a certain strange satisfaction, as though some need were being
+gratified, as though some void in his being were being filled. Then again came
+the prod of his instinct and the warning of past experience. The gods were ever
+crafty, and they had unguessed ways of attaining their ends.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Ah, he had thought so! There it came now, the god&rsquo;s hand, cunning to
+hurt, thrusting out at him, descending upon his head. But the god went on
+talking. His voice was soft and soothing. In spite of the menacing hand, the
+voice inspired confidence. And in spite of the assuring voice, the hand
+inspired distrust. White Fang was torn by conflicting feelings, impulses. It
+seemed he would fly to pieces, so terrible was the control he was exerting,
+holding together by an unwonted indecision the counter-forces that struggled
+within him for mastery.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He compromised. He snarled and bristled and flattened his ears. But he neither
+snapped nor sprang away. The hand descended. Nearer and nearer it came. It
+touched the ends of his upstanding hair. He shrank down under it. It followed
+down after him, pressing more closely against him. Shrinking, almost shivering,
+he still managed to hold himself together. It was a torment, this hand that
+touched him and violated his instinct. He could not forget in a day all the
+evil that had been wrought him at the hands of men. But it was the will of the
+god, and he strove to submit.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The hand lifted and descended again in a patting, caressing movement. This
+continued, but every time the hand lifted, the hair lifted under it. And every
+time the hand descended, the ears flattened down and a cavernous growl surged
+in his throat. White Fang growled and growled with insistent warning. By this
+means he announced that he was prepared to retaliate for any hurt he might
+receive. There was no telling when the god&rsquo;s ulterior motive might be
+disclosed. At any moment that soft, confidence-inspiring voice might break
+forth in a roar of wrath, that gentle and caressing hand transform itself into
+a vice-like grip to hold him helpless and administer punishment.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But the god talked on softly, and ever the hand rose and fell with non-hostile
+pats. White Fang experienced dual feelings. It was distasteful to his instinct.
+It restrained him, opposed the will of him toward personal liberty. And yet it
+was not physically painful. On the contrary, it was even pleasant, in a
+physical way. The patting movement slowly and carefully changed to a rubbing of
+the ears about their bases, and the physical pleasure even increased a little.
+Yet he continued to fear, and he stood on guard, expectant of unguessed evil,
+alternately suffering and enjoying as one feeling or the other came uppermost
+and swayed him.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Well, I&rsquo;ll be gosh-swoggled!&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+So spoke Matt, coming out of the cabin, his sleeves rolled up, a pan of dirty
+dish-water in his hands, arrested in the act of emptying the pan by the sight
+of Weedon Scott patting White Fang.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+At the instant his voice broke the silence, White Fang leaped back, snarling
+savagely at him.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Matt regarded his employer with grieved disapproval.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;If you don&rsquo;t mind my expressin&rsquo; my feelin&rsquo;s, Mr.
+Scott, I&rsquo;ll make free to say you&rsquo;re seventeen kinds of a damn fool
+an&rsquo; all of &rsquo;em different, an&rsquo; then some.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Weedon Scott smiled with a superior air, gained his feet, and walked over to
+White Fang. He talked soothingly to him, but not for long, then slowly put out
+his hand, rested it on White Fang&rsquo;s head, and resumed the interrupted
+patting. White Fang endured it, keeping his eyes fixed suspiciously, not upon
+the man that patted him, but upon the man that stood in the doorway.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;You may be a number one, tip-top minin&rsquo; expert, all right all
+right,&rdquo; the dog-musher delivered himself oracularly, &ldquo;but you
+missed the chance of your life when you was a boy an&rsquo; didn&rsquo;t run
+off an&rsquo; join a circus.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+White Fang snarled at the sound of his voice, but this time did not leap away
+from under the hand that was caressing his head and the back of his neck with
+long, soothing strokes.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+It was the beginning of the end for White Fang&mdash;the ending of the old life
+and the reign of hate. A new and incomprehensibly fairer life was dawning. It
+required much thinking and endless patience on the part of Weedon Scott to
+accomplish this. And on the part of White Fang it required nothing less than a
+revolution. He had to ignore the urges and promptings of instinct and reason,
+defy experience, give the lie to life itself.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Life, as he had known it, not only had had no place in it for much that he now
+did; but all the currents had gone counter to those to which he now abandoned
+himself. In short, when all things were considered, he had to achieve an
+orientation far vaster than the one he had achieved at the time he came
+voluntarily in from the Wild and accepted Grey Beaver as his lord. At that time
+he was a mere puppy, soft from the making, without form, ready for the thumb of
+circumstance to begin its work upon him. But now it was different. The thumb of
+circumstance had done its work only too well. By it he had been formed and
+hardened into the Fighting Wolf, fierce and implacable, unloving and unlovable.
+To accomplish the change was like a reflux of being, and this when the
+plasticity of youth was no longer his; when the fibre of him had become tough
+and knotty; when the warp and the woof of him had made of him an adamantine
+texture, harsh and unyielding; when the face of his spirit had become iron and
+all his instincts and axioms had crystallised into set rules, cautions,
+dislikes, and desires.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Yet again, in this new orientation, it was the thumb of circumstance that
+pressed and prodded him, softening that which had become hard and remoulding it
+into fairer form. Weedon Scott was in truth this thumb. He had gone to the
+roots of White Fang&rsquo;s nature, and with kindness touched to life potencies
+that had languished and well-nigh perished. One such potency was <i>love</i>.
+It took the place of <i>like</i>, which latter had been the highest feeling
+that thrilled him in his intercourse with the gods.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But this love did not come in a day. It began with <i>like</i> and out of it
+slowly developed. White Fang did not run away, though he was allowed to remain
+loose, because he liked this new god. This was certainly better than the life
+he had lived in the cage of Beauty Smith, and it was necessary that he should
+have some god. The lordship of man was a need of his nature. The seal of his
+dependence on man had been set upon him in that early day when he turned his
+back on the Wild and crawled to Grey Beaver&rsquo;s feet to receive the
+expected beating. This seal had been stamped upon him again, and ineradicably,
+on his second return from the Wild, when the long famine was over and there was
+fish once more in the village of Grey Beaver.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And so, because he needed a god and because he preferred Weedon Scott to Beauty
+Smith, White Fang remained. In acknowledgment of fealty, he proceeded to take
+upon himself the guardianship of his master&rsquo;s property. He prowled about
+the cabin while the sled-dogs slept, and the first night-visitor to the cabin
+fought him off with a club until Weedon Scott came to the rescue. But White
+Fang soon learned to differentiate between thieves and honest men, to appraise
+the true value of step and carriage. The man who travelled, loud-stepping, the
+direct line to the cabin door, he let alone&mdash;though he watched him
+vigilantly until the door opened and he received the endorsement of the master.
+But the man who went softly, by circuitous ways, peering with caution, seeking
+after secrecy&mdash;that was the man who received no suspension of judgment
+from White Fang, and who went away abruptly, hurriedly, and without dignity.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Weedon Scott had set himself the task of redeeming White Fang&mdash;or rather,
+of redeeming mankind from the wrong it had done White Fang. It was a matter of
+principle and conscience. He felt that the ill done White Fang was a debt
+incurred by man and that it must be paid. So he went out of his way to be
+especially kind to the Fighting Wolf. Each day he made it a point to caress and
+pet White Fang, and to do it at length.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+At first suspicious and hostile, White Fang grew to like this petting. But
+there was one thing that he never outgrew&mdash;his growling. Growl he would,
+from the moment the petting began till it ended. But it was a growl with a new
+note in it. A stranger could not hear this note, and to such a stranger the
+growling of White Fang was an exhibition of primordial savagery, nerve-racking
+and blood-curdling. But White Fang&rsquo;s throat had become harsh-fibred from
+the making of ferocious sounds through the many years since his first little
+rasp of anger in the lair of his cubhood, and he could not soften the sounds of
+that throat now to express the gentleness he felt. Nevertheless, Weedon
+Scott&rsquo;s ear and sympathy were fine enough to catch the new note all but
+drowned in the fierceness&mdash;the note that was the faintest hint of a croon
+of content and that none but he could hear.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+As the days went by, the evolution of <i>like</i> into <i>love</i> was
+accelerated. White Fang himself began to grow aware of it, though in his
+consciousness he knew not what love was. It manifested itself to him as a void
+in his being&mdash;a hungry, aching, yearning void that clamoured to be filled.
+It was a pain and an unrest; and it received easement only by the touch of the
+new god&rsquo;s presence. At such times love was joy to him, a wild,
+keen-thrilling satisfaction. But when away from his god, the pain and the
+unrest returned; the void in him sprang up and pressed against him with its
+emptiness, and the hunger gnawed and gnawed unceasingly.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+White Fang was in the process of finding himself. In spite of the maturity of
+his years and of the savage rigidity of the mould that had formed him, his
+nature was undergoing an expansion. There was a burgeoning within him of
+strange feelings and unwonted impulses. His old code of conduct was changing.
+In the past he had liked comfort and surcease from pain, disliked discomfort
+and pain, and he had adjusted his actions accordingly. But now it was
+different. Because of this new feeling within him, he ofttimes elected
+discomfort and pain for the sake of his god. Thus, in the early morning,
+instead of roaming and foraging, or lying in a sheltered nook, he would wait
+for hours on the cheerless cabin-stoop for a sight of the god&rsquo;s face. At
+night, when the god returned home, White Fang would leave the warm
+sleeping-place he had burrowed in the snow in order to receive the friendly
+snap of fingers and the word of greeting. Meat, even meat itself, he would
+forego to be with his god, to receive a caress from him or to accompany him
+down into the town.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+<i>Like</i> had been replaced by <i>love</i>. And love was the plummet dropped
+down into the deeps of him where like had never gone. And responsive out of his
+deeps had come the new thing&mdash;love. That which was given unto him did he
+return. This was a god indeed, a love-god, a warm and radiant god, in whose
+light White Fang&rsquo;s nature expanded as a flower expands under the sun.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But White Fang was not demonstrative. He was too old, too firmly moulded, to
+become adept at expressing himself in new ways. He was too self-possessed, too
+strongly poised in his own isolation. Too long had he cultivated reticence,
+aloofness, and moroseness. He had never barked in his life, and he could not
+now learn to bark a welcome when his god approached. He was never in the way,
+never extravagant nor foolish in the expression of his love. He never ran to
+meet his god. He waited at a distance; but he always waited, was always there.
+His love partook of the nature of worship, dumb, inarticulate, a silent
+adoration. Only by the steady regard of his eyes did he express his love, and
+by the unceasing following with his eyes of his god&rsquo;s every movement.
+Also, at times, when his god looked at him and spoke to him, he betrayed an
+awkward self-consciousness, caused by the struggle of his love to express
+itself and his physical inability to express it.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He learned to adjust himself in many ways to his new mode of life. It was borne
+in upon him that he must let his master&rsquo;s dogs alone. Yet his dominant
+nature asserted itself, and he had first to thrash them into an acknowledgment
+of his superiority and leadership. This accomplished, he had little trouble
+with them. They gave trail to him when he came and went or walked among them,
+and when he asserted his will they obeyed.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+In the same way, he came to tolerate Matt&mdash;as a possession of his master.
+His master rarely fed him. Matt did that, it was his business; yet White Fang
+divined that it was his master&rsquo;s food he ate and that it was his master
+who thus fed him vicariously. Matt it was who tried to put him into the harness
+and make him haul sled with the other dogs. But Matt failed. It was not until
+Weedon Scott put the harness on White Fang and worked him, that he understood.
+He took it as his master&rsquo;s will that Matt should drive him and work him
+just as he drove and worked his master&rsquo;s other dogs.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Different from the Mackenzie toboggans were the Klondike sleds with runners
+under them. And different was the method of driving the dogs. There was no
+fan-formation of the team. The dogs worked in single file, one behind another,
+hauling on double traces. And here, in the Klondike, the leader was indeed the
+leader. The wisest as well as strongest dog was the leader, and the team obeyed
+him and feared him. That White Fang should quickly gain this post was
+inevitable. He could not be satisfied with less, as Matt learned after much
+inconvenience and trouble. White Fang picked out the post for himself, and Matt
+backed his judgment with strong language after the experiment had been tried.
+But, though he worked in the sled in the day, White Fang did not forego the
+guarding of his master&rsquo;s property in the night. Thus he was on duty all
+the time, ever vigilant and faithful, the most valuable of all the dogs.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Makin&rsquo; free to spit out what&rsquo;s in me,&rdquo; Matt said one
+day, &ldquo;I beg to state that you was a wise guy all right when you paid the
+price you did for that dog. You clean swindled Beauty Smith on top of
+pushin&rsquo; his face in with your fist.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+A recrudescence of anger glinted in Weedon Scott&rsquo;s grey eyes, and he
+muttered savagely, &ldquo;The beast!&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+In the late spring a great trouble came to White Fang. Without warning, the
+love-master disappeared. There had been warning, but White Fang was unversed in
+such things and did not understand the packing of a grip. He remembered
+afterwards that his packing had preceded the master&rsquo;s disappearance; but
+at the time he suspected nothing. That night he waited for the master to
+return. At midnight the chill wind that blew drove him to shelter at the rear
+of the cabin. There he drowsed, only half asleep, his ears keyed for the first
+sound of the familiar step. But, at two in the morning, his anxiety drove him
+out to the cold front stoop, where he crouched, and waited.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But no master came. In the morning the door opened and Matt stepped outside.
+White Fang gazed at him wistfully. There was no common speech by which he might
+learn what he wanted to know. The days came and went, but never the master.
+White Fang, who had never known sickness in his life, became sick. He became
+very sick, so sick that Matt was finally compelled to bring him inside the
+cabin. Also, in writing to his employer, Matt devoted a postscript to White
+Fang.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Weedon Scott reading the letter down in Circle City, came upon the following:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;That dam wolf won&rsquo;t work. Won&rsquo;t eat. Aint got no spunk left.
+All the dogs is licking him. Wants to know what has become of you, and I
+don&rsquo;t know how to tell him. Mebbe he is going to die.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+It was as Matt had said. White Fang had ceased eating, lost heart, and allowed
+every dog of the team to thrash him. In the cabin he lay on the floor near the
+stove, without interest in food, in Matt, nor in life. Matt might talk gently
+to him or swear at him, it was all the same; he never did more than turn his
+dull eyes upon the man, then drop his head back to its customary position on
+his fore-paws.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And then, one night, Matt, reading to himself with moving lips and mumbled
+sounds, was startled by a low whine from White Fang. He had got upon his feet,
+his ears cocked towards the door, and he was listening intently. A moment
+later, Matt heard a footstep. The door opened, and Weedon Scott stepped in. The
+two men shook hands. Then Scott looked around the room.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Where&rsquo;s the wolf?&rdquo; he asked.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Then he discovered him, standing where he had been lying, near to the stove. He
+had not rushed forward after the manner of other dogs. He stood, watching and
+waiting.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Holy smoke!&rdquo; Matt exclaimed. &ldquo;Look at &rsquo;m wag his
+tail!&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Weedon Scott strode half across the room toward him, at the same time calling
+him. White Fang came to him, not with a great bound, yet quickly. He was
+awakened from self-consciousness, but as he drew near, his eyes took on a
+strange expression. Something, an incommunicable vastness of feeling, rose up
+into his eyes as a light and shone forth.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;He never looked at me that way all the time you was gone!&rdquo; Matt
+commented.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Weedon Scott did not hear. He was squatting down on his heels, face to face
+with White Fang and petting him&mdash;rubbing at the roots of the ears, making
+long caressing strokes down the neck to the shoulders, tapping the spine gently
+with the balls of his fingers. And White Fang was growling responsively, the
+crooning note of the growl more pronounced than ever.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But that was not all. What of his joy, the great love in him, ever surging and
+struggling to express itself, succeeded in finding a new mode of expression. He
+suddenly thrust his head forward and nudged his way in between the
+master&rsquo;s arm and body. And here, confined, hidden from view all except
+his ears, no longer growling, he continued to nudge and snuggle.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The two men looked at each other. Scott&rsquo;s eyes were shining.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Gosh!&rdquo; said Matt in an awe-stricken voice.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+A moment later, when he had recovered himself, he said, &ldquo;I always
+insisted that wolf was a dog. Look at &rsquo;m!&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+With the return of the love-master, White Fang&rsquo;s recovery was rapid. Two
+nights and a day he spent in the cabin. Then he sallied forth. The sled-dogs
+had forgotten his prowess. They remembered only the latest, which was his
+weakness and sickness. At the sight of him as he came out of the cabin, they
+sprang upon him.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Talk about your rough-houses,&rdquo; Matt murmured gleefully, standing
+in the doorway and looking on.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Give &rsquo;m hell, you wolf! Give &rsquo;m hell!&mdash;an&rsquo; then
+some!&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+White Fang did not need the encouragement. The return of the love-master was
+enough. Life was flowing through him again, splendid and indomitable. He fought
+from sheer joy, finding in it an expression of much that he felt and that
+otherwise was without speech. There could be but one ending. The team dispersed
+in ignominious defeat, and it was not until after dark that the dogs came
+sneaking back, one by one, by meekness and humility signifying their fealty to
+White Fang.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Having learned to snuggle, White Fang was guilty of it often. It was the final
+word. He could not go beyond it. The one thing of which he had always been
+particularly jealous was his head. He had always disliked to have it touched.
+It was the Wild in him, the fear of hurt and of the trap, that had given rise
+to the panicky impulses to avoid contacts. It was the mandate of his instinct
+that that head must be free. And now, with the love-master, his snuggling was
+the deliberate act of putting himself into a position of hopeless helplessness.
+It was an expression of perfect confidence, of absolute self-surrender, as
+though he said: &ldquo;I put myself into thy hands. Work thou thy will with
+me.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+One night, not long after the return, Scott and Matt sat at a game of cribbage
+preliminary to going to bed. &ldquo;Fifteen-two, fifteen-four an&rsquo; a pair
+makes six,&rdquo; Mat was pegging up, when there was an outcry and sound of
+snarling without. They looked at each other as they started to rise to their
+feet.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;The wolf&rsquo;s nailed somebody,&rdquo; Matt said.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+A wild scream of fear and anguish hastened them.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Bring a light!&rdquo; Scott shouted, as he sprang outside.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Matt followed with the lamp, and by its light they saw a man lying on his back
+in the snow. His arms were folded, one above the other, across his face and
+throat. Thus he was trying to shield himself from White Fang&rsquo;s teeth. And
+there was need for it. White Fang was in a rage, wickedly making his attack on
+the most vulnerable spot. From shoulder to wrist of the crossed arms, the
+coat-sleeve, blue flannel shirt and undershirt were ripped in rags, while the
+arms themselves were terribly slashed and streaming blood.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+All this the two men saw in the first instant. The next instant Weedon Scott
+had White Fang by the throat and was dragging him clear. White Fang struggled
+and snarled, but made no attempt to bite, while he quickly quieted down at a
+sharp word from the master.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Matt helped the man to his feet. As he arose he lowered his crossed arms,
+exposing the bestial face of Beauty Smith. The dog-musher let go of him
+precipitately, with action similar to that of a man who has picked up live
+fire. Beauty Smith blinked in the lamplight and looked about him. He caught
+sight of White Fang and terror rushed into his face.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+At the same moment Matt noticed two objects lying in the snow. He held the lamp
+close to them, indicating them with his toe for his employer&rsquo;s
+benefit&mdash;a steel dog-chain and a stout club.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Weedon Scott saw and nodded. Not a word was spoken. The dog-musher laid his
+hand on Beauty Smith&rsquo;s shoulder and faced him to the right about. No word
+needed to be spoken. Beauty Smith started.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+In the meantime the love-master was patting White Fang and talking to him.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Tried to steal you, eh? And you wouldn&rsquo;t have it! Well, well, he
+made a mistake, didn&rsquo;t he?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Must &lsquo;a&rsquo; thought he had hold of seventeen devils,&rdquo; the
+dog-musher sniggered.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+White Fang, still wrought up and bristling, growled and growled, the hair
+slowly lying down, the crooning note remote and dim, but growing in his throat.
+</p>
+
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<h2><a name="part05"></a>PART V</h2>
+
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<h3><a name="chap21"></a>CHAPTER I<br/>
+THE LONG TRAIL</h3>
+
+<p>
+It was in the air. White Fang sensed the coming calamity, even before there was
+tangible evidence of it. In vague ways it was borne in upon him that a change
+was impending. He knew not how nor why, yet he got his feel of the oncoming
+event from the gods themselves. In ways subtler than they knew, they betrayed
+their intentions to the wolf-dog that haunted the cabin-stoop, and that, though
+he never came inside the cabin, knew what went on inside their brains.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Listen to that, will you!&rdquo; the dog-musher exclaimed at supper one
+night.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Weedon Scott listened. Through the door came a low, anxious whine, like a
+sobbing under the breath that had just grown audible. Then came the long sniff,
+as White Fang reassured himself that his god was still inside and had not yet
+taken himself off in mysterious and solitary flight.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I do believe that wolf&rsquo;s on to you,&rdquo; the dog-musher said.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Weedon Scott looked across at his companion with eyes that almost pleaded,
+though this was given the lie by his words.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;What the devil can I do with a wolf in California?&rdquo; he demanded.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;That&rsquo;s what I say,&rdquo; Matt answered. &ldquo;What the devil can
+you do with a wolf in California?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But this did not satisfy Weedon Scott. The other seemed to be judging him in a
+non-committal sort of way.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;White man&rsquo;s dogs would have no show against him,&rdquo; Scott went
+on. &ldquo;He&rsquo;d kill them on sight. If he didn&rsquo;t bankrupt me with
+damaged suits, the authorities would take him away from me and electrocute
+him.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;He&rsquo;s a downright murderer, I know,&rdquo; was the
+dog-musher&rsquo;s comment.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Weedon Scott looked at him suspiciously.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;It would never do,&rdquo; he said decisively.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;It would never do!&rdquo; Matt concurred. &ldquo;Why you&rsquo;d have to
+hire a man &rsquo;specially to take care of &rsquo;m.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The other suspicion was allayed. He nodded cheerfully. In the silence that
+followed, the low, half-sobbing whine was heard at the door and then the long,
+questing sniff.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;There&rsquo;s no denyin&rsquo; he thinks a hell of a lot of you,&rdquo;
+Matt said.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The other glared at him in sudden wrath. &ldquo;Damn it all, man! I know my own
+mind and what&rsquo;s best!&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I&rsquo;m agreein&rsquo; with you, only . . . &rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Only what?&rdquo; Scott snapped out.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Only . . . &rdquo; the dog-musher began softly, then changed his mind
+and betrayed a rising anger of his own. &ldquo;Well, you needn&rsquo;t get so
+all-fired het up about it. Judgin&rsquo; by your actions one&rsquo;d think you
+didn&rsquo;t know your own mind.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Weedon Scott debated with himself for a while, and then said more gently:
+&ldquo;You are right, Matt. I don&rsquo;t know my own mind, and that&rsquo;s
+what&rsquo;s the trouble.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Why, it would be rank ridiculousness for me to take that dog
+along,&rdquo; he broke out after another pause.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I&rsquo;m agreein&rsquo; with you,&rdquo; was Matt&rsquo;s answer, and
+again his employer was not quite satisfied with him.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;But how in the name of the great Sardanapolis he knows you&rsquo;re
+goin&rsquo; is what gets me,&rdquo; the dog-musher continued innocently.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;It&rsquo;s beyond me, Matt,&rdquo; Scott answered, with a mournful shake
+of the head.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Then came the day when, through the open cabin door, White Fang saw the fatal
+grip on the floor and the love-master packing things into it. Also, there were
+comings and goings, and the erstwhile placid atmosphere of the cabin was vexed
+with strange perturbations and unrest. Here was indubitable evidence. White
+Fang had already scented it. He now reasoned it. His god was preparing for
+another flight. And since he had not taken him with him before, so, now, he
+could look to be left behind.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+That night he lifted the long wolf-howl. As he had howled, in his puppy days,
+when he fled back from the Wild to the village to find it vanished and naught
+but a rubbish-heap to mark the site of Grey Beaver&rsquo;s tepee, so now he
+pointed his muzzle to the cold stars and told to them his woe.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Inside the cabin the two men had just gone to bed.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;He&rsquo;s gone off his food again,&rdquo; Matt remarked from his bunk.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+There was a grunt from Weedon Scott&rsquo;s bunk, and a stir of blankets.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;From the way he cut up the other time you went away, I wouldn&rsquo;t
+wonder this time but what he died.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The blankets in the other bunk stirred irritably.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Oh, shut up!&rdquo; Scott cried out through the darkness. &ldquo;You nag
+worse than a woman.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I&rsquo;m agreein&rsquo; with you,&rdquo; the dog-musher answered, and
+Weedon Scott was not quite sure whether or not the other had snickered.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The next day White Fang&rsquo;s anxiety and restlessness were even more
+pronounced. He dogged his master&rsquo;s heels whenever he left the cabin, and
+haunted the front stoop when he remained inside. Through the open door he could
+catch glimpses of the luggage on the floor. The grip had been joined by two
+large canvas bags and a box. Matt was rolling the master&rsquo;s blankets and
+fur robe inside a small tarpaulin. White Fang whined as he watched the
+operation.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Later on two Indians arrived. He watched them closely as they shouldered the
+luggage and were led off down the hill by Matt, who carried the bedding and the
+grip. But White Fang did not follow them. The master was still in the cabin.
+After a time, Matt returned. The master came to the door and called White Fang
+inside.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;You poor devil,&rdquo; he said gently, rubbing White Fang&rsquo;s ears
+and tapping his spine. &ldquo;I&rsquo;m hitting the long trail, old man, where
+you cannot follow. Now give me a growl&mdash;the last, good, good-bye
+growl.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But White Fang refused to growl. Instead, and after a wistful, searching look,
+he snuggled in, burrowing his head out of sight between the master&rsquo;s arm
+and body.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;There she blows!&rdquo; Matt cried. From the Yukon arose the hoarse
+bellowing of a river steamboat. &ldquo;You&rsquo;ve got to cut it short. Be
+sure and lock the front door. I&rsquo;ll go out the back. Get a move on!&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The two doors slammed at the same moment, and Weedon Scott waited for Matt to
+come around to the front. From inside the door came a low whining and sobbing.
+Then there were long, deep-drawn sniffs.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;You must take good care of him, Matt,&rdquo; Scott said, as they started
+down the hill. &ldquo;Write and let me know how he gets along.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Sure,&rdquo; the dog-musher answered. &ldquo;But listen to that, will
+you!&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Both men stopped. White Fang was howling as dogs howl when their masters lie
+dead. He was voicing an utter woe, his cry bursting upward in great
+heart-breaking rushes, dying down into quavering misery, and bursting upward
+again with a rush upon rush of grief.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The <i>Aurora</i> was the first steamboat of the year for the Outside, and her
+decks were jammed with prosperous adventurers and broken gold seekers, all
+equally as mad to get to the Outside as they had been originally to get to the
+Inside. Near the gang-plank, Scott was shaking hands with Matt, who was
+preparing to go ashore. But Matt&rsquo;s hand went limp in the other&rsquo;s
+grasp as his gaze shot past and remained fixed on something behind him. Scott
+turned to see. Sitting on the deck several feet away and watching wistfully was
+White Fang.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The dog-musher swore softly, in awe-stricken accents. Scott could only look in
+wonder.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Did you lock the front door?&rdquo; Matt demanded. The other nodded, and
+asked, &ldquo;How about the back?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;You just bet I did,&rdquo; was the fervent reply.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+White Fang flattened his ears ingratiatingly, but remained where he was, making
+no attempt to approach.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I&rsquo;ll have to take &rsquo;m ashore with me.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Matt made a couple of steps toward White Fang, but the latter slid away from
+him. The dog-musher made a rush of it, and White Fang dodged between the legs
+of a group of men. Ducking, turning, doubling, he slid about the deck, eluding
+the other&rsquo;s efforts to capture him.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But when the love-master spoke, White Fang came to him with prompt obedience.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Won&rsquo;t come to the hand that&rsquo;s fed &rsquo;m all these
+months,&rdquo; the dog-musher muttered resentfully. &ldquo;And you&mdash;you
+ain&rsquo;t never fed &rsquo;m after them first days of gettin&rsquo;
+acquainted. I&rsquo;m blamed if I can see how he works it out that you&rsquo;re
+the boss.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Scott, who had been patting White Fang, suddenly bent closer and pointed out
+fresh-made cuts on his muzzle, and a gash between the eyes.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Matt bent over and passed his hand along White Fang&rsquo;s belly.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;We plump forgot the window. He&rsquo;s all cut an&rsquo; gouged
+underneath. Must &lsquo;a&rsquo; butted clean through it, b&rsquo;gosh!&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But Weedon Scott was not listening. He was thinking rapidly. The
+<i>Aurora&rsquo;s</i> whistle hooted a final announcement of departure. Men
+were scurrying down the gang-plank to the shore. Matt loosened the bandana from
+his own neck and started to put it around White Fang&rsquo;s. Scott grasped the
+dog-musher&rsquo;s hand.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Good-bye, Matt, old man. About the wolf&mdash;you needn&rsquo;t write.
+You see, I&rsquo;ve . . . !&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;What!&rdquo; the dog-musher exploded. &ldquo;You don&rsquo;t mean to say
+. . .?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;The very thing I mean. Here&rsquo;s your bandana. I&rsquo;ll write to
+you about him.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Matt paused halfway down the gang-plank.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;He&rsquo;ll never stand the climate!&rdquo; he shouted back.
+&ldquo;Unless you clip &rsquo;m in warm weather!&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The gang-plank was hauled in, and the <i>Aurora</i> swung out from the bank.
+Weedon Scott waved a last good-bye. Then he turned and bent over White Fang,
+standing by his side.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Now growl, damn you, growl,&rdquo; he said, as he patted the responsive
+head and rubbed the flattening ears.
+</p>
+
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<h3><a name="chap22"></a>CHAPTER II<br/>
+THE SOUTHLAND</h3>
+
+<p>
+White Fang landed from the steamer in San Francisco. He was appalled. Deep in
+him, below any reasoning process or act of consciousness, he had associated
+power with godhead. And never had the white men seemed such marvellous gods as
+now, when he trod the slimy pavement of San Francisco. The log cabins he had
+known were replaced by towering buildings. The streets were crowded with
+perils&mdash;waggons, carts, automobiles; great, straining horses pulling huge
+trucks; and monstrous cable and electric cars hooting and clanging through the
+midst, screeching their insistent menace after the manner of the lynxes he had
+known in the northern woods.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+All this was the manifestation of power. Through it all, behind it all, was
+man, governing and controlling, expressing himself, as of old, by his mastery
+over matter. It was colossal, stunning. White Fang was awed. Fear sat upon him.
+As in his cubhood he had been made to feel his smallness and puniness on the
+day he first came in from the Wild to the village of Grey Beaver, so now, in
+his full-grown stature and pride of strength, he was made to feel small and
+puny. And there were so many gods! He was made dizzy by the swarming of them.
+The thunder of the streets smote upon his ears. He was bewildered by the
+tremendous and endless rush and movement of things. As never before, he felt
+his dependence on the love-master, close at whose heels he followed, no matter
+what happened never losing sight of him.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But White Fang was to have no more than a nightmare vision of the city&mdash;an
+experience that was like a bad dream, unreal and terrible, that haunted him for
+long after in his dreams. He was put into a baggage-car by the master, chained
+in a corner in the midst of heaped trunks and valises. Here a squat and brawny
+god held sway, with much noise, hurling trunks and boxes about, dragging them
+in through the door and tossing them into the piles, or flinging them out of
+the door, smashing and crashing, to other gods who awaited them.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And here, in this inferno of luggage, was White Fang deserted by the master. Or
+at least White Fang thought he was deserted, until he smelled out the
+master&rsquo;s canvas clothes-bags alongside of him, and proceeded to mount
+guard over them.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;&rsquo;Bout time you come,&rdquo; growled the god of the car, an hour
+later, when Weedon Scott appeared at the door. &ldquo;That dog of yourn
+won&rsquo;t let me lay a finger on your stuff.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+White Fang emerged from the car. He was astonished. The nightmare city was
+gone. The car had been to him no more than a room in a house, and when he had
+entered it the city had been all around him. In the interval the city had
+disappeared. The roar of it no longer dinned upon his ears. Before him was
+smiling country, streaming with sunshine, lazy with quietude. But he had little
+time to marvel at the transformation. He accepted it as he accepted all the
+unaccountable doings and manifestations of the gods. It was their way.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+There was a carriage waiting. A man and a woman approached the master. The
+woman&rsquo;s arms went out and clutched the master around the neck&mdash;a
+hostile act! The next moment Weedon Scott had torn loose from the embrace and
+closed with White Fang, who had become a snarling, raging demon.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;It&rsquo;s all right, mother,&rdquo; Scott was saying as he kept tight
+hold of White Fang and placated him. &ldquo;He thought you were going to injure
+me, and he wouldn&rsquo;t stand for it. It&rsquo;s all right. It&rsquo;s all
+right. He&rsquo;ll learn soon enough.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;And in the meantime I may be permitted to love my son when his dog is
+not around,&rdquo; she laughed, though she was pale and weak from the fright.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She looked at White Fang, who snarled and bristled and glared malevolently.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;He&rsquo;ll have to learn, and he shall, without postponement,&rdquo;
+Scott said.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He spoke softly to White Fang until he had quieted him, then his voice became
+firm.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Down, sir! Down with you!&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+This had been one of the things taught him by the master, and White Fang
+obeyed, though he lay down reluctantly and sullenly.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Now, mother.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Scott opened his arms to her, but kept his eyes on White Fang.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Down!&rdquo; he warned. &ldquo;Down!&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+White Fang, bristling silently, half-crouching as he rose, sank back and
+watched the hostile act repeated. But no harm came of it, nor of the embrace
+from the strange man-god that followed. Then the clothes-bags were taken into
+the carriage, the strange gods and the love-master followed, and White Fang
+pursued, now running vigilantly behind, now bristling up to the running horses
+and warning them that he was there to see that no harm befell the god they
+dragged so swiftly across the earth.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+At the end of fifteen minutes, the carriage swung in through a stone gateway
+and on between a double row of arched and interlacing walnut trees. On either
+side stretched lawns, their broad sweep broken here and there by great
+sturdy-limbed oaks. In the near distance, in contrast with the young-green of
+the tended grass, sunburnt hay-fields showed tan and gold; while beyond were
+the tawny hills and upland pastures. From the head of the lawn, on the first
+soft swell from the valley-level, looked down the deep-porched, many-windowed
+house.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Little opportunity was given White Fang to see all this. Hardly had the
+carriage entered the grounds, when he was set upon by a sheep-dog, bright-eyed,
+sharp-muzzled, righteously indignant and angry. It was between him and the
+master, cutting him off. White Fang snarled no warning, but his hair bristled
+as he made his silent and deadly rush. This rush was never completed. He halted
+with awkward abruptness, with stiff fore-legs bracing himself against his
+momentum, almost sitting down on his haunches, so desirous was he of avoiding
+contact with the dog he was in the act of attacking. It was a female, and the
+law of his kind thrust a barrier between. For him to attack her would require
+nothing less than a violation of his instinct.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But with the sheep-dog it was otherwise. Being a female, she possessed no such
+instinct. On the other hand, being a sheep-dog, her instinctive fear of the
+Wild, and especially of the wolf, was unusually keen. White Fang was to her a
+wolf, the hereditary marauder who had preyed upon her flocks from the time
+sheep were first herded and guarded by some dim ancestor of hers. And so, as he
+abandoned his rush at her and braced himself to avoid the contact, she sprang
+upon him. He snarled involuntarily as he felt her teeth in his shoulder, but
+beyond this made no offer to hurt her. He backed away, stiff-legged with
+self-consciousness, and tried to go around her. He dodged this way and that,
+and curved and turned, but to no purpose. She remained always between him and
+the way he wanted to go.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Here, Collie!&rdquo; called the strange man in the carriage.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Weedon Scott laughed.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Never mind, father. It is good discipline. White Fang will have to learn
+many things, and it&rsquo;s just as well that he begins now. He&rsquo;ll adjust
+himself all right.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The carriage drove on, and still Collie blocked White Fang&rsquo;s way. He
+tried to outrun her by leaving the drive and circling across the lawn but she
+ran on the inner and smaller circle, and was always there, facing him with her
+two rows of gleaming teeth. Back he circled, across the drive to the other
+lawn, and again she headed him off.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The carriage was bearing the master away. White Fang caught glimpses of it
+disappearing amongst the trees. The situation was desperate. He essayed another
+circle. She followed, running swiftly. And then, suddenly, he turned upon her.
+It was his old fighting trick. Shoulder to shoulder, he struck her squarely.
+Not only was she overthrown. So fast had she been running that she rolled
+along, now on her back, now on her side, as she struggled to stop, clawing
+gravel with her feet and crying shrilly her hurt pride and indignation.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+White Fang did not wait. The way was clear, and that was all he had wanted. She
+took after him, never ceasing her outcry. It was the straightaway now, and when
+it came to real running, White Fang could teach her things. She ran
+frantically, hysterically, straining to the utmost, advertising the effort she
+was making with every leap: and all the time White Fang slid smoothly away from
+her silently, without effort, gliding like a ghost over the ground.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+As he rounded the house to the <i>porte-cochère</i>, he came upon the carriage.
+It had stopped, and the master was alighting. At this moment, still running at
+top speed, White Fang became suddenly aware of an attack from the side. It was
+a deer-hound rushing upon him. White Fang tried to face it. But he was going
+too fast, and the hound was too close. It struck him on the side; and such was
+his forward momentum and the unexpectedness of it, White Fang was hurled to the
+ground and rolled clear over. He came out of the tangle a spectacle of
+malignancy, ears flattened back, lips writhing, nose wrinkling, his teeth
+clipping together as the fangs barely missed the hound&rsquo;s soft throat.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The master was running up, but was too far away; and it was Collie that saved
+the hound&rsquo;s life. Before White Fang could spring in and deliver the fatal
+stroke, and just as he was in the act of springing in, Collie arrived. She had
+been out-manoeuvred and out-run, to say nothing of her having been
+unceremoniously tumbled in the gravel, and her arrival was like that of a
+tornado&mdash;made up of offended dignity, justifiable wrath, and instinctive
+hatred for this marauder from the Wild. She struck White Fang at right angles
+in the midst of his spring, and again he was knocked off his feet and rolled
+over.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The next moment the master arrived, and with one hand held White Fang, while
+the father called off the dogs.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I say, this is a pretty warm reception for a poor lone wolf from the
+Arctic,&rdquo; the master said, while White Fang calmed down under his
+caressing hand. &ldquo;In all his life he&rsquo;s only been known once to go
+off his feet, and here he&rsquo;s been rolled twice in thirty seconds.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The carriage had driven away, and other strange gods had appeared from out the
+house. Some of these stood respectfully at a distance; but two of them, women,
+perpetrated the hostile act of clutching the master around the neck. White
+Fang, however, was beginning to tolerate this act. No harm seemed to come of
+it, while the noises the gods made were certainly not threatening. These gods
+also made overtures to White Fang, but he warned them off with a snarl, and the
+master did likewise with word of mouth. At such times White Fang leaned in
+close against the master&rsquo;s legs and received reassuring pats on the head.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The hound, under the command, &ldquo;Dick! Lie down, sir!&rdquo; had gone up
+the steps and lain down to one side of the porch, still growling and keeping a
+sullen watch on the intruder. Collie had been taken in charge by one of the
+woman-gods, who held arms around her neck and petted and caressed her; but
+Collie was very much perplexed and worried, whining and restless, outraged by
+the permitted presence of this wolf and confident that the gods were making a
+mistake.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+All the gods started up the steps to enter the house. White Fang followed
+closely at the master&rsquo;s heels. Dick, on the porch, growled, and White
+Fang, on the steps, bristled and growled back.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Take Collie inside and leave the two of them to fight it out,&rdquo;
+suggested Scott&rsquo;s father. &ldquo;After that they&rsquo;ll be
+friends.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Then White Fang, to show his friendship, will have to be chief mourner
+at the funeral,&rdquo; laughed the master.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The elder Scott looked incredulously, first at White Fang, then at Dick, and
+finally at his son.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;You mean . . .?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Weedon nodded his head. &ldquo;I mean just that. You&rsquo;d have a dead Dick
+inside one minute&mdash;two minutes at the farthest.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He turned to White Fang. &ldquo;Come on, you wolf. It&rsquo;s you that&rsquo;ll
+have to come inside.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+White Fang walked stiff-legged up the steps and across the porch, with tail
+rigidly erect, keeping his eyes on Dick to guard against a flank attack, and at
+the same time prepared for whatever fierce manifestation of the unknown that
+might pounce out upon him from the interior of the house. But no thing of fear
+pounced out, and when he had gained the inside he scouted carefully around,
+looking at it and finding it not. Then he lay down with a contented grunt at
+the master&rsquo;s feet, observing all that went on, ever ready to spring to
+his feet and fight for life with the terrors he felt must lurk under the
+trap-roof of the dwelling.
+</p>
+
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<h3><a name="chap23"></a>CHAPTER III<br/>
+THE GOD&rsquo;S DOMAIN</h3>
+
+<p>
+Not only was White Fang adaptable by nature, but he had travelled much, and
+knew the meaning and necessity of adjustment. Here, in Sierra Vista, which was
+the name of Judge Scott&rsquo;s place, White Fang quickly began to make himself
+at home. He had no further serious trouble with the dogs. They knew more about
+the ways of the Southland gods than did he, and in their eyes he had qualified
+when he accompanied the gods inside the house. Wolf that he was, and
+unprecedented as it was, the gods had sanctioned his presence, and they, the
+dogs of the gods, could only recognise this sanction.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Dick, perforce, had to go through a few stiff formalities at first, after which
+he calmly accepted White Fang as an addition to the premises. Had Dick had his
+way, they would have been good friends. All but White Fang was averse to
+friendship. All he asked of other dogs was to be let alone. His whole life he
+had kept aloof from his kind, and he still desired to keep aloof. Dick&rsquo;s
+overtures bothered him, so he snarled Dick away. In the north he had learned
+the lesson that he must let the master&rsquo;s dogs alone, and he did not
+forget that lesson now. But he insisted on his own privacy and self-seclusion,
+and so thoroughly ignored Dick that that good-natured creature finally gave him
+up and scarcely took as much interest in him as in the hitching-post near the
+stable.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Not so with Collie. While she accepted him because it was the mandate of the
+gods, that was no reason that she should leave him in peace. Woven into her
+being was the memory of countless crimes he and his had perpetrated against her
+ancestry. Not in a day nor a generation were the ravaged sheepfolds to be
+forgotten. All this was a spur to her, pricking her to retaliation. She could
+not fly in the face of the gods who permitted him, but that did not prevent her
+from making life miserable for him in petty ways. A feud, ages old, was between
+them, and she, for one, would see to it that he was reminded.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+So Collie took advantage of her sex to pick upon White Fang and maltreat him.
+His instinct would not permit him to attack her, while her persistence would
+not permit him to ignore her. When she rushed at him he turned his
+fur-protected shoulder to her sharp teeth and walked away stiff-legged and
+stately. When she forced him too hard, he was compelled to go about in a
+circle, his shoulder presented to her, his head turned from her, and on his
+face and in his eyes a patient and bored expression. Sometimes, however, a nip
+on his hind-quarters hastened his retreat and made it anything but stately. But
+as a rule he managed to maintain a dignity that was almost solemnity. He
+ignored her existence whenever it was possible, and made it a point to keep out
+of her way. When he saw or heard her coming, he got up and walked off.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+There was much in other matters for White Fang to learn. Life in the Northland
+was simplicity itself when compared with the complicated affairs of Sierra
+Vista. First of all, he had to learn the family of the master. In a way he was
+prepared to do this. As Mit-sah and Kloo-kooch had belonged to Grey Beaver,
+sharing his food, his fire, and his blankets, so now, at Sierra Vista, belonged
+to the love-master all the denizens of the house.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But in this matter there was a difference, and many differences. Sierra Vista
+was a far vaster affair than the tepee of Grey Beaver. There were many persons
+to be considered. There was Judge Scott, and there was his wife. There were the
+master&rsquo;s two sisters, Beth and Mary. There was his wife, Alice, and then
+there were his children, Weedon and Maud, toddlers of four and six. There was
+no way for anybody to tell him about all these people, and of blood-ties and
+relationship he knew nothing whatever and never would be capable of knowing.
+Yet he quickly worked it out that all of them belonged to the master. Then, by
+observation, whenever opportunity offered, by study of action, speech, and the
+very intonations of the voice, he slowly learned the intimacy and the degree of
+favour they enjoyed with the master. And by this ascertained standard, White
+Fang treated them accordingly. What was of value to the master he valued; what
+was dear to the master was to be cherished by White Fang and guarded carefully.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Thus it was with the two children. All his life he had disliked children. He
+hated and feared their hands. The lessons were not tender that he had learned
+of their tyranny and cruelty in the days of the Indian villages. When Weedon
+and Maud had first approached him, he growled warningly and looked malignant. A
+cuff from the master and a sharp word had then compelled him to permit their
+caresses, though he growled and growled under their tiny hands, and in the
+growl there was no crooning note. Later, he observed that the boy and girl were
+of great value in the master&rsquo;s eyes. Then it was that no cuff nor sharp
+word was necessary before they could pat him.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Yet White Fang was never effusively affectionate. He yielded to the
+master&rsquo;s children with an ill but honest grace, and endured their fooling
+as one would endure a painful operation. When he could no longer endure, he
+would get up and stalk determinedly away from them. But after a time, he grew
+even to like the children. Still he was not demonstrative. He would not go up
+to them. On the other hand, instead of walking away at sight of them, he waited
+for them to come to him. And still later, it was noticed that a pleased light
+came into his eyes when he saw them approaching, and that he looked after them
+with an appearance of curious regret when they left him for other amusements.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+All this was a matter of development, and took time. Next in his regard, after
+the children, was Judge Scott. There were two reasons, possibly, for this.
+First, he was evidently a valuable possession of the master&rsquo;s, and next,
+he was undemonstrative. White Fang liked to lie at his feet on the wide porch
+when he read the newspaper, from time to time favouring White Fang with a look
+or a word&mdash;untroublesome tokens that he recognised White Fang&rsquo;s
+presence and existence. But this was only when the master was not around. When
+the master appeared, all other beings ceased to exist so far as White Fang was
+concerned.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+White Fang allowed all the members of the family to pet him and make much of
+him; but he never gave to them what he gave to the master. No caress of theirs
+could put the love-croon into his throat, and, try as they would, they could
+never persuade him into snuggling against them. This expression of abandon and
+surrender, of absolute trust, he reserved for the master alone. In fact, he
+never regarded the members of the family in any other light than possessions of
+the love-master.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Also White Fang had early come to differentiate between the family and the
+servants of the household. The latter were afraid of him, while he merely
+refrained from attacking them. This because he considered that they were
+likewise possessions of the master. Between White Fang and them existed a
+neutrality and no more. They cooked for the master and washed the dishes and
+did other things just as Matt had done up in the Klondike. They were, in short,
+appurtenances of the household.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Outside the household there was even more for White Fang to learn. The
+master&rsquo;s domain was wide and complex, yet it had its metes and bounds.
+The land itself ceased at the county road. Outside was the common domain of all
+gods&mdash;the roads and streets. Then inside other fences were the particular
+domains of other gods. A myriad laws governed all these things and determined
+conduct; yet he did not know the speech of the gods, nor was there any way for
+him to learn save by experience. He obeyed his natural impulses until they ran
+him counter to some law. When this had been done a few times, he learned the
+law and after that observed it.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But most potent in his education was the cuff of the master&rsquo;s hand, the
+censure of the master&rsquo;s voice. Because of White Fang&rsquo;s very great
+love, a cuff from the master hurt him far more than any beating Grey Beaver or
+Beauty Smith had ever given him. They had hurt only the flesh of him; beneath
+the flesh the spirit had still raged, splendid and invincible. But with the
+master the cuff was always too light to hurt the flesh. Yet it went deeper. It
+was an expression of the master&rsquo;s disapproval, and White Fang&rsquo;s
+spirit wilted under it.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+In point of fact, the cuff was rarely administered. The master&rsquo;s voice
+was sufficient. By it White Fang knew whether he did right or not. By it he
+trimmed his conduct and adjusted his actions. It was the compass by which he
+steered and learned to chart the manners of a new land and life.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+In the Northland, the only domesticated animal was the dog. All other animals
+lived in the Wild, and were, when not too formidable, lawful spoil for any dog.
+All his days White Fang had foraged among the live things for food. It did not
+enter his head that in the Southland it was otherwise. But this he was to learn
+early in his residence in Santa Clara Valley. Sauntering around the corner of
+the house in the early morning, he came upon a chicken that had escaped from
+the chicken-yard. White Fang&rsquo;s natural impulse was to eat it. A couple of
+bounds, a flash of teeth and a frightened squawk, and he had scooped in the
+adventurous fowl. It was farm-bred and fat and tender; and White Fang licked
+his chops and decided that such fare was good.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Later in the day, he chanced upon another stray chicken near the stables. One
+of the grooms ran to the rescue. He did not know White Fang&rsquo;s breed, so
+for weapon he took a light buggy-whip. At the first cut of the whip, White Fang
+left the chicken for the man. A club might have stopped White Fang, but not a
+whip. Silently, without flinching, he took a second cut in his forward rush,
+and as he leaped for the throat the groom cried out, &ldquo;My God!&rdquo; and
+staggered backward. He dropped the whip and shielded his throat with his arms.
+In consequence, his forearm was ripped open to the bone.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The man was badly frightened. It was not so much White Fang&rsquo;s ferocity as
+it was his silence that unnerved the groom. Still protecting his throat and
+face with his torn and bleeding arm, he tried to retreat to the barn. And it
+would have gone hard with him had not Collie appeared on the scene. As she had
+saved Dick&rsquo;s life, she now saved the groom&rsquo;s. She rushed upon White
+Fang in frenzied wrath. She had been right. She had known better than the
+blundering gods. All her suspicions were justified. Here was the ancient
+marauder up to his old tricks again.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The groom escaped into the stables, and White Fang backed away before
+Collie&rsquo;s wicked teeth, or presented his shoulder to them and circled
+round and round. But Collie did not give over, as was her wont, after a decent
+interval of chastisement. On the contrary, she grew more excited and angry
+every moment, until, in the end, White Fang flung dignity to the winds and
+frankly fled away from her across the fields.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;He&rsquo;ll learn to leave chickens alone,&rdquo; the master said.
+&ldquo;But I can&rsquo;t give him the lesson until I catch him in the
+act.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Two nights later came the act, but on a more generous scale than the master had
+anticipated. White Fang had observed closely the chicken-yards and the habits
+of the chickens. In the night-time, after they had gone to roost, he climbed to
+the top of a pile of newly hauled lumber. From there he gained the roof of a
+chicken-house, passed over the ridgepole and dropped to the ground inside. A
+moment later he was inside the house, and the slaughter began.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+In the morning, when the master came out on to the porch, fifty white Leghorn
+hens, laid out in a row by the groom, greeted his eyes. He whistled to himself,
+softly, first with surprise, and then, at the end, with admiration. His eyes
+were likewise greeted by White Fang, but about the latter there were no signs
+of shame nor guilt. He carried himself with pride, as though, forsooth, he had
+achieved a deed praiseworthy and meritorious. There was about him no
+consciousness of sin. The master&rsquo;s lips tightened as he faced the
+disagreeable task. Then he talked harshly to the unwitting culprit, and in his
+voice there was nothing but godlike wrath. Also, he held White Fang&rsquo;s
+nose down to the slain hens, and at the same time cuffed him soundly.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+White Fang never raided a chicken-roost again. It was against the law, and he
+had learned it. Then the master took him into the chicken-yards. White
+Fang&rsquo;s natural impulse, when he saw the live food fluttering about him
+and under his very nose, was to spring upon it. He obeyed the impulse, but was
+checked by the master&rsquo;s voice. They continued in the yards for half an
+hour. Time and again the impulse surged over White Fang, and each time, as he
+yielded to it, he was checked by the master&rsquo;s voice. Thus it was he
+learned the law, and ere he left the domain of the chickens, he had learned to
+ignore their existence.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;You can never cure a chicken-killer.&rdquo; Judge Scott shook his head
+sadly at luncheon table, when his son narrated the lesson he had given White
+Fang. &ldquo;Once they&rsquo;ve got the habit and the taste of blood . .
+.&rdquo; Again he shook his head sadly.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But Weedon Scott did not agree with his father. &ldquo;I&rsquo;ll tell you what
+I&rsquo;ll do,&rdquo; he challenged finally. &ldquo;I&rsquo;ll lock White Fang
+in with the chickens all afternoon.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;But think of the chickens,&rdquo; objected the judge.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;And furthermore,&rdquo; the son went on, &ldquo;for every chicken he
+kills, I&rsquo;ll pay you one dollar gold coin of the realm.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;But you should penalise father, too,&rdquo; interpose Beth.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Her sister seconded her, and a chorus of approval arose from around the table.
+Judge Scott nodded his head in agreement.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;All right.&rdquo; Weedon Scott pondered for a moment. &ldquo;And if, at
+the end of the afternoon White Fang hasn&rsquo;t harmed a chicken, for every
+ten minutes of the time he has spent in the yard, you will have to say to him,
+gravely and with deliberation, just as if you were sitting on the bench and
+solemnly passing judgment, &lsquo;White Fang, you are smarter than I
+thought.&rsquo;&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+From hidden points of vantage the family watched the performance. But it was a
+fizzle. Locked in the yard and there deserted by the master, White Fang lay
+down and went to sleep. Once he got up and walked over to the trough for a
+drink of water. The chickens he calmly ignored. So far as he was concerned they
+did not exist. At four o&rsquo;clock he executed a running jump, gained the
+roof of the chicken-house and leaped to the ground outside, whence he sauntered
+gravely to the house. He had learned the law. And on the porch, before the
+delighted family, Judge Scott, face to face with White Fang, said slowly and
+solemnly, sixteen times, &ldquo;White Fang, you are smarter than I
+thought.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But it was the multiplicity of laws that befuddled White Fang and often brought
+him into disgrace. He had to learn that he must not touch the chickens that
+belonged to other gods. Then there were cats, and rabbits, and turkeys; all
+these he must let alone. In fact, when he had but partly learned the law, his
+impression was that he must leave all live things alone. Out in the
+back-pasture, a quail could flutter up under his nose unharmed. All tense and
+trembling with eagerness and desire, he mastered his instinct and stood still.
+He was obeying the will of the gods.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And then, one day, again out in the back-pasture, he saw Dick start a
+jackrabbit and run it. The master himself was looking on and did not interfere.
+Nay, he encouraged White Fang to join in the chase. And thus he learned that
+there was no taboo on jackrabbits. In the end he worked out the complete law.
+Between him and all domestic animals there must be no hostilities. If not
+amity, at least neutrality must obtain. But the other animals&mdash;the
+squirrels, and quail, and cottontails, were creatures of the Wild who had never
+yielded allegiance to man. They were the lawful prey of any dog. It was only
+the tame that the gods protected, and between the tame deadly strife was not
+permitted. The gods held the power of life and death over their subjects, and
+the gods were jealous of their power.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Life was complex in the Santa Clara Valley after the simplicities of the
+Northland. And the chief thing demanded by these intricacies of civilisation
+was control, restraint&mdash;a poise of self that was as delicate as the
+fluttering of gossamer wings and at the same time as rigid as steel. Life had a
+thousand faces, and White Fang found he must meet them all&mdash;thus, when he
+went to town, in to San Jose, running behind the carriage or loafing about the
+streets when the carriage stopped. Life flowed past him, deep and wide and
+varied, continually impinging upon his senses, demanding of him instant and
+endless adjustments and correspondences, and compelling him, almost always, to
+suppress his natural impulses.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+There were butcher-shops where meat hung within reach. This meat he must not
+touch. There were cats at the houses the master visited that must be let alone.
+And there were dogs everywhere that snarled at him and that he must not attack.
+And then, on the crowded sidewalks there were persons innumerable whose
+attention he attracted. They would stop and look at him, point him out to one
+another, examine him, talk of him, and, worst of all, pat him. And these
+perilous contacts from all these strange hands he must endure. Yet this
+endurance he achieved. Furthermore, he got over being awkward and
+self-conscious. In a lofty way he received the attentions of the multitudes of
+strange gods. With condescension he accepted their condescension. On the other
+hand, there was something about him that prevented great familiarity. They
+patted him on the head and passed on, contented and pleased with their own
+daring.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But it was not all easy for White Fang. Running behind the carriage in the
+outskirts of San Jose, he encountered certain small boys who made a practice of
+flinging stones at him. Yet he knew that it was not permitted him to pursue and
+drag them down. Here he was compelled to violate his instinct of
+self-preservation, and violate it he did, for he was becoming tame and
+qualifying himself for civilisation.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Nevertheless, White Fang was not quite satisfied with the arrangement. He had
+no abstract ideas about justice and fair play. But there is a certain sense of
+equity that resides in life, and it was this sense in him that resented the
+unfairness of his being permitted no defence against the stone-throwers. He
+forgot that in the covenant entered into between him and the gods they were
+pledged to care for him and defend him. But one day the master sprang from the
+carriage, whip in hand, and gave the stone-throwers a thrashing. After that
+they threw stones no more, and White Fang understood and was satisfied.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+One other experience of similar nature was his. On the way to town, hanging
+around the saloon at the cross-roads, were three dogs that made a practice of
+rushing out upon him when he went by. Knowing his deadly method of fighting,
+the master had never ceased impressing upon White Fang the law that he must not
+fight. As a result, having learned the lesson well, White Fang was hard put
+whenever he passed the cross-roads saloon. After the first rush, each time, his
+snarl kept the three dogs at a distance but they trailed along behind, yelping
+and bickering and insulting him. This endured for some time. The men at the
+saloon even urged the dogs on to attack White Fang. One day they openly sicked
+the dogs on him. The master stopped the carriage.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Go to it,&rdquo; he said to White Fang.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But White Fang could not believe. He looked at the master, and he looked at the
+dogs. Then he looked back eagerly and questioningly at the master.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The master nodded his head. &ldquo;Go to them, old fellow. Eat them up.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+White Fang no longer hesitated. He turned and leaped silently among his
+enemies. All three faced him. There was a great snarling and growling, a
+clashing of teeth and a flurry of bodies. The dust of the road arose in a cloud
+and screened the battle. But at the end of several minutes two dogs were
+struggling in the dirt and the third was in full flight. He leaped a ditch,
+went through a rail fence, and fled across a field. White Fang followed,
+sliding over the ground in wolf fashion and with wolf speed, swiftly and
+without noise, and in the centre of the field he dragged down and slew the dog.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+With this triple killing his main troubles with dogs ceased. The word went up
+and down the valley, and men saw to it that their dogs did not molest the
+Fighting Wolf.
+</p>
+
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<h3><a name="chap24"></a>CHAPTER IV<br/>
+THE CALL OF KIND</h3>
+
+<p>
+The months came and went. There was plenty of food and no work in the
+Southland, and White Fang lived fat and prosperous and happy. Not alone was he
+in the geographical Southland, for he was in the Southland of life. Human
+kindness was like a sun shining upon him, and he flourished like a flower
+planted in good soil.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And yet he remained somehow different from other dogs. He knew the law even
+better than did the dogs that had known no other life, and he observed the law
+more punctiliously; but still there was about him a suggestion of lurking
+ferocity, as though the Wild still lingered in him and the wolf in him merely
+slept.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He never chummed with other dogs. Lonely he had lived, so far as his kind was
+concerned, and lonely he would continue to live. In his puppyhood, under the
+persecution of Lip-lip and the puppy-pack, and in his fighting days with Beauty
+Smith, he had acquired a fixed aversion for dogs. The natural course of his
+life had been diverted, and, recoiling from his kind, he had clung to the
+human.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Besides, all Southland dogs looked upon him with suspicion. He aroused in them
+their instinctive fear of the Wild, and they greeted him always with snarl and
+growl and belligerent hatred. He, on the other hand, learned that it was not
+necessary to use his teeth upon them. His naked fangs and writhing lips were
+uniformly efficacious, rarely failing to send a bellowing on-rushing dog back
+on its haunches.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But there was one trial in White Fang&rsquo;s life&mdash;Collie. She never gave
+him a moment&rsquo;s peace. She was not so amenable to the law as he. She
+defied all efforts of the master to make her become friends with White Fang.
+Ever in his ears was sounding her sharp and nervous snarl. She had never
+forgiven him the chicken-killing episode, and persistently held to the belief
+that his intentions were bad. She found him guilty before the act, and treated
+him accordingly. She became a pest to him, like a policeman following him
+around the stable and the hounds, and, if he even so much as glanced curiously
+at a pigeon or chicken, bursting into an outcry of indignation and wrath. His
+favourite way of ignoring her was to lie down, with his head on his fore-paws,
+and pretend sleep. This always dumfounded and silenced her.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+With the exception of Collie, all things went well with White Fang. He had
+learned control and poise, and he knew the law. He achieved a staidness, and
+calmness, and philosophic tolerance. He no longer lived in a hostile
+environment. Danger and hurt and death did not lurk everywhere about him. In
+time, the unknown, as a thing of terror and menace ever impending, faded away.
+Life was soft and easy. It flowed along smoothly, and neither fear nor foe
+lurked by the way.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He missed the snow without being aware of it. &ldquo;An unduly long
+summer,&rdquo; would have been his thought had he thought about it; as it was,
+he merely missed the snow in a vague, subconscious way. In the same fashion,
+especially in the heat of summer when he suffered from the sun, he experienced
+faint longings for the Northland. Their only effect upon him, however, was to
+make him uneasy and restless without his knowing what was the matter.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+White Fang had never been very demonstrative. Beyond his snuggling and the
+throwing of a crooning note into his love-growl, he had no way of expressing
+his love. Yet it was given him to discover a third way. He had always been
+susceptible to the laughter of the gods. Laughter had affected him with
+madness, made him frantic with rage. But he did not have it in him to be angry
+with the love-master, and when that god elected to laugh at him in a
+good-natured, bantering way, he was nonplussed. He could feel the pricking and
+stinging of the old anger as it strove to rise up in him, but it strove against
+love. He could not be angry; yet he had to do something. At first he was
+dignified, and the master laughed the harder. Then he tried to be more
+dignified, and the master laughed harder than before. In the end, the master
+laughed him out of his dignity. His jaws slightly parted, his lips lifted a
+little, and a quizzical expression that was more love than humour came into his
+eyes. He had learned to laugh.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Likewise he learned to romp with the master, to be tumbled down and rolled
+over, and be the victim of innumerable rough tricks. In return he feigned
+anger, bristling and growling ferociously, and clipping his teeth together in
+snaps that had all the seeming of deadly intention. But he never forgot
+himself. Those snaps were always delivered on the empty air. At the end of such
+a romp, when blow and cuff and snap and snarl were fast and furious, they would
+break off suddenly and stand several feet apart, glaring at each other. And
+then, just as suddenly, like the sun rising on a stormy sea, they would begin
+to laugh. This would always culminate with the master&rsquo;s arms going around
+White Fang&rsquo;s neck and shoulders while the latter crooned and growled his
+love-song.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But nobody else ever romped with White Fang. He did not permit it. He stood on
+his dignity, and when they attempted it, his warning snarl and bristling mane
+were anything but playful. That he allowed the master these liberties was no
+reason that he should be a common dog, loving here and loving there,
+everybody&rsquo;s property for a romp and good time. He loved with single heart
+and refused to cheapen himself or his love.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The master went out on horseback a great deal, and to accompany him was one of
+White Fang&rsquo;s chief duties in life. In the Northland he had evidenced his
+fealty by toiling in the harness; but there were no sleds in the Southland, nor
+did dogs pack burdens on their backs. So he rendered fealty in the new way, by
+running with the master&rsquo;s horse. The longest day never played White Fang
+out. His was the gait of the wolf, smooth, tireless and effortless, and at the
+end of fifty miles he would come in jauntily ahead of the horse.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+It was in connection with the riding, that White Fang achieved one other mode
+of expression&mdash;remarkable in that he did it but twice in all his life. The
+first time occurred when the master was trying to teach a spirited thoroughbred
+the method of opening and closing gates without the rider&rsquo;s dismounting.
+Time and again and many times he ranged the horse up to the gate in the effort
+to close it and each time the horse became frightened and backed and plunged
+away. It grew more nervous and excited every moment. When it reared, the master
+put the spurs to it and made it drop its fore-legs back to earth, whereupon it
+would begin kicking with its hind-legs. White Fang watched the performance with
+increasing anxiety until he could contain himself no longer, when he sprang in
+front of the horse and barked savagely and warningly.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Though he often tried to bark thereafter, and the master encouraged him, he
+succeeded only once, and then it was not in the master&rsquo;s presence. A
+scamper across the pasture, a jackrabbit rising suddenly under the
+horse&rsquo;s feet, a violent sheer, a stumble, a fall to earth, and a broken
+leg for the master, was the cause of it. White Fang sprang in a rage at the
+throat of the offending horse, but was checked by the master&rsquo;s voice.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Home! Go home!&rdquo; the master commanded when he had ascertained his
+injury.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+White Fang was disinclined to desert him. The master thought of writing a note,
+but searched his pockets vainly for pencil and paper. Again he commanded White
+Fang to go home.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The latter regarded him wistfully, started away, then returned and whined
+softly. The master talked to him gently but seriously, and he cocked his ears,
+and listened with painful intentness.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;That&rsquo;s all right, old fellow, you just run along home,&rdquo; ran
+the talk. &ldquo;Go on home and tell them what&rsquo;s happened to me. Home
+with you, you wolf. Get along home!&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+White Fang knew the meaning of &ldquo;home,&rdquo; and though he did not
+understand the remainder of the master&rsquo;s language, he knew it was his
+will that he should go home. He turned and trotted reluctantly away. Then he
+stopped, undecided, and looked back over his shoulder.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Go home!&rdquo; came the sharp command, and this time he obeyed.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The family was on the porch, taking the cool of the afternoon, when White Fang
+arrived. He came in among them, panting, covered with dust.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Weedon&rsquo;s back,&rdquo; Weedon&rsquo;s mother announced.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The children welcomed White Fang with glad cries and ran to meet him. He
+avoided them and passed down the porch, but they cornered him against a
+rocking-chair and the railing. He growled and tried to push by them. Their
+mother looked apprehensively in their direction.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I confess, he makes me nervous around the children,&rdquo; she said.
+&ldquo;I have a dread that he will turn upon them unexpectedly some day.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Growling savagely, White Fang sprang out of the corner, overturning the boy and
+the girl. The mother called them to her and comforted them, telling them not to
+bother White Fang.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;A wolf is a wolf!&rdquo; commented Judge Scott. &ldquo;There is no
+trusting one.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;But he is not all wolf,&rdquo; interposed Beth, standing for her brother
+in his absence.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;You have only Weedon&rsquo;s opinion for that,&rdquo; rejoined the
+judge. &ldquo;He merely surmises that there is some strain of dog in White
+Fang; but as he will tell you himself, he knows nothing about it. As for his
+appearance&mdash;&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He did not finish his sentence. White Fang stood before him, growling fiercely.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Go away! Lie down, sir!&rdquo; Judge Scott commanded.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+White Fang turned to the love-master&rsquo;s wife. She screamed with fright as
+he seized her dress in his teeth and dragged on it till the frail fabric tore
+away. By this time he had become the centre of interest.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He had ceased from his growling and stood, head up, looking into their faces.
+His throat worked spasmodically, but made no sound, while he struggled with all
+his body, convulsed with the effort to rid himself of the incommunicable
+something that strained for utterance.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I hope he is not going mad,&rdquo; said Weedon&rsquo;s mother. &ldquo;I
+told Weedon that I was afraid the warm climate would not agree with an Arctic
+animal.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;He&rsquo;s trying to speak, I do believe,&rdquo; Beth announced.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+At this moment speech came to White Fang, rushing up in a great burst of
+barking.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Something has happened to Weedon,&rdquo; his wife said decisively.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+They were all on their feet now, and White Fang ran down the steps, looking
+back for them to follow. For the second and last time in his life he had barked
+and made himself understood.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+After this event he found a warmer place in the hearts of the Sierra Vista
+people, and even the groom whose arm he had slashed admitted that he was a wise
+dog even if he was a wolf. Judge Scott still held to the same opinion, and
+proved it to everybody&rsquo;s dissatisfaction by measurements and descriptions
+taken from the encyclopaedia and various works on natural history.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The days came and went, streaming their unbroken sunshine over the Santa Clara
+Valley. But as they grew shorter and White Fang&rsquo;s second winter in the
+Southland came on, he made a strange discovery. Collie&rsquo;s teeth were no
+longer sharp. There was a playfulness about her nips and a gentleness that
+prevented them from really hurting him. He forgot that she had made life a
+burden to him, and when she disported herself around him he responded solemnly,
+striving to be playful and becoming no more than ridiculous.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+One day she led him off on a long chase through the back-pasture land into the
+woods. It was the afternoon that the master was to ride, and White Fang knew
+it. The horse stood saddled and waiting at the door. White Fang hesitated. But
+there was that in him deeper than all the law he had learned, than the customs
+that had moulded him, than his love for the master, than the very will to live
+of himself; and when, in the moment of his indecision, Collie nipped him and
+scampered off, he turned and followed after. The master rode alone that day;
+and in the woods, side by side, White Fang ran with Collie, as his mother,
+Kiche, and old One Eye had run long years before in the silent Northland
+forest.
+</p>
+
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<h3><a name="chap25"></a>CHAPTER V<br/>
+THE SLEEPING WOLF</h3>
+
+<p>
+It was about this time that the newspapers were full of the daring escape of a
+convict from San Quentin prison. He was a ferocious man. He had been ill-made
+in the making. He had not been born right, and he had not been helped any by
+the moulding he had received at the hands of society. The hands of society are
+harsh, and this man was a striking sample of its handiwork. He was a
+beast&mdash;a human beast, it is true, but nevertheless so terrible a beast
+that he can best be characterised as carnivorous.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+In San Quentin prison he had proved incorrigible. Punishment failed to break
+his spirit. He could die dumb-mad and fighting to the last, but he could not
+live and be beaten. The more fiercely he fought, the more harshly society
+handled him, and the only effect of harshness was to make him fiercer.
+Strait-jackets, starvation, and beatings and clubbings were the wrong treatment
+for Jim Hall; but it was the treatment he received. It was the treatment he had
+received from the time he was a little pulpy boy in a San Francisco
+slum&mdash;soft clay in the hands of society and ready to be formed into
+something.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+It was during Jim Hall&rsquo;s third term in prison that he encountered a guard
+that was almost as great a beast as he. The guard treated him unfairly, lied
+about him to the warden, lost his credits, persecuted him. The difference
+between them was that the guard carried a bunch of keys and a revolver. Jim
+Hall had only his naked hands and his teeth. But he sprang upon the guard one
+day and used his teeth on the other&rsquo;s throat just like any jungle animal.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+After this, Jim Hall went to live in the incorrigible cell. He lived there
+three years. The cell was of iron, the floor, the walls, the roof. He never
+left this cell. He never saw the sky nor the sunshine. Day was a twilight and
+night was a black silence. He was in an iron tomb, buried alive. He saw no
+human face, spoke to no human thing. When his food was shoved in to him, he
+growled like a wild animal. He hated all things. For days and nights he
+bellowed his rage at the universe. For weeks and months he never made a sound,
+in the black silence eating his very soul. He was a man and a monstrosity, as
+fearful a thing of fear as ever gibbered in the visions of a maddened brain.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And then, one night, he escaped. The warders said it was impossible, but
+nevertheless the cell was empty, and half in half out of it lay the body of a
+dead guard. Two other dead guards marked his trail through the prison to the
+outer walls, and he had killed with his hands to avoid noise.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He was armed with the weapons of the slain guards&mdash;a live arsenal that
+fled through the hills pursued by the organised might of society. A heavy price
+of gold was upon his head. Avaricious farmers hunted him with shot-guns. His
+blood might pay off a mortgage or send a son to college. Public-spirited
+citizens took down their rifles and went out after him. A pack of bloodhounds
+followed the way of his bleeding feet. And the sleuth-hounds of the law, the
+paid fighting animals of society, with telephone, and telegraph, and special
+train, clung to his trail night and day.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Sometimes they came upon him, and men faced him like heroes, or stampeded
+through barbed-wire fences to the delight of the commonwealth reading the
+account at the breakfast table. It was after such encounters that the dead and
+wounded were carted back to the towns, and their places filled by men eager for
+the man-hunt.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And then Jim Hall disappeared. The bloodhounds vainly quested on the lost
+trail. Inoffensive ranchers in remote valleys were held up by armed men and
+compelled to identify themselves. While the remains of Jim Hall were discovered
+on a dozen mountain-sides by greedy claimants for blood-money.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+In the meantime the newspapers were read at Sierra Vista, not so much with
+interest as with anxiety. The women were afraid. Judge Scott pooh-poohed and
+laughed, but not with reason, for it was in his last days on the bench that Jim
+Hall had stood before him and received sentence. And in open court-room, before
+all men, Jim Hall had proclaimed that the day would come when he would wreak
+vengeance on the Judge that sentenced him.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+For once, Jim Hall was right. He was innocent of the crime for which he was
+sentenced. It was a case, in the parlance of thieves and police, of
+&ldquo;rail-roading.&rdquo; Jim Hall was being &ldquo;rail-roaded&rdquo; to
+prison for a crime he had not committed. Because of the two prior convictions
+against him, Judge Scott imposed upon him a sentence of fifty years.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Judge Scott did not know all things, and he did not know that he was party to a
+police conspiracy, that the evidence was hatched and perjured, that Jim Hall
+was guiltless of the crime charged. And Jim Hall, on the other hand, did not
+know that Judge Scott was merely ignorant. Jim Hall believed that the judge
+knew all about it and was hand in glove with the police in the perpetration of
+the monstrous injustice. So it was, when the doom of fifty years of living
+death was uttered by Judge Scott, that Jim Hall, hating all things in the
+society that misused him, rose up and raged in the court-room until dragged
+down by half a dozen of his blue-coated enemies. To him, Judge Scott was the
+keystone in the arch of injustice, and upon Judge Scott he emptied the vials of
+his wrath and hurled the threats of his revenge yet to come. Then Jim Hall went
+to his living death . . . and escaped.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Of all this White Fang knew nothing. But between him and Alice, the
+master&rsquo;s wife, there existed a secret. Each night, after Sierra Vista had
+gone to bed, she rose and let in White Fang to sleep in the big hall. Now White
+Fang was not a house-dog, nor was he permitted to sleep in the house; so each
+morning, early, she slipped down and let him out before the family was awake.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+On one such night, while all the house slept, White Fang awoke and lay very
+quietly. And very quietly he smelled the air and read the message it bore of a
+strange god&rsquo;s presence. And to his ears came sounds of the strange
+god&rsquo;s movements. White Fang burst into no furious outcry. It was not his
+way. The strange god walked softly, but more softly walked White Fang, for he
+had no clothes to rub against the flesh of his body. He followed silently. In
+the Wild he had hunted live meat that was infinitely timid, and he knew the
+advantage of surprise.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The strange god paused at the foot of the great staircase and listened, and
+White Fang was as dead, so without movement was he as he watched and waited. Up
+that staircase the way led to the love-master and to the love-master&rsquo;s
+dearest possessions. White Fang bristled, but waited. The strange god&rsquo;s
+foot lifted. He was beginning the ascent.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Then it was that White Fang struck. He gave no warning, with no snarl
+anticipated his own action. Into the air he lifted his body in the spring that
+landed him on the strange god&rsquo;s back. White Fang clung with his fore-paws
+to the man&rsquo;s shoulders, at the same time burying his fangs into the back
+of the man&rsquo;s neck. He clung on for a moment, long enough to drag the god
+over backward. Together they crashed to the floor. White Fang leaped clear,
+and, as the man struggled to rise, was in again with the slashing fangs.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Sierra Vista awoke in alarm. The noise from downstairs was as that of a score
+of battling fiends. There were revolver shots. A man&rsquo;s voice screamed
+once in horror and anguish. There was a great snarling and growling, and over
+all arose a smashing and crashing of furniture and glass.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But almost as quickly as it had arisen, the commotion died away. The struggle
+had not lasted more than three minutes. The frightened household clustered at
+the top of the stairway. From below, as from out an abyss of blackness, came up
+a gurgling sound, as of air bubbling through water. Sometimes this gurgle
+became sibilant, almost a whistle. But this, too, quickly died down and ceased.
+Then naught came up out of the blackness save a heavy panting of some creature
+struggling sorely for air.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Weedon Scott pressed a button, and the staircase and downstairs hall were
+flooded with light. Then he and Judge Scott, revolvers in hand, cautiously
+descended. There was no need for this caution. White Fang had done his work. In
+the midst of the wreckage of overthrown and smashed furniture, partly on his
+side, his face hidden by an arm, lay a man. Weedon Scott bent over, removed the
+arm and turned the man&rsquo;s face upward. A gaping throat explained the
+manner of his death.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Jim Hall,&rdquo; said Judge Scott, and father and son looked
+significantly at each other.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Then they turned to White Fang. He, too, was lying on his side. His eyes were
+closed, but the lids slightly lifted in an effort to look at them as they bent
+over him, and the tail was perceptibly agitated in a vain effort to wag. Weedon
+Scott patted him, and his throat rumbled an acknowledging growl. But it was a
+weak growl at best, and it quickly ceased. His eyelids drooped and went shut,
+and his whole body seemed to relax and flatten out upon the floor.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;He&rsquo;s all in, poor devil,&rdquo; muttered the master.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;We&rsquo;ll see about that,&rdquo; asserted the Judge, as he started for
+the telephone.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Frankly, he has one chance in a thousand,&rdquo; announced the surgeon,
+after he had worked an hour and a half on White Fang.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Dawn was breaking through the windows and dimming the electric lights. With the
+exception of the children, the whole family was gathered about the surgeon to
+hear his verdict.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;One broken hind-leg,&rdquo; he went on. &ldquo;Three broken ribs, one at
+least of which has pierced the lungs. He has lost nearly all the blood in his
+body. There is a large likelihood of internal injuries. He must have been
+jumped upon. To say nothing of three bullet holes clear through him. One chance
+in a thousand is really optimistic. He hasn&rsquo;t a chance in ten
+thousand.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;But he mustn&rsquo;t lose any chance that might be of help to
+him,&rdquo; Judge Scott exclaimed. &ldquo;Never mind expense. Put him under the
+X-ray&mdash;anything. Weedon, telegraph at once to San Francisco for Doctor
+Nichols. No reflection on you, doctor, you understand; but he must have the
+advantage of every chance.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The surgeon smiled indulgently. &ldquo;Of course I understand. He deserves all
+that can be done for him. He must be nursed as you would nurse a human being, a
+sick child. And don&rsquo;t forget what I told you about temperature.
+I&rsquo;ll be back at ten o&rsquo;clock again.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+White Fang received the nursing. Judge Scott&rsquo;s suggestion of a trained
+nurse was indignantly clamoured down by the girls, who themselves undertook the
+task. And White Fang won out on the one chance in ten thousand denied him by
+the surgeon.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The latter was not to be censured for his misjudgment. All his life he had
+tended and operated on the soft humans of civilisation, who lived sheltered
+lives and had descended out of many sheltered generations. Compared with White
+Fang, they were frail and flabby, and clutched life without any strength in
+their grip. White Fang had come straight from the Wild, where the weak perish
+early and shelter is vouchsafed to none. In neither his father nor his mother
+was there any weakness, nor in the generations before them. A constitution of
+iron and the vitality of the Wild were White Fang&rsquo;s inheritance, and he
+clung to life, the whole of him and every part of him, in spirit and in flesh,
+with the tenacity that of old belonged to all creatures.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Bound down a prisoner, denied even movement by the plaster casts and bandages,
+White Fang lingered out the weeks. He slept long hours and dreamed much, and
+through his mind passed an unending pageant of Northland visions. All the
+ghosts of the past arose and were with him. Once again he lived in the lair
+with Kiche, crept trembling to the knees of Grey Beaver to tender his
+allegiance, ran for his life before Lip-lip and all the howling bedlam of the
+puppy-pack.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He ran again through the silence, hunting his living food through the months of
+famine; and again he ran at the head of the team, the gut-whips of Mit-sah and
+Grey Beaver snapping behind, their voices crying &ldquo;Ra! Raa!&rdquo; when
+they came to a narrow passage and the team closed together like a fan to go
+through. He lived again all his days with Beauty Smith and the fights he had
+fought. At such times he whimpered and snarled in his sleep, and they that
+looked on said that his dreams were bad.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But there was one particular nightmare from which he suffered&mdash;the
+clanking, clanging monsters of electric cars that were to him colossal
+screaming lynxes. He would lie in a screen of bushes, watching for a squirrel
+to venture far enough out on the ground from its tree-refuge. Then, when he
+sprang out upon it, it would transform itself into an electric car, menacing
+and terrible, towering over him like a mountain, screaming and clanging and
+spitting fire at him. It was the same when he challenged the hawk down out of
+the sky. Down out of the blue it would rush, as it dropped upon him changing
+itself into the ubiquitous electric car. Or again, he would be in the pen of
+Beauty Smith. Outside the pen, men would be gathering, and he knew that a fight
+was on. He watched the door for his antagonist to enter. The door would open,
+and thrust in upon him would come the awful electric car. A thousand times this
+occurred, and each time the terror it inspired was as vivid and great as ever.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Then came the day when the last bandage and the last plaster cast were taken
+off. It was a gala day. All Sierra Vista was gathered around. The master rubbed
+his ears, and he crooned his love-growl. The master&rsquo;s wife called him the
+&ldquo;Blessed Wolf,&rdquo; which name was taken up with acclaim and all the
+women called him the Blessed Wolf.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He tried to rise to his feet, and after several attempts fell down from
+weakness. He had lain so long that his muscles had lost their cunning, and all
+the strength had gone out of them. He felt a little shame because of his
+weakness, as though, forsooth, he were failing the gods in the service he owed
+them. Because of this he made heroic efforts to arise and at last he stood on
+his four legs, tottering and swaying back and forth.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;The Blessed Wolf!&rdquo; chorused the women.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Judge Scott surveyed them triumphantly.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Out of your own mouths be it,&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;Just as I contended
+right along. No mere dog could have done what he did. He&rsquo;s a wolf.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;A Blessed Wolf,&rdquo; amended the Judge&rsquo;s wife.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Yes, Blessed Wolf,&rdquo; agreed the Judge. &ldquo;And henceforth that
+shall be my name for him.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;He&rsquo;ll have to learn to walk again,&rdquo; said the surgeon;
+&ldquo;so he might as well start in right now. It won&rsquo;t hurt him. Take
+him outside.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And outside he went, like a king, with all Sierra Vista about him and tending
+on him. He was very weak, and when he reached the lawn he lay down and rested
+for a while.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Then the procession started on, little spurts of strength coming into White
+Fang&rsquo;s muscles as he used them and the blood began to surge through them.
+The stables were reached, and there in the doorway, lay Collie, a half-dozen
+pudgy puppies playing about her in the sun.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+White Fang looked on with a wondering eye. Collie snarled warningly at him, and
+he was careful to keep his distance. The master with his toe helped one
+sprawling puppy toward him. He bristled suspiciously, but the master warned him
+that all was well. Collie, clasped in the arms of one of the women, watched him
+jealously and with a snarl warned him that all was not well.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The puppy sprawled in front of him. He cocked his ears and watched it
+curiously. Then their noses touched, and he felt the warm little tongue of the
+puppy on his jowl. White Fang&rsquo;s tongue went out, he knew not why, and he
+licked the puppy&rsquo;s face.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Hand-clapping and pleased cries from the gods greeted the performance. He was
+surprised, and looked at them in a puzzled way. Then his weakness asserted
+itself, and he lay down, his ears cocked, his head on one side, as he watched
+the puppy. The other puppies came sprawling toward him, to Collie&rsquo;s great
+disgust; and he gravely permitted them to clamber and tumble over him. At
+first, amid the applause of the gods, he betrayed a trifle of his old
+self-consciousness and awkwardness. This passed away as the puppies&rsquo;
+antics and mauling continued, and he lay with half-shut patient eyes, drowsing
+in the sun.
+</p>
+
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+
+<div style='display:block; margin-top:4em'>*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK WHITE FANG ***</div>
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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of White Fang, by Jack London
+(#7 in our series by Jack London)
+
+Copyright laws are changing all over the world. Be sure to check the
+copyright laws for your country before downloading or redistributing
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+**eBooks Readable By Both Humans and By Computers, Since 1971**
+
+*****These eBooks Were Prepared By Thousands of Volunteers!*****
+
+
+Title: White Fang
+
+Author: Jack London
+
+Release Date: May, 1997  [EBook #910]
+[This file was first posted on May 13, 1997]
+[Most recently updated: May 12, 2003]
+
+Edition: 10
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: US-ASCII
+
+*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK, WHITE FANG ***
+
+
+
+
+Transcribed from the 1915 edition by David Price,
+email ccx074@coventry.ac.uk
+
+
+
+
+White Fang
+
+
+
+
+PART I
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I--THE TRAIL OF THE MEAT
+
+
+
+Dark spruce forest frowned on either side the frozen waterway.  The
+trees had been stripped by a recent wind of their white covering of
+frost, and they seemed to lean towards each other, black and
+ominous, in the fading light.  A vast silence reigned over the
+land.  The land itself was a desolation, lifeless, without
+movement, so lone and cold that the spirit of it was not even that
+of sadness.  There was a hint in it of laughter, but of a laughter
+more terrible than any sadness--a laughter that was mirthless as
+the smile of the sphinx, a laughter cold as the frost and partaking
+of the grimness of infallibility.  It was the masterful and
+incommunicable wisdom of eternity laughing at the futility of life
+and the effort of life.  It was the Wild, the savage, frozen-
+hearted Northland Wild.
+
+But there WAS life, abroad in the land and defiant.  Down the
+frozen waterway toiled a string of wolfish dogs.  Their bristly fur
+was rimed with frost.  Their breath froze in the air as it left
+their mouths, spouting forth in spumes of vapour that settled upon
+the hair of their bodies and formed into crystals of frost.
+Leather harness was on the dogs, and leather traces attached them
+to a sled which dragged along behind.  The sled was without
+runners.  It was made of stout birch-bark, and its full surface
+rested on the snow.  The front end of the sled was turned up, like
+a scroll, in order to force down and under the bore of soft snow
+that surged like a wave before it.  On the sled, securely lashed,
+was a long and narrow oblong box.  There were other things on the
+sled--blankets, an axe, and a coffee-pot and frying-pan; but
+prominent, occupying most of the space, was the long and narrow
+oblong box.
+
+In advance of the dogs, on wide snowshoes, toiled a man.  At the
+rear of the sled toiled a second man.  On the sled, in the box, lay
+a third man whose toil was over,--a man whom the Wild had conquered
+and beaten down until he would never move nor struggle again.  It
+is not the way of the Wild to like movement.  Life is an offence to
+it, for life is movement; and the Wild aims always to destroy
+movement.  It freezes the water to prevent it running to the sea;
+it drives the sap out of the trees till they are frozen to their
+mighty hearts; and most ferociously and terribly of all does the
+Wild harry and crush into submission man--man who is the most
+restless of life, ever in revolt against the dictum that all
+movement must in the end come to the cessation of movement.
+
+But at front and rear, unawed and indomitable, toiled the two men
+who were not yet dead.  Their bodies were covered with fur and
+soft-tanned leather.  Eyelashes and cheeks and lips were so coated
+with the crystals from their frozen breath that their faces were
+not discernible.  This gave them the seeming of ghostly masques,
+undertakers in a spectral world at the funeral of some ghost.  But
+under it all they were men, penetrating the land of desolation and
+mockery and silence, puny adventurers bent on colossal adventure,
+pitting themselves against the might of a world as remote and alien
+and pulseless as the abysses of space.
+
+They travelled on without speech, saving their breath for the work
+of their bodies.  On every side was the silence, pressing upon them
+with a tangible presence.  It affected their minds as the many
+atmospheres of deep water affect the body of the diver.  It crushed
+them with the weight of unending vastness and unalterable decree.
+It crushed them into the remotest recesses of their own minds,
+pressing out of them, like juices from the grape, all the false
+ardours and exaltations and undue self-values of the human soul,
+until they perceived themselves finite and small, specks and motes,
+moving with weak cunning and little wisdom amidst the play and
+inter-play of the great blind elements and forces.
+
+An hour went by, and a second hour.  The pale light of the short
+sunless day was beginning to fade, when a faint far cry arose on
+the still air.  It soared upward with a swift rush, till it reached
+its topmost note, where it persisted, palpitant and tense, and then
+slowly died away.  It might have been a lost soul wailing, had it
+not been invested with a certain sad fierceness and hungry
+eagerness.  The front man turned his head until his eyes met the
+eyes of the man behind.  And then, across the narrow oblong box,
+each nodded to the other.
+
+A second cry arose, piercing the silence with needle-like
+shrillness.  Both men located the sound.  It was to the rear,
+somewhere in the snow expanse they had just traversed.  A third and
+answering cry arose, also to the rear and to the left of the second
+cry.
+
+"They're after us, Bill," said the man at the front.
+
+His voice sounded hoarse and unreal, and he had spoken with
+apparent effort.
+
+"Meat is scarce," answered his comrade.  "I ain't seen a rabbit
+sign for days."
+
+Thereafter they spoke no more, though their ears were keen for the
+hunting-cries that continued to rise behind them.
+
+At the fall of darkness they swung the dogs into a cluster of
+spruce trees on the edge of the waterway and made a camp.  The
+coffin, at the side of the fire, served for seat and table.  The
+wolf-dogs, clustered on the far side of the fire, snarled and
+bickered among themselves, but evinced no inclination to stray off
+into the darkness.
+
+"Seems to me, Henry, they're stayin' remarkable close to camp,"
+Bill commented.
+
+Henry, squatting over the fire and settling the pot of coffee with
+a piece of ice, nodded.  Nor did he speak till he had taken his
+seat on the coffin and begun to eat.
+
+"They know where their hides is safe," he said.  "They'd sooner eat
+grub than be grub.  They're pretty wise, them dogs."
+
+Bill shook his head.  "Oh, I don't know."
+
+His comrade looked at him curiously.  "First time I ever heard you
+say anything about their not bein' wise."
+
+"Henry," said the other, munching with deliberation the beans he
+was eating, "did you happen to notice the way them dogs kicked up
+when I was a-feedin' 'em?"
+
+"They did cut up more'n usual," Henry acknowledged.
+
+"How many dogs 've we got, Henry?"
+
+"Six."
+
+"Well, Henry . . . " Bill stopped for a moment, in order that his
+words might gain greater significance.  "As I was sayin', Henry,
+we've got six dogs.  I took six fish out of the bag.  I gave one
+fish to each dog, an', Henry, I was one fish short."
+
+"You counted wrong."
+
+"We've got six dogs," the other reiterated dispassionately.  "I
+took out six fish.  One Ear didn't get no fish.  I came back to the
+bag afterward an' got 'm his fish."
+
+"We've only got six dogs," Henry said.
+
+"Henry," Bill went on.  "I won't say they was all dogs, but there
+was seven of 'm that got fish."
+
+Henry stopped eating to glance across the fire and count the dogs.
+
+"There's only six now," he said.
+
+"I saw the other one run off across the snow," Bill announced with
+cool positiveness.  "I saw seven."
+
+Henry looked at him commiseratingly, and said, "I'll be almighty
+glad when this trip's over."
+
+"What d'ye mean by that?" Bill demanded.
+
+"I mean that this load of ourn is gettin' on your nerves, an' that
+you're beginnin' to see things."
+
+"I thought of that," Bill answered gravely.  "An' so, when I saw it
+run off across the snow, I looked in the snow an' saw its tracks.
+Then I counted the dogs an' there was still six of 'em.  The tracks
+is there in the snow now.  D'ye want to look at 'em?  I'll show 'em
+to you."
+
+Henry did not reply, but munched on in silence, until, the meal
+finished, he topped it with a final cup a of coffee.  He wiped his
+mouth with the back of his hand and said:
+
+"Then you're thinkin' as it was--"
+
+A long wailing cry, fiercely sad, from somewhere in the darkness,
+had interrupted him.  He stopped to listen to it, then he finished
+his sentence with a wave of his hand toward the sound of the cry,
+"--one of them?"
+
+Bill nodded.  "I'd a blame sight sooner think that than anything
+else.  You noticed yourself the row the dogs made."
+
+Cry after cry, and answering cries, were turning the silence into a
+bedlam.  From every side the cries arose, and the dogs betrayed
+their fear by huddling together and so close to the fire that their
+hair was scorched by the heat.  Bill threw on more wood, before
+lighting his pipe.
+
+"I'm thinking you're down in the mouth some," Henry said.
+
+"Henry . . . "  He sucked meditatively at his pipe for some time
+before he went on.  "Henry, I was a-thinkin' what a blame sight
+luckier he is than you an' me'll ever be."
+
+He indicated the third person by a downward thrust of the thumb to
+the box on which they sat.
+
+"You an' me, Henry, when we die, we'll be lucky if we get enough
+stones over our carcases to keep the dogs off of us."
+
+"But we ain't got people an' money an' all the rest, like him,"
+Henry rejoined.  "Long-distance funerals is somethin' you an' me
+can't exactly afford."
+
+"What gets me, Henry, is what a chap like this, that's a lord or
+something in his own country, and that's never had to bother about
+grub nor blankets; why he comes a-buttin' round the Godforsaken
+ends of the earth--that's what I can't exactly see."
+
+"He might have lived to a ripe old age if he'd stayed at home,"
+Henry agreed.
+
+Bill opened his mouth to speak, but changed his mind.  Instead, he
+pointed towards the wall of darkness that pressed about them from
+every side.  There was no suggestion of form in the utter
+blackness; only could be seen a pair of eyes gleaming like live
+coals.  Henry indicated with his head a second pair, and a third.
+A circle of the gleaming eyes had drawn about their camp.  Now and
+again a pair of eyes moved, or disappeared to appear again a moment
+later.
+
+The unrest of the dogs had been increasing, and they stampeded, in
+a surge of sudden fear, to the near side of the fire, cringing and
+crawling about the legs of the men.  In the scramble one of the
+dogs had been overturned on the edge of the fire, and it had yelped
+with pain and fright as the smell of its singed coat possessed the
+air.  The commotion caused the circle of eyes to shift restlessly
+for a moment and even to withdraw a bit, but it settled down again
+as the dogs became quiet.
+
+"Henry, it's a blame misfortune to be out of ammunition."
+
+Bill had finished his pipe and was helping his companion to spread
+the bed of fur and blanket upon the spruce boughs which he had laid
+over the snow before supper.  Henry grunted, and began unlacing his
+mocassins.
+
+"How many cartridges did you say you had left?" he asked.
+
+"Three," came the answer.  "An' I wisht 'twas three hundred.  Then
+I'd show 'em what for, damn 'em!"
+
+He shook his fist angrily at the gleaming eyes, and began securely
+to prop his moccasins before the fire.
+
+"An' I wisht this cold snap'd break," he went on.  "It's ben fifty
+below for two weeks now.  An' I wisht I'd never started on this
+trip, Henry.  I don't like the looks of it.  I don't feel right,
+somehow.  An' while I'm wishin', I wisht the trip was over an' done
+with, an' you an' me a-sittin' by the fire in Fort McGurry just
+about now an' playing cribbage--that's what I wisht."
+
+Henry grunted and crawled into bed.  As he dozed off he was aroused
+by his comrade's voice.
+
+"Say, Henry, that other one that come in an' got a fish--why didn't
+the dogs pitch into it?  That's what's botherin' me."
+
+"You're botherin' too much, Bill," came the sleepy response.  "You
+was never like this before.  You jes' shut up now, an' go to sleep,
+an' you'll be all hunkydory in the mornin'.  Your stomach's sour,
+that's what's botherin' you."
+
+The men slept, breathing heavily, side by side, under the one
+covering.  The fire died down, and the gleaming eyes drew closer
+the circle they had flung about the camp.  The dogs clustered
+together in fear, now and again snarling menacingly as a pair of
+eyes drew close.  Once their uproar became so loud that Bill woke
+up.  He got out of bed carefully, so as not to disturb the sleep of
+his comrade, and threw more wood on the fire.  As it began to flame
+up, the circle of eyes drew farther back.  He glanced casually at
+the huddling dogs.  He rubbed his eyes and looked at them more
+sharply.  Then he crawled back into the blankets.
+
+"Henry," he said.  "Oh, Henry."
+
+Henry groaned as he passed from sleep to waking, and demanded,
+"What's wrong now?"
+
+"Nothin'," came the answer; "only there's seven of 'em again.  I
+just counted."
+
+Henry acknowledged receipt of the information with a grunt that
+slid into a snore as he drifted back into sleep.
+
+In the morning it was Henry who awoke first and routed his
+companion out of bed.  Daylight was yet three hours away, though it
+was already six o'clock; and in the darkness Henry went about
+preparing breakfast, while Bill rolled the blankets and made the
+sled ready for lashing.
+
+"Say, Henry," he asked suddenly, "how many dogs did you say we
+had?"
+
+"Six."
+
+"Wrong," Bill proclaimed triumphantly.
+
+"Seven again?" Henry queried.
+
+"No, five; one's gone."
+
+"The hell!"  Henry cried in wrath, leaving the cooking to come and
+count the dogs.
+
+"You're right, Bill," he concluded.  "Fatty's gone."
+
+"An' he went like greased lightnin' once he got started.  Couldn't
+'ve seen 'm for smoke."
+
+"No chance at all," Henry concluded.  "They jes' swallowed 'm
+alive.  I bet he was yelpin' as he went down their throats, damn
+'em!"
+
+"He always was a fool dog," said Bill.
+
+"But no fool dog ought to be fool enough to go off an' commit
+suicide that way."  He looked over the remainder of the team with a
+speculative eye that summed up instantly the salient traits of each
+animal.  "I bet none of the others would do it."
+
+"Couldn't drive 'em away from the fire with a club," Bill agreed.
+"I always did think there was somethin' wrong with Fatty anyway."
+
+And this was the epitaph of a dead dog on the Northland trail--less
+scant than the epitaph of many another dog, of many a man.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II--THE SHE-WOLF
+
+
+
+Breakfast eaten and the slim camp-outfit lashed to the sled, the
+men turned their backs on the cheery fire and launched out into the
+darkness.  At once began to rise the cries that were fiercely sad--
+cries that called through the darkness and cold to one another and
+answered back.  Conversation ceased.  Daylight came at nine
+o'clock.  At midday the sky to the south warmed to rose-colour, and
+marked where the bulge of the earth intervened between the meridian
+sun and the northern world.  But the rose-colour swiftly faded.
+The grey light of day that remained lasted until three o'clock,
+when it, too, faded, and the pall of the Arctic night descended
+upon the lone and silent land.
+
+As darkness came on, the hunting-cries to right and left and rear
+drew closer--so close that more than once they sent surges of fear
+through the toiling dogs, throwing them into short-lived panics.
+
+At the conclusion of one such panic, when he and Henry had got the
+dogs back in the traces, Bill said:
+
+"I wisht they'd strike game somewheres, an' go away an' leave us
+alone."
+
+"They do get on the nerves horrible,"  Henry sympathised.
+
+They spoke no more until camp was made.
+
+Henry was bending over and adding ice to the babbling pot of beans
+when he was startled by the sound of a blow, an exclamation from
+Bill, and a sharp snarling cry of pain from among the dogs.  He
+straightened up in time to see a dim form disappearing across the
+snow into the shelter of the dark.  Then he saw Bill, standing amid
+the dogs, half triumphant, half crestfallen, in one hand a stout
+club, in the other the tail and part of the body of a sun-cured
+salmon.
+
+"It got half of it," he announced; "but I got a whack at it jes'
+the same.  D'ye hear it squeal?"
+
+"What'd it look like?" Henry asked.
+
+"Couldn't see.  But it had four legs an' a mouth an' hair an'
+looked like any dog."
+
+"Must be a tame wolf, I reckon."
+
+"It's damned tame, whatever it is, comin' in here at feedin' time
+an' gettin' its whack of fish."
+
+That night, when supper was finished and they sat on the oblong box
+and pulled at their pipes, the circle of gleaming eyes drew in even
+closer than before.
+
+"I wisht they'd spring up a bunch of moose or something, an' go
+away an' leave us alone," Bill said.
+
+Henry grunted with an intonation that was not all sympathy, and for
+a quarter of an hour they sat on in silence, Henry staring at the
+fire, and Bill at the circle of eyes that burned in the darkness
+just beyond the firelight.
+
+"I wisht we was pullin' into McGurry right now," he began again.
+
+"Shut up your wishin' and your croakin'," Henry burst out angrily.
+"Your stomach's sour.  That's what's ailin' you.  Swallow a
+spoonful of sody, an' you'll sweeten up wonderful an' be more
+pleasant company."
+
+In the morning Henry was aroused by fervid blasphemy that proceeded
+from the mouth of Bill.  Henry propped himself up on an elbow and
+looked to see his comrade standing among the dogs beside the
+replenished fire, his arms raised in objurgation, his face
+distorted with passion.
+
+"Hello!" Henry called.  "What's up now?"
+
+"Frog's gone," came the answer.
+
+"No."
+
+"I tell you yes."
+
+Henry leaped out of the blankets and to the dogs.  He counted them
+with care, and then joined his partner in cursing the power of the
+Wild that had robbed them of another dog.
+
+"Frog was the strongest dog of the bunch," Bill pronounced finally.
+
+"An' he was no fool dog neither," Henry added.
+
+And so was recorded the second epitaph in two days.
+
+A gloomy breakfast was eaten, and the four remaining dogs were
+harnessed to the sled.  The day was a repetition of the days that
+had gone before.  The men toiled without speech across the face of
+the frozen world.  The silence was unbroken save by the cries of
+their pursuers, that, unseen, hung upon their rear.  With the
+coming of night in the mid-afternoon, the cries sounded closer as
+the pursuers drew in according to their custom; and the dogs grew
+excited and frightened, and were guilty of panics that tangled the
+traces and further depressed the two men.
+
+"There, that'll fix you fool critters," Bill said with satisfaction
+that night, standing erect at completion of his task.
+
+Henry left the cooking to come and see.  Not only had his partner
+tied the dogs up, but he had tied them, after the Indian fashion,
+with sticks.  About the neck of each dog he had fastened a leather
+thong.  To this, and so close to the neck that the dog could not
+get his teeth to it, he had tied a stout stick four or five feet in
+length.  The other end of the stick, in turn, was made fast to a
+stake in the ground by means of a leather thong.  The dog was
+unable to gnaw through the leather at his own end of the stick.
+The stick prevented him from getting at the leather that fastened
+the other end.
+
+Henry nodded his head approvingly.
+
+"It's the only contraption that'll ever hold One Ear," he said.
+"He can gnaw through leather as clean as a knife an' jes' about
+half as quick.  They all'll be here in the mornin' hunkydory."
+
+"You jes' bet they will," Bill affirmed.  "If one of em' turns up
+missin', I'll go without my coffee."
+
+"They jes' know we ain't loaded to kill," Henry remarked at bed-
+time, indicating the gleaming circle that hemmed them in.  "If we
+could put a couple of shots into 'em, they'd be more respectful.
+They come closer every night.  Get the firelight out of your eyes
+an' look hard--there!  Did you see that one?"
+
+For some time the two men amused themselves with watching the
+movement of vague forms on the edge of the firelight.  By looking
+closely and steadily at where a pair of eyes burned in the
+darkness, the form of the animal would slowly take shape.  They
+could even see these forms move at times.
+
+A sound among the dogs attracted the men's attention.  One Ear was
+uttering quick, eager whines, lunging at the length of his stick
+toward the darkness, and desisting now and again in order to make
+frantic attacks on the stick with his teeth.
+
+"Look at that, Bill," Henry whispered.
+
+Full into the firelight, with a stealthy, sidelong movement, glided
+a doglike animal.  It moved with commingled mistrust and daring,
+cautiously observing the men, its attention fixed on the dogs.  One
+Ear strained the full length of the stick toward the intruder and
+whined with eagerness.
+
+"That fool One Ear don't seem scairt much," Bill said in a low
+tone.
+
+"It's a she-wolf," Henry whispered back, "an' that accounts for
+Fatty an' Frog.  She's the decoy for the pack.  She draws out the
+dog an' then all the rest pitches in an' eats 'm up."
+
+The fire crackled.  A log fell apart with a loud spluttering noise.
+At the sound of it the strange animal leaped back into the
+darkness.
+
+"Henry, I'm a-thinkin'," Bill announced.
+
+"Thinkin' what?"
+
+"I'm a-thinkin' that was the one I lambasted with the club."
+
+"Ain't the slightest doubt in the world," was Henry's response.
+
+"An' right here I want to remark," Bill went on, "that that
+animal's familyarity with campfires is suspicious an' immoral."
+
+"It knows for certain more'n a self-respectin' wolf ought to know,"
+Henry agreed.  "A wolf that knows enough to come in with the dogs
+at feedin' time has had experiences."
+
+"Ol' Villan had a dog once that run away with the wolves," Bill
+cogitates aloud.  "I ought to know.  I shot it out of the pack in a
+moose pasture over 'on Little Stick.  An' Ol' Villan cried like a
+baby.  Hadn't seen it for three years, he said.  Ben with the
+wolves all that time."
+
+"I reckon you've called the turn, Bill.  That wolf's a dog, an'
+it's eaten fish many's the time from the hand of man."
+
+"An if I get a chance at it, that wolf that's a dog'll be jes'
+meat," Bill declared.  "We can't afford to lose no more animals."
+
+"But you've only got three cartridges," Henry objected.
+
+"I'll wait for a dead sure shot," was the reply.
+
+In the morning Henry renewed the fire and cooked breakfast to the
+accompaniment of his partner's snoring.
+
+"You was sleepin' jes' too comfortable for anything," Henry told
+him, as he routed him out for breakfast.  "I hadn't the heart to
+rouse you."
+
+Bill began to eat sleepily.  He noticed that his cup was empty and
+started to reach for the pot.  But the pot was beyond arm's length
+and beside Henry.
+
+"Say, Henry," he chided gently, "ain't you forgot somethin'?"
+
+Henry looked about with great carefulness and shook his head.  Bill
+held up the empty cup.
+
+"You don't get no coffee," Henry announced.
+
+"Ain't run out?" Bill asked anxiously.
+
+"Nope."
+
+"Ain't thinkin' it'll hurt my digestion?"
+
+"Nope."
+
+A flush of angry blood pervaded Bill's face.
+
+"Then it's jes' warm an' anxious I am to be hearin' you explain
+yourself," he said.
+
+"Spanker's gone," Henry answered.
+
+Without haste, with the air of one resigned to misfortune Bill
+turned his head, and from where he sat counted the dogs.
+
+"How'd it happen?" he asked apathetically.
+
+Henry shrugged his shoulders.  "Don't know.  Unless One Ear gnawed
+'m loose.  He couldn't a-done it himself, that's sure."
+
+"The darned cuss."  Bill spoke gravely and slowly, with no hint of
+the anger that was raging within.  "Jes' because he couldn't chew
+himself loose, he chews Spanker loose."
+
+"Well, Spanker's troubles is over anyway; I guess he's digested by
+this time an' cavortin' over the landscape in the bellies of twenty
+different wolves," was Henry's epitaph on this, the latest lost
+dog.  "Have some coffee, Bill."
+
+But Bill shook his head.
+
+"Go on," Henry pleaded, elevating the pot.
+
+Bill shoved his cup aside.  "I'll be ding-dong-danged if I do.  I
+said I wouldn't if ary dog turned up missin', an' I won't."
+
+"It's darn good coffee," Henry said enticingly.
+
+But Bill was stubborn, and he ate a dry breakfast washed down with
+mumbled curses at One Ear for the trick he had played.
+
+"I'll tie 'em up out of reach of each other to-night," Bill said,
+as they took the trail.
+
+They had travelled little more than a hundred yards, when Henry,
+who was in front, bent down and picked up something with which his
+snowshoe had collided.  It was dark, and he could not see it, but
+he recognised it by the touch.  He flung it back, so that it struck
+the sled and bounced along until it fetched up on Bill's snowshoes.
+
+"Mebbe you'll need that in your business," Henry said.
+
+Bill uttered an exclamation.  It was all that was left of Spanker--
+the stick with which he had been tied.
+
+"They ate 'm hide an' all," Bill announced.  "The stick's as clean
+as a whistle.  They've ate the leather offen both ends.  They're
+damn hungry, Henry, an' they'll have you an' me guessin' before
+this trip's over."
+
+Henry laughed defiantly.  "I ain't been trailed this way by wolves
+before, but I've gone through a whole lot worse an' kept my health.
+Takes more'n a handful of them pesky critters to do for yours
+truly, Bill, my son."
+
+"I don't know, I don't know," Bill muttered ominously.
+
+"Well, you'll know all right when we pull into McGurry."
+
+"I ain't feelin' special enthusiastic," Bill persisted.
+
+"You're off colour, that's what's the matter with you," Henry
+dogmatised.  "What you need is quinine, an' I'm goin' to dose you
+up stiff as soon as we make McGurry."
+
+Bill grunted his disagreement with the diagnosis, and lapsed into
+silence.  The day was like all the days.  Light came at nine
+o'clock.  At twelve o'clock the southern horizon was warmed by the
+unseen sun; and then began the cold grey of afternoon that would
+merge, three hours later, into night.
+
+It was just after the sun's futile effort to appear, that Bill
+slipped the rifle from under the sled-lashings and said:
+
+"You keep right on, Henry, I'm goin' to see what I can see."
+
+"You'd better stick by the sled," his partner protested.  "You've
+only got three cartridges, an' there's no tellin' what might
+happen."
+
+"Who's croaking now?" Bill demanded triumphantly.
+
+Henry made no reply, and plodded on alone, though often he cast
+anxious glances back into the grey solitude where his partner had
+disappeared.  An hour later, taking advantage of the cut-offs
+around which the sled had to go, Bill arrived.
+
+"They're scattered an' rangin' along wide," he said:  "keeping up
+with us an' lookin' for game at the same time.  You see, they're
+sure of us, only they know they've got to wait to get us.  In the
+meantime they're willin' to pick up anything eatable that comes
+handy."
+
+"You mean they THINK they're sure of us," Henry objected pointedly.
+
+But Bill ignored him.  "I seen some of them.  They're pretty thin.
+They ain't had a bite in weeks I reckon, outside of Fatty an' Frog
+an' Spanker; an' there's so many of 'em that that didn't go far.
+They're remarkable thin.  Their ribs is like wash-boards, an' their
+stomachs is right up against their backbones.  They're pretty
+desperate, I can tell you.  They'll be goin' mad, yet, an' then
+watch out."
+
+A few minutes later, Henry, who was now travelling behind the sled,
+emitted a low, warning whistle.  Bill turned and looked, then
+quietly stopped the dogs.  To the rear, from around the last bend
+and plainly into view, on the very trail they had just covered,
+trotted a furry, slinking form.  Its nose was to the trail, and it
+trotted with a peculiar, sliding, effortless gait.  When they
+halted, it halted, throwing up its head and regarding them steadily
+with nostrils that twitched as it caught and studied the scent of
+them.
+
+"It's the she-wolf," Bill answered.
+
+The dogs had laid down in the snow, and he walked past them to join
+his partner in the sled.  Together they watched the strange animal
+that had pursued them for days and that had already accomplished
+the destruction of half their dog-team.
+
+After a searching scrutiny, the animal trotted forward a few steps.
+This it repeated several times, till it was a short hundred yards
+away.  It paused, head up, close by a clump of spruce trees, and
+with sight and scent studied the outfit of the watching men.  It
+looked at them in a strangely wistful way, after the manner of a
+dog; but in its wistfulness there was none of the dog affection.
+It was a wistfulness bred of hunger, as cruel as its own fangs, as
+merciless as the frost itself.
+
+It was large for a wolf, its gaunt frame advertising the lines of
+an animal that was among the largest of its kind.
+
+"Stands pretty close to two feet an' a half at the shoulders,"
+Henry commented.  "An' I'll bet it ain't far from five feet long."
+
+"Kind of strange colour for a wolf," was Bill's criticism.  "I
+never seen a red wolf before.  Looks almost cinnamon to me."
+
+The animal was certainly not cinnamon-coloured.  Its coat was the
+true wolf-coat.  The dominant colour was grey, and yet there was to
+it a faint reddish hue--a hue that was baffling, that appeared and
+disappeared, that was more like an illusion of the vision, now
+grey, distinctly grey, and again giving hints and glints of a vague
+redness of colour not classifiable in terms of ordinary experience.
+
+"Looks for all the world like a big husky sled-dog," Bill said.  "I
+wouldn't be s'prised to see it wag its tail."
+
+"Hello, you husky!" he called.  "Come here, you whatever-your-name-
+is."
+
+"Ain't a bit scairt of you," Henry laughed.
+
+Bill waved his hand at it threateningly and shouted loudly; but the
+animal betrayed no fear.  The only change in it that they could
+notice was an accession of alertness.  It still regarded them with
+the merciless wistfulness of hunger.  They were meat, and it was
+hungry; and it would like to go in and eat them if it dared.
+
+"Look here, Henry," Bill said, unconsciously lowering his voice to
+a whisper because of what he imitated.  "We've got three
+cartridges.  But it's a dead shot.  Couldn't miss it.  It's got
+away with three of our dogs, an' we oughter put a stop to it.  What
+d'ye say?"
+
+Henry nodded his consent.  Bill cautiously slipped the gun from
+under the sled-lashing.  The gun was on the way to his shoulder,
+but it never got there.  For in that instant the she-wolf leaped
+sidewise from the trail into the clump of spruce trees and
+disappeared.
+
+The two men looked at each other.  Henry whistled long and
+comprehendingly.
+
+"I might have knowed it," Bill chided himself aloud as he replaced
+the gun.  "Of course a wolf that knows enough to come in with the
+dogs at feedin' time, 'd know all about shooting-irons.  I tell you
+right now, Henry, that critter's the cause of all our trouble.
+We'd have six dogs at the present time, 'stead of three, if it
+wasn't for her.  An' I tell you right now, Henry, I'm goin' to get
+her.  She's too smart to be shot in the open.  But I'm goin' to lay
+for her.  I'll bushwhack her as sure as my name is Bill."
+
+"You needn't stray off too far in doin' it," his partner
+admonished.  "If that pack ever starts to jump you, them three
+cartridges'd be wuth no more'n three whoops in hell.  Them animals
+is damn hungry, an' once they start in, they'll sure get you,
+Bill."
+
+They camped early that night.  Three dogs could not drag the sled
+so fast nor for so long hours as could six, and they were showing
+unmistakable signs of playing out.  And the men went early to bed,
+Bill first seeing to it that the dogs were tied out of gnawing-
+reach of one another.
+
+But the wolves were growing bolder, and the men were aroused more
+than once from their sleep.  So near did the wolves approach, that
+the dogs became frantic with terror, and it was necessary to
+replenish the fire from time to time in order to keep the
+adventurous marauders at safer distance.
+
+"I've hearn sailors talk of sharks followin' a ship," Bill
+remarked, as he crawled back into the blankets after one such
+replenishing of the fire.  "Well, them wolves is land sharks.  They
+know their business better'n we do, an' they ain't a-holdin' our
+trail this way for their health.  They're goin' to get us.  They're
+sure goin' to get us, Henry."
+
+"They've half got you a'ready, a-talkin' like that," Henry retorted
+sharply.  "A man's half licked when he says he is.  An' you're half
+eaten from the way you're goin' on about it."
+
+"They've got away with better men than you an' me," Bill answered.
+
+"Oh, shet up your croakin'.  You make me all-fired tired."
+
+Henry rolled over angrily on his side, but was surprised that Bill
+made no similar display of temper.  This was not Bill's way, for he
+was easily angered by sharp words.  Henry thought long over it
+before he went to sleep, and as his eyelids fluttered down and he
+dozed off, the thought in his mind was:  "There's no mistakin' it,
+Bill's almighty blue.  I'll have to cheer him up to-morrow."
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III--THE HUNGER CRY
+
+
+
+The day began auspiciously.  They had lost no dogs during the
+night, and they swung out upon the trail and into the silence, the
+darkness, and the cold with spirits that were fairly light.  Bill
+seemed to have forgotten his forebodings of the previous night, and
+even waxed facetious with the dogs when, at midday, they overturned
+the sled on a bad piece of trail.
+
+It was an awkward mix-up.  The sled was upside down and jammed
+between a tree-trunk and a huge rock, and they were forced to
+unharness the dogs in order to straighten out the tangle.  The two
+men were bent over the sled and trying to right it, when Henry
+observed One Ear sidling away.
+
+"Here, you, One Ear!" he cried, straightening up and turning around
+on the dog.
+
+But One Ear broke into a run across the snow, his traces trailing
+behind him.  And there, out in the snow of their back track, was
+the she-wolf waiting for him.  As he neared her, he became suddenly
+cautious.  He slowed down to an alert and mincing walk and then
+stopped.  He regarded her carefully and dubiously, yet desirefully.
+She seemed to smile at him, showing her teeth in an ingratiating
+rather than a menacing way.  She moved toward him a few steps,
+playfully, and then halted.  One Ear drew near to her, still alert
+and cautious, his tail and ears in the air, his head held high.
+
+He tried to sniff noses with her, but she retreated playfully and
+coyly.  Every advance on his part was accompanied by a
+corresponding retreat on her part.  Step by step she was luring him
+away from the security of his human companionship.  Once, as though
+a warning had in vague ways flitted through his intelligence, he
+turned his head and looked back at the overturned sled, at his
+team-mates, and at the two men who were calling to him.
+
+But whatever idea was forming in his mind, was dissipated by the
+she-wolf, who advanced upon him, sniffed noses with him for a
+fleeting instant, and then resumed her coy retreat before his
+renewed advances.
+
+In the meantime, Bill had bethought himself of the rifle.  But it
+was jammed beneath the overturned sled, and by the time Henry had
+helped him to right the load, One Ear and the she-wolf were too
+close together and the distance too great to risk a shot.
+
+Too late One Ear learned his mistake.  Before they saw the cause,
+the two men saw him turn and start to run back toward them.  Then,
+approaching at right angles to the trail and cutting off his
+retreat they saw a dozen wolves, lean and grey, bounding across the
+snow.  On the instant, the she-wolf's coyness and playfulness
+disappeared.  With a snarl she sprang upon One Ear.  He thrust her
+off with his shoulder, and, his retreat cut off and still intent on
+regaining the sled, he altered his course in an attempt to circle
+around to it.  More wolves were appearing every moment and joining
+in the chase.  The she-wolf was one leap behind One Ear and holding
+her own.
+
+"Where are you goin'?" Henry suddenly demanded, laying his hand on
+his partner's arm.
+
+Bill shook it off.  "I won't stand it," he said.  "They ain't a-
+goin' to get any more of our dogs if I can help it."
+
+Gun in hand, he plunged into the underbrush that lined the side of
+the trail.  His intention was apparent enough.  Taking the sled as
+the centre of the circle that One Ear was making, Bill planned to
+tap that circle at a point in advance of the pursuit.  With his
+rifle, in the broad daylight, it might be possible for him to awe
+the wolves and save the dog.
+
+"Say, Bill!" Henry called after him.  "Be careful!  Don't take no
+chances!"
+
+Henry sat down on the sled and watched.  There was nothing else for
+him to do.  Bill had already gone from sight; but now and again,
+appearing and disappearing amongst the underbrush and the scattered
+clumps of spruce, could be seen One Ear.  Henry judged his case to
+be hopeless.  The dog was thoroughly alive to its danger, but it
+was running on the outer circle while the wolf-pack was running on
+the inner and shorter circle.  It was vain to think of One Ear so
+outdistancing his pursuers as to be able to cut across their circle
+in advance of them and to regain the sled.
+
+The different lines were rapidly approaching a point.  Somewhere
+out there in the snow, screened from his sight by trees and
+thickets, Henry knew that the wolf-pack, One Ear, and Bill were
+coming together.  All too quickly, far more quickly than he had
+expected, it happened.  He heard a shot, then two shots, in rapid
+succession, and he knew that Bill's ammunition was gone.  Then he
+heard a great outcry of snarls and yelps.  He recognised One Ear's
+yell of pain and terror, and he heard a wolf-cry that bespoke a
+stricken animal.  And that was all.  The snarls ceased.  The
+yelping died away.  Silence settled down again over the lonely
+land.
+
+He sat for a long while upon the sled.  There was no need for him
+to go and see what had happened.  He knew it as though it had taken
+place before his eyes.  Once, he roused with a start and hastily
+got the axe out from underneath the lashings.  But for some time
+longer he sat and brooded, the two remaining dogs crouching and
+trembling at his feet.
+
+At last he arose in a weary manner, as though all the resilience
+had gone out of his body, and proceeded to fasten the dogs to the
+sled.  He passed a rope over his shoulder, a man-trace, and pulled
+with the dogs.  He did not go far.  At the first hint of darkness
+he hastened to make a camp, and he saw to it that he had a generous
+supply of firewood.  He fed the dogs, cooked and ate his supper,
+and made his bed close to the fire.
+
+But he was not destined to enjoy that bed.  Before his eyes closed
+the wolves had drawn too near for safety.  It no longer required an
+effort of the vision to see them.  They were all about him and the
+fire, in a narrow circle, and he could see them plainly in the
+firelight lying down, sitting up, crawling forward on their
+bellies, or slinking back and forth.  They even slept.  Here and
+there he could see one curled up in the snow like a dog, taking the
+sleep that was now denied himself.
+
+He kept the fire brightly blazing, for he knew that it alone
+intervened between the flesh of his body and their hungry fangs.
+His two dogs stayed close by him, one on either side, leaning
+against him for protection, crying and whimpering, and at times
+snarling desperately when a wolf approached a little closer than
+usual.  At such moments, when his dogs snarled, the whole circle
+would be agitated, the wolves coming to their feet and pressing
+tentatively forward, a chorus of snarls and eager yelps rising
+about him.  Then the circle would lie down again, and here and
+there a wolf would resume its broken nap.
+
+But this circle had a continuous tendency to draw in upon him.  Bit
+by bit, an inch at a time, with here a wolf bellying forward, and
+there a wolf bellying forward, the circle would narrow until the
+brutes were almost within springing distance.  Then he would seize
+brands from the fire and hurl them into the pack.  A hasty drawing
+back always resulted, accompanied by an yelps and frightened snarls
+when a well-aimed brand struck and scorched a too daring animal.
+
+Morning found the man haggard and worn, wide-eyed from want of
+sleep.  He cooked breakfast in the darkness, and at nine o'clock,
+when, with the coming of daylight, the wolf-pack drew back, he set
+about the task he had planned through the long hours of the night.
+Chopping down young saplings, he made them cross-bars of a scaffold
+by lashing them high up to the trunks of standing trees.  Using the
+sled-lashing for a heaving rope, and with the aid of the dogs, he
+hoisted the coffin to the top of the scaffold.
+
+"They got Bill, an' they may get me, but they'll sure never get
+you, young man," he said, addressing the dead body in its tree-
+sepulchre.
+
+Then he took the trail, the lightened sled bounding along behind
+the willing dogs; for they, too, knew that safety lay open in the
+gaining of Fort McGurry.  The wolves were now more open in their
+pursuit, trotting sedately behind and ranging along on either side,
+their red tongues lolling out, their-lean sides showing the
+udulating ribs with every movement.  They were very lean, mere
+skin-bags stretched over bony frames, with strings for muscles--so
+lean that Henry found it in his mind to marvel that they still kept
+their feet and did not collapse forthright in the snow.
+
+He did not dare travel until dark.  At midday, not only did the sun
+warm the southern horizon, but it even thrust its upper rim, pale
+and golden, above the sky-line.  He received it as a sign.  The
+days were growing longer.  The sun was returning.  But scarcely had
+the cheer of its light departed, than he went into camp.  There
+were still several hours of grey daylight and sombre twilight, and
+he utilised them in chopping an enormous supply of fire-wood.
+
+With night came horror.  Not only were the starving wolves growing
+bolder, but lack of sleep was telling upon Henry.  He dozed despite
+himself, crouching by the fire, the blankets about his shoulders,
+the axe between his knees, and on either side a dog pressing close
+against him.  He awoke once and saw in front of him, not a dozen
+feet away, a big grey wolf, one of the largest of the pack.  And
+even as he looked, the brute deliberately stretched himself after
+the manner of a lazy dog, yawning full in his face and looking upon
+him with a possessive eye, as if, in truth, he were merely a
+delayed meal that was soon to be eaten.
+
+This certitude was shown by the whole pack.  Fully a score he could
+count, staring hungrily at him or calmly sleeping in the snow.
+They reminded him of children gathered about a spread table and
+awaiting permission to begin to eat.  And he was the food they were
+to eat!  He wondered how and when the meal would begin.
+
+As he piled wood on the fire he discovered an appreciation of his
+own body which he had never felt before.  He watched his moving
+muscles and was interested in the cunning mechanism of his fingers.
+By the light of the fire he crooked his fingers slowly and
+repeatedly now one at a time, now all together, spreading them wide
+or making quick gripping movements.  He studied the nail-formation,
+and prodded the finger-tips, now sharply, and again softly, gauging
+the while the nerve-sensations produced.  It fascinated him, and he
+grew suddenly fond of this subtle flesh of his that worked so
+beautifully and smoothly and delicately.  Then he would cast a
+glance of fear at the wolf-circle drawn expectantly about him, and
+like a blow the realisation would strike him that this wonderful
+body of his, this living flesh, was no more than so much meat, a
+quest of ravenous animals, to be torn and slashed by their hungry
+fangs, to be sustenance to them as the moose and the rabbit had
+often been sustenance to him.
+
+He came out of a doze that was half nightmare, to see the red-hued
+she-wolf before him.  She was not more than half a dozen feet away
+sitting in the snow and wistfully regarding him.  The two dogs were
+whimpering and snarling at his feet, but she took no notice of
+them.  She was looking at the man, and for some time he returned
+her look.  There was nothing threatening about her.  She looked at
+him merely with a great wistfulness, but he knew it to be the
+wistfulness of an equally great hunger.  He was the food, and the
+sight of him excited in her the gustatory sensations.  Her mouth
+opened, the saliva drooled forth, and she licked her chops with the
+pleasure of anticipation.
+
+A spasm of fear went through him.  He reached hastily for a brand
+to throw at her.  But even as he reached, and before his fingers
+had closed on the missile, she sprang back into safety; and he knew
+that she was used to having things thrown at her.  She had snarled
+as she sprang away, baring her white fangs to their roots, all her
+wistfulness vanishing, being replaced by a carnivorous malignity
+that made him shudder.  He glanced at the hand that held the brand,
+noticing the cunning delicacy of the fingers that gripped it, how
+they adjusted themselves to all the inequalities of the surface,
+curling over and under and about the rough wood, and one little
+finger, too close to the burning portion of the brand, sensitively
+and automatically writhing back from the hurtful heat to a cooler
+gripping-place; and in the same instant he seemed to see a vision
+of those same sensitive and delicate fingers being crushed and torn
+by the white teeth of the she-wolf.  Never had he been so fond of
+this body of his as now when his tenure of it was so precarious.
+
+All night, with burning brands, he fought off the hungry pack.
+When he dozed despite himself, the whimpering and snarling of the
+dogs aroused him.  Morning came, but for the first time the light
+of day failed to scatter the wolves.  The man waited in vain for
+them to go.  They remained in a circle about him and his fire,
+displaying an arrogance of possession that shook his courage born
+of the morning light.
+
+He made one desperate attempt to pull out on the trail.  But the
+moment he left the protection of the fire, the boldest wolf leaped
+for him, but leaped short.  He saved himself by springing back, the
+jaws snapping together a scant six inches from his thigh.  The rest
+of the pack was now up and surging upon him, and a throwing of
+firebrands right and left was necessary to drive them back to a
+respectful distance.
+
+Even in the daylight he did not dare leave the fire to chop fresh
+wood.  Twenty feet away towered a huge dead spruce.  He spent half
+the day extending his campfire to the tree, at any moment a half
+dozen burning faggots ready at hand to fling at his enemies.  Once
+at the tree, he studied the surrounding forest in order to fell the
+tree in the direction of the most firewood.
+
+The night was a repetition of the night before, save that the need
+for sleep was becoming overpowering.  The snarling of his dogs was
+losing its efficacy.  Besides, they were snarling all the time, and
+his benumbed and drowsy senses no longer took note of changing
+pitch and intensity.  He awoke with a start.  The she-wolf was less
+than a yard from him.  Mechanically, at short range, without
+letting go of it, he thrust a brand full into her open and snarling
+mouth.  She sprang away, yelling with pain, and while he took
+delight in the smell of burning flesh and hair, he watched her
+shaking her head and growling wrathfully a score of feet away.
+
+But this time, before he dozed again, he tied a burning pine-knot
+to his right hand.  His eyes were closed but few minutes when the
+burn of the flame on his flesh awakened him.  For several hours he
+adhered to this programme.  Every time he was thus awakened he
+drove back the wolves with flying brands, replenished the fire, and
+rearranged the pine-knot on his hand.  All worked well, but there
+came a time when he fastened the pine-knot insecurely.  As his eyes
+closed it fell away from his hand.
+
+He dreamed.  It seemed to him that he was in Fort McGurry.  It was
+warm and comfortable, and he was playing cribbage with the Factor.
+Also, it seemed to him that the fort was besieged by wolves.  They
+were howling at the very gates, and sometimes he and the Factor
+paused from the game to listen and laugh at the futile efforts of
+the wolves to get in.  And then, so strange was the dream, there
+was a crash.  The door was burst open.  He could see the wolves
+flooding into the big living-room of the fort.  They were leaping
+straight for him and the Factor.  With the bursting open of the
+door, the noise of their howling had increased tremendously.  This
+howling now bothered him.  His dream was merging into something
+else--he knew not what; but through it all, following him,
+persisted the howling.
+
+And then he awoke to find the howling real.  There was a great
+snarling and yelping.  The wolves were rushing him.  They were all
+about him and upon him.  The teeth of one had closed upon his arm.
+Instinctively he leaped into the fire, and as he leaped, he felt
+the sharp slash of teeth that tore through the flesh of his leg.
+Then began a fire fight.  His stout mittens temporarily protected
+his hands, and he scooped live coals into the air in all
+directions, until the campfire took on the semblance of a volcano.
+
+But it could not last long.  His face was blistering in the heat,
+his eyebrows and lashes were singed off, and the heat was becoming
+unbearable to his feet.  With a flaming brand in each hand, he
+sprang to the edge of the fire.  The wolves had been driven back.
+On every side, wherever the live coals had fallen, the snow was
+sizzling, and every little while a retiring wolf, with wild leap
+and snort and snarl, announced that one such live coal had been
+stepped upon.
+
+Flinging his brands at the nearest of his enemies, the man thrust
+his smouldering mittens into the snow and stamped about to cool his
+feet.  His two dogs were missing, and he well knew that they had
+served as a course in the protracted meal which had begun days
+before with Fatty, the last course of which would likely be himself
+in the days to follow.
+
+"You ain't got me yet!" he cried, savagely shaking his fist at the
+hungry beasts; and at the sound of his voice the whole circle was
+agitated, there was a general snarl, and the she-wolf slid up close
+to him across the snow and watched him with hungry wistfulness.
+
+He set to work to carry out a new idea that had come to him.  He
+extended the fire into a large circle.  Inside this circle he
+crouched, his sleeping outfit under him as a protection against the
+melting snow.  When he had thus disappeared within his shelter of
+flame, the whole pack came curiously to the rim of the fire to see
+what had become of him.  Hitherto they had been denied access to
+the fire, and they now settled down in a close-drawn circle, like
+so many dogs, blinking and yawning and stretching their lean bodies
+in the unaccustomed warmth.  Then the she-wolf sat down, pointed
+her nose at a star, and began to howl.  One by one the wolves
+joined her, till the whole pack, on haunches, with noses pointed
+skyward, was howling its hunger cry.
+
+Dawn came, and daylight.  The fire was burning low.  The fuel had
+run out, and there was need to get more.  The man attempted to step
+out of his circle of flame, but the wolves surged to meet him.
+Burning brands made them spring aside, but they no longer sprang
+back.  In vain he strove to drive them back.  As he gave up and
+stumbled inside his circle, a wolf leaped for him, missed, and
+landed with all four feet in the coals.  It cried out with terror,
+at the same time snarling, and scrambled back to cool its paws in
+the snow.
+
+The man sat down on his blankets in a crouching position.  His body
+leaned forward from the hips.  His shoulders, relaxed and drooping,
+and his head on his knees advertised that he had given up the
+struggle.  Now and again he raised his head to note the dying down
+of the fire.  The circle of flame and coals was breaking into
+segments with openings in between.  These openings grew in size,
+the segments diminished.
+
+"I guess you can come an' get me any time," he mumbled.  "Anyway,
+I'm goin' to sleep."
+
+Once he awakened, and in an opening in the circle, directly in
+front of him, he saw the she-wolf gazing at him.
+
+Again he awakened, a little later, though it seemed hours to him.
+A mysterious change had taken place--so mysterious a change that he
+was shocked wider awake.  Something had happened.  He could not
+understand at first.  Then he discovered it.  The wolves were gone.
+Remained only the trampled snow to show how closely they had
+pressed him.  Sleep was welling up and gripping him again, his head
+was sinking down upon his knees, when he roused with a sudden
+start.
+
+There were cries of men, and churn of sleds, the creaking of
+harnesses, and the eager whimpering of straining dogs.  Four sleds
+pulled in from the river bed to the camp among the trees.  Half a
+dozen men were about the man who crouched in the centre of the
+dying fire.  They were shaking and prodding him into consciousness.
+He looked at them like a drunken man and maundered in strange,
+sleepy speech.
+
+"Red she-wolf. . . . Come in with the dogs at feedin' time. . . .
+First she ate the dog-food. . . . Then she ate the dogs. . . . An'
+after that she ate Bill. . . . "
+
+"Where's Lord Alfred?" one of the men bellowed in his ear, shaking
+him roughly.
+
+He shook his head slowly.  "No, she didn't eat him. . . . He's
+roostin' in a tree at the last camp."
+
+"Dead?" the man shouted.
+
+"An' in a box," Henry answered.  He jerked his shoulder petulantly
+away from the grip of his questioner.  "Say, you lemme alone. . . .
+I'm jes' plump tuckered out. . . . Goo' night, everybody."
+
+His eyes fluttered and went shut.  His chin fell forward on his
+chest.  And even as they eased him down upon the blankets his
+snores were rising on the frosty air.
+
+But there was another sound.  Far and faint it was, in the remote
+distance, the cry of the hungry wolf-pack as it took the trail of
+other meat than the man it had just missed.
+
+
+
+
+PART II
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I--THE BATTLE OF THE FANGS
+
+
+
+It was the she-wolf who had first caught the sound of men's voices
+and the whining of the sled-dogs; and it was the she-wolf who was
+first to spring away from the cornered man in his circle of dying
+flame.  The pack had been loath to forego the kill it had hunted
+down, and it lingered for several minutes, making sure of the
+sounds, and then it, too, sprang away on the trail made by the she-
+wolf.
+
+Running at the forefront of the pack was a large grey wolf--one of
+its several leaders.  It was he who directed the pack's course on
+the heels of the she-wolf.  It was he who snarled warningly at the
+younger members of the pack or slashed at them with his fangs when
+they ambitiously tried to pass him.  And it was he who increased
+the pace when he sighted the she-wolf, now trotting slowly across
+the snow.
+
+She dropped in alongside by him, as though it were her appointed
+position, and took the pace of the pack.  He did not snarl at her,
+nor show his teeth, when any leap of hers chanced to put her in
+advance of him.  On the contrary, he seemed kindly disposed toward
+her--too kindly to suit her, for he was prone to run near to her,
+and when he ran too near it was she who snarled and showed her
+teeth.  Nor was she above slashing his shoulder sharply on
+occasion.  At such times he betrayed no anger.  He merely sprang to
+the side and ran stiffly ahead for several awkward leaps, in
+carriage and conduct resembling an abashed country swain.
+
+This was his one trouble in the running of the pack; but she had
+other troubles.  On her other side ran a gaunt old wolf, grizzled
+and marked with the scars of many battles.  He ran always on her
+right side.  The fact that he had but one eye, and that the left
+eye, might account for this.  He, also, was addicted to crowding
+her, to veering toward her till his scarred muzzle touched her
+body, or shoulder, or neck.  As with the running mate on the left,
+she repelled these attentions with her teeth; but when both
+bestowed their attentions at the same time she was roughly jostled,
+being compelled, with quick snaps to either side, to drive both
+lovers away and at the same time to maintain her forward leap with
+the pack and see the way of her feet before her.  At such times her
+running mates flashed their teeth and growled threateningly across
+at each other.  They might have fought, but even wooing and its
+rivalry waited upon the more pressing hunger-need of the pack.
+
+After each repulse, when the old wolf sheered abruptly away from
+the sharp-toothed object of his desire, he shouldered against a
+young three-year-old that ran on his blind right side.  This young
+wolf had attained his full size; and, considering the weak and
+famished condition of the pack, he possessed more than the average
+vigour and spirit.  Nevertheless, he ran with his head even with
+the shoulder of his one-eyed elder.  When he ventured to run
+abreast of the older wolf (which was seldom), a snarl and a snap
+sent him back even with the shoulder again.  Sometimes, however, he
+dropped cautiously and slowly behind and edged in between the old
+leader and the she-wolf.  This was doubly resented, even triply
+resented.  When she snarled her displeasure, the old leader would
+whirl on the three-year-old.  Sometimes she whirled with him.  And
+sometimes the young leader on the left whirled, too.
+
+At such times, confronted by three sets of savage teeth, the young
+wolf stopped precipitately, throwing himself back on his haunches,
+with fore-legs stiff, mouth menacing, and mane bristling.  This
+confusion in the front of the moving pack always caused confusion
+in the rear.  The wolves behind collided with the young wolf and
+expressed their displeasure by administering sharp nips on his
+hind-legs and flanks.  He was laying up trouble for himself, for
+lack of food and short tempers went together; but with the
+boundless faith of youth he persisted in repeating the manoeuvre
+every little while, though it never succeeded in gaining anything
+for him but discomfiture.
+
+Had there been food, love-making and fighting would have gone on
+apace, and the pack-formation would have been broken up.  But the
+situation of the pack was desperate.  It was lean with long-
+standing hunger.  It ran below its ordinary speed.  At the rear
+limped the weak members, the very young and the very old.  At the
+front were the strongest.  Yet all were more like skeletons than
+full-bodied wolves.  Nevertheless, with the exception of the ones
+that limped, the movements of the animals were eftortless and
+tireless.  Their stringy muscles seemed founts of inexhaustible
+energy.  Behind every steel-like contraction of a muscle, lay
+another steel-like contraction, and another, and another,
+apparently without end.
+
+They ran many miles that day.  They ran through the night.  And the
+next day found them still running.  They were running over the
+surface of a world frozen and dead.  No life stirred.  They alone
+moved through the vast inertness.  They alone were alive, and they
+sought for other things that were alive in order that they might
+devour them and continue to live.
+
+They crossed low divides and ranged a dozen small streams in a
+lower-lying country before their quest was rewarded.  Then they
+came upon moose.  It was a big bull they first found.  Here was
+meat and life, and it was guarded by no mysterious fires nor flying
+missiles of flame.  Splay hoofs and palmated antlers they knew, and
+they flung their customary patience and caution to the wind.  It
+was a brief fight and fierce.  The big bull was beset on every
+side.  He ripped them open or split their skulls with shrewdly
+driven blows of his great hoofs.  He crushed them and broke them on
+his large horns.  He stamped them into the snow under him in the
+wallowing struggle.  But he was foredoomed, and he went down with
+the she-wolf tearing savagely at his throat, and with other teeth
+fixed everywhere upon him, devouring him alive, before ever his
+last struggles ceased or his last damage had been wrought.
+
+There was food in plenty.  The bull weighed over eight hundred
+pounds--fully twenty pounds of meat per mouth for the forty-odd
+wolves of the pack.  But if they could fast prodigiously, they
+could feed prodigiously, and soon a few scattered bones were all
+that remained of the splendid live brute that had faced the pack a
+few hours before.
+
+There was now much resting and sleeping.  With full stomachs,
+bickering and quarrelling began among the younger males, and this
+continued through the few days that followed before the breaking-up
+of the pack.  The famine was over.  The wolves were now in the
+country of game, and though they still hunted in pack, they hunted
+more cautiously, cutting out heavy cows or crippled old bulls from
+the small moose-herds they ran across.
+
+There came a day, in this land of plenty, when the wolf-pack split
+in half and went in different directions.  The she-wolf, the young
+leader on her left, and the one-eyed elder on her right, led their
+half of the pack down to the Mackenzie River and across into the
+lake country to the east.  Each day this remnant of the pack
+dwindled.  Two by two, male and female, the wolves were deserting.
+Occasionally a solitary male was driven out by the sharp teeth of
+his rivals.  In the end there remained only four:  the she-wolf,
+the young leader, the one-eyed one, and the ambitious three-year-
+old.
+
+The she-wolf had by now developed a ferocious temper.  Her three
+suitors all bore the marks of her teeth.  Yet they never replied in
+kind, never defended themselves against her.  They turned their
+shoulders to her most savage slashes, and with wagging tails and
+mincing steps strove to placate her wrath.  But if they were all
+mildness toward her, they were all fierceness toward one another.
+The three-year-old grew too ambitious in his fierceness.  He caught
+the one-eyed elder on his blind side and ripped his ear into
+ribbons.  Though the grizzled old fellow could see only on one
+side, against the youth and vigour of the other he brought into
+play the wisdom of long years of experience.  His lost eye and his
+scarred muzzle bore evidence to the nature of his experience.  He
+had survived too many battles to be in doubt for a moment about
+what to do.
+
+The battle began fairly, but it did not end fairly.  There was no
+telling what the outcome would have been, for the third wolf joined
+the elder, and together, old leader and young leader, they attacked
+the ambitious three-year-old and proceeded to destroy him.  He was
+beset on either side by the merciless fangs of his erstwhile
+comrades.  Forgotten were the days they had hunted together, the
+game they had pulled down, the famine they had suffered.  That
+business was a thing of the past.  The business of love was at
+hand--ever a sterner and crueller business than that of food-
+getting.
+
+And in the meanwhile, the she-wolf, the cause of it all, sat down
+contentedly on her haunches and watched.  She was even pleased.
+This was her day--and it came not often--when manes bristled, and
+fang smote fang or ripped and tore the yielding flesh, all for the
+possession of her.
+
+And in the business of love the three-year-old, who had made this
+his first adventure upon it, yielded up his life.  On either side
+of his body stood his two rivals.  They were gazing at the she-
+wolf, who sat smiling in the snow.  But the elder leader was wise,
+very wise, in love even as in battle.  The younger leader turned
+his head to lick a wound on his shoulder.  The curve of his neck
+was turned toward his rival.  With his one eye the elder saw the
+opportunity.  He darted in low and closed with his fangs.  It was a
+long, ripping slash, and deep as well.  His teeth, in passing,
+burst the wall of the great vein of the throat.  Then he leaped
+clear.
+
+The young leader snarled terribly, but his snarl broke midmost into
+a tickling cough.  Bleeding and coughing, already stricken, he
+sprang at the elder and fought while life faded from him, his legs
+going weak beneath him, the light of day dulling on his eyes, his
+blows and springs falling shorter and shorter.
+
+And all the while the she-wolf sat on her haunches and smiled.  She
+was made glad in vague ways by the battle, for this was the love-
+making of the Wild, the sex-tragedy of the natural world that was
+tragedy only to those that died.  To those that survived it was not
+tragedy, but realisation and achievement.
+
+When the young leader lay in the snow and moved no more, One Eye
+stalked over to the she-wolf.  His carriage was one of mingled
+triumph and caution.  He was plainly expectant of a rebuff, and he
+was just as plainly surprised when her teeth did not flash out at
+him in anger.  For the first time she met him with a kindly manner.
+She sniffed noses with him, and even condescended to leap about and
+frisk and play with him in quite puppyish fashion.  And he, for all
+his grey years and sage experience, behaved quite as puppyishly and
+even a little more foolishly.
+
+Forgotten already were the vanquished rivals and the love-tale red-
+written on the snow.  Forgotten, save once, when old One Eye
+stopped for a moment to lick his stiffening wounds.  Then it was
+that his lips half writhed into a snarl, and the hair of his neck
+and shoulders involuntarily bristled, while he half crouched for a
+spring, his claws spasmodically clutching into the snow-surface for
+firmer footing.  But it was all forgotten the next moment, as he
+sprang after the she-wolf, who was coyly leading him a chase
+through the woods.
+
+After that they ran side by side, like good friends who have come
+to an understanding.  The days passed by, and they kept together,
+hunting their meat and killing and eating it in common.  After a
+time the she-wolf began to grow restless.  She seemed to be
+searching for something that she could not find.  The hollows under
+fallen trees seemed to attract her, and she spent much time nosing
+about among the larger snow-piled crevices in the rocks and in the
+caves of overhanging banks.  Old One Eye was not interested at all,
+but he followed her good-naturedly in her quest, and when her
+investigations in particular places were unusually protracted, he
+would lie down and wait until she was ready to go on.
+
+They did not remain in one place, but travelled across country
+until they regained the Mackenzie River, down which they slowly
+went, leaving it often to hunt game along the small streams that
+entered it, but always returning to it again.  Sometimes they
+chanced upon other wolves, usually in pairs; but there was no
+friendliness of intercourse displayed on either side, no gladness
+at meeting, no desire to return to the pack-formation.  Several
+times they encountered solitary wolves.  These were always males,
+and they were pressingly insistent on joining with One Eye and his
+mate.  This he resented, and when she stood shoulder to shoulder
+with him, bristling and showing her teeth, the aspiring solitary
+ones would back off, turn-tail, and continue on their lonely way.
+
+One moonlight night, running through the quiet forest, One Eye
+suddenly halted.  His muzzle went up, his tail stiffened, and his
+nostrils dilated as he scented the air.  One foot also he held up,
+after the manner of a dog.  He was not satisfied, and he continued
+to smell the air, striving to understand the message borne upon it
+to him.  One careless sniff had satisfied his mate, and she trotted
+on to reassure him.  Though he followed her, he was still dubious,
+and he could not forbear an occasional halt in order more carefully
+to study the warning.
+
+She crept out cautiously on the edge of a large open space in the
+midst of the trees.  For some time she stood alone.  Then One Eye,
+creeping and crawling, every sense on the alert, every hair
+radiating infinite suspicion, joined her.  They stood side by side,
+watching and listening and smelling.
+
+To their ears came the sounds of dogs wrangling and scuffling, the
+guttural cries of men, the sharper voices of scolding women, and
+once the shrill and plaintive cry of a child.  With the exception
+of the huge bulks of the skin-lodges, little could be seen save the
+flames of the fire, broken by the movements of intervening bodies,
+and the smoke rising slowly on the quiet air.  But to their
+nostrils came the myriad smells of an Indian camp, carrying a story
+that was largely incomprehensible to One Eye, but every detail of
+which the she-wolf knew.
+
+She was strangely stirred, and sniffed and sniffed with an
+increasing delight.  But old One Eye was doubtful.  He betrayed his
+apprehension, and started tentatively to go.  She turned. and
+touched his neck with her muzzle in a reassuring way, then regarded
+the camp again.  A new wistfulness was in her face, but it was not
+the wistfulness of hunger.  She was thrilling to a desire that
+urged her to go forward, to be in closer to that fire, to be
+squabbling with the dogs, and to be avoiding and dodging the
+stumbling feet of men.
+
+One Eye moved impatiently beside her; her unrest came back upon
+her, and she knew again her pressing need to find the thing for
+which she searched.  She turned and trotted back into the forest,
+to the great relief of One Eye, who trotted a little to the fore
+until they were well within the shelter of the trees.
+
+As they slid along, noiseless as shadows, in the moonlight, they
+came upon a run-way.  Both noses went down to the footprints in the
+snow.  These footprints were very fresh.  One Eye ran ahead
+cautiously, his mate at his heels.  The broad pads of their feet
+were spread wide and in contact with the snow were like velvet.
+One Eye caught sight of a dim movement of white in the midst of the
+white.  His sliding gait had been deceptively swift, but it was as
+nothing to the speed at which he now ran.  Before him was bounding
+the faint patch of white he had discovered.
+
+They were running along a narrow alley flanked on either side by a
+growth of young spruce.  Through the trees the mouth of the alley
+could be seen, opening out on a moonlit glade.  Old One Eye was
+rapidly overhauling the fleeing shape of white.  Bound by bound he
+gained.  Now he was upon it.  One leap more and his teeth would be
+sinking into it.  But that leap was never made.  High in the air,
+and straight up, soared the shape of white, now a struggling
+snowshoe rabbit that leaped and bounded, executing a fantastic
+dance there above him in the air and never once returning to earth.
+
+One Eye sprang back with a snort of sudden fright, then shrank down
+to the snow and crouched, snarling threats at this thing of fear he
+did not understand.  But the she-wolf coolly thrust past him.  She
+poised for a moment, then sprang for the dancing rabbit.  She, too,
+soared high, but not so high as the quarry, and her teeth clipped
+emptily together with a metallic snap.  She made another leap, and
+another.
+
+Her mate had slowly relaxed from his crouch and was watching her.
+He now evinced displeasure at her repeated failures, and himself
+made a mighty spring upward.  His teeth closed upon the rabbit, and
+he bore it back to earth with him.  But at the same time there was
+a suspicious crackling movement beside him, and his astonished eye
+saw a young spruce sapling bending down above him to strike him.
+His jaws let go their grip, and he leaped backward to escape this
+strange danger, his lips drawn back from his fangs, his throat
+snarling, every hair bristling with rage and fright.  And in that
+moment the sapling reared its slender length upright and the rabbit
+soared dancing in the air again.
+
+The she-wolf was angry.  She sank her fangs into her mate's
+shoulder in reproof; and he, frightened, unaware of what
+constituted this new onslaught, struck back ferociously and in
+still greater fright, ripping down the side of the she-wolf's
+muzzle.  For him to resent such reproof was equally unexpected to
+her, and she sprang upon him in snarling indignation.  Then he
+discovered his mistake and tried to placate her.  But she proceeded
+to punish him roundly, until he gave over all attempts at
+placation, and whirled in a circle, his head away from her, his
+shoulders receiving the punishment of her teeth.
+
+In the meantime the rabbit danced above them in the air.  The she-
+wolf sat down in the snow, and old One Eye, now more in fear of his
+mate than of the mysterious sapling, again sprang for the rabbit.
+As he sank back with it between his teeth, he kept his eye on the
+sapling.  As before, it followed him back to earth.  He crouched
+down under the impending blow, his hair bristling, but his teeth
+still keeping tight hold of the rabbit.  But the blow did not fall.
+The sapling remained bent above him.  When he moved it moved, and
+he growled at it through his clenched jaws; when he remained still,
+it remained still, and he concluded it was safer to continue
+remaining still.  Yet the warm blood of the rabbit tasted good in
+his mouth.
+
+It was his mate who relieved him from the quandary in which he
+found himself.  She took the rabbit from him, and while the sapling
+swayed and teetered threateningly above her she calmly gnawed off
+the rabbit's head.  At once the sapling shot up, and after that
+gave no more trouble, remaining in the decorous and perpendicular
+position in which nature had intended it to grow.  Then, between
+them, the she-wolf and One Eye devoured the game which the
+mysterious sapling had caught for them.
+
+There were other run-ways and alleys where rabbits were hanging in
+the air, and the wolf-pair prospected them all, the she-wolf
+leading the way, old One Eye following and observant, learning the
+method of robbing snares--a knowledge destined to stand him in good
+stead in the days to come.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II--THE LAIR
+
+
+
+For two days the she-wolf and One Eye hung about the Indian camp.
+He was worried and apprehensive, yet the camp lured his mate and
+she was loath to depart.  But when, one morning, the air was rent
+with the report of a rifle close at hand, and a bullet smashed
+against a tree trunk several inches from One Eye's head, they
+hesitated no more, but went off on a long, swinging lope that put
+quick miles between them and the danger.
+
+They did not go far--a couple of days' journey.  The she-wolf's
+need to find the thing for which she searched had now become
+imperative.  She was getting very heavy, and could run but slowly.
+Once, in the pursuit of a rabbit, which she ordinarily would have
+caught with ease, she gave over and lay down and rested.  One Eye
+came to her; but when he touched her neck gently with his muzzle
+she snapped at him with such quick fierceness that he tumbled over
+backward and cut a ridiculous figure in his effort to escape her
+teeth.  Her temper was now shorter than ever; but he had become
+more patient than ever and more solicitous.
+
+And then she found the thing for which she sought.  It was a few
+miles up a small stream that in the summer time flowed into the
+Mackenzie, but that then was frozen over and frozen down to its
+rocky bottom--a dead stream of solid white from source to mouth.
+The she-wolf was trotting wearily along, her mate well in advance,
+when she came upon the overhanging, high clay-bank.  She turned
+aside and trotted over to it.  The wear and tear of spring storms
+and melting snows had underwashed the bank and in one place had
+made a small cave out of a narrow fissure.
+
+She paused at the mouth of the cave and looked the wall over
+carefully.  Then, on one side and the other, she ran along the base
+of the wall to where its abrupt bulk merged from the softer-lined
+landscape.  Returning to the cave, she entered its narrow mouth.
+For a short three feet she was compelled to crouch, then the walls
+widened and rose higher in a little round chamber nearly six feet
+in diameter.  The roof barely cleared her head.  It was dry and
+cosey.  She inspected it with painstaking care, while One Eye, who
+had returned, stood in the entrance and patiently watched her.  She
+dropped her head, with her nose to the ground and directed toward a
+point near to her closely bunched feet, and around this point she
+circled several times; then, with a tired sigh that was almost a
+grunt, she curled her body in, relaxed her legs, and dropped down,
+her head toward the entrance.  One Eye, with pointed, interested
+ears, laughed at her, and beyond, outlined against the white light,
+she could see the brush of his tail waving good-naturedly.  Her own
+ears, with a snuggling movement, laid their sharp points backward
+and down against the head for a moment, while her mouth opened and
+her tongue lolled peaceably out, and in this way she expressed that
+she was pleased and satisfied.
+
+One Eye was hungry.  Though he lay down in the entrance and slept,
+his sleep was fitful.  He kept awaking and cocking his ears at the
+bright world without, where the April sun was blazing across the
+snow.  When he dozed, upon his ears would steal the faint whispers
+of hidden trickles of running water, and he would rouse and listen
+intently.  The sun had come back, and all the awakening Northland
+world was calling to him.  Life was stirring.  The feel of spring
+was in the air, the feel of growing life under the snow, of sap
+ascending in the trees, of buds bursting the shackles of the frost.
+
+He cast anxious glances at his mate, but she showed no desire to
+get up.  He looked outside, and half a dozen snow-birds fluttered
+across his field of vision.  He started to get up, then looked back
+to his mate again, and settled down and dozed.  A shrill and minute
+singing stole upon his heating.  Once, and twice, he sleepily
+brushed his nose with his paw.  Then he woke up.  There, buzzing in
+the air at the tip of his nose, was a lone mosquito.  It was a
+full-grown mosquito, one that had lain frozen in a dry log all
+winter and that had now been thawed out by the sun.  He could
+resist the call of the world no longer.  Besides, he was hungry.
+
+He crawled over to his mate and tried to persuade her to get up.
+But she only snarled at him, and he walked out alone into the
+bright sunshine to find the snow-surface soft under foot and the
+travelling difficult.  He went up the frozen bed of the stream,
+where the snow, shaded by the trees, was yet hard and crystalline.
+He was gone eight hours, and he came back through the darkness
+hungrier than when he had started.  He had found game, but he had
+not caught it.  He had broken through the melting snow crust, and
+wallowed, while the snowshoe rabbits had skimmed along on top
+lightly as ever.
+
+He paused at the mouth of the cave with a sudden shock of
+suspicion.  Faint, strange sounds came from within.  They were
+sounds not made by his mate, and yet they were remotely familiar.
+He bellied cautiously inside and was met by a warning snarl from
+the she-wolf.  This he received without perturbation, though he
+obeyed it by keeping his distance; but he remained interested in
+the other sounds--faint, muffled sobbings and slubberings.
+
+His mate warned him irritably away, and he curled up and slept in
+the entrance.  When morning came and a dim light pervaded the lair,
+he again sought after the source of the remotely familiar sounds.
+There was a new note in his mate's warning snarl.  It was a jealous
+note, and he was very careful in keeping a respectful distance.
+Nevertheless, he made out, sheltering between her legs against the
+length of her body, five strange little bundles of life, very
+feeble, very helpless, making tiny whimpering noises, with eyes
+that did not open to the light.  He was surprised.  It was not the
+first time in his long and successful life that this thing had
+happened.  It had happened many times, yet each time it was as
+fresh a surprise as ever to him.
+
+His mate looked at him anxiously.  Every little while she emitted a
+low growl, and at times, when it seemed to her he approached too
+near, the growl shot up in her throat to a sharp snarl.  Of her own
+experience she had no memory of the thing happening; but in her
+instinct, which was the experience of all the mothers of wolves,
+there lurked a memory of fathers that had eaten their new-born and
+helpless progeny.  It manifested itself as a fear strong within
+her, that made her prevent One Eye from more closely inspecting the
+cubs he had fathered.
+
+But there was no danger.  Old One Eye was feeling the urge of an
+impulse, that was, in turn, an instinct that had come down to him
+from all the fathers of wolves.  He did not question it, nor puzzle
+over it.  It was there, in the fibre of his being; and it was the
+most natural thing in the world that he should obey it by turning
+his back on his new-born family and by trotting out and away on the
+meat-trail whereby he lived.
+
+Five or six miles from the lair, the stream divided, its forks
+going off among the mountains at a right angle.  Here, leading up
+the left fork, he came upon a fresh track.  He smelled it and found
+it so recent that he crouched swiftly, and looked in the direction
+in which it disappeared.  Then he turned deliberately and took the
+right fork.  The footprint was much larger than the one his own
+feet made, and he knew that in the wake of such a trail there was
+little meat for him.
+
+Half a mile up the right fork, his quick ears caught the sound of
+gnawing teeth.  He stalked the quarry and found it to be a
+porcupine, standing upright against a tree and trying his teeth on
+the bark.  One Eye approached carefully but hopelessly.  He knew
+the breed, though he had never met it so far north before; and
+never in his long life had porcupine served him for a meal.  But he
+had long since learned that there was such a thing as Chance, or
+Opportunity, and he continued to draw near.  There was never any
+telling what might happen, for with live things events were somehow
+always happening differently.
+
+The porcupine rolled itself into a ball, radiating long, sharp
+needles in all directions that defied attack.  In his youth One Eye
+had once sniffed too near a similar, apparently inert ball of
+quills, and had the tail flick out suddenly in his face.  One quill
+he had carried away in his muzzle, where it had remained for weeks,
+a rankling flame, until it finally worked out.  So he lay down, in
+a comfortable crouching position, his nose fully a foot away, and
+out of the line of the tail.  Thus he waited, keeping perfectly
+quiet.  There was no telling.  Something might happen.  The
+porcupine might unroll.  There might be opportunity for a deft and
+ripping thrust of paw into the tender, unguarded belly.
+
+But at the end of half an hour he arose, growled wrathfully at the
+motionless ball, and trotted on.  He had waited too often and
+futilely in the past for porcupines to unroll, to waste any more
+time.  He continued up the right fork.  The day wore along, and
+nothing rewarded his hunt.
+
+The urge of his awakened instinct of fatherhood was strong upon
+him.  He must find meat.  In the afternoon he blundered upon a
+ptarmigan.  He came out of a thicket and found himself face to face
+with the slow-witted bird.  It was sitting on a log, not a foot
+beyond the end of his nose.  Each saw the other.  The bird made a
+startled rise, but he struck it with his paw, and smashed it down
+to earth, then pounced upon it, and caught it in his teeth as it
+scuttled across the snow trying to rise in the air again.  As his
+teeth crunched through the tender flesh and fragile bones, he began
+naturally to eat.  Then he remembered, and, turning on the back-
+track, started for home, carrying the ptarmigan in his mouth.
+
+A mile above the forks, running velvet-footed as was his custom, a
+gliding shadow that cautiously prospected each new vista of the
+trail, he came upon later imprints of the large tracks he had
+discovered in the early morning.  As the track led his way, he
+followed, prepared to meet the maker of it at every turn of the
+stream.
+
+He slid his head around a corner of rock, where began an unusually
+large bend in the stream, and his quick eyes made out something
+that sent him crouching swiftly down.  It was the maker of the
+track, a large female lynx.  She was crouching as he had crouched
+once that day, in front of her the tight-rolled ball of quills.  If
+he had been a gliding shadow before, he now became the ghost of
+such a shadow, as he crept and circled around, and came up well to
+leeward of the silent, motionless pair.
+
+He lay down in the snow, depositing the ptarmigan beside him, and
+with eyes peering through the needles of a low-growing spruce he
+watched the play of life before him--the waiting lynx and the
+waiting porcupine, each intent on life; and, such was the
+curiousness of the game, the way of life for one lay in the eating
+of the other, and the way of life for the other lay in being not
+eaten.  While old One Eye, the wolf crouching in the covert, played
+his part, too, in the game, waiting for some strange freak of
+Chance, that might help him on the meat-trail which was his way of
+life.
+
+Half an hour passed, an hour; and nothing happened.  The balls of
+quills might have been a stone for all it moved; the lynx might
+have been frozen to marble; and old One Eye might have been dead.
+Yet all three animals were keyed to a tenseness of living that was
+almost painful, and scarcely ever would it come to them to be more
+alive than they were then in their seeming petrifaction.
+
+One Eye moved slightly and peered forth with increased eagerness.
+Something was happening.  The porcupine had at last decided that
+its enemy had gone away.  Slowly, cautiously, it was unrolling its
+ball of impregnable armour.  It was agitated by no tremor of
+anticipation.  Slowly, slowly, the bristling ball straightened out
+and lengthened.  One Eye watching, felt a sudden moistness in his
+mouth and a drooling of saliva, involuntary, excited by the living
+meat that was spreading itself like a repast before him.
+
+Not quite entirely had the porcupine unrolled when it discovered
+its enemy.  In that instant the lynx struck.  The blow was like a
+flash of light.  The paw, with rigid claws curving like talons,
+shot under the tender belly and came back with a swift ripping
+movement.  Had the porcupine been entirely unrolled, or had it not
+discovered its enemy a fraction of a second before the blow was
+struck, the paw would have escaped unscathed; but a side-flick of
+the tail sank sharp quills into it as it was withdrawn.
+
+Everything had happened at once--the blow, the counter-blow, the
+squeal of agony from the porcupine, the big cat's squall of sudden
+hurt and astonishment.  One Eye half arose in his excitement, his
+ears up, his tail straight out and quivering behind him.  The
+lynx's bad temper got the best of her.  She sprang savagely at the
+thing that had hurt her.  But the porcupine, squealing and
+grunting, with disrupted anatomy trying feebly to roll up into its
+ball-protection, flicked out its tail again, and again the big cat
+squalled with hurt and astonishment.  Then she fell to backing away
+and sneezing, her nose bristling with quills like a monstrous pin-
+cushion.  She brushed her nose with her paws, trying to dislodge
+the fiery darts, thrust it into the snow, and rubbed it against
+twigs and branches, and all the time leaping about, ahead,
+sidewise, up and down, in a frenzy of pain and fright.
+
+She sneezed continually, and her stub of a tail was doing its best
+toward lashing about by giving quick, violent jerks.  She quit her
+antics, and quieted down for a long minute.  One Eye watched.  And
+even he could not repress a start and an involuntary bristling of
+hair along his back when she suddenly leaped, without warning,
+straight up in the air, at the same time emitting a long and most
+terrible squall.  Then she sprang away, up the trail, squalling
+with every leap she made.
+
+It was not until her racket had faded away in the distance and died
+out that One Eye ventured forth.  He walked as delicately as though
+all the snow were carpeted with porcupine quills, erect and ready
+to pierce the soft pads of his feet.  The porcupine met his
+approach with a furious squealing and a clashing of its long teeth.
+It had managed to roll up in a ball again, but it was not quite the
+old compact ball; its muscles were too much torn for that.  It had
+been ripped almost in half, and was still bleeding profusely.
+
+One Eye scooped out mouthfuls of the blood-soaked snow, and chewed
+and tasted and swallowed.  This served as a relish, and his hunger
+increased mightily; but he was too old in the world to forget his
+caution.  He waited.  He lay down and waited, while the porcupine
+grated its teeth and uttered grunts and sobs and occasional sharp
+little squeals.  In a little while, One Eye noticed that the quills
+were drooping and that a great quivering had set up.  The quivering
+came to an end suddenly.  There was a final defiant clash of the
+long teeth.  Then all the quills drooped quite down, and the body
+relaxed and moved no more.
+
+With a nervous, shrinking paw, One Eye stretched out the porcupine
+to its full length and turned it over on its back.  Nothing had
+happened.  It was surely dead.  He studied it intently for a
+moment, then took a careful grip with his teeth and started off
+down the stream, partly carrying, partly dragging the porcupine,
+with head turned to the side so as to avoid stepping on the prickly
+mass.  He recollected something, dropped the burden, and trotted
+back to where he had left the ptarmigan.  He did not hesitate a
+moment.  He knew clearly what was to be done, and this he did by
+promptly eating the ptarmigan.  Then he returned and took up his
+burden.
+
+When he dragged the result of his day's hunt into the cave, the
+she-wolf inspected it, turned her muzzle to him, and lightly licked
+him on the neck.  But the next instant she was warning him away
+from the cubs with a snarl that was less harsh than usual and that
+was more apologetic than menacing.  Her instinctive fear of the
+father of her progeny was toning down.  He was behaving as a wolf-
+father should, and manifesting no unholy desire to devour the young
+lives she had brought into the world.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III--THE GREY CUB
+
+
+
+He was different from his brothers and sisters.  Their hair already
+betrayed the reddish hue inherited from their mother, the she-wolf;
+while he alone, in this particular, took after his father.  He was
+the one little grey cub of the litter.  He had bred true to the
+straight wolf-stock--in fact, he had bred true to old One Eye
+himself, physically, with but a single exception, and that was he
+had two eyes to his father's one.
+
+The grey cub's eyes had not been open long, yet already he could
+see with steady clearness.  And while his eyes were still closed,
+he had felt, tasted, and smelled.  He knew his two brothers and his
+two sisters very well.  He had begun to romp with them in a feeble,
+awkward way, and even to squabble, his little throat vibrating with
+a queer rasping noise (the forerunner of the growl), as he worked
+himself into a passion.  And long before his eyes had opened he had
+learned by touch, taste, and smell to know his mother--a fount of
+warmth and liquid food and tenderness.  She possessed a gentle,
+caressing tongue that soothed him when it passed over his soft
+little body, and that impelled him to snuggle close against her and
+to doze off to sleep.
+
+Most of the first month of his life had been passed thus in
+sleeping; but now he could see quite well, and he stayed awake for
+longer periods of time, and he was coming to learn his world quite
+well.  His world was gloomy; but he did not know that, for he knew
+no other world.  It was dim-lighted; but his eyes had never had to
+adjust themselves to any other light.  His world was very small.
+Its limits were the walls of the lair; but as he had no knowledge
+of the wide world outside, he was never oppressed by the narrow
+confines of his existence.
+
+But he had early discovered that one wall of his world was
+different from the rest.  This was the mouth of the cave and the
+source of light.  He had discovered that it was different from the
+other walls long before he had any thoughts of his own, any
+conscious volitions.  It had been an irresistible attraction before
+ever his eyes opened and looked upon it.  The light from it had
+beat upon his sealed lids, and the eyes and the optic nerves had
+pulsated to little, sparklike flashes, warm-coloured and strangely
+pleasing.  The life of his body, and of every fibre of his body,
+the life that was the very substance of his body and that was apart
+from his own personal life, had yearned toward this light and urged
+his body toward it in the same way that the cunning chemistry of a
+plant urges it toward the sun.
+
+Always, in the beginning, before his conscious life dawned, he had
+crawled toward the mouth of the cave.  And in this his brothers and
+sisters were one with him.  Never, in that period, did any of them
+crawl toward the dark corners of the back-wall.  The light drew
+them as if they were plants; the chemistry of the life that
+composed them demanded the light as a necessity of being; and their
+little puppet-bodies crawled blindly and chemically, like the
+tendrils of a vine.  Later on, when each developed individuality
+and became personally conscious of impulsions and desires, the
+attraction of the light increased.  They were always crawling and
+sprawling toward it, and being driven back from it by their mother.
+
+It was in this way that the grey cub learned other attributes of
+his mother than the soft, soothing, tongue.  In his insistent
+crawling toward the light, he discovered in her a nose that with a
+sharp nudge administered rebuke, and later, a paw, that crushed him
+down and rolled him over and over with swift, calculating stroke.
+Thus he learned hurt; and on top of it he learned to avoid hurt,
+first, by not incurring the risk of it; and second, when he had
+incurred the risk, by dodging and by retreating.  These were
+conscious actions, and were the results of his first
+generalisations upon the world.  Before that he had recoiled
+automatically from hurt, as he had crawled automatically toward the
+light.  After that he recoiled from hurt because he KNEW that it
+was hurt.
+
+He was a fierce little cub.  So were his brothers and sisters.  It
+was to be expected.  He was a carnivorous animal.  He came of a
+breed of meat-killers and meat-eaters.  His father and mother lived
+wholly upon meat.  The milk he had sucked with his first flickering
+life, was milk transformed directly from meat, and now, at a month
+old, when his eyes had been open for but a week, he was beginning
+himself to eat meat--meat half-digested by the she-wolf and
+disgorged for the five growing cubs that already made too great
+demand upon her breast.
+
+But he was, further, the fiercest of the litter.  He could make a
+louder rasping growl than any of them.  His tiny rages were much
+more terrible than theirs.  It was he that first learned the trick
+of rolling a fellow-cub over with a cunning paw-stroke.  And it was
+he that first gripped another cub by the ear and pulled and tugged
+and growled through jaws tight-clenched.  And certainly it was he
+that caused the mother the most trouble in keeping her litter from
+the mouth of the cave.
+
+The fascination of the light for the grey cub increased from day to
+day.  He was perpetually departing on yard-long adventures toward
+the cave's entrance, and as perpetually being driven back.  Only he
+did not know it for an entrance.  He did not know anything about
+entrances--passages whereby one goes from one place to another
+place.  He did not know any other place, much less of a way to get
+there.  So to him the entrance of the cave was a wall--a wall of
+light.  As the sun was to the outside dweller, this wall was to him
+the sun of his world.  It attracted him as a candle attracts a
+moth.  He was always striving to attain it.  The life that was so
+swiftly expanding within him, urged him continually toward the wall
+of light.  The life that was within him knew that it was the one
+way out, the way he was predestined to tread.  But he himself did
+not know anything about it.  He did not know there was any outside
+at all.
+
+There was one strange thing about this wall of light.  His father
+(he had already come to recognise his father as the one other
+dweller in the world, a creature like his mother, who slept near
+the light and was a bringer of meat)--his father had a way of
+walking right into the white far wall and disappearing.  The grey
+cub could not understand this.  Though never permitted by his
+mother to approach that wall, he had approached the other walls,
+and encountered hard obstruction on the end of his tender nose.
+This hurt.  And after several such adventures, he left the walls
+alone.  Without thinking about it, he accepted this disappearing
+into the wall as a peculiarity of his father, as milk and half-
+digested meat were peculiarities of his mother.
+
+In fact, the grey cub was not given to thinking--at least, to the
+kind of thinking customary of men.  His brain worked in dim ways.
+Yet his conclusions were as sharp and distinct as those achieved by
+men.  He had a method of accepting things, without questioning the
+why and wherefore.  In reality, this was the act of classification.
+He was never disturbed over why a thing happened.  How it happened
+was sufficient for him.  Thus, when he had bumped his nose on the
+back-wall a few times, he accepted that he would not disappear into
+walls.  In the same way he accepted that his father could disappear
+into walls.  But he was not in the least disturbed by desire to
+find out the reason for the difference between his father and
+himself.  Logic and physics were no part of his mental make-up.
+
+Like most creatures of the Wild, he early experienced famine.
+There came a time when not only did the meat-supply cease, but the
+milk no longer came from his mother's breast.  At first, the cubs
+whimpered and cried, but for the most part they slept.  It was not
+long before they were reduced to a coma of hunger.  There were no
+more spats and squabbles, no more tiny rages nor attempts at
+growling; while the adventures toward the far white wall ceased
+altogether.  The cubs slept, while the life that was in them
+flickered and died down.
+
+One Eye was desperate.  He ranged far and wide, and slept but
+little in the lair that had now become cheerless and miserable.
+The she-wolf, too, left her litter and went out in search of meat.
+In the first days after the birth of the cubs, One Eye had
+journeyed several times back to the Indian camp and robbed the
+rabbit snares; but, with the melting of the snow and the opening of
+the streams, the Indian camp had moved away, and that source of
+supply was closed to him.
+
+When the grey cub came back to life and again took interest in the
+far white wall, he found that the population of his world had been
+reduced.  Only one sister remained to him.  The rest were gone.  As
+he grew stronger, he found himself compelled to play alone, for the
+sister no longer lifted her head nor moved about.  His little body
+rounded out with the meat he now ate; but the food had come too
+late for her.  She slept continuously, a tiny skeleton flung round
+with skin in which the flame flickered lower and lower and at last
+went out.
+
+Then there came a time when the grey cub no longer saw his father
+appearing and disappearing in the wall nor lying down asleep in the
+entrance.  This had happened at the end of a second and less severe
+famine.  The she-wolf knew why One Eye never came back, but there
+was no way by which she could tell what she had seen to the grey
+cub.  Hunting herself for meat, up the left fork of the stream
+where lived the lynx, she had followed a day-old trail of One Eye.
+And she had found him, or what remained of him, at the end of the
+trail.  There were many signs of the battle that had been fought,
+and of the lynx's withdrawal to her lair after having won the
+victory.  Before she went away, the she-wolf had found this lair,
+but the signs told her that the lynx was inside, and she had not
+dared to venture in.
+
+After that, the she-wolf in her hunting avoided the left fork.  For
+she knew that in the lynx's lair was a litter of kittens, and she
+knew the lynx for a fierce, bad-tempered creature and a terrible
+fighter.  It was all very well for half a dozen wolves to drive a
+lynx, spitting and bristling, up a tree; but it was quite a
+different matter for a lone wolf to encounter a lynx--especially
+when the lynx was known to have a litter of hungry kittens at her
+back.
+
+But the Wild is the Wild, and motherhood is motherhood, at all
+times fiercely protective whether in the Wild or out of it; and the
+time was to come when the she-wolf, for her grey cub's sake, would
+venture the left fork, and the lair in the rocks, and the lynx's
+wrath.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV--THE WALL OF THE WORLD
+
+
+
+By the time his mother began leaving the cave on hunting
+expeditions, the cub had learned well the law that forbade his
+approaching the entrance.  Not only had this law been forcibly and
+many times impressed on him by his mother's nose and paw, but in
+him the instinct of fear was developing.  Never, in his brief cave-
+life, had he encountered anything of which to be afraid.  Yet fear
+was in him.  It had come down to him from a remote ancestry through
+a thousand thousand lives.  It was a heritage he had received
+directly from One Eye and the she-wolf; but to them, in turn, it
+had been passed down through all the generations of wolves that had
+gone before.  Fear!--that legacy of the Wild which no animal may
+escape nor exchange for pottage.
+
+So the grey cub knew fear, though he knew not the stuff of which
+fear was made.  Possibly he accepted it as one of the restrictions
+of life.  For he had already learned that there were such
+restrictions.  Hunger he had known; and when he could not appease
+his hunger he had felt restriction.  The hard obstruction of the
+cave-wall, the sharp nudge of his mother's nose, the smashing
+stroke of her paw, the hunger unappeased of several famines, had
+borne in upon him that all was not freedom in the world, that to
+life there was limitations and restraints.  These limitations and
+restraints were laws.  To be obedient to them was to escape hurt
+and make for happiness.
+
+He did not reason the question out in this man fashion.  He merely
+classified the things that hurt and the things that did not hurt.
+And after such classification he avoided the things that hurt, the
+restrictions and restraints, in order to enjoy the satisfactions
+and the remunerations of life.
+
+Thus it was that in obedience to the law laid down by his mother,
+and in obedience to the law of that unknown and nameless thing,
+fear, he kept away from the mouth of the cave.  It remained to him
+a white wall of light.  When his mother was absent, he slept most
+of the time, while during the intervals that he was awake he kept
+very quiet, suppressing the whimpering cries that tickled in his
+throat and strove for noise.
+
+Once, lying awake, he heard a strange sound in the white wall.  He
+did not know that it was a wolverine, standing outside, all a-
+trembling with its own daring, and cautiously scenting out the
+contents of the cave.  The cub knew only that the sniff was
+strange, a something unclassified, therefore unknown and terrible--
+for the unknown was one of the chief elements that went into the
+making of fear.
+
+The hair bristled upon the grey cub's back, but it bristled
+silently.  How was he to know that this thing that sniffed was a
+thing at which to bristle?  It was not born of any knowledge of
+his, yet it was the visible expression of the fear that was in him,
+and for which, in his own life, there was no accounting.  But fear
+was accompanied by another instinct--that of concealment.  The cub
+was in a frenzy of terror, yet he lay without movement or sound,
+frozen, petrified into immobility, to all appearances dead.  His
+mother, coming home, growled as she smelt the wolverine's track,
+and bounded into the cave and licked and nozzled him with undue
+vehemence of affection.  And the cub felt that somehow he had
+escaped a great hurt.
+
+But there were other forces at work in the cub, the greatest of
+which was growth.  Instinct and law demanded of him obedience.  But
+growth demanded disobedience.  His mother and fear impelled him to
+keep away from the white wall.  Growth is life, and life is for
+ever destined to make for light.  So there was no damming up the
+tide of life that was rising within him--rising with every mouthful
+of meat he swallowed, with every breath he drew.  In the end, one
+day, fear and obedience were swept away by the rush of life, and
+the cub straddled and sprawled toward the entrance.
+
+Unlike any other wall with which he had had experience, this wall
+seemed to recede from him as he approached.  No hard surface
+collided with the tender little nose he thrust out tentatively
+before him.  The substance of the wall seemed as permeable and
+yielding as light.  And as condition, in his eyes, had the seeming
+of form, so he entered into what had been wall to him and bathed in
+the substance that composed it.
+
+It was bewildering.  He was sprawling through solidity.  And ever
+the light grew brighter.  Fear urged him to go back, but growth
+drove him on.  Suddenly he found himself at the mouth of the cave.
+The wall, inside which he had thought himself, as suddenly leaped
+back before him to an immeasurable distance.  The light had become
+painfully bright.  He was dazzled by it.  Likewise he was made
+dizzy by this abrupt and tremendous extension of space.
+Automatically, his eyes were adjusting themselves to the
+brightness, focusing themselves to meet the increased distance of
+objects.  At first, the wall had leaped beyond his vision.  He now
+saw it again; but it had taken upon itself a remarkable remoteness.
+Also, its appearance had changed.  It was now a variegated wall,
+composed of the trees that fringed the stream, the opposing
+mountain that towered above the trees, and the sky that out-towered
+the mountain.
+
+A great fear came upon him.  This was more of the terrible unknown.
+He crouched down on the lip of the cave and gazed out on the world.
+He was very much afraid.  Because it was unknown, it was hostile to
+him.  Therefore the hair stood up on end along his back and his
+lips wrinkled weakly in an attempt at a ferocious and intimidating
+snarl.  Out of his puniness and fright he challenged and menaced
+the whole wide world.
+
+Nothing happened.  He continued to gaze, and in his interest he
+forgot to snarl.  Also, he forgot to be afraid.  For the time, fear
+had been routed by growth, while growth had assumed the guise of
+curiosity.  He began to notice near objects--an open portion of the
+stream that flashed in the sun, the blasted pine-tree that stood at
+the base of the slope, and the slope itself, that ran right up to
+him and ceased two feet beneath the lip of the cave on which he
+crouched.
+
+Now the grey cub had lived all his days on a level floor.  He had
+never experienced the hurt of a fall.  He did not know what a fall
+was.  So he stepped boldly out upon the air.  His hind-legs still
+rested on the cave-lip, so he fell forward head downward.  The
+earth struck him a harsh blow on the nose that made him yelp.  Then
+he began rolling down the slope, over and over.  He was in a panic
+of terror.  The unknown had caught him at last.  It had gripped
+savagely hold of him and was about to wreak upon him some terrific
+hurt.  Growth was now routed by fear, and he ki-yi'd like any
+frightened puppy.
+
+The unknown bore him on he knew not to what frightful hurt, and he
+yelped and ki-yi'd unceasingly.  This was a different proposition
+from crouching in frozen fear while the unknown lurked just
+alongside.  Now the unknown had caught tight hold of him.  Silence
+would do no good.  Besides, it was not fear, but terror, that
+convulsed him.
+
+But the slope grew more gradual, and its base was grass-covered.
+Here the cub lost momentum.  When at last he came to a stop, he
+gave one last agonised yell and then a long, whimpering wail.
+Also, and quite as a matter of course, as though in his life he had
+already made a thousand toilets, he proceeded to lick away the dry
+clay that soiled him.
+
+After that he sat up and gazed about him, as might the first man of
+the earth who landed upon Mars.  The cub had broken through the
+wall of the world, the unknown had let go its hold of him, and here
+he was without hurt.  But the first man on Mars would have
+experienced less unfamiliarity than did he.  Without any antecedent
+knowledge, without any warning whatever that such existed, he found
+himself an explorer in a totally new world.
+
+Now that the terrible unknown had let go of him, he forgot that the
+unknown had any terrors.  He was aware only of curiosity in all the
+things about him.  He inspected the grass beneath him, the moss-
+berry plant just beyond, and the dead trunk of the blasted pine
+that stood on the edge of an open space among the trees.  A
+squirrel, running around the base of the trunk, came full upon him,
+and gave him a great fright.  He cowered down and snarled.  But the
+squirrel was as badly scared.  It ran up the tree, and from a point
+of safety chattered back savagely.
+
+This helped the cub's courage, and though the woodpecker he next
+encountered gave him a start, he proceeded confidently on his way.
+Such was his confidence, that when a moose-bird impudently hopped
+up to him, he reached out at it with a playful paw.  The result was
+a sharp peck on the end of his nose that made him cower down and
+ki-yi.  The noise he made was too much for the moose-bird, who
+sought safety in flight.
+
+But the cub was learning.  His misty little mind had already made
+an unconscious classification.  There were live things and things
+not alive.  Also, he must watch out for the live things.  The
+things not alive remained always in one place, but the live things
+moved about, and there was no telling what they might do.  The
+thing to expect of them was the unexpected, and for this he must be
+prepared.
+
+He travelled very clumsily.  He ran into sticks and things.  A twig
+that he thought a long way off, would the next instant hit him on
+the nose or rake along his ribs.  There were inequalities of
+surface.  Sometimes he overstepped and stubbed his nose.  Quite as
+often he understepped and stubbed his feet.  Then there were the
+pebbles and stones that turned under him when he trod upon them;
+and from them he came to know that the things not alive were not
+all in the same state of stable equilibrium as was his cave--also,
+that small things not alive were more liable than large things to
+fall down or turn over.  But with every mishap he was learning.
+The longer he walked, the better he walked.  He was adjusting
+himself.  He was learning to calculate his own muscular movements,
+to know his physical limitations, to measure distances between
+objects, and between objects and himself.
+
+His was the luck of the beginner.  Born to be a hunter of meat
+(though he did not know it), he blundered upon meat just outside
+his own cave-door on his first foray into the world.  It was by
+sheer blundering that he chanced upon the shrewdly hidden ptarmigan
+nest.  He fell into it.  He had essayed to walk along the trunk of
+a fallen pine.  The rotten bark gave way under his feet, and with a
+despairing yelp he pitched down the rounded crescent, smashed
+through the leafage and stalks of a small bush, and in the heart of
+the bush, on the ground, fetched up in the midst of seven ptarmigan
+chicks.
+
+They made noises, and at first he was frightened at them.  Then he
+perceived that they were very little, and he became bolder.  They
+moved.  He placed his paw on one, and its movements were
+accelerated.  This was a source of enjoyment to him.  He smelled
+it.  He picked it up in his mouth.  It struggled and tickled his
+tongue.  At the same time he was made aware of a sensation of
+hunger.  His jaws closed together.  There was a crunching of
+fragile bones, and warm blood ran in his mouth.  The taste of it
+was good.  This was meat, the same as his mother gave him, only it
+was alive between his teeth and therefore better.  So he ate the
+ptarmigan.  Nor did he stop till he had devoured the whole brood.
+Then he licked his chops in quite the same way his mother did, and
+began to crawl out of the bush.
+
+He encountered a feathered whirlwind.  He was confused and blinded
+by the rush of it and the beat of angry wings.  He hid his head
+between his paws and yelped.  The blows increased.  The mother
+ptarmigan was in a fury.  Then he became angry.  He rose up,
+snarling, striking out with his paws.  He sank his tiny teeth into
+one of the wings and pulled and tugged sturdily.  The ptarmigan
+struggled against him, showering blows upon him with her free wing.
+It was his first battle.  He was elated.  He forgot all about the
+unknown.  He no longer was afraid of anything.  He was fighting,
+tearing at a live thing that was striking at him.  Also, this live
+thing was meat.  The lust to kill was on him.  He had just
+destroyed little live things.  He would now destroy a big live
+thing.  He was too busy and happy to know that he was happy.  He
+was thrilling and exulting in ways new to him and greater to him
+than any he had known before.
+
+He held on to the wing and growled between his tight-clenched
+teeth.  The ptarmigan dragged him out of the bush.  When she turned
+and tried to drag him back into the bush's shelter, he pulled her
+away from it and on into the open.  And all the time she was making
+outcry and striking with her free wing, while feathers were flying
+like a snow-fall.  The pitch to which he was aroused was
+tremendous.  All the fighting blood of his breed was up in him and
+surging through him.  This was living, though he did not know it.
+He was realising his own meaning in the world; he was doing that
+for which he was made--killing meat and battling to kill it.  He
+was justifying his existence, than which life can do no greater;
+for life achieves its summit when it does to the uttermost that
+which it was equipped to do.
+
+After a time, the ptarmigan ceased her struggling.  He still held
+her by the wing, and they lay on the ground and looked at each
+other.  He tried to growl threateningly, ferociously.  She pecked
+on his nose, which by now, what of previous adventures was sore.
+He winced but held on.  She pecked him again and again.  From
+wincing he went to whimpering.  He tried to back away from her,
+oblivious to the fact that by his hold on her he dragged her after
+him.  A rain of pecks fell on his ill-used nose.  The flood of
+fight ebbed down in him, and, releasing his prey, he turned tail
+and scampered on across the open in inglorious retreat.
+
+He lay down to rest on the other side of the open, near the edge of
+the bushes, his tongue lolling out, his chest heaving and panting,
+his nose still hurting him and causing him to continue his whimper.
+But as he lay there, suddenly there came to him a feeling as of
+something terrible impending.  The unknown with all its terrors
+rushed upon him, and he shrank back instinctively into the shelter
+of the bush.  As he did so, a draught of air fanned him, and a
+large, winged body swept ominously and silently past.  A hawk,
+driving down out of the blue, had barely missed him.
+
+While he lay in the bush, recovering from his fright and peering
+fearfully out, the mother-ptarmigan on the other side of the open
+space fluttered out of the ravaged nest.  It was because of her
+loss that she paid no attention to the winged bolt of the sky.  But
+the cub saw, and it was a warning and a lesson to him--the swift
+downward swoop of the hawk, the short skim of its body just above
+the ground, the strike of its talons in the body of the ptarmigan,
+the ptarmigan's squawk of agony and fright, and the hawk's rush
+upward into the blue, carrying the ptarmigan away with it,
+
+It was a long time before the cub left its shelter.  He had learned
+much.  Live things were meat.  They were good to eat.  Also, live
+things when they were large enough, could give hurt.  It was better
+to eat small live things like ptarmigan chicks, and to let alone
+large live things like ptarmigan hens.  Nevertheless he felt a
+little prick of ambition, a sneaking desire to have another battle
+with that ptarmigan hen--only the hawk had carried her away.  May
+be there were other ptarmigan hens.  He would go and see.
+
+He came down a shelving bank to the stream.  He had never seen
+water before.  The footing looked good.  There were no inequalities
+of surface.  He stepped boldly out on it; and went down, crying
+with fear, into the embrace of the unknown.  It was cold, and he
+gasped, breathing quickly.  The water rushed into his lungs instead
+of the air that had always accompanied his act of breathing.  The
+suffocation he experienced was like the pang of death.  To him it
+signified death.  He had no conscious knowledge of death, but like
+every animal of the Wild, he possessed the instinct of death.  To
+him it stood as the greatest of hurts.  It was the very essence of
+the unknown; it was the sum of the terrors of the unknown, the one
+culminating and unthinkable catastrophe that could happen to him,
+about which he knew nothing and about which he feared everything.
+
+He came to the surface, and the sweet air rushed into his open
+mouth.  He did not go down again.  Quite as though it had been a
+long-established custom of his he struck out with all his legs and
+began to swim.  The near bank was a yard away; but he had come up
+with his back to it, and the first thing his eyes rested upon was
+the opposite bank, toward which he immediately began to swim.  The
+stream was a small one, but in the pool it widened out to a score
+of feet.
+
+Midway in the passage, the current picked up the cub and swept him
+downstream.  He was caught in the miniature rapid at the bottom of
+the pool.  Here was little chance for swimming.  The quiet water
+had become suddenly angry.  Sometimes he was under, sometimes on
+top.  At all times he was in violent motion, now being turned over
+or around, and again, being smashed against a rock.  And with every
+rock he struck, he yelped.  His progress was a series of yelps,
+from which might have been adduced the number of rocks he
+encountered.
+
+Below the rapid was a second pool, and here, captured by the eddy,
+he was gently borne to the bank, and as gently deposited on a bed
+of gravel.  He crawled frantically clear of the water and lay down.
+He had learned some more about the world.  Water was not alive.
+Yet it moved.  Also, it looked as solid as the earth, but was
+without any solidity at all.  His conclusion was that things were
+not always what they appeared to be.  The cub's fear of the unknown
+was an inherited distrust, and it had now been strengthened by
+experience.  Thenceforth, in the nature of things, he would possess
+an abiding distrust of appearances.  He would have to learn the
+reality of a thing before he could put his faith into it.
+
+One other adventure was destined for him that day.  He had
+recollected that there was such a thing in the world as his mother.
+And then there came to him a feeling that he wanted her more than
+all the rest of the things in the world.  Not only was his body
+tired with the adventures it had undergone, but his little brain
+was equally tired.  In all the days he had lived it had not worked
+so hard as on this one day.  Furthermore, he was sleepy.  So he
+started out to look for the cave and his mother, feeling at the
+same time an overwhelming rush of loneliness and helplessness.
+
+He was sprawling along between some bushes, when he heard a sharp
+intimidating cry.  There was a flash of yellow before his eyes.  He
+saw a weasel leaping swiftly away from him.  It was a small live
+thing, and he had no fear.  Then, before him, at his feet, he saw
+an extremely small live thing, only several inches long, a young
+weasel, that, like himself, had disobediently gone out adventuring.
+It tried to retreat before him.  He turned it over with his paw.
+It made a queer, grating noise.  The next moment the flash of
+yellow reappeared before his eyes.  He heard again the intimidating
+cry, and at the same instant received a sharp blow on the side of
+the neck and felt the sharp teeth of the mother-weasel cut into his
+flesh.
+
+While he yelped and ki-yi'd and scrambled backward, he saw the
+mother-weasel leap upon her young one and disappear with it into
+the neighbouring thicket.  The cut of her teeth in his neck still
+hurt, but his feelings were hurt more grievously, and he sat down
+and weakly whimpered.  This mother-weasel was so small and so
+savage.  He was yet to learn that for size and weight the weasel
+was the most ferocious, vindictive, and terrible of all the killers
+of the Wild.  But a portion of this knowledge was quickly to be
+his.
+
+He was still whimpering when the mother-weasel reappeared.  She did
+not rush him, now that her young one was safe.  She approached more
+cautiously, and the cub had full opportunity to observe her lean,
+snakelike body, and her head, erect, eager, and snake-like itself.
+Her sharp, menacing cry sent the hair bristling along his back, and
+he snarled warningly at her.  She came closer and closer.  There
+was a leap, swifter than his unpractised sight, and the lean,
+yellow body disappeared for a moment out of the field of his
+vision.  The next moment she was at his throat, her teeth buried in
+his hair and flesh.
+
+At first he snarled and tried to fight; but he was very young, and
+this was only his first day in the world, and his snarl became a
+whimper, his fight a struggle to escape.  The weasel never relaxed
+her hold.  She hung on, striving to press down with her teeth to
+the great vein were his life-blood bubbled.  The weasel was a
+drinker of blood, and it was ever her preference to drink from the
+throat of life itself.
+
+The grey cub would have died, and there would have been no story to
+write about him, had not the she-wolf come bounding through the
+bushes.  The weasel let go the cub and flashed at the she-wolf's
+throat, missing, but getting a hold on the jaw instead.  The she-
+wolf flirted her head like the snap of a whip, breaking the
+weasel's hold and flinging it high in the air.  And, still in the
+air, the she-wolf's jaws closed on the lean, yellow body, and the
+weasel knew death between the crunching teeth.
+
+The cub experienced another access of affection on the part of his
+mother.  Her joy at finding him seemed even greater than his joy at
+being found.  She nozzled him and caressed him and licked the cuts
+made in him by the weasel's teeth.  Then, between them, mother and
+cub, they ate the blood-drinker, and after that went back to the
+cave and slept.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V--THE LAW OF MEAT
+
+
+
+The cub's development was rapid.  He rested for two days, and then
+ventured forth from the cave again.  It was on this adventure that
+he found the young weasel whose mother he had helped eat, and he
+saw to it that the young weasel went the way of its mother.  But on
+this trip he did not get lost.  When he grew tired, he found his
+way back to the cave and slept.  And every day thereafter found him
+out and ranging a wider area.
+
+He began to get accurate measurement of his strength and his
+weakness, and to know when to be bold and when to be cautious.  He
+found it expedient to be cautious all the time, except for the rare
+moments, when, assured of his own intrepidity, he abandoned himself
+to petty rages and lusts.
+
+He was always a little demon of fury when he chanced upon a stray
+ptarmigan.  Never did he fail to respond savagely to the chatter of
+the squirrel he had first met on the blasted pine.  While the sight
+of a moose-bird almost invariably put him into the wildest of
+rages; for he never forgot the peck on the nose he had received
+from the first of that ilk he encountered.
+
+But there were times when even a moose-bird failed to affect him,
+and those were times when he felt himself to be in danger from some
+other prowling meat hunter.  He never forgot the hawk, and its
+moving shadow always sent him crouching into the nearest thicket.
+He no longer sprawled and straddled, and already he was developing
+the gait of his mother, slinking and furtive, apparently without
+exertion, yet sliding along with a swiftness that was as deceptive
+as it was imperceptible.
+
+In the matter of meat, his luck had been all in the beginning.  The
+seven ptarmigan chicks and the baby weasel represented the sum of
+his killings.  His desire to kill strengthened with the days, and
+he cherished hungry ambitions for the squirrel that chattered so
+volubly and always informed all wild creatures that the wolf-cub
+was approaching.  But as birds flew in the air, squirrels could
+climb trees, and the cub could only try to crawl unobserved upon
+the squirrel when it was on the ground.
+
+The cub entertained a great respect for his mother.  She could get
+meat, and she never failed to bring him his share.  Further, she
+was unafraid of things.  It did not occur to him that this
+fearlessness was founded upon experience and knowledge.  Its effect
+on him was that of an impression of power.  His mother represented
+power; and as he grew older he felt this power in the sharper
+admonishment of her paw; while the reproving nudge of her nose gave
+place to the slash of her fangs.  For this, likewise, he respected
+his mother.  She compelled obedience from him, and the older he
+grew the shorter grew her temper.
+
+Famine came again, and the cub with clearer consciousness knew once
+more the bite of hunger.  The she-wolf ran herself thin in the
+quest for meat.  She rarely slept any more in the cave, spending
+most of her time on the meat-trail, and spending it vainly.  This
+famine was not a long one, but it was severe while it lasted.  The
+cub found no more milk in his mother's breast, nor did he get one
+mouthful of meat for himself.
+
+Before, he had hunted in play, for the sheer joyousness of it; now
+he hunted in deadly earnestness, and found nothing.  Yet the
+failure of it accelerated his development.  He studied the habits
+of the squirrel with greater carefulness, and strove with greater
+craft to steal upon it and surprise it.  He studied the wood-mice
+and tried to dig them out of their burrows; and he learned much
+about the ways of moose-birds and woodpeckers.  And there came a
+day when the hawk's shadow did not drive him crouching into the
+bushes.  He had grown stronger and wiser, and more confident.
+Also, he was desperate.  So he sat on his haunches, conspicuously
+in an open space, and challenged the hawk down out of the sky.  For
+he knew that there, floating in the blue above him, was meat, the
+meat his stomach yearned after so insistently.  But the hawk
+refused to come down and give battle, and the cub crawled away into
+a thicket and whimpered his disappointment and hunger.
+
+The famine broke.  The she-wolf brought home meat.  It was strange
+meat, different from any she had ever brought before.  It was a
+lynx kitten, partly grown, like the cub, but not so large.  And it
+was all for him.  His mother had satisfied her hunger elsewhere;
+though he did not know that it was the rest of the lynx litter that
+had gone to satisfy her.  Nor did he know the desperateness of her
+deed.  He knew only that the velvet-furred kitten was meat, and he
+ate and waxed happier with every mouthful.
+
+A full stomach conduces to inaction, and the cub lay in the cave,
+sleeping against his mother's side.  He was aroused by her
+snarling.  Never had he heard her snarl so terribly.  Possibly in
+her whole life it was the most terrible snarl she ever gave.  There
+was reason for it, and none knew it better than she.  A lynx's lair
+is not despoiled with impunity.  In the full glare of the afternoon
+light, crouching in the entrance of the cave, the cub saw the lynx-
+mother.  The hair rippled up along his back at the sight.  Here was
+fear, and it did not require his instinct to tell him of it.  And
+if sight alone were not sufficient, the cry of rage the intruder
+gave, beginning with a snarl and rushing abruptly upward into a
+hoarse screech, was convincing enough in itself.
+
+The cub felt the prod of the life that was in him, and stood up and
+snarled valiantly by his mother's side.  But she thrust him
+ignominiously away and behind her.  Because of the low-roofed
+entrance the lynx could not leap in, and when she made a crawling
+rush of it the she-wolf sprang upon her and pinned her down.  The
+cub saw little of the battle.  There was a tremendous snarling and
+spitting and screeching.  The two animals threshed about, the lynx
+ripping and tearing with her claws and using her teeth as well,
+while the she-wolf used her teeth alone.
+
+Once, the cub sprang in and sank his teeth into the hind leg of the
+lynx.  He clung on, growling savagely.  Though he did not know it,
+by the weight of his body he clogged the action of the leg and
+thereby saved his mother much damage.  A change in the battle
+crushed him under both their bodies and wrenched loose his hold.
+The next moment the two mothers separated, and, before they rushed
+together again, the lynx lashed out at the cub with a huge fore-paw
+that ripped his shoulder open to the bone and sent him hurtling
+sidewise against the wall.  Then was added to the uproar the cub's
+shrill yelp of pain and fright.  But the fight lasted so long that
+he had time to cry himself out and to experience a second burst of
+courage; and the end of the battle found him again clinging to a
+hind-leg and furiously growling between his teeth.
+
+The lynx was dead.  But the she-wolf was very weak and sick.  At
+first she caressed the cub and licked his wounded shoulder; but the
+blood she had lost had taken with it her strength, and for all of a
+day and a night she lay by her dead foe's side, without movement,
+scarcely breathing.  For a week she never left the cave, except for
+water, and then her movements were slow and painful.  At the end of
+that time the lynx was devoured, while the she-wolf's wounds had
+healed sufficiently to permit her to take the meat-trail again.
+
+The cub's shoulder was stiff and sore, and for some time he limped
+from the terrible slash he had received.  But the world now seemed
+changed.  He went about in it with greater confidence, with a
+feeling of prowess that had not been his in the days before the
+battle with the lynx.  He had looked upon life in a more ferocious
+aspect; he had fought; he had buried his teeth in the flesh of a
+foe; and he had survived.  And because of all this, he carried
+himself more boldly, with a touch of defiance that was new in him.
+He was no longer afraid of minor things, and much of his timidity
+had vanished, though the unknown never ceased to press upon him
+with its mysteries and terrors, intangible and ever-menacing.
+
+He began to accompany his mother on the meat-trail, and he saw much
+of the killing of meat and began to play his part in it.  And in
+his own dim way he learned the law of meat.  There were two kinds
+of life--his own kind and the other kind.  His own kind included
+his mother and himself.  The other kind included all live things
+that moved.  But the other kind was divided.  One portion was what
+his own kind killed and ate.  This portion was composed of the non-
+killers and the small killers.  The other portion killed and ate
+his own kind, or was killed and eaten by his own kind.  And out of
+this classification arose the law.  The aim of life was meat.  Life
+itself was meat.  Life lived on life.  There were the eaters and
+the eaten.  The law was:  EAT OR BE EATEN.  He did not formulate
+the law in clear, set terms and moralise about it.  He did not even
+think the law; he merely lived the law without thinking about it at
+all.
+
+He saw the law operating around him on every side.  He had eaten
+the ptarmigan chicks.  The hawk had eaten the ptarmigan-mother.
+The hawk would also have eaten him.  Later, when he had grown more
+formidable, he wanted to eat the hawk.  He had eaten the lynx
+kitten.  The lynx-mother would have eaten him had she not herself
+been killed and eaten.  And so it went.  The law was being lived
+about him by all live things, and he himself was part and parcel of
+the law.  He was a killer.  His only food was meat, live meat, that
+ran away swiftly before him, or flew into the air, or climbed
+trees, or hid in the ground, or faced him and fought with him, or
+turned the tables and ran after him.
+
+Had the cub thought in man-fashion, he might have epitomised life
+as a voracious appetite and the world as a place wherein ranged a
+multitude of appetites, pursuing and being pursued, hunting and
+being hunted, eating and being eaten, all in blindness and
+confusion, with violence and disorder, a chaos of gluttony and
+slaughter, ruled over by chance, merciless, planless, endless.
+
+But the cub did not think in man-fashion.  He did not look at
+things with wide vision.  He was single-purposed, and entertained
+but one thought or desire at a time.  Besides the law of meat,
+there were a myriad other and lesser laws for him to learn and
+obey.  The world was filled with surprise.  The stir of the life
+that was in him, the play of his muscles, was an unending
+happiness.  To run down meat was to experience thrills and
+elations.  His rages and battles were pleasures.  Terror itself,
+and the mystery of the unknown, led to his living.
+
+And there were easements and satisfactions.  To have a full
+stomach, to doze lazily in the sunshine--such things were
+remuneration in full for his ardours and toils, while his ardours
+and tolls were in themselves self-remunerative.  They were
+expressions of life, and life is always happy when it is expressing
+itself.  So the cub had no quarrel with his hostile environment.
+He was very much alive, very happy, and very proud of himself.
+
+
+
+
+PART III
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I--THE MAKERS OF FIRE
+
+
+
+The cub came upon it suddenly.  It was his own fault.  He had been
+careless.  He had left the cave and run down to the stream to
+drink.  It might have been that he took no notice because he was
+heavy with sleep.  (He had been out all night on the meat-trail,
+and had but just then awakened.)  And his carelessness might have
+been due to the familiarity of the trail to the pool.  He had
+travelled it often, and nothing had ever happened on it.
+
+He went down past the blasted pine, crossed the open space, and
+trotted in amongst the trees.  Then, at the same instant, he saw
+and smelt.  Before him, sitting silently on their haunches, were
+five live things, the like of which he had never seen before.  It
+was his first glimpse of mankind.  But at the sight of him the five
+men did not spring to their feet, nor show their teeth, nor snarl.
+They did not move, but sat there, silent and ominous.
+
+Nor did the cub move.  Every instinct of his nature would have
+impelled him to dash wildly away, had there not suddenly and for
+the first time arisen in him another and counter instinct.  A great
+awe descended upon him.  He was beaten down to movelessness by an
+overwhelming sense of his own weakness and littleness.  Here was
+mastery and power, something far and away beyond him.
+
+The cub had never seen man, yet the instinct concerning man was
+his.  In dim ways he recognised in man the animal that had fought
+itself to primacy over the other animals of the Wild.  Not alone
+out of his own eyes, but out of the eyes of all his ancestors was
+the cub now looking upon man--out of eyes that had circled in the
+darkness around countless winter camp-fires, that had peered from
+safe distances and from the hearts of thickets at the strange, two-
+legged animal that was lord over living things.  The spell of the
+cub's heritage was upon him, the fear and the respect born of the
+centuries of struggle and the accumulated experience of the
+generations.  The heritage was too compelling for a wolf that was
+only a cub.  Had he been full-grown, he would have run away.  As it
+was, he cowered down in a paralysis of fear, already half
+proffering the submission that his kind had proffered from the
+first time a wolf came in to sit by man's fire and be made warm.
+
+One of the Indians arose and walked over to him and stooped above
+him.  The cub cowered closer to the ground.  It was the unknown,
+objectified at last, in concrete flesh and blood, bending over him
+and reaching down to seize hold of him.  His hair bristled
+involuntarily; his lips writhed back and his little fangs were
+bared.  The hand, poised like doom above him, hesitated, and the
+man spoke laughing, "Wabam wabisca ip pit tah."  ("Look!  The white
+fangs!")
+
+The other Indians laughed loudly, and urged the man on to pick up
+the cub.  As the hand descended closer and closer, there raged
+within the cub a battle of the instincts.  He experienced two great
+impulsions--to yield and to fight.  The resulting action was a
+compromise.  He did both.  He yielded till the hand almost touched
+him.  Then he fought, his teeth flashing in a snap that sank them
+into the hand.  The next moment he received a clout alongside the
+head that knocked him over on his side.  Then all fight fled out of
+him.  His puppyhood and the instinct of submission took charge of
+him.  He sat up on his haunches and ki-yi'd.  But the man whose
+hand he had bitten was angry.  The cub received a clout on the
+other side of his head.  Whereupon he sat up and ki-yi'd louder
+than ever.
+
+The four Indians laughed more loudly, while even the man who had
+been bitten began to laugh.  They surrounded the cub and laughed at
+him, while he wailed out his terror and his hurt.  In the midst of
+it, he heard something.  The Indians heard it too.  But the cub
+knew what it was, and with a last, long wail that had in it more of
+triumph than grief, he ceased his noise and waited for the coming
+of his mother, of his ferocious and indomitable mother who fought
+and killed all things and was never afraid.  She was snarling as
+she ran.  She had heard the cry of her cub and was dashing to save
+him.
+
+She bounded in amongst them, her anxious and militant motherhood
+making her anything but a pretty sight.  But to the cub the
+spectacle of her protective rage was pleasing.  He uttered a glad
+little cry and bounded to meet her, while the man-animals went back
+hastily several steps.  The she-wolf stood over against her cub,
+facing the men, with bristling hair, a snarl rumbling deep in her
+throat.  Her face was distorted and malignant with menace, even the
+bridge of the nose wrinkling from tip to eyes so prodigious was her
+snarl.
+
+Then it was that a cry went up from one of the men.  "Kiche!" was
+what he uttered.  It was an exclamation of surprise.  The cub felt
+his mother wilting at the sound.
+
+"Kiche!" the man cried again, this time with sharpness and
+authority.
+
+And then the cub saw his mother, the she-wolf, the fearless one,
+crouching down till her belly touched the ground, whimpering,
+wagging her tail, making peace signs.  The cub could not
+understand.  He was appalled.  The awe of man rushed over him
+again.  His instinct had been true.  His mother verified it.  She,
+too, rendered submission to the man-animals.
+
+The man who had spoken came over to her.  He put his hand upon her
+head, and she only crouched closer.  She did not snap, nor threaten
+to snap.  The other men came up, and surrounded her, and felt her,
+and pawed her, which actions she made no attempt to resent.  They
+were greatly excited, and made many noises with their mouths.
+These noises were not indication of danger, the cub decided, as he
+crouched near his mother still bristling from time to time but
+doing his best to submit.
+
+"It is not strange," an Indian was saying.  "Her father was a wolf.
+It is true, her mother was a dog; but did not my brother tie her
+out in the woods all of three nights in the mating season?
+Therefore was the father of Kiche a wolf."
+
+"It is a year, Grey Beaver, since she ran away," spoke a second
+Indian.
+
+"It is not strange, Salmon Tongue," Grey Beaver answered.  "It was
+the time of the famine, and there was no meat for the dogs."
+
+"She has lived with the wolves," said a third Indian.
+
+"So it would seem, Three Eagles," Grey Beaver answered, lying his
+hand on the cub; "and this be the sign of it."
+
+The cub snarled a little at the touch of the hand, and the hand
+flew back to administer a clout.  Whereupon the cub covered its
+fangs, and sank down submissively, while the hand, returning,
+rubbed behind his ears, and up and down his back.
+
+"This be the sign of it," Grey Beaver went on.  "It is plain that
+his mother is Kiche.  But this father was a wolf.  Wherefore is
+there in him little dog and much wolf.  His fangs be white, and
+White Fang shall be his name.  I have spoken.  He is my dog.  For
+was not Kiche my brother's dog?  And is not my brother dead?"
+
+The cub, who had thus received a name in the world, lay and
+watched.  For a time the man-animals continued to make their mouth-
+noises.  Then Grey Beaver took a knife from a sheath that hung
+around his neck, and went into the thicket and cut a stick.  White
+Fang watched him.  He notched the stick at each end and in the
+notches fastened strings of raw-hide.  One string he tied around
+the throat of Kiche.  Then he led her to a small pine, around which
+he tied the other string.
+
+White Fang followed and lay down beside her.  Salmon Tongue's hand
+reached out to him and rolled him over on his back.  Kiche looked
+on anxiously.  White Fang felt fear mounting in him again.  He
+could not quite suppress a snarl, but he made no offer to snap.
+The hand, with fingers crooked and spread apart, rubbed his stomach
+in a playful way and rolled him from side to side.  It was
+ridiculous and ungainly, lying there on his back with legs
+sprawling in the air.  Besides, it was a position of such utter
+helplessness that White Fang's whole nature revolted against it.
+He could do nothing to defend himself.  If this man-animal intended
+harm, White Fang knew that he could not escape it.  How could he
+spring away with his four legs in the air above him?  Yet
+submission made him master his fear, and he only growled softly.
+This growl he could not suppress; nor did the man-animal resent it
+by giving him a blow on the head.  And furthermore, such was the
+strangeness of it, White Fang experienced an unaccountable
+sensation of pleasure as the hand rubbed back and forth.  When he
+was rolled on his side he ceased to growl, when the fingers pressed
+and prodded at the base of his ears the pleasurable sensation
+increased; and when, with a final rub and scratch, the man left him
+alone and went away, all fear had died out of White Fang.  He was
+to know fear many times in his dealing with man; yet it was a token
+of the fearless companionship with man that was ultimately to be
+his.
+
+After a time, White Fang heard strange noises approaching.  He was
+quick in his classification, for he knew them at once for man-
+animal noises.  A few minutes later the remainder of the tribe,
+strung out as it was on the march, trailed in.  There were more men
+and many women and children, forty souls of them, and all heavily
+burdened with camp equipage and outfit.  Also there were many dogs;
+and these, with the exception of the part-grown puppies, were
+likewise burdened with camp outfit.  On their backs, in bags that
+fastened tightly around underneath, the dogs carried from twenty to
+thirty pounds of weight.
+
+White Fang had never seen dogs before, but at sight of them he felt
+that they were his own kind, only somehow different.  But they
+displayed little difference from the wolf when they discovered the
+cub and his mother.  There was a rush.  White Fang bristled and
+snarled and snapped in the face of the open-mouthed oncoming wave
+of dogs, and went down and under them, feeling the sharp slash of
+teeth in his body, himself biting and tearing at the legs and
+bellies above him.  There was a great uproar.  He could hear the
+snarl of Kiche as she fought for him; and he could hear the cries
+of the man-animals, the sound of clubs striking upon bodies, and
+the yelps of pain from the dogs so struck.
+
+Only a few seconds elapsed before he was on his feet again.  He
+could now see the man-animals driving back the dogs with clubs and
+stones, defending him, saving him from the savage teeth of his kind
+that somehow was not his kind.  And though there was no reason in
+his brain for a clear conception of so abstract a thing as justice,
+nevertheless, in his own way, he felt the justice of the man-
+animals, and he knew them for what they were--makers of law and
+executors of law.  Also, he appreciated the power with which they
+administered the law.  Unlike any animals he had ever encountered,
+they did not bite nor claw.  They enforced their live strength with
+the power of dead things.  Dead things did their bidding.  Thus,
+sticks and stones, directed by these strange creatures, leaped
+through the air like living things, inflicting grievous hurts upon
+the dogs.
+
+To his mind this was power unusual, power inconceivable and beyond
+the natural, power that was godlike.  White Fang, in the very
+nature of him, could never know anything about gods; at the best he
+could know only things that were beyond knowing--but the wonder and
+awe that he had of these man-animals in ways resembled what would
+be the wonder and awe of man at sight of some celestial creature,
+on a mountain top, hurling thunderbolts from either hand at an
+astonished world.
+
+The last dog had been driven back.  The hubbub died down.  And
+White Fang licked his hurts and meditated upon this, his first
+taste of pack-cruelty and his introduction to the pack.  He had
+never dreamed that his own kind consisted of more than One Eye, his
+mother, and himself.  They had constituted a kind apart, and here,
+abruptly, he had discovered many more creatures apparently of his
+own kind.  And there was a subconscious resentment that these, his
+kind, at first sight had pitched upon him and tried to destroy him.
+In the same way he resented his mother being tied with a stick,
+even though it was done by the superior man-animals.  It savoured
+of the trap, of bondage.  Yet of the trap and of bondage he knew
+nothing.  Freedom to roam and run and lie down at will, had been
+his heritage; and here it was being infringed upon.  His mother's
+movements were restricted to the length of a stick, and by the
+length of that same stick was he restricted, for he had not yet got
+beyond the need of his mother's side.
+
+He did not like it.  Nor did he like it when the man-animals arose
+and went on with their march; for a tiny man-animal took the other
+end of the stick and led Kiche captive behind him, and behind Kiche
+followed White Fang, greatly perturbed and worried by this new
+adventure he had entered upon.
+
+They went down the valley of the stream, far beyond White Fang's
+widest ranging, until they came to the end of the valley, where the
+stream ran into the Mackenzie River.  Here, where canoes were
+cached on poles high in the air and where stood fish-racks for the
+drying of fish, camp was made; and White Fang looked on with
+wondering eyes.  The superiority of these man-animals increased
+with every moment.  There was their mastery over all these sharp-
+fanged dogs.  It breathed of power.  But greater than that, to the
+wolf-cub, was their mastery over things not alive; their capacity
+to communicate motion to unmoving things; their capacity to change
+the very face of the world.
+
+It was this last that especially affected him.  The elevation of
+frames of poles caught his eye; yet this in itself was not so
+remarkable, being done by the same creatures that flung sticks and
+stones to great distances.  But when the frames of poles were made
+into tepees by being covered with cloth and skins, White Fang was
+astounded.  It was the colossal bulk of them that impressed him.
+They arose around him, on every side, like some monstrous quick-
+growing form of life.  They occupied nearly the whole circumference
+of his field of vision.  He was afraid of them.  They loomed
+ominously above him; and when the breeze stirred them into huge
+movements, he cowered down in fear, keeping his eyes warily upon
+them, and prepared to spring away if they attempted to precipitate
+themselves upon him.
+
+But in a short while his fear of the tepees passed away.  He saw
+the women and children passing in and out of them without harm, and
+he saw the dogs trying often to get into them, and being driven
+away with sharp words and flying stones.  After a time, he left
+Kiche's side and crawled cautiously toward the wall of the nearest
+tepee.  It was the curiosity of growth that urged him on--the
+necessity of learning and living and doing that brings experience.
+The last few inches to the wall of the tepee were crawled with
+painful slowness and precaution.  The day's events had prepared him
+for the unknown to manifest itself in most stupendous and
+unthinkable ways.  At last his nose touched the canvas.  He waited.
+Nothing happened.  Then he smelled the strange fabric, saturated
+with the man-smell.  He closed on the canvas with his teeth and
+gave a gentle tug.  Nothing happened, though the adjacent portions
+of the tepee moved.  He tugged harder.  There was a greater
+movement.  It was delightful.  He tugged still harder, and
+repeatedly, until the whole tepee was in motion.  Then the sharp
+cry of a squaw inside sent him scampering back to Kiche.  But after
+that he was afraid no more of the looming bulks of the tepees.
+
+A moment later he was straying away again from his mother.  Her
+stick was tied to a peg in the ground and she could not follow him.
+A part-grown puppy, somewhat larger and older than he, came toward
+him slowly, with ostentatious and belligerent importance.  The
+puppy's name, as White Fang was afterward to hear him called, was
+Lip-lip.  He had had experience in puppy fights and was already
+something of a bully.
+
+Lip-lip was White Fang's own kind, and, being only a puppy, did not
+seem dangerous; so White Fang prepared to meet him in a friendly
+spirit.  But when the strangers walk became stiff-legged and his
+lips lifted clear of his teeth, White Fang stiffened too, and
+answered with lifted lips.  They half circled about each other,
+tentatively, snarling and bristling.  This lasted several minutes,
+and White Fang was beginning to enjoy it, as a sort of game.  But
+suddenly, with remarkable swiftness, Lip-lip leaped in, delivering
+a slashing snap, and leaped away again.  The snap had taken effect
+on the shoulder that had been hurt by the lynx and that was still
+sore deep down near the bone.  The surprise and hurt of it brought
+a yelp out of White Fang; but the next moment, in a rush of anger,
+he was upon Lip-lip and snapping viciously.
+
+But Lip-hp had lived his life in camp and had fought many puppy
+fights.  Three times, four times, and half a dozen times, his sharp
+little teeth scored on the newcomer, until White Fang, yelping
+shamelessly, fled to the protection of his mother.  It was the
+first of the many fights he was to have with Lip-lip, for they were
+enemies from the start, born so, with natures destined perpetually
+to clash.
+
+Kiche licked White Fang soothingly with her tongue, and tried to
+prevail upon him to remain with her.  But his curiosity was
+rampant, and several minutes later he was venturing forth on a new
+quest.  He came upon one of the man-animals, Grey Beaver, who was
+squatting on his hams and doing something with sticks and dry moss
+spread before him on the ground.  White Fang came near to him and
+watched.  Grey Beaver made mouth-noises which White Fang
+interpreted as not hostile, so he came still nearer.
+
+Women and children were carrying more sticks and branches to Grey
+Beaver.  It was evidently an affair of moment.  White Fang came in
+until he touched Grey Beaver's knee, so curious was he, and already
+forgetful that this was a terrible man-animal.  Suddenly he saw a
+strange thing like mist beginning to arise from the sticks and moss
+beneath Grey Beaver's hands.  Then, amongst the sticks themselves,
+appeared a live thing, twisting and turning, of a colour like the
+colour of the sun in the sky.  White Fang knew nothing about fire.
+It drew him as the light, in the mouth of the cave had drawn him in
+his early puppyhood.  He crawled the several steps toward the
+flame.  He heard Grey Beaver chuckle above him, and he knew the
+sound was not hostile.  Then his nose touched the flame, and at the
+same instant his little tongue went out to it.
+
+For a moment he was paralysed.  The unknown, lurking in the midst
+of the sticks and moss, was savagely clutching him by the nose.  He
+scrambled backward, bursting out in an astonished explosion of ki-
+yi's.  At the sound, Kiche leaped snarling to the end of her stick,
+and there raged terribly because she could not come to his aid.
+But Grey Beaver laughed loudly, and slapped his thighs, and told
+the happening to all the rest of the camp, till everybody was
+laughing uproariously.  But White Fang sat on his haunches and ki-
+yi'd and ki-yi'd, a forlorn and pitiable little figure in the midst
+of the man-animals.
+
+It was the worst hurt he had ever known.  Both nose and tongue had
+been scorched by the live thing, sun-coloured, that had grown up
+under Grey Beaver's hands.  He cried and cried interminably, and
+every fresh wail was greeted by bursts of laughter on the part of
+the man-animals.  He tried to soothe his nose with his tongue, but
+the tongue was burnt too, and the two hurts coming together
+produced greater hurt; whereupon he cried more hopelessly and
+helplessly than ever.
+
+And then shame came to him.  He knew laughter and the meaning of
+it.  It is not given us to know how some animals know laughter, and
+know when they are being laughed at; but it was this same way that
+White Fang knew it.  And he felt shame that the man-animals should
+be laughing at him.  He turned and fled away, not from the hurt of
+the fire, but from the laughter that sank even deeper, and hurt in
+the spirit of him.  And he fled to Kiche, raging at the end of her
+stick like an animal gone mad--to Kiche, the one creature in the
+world who was not laughing at him.
+
+Twilight drew down and night came on, and White Fang lay by his
+mother's side.  His nose and tongue still hurt, but he was
+perplexed by a greater trouble.  He was homesick.  He felt a
+vacancy in him, a need for the hush and quietude of the stream and
+the cave in the cliff.  Life had become too populous.  There were
+so many of the man-animals, men, women, and children, all making
+noises and irritations.  And there were the dogs, ever squabbling
+and bickering, bursting into uproars and creating confusions.  The
+restful loneliness of the only life he had known was gone.  Here
+the very air was palpitant with life.  It hummed and buzzed
+unceasingly.  Continually changing its intensity and abruptly
+variant in pitch, it impinged on his nerves and senses, made him
+nervous and restless and worried him with a perpetual imminence of
+happening.
+
+He watched the man-animals coming and going and moving about the
+camp.  In fashion distantly resembling the way men look upon the
+gods they create, so looked White Fang upon the man-animals before
+him.  They were superior creatures, of a verity, gods.  To his dim
+comprehension they were as much wonder-workers as gods are to men.
+They were creatures of mastery, possessing all manner of unknown
+and impossible potencies, overlords of the alive and the not alive-
+-making obey that which moved, imparting movement to that which did
+not move, and making life, sun-coloured and biting life, to grow
+out of dead moss and wood.  They were fire-makers!  They were gods.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II--THE BONDAGE
+
+
+
+The days were thronged with experience for White Fang.  During the
+time that Kiche was tied by the stick, he ran about over all the
+camp, inquiring, investigating, learning.  He quickly came to know
+much of the ways of the man-animals, but familiarity did not breed
+contempt.  The more he came to know them, the more they vindicated
+their superiority, the more they displayed their mysterious powers,
+the greater loomed their god-likeness.
+
+To man has been given the grief, often, of seeing his gods
+overthrown and his altars crumbling; but to the wolf and the wild
+dog that have come in to crouch at man's feet, this grief has never
+come.  Unlike man, whose gods are of the unseen and the
+overguessed, vapours and mists of fancy eluding the garmenture of
+reality, wandering wraiths of desired goodness and power,
+intangible out-croppings of self into the realm of spirit--unlike
+man, the wolf and the wild dog that have come in to the fire find
+their gods in the living flesh, solid to the touch, occupying
+earth-space and requiring time for the accomplishment of their ends
+and their existence.  No effort of faith is necessary to believe in
+such a god; no effort of will can possibly induce disbelief in such
+a god.  There is no getting away from it.  There it stands, on its
+two hind-legs, club in hand, immensely potential, passionate and
+wrathful and loving, god and mystery and power all wrapped up and
+around by flesh that bleeds when it is torn and that is good to eat
+like any flesh.
+
+And so it was with White Fang.  The man-animals were gods
+unmistakable and unescapable.  As his mother, Kiche, had rendered
+her allegiance to them at the first cry of her name, so he was
+beginning to render his allegiance.  He gave them the trail as a
+privilege indubitably theirs.  When they walked, he got out of
+their way.  When they called, he came.  When they threatened, he
+cowered down.  When they commanded him to go, he went away
+hurriedly.  For behind any wish of theirs was power to enforce that
+wish, power that hurt, power that expressed itself in clouts and
+clubs, in flying stones and stinging lashes of whips.
+
+He belonged to them as all dogs belonged to them.  His actions were
+theirs to command.  His body was theirs to maul, to stamp upon, to
+tolerate.  Such was the lesson that was quickly borne in upon him.
+It came hard, going as it did, counter to much that was strong and
+dominant in his own nature; and, while he disliked it in the
+learning of it, unknown to himself he was learning to like it.  It
+was a placing of his destiny in another's hands, a shifting of the
+responsibilities of existence.  This in itself was compensation,
+for it is always easier to lean upon another than to stand alone.
+
+But it did not all happen in a day, this giving over of himself,
+body and soul, to the man-animals.  He could not immediately forego
+his wild heritage and his memories of the Wild.  There were days
+when he crept to the edge of the forest and stood and listened to
+something calling him far and away.  And always he returned,
+restless and uncomfortable, to whimper softly and wistfully at
+Kiche's side and to lick her face with eager, questioning tongue.
+
+White Fang learned rapidly the ways of the camp.  He knew the
+injustice and greediness of the older dogs when meat or fish was
+thrown out to be eaten.  He came to know that men were more just,
+children more cruel, and women more kindly and more likely to toss
+him a bit of meat or bone.  And after two or three painful
+adventures with the mothers of part-grown puppies, he came into the
+knowledge that it was always good policy to let such mothers alone,
+to keep away from them as far as possible, and to avoid them when
+he saw them coming.
+
+But the bane of his life was Lip-lip.  Larger, older, and stronger,
+Lip-lip had selected White Fang for his special object of
+persecution.  While Fang fought willingly enough, but he was
+outclassed.  His enemy was too big.  Lip-lip became a nightmare to
+him.  Whenever he ventured away from his mother, the bully was sure
+to appear, trailing at his heels, snarling at him, picking upon
+him, and watchful of an opportunity, when no man-animal was near,
+to spring upon him and force a fight.  As Lip-lip invariably won,
+he enjoyed it hugely.  It became his chief delight in life, as it
+became White Fang's chief torment.
+
+But the effect upon White Fang was not to cow him.  Though he
+suffered most of the damage and was always defeated, his spirit
+remained unsubdued.  Yet a bad effect was produced.  He became
+malignant and morose.  His temper had been savage by birth, but it
+became more savage under this unending persecution.  The genial,
+playful, puppyish side of him found little expression.  He never
+played and gambolled about with the other puppies of the camp.
+Lip-lip would not permit it.  The moment White Fang appeared near
+them, Lip-lip was upon him, bullying and hectoring him, or fighting
+with him until he had driven him away.
+
+The effect of all this was to rob White Fang of much of his
+puppyhood and to make him in his comportment older than his age.
+Denied the outlet, through play, of his energies, he recoiled upon
+himself and developed his mental processes.  He became cunning; he
+had idle time in which to devote himself to thoughts of trickery.
+Prevented from obtaining his share of meat and fish when a general
+feed was given to the camp-dogs, he became a clever thief.  He had
+to forage for himself, and he foraged well, though he was oft-times
+a plague to the squaws in consequence.  He learned to sneak about
+camp, to be crafty, to know what was going on everywhere, to see
+and to hear everything and to reason accordingly, and successfully
+to devise ways and means of avoiding his implacable persecutor.
+
+It was early in the days of his persecution that he played his
+first really big crafty game and got there from his first taste of
+revenge.  As Kiche, when with the wolves, had lured out to
+destruction dogs from the camps of men, so White Fang, in manner
+somewhat similar, lured Lip-lip into Kiche's avenging jaws.
+Retreating before Lip-lip, White Fang made an indirect flight that
+led in and out and around the various tepees of the camp.  He was a
+good runner, swifter than any puppy of his size, and swifter than
+Lip-lip.  But he did not run his best in this chase.  He barely
+held his own, one leap ahead of his pursuer.
+
+Lip-lip, excited by the chase and by the persistent nearness of his
+victim, forgot caution and locality.  When he remembered locality,
+it was too late.  Dashing at top speed around a tepee, he ran full
+tilt into Kiche lying at the end of her stick.  He gave one yelp of
+consternation, and then her punishing jaws closed upon him.  She
+was tied, but he could not get away from her easily.  She rolled
+him off his legs so that he could not run, while she repeatedly
+ripped and slashed him with her fangs.
+
+When at last he succeeded in rolling clear of her, he crawled to
+his feet, badly dishevelled, hurt both in body and in spirit.  His
+hair was standing out all over him in tufts where her teeth had
+mauled.  He stood where he had arisen, opened his mouth, and broke
+out the long, heart-broken puppy wail.  But even this he was not
+allowed to complete.  In the middle of it, White Fang, rushing in,
+sank his teeth into Lip-lip's hind leg.  There was no fight left in
+Lip-lip, and he ran away shamelessly, his victim hot on his heels
+and worrying him all the way back to his own tepee.  Here the
+squaws came to his aid, and White Fang, transformed into a raging
+demon, was finally driven off only by a fusillade of stones.
+
+Came the day when Grey Beaver, deciding that the liability of her
+running away was past, released Kiche.  White Fang was delighted
+with his mother's freedom.  He accompanied her joyfully about the
+camp; and, so long as he remained close by her side, Lip-lip kept a
+respectful distance.  White-Fang even bristled up to him and walked
+stiff-legged, but Lip-lip ignored the challenge.  He was no fool
+himself, and whatever vengeance he desired to wreak, he could wait
+until he caught White Fang alone.
+
+Later on that day, Kiche and White Fang strayed into the edge of
+the woods next to the camp.  He had led his mother there, step by
+step, and now when she stopped, he tried to inveigle her farther.
+The stream, the lair, and the quiet woods were calling to him, and
+he wanted her to come.  He ran on a few steps, stopped, and looked
+back.  She had not moved.  He whined pleadingly, and scurried
+playfully in and out of the underbrush.  He ran back to her, licked
+her face, and ran on again.  And still she did not move.  He
+stopped and regarded her, all of an intentness and eagerness,
+physically expressed, that slowly faded out of him as she turned
+her head and gazed back at the camp.
+
+There was something calling to him out there in the open.  His
+mother heard it too.  But she heard also that other and louder
+call, the call of the fire and of man--the call which has been
+given alone of all animals to the wolf to answer, to the wolf and
+the wild-dog, who are brothers.
+
+Kiche turned and slowly trotted back toward camp.  Stronger than
+the physical restraint of the stick was the clutch of the camp upon
+her.  Unseen and occultly, the gods still gripped with their power
+and would not let her go.  White Fang sat down in the shadow of a
+birch and whimpered softly.  There was a strong smell of pine, and
+subtle wood fragrances filled the air, reminding him of his old
+life of freedom before the days of his bondage.  But he was still
+only a part-grown puppy, and stronger than the call either of man
+or of the Wild was the call of his mother.  All the hours of his
+short life he had depended upon her.  The time was yet to come for
+independence.  So he arose and trotted forlornly back to camp,
+pausing once, and twice, to sit down and whimper and to listen to
+the call that still sounded in the depths of the forest.
+
+In the Wild the time of a mother with her young is short; but under
+the dominion of man it is sometimes even shorter.  Thus it was with
+White Fang.  Grey Beaver was in the debt of Three Eagles.  Three
+Eagles was going away on a trip up the Mackenzie to the Great Slave
+Lake.  A strip of scarlet cloth, a bearskin, twenty cartridges, and
+Kiche, went to pay the debt.  White Fang saw his mother taken
+aboard Three Eagles' canoe, and tried to follow her.  A blow from
+Three Eagles knocked him backward to the land.  The canoe shoved
+off.  He sprang into the water and swam after it, deaf to the sharp
+cries of Grey Beaver to return.  Even a man-animal, a god, White
+Fang ignored, such was the terror he was in of losing his mother.
+
+But gods are accustomed to being obeyed, and Grey Beaver wrathfully
+launched a canoe in pursuit.  When he overtook White Fang, he
+reached down and by the nape of the neck lifted him clear of the
+water.  He did not deposit him at once in the bottom of the canoe.
+Holding him suspended with one hand, with the other hand he
+proceeded to give him a beating.  And it WAS a beating.  His hand
+was heavy.  Every blow was shrewd to hurt; and he delivered a
+multitude of blows.
+
+Impelled by the blows that rained upon him, now from this side, now
+from that, White Fang swung back and forth like an erratic and
+jerky pendulum.  Varying were the emotions that surged through him.
+At first, he had known surprise.  Then came a momentary fear, when
+he yelped several times to the impact of the hand.  But this was
+quickly followed by anger.  His free nature asserted itself, and he
+showed his teeth and snarled fearlessly in the face of the wrathful
+god.  This but served to make the god more wrathful.  The blows
+came faster, heavier, more shrewd to hurt.
+
+Grey Beaver continued to beat, White Fang continued to snarl.  But
+this could not last for ever.  One or the other must give over, and
+that one was White Fang.  Fear surged through him again.  For the
+first time he was being really man-handled.  The occasional blows
+of sticks and stones he had previously experienced were as caresses
+compared with this.  He broke down and began to cry and yelp.  For
+a time each blow brought a yelp from him; but fear passed into
+terror, until finally his yelps were voiced in unbroken succession,
+unconnected with the rhythm of the punishment.
+
+At last Grey Beaver withheld his hand.  White Fang, hanging limply,
+continued to cry.  This seemed to satisfy his master, who flung him
+down roughly in the bottom of the canoe.  In the meantime the canoe
+had drifted down the stream.  Grey Beaver picked up the paddle.
+White Fang was in his way.  He spurned him savagely with his foot.
+In that moment White Fang's free nature flashed forth again, and he
+sank his teeth into the moccasined foot.
+
+The beating that had gone before was as nothing compared with the
+beating he now received.  Grey Beaver's wrath was terrible;
+likewise was White Fang's fright.  Not only the hand, but the hard
+wooden paddle was used upon him; and he was bruised and sore in all
+his small body when he was again flung down in the canoe.  Again,
+and this time with purpose, did Grey Beaver kick him.  White Fang
+did not repeat his attack on the foot.  He had learned another
+lesson of his bondage.  Never, no matter what the circumstance,
+must he dare to bite the god who was lord and master over him; the
+body of the lord and master was sacred, not to be defiled by the
+teeth of such as he.  That was evidently the crime of crimes, the
+one offence there was no condoning nor overlooking.
+
+When the canoe touched the shore, White Fang lay whimpering and
+motionless, waiting the will of Grey Beaver.  It was Grey Beaver's
+will that he should go ashore, for ashore he was flung, striking
+heavily on his side and hurting his bruises afresh.  He crawled
+tremblingly to his feet and stood whimpering.  Lip-lip, who had
+watched the whole proceeding from the bank, now rushed upon him,
+knocking him over and sinking his teeth into him.  White Fang was
+too helpless to defend himself, and it would have gone hard with
+him had not Grey Beaver's foot shot out, lifting Lip-lip into the
+air with its violence so that he smashed down to earth a dozen feet
+away.  This was the man-animal's justice; and even then, in his own
+pitiable plight, White Fang experienced a little grateful thrill.
+At Grey Beaver's heels he limped obediently through the village to
+the tepee.  And so it came that White Fang learned that the right
+to punish was something the gods reserved for themselves and denied
+to the lesser creatures under them.
+
+That night, when all was still, White Fang remembered his mother
+and sorrowed for her.  He sorrowed too loudly and woke up Grey
+Beaver, who beat him.  After that he mourned gently when the gods
+were around.  But sometimes, straying off to the edge of the woods
+by himself, he gave vent to his grief, and cried it out with loud
+whimperings and wailings.
+
+It was during this period that he might have harkened to the
+memories of the lair and the stream and run back to the Wild.  But
+the memory of his mother held him.  As the hunting man-animals went
+out and came back, so she would come back to the village some time.
+So he remained in his bondage waiting for her.
+
+But it was not altogether an unhappy bondage.  There was much to
+interest him.  Something was always happening.  There was no end to
+the strange things these gods did, and he was always curious to
+see.  Besides, he was learning how to get along with Grey Beaver.
+Obedience, rigid, undeviating obedience, was what was exacted of
+him; and in return he escaped beatings and his existence was
+tolerated.
+
+Nay, Grey Beaver himself sometimes tossed him a piece of meat, and
+defended him against the other dogs in the eating of it.  And such
+a piece of meat was of value.  It was worth more, in some strange
+way, then a dozen pieces of meat from the hand of a squaw.  Grey
+Beaver never petted nor caressed.  Perhaps it was the weight of his
+hand, perhaps his justice, perhaps the sheer power of him, and
+perhaps it was all these things that influenced White Fang; for a
+certain tie of attachment was forming between him and his surly
+lord.
+
+Insidiously, and by remote ways, as well as by the power of stick
+and stone and clout of hand, were the shackles of White Fang's
+bondage being riveted upon him.  The qualities in his kind that in
+the beginning made it possible for them to come in to the fires of
+men, were qualities capable of development.  They were developing
+in him, and the camp-life, replete with misery as it was, was
+secretly endearing itself to him all the time.  But White Fang was
+unaware of it.  He knew only grief for the loss of Kiche, hope for
+her return, and a hungry yearning for the free life that had been
+his.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III--THE OUTCAST
+
+
+
+Lip-lip continued so to darken his days that White Fang became
+wickeder and more ferocious than it was his natural right to be.
+Savageness was a part of his make-up, but the savageness thus
+developed exceeded his make-up.  He acquired a reputation for
+wickedness amongst the man-animals themselves.  Wherever there was
+trouble and uproar in camp, fighting and squabbling or the outcry
+of a squaw over a bit of stolen meat, they were sure to find White
+Fang mixed up in it and usually at the bottom of it.  They did not
+bother to look after the causes of his conduct.  They saw only the
+effects, and the effects were bad.  He was a sneak and a thief, a
+mischief-maker, a fomenter of trouble; and irate squaws told him to
+his face, the while he eyed them alert and ready to dodge any
+quick-flung missile, that he was a wolf and worthless and bound to
+come to an evil end.
+
+He found himself an outcast in the midst of the populous camp.  All
+the young dogs followed Lip-lip's lead.  There was a difference
+between White Fang and them.  Perhaps they sensed his wild-wood
+breed, and instinctively felt for him the enmity that the domestic
+dog feels for the wolf.  But be that as it may, they joined with
+Lip-lip in the persecution.  And, once declared against him, they
+found good reason to continue declared against him.  One and all,
+from time to time, they felt his teeth; and to his credit, he gave
+more than he received.  Many of them he could whip in single fight;
+but single fight was denied him.  The beginning of such a fight was
+a signal for all the young dogs in camp to come running and pitch
+upon him.
+
+Out of this pack-persecution he learned two important things:  how
+to take care of himself in a mass-fight against him--and how, on a
+single dog, to inflict the greatest amount of damage in the
+briefest space of time.  To keep one's feet in the midst of the
+hostile mass meant life, and this he learnt well.  He became cat-
+like in his ability to stay on his feet.  Even grown dogs might
+hurtle him backward or sideways with the impact of their heavy
+bodies; and backward or sideways he would go, in the air or sliding
+on the ground, but always with his legs under him and his feet
+downward to the mother earth.
+
+When dogs fight, there are usually preliminaries to the actual
+combat--snarlings and bristlings and stiff-legged struttings.  But
+White Fang learned to omit these preliminaries.  Delay meant the
+coming against him of all the young dogs.  He must do his work
+quickly and get away.  So he learnt to give no warning of his
+intention.  He rushed in and snapped and slashed on the instant,
+without notice, before his foe could prepare to meet him.  Thus he
+learned how to inflict quick and severe damage.  Also he learned
+the value of surprise.  A dog, taken off its guard, its shoulder
+slashed open or its ear ripped in ribbons before it knew what was
+happening, was a dog half whipped.
+
+Furthermore, it was remarkably easy to overthrow a dog taken by
+surprise; while a dog, thus overthrown, invariably exposed for a
+moment the soft underside of its neck--the vulnerable point at
+which to strike for its life.  White Fang knew this point.  It was
+a knowledge bequeathed to him directly from the hunting generation
+of wolves.  So it was that White Fang's method when he took the
+offensive, was:  first to find a young dog alone; second, to
+surprise it and knock it off its feet; and third, to drive in with
+his teeth at the soft throat.
+
+Being but partly grown his jaws had not yet become large enough nor
+strong enough to make his throat-attack deadly; but many a young
+dog went around camp with a lacerated throat in token of White
+Fang's intention.  And one day, catching one of his enemies alone
+on the edge of the woods, he managed, by repeatedly overthrowing
+him and attacking the throat, to cut the great vein and let out the
+life.  There was a great row that night.  He had been observed, the
+news had been carried to the dead dog's master, the squaws
+remembered all the instances of stolen meat, and Grey Beaver was
+beset by many angry voices.  But he resolutely held the door of his
+tepee, inside which he had placed the culprit, and refused to
+permit the vengeance for which his tribespeople clamoured.
+
+White Fang became hated by man and dog.  During this period of his
+development he never knew a moment's security.  The tooth of every
+dog was against him, the hand of every man.  He was greeted with
+snarls by his kind, with curses and stones by his gods.  He lived
+tensely.  He was always keyed up, alert for attack, wary of being
+attacked, with an eye for sudden and unexpected missiles, prepared
+to act precipitately and coolly, to leap in with a flash of teeth,
+or to leap away with a menacing snarl.
+
+As for snarling he could snarl more terribly than any dog, young or
+old, in camp.  The intent of the snarl is to warn or frighten, and
+judgment is required to know when it should be used.  White Fang
+knew how to make it and when to make it.  Into his snarl he
+incorporated all that was vicious, malignant, and horrible.  With
+nose serrulated by continuous spasms, hair bristling in recurrent
+waves, tongue whipping out like a red snake and whipping back
+again, ears flattened down, eyes gleaming hatred, lips wrinkled
+back, and fangs exposed and dripping, he could compel a pause on
+the part of almost any assailant.  A temporary pause, when taken
+off his guard, gave him the vital moment in which to think and
+determine his action.  But often a pause so gained lengthened out
+until it evolved into a complete cessation from the attack.  And
+before more than one of the grown dogs White Fang's snarl enabled
+him to beat an honourable retreat.
+
+An outcast himself from the pack of the part-grown dogs, his
+sanguinary methods and remarkable efficiency made the pack pay for
+its persecution of him.  Not permitted himself to run with the
+pack, the curious state of affairs obtained that no member of the
+pack could run outside the pack.  White Fang would not permit it.
+What of his bushwhacking and waylaying tactics, the young dogs were
+afraid to run by themselves.  With the exception of Lip-lip, they
+were compelled to hunch together for mutual protection against the
+terrible enemy they had made.  A puppy alone by the river bank
+meant a puppy dead or a puppy that aroused the camp with its shrill
+pain and terror as it fled back from the wolf-cub that had waylaid
+it.
+
+But White Fang's reprisals did not cease, even when the young dogs
+had learned thoroughly that they must stay together.  He attacked
+them when he caught them alone, and they attacked him when they
+were bunched.  The sight of him was sufficient to start them
+rushing after him, at which times his swiftness usually carried him
+into safety.  But woe the dog that outran his fellows in such
+pursuit!  White Fang had learned to turn suddenly upon the pursuer
+that was ahead of the pack and thoroughly to rip him up before the
+pack could arrive.  This occurred with great frequency, for, once
+in full cry, the dogs were prone to forget themselves in the
+excitement of the chase, while White Fang never forgot himself.
+Stealing backward glances as he ran, he was always ready to whirl
+around and down the overzealous pursuer that outran his fellows.
+
+Young dogs are bound to play, and out of the exigencies of the
+situation they realised their play in this mimic warfare.  Thus it
+was that the hunt of White Fang became their chief game--a deadly
+game, withal, and at all times a serious game.  He, on the other
+hand, being the fastest-footed, was unafraid to venture anywhere.
+During the period that he waited vainly for his mother to come
+back, he led the pack many a wild chase through the adjacent woods.
+But the pack invariably lost him.  Its noise and outcry warned him
+of its presence, while he ran alone, velvet-footed, silently, a
+moving shadow among the trees after the manner of his father and
+mother before him.  Further he was more directly connected with the
+Wild than they; and he knew more of its secrets and stratagems.  A
+favourite trick of his was to lose his trail in running water and
+then lie quietly in a near-by thicket while their baffled cries
+arose around him.
+
+Hated by his kind and by mankind, indomitable, perpetually warred
+upon and himself waging perpetual war, his development was rapid
+and one-sided.  This was no soil for kindliness and affection to
+blossom in.  Of such things he had not the faintest glimmering.
+The code he learned was to obey the strong and to oppress the weak.
+Grey Beaver was a god, and strong.  Therefore White Fang obeyed
+him.  But the dog younger or smaller than himself was weak, a thing
+to be destroyed.  His development was in the direction of power.
+In order to face the constant danger of hurt and even of
+destruction, his predatory and protective faculties were unduly
+developed.  He became quicker of movement than the other dogs,
+swifter of foot, craftier, deadlier, more lithe, more lean with
+ironlike muscle and sinew, more enduring, more cruel, more
+ferocious, and more intelligent.  He had to become all these
+things, else he would not have held his own nor survive the hostile
+environment in which he found himself.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV--THE TRAIL OF THE GODS
+
+
+
+In the fall of the year, when the days were shortening and the bite
+of the frost was coming into the air, White Fang got his chance for
+liberty.  For several days there had been a great hubbub in the
+village.  The summer camp was being dismantled, and the tribe, bag
+and baggage, was preparing to go off to the fall hunting.  White
+Fang watched it all with eager eyes, and when the tepees began to
+come down and the canoes were loading at the bank, he understood.
+Already the canoes were departing, and some had disappeared down
+the river.
+
+Quite deliberately he determined to stay behind.  He waited his
+opportunity to slink out of camp to the woods.  Here, in the
+running stream where ice was beginning to form, he hid his trail.
+Then he crawled into the heart of a dense thicket and waited.  The
+time passed by, and he slept intermittently for hours.  Then he was
+aroused by Grey Beaver's voice calling him by name.  There were
+other voices.  White Fang could hear Grey Beaver's squaw taking
+part in the search, and Mit-sah, who was Grey Beaver's son.
+
+White Fang trembled with fear, and though the impulse came to crawl
+out of his hiding-place, he resisted it.  After a time the voices
+died away, and some time after that he crept out to enjoy the
+success of his undertaking.  Darkness was coming on, and for a
+while he played about among the trees, pleasuring in his freedom.
+Then, and quite suddenly, he became aware of loneliness.  He sat
+down to consider, listening to the silence of the forest and
+perturbed by it.  That nothing moved nor sounded, seemed ominous.
+He felt the lurking of danger, unseen and unguessed.  He was
+suspicious of the looming bulks of the trees and of the dark
+shadows that might conceal all manner of perilous things.
+
+Then it was cold.  Here was no warm side of a tepee against which
+to snuggle.  The frost was in his feet, and he kept lifting first
+one fore-foot and then the other.  He curved his bushy tail around
+to cover them, and at the same time he saw a vision.  There was
+nothing strange about it.  Upon his inward sight was impressed a
+succession of memory-pictures.  He saw the camp again, the tepees,
+and the blaze of the fires.  He heard the shrill voices of the
+women, the gruff basses of the men, and the snarling of the dogs.
+He was hungry, and he remembered pieces of meat and fish that had
+been thrown him.  Here was no meat, nothing but a threatening and
+inedible silence.
+
+His bondage had softened him.  Irresponsibility had weakened him.
+He had forgotten how to shift for himself.  The night yawned about
+him.  His senses, accustomed to the hum and bustle of the camp,
+used to the continuous impact of sights and sounds, were now left
+idle.  There was nothing to do, nothing to see nor hear.  They
+strained to catch some interruption of the silence and immobility
+of nature.  They were appalled by inaction and by the feel of
+something terrible impending.
+
+He gave a great start of fright.  A colossal and formless something
+was rushing across the field of his vision.  It was a tree-shadow
+flung by the moon, from whose face the clouds had been brushed
+away.  Reassured, he whimpered softly; then he suppressed the
+whimper for fear that it might attract the attention of the lurking
+dangers.
+
+A tree, contracting in the cool of the night, made a loud noise.
+It was directly above him.  He yelped in his fright.  A panic
+seized him, and he ran madly toward the village.  He knew an
+overpowering desire for the protection and companionship of man.
+In his nostrils was the smell of the camp-smoke.  In his ears the
+camp-sounds and cries were ringing loud.  He passed out of the
+forest and into the moonlit open where were no shadows nor
+darknesses.  But no village greeted his eyes.  He had forgotten.
+The village had gone away.
+
+His wild flight ceased abruptly.  There was no place to which to
+flee.  He slunk forlornly through the deserted camp, smelling the
+rubbish-heaps and the discarded rags and tags of the gods.  He
+would have been glad for the rattle of stones about him, flung by
+an angry squaw, glad for the hand of Grey Beaver descending upon
+him in wrath; while he would have welcomed with delight Lip-lip and
+the whole snarling, cowardly pack.
+
+He came to where Grey Beaver's tepee had stood.  In the centre of
+the space it had occupied, he sat down.  He pointed his nose at the
+moon.  His throat was afflicted by rigid spasms, his mouth opened,
+and in a heart-broken cry bubbled up his loneliness and fear, his
+grief for Kiche, all his past sorrows and miseries as well as his
+apprehension of sufferings and dangers to come.  It was the long
+wolf-howl, full-throated and mournful, the first howl he had ever
+uttered.
+
+The coming of daylight dispelled his fears but increased his
+loneliness.  The naked earth, which so shortly before had been so
+populous; thrust his loneliness more forcibly upon him.  It did not
+take him long to make up his mind.  He plunged into the forest and
+followed the river bank down the stream.  All day he ran.  He did
+not rest.  He seemed made to run on for ever.  His iron-like body
+ignored fatigue.  And even after fatigue came, his heritage of
+endurance braced him to endless endeavour and enabled him to drive
+his complaining body onward.
+
+Where the river swung in against precipitous bluffs, he climbed the
+high mountains behind.  Rivers and streams that entered the main
+river he forded or swam.  Often he took to the rim-ice that was
+beginning to form, and more than once he crashed through and
+struggled for life in the icy current.  Always he was on the
+lookout for the trail of the gods where it might leave the river
+and proceed inland.
+
+White Fang was intelligent beyond the average of his kind; yet his
+mental vision was not wide enough to embrace the other bank of the
+Mackenzie.  What if the trail of the gods led out on that side?  It
+never entered his head.  Later on, when he had travelled more and
+grown older and wiser and come to know more of trails and rivers,
+it might be that he could grasp and apprehend such a possibility.
+But that mental power was yet in the future.  Just now he ran
+blindly, his own bank of the Mackenzie alone entering into his
+calculations.
+
+All night he ran, blundering in the darkness into mishaps and
+obstacles that delayed but did not daunt.  By the middle of the
+second day he had been running continuously for thirty hours, and
+the iron of his flesh was giving out.  It was the endurance of his
+mind that kept him going.  He had not eaten in forty hours, and he
+was weak with hunger.  The repeated drenchings in the icy water had
+likewise had their effect on him.  His handsome coat was draggled.
+The broad pads of his feet were bruised and bleeding.  He had begun
+to limp, and this limp increased with the hours.  To make it worse,
+the light of the sky was obscured and snow began to fall--a raw,
+moist, melting, clinging snow, slippery under foot, that hid from
+him the landscape he traversed, and that covered over the
+inequalities of the ground so that the way of his feet was more
+difficult and painful.
+
+Grey Beaver had intended camping that night on the far bank of the
+Mackenzie, for it was in that direction that the hunting lay.  But
+on the near bank, shortly before dark, a moose coming down to
+drink, had been espied by Kloo-kooch, who was Grey Beaver's squaw.
+Now, had not the moose come down to drink, had not Mit-sah been
+steering out of the course because of the snow, had not Kloo-kooch
+sighted the moose, and had not Grey Beaver killed it with a lucky
+shot from his rifle, all subsequent things would have happened
+differently.  Grey Beaver would not have camped on the near side of
+the Mackenzie, and White Fang would have passed by and gone on,
+either to die or to find his way to his wild brothers and become
+one of them--a wolf to the end of his days.
+
+Night had fallen.  The snow was flying more thickly, and White
+Fang, whimpering softly to himself as he stumbled and limped along,
+came upon a fresh trail in the snow.  So fresh was it that he knew
+it immediately for what it was.  Whining with eagerness, he
+followed back from the river bank and in among the trees.  The
+camp-sounds came to his ears.  He saw the blaze of the fire, Kloo-
+kooch cooking, and Grey Beaver squatting on his hams and mumbling a
+chunk of raw tallow.  There was fresh meat in camp!
+
+White Fang expected a beating.  He crouched and bristled a little
+at the thought of it.  Then he went forward again.  He feared and
+disliked the beating he knew to be waiting for him.  But he knew,
+further, that the comfort of the fire would be his, the protection
+of the gods, the companionship of the dogs--the last, a
+companionship of enmity, but none the less a companionship and
+satisfying to his gregarious needs.
+
+He came cringing and crawling into the firelight.  Grey Beaver saw
+him, and stopped munching the tallow.  White Fang crawled slowly,
+cringing and grovelling in the abjectness of his abasement and
+submission.  He crawled straight toward Grey Beaver, every inch of
+his progress becoming slower and more painful.  At last he lay at
+the master's feet, into whose possession he now surrendered
+himself, voluntarily, body and soul.  Of his own choice, he came in
+to sit by man's fire and to be ruled by him.  White Fang trembled,
+waiting for the punishment to fall upon him.  There was a movement
+of the hand above him.  He cringed involuntarily under the expected
+blow.  It did not fall.  He stole a glance upward.  Grey Beaver was
+breaking the lump of tallow in half!  Grey Beaver was offering him
+one piece of the tallow!  Very gently and somewhat suspiciously, he
+first smelled the tallow and then proceeded to eat it.  Grey Beaver
+ordered meat to be brought to him, and guarded him from the other
+dogs while he ate.  After that, grateful and content, White Fang
+lay at Grey Beaver's feet, gazing at the fire that warmed him,
+blinking and dozing, secure in the knowledge that the morrow would
+find him, not wandering forlorn through bleak forest-stretches, but
+in the camp of the man-animals, with the gods to whom he had given
+himself and upon whom he was now dependent.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V--THE COVENANT
+
+
+
+When December was well along, Grey Beaver went on a journey up the
+Mackenzie.  Mit-sah and Kloo-kooch went with him.  One sled he
+drove himself, drawn by dogs he had traded for or borrowed.  A
+second and smaller sled was driven by Mit-sah, and to this was
+harnessed a team of puppies.  It was more of a toy affair than
+anything else, yet it was the delight of Mit-sah, who felt that he
+was beginning to do a man's work in the world.  Also, he was
+learning to drive dogs and to train dogs; while the puppies
+themselves were being broken in to the harness.  Furthermore, the
+sled was of some service, for it carried nearly two hundred pounds
+of outfit and food.
+
+White Fang had seen the camp-dogs toiling in the harness, so that
+he did not resent overmuch the first placing of the harness upon
+himself.  About his neck was put a moss-stuffed collar, which was
+connected by two pulling-traces to a strap that passed around his
+chest and over his back.  It was to this that was fastened the long
+rope by which he pulled at the sled.
+
+There were seven puppies in the team.  The others had been born
+earlier in the year and were nine and ten months old, while White
+Fang was only eight months old.  Each dog was fastened to the sled
+by a single rope.  No two ropes were of the same length, while the
+difference in length between any two ropes was at least that of a
+dog's body.  Every rope was brought to a ring at the front end of
+the sled.  The sled itself was without runners, being a birch-bark
+toboggan, with upturned forward end to keep it from ploughing under
+the snow.  This construction enabled the weight of the sled and
+load to be distributed over the largest snow-surface; for the snow
+was crystal-powder and very soft.  Observing the same principle of
+widest distribution of weight, the dogs at the ends of their ropes
+radiated fan-fashion from the nose of the sled, so that no dog trod
+in another's footsteps.
+
+There was, furthermore, another virtue in the fan-formation.  The
+ropes of varying length prevented the dogs attacking from the rear
+those that ran in front of them.  For a dog to attack another, it
+would have to turn upon one at a shorter rope.  In which case it
+would find itself face to face with the dog attacked, and also it
+would find itself facing the whip of the driver.  But the most
+peculiar virtue of all lay in the fact that the dog that strove to
+attack one in front of him must pull the sled faster, and that the
+faster the sled travelled, the faster could the dog attacked run
+away.  Thus, the dog behind could never catch up with the one in
+front.  The faster he ran, the faster ran the one he was after, and
+the faster ran all the dogs.  Incidentally, the sled went faster,
+and thus, by cunning indirection, did man increase his mastery over
+the beasts.
+
+Mit-sah resembled his father, much of whose grey wisdom he
+possessed.  In the past he had observed Lip-lip's persecution of
+White Fang; but at that time Lip-lip was another man's dog, and
+Mit-sah had never dared more than to shy an occasional stone at
+him.  But now Lip-lip was his dog, and he proceeded to wreak his
+vengeance on him by putting him at the end of the longest rope.
+This made Lip-lip the leader, and was apparently an honour! but in
+reality it took away from him all honour, and instead of being
+bully and master of the pack, he now found himself hated and
+persecuted by the pack.
+
+Because he ran at the end of the longest rope, the dogs had always
+the view of him running away before them.  All that they saw of him
+was his bushy tail and fleeing hind legs--a view far less ferocious
+and intimidating than his bristling mane and gleaming fangs.  Also,
+dogs being so constituted in their mental ways, the sight of him
+running away gave desire to run after him and a feeling that he ran
+away from them.
+
+The moment the sled started, the team took after Lip-lip in a chase
+that extended throughout the day.  At first he had been prone to
+turn upon his pursuers, jealous of his dignity and wrathful; but at
+such times Mit-sah would throw the stinging lash of the thirty-foot
+cariboo-gut whip into his face and compel him to turn tail and run
+on.  Lip-lip might face the pack, but he could not face that whip,
+and all that was left him to do was to keep his long rope taut and
+his flanks ahead of the teeth of his mates.
+
+But a still greater cunning lurked in the recesses of the Indian
+mind.  To give point to unending pursuit of the leader, Mit-sah
+favoured him over the other dogs.  These favours aroused in them
+jealousy and hatred.  In their presence Mit-sah would give him meat
+and would give it to him only.  This was maddening to them.  They
+would rage around just outside the throwing-distance of the whip,
+while Lip-lip devoured the meat and Mit-sah protected him.  And
+when there was no meat to give, Mit-sah would keep the team at a
+distance and make believe to give meat to Lip-lip.
+
+White Fang took kindly to the work.  He had travelled a greater
+distance than the other dogs in the yielding of himself to the rule
+of the gods, and he had learned more thoroughly the futility of
+opposing their will.  In addition, the persecution he had suffered
+from the pack had made the pack less to him in the scheme of
+things, and man more.  He had not learned to be dependent on his
+kind for companionship.  Besides, Kiche was well-nigh forgotten;
+and the chief outlet of expression that remained to him was in the
+allegiance he tendered the gods he had accepted as masters.  So he
+worked hard, learned discipline, and was obedient.  Faithfulness
+and willingness characterised his toil.  These are essential traits
+of the wolf and the wild-dog when they have become domesticated,
+and these traits White Fang possessed in unusual measure.
+
+A companionship did exist between White Fang and the other dogs,
+but it was one of warfare and enmity.  He had never learned to play
+with them.  He knew only how to fight, and fight with them he did,
+returning to them a hundred-fold the snaps and slashes they had
+given him in the days when Lip-lip was leader of the pack.  But
+Lip-lip was no longer leader--except when he fled away before his
+mates at the end of his rope, the sled bounding along behind.  In
+camp he kept close to Mit-sah or Grey Beaver or Kloo-kooch.  He did
+not dare venture away from the gods, for now the fangs of all dogs
+were against him, and he tasted to the dregs the persecution that
+had been White Fang's.
+
+With the overthrow of Lip-lip, White Fang could have become leader
+of the pack.  But he was too morose and solitary for that.  He
+merely thrashed his team-mates.  Otherwise he ignored them.  They
+got out of his way when he came along; nor did the boldest of them
+ever dare to rob him of his meat.  On the contrary, they devoured
+their own meat hurriedly, for fear that he would take it away from
+them.  White Fang knew the law well:  TO OPPRESS THE WEAK AND OBEY
+THE STRONG.  He ate his share of meat as rapidly as he could.  And
+then woe the dog that had not yet finished!  A snarl and a flash of
+fangs, and that dog would wail his indignation to the uncomforting
+stars while White Fang finished his portion for him.
+
+Every little while, however, one dog or another would flame up in
+revolt and be promptly subdued.  Thus White Fang was kept in
+training.  He was jealous of the isolation in which he kept himself
+in the midst of the pack, and he fought often to maintain it.  But
+such fights were of brief duration.  He was too quick for the
+others.  They were slashed open and bleeding before they knew what
+had happened, were whipped almost before they had begun to fight.
+
+As rigid as the sled-discipline of the gods, was the discipline
+maintained by White Fang amongst his fellows.  He never allowed
+them any latitude.  He compelled them to an unremitting respect for
+him.  They might do as they pleased amongst themselves.  That was
+no concern of his.  But it WAS his concern that they leave him
+alone in his isolation, get out of his way when he elected to walk
+among them, and at all times acknowledge his mastery over them.  A
+hint of stiff-leggedness on their part, a lifted lip or a bristle
+of hair, and he would be upon them, merciless and cruel, swiftly
+convincing them of the error of their way.
+
+He was a monstrous tyrant.  His mastery was rigid as steel.  He
+oppressed the weak with a vengeance.  Not for nothing had he been
+exposed to the pitiless struggles for life in the day of his
+cubhood, when his mother and he, alone and unaided, held their own
+and survived in the ferocious environment of the Wild.  And not for
+nothing had he learned to walk softly when superior strength went
+by.  He oppressed the weak, but he respected the strong.  And in
+the course of the long journey with Grey Beaver he walked softly
+indeed amongst the full-grown dogs in the camps of the strange man-
+animals they encountered.
+
+The months passed by.  Still continued the journey of Grey Beaver.
+White Fang's strength was developed by the long hours on trail and
+the steady toil at the sled; and it would have seemed that his
+mental development was well-nigh complete.  He had come to know
+quite thoroughly the world in which he lived.  His outlook was
+bleak and materialistic.  The world as he saw it was a fierce and
+brutal world, a world without warmth, a world in which caresses and
+affection and the bright sweetnesses of the spirit did not exist.
+
+He had no affection for Grey Beaver.  True, he was a god, but a
+most savage god.  White Fang was glad to acknowledge his lordship,
+but it was a lordship based upon superior intelligence and brute
+strength.  There was something in the fibre of White Fang's being
+that made his lordship a thing to be desired, else he would not
+have come back from the Wild when he did to tender his allegiance.
+There were deeps in his nature which had never been sounded.  A
+kind word, a caressing touch of the hand, on the part of Grey
+Beaver, might have sounded these deeps; but Grey Beaver did not
+caress, nor speak kind words.  It was not his way.  His primacy was
+savage, and savagely he ruled, administering justice with a club,
+punishing transgression with the pain of a blow, and rewarding
+merit, not by kindness, but by withholding a blow.
+
+So White Fang knew nothing of the heaven a man's hand might contain
+for him.  Besides, he did not like the hands of the man-animals.
+He was suspicious of them.  It was true that they sometimes gave
+meat, but more often they gave hurt.  Hands were things to keep
+away from.  They hurled stones, wielded sticks and clubs and whips,
+administered slaps and clouts, and, when they touched him, were
+cunning to hurt with pinch and twist and wrench.  In strange
+villages he had encountered the hands of the children and learned
+that they were cruel to hurt.  Also, he had once nearly had an eye
+poked out by a toddling papoose.  From these experiences he became
+suspicious of all children.  He could not tolerate them.  When they
+came near with their ominous hands, he got up.
+
+It was in a village at the Great Slave Lake, that, in the course of
+resenting the evil of the hands of the man-animals, he came to
+modify the law that he had learned from Grey Beaver:  namely, that
+the unpardonable crime was to bite one of the gods.  In this
+village, after the custom of all dogs in all villages, White Fang
+went foraging, for food.  A boy was chopping frozen moose-meat with
+an axe, and the chips were flying in the snow.  White Fang, sliding
+by in quest of meat, stopped and began to eat the chips.  He
+observed the boy lay down the axe and take up a stout club.  White
+Fang sprang clear, just in time to escape the descending blow.  The
+boy pursued him, and he, a stranger in the village, fled between
+two tepees to find himself cornered against a high earth bank.
+
+There was no escape for White Fang.  The only way out was between
+the two tepees, and this the boy guarded.  Holding his club
+prepared to strike, he drew in on his cornered quarry.  White Fang
+was furious.  He faced the boy, bristling and snarling, his sense
+of justice outraged.  He knew the law of forage.  All the wastage
+of meat, such as the frozen chips, belonged to the dog that found
+it.  He had done no wrong, broken no law, yet here was this boy
+preparing to give him a beating.  White Fang scarcely knew what
+happened.  He did it in a surge of rage.  And he did it so quickly
+that the boy did not know either.  All the boy knew was that he had
+in some unaccountable way been overturned into the snow, and that
+his club-hand had been ripped wide open by White Fang's teeth.
+
+But White Fang knew that he had broken the law of the gods.  He had
+driven his teeth into the sacred flesh of one of them, and could
+expect nothing but a most terrible punishment.  He fled away to
+Grey Beaver, behind whose protecting legs he crouched when the
+bitten boy and the boy's family came, demanding vengeance.  But
+they went away with vengeance unsatisfied.  Grey Beaver defended
+White Fang.  So did Mit-sah and Kloo-kooch.  White Fang, listening
+to the wordy war and watching the angry gestures, knew that his act
+was justified.  And so it came that he learned there were gods and
+gods.  There were his gods, and there were other gods, and between
+them there was a difference.  Justice or injustice, it was all the
+same, he must take all things from the hands of his own gods.  But
+he was not compelled to take injustice from the other gods.  It was
+his privilege to resent it with his teeth.  And this also was a law
+of the gods.
+
+Before the day was out, White Fang was to learn more about this
+law.  Mit-sah, alone, gathering firewood in the forest, encountered
+the boy that had been bitten.  With him were other boys.  Hot words
+passed.  Then all the boys attacked Mit-sah.  It was going hard
+with him.  Blows were raining upon him from all sides.  White Fang
+looked on at first.  This was an affair of the gods, and no concern
+of his.  Then he realised that this was Mit-sah, one of his own
+particular gods, who was being maltreated.  It was no reasoned
+impulse that made White Fang do what he then did.  A mad rush of
+anger sent him leaping in amongst the combatants.  Five minutes
+later the landscape was covered with fleeing boys, many of whom
+dripped blood upon the snow in token that White Fang's teeth had
+not been idle.  When Mit-sah told the story in camp, Grey Beaver
+ordered meat to be given to White Fang.  He ordered much meat to be
+given, and White Fang, gorged and sleepy by the fire, knew that the
+law had received its verification.
+
+It was in line with these experiences that White Fang came to learn
+the law of property and the duty of the defence of property.  From
+the protection of his god's body to the protection of his god's
+possessions was a step, and this step he made.  What was his god's
+was to be defended against all the world--even to the extent of
+biting other gods.  Not only was such an act sacrilegious in its
+nature, but it was fraught with peril.  The gods were all-powerful,
+and a dog was no match against them; yet White Fang learned to face
+them, fiercely belligerent and unafraid.  Duty rose above fear, and
+thieving gods learned to leave Grey Beaver's property alone.
+
+One thing, in this connection, White Fang quickly learnt, and that
+was that a thieving god was usually a cowardly god and prone to run
+away at the sounding of the alarm.  Also, he learned that but brief
+time elapsed between his sounding of the alarm and Grey Beaver
+coming to his aid.  He came to know that it was not fear of him
+that drove the thief away, but fear of Grey Beaver.  White Fang did
+not give the alarm by barking.  He never barked.  His method was to
+drive straight at the intruder, and to sink his teeth in if he
+could.  Because he was morose and solitary, having nothing to do
+with the other dogs, he was unusually fitted to guard his master's
+property; and in this he was encouraged and trained by Grey Beaver.
+One result of this was to make White Fang more ferocious and
+indomitable, and more solitary.
+
+The months went by, binding stronger and stronger the covenant
+between dog and man.  This was the ancient covenant that the first
+wolf that came in from the Wild entered into with man.  And, like
+all succeeding wolves and wild dogs that had done likewise, White
+Fang worked the covenant out for himself.  The terms were simple.
+For the possession of a flesh-and-blood god, he exchanged his own
+liberty.  Food and fire, protection and companionship, were some of
+the things he received from the god.  In return, he guarded the
+god's property, defended his body, worked for him, and obeyed him.
+
+The possession of a god implies service.  White Fang's was a
+service of duty and awe, but not of love.  He did not know what
+love was.  He had no experience of love.  Kiche was a remote
+memory.  Besides, not only had he abandoned the Wild and his kind
+when he gave himself up to man, but the terms of the covenant were
+such that if ever he met Kiche again he would not desert his god to
+go with her.  His allegiance to man seemed somehow a law of his
+being greater than the love of liberty, of kind and kin.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI--THE FAMINE
+
+
+
+The spring of the year was at hand when Grey Beaver finished his
+long journey.  It was April, and White Fang was a year old when he
+pulled into the home villages and was loosed from the harness by
+Mit-sah.  Though a long way from his full growth, White Fang, next
+to Lip-lip, was the largest yearling in the village.  Both from his
+father, the wolf, and from Kiche, he had inherited stature and
+strength, and already he was measuring up alongside the full-grown
+dogs.  But he had not yet grown compact.  His body was slender and
+rangy, and his strength more stringy than massive, His coat was the
+true wolf-grey, and to all appearances he was true wolf himself.
+The quarter-strain of dog he had inherited from Kiche had left no
+mark on him physically, though it had played its part in his mental
+make-up.
+
+He wandered through the village, recognising with staid
+satisfaction the various gods he had known before the long journey.
+Then there were the dogs, puppies growing up like himself, and
+grown dogs that did not look so large and formidable as the memory
+pictures he retained of them.  Also, he stood less in fear of them
+than formerly, stalking among them with a certain careless ease
+that was as new to him as it was enjoyable.
+
+There was Baseek, a grizzled old fellow that in his younger days
+had but to uncover his fangs to send White Fang cringing and
+crouching to the right about.  From him White Fang had learned much
+of his own insignificance; and from him he was now to learn much of
+the change and development that had taken place in himself.  While
+Baseek had been growing weaker with age, White Fang had been
+growing stronger with youth.
+
+It was at the cutting-up of a moose, fresh-killed, that White Fang
+learned of the changed relations in which he stood to the dog-
+world.  He had got for himself a hoof and part of the shin-bone, to
+which quite a bit of meat was attached.  Withdrawn from the
+immediate scramble of the other dogs--in fact out of sight behind a
+thicket--he was devouring his prize, when Baseek rushed in upon
+him.  Before he knew what he was doing, he had slashed the intruder
+twice and sprung clear.  Baseek was surprised by the other's
+temerity and swiftness of attack.  He stood, gazing stupidly across
+at White Fang, the raw, red shin-bone between them.
+
+Baseek was old, and already he had come to know the increasing
+valour of the dogs it had been his wont to bully.  Bitter
+experiences these, which, perforce, he swallowed, calling upon all
+his wisdom to cope with them.  In the old days he would have sprung
+upon White Fang in a fury of righteous wrath.  But now his waning
+powers would not permit such a course.  He bristled fiercely and
+looked ominously across the shin-bone at White Fang.  And White
+Fang, resurrecting quite a deal of the old awe, seemed to wilt and
+to shrink in upon himself and grow small, as he cast about in his
+mind for a way to beat a retreat not too inglorious.
+
+And right here Baseek erred.  Had he contented himself with looking
+fierce and ominous, all would have been well.  White Fang, on the
+verge of retreat, would have retreated, leaving the meat to him.
+But Baseek did not wait.  He considered the victory already his and
+stepped forward to the meat.  As he bent his head carelessly to
+smell it, White Fang bristled slightly.  Even then it was not too
+late for Baseek to retrieve the situation.  Had he merely stood
+over the meat, head up and glowering, White Fang would ultimately
+have slunk away.  But the fresh meat was strong in Baseek's
+nostrils, and greed urged him to take a bite of it.
+
+This was too much for White Fang.  Fresh upon his months of mastery
+over his own team-mates, it was beyond his self-control to stand
+idly by while another devoured the meat that belonged to him.  He
+struck, after his custom, without warning.  With the first slash,
+Baseek's right ear was ripped into ribbons.  He was astounded at
+the suddenness of it.  But more things, and most grievous ones,
+were happening with equal suddenness.  He was knocked off his feet.
+His throat was bitten.  While he was struggling to his feet the
+young dog sank teeth twice into his shoulder.  The swiftness of it
+was bewildering.  He made a futile rush at White Fang, clipping the
+empty air with an outraged snap.  The next moment his nose was laid
+open, and he was staggering backward away from the meat.
+
+The situation was now reversed.  White Fang stood over the shin-
+bone, bristling and menacing, while Baseek stood a little way off,
+preparing to retreat.  He dared not risk a fight with this young
+lightning-flash, and again he knew, and more bitterly, the
+enfeeblement of oncoming age.  His attempt to maintain his dignity
+was heroic.  Calmly turning his back upon young dog and shin-bone,
+as though both were beneath his notice and unworthy of his
+consideration, he stalked grandly away.  Nor, until well out of
+sight, did he stop to lick his bleeding wounds.
+
+The effect on White Fang was to give him a greater faith in
+himself, and a greater pride.  He walked less softly among the
+grown dogs; his attitude toward them was less compromising.  Not
+that he went out of his way looking for trouble.  Far from it.  But
+upon his way he demanded consideration.  He stood upon his right to
+go his way unmolested and to give trail to no dog.  He had to be
+taken into account, that was all.  He was no longer to be
+disregarded and ignored, as was the lot of puppies, and as
+continued to be the lot of the puppies that were his team-mates.
+They got out of the way, gave trail to the grown dogs, and gave up
+meat to them under compulsion.  But White Fang, uncompanionable,
+solitary, morose, scarcely looking to right or left, redoubtable,
+forbidding of aspect, remote and alien, was accepted as an equal by
+his puzzled elders.  They quickly learned to leave him alone,
+neither venturing hostile acts nor making overtures of
+friendliness.  If they left him alone, he left them alone--a state
+of affairs that they found, after a few encounters, to be pre-
+eminently desirable.
+
+In midsummer White Fang had an experience.  Trotting along in his
+silent way to investigate a new tepee which had been erected on the
+edge of the village while he was away with the hunters after moose,
+he came full upon Kiche.  He paused and looked at her.  He
+remembered her vaguely, but he REMEMBERED her, and that was more
+than could be said for her.  She lifted her lip at him in the old
+snarl of menace, and his memory became clear.  His forgotten
+cubhood, all that was associated with that familiar snarl, rushed
+back to him.  Before he had known the gods, she had been to him the
+centre-pin of the universe.  The old familiar feelings of that time
+came back upon him, surged up within him.  He bounded towards her
+joyously, and she met him with shrewd fangs that laid his cheek
+open to the bone.  He did not understand.  He backed away,
+bewildered and puzzled.
+
+But it was not Kiche's fault.  A wolf-mother was not made to
+remember her cubs of a year or so before.  So she did not remember
+White Fang.  He was a strange animal, an intruder; and her present
+litter of puppies gave her the right to resent such intrusion.
+
+One of the puppies sprawled up to White Fang.  They were half-
+brothers, only they did not know it.  White Fang sniffed the puppy
+curiously, whereupon Kiche rushed upon him, gashing is face a
+second time.  He backed farther away.  All the old memories and
+associations died down again and passed into the grave from which
+they had been resurrected.  He looked at Kiche licking her puppy
+and stopping now and then to snarl at him.  She was without value
+to him.  He had learned to get along without her.  Her meaning was
+forgotten.  There was no place for her in his scheme of things, as
+there was no place for him in hers.
+
+He was still standing, stupid and bewildered, the memories
+forgotten, wondering what it was all about, when Kiche attacked him
+a third time, intent on driving him away altogether from the
+vicinity.  And White Fang allowed himself to be driven away.  This
+was a female of his kind, and it was a law of his kind that the
+males must not fight the females.  He did not know anything about
+this law, for it was no generalisation of the mind, not a something
+acquired by experience of the world.  He knew it as a secret
+prompting, as an urge of instinct--of the same instinct that made
+him howl at the moon and stars of nights, and that made him fear
+death and the unknown.
+
+The months went by.  White Fang grew stronger, heavier, and more
+compact, while his character was developing along the lines laid
+down by his heredity and his environment.  His heredity was a life-
+stuff that may be likened to clay.  It possessed many
+possibilities, was capable of being moulded into many different
+forms.  Environment served to model the clay, to give it a
+particular form.  Thus, had White Fang never come in to the fires
+of man, the Wild would have moulded him into a true wolf.  But the
+gods had given him a different environment, and he was moulded into
+a dog that was rather wolfish, but that was a dog and not a wolf.
+
+And so, according to the clay of his nature and the pressure of his
+surroundings, his character was being moulded into a certain
+particular shape.  There was no escaping it.  He was becoming more
+morose, more uncompanionable, more solitary, more ferocious; while
+the dogs were learning more and more that it was better to be at
+peace with him than at war, and Grey Beaver was coming to prize him
+more greatly with the passage of each day.
+
+White Fang, seeming to sum up strength in all his qualities,
+nevertheless suffered from one besetting weakness.  He could not
+stand being laughed at.  The laughter of men was a hateful thing.
+They might laugh among themselves about anything they pleased
+except himself, and he did not mind.  But the moment laughter was
+turned upon him he would fly into a most terrible rage.  Grave,
+dignified, sombre, a laugh made him frantic to ridiculousness.  It
+so outraged him and upset him that for hours he would behave like a
+demon.  And woe to the dog that at such times ran foul of him.  He
+knew the law too well to take it out of Grey Beaver; behind Grey
+Beaver were a club and godhead.  But behind the dogs there was
+nothing but space, and into this space they flew when White Fang
+came on the scene, made mad by laughter.
+
+In the third year of his life there came a great famine to the
+Mackenzie Indians.  In the summer the fish failed.  In the winter
+the cariboo forsook their accustomed track.  Moose were scarce, the
+rabbits almost disappeared, hunting and preying animals perished.
+Denied their usual food-supply, weakened by hunger, they fell upon
+and devoured one another.  Only the strong survived.  White Fang's
+gods were always hunting animals.  The old and the weak of them
+died of hunger.  There was wailing in the village, where the women
+and children went without in order that what little they had might
+go into the bellies of the lean and hollow-eyed hunters who trod
+the forest in the vain pursuit of meat.
+
+To such extremity were the gods driven that they ate the soft-
+tanned leather of their mocassins and mittens, while the dogs ate
+the harnesses off their backs and the very whip-lashes.  Also, the
+dogs ate one another, and also the gods ate the dogs.  The weakest
+and the more worthless were eaten first.  The dogs that still
+lived, looked on and understood.  A few of the boldest and wisest
+forsook the fires of the gods, which had now become a shambles, and
+fled into the forest, where, in the end, they starved to death or
+were eaten by wolves.
+
+In this time of misery, White Fang, too, stole away into the woods.
+He was better fitted for the life than the other dogs, for he had
+the training of his cubhood to guide him.  Especially adept did he
+become in stalking small living things.  He would lie concealed for
+hours, following every movement of a cautious tree-squirrel,
+waiting, with a patience as huge as the hunger he suffered from,
+until the squirrel ventured out upon the ground.  Even then, White
+Fang was not premature.  He waited until he was sure of striking
+before the squirrel could gain a tree-refuge.  Then, and not until
+then, would he flash from his hiding-place, a grey projectile,
+incredibly swift, never failing its mark--the fleeing squirrel that
+fled not fast enough.
+
+Successful as he was with squirrels, there was one difficulty that
+prevented him from living and growing fat on them.  There were not
+enough squirrels.  So he was driven to hunt still smaller things.
+So acute did his hunger become at times that he was not above
+rooting out wood-mice from their burrows in the ground.  Nor did he
+scorn to do battle with a weasel as hungry as himself and many
+times more ferocious.
+
+In the worst pinches of the famine he stole back to the fires of
+the gods.  But he did not go into the fires.  He lurked in the
+forest, avoiding discovery and robbing the snares at the rare
+intervals when game was caught.  He even robbed Grey Beaver's snare
+of a rabbit at a time when Grey Beaver staggered and tottered
+through the forest, sitting down often to rest, what of weakness
+and of shortness of breath.
+
+One day While Fang encountered a young wolf, gaunt and scrawny,
+loose-jointed with famine.  Had he not been hungry himself, White
+Fang might have gone with him and eventually found his way into the
+pack amongst his wild brethren.  As it was, he ran the young wolf
+down and killed and ate him.
+
+Fortune seemed to favour him.  Always, when hardest pressed for
+food, he found something to kill.  Again, when he was weak, it was
+his luck that none of the larger preying animals chanced upon him.
+Thus, he was strong from the two days' eating a lynx had afforded
+him when the hungry wolf-pack ran full tilt upon him.  It was a
+long, cruel chase, but he was better nourished than they, and in
+the end outran them.  And not only did he outrun them, but,
+circling widely back on his track, he gathered in one of his
+exhausted pursuers.
+
+After that he left that part of the country and journeyed over to
+the valley wherein he had been born.  Here, in the old lair, he
+encountered Kiche.  Up to her old tricks, she, too, had fled the
+inhospitable fires of the gods and gone back to her old refuge to
+give birth to her young.  Of this litter but one remained alive
+when White Fang came upon the scene, and this one was not destined
+to live long.  Young life had little chance in such a famine.
+
+Kiche's greeting of her grown son was anything but affectionate.
+But White Fang did not mind.  He had outgrown his mother.  So he
+turned tail philosophically and trotted on up the stream.  At the
+forks he took the turning to the left, where he found the lair of
+the lynx with whom his mother and he had fought long before.  Here,
+in the abandoned lair, he settled down and rested for a day.
+
+During the early summer, in the last days of the famine, he met
+Lip-lip, who had likewise taken to the woods, where he had eked out
+a miserable existence.
+
+White Fang came upon him unexpectedly.  Trotting in opposite
+directions along the base of a high bluff, they rounded a corner of
+rock and found themselves face to face.  They paused with instant
+alarm, and looked at each other suspiciously.
+
+White Fang was in splendid condition.  His hunting had been good,
+and for a week he had eaten his fill.  He was even gorged from his
+latest kill.  But in the moment he looked at Lip-lip his hair rose
+on end all along his back.  It was an involuntary bristling on his
+part, the physical state that in the past had always accompanied
+the mental state produced in him by Lip-lip's bullying and
+persecution.  As in the past he had bristled and snarled at sight
+of Lip-lip, so now, and automatically, he bristled and snarled.  He
+did not waste any time.  The thing was done thoroughly and with
+despatch.  Lip-lip essayed to back away, but White Fang struck him
+hard, shoulder to shoulder.  Lip-lip was overthrown and rolled upon
+his back.  White Fang's teeth drove into the scrawny throat.  There
+was a death-struggle, during which White Fang walked around, stiff-
+legged and observant.  Then he resumed his course and trotted on
+along the base of the bluff.
+
+One day, not long after, he came to the edge of the forest, where a
+narrow stretch of open land sloped down to the Mackenzie.  He had
+been over this ground before, when it was bare, but now a village
+occupied it.  Still hidden amongst the trees, he paused to study
+the situation.  Sights and sounds and scents were familiar to him.
+It was the old village changed to a new place.  But sights and
+sounds and smells were different from those he had last had when he
+fled away from it.  There was no whimpering nor wailing.  Contented
+sounds saluted his ear, and when he heard the angry voice of a
+woman he knew it to be the anger that proceeds from a full stomach.
+And there was a smell in the air of fish.  There was food.  The
+famine was gone.  He came out boldly from the forest and trotted
+into camp straight to Grey Beaver's tepee.  Grey Beaver was not
+there; but Kloo-kooch welcomed him with glad cries and the whole of
+a fresh-caught fish, and he lay down to wait Grey Beaver's coming.
+
+
+
+
+PART IV
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I--THE ENEMY OF HIS KIND
+
+
+
+Had there been in White Fang's nature any possibility, no matter
+how remote, of his ever coming to fraternise with his kind, such
+possibility was irretrievably destroyed when he was made leader of
+the sled-team.  For now the dogs hated him--hated him for the extra
+meat bestowed upon him by Mit-sah; hated him for all the real and
+fancied favours he received; hated him for that he fled always at
+the head of the team, his waving brush of a tail and his
+perpetually retreating hind-quarters for ever maddening their eyes.
+
+And White Fang just as bitterly hated them back.  Being sled-leader
+was anything but gratifying to him.  To be compelled to run away
+before the yelling pack, every dog of which, for three years, he
+had thrashed and mastered, was almost more than he could endure.
+But endure it he must, or perish, and the life that was in him had
+no desire to perish out.  The moment Mit-sah gave his order for the
+start, that moment the whole team, with eager, savage cries, sprang
+forward at White Fang.
+
+There was no defence for him.  If he turned upon them, Mit-sah
+would throw the stinging lash of the whip into his face.  Only
+remained to him to run away.  He could not encounter that howling
+horde with his tail and hind-quarters.  These were scarcely fit
+weapons with which to meet the many merciless fangs.  So run away
+he did, violating his own nature and pride with every leap he made,
+and leaping all day long.
+
+One cannot violate the promptings of one's nature without having
+that nature recoil upon itself.  Such a recoil is like that of a
+hair, made to grow out from the body, turning unnaturally upon the
+direction of its growth and growing into the body--a rankling,
+festering thing of hurt.  And so with White Fang.  Every urge of
+his being impelled him to spring upon the pack that cried at his
+heels, but it was the will of the gods that this should not be; and
+behind the will, to enforce it, was the whip of cariboo-gut with
+its biting thirty-foot lash.  So White Fang could only eat his
+heart in bitterness and develop a hatred and malice commensurate
+with the ferocity and indomitability of his nature.
+
+If ever a creature was the enemy of its kind, White Fang was that
+creature.  He asked no quarter, gave none.  He was continually
+marred and scarred by the teeth of the pack, and as continually he
+left his own marks upon the pack.  Unlike most leaders, who, when
+camp was made and the dogs were unhitched, huddled near to the gods
+for protection, White Fang disdained such protection.  He walked
+boldly about the camp, inflicting punishment in the night for what
+he had suffered in the day.  In the time before he was made leader
+of the team, the pack had learned to get out of his way.  But now
+it was different.  Excited by the day-long pursuit of him, swayed
+subconsciously by the insistent iteration on their brains of the
+sight of him fleeing away, mastered by the feeling of mastery
+enjoyed all day, the dogs could not bring themselves to give way to
+him.  When he appeared amongst them, there was always a squabble.
+His progress was marked by snarl and snap and growl.  The very
+atmosphere he breathed was surcharged with hatred and malice, and
+this but served to increase the hatred and malice within him.
+
+When Mit-sah cried out his command for the team to stop, White Fang
+obeyed.  At first this caused trouble for the other dogs.  All of
+them would spring upon the hated leader only to find the tables
+turned.  Behind him would be Mit-sah, the great whip singing in his
+hand.  So the dogs came to understand that when the team stopped by
+order, White Fang was to be let alone.  But when White Fang stopped
+without orders, then it was allowed them to spring upon him and
+destroy him if they could.  After several experiences, White Fang
+never stopped without orders.  He learned quickly.  It was in the
+nature of things, that he must learn quickly if he were to survive
+the unusually severe conditions under which life was vouchsafed
+him.
+
+But the dogs could never learn the lesson to leave him alone in
+camp.  Each day, pursuing him and crying defiance at him, the
+lesson of the previous night was erased, and that night would have
+to be learned over again, to be as immediately forgotten.  Besides,
+there was a greater consistence in their dislike of him.  They
+sensed between themselves and him a difference of kind--cause
+sufficient in itself for hostility.  Like him, they were
+domesticated wolves.  But they had been domesticated for
+generations.  Much of the Wild had been lost, so that to them the
+Wild was the unknown, the terrible, the ever-menacing and ever
+warring.  But to him, in appearance and action and impulse, still
+clung the Wild.  He symbolised it, was its personification:  so
+that when they showed their teeth to him they were defending
+themselves against the powers of destruction that lurked in the
+shadows of the forest and in the dark beyond the camp-fire.
+
+But there was one lesson the dogs did learn, and that was to keep
+together.  White Fang was too terrible for any of them to face
+single-handed.  They met him with the mass-formation, otherwise he
+would have killed them, one by one, in a night.  As it was, he
+never had a chance to kill them.  He might roll a dog off its feet,
+but the pack would be upon him before he could follow up and
+deliver the deadly throat-stroke.  At the first hint of conflict,
+the whole team drew together and faced him.  The dogs had quarrels
+among themselves, but these were forgotten when trouble was brewing
+with White Fang.
+
+On the other hand, try as they would, they could not kill White
+Fang.  He was too quick for them, too formidable, too wise.  He
+avoided tight places and always backed out of it when they bade
+fair to surround him.  While, as for getting him off his feet,
+there was no dog among them capable of doing the trick.  His feet
+clung to the earth with the same tenacity that he clung to life.
+For that matter, life and footing were synonymous in this unending
+warfare with the pack, and none knew it better than White Fang.
+
+So he became the enemy of his kind, domesticated wolves that they
+were, softened by the fires of man, weakened in the sheltering
+shadow of man's strength.  White Fang was bitter and implacable.
+The clay of him was so moulded.  He declared a vendetta against all
+dogs.  And so terribly did he live this vendetta that Grey Beaver,
+fierce savage himself, could not but marvel at White Fang's
+ferocity.  Never, he swore, had there been the like of this animal;
+and the Indians in strange villages swore likewise when they
+considered the tale of his killings amongst their dogs.
+
+When White Fang was nearly five years old, Grey Beaver took him on
+another great journey, and long remembered was the havoc he worked
+amongst the dogs of the many villages along the Mackenzie, across
+the Rockies, and down the Porcupine to the Yukon.  He revelled in
+the vengeance he wreaked upon his kind.  They were ordinary,
+unsuspecting dogs.  They were not prepared for his swiftness and
+directness, for his attack without warning.  They did not know him
+for what he was, a lightning-flash of slaughter.  They bristled up
+to him, stiff-legged and challenging, while he, wasting no time on
+elaborate preliminaries, snapping into action like a steel spring,
+was at their throats and destroying them before they knew what was
+happening and while they were yet in the throes of surprise.
+
+He became an adept at fighting.  He economised.  He never wasted
+his strength, never tussled.  He was in too quickly for that, and,
+if he missed, was out again too quickly.  The dislike of the wolf
+for close quarters was his to an unusual degree.  He could not
+endure a prolonged contact with another body.  It smacked of
+danger.  It made him frantic.  He must be away, free, on his own
+legs, touching no living thing.  It was the Wild still clinging to
+him, asserting itself through him.  This feeling had been
+accentuated by the Ishmaelite life he had led from his puppyhood.
+Danger lurked in contacts.  It was the trap, ever the trap, the
+fear of it lurking deep in the life of him, woven into the fibre of
+him
+
+In consequence, the strange dogs he encountered had no chance
+against him.  He eluded their fangs.  He got them, or got away,
+himself untouched in either event.  In the natural course of things
+there were exceptions to this.  There were times when several dogs,
+pitching on to him, punished him before he could get away; and
+there were times when a single dog scored deeply on him.  But these
+were accidents.  In the main, so efficient a fighter had he become,
+he went his way unscathed.
+
+Another advantage he possessed was that of correctly judging time
+and distance.  Not that he did this consciously, however.  He did
+not calculate such things.  It was all automatic.  His eyes saw
+correctly, and the nerves carried the vision correctly to his
+brain.  The parts of him were better adjusted than those of the
+average dog.  They worked together more smoothly and steadily.  His
+was a better, far better, nervous, mental, and muscular co-
+ordination.  When his eyes conveyed to his brain the moving image
+of an action, his brain without conscious effort, knew the space
+that limited that action and the time required for its completion.
+Thus, he could avoid the leap of another dog, or the drive of its
+fangs, and at the same moment could seize the infinitesimal
+fraction of time in which to deliver his own attack.  Body and
+brain, his was a more perfected mechanism.  Not that he was to be
+praised for it.  Nature had been more generous to him than to the
+average animal, that was all.
+
+It was in the summer that White Fang arrived at Fort Yukon.  Grey
+Beaver had crossed the great watershed between Mackenzie and the
+Yukon in the late winter, and spent the spring in hunting among the
+western outlying spurs of the Rockies.  Then, after the break-up of
+the ice on the Porcupine, he had built a canoe and paddled down
+that stream to where it effected its junction with the Yukon just
+under the Artic circle.  Here stood the old Hudson's Bay Company
+fort; and here were many Indians, much food, and unprecedented
+excitement.  It was the summer of 1898, and thousands of gold-
+hunters were going up the Yukon to Dawson and the Klondike.  Still
+hundreds of miles from their goal, nevertheless many of them had
+been on the way for a year, and the least any of them had travelled
+to get that far was five thousand miles, while some had come from
+the other side of the world.
+
+Here Grey Beaver stopped.  A whisper of the gold-rush had reached
+his ears, and he had come with several bales of furs, and another
+of gut-sewn mittens and moccasins.  He would not have ventured so
+long a trip had he not expected generous profits.  But what he had
+expected was nothing to what he realised.  His wildest dreams had
+not exceeded a hundred per cent. profit; he made a thousand per
+cent.  And like a true Indian, he settled down to trade carefully
+and slowly, even if it took all summer and the rest of the winter
+to dispose of his goods.
+
+It was at Fort Yukon that White Fang saw his first white men.  As
+compared with the Indians he had known, they were to him another
+race of beings, a race of superior gods.  They impressed him as
+possessing superior power, and it is on power that godhead rests.
+White Fang did not reason it out, did not in his mind make the
+sharp generalisation that the white gods were more powerful.  It
+was a feeling, nothing more, and yet none the less potent.  As, in
+his puppyhood, the looming bulks of the tepees, man-reared, had
+affected him as manifestations of power, so was he affected now by
+the houses and the huge fort all of massive logs.  Here was power.
+Those white gods were strong.  They possessed greater mastery over
+matter than the gods he had known, most powerful among which was
+Grey Beaver.  And yet Grey Beaver was as a child-god among these
+white-skinned ones.
+
+To be sure, White Fang only felt these things.  He was not
+conscious of them.  Yet it is upon feeling, more often than
+thinking, that animals act; and every act White Fang now performed
+was based upon the feeling that the white men were the superior
+gods.  In the first place he was very suspicious of them.  There
+was no telling what unknown terrors were theirs, what unknown hurts
+they could administer.  He was curious to observe them, fearful of
+being noticed by them.  For the first few hours he was content with
+slinking around and watching them from a safe distance.  Then he
+saw that no harm befell the dogs that were near to them, and he
+came in closer.
+
+In turn he was an object of great curiosity to them.  His wolfish
+appearance caught their eyes at once, and they pointed him out to
+one another.  This act of pointing put White Fang on his guard, and
+when they tried to approach him he showed his teeth and backed
+away.  Not one succeeded in laying a hand on him, and it was well
+that they did not.
+
+White Fang soon learned that very few of these gods--not more than
+a dozen--lived at this place.  Every two or three days a steamer
+(another and colossal manifestation of power) came into the bank
+and stopped for several hours.  The white men came from off these
+steamers and went away on them again.  There seemed untold numbers
+of these white men.  In the first day or so, he saw more of them
+than he had seen Indians in all his life; and as the days went by
+they continued to come up the river, stop, and then go on up the
+river out of sight.
+
+But if the white gods were all-powerful, their dogs did not amount
+to much.  This White Fang quickly discovered by mixing with those
+that came ashore with their masters.  They were irregular shapes
+and sizes.  Some were short-legged--too short; others were long-
+legged--too long.  They had hair instead of fur, and a few had very
+little hair at that.  And none of them knew how to fight.
+
+As an enemy of his kind, it was in White Fang's province to fight
+with them.  This he did, and he quickly achieved for them a mighty
+contempt.  They were soft and helpless, made much noise, and
+floundered around clumsily trying to accomplish by main strength
+what he accomplished by dexterity and cunning.  They rushed
+bellowing at him.  He sprang to the side.  They did not know what
+had become of him; and in that moment he struck them on the
+shoulder, rolling them off their feet and delivering his stroke at
+the throat.
+
+Sometimes this stroke was successful, and a stricken dog rolled in
+the dirt, to be pounced upon and torn to pieces by the pack of
+Indian dogs that waited.  White Fang was wise.  He had long since
+learned that the gods were made angry when their dogs were killed.
+The white men were no exception to this.  So he was content, when
+he had overthrown and slashed wide the throat of one of their dogs,
+to drop back and let the pack go in and do the cruel finishing
+work.  It was then that the white men rushed in, visiting their
+wrath heavily on the pack, while White Fang went free.  He would
+stand off at a little distance and look on, while stones, clubs,
+axes, and all sorts of weapons fell upon his fellows.  White Fang
+was very wise.
+
+But his fellows grew wise in their own way; and in this White Fang
+grew wise with them.  They learned that it was when a steamer first
+tied to the bank that they had their fun.  After the first two or
+three strange dogs had been downed and destroyed, the white men
+hustled their own animals back on board and wrecked savage
+vengeance on the offenders.  One white man, having seen his dog, a
+setter, torn to pieces before his eyes, drew a revolver.  He fired
+rapidly, six times, and six of the pack lay dead or dying--another
+manifestation of power that sank deep into White Fang's
+consciousness.
+
+White Fang enjoyed it all.  He did not love his kind, and he was
+shrewd enough to escape hurt himself.  At first, the killing of the
+white men's dogs had been a diversion.  After a time it became his
+occupation.  There was no work for him to do.  Grey Beaver was busy
+trading and getting wealthy.  So White Fang hung around the landing
+with the disreputable gang of Indian dogs, waiting for steamers.
+With the arrival of a steamer the fun began.  After a few minutes,
+by the time the white men had got over their surprise, the gang
+scattered.  The fun was over until the next steamer should arrive.
+
+But it can scarcely be said that White Fang was a member of the
+gang.  He did not mingle with it, but remained aloof, always
+himself, and was even feared by it.  It is true, he worked with it.
+He picked the quarrel with the strange dog while the gang waited.
+And when he had overthrown the strange dog the gang went in to
+finish it.  But it is equally true that he then withdrew, leaving
+the gang to receive the punishment of the outraged gods.
+
+It did not require much exertion to pick these quarrels.  All he
+had to do, when the strange dogs came ashore, was to show himself.
+When they saw him they rushed for him.  It was their instinct.  He
+was the Wild--the unknown, the terrible, the ever-menacing, the
+thing that prowled in the darkness around the fires of the primeval
+world when they, cowering close to the fires, were reshaping their
+instincts, learning to fear the Wild out of which they had come,
+and which they had deserted and betrayed.  Generation by
+generation, down all the generations, had this fear of the Wild
+been stamped into their natures.  For centuries the Wild had stood
+for terror and destruction.  And during all this time free licence
+had been theirs, from their masters, to kill the things of the
+Wild.  In doing this they had protected both themselves and the
+gods whose companionship they shared
+
+And so, fresh from the soft southern world, these dogs, trotting
+down the gang-plank and out upon the Yukon shore had but to see
+White Fang to experience the irresistible impulse to rush upon him
+and destroy him.  They might be town-reared dogs, but the
+instinctive fear of the Wild was theirs just the same.  Not alone
+with their own eyes did they see the wolfish creature in the clear
+light of day, standing before them.  They saw him with the eyes of
+their ancestors, and by their inherited memory they knew White Fang
+for the wolf, and they remembered the ancient feud.
+
+All of which served to make White Fang's days enjoyable.  If the
+sight of him drove these strange dogs upon him, so much the better
+for him, so much the worse for them.  They looked upon him as
+legitimate prey, and as legitimate prey he looked upon them.
+
+Not for nothing had he first seen the light of day in a lonely lair
+and fought his first fights with the ptarmigan, the weasel, and the
+lynx.  And not for nothing had his puppyhood been made bitter by
+the persecution of Lip-lip and the whole puppy pack.  It might have
+been otherwise, and he would then have been otherwise.  Had Lip-lip
+not existed, he would have passed his puppyhood with the other
+puppies and grown up more doglike and with more liking for dogs.
+Had Grey Beaver possessed the plummet of affection and love, he
+might have sounded the deeps of White Fang's nature and brought up
+to the surface all manner of kindly qualities.  But these things
+had not been so.  The clay of White Fang had been moulded until he
+became what he was, morose and lonely, unloving and ferocious, the
+enemy of all his kind.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II--THE MAD GOD
+
+
+
+A small number of white men lived in Fort Yukon.  These men had
+been long in the country.  They called themselves Sour-doughs, and
+took great pride in so classifying themselves.  For other men, new
+in the land, they felt nothing but disdain.  The men who came
+ashore from the steamers were newcomers.  They were known as
+chechaquos, and they always wilted at the application of the name.
+They made their bread with baking-powder.  This was the invidious
+distinction between them and the Sour-doughs, who, forsooth, made
+their bread from sour-dough because they had no baking-powder.
+
+All of which is neither here nor there.  The men in the fort
+disdained the newcomers and enjoyed seeing them come to grief.
+Especially did they enjoy the havoc worked amongst the newcomers'
+dogs by White Fang and his disreputable gang.  When a steamer
+arrived, the men of the fort made it a point always to come down to
+the bank and see the fun.  They looked forward to it with as much
+anticipation as did the Indian dogs, while they were not slow to
+appreciate the savage and crafty part played by White Fang.
+
+But there was one man amongst them who particularly enjoyed the
+sport.  He would come running at the first sound of a steamboat's
+whistle; and when the last fight was over and White Fang and the
+pack had scattered, he would return slowly to the fort, his face
+heavy with regret.  Sometimes, when a soft southland dog went down,
+shrieking its death-cry under the fangs of the pack, this man would
+be unable to contain himself, and would leap into the air and cry
+out with delight.  And always he had a sharp and covetous eye for
+White Fang.
+
+This man was called "Beauty" by the other men of the fort.  No one
+knew his first name, and in general he was known in the country as
+Beauty Smith.  But he was anything save a beauty.  To antithesis
+was due his naming.  He was pre-eminently unbeautiful.  Nature had
+been niggardly with him.  He was a small man to begin with; and
+upon his meagre frame was deposited an even more strikingly meagre
+head.  Its apex might be likened to a point.  In fact, in his
+boyhood, before he had been named Beauty by his fellows, he had
+been called "Pinhead."
+
+Backward, from the apex, his head slanted down to his neck and
+forward it slanted uncompromisingly to meet a low and remarkably
+wide forehead.  Beginning here, as though regretting her parsimony,
+Nature had spread his features with a lavish hand.  His eyes were
+large, and between them was the distance of two eyes.  His face, in
+relation to the rest of him, was prodigious.  In order to discover
+the necessary area, Nature had given him an enormous prognathous
+jaw.  It was wide and heavy, and protruded outward and down until
+it seemed to rest on his chest.  Possibly this appearance was due
+to the weariness of the slender neck, unable properly to support so
+great a burden.
+
+This jaw gave the impression of ferocious determination.  But
+something lacked.  Perhaps it was from excess.  Perhaps the jaw was
+too large.  At any rate, it was a lie.  Beauty Smith was known far
+and wide as the weakest of weak-kneed and snivelling cowards.  To
+complete his description, his teeth were large and yellow, while
+the two eye-teeth, larger than their fellows, showed under his lean
+lips like fangs.  His eyes were yellow and muddy, as though Nature
+had run short on pigments and squeezed together the dregs of all
+her tubes.  It was the same with his hair, sparse and irregular of
+growth, muddy-yellow and dirty-yellow, rising on his head and
+sprouting out of his face in unexpected tufts and bunches, in
+appearance like clumped and wind-blown grain.
+
+In short, Beauty Smith was a monstrosity, and the blame of it lay
+elsewhere.  He was not responsible.  The clay of him had been so
+moulded in the making.  He did the cooking for the other men in the
+fort, the dish-washing and the drudgery.  They did not despise him.
+Rather did they tolerate him in a broad human way, as one tolerates
+any creature evilly treated in the making.  Also, they feared him.
+His cowardly rages made them dread a shot in the back or poison in
+their coffee.  But somebody had to do the cooking, and whatever
+else his shortcomings, Beauty Smith could cook.
+
+This was the man that looked at White Fang, delighted in his
+ferocious prowess, and desired to possess him.  He made overtures
+to White Fang from the first.  White Fang began by ignoring him.
+Later on, when the overtures became more insistent, White Fang
+bristled and bared his teeth and backed away.  He did not like the
+man.  The feel of him was bad.  He sensed the evil in him, and
+feared the extended hand and the attempts at soft-spoken speech.
+Because of all this, he hated the man.
+
+With the simpler creatures, good and bad are things simply
+understood.  The good stands for all things that bring easement and
+satisfaction and surcease from pain.  Therefore, the good is liked.
+The bad stands for all things that are fraught with discomfort,
+menace, and hurt, and is hated accordingly.  White Fang's feel of
+Beauty Smith was bad.  From the man's distorted body and twisted
+mind, in occult ways, like mists rising from malarial marshes, came
+emanations of the unhealth within.  Not by reasoning, not by the
+five senses alone, but by other and remoter and uncharted senses,
+came the feeling to White Fang that the man was ominous with evil,
+pregnant with hurtfulness, and therefore a thing bad, and wisely to
+be hated.
+
+White Fang was in Grey Beaver's camp when Beauty Smith first
+visited it.  At the faint sound of his distant feet, before he came
+in sight, White Fang knew who was coming and began to bristle.  He
+had been lying down in an abandon of comfort, but he arose quickly,
+and, as the man arrived, slid away in true wolf-fashion to the edge
+of the camp.  He did not know what they said, but he could see the
+man and Grey Beaver talking together.  Once, the man pointed at
+him, and White Fang snarled back as though the hand were just
+descending upon him instead of being, as it was, fifty feet away.
+The man laughed at this; and White Fang slunk away to the
+sheltering woods, his head turned to observe as he glided softly
+over the ground.
+
+Grey Beaver refused to sell the dog.  He had grown rich with his
+trading and stood in need of nothing.  Besides, White Fang was a
+valuable animal, the strongest sled-dog he had ever owned, and the
+best leader.  Furthermore, there was no dog like him on the
+Mackenzie nor the Yukon.  He could fight.  He killed other dogs as
+easily as men killed mosquitoes.  (Beauty Smith's eyes lighted up
+at this, and he licked his thin lips with an eager tongue).  No,
+White Fang was not for sale at any price.
+
+But Beauty Smith knew the ways of Indians.  He visited Grey
+Beaver's camp often, and hidden under his coat was always a black
+bottle or so.  One of the potencies of whisky is the breeding of
+thirst.  Grey Beaver got the thirst.  His fevered membranes and
+burnt stomach began to clamour for more and more of the scorching
+fluid; while his brain, thrust all awry by the unwonted stimulant,
+permitted him to go any length to obtain it.  The money he had
+received for his furs and mittens and moccasins began to go.  It
+went faster and faster, and the shorter his money-sack grew, the
+shorter grew his temper.
+
+In the end his money and goods and temper were all gone.  Nothing
+remained to him but his thirst, a prodigious possession in itself
+that grew more prodigious with every sober breath he drew.  Then it
+was that Beauty Smith had talk with him again about the sale of
+White Fang; but this time the price offered was in bottles, not
+dollars, and Grey Beaver's ears were more eager to hear.
+
+"You ketch um dog you take um all right," was his last word.
+
+The bottles were delivered, but after two days.  "You ketch um
+dog," were Beauty Smith's words to Grey Beaver.
+
+White Fang slunk into camp one evening and dropped down with a sigh
+of content.  The dreaded white god was not there.  For days his
+manifestations of desire to lay hands on him had been growing more
+insistent, and during that time White Fang had been compelled to
+avoid the camp.  He did not know what evil was threatened by those
+insistent hands.  He knew only that they did threaten evil of some
+sort, and that it was best for him to keep out of their reach.
+
+But scarcely had he lain down when Grey Beaver staggered over to
+him and tied a leather thong around his neck.  He sat down beside
+White Fang, holding the end of the thong in his hand.  In the other
+hand he held a bottle, which, from time to time, was inverted above
+his head to the accompaniment of gurgling noises.
+
+An hour of this passed, when the vibrations of feet in contact with
+the ground foreran the one who approached.  White Fang heard it
+first, and he was bristling with recognition while Grey Beaver
+still nodded stupidly.  White Fang tried to draw the thong softly
+out of his master's hand; but the relaxed fingers closed tightly
+and Grey Beaver roused himself.
+
+Beauty Smith strode into camp and stood over White Fang.  He
+snarled softly up at the thing of fear, watching keenly the
+deportment of the hands.  One hand extended outward and began to
+descend upon his head.  His soft snarl grew tense and harsh.  The
+hand continued slowly to descend, while he crouched beneath it,
+eyeing it malignantly, his snarl growing shorter and shorter as,
+with quickening breath, it approached its culmination.  Suddenly he
+snapped, striking with his fangs like a snake.  The hand was jerked
+back, and the teeth came together emptily with a sharp click.
+Beauty Smith was frightened and angry.  Grey Beaver clouted White
+Fang alongside the head, so that he cowered down close to the earth
+in respectful obedience.
+
+White Fang's suspicious eyes followed every movement.  He saw
+Beauty Smith go away and return with a stout club.  Then the end of
+the thong was given over to him by Grey Beaver.  Beauty Smith
+started to walk away.  The thong grew taut.  White Fang resisted
+it.  Grey Beaver clouted him right and left to make him get up and
+follow.  He obeyed, but with a rush, hurling himself upon the
+stranger who was dragging him away.  Beauty Smith did not jump
+away.  He had been waiting for this.  He swung the club smartly,
+stopping the rush midway and smashing White Fang down upon the
+ground.  Grey Beaver laughed and nodded approval.  Beauty Smith
+tightened the thong again, and White Fang crawled limply and
+dizzily to his feet.
+
+He did not rush a second time.  One smash from the club was
+sufficient to convince him that the white god knew how to handle
+it, and he was too wise to fight the inevitable.  So he followed
+morosely at Beauty Smith's heels, his tail between his legs, yet
+snarling softly under his breath.  But Beauty Smith kept a wary eye
+on him, and the club was held always ready to strike.
+
+At the fort Beauty Smith left him securely tied and went in to bed.
+White Fang waited an hour.  Then he applied his teeth to the thong,
+and in the space of ten seconds was free.  He had wasted no time
+with his teeth.  There had been no useless gnawing.  The thong was
+cut across, diagonally, almost as clean as though done by a knife.
+White Fang looked up at the fort, at the same time bristling and
+growling.  Then he turned and trotted back to Grey Beaver's camp.
+He owed no allegiance to this strange and terrible god.  He had
+given himself to Grey Beaver, and to Grey Beaver he considered he
+still belonged.
+
+But what had occurred before was repeated--with a difference.  Grey
+Beaver again made him fast with a thong, and in the morning turned
+him over to Beauty Smith.  And here was where the difference came
+in.  Beauty Smith gave him a beating.  Tied securely, White Fang
+could only rage futilely and endure the punishment.  Club and whip
+were both used upon him, and he experienced the worst beating he
+had ever received in his life.  Even the big beating given him in
+his puppyhood by Grey Beaver was mild compared with this.
+
+Beauty Smith enjoyed the task.  He delighted in it.  He gloated
+over his victim, and his eyes flamed dully, as he swung the whip or
+club and listened to White Fang's cries of pain and to his helpless
+bellows and snarls.  For Beauty Smith was cruel in the way that
+cowards are cruel.  Cringing and snivelling himself before the
+blows or angry speech of a man, he revenged himself, in turn, upon
+creatures weaker than he.  All life likes power, and Beauty Smith
+was no exception.  Denied the expression of power amongst his own
+kind, he fell back upon the lesser creatures and there vindicated
+the life that was in him.  But Beauty Smith had not created
+himself, and no blame was to be attached to him.  He had come into
+the world with a twisted body and a brute intelligence.  This had
+constituted the clay of him, and it had not been kindly moulded by
+the world.
+
+White Fang knew why he was being beaten.  When Grey Beaver tied the
+thong around his neck, and passed the end of the thong into Beauty
+Smith's keeping, White Fang knew that it was his god's will for him
+to go with Beauty Smith.  And when Beauty Smith left him tied
+outside the fort, he knew that it was Beauty Smith's will that he
+should remain there.  Therefore, he had disobeyed the will of both
+the gods, and earned the consequent punishment.  He had seen dogs
+change owners in the past, and he had seen the runaways beaten as
+he was being beaten.  He was wise, and yet in the nature of him
+there were forces greater than wisdom.  One of these was fidelity.
+He did not love Grey Beaver, yet, even in the face of his will and
+his anger, he was faithful to him.  He could not help it.  This
+faithfulness was a quality of the clay that composed him.  It was
+the quality that was peculiarly the possession of his kind; the
+quality that set apart his species from all other species; the
+quality that has enabled the wolf and the wild dog to come in from
+the open and be the companions of man.
+
+After the beating, White Fang was dragged back to the fort.  But
+this time Beauty Smith left him tied with a stick.  One does not
+give up a god easily, and so with White Fang.  Grey Beaver was his
+own particular god, and, in spite of Grey Beaver's will, White Fang
+still clung to him and would not give him up.  Grey Beaver had
+betrayed and forsaken him, but that had no effect upon him.  Not
+for nothing had he surrendered himself body and soul to Grey
+Beaver.  There had been no reservation on White Fang's part, and
+the bond was not to be broken easily.
+
+So, in the night, when the men in the fort were asleep, White Fang
+applied his teeth to the stick that held him.  The wood was
+seasoned and dry, and it was tied so closely to his neck that he
+could scarcely get his teeth to it.  It was only by the severest
+muscular exertion and neck-arching that he succeeded in getting the
+wood between his teeth, and barely between his teeth at that; and
+it was only by the exercise of an immense patience, extending
+through many hours, that he succeeded in gnawing through the stick.
+This was something that dogs were not supposed to do.  It was
+unprecedented.  But White Fang did it, trotting away from the fort
+in the early morning, with the end of the stick hanging to his
+neck.
+
+He was wise.  But had he been merely wise he would not have gone
+back to Grey Beaver who had already twice betrayed him.  But there
+was his faithfulness, and he went back to be betrayed yet a third
+time.  Again he yielded to the tying of a thong around his neck by
+Grey Beaver, and again Beauty Smith came to claim him.  And this
+time he was beaten even more severely than before.
+
+Grey Beaver looked on stolidly while the white man wielded the
+whip.  He gave no protection.  It was no longer his dog.  When the
+beating was over White Fang was sick.  A soft southland dog would
+have died under it, but not he.  His school of life had been
+sterner, and he was himself of sterner stuff.  He had too great
+vitality.  His clutch on life was too strong.  But he was very
+sick.  At first he was unable to drag himself along, and Beauty
+Smith had to wait half-an-hour for him.  And then, blind and
+reeling, he followed at Beauty Smith's heels back to the fort.
+
+But now he was tied with a chain that defied his teeth, and he
+strove in vain, by lunging, to draw the staple from the timber into
+which it was driven.  After a few days, sober and bankrupt, Grey
+Beaver departed up the Porcupine on his long journey to the
+Mackenzie.  White Fang remained on the Yukon, the property of a man
+more than half mad and all brute.  But what is a dog to know in its
+consciousness of madness?  To White Fang, Beauty Smith was a
+veritable, if terrible, god.  He was a mad god at best, but White
+Fang knew nothing of madness; he knew only that he must submit to
+the will of this new master, obey his every whim and fancy.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III--THE REIGN OF HATE
+
+
+
+Under the tutelage of the mad god, White Fang became a fiend.  He
+was kept chained in a pen at the rear of the fort, and here Beauty
+Smith teased and irritated and drove him wild with petty torments.
+The man early discovered White Fang's susceptibility to laughter,
+and made it a point after painfully tricking him, to laugh at him.
+This laughter was uproarious and scornful, and at the same time the
+god pointed his finger derisively at White Fang.  At such times
+reason fled from White Fang, and in his transports of rage he was
+even more mad than Beauty Smith.
+
+Formerly, White Fang had been merely the enemy of his kind, withal
+a ferocious enemy.  He now became the enemy of all things, and more
+ferocious than ever.  To such an extent was he tormented, that he
+hated blindly and without the faintest spark of reason.  He hated
+the chain that bound him, the men who peered in at him through the
+slats of the pen, the dogs that accompanied the men and that
+snarled malignantly at him in his helplessness.  He hated the very
+wood of the pen that confined him.  And, first, last, and most of
+all, he hated Beauty Smith.
+
+But Beauty Smith had a purpose in all that he did to White Fang.
+One day a number of men gathered about the pen.  Beauty Smith
+entered, club in hand, and took the chain off from White Fang's
+neck.  When his master had gone out, White Fang turned loose and
+tore around the pen, trying to get at the men outside.  He was
+magnificently terrible.  Fully five feet in length, and standing
+two and one-half feet at the shoulder, he far outweighed a wolf of
+corresponding size.  From his mother he had inherited the heavier
+proportions of the dog, so that he weighed, without any fat and
+without an ounce of superfluous flesh, over ninety pounds.  It was
+all muscle, bone, and sinew-fighting flesh in the finest condition.
+
+The door of the pen was being opened again.  White Fang paused.
+Something unusual was happening.  He waited.  The door was opened
+wider.  Then a huge dog was thrust inside, and the door was slammed
+shut behind him.  White Fang had never seen such a dog (it was a
+mastiff); but the size and fierce aspect of the intruder did not
+deter him.  Here was some thing, not wood nor iron, upon which to
+wreak his hate.  He leaped in with a flash of fangs that ripped
+down the side of the mastiff's neck.  The mastiff shook his head,
+growled hoarsely, and plunged at White Fang.  But White Fang was
+here, there, and everywhere, always evading and eluding, and always
+leaping in and slashing with his fangs and leaping out again in
+time to escape punishment.
+
+The men outside shouted and applauded, while Beauty Smith, in an
+ecstasy of delight, gloated over the rippling and manging performed
+by White Fang.  There was no hope for the mastiff from the first.
+He was too ponderous and slow.  In the end, while Beauty Smith beat
+White Fang back with a club, the mastiff was dragged out by its
+owner.  Then there was a payment of bets, and money clinked in
+Beauty Smith's hand.
+
+White Fang came to look forward eagerly to the gathering of the men
+around his pen.  It meant a fight; and this was the only way that
+was now vouchsafed him of expressing the life that was in him.
+Tormented, incited to hate, he was kept a prisoner so that there
+was no way of satisfying that hate except at the times his master
+saw fit to put another dog against him.  Beauty Smith had estimated
+his powers well, for he was invariably the victor.  One day, three
+dogs were turned in upon him in succession.  Another day a full-
+grown wolf, fresh-caught from the Wild, was shoved in through the
+door of the pen.  And on still another day two dogs were set
+against him at the same time.  This was his severest fight, and
+though in the end he killed them both he was himself half killed in
+doing it.
+
+In the fall of the year, when the first snows were falling and
+mush-ice was running in the river, Beauty Smith took passage for
+himself and White Fang on a steamboat bound up the Yukon to Dawson.
+White Fang had now achieved a reputation in the land.  As "the
+Fighting Wolf" he was known far and wide, and the cage in which he
+was kept on the steam-boat's deck was usually surrounded by curious
+men.  He raged and snarled at them, or lay quietly and studied them
+with cold hatred.  Why should he not hate them?  He never asked
+himself the question.  He knew only hate and lost himself in the
+passion of it.  Life had become a hell to him.  He had not been
+made for the close confinement wild beasts endure at the hands of
+men.  And yet it was in precisely this way that he was treated.
+Men stared at him, poked sticks between the bars to make him snarl,
+and then laughed at him.
+
+They were his environment, these men, and they were moulding the
+clay of him into a more ferocious thing than had been intended by
+Nature.  Nevertheless, Nature had given him plasticity.  Where many
+another animal would have died or had its spirit broken, he
+adjusted himself and lived, and at no expense of the spirit.
+Possibly Beauty Smith, arch-fiend and tormentor, was capable of
+breaking White Fang's spirit, but as yet there were no signs of his
+succeeding.
+
+If Beauty Smith had in him a devil, White Fang had another; and the
+two of them raged against each other unceasingly.  In the days
+before, White Fang had had the wisdom to cower down and submit to a
+man with a club in his hand; but this wisdom now left him.  The
+mere sight of Beauty Smith was sufficient to send him into
+transports of fury.  And when they came to close quarters, and he
+had been beaten back by the club, he went on growling and snarling,
+and showing his fangs.  The last growl could never be extracted
+from him.  No matter how terribly he was beaten, he had always
+another growl; and when Beauty Smith gave up and withdrew, the
+defiant growl followed after him, or White Fang sprang at the bars
+of the cage bellowing his hatred.
+
+When the steamboat arrived at Dawson, White Fang went ashore.  But
+he still lived a public life, in a cage, surrounded by curious men.
+He was exhibited as "the Fighting Wolf," and men paid fifty cents
+in gold dust to see him.  He was given no rest.  Did he lie down to
+sleep, he was stirred up by a sharp stick--so that the audience
+might get its money's worth.  In order to make the exhibition
+interesting, he was kept in a rage most of the time.  But worse
+than all this, was the atmosphere in which he lived.  He was
+regarded as the most fearful of wild beasts, and this was borne in
+to him through the bars of the cage.  Every word, every cautious
+action, on the part of the men, impressed upon him his own terrible
+ferocity.  It was so much added fuel to the flame of his
+fierceness.  There could be but one result, and that was that his
+ferocity fed upon itself and increased.  It was another instance of
+the plasticity of his clay, of his capacity for being moulded by
+the pressure of environment.
+
+In addition to being exhibited he was a professional fighting
+animal.  At irregular intervals, whenever a fight could be
+arranged, he was taken out of his cage and led off into the woods a
+few miles from town.  Usually this occurred at night, so as to
+avoid interference from the mounted police of the Territory.  After
+a few hours of waiting, when daylight had come, the audience and
+the dog with which he was to fight arrived.  In this manner it came
+about that he fought all sizes and breeds of dogs.  It was a savage
+land, the men were savage, and the fights were usually to the
+death.
+
+Since White Fang continued to fight, it is obvious that it was the
+other dogs that died.  He never knew defeat.  His early training,
+when he fought with Lip-lip and the whole puppy-pack, stood him in
+good stead.  There was the tenacity with which he clung to the
+earth.  No dog could make him lose his footing.  This was the
+favourite trick of the wolf breeds--to rush in upon him, either
+directly or with an unexpected swerve, in the hope of striking his
+shoulder and overthrowing him.  Mackenzie hounds, Eskimo and
+Labrador dogs, huskies and Malemutes--all tried it on him, and all
+failed.  He was never known to lose his footing.  Men told this to
+one another, and looked each time to see it happen; but White Fang
+always disappointed them.
+
+Then there was his lightning quickness.  It gave him a tremendous
+advantage over his antagonists.  No matter what their fighting
+experience, they had never encountered a dog that moved so swiftly
+as he.  Also to be reckoned with, was the immediateness of his
+attack.  The average dog was accustomed to the preliminaries of
+snarling and bristling and growling, and the average dog was
+knocked off his feet and finished before he had begun to fight or
+recovered from his surprise.  So often did this happen, that it
+became the custom to hold White Fang until the other dog went
+through its preliminaries, was good and ready, and even made the
+first attack.
+
+But greatest of all the advantages in White Fang's favour, was his
+experience.  He knew more about fighting than did any of the dogs
+that faced him.  He had fought more fights, knew how to meet more
+tricks and methods, and had more tricks himself, while his own
+method was scarcely to be improved upon.
+
+As the time went by, he had fewer and fewer fights.  Men despaired
+of matching him with an equal, and Beauty Smith was compelled to
+pit wolves against him.  These were trapped by the Indians for the
+purpose, and a fight between White Fang and a wolf was always sure
+to draw a crowd.  Once, a full-grown female lynx was secured, and
+this time White Fang fought for his life.  Her quickness matched
+his; her ferocity equalled his; while he fought with his fangs
+alone, and she fought with her sharp-clawed feet as well.
+
+But after the lynx, all fighting ceased for White Fang.  There were
+no more animals with which to fight--at least, there was none
+considered worthy of fighting with him.  So he remained on
+exhibition until spring, when one Tim Keenan, a faro-dealer,
+arrived in the land.  With him came the first bull-dog that had
+ever entered the Klondike.  That this dog and White Fang should
+come together was inevitable, and for a week the anticipated fight
+was the mainspring of conversation in certain quarters of the town.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV--THE CLINGING DEATH
+
+
+
+Beauty Smith slipped the chain from his neck and stepped back.
+
+For once White Fang did not make an immediate attack.  He stood
+still, ears pricked forward, alert and curious, surveying the
+strange animal that faced him.  He had never seen such a dog
+before.  Tim Keenan shoved the bull-dog forward with a muttered "Go
+to it."  The animal waddled toward the centre of the circle, short
+and squat and ungainly.  He came to a stop and blinked across at
+White Fang.
+
+There were cries from the crowd of, "Go to him, Cherokee!  Sick 'm,
+Cherokee!  Eat 'm up!"
+
+But Cherokee did not seem anxious to fight.  He turned his head and
+blinked at the men who shouted, at the same time wagging his stump
+of a tail good-naturedly.  He was not afraid, but merely lazy.
+Besides, it did not seem to him that it was intended he should
+fight with the dog he saw before him.  He was not used to fighting
+with that kind of dog, and he was waiting for them to bring on the
+real dog.
+
+Tim Keenan stepped in and bent over Cherokee, fondling him on both
+sides of the shoulders with hands that rubbed against the grain of
+the hair and that made slight, pushing-forward movements.  These
+were so many suggestions.  Also, their effect was irritating, for
+Cherokee began to growl, very softly, deep down in his throat.
+There was a correspondence in rhythm between the growls and the
+movements of the man's hands.  The growl rose in the throat with
+the culmination of each forward-pushing movement, and ebbed down to
+start up afresh with the beginning of the next movement.  The end
+of each movement was the accent of the rhythm, the movement ending
+abruptly and the growling rising with a jerk.
+
+This was not without its effect on White Fang.  The hair began to
+rise on his neck and across the shoulders.  Tim Keenan gave a final
+shove forward and stepped back again.  As the impetus that carried
+Cherokee forward died down, he continued to go forward of his own
+volition, in a swift, bow-legged run.  Then White Fang struck.  A
+cry of startled admiration went up.  He had covered the distance
+and gone in more like a cat than a dog; and with the same cat-like
+swiftness he had slashed with his fangs and leaped clear.
+
+The bull-dog was bleeding back of one ear from a rip in his thick
+neck.  He gave no sign, did not even snarl, but turned and followed
+after White Fang.  The display on both sides, the quickness of the
+one and the steadiness of the other, had excited the partisan
+spirit of the crowd, and the men were making new bets and
+increasing original bets.  Again, and yet again, White Fang sprang
+in, slashed, and got away untouched, and still his strange foe
+followed after him, without too great haste, not slowly, but
+deliberately and determinedly, in a businesslike sort of way.
+There was purpose in his method--something for him to do that he
+was intent upon doing and from which nothing could distract him.
+
+His whole demeanour, every action, was stamped with this purpose.
+It puzzled White Fang.  Never had he seen such a dog.  It had no
+hair protection.  It was soft, and bled easily.  There was no thick
+mat of fur to baffle White Fang's teeth as they were often baffled
+by dogs of his own breed.  Each time that his teeth struck they
+sank easily into the yielding flesh, while the animal did not seem
+able to defend itself.  Another disconcerting thing was that it
+made no outcry, such as he had been accustomed to with the other
+dogs he had fought.  Beyond a growl or a grunt, the dog took its
+punishment silently.  And never did it flag in its pursuit of him.
+
+Not that Cherokee was slow.  He could turn and whirl swiftly
+enough, but White Fang was never there.  Cherokee was puzzled, too.
+He had never fought before with a dog with which he could not
+close.  The desire to close had always been mutual.  But here was a
+dog that kept at a distance, dancing and dodging here and there and
+all about.  And when it did get its teeth into him, it did not hold
+on but let go instantly and darted away again.
+
+But White Fang could not get at the soft underside of the throat.
+The bull-dog stood too short, while its massive jaws were an added
+protection.  White Fang darted in and out unscathed, while
+Cherokee's wounds increased.  Both sides of his neck and head were
+ripped and slashed.  He bled freely, but showed no signs of being
+disconcerted.  He continued his plodding pursuit, though once, for
+the moment baffled, he came to a full stop and blinked at the men
+who looked on, at the same time wagging his stump of a tail as an
+expression of his willingness to fight.
+
+In that moment White Fang was in upon him and out, in passing
+ripping his trimmed remnant of an ear.  With a slight manifestation
+of anger, Cherokee took up the pursuit again, running on the inside
+of the circle White Fang was making, and striving to fasten his
+deadly grip on White Fang's throat.  The bull-dog missed by a
+hair's-breadth, and cries of praise went up as White Fang doubled
+suddenly out of danger in the opposite direction.
+
+The time went by.  White Fang still danced on, dodging and
+doubling, leaping in and out, and ever inflicting damage.  And
+still the bull-dog, with grim certitude, toiled after him.  Sooner
+or later he would accomplish his purpose, get the grip that would
+win the battle.  In the meantime, he accepted all the punishment
+the other could deal him.  His tufts of ears had become tassels,
+his neck and shoulders were slashed in a score of places, and his
+very lips were cut and bleeding--all from these lightning snaps
+that were beyond his foreseeing and guarding.
+
+Time and again White Fang had attempted to knock Cherokee off his
+feet; but the difference in their height was too great.  Cherokee
+was too squat, too close to the ground.  White Fang tried the trick
+once too often.  The chance came in one of his quick doublings and
+counter-circlings.  He caught Cherokee with head turned away as he
+whirled more slowly.  His shoulder was exposed.  White Fang drove
+in upon it:  but his own shoulder was high above, while he struck
+with such force that his momentum carried him on across over the
+other's body.  For the first time in his fighting history, men saw
+White Fang lose his footing.  His body turned a half-somersault in
+the air, and he would have landed on his back had he not twisted,
+catlike, still in the air, in the effort to bring his feet to the
+earth.  As it was, he struck heavily on his side.  The next instant
+he was on his feet, but in that instant Cherokee's teeth closed on
+his throat.
+
+It was not a good grip, being too low down toward the chest; but
+Cherokee held on.  White Fang sprang to his feet and tore wildly
+around, trying to shake off the bull-dog's body.  It made him
+frantic, this clinging, dragging weight.  It bound his movements,
+restricted his freedom.  It was like the trap, and all his instinct
+resented it and revolted against it.  It was a mad revolt.  For
+several minutes he was to all intents insane.  The basic life that
+was in him took charge of him.  The will to exist of his body
+surged over him.  He was dominated by this mere flesh-love of life.
+All intelligence was gone.  It was as though he had no brain.  His
+reason was unseated by the blind yearning of the flesh to exist and
+move, at all hazards to move, to continue to move, for movement was
+the expression of its existence.
+
+Round and round he went, whirling and turning and reversing, trying
+to shake off the fifty-pound weight that dragged at his throat.
+The bull-dog did little but keep his grip.  Sometimes, and rarely,
+he managed to get his feet to the earth and for a moment to brace
+himself against White Fang.  But the next moment his footing would
+be lost and he would be dragging around in the whirl of one of
+White Fang's mad gyrations.  Cherokee identified himself with his
+instinct.  He knew that he was doing the right thing by holding on,
+and there came to him certain blissful thrills of satisfaction.  At
+such moments he even closed his eyes and allowed his body to be
+hurled hither and thither, willy-nilly, careless of any hurt that
+might thereby come to it.  That did not count.  The grip was the
+thing, and the grip he kept.
+
+White Fang ceased only when he had tired himself out.  He could do
+nothing, and he could not understand.  Never, in all his fighting,
+had this thing happened.  The dogs he had fought with did not fight
+that way.  With them it was snap and slash and get away, snap and
+slash and get away.  He lay partly on his side, panting for breath.
+Cherokee still holding his grip, urged against him, trying to get
+him over entirely on his side.  White Fang resisted, and he could
+feel the jaws shifting their grip, slightly relaxing and coming
+together again in a chewing movement.  Each shift brought the grip
+closer to his throat.  The bull-dog's method was to hold what he
+had, and when opportunity favoured to work in for more.
+Opportunity favoured when White Fang remained quiet.  When White
+Fang struggled, Cherokee was content merely to hold on.
+
+The bulging back of Cherokee's neck was the only portion of his
+body that White Fang's teeth could reach.  He got hold toward the
+base where the neck comes out from the shoulders; but he did not
+know the chewing method of fighting, nor were his jaws adapted to
+it.  He spasmodically ripped and tore with his fangs for a space.
+Then a change in their position diverted him.  The bull-dog had
+managed to roll him over on his back, and still hanging on to his
+throat, was on top of him.  Like a cat, White Fang bowed his hind-
+quarters in, and, with the feet digging into his enemy's abdomen
+above him, he began to claw with long tearing-strokes.  Cherokee
+might well have been disembowelled had he not quickly pivoted on
+his grip and got his body off of White Fang's and at right angles
+to it.
+
+There was no escaping that grip.  It was like Fate itself, and as
+inexorable.  Slowly it shifted up along the jugular.  All that
+saved White Fang from death was the loose skin of his neck and the
+thick fur that covered it.  This served to form a large roll in
+Cherokee's mouth, the fur of which well-nigh defied his teeth.  But
+bit by bit, whenever the chance offered, he was getting more of the
+loose skin and fur in his mouth.  The result was that he was slowly
+throttling White Fang.  The latter's breath was drawn with greater
+and greater difficulty as the moments went by.
+
+It began to look as though the battle were over.  The backers of
+Cherokee waxed jubilant and offered ridiculous odds.  White Fang's
+backers were correspondingly depressed, and refused bets of ten to
+one and twenty to one, though one man was rash enough to close a
+wager of fifty to one.  This man was Beauty Smith.  He took a step
+into the ring and pointed his finger at White Fang.  Then he began
+to laugh derisively and scornfully.  This produced the desired
+effect.  White Fang went wild with rage.  He called up his reserves
+of strength, and gained his feet.  As he struggled around the ring,
+the fifty pounds of his foe ever dragging on his throat, his anger
+passed on into panic.  The basic life of him dominated him again,
+and his intelligence fled before the will of his flesh to live.
+Round and round and back again, stumbling and falling and rising,
+even uprearing at times on his hind-legs and lifting his foe clear
+of the earth, he struggled vainly to shake off the clinging death.
+
+At last he fell, toppling backward, exhausted; and the bull-dog
+promptly shifted his grip, getting in closer, mangling more and
+more of the fur-folded flesh, throttling White Fang more severely
+than ever.  Shouts of applause went up for the victor, and there
+were many cries of "Cherokee!" "Cherokee!"  To this Cherokee
+responded by vigorous wagging of the stump of his tail.  But the
+clamour of approval did not distract him.  There was no sympathetic
+relation between his tail and his massive jaws.  The one might wag,
+but the others held their terrible grip on White Fang's throat.
+
+It was at this time that a diversion came to the spectators.  There
+was a jingle of bells.  Dog-mushers' cries were heard.  Everybody,
+save Beauty Smith, looked apprehensively, the fear of the police
+strong upon them.  But they saw, up the trail, and not down, two
+men running with sled and dogs.  They were evidently coming down
+the creek from some prospecting trip.  At sight of the crowd they
+stopped their dogs and came over and joined it, curious to see the
+cause of the excitement.  The dog-musher wore a moustache, but the
+other, a taller and younger man, was smooth-shaven, his skin rosy
+from the pounding of his blood and the running in the frosty air.
+
+White Fang had practically ceased struggling.  Now and again he
+resisted spasmodically and to no purpose.  He could get little air,
+and that little grew less and less under the merciless grip that
+ever tightened.  In spite of his armour of fur, the great vein of
+his throat would have long since been torn open, had not the first
+grip of the bull-dog been so low down as to be practically on the
+chest.  It had taken Cherokee a long time to shift that grip
+upward, and this had also tended further to clog his jaws with fur
+and skin-fold.
+
+In the meantime, the abysmal brute in Beauty Smith had been rising
+into his brain and mastering the small bit of sanity that he
+possessed at best.  When he saw White Fang's eyes beginning to
+glaze, he knew beyond doubt that the fight was lost.  Then he broke
+loose.  He sprang upon White Fang and began savagely to kick him.
+There were hisses from the crowd and cries of protest, but that was
+all.  While this went on, and Beauty Smith continued to kick White
+Fang, there was a commotion in the crowd.  The tall young newcomer
+was forcing his way through, shouldering men right and left without
+ceremony or gentleness.  When he broke through into the ring,
+Beauty Smith was just in the act of delivering another kick.  All
+his weight was on one loot, and he was in a state of unstable
+equilibrium.  At that moment the newcomer's fist landed a smashing
+blow full in his face.  Beauty Smith's remaining leg left the
+ground, and his whole body seemed to lift into the air as he turned
+over backward and struck the snow.  The newcomer turned upon the
+crowd.
+
+"You cowards!" he cried.  "You beasts!"
+
+He was in a rage himself--a sane rage.  His grey eyes seemed
+metallic and steel-like as they flashed upon the crowd.  Beauty
+Smith regained his feet and came toward him, sniffling and
+cowardly.  The new-comer did not understand.  He did not know how
+abject a coward the other was, and thought he was coming back
+intent on fighting.  So, with a "You beast!" he smashed Beauty
+Smith over backward with a second blow in the face.  Beauty Smith
+decided that the snow was the safest place for him, and lay where
+he had fallen, making no effort to get up.
+
+"Come on, Matt, lend a hand," the newcomer called the dog-musher,
+who had followed him into the ring.
+
+Both men bent over the dogs.  Matt took hold of White Fang, ready
+to pull when Cherokee's jaws should be loosened.  This the younger
+man endeavoured to accomplish by clutching the bulldog's jaws in
+his hands and trying to spread them.  It was a vain undertaking.
+As he pulled and tugged and wrenched, he kept exclaiming with every
+expulsion of breath, "Beasts!"
+
+The crowd began to grow unruly, and some of the men were protesting
+against the spoiling of the sport; but they were silenced when the
+newcomer lifted his head from his work for a moment and glared at
+them.
+
+"You damn beasts!" he finally exploded, and went back to his task.
+
+"It's no use, Mr. Scott, you can't break 'm apart that way," Matt
+said at last.
+
+The pair paused and surveyed the locked dogs.
+
+"Ain't bleedin' much," Matt announced.  "Ain't got all the way in
+yet."
+
+"But he's liable to any moment," Scott answered.  "There, did you
+see that!  He shifted his grip in a bit."
+
+The younger man's excitement and apprehension for White Fang was
+growing.  He struck Cherokee about the head savagely again and
+again.  But that did not loosen the jaws.  Cherokee wagged the
+stump of his tail in advertisement that he understood the meaning
+of the blows, but that he knew he was himself in the right and only
+doing his duty by keeping his grip.
+
+"Won't some of you help?" Scott cried desperately at the crowd.
+
+But no help was offered.  Instead, the crowd began sarcastically to
+cheer him on and showered him with facetious advice.
+
+"You'll have to get a pry," Matt counselled.
+
+The other reached into the holster at his hip, drew his revolver,
+and tried to thrust its muzzle between the bull-dog's jaws.  He
+shoved, and shoved hard, till the grating of the steel against the
+locked teeth could be distinctly heard.  Both men were on their
+knees, bending over the dogs.  Tim Keenan strode into the ring.  He
+paused beside Scott and touched him on the shoulder, saying
+ominously:
+
+"Don't break them teeth, stranger."
+
+"Then I'll break his neck," Scott retorted, continuing his shoving
+and wedging with the revolver muzzle.
+
+"I said don't break them teeth," the faro-dealer repeated more
+ominously than before.
+
+But if it was a bluff he intended, it did not work.  Scott never
+desisted from his efforts, though he looked up coolly and asked:
+
+"Your dog?"
+
+The faro-dealer grunted.
+
+"Then get in here and break this grip."
+
+"Well, stranger," the other drawled irritatingly, "I don't mind
+telling you that's something I ain't worked out for myself.  I
+don't know how to turn the trick."
+
+"Then get out of the way," was the reply, "and don't bother me.
+I'm busy."
+
+Tim Keenan continued standing over him, but Scott took no further
+notice of his presence.  He had managed to get the muzzle in
+between the jaws on one side, and was trying to get it out between
+the jaws on the other side.  This accomplished, he pried gently and
+carefully, loosening the jaws a bit at a time, while Matt, a bit at
+a time, extricated White Fang's mangled neck.
+
+"Stand by to receive your dog," was Scott's peremptory order to
+Cherokee's owner.
+
+The faro-dealer stooped down obediently and got a firm hold on
+Cherokee.
+
+"Now!" Scott warned, giving the final pry.
+
+The dogs were drawn apart, the bull-dog struggling vigorously.
+
+"Take him away," Scott commanded, and Tim Keenan dragged Cherokee
+back into the crowd.
+
+White Fang made several ineffectual efforts to get up.  Once he
+gained his feet, but his legs were too weak to sustain him, and he
+slowly wilted and sank back into the snow.  His eyes were half
+closed, and the surface of them was glassy.  His jaws were apart,
+and through them the tongue protruded, draggled and limp.  To all
+appearances he looked like a dog that had been strangled to death.
+Matt examined him.
+
+"Just about all in," he announced; "but he's breathin' all right."
+
+Beauty Smith had regained his feet and come over to look at White
+Fang.
+
+"Matt, how much is a good sled-dog worth?" Scott asked.
+
+The dog-musher, still on his knees and stooped over White Fang,
+calculated for a moment.
+
+"Three hundred dollars," he answered.
+
+"And how much for one that's all chewed up like this one?" Scott
+asked, nudging White Fang with his foot.
+
+"Half of that," was the dog-musher's judgment.  Scott turned upon
+Beauty Smith.
+
+"Did you hear, Mr. Beast?  I'm going to take your dog from you, and
+I'm going to give you a hundred and fifty for him."
+
+He opened his pocket-book and counted out the bills.
+
+Beauty Smith put his hands behind his back, refusing to touch the
+proffered money.
+
+"I ain't a-sellin'," he said.
+
+"Oh, yes you are," the other assured him.  "Because I'm buying.
+Here's your money.  The dog's mine."
+
+Beauty Smith, his hands still behind him, began to back away.
+
+Scott sprang toward him, drawing his fist back to strike.  Beauty
+Smith cowered down in anticipation of the blow.
+
+"I've got my rights," he whimpered.
+
+"You've forfeited your rights to own that dog," was the rejoinder.
+"Are you going to take the money? or do I have to hit you again?"
+
+"All right," Beauty Smith spoke up with the alacrity of fear.  "But
+I take the money under protest," he added.  "The dog's a mint.  I
+ain't a-goin' to be robbed.  A man's got his rights."
+
+"Correct," Scott answered, passing the money over to him.  "A man's
+got his rights.  But you're not a man.  You're a beast."
+
+"Wait till I get back to Dawson," Beauty Smith threatened.  "I'll
+have the law on you."
+
+"If you open your mouth when you get back to Dawson, I'll have you
+run out of town.  Understand?"
+
+Beauty Smith replied with a grunt.
+
+"Understand?" the other thundered with abrupt fierceness.
+
+"Yes," Beauty Smith grunted, shrinking away.
+
+"Yes what?"
+
+"Yes, sir," Beauty Smith snarled.
+
+"Look out!  He'll bite!" some one shouted, and a guffaw of laughter
+went up.
+
+Scott turned his back on him, and returned to help the dog-musher,
+who was working over White Fang.
+
+Some of the men were already departing; others stood in groups,
+looking on and talking.  Tim Keenan joined one of the groups.
+
+"Who's that mug?" he asked.
+
+"Weedon Scott," some one answered.
+
+"And who in hell is Weedon Scott?" the faro-dealer demanded.
+
+"Oh, one of them crackerjack minin' experts.  He's in with all the
+big bugs.  If you want to keep out of trouble, you'll steer clear
+of him, that's my talk.  He's all hunky with the officials.  The
+Gold Commissioner's a special pal of his."
+
+"I thought he must be somebody," was the faro-dealer's comment.
+"That's why I kept my hands offen him at the start."
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V--THE INDOMITABLE
+
+
+
+"It's hopeless," Weedon Scott confessed.
+
+He sat on the step of his cabin and stared at the dog-musher, who
+responded with a shrug that was equally hopeless.
+
+Together they looked at White Fang at the end of his stretched
+chain, bristling, snarling, ferocious, straining to get at the
+sled-dogs.  Having received sundry lessons from Matt, said lessons
+being imparted by means of a club, the sled-dogs had learned to
+leave White Fang alone; and even then they were lying down at a
+distance, apparently oblivious of his existence.
+
+"It's a wolf and there's no taming it," Weedon Scott announced.
+
+"Oh, I don't know about that," Matt objected.  "Might be a lot of
+dog in 'm, for all you can tell.  But there's one thing I know
+sure, an' that there's no gettin' away from."
+
+The dog-musher paused and nodded his head confidentially at
+Moosehide Mountain.
+
+"Well, don't be a miser with what you know," Scott said sharply,
+after waiting a suitable length of time.  "Spit it out.  What is
+it?"
+
+The dog-musher indicated White Fang with a backward thrust of his
+thumb.
+
+"Wolf or dog, it's all the same--he's ben tamed 'ready."
+
+"No!"
+
+"I tell you yes, an' broke to harness.  Look close there.  D'ye see
+them marks across the chest?"
+
+"You're right, Matt.  He was a sled-dog before Beauty Smith got
+hold of him."
+
+"And there's not much reason against his bein' a sled-dog again."
+
+"What d'ye think?" Scott queried eagerly.  Then the hope died down
+as he added, shaking his head, "We've had him two weeks now, and if
+anything he's wilder than ever at the present moment."
+
+"Give 'm a chance," Matt counselled.  "Turn 'm loose for a spell."
+
+The other looked at him incredulously.
+
+"Yes," Matt went on, "I know you've tried to, but you didn't take a
+club."
+
+"You try it then."
+
+The dog-musher secured a club and went over to the chained animal.
+White Fang watched the club after the manner of a caged lion
+watching the whip of its trainer.
+
+"See 'm keep his eye on that club," Matt said.  "That's a good
+sign.  He's no fool.  Don't dast tackle me so long as I got that
+club handy.  He's not clean crazy, sure."
+
+As the man's hand approached his neck, White Fang bristled and
+snarled and crouched down.  But while he eyed the approaching hand,
+he at the same time contrived to keep track of the club in the
+other hand, suspended threateningly above him.  Matt unsnapped the
+chain from the collar and stepped back.
+
+White Fang could scarcely realise that he was free.  Many months
+had gone by since he passed into the possession of Beauty Smith,
+and in all that period he had never known a moment of freedom
+except at the times he had been loosed to fight with other dogs.
+Immediately after such fights he had always been imprisoned again.
+
+He did not know what to make of it.  Perhaps some new devilry of
+the gods was about to be perpetrated on him.  He walked slowly and
+cautiously, prepared to be assailed at any moment.  He did not know
+what to do, it was all so unprecedented.  He took the precaution to
+sheer off from the two watching gods, and walked carefully to the
+corner of the cabin.  Nothing happened.  He was plainly perplexed,
+and he came back again, pausing a dozen feet away and regarding the
+two men intently.
+
+"Won't he run away?" his new owner asked.
+
+Matt shrugged his shoulders.  "Got to take a gamble.  Only way to
+find out is to find out."
+
+"Poor devil," Scott murmured pityingly.  "What he needs is some
+show of human kindness," he added, turning and going into the
+cabin.
+
+He came out with a piece of meat, which he tossed to White Fang.
+He sprang away from it, and from a distance studied it
+suspiciously.
+
+"Hi-yu, Major!" Matt shouted warningly, but too late.
+
+Major had made a spring for the meat.  At the instant his jaws
+closed on it, White Fang struck him.  He was overthrown.  Matt
+rushed in, but quicker than he was White Fang.  Major staggered to
+his feet, but the blood spouting from his throat reddened the snow
+in a widening path.
+
+"It's too bad, but it served him right," Scott said hastily.
+
+But Matt's foot had already started on its way to kick White Fang.
+There was a leap, a flash of teeth, a sharp exclamation.  White
+Fang, snarling fiercely, scrambled backward for several yards,
+while Matt stooped and investigated his leg.
+
+"He got me all right," he announced, pointing to the torn trousers
+and undercloths, and the growing stain of red.
+
+"I told you it was hopeless, Matt," Scott said in a discouraged
+voice.  "I've thought about it off and on, while not wanting to
+think of it.  But we've come to it now.  It's the only thing to
+do."
+
+As he talked, with reluctant movements he drew his revolver, threw
+open the cylinder, and assured himself of its contents.
+
+"Look here, Mr. Scott," Matt objected; "that dog's ben through
+hell.  You can't expect 'm to come out a white an' shinin' angel.
+Give 'm time."
+
+"Look at Major," the other rejoined.
+
+The dog-musher surveyed the stricken dog.  He had sunk down on the
+snow in the circle of his blood and was plainly in the last gasp.
+
+"Served 'm right.  You said so yourself, Mr. Scott.  He tried to
+take White Fang's meat, an' he's dead-O.  That was to be expected.
+I wouldn't give two whoops in hell for a dog that wouldn't fight
+for his own meat."
+
+"But look at yourself, Matt.  It's all right about the dogs, but we
+must draw the line somewhere."
+
+"Served me right," Matt argued stubbornly.  "What'd I want to kick
+'m for?  You said yourself that he'd done right.  Then I had no
+right to kick 'm."
+
+"It would be a mercy to kill him," Scott insisted.  "He's
+untamable."
+
+"Now look here, Mr. Scott, give the poor devil a fightin' chance.
+He ain't had no chance yet.  He's just come through hell, an' this
+is the first time he's ben loose.  Give 'm a fair chance, an' if he
+don't deliver the goods, I'll kill 'm myself.  There!"
+
+"God knows I don't want to kill him or have him killed," Scott
+answered, putting away the revolver.  "We'll let him run loose and
+see what kindness can do for him.  And here's a try at it."
+
+He walked over to White Fang and began talking to him gently and
+soothingly.
+
+"Better have a club handy," Matt warned.
+
+Scott shook his head and went on trying to win White Fang's
+confidence.
+
+White Fang was suspicious.  Something was impending.  He had killed
+this god's dog, bitten his companion god, and what else was to be
+expected than some terrible punishment?  But in the face of it he
+was indomitable.  He bristled and showed his teeth, his eyes
+vigilant, his whole body wary and prepared for anything.  The god
+had no club, so he suffered him to approach quite near.  The god's
+hand had come out and was descending upon his head.  White Fang
+shrank together and grew tense as he crouched under it.  Here was
+danger, some treachery or something.  He knew the hands of the
+gods, their proved mastery, their cunning to hurt.  Besides, there
+was his old antipathy to being touched.  He snarled more
+menacingly, crouched still lower, and still the hand descended.  He
+did not want to bite the hand, and he endured the peril of it until
+his instinct surged up in him, mastering him with its insatiable
+yearning for life.
+
+Weedon Scott had believed that he was quick enough to avoid any
+snap or slash.  But he had yet to learn the remarkable quickness of
+White Fang, who struck with the certainty and swiftness of a coiled
+snake.
+
+Scott cried out sharply with surprise, catching his torn hand and
+holding it tightly in his other hand.  Matt uttered a great oath
+and sprang to his side.  White Fang crouched down, and backed away,
+bristling, showing his fangs, his eyes malignant with menace.  Now
+he could expect a beating as fearful as any he had received from
+Beauty Smith.
+
+"Here!  What are you doing?" Scott cried suddenly.
+
+Matt had dashed into the cabin and come out with a rifle.
+
+"Nothin'," he said slowly, with a careless calmness that was
+assumed, "only goin' to keep that promise I made.  I reckon it's up
+to me to kill 'm as I said I'd do."
+
+"No you don't!"
+
+"Yes I do.  Watch me."
+
+As Matt had pleaded for White Fang when he had been bitten, it was
+now Weedon Scott's turn to plead.
+
+"You said to give him a chance.  Well, give it to him.  We've only
+just started, and we can't quit at the beginning.  It served me
+right, this time.  And--look at him!"
+
+White Fang, near the corner of the cabin and forty feet away, was
+snarling with blood-curdling viciousness, not at Scott, but at the
+dog-musher.
+
+"Well, I'll be everlastingly gosh-swoggled!" was the dog-musher's
+expression of astonishment.
+
+"Look at the intelligence of him," Scott went on hastily.  "He
+knows the meaning of firearms as well as you do.  He's got
+intelligence and we've got to give that intelligence a chance.  Put
+up the gun."
+
+"All right, I'm willin'," Matt agreed, leaning the rifle against
+the woodpile
+
+"But will you look at that!" he exclaimed the next moment.
+
+White Fang had quieted down and ceased snarling.  "This is worth
+investigatin'.  Watch."
+
+Matt, reached for the rifle, and at the same moment White Fang
+snarled.  He stepped away from the rifle, and White Fang's lifted
+lips descended, covering his teeth.
+
+"Now, just for fun."
+
+Matt took the rifle and began slowly to raise it to his shoulder.
+White Fang's snarling began with the movement, and increased as the
+movement approached its culmination.  But the moment before the
+rifle came to a level on him, he leaped sidewise behind the corner
+of the cabin.  Matt stood staring along the sights at the empty
+space of snow which had been occupied by White Fang.
+
+The dog-musher put the rifle down solemnly, then turned and looked
+at his employer.
+
+"I agree with you, Mr. Scott.  That dog's too intelligent to kill."
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI--THE LOVE-MASTER
+
+
+
+As White Fang watched Weedon Scott approach, he bristled and
+snarled to advertise that he would not submit to punishment.
+Twenty-four hours had passed since he had slashed open the hand
+that was now bandaged and held up by a sling to keep the blood out
+of it.  In the past White Fang had experienced delayed punishments,
+and he apprehended that such a one was about to befall him.  How
+could it be otherwise?  He had committed what was to him sacrilege,
+sunk his fangs into the holy flesh of a god, and of a white-skinned
+superior god at that.  In the nature of things, and of intercourse
+with gods, something terrible awaited him.
+
+The god sat down several feet away.  White Fang could see nothing
+dangerous in that.  When the gods administered punishment they
+stood on their legs.  Besides, this god had no club, no whip, no
+firearm.  And furthermore, he himself was free.  No chain nor stick
+bound him.  He could escape into safety while the god was
+scrambling to his feet.  In the meantime he would wait and see.
+
+The god remained quiet, made no movement; and White Fang's snarl
+slowly dwindled to a growl that ebbed down in his throat and
+ceased.  Then the god spoke, and at the first sound of his voice,
+the hair rose on White Fang's neck and the growl rushed up in his
+throat.  But the god made no hostile movement, and went on calmly
+talking.  For a time White Fang growled in unison with him, a
+correspondence of rhythm being established between growl and voice.
+But the god talked on interminably.  He talked to White Fang as
+White Fang had never been talked to before.  He talked softly and
+soothingly, with a gentleness that somehow, somewhere, touched
+White Fang.  In spite of himself and all the pricking warnings of
+his instinct, White Fang began to have confidence in this god.  He
+had a feeling of security that was belied by all his experience
+with men.
+
+After a long time, the god got up and went into the cabin.  White
+Fang scanned him apprehensively when he came out.  He had neither
+whip nor club nor weapon.  Nor was his uninjured hand behind his
+back hiding something.  He sat down as before, in the same spot,
+several feet away.  He held out a small piece of meat.  White Fang
+pricked his ears and investigated it suspiciously, managing to look
+at the same time both at the meat and the god, alert for any overt
+act, his body tense and ready to spring away at the first sign of
+hostility.
+
+Still the punishment delayed.  The god merely held near to his nose
+a piece of meat.  And about the meat there seemed nothing wrong.
+Still White Fang suspected; and though the meat was proffered to
+him with short inviting thrusts of the hand, he refused to touch
+it.  The gods were all-wise, and there was no telling what
+masterful treachery lurked behind that apparently harmless piece of
+meat.  In past experience, especially in dealing with squaws, meat
+and punishment had often been disastrously related.
+
+In the end, the god tossed the meat on the snow at White Fang's
+feet.  He smelled the meat carefully; but he did not look at it.
+While he smelled it he kept his eyes on the god.  Nothing happened.
+He took the meat into his mouth and swallowed it.  Still nothing
+happened.  The god was actually offering him another piece of meat.
+Again he refused to take it from the hand, and again it was tossed
+to him.  This was repeated a number of times.  But there came a
+time when the god refused to toss it.  He kept it in his hand and
+steadfastly proffered it.
+
+The meat was good meat, and White Fang was hungry.  Bit by bit,
+infinitely cautious, he approached the hand.  At last the time came
+that he decided to eat the meat from the hand.  He never took his
+eyes from the god, thrusting his head forward with ears flattened
+back and hair involuntarily rising and cresting on his neck.  Also
+a low growl rumbled in his throat as warning that he was not to be
+trifled with.  He ate the meat, and nothing happened.  Piece by
+piece, he ate all the meat, and nothing happened.  Still the
+punishment delayed.
+
+He licked his chops and waited.  The god went on talking.  In his
+voice was kindness--something of which White Fang had no experience
+whatever.  And within him it aroused feelings which he had likewise
+never experienced before.  He was aware of a certain strange
+satisfaction, as though some need were being gratified, as though
+some void in his being were being filled.  Then again came the prod
+of his instinct and the warning of past experience.  The gods were
+ever crafty, and they had unguessed ways of attaining their ends.
+
+Ah, he had thought so!  There it came now, the god's hand, cunning
+to hurt, thrusting out at him, descending upon his head.  But the
+god went on talking.  His voice was soft and soothing.  In spite of
+the menacing hand, the voice inspired confidence.  And in spite of
+the assuring voice, the hand inspired distrust.  White Fang was
+torn by conflicting feelings, impulses.  It seemed he would fly to
+pieces, so terrible was the control he was exerting, holding
+together by an unwonted indecision the counter-forces that
+struggled within him for mastery.
+
+He compromised.  He snarled and bristled and flattened his ears.
+But he neither snapped nor sprang away.  The hand descended.
+Nearer and nearer it came.  It touched the ends of his upstanding
+hair.  He shrank down under it.  It followed down after him,
+pressing more closely against him.  Shrinking, almost shivering, he
+still managed to hold himself together.  It was a torment, this
+hand that touched him and violated his instinct.  He could not
+forget in a day all the evil that had been wrought him at the hands
+of men.  But it was the will of the god, and he strove to submit.
+
+The hand lifted and descended again in a patting, caressing
+movement.  This continued, but every time the hand lifted, the hair
+lifted under it.  And every time the hand descended, the ears
+flattened down and a cavernous growl surged in his throat.  White
+Fang growled and growled with insistent warning.  By this means he
+announced that he was prepared to retaliate for any hurt he might
+receive.  There was no telling when the god's ulterior motive might
+be disclosed.  At any moment that soft, confidence-inspiring voice
+might break forth in a roar of wrath, that gentle and caressing
+hand transform itself into a vice-like grip to hold him helpless
+and administer punishment.
+
+But the god talked on softly, and ever the hand rose and fell with
+non-hostile pats.  White Fang experienced dual feelings.  It was
+distasteful to his instinct.  It restrained him, opposed the will
+of him toward personal liberty.  And yet it was not physically
+painful.  On the contrary, it was even pleasant, in a physical way.
+The patting movement slowly and carefully changed to a rubbing of
+the ears about their bases, and the physical pleasure even
+increased a little.  Yet he continued to fear, and he stood on
+guard, expectant of unguessed evil, alternately suffering and
+enjoying as one feeling or the other came uppermost and swayed him.
+
+"Well, I'll be gosh-swoggled!"
+
+So spoke Matt, coming out of the cabin, his sleeves rolled up, a
+pan of dirty dish-water in his hands, arrested in the act of
+emptying the pan by the sight of Weedon Scott patting White Fang.
+
+At the instant his voice broke the silence, White Fang leaped back,
+snarling savagely at him.
+
+Matt regarded his employer with grieved disapproval.
+
+"If you don't mind my expressin' my feelin's, Mr. Scott, I'll make
+free to say you're seventeen kinds of a damn fool an' all of 'em
+different, an' then some."
+
+Weedon Scott smiled with a superior air, gained his feet, and
+walked over to White Fang.  He talked soothingly to him, but not
+for long, then slowly put out his hand, rested it on White Fang's
+head, and resumed the interrupted patting.  White Fang endured it,
+keeping his eyes fixed suspiciously, not upon the man that patted
+him, but upon the man that stood in the doorway.
+
+"You may be a number one, tip-top minin' expert, all right all
+right," the dog-musher delivered himself oracularly, "but you
+missed the chance of your life when you was a boy an' didn't run
+off an' join a circus."
+
+White Fang snarled at the sound of his voice, but this time did not
+leap away from under the hand that was caressing his head and the
+back of his neck with long, soothing strokes.
+
+It was the beginning of the end for White Fang--the ending of the
+old life and the reign of hate.  A new and incomprehensibly fairer
+life was dawning.  It required much thinking and endless patience
+on the part of Weedon Scott to accomplish this.  And on the part of
+White Fang it required nothing less than a revolution.  He had to
+ignore the urges and promptings of instinct and reason, defy
+experience, give the lie to life itself.
+
+Life, as he had known it, not only had had no place in it for much
+that he now did; but all the currents had gone counter to those to
+which he now abandoned himself.  In short, when all things were
+considered, he had to achieve an orientation far vaster than the
+one he had achieved at the time he came voluntarily in from the
+Wild and accepted Grey Beaver as his lord.  At that time he was a
+mere puppy, soft from the making, without form, ready for the thumb
+of circumstance to begin its work upon him.  But now it was
+different.  The thumb of circumstance had done its work only too
+well.  By it he had been formed and hardened into the Fighting
+Wolf, fierce and implacable, unloving and unlovable.  To accomplish
+the change was like a reflux of being, and this when the plasticity
+of youth was no longer his; when the fibre of him had become tough
+and knotty; when the warp and the woof of him had made of him an
+adamantine texture, harsh and unyielding; when the face of his
+spirit had become iron and all his instincts and axioms had
+crystallised into set rules, cautions, dislikes, and desires.
+
+Yet again, in this new orientation, it was the thumb of
+circumstance that pressed and prodded him, softening that which had
+become hard and remoulding it into fairer form.  Weedon Scott was
+in truth this thumb.  He had gone to the roots of White Fang's
+nature, and with kindness touched to life potencies that had
+languished and well-nigh perished.  One such potency was LOVE.  It
+took the place of LIKE, which latter had been the highest feeling
+that thrilled him in his intercourse with the gods.
+
+But this love did not come in a day.  It began with LIKE and out of
+it slowly developed.  White Fang did not run away, though he was
+allowed to remain loose, because he liked this new god.  This was
+certainly better than the life he had lived in the cage of Beauty
+Smith, and it was necessary that he should have some god.  The
+lordship of man was a need of his nature.  The seal of his
+dependence on man had been set upon him in that early day when he
+turned his back on the Wild and crawled to Grey Beaver's feet to
+receive the expected beating.  This seal had been stamped upon him
+again, and ineradicably, on his second return from the Wild, when
+the long famine was over and there was fish once more in the
+village of Grey Beaver.
+
+And so, because he needed a god and because he preferred Weedon
+Scott to Beauty Smith, White Fang remained.  In acknowledgment of
+fealty, he proceeded to take upon himself the guardianship of his
+master's property.  He prowled about the cabin while the sled-dogs
+slept, and the first night-visitor to the cabin fought him off with
+a club until Weedon Scott came to the rescue.  But White Fang soon
+learned to differentiate between thieves and honest men, to
+appraise the true value of step and carriage.  The man who
+travelled, loud-stepping, the direct line to the cabin door, he let
+alone--though he watched him vigilantly until the door opened and
+he received the endorsement of the master.  But the man who went
+softly, by circuitous ways, peering with caution, seeking after
+secrecy--that was the man who received no suspension of judgment
+from White Fang, and who went away abruptly, hurriedly, and without
+dignity.
+
+Weedon Scott had set himself the task of redeeming White Fang--or
+rather, of redeeming mankind from the wrong it had done White Fang.
+It was a matter of principle and conscience.  He felt that the ill
+done White Fang was a debt incurred by man and that it must be
+paid.  So he went out of his way to be especially kind to the
+Fighting Wolf.  Each day he made it a point to caress and pet White
+Fang, and to do it at length.
+
+At first suspicious and hostile, White Fang grew to like this
+petting.  But there was one thing that he never outgrew--his
+growling.  Growl he would, from the moment the petting began till
+it ended.  But it was a growl with a new note in it.  A stranger
+could not hear this note, and to such a stranger the growling of
+White Fang was an exhibition of primordial savagery, nerve-racking
+and blood-curdling.  But White Fang's throat had become harsh-
+fibred from the making of ferocious sounds through the many years
+since his first little rasp of anger in the lair of his cubhood,
+and he could not soften the sounds of that throat now to express
+the gentleness he felt.  Nevertheless, Weedon Scott's ear and
+sympathy were fine enough to catch the new note all but drowned in
+the fierceness--the note that was the faintest hint of a croon of
+content and that none but he could hear.
+
+As the days went by, the evolution of LIKE into LOVE was
+accelerated.  White Fang himself began to grow aware of it, though
+in his consciousness he knew not what love was.  It manifested
+itself to him as a void in his being--a hungry, aching, yearning
+void that clamoured to be filled.  It was a pain and an unrest; and
+it received easement only by the touch of the new god's presence.
+At such times love was joy to him, a wild, keen-thrilling
+satisfaction.  But when away from his god, the pain and the unrest
+returned; the void in him sprang up and pressed against him with
+its emptiness, and the hunger gnawed and gnawed unceasingly.
+
+White Fang was in the process of finding himself.  In spite of the
+maturity of his years and of the savage rigidity of the mould that
+had formed him, his nature was undergoing an expansion.  There was
+a burgeoning within him of strange feelings and unwonted impulses.
+His old code of conduct was changing.  In the past he had liked
+comfort and surcease from pain, disliked discomfort and pain, and
+he had adjusted his actions accordingly.  But now it was different.
+Because of this new feeling within him, he ofttimes elected
+discomfort and pain for the sake of his god.  Thus, in the early
+morning, instead of roaming and foraging, or lying in a sheltered
+nook, he would wait for hours on the cheerless cabin-stoop for a
+sight of the god's face.  At night, when the god returned home,
+White Fang would leave the warm sleeping-place he had burrowed in
+the snow in order to receive the friendly snap of fingers and the
+word of greeting.  Meat, even meat itself, he would forego to be
+with his god, to receive a caress from him or to accompany him down
+into the town.
+
+LIKE had been replaced by LOVE.  And love was the plummet dropped
+down into the deeps of him where like had never gone.  And
+responsive out of his deeps had come the new thing--love.  That
+which was given unto him did he return.  This was a god indeed, a
+love-god, a warm and radiant god, in whose light White Fang's
+nature expanded as a flower expands under the sun.
+
+But White Fang was not demonstrative.  He was too old, too firmly
+moulded, to become adept at expressing himself in new ways.  He was
+too self-possessed, too strongly poised in his own isolation.  Too
+long had he cultivated reticence, aloofness, and moroseness.  He
+had never barked in his life, and he could not now learn to bark a
+welcome when his god approached.  He was never in the way, never
+extravagant nor foolish in the expression of his love.  He never
+ran to meet his god.  He waited at a distance; but he always
+waited, was always there.  His love partook of the nature of
+worship, dumb, inarticulate, a silent adoration.  Only by the
+steady regard of his eyes did he express his love, and by the
+unceasing following with his eyes of his god's every movement.
+Also, at times, when his god looked at him and spoke to him, he
+betrayed an awkward self-consciousness, caused by the struggle of
+his love to express itself and his physical inability to express
+it.
+
+He learned to adjust himself in many ways to his new mode of life.
+It was borne in upon him that he must let his master's dogs alone.
+Yet his dominant nature asserted itself, and he had first to thrash
+them into an acknowledgment of his superiority and leadership.
+This accomplished, he had little trouble with them.  They gave
+trail to him when he came and went or walked among them, and when
+he asserted his will they obeyed.
+
+In the same way, he came to tolerate Matt--as a possession of his
+master.  His master rarely fed him.  Matt did that, it was his
+business; yet White Fang divined that it was his master's food he
+ate and that it was his master who thus led him vicariously.  Matt
+it was who tried to put him into the harness and make him haul sled
+with the other dogs.  But Matt failed.  It was not until Weedon
+Scott put the harness on White Fang and worked him, that he
+understood.  He took it as his master's will that Matt should drive
+him and work him just as he drove and worked his master's other
+dogs.
+
+Different from the Mackenzie toboggans were the Klondike sleds with
+runners under them.  And different was the method of driving the
+dogs.  There was no fan-formation of the team.  The dogs worked in
+single file, one behind another, hauling on double traces.  And
+here, in the Klondike, the leader was indeed the leader.  The
+wisest as well as strongest dog was the leader, and the team obeyed
+him and feared him.  That White Fang should quickly gain this post
+was inevitable.  He could not be satisfied with less, as Matt
+learned after much inconvenience and trouble.  White Fang picked
+out the post for himself, and Matt backed his judgment with strong
+language after the experiment had been tried.  But, though he
+worked in the sled in the day, White Fang did not forego the
+guarding of his master's property in the night.  Thus he was on
+duty all the time, ever vigilant and faithful, the most valuable of
+all the dogs.
+
+"Makin' free to spit out what's in me," Matt said one day, "I beg
+to state that you was a wise guy all right when you paid the price
+you did for that dog.  You clean swindled Beauty Smith on top of
+pushin' his face in with your fist."
+
+A recrudescence of anger glinted in Weedon Scott's grey eyes, and
+he muttered savagely, "The beast!"
+
+In the late spring a great trouble came to White Fang.  Without
+warning, the love-master disappeared.  There had been warning, but
+White Fang was unversed in such things and did not understand the
+packing of a grip.  He remembered afterwards that his packing had
+preceded the master's disappearance; but at the time he suspected
+nothing.  That night he waited for the master to return.  At
+midnight the chill wind that blew drove him to shelter at the rear
+of the cabin.  There he drowsed, only half asleep, his ears keyed
+for the first sound of the familiar step.  But, at two in the
+morning, his anxiety drove him out to the cold front stoop, where
+he crouched, and waited.
+
+But no master came.  In the morning the door opened and Matt
+stepped outside.  White Fang gazed at him wistfully.  There was no
+common speech by which he might learn what he wanted to know.  The
+days came and went, but never the master.  White Fang, who had
+never known sickness in his life, became sick.  He became very
+sick, so sick that Matt was finally compelled to bring him inside
+the cabin.  Also, in writing to his employer, Matt devoted a
+postscript to White Fang.
+
+Weedon Scott reading the letter down in Circle City, came upon the
+following:
+
+"That dam wolf won't work.  Won't eat.  Aint got no spunk left.
+All the dogs is licking him.  Wants to know what has become of you,
+and I don't know how to tell him.  Mebbe he is going to die."
+
+It was as Matt had said.  White Fang had ceased eating, lost heart,
+and allowed every dog of the team to thrash him.  In the cabin he
+lay on the floor near the stove, without interest in food, in Matt,
+nor in life.  Matt might talk gently to him or swear at him, it was
+all the same; he never did more than turn his dull eyes upon the
+man, then drop his head back to its customary position on his fore-
+paws.
+
+And then, one night, Matt, reading to himself with moving lips and
+mumbled sounds, was startled by a low whine from White Fang.  He
+had got upon his feet, his ears cocked towards the door, and he was
+listening intently.  A moment later, Matt heard a footstep.  The
+door opened, and Weedon Scott stepped in.  The two men shook hands.
+Then Scott looked around the room.
+
+"Where's the wolf?" he asked.
+
+Then he discovered him, standing where he had been lying, near to
+the stove.  He had not rushed forward after the manner of other
+dogs.  He stood, watching and waiting.
+
+"Holy smoke!" Matt exclaimed.  "Look at 'm wag his tail!"
+
+Weedon Scott strode half across the room toward him, at the same
+time calling him.  White Fang came to him, not with a great bound,
+yet quickly.  He was awakened from self-consciousness, but as he
+drew near, his eyes took on a strange expression.  Something, an
+incommunicable vastness of feeling, rose up into his eyes as a
+light and shone forth.
+
+"He never looked at me that way all the time you was gone!" Matt
+commented.
+
+Weedon Scott did not hear.  He was squatting down on his heels,
+face to face with White Fang and petting him--rubbing at the roots
+of the ears, making long caressing strokes down the neck to the
+shoulders, tapping the spine gently with the balls of his fingers.
+And White Fang was growling responsively, the crooning note of the
+growl more pronounced than ever.
+
+But that was not all.  What of his joy, the great love in him, ever
+surging and struggling to express itself, succeeding in finding a
+new mode of expression.  He suddenly thrust his head forward and
+nudged his way in between the master's arm and body.  And here,
+confined, hidden from view all except his ears, no longer growling,
+he continued to nudge and snuggle.
+
+The two men looked at each other.  Scott's eyes were shining.
+
+"Gosh!" said Matt in an awe-stricken voice.
+
+A moment later, when he had recovered himself, he said, "I always
+insisted that wolf was a dog.  Look at 'm!"
+
+With the return of the love-master, White Fang's recovery was
+rapid.  Two nights and a day he spent in the cabin.  Then he
+sallied forth.  The sled-dogs had forgotten his prowess.  They
+remembered only the latest, which was his weakness and sickness.
+At the sight of him as he came out of the cabin, they sprang upon
+him.
+
+"Talk about your rough-houses," Matt murmured gleefully, standing
+in the doorway and looking on.
+
+"Give 'm hell, you wolf!  Give 'm hell!--an' then some!"
+
+White Fang did not need the encouragement.  The return of the love-
+master was enough.  Life was flowing through him again, splendid
+and indomitable.  He fought from sheer joy, finding in it an
+expression of much that he felt and that otherwise was without
+speech.  There could be but one ending.  The team dispersed in
+ignominious defeat, and it was not until after dark that the dogs
+came sneaking back, one by one, by meekness and humility signifying
+their fealty to White Fang.
+
+Having learned to snuggle, White Fang was guilty of it often.  It
+was the final word.  He could not go beyond it.  The one thing of
+which he had always been particularly jealous was his head.  He had
+always disliked to have it touched.  It was the Wild in him, the
+fear of hurt and of the trap, that had given rise to the panicky
+impulses to avoid contacts.  It was the mandate of his instinct
+that that head must be free.  And now, with the love-master, his
+snuggling was the deliberate act of putting himself into a position
+of hopeless helplessness.  It was an expression of perfect
+confidence, of absolute self-surrender, as though he said:  "I put
+myself into thy hands.  Work thou thy will with me."
+
+One night, not long after the return, Scott and Matt sat at a game
+of cribbage preliminary to going to bed.  "Fifteen-two, fifteen-
+four an' a pair makes six," Mat was pegging up, when there was an
+outcry and sound of snarling without.  They looked at each other as
+they started to rise to their feet.
+
+"The wolf's nailed somebody," Matt said.
+
+A wild scream of fear and anguish hastened them.
+
+"Bring a light!" Scott shouted, as he sprang outside.
+
+Matt followed with the lamp, and by its light they saw a man lying
+on his back in the snow.  His arms were folded, one above the
+other, across his face and throat.  Thus he was trying to shield
+himself from White Fang's teeth.  And there was need for it.  White
+Fang was in a rage, wickedly making his attack on the most
+vulnerable spot.  From shoulder to wrist of the crossed arms, the
+coat-sleeve, blue flannel shirt and undershirt were ripped in rags,
+while the arms themselves were terribly slashed and streaming
+blood.
+
+All this the two men saw in the first instant.  The next instant
+Weedon Scott had White Fang by the throat and was dragging him
+clear.  White Fang struggled and snarled, but made no attempt to
+bite, while he quickly quieted down at a sharp word from the
+master.
+
+Matt helped the man to his feet.  As he arose he lowered his
+crossed arms, exposing the bestial face of Beauty Smith.  The dog-
+musher let go of him precipitately, with action similar to that of
+a man who has picked up live fire.  Beauty Smith blinked in the
+lamplight and looked about him.  He caught sight of White Fang and
+terror rushed into his face.
+
+At the same moment Matt noticed two objects lying in the snow.  He
+held the lamp close to them, indicating them with his toe for his
+employer's benefit--a steel dog-chain and a stout club.
+
+Weedon Scott saw and nodded.  Not a word was spoken.  The dog-
+musher laid his hand on Beauty Smith's shoulder and faced him to
+the right about.  No word needed to be spoken.  Beauty Smith
+started.
+
+In the meantime the love-master was patting White Fang and talking
+to him.
+
+"Tried to steal you, eh?  And you wouldn't have it!  Well, well, he
+made a mistake, didn't he?"
+
+"Must 'a' thought he had hold of seventeen devils," the dog-musher
+sniggered.
+
+White Fang, still wrought up and bristling, growled and growled,
+the hair slowly lying down, the crooning note remote and dim, but
+growing in his throat.
+
+
+
+
+PART V
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I--THE LONG TRAIL
+
+
+
+It was in the air.  White Fang sensed the coming calamity, even
+before there was tangible evidence of it.  In vague ways it was
+borne in upon him that a change was impending.  He knew not how nor
+why, yet he got his feel of the oncoming event from the gods
+themselves.  In ways subtler than they knew, they betrayed their
+intentions to the wolf-dog that haunted the cabin-stoop, and that,
+though he never came inside the cabin, knew what went on inside
+their brains.
+
+"Listen to that, will you!" the dug-musher exclaimed at supper one
+night.
+
+Weedon Scott listened.  Through the door came a low, anxious whine,
+like a sobbing under the breath that had just grown audible.  Then
+came the long sniff, as White Fang reassured himself that his god
+was still inside and had not yet taken himself off in mysterious
+and solitary flight.
+
+"I do believe that wolf's on to you," the dog-musher said.
+
+Weedon Scott looked across at his companion with eyes that almost
+pleaded, though this was given the lie by his words.
+
+"What the devil can I do with a wolf in California?" he demanded.
+
+"That's what I say," Matt answered.  "What the devil can you do
+with a wolf in California?"
+
+But this did not satisfy Weedon Scott.  The other seemed to be
+judging him in a non-committal sort of way.
+
+"White man's dogs would have no show against him," Scott went on.
+"He'd kill them on sight.  If he didn't bankrupt me with damaged
+suits, the authorities would take him away from me and electrocute
+him."
+
+"He's a downright murderer, I know," was the dog-musher's comment.
+
+Weedon Scott looked at him suspiciously.
+
+"It would never do," he said decisively.
+
+"It would never do!" Matt concurred.  "Why you'd have to hire a man
+'specially to take care of 'm."
+
+The other suspicion was allayed.  He nodded cheerfully.  In the
+silence that followed, the low, half-sobbing whine was heard at the
+door and then the long, questing sniff.
+
+"There's no denyin' he thinks a hell of a lot of you," Matt said.
+
+The other glared at him in sudden wrath.  "Damn it all, man!  I
+know my own mind and what's best!"
+
+"I'm agreein' with you, only . . . "
+
+"Only what?" Scott snapped out.
+
+"Only . . . " the dog-musher began softly, then changed his mind
+and betrayed a rising anger of his own.  "Well, you needn't get so
+all-fired het up about it.  Judgin' by your actions one'd think you
+didn't know your own mind."
+
+Weedon Scott debated with himself for a while, and then said more
+gently:  "You are right, Matt.  I don't know my own mind, and
+that's what's the trouble."
+
+"Why, it would be rank ridiculousness for me to take that dog
+along," he broke out after another pause.
+
+"I'm agreein' with you," was Matt's answer, and again his employer
+was not quite satisfied with him.
+
+"But how in the name of the great Sardanapolis he knows you're
+goin' is what gets me," the dog-musher continued innocently.
+
+"It's beyond me, Matt," Scott answered, with a mournful shake of
+the head.
+
+Then came the day when, through the open cabin door, White Fang saw
+the fatal grip on the floor and the love-master packing things into
+it.  Also, there were comings and goings, and the erstwhile placid
+atmosphere of the cabin was vexed with strange perturbations and
+unrest.  Here was indubitable evidence.  White Fang had already
+scented it.  He now reasoned it.  His god was preparing for another
+flight.  And since he had not taken him with him before, so, now,
+he could look to be left behind.
+
+That night he lifted the long wolf-howl.  As he had howled, in his
+puppy days, when he fled back from the Wild to the village to find
+it vanished and naught but a rubbish-heap to mark the site of Grey
+Beaver's tepee, so now he pointed his muzzle to the cold stars and
+told to them his woe.
+
+Inside the cabin the two men had just gone to bed.
+
+"He's gone off his food again," Matt remarked from his bunk.
+
+There was a grunt from Weedon Scott's bunk, and a stir of blankets.
+
+"From the way he cut up the other time you went away, I wouldn't
+wonder this time but what he died."
+
+The blankets in the other bunk stirred irritably.
+
+"Oh, shut up!" Scott cried out through the darkness.  "You nag
+worse than a woman."
+
+"I'm agreein' with you," the dog-musher answered, and Weedon Scott
+was not quite sure whether or not the other had snickered.
+
+The next day White Fang's anxiety and restlessness were even more
+pronounced.  He dogged his master's heels whenever he left the
+cabin, and haunted the front stoop when he remained inside.
+Through the open door he could catch glimpses of the luggage on the
+floor.  The grip had been joined by two large canvas bags and a
+box.  Matt was rolling the master's blankets and fur robe inside a
+small tarpaulin.  White Fang whined as he watched the operation.
+
+Later on two Indians arrived.  He watched them closely as they
+shouldered the luggage and were led off down the hill by Matt, who
+carried the bedding and the grip.  But White Fang did not follow
+them.  The master was still in the cabin.  After a time, Matt
+returned.  The master came to the door and called White Fang
+inside.
+
+"You poor devil," he said gently, rubbing White Fang's ears and
+tapping his spine.  "I'm hitting the long trail, old man, where you
+cannot follow.  Now give me a growl--the last, good, good-bye
+growl."
+
+But White Fang refused to growl.  Instead, and after a wistful,
+searching look, he snuggled in, burrowing his head out of sight
+between the master's arm and body.
+
+"There she blows!" Matt cried.  From the Yukon arose the hoarse
+bellowing of a river steamboat.  "You've got to cut it short.  Be
+sure and lock the front door.  I'll go out the back.  Get a move
+on!"
+
+The two doors slammed at the same moment, and Weedon Scott waited
+for Matt to come around to the front.  From inside the door came a
+low whining and sobbing.  Then there were long, deep-drawn sniffs.
+
+"You must take good care of him, Matt," Scott said, as they started
+down the hill.  "Write and let me know how he gets along."
+
+"Sure," the dog-musher answered.  "But listen to that, will you!"
+
+Both men stopped.  White Fang was howling as dogs howl when their
+masters lie dead.  He was voicing an utter woe, his cry bursting
+upward in great heart-breaking rushes, dying down into quavering
+misery, and bursting upward again with a rush upon rush of grief.
+
+The Aurora was the first steamboat of the year for the Outside, and
+her decks were jammed with prosperous adventurers and broken gold
+seekers, all equally as mad to get to the Outside as they had been
+originally to get to the Inside.  Near the gang-plank, Scott was
+shaking hands with Matt, who was preparing to go ashore.  But
+Matt's hand went limp in the other's grasp as his gaze shot past
+and remained fixed on something behind him.  Scott turned to see.
+Sitting on the deck several feet away and watching wistfully was
+White Fang,
+
+The dog-musher swore softly, in awe-stricken accents.  Scott could
+only look in wonder.
+
+"Did you lock the front door?" Matt demanded.  The other nodded,
+and asked, "How about the back?"
+
+"You just bet I did," was the fervent reply.
+
+White Fang flattened his ears ingratiatingly, but remained where he
+was, making no attempt to approach.
+
+"I'll have to take 'm ashore with me."
+
+Matt made a couple of steps toward White Fang, but the latter slid
+away from him.  The dog-musher made a rush of it, and White Fang
+dodged between the legs of a group of men.  Ducking, turning,
+doubling, he slid about the deck, eluding the other's efforts to
+capture him.
+
+But when the love-master spoke, White Fang came to him with prompt
+obedience.
+
+"Won't come to the hand that's fed 'm all these months," the dog-
+musher muttered resentfully.  "And you--you ain't never fed 'm
+after them first days of gettin' acquainted.  I'm blamed if I can
+see how he works it out that you're the boss."
+
+Scott, who had been patting White Fang, suddenly bent closer and
+pointed out fresh-made cuts on his muzzle, and a gash between the
+eyes.
+
+Matt bent over and passed his hand along White Fang's belly.
+
+"We plump forgot the window.  He's all cut an' gouged underneath.
+Must 'a' butted clean through it, b'gosh!"
+
+But Weedon Scott was not listening.  He was thinking rapidly.  The
+Aurora's whistle hooted a final announcement of departure.  Men
+were scurrying down the gang-plank to the shore.  Matt loosened the
+bandana from his own neck and started to put it around White
+Fang's.  Scott grasped the dog-musher's hand.
+
+"Good-bye, Matt, old man.  About the wolf-you needn't write.  You
+see, I've . . . !"
+
+"What!" the dog-musher exploded.  "You don't mean to say . . .?"
+
+"The very thing I mean.  Here's your bandana.  I'll write to you
+about him."
+
+Matt paused halfway down the gang-plank.
+
+"He'll never stand the climate!" he shouted back.  "Unless you clip
+'m in warm weather!"
+
+The gang-plank was hauled in, and the Aurora swang out from the
+bank.  Weedon Scott waved a last good-bye.  Then he turned and bent
+over White Fang, standing by his side.
+
+"Now growl, damn you, growl," he said, as he patted the responsive
+head and rubbed the flattening ears.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II--THE SOUTHLAND
+
+
+
+White Fang landed from the steamer in San Francisco.  He was
+appalled.  Deep in him, below any reasoning process or act of
+consciousness, he had associated power with godhead.  And never had
+the white men seemed such marvellous gods as now, when he trod the
+slimy pavement of San Francisco.  The log cabins he had known were
+replaced by towering buildings.  The streets were crowded with
+perils--waggons, carts, automobiles; great, straining horses
+pulling huge trucks; and monstrous cable and electric ears hooting
+and clanging through the midst, screeching their insistent menace
+after the manner of the lynxes he had known in the northern woods.
+
+All this was the manifestation of power.  Through it all, behind it
+all, was man, governing and controlling, expressing himself, as of
+old, by his mastery over matter.  It was colossal, stunning.  White
+Fang was awed.  Fear sat upon him.  As in his cubhood he had been
+made to feel his smallness and puniness on the day he first came in
+from the Wild to the village of Grey Beaver, so now, in his full-
+grown stature and pride of strength, he was made to feel small and
+puny.  And there were so many gods!  He was made dizzy by the
+swarming of them.  The thunder of the streets smote upon his ears.
+He was bewildered by the tremendous and endless rush and movement
+of things.  As never before, he felt his dependence on the love-
+master, close at whose heels he followed, no matter what happened
+never losing sight of him.
+
+But White Fang was to have no more than a nightmare vision of the
+city--an experience that was like a bad dream, unreal and terrible,
+that haunted him for long after in his dreams.  He was put into a
+baggage-car by the master, chained in a corner in the midst of
+heaped trunks and valises.  Here a squat and brawny god held sway,
+with much noise, hurling trunks and boxes about, dragging them in
+through the door and tossing them into the piles, or flinging them
+out of the door, smashing and crashing, to other gods who awaited
+them.
+
+And here, in this inferno of luggage, was White Fang deserted by
+the master.  Or at least White Fang thought he was deserted, until
+he smelled out the master's canvas clothes-bags alongside of him,
+and proceeded to mount guard over them.
+
+"'Bout time you come," growled the god of the car, an hour later,
+when Weedon Scott appeared at the door.  "That dog of yourn won't
+let me lay a finger on your stuff."
+
+White Fang emerged from the car.  He was astonished.  The nightmare
+city was gone.  The car had been to him no more than a room in a
+house, and when he had entered it the city had been all around him.
+In the interval the city had disappeared.  The roar of it no longer
+dinned upon his ears.  Before him was smiling country, streaming
+with sunshine, lazy with quietude.  But he had little time to
+marvel at the transformation.  He accepted it as he accepted all
+the unaccountable doings and manifestations of the gods.  It was
+their way.
+
+There was a carriage waiting.  A man and a woman approached the
+master.  The woman's arms went out and clutched the master around
+the neck--a hostile act!  The next moment Weedon Scott had torn
+loose from the embrace and closed with White Fang, who had become a
+snarling, raging demon.
+
+"It's all right, mother," Scott was saving as he kept tight hold of
+White Fang and placated him.  "He thought you were going to injure
+me, and he wouldn't stand for it.  It's all right.  It's all right.
+He'll learn soon enough."
+
+"And in the meantime I may be permitted to love my son when his dog
+is not around," she laughed, though she was pale and weak from the
+fright.
+
+She looked at White Fang, who snarled and bristled and glared
+malevolently.
+
+"He'll have to learn, and he shall, without postponement," Scott
+said.
+
+He spoke softly to White Fang until he had quieted him, then his
+voice became firm.
+
+"Down, sir!  Down with you!"
+
+This had been one of the things taught him by the master, and White
+Fang obeyed, though he lay down reluctantly and sullenly.
+
+"Now, mother."
+
+Scott opened his arms to her, but kept his eyes on White Fang.
+
+"Down!" he warned.  "Down!"
+
+White Fang, bristling silently, half-crouching as he rose, sank
+back and watched the hostile act repeated.  But no harm came of it,
+nor of the embrace from the strange man-god that followed.  Then
+the clothes-bags were taken into the carriage, the strange gods and
+the love-master followed, and White Fang pursued, now running
+vigilantly behind, now bristling up to the running horses and
+warning them that he was there to see that no harm befell the god
+they dragged so swiftly across the earth.
+
+At the end of fifteen minutes, the carriage swung in through a
+stone gateway and on between a double row of arched and interlacing
+walnut trees.  On either side stretched lawns, their broad sweep
+broken here and there by great sturdy-limbed oaks.  In the near
+distance, in contrast with the young-green of the tended grass,
+sunburnt hay-fields showed tan and gold; while beyond were the
+tawny hills and upland pastures.  From the head of the lawn, on the
+first soft swell from the valley-level, looked down the deep-
+porched, many-windowed house.
+
+Little opportunity was given White Fang to see all this.  Hardly
+had the carriage entered the grounds, when he was set upon by a
+sheep-dog, bright-eyed, sharp-muzzled, righteously indignant and
+angry.  It was between him and the master, cutting him off.  White
+Fang snarled no warning, but his hair bristled as he made his
+silent and deadly rush.  This rush was never completed.  He halted
+with awkward abruptness, with stiff fore-legs bracing himself
+against his momentum, almost sitting down on his haunches, so
+desirous was he of avoiding contact with the dog he was in the act
+of attacking.  It was a female, and the law of his kind thrust a
+barrier between.  For him to attack her would require nothing less
+than a violation of his instinct.
+
+But with the sheep-dog it was otherwise.  Being a female, she
+possessed no such instinct.  On the other hand, being a sheep-dog,
+her instinctive fear of the Wild, and especially of the wolf, was
+unusually keen.  White Fang was to her a wolf, the hereditary
+marauder who had preyed upon her flocks from the time sheep were
+first herded and guarded by some dim ancestor of hers.  And so, as
+he abandoned his rush at her and braced himself to avoid the
+contact, she sprang upon him.  He snarled involuntarily as he felt
+her teeth in his shoulder, but beyond this made no offer to hurt
+her.  He backed away, stiff-legged with self-consciousness, and
+tried to go around her.  He dodged this way and that, and curved
+and turned, but to no purpose.  She remained always between him and
+the way he wanted to go.
+
+"Here, Collie!" called the strange man in the carriage.
+
+Weedon Scott laughed.
+
+"Never mind, father.  It is good discipline.  White Fang will have
+to learn many things, and it's just as well that he begins now.
+He'll adjust himself all right."
+
+The carriage drove on, and still Collie blocked White Fang's way.
+He tried to outrun her by leaving the drive and circling across the
+lawn but she ran on the inner and smaller circle, and was always
+there, facing him with her two rows of gleaming teeth.  Back he
+circled, across the drive to the other lawn, and again she headed
+him off.
+
+The carriage was bearing the master away.  White Fang caught
+glimpses of it disappearing amongst the trees.  The situation was
+desperate.  He essayed another circle.  She followed, running
+swiftly.  And then, suddenly, he turned upon her.  It was his old
+fighting trick.  Shoulder to shoulder, he struck her squarely.  Not
+only was she overthrown.  So fast had she been running that she
+rolled along, now on her back, now on her side, as she struggled to
+stop, clawing gravel with her feet and crying shrilly her hurt
+pride and indignation.
+
+White Fang did not wait.  The way was clear, and that was all he
+had wanted.  She took after him, never ceasing her outcry.  It was
+the straightaway now, and when it came to real running, White Fang
+could teach her things.  She ran frantically, hysterically,
+straining to the utmost, advertising the effort she was making with
+every leap:  and all the time White Fang slid smoothly away from
+her silently, without effort, gliding like a ghost over the ground.
+
+As he rounded the house to the porte-cochere, he came upon the
+carriage.  It had stopped, and the master was alighting.  At this
+moment, still running at top speed, White Fang became suddenly
+aware of an attack from the side.  It was a deer-hound rushing upon
+him.  White Fang tried to face it.  But he was going too fast, and
+the hound was too close.  It struck him on the side; and such was
+his forward momentum and the unexpectedness of it, White Fang was
+hurled to the ground and rolled clear over.  He came out of the
+tangle a spectacle of malignancy, ears flattened back, lips
+writhing, nose wrinkling, his teeth clipping together as the fangs
+barely missed the hound's soft throat.
+
+The master was running up, but was too far away; and it was Collie
+that saved the hound's life.  Before White Fang could spring in and
+deliver the fatal stroke, and just as he was in the act of
+springing in, Collie arrived.  She had been out-manoeuvred and out-
+run, to say nothing of her having been unceremoniously tumbled in
+the gravel, and her arrival was like that of a tornado--made up of
+offended dignity, justifiable wrath, and instinctive hatred for
+this marauder from the Wild.  She struck White Fang at right angles
+in the midst of his spring, and again he was knocked off his feet
+and rolled over.
+
+The next moment the master arrived, and with one hand held White
+Fang, while the father called off the dogs.
+
+"I say, this is a pretty warm reception for a poor lone wolf from
+the Arctic," the master said, while White Fang calmed down under
+his caressing hand.  "In all his life he's only been known once to
+go off his feet, and here he's been rolled twice in thirty
+seconds."
+
+The carriage had driven away, and other strange gods had appeared
+from out the house.  Some of these stood respectfully at a
+distance; but two of them, women, perpetrated the hostile act of
+clutching the master around the neck.  White Fang, however, was
+beginning to tolerate this act.  No harm seemed to come of it,
+while the noises the gods made were certainly not threatening.
+These gods also made overtures to White Fang, but he warned them
+off with a snarl, and the master did likewise with word of mouth.
+At such times White Fang leaned in close against the master's legs
+and received reassuring pats on the head.
+
+The hound, under the command, "Dick!  Lie down, sir!" had gone up
+the steps and lain down to one side of the porch, still growling
+and keeping a sullen watch on the intruder.  Collie had been taken
+in charge by one of the woman-gods, who held arms around her neck
+and petted and caressed her; but Collie was very much perplexed and
+worried, whining and restless, outraged by the permitted presence
+of this wolf and confident that the gods were making a mistake.
+
+All the gods started up the steps to enter the house.  White Fang
+followed closely at the master's heels.  Dick, on the porch,
+growled, and White Fang, on the steps, bristled and growled back.
+
+"Take Collie inside and leave the two of them to fight it out,"
+suggested Scott's father.  "After that they'll be friends."
+
+"Then White Fang, to show his friendship, will have to be chief
+mourner at the funeral," laughed the master.
+
+The elder Scott looked incredulously, first at White Fang, then at
+Dick, and finally at his son.
+
+"You mean . . .?"
+
+Weedon nodded his head.  "I mean just that.  You'd have a dead Dick
+inside one minute--two minutes at the farthest."
+
+He turned to White Fang.  "Come on, you wolf.  It's you that'll
+have to come inside."
+
+White Fang walked stiff-legged up the steps and across the porch,
+with tail rigidly erect, keeping his eyes on Dick to guard against
+a flank attack, and at the same time prepared for whatever fierce
+manifestation of the unknown that might pounce out upon him from
+the interior of the house.  But no thing of fear pounced out, and
+when he had gained the inside he scouted carefully around, looking
+at it and finding it not.  Then he lay down with a contented grunt
+at the master's feet, observing all that went on, ever ready to
+spring to his feet and fight for life with the terrors he felt must
+lurk under the trap-roof of the dwelling.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III--THE GOD'S DOMAIN
+
+
+
+Not only was White Fang adaptable by nature, but he had travelled
+much, and knew the meaning and necessity of adjustment.  Here, in
+Sierra Vista, which was the name of Judge Scott's place, White Fang
+quickly began to make himself at home.  He had no further serious
+trouble with the dogs.  They knew more about the ways of the
+Southland gods than did he, and in their eyes he had qualified when
+he accompanied the gods inside the house.  Wolf that he was, and
+unprecedented as it was, the gods had sanctioned his presence, and
+they, the dogs of the gods, could only recognise this sanction.
+
+Dick, perforce, had to go through a few stiff formalities at first,
+after which he calmly accepted White Fang as an addition to the
+premises.  Had Dick had his way, they would have been good friends.
+All but White Fang was averse to friendship.  All he asked of other
+dogs was to be let alone.  His whole life he had kept aloof from
+his kind, and he still desired to keep aloof.  Dick's overtures
+bothered him, so he snarled Dick away.  In the north he had learned
+the lesson that he must let the master's dogs alone, and he did not
+forget that lesson now.  But he insisted on his own privacy and
+self-seclusion, and so thoroughly ignored Dick that that good-
+natured creature finally gave him up and scarcely took as much
+interest in him as in the hitching-post near the stable.
+
+Not so with Collie.  While she accepted him because it was the
+mandate of the gods, that was no reason that she should leave him
+in peace.  Woven into her being was the memory of countless crimes
+he and his had perpetrated against her ancestry.  Not in a day nor
+a generation were the ravaged sheepfolds to be forgotten.  All this
+was a spur to her, pricking her to retaliation.  She could not fly
+in the face of the gods who permitted him, but that did not prevent
+her from making life miserable for him in petty ways.  A feud, ages
+old, was between them, and she, for one, would see to it that he
+was reminded.
+
+So Collie took advantage of her sex to pick upon White Fang and
+maltreat him.  His instinct would not permit him to attack her,
+while her persistence would not permit him to ignore her.  When she
+rushed at him he turned his fur-protected shoulder to her sharp
+teeth and walked away stiff-legged and stately.  When she forced
+him too hard, he was compelled to go about in a circle, his
+shoulder presented to her, his head turned from her, and on his
+face and in his eyes a patient and bored expression.  Sometimes,
+however, a nip on his hind-quarters hastened his retreat and made
+it anything but stately.  But as a rule he managed to maintain a
+dignity that was almost solemnity.  He ignored her existence
+whenever it was possible, and made it a point to keep out of her
+way.  When he saw or heard her coming, he got up and walked off.
+
+There was much in other matters for White Fang to learn.  Life in
+the Northland was simplicity itself when compared with the
+complicated affairs of Sierra Vista.  First of all, he had to learn
+the family of the master.  In a way he was prepared to do this.  As
+Mit-sah and Kloo-kooch had belonged to Grey Beaver, sharing his
+food, his fire, and his blankets, so now, at Sierra Vista, belonged
+to the love-master all the denizens of the house.
+
+But in this matter there was a difference, and many differences.
+Sierra Vista was a far vaster affair than the tepee of Grey Beaver.
+There were many persons to be considered.  There was Judge Scott,
+and there was his wife.  There were the master's two sisters, Beth
+and Mary.  There was his wife, Alice, and then there were his
+children, Weedon and Maud, toddlers of four and six.  There was no
+way for anybody to tell him about all these people, and of blood-
+ties and relationship he knew nothing whatever and never would be
+capable of knowing.  Yet he quickly worked it out that all of them
+belonged to the master.  Then, by observation, whenever opportunity
+offered, by study of action, speech, and the very intonations of
+the voice, he slowly learned the intimacy and the degree of favour
+they enjoyed with the master.  And by this ascertained standard,
+White Fang treated them accordingly.  What was of value to the
+master he valued; what was dear to the master was to be cherished
+by White Fang and guarded carefully.
+
+Thus it was with the two children.  All his life he had disliked
+children.  He hated and feared their hands.  The lessons were not
+tender that he had learned of their tyranny and cruelty in the days
+of the Indian villages.  When Weedon and Maud had first approached
+him, he growled warningly and looked malignant.  A cuff from the
+master and a sharp word had then compelled him to permit their
+caresses, though he growled and growled under their tiny hands, and
+in the growl there was no crooning note.  Later, he observed that
+the boy and girl were of great value in the master's eyes.  Then it
+was that no cuff nor sharp word was necessary before they could pat
+him.
+
+Yet White Fang was never effusively affectionate.  He yielded to
+the master's children with an ill but honest grace, and endured
+their fooling as one would endure a painful operation.  When he
+could no longer endure, he would get up and stalk determinedly away
+from them.  But after a time, he grew even to like the children.
+Still he was not demonstrative.  He would not go up to them.  On
+the other hand, instead of walking away at sight of them, he waited
+for them to come to him.  And still later, it was noticed that a
+pleased light came into his eyes when he saw them approaching, and
+that he looked after them with an appearance of curious regret when
+they left him for other amusements.
+
+All this was a matter of development, and took time.  Next in his
+regard, after the children, was Judge Scott.  There were two
+reasons, possibly, for this.  First, he was evidently a valuable
+possession of the master's, and next, he was undemonstrative.
+White Fang liked to lie at his feet on the wide porch when he read
+the newspaper, from time to time favouring White Fang with a look
+or a word--untroublesome tokens that he recognised White Fang's
+presence and existence.  But this was only when the master was not
+around.  When the master appeared, all other beings ceased to exist
+so far as White Fang was concerned.
+
+White Fang allowed all the members of the family to pet him and
+make much of him; but he never gave to them what he gave to the
+master.  No caress of theirs could put the love-croon into his
+throat, and, try as they would, they could never persuade him into
+snuggling against them.  This expression of abandon and surrender,
+of absolute trust, he reserved for the master alone.  In fact, he
+never regarded the members of the family in any other light than
+possessions of the love-master.
+
+Also White Fang had early come to differentiate between the family
+and the servants of the household.  The latter were afraid of him,
+while he merely refrained from attacking them.  This because he
+considered that they were likewise possessions of the master.
+Between White Fang and them existed a neutrality and no more.  They
+cooked for the master and washed the dishes and did other things
+just as Matt had done up in the Klondike.  They were, in short,
+appurtenances of the household.
+
+Outside the household there was even more for White Fang to learn.
+The master's domain was wide and complex, yet it had its metes and
+bounds.  The land itself ceased at the county road.  Outside was
+the common domain of all gods--the roads and streets.  Then inside
+other fences were the particular domains of other gods.  A myriad
+laws governed all these things and determined conduct; yet he did
+not know the speech of the gods, nor was there any way for him to
+learn save by experience.  He obeyed his natural impulses until
+they ran him counter to some law.  When this had been done a few
+times, he learned the law and after that observed it.
+
+But most potent in his education was the cuff of the master's hand,
+the censure of the master's voice.  Because of White Fang's very
+great love, a cuff from the master hurt him far more than any
+beating Grey Beaver or Beauty Smith had ever given him.  They had
+hurt only the flesh of him; beneath the flesh the spirit had still
+raged, splendid and invincible.  But with the master the cuff was
+always too light to hurt the flesh.  Yet it went deeper.  It was an
+expression of the master's disapproval, and White Fang's spirit
+wilted under it.
+
+In point of fact, the cuff was rarely administered.  The master's
+voice was sufficient.  By it White Fang knew whether he did right
+or not.  By it he trimmed his conduct and adjusted his actions.  It
+was the compass by which he steered and learned to chart the
+manners of a new land and life.
+
+In the Northland, the only domesticated animal was the dog.  All
+other animals lived in the Wild, and were, when not too formidable,
+lawful spoil for any dog.  All his days White Fang had foraged
+among the live things for food.  It did not enter his head that in
+the Southland it was otherwise.  But this he was to learn early in
+his residence in Santa Clara Valley.  Sauntering around the corner
+of the house in the early morning, he came upon a chicken that had
+escaped from the chicken-yard.  White Fang's natural impulse was to
+eat it.  A couple of bounds, a flash of teeth and a frightened
+squawk, and he had scooped in the adventurous fowl.  It was farm-
+bred and fat and tender; and White Fang licked his chops and
+decided that such fare was good.
+
+Later in the day, he chanced upon another stray chicken near the
+stables.  One of the grooms ran to the rescue.  He did not know
+White Fang's breed, so for weapon he took a light buggy-whip.  At
+the first cut of the whip, White Fang left the chicken for the man.
+A club might have stopped White Fang, but not a whip.  Silently,
+without flinching, he took a second cut in his forward rush, and as
+he leaped for the throat the groom cried out, "My God!" and
+staggered backward.  He dropped the whip and shielded his throat
+with his arms.  In consequence, his forearm was ripped open to the
+bone.
+
+The man was badly frightened.  It was not so much White Fang's
+ferocity as it was his silence that unnerved the groom.  Still
+protecting his throat and face with his torn and bleeding arm, he
+tried to retreat to the barn.  And it would have gone hard with him
+had not Collie appeared on the scene.  As she had saved Dick's
+life, she now saved the groom's.  She rushed upon White Fang in
+frenzied wrath.  She had been right.  She had known better than the
+blundering gods.  All her suspicions were justified.  Here was the
+ancient marauder up to his old tricks again.
+
+The groom escaped into the stables, and White Fang backed away
+before Collie's wicked teeth, or presented his shoulder to them and
+circled round and round.  But Collie did not give over, as was her
+wont, after a decent interval of chastisement.  On the contrary,
+she grew more excited and angry every moment, until, in the end,
+White Fang flung dignity to the winds and frankly fled away from
+her across the fields.
+
+"He'll learn to leave chickens alone," the master said.  "But I
+can't give him the lesson until I catch him in the act."
+
+Two nights later came the act, but on a more generous scale than
+the master had anticipated.  White Fang had observed closely the
+chicken-yards and the habits of the chickens.  In the night-time,
+after they had gone to roost, he climbed to the top of a pile of
+newly hauled lumber.  From there he gained the roof of a chicken-
+house, passed over the ridgepole and dropped to the ground inside.
+A moment later he was inside the house, and the slaughter began.
+
+In the morning, when the master came out on to the porch, fifty
+white Leghorn hens, laid out in a row by the groom, greeted his
+eyes.  He whistled to himself, softly, first with surprise, and
+then, at the end, with admiration.  His eyes were likewise greeted
+by White Fang, but about the latter there were no signs of shame
+nor guilt.  He carried himself with pride, as though, forsooth, he
+had achieved a deed praiseworthy and meritorious.  There was about
+him no consciousness of sin.  The master's lips tightened as he
+faced the disagreeable task.  Then he talked harshly to the
+unwitting culprit, and in his voice there was nothing but godlike
+wrath.  Also, he held White Fang's nose down to the slain hens, and
+at the same time cuffed him soundly.
+
+White Fang never raided a chicken-roost again.  It was against the
+law, and he had learned it.  Then the master took him into the
+chicken-yards.  White Fang's natural impulse, when he saw the live
+food fluttering about him and under his very nose, was to spring
+upon it.  He obeyed the impulse, but was checked by the master's
+voice.  They continued in the yards for half an hour.  Time and
+again the impulse surged over White Fang, and each time, as he
+yielded to it, he was checked by the master's voice.  Thus it was
+he learned the law, and ere he left the domain of the chickens, he
+had learned to ignore their existence.
+
+"You can never cure a chicken-killer."  Judge Scott shook his head
+sadly at luncheon table, when his son narrated the lesson he had
+given White Fang.  "Once they've got the habit and the taste of
+blood . . ."  Again he shook his head sadly.
+
+But Weedon Scott did not agree with his father.  "I'll tell you
+what I'll do," he challenged finally.  "I'll lock White Fang in
+with the chickens all afternoon."
+
+"But think of the chickens," objected the judge.
+
+"And furthermore," the son went on, "for every chicken he kills,
+I'll pay you one dollar gold coin of the realm."
+
+"But you should penalise father, too," interpose Beth.
+
+Her sister seconded her, and a chorus of approval arose from around
+the table.  Judge Scott nodded his head in agreement.
+
+"All right." Weedon Scott pondered for a moment.  "And if, at the
+end of the afternoon White Fang hasn't harmed a chicken, for every
+ten minutes of the time he has spent in the yard, you will have to
+say to him, gravely and with deliberation, just as if you were
+sitting on the bench and solemnly passing judgment, 'White Fang,
+you are smarter than I thought.'"
+
+From hidden points of vantage the family watched the performance.
+But it was a fizzle.  Locked in the yard and there deserted by the
+master, White Fang lay down and went to sleep.  Once he got up and
+walked over to the trough for a drink of water.  The chickens he
+calmly ignored.  So far as he was concerned they did not exist.  At
+four o'clock he executed a running jump, gained the roof of the
+chicken-house and leaped to the ground outside, whence he sauntered
+gravely to the house.  He had learned the law.  And on the porch,
+before the delighted family, Judge Scott, face to face with White
+Fang, said slowly and solemnly, sixteen times, "White Fang, you are
+smarter than I thought."
+
+But it was the multiplicity of laws that befuddled White Fang and
+often brought him into disgrace.  He had to learn that he must not
+touch the chickens that belonged to other gods.  Then there were
+cats, and rabbits, and turkeys; all these he must let alone.  In
+fact, when he had but partly learned the law, his impression was
+that he must leave all live things alone.  Out in the back-pasture,
+a quail could flutter up under his nose unharmed.  All tense and
+trembling with eagerness and desire, he mastered his instinct and
+stood still.  He was obeying the will of the gods.
+
+And then, one day, again out in the back-pasture, he saw Dick start
+a jackrabbit and run it.  The master himself was looking on and did
+not interfere.  Nay, he encouraged White Fang to join in the chase.
+And thus he learned that there was no taboo on jackrabbits.  In the
+end he worked out the complete law.  Between him and all domestic
+animals there must be no hostilities.  If not amity, at least
+neutrality must obtain.  But the other animals--the squirrels, and
+quail, and cottontails, were creatures of the Wild who had never
+yielded allegiance to man.  They were the lawful prey of any dog.
+It was only the tame that the gods protected, and between the tame
+deadly strife was not permitted.  The gods held the power of life
+and death over their subjects, and the gods were jealous of their
+power.
+
+Life was complex in the Santa Clara Valley after the simplicities
+of the Northland.  And the chief thing demanded by these
+intricacies of civilisation was control, restraint--a poise of self
+that was as delicate as the fluttering of gossamer wings and at the
+same time as rigid as steel.  Life had a thousand faces, and White
+Fang found he must meet them all--thus, when he went to town, in to
+San Jose, running behind the carriage or loafing about the streets
+when the carriage stopped.  Life flowed past him, deep and wide and
+varied, continually impinging upon his senses, demanding of him
+instant and endless adjustments and correspondences, and compelling
+him, almost always, to suppress his natural impulses.
+
+There were butcher-shops where meat hung within reach.  This meat
+he must not touch.  There were cats at the houses the master
+visited that must be let alone.  And there were dogs everywhere
+that snarled at him and that he must not attack.  And then, on the
+crowded sidewalks there were persons innumerable whose attention he
+attracted.  They would stop and look at him, point him out to one
+another, examine him, talk of him, and, worst of all, pat him.  And
+these perilous contacts from all these strange hands he must
+endure.  Yet this endurance he achieved.  Furthermore, he got over
+being awkward and self-conscious.  In a lofty way he received the
+attentions of the multitudes of strange gods.  With condescension
+he accepted their condescension.  On the other hand, there was
+something about him that prevented great familiarity.  They patted
+him on the head and passed on, contented and pleased with their own
+daring.
+
+But it was not all easy for White Fang.  Running behind the
+carriage in the outskirts of San Jose, he encountered certain small
+boys who made a practice of flinging stones at him.  Yet he knew
+that it was not permitted him to pursue and drag them down.  Here
+he was compelled to violate his instinct of self-preservation, and
+violate it he did, for he was becoming tame and qualifying himself
+for civilisation.
+
+Nevertheless, White Fang was not quite satisfied with the
+arrangement.  He had no abstract ideas about justice and fair play.
+But there is a certain sense of equity that resides in life, and it
+was this sense in him that resented the unfairness of his being
+permitted no defence against the stone-throwers.  He forgot that in
+the covenant entered into between him and the gods they were
+pledged to care for him and defend him.  But one day the master
+sprang from the carriage, whip in hand, and gave the stone-throwers
+a thrashing.  After that they threw stones no more, and White Fang
+understood and was satisfied.
+
+One other experience of similar nature was his.  On the way to
+town, hanging around the saloon at the cross-roads, were three dogs
+that made a practice of rushing out upon him when he went by.
+Knowing his deadly method of fighting, the master had never ceased
+impressing upon White Fang the law that he must not fight.  As a
+result, having learned the lesson well, White Fang was hard put
+whenever he passed the cross-roads saloon.  After the first rush,
+each time, his snarl kept the three dogs at a distance but they
+trailed along behind, yelping and bickering and insulting him.
+This endured for some time.  The men at the saloon even urged the
+dogs on to attack White Fang.  One day they openly sicked the dogs
+on him.  The master stopped the carriage.
+
+"Go to it," he said to White Fang.
+
+But White Fang could not believe.  He looked at the master, and he
+looked at the dogs.  Then he looked back eagerly and questioningly
+at the master.
+
+The master nodded his head.  "Go to them, old fellow.  Eat them
+up."
+
+White Fang no longer hesitated.  He turned and leaped silently
+among his enemies.  All three faced him.  There was a great
+snarling and growling, a clashing of teeth and a flurry of bodies.
+The dust of the road arose in a cloud and screened the battle.  But
+at the end of several minutes two dogs were struggling in the dirt
+and the third was in full flight.  He leaped a ditch, went through
+a rail fence, and fled across a field.  White Fang followed,
+sliding over the ground in wolf fashion and with wolf speed,
+swiftly and without noise, and in the centre of the field he
+dragged down and slew the dog.
+
+With this triple killing his main troubles with dogs ceased.  The
+word went up and down the valley, and men saw to it that their dogs
+did not molest the Fighting Wolf.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV--THE CALL OF KIND
+
+
+
+The months came and went.  There was plenty of food and no work in
+the Southland, and White Fang lived fat and prosperous and happy.
+Not alone was he in the geographical Southland, for he was in the
+Southland of life.  Human kindness was like a sun shining upon him,
+and he flourished like a flower planted in good soil.
+
+And yet he remained somehow different from other dogs.  He knew the
+law even better than did the dogs that had known no other life, and
+he observed the law more punctiliously; but still there was about
+him a suggestion of lurking ferocity, as though the Wild still
+lingered in him and the wolf in him merely slept.
+
+He never chummed with other dogs.  Lonely he had lived, so far as
+his kind was concerned, and lonely he would continue to live.  In
+his puppyhood, under the persecution of Lip-lip and the puppy-pack,
+and in his fighting days with Beauty Smith, he had acquired a fixed
+aversion for dogs.  The natural course of his life had been
+diverted, and, recoiling from his kind, he had clung to the human.
+
+Besides, all Southland dogs looked upon him with suspicion.  He
+aroused in them their instinctive fear of the Wild, and they
+greeted him always with snarl and growl and belligerent hatred.
+He, on the other hand, learned that it was not necessary to use his
+teeth upon them.  His naked fangs and writhing lips were uniformly
+efficacious, rarely failing to send a bellowing on-rushing dog back
+on its haunches.
+
+But there was one trial in White Fang's life--Collie.  She never
+gave him a moment's peace.  She was not so amenable to the law as
+he.  She defied all efforts of the master to make her become
+friends with White Fang.  Ever in his ears was sounding her sharp
+and nervous snarl.  She had never forgiven him the chicken-killing
+episode, and persistently held to the belief that his intentions
+were bad.  She found him guilty before the act, and treated him
+accordingly.  She became a pest to him, like a policeman following
+him around the stable and the hounds, and, if he even so much as
+glanced curiously at a pigeon or chicken, bursting into an outcry
+of indignation and wrath.  His favourite way of ignoring her was to
+lie down, with his head on his fore-paws, and pretend sleep.  This
+always dumfounded and silenced her.
+
+With the exception of Collie, all things went well with White Fang.
+He had learned control and poise, and he knew the law.  He achieved
+a staidness, and calmness, and philosophic tolerance.  He no longer
+lived in a hostile environment.  Danger and hurt and death did not
+lurk everywhere about him.  In time, the unknown, as a thing of
+terror and menace ever impending, faded away.  Life was soft and
+easy.  It flowed along smoothly, and neither fear nor foe lurked by
+the way.
+
+He missed the snow without being aware of it.  "An unduly long
+summer," would have been his thought had he thought about it; as it
+was, he merely missed the snow in a vague, subconscious way.  In
+the same fashion, especially in the heat of summer when he suffered
+from the sun, he experienced faint longings for the Northland.
+Their only effect upon him, however, was to make him uneasy and
+restless without his knowing what was the matter.
+
+White Fang had never been very demonstrative.  Beyond his snuggling
+and the throwing of a crooning note into his love-growl, he had no
+way of expressing his love.  Yet it was given him to discover a
+third way.  He had always been susceptible to the laughter of the
+gods.  Laughter had affected him with madness, made him frantic
+with rage.  But he did not have it in him to be angry with the
+love-master, and when that god elected to laugh at him in a good-
+natured, bantering way, he was nonplussed.  He could feel the
+pricking and stinging of the old anger as it strove to rise up in
+him, but it strove against love.  He could not be angry; yet he had
+to do something.  At first he was dignified, and the master laughed
+the harder.  Then he tried to be more dignified, and the master
+laughed harder than before.  In the end, the master laughed him out
+of his dignity.  His jaws slightly parted, his lips lifted a
+little, and a quizzical expression that was more love than humour
+came into his eyes.  He had learned to laugh.
+
+Likewise he learned to romp with the master, to be tumbled down and
+rolled over, and be the victim of innumerable rough tricks.  In
+return he feigned anger, bristling and growling ferociously, and
+clipping his teeth together in snaps that had all the seeming of
+deadly intention.  But he never forgot himself.  Those snaps were
+always delivered on the empty air.  At the end of such a romp, when
+blow and cuff and snap and snarl were last and furious, they would
+break off suddenly and stand several feet apart, glaring at each
+other.  And then, just as suddenly, like the sun rising on a stormy
+sea, they would begin to laugh.  This would always culminate with
+the master's arms going around White Fang's neck and shoulders
+while the latter crooned and growled his love-song.
+
+But nobody else ever romped with White Fang.  He did not permit it.
+He stood on his dignity, and when they attempted it, his warning
+snarl and bristling mane were anything but playful.  That he
+allowed the master these liberties was no reason that he should be
+a common dog, loving here and loving there, everybody's property
+for a romp and good time.  He loved with single heart and refused
+to cheapen himself or his love.
+
+The master went out on horseback a great deal, and to accompany him
+was one of White Fang's chief duties in life.  In the Northland he
+had evidenced his fealty by toiling in the harness; but there were
+no sleds in the Southland, nor did dogs pack burdens on their
+backs.  So he rendered fealty in the new way, by running with the
+master's horse.  The longest day never played White Fang out.  His
+was the gait of the wolf, smooth, tireless and effortless, and at
+the end of fifty miles he would come in jauntily ahead of the
+horse.
+
+It was in connection with the riding, that White Fang achieved one
+other mode of expression--remarkable in that he did it but twice in
+all his life.  The first time occurred when the master was trying
+to teach a spirited thoroughbred the method of opening and closing
+gates without the rider's dismounting.  Time and again and many
+times he ranged the horse up to the gate in the effort to close it
+and each time the horse became frightened and backed and plunged
+away.  It grew more nervous and excited every moment.  When it
+reared, the master put the spurs to it and made it drop its fore-
+legs back to earth, whereupon it would begin kicking with its hind-
+legs.  White Fang watched the performance with increasing anxiety
+until he could contain himself no longer, when he sprang in front
+of the horse and barked savagely and warningly.
+
+Though he often tried to bark thereafter, and the master encouraged
+him, he succeeded only once, and then it was not in the master's
+presence.  A scamper across the pasture, a jackrabbit rising
+suddenly under the horse's feet, a violent sheer, a stumble, a fall
+to earth, and a broken leg for the master, was the cause of it.
+White Fang sprang in a rage at the throat of the offending horse,
+but was checked by the master's voice.
+
+"Home!  Go home!" the master commanded when he had ascertained his
+injury.
+
+White Fang was disinclined to desert him.  The master thought of
+writing a note, but searched his pockets vainly for pencil and
+paper.  Again he commanded White Fang to go home.
+
+The latter regarded him wistfully, started away, then returned and
+whined softly.  The master talked to him gently but seriously, and
+he cocked his ears, and listened with painful intentness.
+
+"That's all right, old fellow, you just run along home," ran the
+talk.  "Go on home and tell them what's happened to me.  Home with
+you, you wolf.  Get along home!"
+
+White Fang knew the meaning of "home," and though he did not
+understand the remainder of the master's language, he knew it was
+his will that he should go home.  He turned and trotted reluctantly
+away.  Then he stopped, undecided, and looked back over his
+shoulder.
+
+"Go home!" came the sharp command, and this time he obeyed.
+
+The family was on the porch, taking the cool of the afternoon, when
+White Fang arrived.  He came in among them, panting, covered with
+dust.
+
+"Weedon's back," Weedon's mother announced.
+
+The children welcomed White Fang with glad cries and ran to meet
+him.  He avoided them and passed down the porch, but they cornered
+him against a rocking-chair and the railing.  He growled and tried
+to push by them.  Their mother looked apprehensively in their
+direction.
+
+"I confess, he makes me nervous around the children," she said.  "I
+have a dread that he will turn upon them unexpectedly some day."
+
+Growling savagely, White Fang sprang out of the corner, overturning
+the boy and the girl.  The mother called them to her and comforted
+them, telling them not to bother White Fang.
+
+"A wolf is a wolf!" commented Judge Scott.  "There is no trusting
+one."
+
+"But he is not all wolf," interposed Beth, standing for her brother
+in his absence.
+
+"You have only Weedon's opinion for that," rejoined the judge.  "He
+merely surmises that there is some strain of dog in White Fang; but
+as he will tell you himself, he knows nothing about it.  As for his
+appearance--"
+
+He did not finish his sentence.  White Fang stood before him,
+growling fiercely.
+
+"Go away!  Lie down, sir!" Judge Scott commanded.
+
+White Fang turned to the love-master's wife.  She screamed with
+fright as he seized her dress in his teeth and dragged on it till
+the frail fabric tore away.  By this time he had become the centre
+of interest.
+
+He had ceased from his growling and stood, head up, looking into
+their faces.  His throat worked spasmodically, but made no sound,
+while he struggled with all his body, convulsed with the effort to
+rid himself of the incommunicable something that strained for
+utterance.
+
+"I hope he is not going mad," said Weedon's mother.  "I told Weedon
+that I was afraid the warm climate would not agree with an Arctic
+animal."
+
+"He's trying to speak, I do believe," Beth announced.
+
+At this moment speech came to White Fang, rushing up in a great
+burst of barking.
+
+"Something has happened to Weedon," his wife said decisively.
+
+They were all on their feet now, and White Fang ran down the steps,
+looking back for them to follow.  For the second and last time in
+his life he had barked and made himself understood.
+
+After this event he found a warmer place in the hearts of the
+Sierra Vista people, and even the groom whose arm he had slashed
+admitted that he was a wise dog even if he was a wolf.  Judge Scott
+still held to the same opinion, and proved it to everybody's
+dissatisfaction by measurements and descriptions taken from the
+encyclopaedia and various works on natural history.
+
+The days came and went, streaming their unbroken sunshine over the
+Santa Clara Valley.  But as they grew shorter and White Fang's
+second winter in the Southland came on, he made a strange
+discovery.  Collie's teeth were no longer sharp.  There was a
+playfulness about her nips and a gentleness that prevented them
+from really hurting him.  He forgot that she had made life a burden
+to him, and when she disported herself around him he responded
+solemnly, striving to be playful and becoming no more than
+ridiculous.
+
+One day she led him off on a long chase through the back-pasture
+land into the woods.  It was the afternoon that the master was to
+ride, and White Fang knew it.  The horse stood saddled and waiting
+at the door.  White Fang hesitated.  But there was that in him
+deeper than all the law he had learned, than the customs that had
+moulded him, than his love for the master, than the very will to
+live of himself; and when, in the moment of his indecision, Collie
+nipped him and scampered off, he turned and followed after.  The
+master rode alone that day; and in the woods, side by side, White
+Fang ran with Collie, as his mother, Kiche, and old One Eye had run
+long years before in the silent Northland forest.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V--THE SLEEPING WOLF
+
+
+
+It was about this time that the newspapers were full of the daring
+escape of a convict from San Quentin prison.  He was a ferocious
+man.  He had been ill-made in the making.  He had not been born
+right, and he had not been helped any by the moulding he had
+received at the hands of society.  The hands of society are harsh,
+and this man was a striking sample of its handiwork.  He was a
+beast--a human beast, it is true, but nevertheless so terrible a
+beast that he can best be characterised as carnivorous.
+
+In San Quentin prison he had proved incorrigible.  Punishment
+failed to break his spirit.  He could die dumb-mad and fighting to
+the last, but he could not live and be beaten.  The more fiercely
+he fought, the more harshly society handled him, and the only
+effect of harshness was to make him fiercer.  Straight-jackets,
+starvation, and beatings and clubbings were the wrong treatment for
+Jim Hall; but it was the treatment he received.  It was the
+treatment he had received from the time he was a little pulpy boy
+in a San Francisco slum--soft clay in the hands of society and
+ready to be formed into something.
+
+It was during Jim Hall's third term in prison that he encountered a
+guard that was almost as great a beast as he.  The guard treated
+him unfairly, lied about him to the warden, lost his credits,
+persecuted him.  The difference between them was that the guard
+carried a bunch of keys and a revolver.  Jim Hall had only his
+naked hands and his teeth.  But he sprang upon the guard one day
+and used his teeth on the other's throat just like any jungle
+animal.
+
+After this, Jim Hall went to live in the incorrigible cell.  He
+lived there three years.  The cell was of iron, the floor, the
+walls, the roof.  He never left this cell.  He never saw the sky
+nor the sunshine.  Day was a twilight and night was a black
+silence.  He was in an iron tomb, buried alive.  He saw no human
+face, spoke to no human thing.  When his food was shoved in to him,
+he growled like a wild animal.  He hated all things.  For days and
+nights he bellowed his rage at the universe.  For weeks and months
+he never made a sound, in the black silence eating his very soul.
+He was a man and a monstrosity, as fearful a thing of fear as ever
+gibbered in the visions of a maddened brain.
+
+And then, one night, he escaped.  The warders said it was
+impossible, but nevertheless the cell was empty, and half in half
+out of it lay the body of a dead guard.  Two other dead guards
+marked his trail through the prison to the outer walls, and he had
+killed with his hands to avoid noise.
+
+He was armed with the weapons of the slain guards--a live arsenal
+that fled through the hills pursued by the organised might of
+society.  A heavy price of gold was upon his head.  Avaricious
+farmers hunted him with shot-guns.  His blood might pay off a
+mortgage or send a son to college.  Public-spirited citizens took
+down their rifles and went out after him.  A pack of bloodhounds
+followed the way of his bleeding feet.  And the sleuth-hounds of
+the law, the paid fighting animals of society, with telephone, and
+telegraph, and special train, clung to his trail night and day.
+
+Sometimes they came upon him, and men faced him like heroes, or
+stampeded through barbed-wire fences to the delight of the
+commonwealth reading the account at the breakfast table.  It was
+after such encounters that the dead and wounded were carted back to
+the towns, and their places filled by men eager for the man-hunt.
+
+And then Jim Hall disappeared.  The bloodhounds vainly quested on
+the lost trail.  Inoffensive ranchers in remote valleys were held
+up by armed men and compelled to identify themselves.  While the
+remains of Jim Hall were discovered on a dozen mountain-sides by
+greedy claimants for blood-money.
+
+In the meantime the newspapers were read at Sierra Vista, not so
+much with interest as with anxiety.  The women were afraid.  Judge
+Scott pooh-poohed and laughed, but not with reason, for it was in
+his last days on the bench that Jim Hall had stood before him and
+received sentence.  And in open court-room, before all men, Jim
+Hall had proclaimed that the day would come when he would wreak
+vengeance on the Judge that sentenced him.
+
+For once, Jim Hall was right.  He was innocent of the crime for
+which he was sentenced.  It was a case, in the parlance of thieves
+and police, of "rail-roading."  Jim Hall was being "rail-roaded" to
+prison for a crime he had not committed.  Because of the two prior
+convictions against him, Judge Scott imposed upon him a sentence of
+fifty years.
+
+Judge Scott did not know all things, and he did not know that he
+was party to a police conspiracy, that the evidence was hatched and
+perjured, that Jim Hall was guiltless of the crime charged.  And
+Jim Hall, on the other hand, did not know that Judge Scott was
+merely ignorant.  Jim Hall believed that the judge knew all about
+it and was hand in glove with the police in the perpetration of the
+monstrous injustice.  So it was, when the doom of fifty years of
+living death was uttered by Judge Scott, that Jim Hall, hating all
+things in the society that misused him, rose up and raged in the
+court-room until dragged down by half a dozen of his blue-coated
+enemies.  To him, Judge Scott was the keystone in the arch of
+injustice, and upon Judge Scott he emptied the vials of his wrath
+and hurled the threats of his revenge yet to come.  Then Jim Hall
+went to his living death . . . and escaped.
+
+Of all this White Fang knew nothing.  But between him and Alice,
+the master's wife, there existed a secret.  Each night, after
+Sierra Vista had gone to bed, she rose and let in White Fang to
+sleep in the big hall.  Now White Fang was not a house-dog, nor was
+he permitted to sleep in the house; so each morning, early, she
+slipped down and let him out before the family was awake.
+
+On one such night, while all the house slept, White Fang awoke and
+lay very quietly.  And very quietly he smelled the air and read the
+message it bore of a strange god's presence.  And to his ears came
+sounds of the strange god's movements.  White Fang burst into no
+furious outcry.  It was not his way.  The strange god walked
+softly, but more softly walked White Fang, for he had no clothes to
+rub against the flesh of his body.  He followed silently.  In the
+Wild he had hunted live meat that was infinitely timid, and he knew
+the advantage of surprise.
+
+The strange god paused at the foot of the great staircase and
+listened, and White Fang was as dead, so without movement was he as
+he watched and waited.  Up that staircase the way led to the love-
+master and to the love-master's dearest possessions.  White Fang
+bristled, but waited.  The strange god's foot lifted.  He was
+beginning the ascent.
+
+Then it was that White Fang struck.  He gave no warning, with no
+snarl anticipated his own action.  Into the air he lifted his body
+in the spring that landed him on the strange god's back.  White
+Fang clung with his fore-paws to the man's shoulders, at the same
+time burying his fangs into the back of the man's neck.  He clung
+on for a moment, long enough to drag the god over backward.
+Together they crashed to the floor.  White Fang leaped clear, and,
+as the man struggled to rise, was in again with the slashing fangs.
+
+Sierra Vista awoke in alarm.  The noise from downstairs was as that
+of a score of battling fiends.  There were revolver shots.  A man's
+voice screamed once in horror and anguish.  There was a great
+snarling and growling, and over all arose a smashing and crashing
+of furniture and glass.
+
+But almost as quickly as it had arisen, the commotion died away.
+The struggle had not lasted more than three minutes.  The
+frightened household clustered at the top of the stairway.  From
+below, as from out an abyss of blackness, came up a gurgling sound,
+as of air bubbling through water.  Sometimes this gurgle became
+sibilant, almost a whistle.  But this, too, quickly died down and
+ceased.  Then naught came up out of the blackness save a heavy
+panting of some creature struggling sorely for air.
+
+Weedon Scott pressed a button, and the staircase and downstairs
+hall were flooded with light.  Then he and Judge Scott, revolvers
+in hand, cautiously descended.  There was no need for this caution.
+White Fang had done his work.  In the midst of the wreckage of
+overthrown and smashed furniture, partly on his side, his face
+hidden by an arm, lay a man.  Weedon Scott bent over, removed the
+arm and turned the man's face upward.  A gaping throat explained
+the manner of his death.
+
+"Jim Hall," said Judge Scott, and father and son looked
+significantly at each other.
+
+Then they turned to White Fang.  He, too, was lying on his side.
+His eyes were closed, but the lids slightly lifted in an effort to
+look at them as they bent over him, and the tail was perceptibly
+agitated in a vain effort to wag.  Weedon Scott patted him, and his
+throat rumbled an acknowledging growl.  But it was a weak growl at
+best, and it quickly ceased.  His eyelids drooped and went shut,
+and his whole body seemed to relax and flatten out upon the floor.
+
+"He's all in, poor devil," muttered the master.
+
+"We'll see about that," asserted the Judge, as he started for the
+telephone.
+
+"Frankly, he has one chance in a thousand," announced the surgeon,
+after he had worked an hour and a half on White Fang.
+
+Dawn was breaking through the windows and dimming the electric
+lights.  With the exception of the children, the whole family was
+gathered about the surgeon to hear his verdict.
+
+"One broken hind-leg," he went on.  "Three broken ribs, one at
+least of which has pierced the lungs.  He has lost nearly all the
+blood in his body.  There is a large likelihood of internal
+injuries.  He must have been jumped upon.  To say nothing of three
+bullet holes clear through him.  One chance in a thousand is really
+optimistic.  He hasn't a chance in ten thousand."
+
+"But he mustn't lose any chance that might be of help to him,"
+Judge Scott exclaimed.  "Never mind expense.  Put him under the X-
+ray--anything.  Weedon, telegraph at once to San Francisco for
+Doctor Nichols.  No reflection on you, doctor, you understand; but
+he must have the advantage of every chance."
+
+The surgeon smiled indulgently.  "Of course I understand.  He
+deserves all that can be done for him.  He must be nursed as you
+would nurse a human being, a sick child.  And don't forget what I
+told you about temperature.  I'll be back at ten o'clock again."
+
+White Fang received the nursing.  Judge Scott's suggestion of a
+trained nurse was indignantly clamoured down by the girls, who
+themselves undertook the task.  And White Fang won out on the one
+chance in ten thousand denied him by the surgeon.
+
+The latter was not to be censured for his misjudgment.  All his
+life he had tended and operated on the soft humans of civilisation,
+who lived sheltered lives and had descended out of many sheltered
+generations.  Compared with White Fang, they were frail and flabby,
+and clutched life without any strength in their grip.  White Fang
+had come straight from the Wild, where the weak perish early and
+shelter is vouchsafed to none.  In neither his father nor his
+mother was there any weakness, nor in the generations before them.
+A constitution of iron and the vitality of the Wild were White
+Fang's inheritance, and he clung to life, the whole of him and
+every part of him, in spirit and in flesh, with the tenacity that
+of old belonged to all creatures.
+
+Bound down a prisoner, denied even movement by the plaster casts
+and bandages, White Fang lingered out the weeks.  He slept long
+hours and dreamed much, and through his mind passed an unending
+pageant of Northland visions.  All the ghosts of the past arose and
+were with him.  Once again he lived in the lair with Kiche, crept
+trembling to the knees of Grey Beaver to tender his allegiance, ran
+for his life before Lip-lip and all the howling bedlam of the
+puppy-pack.
+
+He ran again through the silence, hunting his living food through
+the months of famine; and again he ran at the head of the team, the
+gut-whips of Mit-sah and Grey Beaver snapping behind, their voices
+crying "Ra! Raa!" when they came to a narrow passage and the team
+closed together like a fan to go through.  He lived again all his
+days with Beauty Smith and the fights he had fought.  At such times
+he whimpered and snarled in his sleep, and they that looked on said
+that his dreams were bad.
+
+But there was one particular nightmare from which he suffered--the
+clanking, clanging monsters of electric cars that were to him
+colossal screaming lynxes.  He would lie in a screen of bushes,
+watching for a squirrel to venture far enough out on the ground
+from its tree-refuge.  Then, when he sprang out upon it, it would
+transform itself into an electric car, menacing and terrible,
+towering over him like a mountain, screaming and clanging and
+spitting fire at him.  It was the same when he challenged the hawk
+down out of the sky.  Down out of the blue it would rush, as it
+dropped upon him changing itself into the ubiquitous electric car.
+Or again, he would be in the pen of Beauty Smith.  Outside the pen,
+men would be gathering, and he knew that a fight was on.  He
+watched the door for his antagonist to enter.  The door would open,
+and thrust in upon him would come the awful electric car.  A
+thousand times this occurred, and each time the terror it inspired
+was as vivid and great as ever.
+
+Then came the day when the last bandage and the last plaster cast
+were taken off.  It was a gala day.  All Sierra Vista was gathered
+around.  The master rubbed his ears, and he crooned his love-growl.
+The master's wife called him the "Blessed Wolf," which name was
+taken up with acclaim and all the women called him the Blessed
+Wolf.
+
+He tried to rise to his feet, and after several attempts fell down
+from weakness.  He had lain so long that his muscles had lost their
+cunning, and all the strength had gone out of them.  He felt a
+little shame because of his weakness, as though, forsooth, he were
+failing the gods in the service he owed them.  Because of this he
+made heroic efforts to arise and at last he stood on his four legs,
+tottering and swaying back and forth.
+
+"The Blessed Wolf!" chorused the women.
+
+Judge Scott surveyed them triumphantly.
+
+"Out of your own mouths be it," he said.  "Just as I contended
+right along.  No mere dog could have done what he did.  He's a
+wolf."
+
+"A Blessed Wolf," amended the Judge's wife.
+
+"Yes, Blessed Wolf," agreed the Judge.  "And henceforth that shall
+be my name for him."
+
+"He'll have to learn to walk again," said the surgeon; "so he might
+as well start in right now.  It won't hurt him.  Take him outside."
+
+And outside he went, like a king, with all Sierra Vista about him
+and tending on him.  He was very weak, and when he reached the lawn
+he lay down and rested for a while.
+
+Then the procession started on, little spurts of strength coming
+into White Fang's muscles as he used them and the blood began to
+surge through them.  The stables were reached, and there in the
+doorway, lay Collie, a half-dozen pudgy puppies playing about her
+in the sun.
+
+White Fang looked on with a wondering eye.  Collie snarled
+warningly at him, and he was careful to keep his distance.  The
+master with his toe helped one sprawling puppy toward him.  He
+bristled suspiciously, but the master warned him that all was well.
+Collie, clasped in the arms of one of the women, watched him
+jealously and with a snarl warned him that all was not well.
+
+The puppy sprawled in front of him.  He cocked his ears and watched
+it curiously.  Then their noses touched, and he felt the warm
+little tongue of the puppy on his jowl.  White Fang's tongue went
+out, he knew not why, and he licked the puppy's face.
+
+Hand-clapping and pleased cries from the gods greeted the
+performance.  He was surprised, and looked at them in a puzzled
+way.  Then his weakness asserted itself, and he lay down, his ears
+cocked, his head on one side, as he watched the puppy.  The other
+puppies came sprawling toward him, to Collie's great disgust; and
+he gravely permitted them to clamber and tumble over him.  At
+first, amid the applause of the gods, he betrayed a trifle of his
+old self-consciousness and awkwardness.  This passed away as the
+puppies' antics and mauling continued, and he lay with half-shut
+patient eyes, drowsing in the sun.
+
+
+
+
+*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK, WHITE FANG ***
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+<head>
+<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=US-ASCII" />
+<title>White Fang</title>
+</head>
+<body>
+<h2>
+<a href="#startoftext">White Fang, by Jack London</a>
+</h2>
+<pre>
+The Project Gutenberg EBook of White Fang, by Jack London
+(#7 in our series by Jack London)
+
+Copyright laws are changing all over the world. Be sure to check the
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+**Welcome To The World of Free Plain Vanilla Electronic Texts**
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+**eBooks Readable By Both Humans and By Computers, Since 1971**
+
+*****These eBooks Were Prepared By Thousands of Volunteers!*****
+
+
+Title: White Fang
+
+Author: Jack London
+
+Release Date: May, 1997  [EBook #910]
+[This file was first posted on May 13, 1997]
+[Most recently updated: May 12, 2003]
+
+Edition: 10
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: US-ASCII
+</pre>
+<p><a name="startoftext"></a></p>
+<p>Transcribed from the 1915 edition by David Price,
+email ccx074@coventry.ac.uk</p>
+<div class="GutenbergBlankLines3"><br /><br /><br /></div>
+<h1>White Fang</h1>
+<div class="GutenbergBlankLines3"><br /><br /><br /></div>
+<h2>PART I</h2>
+<div class="GutenbergBlankLines3"><br /><br /><br /></div>
+<h3>CHAPTER I&mdash;THE TRAIL OF THE MEAT</h3>
+<div class="GutenbergBlankLines2"><br /><br /></div>
+<p>Dark spruce forest frowned on either side the frozen waterway.&nbsp;
+The trees had been stripped by a recent wind of their white covering
+of frost, and they seemed to lean towards each other, black and ominous,
+in the fading light.&nbsp; A vast silence reigned over the land.&nbsp;
+The land itself was a desolation, lifeless, without movement, so lone
+and cold that the spirit of it was not even that of sadness.&nbsp; There
+was a hint in it of laughter, but of a laughter more terrible than any
+sadness&mdash;a laughter that was mirthless as the smile of the sphinx,
+a laughter cold as the frost and partaking of the grimness of infallibility.&nbsp;
+It was the masterful and incommunicable wisdom of eternity laughing
+at the futility of life and the effort of life.&nbsp; It was the Wild,
+the savage, frozen-hearted Northland Wild.</p>
+<p>But there <i>was</i> life, abroad in the land and defiant.&nbsp;
+Down the frozen waterway toiled a string of wolfish dogs.&nbsp; Their
+bristly fur was rimed with frost.&nbsp; Their breath froze in the air
+as it left their mouths, spouting forth in spumes of vapour that settled
+upon the hair of their bodies and formed into crystals of frost.&nbsp;
+Leather harness was on the dogs, and leather traces attached them to
+a sled which dragged along behind.&nbsp; The sled was without runners.&nbsp;
+It was made of stout birch-bark, and its full surface rested on the
+snow.&nbsp; The front end of the sled was turned up, like a scroll,
+in order to force down and under the bore of soft snow that surged like
+a wave before it.&nbsp; On the sled, securely lashed, was a long and
+narrow oblong box.&nbsp; There were other things on the sled&mdash;blankets,
+an axe, and a coffee-pot and frying-pan; but prominent, occupying most
+of the space, was the long and narrow oblong box.</p>
+<p>In advance of the dogs, on wide snowshoes, toiled a man.&nbsp; At
+the rear of the sled toiled a second man.&nbsp; On the sled, in the
+box, lay a third man whose toil was over,&mdash;a man whom the Wild
+had conquered and beaten down until he would never move nor struggle
+again.&nbsp; It is not the way of the Wild to like movement.&nbsp; Life
+is an offence to it, for life is movement; and the Wild aims always
+to destroy movement.&nbsp; It freezes the water to prevent it running
+to the sea; it drives the sap out of the trees till they are frozen
+to their mighty hearts; and most ferociously and terribly of all does
+the Wild harry and crush into submission man&mdash;man who is the most
+restless of life, ever in revolt against the dictum that all movement
+must in the end come to the cessation of movement.</p>
+<p>But at front and rear, unawed and indomitable, toiled the two men
+who were not yet dead.&nbsp; Their bodies were covered with fur and
+soft-tanned leather.&nbsp; Eyelashes and cheeks and lips were so coated
+with the crystals from their frozen breath that their faces were not
+discernible.&nbsp; This gave them the seeming of ghostly masques, undertakers
+in a spectral world at the funeral of some ghost.&nbsp; But under it
+all they were men, penetrating the land of desolation and mockery and
+silence, puny adventurers bent on colossal adventure, pitting themselves
+against the might of a world as remote and alien and pulseless as the
+abysses of space.</p>
+<p>They travelled on without speech, saving their breath for the work
+of their bodies.&nbsp; On every side was the silence, pressing upon
+them with a tangible presence.&nbsp; It affected their minds as the
+many atmospheres of deep water affect the body of the diver.&nbsp; It
+crushed them with the weight of unending vastness and unalterable decree.&nbsp;
+It crushed them into the remotest recesses of their own minds, pressing
+out of them, like juices from the grape, all the false ardours and exaltations
+and undue self-values of the human soul, until they perceived themselves
+finite and small, specks and motes, moving with weak cunning and little
+wisdom amidst the play and inter-play of the great blind elements and
+forces.</p>
+<p>An hour went by, and a second hour.&nbsp; The pale light of the short
+sunless day was beginning to fade, when a faint far cry arose on the
+still air.&nbsp; It soared upward with a swift rush, till it reached
+its topmost note, where it persisted, palpitant and tense, and then
+slowly died away.&nbsp; It might have been a lost soul wailing, had
+it not been invested with a certain sad fierceness and hungry eagerness.&nbsp;
+The front man turned his head until his eyes met the eyes of the man
+behind.&nbsp; And then, across the narrow oblong box, each nodded to
+the other.</p>
+<p>A second cry arose, piercing the silence with needle-like shrillness.&nbsp;
+Both men located the sound.&nbsp; It was to the rear, somewhere in the
+snow expanse they had just traversed.&nbsp; A third and answering cry
+arose, also to the rear and to the left of the second cry.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;They&rsquo;re after us, Bill,&rdquo; said the man at the front.</p>
+<p>His voice sounded hoarse and unreal, and he had spoken with apparent
+effort.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Meat is scarce,&rdquo; answered his comrade.&nbsp; &ldquo;I
+ain&rsquo;t seen a rabbit sign for days.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Thereafter they spoke no more, though their ears were keen for the
+hunting-cries that continued to rise behind them.</p>
+<p>At the fall of darkness they swung the dogs into a cluster of spruce
+trees on the edge of the waterway and made a camp.&nbsp; The coffin,
+at the side of the fire, served for seat and table.&nbsp; The wolf-dogs,
+clustered on the far side of the fire, snarled and bickered among themselves,
+but evinced no inclination to stray off into the darkness.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Seems to me, Henry, they&rsquo;re stayin&rsquo; remarkable
+close to camp,&rdquo; Bill commented.</p>
+<p>Henry, squatting over the fire and settling the pot of coffee with
+a piece of ice, nodded.&nbsp; Nor did he speak till he had taken his
+seat on the coffin and begun to eat.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;They know where their hides is safe,&rdquo; he said.&nbsp;
+&ldquo;They&rsquo;d sooner eat grub than be grub.&nbsp; They&rsquo;re
+pretty wise, them dogs.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Bill shook his head.&nbsp; &ldquo;Oh, I don&rsquo;t know.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>His comrade looked at him curiously.&nbsp; &ldquo;First time I ever
+heard you say anything about their not bein&rsquo; wise.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Henry,&rdquo; said the other, munching with deliberation the
+beans he was eating, &ldquo;did you happen to notice the way them dogs
+kicked up when I was a-feedin&rsquo; &rsquo;em?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;They did cut up more&rsquo;n usual,&rdquo; Henry acknowledged.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;How many dogs &rsquo;ve we got, Henry?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Six.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Well, Henry . . . &rdquo; Bill stopped for a moment, in order
+that his words might gain greater significance.&nbsp; &ldquo;As I was
+sayin&rsquo;, Henry, we&rsquo;ve got six dogs.&nbsp; I took six fish
+out of the bag.&nbsp; I gave one fish to each dog, an&rsquo;, Henry,
+I was one fish short.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;You counted wrong.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;We&rsquo;ve got six dogs,&rdquo; the other reiterated dispassionately.&nbsp;
+&ldquo;I took out six fish.&nbsp; One Ear didn&rsquo;t get no fish.&nbsp;
+I came back to the bag afterward an&rsquo; got &rsquo;m his fish.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;We&rsquo;ve only got six dogs,&rdquo; Henry said.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Henry,&rdquo; Bill went on.&nbsp; &ldquo;I won&rsquo;t say
+they was all dogs, but there was seven of &rsquo;m that got fish.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Henry stopped eating to glance across the fire and count the dogs.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;There&rsquo;s only six now,&rdquo; he said.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I saw the other one run off across the snow,&rdquo; Bill announced
+with cool positiveness.&nbsp; &ldquo;I saw seven.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Henry looked at him commiseratingly, and said, &ldquo;I&rsquo;ll
+be almighty glad when this trip&rsquo;s over.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;What d&rsquo;ye mean by that?&rdquo; Bill demanded.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I mean that this load of ourn is gettin&rsquo; on your nerves,
+an&rsquo; that you&rsquo;re beginnin&rsquo; to see things.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I thought of that,&rdquo; Bill answered gravely.&nbsp; &ldquo;An&rsquo;
+so, when I saw it run off across the snow, I looked in the snow an&rsquo;
+saw its tracks.&nbsp; Then I counted the dogs an&rsquo; there was still
+six of &rsquo;em.&nbsp; The tracks is there in the snow now.&nbsp; D&rsquo;ye
+want to look at &rsquo;em?&nbsp; I&rsquo;ll show &rsquo;em to you.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Henry did not reply, but munched on in silence, until, the meal finished,
+he topped it with a final cup a of coffee.&nbsp; He wiped his mouth
+with the back of his hand and said:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Then you&rsquo;re thinkin&rsquo; as it was&mdash;&rdquo;</p>
+<p>A long wailing cry, fiercely sad, from somewhere in the darkness,
+had interrupted him.&nbsp; He stopped to listen to it, then he finished
+his sentence with a wave of his hand toward the sound of the cry, &ldquo;&mdash;one
+of them?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Bill nodded.&nbsp; &ldquo;I&rsquo;d a blame sight sooner think that
+than anything else.&nbsp; You noticed yourself the row the dogs made.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Cry after cry, and answering cries, were turning the silence into
+a bedlam.&nbsp; From every side the cries arose, and the dogs betrayed
+their fear by huddling together and so close to the fire that their
+hair was scorched by the heat.&nbsp; Bill threw on more wood, before
+lighting his pipe.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I&rsquo;m thinking you&rsquo;re down in the mouth some,&rdquo;
+Henry said.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Henry . . . &rdquo;&nbsp; He sucked meditatively at his pipe
+for some time before he went on.&nbsp; &ldquo;Henry, I was a-thinkin&rsquo;
+what a blame sight luckier he is than you an&rsquo; me&rsquo;ll ever
+be.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>He indicated the third person by a downward thrust of the thumb to
+the box on which they sat.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;You an&rsquo; me, Henry, when we die, we&rsquo;ll be lucky
+if we get enough stones over our carcases to keep the dogs off of us.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;But we ain&rsquo;t got people an&rsquo; money an&rsquo; all
+the rest, like him,&rdquo; Henry rejoined.&nbsp; &ldquo;Long-distance
+funerals is somethin&rsquo; you an&rsquo; me can&rsquo;t exactly afford.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;What gets me, Henry, is what a chap like this, that&rsquo;s
+a lord or something in his own country, and that&rsquo;s never had to
+bother about grub nor blankets; why he comes a-buttin&rsquo; round the
+Godforsaken ends of the earth&mdash;that&rsquo;s what I can&rsquo;t
+exactly see.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;He might have lived to a ripe old age if he&rsquo;d stayed
+at home,&rdquo; Henry agreed.</p>
+<p>Bill opened his mouth to speak, but changed his mind.&nbsp; Instead,
+he pointed towards the wall of darkness that pressed about them from
+every side.&nbsp; There was no suggestion of form in the utter blackness;
+only could be seen a pair of eyes gleaming like live coals.&nbsp; Henry
+indicated with his head a second pair, and a third.&nbsp; A circle of
+the gleaming eyes had drawn about their camp.&nbsp; Now and again a
+pair of eyes moved, or disappeared to appear again a moment later.</p>
+<p>The unrest of the dogs had been increasing, and they stampeded, in
+a surge of sudden fear, to the near side of the fire, cringing and crawling
+about the legs of the men.&nbsp; In the scramble one of the dogs had
+been overturned on the edge of the fire, and it had yelped with pain
+and fright as the smell of its singed coat possessed the air.&nbsp;
+The commotion caused the circle of eyes to shift restlessly for a moment
+and even to withdraw a bit, but it settled down again as the dogs became
+quiet.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Henry, it&rsquo;s a blame misfortune to be out of ammunition.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Bill had finished his pipe and was helping his companion to spread
+the bed of fur and blanket upon the spruce boughs which he had laid
+over the snow before supper.&nbsp; Henry grunted, and began unlacing
+his mocassins.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;How many cartridges did you say you had left?&rdquo; he asked.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Three,&rdquo; came the answer.&nbsp; &ldquo;An&rsquo; I wisht
+&rsquo;twas three hundred.&nbsp; Then I&rsquo;d show &rsquo;em what
+for, damn &rsquo;em!&rdquo;</p>
+<p>He shook his fist angrily at the gleaming eyes, and began securely
+to prop his moccasins before the fire.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;An&rsquo; I wisht this cold snap&rsquo;d break,&rdquo; he
+went on.&nbsp; &ldquo;It&rsquo;s ben fifty below for two weeks now.&nbsp;
+An&rsquo; I wisht I&rsquo;d never started on this trip, Henry.&nbsp;
+I don&rsquo;t like the looks of it.&nbsp; I don&rsquo;t feel right,
+somehow.&nbsp; An&rsquo; while I&rsquo;m wishin&rsquo;, I wisht the
+trip was over an&rsquo; done with, an&rsquo; you an&rsquo; me a-sittin&rsquo;
+by the fire in Fort McGurry just about now an&rsquo; playing cribbage&mdash;that&rsquo;s
+what I wisht.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Henry grunted and crawled into bed.&nbsp; As he dozed off he was
+aroused by his comrade&rsquo;s voice.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Say, Henry, that other one that come in an&rsquo; got a fish&mdash;why
+didn&rsquo;t the dogs pitch into it?&nbsp; That&rsquo;s what&rsquo;s
+botherin&rsquo; me.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;You&rsquo;re botherin&rsquo; too much, Bill,&rdquo; came the
+sleepy response.&nbsp; &ldquo;You was never like this before.&nbsp;
+You jes&rsquo; shut up now, an&rsquo; go to sleep, an&rsquo; you&rsquo;ll
+be all hunkydory in the mornin&rsquo;.&nbsp; Your stomach&rsquo;s sour,
+that&rsquo;s what&rsquo;s botherin&rsquo; you.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>The men slept, breathing heavily, side by side, under the one covering.&nbsp;
+The fire died down, and the gleaming eyes drew closer the circle they
+had flung about the camp.&nbsp; The dogs clustered together in fear,
+now and again snarling menacingly as a pair of eyes drew close.&nbsp;
+Once their uproar became so loud that Bill woke up.&nbsp; He got out
+of bed carefully, so as not to disturb the sleep of his comrade, and
+threw more wood on the fire.&nbsp; As it began to flame up, the circle
+of eyes drew farther back.&nbsp; He glanced casually at the huddling
+dogs.&nbsp; He rubbed his eyes and looked at them more sharply.&nbsp;
+Then he crawled back into the blankets.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Henry,&rdquo; he said.&nbsp; &ldquo;Oh, Henry.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Henry groaned as he passed from sleep to waking, and demanded, &ldquo;What&rsquo;s
+wrong now?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Nothin&rsquo;,&rdquo; came the answer; &ldquo;only there&rsquo;s
+seven of &rsquo;em again.&nbsp; I just counted.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Henry acknowledged receipt of the information with a grunt that slid
+into a snore as he drifted back into sleep.</p>
+<p>In the morning it was Henry who awoke first and routed his companion
+out of bed.&nbsp; Daylight was yet three hours away, though it was already
+six o&rsquo;clock; and in the darkness Henry went about preparing breakfast,
+while Bill rolled the blankets and made the sled ready for lashing.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Say, Henry,&rdquo; he asked suddenly, &ldquo;how many dogs
+did you say we had?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Six.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Wrong,&rdquo; Bill proclaimed triumphantly.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Seven again?&rdquo; Henry queried.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;No, five; one&rsquo;s gone.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;The hell!&rdquo;&nbsp; Henry cried in wrath, leaving the cooking
+to come and count the dogs.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;You&rsquo;re right, Bill,&rdquo; he concluded.&nbsp; &ldquo;Fatty&rsquo;s
+gone.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;An&rsquo; he went like greased lightnin&rsquo; once he got
+started.&nbsp; Couldn&rsquo;t &rsquo;ve seen &rsquo;m for smoke.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;No chance at all,&rdquo; Henry concluded.&nbsp; &ldquo;They
+jes&rsquo; swallowed &rsquo;m alive.&nbsp; I bet he was yelpin&rsquo;
+as he went down their throats, damn &rsquo;em!&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;He always was a fool dog,&rdquo; said Bill.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;But no fool dog ought to be fool enough to go off an&rsquo;
+commit suicide that way.&rdquo;&nbsp; He looked over the remainder of
+the team with a speculative eye that summed up instantly the salient
+traits of each animal.&nbsp; &ldquo;I bet none of the others would do
+it.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Couldn&rsquo;t drive &rsquo;em away from the fire with a club,&rdquo;
+Bill agreed.&nbsp; &ldquo;I always did think there was somethin&rsquo;
+wrong with Fatty anyway.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>And this was the epitaph of a dead dog on the Northland trail&mdash;less
+scant than the epitaph of many another dog, of many a man.</p>
+<div class="GutenbergBlankLines2"><br /><br /></div>
+<h3>CHAPTER II&mdash;THE SHE-WOLF</h3>
+<div class="GutenbergBlankLines2"><br /><br /></div>
+<p>Breakfast eaten and the slim camp-outfit lashed to the sled, the
+men turned their backs on the cheery fire and launched out into the
+darkness.&nbsp; At once began to rise the cries that were fiercely sad&mdash;cries
+that called through the darkness and cold to one another and answered
+back.&nbsp; Conversation ceased.&nbsp; Daylight came at nine o&rsquo;clock.&nbsp;
+At midday the sky to the south warmed to rose-colour, and marked where
+the bulge of the earth intervened between the meridian sun and the northern
+world.&nbsp; But the rose-colour swiftly faded.&nbsp; The grey light
+of day that remained lasted until three o&rsquo;clock, when it, too,
+faded, and the pall of the Arctic night descended upon the lone and
+silent land.</p>
+<p>As darkness came on, the hunting-cries to right and left and rear
+drew closer&mdash;so close that more than once they sent surges of fear
+through the toiling dogs, throwing them into short-lived panics.</p>
+<p>At the conclusion of one such panic, when he and Henry had got the
+dogs back in the traces, Bill said:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I wisht they&rsquo;d strike game somewheres, an&rsquo; go
+away an&rsquo; leave us alone.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;They do get on the nerves horrible,&rdquo;&nbsp; Henry sympathised.</p>
+<p>They spoke no more until camp was made.</p>
+<p>Henry was bending over and adding ice to the babbling pot of beans
+when he was startled by the sound of a blow, an exclamation from Bill,
+and a sharp snarling cry of pain from among the dogs.&nbsp; He straightened
+up in time to see a dim form disappearing across the snow into the shelter
+of the dark.&nbsp; Then he saw Bill, standing amid the dogs, half triumphant,
+half crestfallen, in one hand a stout club, in the other the tail and
+part of the body of a sun-cured salmon.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;It got half of it,&rdquo; he announced; &ldquo;but I got a
+whack at it jes&rsquo; the same.&nbsp; D&rsquo;ye hear it squeal?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;What&rsquo;d it look like?&rdquo; Henry asked.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Couldn&rsquo;t see.&nbsp; But it had four legs an&rsquo; a
+mouth an&rsquo; hair an&rsquo; looked like any dog.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Must be a tame wolf, I reckon.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;It&rsquo;s damned tame, whatever it is, comin&rsquo; in here
+at feedin&rsquo; time an&rsquo; gettin&rsquo; its whack of fish.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>That night, when supper was finished and they sat on the oblong box
+and pulled at their pipes, the circle of gleaming eyes drew in even
+closer than before.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I wisht they&rsquo;d spring up a bunch of moose or something,
+an&rsquo; go away an&rsquo; leave us alone,&rdquo; Bill said.</p>
+<p>Henry grunted with an intonation that was not all sympathy, and for
+a quarter of an hour they sat on in silence, Henry staring at the fire,
+and Bill at the circle of eyes that burned in the darkness just beyond
+the firelight.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I wisht we was pullin&rsquo; into McGurry right now,&rdquo;
+he began again.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Shut up your wishin&rsquo; and your croakin&rsquo;,&rdquo;
+Henry burst out angrily.&nbsp; &ldquo;Your stomach&rsquo;s sour.&nbsp;
+That&rsquo;s what&rsquo;s ailin&rsquo; you.&nbsp; Swallow a spoonful
+of sody, an&rsquo; you&rsquo;ll sweeten up wonderful an&rsquo; be more
+pleasant company.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>In the morning Henry was aroused by fervid blasphemy that proceeded
+from the mouth of Bill.&nbsp; Henry propped himself up on an elbow and
+looked to see his comrade standing among the dogs beside the replenished
+fire, his arms raised in objurgation, his face distorted with passion.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Hello!&rdquo; Henry called.&nbsp; &ldquo;What&rsquo;s up now?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Frog&rsquo;s gone,&rdquo; came the answer.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;No.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I tell you yes.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Henry leaped out of the blankets and to the dogs.&nbsp; He counted
+them with care, and then joined his partner in cursing the power of
+the Wild that had robbed them of another dog.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Frog was the strongest dog of the bunch,&rdquo; Bill pronounced
+finally.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;An&rsquo; he was no fool dog neither,&rdquo; Henry added.</p>
+<p>And so was recorded the second epitaph in two days.</p>
+<p>A gloomy breakfast was eaten, and the four remaining dogs were harnessed
+to the sled.&nbsp; The day was a repetition of the days that had gone
+before.&nbsp; The men toiled without speech across the face of the frozen
+world.&nbsp; The silence was unbroken save by the cries of their pursuers,
+that, unseen, hung upon their rear.&nbsp; With the coming of night in
+the mid-afternoon, the cries sounded closer as the pursuers drew in
+according to their custom; and the dogs grew excited and frightened,
+and were guilty of panics that tangled the traces and further depressed
+the two men.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;There, that&rsquo;ll fix you fool critters,&rdquo; Bill said
+with satisfaction that night, standing erect at completion of his task.</p>
+<p>Henry left the cooking to come and see.&nbsp; Not only had his partner
+tied the dogs up, but he had tied them, after the Indian fashion, with
+sticks.&nbsp; About the neck of each dog he had fastened a leather thong.&nbsp;
+To this, and so close to the neck that the dog could not get his teeth
+to it, he had tied a stout stick four or five feet in length.&nbsp;
+The other end of the stick, in turn, was made fast to a stake in the
+ground by means of a leather thong.&nbsp; The dog was unable to gnaw
+through the leather at his own end of the stick.&nbsp; The stick prevented
+him from getting at the leather that fastened the other end.</p>
+<p>Henry nodded his head approvingly.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;It&rsquo;s the only contraption that&rsquo;ll ever hold One
+Ear,&rdquo; he said.&nbsp; &ldquo;He can gnaw through leather as clean
+as a knife an&rsquo; jes&rsquo; about half as quick.&nbsp; They all&rsquo;ll
+be here in the mornin&rsquo; hunkydory.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;You jes&rsquo; bet they will,&rdquo; Bill affirmed.&nbsp;
+&ldquo;If one of em&rsquo; turns up missin&rsquo;, I&rsquo;ll go without
+my coffee.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;They jes&rsquo; know we ain&rsquo;t loaded to kill,&rdquo;
+Henry remarked at bed-time, indicating the gleaming circle that hemmed
+them in.&nbsp; &ldquo;If we could put a couple of shots into &rsquo;em,
+they&rsquo;d be more respectful.&nbsp; They come closer every night.&nbsp;
+Get the firelight out of your eyes an&rsquo; look hard&mdash;there!&nbsp;
+Did you see that one?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>For some time the two men amused themselves with watching the movement
+of vague forms on the edge of the firelight.&nbsp; By looking closely
+and steadily at where a pair of eyes burned in the darkness, the form
+of the animal would slowly take shape.&nbsp; They could even see these
+forms move at times.</p>
+<p>A sound among the dogs attracted the men&rsquo;s attention.&nbsp;
+One Ear was uttering quick, eager whines, lunging at the length of his
+stick toward the darkness, and desisting now and again in order to make
+frantic attacks on the stick with his teeth.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Look at that, Bill,&rdquo; Henry whispered.</p>
+<p>Full into the firelight, with a stealthy, sidelong movement, glided
+a doglike animal.&nbsp; It moved with commingled mistrust and daring,
+cautiously observing the men, its attention fixed on the dogs.&nbsp;
+One Ear strained the full length of the stick toward the intruder and
+whined with eagerness.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;That fool One Ear don&rsquo;t seem scairt much,&rdquo; Bill
+said in a low tone.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;It&rsquo;s a she-wolf,&rdquo; Henry whispered back, &ldquo;an&rsquo;
+that accounts for Fatty an&rsquo; Frog.&nbsp; She&rsquo;s the decoy
+for the pack.&nbsp; She draws out the dog an&rsquo; then all the rest
+pitches in an&rsquo; eats &rsquo;m up.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>The fire crackled.&nbsp; A log fell apart with a loud spluttering
+noise.&nbsp; At the sound of it the strange animal leaped back into
+the darkness.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Henry, I&rsquo;m a-thinkin&rsquo;,&rdquo; Bill announced.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Thinkin&rsquo; what?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I&rsquo;m a-thinkin&rsquo; that was the one I lambasted with
+the club.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Ain&rsquo;t the slightest doubt in the world,&rdquo; was Henry&rsquo;s
+response.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;An&rsquo; right here I want to remark,&rdquo; Bill went on,
+&ldquo;that that animal&rsquo;s familyarity with campfires is suspicious
+an&rsquo; immoral.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;It knows for certain more&rsquo;n a self-respectin&rsquo;
+wolf ought to know,&rdquo; Henry agreed.&nbsp; &ldquo;A wolf that knows
+enough to come in with the dogs at feedin&rsquo; time has had experiences.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Ol&rsquo; Villan had a dog once that run away with the wolves,&rdquo;
+Bill cogitates aloud.&nbsp; &ldquo;I ought to know.&nbsp; I shot it
+out of the pack in a moose pasture over &lsquo;on Little Stick.&nbsp;
+An&rsquo; Ol&rsquo; Villan cried like a baby.&nbsp; Hadn&rsquo;t seen
+it for three years, he said.&nbsp; Ben with the wolves all that time.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I reckon you&rsquo;ve called the turn, Bill.&nbsp; That wolf&rsquo;s
+a dog, an&rsquo; it&rsquo;s eaten fish many&rsquo;s the time from the
+hand of man.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;An if I get a chance at it, that wolf that&rsquo;s a dog&rsquo;ll
+be jes&rsquo; meat,&rdquo; Bill declared.&nbsp; &ldquo;We can&rsquo;t
+afford to lose no more animals.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;But you&rsquo;ve only got three cartridges,&rdquo; Henry objected.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I&rsquo;ll wait for a dead sure shot,&rdquo; was the reply.</p>
+<p>In the morning Henry renewed the fire and cooked breakfast to the
+accompaniment of his partner&rsquo;s snoring.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;You was sleepin&rsquo; jes&rsquo; too comfortable for anything,&rdquo;
+Henry told him, as he routed him out for breakfast.&nbsp; &ldquo;I hadn&rsquo;t
+the heart to rouse you.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Bill began to eat sleepily.&nbsp; He noticed that his cup was empty
+and started to reach for the pot.&nbsp; But the pot was beyond arm&rsquo;s
+length and beside Henry.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Say, Henry,&rdquo; he chided gently, &ldquo;ain&rsquo;t you
+forgot somethin&rsquo;?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Henry looked about with great carefulness and shook his head.&nbsp;
+Bill held up the empty cup.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;You don&rsquo;t get no coffee,&rdquo; Henry announced.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Ain&rsquo;t run out?&rdquo; Bill asked anxiously.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Nope.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Ain&rsquo;t thinkin&rsquo; it&rsquo;ll hurt my digestion?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Nope.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>A flush of angry blood pervaded Bill&rsquo;s face.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Then it&rsquo;s jes&rsquo; warm an&rsquo; anxious I am to
+be hearin&rsquo; you explain yourself,&rdquo; he said.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Spanker&rsquo;s gone,&rdquo; Henry answered.</p>
+<p>Without haste, with the air of one resigned to misfortune Bill turned
+his head, and from where he sat counted the dogs.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;How&rsquo;d it happen?&rdquo; he asked apathetically.</p>
+<p>Henry shrugged his shoulders.&nbsp; &ldquo;Don&rsquo;t know.&nbsp;
+Unless One Ear gnawed &rsquo;m loose.&nbsp; He couldn&rsquo;t a-done
+it himself, that&rsquo;s sure.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;The darned cuss.&rdquo;&nbsp; Bill spoke gravely and slowly,
+with no hint of the anger that was raging within.&nbsp; &ldquo;Jes&rsquo;
+because he couldn&rsquo;t chew himself loose, he chews Spanker loose.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Well, Spanker&rsquo;s troubles is over anyway; I guess he&rsquo;s
+digested by this time an&rsquo; cavortin&rsquo; over the landscape in
+the bellies of twenty different wolves,&rdquo; was Henry&rsquo;s epitaph
+on this, the latest lost dog.&nbsp; &ldquo;Have some coffee, Bill.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>But Bill shook his head.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Go on,&rdquo; Henry pleaded, elevating the pot.</p>
+<p>Bill shoved his cup aside.&nbsp; &ldquo;I&rsquo;ll be ding-dong-danged
+if I do.&nbsp; I said I wouldn&rsquo;t if ary dog turned up missin&rsquo;,
+an&rsquo; I won&rsquo;t.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;It&rsquo;s darn good coffee,&rdquo; Henry said enticingly.</p>
+<p>But Bill was stubborn, and he ate a dry breakfast washed down with
+mumbled curses at One Ear for the trick he had played.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I&rsquo;ll tie &rsquo;em up out of reach of each other to-night,&rdquo;
+Bill said, as they took the trail.</p>
+<p>They had travelled little more than a hundred yards, when Henry,
+who was in front, bent down and picked up something with which his snowshoe
+had collided.&nbsp; It was dark, and he could not see it, but he recognised
+it by the touch.&nbsp; He flung it back, so that it struck the sled
+and bounced along until it fetched up on Bill&rsquo;s snowshoes.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Mebbe you&rsquo;ll need that in your business,&rdquo; Henry
+said.</p>
+<p>Bill uttered an exclamation.&nbsp; It was all that was left of Spanker&mdash;the
+stick with which he had been tied.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;They ate &rsquo;m hide an&rsquo; all,&rdquo; Bill announced.&nbsp;
+&ldquo;The stick&rsquo;s as clean as a whistle.&nbsp; They&rsquo;ve
+ate the leather offen both ends.&nbsp; They&rsquo;re damn hungry, Henry,
+an&rsquo; they&rsquo;ll have you an&rsquo; me guessin&rsquo; before
+this trip&rsquo;s over.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Henry laughed defiantly.&nbsp; &ldquo;I ain&rsquo;t been trailed
+this way by wolves before, but I&rsquo;ve gone through a whole lot worse
+an&rsquo; kept my health.&nbsp; Takes more&rsquo;n a handful of them
+pesky critters to do for yours truly, Bill, my son.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I don&rsquo;t know, I don&rsquo;t know,&rdquo; Bill muttered
+ominously.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Well, you&rsquo;ll know all right when we pull into McGurry.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I ain&rsquo;t feelin&rsquo; special enthusiastic,&rdquo; Bill
+persisted.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;You&rsquo;re off colour, that&rsquo;s what&rsquo;s the matter
+with you,&rdquo; Henry dogmatised.&nbsp; &ldquo;What you need is quinine,
+an&rsquo; I&rsquo;m goin&rsquo; to dose you up stiff as soon as we make
+McGurry.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Bill grunted his disagreement with the diagnosis, and lapsed into
+silence.&nbsp; The day was like all the days.&nbsp; Light came at nine
+o&rsquo;clock.&nbsp; At twelve o&rsquo;clock the southern horizon was
+warmed by the unseen sun; and then began the cold grey of afternoon
+that would merge, three hours later, into night.</p>
+<p>It was just after the sun&rsquo;s futile effort to appear, that Bill
+slipped the rifle from under the sled-lashings and said:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;You keep right on, Henry, I&rsquo;m goin&rsquo; to see what
+I can see.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;You&rsquo;d better stick by the sled,&rdquo; his partner protested.&nbsp;
+&ldquo;You&rsquo;ve only got three cartridges, an&rsquo; there&rsquo;s
+no tellin&rsquo; what might happen.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Who&rsquo;s croaking now?&rdquo; Bill demanded triumphantly.</p>
+<p>Henry made no reply, and plodded on alone, though often he cast anxious
+glances back into the grey solitude where his partner had disappeared.&nbsp;
+An hour later, taking advantage of the cut-offs around which the sled
+had to go, Bill arrived.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;They&rsquo;re scattered an&rsquo; rangin&rsquo; along wide,&rdquo;
+he said: &ldquo;keeping up with us an&rsquo; lookin&rsquo; for game
+at the same time.&nbsp; You see, they&rsquo;re sure of us, only they
+know they&rsquo;ve got to wait to get us.&nbsp; In the meantime they&rsquo;re
+willin&rsquo; to pick up anything eatable that comes handy.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;You mean they <i>think</i> they&rsquo;re sure of us,&rdquo;
+Henry objected pointedly.</p>
+<p>But Bill ignored him.&nbsp; &ldquo;I seen some of them.&nbsp; They&rsquo;re
+pretty thin.&nbsp; They ain&rsquo;t had a bite in weeks I reckon, outside
+of Fatty an&rsquo; Frog an&rsquo; Spanker; an&rsquo; there&rsquo;s so
+many of &rsquo;em that that didn&rsquo;t go far.&nbsp; They&rsquo;re
+remarkable thin.&nbsp; Their ribs is like wash-boards, an&rsquo; their
+stomachs is right up against their backbones.&nbsp; They&rsquo;re pretty
+desperate, I can tell you.&nbsp; They&rsquo;ll be goin&rsquo; mad, yet,
+an&rsquo; then watch out.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>A few minutes later, Henry, who was now travelling behind the sled,
+emitted a low, warning whistle.&nbsp; Bill turned and looked, then quietly
+stopped the dogs.&nbsp; To the rear, from around the last bend and plainly
+into view, on the very trail they had just covered, trotted a furry,
+slinking form.&nbsp; Its nose was to the trail, and it trotted with
+a peculiar, sliding, effortless gait.&nbsp; When they halted, it halted,
+throwing up its head and regarding them steadily with nostrils that
+twitched as it caught and studied the scent of them.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;It&rsquo;s the she-wolf,&rdquo; Bill answered.</p>
+<p>The dogs had laid down in the snow, and he walked past them to join
+his partner in the sled.&nbsp; Together they watched the strange animal
+that had pursued them for days and that had already accomplished the
+destruction of half their dog-team.</p>
+<p>After a searching scrutiny, the animal trotted forward a few steps.&nbsp;
+This it repeated several times, till it was a short hundred yards away.&nbsp;
+It paused, head up, close by a clump of spruce trees, and with sight
+and scent studied the outfit of the watching men.&nbsp; It looked at
+them in a strangely wistful way, after the manner of a dog; but in its
+wistfulness there was none of the dog affection.&nbsp; It was a wistfulness
+bred of hunger, as cruel as its own fangs, as merciless as the frost
+itself.</p>
+<p>It was large for a wolf, its gaunt frame advertising the lines of
+an animal that was among the largest of its kind.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Stands pretty close to two feet an&rsquo; a half at the shoulders,&rdquo;
+Henry commented.&nbsp; &ldquo;An&rsquo; I&rsquo;ll bet it ain&rsquo;t
+far from five feet long.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Kind of strange colour for a wolf,&rdquo; was Bill&rsquo;s
+criticism.&nbsp; &ldquo;I never seen a red wolf before.&nbsp; Looks
+almost cinnamon to me.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>The animal was certainly not cinnamon-coloured.&nbsp; Its coat was
+the true wolf-coat.&nbsp; The dominant colour was grey, and yet there
+was to it a faint reddish hue&mdash;a hue that was baffling, that appeared
+and disappeared, that was more like an illusion of the vision, now grey,
+distinctly grey, and again giving hints and glints of a vague redness
+of colour not classifiable in terms of ordinary experience.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Looks for all the world like a big husky sled-dog,&rdquo;
+Bill said.&nbsp; &ldquo;I wouldn&rsquo;t be s&rsquo;prised to see it
+wag its tail.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Hello, you husky!&rdquo; he called.&nbsp; &ldquo;Come here,
+you whatever-your-name-is.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Ain&rsquo;t a bit scairt of you,&rdquo; Henry laughed.</p>
+<p>Bill waved his hand at it threateningly and shouted loudly; but the
+animal betrayed no fear.&nbsp; The only change in it that they could
+notice was an accession of alertness.&nbsp; It still regarded them with
+the merciless wistfulness of hunger.&nbsp; They were meat, and it was
+hungry; and it would like to go in and eat them if it dared.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Look here, Henry,&rdquo; Bill said, unconsciously lowering
+his voice to a whisper because of what he imitated.&nbsp; &ldquo;We&rsquo;ve
+got three cartridges.&nbsp; But it&rsquo;s a dead shot.&nbsp; Couldn&rsquo;t
+miss it.&nbsp; It&rsquo;s got away with three of our dogs, an&rsquo;
+we oughter put a stop to it.&nbsp; What d&rsquo;ye say?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Henry nodded his consent.&nbsp; Bill cautiously slipped the gun from
+under the sled-lashing.&nbsp; The gun was on the way to his shoulder,
+but it never got there.&nbsp; For in that instant the she-wolf leaped
+sidewise from the trail into the clump of spruce trees and disappeared.</p>
+<p>The two men looked at each other.&nbsp; Henry whistled long and comprehendingly.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I might have knowed it,&rdquo; Bill chided himself aloud as
+he replaced the gun.&nbsp; &ldquo;Of course a wolf that knows enough
+to come in with the dogs at feedin&rsquo; time, &rsquo;d know all about
+shooting-irons.&nbsp; I tell you right now, Henry, that critter&rsquo;s
+the cause of all our trouble.&nbsp; We&rsquo;d have six dogs at the
+present time, &rsquo;stead of three, if it wasn&rsquo;t for her.&nbsp;
+An&rsquo; I tell you right now, Henry, I&rsquo;m goin&rsquo; to get
+her.&nbsp; She&rsquo;s too smart to be shot in the open.&nbsp; But I&rsquo;m
+goin&rsquo; to lay for her.&nbsp; I&rsquo;ll bushwhack her as sure as
+my name is Bill.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;You needn&rsquo;t stray off too far in doin&rsquo; it,&rdquo;
+his partner admonished.&nbsp; &ldquo;If that pack ever starts to jump
+you, them three cartridges&rsquo;d be wuth no more&rsquo;n three whoops
+in hell.&nbsp; Them animals is damn hungry, an&rsquo; once they start
+in, they&rsquo;ll sure get you, Bill.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>They camped early that night.&nbsp; Three dogs could not drag the
+sled so fast nor for so long hours as could six, and they were showing
+unmistakable signs of playing out.&nbsp; And the men went early to bed,
+Bill first seeing to it that the dogs were tied out of gnawing-reach
+of one another.</p>
+<p>But the wolves were growing bolder, and the men were aroused more
+than once from their sleep.&nbsp; So near did the wolves approach, that
+the dogs became frantic with terror, and it was necessary to replenish
+the fire from time to time in order to keep the adventurous marauders
+at safer distance.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I&rsquo;ve hearn sailors talk of sharks followin&rsquo; a
+ship,&rdquo; Bill remarked, as he crawled back into the blankets after
+one such replenishing of the fire.&nbsp; &ldquo;Well, them wolves is
+land sharks.&nbsp; They know their business better&rsquo;n we do, an&rsquo;
+they ain&rsquo;t a-holdin&rsquo; our trail this way for their health.&nbsp;
+They&rsquo;re goin&rsquo; to get us.&nbsp; They&rsquo;re sure goin&rsquo;
+to get us, Henry.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;They&rsquo;ve half got you a&rsquo;ready, a-talkin&rsquo;
+like that,&rdquo; Henry retorted sharply.&nbsp; &ldquo;A man&rsquo;s
+half licked when he says he is.&nbsp; An&rsquo; you&rsquo;re half eaten
+from the way you&rsquo;re goin&rsquo; on about it.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;They&rsquo;ve got away with better men than you an&rsquo;
+me,&rdquo; Bill answered.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Oh, shet up your croakin&rsquo;.&nbsp; You make me all-fired
+tired.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Henry rolled over angrily on his side, but was surprised that Bill
+made no similar display of temper.&nbsp; This was not Bill&rsquo;s way,
+for he was easily angered by sharp words.&nbsp; Henry thought long over
+it before he went to sleep, and as his eyelids fluttered down and he
+dozed off, the thought in his mind was: &ldquo;There&rsquo;s no mistakin&rsquo;
+it, Bill&rsquo;s almighty blue.&nbsp; I&rsquo;ll have to cheer him up
+to-morrow.&rdquo;</p>
+<div class="GutenbergBlankLines2"><br /><br /></div>
+<h3>CHAPTER III&mdash;THE HUNGER CRY</h3>
+<div class="GutenbergBlankLines2"><br /><br /></div>
+<p>The day began auspiciously.&nbsp; They had lost no dogs during the
+night, and they swung out upon the trail and into the silence, the darkness,
+and the cold with spirits that were fairly light.&nbsp; Bill seemed
+to have forgotten his forebodings of the previous night, and even waxed
+facetious with the dogs when, at midday, they overturned the sled on
+a bad piece of trail.</p>
+<p>It was an awkward mix-up.&nbsp; The sled was upside down and jammed
+between a tree-trunk and a huge rock, and they were forced to unharness
+the dogs in order to straighten out the tangle.&nbsp; The two men were
+bent over the sled and trying to right it, when Henry observed One Ear
+sidling away.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Here, you, One Ear!&rdquo; he cried, straightening up and
+turning around on the dog.</p>
+<p>But One Ear broke into a run across the snow, his traces trailing
+behind him.&nbsp; And there, out in the snow of their back track, was
+the she-wolf waiting for him.&nbsp; As he neared her, he became suddenly
+cautious.&nbsp; He slowed down to an alert and mincing walk and then
+stopped.&nbsp; He regarded her carefully and dubiously, yet desirefully.&nbsp;
+She seemed to smile at him, showing her teeth in an ingratiating rather
+than a menacing way.&nbsp; She moved toward him a few steps, playfully,
+and then halted.&nbsp; One Ear drew near to her, still alert and cautious,
+his tail and ears in the air, his head held high.</p>
+<p>He tried to sniff noses with her, but she retreated playfully and
+coyly.&nbsp; Every advance on his part was accompanied by a corresponding
+retreat on her part.&nbsp; Step by step she was luring him away from
+the security of his human companionship.&nbsp; Once, as though a warning
+had in vague ways flitted through his intelligence, he turned his head
+and looked back at the overturned sled, at his team-mates, and at the
+two men who were calling to him.</p>
+<p>But whatever idea was forming in his mind, was dissipated by the
+she-wolf, who advanced upon him, sniffed noses with him for a fleeting
+instant, and then resumed her coy retreat before his renewed advances.</p>
+<p>In the meantime, Bill had bethought himself of the rifle.&nbsp; But
+it was jammed beneath the overturned sled, and by the time Henry had
+helped him to right the load, One Ear and the she-wolf were too close
+together and the distance too great to risk a shot.</p>
+<p>Too late One Ear learned his mistake.&nbsp; Before they saw the cause,
+the two men saw him turn and start to run back toward them.&nbsp; Then,
+approaching at right angles to the trail and cutting off his retreat
+they saw a dozen wolves, lean and grey, bounding across the snow.&nbsp;
+On the instant, the she-wolf&rsquo;s coyness and playfulness disappeared.&nbsp;
+With a snarl she sprang upon One Ear.&nbsp; He thrust her off with his
+shoulder, and, his retreat cut off and still intent on regaining the
+sled, he altered his course in an attempt to circle around to it.&nbsp;
+More wolves were appearing every moment and joining in the chase.&nbsp;
+The she-wolf was one leap behind One Ear and holding her own.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Where are you goin&rsquo;?&rdquo; Henry suddenly demanded,
+laying his hand on his partner&rsquo;s arm.</p>
+<p>Bill shook it off.&nbsp; &ldquo;I won&rsquo;t stand it,&rdquo; he
+said.&nbsp; &ldquo;They ain&rsquo;t a-goin&rsquo; to get any more of
+our dogs if I can help it.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Gun in hand, he plunged into the underbrush that lined the side of
+the trail.&nbsp; His intention was apparent enough.&nbsp; Taking the
+sled as the centre of the circle that One Ear was making, Bill planned
+to tap that circle at a point in advance of the pursuit.&nbsp; With
+his rifle, in the broad daylight, it might be possible for him to awe
+the wolves and save the dog.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Say, Bill!&rdquo; Henry called after him.&nbsp; &ldquo;Be
+careful!&nbsp; Don&rsquo;t take no chances!&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Henry sat down on the sled and watched.&nbsp; There was nothing else
+for him to do.&nbsp; Bill had already gone from sight; but now and again,
+appearing and disappearing amongst the underbrush and the scattered
+clumps of spruce, could be seen One Ear.&nbsp; Henry judged his case
+to be hopeless.&nbsp; The dog was thoroughly alive to its danger, but
+it was running on the outer circle while the wolf-pack was running on
+the inner and shorter circle.&nbsp; It was vain to think of One Ear
+so outdistancing his pursuers as to be able to cut across their circle
+in advance of them and to regain the sled.</p>
+<p>The different lines were rapidly approaching a point.&nbsp; Somewhere
+out there in the snow, screened from his sight by trees and thickets,
+Henry knew that the wolf-pack, One Ear, and Bill were coming together.&nbsp;
+All too quickly, far more quickly than he had expected, it happened.&nbsp;
+He heard a shot, then two shots, in rapid succession, and he knew that
+Bill&rsquo;s ammunition was gone.&nbsp; Then he heard a great outcry
+of snarls and yelps.&nbsp; He recognised One Ear&rsquo;s yell of pain
+and terror, and he heard a wolf-cry that bespoke a stricken animal.&nbsp;
+And that was all.&nbsp; The snarls ceased.&nbsp; The yelping died away.&nbsp;
+Silence settled down again over the lonely land.</p>
+<p>He sat for a long while upon the sled.&nbsp; There was no need for
+him to go and see what had happened.&nbsp; He knew it as though it had
+taken place before his eyes.&nbsp; Once, he roused with a start and
+hastily got the axe out from underneath the lashings.&nbsp; But for
+some time longer he sat and brooded, the two remaining dogs crouching
+and trembling at his feet.</p>
+<p>At last he arose in a weary manner, as though all the resilience
+had gone out of his body, and proceeded to fasten the dogs to the sled.&nbsp;
+He passed a rope over his shoulder, a man-trace, and pulled with the
+dogs.&nbsp; He did not go far.&nbsp; At the first hint of darkness he
+hastened to make a camp, and he saw to it that he had a generous supply
+of firewood.&nbsp; He fed the dogs, cooked and ate his supper, and made
+his bed close to the fire.</p>
+<p>But he was not destined to enjoy that bed.&nbsp; Before his eyes
+closed the wolves had drawn too near for safety.&nbsp; It no longer
+required an effort of the vision to see them.&nbsp; They were all about
+him and the fire, in a narrow circle, and he could see them plainly
+in the firelight lying down, sitting up, crawling forward on their bellies,
+or slinking back and forth.&nbsp; They even slept.&nbsp; Here and there
+he could see one curled up in the snow like a dog, taking the sleep
+that was now denied himself.</p>
+<p>He kept the fire brightly blazing, for he knew that it alone intervened
+between the flesh of his body and their hungry fangs.&nbsp; His two
+dogs stayed close by him, one on either side, leaning against him for
+protection, crying and whimpering, and at times snarling desperately
+when a wolf approached a little closer than usual.&nbsp; At such moments,
+when his dogs snarled, the whole circle would be agitated, the wolves
+coming to their feet and pressing tentatively forward, a chorus of snarls
+and eager yelps rising about him.&nbsp; Then the circle would lie down
+again, and here and there a wolf would resume its broken nap.</p>
+<p>But this circle had a continuous tendency to draw in upon him.&nbsp;
+Bit by bit, an inch at a time, with here a wolf bellying forward, and
+there a wolf bellying forward, the circle would narrow until the brutes
+were almost within springing distance.&nbsp; Then he would seize brands
+from the fire and hurl them into the pack.&nbsp; A hasty drawing back
+always resulted, accompanied by an yelps and frightened snarls when
+a well-aimed brand struck and scorched a too daring animal.</p>
+<p>Morning found the man haggard and worn, wide-eyed from want of sleep.&nbsp;
+He cooked breakfast in the darkness, and at nine o&rsquo;clock, when,
+with the coming of daylight, the wolf-pack drew back, he set about the
+task he had planned through the long hours of the night.&nbsp; Chopping
+down young saplings, he made them cross-bars of a scaffold by lashing
+them high up to the trunks of standing trees.&nbsp; Using the sled-lashing
+for a heaving rope, and with the aid of the dogs, he hoisted the coffin
+to the top of the scaffold.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;They got Bill, an&rsquo; they may get me, but they&rsquo;ll
+sure never get you, young man,&rdquo; he said, addressing the dead body
+in its tree-sepulchre.</p>
+<p>Then he took the trail, the lightened sled bounding along behind
+the willing dogs; for they, too, knew that safety lay open in the gaining
+of Fort McGurry.&nbsp; The wolves were now more open in their pursuit,
+trotting sedately behind and ranging along on either side, their red
+tongues lolling out, their-lean sides showing the udulating ribs with
+every movement.&nbsp; They were very lean, mere skin-bags stretched
+over bony frames, with strings for muscles&mdash;so lean that Henry
+found it in his mind to marvel that they still kept their feet and did
+not collapse forthright in the snow.</p>
+<p>He did not dare travel until dark.&nbsp; At midday, not only did
+the sun warm the southern horizon, but it even thrust its upper rim,
+pale and golden, above the sky-line.&nbsp; He received it as a sign.&nbsp;
+The days were growing longer.&nbsp; The sun was returning.&nbsp; But
+scarcely had the cheer of its light departed, than he went into camp.&nbsp;
+There were still several hours of grey daylight and sombre twilight,
+and he utilised them in chopping an enormous supply of fire-wood.</p>
+<p>With night came horror.&nbsp; Not only were the starving wolves growing
+bolder, but lack of sleep was telling upon Henry.&nbsp; He dozed despite
+himself, crouching by the fire, the blankets about his shoulders, the
+axe between his knees, and on either side a dog pressing close against
+him.&nbsp; He awoke once and saw in front of him, not a dozen feet away,
+a big grey wolf, one of the largest of the pack.&nbsp; And even as he
+looked, the brute deliberately stretched himself after the manner of
+a lazy dog, yawning full in his face and looking upon him with a possessive
+eye, as if, in truth, he were merely a delayed meal that was soon to
+be eaten.</p>
+<p>This certitude was shown by the whole pack.&nbsp; Fully a score he
+could count, staring hungrily at him or calmly sleeping in the snow.&nbsp;
+They reminded him of children gathered about a spread table and awaiting
+permission to begin to eat.&nbsp; And he was the food they were to eat!&nbsp;
+He wondered how and when the meal would begin.</p>
+<p>As he piled wood on the fire he discovered an appreciation of his
+own body which he had never felt before.&nbsp; He watched his moving
+muscles and was interested in the cunning mechanism of his fingers.&nbsp;
+By the light of the fire he crooked his fingers slowly and repeatedly
+now one at a time, now all together, spreading them wide or making quick
+gripping movements.&nbsp; He studied the nail-formation, and prodded
+the finger-tips, now sharply, and again softly, gauging the while the
+nerve-sensations produced.&nbsp; It fascinated him, and he grew suddenly
+fond of this subtle flesh of his that worked so beautifully and smoothly
+and delicately.&nbsp; Then he would cast a glance of fear at the wolf-circle
+drawn expectantly about him, and like a blow the realisation would strike
+him that this wonderful body of his, this living flesh, was no more
+than so much meat, a quest of ravenous animals, to be torn and slashed
+by their hungry fangs, to be sustenance to them as the moose and the
+rabbit had often been sustenance to him.</p>
+<p>He came out of a doze that was half nightmare, to see the red-hued
+she-wolf before him.&nbsp; She was not more than half a dozen feet away
+sitting in the snow and wistfully regarding him.&nbsp; The two dogs
+were whimpering and snarling at his feet, but she took no notice of
+them.&nbsp; She was looking at the man, and for some time he returned
+her look.&nbsp; There was nothing threatening about her.&nbsp; She looked
+at him merely with a great wistfulness, but he knew it to be the wistfulness
+of an equally great hunger.&nbsp; He was the food, and the sight of
+him excited in her the gustatory sensations.&nbsp; Her mouth opened,
+the saliva drooled forth, and she licked her chops with the pleasure
+of anticipation.</p>
+<p>A spasm of fear went through him.&nbsp; He reached hastily for a
+brand to throw at her.&nbsp; But even as he reached, and before his
+fingers had closed on the missile, she sprang back into safety; and
+he knew that she was used to having things thrown at her.&nbsp; She
+had snarled as she sprang away, baring her white fangs to their roots,
+all her wistfulness vanishing, being replaced by a carnivorous malignity
+that made him shudder.&nbsp; He glanced at the hand that held the brand,
+noticing the cunning delicacy of the fingers that gripped it, how they
+adjusted themselves to all the inequalities of the surface, curling
+over and under and about the rough wood, and one little finger, too
+close to the burning portion of the brand, sensitively and automatically
+writhing back from the hurtful heat to a cooler gripping-place; and
+in the same instant he seemed to see a vision of those same sensitive
+and delicate fingers being crushed and torn by the white teeth of the
+she-wolf.&nbsp; Never had he been so fond of this body of his as now
+when his tenure of it was so precarious.</p>
+<p>All night, with burning brands, he fought off the hungry pack.&nbsp;
+When he dozed despite himself, the whimpering and snarling of the dogs
+aroused him.&nbsp; Morning came, but for the first time the light of
+day failed to scatter the wolves.&nbsp; The man waited in vain for them
+to go.&nbsp; They remained in a circle about him and his fire, displaying
+an arrogance of possession that shook his courage born of the morning
+light.</p>
+<p>He made one desperate attempt to pull out on the trail.&nbsp; But
+the moment he left the protection of the fire, the boldest wolf leaped
+for him, but leaped short.&nbsp; He saved himself by springing back,
+the jaws snapping together a scant six inches from his thigh.&nbsp;
+The rest of the pack was now up and surging upon him, and a throwing
+of firebrands right and left was necessary to drive them back to a respectful
+distance.</p>
+<p>Even in the daylight he did not dare leave the fire to chop fresh
+wood.&nbsp; Twenty feet away towered a huge dead spruce.&nbsp; He spent
+half the day extending his campfire to the tree, at any moment a half
+dozen burning faggots ready at hand to fling at his enemies.&nbsp; Once
+at the tree, he studied the surrounding forest in order to fell the
+tree in the direction of the most firewood.</p>
+<p>The night was a repetition of the night before, save that the need
+for sleep was becoming overpowering.&nbsp; The snarling of his dogs
+was losing its efficacy.&nbsp; Besides, they were snarling all the time,
+and his benumbed and drowsy senses no longer took note of changing pitch
+and intensity.&nbsp; He awoke with a start.&nbsp; The she-wolf was less
+than a yard from him.&nbsp; Mechanically, at short range, without letting
+go of it, he thrust a brand full into her open and snarling mouth.&nbsp;
+She sprang away, yelling with pain, and while he took delight in the
+smell of burning flesh and hair, he watched her shaking her head and
+growling wrathfully a score of feet away.</p>
+<p>But this time, before he dozed again, he tied a burning pine-knot
+to his right hand.&nbsp; His eyes were closed but few minutes when the
+burn of the flame on his flesh awakened him.&nbsp; For several hours
+he adhered to this programme.&nbsp; Every time he was thus awakened
+he drove back the wolves with flying brands, replenished the fire, and
+rearranged the pine-knot on his hand.&nbsp; All worked well, but there
+came a time when he fastened the pine-knot insecurely.&nbsp; As his
+eyes closed it fell away from his hand.</p>
+<p>He dreamed.&nbsp; It seemed to him that he was in Fort McGurry.&nbsp;
+It was warm and comfortable, and he was playing cribbage with the Factor.&nbsp;
+Also, it seemed to him that the fort was besieged by wolves.&nbsp; They
+were howling at the very gates, and sometimes he and the Factor paused
+from the game to listen and laugh at the futile efforts of the wolves
+to get in.&nbsp; And then, so strange was the dream, there was a crash.&nbsp;
+The door was burst open.&nbsp; He could see the wolves flooding into
+the big living-room of the fort.&nbsp; They were leaping straight for
+him and the Factor.&nbsp; With the bursting open of the door, the noise
+of their howling had increased tremendously.&nbsp; This howling now
+bothered him.&nbsp; His dream was merging into something else&mdash;he
+knew not what; but through it all, following him, persisted the howling.</p>
+<p>And then he awoke to find the howling real.&nbsp; There was a great
+snarling and yelping.&nbsp; The wolves were rushing him.&nbsp; They
+were all about him and upon him.&nbsp; The teeth of one had closed upon
+his arm.&nbsp; Instinctively he leaped into the fire, and as he leaped,
+he felt the sharp slash of teeth that tore through the flesh of his
+leg.&nbsp; Then began a fire fight.&nbsp; His stout mittens temporarily
+protected his hands, and he scooped live coals into the air in all directions,
+until the campfire took on the semblance of a volcano.</p>
+<p>But it could not last long.&nbsp; His face was blistering in the
+heat, his eyebrows and lashes were singed off, and the heat was becoming
+unbearable to his feet.&nbsp; With a flaming brand in each hand, he
+sprang to the edge of the fire.&nbsp; The wolves had been driven back.&nbsp;
+On every side, wherever the live coals had fallen, the snow was sizzling,
+and every little while a retiring wolf, with wild leap and snort and
+snarl, announced that one such live coal had been stepped upon.</p>
+<p>Flinging his brands at the nearest of his enemies, the man thrust
+his smouldering mittens into the snow and stamped about to cool his
+feet.&nbsp; His two dogs were missing, and he well knew that they had
+served as a course in the protracted meal which had begun days before
+with Fatty, the last course of which would likely be himself in the
+days to follow.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;You ain&rsquo;t got me yet!&rdquo; he cried, savagely shaking
+his fist at the hungry beasts; and at the sound of his voice the whole
+circle was agitated, there was a general snarl, and the she-wolf slid
+up close to him across the snow and watched him with hungry wistfulness.</p>
+<p>He set to work to carry out a new idea that had come to him.&nbsp;
+He extended the fire into a large circle.&nbsp; Inside this circle he
+crouched, his sleeping outfit under him as a protection against the
+melting snow.&nbsp; When he had thus disappeared within his shelter
+of flame, the whole pack came curiously to the rim of the fire to see
+what had become of him.&nbsp; Hitherto they had been denied access to
+the fire, and they now settled down in a close-drawn circle, like so
+many dogs, blinking and yawning and stretching their lean bodies in
+the unaccustomed warmth.&nbsp; Then the she-wolf sat down, pointed her
+nose at a star, and began to howl.&nbsp; One by one the wolves joined
+her, till the whole pack, on haunches, with noses pointed skyward, was
+howling its hunger cry.</p>
+<p>Dawn came, and daylight.&nbsp; The fire was burning low.&nbsp; The
+fuel had run out, and there was need to get more.&nbsp; The man attempted
+to step out of his circle of flame, but the wolves surged to meet him.&nbsp;
+Burning brands made them spring aside, but they no longer sprang back.&nbsp;
+In vain he strove to drive them back.&nbsp; As he gave up and stumbled
+inside his circle, a wolf leaped for him, missed, and landed with all
+four feet in the coals.&nbsp; It cried out with terror, at the same
+time snarling, and scrambled back to cool its paws in the snow.</p>
+<p>The man sat down on his blankets in a crouching position.&nbsp; His
+body leaned forward from the hips.&nbsp; His shoulders, relaxed and
+drooping, and his head on his knees advertised that he had given up
+the struggle.&nbsp; Now and again he raised his head to note the dying
+down of the fire.&nbsp; The circle of flame and coals was breaking into
+segments with openings in between.&nbsp; These openings grew in size,
+the segments diminished.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I guess you can come an&rsquo; get me any time,&rdquo; he
+mumbled.&nbsp; &ldquo;Anyway, I&rsquo;m goin&rsquo; to sleep.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Once he awakened, and in an opening in the circle, directly in front
+of him, he saw the she-wolf gazing at him.</p>
+<p>Again he awakened, a little later, though it seemed hours to him.&nbsp;
+A mysterious change had taken place&mdash;so mysterious a change that
+he was shocked wider awake.&nbsp; Something had happened.&nbsp; He could
+not understand at first.&nbsp; Then he discovered it.&nbsp; The wolves
+were gone.&nbsp; Remained only the trampled snow to show how closely
+they had pressed him.&nbsp; Sleep was welling up and gripping him again,
+his head was sinking down upon his knees, when he roused with a sudden
+start.</p>
+<p>There were cries of men, and churn of sleds, the creaking of harnesses,
+and the eager whimpering of straining dogs.&nbsp; Four sleds pulled
+in from the river bed to the camp among the trees.&nbsp; Half a dozen
+men were about the man who crouched in the centre of the dying fire.&nbsp;
+They were shaking and prodding him into consciousness.&nbsp; He looked
+at them like a drunken man and maundered in strange, sleepy speech.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Red she-wolf. . . . Come in with the dogs at feedin&rsquo;
+time. . . . First she ate the dog-food. . . . Then she ate the dogs.
+. . . An&rsquo; after that she ate Bill. . . . &rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Where&rsquo;s Lord Alfred?&rdquo; one of the men bellowed
+in his ear, shaking him roughly.</p>
+<p>He shook his head slowly.&nbsp; &ldquo;No, she didn&rsquo;t eat him.
+. . . He&rsquo;s roostin&rsquo; in a tree at the last camp.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Dead?&rdquo; the man shouted.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;An&rsquo; in a box,&rdquo; Henry answered.&nbsp; He jerked
+his shoulder petulantly away from the grip of his questioner.&nbsp;
+&ldquo;Say, you lemme alone. . . . I&rsquo;m jes&rsquo; plump tuckered
+out. . . . Goo&rsquo; night, everybody.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>His eyes fluttered and went shut.&nbsp; His chin fell forward on
+his chest.&nbsp; And even as they eased him down upon the blankets his
+snores were rising on the frosty air.</p>
+<p>But there was another sound.&nbsp; Far and faint it was, in the remote
+distance, the cry of the hungry wolf-pack as it took the trail of other
+meat than the man it had just missed.</p>
+<div class="GutenbergBlankLines3"><br /><br /><br /></div>
+<h2>PART II</h2>
+<div class="GutenbergBlankLines3"><br /><br /><br /></div>
+<h3>CHAPTER I&mdash;THE BATTLE OF THE FANGS</h3>
+<div class="GutenbergBlankLines2"><br /><br /></div>
+<p>It was the she-wolf who had first caught the sound of men&rsquo;s
+voices and the whining of the sled-dogs; and it was the she-wolf who
+was first to spring away from the cornered man in his circle of dying
+flame.&nbsp; The pack had been loath to forego the kill it had hunted
+down, and it lingered for several minutes, making sure of the sounds,
+and then it, too, sprang away on the trail made by the she-wolf.</p>
+<p>Running at the forefront of the pack was a large grey wolf&mdash;one
+of its several leaders.&nbsp; It was he who directed the pack&rsquo;s
+course on the heels of the she-wolf.&nbsp; It was he who snarled warningly
+at the younger members of the pack or slashed at them with his fangs
+when they ambitiously tried to pass him.&nbsp; And it was he who increased
+the pace when he sighted the she-wolf, now trotting slowly across the
+snow.</p>
+<p>She dropped in alongside by him, as though it were her appointed
+position, and took the pace of the pack.&nbsp; He did not snarl at her,
+nor show his teeth, when any leap of hers chanced to put her in advance
+of him.&nbsp; On the contrary, he seemed kindly disposed toward her&mdash;too
+kindly to suit her, for he was prone to run near to her, and when he
+ran too near it was she who snarled and showed her teeth.&nbsp; Nor
+was she above slashing his shoulder sharply on occasion.&nbsp; At such
+times he betrayed no anger.&nbsp; He merely sprang to the side and ran
+stiffly ahead for several awkward leaps, in carriage and conduct resembling
+an abashed country swain.</p>
+<p>This was his one trouble in the running of the pack; but she had
+other troubles.&nbsp; On her other side ran a gaunt old wolf, grizzled
+and marked with the scars of many battles.&nbsp; He ran always on her
+right side.&nbsp; The fact that he had but one eye, and that the left
+eye, might account for this.&nbsp; He, also, was addicted to crowding
+her, to veering toward her till his scarred muzzle touched her body,
+or shoulder, or neck.&nbsp; As with the running mate on the left, she
+repelled these attentions with her teeth; but when both bestowed their
+attentions at the same time she was roughly jostled, being compelled,
+with quick snaps to either side, to drive both lovers away and at the
+same time to maintain her forward leap with the pack and see the way
+of her feet before her.&nbsp; At such times her running mates flashed
+their teeth and growled threateningly across at each other.&nbsp; They
+might have fought, but even wooing and its rivalry waited upon the more
+pressing hunger-need of the pack.</p>
+<p>After each repulse, when the old wolf sheered abruptly away from
+the sharp-toothed object of his desire, he shouldered against a young
+three-year-old that ran on his blind right side.&nbsp; This young wolf
+had attained his full size; and, considering the weak and famished condition
+of the pack, he possessed more than the average vigour and spirit.&nbsp;
+Nevertheless, he ran with his head even with the shoulder of his one-eyed
+elder.&nbsp; When he ventured to run abreast of the older wolf (which
+was seldom), a snarl and a snap sent him back even with the shoulder
+again.&nbsp; Sometimes, however, he dropped cautiously and slowly behind
+and edged in between the old leader and the she-wolf.&nbsp; This was
+doubly resented, even triply resented.&nbsp; When she snarled her displeasure,
+the old leader would whirl on the three-year-old.&nbsp; Sometimes she
+whirled with him.&nbsp; And sometimes the young leader on the left whirled,
+too.</p>
+<p>At such times, confronted by three sets of savage teeth, the young
+wolf stopped precipitately, throwing himself back on his haunches, with
+fore-legs stiff, mouth menacing, and mane bristling.&nbsp; This confusion
+in the front of the moving pack always caused confusion in the rear.&nbsp;
+The wolves behind collided with the young wolf and expressed their displeasure
+by administering sharp nips on his hind-legs and flanks.&nbsp; He was
+laying up trouble for himself, for lack of food and short tempers went
+together; but with the boundless faith of youth he persisted in repeating
+the manoeuvre every little while, though it never succeeded in gaining
+anything for him but discomfiture.</p>
+<p>Had there been food, love-making and fighting would have gone on
+apace, and the pack-formation would have been broken up.&nbsp; But the
+situation of the pack was desperate.&nbsp; It was lean with long-standing
+hunger.&nbsp; It ran below its ordinary speed.&nbsp; At the rear limped
+the weak members, the very young and the very old.&nbsp; At the front
+were the strongest.&nbsp; Yet all were more like skeletons than full-bodied
+wolves.&nbsp; Nevertheless, with the exception of the ones that limped,
+the movements of the animals were eftortless and tireless.&nbsp; Their
+stringy muscles seemed founts of inexhaustible energy.&nbsp; Behind
+every steel-like contraction of a muscle, lay another steel-like contraction,
+and another, and another, apparently without end.</p>
+<p>They ran many miles that day.&nbsp; They ran through the night.&nbsp;
+And the next day found them still running.&nbsp; They were running over
+the surface of a world frozen and dead.&nbsp; No life stirred.&nbsp;
+They alone moved through the vast inertness.&nbsp; They alone were alive,
+and they sought for other things that were alive in order that they
+might devour them and continue to live.</p>
+<p>They crossed low divides and ranged a dozen small streams in a lower-lying
+country before their quest was rewarded.&nbsp; Then they came upon moose.&nbsp;
+It was a big bull they first found.&nbsp; Here was meat and life, and
+it was guarded by no mysterious fires nor flying missiles of flame.&nbsp;
+Splay hoofs and palmated antlers they knew, and they flung their customary
+patience and caution to the wind.&nbsp; It was a brief fight and fierce.&nbsp;
+The big bull was beset on every side.&nbsp; He ripped them open or split
+their skulls with shrewdly driven blows of his great hoofs.&nbsp; He
+crushed them and broke them on his large horns.&nbsp; He stamped them
+into the snow under him in the wallowing struggle.&nbsp; But he was
+foredoomed, and he went down with the she-wolf tearing savagely at his
+throat, and with other teeth fixed everywhere upon him, devouring him
+alive, before ever his last struggles ceased or his last damage had
+been wrought.</p>
+<p>There was food in plenty.&nbsp; The bull weighed over eight hundred
+pounds&mdash;fully twenty pounds of meat per mouth for the forty-odd
+wolves of the pack.&nbsp; But if they could fast prodigiously, they
+could feed prodigiously, and soon a few scattered bones were all that
+remained of the splendid live brute that had faced the pack a few hours
+before.</p>
+<p>There was now much resting and sleeping.&nbsp; With full stomachs,
+bickering and quarrelling began among the younger males, and this continued
+through the few days that followed before the breaking-up of the pack.&nbsp;
+The famine was over.&nbsp; The wolves were now in the country of game,
+and though they still hunted in pack, they hunted more cautiously, cutting
+out heavy cows or crippled old bulls from the small moose-herds they
+ran across.</p>
+<p>There came a day, in this land of plenty, when the wolf-pack split
+in half and went in different directions.&nbsp; The she-wolf, the young
+leader on her left, and the one-eyed elder on her right, led their half
+of the pack down to the Mackenzie River and across into the lake country
+to the east.&nbsp; Each day this remnant of the pack dwindled.&nbsp;
+Two by two, male and female, the wolves were deserting.&nbsp; Occasionally
+a solitary male was driven out by the sharp teeth of his rivals.&nbsp;
+In the end there remained only four: the she-wolf, the young leader,
+the one-eyed one, and the ambitious three-year-old.</p>
+<p>The she-wolf had by now developed a ferocious temper.&nbsp; Her three
+suitors all bore the marks of her teeth.&nbsp; Yet they never replied
+in kind, never defended themselves against her.&nbsp; They turned their
+shoulders to her most savage slashes, and with wagging tails and mincing
+steps strove to placate her wrath.&nbsp; But if they were all mildness
+toward her, they were all fierceness toward one another.&nbsp; The three-year-old
+grew too ambitious in his fierceness.&nbsp; He caught the one-eyed elder
+on his blind side and ripped his ear into ribbons.&nbsp; Though the
+grizzled old fellow could see only on one side, against the youth and
+vigour of the other he brought into play the wisdom of long years of
+experience.&nbsp; His lost eye and his scarred muzzle bore evidence
+to the nature of his experience.&nbsp; He had survived too many battles
+to be in doubt for a moment about what to do.</p>
+<p>The battle began fairly, but it did not end fairly.&nbsp; There was
+no telling what the outcome would have been, for the third wolf joined
+the elder, and together, old leader and young leader, they attacked
+the ambitious three-year-old and proceeded to destroy him.&nbsp; He
+was beset on either side by the merciless fangs of his erstwhile comrades.&nbsp;
+Forgotten were the days they had hunted together, the game they had
+pulled down, the famine they had suffered.&nbsp; That business was a
+thing of the past.&nbsp; The business of love was at hand&mdash;ever
+a sterner and crueller business than that of food-getting.</p>
+<p>And in the meanwhile, the she-wolf, the cause of it all, sat down
+contentedly on her haunches and watched.&nbsp; She was even pleased.&nbsp;
+This was her day&mdash;and it came not often&mdash;when manes bristled,
+and fang smote fang or ripped and tore the yielding flesh, all for the
+possession of her.</p>
+<p>And in the business of love the three-year-old, who had made this
+his first adventure upon it, yielded up his life.&nbsp; On either side
+of his body stood his two rivals.&nbsp; They were gazing at the she-wolf,
+who sat smiling in the snow.&nbsp; But the elder leader was wise, very
+wise, in love even as in battle.&nbsp; The younger leader turned his
+head to lick a wound on his shoulder.&nbsp; The curve of his neck was
+turned toward his rival.&nbsp; With his one eye the elder saw the opportunity.&nbsp;
+He darted in low and closed with his fangs.&nbsp; It was a long, ripping
+slash, and deep as well.&nbsp; His teeth, in passing, burst the wall
+of the great vein of the throat.&nbsp; Then he leaped clear.</p>
+<p>The young leader snarled terribly, but his snarl broke midmost into
+a tickling cough.&nbsp; Bleeding and coughing, already stricken, he
+sprang at the elder and fought while life faded from him, his legs going
+weak beneath him, the light of day dulling on his eyes, his blows and
+springs falling shorter and shorter.</p>
+<p>And all the while the she-wolf sat on her haunches and smiled.&nbsp;
+She was made glad in vague ways by the battle, for this was the love-making
+of the Wild, the sex-tragedy of the natural world that was tragedy only
+to those that died.&nbsp; To those that survived it was not tragedy,
+but realisation and achievement.</p>
+<p>When the young leader lay in the snow and moved no more, One Eye
+stalked over to the she-wolf.&nbsp; His carriage was one of mingled
+triumph and caution.&nbsp; He was plainly expectant of a rebuff, and
+he was just as plainly surprised when her teeth did not flash out at
+him in anger.&nbsp; For the first time she met him with a kindly manner.&nbsp;
+She sniffed noses with him, and even condescended to leap about and
+frisk and play with him in quite puppyish fashion.&nbsp; And he, for
+all his grey years and sage experience, behaved quite as puppyishly
+and even a little more foolishly.</p>
+<p>Forgotten already were the vanquished rivals and the love-tale red-written
+on the snow.&nbsp; Forgotten, save once, when old One Eye stopped for
+a moment to lick his stiffening wounds.&nbsp; Then it was that his lips
+half writhed into a snarl, and the hair of his neck and shoulders involuntarily
+bristled, while he half crouched for a spring, his claws spasmodically
+clutching into the snow-surface for firmer footing.&nbsp; But it was
+all forgotten the next moment, as he sprang after the she-wolf, who
+was coyly leading him a chase through the woods.</p>
+<p>After that they ran side by side, like good friends who have come
+to an understanding.&nbsp; The days passed by, and they kept together,
+hunting their meat and killing and eating it in common.&nbsp; After
+a time the she-wolf began to grow restless.&nbsp; She seemed to be searching
+for something that she could not find.&nbsp; The hollows under fallen
+trees seemed to attract her, and she spent much time nosing about among
+the larger snow-piled crevices in the rocks and in the caves of overhanging
+banks.&nbsp; Old One Eye was not interested at all, but he followed
+her good-naturedly in her quest, and when her investigations in particular
+places were unusually protracted, he would lie down and wait until she
+was ready to go on.</p>
+<p>They did not remain in one place, but travelled across country until
+they regained the Mackenzie River, down which they slowly went, leaving
+it often to hunt game along the small streams that entered it, but always
+returning to it again.&nbsp; Sometimes they chanced upon other wolves,
+usually in pairs; but there was no friendliness of intercourse displayed
+on either side, no gladness at meeting, no desire to return to the pack-formation.&nbsp;
+Several times they encountered solitary wolves.&nbsp; These were always
+males, and they were pressingly insistent on joining with One Eye and
+his mate.&nbsp; This he resented, and when she stood shoulder to shoulder
+with him, bristling and showing her teeth, the aspiring solitary ones
+would back off, turn-tail, and continue on their lonely way.</p>
+<p>One moonlight night, running through the quiet forest, One Eye suddenly
+halted.&nbsp; His muzzle went up, his tail stiffened, and his nostrils
+dilated as he scented the air.&nbsp; One foot also he held up, after
+the manner of a dog.&nbsp; He was not satisfied, and he continued to
+smell the air, striving to understand the message borne upon it to him.&nbsp;
+One careless sniff had satisfied his mate, and she trotted on to reassure
+him.&nbsp; Though he followed her, he was still dubious, and he could
+not forbear an occasional halt in order more carefully to study the
+warning.</p>
+<p>She crept out cautiously on the edge of a large open space in the
+midst of the trees.&nbsp; For some time she stood alone.&nbsp; Then
+One Eye, creeping and crawling, every sense on the alert, every hair
+radiating infinite suspicion, joined her.&nbsp; They stood side by side,
+watching and listening and smelling.</p>
+<p>To their ears came the sounds of dogs wrangling and scuffling, the
+guttural cries of men, the sharper voices of scolding women, and once
+the shrill and plaintive cry of a child.&nbsp; With the exception of
+the huge bulks of the skin-lodges, little could be seen save the flames
+of the fire, broken by the movements of intervening bodies, and the
+smoke rising slowly on the quiet air.&nbsp; But to their nostrils came
+the myriad smells of an Indian camp, carrying a story that was largely
+incomprehensible to One Eye, but every detail of which the she-wolf
+knew.</p>
+<p>She was strangely stirred, and sniffed and sniffed with an increasing
+delight.&nbsp; But old One Eye was doubtful.&nbsp; He betrayed his apprehension,
+and started tentatively to go.&nbsp; She turned. and touched his neck
+with her muzzle in a reassuring way, then regarded the camp again.&nbsp;
+A new wistfulness was in her face, but it was not the wistfulness of
+hunger.&nbsp; She was thrilling to a desire that urged her to go forward,
+to be in closer to that fire, to be squabbling with the dogs, and to
+be avoiding and dodging the stumbling feet of men.</p>
+<p>One Eye moved impatiently beside her; her unrest came back upon her,
+and she knew again her pressing need to find the thing for which she
+searched.&nbsp; She turned and trotted back into the forest, to the
+great relief of One Eye, who trotted a little to the fore until they
+were well within the shelter of the trees.</p>
+<p>As they slid along, noiseless as shadows, in the moonlight, they
+came upon a run-way.&nbsp; Both noses went down to the footprints in
+the snow.&nbsp; These footprints were very fresh.&nbsp; One Eye ran
+ahead cautiously, his mate at his heels.&nbsp; The broad pads of their
+feet were spread wide and in contact with the snow were like velvet.&nbsp;
+One Eye caught sight of a dim movement of white in the midst of the
+white.&nbsp; His sliding gait had been deceptively swift, but it was
+as nothing to the speed at which he now ran.&nbsp; Before him was bounding
+the faint patch of white he had discovered.</p>
+<p>They were running along a narrow alley flanked on either side by
+a growth of young spruce.&nbsp; Through the trees the mouth of the alley
+could be seen, opening out on a moonlit glade.&nbsp; Old One Eye was
+rapidly overhauling the fleeing shape of white.&nbsp; Bound by bound
+he gained.&nbsp; Now he was upon it.&nbsp; One leap more and his teeth
+would be sinking into it.&nbsp; But that leap was never made.&nbsp;
+High in the air, and straight up, soared the shape of white, now a struggling
+snowshoe rabbit that leaped and bounded, executing a fantastic dance
+there above him in the air and never once returning to earth.</p>
+<p>One Eye sprang back with a snort of sudden fright, then shrank down
+to the snow and crouched, snarling threats at this thing of fear he
+did not understand.&nbsp; But the she-wolf coolly thrust past him.&nbsp;
+She poised for a moment, then sprang for the dancing rabbit.&nbsp; She,
+too, soared high, but not so high as the quarry, and her teeth clipped
+emptily together with a metallic snap.&nbsp; She made another leap,
+and another.</p>
+<p>Her mate had slowly relaxed from his crouch and was watching her.&nbsp;
+He now evinced displeasure at her repeated failures, and himself made
+a mighty spring upward.&nbsp; His teeth closed upon the rabbit, and
+he bore it back to earth with him.&nbsp; But at the same time there
+was a suspicious crackling movement beside him, and his astonished eye
+saw a young spruce sapling bending down above him to strike him.&nbsp;
+His jaws let go their grip, and he leaped backward to escape this strange
+danger, his lips drawn back from his fangs, his throat snarling, every
+hair bristling with rage and fright.&nbsp; And in that moment the sapling
+reared its slender length upright and the rabbit soared dancing in the
+air again.</p>
+<p>The she-wolf was angry.&nbsp; She sank her fangs into her mate&rsquo;s
+shoulder in reproof; and he, frightened, unaware of what constituted
+this new onslaught, struck back ferociously and in still greater fright,
+ripping down the side of the she-wolf&rsquo;s muzzle.&nbsp; For him
+to resent such reproof was equally unexpected to her, and she sprang
+upon him in snarling indignation.&nbsp; Then he discovered his mistake
+and tried to placate her.&nbsp; But she proceeded to punish him roundly,
+until he gave over all attempts at placation, and whirled in a circle,
+his head away from her, his shoulders receiving the punishment of her
+teeth.</p>
+<p>In the meantime the rabbit danced above them in the air.&nbsp; The
+she-wolf sat down in the snow, and old One Eye, now more in fear of
+his mate than of the mysterious sapling, again sprang for the rabbit.&nbsp;
+As he sank back with it between his teeth, he kept his eye on the sapling.&nbsp;
+As before, it followed him back to earth.&nbsp; He crouched down under
+the impending blow, his hair bristling, but his teeth still keeping
+tight hold of the rabbit.&nbsp; But the blow did not fall.&nbsp; The
+sapling remained bent above him.&nbsp; When he moved it moved, and he
+growled at it through his clenched jaws; when he remained still, it
+remained still, and he concluded it was safer to continue remaining
+still.&nbsp; Yet the warm blood of the rabbit tasted good in his mouth.</p>
+<p>It was his mate who relieved him from the quandary in which he found
+himself.&nbsp; She took the rabbit from him, and while the sapling swayed
+and teetered threateningly above her she calmly gnawed off the rabbit&rsquo;s
+head.&nbsp; At once the sapling shot up, and after that gave no more
+trouble, remaining in the decorous and perpendicular position in which
+nature had intended it to grow.&nbsp; Then, between them, the she-wolf
+and One Eye devoured the game which the mysterious sapling had caught
+for them.</p>
+<p>There were other run-ways and alleys where rabbits were hanging in
+the air, and the wolf-pair prospected them all, the she-wolf leading
+the way, old One Eye following and observant, learning the method of
+robbing snares&mdash;a knowledge destined to stand him in good stead
+in the days to come.</p>
+<div class="GutenbergBlankLines2"><br /><br /></div>
+<h3>CHAPTER II&mdash;THE LAIR</h3>
+<div class="GutenbergBlankLines2"><br /><br /></div>
+<p>For two days the she-wolf and One Eye hung about the Indian camp.&nbsp;
+He was worried and apprehensive, yet the camp lured his mate and she
+was loath to depart.&nbsp; But when, one morning, the air was rent with
+the report of a rifle close at hand, and a bullet smashed against a
+tree trunk several inches from One Eye&rsquo;s head, they hesitated
+no more, but went off on a long, swinging lope that put quick miles
+between them and the danger.</p>
+<p>They did not go far&mdash;a couple of days&rsquo; journey.&nbsp;
+The she-wolf&rsquo;s need to find the thing for which she searched had
+now become imperative.&nbsp; She was getting very heavy, and could run
+but slowly.&nbsp; Once, in the pursuit of a rabbit, which she ordinarily
+would have caught with ease, she gave over and lay down and rested.&nbsp;
+One Eye came to her; but when he touched her neck gently with his muzzle
+she snapped at him with such quick fierceness that he tumbled over backward
+and cut a ridiculous figure in his effort to escape her teeth.&nbsp;
+Her temper was now shorter than ever; but he had become more patient
+than ever and more solicitous.</p>
+<p>And then she found the thing for which she sought.&nbsp; It was a
+few miles up a small stream that in the summer time flowed into the
+Mackenzie, but that then was frozen over and frozen down to its rocky
+bottom&mdash;a dead stream of solid white from source to mouth.&nbsp;
+The she-wolf was trotting wearily along, her mate well in advance, when
+she came upon the overhanging, high clay-bank.&nbsp; She turned aside
+and trotted over to it.&nbsp; The wear and tear of spring storms and
+melting snows had underwashed the bank and in one place had made a small
+cave out of a narrow fissure.</p>
+<p>She paused at the mouth of the cave and looked the wall over carefully.&nbsp;
+Then, on one side and the other, she ran along the base of the wall
+to where its abrupt bulk merged from the softer-lined landscape.&nbsp;
+Returning to the cave, she entered its narrow mouth.&nbsp; For a short
+three feet she was compelled to crouch, then the walls widened and rose
+higher in a little round chamber nearly six feet in diameter.&nbsp;
+The roof barely cleared her head.&nbsp; It was dry and cosey.&nbsp;
+She inspected it with painstaking care, while One Eye, who had returned,
+stood in the entrance and patiently watched her.&nbsp; She dropped her
+head, with her nose to the ground and directed toward a point near to
+her closely bunched feet, and around this point she circled several
+times; then, with a tired sigh that was almost a grunt, she curled her
+body in, relaxed her legs, and dropped down, her head toward the entrance.&nbsp;
+One Eye, with pointed, interested ears, laughed at her, and beyond,
+outlined against the white light, she could see the brush of his tail
+waving good-naturedly.&nbsp; Her own ears, with a snuggling movement,
+laid their sharp points backward and down against the head for a moment,
+while her mouth opened and her tongue lolled peaceably out, and in this
+way she expressed that she was pleased and satisfied.</p>
+<p>One Eye was hungry.&nbsp; Though he lay down in the entrance and
+slept, his sleep was fitful.&nbsp; He kept awaking and cocking his ears
+at the bright world without, where the April sun was blazing across
+the snow.&nbsp; When he dozed, upon his ears would steal the faint whispers
+of hidden trickles of running water, and he would rouse and listen intently.&nbsp;
+The sun had come back, and all the awakening Northland world was calling
+to him.&nbsp; Life was stirring.&nbsp; The feel of spring was in the
+air, the feel of growing life under the snow, of sap ascending in the
+trees, of buds bursting the shackles of the frost.</p>
+<p>He cast anxious glances at his mate, but she showed no desire to
+get up.&nbsp; He looked outside, and half a dozen snow-birds fluttered
+across his field of vision.&nbsp; He started to get up, then looked
+back to his mate again, and settled down and dozed.&nbsp; A shrill and
+minute singing stole upon his heating.&nbsp; Once, and twice, he sleepily
+brushed his nose with his paw.&nbsp; Then he woke up.&nbsp; There, buzzing
+in the air at the tip of his nose, was a lone mosquito.&nbsp; It was
+a full-grown mosquito, one that had lain frozen in a dry log all winter
+and that had now been thawed out by the sun.&nbsp; He could resist the
+call of the world no longer.&nbsp; Besides, he was hungry.</p>
+<p>He crawled over to his mate and tried to persuade her to get up.&nbsp;
+But she only snarled at him, and he walked out alone into the bright
+sunshine to find the snow-surface soft under foot and the travelling
+difficult.&nbsp; He went up the frozen bed of the stream, where the
+snow, shaded by the trees, was yet hard and crystalline.&nbsp; He was
+gone eight hours, and he came back through the darkness hungrier than
+when he had started.&nbsp; He had found game, but he had not caught
+it.&nbsp; He had broken through the melting snow crust, and wallowed,
+while the snowshoe rabbits had skimmed along on top lightly as ever.</p>
+<p>He paused at the mouth of the cave with a sudden shock of suspicion.&nbsp;
+Faint, strange sounds came from within.&nbsp; They were sounds not made
+by his mate, and yet they were remotely familiar.&nbsp; He bellied cautiously
+inside and was met by a warning snarl from the she-wolf.&nbsp; This
+he received without perturbation, though he obeyed it by keeping his
+distance; but he remained interested in the other sounds&mdash;faint,
+muffled sobbings and slubberings.</p>
+<p>His mate warned him irritably away, and he curled up and slept in
+the entrance.&nbsp; When morning came and a dim light pervaded the lair,
+he again sought after the source of the remotely familiar sounds.&nbsp;
+There was a new note in his mate&rsquo;s warning snarl.&nbsp; It was
+a jealous note, and he was very careful in keeping a respectful distance.&nbsp;
+Nevertheless, he made out, sheltering between her legs against the length
+of her body, five strange little bundles of life, very feeble, very
+helpless, making tiny whimpering noises, with eyes that did not open
+to the light.&nbsp; He was surprised.&nbsp; It was not the first time
+in his long and successful life that this thing had happened.&nbsp;
+It had happened many times, yet each time it was as fresh a surprise
+as ever to him.</p>
+<p>His mate looked at him anxiously.&nbsp; Every little while she emitted
+a low growl, and at times, when it seemed to her he approached too near,
+the growl shot up in her throat to a sharp snarl.&nbsp; Of her own experience
+she had no memory of the thing happening; but in her instinct, which
+was the experience of all the mothers of wolves, there lurked a memory
+of fathers that had eaten their new-born and helpless progeny.&nbsp;
+It manifested itself as a fear strong within her, that made her prevent
+One Eye from more closely inspecting the cubs he had fathered.</p>
+<p>But there was no danger.&nbsp; Old One Eye was feeling the urge of
+an impulse, that was, in turn, an instinct that had come down to him
+from all the fathers of wolves.&nbsp; He did not question it, nor puzzle
+over it.&nbsp; It was there, in the fibre of his being; and it was the
+most natural thing in the world that he should obey it by turning his
+back on his new-born family and by trotting out and away on the meat-trail
+whereby he lived.</p>
+<p>Five or six miles from the lair, the stream divided, its forks going
+off among the mountains at a right angle.&nbsp; Here, leading up the
+left fork, he came upon a fresh track.&nbsp; He smelled it and found
+it so recent that he crouched swiftly, and looked in the direction in
+which it disappeared.&nbsp; Then he turned deliberately and took the
+right fork.&nbsp; The footprint was much larger than the one his own
+feet made, and he knew that in the wake of such a trail there was little
+meat for him.</p>
+<p>Half a mile up the right fork, his quick ears caught the sound of
+gnawing teeth.&nbsp; He stalked the quarry and found it to be a porcupine,
+standing upright against a tree and trying his teeth on the bark.&nbsp;
+One Eye approached carefully but hopelessly.&nbsp; He knew the breed,
+though he had never met it so far north before; and never in his long
+life had porcupine served him for a meal.&nbsp; But he had long since
+learned that there was such a thing as Chance, or Opportunity, and he
+continued to draw near.&nbsp; There was never any telling what might
+happen, for with live things events were somehow always happening differently.</p>
+<p>The porcupine rolled itself into a ball, radiating long, sharp needles
+in all directions that defied attack.&nbsp; In his youth One Eye had
+once sniffed too near a similar, apparently inert ball of quills, and
+had the tail flick out suddenly in his face.&nbsp; One quill he had
+carried away in his muzzle, where it had remained for weeks, a rankling
+flame, until it finally worked out.&nbsp; So he lay down, in a comfortable
+crouching position, his nose fully a foot away, and out of the line
+of the tail.&nbsp; Thus he waited, keeping perfectly quiet.&nbsp; There
+was no telling.&nbsp; Something might happen.&nbsp; The porcupine might
+unroll.&nbsp; There might be opportunity for a deft and ripping thrust
+of paw into the tender, unguarded belly.</p>
+<p>But at the end of half an hour he arose, growled wrathfully at the
+motionless ball, and trotted on.&nbsp; He had waited too often and futilely
+in the past for porcupines to unroll, to waste any more time.&nbsp;
+He continued up the right fork.&nbsp; The day wore along, and nothing
+rewarded his hunt.</p>
+<p>The urge of his awakened instinct of fatherhood was strong upon him.&nbsp;
+He must find meat.&nbsp; In the afternoon he blundered upon a ptarmigan.&nbsp;
+He came out of a thicket and found himself face to face with the slow-witted
+bird.&nbsp; It was sitting on a log, not a foot beyond the end of his
+nose.&nbsp; Each saw the other.&nbsp; The bird made a startled rise,
+but he struck it with his paw, and smashed it down to earth, then pounced
+upon it, and caught it in his teeth as it scuttled across the snow trying
+to rise in the air again.&nbsp; As his teeth crunched through the tender
+flesh and fragile bones, he began naturally to eat.&nbsp; Then he remembered,
+and, turning on the back-track, started for home, carrying the ptarmigan
+in his mouth.</p>
+<p>A mile above the forks, running velvet-footed as was his custom,
+a gliding shadow that cautiously prospected each new vista of the trail,
+he came upon later imprints of the large tracks he had discovered in
+the early morning.&nbsp; As the track led his way, he followed, prepared
+to meet the maker of it at every turn of the stream.</p>
+<p>He slid his head around a corner of rock, where began an unusually
+large bend in the stream, and his quick eyes made out something that
+sent him crouching swiftly down.&nbsp; It was the maker of the track,
+a large female lynx.&nbsp; She was crouching as he had crouched once
+that day, in front of her the tight-rolled ball of quills.&nbsp; If
+he had been a gliding shadow before, he now became the ghost of such
+a shadow, as he crept and circled around, and came up well to leeward
+of the silent, motionless pair.</p>
+<p>He lay down in the snow, depositing the ptarmigan beside him, and
+with eyes peering through the needles of a low-growing spruce he watched
+the play of life before him&mdash;the waiting lynx and the waiting porcupine,
+each intent on life; and, such was the curiousness of the game, the
+way of life for one lay in the eating of the other, and the way of life
+for the other lay in being not eaten.&nbsp; While old One Eye, the wolf
+crouching in the covert, played his part, too, in the game, waiting
+for some strange freak of Chance, that might help him on the meat-trail
+which was his way of life.</p>
+<p>Half an hour passed, an hour; and nothing happened.&nbsp; The balls
+of quills might have been a stone for all it moved; the lynx might have
+been frozen to marble; and old One Eye might have been dead.&nbsp; Yet
+all three animals were keyed to a tenseness of living that was almost
+painful, and scarcely ever would it come to them to be more alive than
+they were then in their seeming petrifaction.</p>
+<p>One Eye moved slightly and peered forth with increased eagerness.&nbsp;
+Something was happening.&nbsp; The porcupine had at last decided that
+its enemy had gone away.&nbsp; Slowly, cautiously, it was unrolling
+its ball of impregnable armour.&nbsp; It was agitated by no tremor of
+anticipation.&nbsp; Slowly, slowly, the bristling ball straightened
+out and lengthened.&nbsp; One Eye watching, felt a sudden moistness
+in his mouth and a drooling of saliva, involuntary, excited by the living
+meat that was spreading itself like a repast before him.</p>
+<p>Not quite entirely had the porcupine unrolled when it discovered
+its enemy.&nbsp; In that instant the lynx struck.&nbsp; The blow was
+like a flash of light.&nbsp; The paw, with rigid claws curving like
+talons, shot under the tender belly and came back with a swift ripping
+movement.&nbsp; Had the porcupine been entirely unrolled, or had it
+not discovered its enemy a fraction of a second before the blow was
+struck, the paw would have escaped unscathed; but a side-flick of the
+tail sank sharp quills into it as it was withdrawn.</p>
+<p>Everything had happened at once&mdash;the blow, the counter-blow,
+the squeal of agony from the porcupine, the big cat&rsquo;s squall of
+sudden hurt and astonishment.&nbsp; One Eye half arose in his excitement,
+his ears up, his tail straight out and quivering behind him.&nbsp; The
+lynx&rsquo;s bad temper got the best of her.&nbsp; She sprang savagely
+at the thing that had hurt her.&nbsp; But the porcupine, squealing and
+grunting, with disrupted anatomy trying feebly to roll up into its ball-protection,
+flicked out its tail again, and again the big cat squalled with hurt
+and astonishment.&nbsp; Then she fell to backing away and sneezing,
+her nose bristling with quills like a monstrous pin-cushion.&nbsp; She
+brushed her nose with her paws, trying to dislodge the fiery darts,
+thrust it into the snow, and rubbed it against twigs and branches, and
+all the time leaping about, ahead, sidewise, up and down, in a frenzy
+of pain and fright.</p>
+<p>She sneezed continually, and her stub of a tail was doing its best
+toward lashing about by giving quick, violent jerks.&nbsp; She quit
+her antics, and quieted down for a long minute.&nbsp; One Eye watched.&nbsp;
+And even he could not repress a start and an involuntary bristling of
+hair along his back when she suddenly leaped, without warning, straight
+up in the air, at the same time emitting a long and most terrible squall.&nbsp;
+Then she sprang away, up the trail, squalling with every leap she made.</p>
+<p>It was not until her racket had faded away in the distance and died
+out that One Eye ventured forth.&nbsp; He walked as delicately as though
+all the snow were carpeted with porcupine quills, erect and ready to
+pierce the soft pads of his feet.&nbsp; The porcupine met his approach
+with a furious squealing and a clashing of its long teeth.&nbsp; It
+had managed to roll up in a ball again, but it was not quite the old
+compact ball; its muscles were too much torn for that.&nbsp; It had
+been ripped almost in half, and was still bleeding profusely.</p>
+<p>One Eye scooped out mouthfuls of the blood-soaked snow, and chewed
+and tasted and swallowed.&nbsp; This served as a relish, and his hunger
+increased mightily; but he was too old in the world to forget his caution.&nbsp;
+He waited.&nbsp; He lay down and waited, while the porcupine grated
+its teeth and uttered grunts and sobs and occasional sharp little squeals.&nbsp;
+In a little while, One Eye noticed that the quills were drooping and
+that a great quivering had set up.&nbsp; The quivering came to an end
+suddenly.&nbsp; There was a final defiant clash of the long teeth.&nbsp;
+Then all the quills drooped quite down, and the body relaxed and moved
+no more.</p>
+<p>With a nervous, shrinking paw, One Eye stretched out the porcupine
+to its full length and turned it over on its back.&nbsp; Nothing had
+happened.&nbsp; It was surely dead.&nbsp; He studied it intently for
+a moment, then took a careful grip with his teeth and started off down
+the stream, partly carrying, partly dragging the porcupine, with head
+turned to the side so as to avoid stepping on the prickly mass.&nbsp;
+He recollected something, dropped the burden, and trotted back to where
+he had left the ptarmigan.&nbsp; He did not hesitate a moment.&nbsp;
+He knew clearly what was to be done, and this he did by promptly eating
+the ptarmigan.&nbsp; Then he returned and took up his burden.</p>
+<p>When he dragged the result of his day&rsquo;s hunt into the cave,
+the she-wolf inspected it, turned her muzzle to him, and lightly licked
+him on the neck.&nbsp; But the next instant she was warning him away
+from the cubs with a snarl that was less harsh than usual and that was
+more apologetic than menacing.&nbsp; Her instinctive fear of the father
+of her progeny was toning down.&nbsp; He was behaving as a wolf-father
+should, and manifesting no unholy desire to devour the young lives she
+had brought into the world.</p>
+<div class="GutenbergBlankLines2"><br /><br /></div>
+<h3>CHAPTER III&mdash;THE GREY CUB</h3>
+<div class="GutenbergBlankLines2"><br /><br /></div>
+<p>He was different from his brothers and sisters.&nbsp; Their hair
+already betrayed the reddish hue inherited from their mother, the she-wolf;
+while he alone, in this particular, took after his father.&nbsp; He
+was the one little grey cub of the litter.&nbsp; He had bred true to
+the straight wolf-stock&mdash;in fact, he had bred true to old One Eye
+himself, physically, with but a single exception, and that was he had
+two eyes to his father&rsquo;s one.</p>
+<p>The grey cub&rsquo;s eyes had not been open long, yet already he
+could see with steady clearness.&nbsp; And while his eyes were still
+closed, he had felt, tasted, and smelled.&nbsp; He knew his two brothers
+and his two sisters very well.&nbsp; He had begun to romp with them
+in a feeble, awkward way, and even to squabble, his little throat vibrating
+with a queer rasping noise (the forerunner of the growl), as he worked
+himself into a passion.&nbsp; And long before his eyes had opened he
+had learned by touch, taste, and smell to know his mother&mdash;a fount
+of warmth and liquid food and tenderness.&nbsp; She possessed a gentle,
+caressing tongue that soothed him when it passed over his soft little
+body, and that impelled him to snuggle close against her and to doze
+off to sleep.</p>
+<p>Most of the first month of his life had been passed thus in sleeping;
+but now he could see quite well, and he stayed awake for longer periods
+of time, and he was coming to learn his world quite well.&nbsp; His
+world was gloomy; but he did not know that, for he knew no other world.&nbsp;
+It was dim-lighted; but his eyes had never had to adjust themselves
+to any other light.&nbsp; His world was very small.&nbsp; Its limits
+were the walls of the lair; but as he had no knowledge of the wide world
+outside, he was never oppressed by the narrow confines of his existence.</p>
+<p>But he had early discovered that one wall of his world was different
+from the rest.&nbsp; This was the mouth of the cave and the source of
+light.&nbsp; He had discovered that it was different from the other
+walls long before he had any thoughts of his own, any conscious volitions.&nbsp;
+It had been an irresistible attraction before ever his eyes opened and
+looked upon it.&nbsp; The light from it had beat upon his sealed lids,
+and the eyes and the optic nerves had pulsated to little, sparklike
+flashes, warm-coloured and strangely pleasing.&nbsp; The life of his
+body, and of every fibre of his body, the life that was the very substance
+of his body and that was apart from his own personal life, had yearned
+toward this light and urged his body toward it in the same way that
+the cunning chemistry of a plant urges it toward the sun.</p>
+<p>Always, in the beginning, before his conscious life dawned, he had
+crawled toward the mouth of the cave.&nbsp; And in this his brothers
+and sisters were one with him.&nbsp; Never, in that period, did any
+of them crawl toward the dark corners of the back-wall.&nbsp; The light
+drew them as if they were plants; the chemistry of the life that composed
+them demanded the light as a necessity of being; and their little puppet-bodies
+crawled blindly and chemically, like the tendrils of a vine.&nbsp; Later
+on, when each developed individuality and became personally conscious
+of impulsions and desires, the attraction of the light increased.&nbsp;
+They were always crawling and sprawling toward it, and being driven
+back from it by their mother.</p>
+<p>It was in this way that the grey cub learned other attributes of
+his mother than the soft, soothing, tongue.&nbsp; In his insistent crawling
+toward the light, he discovered in her a nose that with a sharp nudge
+administered rebuke, and later, a paw, that crushed him down and rolled
+him over and over with swift, calculating stroke.&nbsp; Thus he learned
+hurt; and on top of it he learned to avoid hurt, first, by not incurring
+the risk of it; and second, when he had incurred the risk, by dodging
+and by retreating.&nbsp; These were conscious actions, and were the
+results of his first generalisations upon the world.&nbsp; Before that
+he had recoiled automatically from hurt, as he had crawled automatically
+toward the light.&nbsp; After that he recoiled from hurt because he
+<i>knew</i> that it was hurt.</p>
+<p>He was a fierce little cub.&nbsp; So were his brothers and sisters.&nbsp;
+It was to be expected.&nbsp; He was a carnivorous animal.&nbsp; He came
+of a breed of meat-killers and meat-eaters.&nbsp; His father and mother
+lived wholly upon meat.&nbsp; The milk he had sucked with his first
+flickering life, was milk transformed directly from meat, and now, at
+a month old, when his eyes had been open for but a week, he was beginning
+himself to eat meat&mdash;meat half-digested by the she-wolf and disgorged
+for the five growing cubs that already made too great demand upon her
+breast.</p>
+<p>But he was, further, the fiercest of the litter.&nbsp; He could make
+a louder rasping growl than any of them.&nbsp; His tiny rages were much
+more terrible than theirs.&nbsp; It was he that first learned the trick
+of rolling a fellow-cub over with a cunning paw-stroke.&nbsp; And it
+was he that first gripped another cub by the ear and pulled and tugged
+and growled through jaws tight-clenched.&nbsp; And certainly it was
+he that caused the mother the most trouble in keeping her litter from
+the mouth of the cave.</p>
+<p>The fascination of the light for the grey cub increased from day
+to day.&nbsp; He was perpetually departing on yard-long adventures toward
+the cave&rsquo;s entrance, and as perpetually being driven back.&nbsp;
+Only he did not know it for an entrance.&nbsp; He did not know anything
+about entrances&mdash;passages whereby one goes from one place to another
+place.&nbsp; He did not know any other place, much less of a way to
+get there.&nbsp; So to him the entrance of the cave was a wall&mdash;a
+wall of light.&nbsp; As the sun was to the outside dweller, this wall
+was to him the sun of his world.&nbsp; It attracted him as a candle
+attracts a moth.&nbsp; He was always striving to attain it.&nbsp; The
+life that was so swiftly expanding within him, urged him continually
+toward the wall of light.&nbsp; The life that was within him knew that
+it was the one way out, the way he was predestined to tread.&nbsp; But
+he himself did not know anything about it.&nbsp; He did not know there
+was any outside at all.</p>
+<p>There was one strange thing about this wall of light.&nbsp; His father
+(he had already come to recognise his father as the one other dweller
+in the world, a creature like his mother, who slept near the light and
+was a bringer of meat)&mdash;his father had a way of walking right into
+the white far wall and disappearing.&nbsp; The grey cub could not understand
+this.&nbsp; Though never permitted by his mother to approach that wall,
+he had approached the other walls, and encountered hard obstruction
+on the end of his tender nose.&nbsp; This hurt.&nbsp; And after several
+such adventures, he left the walls alone.&nbsp; Without thinking about
+it, he accepted this disappearing into the wall as a peculiarity of
+his father, as milk and half-digested meat were peculiarities of his
+mother.</p>
+<p>In fact, the grey cub was not given to thinking&mdash;at least, to
+the kind of thinking customary of men.&nbsp; His brain worked in dim
+ways.&nbsp; Yet his conclusions were as sharp and distinct as those
+achieved by men.&nbsp; He had a method of accepting things, without
+questioning the why and wherefore.&nbsp; In reality, this was the act
+of classification.&nbsp; He was never disturbed over why a thing happened.&nbsp;
+How it happened was sufficient for him.&nbsp; Thus, when he had bumped
+his nose on the back-wall a few times, he accepted that he would not
+disappear into walls.&nbsp; In the same way he accepted that his father
+could disappear into walls.&nbsp; But he was not in the least disturbed
+by desire to find out the reason for the difference between his father
+and himself.&nbsp; Logic and physics were no part of his mental make-up.</p>
+<p>Like most creatures of the Wild, he early experienced famine.&nbsp;
+There came a time when not only did the meat-supply cease, but the milk
+no longer came from his mother&rsquo;s breast.&nbsp; At first, the cubs
+whimpered and cried, but for the most part they slept.&nbsp; It was
+not long before they were reduced to a coma of hunger.&nbsp; There were
+no more spats and squabbles, no more tiny rages nor attempts at growling;
+while the adventures toward the far white wall ceased altogether.&nbsp;
+The cubs slept, while the life that was in them flickered and died down.</p>
+<p>One Eye was desperate.&nbsp; He ranged far and wide, and slept but
+little in the lair that had now become cheerless and miserable.&nbsp;
+The she-wolf, too, left her litter and went out in search of meat.&nbsp;
+In the first days after the birth of the cubs, One Eye had journeyed
+several times back to the Indian camp and robbed the rabbit snares;
+but, with the melting of the snow and the opening of the streams, the
+Indian camp had moved away, and that source of supply was closed to
+him.</p>
+<p>When the grey cub came back to life and again took interest in the
+far white wall, he found that the population of his world had been reduced.&nbsp;
+Only one sister remained to him.&nbsp; The rest were gone.&nbsp; As
+he grew stronger, he found himself compelled to play alone, for the
+sister no longer lifted her head nor moved about.&nbsp; His little body
+rounded out with the meat he now ate; but the food had come too late
+for her.&nbsp; She slept continuously, a tiny skeleton flung round with
+skin in which the flame flickered lower and lower and at last went out.</p>
+<p>Then there came a time when the grey cub no longer saw his father
+appearing and disappearing in the wall nor lying down asleep in the
+entrance.&nbsp; This had happened at the end of a second and less severe
+famine.&nbsp; The she-wolf knew why One Eye never came back, but there
+was no way by which she could tell what she had seen to the grey cub.&nbsp;
+Hunting herself for meat, up the left fork of the stream where lived
+the lynx, she had followed a day-old trail of One Eye.&nbsp; And she
+had found him, or what remained of him, at the end of the trail.&nbsp;
+There were many signs of the battle that had been fought, and of the
+lynx&rsquo;s withdrawal to her lair after having won the victory.&nbsp;
+Before she went away, the she-wolf had found this lair, but the signs
+told her that the lynx was inside, and she had not dared to venture
+in.</p>
+<p>After that, the she-wolf in her hunting avoided the left fork.&nbsp;
+For she knew that in the lynx&rsquo;s lair was a litter of kittens,
+and she knew the lynx for a fierce, bad-tempered creature and a terrible
+fighter.&nbsp; It was all very well for half a dozen wolves to drive
+a lynx, spitting and bristling, up a tree; but it was quite a different
+matter for a lone wolf to encounter a lynx&mdash;especially when the
+lynx was known to have a litter of hungry kittens at her back.</p>
+<p>But the Wild is the Wild, and motherhood is motherhood, at all times
+fiercely protective whether in the Wild or out of it; and the time was
+to come when the she-wolf, for her grey cub&rsquo;s sake, would venture
+the left fork, and the lair in the rocks, and the lynx&rsquo;s wrath.</p>
+<div class="GutenbergBlankLines2"><br /><br /></div>
+<h3>CHAPTER IV&mdash;THE WALL OF THE WORLD</h3>
+<div class="GutenbergBlankLines2"><br /><br /></div>
+<p>By the time his mother began leaving the cave on hunting expeditions,
+the cub had learned well the law that forbade his approaching the entrance.&nbsp;
+Not only had this law been forcibly and many times impressed on him
+by his mother&rsquo;s nose and paw, but in him the instinct of fear
+was developing.&nbsp; Never, in his brief cave-life, had he encountered
+anything of which to be afraid.&nbsp; Yet fear was in him.&nbsp; It
+had come down to him from a remote ancestry through a thousand thousand
+lives.&nbsp; It was a heritage he had received directly from One Eye
+and the she-wolf; but to them, in turn, it had been passed down through
+all the generations of wolves that had gone before.&nbsp; Fear!&mdash;that
+legacy of the Wild which no animal may escape nor exchange for pottage.</p>
+<p>So the grey cub knew fear, though he knew not the stuff of which
+fear was made.&nbsp; Possibly he accepted it as one of the restrictions
+of life.&nbsp; For he had already learned that there were such restrictions.&nbsp;
+Hunger he had known; and when he could not appease his hunger he had
+felt restriction.&nbsp; The hard obstruction of the cave-wall, the sharp
+nudge of his mother&rsquo;s nose, the smashing stroke of her paw, the
+hunger unappeased of several famines, had borne in upon him that all
+was not freedom in the world, that to life there was limitations and
+restraints.&nbsp; These limitations and restraints were laws.&nbsp;
+To be obedient to them was to escape hurt and make for happiness.</p>
+<p>He did not reason the question out in this man fashion.&nbsp; He
+merely classified the things that hurt and the things that did not hurt.&nbsp;
+And after such classification he avoided the things that hurt, the restrictions
+and restraints, in order to enjoy the satisfactions and the remunerations
+of life.</p>
+<p>Thus it was that in obedience to the law laid down by his mother,
+and in obedience to the law of that unknown and nameless thing, fear,
+he kept away from the mouth of the cave.&nbsp; It remained to him a
+white wall of light.&nbsp; When his mother was absent, he slept most
+of the time, while during the intervals that he was awake he kept very
+quiet, suppressing the whimpering cries that tickled in his throat and
+strove for noise.</p>
+<p>Once, lying awake, he heard a strange sound in the white wall.&nbsp;
+He did not know that it was a wolverine, standing outside, all a-trembling
+with its own daring, and cautiously scenting out the contents of the
+cave.&nbsp; The cub knew only that the sniff was strange, a something
+unclassified, therefore unknown and terrible&mdash;for the unknown was
+one of the chief elements that went into the making of fear.</p>
+<p>The hair bristled upon the grey cub&rsquo;s back, but it bristled
+silently.&nbsp; How was he to know that this thing that sniffed was
+a thing at which to bristle?&nbsp; It was not born of any knowledge
+of his, yet it was the visible expression of the fear that was in him,
+and for which, in his own life, there was no accounting.&nbsp; But fear
+was accompanied by another instinct&mdash;that of concealment.&nbsp;
+The cub was in a frenzy of terror, yet he lay without movement or sound,
+frozen, petrified into immobility, to all appearances dead.&nbsp; His
+mother, coming home, growled as she smelt the wolverine&rsquo;s track,
+and bounded into the cave and licked and nozzled him with undue vehemence
+of affection.&nbsp; And the cub felt that somehow he had escaped a great
+hurt.</p>
+<p>But there were other forces at work in the cub, the greatest of which
+was growth.&nbsp; Instinct and law demanded of him obedience.&nbsp;
+But growth demanded disobedience.&nbsp; His mother and fear impelled
+him to keep away from the white wall.&nbsp; Growth is life, and life
+is for ever destined to make for light.&nbsp; So there was no damming
+up the tide of life that was rising within him&mdash;rising with every
+mouthful of meat he swallowed, with every breath he drew.&nbsp; In the
+end, one day, fear and obedience were swept away by the rush of life,
+and the cub straddled and sprawled toward the entrance.</p>
+<p>Unlike any other wall with which he had had experience, this wall
+seemed to recede from him as he approached.&nbsp; No hard surface collided
+with the tender little nose he thrust out tentatively before him.&nbsp;
+The substance of the wall seemed as permeable and yielding as light.&nbsp;
+And as condition, in his eyes, had the seeming of form, so he entered
+into what had been wall to him and bathed in the substance that composed
+it.</p>
+<p>It was bewildering.&nbsp; He was sprawling through solidity.&nbsp;
+And ever the light grew brighter.&nbsp; Fear urged him to go back, but
+growth drove him on.&nbsp; Suddenly he found himself at the mouth of
+the cave.&nbsp; The wall, inside which he had thought himself, as suddenly
+leaped back before him to an immeasurable distance.&nbsp; The light
+had become painfully bright.&nbsp; He was dazzled by it.&nbsp; Likewise
+he was made dizzy by this abrupt and tremendous extension of space.&nbsp;
+Automatically, his eyes were adjusting themselves to the brightness,
+focusing themselves to meet the increased distance of objects.&nbsp;
+At first, the wall had leaped beyond his vision.&nbsp; He now saw it
+again; but it had taken upon itself a remarkable remoteness.&nbsp; Also,
+its appearance had changed.&nbsp; It was now a variegated wall, composed
+of the trees that fringed the stream, the opposing mountain that towered
+above the trees, and the sky that out-towered the mountain.</p>
+<p>A great fear came upon him.&nbsp; This was more of the terrible unknown.&nbsp;
+He crouched down on the lip of the cave and gazed out on the world.&nbsp;
+He was very much afraid.&nbsp; Because it was unknown, it was hostile
+to him.&nbsp; Therefore the hair stood up on end along his back and
+his lips wrinkled weakly in an attempt at a ferocious and intimidating
+snarl.&nbsp; Out of his puniness and fright he challenged and menaced
+the whole wide world.</p>
+<p>Nothing happened.&nbsp; He continued to gaze, and in his interest
+he forgot to snarl.&nbsp; Also, he forgot to be afraid.&nbsp; For the
+time, fear had been routed by growth, while growth had assumed the guise
+of curiosity.&nbsp; He began to notice near objects&mdash;an open portion
+of the stream that flashed in the sun, the blasted pine-tree that stood
+at the base of the slope, and the slope itself, that ran right up to
+him and ceased two feet beneath the lip of the cave on which he crouched.</p>
+<p>Now the grey cub had lived all his days on a level floor.&nbsp; He
+had never experienced the hurt of a fall.&nbsp; He did not know what
+a fall was.&nbsp; So he stepped boldly out upon the air.&nbsp; His hind-legs
+still rested on the cave-lip, so he fell forward head downward.&nbsp;
+The earth struck him a harsh blow on the nose that made him yelp.&nbsp;
+Then he began rolling down the slope, over and over.&nbsp; He was in
+a panic of terror.&nbsp; The unknown had caught him at last.&nbsp; It
+had gripped savagely hold of him and was about to wreak upon him some
+terrific hurt.&nbsp; Growth was now routed by fear, and he ki-yi&rsquo;d
+like any frightened puppy.</p>
+<p>The unknown bore him on he knew not to what frightful hurt, and he
+yelped and ki-yi&rsquo;d unceasingly.&nbsp; This was a different proposition
+from crouching in frozen fear while the unknown lurked just alongside.&nbsp;
+Now the unknown had caught tight hold of him.&nbsp; Silence would do
+no good.&nbsp; Besides, it was not fear, but terror, that convulsed
+him.</p>
+<p>But the slope grew more gradual, and its base was grass-covered.&nbsp;
+Here the cub lost momentum.&nbsp; When at last he came to a stop, he
+gave one last agonised yell and then a long, whimpering wail.&nbsp;
+Also, and quite as a matter of course, as though in his life he had
+already made a thousand toilets, he proceeded to lick away the dry clay
+that soiled him.</p>
+<p>After that he sat up and gazed about him, as might the first man
+of the earth who landed upon Mars.&nbsp; The cub had broken through
+the wall of the world, the unknown had let go its hold of him, and here
+he was without hurt.&nbsp; But the first man on Mars would have experienced
+less unfamiliarity than did he.&nbsp; Without any antecedent knowledge,
+without any warning whatever that such existed, he found himself an
+explorer in a totally new world.</p>
+<p>Now that the terrible unknown had let go of him, he forgot that the
+unknown had any terrors.&nbsp; He was aware only of curiosity in all
+the things about him.&nbsp; He inspected the grass beneath him, the
+moss-berry plant just beyond, and the dead trunk of the blasted pine
+that stood on the edge of an open space among the trees.&nbsp; A squirrel,
+running around the base of the trunk, came full upon him, and gave him
+a great fright.&nbsp; He cowered down and snarled.&nbsp; But the squirrel
+was as badly scared.&nbsp; It ran up the tree, and from a point of safety
+chattered back savagely.</p>
+<p>This helped the cub&rsquo;s courage, and though the woodpecker he
+next encountered gave him a start, he proceeded confidently on his way.&nbsp;
+Such was his confidence, that when a moose-bird impudently hopped up
+to him, he reached out at it with a playful paw.&nbsp; The result was
+a sharp peck on the end of his nose that made him cower down and ki-yi.&nbsp;
+The noise he made was too much for the moose-bird, who sought safety
+in flight.</p>
+<p>But the cub was learning.&nbsp; His misty little mind had already
+made an unconscious classification.&nbsp; There were live things and
+things not alive.&nbsp; Also, he must watch out for the live things.&nbsp;
+The things not alive remained always in one place, but the live things
+moved about, and there was no telling what they might do.&nbsp; The
+thing to expect of them was the unexpected, and for this he must be
+prepared.</p>
+<p>He travelled very clumsily.&nbsp; He ran into sticks and things.&nbsp;
+A twig that he thought a long way off, would the next instant hit him
+on the nose or rake along his ribs.&nbsp; There were inequalities of
+surface.&nbsp; Sometimes he overstepped and stubbed his nose.&nbsp;
+Quite as often he understepped and stubbed his feet.&nbsp; Then there
+were the pebbles and stones that turned under him when he trod upon
+them; and from them he came to know that the things not alive were not
+all in the same state of stable equilibrium as was his cave&mdash;also,
+that small things not alive were more liable than large things to fall
+down or turn over.&nbsp; But with every mishap he was learning.&nbsp;
+The longer he walked, the better he walked.&nbsp; He was adjusting himself.&nbsp;
+He was learning to calculate his own muscular movements, to know his
+physical limitations, to measure distances between objects, and between
+objects and himself.</p>
+<p>His was the luck of the beginner.&nbsp; Born to be a hunter of meat
+(though he did not know it), he blundered upon meat just outside his
+own cave-door on his first foray into the world.&nbsp; It was by sheer
+blundering that he chanced upon the shrewdly hidden ptarmigan nest.&nbsp;
+He fell into it.&nbsp; He had essayed to walk along the trunk of a fallen
+pine.&nbsp; The rotten bark gave way under his feet, and with a despairing
+yelp he pitched down the rounded crescent, smashed through the leafage
+and stalks of a small bush, and in the heart of the bush, on the ground,
+fetched up in the midst of seven ptarmigan chicks.</p>
+<p>They made noises, and at first he was frightened at them.&nbsp; Then
+he perceived that they were very little, and he became bolder.&nbsp;
+They moved.&nbsp; He placed his paw on one, and its movements were accelerated.&nbsp;
+This was a source of enjoyment to him.&nbsp; He smelled it.&nbsp; He
+picked it up in his mouth.&nbsp; It struggled and tickled his tongue.&nbsp;
+At the same time he was made aware of a sensation of hunger.&nbsp; His
+jaws closed together.&nbsp; There was a crunching of fragile bones,
+and warm blood ran in his mouth.&nbsp; The taste of it was good.&nbsp;
+This was meat, the same as his mother gave him, only it was alive between
+his teeth and therefore better.&nbsp; So he ate the ptarmigan.&nbsp;
+Nor did he stop till he had devoured the whole brood.&nbsp; Then he
+licked his chops in quite the same way his mother did, and began to
+crawl out of the bush.</p>
+<p>He encountered a feathered whirlwind.&nbsp; He was confused and blinded
+by the rush of it and the beat of angry wings.&nbsp; He hid his head
+between his paws and yelped.&nbsp; The blows increased.&nbsp; The mother
+ptarmigan was in a fury.&nbsp; Then he became angry.&nbsp; He rose up,
+snarling, striking out with his paws.&nbsp; He sank his tiny teeth into
+one of the wings and pulled and tugged sturdily.&nbsp; The ptarmigan
+struggled against him, showering blows upon him with her free wing.&nbsp;
+It was his first battle.&nbsp; He was elated.&nbsp; He forgot all about
+the unknown.&nbsp; He no longer was afraid of anything.&nbsp; He was
+fighting, tearing at a live thing that was striking at him.&nbsp; Also,
+this live thing was meat.&nbsp; The lust to kill was on him.&nbsp; He
+had just destroyed little live things.&nbsp; He would now destroy a
+big live thing.&nbsp; He was too busy and happy to know that he was
+happy.&nbsp; He was thrilling and exulting in ways new to him and greater
+to him than any he had known before.</p>
+<p>He held on to the wing and growled between his tight-clenched teeth.&nbsp;
+The ptarmigan dragged him out of the bush.&nbsp; When she turned and
+tried to drag him back into the bush&rsquo;s shelter, he pulled her
+away from it and on into the open.&nbsp; And all the time she was making
+outcry and striking with her free wing, while feathers were flying like
+a snow-fall.&nbsp; The pitch to which he was aroused was tremendous.&nbsp;
+All the fighting blood of his breed was up in him and surging through
+him.&nbsp; This was living, though he did not know it.&nbsp; He was
+realising his own meaning in the world; he was doing that for which
+he was made&mdash;killing meat and battling to kill it.&nbsp; He was
+justifying his existence, than which life can do no greater; for life
+achieves its summit when it does to the uttermost that which it was
+equipped to do.</p>
+<p>After a time, the ptarmigan ceased her struggling.&nbsp; He still
+held her by the wing, and they lay on the ground and looked at each
+other.&nbsp; He tried to growl threateningly, ferociously.&nbsp; She
+pecked on his nose, which by now, what of previous adventures was sore.&nbsp;
+He winced but held on.&nbsp; She pecked him again and again.&nbsp; From
+wincing he went to whimpering.&nbsp; He tried to back away from her,
+oblivious to the fact that by his hold on her he dragged her after him.&nbsp;
+A rain of pecks fell on his ill-used nose.&nbsp; The flood of fight
+ebbed down in him, and, releasing his prey, he turned tail and scampered
+on across the open in inglorious retreat.</p>
+<p>He lay down to rest on the other side of the open, near the edge
+of the bushes, his tongue lolling out, his chest heaving and panting,
+his nose still hurting him and causing him to continue his whimper.&nbsp;
+But as he lay there, suddenly there came to him a feeling as of something
+terrible impending.&nbsp; The unknown with all its terrors rushed upon
+him, and he shrank back instinctively into the shelter of the bush.&nbsp;
+As he did so, a draught of air fanned him, and a large, winged body
+swept ominously and silently past.&nbsp; A hawk, driving down out of
+the blue, had barely missed him.</p>
+<p>While he lay in the bush, recovering from his fright and peering
+fearfully out, the mother-ptarmigan on the other side of the open space
+fluttered out of the ravaged nest.&nbsp; It was because of her loss
+that she paid no attention to the winged bolt of the sky.&nbsp; But
+the cub saw, and it was a warning and a lesson to him&mdash;the swift
+downward swoop of the hawk, the short skim of its body just above the
+ground, the strike of its talons in the body of the ptarmigan, the ptarmigan&rsquo;s
+squawk of agony and fright, and the hawk&rsquo;s rush upward into the
+blue, carrying the ptarmigan away with it,</p>
+<p>It was a long time before the cub left its shelter.&nbsp; He had
+learned much.&nbsp; Live things were meat.&nbsp; They were good to eat.&nbsp;
+Also, live things when they were large enough, could give hurt.&nbsp;
+It was better to eat small live things like ptarmigan chicks, and to
+let alone large live things like ptarmigan hens.&nbsp; Nevertheless
+he felt a little prick of ambition, a sneaking desire to have another
+battle with that ptarmigan hen&mdash;only the hawk had carried her away.&nbsp;
+May be there were other ptarmigan hens.&nbsp; He would go and see.</p>
+<p>He came down a shelving bank to the stream.&nbsp; He had never seen
+water before.&nbsp; The footing looked good.&nbsp; There were no inequalities
+of surface.&nbsp; He stepped boldly out on it; and went down, crying
+with fear, into the embrace of the unknown.&nbsp; It was cold, and he
+gasped, breathing quickly.&nbsp; The water rushed into his lungs instead
+of the air that had always accompanied his act of breathing.&nbsp; The
+suffocation he experienced was like the pang of death.&nbsp; To him
+it signified death.&nbsp; He had no conscious knowledge of death, but
+like every animal of the Wild, he possessed the instinct of death.&nbsp;
+To him it stood as the greatest of hurts.&nbsp; It was the very essence
+of the unknown; it was the sum of the terrors of the unknown, the one
+culminating and unthinkable catastrophe that could happen to him, about
+which he knew nothing and about which he feared everything.</p>
+<p>He came to the surface, and the sweet air rushed into his open mouth.&nbsp;
+He did not go down again.&nbsp; Quite as though it had been a long-established
+custom of his he struck out with all his legs and began to swim.&nbsp;
+The near bank was a yard away; but he had come up with his back to it,
+and the first thing his eyes rested upon was the opposite bank, toward
+which he immediately began to swim.&nbsp; The stream was a small one,
+but in the pool it widened out to a score of feet.</p>
+<p>Midway in the passage, the current picked up the cub and swept him
+downstream.&nbsp; He was caught in the miniature rapid at the bottom
+of the pool.&nbsp; Here was little chance for swimming.&nbsp; The quiet
+water had become suddenly angry.&nbsp; Sometimes he was under, sometimes
+on top.&nbsp; At all times he was in violent motion, now being turned
+over or around, and again, being smashed against a rock.&nbsp; And with
+every rock he struck, he yelped.&nbsp; His progress was a series of
+yelps, from which might have been adduced the number of rocks he encountered.</p>
+<p>Below the rapid was a second pool, and here, captured by the eddy,
+he was gently borne to the bank, and as gently deposited on a bed of
+gravel.&nbsp; He crawled frantically clear of the water and lay down.&nbsp;
+He had learned some more about the world.&nbsp; Water was not alive.&nbsp;
+Yet it moved.&nbsp; Also, it looked as solid as the earth, but was without
+any solidity at all.&nbsp; His conclusion was that things were not always
+what they appeared to be.&nbsp; The cub&rsquo;s fear of the unknown
+was an inherited distrust, and it had now been strengthened by experience.&nbsp;
+Thenceforth, in the nature of things, he would possess an abiding distrust
+of appearances.&nbsp; He would have to learn the reality of a thing
+before he could put his faith into it.</p>
+<p>One other adventure was destined for him that day.&nbsp; He had recollected
+that there was such a thing in the world as his mother.&nbsp; And then
+there came to him a feeling that he wanted her more than all the rest
+of the things in the world.&nbsp; Not only was his body tired with the
+adventures it had undergone, but his little brain was equally tired.&nbsp;
+In all the days he had lived it had not worked so hard as on this one
+day.&nbsp; Furthermore, he was sleepy.&nbsp; So he started out to look
+for the cave and his mother, feeling at the same time an overwhelming
+rush of loneliness and helplessness.</p>
+<p>He was sprawling along between some bushes, when he heard a sharp
+intimidating cry.&nbsp; There was a flash of yellow before his eyes.&nbsp;
+He saw a weasel leaping swiftly away from him.&nbsp; It was a small
+live thing, and he had no fear.&nbsp; Then, before him, at his feet,
+he saw an extremely small live thing, only several inches long, a young
+weasel, that, like himself, had disobediently gone out adventuring.&nbsp;
+It tried to retreat before him.&nbsp; He turned it over with his paw.&nbsp;
+It made a queer, grating noise.&nbsp; The next moment the flash of yellow
+reappeared before his eyes.&nbsp; He heard again the intimidating cry,
+and at the same instant received a sharp blow on the side of the neck
+and felt the sharp teeth of the mother-weasel cut into his flesh.</p>
+<p>While he yelped and ki-yi&rsquo;d and scrambled backward, he saw
+the mother-weasel leap upon her young one and disappear with it into
+the neighbouring thicket.&nbsp; The cut of her teeth in his neck still
+hurt, but his feelings were hurt more grievously, and he sat down and
+weakly whimpered.&nbsp; This mother-weasel was so small and so savage.&nbsp;
+He was yet to learn that for size and weight the weasel was the most
+ferocious, vindictive, and terrible of all the killers of the Wild.&nbsp;
+But a portion of this knowledge was quickly to be his.</p>
+<p>He was still whimpering when the mother-weasel reappeared.&nbsp;
+She did not rush him, now that her young one was safe.&nbsp; She approached
+more cautiously, and the cub had full opportunity to observe her lean,
+snakelike body, and her head, erect, eager, and snake-like itself.&nbsp;
+Her sharp, menacing cry sent the hair bristling along his back, and
+he snarled warningly at her.&nbsp; She came closer and closer.&nbsp;
+There was a leap, swifter than his unpractised sight, and the lean,
+yellow body disappeared for a moment out of the field of his vision.&nbsp;
+The next moment she was at his throat, her teeth buried in his hair
+and flesh.</p>
+<p>At first he snarled and tried to fight; but he was very young, and
+this was only his first day in the world, and his snarl became a whimper,
+his fight a struggle to escape.&nbsp; The weasel never relaxed her hold.&nbsp;
+She hung on, striving to press down with her teeth to the great vein
+were his life-blood bubbled.&nbsp; The weasel was a drinker of blood,
+and it was ever her preference to drink from the throat of life itself.</p>
+<p>The grey cub would have died, and there would have been no story
+to write about him, had not the she-wolf come bounding through the bushes.&nbsp;
+The weasel let go the cub and flashed at the she-wolf&rsquo;s throat,
+missing, but getting a hold on the jaw instead.&nbsp; The she-wolf flirted
+her head like the snap of a whip, breaking the weasel&rsquo;s hold and
+flinging it high in the air.&nbsp; And, still in the air, the she-wolf&rsquo;s
+jaws closed on the lean, yellow body, and the weasel knew death between
+the crunching teeth.</p>
+<p>The cub experienced another access of affection on the part of his
+mother.&nbsp; Her joy at finding him seemed even greater than his joy
+at being found.&nbsp; She nozzled him and caressed him and licked the
+cuts made in him by the weasel&rsquo;s teeth.&nbsp; Then, between them,
+mother and cub, they ate the blood-drinker, and after that went back
+to the cave and slept.</p>
+<div class="GutenbergBlankLines2"><br /><br /></div>
+<h3>CHAPTER V&mdash;THE LAW OF MEAT</h3>
+<div class="GutenbergBlankLines2"><br /><br /></div>
+<p>The cub&rsquo;s development was rapid.&nbsp; He rested for two days,
+and then ventured forth from the cave again.&nbsp; It was on this adventure
+that he found the young weasel whose mother he had helped eat, and he
+saw to it that the young weasel went the way of its mother.&nbsp; But
+on this trip he did not get lost.&nbsp; When he grew tired, he found
+his way back to the cave and slept.&nbsp; And every day thereafter found
+him out and ranging a wider area.</p>
+<p>He began to get accurate measurement of his strength and his weakness,
+and to know when to be bold and when to be cautious.&nbsp; He found
+it expedient to be cautious all the time, except for the rare moments,
+when, assured of his own intrepidity, he abandoned himself to petty
+rages and lusts.</p>
+<p>He was always a little demon of fury when he chanced upon a stray
+ptarmigan.&nbsp; Never did he fail to respond savagely to the chatter
+of the squirrel he had first met on the blasted pine.&nbsp; While the
+sight of a moose-bird almost invariably put him into the wildest of
+rages; for he never forgot the peck on the nose he had received from
+the first of that ilk he encountered.</p>
+<p>But there were times when even a moose-bird failed to affect him,
+and those were times when he felt himself to be in danger from some
+other prowling meat hunter.&nbsp; He never forgot the hawk, and its
+moving shadow always sent him crouching into the nearest thicket.&nbsp;
+He no longer sprawled and straddled, and already he was developing the
+gait of his mother, slinking and furtive, apparently without exertion,
+yet sliding along with a swiftness that was as deceptive as it was imperceptible.</p>
+<p>In the matter of meat, his luck had been all in the beginning.&nbsp;
+The seven ptarmigan chicks and the baby weasel represented the sum of
+his killings.&nbsp; His desire to kill strengthened with the days, and
+he cherished hungry ambitions for the squirrel that chattered so volubly
+and always informed all wild creatures that the wolf-cub was approaching.&nbsp;
+But as birds flew in the air, squirrels could climb trees, and the cub
+could only try to crawl unobserved upon the squirrel when it was on
+the ground.</p>
+<p>The cub entertained a great respect for his mother.&nbsp; She could
+get meat, and she never failed to bring him his share.&nbsp; Further,
+she was unafraid of things.&nbsp; It did not occur to him that this
+fearlessness was founded upon experience and knowledge.&nbsp; Its effect
+on him was that of an impression of power.&nbsp; His mother represented
+power; and as he grew older he felt this power in the sharper admonishment
+of her paw; while the reproving nudge of her nose gave place to the
+slash of her fangs.&nbsp; For this, likewise, he respected his mother.&nbsp;
+She compelled obedience from him, and the older he grew the shorter
+grew her temper.</p>
+<p>Famine came again, and the cub with clearer consciousness knew once
+more the bite of hunger.&nbsp; The she-wolf ran herself thin in the
+quest for meat.&nbsp; She rarely slept any more in the cave, spending
+most of her time on the meat-trail, and spending it vainly.&nbsp; This
+famine was not a long one, but it was severe while it lasted.&nbsp;
+The cub found no more milk in his mother&rsquo;s breast, nor did he
+get one mouthful of meat for himself.</p>
+<p>Before, he had hunted in play, for the sheer joyousness of it; now
+he hunted in deadly earnestness, and found nothing.&nbsp; Yet the failure
+of it accelerated his development.&nbsp; He studied the habits of the
+squirrel with greater carefulness, and strove with greater craft to
+steal upon it and surprise it.&nbsp; He studied the wood-mice and tried
+to dig them out of their burrows; and he learned much about the ways
+of moose-birds and woodpeckers.&nbsp; And there came a day when the
+hawk&rsquo;s shadow did not drive him crouching into the bushes.&nbsp;
+He had grown stronger and wiser, and more confident.&nbsp; Also, he
+was desperate.&nbsp; So he sat on his haunches, conspicuously in an
+open space, and challenged the hawk down out of the sky.&nbsp; For he
+knew that there, floating in the blue above him, was meat, the meat
+his stomach yearned after so insistently.&nbsp; But the hawk refused
+to come down and give battle, and the cub crawled away into a thicket
+and whimpered his disappointment and hunger.</p>
+<p>The famine broke.&nbsp; The she-wolf brought home meat.&nbsp; It
+was strange meat, different from any she had ever brought before.&nbsp;
+It was a lynx kitten, partly grown, like the cub, but not so large.&nbsp;
+And it was all for him.&nbsp; His mother had satisfied her hunger elsewhere;
+though he did not know that it was the rest of the lynx litter that
+had gone to satisfy her.&nbsp; Nor did he know the desperateness of
+her deed.&nbsp; He knew only that the velvet-furred kitten was meat,
+and he ate and waxed happier with every mouthful.</p>
+<p>A full stomach conduces to inaction, and the cub lay in the cave,
+sleeping against his mother&rsquo;s side.&nbsp; He was aroused by her
+snarling.&nbsp; Never had he heard her snarl so terribly.&nbsp; Possibly
+in her whole life it was the most terrible snarl she ever gave.&nbsp;
+There was reason for it, and none knew it better than she.&nbsp; A lynx&rsquo;s
+lair is not despoiled with impunity.&nbsp; In the full glare of the
+afternoon light, crouching in the entrance of the cave, the cub saw
+the lynx-mother.&nbsp; The hair rippled up along his back at the sight.&nbsp;
+Here was fear, and it did not require his instinct to tell him of it.&nbsp;
+And if sight alone were not sufficient, the cry of rage the intruder
+gave, beginning with a snarl and rushing abruptly upward into a hoarse
+screech, was convincing enough in itself.</p>
+<p>The cub felt the prod of the life that was in him, and stood up and
+snarled valiantly by his mother&rsquo;s side.&nbsp; But she thrust him
+ignominiously away and behind her.&nbsp; Because of the low-roofed entrance
+the lynx could not leap in, and when she made a crawling rush of it
+the she-wolf sprang upon her and pinned her down.&nbsp; The cub saw
+little of the battle.&nbsp; There was a tremendous snarling and spitting
+and screeching.&nbsp; The two animals threshed about, the lynx ripping
+and tearing with her claws and using her teeth as well, while the she-wolf
+used her teeth alone.</p>
+<p>Once, the cub sprang in and sank his teeth into the hind leg of the
+lynx.&nbsp; He clung on, growling savagely.&nbsp; Though he did not
+know it, by the weight of his body he clogged the action of the leg
+and thereby saved his mother much damage.&nbsp; A change in the battle
+crushed him under both their bodies and wrenched loose his hold.&nbsp;
+The next moment the two mothers separated, and, before they rushed together
+again, the lynx lashed out at the cub with a huge fore-paw that ripped
+his shoulder open to the bone and sent him hurtling sidewise against
+the wall.&nbsp; Then was added to the uproar the cub&rsquo;s shrill
+yelp of pain and fright.&nbsp; But the fight lasted so long that he
+had time to cry himself out and to experience a second burst of courage;
+and the end of the battle found him again clinging to a hind-leg and
+furiously growling between his teeth.</p>
+<p>The lynx was dead.&nbsp; But the she-wolf was very weak and sick.&nbsp;
+At first she caressed the cub and licked his wounded shoulder; but the
+blood she had lost had taken with it her strength, and for all of a
+day and a night she lay by her dead foe&rsquo;s side, without movement,
+scarcely breathing.&nbsp; For a week she never left the cave, except
+for water, and then her movements were slow and painful.&nbsp; At the
+end of that time the lynx was devoured, while the she-wolf&rsquo;s wounds
+had healed sufficiently to permit her to take the meat-trail again.</p>
+<p>The cub&rsquo;s shoulder was stiff and sore, and for some time he
+limped from the terrible slash he had received.&nbsp; But the world
+now seemed changed.&nbsp; He went about in it with greater confidence,
+with a feeling of prowess that had not been his in the days before the
+battle with the lynx.&nbsp; He had looked upon life in a more ferocious
+aspect; he had fought; he had buried his teeth in the flesh of a foe;
+and he had survived.&nbsp; And because of all this, he carried himself
+more boldly, with a touch of defiance that was new in him.&nbsp; He
+was no longer afraid of minor things, and much of his timidity had vanished,
+though the unknown never ceased to press upon him with its mysteries
+and terrors, intangible and ever-menacing.</p>
+<p>He began to accompany his mother on the meat-trail, and he saw much
+of the killing of meat and began to play his part in it.&nbsp; And in
+his own dim way he learned the law of meat.&nbsp; There were two kinds
+of life&mdash;his own kind and the other kind.&nbsp; His own kind included
+his mother and himself.&nbsp; The other kind included all live things
+that moved.&nbsp; But the other kind was divided.&nbsp; One portion
+was what his own kind killed and ate.&nbsp; This portion was composed
+of the non-killers and the small killers.&nbsp; The other portion killed
+and ate his own kind, or was killed and eaten by his own kind.&nbsp;
+And out of this classification arose the law.&nbsp; The aim of life
+was meat.&nbsp; Life itself was meat.&nbsp; Life lived on life.&nbsp;
+There were the eaters and the eaten.&nbsp; The law was: EAT OR BE EATEN.&nbsp;
+He did not formulate the law in clear, set terms and moralise about
+it.&nbsp; He did not even think the law; he merely lived the law without
+thinking about it at all.</p>
+<p>He saw the law operating around him on every side.&nbsp; He had eaten
+the ptarmigan chicks.&nbsp; The hawk had eaten the ptarmigan-mother.&nbsp;
+The hawk would also have eaten him.&nbsp; Later, when he had grown more
+formidable, he wanted to eat the hawk.&nbsp; He had eaten the lynx kitten.&nbsp;
+The lynx-mother would have eaten him had she not herself been killed
+and eaten.&nbsp; And so it went.&nbsp; The law was being lived about
+him by all live things, and he himself was part and parcel of the law.&nbsp;
+He was a killer.&nbsp; His only food was meat, live meat, that ran away
+swiftly before him, or flew into the air, or climbed trees, or hid in
+the ground, or faced him and fought with him, or turned the tables and
+ran after him.</p>
+<p>Had the cub thought in man-fashion, he might have epitomised life
+as a voracious appetite and the world as a place wherein ranged a multitude
+of appetites, pursuing and being pursued, hunting and being hunted,
+eating and being eaten, all in blindness and confusion, with violence
+and disorder, a chaos of gluttony and slaughter, ruled over by chance,
+merciless, planless, endless.</p>
+<p>But the cub did not think in man-fashion.&nbsp; He did not look at
+things with wide vision.&nbsp; He was single-purposed, and entertained
+but one thought or desire at a time.&nbsp; Besides the law of meat,
+there were a myriad other and lesser laws for him to learn and obey.&nbsp;
+The world was filled with surprise.&nbsp; The stir of the life that
+was in him, the play of his muscles, was an unending happiness.&nbsp;
+To run down meat was to experience thrills and elations.&nbsp; His rages
+and battles were pleasures.&nbsp; Terror itself, and the mystery of
+the unknown, led to his living.</p>
+<p>And there were easements and satisfactions.&nbsp; To have a full
+stomach, to doze lazily in the sunshine&mdash;such things were remuneration
+in full for his ardours and toils, while his ardours and tolls were
+in themselves self-remunerative.&nbsp; They were expressions of life,
+and life is always happy when it is expressing itself.&nbsp; So the
+cub had no quarrel with his hostile environment.&nbsp; He was very much
+alive, very happy, and very proud of himself.</p>
+<div class="GutenbergBlankLines3"><br /><br /><br /></div>
+<h2>PART III</h2>
+<div class="GutenbergBlankLines3"><br /><br /><br /></div>
+<h3>CHAPTER I&mdash;THE MAKERS OF FIRE</h3>
+<div class="GutenbergBlankLines2"><br /><br /></div>
+<p>The cub came upon it suddenly.&nbsp; It was his own fault.&nbsp;
+He had been careless.&nbsp; He had left the cave and run down to the
+stream to drink.&nbsp; It might have been that he took no notice because
+he was heavy with sleep.&nbsp; (He had been out all night on the meat-trail,
+and had but just then awakened.)&nbsp; And his carelessness might have
+been due to the familiarity of the trail to the pool.&nbsp; He had travelled
+it often, and nothing had ever happened on it.</p>
+<p>He went down past the blasted pine, crossed the open space, and trotted
+in amongst the trees.&nbsp; Then, at the same instant, he saw and smelt.&nbsp;
+Before him, sitting silently on their haunches, were five live things,
+the like of which he had never seen before.&nbsp; It was his first glimpse
+of mankind.&nbsp; But at the sight of him the five men did not spring
+to their feet, nor show their teeth, nor snarl.&nbsp; They did not move,
+but sat there, silent and ominous.</p>
+<p>Nor did the cub move.&nbsp; Every instinct of his nature would have
+impelled him to dash wildly away, had there not suddenly and for the
+first time arisen in him another and counter instinct.&nbsp; A great
+awe descended upon him.&nbsp; He was beaten down to movelessness by
+an overwhelming sense of his own weakness and littleness.&nbsp; Here
+was mastery and power, something far and away beyond him.</p>
+<p>The cub had never seen man, yet the instinct concerning man was his.&nbsp;
+In dim ways he recognised in man the animal that had fought itself to
+primacy over the other animals of the Wild.&nbsp; Not alone out of his
+own eyes, but out of the eyes of all his ancestors was the cub now looking
+upon man&mdash;out of eyes that had circled in the darkness around countless
+winter camp-fires, that had peered from safe distances and from the
+hearts of thickets at the strange, two-legged animal that was lord over
+living things.&nbsp; The spell of the cub&rsquo;s heritage was upon
+him, the fear and the respect born of the centuries of struggle and
+the accumulated experience of the generations.&nbsp; The heritage was
+too compelling for a wolf that was only a cub.&nbsp; Had he been full-grown,
+he would have run away.&nbsp; As it was, he cowered down in a paralysis
+of fear, already half proffering the submission that his kind had proffered
+from the first time a wolf came in to sit by man&rsquo;s fire and be
+made warm.</p>
+<p>One of the Indians arose and walked over to him and stooped above
+him.&nbsp; The cub cowered closer to the ground.&nbsp; It was the unknown,
+objectified at last, in concrete flesh and blood, bending over him and
+reaching down to seize hold of him.&nbsp; His hair bristled involuntarily;
+his lips writhed back and his little fangs were bared.&nbsp; The hand,
+poised like doom above him, hesitated, and the man spoke laughing, &ldquo;<i>Wabam
+wabisca ip pit tah</i>.&rdquo;&nbsp; (&ldquo;Look!&nbsp; The white fangs!&rdquo;)</p>
+<p>The other Indians laughed loudly, and urged the man on to pick up
+the cub.&nbsp; As the hand descended closer and closer, there raged
+within the cub a battle of the instincts.&nbsp; He experienced two great
+impulsions&mdash;to yield and to fight.&nbsp; The resulting action was
+a compromise.&nbsp; He did both.&nbsp; He yielded till the hand almost
+touched him.&nbsp; Then he fought, his teeth flashing in a snap that
+sank them into the hand.&nbsp; The next moment he received a clout alongside
+the head that knocked him over on his side.&nbsp; Then all fight fled
+out of him.&nbsp; His puppyhood and the instinct of submission took
+charge of him.&nbsp; He sat up on his haunches and ki-yi&rsquo;d.&nbsp;
+But the man whose hand he had bitten was angry.&nbsp; The cub received
+a clout on the other side of his head.&nbsp; Whereupon he sat up and
+ki-yi&rsquo;d louder than ever.</p>
+<p>The four Indians laughed more loudly, while even the man who had
+been bitten began to laugh.&nbsp; They surrounded the cub and laughed
+at him, while he wailed out his terror and his hurt.&nbsp; In the midst
+of it, he heard something.&nbsp; The Indians heard it too.&nbsp; But
+the cub knew what it was, and with a last, long wail that had in it
+more of triumph than grief, he ceased his noise and waited for the coming
+of his mother, of his ferocious and indomitable mother who fought and
+killed all things and was never afraid.&nbsp; She was snarling as she
+ran.&nbsp; She had heard the cry of her cub and was dashing to save
+him.</p>
+<p>She bounded in amongst them, her anxious and militant motherhood
+making her anything but a pretty sight.&nbsp; But to the cub the spectacle
+of her protective rage was pleasing.&nbsp; He uttered a glad little
+cry and bounded to meet her, while the man-animals went back hastily
+several steps.&nbsp; The she-wolf stood over against her cub, facing
+the men, with bristling hair, a snarl rumbling deep in her throat.&nbsp;
+Her face was distorted and malignant with menace, even the bridge of
+the nose wrinkling from tip to eyes so prodigious was her snarl.</p>
+<p>Then it was that a cry went up from one of the men.&nbsp; &ldquo;Kiche!&rdquo;
+was what he uttered.&nbsp; It was an exclamation of surprise.&nbsp;
+The cub felt his mother wilting at the sound.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Kiche!&rdquo; the man cried again, this time with sharpness
+and authority.</p>
+<p>And then the cub saw his mother, the she-wolf, the fearless one,
+crouching down till her belly touched the ground, whimpering, wagging
+her tail, making peace signs.&nbsp; The cub could not understand.&nbsp;
+He was appalled.&nbsp; The awe of man rushed over him again.&nbsp; His
+instinct had been true.&nbsp; His mother verified it.&nbsp; She, too,
+rendered submission to the man-animals.</p>
+<p>The man who had spoken came over to her.&nbsp; He put his hand upon
+her head, and she only crouched closer.&nbsp; She did not snap, nor
+threaten to snap.&nbsp; The other men came up, and surrounded her, and
+felt her, and pawed her, which actions she made no attempt to resent.&nbsp;
+They were greatly excited, and made many noises with their mouths.&nbsp;
+These noises were not indication of danger, the cub decided, as he crouched
+near his mother still bristling from time to time but doing his best
+to submit.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;It is not strange,&rdquo; an Indian was saying.&nbsp; &ldquo;Her
+father was a wolf.&nbsp; It is true, her mother was a dog; but did not
+my brother tie her out in the woods all of three nights in the mating
+season?&nbsp; Therefore was the father of Kiche a wolf.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;It is a year, Grey Beaver, since she ran away,&rdquo; spoke
+a second Indian.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;It is not strange, Salmon Tongue,&rdquo; Grey Beaver answered.&nbsp;
+&ldquo;It was the time of the famine, and there was no meat for the
+dogs.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;She has lived with the wolves,&rdquo; said a third Indian.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;So it would seem, Three Eagles,&rdquo; Grey Beaver answered,
+lying his hand on the cub; &ldquo;and this be the sign of it.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>The cub snarled a little at the touch of the hand, and the hand flew
+back to administer a clout.&nbsp; Whereupon the cub covered its fangs,
+and sank down submissively, while the hand, returning, rubbed behind
+his ears, and up and down his back.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;This be the sign of it,&rdquo; Grey Beaver went on.&nbsp;
+&ldquo;It is plain that his mother is Kiche.&nbsp; But this father was
+a wolf.&nbsp; Wherefore is there in him little dog and much wolf.&nbsp;
+His fangs be white, and White Fang shall be his name.&nbsp; I have spoken.&nbsp;
+He is my dog.&nbsp; For was not Kiche my brother&rsquo;s dog?&nbsp;
+And is not my brother dead?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>The cub, who had thus received a name in the world, lay and watched.&nbsp;
+For a time the man-animals continued to make their mouth-noises.&nbsp;
+Then Grey Beaver took a knife from a sheath that hung around his neck,
+and went into the thicket and cut a stick.&nbsp; White Fang watched
+him.&nbsp; He notched the stick at each end and in the notches fastened
+strings of raw-hide.&nbsp; One string he tied around the throat of Kiche.&nbsp;
+Then he led her to a small pine, around which he tied the other string.</p>
+<p>White Fang followed and lay down beside her.&nbsp; Salmon Tongue&rsquo;s
+hand reached out to him and rolled him over on his back.&nbsp; Kiche
+looked on anxiously.&nbsp; White Fang felt fear mounting in him again.&nbsp;
+He could not quite suppress a snarl, but he made no offer to snap.&nbsp;
+The hand, with fingers crooked and spread apart, rubbed his stomach
+in a playful way and rolled him from side to side.&nbsp; It was ridiculous
+and ungainly, lying there on his back with legs sprawling in the air.&nbsp;
+Besides, it was a position of such utter helplessness that White Fang&rsquo;s
+whole nature revolted against it.&nbsp; He could do nothing to defend
+himself.&nbsp; If this man-animal intended harm, White Fang knew that
+he could not escape it.&nbsp; How could he spring away with his four
+legs in the air above him?&nbsp; Yet submission made him master his
+fear, and he only growled softly.&nbsp; This growl he could not suppress;
+nor did the man-animal resent it by giving him a blow on the head.&nbsp;
+And furthermore, such was the strangeness of it, White Fang experienced
+an unaccountable sensation of pleasure as the hand rubbed back and forth.&nbsp;
+When he was rolled on his side he ceased to growl, when the fingers
+pressed and prodded at the base of his ears the pleasurable sensation
+increased; and when, with a final rub and scratch, the man left him
+alone and went away, all fear had died out of White Fang.&nbsp; He was
+to know fear many times in his dealing with man; yet it was a token
+of the fearless companionship with man that was ultimately to be his.</p>
+<p>After a time, White Fang heard strange noises approaching.&nbsp;
+He was quick in his classification, for he knew them at once for man-animal
+noises.&nbsp; A few minutes later the remainder of the tribe, strung
+out as it was on the march, trailed in.&nbsp; There were more men and
+many women and children, forty souls of them, and all heavily burdened
+with camp equipage and outfit.&nbsp; Also there were many dogs; and
+these, with the exception of the part-grown puppies, were likewise burdened
+with camp outfit.&nbsp; On their backs, in bags that fastened tightly
+around underneath, the dogs carried from twenty to thirty pounds of
+weight.</p>
+<p>White Fang had never seen dogs before, but at sight of them he felt
+that they were his own kind, only somehow different.&nbsp; But they
+displayed little difference from the wolf when they discovered the cub
+and his mother.&nbsp; There was a rush.&nbsp; White Fang bristled and
+snarled and snapped in the face of the open-mouthed oncoming wave of
+dogs, and went down and under them, feeling the sharp slash of teeth
+in his body, himself biting and tearing at the legs and bellies above
+him.&nbsp; There was a great uproar.&nbsp; He could hear the snarl of
+Kiche as she fought for him; and he could hear the cries of the man-animals,
+the sound of clubs striking upon bodies, and the yelps of pain from
+the dogs so struck.</p>
+<p>Only a few seconds elapsed before he was on his feet again.&nbsp;
+He could now see the man-animals driving back the dogs with clubs and
+stones, defending him, saving him from the savage teeth of his kind
+that somehow was not his kind.&nbsp; And though there was no reason
+in his brain for a clear conception of so abstract a thing as justice,
+nevertheless, in his own way, he felt the justice of the man-animals,
+and he knew them for what they were&mdash;makers of law and executors
+of law.&nbsp; Also, he appreciated the power with which they administered
+the law.&nbsp; Unlike any animals he had ever encountered, they did
+not bite nor claw.&nbsp; They enforced their live strength with the
+power of dead things.&nbsp; Dead things did their bidding.&nbsp; Thus,
+sticks and stones, directed by these strange creatures, leaped through
+the air like living things, inflicting grievous hurts upon the dogs.</p>
+<p>To his mind this was power unusual, power inconceivable and beyond
+the natural, power that was godlike.&nbsp; White Fang, in the very nature
+of him, could never know anything about gods; at the best he could know
+only things that were beyond knowing&mdash;but the wonder and awe that
+he had of these man-animals in ways resembled what would be the wonder
+and awe of man at sight of some celestial creature, on a mountain top,
+hurling thunderbolts from either hand at an astonished world.</p>
+<p>The last dog had been driven back.&nbsp; The hubbub died down.&nbsp;
+And White Fang licked his hurts and meditated upon this, his first taste
+of pack-cruelty and his introduction to the pack.&nbsp; He had never
+dreamed that his own kind consisted of more than One Eye, his mother,
+and himself.&nbsp; They had constituted a kind apart, and here, abruptly,
+he had discovered many more creatures apparently of his own kind.&nbsp;
+And there was a subconscious resentment that these, his kind, at first
+sight had pitched upon him and tried to destroy him.&nbsp; In the same
+way he resented his mother being tied with a stick, even though it was
+done by the superior man-animals.&nbsp; It savoured of the trap, of
+bondage.&nbsp; Yet of the trap and of bondage he knew nothing.&nbsp;
+Freedom to roam and run and lie down at will, had been his heritage;
+and here it was being infringed upon.&nbsp; His mother&rsquo;s movements
+were restricted to the length of a stick, and by the length of that
+same stick was he restricted, for he had not yet got beyond the need
+of his mother&rsquo;s side.</p>
+<p>He did not like it.&nbsp; Nor did he like it when the man-animals
+arose and went on with their march; for a tiny man-animal took the other
+end of the stick and led Kiche captive behind him, and behind Kiche
+followed White Fang, greatly perturbed and worried by this new adventure
+he had entered upon.</p>
+<p>They went down the valley of the stream, far beyond White Fang&rsquo;s
+widest ranging, until they came to the end of the valley, where the
+stream ran into the Mackenzie River.&nbsp; Here, where canoes were cached
+on poles high in the air and where stood fish-racks for the drying of
+fish, camp was made; and White Fang looked on with wondering eyes.&nbsp;
+The superiority of these man-animals increased with every moment.&nbsp;
+There was their mastery over all these sharp-fanged dogs.&nbsp; It breathed
+of power.&nbsp; But greater than that, to the wolf-cub, was their mastery
+over things not alive; their capacity to communicate motion to unmoving
+things; their capacity to change the very face of the world.</p>
+<p>It was this last that especially affected him.&nbsp; The elevation
+of frames of poles caught his eye; yet this in itself was not so remarkable,
+being done by the same creatures that flung sticks and stones to great
+distances.&nbsp; But when the frames of poles were made into tepees
+by being covered with cloth and skins, White Fang was astounded.&nbsp;
+It was the colossal bulk of them that impressed him.&nbsp; They arose
+around him, on every side, like some monstrous quick-growing form of
+life.&nbsp; They occupied nearly the whole circumference of his field
+of vision.&nbsp; He was afraid of them.&nbsp; They loomed ominously
+above him; and when the breeze stirred them into huge movements, he
+cowered down in fear, keeping his eyes warily upon them, and prepared
+to spring away if they attempted to precipitate themselves upon him.</p>
+<p>But in a short while his fear of the tepees passed away.&nbsp; He
+saw the women and children passing in and out of them without harm,
+and he saw the dogs trying often to get into them, and being driven
+away with sharp words and flying stones.&nbsp; After a time, he left
+Kiche&rsquo;s side and crawled cautiously toward the wall of the nearest
+tepee.&nbsp; It was the curiosity of growth that urged him on&mdash;the
+necessity of learning and living and doing that brings experience.&nbsp;
+The last few inches to the wall of the tepee were crawled with painful
+slowness and precaution.&nbsp; The day&rsquo;s events had prepared him
+for the unknown to manifest itself in most stupendous and unthinkable
+ways.&nbsp; At last his nose touched the canvas.&nbsp; He waited.&nbsp;
+Nothing happened.&nbsp; Then he smelled the strange fabric, saturated
+with the man-smell.&nbsp; He closed on the canvas with his teeth and
+gave a gentle tug.&nbsp; Nothing happened, though the adjacent portions
+of the tepee moved.&nbsp; He tugged harder.&nbsp; There was a greater
+movement.&nbsp; It was delightful.&nbsp; He tugged still harder, and
+repeatedly, until the whole tepee was in motion.&nbsp; Then the sharp
+cry of a squaw inside sent him scampering back to Kiche.&nbsp; But after
+that he was afraid no more of the looming bulks of the tepees.</p>
+<p>A moment later he was straying away again from his mother.&nbsp;
+Her stick was tied to a peg in the ground and she could not follow him.&nbsp;
+A part-grown puppy, somewhat larger and older than he, came toward him
+slowly, with ostentatious and belligerent importance.&nbsp; The puppy&rsquo;s
+name, as White Fang was afterward to hear him called, was Lip-lip.&nbsp;
+He had had experience in puppy fights and was already something of a
+bully.</p>
+<p>Lip-lip was White Fang&rsquo;s own kind, and, being only a puppy,
+did not seem dangerous; so White Fang prepared to meet him in a friendly
+spirit.&nbsp; But when the strangers walk became stiff-legged and his
+lips lifted clear of his teeth, White Fang stiffened too, and answered
+with lifted lips.&nbsp; They half circled about each other, tentatively,
+snarling and bristling.&nbsp; This lasted several minutes, and White
+Fang was beginning to enjoy it, as a sort of game.&nbsp; But suddenly,
+with remarkable swiftness, Lip-lip leaped in, delivering a slashing
+snap, and leaped away again.&nbsp; The snap had taken effect on the
+shoulder that had been hurt by the lynx and that was still sore deep
+down near the bone.&nbsp; The surprise and hurt of it brought a yelp
+out of White Fang; but the next moment, in a rush of anger, he was upon
+Lip-lip and snapping viciously.</p>
+<p>But Lip-hp had lived his life in camp and had fought many puppy fights.&nbsp;
+Three times, four times, and half a dozen times, his sharp little teeth
+scored on the newcomer, until White Fang, yelping shamelessly, fled
+to the protection of his mother.&nbsp; It was the first of the many
+fights he was to have with Lip-lip, for they were enemies from the start,
+born so, with natures destined perpetually to clash.</p>
+<p>Kiche licked White Fang soothingly with her tongue, and tried to
+prevail upon him to remain with her.&nbsp; But his curiosity was rampant,
+and several minutes later he was venturing forth on a new quest.&nbsp;
+He came upon one of the man-animals, Grey Beaver, who was squatting
+on his hams and doing something with sticks and dry moss spread before
+him on the ground.&nbsp; White Fang came near to him and watched.&nbsp;
+Grey Beaver made mouth-noises which White Fang interpreted as not hostile,
+so he came still nearer.</p>
+<p>Women and children were carrying more sticks and branches to Grey
+Beaver.&nbsp; It was evidently an affair of moment.&nbsp; White Fang
+came in until he touched Grey Beaver&rsquo;s knee, so curious was he,
+and already forgetful that this was a terrible man-animal.&nbsp; Suddenly
+he saw a strange thing like mist beginning to arise from the sticks
+and moss beneath Grey Beaver&rsquo;s hands.&nbsp; Then, amongst the
+sticks themselves, appeared a live thing, twisting and turning, of a
+colour like the colour of the sun in the sky.&nbsp; White Fang knew
+nothing about fire.&nbsp; It drew him as the light, in the mouth of
+the cave had drawn him in his early puppyhood.&nbsp; He crawled the
+several steps toward the flame.&nbsp; He heard Grey Beaver chuckle above
+him, and he knew the sound was not hostile.&nbsp; Then his nose touched
+the flame, and at the same instant his little tongue went out to it.</p>
+<p>For a moment he was paralysed.&nbsp; The unknown, lurking in the
+midst of the sticks and moss, was savagely clutching him by the nose.&nbsp;
+He scrambled backward, bursting out in an astonished explosion of ki-yi&rsquo;s.&nbsp;
+At the sound, Kiche leaped snarling to the end of her stick, and there
+raged terribly because she could not come to his aid.&nbsp; But Grey
+Beaver laughed loudly, and slapped his thighs, and told the happening
+to all the rest of the camp, till everybody was laughing uproariously.&nbsp;
+But White Fang sat on his haunches and ki-yi&rsquo;d and ki-yi&rsquo;d,
+a forlorn and pitiable little figure in the midst of the man-animals.</p>
+<p>It was the worst hurt he had ever known.&nbsp; Both nose and tongue
+had been scorched by the live thing, sun-coloured, that had grown up
+under Grey Beaver&rsquo;s hands.&nbsp; He cried and cried interminably,
+and every fresh wail was greeted by bursts of laughter on the part of
+the man-animals.&nbsp; He tried to soothe his nose with his tongue,
+but the tongue was burnt too, and the two hurts coming together produced
+greater hurt; whereupon he cried more hopelessly and helplessly than
+ever.</p>
+<p>And then shame came to him.&nbsp; He knew laughter and the meaning
+of it.&nbsp; It is not given us to know how some animals know laughter,
+and know when they are being laughed at; but it was this same way that
+White Fang knew it.&nbsp; And he felt shame that the man-animals should
+be laughing at him.&nbsp; He turned and fled away, not from the hurt
+of the fire, but from the laughter that sank even deeper, and hurt in
+the spirit of him.&nbsp; And he fled to Kiche, raging at the end of
+her stick like an animal gone mad&mdash;to Kiche, the one creature in
+the world who was not laughing at him.</p>
+<p>Twilight drew down and night came on, and White Fang lay by his mother&rsquo;s
+side.&nbsp; His nose and tongue still hurt, but he was perplexed by
+a greater trouble.&nbsp; He was homesick.&nbsp; He felt a vacancy in
+him, a need for the hush and quietude of the stream and the cave in
+the cliff.&nbsp; Life had become too populous.&nbsp; There were so many
+of the man-animals, men, women, and children, all making noises and
+irritations.&nbsp; And there were the dogs, ever squabbling and bickering,
+bursting into uproars and creating confusions.&nbsp; The restful loneliness
+of the only life he had known was gone.&nbsp; Here the very air was
+palpitant with life.&nbsp; It hummed and buzzed unceasingly.&nbsp; Continually
+changing its intensity and abruptly variant in pitch, it impinged on
+his nerves and senses, made him nervous and restless and worried him
+with a perpetual imminence of happening.</p>
+<p>He watched the man-animals coming and going and moving about the
+camp.&nbsp; In fashion distantly resembling the way men look upon the
+gods they create, so looked White Fang upon the man-animals before him.&nbsp;
+They were superior creatures, of a verity, gods.&nbsp; To his dim comprehension
+they were as much wonder-workers as gods are to men.&nbsp; They were
+creatures of mastery, possessing all manner of unknown and impossible
+potencies, overlords of the alive and the not alive&mdash;making obey
+that which moved, imparting movement to that which did not move, and
+making life, sun-coloured and biting life, to grow out of dead moss
+and wood.&nbsp; They were fire-makers!&nbsp; They were gods.</p>
+<div class="GutenbergBlankLines2"><br /><br /></div>
+<h3>CHAPTER II&mdash;THE BONDAGE</h3>
+<div class="GutenbergBlankLines2"><br /><br /></div>
+<p>The days were thronged with experience for White Fang.&nbsp; During
+the time that Kiche was tied by the stick, he ran about over all the
+camp, inquiring, investigating, learning.&nbsp; He quickly came to know
+much of the ways of the man-animals, but familiarity did not breed contempt.&nbsp;
+The more he came to know them, the more they vindicated their superiority,
+the more they displayed their mysterious powers, the greater loomed
+their god-likeness.</p>
+<p>To man has been given the grief, often, of seeing his gods overthrown
+and his altars crumbling; but to the wolf and the wild dog that have
+come in to crouch at man&rsquo;s feet, this grief has never come.&nbsp;
+Unlike man, whose gods are of the unseen and the overguessed, vapours
+and mists of fancy eluding the garmenture of reality, wandering wraiths
+of desired goodness and power, intangible out-croppings of self into
+the realm of spirit&mdash;unlike man, the wolf and the wild dog that
+have come in to the fire find their gods in the living flesh, solid
+to the touch, occupying earth-space and requiring time for the accomplishment
+of their ends and their existence.&nbsp; No effort of faith is necessary
+to believe in such a god; no effort of will can possibly induce disbelief
+in such a god.&nbsp; There is no getting away from it.&nbsp; There it
+stands, on its two hind-legs, club in hand, immensely potential, passionate
+and wrathful and loving, god and mystery and power all wrapped up and
+around by flesh that bleeds when it is torn and that is good to eat
+like any flesh.</p>
+<p>And so it was with White Fang.&nbsp; The man-animals were gods unmistakable
+and unescapable.&nbsp; As his mother, Kiche, had rendered her allegiance
+to them at the first cry of her name, so he was beginning to render
+his allegiance.&nbsp; He gave them the trail as a privilege indubitably
+theirs.&nbsp; When they walked, he got out of their way.&nbsp; When
+they called, he came.&nbsp; When they threatened, he cowered down.&nbsp;
+When they commanded him to go, he went away hurriedly.&nbsp; For behind
+any wish of theirs was power to enforce that wish, power that hurt,
+power that expressed itself in clouts and clubs, in flying stones and
+stinging lashes of whips.</p>
+<p>He belonged to them as all dogs belonged to them.&nbsp; His actions
+were theirs to command.&nbsp; His body was theirs to maul, to stamp
+upon, to tolerate.&nbsp; Such was the lesson that was quickly borne
+in upon him.&nbsp; It came hard, going as it did, counter to much that
+was strong and dominant in his own nature; and, while he disliked it
+in the learning of it, unknown to himself he was learning to like it.&nbsp;
+It was a placing of his destiny in another&rsquo;s hands, a shifting
+of the responsibilities of existence.&nbsp; This in itself was compensation,
+for it is always easier to lean upon another than to stand alone.</p>
+<p>But it did not all happen in a day, this giving over of himself,
+body and soul, to the man-animals.&nbsp; He could not immediately forego
+his wild heritage and his memories of the Wild.&nbsp; There were days
+when he crept to the edge of the forest and stood and listened to something
+calling him far and away.&nbsp; And always he returned, restless and
+uncomfortable, to whimper softly and wistfully at Kiche&rsquo;s side
+and to lick her face with eager, questioning tongue.</p>
+<p>White Fang learned rapidly the ways of the camp.&nbsp; He knew the
+injustice and greediness of the older dogs when meat or fish was thrown
+out to be eaten.&nbsp; He came to know that men were more just, children
+more cruel, and women more kindly and more likely to toss him a bit
+of meat or bone.&nbsp; And after two or three painful adventures with
+the mothers of part-grown puppies, he came into the knowledge that it
+was always good policy to let such mothers alone, to keep away from
+them as far as possible, and to avoid them when he saw them coming.</p>
+<p>But the bane of his life was Lip-lip.&nbsp; Larger, older, and stronger,
+Lip-lip had selected White Fang for his special object of persecution.&nbsp;
+While Fang fought willingly enough, but he was outclassed.&nbsp; His
+enemy was too big.&nbsp; Lip-lip became a nightmare to him.&nbsp; Whenever
+he ventured away from his mother, the bully was sure to appear, trailing
+at his heels, snarling at him, picking upon him, and watchful of an
+opportunity, when no man-animal was near, to spring upon him and force
+a fight.&nbsp; As Lip-lip invariably won, he enjoyed it hugely.&nbsp;
+It became his chief delight in life, as it became White Fang&rsquo;s
+chief torment.</p>
+<p>But the effect upon White Fang was not to cow him.&nbsp; Though he
+suffered most of the damage and was always defeated, his spirit remained
+unsubdued.&nbsp; Yet a bad effect was produced.&nbsp; He became malignant
+and morose.&nbsp; His temper had been savage by birth, but it became
+more savage under this unending persecution.&nbsp; The genial, playful,
+puppyish side of him found little expression.&nbsp; He never played
+and gambolled about with the other puppies of the camp.&nbsp; Lip-lip
+would not permit it.&nbsp; The moment White Fang appeared near them,
+Lip-lip was upon him, bullying and hectoring him, or fighting with him
+until he had driven him away.</p>
+<p>The effect of all this was to rob White Fang of much of his puppyhood
+and to make him in his comportment older than his age.&nbsp; Denied
+the outlet, through play, of his energies, he recoiled upon himself
+and developed his mental processes.&nbsp; He became cunning; he had
+idle time in which to devote himself to thoughts of trickery.&nbsp;
+Prevented from obtaining his share of meat and fish when a general feed
+was given to the camp-dogs, he became a clever thief.&nbsp; He had to
+forage for himself, and he foraged well, though he was oft-times a plague
+to the squaws in consequence.&nbsp; He learned to sneak about camp,
+to be crafty, to know what was going on everywhere, to see and to hear
+everything and to reason accordingly, and successfully to devise ways
+and means of avoiding his implacable persecutor.</p>
+<p>It was early in the days of his persecution that he played his first
+really big crafty game and got there from his first taste of revenge.&nbsp;
+As Kiche, when with the wolves, had lured out to destruction dogs from
+the camps of men, so White Fang, in manner somewhat similar, lured Lip-lip
+into Kiche&rsquo;s avenging jaws.&nbsp; Retreating before Lip-lip, White
+Fang made an indirect flight that led in and out and around the various
+tepees of the camp.&nbsp; He was a good runner, swifter than any puppy
+of his size, and swifter than Lip-lip.&nbsp; But he did not run his
+best in this chase.&nbsp; He barely held his own, one leap ahead of
+his pursuer.</p>
+<p>Lip-lip, excited by the chase and by the persistent nearness of his
+victim, forgot caution and locality.&nbsp; When he remembered locality,
+it was too late.&nbsp; Dashing at top speed around a tepee, he ran full
+tilt into Kiche lying at the end of her stick.&nbsp; He gave one yelp
+of consternation, and then her punishing jaws closed upon him.&nbsp;
+She was tied, but he could not get away from her easily.&nbsp; She rolled
+him off his legs so that he could not run, while she repeatedly ripped
+and slashed him with her fangs.</p>
+<p>When at last he succeeded in rolling clear of her, he crawled to
+his feet, badly dishevelled, hurt both in body and in spirit.&nbsp;
+His hair was standing out all over him in tufts where her teeth had
+mauled.&nbsp; He stood where he had arisen, opened his mouth, and broke
+out the long, heart-broken puppy wail.&nbsp; But even this he was not
+allowed to complete.&nbsp; In the middle of it, White Fang, rushing
+in, sank his teeth into Lip-lip&rsquo;s hind leg.&nbsp; There was no
+fight left in Lip-lip, and he ran away shamelessly, his victim hot on
+his heels and worrying him all the way back to his own tepee.&nbsp;
+Here the squaws came to his aid, and White Fang, transformed into a
+raging demon, was finally driven off only by a fusillade of stones.</p>
+<p>Came the day when Grey Beaver, deciding that the liability of her
+running away was past, released Kiche.&nbsp; White Fang was delighted
+with his mother&rsquo;s freedom.&nbsp; He accompanied her joyfully about
+the camp; and, so long as he remained close by her side, Lip-lip kept
+a respectful distance.&nbsp; White-Fang even bristled up to him and
+walked stiff-legged, but Lip-lip ignored the challenge.&nbsp; He was
+no fool himself, and whatever vengeance he desired to wreak, he could
+wait until he caught White Fang alone.</p>
+<p>Later on that day, Kiche and White Fang strayed into the edge of
+the woods next to the camp.&nbsp; He had led his mother there, step
+by step, and now when she stopped, he tried to inveigle her farther.&nbsp;
+The stream, the lair, and the quiet woods were calling to him, and he
+wanted her to come.&nbsp; He ran on a few steps, stopped, and looked
+back.&nbsp; She had not moved.&nbsp; He whined pleadingly, and scurried
+playfully in and out of the underbrush.&nbsp; He ran back to her, licked
+her face, and ran on again.&nbsp; And still she did not move.&nbsp;
+He stopped and regarded her, all of an intentness and eagerness, physically
+expressed, that slowly faded out of him as she turned her head and gazed
+back at the camp.</p>
+<p>There was something calling to him out there in the open.&nbsp; His
+mother heard it too.&nbsp; But she heard also that other and louder
+call, the call of the fire and of man&mdash;the call which has been
+given alone of all animals to the wolf to answer, to the wolf and the
+wild-dog, who are brothers.</p>
+<p>Kiche turned and slowly trotted back toward camp.&nbsp; Stronger
+than the physical restraint of the stick was the clutch of the camp
+upon her.&nbsp; Unseen and occultly, the gods still gripped with their
+power and would not let her go.&nbsp; White Fang sat down in the shadow
+of a birch and whimpered softly.&nbsp; There was a strong smell of pine,
+and subtle wood fragrances filled the air, reminding him of his old
+life of freedom before the days of his bondage.&nbsp; But he was still
+only a part-grown puppy, and stronger than the call either of man or
+of the Wild was the call of his mother.&nbsp; All the hours of his short
+life he had depended upon her.&nbsp; The time was yet to come for independence.&nbsp;
+So he arose and trotted forlornly back to camp, pausing once, and twice,
+to sit down and whimper and to listen to the call that still sounded
+in the depths of the forest.</p>
+<p>In the Wild the time of a mother with her young is short; but under
+the dominion of man it is sometimes even shorter.&nbsp; Thus it was
+with White Fang.&nbsp; Grey Beaver was in the debt of Three Eagles.&nbsp;
+Three Eagles was going away on a trip up the Mackenzie to the Great
+Slave Lake.&nbsp; A strip of scarlet cloth, a bearskin, twenty cartridges,
+and Kiche, went to pay the debt.&nbsp; White Fang saw his mother taken
+aboard Three Eagles&rsquo; canoe, and tried to follow her.&nbsp; A blow
+from Three Eagles knocked him backward to the land.&nbsp; The canoe
+shoved off.&nbsp; He sprang into the water and swam after it, deaf to
+the sharp cries of Grey Beaver to return.&nbsp; Even a man-animal, a
+god, White Fang ignored, such was the terror he was in of losing his
+mother.</p>
+<p>But gods are accustomed to being obeyed, and Grey Beaver wrathfully
+launched a canoe in pursuit.&nbsp; When he overtook White Fang, he reached
+down and by the nape of the neck lifted him clear of the water.&nbsp;
+He did not deposit him at once in the bottom of the canoe.&nbsp; Holding
+him suspended with one hand, with the other hand he proceeded to give
+him a beating.&nbsp; And it <i>was</i> a beating.&nbsp; His hand was
+heavy.&nbsp; Every blow was shrewd to hurt; and he delivered a multitude
+of blows.</p>
+<p>Impelled by the blows that rained upon him, now from this side, now
+from that, White Fang swung back and forth like an erratic and jerky
+pendulum.&nbsp; Varying were the emotions that surged through him.&nbsp;
+At first, he had known surprise.&nbsp; Then came a momentary fear, when
+he yelped several times to the impact of the hand.&nbsp; But this was
+quickly followed by anger.&nbsp; His free nature asserted itself, and
+he showed his teeth and snarled fearlessly in the face of the wrathful
+god.&nbsp; This but served to make the god more wrathful.&nbsp; The
+blows came faster, heavier, more shrewd to hurt.</p>
+<p>Grey Beaver continued to beat, White Fang continued to snarl.&nbsp;
+But this could not last for ever.&nbsp; One or the other must give over,
+and that one was White Fang.&nbsp; Fear surged through him again.&nbsp;
+For the first time he was being really man-handled.&nbsp; The occasional
+blows of sticks and stones he had previously experienced were as caresses
+compared with this.&nbsp; He broke down and began to cry and yelp.&nbsp;
+For a time each blow brought a yelp from him; but fear passed into terror,
+until finally his yelps were voiced in unbroken succession, unconnected
+with the rhythm of the punishment.</p>
+<p>At last Grey Beaver withheld his hand.&nbsp; White Fang, hanging
+limply, continued to cry.&nbsp; This seemed to satisfy his master, who
+flung him down roughly in the bottom of the canoe.&nbsp; In the meantime
+the canoe had drifted down the stream.&nbsp; Grey Beaver picked up the
+paddle.&nbsp; White Fang was in his way.&nbsp; He spurned him savagely
+with his foot.&nbsp; In that moment White Fang&rsquo;s free nature flashed
+forth again, and he sank his teeth into the moccasined foot.</p>
+<p>The beating that had gone before was as nothing compared with the
+beating he now received.&nbsp; Grey Beaver&rsquo;s wrath was terrible;
+likewise was White Fang&rsquo;s fright.&nbsp; Not only the hand, but
+the hard wooden paddle was used upon him; and he was bruised and sore
+in all his small body when he was again flung down in the canoe.&nbsp;
+Again, and this time with purpose, did Grey Beaver kick him.&nbsp; White
+Fang did not repeat his attack on the foot.&nbsp; He had learned another
+lesson of his bondage.&nbsp; Never, no matter what the circumstance,
+must he dare to bite the god who was lord and master over him; the body
+of the lord and master was sacred, not to be defiled by the teeth of
+such as he.&nbsp; That was evidently the crime of crimes, the one offence
+there was no condoning nor overlooking.</p>
+<p>When the canoe touched the shore, White Fang lay whimpering and motionless,
+waiting the will of Grey Beaver.&nbsp; It was Grey Beaver&rsquo;s will
+that he should go ashore, for ashore he was flung, striking heavily
+on his side and hurting his bruises afresh.&nbsp; He crawled tremblingly
+to his feet and stood whimpering.&nbsp; Lip-lip, who had watched the
+whole proceeding from the bank, now rushed upon him, knocking him over
+and sinking his teeth into him.&nbsp; White Fang was too helpless to
+defend himself, and it would have gone hard with him had not Grey Beaver&rsquo;s
+foot shot out, lifting Lip-lip into the air with its violence so that
+he smashed down to earth a dozen feet away.&nbsp; This was the man-animal&rsquo;s
+justice; and even then, in his own pitiable plight, White Fang experienced
+a little grateful thrill.&nbsp; At Grey Beaver&rsquo;s heels he limped
+obediently through the village to the tepee.&nbsp; And so it came that
+White Fang learned that the right to punish was something the gods reserved
+for themselves and denied to the lesser creatures under them.</p>
+<p>That night, when all was still, White Fang remembered his mother
+and sorrowed for her.&nbsp; He sorrowed too loudly and woke up Grey
+Beaver, who beat him.&nbsp; After that he mourned gently when the gods
+were around.&nbsp; But sometimes, straying off to the edge of the woods
+by himself, he gave vent to his grief, and cried it out with loud whimperings
+and wailings.</p>
+<p>It was during this period that he might have harkened to the memories
+of the lair and the stream and run back to the Wild.&nbsp; But the memory
+of his mother held him.&nbsp; As the hunting man-animals went out and
+came back, so she would come back to the village some time.&nbsp; So
+he remained in his bondage waiting for her.</p>
+<p>But it was not altogether an unhappy bondage.&nbsp; There was much
+to interest him.&nbsp; Something was always happening.&nbsp; There was
+no end to the strange things these gods did, and he was always curious
+to see.&nbsp; Besides, he was learning how to get along with Grey Beaver.&nbsp;
+Obedience, rigid, undeviating obedience, was what was exacted of him;
+and in return he escaped beatings and his existence was tolerated.</p>
+<p>Nay, Grey Beaver himself sometimes tossed him a piece of meat, and
+defended him against the other dogs in the eating of it.&nbsp; And such
+a piece of meat was of value.&nbsp; It was worth more, in some strange
+way, then a dozen pieces of meat from the hand of a squaw.&nbsp; Grey
+Beaver never petted nor caressed.&nbsp; Perhaps it was the weight of
+his hand, perhaps his justice, perhaps the sheer power of him, and perhaps
+it was all these things that influenced White Fang; for a certain tie
+of attachment was forming between him and his surly lord.</p>
+<p>Insidiously, and by remote ways, as well as by the power of stick
+and stone and clout of hand, were the shackles of White Fang&rsquo;s
+bondage being riveted upon him.&nbsp; The qualities in his kind that
+in the beginning made it possible for them to come in to the fires of
+men, were qualities capable of development.&nbsp; They were developing
+in him, and the camp-life, replete with misery as it was, was secretly
+endearing itself to him all the time.&nbsp; But White Fang was unaware
+of it.&nbsp; He knew only grief for the loss of Kiche, hope for her
+return, and a hungry yearning for the free life that had been his.</p>
+<div class="GutenbergBlankLines2"><br /><br /></div>
+<h3>CHAPTER III&mdash;THE OUTCAST</h3>
+<div class="GutenbergBlankLines2"><br /><br /></div>
+<p>Lip-lip continued so to darken his days that White Fang became wickeder
+and more ferocious than it was his natural right to be.&nbsp; Savageness
+was a part of his make-up, but the savageness thus developed exceeded
+his make-up.&nbsp; He acquired a reputation for wickedness amongst the
+man-animals themselves.&nbsp; Wherever there was trouble and uproar
+in camp, fighting and squabbling or the outcry of a squaw over a bit
+of stolen meat, they were sure to find White Fang mixed up in it and
+usually at the bottom of it.&nbsp; They did not bother to look after
+the causes of his conduct.&nbsp; They saw only the effects, and the
+effects were bad.&nbsp; He was a sneak and a thief, a mischief-maker,
+a fomenter of trouble; and irate squaws told him to his face, the while
+he eyed them alert and ready to dodge any quick-flung missile, that
+he was a wolf and worthless and bound to come to an evil end.</p>
+<p>He found himself an outcast in the midst of the populous camp.&nbsp;
+All the young dogs followed Lip-lip&rsquo;s lead.&nbsp; There was a
+difference between White Fang and them.&nbsp; Perhaps they sensed his
+wild-wood breed, and instinctively felt for him the enmity that the
+domestic dog feels for the wolf.&nbsp; But be that as it may, they joined
+with Lip-lip in the persecution.&nbsp; And, once declared against him,
+they found good reason to continue declared against him.&nbsp; One and
+all, from time to time, they felt his teeth; and to his credit, he gave
+more than he received.&nbsp; Many of them he could whip in single fight;
+but single fight was denied him.&nbsp; The beginning of such a fight
+was a signal for all the young dogs in camp to come running and pitch
+upon him.</p>
+<p>Out of this pack-persecution he learned two important things: how
+to take care of himself in a mass-fight against him&mdash;and how, on
+a single dog, to inflict the greatest amount of damage in the briefest
+space of time.&nbsp; To keep one&rsquo;s feet in the midst of the hostile
+mass meant life, and this he learnt well.&nbsp; He became cat-like in
+his ability to stay on his feet.&nbsp; Even grown dogs might hurtle
+him backward or sideways with the impact of their heavy bodies; and
+backward or sideways he would go, in the air or sliding on the ground,
+but always with his legs under him and his feet downward to the mother
+earth.</p>
+<p>When dogs fight, there are usually preliminaries to the actual combat&mdash;snarlings
+and bristlings and stiff-legged struttings.&nbsp; But White Fang learned
+to omit these preliminaries.&nbsp; Delay meant the coming against him
+of all the young dogs.&nbsp; He must do his work quickly and get away.&nbsp;
+So he learnt to give no warning of his intention.&nbsp; He rushed in
+and snapped and slashed on the instant, without notice, before his foe
+could prepare to meet him.&nbsp; Thus he learned how to inflict quick
+and severe damage.&nbsp; Also he learned the value of surprise.&nbsp;
+A dog, taken off its guard, its shoulder slashed open or its ear ripped
+in ribbons before it knew what was happening, was a dog half whipped.</p>
+<p>Furthermore, it was remarkably easy to overthrow a dog taken by surprise;
+while a dog, thus overthrown, invariably exposed for a moment the soft
+underside of its neck&mdash;the vulnerable point at which to strike
+for its life.&nbsp; White Fang knew this point.&nbsp; It was a knowledge
+bequeathed to him directly from the hunting generation of wolves.&nbsp;
+So it was that White Fang&rsquo;s method when he took the offensive,
+was: first to find a young dog alone; second, to surprise it and knock
+it off its feet; and third, to drive in with his teeth at the soft throat.</p>
+<p>Being but partly grown his jaws had not yet become large enough nor
+strong enough to make his throat-attack deadly; but many a young dog
+went around camp with a lacerated throat in token of White Fang&rsquo;s
+intention.&nbsp; And one day, catching one of his enemies alone on the
+edge of the woods, he managed, by repeatedly overthrowing him and attacking
+the throat, to cut the great vein and let out the life.&nbsp; There
+was a great row that night.&nbsp; He had been observed, the news had
+been carried to the dead dog&rsquo;s master, the squaws remembered all
+the instances of stolen meat, and Grey Beaver was beset by many angry
+voices.&nbsp; But he resolutely held the door of his tepee, inside which
+he had placed the culprit, and refused to permit the vengeance for which
+his tribespeople clamoured.</p>
+<p>White Fang became hated by man and dog.&nbsp; During this period
+of his development he never knew a moment&rsquo;s security.&nbsp; The
+tooth of every dog was against him, the hand of every man.&nbsp; He
+was greeted with snarls by his kind, with curses and stones by his gods.&nbsp;
+He lived tensely.&nbsp; He was always keyed up, alert for attack, wary
+of being attacked, with an eye for sudden and unexpected missiles, prepared
+to act precipitately and coolly, to leap in with a flash of teeth, or
+to leap away with a menacing snarl.</p>
+<p>As for snarling he could snarl more terribly than any dog, young
+or old, in camp.&nbsp; The intent of the snarl is to warn or frighten,
+and judgment is required to know when it should be used.&nbsp; White
+Fang knew how to make it and when to make it.&nbsp; Into his snarl he
+incorporated all that was vicious, malignant, and horrible.&nbsp; With
+nose serrulated by continuous spasms, hair bristling in recurrent waves,
+tongue whipping out like a red snake and whipping back again, ears flattened
+down, eyes gleaming hatred, lips wrinkled back, and fangs exposed and
+dripping, he could compel a pause on the part of almost any assailant.&nbsp;
+A temporary pause, when taken off his guard, gave him the vital moment
+in which to think and determine his action.&nbsp; But often a pause
+so gained lengthened out until it evolved into a complete cessation
+from the attack.&nbsp; And before more than one of the grown dogs White
+Fang&rsquo;s snarl enabled him to beat an honourable retreat.</p>
+<p>An outcast himself from the pack of the part-grown dogs, his sanguinary
+methods and remarkable efficiency made the pack pay for its persecution
+of him.&nbsp; Not permitted himself to run with the pack, the curious
+state of affairs obtained that no member of the pack could run outside
+the pack.&nbsp; White Fang would not permit it.&nbsp; What of his bushwhacking
+and waylaying tactics, the young dogs were afraid to run by themselves.&nbsp;
+With the exception of Lip-lip, they were compelled to hunch together
+for mutual protection against the terrible enemy they had made.&nbsp;
+A puppy alone by the river bank meant a puppy dead or a puppy that aroused
+the camp with its shrill pain and terror as it fled back from the wolf-cub
+that had waylaid it.</p>
+<p>But White Fang&rsquo;s reprisals did not cease, even when the young
+dogs had learned thoroughly that they must stay together.&nbsp; He attacked
+them when he caught them alone, and they attacked him when they were
+bunched.&nbsp; The sight of him was sufficient to start them rushing
+after him, at which times his swiftness usually carried him into safety.&nbsp;
+But woe the dog that outran his fellows in such pursuit!&nbsp; White
+Fang had learned to turn suddenly upon the pursuer that was ahead of
+the pack and thoroughly to rip him up before the pack could arrive.&nbsp;
+This occurred with great frequency, for, once in full cry, the dogs
+were prone to forget themselves in the excitement of the chase, while
+White Fang never forgot himself.&nbsp; Stealing backward glances as
+he ran, he was always ready to whirl around and down the overzealous
+pursuer that outran his fellows.</p>
+<p>Young dogs are bound to play, and out of the exigencies of the situation
+they realised their play in this mimic warfare.&nbsp; Thus it was that
+the hunt of White Fang became their chief game&mdash;a deadly game,
+withal, and at all times a serious game.&nbsp; He, on the other hand,
+being the fastest-footed, was unafraid to venture anywhere.&nbsp; During
+the period that he waited vainly for his mother to come back, he led
+the pack many a wild chase through the adjacent woods.&nbsp; But the
+pack invariably lost him.&nbsp; Its noise and outcry warned him of its
+presence, while he ran alone, velvet-footed, silently, a moving shadow
+among the trees after the manner of his father and mother before him.&nbsp;
+Further he was more directly connected with the Wild than they; and
+he knew more of its secrets and stratagems.&nbsp; A favourite trick
+of his was to lose his trail in running water and then lie quietly in
+a near-by thicket while their baffled cries arose around him.</p>
+<p>Hated by his kind and by mankind, indomitable, perpetually warred
+upon and himself waging perpetual war, his development was rapid and
+one-sided.&nbsp; This was no soil for kindliness and affection to blossom
+in.&nbsp; Of such things he had not the faintest glimmering.&nbsp; The
+code he learned was to obey the strong and to oppress the weak.&nbsp;
+Grey Beaver was a god, and strong.&nbsp; Therefore White Fang obeyed
+him.&nbsp; But the dog younger or smaller than himself was weak, a thing
+to be destroyed.&nbsp; His development was in the direction of power.&nbsp;
+In order to face the constant danger of hurt and even of destruction,
+his predatory and protective faculties were unduly developed.&nbsp;
+He became quicker of movement than the other dogs, swifter of foot,
+craftier, deadlier, more lithe, more lean with ironlike muscle and sinew,
+more enduring, more cruel, more ferocious, and more intelligent.&nbsp;
+He had to become all these things, else he would not have held his own
+nor survive the hostile environment in which he found himself.</p>
+<div class="GutenbergBlankLines2"><br /><br /></div>
+<h3>CHAPTER IV&mdash;THE TRAIL OF THE GODS</h3>
+<div class="GutenbergBlankLines2"><br /><br /></div>
+<p>In the fall of the year, when the days were shortening and the bite
+of the frost was coming into the air, White Fang got his chance for
+liberty.&nbsp; For several days there had been a great hubbub in the
+village.&nbsp; The summer camp was being dismantled, and the tribe,
+bag and baggage, was preparing to go off to the fall hunting.&nbsp;
+White Fang watched it all with eager eyes, and when the tepees began
+to come down and the canoes were loading at the bank, he understood.&nbsp;
+Already the canoes were departing, and some had disappeared down the
+river.</p>
+<p>Quite deliberately he determined to stay behind.&nbsp; He waited
+his opportunity to slink out of camp to the woods.&nbsp; Here, in the
+running stream where ice was beginning to form, he hid his trail.&nbsp;
+Then he crawled into the heart of a dense thicket and waited.&nbsp;
+The time passed by, and he slept intermittently for hours.&nbsp; Then
+he was aroused by Grey Beaver&rsquo;s voice calling him by name.&nbsp;
+There were other voices.&nbsp; White Fang could hear Grey Beaver&rsquo;s
+squaw taking part in the search, and Mit-sah, who was Grey Beaver&rsquo;s
+son.</p>
+<p>White Fang trembled with fear, and though the impulse came to crawl
+out of his hiding-place, he resisted it.&nbsp; After a time the voices
+died away, and some time after that he crept out to enjoy the success
+of his undertaking.&nbsp; Darkness was coming on, and for a while he
+played about among the trees, pleasuring in his freedom.&nbsp; Then,
+and quite suddenly, he became aware of loneliness.&nbsp; He sat down
+to consider, listening to the silence of the forest and perturbed by
+it.&nbsp; That nothing moved nor sounded, seemed ominous.&nbsp; He felt
+the lurking of danger, unseen and unguessed.&nbsp; He was suspicious
+of the looming bulks of the trees and of the dark shadows that might
+conceal all manner of perilous things.</p>
+<p>Then it was cold.&nbsp; Here was no warm side of a tepee against
+which to snuggle.&nbsp; The frost was in his feet, and he kept lifting
+first one fore-foot and then the other.&nbsp; He curved his bushy tail
+around to cover them, and at the same time he saw a vision.&nbsp; There
+was nothing strange about it.&nbsp; Upon his inward sight was impressed
+a succession of memory-pictures.&nbsp; He saw the camp again, the tepees,
+and the blaze of the fires.&nbsp; He heard the shrill voices of the
+women, the gruff basses of the men, and the snarling of the dogs.&nbsp;
+He was hungry, and he remembered pieces of meat and fish that had been
+thrown him.&nbsp; Here was no meat, nothing but a threatening and inedible
+silence.</p>
+<p>His bondage had softened him.&nbsp; Irresponsibility had weakened
+him.&nbsp; He had forgotten how to shift for himself.&nbsp; The night
+yawned about him.&nbsp; His senses, accustomed to the hum and bustle
+of the camp, used to the continuous impact of sights and sounds, were
+now left idle.&nbsp; There was nothing to do, nothing to see nor hear.&nbsp;
+They strained to catch some interruption of the silence and immobility
+of nature.&nbsp; They were appalled by inaction and by the feel of something
+terrible impending.</p>
+<p>He gave a great start of fright.&nbsp; A colossal and formless something
+was rushing across the field of his vision.&nbsp; It was a tree-shadow
+flung by the moon, from whose face the clouds had been brushed away.&nbsp;
+Reassured, he whimpered softly; then he suppressed the whimper for fear
+that it might attract the attention of the lurking dangers.</p>
+<p>A tree, contracting in the cool of the night, made a loud noise.&nbsp;
+It was directly above him.&nbsp; He yelped in his fright.&nbsp; A panic
+seized him, and he ran madly toward the village.&nbsp; He knew an overpowering
+desire for the protection and companionship of man.&nbsp; In his nostrils
+was the smell of the camp-smoke.&nbsp; In his ears the camp-sounds and
+cries were ringing loud.&nbsp; He passed out of the forest and into
+the moonlit open where were no shadows nor darknesses.&nbsp; But no
+village greeted his eyes.&nbsp; He had forgotten.&nbsp; The village
+had gone away.</p>
+<p>His wild flight ceased abruptly.&nbsp; There was no place to which
+to flee.&nbsp; He slunk forlornly through the deserted camp, smelling
+the rubbish-heaps and the discarded rags and tags of the gods.&nbsp;
+He would have been glad for the rattle of stones about him, flung by
+an angry squaw, glad for the hand of Grey Beaver descending upon him
+in wrath; while he would have welcomed with delight Lip-lip and the
+whole snarling, cowardly pack.</p>
+<p>He came to where Grey Beaver&rsquo;s tepee had stood.&nbsp; In the
+centre of the space it had occupied, he sat down.&nbsp; He pointed his
+nose at the moon.&nbsp; His throat was afflicted by rigid spasms, his
+mouth opened, and in a heart-broken cry bubbled up his loneliness and
+fear, his grief for Kiche, all his past sorrows and miseries as well
+as his apprehension of sufferings and dangers to come.&nbsp; It was
+the long wolf-howl, full-throated and mournful, the first howl he had
+ever uttered.</p>
+<p>The coming of daylight dispelled his fears but increased his loneliness.&nbsp;
+The naked earth, which so shortly before had been so populous; thrust
+his loneliness more forcibly upon him.&nbsp; It did not take him long
+to make up his mind.&nbsp; He plunged into the forest and followed the
+river bank down the stream.&nbsp; All day he ran.&nbsp; He did not rest.&nbsp;
+He seemed made to run on for ever.&nbsp; His iron-like body ignored
+fatigue.&nbsp; And even after fatigue came, his heritage of endurance
+braced him to endless endeavour and enabled him to drive his complaining
+body onward.</p>
+<p>Where the river swung in against precipitous bluffs, he climbed the
+high mountains behind.&nbsp; Rivers and streams that entered the main
+river he forded or swam.&nbsp; Often he took to the rim-ice that was
+beginning to form, and more than once he crashed through and struggled
+for life in the icy current.&nbsp; Always he was on the lookout for
+the trail of the gods where it might leave the river and proceed inland.</p>
+<p>White Fang was intelligent beyond the average of his kind; yet his
+mental vision was not wide enough to embrace the other bank of the Mackenzie.&nbsp;
+What if the trail of the gods led out on that side?&nbsp; It never entered
+his head.&nbsp; Later on, when he had travelled more and grown older
+and wiser and come to know more of trails and rivers, it might be that
+he could grasp and apprehend such a possibility.&nbsp; But that mental
+power was yet in the future.&nbsp; Just now he ran blindly, his own
+bank of the Mackenzie alone entering into his calculations.</p>
+<p>All night he ran, blundering in the darkness into mishaps and obstacles
+that delayed but did not daunt.&nbsp; By the middle of the second day
+he had been running continuously for thirty hours, and the iron of his
+flesh was giving out.&nbsp; It was the endurance of his mind that kept
+him going.&nbsp; He had not eaten in forty hours, and he was weak with
+hunger.&nbsp; The repeated drenchings in the icy water had likewise
+had their effect on him.&nbsp; His handsome coat was draggled.&nbsp;
+The broad pads of his feet were bruised and bleeding.&nbsp; He had begun
+to limp, and this limp increased with the hours.&nbsp; To make it worse,
+the light of the sky was obscured and snow began to fall&mdash;a raw,
+moist, melting, clinging snow, slippery under foot, that hid from him
+the landscape he traversed, and that covered over the inequalities of
+the ground so that the way of his feet was more difficult and painful.</p>
+<p>Grey Beaver had intended camping that night on the far bank of the
+Mackenzie, for it was in that direction that the hunting lay.&nbsp;
+But on the near bank, shortly before dark, a moose coming down to drink,
+had been espied by Kloo-kooch, who was Grey Beaver&rsquo;s squaw.&nbsp;
+Now, had not the moose come down to drink, had not Mit-sah been steering
+out of the course because of the snow, had not Kloo-kooch sighted the
+moose, and had not Grey Beaver killed it with a lucky shot from his
+rifle, all subsequent things would have happened differently.&nbsp;
+Grey Beaver would not have camped on the near side of the Mackenzie,
+and White Fang would have passed by and gone on, either to die or to
+find his way to his wild brothers and become one of them&mdash;a wolf
+to the end of his days.</p>
+<p>Night had fallen.&nbsp; The snow was flying more thickly, and White
+Fang, whimpering softly to himself as he stumbled and limped along,
+came upon a fresh trail in the snow.&nbsp; So fresh was it that he knew
+it immediately for what it was.&nbsp; Whining with eagerness, he followed
+back from the river bank and in among the trees.&nbsp; The camp-sounds
+came to his ears.&nbsp; He saw the blaze of the fire, Kloo-kooch cooking,
+and Grey Beaver squatting on his hams and mumbling a chunk of raw tallow.&nbsp;
+There was fresh meat in camp!</p>
+<p>White Fang expected a beating.&nbsp; He crouched and bristled a little
+at the thought of it.&nbsp; Then he went forward again.&nbsp; He feared
+and disliked the beating he knew to be waiting for him.&nbsp; But he
+knew, further, that the comfort of the fire would be his, the protection
+of the gods, the companionship of the dogs&mdash;the last, a companionship
+of enmity, but none the less a companionship and satisfying to his gregarious
+needs.</p>
+<p>He came cringing and crawling into the firelight.&nbsp; Grey Beaver
+saw him, and stopped munching the tallow.&nbsp; White Fang crawled slowly,
+cringing and grovelling in the abjectness of his abasement and submission.&nbsp;
+He crawled straight toward Grey Beaver, every inch of his progress becoming
+slower and more painful.&nbsp; At last he lay at the master&rsquo;s
+feet, into whose possession he now surrendered himself, voluntarily,
+body and soul.&nbsp; Of his own choice, he came in to sit by man&rsquo;s
+fire and to be ruled by him.&nbsp; White Fang trembled, waiting for
+the punishment to fall upon him.&nbsp; There was a movement of the hand
+above him.&nbsp; He cringed involuntarily under the expected blow.&nbsp;
+It did not fall.&nbsp; He stole a glance upward.&nbsp; Grey Beaver was
+breaking the lump of tallow in half!&nbsp; Grey Beaver was offering
+him one piece of the tallow!&nbsp; Very gently and somewhat suspiciously,
+he first smelled the tallow and then proceeded to eat it.&nbsp; Grey
+Beaver ordered meat to be brought to him, and guarded him from the other
+dogs while he ate.&nbsp; After that, grateful and content, White Fang
+lay at Grey Beaver&rsquo;s feet, gazing at the fire that warmed him,
+blinking and dozing, secure in the knowledge that the morrow would find
+him, not wandering forlorn through bleak forest-stretches, but in the
+camp of the man-animals, with the gods to whom he had given himself
+and upon whom he was now dependent.</p>
+<div class="GutenbergBlankLines2"><br /><br /></div>
+<h3>CHAPTER V&mdash;THE COVENANT</h3>
+<div class="GutenbergBlankLines2"><br /><br /></div>
+<p>When December was well along, Grey Beaver went on a journey up the
+Mackenzie.&nbsp; Mit-sah and Kloo-kooch went with him.&nbsp; One sled
+he drove himself, drawn by dogs he had traded for or borrowed.&nbsp;
+A second and smaller sled was driven by Mit-sah, and to this was harnessed
+a team of puppies.&nbsp; It was more of a toy affair than anything else,
+yet it was the delight of Mit-sah, who felt that he was beginning to
+do a man&rsquo;s work in the world.&nbsp; Also, he was learning to drive
+dogs and to train dogs; while the puppies themselves were being broken
+in to the harness.&nbsp; Furthermore, the sled was of some service,
+for it carried nearly two hundred pounds of outfit and food.</p>
+<p>White Fang had seen the camp-dogs toiling in the harness, so that
+he did not resent overmuch the first placing of the harness upon himself.&nbsp;
+About his neck was put a moss-stuffed collar, which was connected by
+two pulling-traces to a strap that passed around his chest and over
+his back.&nbsp; It was to this that was fastened the long rope by which
+he pulled at the sled.</p>
+<p>There were seven puppies in the team.&nbsp; The others had been born
+earlier in the year and were nine and ten months old, while White Fang
+was only eight months old.&nbsp; Each dog was fastened to the sled by
+a single rope.&nbsp; No two ropes were of the same length, while the
+difference in length between any two ropes was at least that of a dog&rsquo;s
+body.&nbsp; Every rope was brought to a ring at the front end of the
+sled.&nbsp; The sled itself was without runners, being a birch-bark
+toboggan, with upturned forward end to keep it from ploughing under
+the snow.&nbsp; This construction enabled the weight of the sled and
+load to be distributed over the largest snow-surface; for the snow was
+crystal-powder and very soft.&nbsp; Observing the same principle of
+widest distribution of weight, the dogs at the ends of their ropes radiated
+fan-fashion from the nose of the sled, so that no dog trod in another&rsquo;s
+footsteps.</p>
+<p>There was, furthermore, another virtue in the fan-formation.&nbsp;
+The ropes of varying length prevented the dogs attacking from the rear
+those that ran in front of them.&nbsp; For a dog to attack another,
+it would have to turn upon one at a shorter rope.&nbsp; In which case
+it would find itself face to face with the dog attacked, and also it
+would find itself facing the whip of the driver.&nbsp; But the most
+peculiar virtue of all lay in the fact that the dog that strove to attack
+one in front of him must pull the sled faster, and that the faster the
+sled travelled, the faster could the dog attacked run away.&nbsp; Thus,
+the dog behind could never catch up with the one in front.&nbsp; The
+faster he ran, the faster ran the one he was after, and the faster ran
+all the dogs.&nbsp; Incidentally, the sled went faster, and thus, by
+cunning indirection, did man increase his mastery over the beasts.</p>
+<p>Mit-sah resembled his father, much of whose grey wisdom he possessed.&nbsp;
+In the past he had observed Lip-lip&rsquo;s persecution of White Fang;
+but at that time Lip-lip was another man&rsquo;s dog, and Mit-sah had
+never dared more than to shy an occasional stone at him.&nbsp; But now
+Lip-lip was his dog, and he proceeded to wreak his vengeance on him
+by putting him at the end of the longest rope.&nbsp; This made Lip-lip
+the leader, and was apparently an honour! but in reality it took away
+from him all honour, and instead of being bully and master of the pack,
+he now found himself hated and persecuted by the pack.</p>
+<p>Because he ran at the end of the longest rope, the dogs had always
+the view of him running away before them.&nbsp; All that they saw of
+him was his bushy tail and fleeing hind legs&mdash;a view far less ferocious
+and intimidating than his bristling mane and gleaming fangs.&nbsp; Also,
+dogs being so constituted in their mental ways, the sight of him running
+away gave desire to run after him and a feeling that he ran away from
+them.</p>
+<p>The moment the sled started, the team took after Lip-lip in a chase
+that extended throughout the day.&nbsp; At first he had been prone to
+turn upon his pursuers, jealous of his dignity and wrathful; but at
+such times Mit-sah would throw the stinging lash of the thirty-foot
+cariboo-gut whip into his face and compel him to turn tail and run on.&nbsp;
+Lip-lip might face the pack, but he could not face that whip, and all
+that was left him to do was to keep his long rope taut and his flanks
+ahead of the teeth of his mates.</p>
+<p>But a still greater cunning lurked in the recesses of the Indian
+mind.&nbsp; To give point to unending pursuit of the leader, Mit-sah
+favoured him over the other dogs.&nbsp; These favours aroused in them
+jealousy and hatred.&nbsp; In their presence Mit-sah would give him
+meat and would give it to him only.&nbsp; This was maddening to them.&nbsp;
+They would rage around just outside the throwing-distance of the whip,
+while Lip-lip devoured the meat and Mit-sah protected him.&nbsp; And
+when there was no meat to give, Mit-sah would keep the team at a distance
+and make believe to give meat to Lip-lip.</p>
+<p>White Fang took kindly to the work.&nbsp; He had travelled a greater
+distance than the other dogs in the yielding of himself to the rule
+of the gods, and he had learned more thoroughly the futility of opposing
+their will.&nbsp; In addition, the persecution he had suffered from
+the pack had made the pack less to him in the scheme of things, and
+man more.&nbsp; He had not learned to be dependent on his kind for companionship.&nbsp;
+Besides, Kiche was well-nigh forgotten; and the chief outlet of expression
+that remained to him was in the allegiance he tendered the gods he had
+accepted as masters.&nbsp; So he worked hard, learned discipline, and
+was obedient.&nbsp; Faithfulness and willingness characterised his toil.&nbsp;
+These are essential traits of the wolf and the wild-dog when they have
+become domesticated, and these traits White Fang possessed in unusual
+measure.</p>
+<p>A companionship did exist between White Fang and the other dogs,
+but it was one of warfare and enmity.&nbsp; He had never learned to
+play with them.&nbsp; He knew only how to fight, and fight with them
+he did, returning to them a hundred-fold the snaps and slashes they
+had given him in the days when Lip-lip was leader of the pack.&nbsp;
+But Lip-lip was no longer leader&mdash;except when he fled away before
+his mates at the end of his rope, the sled bounding along behind.&nbsp;
+In camp he kept close to Mit-sah or Grey Beaver or Kloo-kooch.&nbsp;
+He did not dare venture away from the gods, for now the fangs of all
+dogs were against him, and he tasted to the dregs the persecution that
+had been White Fang&rsquo;s.</p>
+<p>With the overthrow of Lip-lip, White Fang could have become leader
+of the pack.&nbsp; But he was too morose and solitary for that.&nbsp;
+He merely thrashed his team-mates.&nbsp; Otherwise he ignored them.&nbsp;
+They got out of his way when he came along; nor did the boldest of them
+ever dare to rob him of his meat.&nbsp; On the contrary, they devoured
+their own meat hurriedly, for fear that he would take it away from them.&nbsp;
+White Fang knew the law well: <i>to oppress</i> <i>the weak and obey
+the strong</i>.&nbsp; He ate his share of meat as rapidly as he could.&nbsp;
+And then woe the dog that had not yet finished!&nbsp; A snarl and a
+flash of fangs, and that dog would wail his indignation to the uncomforting
+stars while White Fang finished his portion for him.</p>
+<p>Every little while, however, one dog or another would flame up in
+revolt and be promptly subdued.&nbsp; Thus White Fang was kept in training.&nbsp;
+He was jealous of the isolation in which he kept himself in the midst
+of the pack, and he fought often to maintain it.&nbsp; But such fights
+were of brief duration.&nbsp; He was too quick for the others.&nbsp;
+They were slashed open and bleeding before they knew what had happened,
+were whipped almost before they had begun to fight.</p>
+<p>As rigid as the sled-discipline of the gods, was the discipline maintained
+by White Fang amongst his fellows.&nbsp; He never allowed them any latitude.&nbsp;
+He compelled them to an unremitting respect for him.&nbsp; They might
+do as they pleased amongst themselves.&nbsp; That was no concern of
+his.&nbsp; But it <i>was</i> his concern that they leave him alone in
+his isolation, get out of his way when he elected to walk among them,
+and at all times acknowledge his mastery over them.&nbsp; A hint of
+stiff-leggedness on their part, a lifted lip or a bristle of hair, and
+he would be upon them, merciless and cruel, swiftly convincing them
+of the error of their way.</p>
+<p>He was a monstrous tyrant.&nbsp; His mastery was rigid as steel.&nbsp;
+He oppressed the weak with a vengeance.&nbsp; Not for nothing had he
+been exposed to the pitiless struggles for life in the day of his cubhood,
+when his mother and he, alone and unaided, held their own and survived
+in the ferocious environment of the Wild.&nbsp; And not for nothing
+had he learned to walk softly when superior strength went by.&nbsp;
+He oppressed the weak, but he respected the strong.&nbsp; And in the
+course of the long journey with Grey Beaver he walked softly indeed
+amongst the full-grown dogs in the camps of the strange man-animals
+they encountered.</p>
+<p>The months passed by.&nbsp; Still continued the journey of Grey Beaver.&nbsp;
+White Fang&rsquo;s strength was developed by the long hours on trail
+and the steady toil at the sled; and it would have seemed that his mental
+development was well-nigh complete.&nbsp; He had come to know quite
+thoroughly the world in which he lived.&nbsp; His outlook was bleak
+and materialistic.&nbsp; The world as he saw it was a fierce and brutal
+world, a world without warmth, a world in which caresses and affection
+and the bright sweetnesses of the spirit did not exist.</p>
+<p>He had no affection for Grey Beaver.&nbsp; True, he was a god, but
+a most savage god.&nbsp; White Fang was glad to acknowledge his lordship,
+but it was a lordship based upon superior intelligence and brute strength.&nbsp;
+There was something in the fibre of White Fang&rsquo;s being that made
+his lordship a thing to be desired, else he would not have come back
+from the Wild when he did to tender his allegiance.&nbsp; There were
+deeps in his nature which had never been sounded.&nbsp; A kind word,
+a caressing touch of the hand, on the part of Grey Beaver, might have
+sounded these deeps; but Grey Beaver did not caress, nor speak kind
+words.&nbsp; It was not his way.&nbsp; His primacy was savage, and savagely
+he ruled, administering justice with a club, punishing transgression
+with the pain of a blow, and rewarding merit, not by kindness, but by
+withholding a blow.</p>
+<p>So White Fang knew nothing of the heaven a man&rsquo;s hand might
+contain for him.&nbsp; Besides, he did not like the hands of the man-animals.&nbsp;
+He was suspicious of them.&nbsp; It was true that they sometimes gave
+meat, but more often they gave hurt.&nbsp; Hands were things to keep
+away from.&nbsp; They hurled stones, wielded sticks and clubs and whips,
+administered slaps and clouts, and, when they touched him, were cunning
+to hurt with pinch and twist and wrench.&nbsp; In strange villages he
+had encountered the hands of the children and learned that they were
+cruel to hurt.&nbsp; Also, he had once nearly had an eye poked out by
+a toddling papoose.&nbsp; From these experiences he became suspicious
+of all children.&nbsp; He could not tolerate them.&nbsp; When they came
+near with their ominous hands, he got up.</p>
+<p>It was in a village at the Great Slave Lake, that, in the course
+of resenting the evil of the hands of the man-animals, he came to modify
+the law that he had learned from Grey Beaver: namely, that the unpardonable
+crime was to bite one of the gods.&nbsp; In this village, after the
+custom of all dogs in all villages, White Fang went foraging, for food.&nbsp;
+A boy was chopping frozen moose-meat with an axe, and the chips were
+flying in the snow.&nbsp; White Fang, sliding by in quest of meat, stopped
+and began to eat the chips.&nbsp; He observed the boy lay down the axe
+and take up a stout club.&nbsp; White Fang sprang clear, just in time
+to escape the descending blow.&nbsp; The boy pursued him, and he, a
+stranger in the village, fled between two tepees to find himself cornered
+against a high earth bank.</p>
+<p>There was no escape for White Fang.&nbsp; The only way out was between
+the two tepees, and this the boy guarded.&nbsp; Holding his club prepared
+to strike, he drew in on his cornered quarry.&nbsp; White Fang was furious.&nbsp;
+He faced the boy, bristling and snarling, his sense of justice outraged.&nbsp;
+He knew the law of forage.&nbsp; All the wastage of meat, such as the
+frozen chips, belonged to the dog that found it.&nbsp; He had done no
+wrong, broken no law, yet here was this boy preparing to give him a
+beating.&nbsp; White Fang scarcely knew what happened.&nbsp; He did
+it in a surge of rage.&nbsp; And he did it so quickly that the boy did
+not know either.&nbsp; All the boy knew was that he had in some unaccountable
+way been overturned into the snow, and that his club-hand had been ripped
+wide open by White Fang&rsquo;s teeth.</p>
+<p>But White Fang knew that he had broken the law of the gods.&nbsp;
+He had driven his teeth into the sacred flesh of one of them, and could
+expect nothing but a most terrible punishment.&nbsp; He fled away to
+Grey Beaver, behind whose protecting legs he crouched when the bitten
+boy and the boy&rsquo;s family came, demanding vengeance.&nbsp; But
+they went away with vengeance unsatisfied.&nbsp; Grey Beaver defended
+White Fang.&nbsp; So did Mit-sah and Kloo-kooch.&nbsp; White Fang, listening
+to the wordy war and watching the angry gestures, knew that his act
+was justified.&nbsp; And so it came that he learned there were gods
+and gods.&nbsp; There were his gods, and there were other gods, and
+between them there was a difference.&nbsp; Justice or injustice, it
+was all the same, he must take all things from the hands of his own
+gods.&nbsp; But he was not compelled to take injustice from the other
+gods.&nbsp; It was his privilege to resent it with his teeth.&nbsp;
+And this also was a law of the gods.</p>
+<p>Before the day was out, White Fang was to learn more about this law.&nbsp;
+Mit-sah, alone, gathering firewood in the forest, encountered the boy
+that had been bitten.&nbsp; With him were other boys.&nbsp; Hot words
+passed.&nbsp; Then all the boys attacked Mit-sah.&nbsp; It was going
+hard with him.&nbsp; Blows were raining upon him from all sides.&nbsp;
+White Fang looked on at first.&nbsp; This was an affair of the gods,
+and no concern of his.&nbsp; Then he realised that this was Mit-sah,
+one of his own particular gods, who was being maltreated.&nbsp; It was
+no reasoned impulse that made White Fang do what he then did.&nbsp;
+A mad rush of anger sent him leaping in amongst the combatants.&nbsp;
+Five minutes later the landscape was covered with fleeing boys, many
+of whom dripped blood upon the snow in token that White Fang&rsquo;s
+teeth had not been idle.&nbsp; When Mit-sah told the story in camp,
+Grey Beaver ordered meat to be given to White Fang.&nbsp; He ordered
+much meat to be given, and White Fang, gorged and sleepy by the fire,
+knew that the law had received its verification.</p>
+<p>It was in line with these experiences that White Fang came to learn
+the law of property and the duty of the defence of property.&nbsp; From
+the protection of his god&rsquo;s body to the protection of his god&rsquo;s
+possessions was a step, and this step he made.&nbsp; What was his god&rsquo;s
+was to be defended against all the world&mdash;even to the extent of
+biting other gods.&nbsp; Not only was such an act sacrilegious in its
+nature, but it was fraught with peril.&nbsp; The gods were all-powerful,
+and a dog was no match against them; yet White Fang learned to face
+them, fiercely belligerent and unafraid.&nbsp; Duty rose above fear,
+and thieving gods learned to leave Grey Beaver&rsquo;s property alone.</p>
+<p>One thing, in this connection, White Fang quickly learnt, and that
+was that a thieving god was usually a cowardly god and prone to run
+away at the sounding of the alarm.&nbsp; Also, he learned that but brief
+time elapsed between his sounding of the alarm and Grey Beaver coming
+to his aid.&nbsp; He came to know that it was not fear of him that drove
+the thief away, but fear of Grey Beaver.&nbsp; White Fang did not give
+the alarm by barking.&nbsp; He never barked.&nbsp; His method was to
+drive straight at the intruder, and to sink his teeth in if he could.&nbsp;
+Because he was morose and solitary, having nothing to do with the other
+dogs, he was unusually fitted to guard his master&rsquo;s property;
+and in this he was encouraged and trained by Grey Beaver.&nbsp; One
+result of this was to make White Fang more ferocious and indomitable,
+and more solitary.</p>
+<p>The months went by, binding stronger and stronger the covenant between
+dog and man.&nbsp; This was the ancient covenant that the first wolf
+that came in from the Wild entered into with man.&nbsp; And, like all
+succeeding wolves and wild dogs that had done likewise, White Fang worked
+the covenant out for himself.&nbsp; The terms were simple.&nbsp; For
+the possession of a flesh-and-blood god, he exchanged his own liberty.&nbsp;
+Food and fire, protection and companionship, were some of the things
+he received from the god.&nbsp; In return, he guarded the god&rsquo;s
+property, defended his body, worked for him, and obeyed him.</p>
+<p>The possession of a god implies service.&nbsp; White Fang&rsquo;s
+was a service of duty and awe, but not of love.&nbsp; He did not know
+what love was.&nbsp; He had no experience of love.&nbsp; Kiche was a
+remote memory.&nbsp; Besides, not only had he abandoned the Wild and
+his kind when he gave himself up to man, but the terms of the covenant
+were such that if ever he met Kiche again he would not desert his god
+to go with her.&nbsp; His allegiance to man seemed somehow a law of
+his being greater than the love of liberty, of kind and kin.</p>
+<div class="GutenbergBlankLines2"><br /><br /></div>
+<h3>CHAPTER VI&mdash;THE FAMINE</h3>
+<div class="GutenbergBlankLines2"><br /><br /></div>
+<p>The spring of the year was at hand when Grey Beaver finished his
+long journey.&nbsp; It was April, and White Fang was a year old when
+he pulled into the home villages and was loosed from the harness by
+Mit-sah.&nbsp; Though a long way from his full growth, White Fang, next
+to Lip-lip, was the largest yearling in the village.&nbsp; Both from
+his father, the wolf, and from Kiche, he had inherited stature and strength,
+and already he was measuring up alongside the full-grown dogs.&nbsp;
+But he had not yet grown compact.&nbsp; His body was slender and rangy,
+and his strength more stringy than massive, His coat was the true wolf-grey,
+and to all appearances he was true wolf himself.&nbsp; The quarter-strain
+of dog he had inherited from Kiche had left no mark on him physically,
+though it had played its part in his mental make-up.</p>
+<p>He wandered through the village, recognising with staid satisfaction
+the various gods he had known before the long journey.&nbsp; Then there
+were the dogs, puppies growing up like himself, and grown dogs that
+did not look so large and formidable as the memory pictures he retained
+of them.&nbsp; Also, he stood less in fear of them than formerly, stalking
+among them with a certain careless ease that was as new to him as it
+was enjoyable.</p>
+<p>There was Baseek, a grizzled old fellow that in his younger days
+had but to uncover his fangs to send White Fang cringing and crouching
+to the right about.&nbsp; From him White Fang had learned much of his
+own insignificance; and from him he was now to learn much of the change
+and development that had taken place in himself.&nbsp; While Baseek
+had been growing weaker with age, White Fang had been growing stronger
+with youth.</p>
+<p>It was at the cutting-up of a moose, fresh-killed, that White Fang
+learned of the changed relations in which he stood to the dog-world.&nbsp;
+He had got for himself a hoof and part of the shin-bone, to which quite
+a bit of meat was attached.&nbsp; Withdrawn from the immediate scramble
+of the other dogs&mdash;in fact out of sight behind a thicket&mdash;he
+was devouring his prize, when Baseek rushed in upon him.&nbsp; Before
+he knew what he was doing, he had slashed the intruder twice and sprung
+clear.&nbsp; Baseek was surprised by the other&rsquo;s temerity and
+swiftness of attack.&nbsp; He stood, gazing stupidly across at White
+Fang, the raw, red shin-bone between them.</p>
+<p>Baseek was old, and already he had come to know the increasing valour
+of the dogs it had been his wont to bully.&nbsp; Bitter experiences
+these, which, perforce, he swallowed, calling upon all his wisdom to
+cope with them.&nbsp; In the old days he would have sprung upon White
+Fang in a fury of righteous wrath.&nbsp; But now his waning powers would
+not permit such a course.&nbsp; He bristled fiercely and looked ominously
+across the shin-bone at White Fang.&nbsp; And White Fang, resurrecting
+quite a deal of the old awe, seemed to wilt and to shrink in upon himself
+and grow small, as he cast about in his mind for a way to beat a retreat
+not too inglorious.</p>
+<p>And right here Baseek erred.&nbsp; Had he contented himself with
+looking fierce and ominous, all would have been well.&nbsp; White Fang,
+on the verge of retreat, would have retreated, leaving the meat to him.&nbsp;
+But Baseek did not wait.&nbsp; He considered the victory already his
+and stepped forward to the meat.&nbsp; As he bent his head carelessly
+to smell it, White Fang bristled slightly.&nbsp; Even then it was not
+too late for Baseek to retrieve the situation.&nbsp; Had he merely stood
+over the meat, head up and glowering, White Fang would ultimately have
+slunk away.&nbsp; But the fresh meat was strong in Baseek&rsquo;s nostrils,
+and greed urged him to take a bite of it.</p>
+<p>This was too much for White Fang.&nbsp; Fresh upon his months of
+mastery over his own team-mates, it was beyond his self-control to stand
+idly by while another devoured the meat that belonged to him.&nbsp;
+He struck, after his custom, without warning.&nbsp; With the first slash,
+Baseek&rsquo;s right ear was ripped into ribbons.&nbsp; He was astounded
+at the suddenness of it.&nbsp; But more things, and most grievous ones,
+were happening with equal suddenness.&nbsp; He was knocked off his feet.&nbsp;
+His throat was bitten.&nbsp; While he was struggling to his feet the
+young dog sank teeth twice into his shoulder.&nbsp; The swiftness of
+it was bewildering.&nbsp; He made a futile rush at White Fang, clipping
+the empty air with an outraged snap.&nbsp; The next moment his nose
+was laid open, and he was staggering backward away from the meat.</p>
+<p>The situation was now reversed.&nbsp; White Fang stood over the shin-bone,
+bristling and menacing, while Baseek stood a little way off, preparing
+to retreat.&nbsp; He dared not risk a fight with this young lightning-flash,
+and again he knew, and more bitterly, the enfeeblement of oncoming age.&nbsp;
+His attempt to maintain his dignity was heroic.&nbsp; Calmly turning
+his back upon young dog and shin-bone, as though both were beneath his
+notice and unworthy of his consideration, he stalked grandly away.&nbsp;
+Nor, until well out of sight, did he stop to lick his bleeding wounds.</p>
+<p>The effect on White Fang was to give him a greater faith in himself,
+and a greater pride.&nbsp; He walked less softly among the grown dogs;
+his attitude toward them was less compromising.&nbsp; Not that he went
+out of his way looking for trouble.&nbsp; Far from it.&nbsp; But upon
+his way he demanded consideration.&nbsp; He stood upon his right to
+go his way unmolested and to give trail to no dog.&nbsp; He had to be
+taken into account, that was all.&nbsp; He was no longer to be disregarded
+and ignored, as was the lot of puppies, and as continued to be the lot
+of the puppies that were his team-mates.&nbsp; They got out of the way,
+gave trail to the grown dogs, and gave up meat to them under compulsion.&nbsp;
+But White Fang, uncompanionable, solitary, morose, scarcely looking
+to right or left, redoubtable, forbidding of aspect, remote and alien,
+was accepted as an equal by his puzzled elders.&nbsp; They quickly learned
+to leave him alone, neither venturing hostile acts nor making overtures
+of friendliness.&nbsp; If they left him alone, he left them alone&mdash;a
+state of affairs that they found, after a few encounters, to be pre-eminently
+desirable.</p>
+<p>In midsummer White Fang had an experience.&nbsp; Trotting along in
+his silent way to investigate a new tepee which had been erected on
+the edge of the village while he was away with the hunters after moose,
+he came full upon Kiche.&nbsp; He paused and looked at her.&nbsp; He
+remembered her vaguely, but he <i>remembered</i> her, and that was more
+than could be said for her.&nbsp; She lifted her lip at him in the old
+snarl of menace, and his memory became clear.&nbsp; His forgotten cubhood,
+all that was associated with that familiar snarl, rushed back to him.&nbsp;
+Before he had known the gods, she had been to him the centre-pin of
+the universe.&nbsp; The old familiar feelings of that time came back
+upon him, surged up within him.&nbsp; He bounded towards her joyously,
+and she met him with shrewd fangs that laid his cheek open to the bone.&nbsp;
+He did not understand.&nbsp; He backed away, bewildered and puzzled.</p>
+<p>But it was not Kiche&rsquo;s fault.&nbsp; A wolf-mother was not made
+to remember her cubs of a year or so before.&nbsp; So she did not remember
+White Fang.&nbsp; He was a strange animal, an intruder; and her present
+litter of puppies gave her the right to resent such intrusion.</p>
+<p>One of the puppies sprawled up to White Fang.&nbsp; They were half-brothers,
+only they did not know it.&nbsp; White Fang sniffed the puppy curiously,
+whereupon Kiche rushed upon him, gashing is face a second time.&nbsp;
+He backed farther away.&nbsp; All the old memories and associations
+died down again and passed into the grave from which they had been resurrected.&nbsp;
+He looked at Kiche licking her puppy and stopping now and then to snarl
+at him.&nbsp; She was without value to him.&nbsp; He had learned to
+get along without her.&nbsp; Her meaning was forgotten.&nbsp; There
+was no place for her in his scheme of things, as there was no place
+for him in hers.</p>
+<p>He was still standing, stupid and bewildered, the memories forgotten,
+wondering what it was all about, when Kiche attacked him a third time,
+intent on driving him away altogether from the vicinity.&nbsp; And White
+Fang allowed himself to be driven away.&nbsp; This was a female of his
+kind, and it was a law of his kind that the males must not fight the
+females.&nbsp; He did not know anything about this law, for it was no
+generalisation of the mind, not a something acquired by experience of
+the world.&nbsp; He knew it as a secret prompting, as an urge of instinct&mdash;of
+the same instinct that made him howl at the moon and stars of nights,
+and that made him fear death and the unknown.</p>
+<p>The months went by.&nbsp; White Fang grew stronger, heavier, and
+more compact, while his character was developing along the lines laid
+down by his heredity and his environment.&nbsp; His heredity was a life-stuff
+that may be likened to clay.&nbsp; It possessed many possibilities,
+was capable of being moulded into many different forms.&nbsp; Environment
+served to model the clay, to give it a particular form.&nbsp; Thus,
+had White Fang never come in to the fires of man, the Wild would have
+moulded him into a true wolf.&nbsp; But the gods had given him a different
+environment, and he was moulded into a dog that was rather wolfish,
+but that was a dog and not a wolf.</p>
+<p>And so, according to the clay of his nature and the pressure of his
+surroundings, his character was being moulded into a certain particular
+shape.&nbsp; There was no escaping it.&nbsp; He was becoming more morose,
+more uncompanionable, more solitary, more ferocious; while the dogs
+were learning more and more that it was better to be at peace with him
+than at war, and Grey Beaver was coming to prize him more greatly with
+the passage of each day.</p>
+<p>White Fang, seeming to sum up strength in all his qualities, nevertheless
+suffered from one besetting weakness.&nbsp; He could not stand being
+laughed at.&nbsp; The laughter of men was a hateful thing.&nbsp; They
+might laugh among themselves about anything they pleased except himself,
+and he did not mind.&nbsp; But the moment laughter was turned upon him
+he would fly into a most terrible rage.&nbsp; Grave, dignified, sombre,
+a laugh made him frantic to ridiculousness.&nbsp; It so outraged him
+and upset him that for hours he would behave like a demon.&nbsp; And
+woe to the dog that at such times ran foul of him.&nbsp; He knew the
+law too well to take it out of Grey Beaver; behind Grey Beaver were
+a club and godhead.&nbsp; But behind the dogs there was nothing but
+space, and into this space they flew when White Fang came on the scene,
+made mad by laughter.</p>
+<p>In the third year of his life there came a great famine to the Mackenzie
+Indians.&nbsp; In the summer the fish failed.&nbsp; In the winter the
+cariboo forsook their accustomed track.&nbsp; Moose were scarce, the
+rabbits almost disappeared, hunting and preying animals perished.&nbsp;
+Denied their usual food-supply, weakened by hunger, they fell upon and
+devoured one another.&nbsp; Only the strong survived.&nbsp; White Fang&rsquo;s
+gods were always hunting animals.&nbsp; The old and the weak of them
+died of hunger.&nbsp; There was wailing in the village, where the women
+and children went without in order that what little they had might go
+into the bellies of the lean and hollow-eyed hunters who trod the forest
+in the vain pursuit of meat.</p>
+<p>To such extremity were the gods driven that they ate the soft-tanned
+leather of their mocassins and mittens, while the dogs ate the harnesses
+off their backs and the very whip-lashes.&nbsp; Also, the dogs ate one
+another, and also the gods ate the dogs.&nbsp; The weakest and the more
+worthless were eaten first.&nbsp; The dogs that still lived, looked
+on and understood.&nbsp; A few of the boldest and wisest forsook the
+fires of the gods, which had now become a shambles, and fled into the
+forest, where, in the end, they starved to death or were eaten by wolves.</p>
+<p>In this time of misery, White Fang, too, stole away into the woods.&nbsp;
+He was better fitted for the life than the other dogs, for he had the
+training of his cubhood to guide him.&nbsp; Especially adept did he
+become in stalking small living things.&nbsp; He would lie concealed
+for hours, following every movement of a cautious tree-squirrel, waiting,
+with a patience as huge as the hunger he suffered from, until the squirrel
+ventured out upon the ground.&nbsp; Even then, White Fang was not premature.&nbsp;
+He waited until he was sure of striking before the squirrel could gain
+a tree-refuge.&nbsp; Then, and not until then, would he flash from his
+hiding-place, a grey projectile, incredibly swift, never failing its
+mark&mdash;the fleeing squirrel that fled not fast enough.</p>
+<p>Successful as he was with squirrels, there was one difficulty that
+prevented him from living and growing fat on them.&nbsp; There were
+not enough squirrels.&nbsp; So he was driven to hunt still smaller things.&nbsp;
+So acute did his hunger become at times that he was not above rooting
+out wood-mice from their burrows in the ground.&nbsp; Nor did he scorn
+to do battle with a weasel as hungry as himself and many times more
+ferocious.</p>
+<p>In the worst pinches of the famine he stole back to the fires of
+the gods.&nbsp; But he did not go into the fires.&nbsp; He lurked in
+the forest, avoiding discovery and robbing the snares at the rare intervals
+when game was caught.&nbsp; He even robbed Grey Beaver&rsquo;s snare
+of a rabbit at a time when Grey Beaver staggered and tottered through
+the forest, sitting down often to rest, what of weakness and of shortness
+of breath.</p>
+<p>One day While Fang encountered a young wolf, gaunt and scrawny, loose-jointed
+with famine.&nbsp; Had he not been hungry himself, White Fang might
+have gone with him and eventually found his way into the pack amongst
+his wild brethren.&nbsp; As it was, he ran the young wolf down and killed
+and ate him.</p>
+<p>Fortune seemed to favour him.&nbsp; Always, when hardest pressed
+for food, he found something to kill.&nbsp; Again, when he was weak,
+it was his luck that none of the larger preying animals chanced upon
+him.&nbsp; Thus, he was strong from the two days&rsquo; eating a lynx
+had afforded him when the hungry wolf-pack ran full tilt upon him.&nbsp;
+It was a long, cruel chase, but he was better nourished than they, and
+in the end outran them.&nbsp; And not only did he outrun them, but,
+circling widely back on his track, he gathered in one of his exhausted
+pursuers.</p>
+<p>After that he left that part of the country and journeyed over to
+the valley wherein he had been born.&nbsp; Here, in the old lair, he
+encountered Kiche.&nbsp; Up to her old tricks, she, too, had fled the
+inhospitable fires of the gods and gone back to her old refuge to give
+birth to her young.&nbsp; Of this litter but one remained alive when
+White Fang came upon the scene, and this one was not destined to live
+long.&nbsp; Young life had little chance in such a famine.</p>
+<p>Kiche&rsquo;s greeting of her grown son was anything but affectionate.&nbsp;
+But White Fang did not mind.&nbsp; He had outgrown his mother.&nbsp;
+So he turned tail philosophically and trotted on up the stream.&nbsp;
+At the forks he took the turning to the left, where he found the lair
+of the lynx with whom his mother and he had fought long before.&nbsp;
+Here, in the abandoned lair, he settled down and rested for a day.</p>
+<p>During the early summer, in the last days of the famine, he met Lip-lip,
+who had likewise taken to the woods, where he had eked out a miserable
+existence.</p>
+<p>White Fang came upon him unexpectedly.&nbsp; Trotting in opposite
+directions along the base of a high bluff, they rounded a corner of
+rock and found themselves face to face.&nbsp; They paused with instant
+alarm, and looked at each other suspiciously.</p>
+<p>White Fang was in splendid condition.&nbsp; His hunting had been
+good, and for a week he had eaten his fill.&nbsp; He was even gorged
+from his latest kill.&nbsp; But in the moment he looked at Lip-lip his
+hair rose on end all along his back.&nbsp; It was an involuntary bristling
+on his part, the physical state that in the past had always accompanied
+the mental state produced in him by Lip-lip&rsquo;s bullying and persecution.&nbsp;
+As in the past he had bristled and snarled at sight of Lip-lip, so now,
+and automatically, he bristled and snarled.&nbsp; He did not waste any
+time.&nbsp; The thing was done thoroughly and with despatch.&nbsp; Lip-lip
+essayed to back away, but White Fang struck him hard, shoulder to shoulder.&nbsp;
+Lip-lip was overthrown and rolled upon his back.&nbsp; White Fang&rsquo;s
+teeth drove into the scrawny throat.&nbsp; There was a death-struggle,
+during which White Fang walked around, stiff-legged and observant.&nbsp;
+Then he resumed his course and trotted on along the base of the bluff.</p>
+<p>One day, not long after, he came to the edge of the forest, where
+a narrow stretch of open land sloped down to the Mackenzie.&nbsp; He
+had been over this ground before, when it was bare, but now a village
+occupied it.&nbsp; Still hidden amongst the trees, he paused to study
+the situation.&nbsp; Sights and sounds and scents were familiar to him.&nbsp;
+It was the old village changed to a new place.&nbsp; But sights and
+sounds and smells were different from those he had last had when he
+fled away from it.&nbsp; There was no whimpering nor wailing.&nbsp;
+Contented sounds saluted his ear, and when he heard the angry voice
+of a woman he knew it to be the anger that proceeds from a full stomach.&nbsp;
+And there was a smell in the air of fish.&nbsp; There was food.&nbsp;
+The famine was gone.&nbsp; He came out boldly from the forest and trotted
+into camp straight to Grey Beaver&rsquo;s tepee.&nbsp; Grey Beaver was
+not there; but Kloo-kooch welcomed him with glad cries and the whole
+of a fresh-caught fish, and he lay down to wait Grey Beaver&rsquo;s
+coming.</p>
+<div class="GutenbergBlankLines3"><br /><br /><br /></div>
+<h2>PART IV</h2>
+<div class="GutenbergBlankLines3"><br /><br /><br /></div>
+<h3>CHAPTER I&mdash;THE ENEMY OF HIS KIND</h3>
+<div class="GutenbergBlankLines2"><br /><br /></div>
+<p>Had there been in White Fang&rsquo;s nature any possibility, no matter
+how remote, of his ever coming to fraternise with his kind, such possibility
+was irretrievably destroyed when he was made leader of the sled-team.&nbsp;
+For now the dogs hated him&mdash;hated him for the extra meat bestowed
+upon him by Mit-sah; hated him for all the real and fancied favours
+he received; hated him for that he fled always at the head of the team,
+his waving brush of a tail and his perpetually retreating hind-quarters
+for ever maddening their eyes.</p>
+<p>And White Fang just as bitterly hated them back.&nbsp; Being sled-leader
+was anything but gratifying to him.&nbsp; To be compelled to run away
+before the yelling pack, every dog of which, for three years, he had
+thrashed and mastered, was almost more than he could endure.&nbsp; But
+endure it he must, or perish, and the life that was in him had no desire
+to perish out.&nbsp; The moment Mit-sah gave his order for the start,
+that moment the whole team, with eager, savage cries, sprang forward
+at White Fang.</p>
+<p>There was no defence for him.&nbsp; If he turned upon them, Mit-sah
+would throw the stinging lash of the whip into his face.&nbsp; Only
+remained to him to run away.&nbsp; He could not encounter that howling
+horde with his tail and hind-quarters.&nbsp; These were scarcely fit
+weapons with which to meet the many merciless fangs.&nbsp; So run away
+he did, violating his own nature and pride with every leap he made,
+and leaping all day long.</p>
+<p>One cannot violate the promptings of one&rsquo;s nature without having
+that nature recoil upon itself.&nbsp; Such a recoil is like that of
+a hair, made to grow out from the body, turning unnaturally upon the
+direction of its growth and growing into the body&mdash;a rankling,
+festering thing of hurt.&nbsp; And so with White Fang.&nbsp; Every urge
+of his being impelled him to spring upon the pack that cried at his
+heels, but it was the will of the gods that this should not be; and
+behind the will, to enforce it, was the whip of cariboo-gut with its
+biting thirty-foot lash.&nbsp; So White Fang could only eat his heart
+in bitterness and develop a hatred and malice commensurate with the
+ferocity and indomitability of his nature.</p>
+<p>If ever a creature was the enemy of its kind, White Fang was that
+creature.&nbsp; He asked no quarter, gave none.&nbsp; He was continually
+marred and scarred by the teeth of the pack, and as continually he left
+his own marks upon the pack.&nbsp; Unlike most leaders, who, when camp
+was made and the dogs were unhitched, huddled near to the gods for protection,
+White Fang disdained such protection.&nbsp; He walked boldly about the
+camp, inflicting punishment in the night for what he had suffered in
+the day.&nbsp; In the time before he was made leader of the team, the
+pack had learned to get out of his way.&nbsp; But now it was different.&nbsp;
+Excited by the day-long pursuit of him, swayed subconsciously by the
+insistent iteration on their brains of the sight of him fleeing away,
+mastered by the feeling of mastery enjoyed all day, the dogs could not
+bring themselves to give way to him.&nbsp; When he appeared amongst
+them, there was always a squabble.&nbsp; His progress was marked by
+snarl and snap and growl.&nbsp; The very atmosphere he breathed was
+surcharged with hatred and malice, and this but served to increase the
+hatred and malice within him.</p>
+<p>When Mit-sah cried out his command for the team to stop, White Fang
+obeyed.&nbsp; At first this caused trouble for the other dogs.&nbsp;
+All of them would spring upon the hated leader only to find the tables
+turned.&nbsp; Behind him would be Mit-sah, the great whip singing in
+his hand.&nbsp; So the dogs came to understand that when the team stopped
+by order, White Fang was to be let alone.&nbsp; But when White Fang
+stopped without orders, then it was allowed them to spring upon him
+and destroy him if they could.&nbsp; After several experiences, White
+Fang never stopped without orders.&nbsp; He learned quickly.&nbsp; It
+was in the nature of things, that he must learn quickly if he were to
+survive the unusually severe conditions under which life was vouchsafed
+him.</p>
+<p>But the dogs could never learn the lesson to leave him alone in camp.&nbsp;
+Each day, pursuing him and crying defiance at him, the lesson of the
+previous night was erased, and that night would have to be learned over
+again, to be as immediately forgotten.&nbsp; Besides, there was a greater
+consistence in their dislike of him.&nbsp; They sensed between themselves
+and him a difference of kind&mdash;cause sufficient in itself for hostility.&nbsp;
+Like him, they were domesticated wolves.&nbsp; But they had been domesticated
+for generations.&nbsp; Much of the Wild had been lost, so that to them
+the Wild was the unknown, the terrible, the ever-menacing and ever warring.&nbsp;
+But to him, in appearance and action and impulse, still clung the Wild.&nbsp;
+He symbolised it, was its personification: so that when they showed
+their teeth to him they were defending themselves against the powers
+of destruction that lurked in the shadows of the forest and in the dark
+beyond the camp-fire.</p>
+<p>But there was one lesson the dogs did learn, and that was to keep
+together.&nbsp; White Fang was too terrible for any of them to face
+single-handed.&nbsp; They met him with the mass-formation, otherwise
+he would have killed them, one by one, in a night.&nbsp; As it was,
+he never had a chance to kill them.&nbsp; He might roll a dog off its
+feet, but the pack would be upon him before he could follow up and deliver
+the deadly throat-stroke.&nbsp; At the first hint of conflict, the whole
+team drew together and faced him.&nbsp; The dogs had quarrels among
+themselves, but these were forgotten when trouble was brewing with White
+Fang.</p>
+<p>On the other hand, try as they would, they could not kill White Fang.&nbsp;
+He was too quick for them, too formidable, too wise.&nbsp; He avoided
+tight places and always backed out of it when they bade fair to surround
+him.&nbsp; While, as for getting him off his feet, there was no dog
+among them capable of doing the trick.&nbsp; His feet clung to the earth
+with the same tenacity that he clung to life.&nbsp; For that matter,
+life and footing were synonymous in this unending warfare with the pack,
+and none knew it better than White Fang.</p>
+<p>So he became the enemy of his kind, domesticated wolves that they
+were, softened by the fires of man, weakened in the sheltering shadow
+of man&rsquo;s strength.&nbsp; White Fang was bitter and implacable.&nbsp;
+The clay of him was so moulded.&nbsp; He declared a vendetta against
+all dogs.&nbsp; And so terribly did he live this vendetta that Grey
+Beaver, fierce savage himself, could not but marvel at White Fang&rsquo;s
+ferocity.&nbsp; Never, he swore, had there been the like of this animal;
+and the Indians in strange villages swore likewise when they considered
+the tale of his killings amongst their dogs.</p>
+<p>When White Fang was nearly five years old, Grey Beaver took him on
+another great journey, and long remembered was the havoc he worked amongst
+the dogs of the many villages along the Mackenzie, across the Rockies,
+and down the Porcupine to the Yukon.&nbsp; He revelled in the vengeance
+he wreaked upon his kind.&nbsp; They were ordinary, unsuspecting dogs.&nbsp;
+They were not prepared for his swiftness and directness, for his attack
+without warning.&nbsp; They did not know him for what he was, a lightning-flash
+of slaughter.&nbsp; They bristled up to him, stiff-legged and challenging,
+while he, wasting no time on elaborate preliminaries, snapping into
+action like a steel spring, was at their throats and destroying them
+before they knew what was happening and while they were yet in the throes
+of surprise.</p>
+<p>He became an adept at fighting.&nbsp; He economised.&nbsp; He never
+wasted his strength, never tussled.&nbsp; He was in too quickly for
+that, and, if he missed, was out again too quickly.&nbsp; The dislike
+of the wolf for close quarters was his to an unusual degree.&nbsp; He
+could not endure a prolonged contact with another body.&nbsp; It smacked
+of danger.&nbsp; It made him frantic.&nbsp; He must be away, free, on
+his own legs, touching no living thing.&nbsp; It was the Wild still
+clinging to him, asserting itself through him.&nbsp; This feeling had
+been accentuated by the Ishmaelite life he had led from his puppyhood.&nbsp;
+Danger lurked in contacts.&nbsp; It was the trap, ever the trap, the
+fear of it lurking deep in the life of him, woven into the fibre of
+him</p>
+<p>In consequence, the strange dogs he encountered had no chance against
+him.&nbsp; He eluded their fangs.&nbsp; He got them, or got away, himself
+untouched in either event.&nbsp; In the natural course of things there
+were exceptions to this.&nbsp; There were times when several dogs, pitching
+on to him, punished him before he could get away; and there were times
+when a single dog scored deeply on him.&nbsp; But these were accidents.&nbsp;
+In the main, so efficient a fighter had he become, he went his way unscathed.</p>
+<p>Another advantage he possessed was that of correctly judging time
+and distance.&nbsp; Not that he did this consciously, however.&nbsp;
+He did not calculate such things.&nbsp; It was all automatic.&nbsp;
+His eyes saw correctly, and the nerves carried the vision correctly
+to his brain.&nbsp; The parts of him were better adjusted than those
+of the average dog.&nbsp; They worked together more smoothly and steadily.&nbsp;
+His was a better, far better, nervous, mental, and muscular co-ordination.&nbsp;
+When his eyes conveyed to his brain the moving image of an action, his
+brain without conscious effort, knew the space that limited that action
+and the time required for its completion.&nbsp; Thus, he could avoid
+the leap of another dog, or the drive of its fangs, and at the same
+moment could seize the infinitesimal fraction of time in which to deliver
+his own attack.&nbsp; Body and brain, his was a more perfected mechanism.&nbsp;
+Not that he was to be praised for it.&nbsp; Nature had been more generous
+to him than to the average animal, that was all.</p>
+<p>It was in the summer that White Fang arrived at Fort Yukon.&nbsp;
+Grey Beaver had crossed the great watershed between Mackenzie and the
+Yukon in the late winter, and spent the spring in hunting among the
+western outlying spurs of the Rockies.&nbsp; Then, after the break-up
+of the ice on the Porcupine, he had built a canoe and paddled down that
+stream to where it effected its junction with the Yukon just under the
+Artic circle.&nbsp; Here stood the old Hudson&rsquo;s Bay Company fort;
+and here were many Indians, much food, and unprecedented excitement.&nbsp;
+It was the summer of 1898, and thousands of gold-hunters were going
+up the Yukon to Dawson and the Klondike.&nbsp; Still hundreds of miles
+from their goal, nevertheless many of them had been on the way for a
+year, and the least any of them had travelled to get that far was five
+thousand miles, while some had come from the other side of the world.</p>
+<p>Here Grey Beaver stopped.&nbsp; A whisper of the gold-rush had reached
+his ears, and he had come with several bales of furs, and another of
+gut-sewn mittens and moccasins.&nbsp; He would not have ventured so
+long a trip had he not expected generous profits.&nbsp; But what he
+had expected was nothing to what he realised.&nbsp; His wildest dreams
+had not exceeded a hundred per cent. profit; he made a thousand per
+cent.&nbsp; And like a true Indian, he settled down to trade carefully
+and slowly, even if it took all summer and the rest of the winter to
+dispose of his goods.</p>
+<p>It was at Fort Yukon that White Fang saw his first white men.&nbsp;
+As compared with the Indians he had known, they were to him another
+race of beings, a race of superior gods.&nbsp; They impressed him as
+possessing superior power, and it is on power that godhead rests.&nbsp;
+White Fang did not reason it out, did not in his mind make the sharp
+generalisation that the white gods were more powerful.&nbsp; It was
+a feeling, nothing more, and yet none the less potent.&nbsp; As, in
+his puppyhood, the looming bulks of the tepees, man-reared, had affected
+him as manifestations of power, so was he affected now by the houses
+and the huge fort all of massive logs.&nbsp; Here was power.&nbsp; Those
+white gods were strong.&nbsp; They possessed greater mastery over matter
+than the gods he had known, most powerful among which was Grey Beaver.&nbsp;
+And yet Grey Beaver was as a child-god among these white-skinned ones.</p>
+<p>To be sure, White Fang only felt these things.&nbsp; He was not conscious
+of them.&nbsp; Yet it is upon feeling, more often than thinking, that
+animals act; and every act White Fang now performed was based upon the
+feeling that the white men were the superior gods.&nbsp; In the first
+place he was very suspicious of them.&nbsp; There was no telling what
+unknown terrors were theirs, what unknown hurts they could administer.&nbsp;
+He was curious to observe them, fearful of being noticed by them.&nbsp;
+For the first few hours he was content with slinking around and watching
+them from a safe distance.&nbsp; Then he saw that no harm befell the
+dogs that were near to them, and he came in closer.</p>
+<p>In turn he was an object of great curiosity to them.&nbsp; His wolfish
+appearance caught their eyes at once, and they pointed him out to one
+another.&nbsp; This act of pointing put White Fang on his guard, and
+when they tried to approach him he showed his teeth and backed away.&nbsp;
+Not one succeeded in laying a hand on him, and it was well that they
+did not.</p>
+<p>White Fang soon learned that very few of these gods&mdash;not more
+than a dozen&mdash;lived at this place.&nbsp; Every two or three days
+a steamer (another and colossal manifestation of power) came into the
+bank and stopped for several hours.&nbsp; The white men came from off
+these steamers and went away on them again.&nbsp; There seemed untold
+numbers of these white men.&nbsp; In the first day or so, he saw more
+of them than he had seen Indians in all his life; and as the days went
+by they continued to come up the river, stop, and then go on up the
+river out of sight.</p>
+<p>But if the white gods were all-powerful, their dogs did not amount
+to much.&nbsp; This White Fang quickly discovered by mixing with those
+that came ashore with their masters.&nbsp; They were irregular shapes
+and sizes.&nbsp; Some were short-legged&mdash;too short; others were
+long-legged&mdash;too long.&nbsp; They had hair instead of fur, and
+a few had very little hair at that.&nbsp; And none of them knew how
+to fight.</p>
+<p>As an enemy of his kind, it was in White Fang&rsquo;s province to
+fight with them.&nbsp; This he did, and he quickly achieved for them
+a mighty contempt.&nbsp; They were soft and helpless, made much noise,
+and floundered around clumsily trying to accomplish by main strength
+what he accomplished by dexterity and cunning.&nbsp; They rushed bellowing
+at him.&nbsp; He sprang to the side.&nbsp; They did not know what had
+become of him; and in that moment he struck them on the shoulder, rolling
+them off their feet and delivering his stroke at the throat.</p>
+<p>Sometimes this stroke was successful, and a stricken dog rolled in
+the dirt, to be pounced upon and torn to pieces by the pack of Indian
+dogs that waited.&nbsp; White Fang was wise.&nbsp; He had long since
+learned that the gods were made angry when their dogs were killed.&nbsp;
+The white men were no exception to this.&nbsp; So he was content, when
+he had overthrown and slashed wide the throat of one of their dogs,
+to drop back and let the pack go in and do the cruel finishing work.&nbsp;
+It was then that the white men rushed in, visiting their wrath heavily
+on the pack, while White Fang went free.&nbsp; He would stand off at
+a little distance and look on, while stones, clubs, axes, and all sorts
+of weapons fell upon his fellows.&nbsp; White Fang was very wise.</p>
+<p>But his fellows grew wise in their own way; and in this White Fang
+grew wise with them.&nbsp; They learned that it was when a steamer first
+tied to the bank that they had their fun.&nbsp; After the first two
+or three strange dogs had been downed and destroyed, the white men hustled
+their own animals back on board and wrecked savage vengeance on the
+offenders.&nbsp; One white man, having seen his dog, a setter, torn
+to pieces before his eyes, drew a revolver.&nbsp; He fired rapidly,
+six times, and six of the pack lay dead or dying&mdash;another manifestation
+of power that sank deep into White Fang&rsquo;s consciousness.</p>
+<p>White Fang enjoyed it all.&nbsp; He did not love his kind, and he
+was shrewd enough to escape hurt himself.&nbsp; At first, the killing
+of the white men&rsquo;s dogs had been a diversion.&nbsp; After a time
+it became his occupation.&nbsp; There was no work for him to do.&nbsp;
+Grey Beaver was busy trading and getting wealthy.&nbsp; So White Fang
+hung around the landing with the disreputable gang of Indian dogs, waiting
+for steamers.&nbsp; With the arrival of a steamer the fun began.&nbsp;
+After a few minutes, by the time the white men had got over their surprise,
+the gang scattered.&nbsp; The fun was over until the next steamer should
+arrive.</p>
+<p>But it can scarcely be said that White Fang was a member of the gang.&nbsp;
+He did not mingle with it, but remained aloof, always himself, and was
+even feared by it.&nbsp; It is true, he worked with it.&nbsp; He picked
+the quarrel with the strange dog while the gang waited.&nbsp; And when
+he had overthrown the strange dog the gang went in to finish it.&nbsp;
+But it is equally true that he then withdrew, leaving the gang to receive
+the punishment of the outraged gods.</p>
+<p>It did not require much exertion to pick these quarrels.&nbsp; All
+he had to do, when the strange dogs came ashore, was to show himself.&nbsp;
+When they saw him they rushed for him.&nbsp; It was their instinct.&nbsp;
+He was the Wild&mdash;the unknown, the terrible, the ever-menacing,
+the thing that prowled in the darkness around the fires of the primeval
+world when they, cowering close to the fires, were reshaping their instincts,
+learning to fear the Wild out of which they had come, and which they
+had deserted and betrayed.&nbsp; Generation by generation, down all
+the generations, had this fear of the Wild been stamped into their natures.&nbsp;
+For centuries the Wild had stood for terror and destruction.&nbsp; And
+during all this time free licence had been theirs, from their masters,
+to kill the things of the Wild.&nbsp; In doing this they had protected
+both themselves and the gods whose companionship they shared</p>
+<p>And so, fresh from the soft southern world, these dogs, trotting
+down the gang-plank and out upon the Yukon shore had but to see White
+Fang to experience the irresistible impulse to rush upon him and destroy
+him.&nbsp; They might be town-reared dogs, but the instinctive fear
+of the Wild was theirs just the same.&nbsp; Not alone with their own
+eyes did they see the wolfish creature in the clear light of day, standing
+before them.&nbsp; They saw him with the eyes of their ancestors, and
+by their inherited memory they knew White Fang for the wolf, and they
+remembered the ancient feud.</p>
+<p>All of which served to make White Fang&rsquo;s days enjoyable.&nbsp;
+If the sight of him drove these strange dogs upon him, so much the better
+for him, so much the worse for them.&nbsp; They looked upon him as legitimate
+prey, and as legitimate prey he looked upon them.</p>
+<p>Not for nothing had he first seen the light of day in a lonely lair
+and fought his first fights with the ptarmigan, the weasel, and the
+lynx.&nbsp; And not for nothing had his puppyhood been made bitter by
+the persecution of Lip-lip and the whole puppy pack.&nbsp; It might
+have been otherwise, and he would then have been otherwise.&nbsp; Had
+Lip-lip not existed, he would have passed his puppyhood with the other
+puppies and grown up more doglike and with more liking for dogs.&nbsp;
+Had Grey Beaver possessed the plummet of affection and love, he might
+have sounded the deeps of White Fang&rsquo;s nature and brought up to
+the surface all manner of kindly qualities.&nbsp; But these things had
+not been so.&nbsp; The clay of White Fang had been moulded until he
+became what he was, morose and lonely, unloving and ferocious, the enemy
+of all his kind.</p>
+<div class="GutenbergBlankLines2"><br /><br /></div>
+<h3>CHAPTER II&mdash;THE MAD GOD</h3>
+<div class="GutenbergBlankLines2"><br /><br /></div>
+<p>A small number of white men lived in Fort Yukon.&nbsp; These men
+had been long in the country.&nbsp; They called themselves Sour-doughs,
+and took great pride in so classifying themselves.&nbsp; For other men,
+new in the land, they felt nothing but disdain.&nbsp; The men who came
+ashore from the steamers were newcomers.&nbsp; They were known as <i>chechaquos</i>,
+and they always wilted at the application of the name.&nbsp; They made
+their bread with baking-powder.&nbsp; This was the invidious distinction
+between them and the Sour-doughs, who, forsooth, made their bread from
+sour-dough because they had no baking-powder.</p>
+<p>All of which is neither here nor there.&nbsp; The men in the fort
+disdained the newcomers and enjoyed seeing them come to grief.&nbsp;
+Especially did they enjoy the havoc worked amongst the newcomers&rsquo;
+dogs by White Fang and his disreputable gang.&nbsp; When a steamer arrived,
+the men of the fort made it a point always to come down to the bank
+and see the fun.&nbsp; They looked forward to it with as much anticipation
+as did the Indian dogs, while they were not slow to appreciate the savage
+and crafty part played by White Fang.</p>
+<p>But there was one man amongst them who particularly enjoyed the sport.&nbsp;
+He would come running at the first sound of a steamboat&rsquo;s whistle;
+and when the last fight was over and White Fang and the pack had scattered,
+he would return slowly to the fort, his face heavy with regret.&nbsp;
+Sometimes, when a soft southland dog went down, shrieking its death-cry
+under the fangs of the pack, this man would be unable to contain himself,
+and would leap into the air and cry out with delight.&nbsp; And always
+he had a sharp and covetous eye for White Fang.</p>
+<p>This man was called &ldquo;Beauty&rdquo; by the other men of the
+fort.&nbsp; No one knew his first name, and in general he was known
+in the country as Beauty Smith.&nbsp; But he was anything save a beauty.&nbsp;
+To antithesis was due his naming.&nbsp; He was pre-eminently unbeautiful.&nbsp;
+Nature had been niggardly with him.&nbsp; He was a small man to begin
+with; and upon his meagre frame was deposited an even more strikingly
+meagre head.&nbsp; Its apex might be likened to a point.&nbsp; In fact,
+in his boyhood, before he had been named Beauty by his fellows, he had
+been called &ldquo;Pinhead.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Backward, from the apex, his head slanted down to his neck and forward
+it slanted uncompromisingly to meet a low and remarkably wide forehead.&nbsp;
+Beginning here, as though regretting her parsimony, Nature had spread
+his features with a lavish hand.&nbsp; His eyes were large, and between
+them was the distance of two eyes.&nbsp; His face, in relation to the
+rest of him, was prodigious.&nbsp; In order to discover the necessary
+area, Nature had given him an enormous prognathous jaw.&nbsp; It was
+wide and heavy, and protruded outward and down until it seemed to rest
+on his chest.&nbsp; Possibly this appearance was due to the weariness
+of the slender neck, unable properly to support so great a burden.</p>
+<p>This jaw gave the impression of ferocious determination.&nbsp; But
+something lacked.&nbsp; Perhaps it was from excess.&nbsp; Perhaps the
+jaw was too large.&nbsp; At any rate, it was a lie.&nbsp; Beauty Smith
+was known far and wide as the weakest of weak-kneed and snivelling cowards.&nbsp;
+To complete his description, his teeth were large and yellow, while
+the two eye-teeth, larger than their fellows, showed under his lean
+lips like fangs.&nbsp; His eyes were yellow and muddy, as though Nature
+had run short on pigments and squeezed together the dregs of all her
+tubes.&nbsp; It was the same with his hair, sparse and irregular of
+growth, muddy-yellow and dirty-yellow, rising on his head and sprouting
+out of his face in unexpected tufts and bunches, in appearance like
+clumped and wind-blown grain.</p>
+<p>In short, Beauty Smith was a monstrosity, and the blame of it lay
+elsewhere.&nbsp; He was not responsible.&nbsp; The clay of him had been
+so moulded in the making.&nbsp; He did the cooking for the other men
+in the fort, the dish-washing and the drudgery.&nbsp; They did not despise
+him.&nbsp; Rather did they tolerate him in a broad human way, as one
+tolerates any creature evilly treated in the making.&nbsp; Also, they
+feared him.&nbsp; His cowardly rages made them dread a shot in the back
+or poison in their coffee.&nbsp; But somebody had to do the cooking,
+and whatever else his shortcomings, Beauty Smith could cook.</p>
+<p>This was the man that looked at White Fang, delighted in his ferocious
+prowess, and desired to possess him.&nbsp; He made overtures to White
+Fang from the first.&nbsp; White Fang began by ignoring him.&nbsp; Later
+on, when the overtures became more insistent, White Fang bristled and
+bared his teeth and backed away.&nbsp; He did not like the man.&nbsp;
+The feel of him was bad.&nbsp; He sensed the evil in him, and feared
+the extended hand and the attempts at soft-spoken speech.&nbsp; Because
+of all this, he hated the man.</p>
+<p>With the simpler creatures, good and bad are things simply understood.&nbsp;
+The good stands for all things that bring easement and satisfaction
+and surcease from pain.&nbsp; Therefore, the good is liked.&nbsp; The
+bad stands for all things that are fraught with discomfort, menace,
+and hurt, and is hated accordingly.&nbsp; White Fang&rsquo;s feel of
+Beauty Smith was bad.&nbsp; From the man&rsquo;s distorted body and
+twisted mind, in occult ways, like mists rising from malarial marshes,
+came emanations of the unhealth within.&nbsp; Not by reasoning, not
+by the five senses alone, but by other and remoter and uncharted senses,
+came the feeling to White Fang that the man was ominous with evil, pregnant
+with hurtfulness, and therefore a thing bad, and wisely to be hated.</p>
+<p>White Fang was in Grey Beaver&rsquo;s camp when Beauty Smith first
+visited it.&nbsp; At the faint sound of his distant feet, before he
+came in sight, White Fang knew who was coming and began to bristle.&nbsp;
+He had been lying down in an abandon of comfort, but he arose quickly,
+and, as the man arrived, slid away in true wolf-fashion to the edge
+of the camp.&nbsp; He did not know what they said, but he could see
+the man and Grey Beaver talking together.&nbsp; Once, the man pointed
+at him, and White Fang snarled back as though the hand were just descending
+upon him instead of being, as it was, fifty feet away.&nbsp; The man
+laughed at this; and White Fang slunk away to the sheltering woods,
+his head turned to observe as he glided softly over the ground.</p>
+<p>Grey Beaver refused to sell the dog.&nbsp; He had grown rich with
+his trading and stood in need of nothing.&nbsp; Besides, White Fang
+was a valuable animal, the strongest sled-dog he had ever owned, and
+the best leader.&nbsp; Furthermore, there was no dog like him on the
+Mackenzie nor the Yukon.&nbsp; He could fight.&nbsp; He killed other
+dogs as easily as men killed mosquitoes.&nbsp; (Beauty Smith&rsquo;s
+eyes lighted up at this, and he licked his thin lips with an eager tongue).&nbsp;
+No, White Fang was not for sale at any price.</p>
+<p>But Beauty Smith knew the ways of Indians.&nbsp; He visited Grey
+Beaver&rsquo;s camp often, and hidden under his coat was always a black
+bottle or so.&nbsp; One of the potencies of whisky is the breeding of
+thirst.&nbsp; Grey Beaver got the thirst.&nbsp; His fevered membranes
+and burnt stomach began to clamour for more and more of the scorching
+fluid; while his brain, thrust all awry by the unwonted stimulant, permitted
+him to go any length to obtain it.&nbsp; The money he had received for
+his furs and mittens and moccasins began to go.&nbsp; It went faster
+and faster, and the shorter his money-sack grew, the shorter grew his
+temper.</p>
+<p>In the end his money and goods and temper were all gone.&nbsp; Nothing
+remained to him but his thirst, a prodigious possession in itself that
+grew more prodigious with every sober breath he drew.&nbsp; Then it
+was that Beauty Smith had talk with him again about the sale of White
+Fang; but this time the price offered was in bottles, not dollars, and
+Grey Beaver&rsquo;s ears were more eager to hear.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;You ketch um dog you take um all right,&rdquo; was his last
+word.</p>
+<p>The bottles were delivered, but after two days.&nbsp; &ldquo;You
+ketch um dog,&rdquo; were Beauty Smith&rsquo;s words to Grey Beaver.</p>
+<p>White Fang slunk into camp one evening and dropped down with a sigh
+of content.&nbsp; The dreaded white god was not there.&nbsp; For days
+his manifestations of desire to lay hands on him had been growing more
+insistent, and during that time White Fang had been compelled to avoid
+the camp.&nbsp; He did not know what evil was threatened by those insistent
+hands.&nbsp; He knew only that they did threaten evil of some sort,
+and that it was best for him to keep out of their reach.</p>
+<p>But scarcely had he lain down when Grey Beaver staggered over to
+him and tied a leather thong around his neck.&nbsp; He sat down beside
+White Fang, holding the end of the thong in his hand.&nbsp; In the other
+hand he held a bottle, which, from time to time, was inverted above
+his head to the accompaniment of gurgling noises.</p>
+<p>An hour of this passed, when the vibrations of feet in contact with
+the ground foreran the one who approached.&nbsp; White Fang heard it
+first, and he was bristling with recognition while Grey Beaver still
+nodded stupidly.&nbsp; White Fang tried to draw the thong softly out
+of his master&rsquo;s hand; but the relaxed fingers closed tightly and
+Grey Beaver roused himself.</p>
+<p>Beauty Smith strode into camp and stood over White Fang.&nbsp; He
+snarled softly up at the thing of fear, watching keenly the deportment
+of the hands.&nbsp; One hand extended outward and began to descend upon
+his head.&nbsp; His soft snarl grew tense and harsh.&nbsp; The hand
+continued slowly to descend, while he crouched beneath it, eyeing it
+malignantly, his snarl growing shorter and shorter as, with quickening
+breath, it approached its culmination.&nbsp; Suddenly he snapped, striking
+with his fangs like a snake.&nbsp; The hand was jerked back, and the
+teeth came together emptily with a sharp click.&nbsp; Beauty Smith was
+frightened and angry.&nbsp; Grey Beaver clouted White Fang alongside
+the head, so that he cowered down close to the earth in respectful obedience.</p>
+<p>White Fang&rsquo;s suspicious eyes followed every movement.&nbsp;
+He saw Beauty Smith go away and return with a stout club.&nbsp; Then
+the end of the thong was given over to him by Grey Beaver.&nbsp; Beauty
+Smith started to walk away.&nbsp; The thong grew taut.&nbsp; White Fang
+resisted it.&nbsp; Grey Beaver clouted him right and left to make him
+get up and follow.&nbsp; He obeyed, but with a rush, hurling himself
+upon the stranger who was dragging him away.&nbsp; Beauty Smith did
+not jump away.&nbsp; He had been waiting for this.&nbsp; He swung the
+club smartly, stopping the rush midway and smashing White Fang down
+upon the ground.&nbsp; Grey Beaver laughed and nodded approval.&nbsp;
+Beauty Smith tightened the thong again, and White Fang crawled limply
+and dizzily to his feet.</p>
+<p>He did not rush a second time.&nbsp; One smash from the club was
+sufficient to convince him that the white god knew how to handle it,
+and he was too wise to fight the inevitable.&nbsp; So he followed morosely
+at Beauty Smith&rsquo;s heels, his tail between his legs, yet snarling
+softly under his breath.&nbsp; But Beauty Smith kept a wary eye on him,
+and the club was held always ready to strike.</p>
+<p>At the fort Beauty Smith left him securely tied and went in to bed.&nbsp;
+White Fang waited an hour.&nbsp; Then he applied his teeth to the thong,
+and in the space of ten seconds was free.&nbsp; He had wasted no time
+with his teeth.&nbsp; There had been no useless gnawing.&nbsp; The thong
+was cut across, diagonally, almost as clean as though done by a knife.&nbsp;
+White Fang looked up at the fort, at the same time bristling and growling.&nbsp;
+Then he turned and trotted back to Grey Beaver&rsquo;s camp.&nbsp; He
+owed no allegiance to this strange and terrible god.&nbsp; He had given
+himself to Grey Beaver, and to Grey Beaver he considered he still belonged.</p>
+<p>But what had occurred before was repeated&mdash;with a difference.&nbsp;
+Grey Beaver again made him fast with a thong, and in the morning turned
+him over to Beauty Smith.&nbsp; And here was where the difference came
+in.&nbsp; Beauty Smith gave him a beating.&nbsp; Tied securely, White
+Fang could only rage futilely and endure the punishment.&nbsp; Club
+and whip were both used upon him, and he experienced the worst beating
+he had ever received in his life.&nbsp; Even the big beating given him
+in his puppyhood by Grey Beaver was mild compared with this.</p>
+<p>Beauty Smith enjoyed the task.&nbsp; He delighted in it.&nbsp; He
+gloated over his victim, and his eyes flamed dully, as he swung the
+whip or club and listened to White Fang&rsquo;s cries of pain and to
+his helpless bellows and snarls.&nbsp; For Beauty Smith was cruel in
+the way that cowards are cruel.&nbsp; Cringing and snivelling himself
+before the blows or angry speech of a man, he revenged himself, in turn,
+upon creatures weaker than he.&nbsp; All life likes power, and Beauty
+Smith was no exception.&nbsp; Denied the expression of power amongst
+his own kind, he fell back upon the lesser creatures and there vindicated
+the life that was in him.&nbsp; But Beauty Smith had not created himself,
+and no blame was to be attached to him.&nbsp; He had come into the world
+with a twisted body and a brute intelligence.&nbsp; This had constituted
+the clay of him, and it had not been kindly moulded by the world.</p>
+<p>White Fang knew why he was being beaten.&nbsp; When Grey Beaver tied
+the thong around his neck, and passed the end of the thong into Beauty
+Smith&rsquo;s keeping, White Fang knew that it was his god&rsquo;s will
+for him to go with Beauty Smith.&nbsp; And when Beauty Smith left him
+tied outside the fort, he knew that it was Beauty Smith&rsquo;s will
+that he should remain there.&nbsp; Therefore, he had disobeyed the will
+of both the gods, and earned the consequent punishment.&nbsp; He had
+seen dogs change owners in the past, and he had seen the runaways beaten
+as he was being beaten.&nbsp; He was wise, and yet in the nature of
+him there were forces greater than wisdom.&nbsp; One of these was fidelity.&nbsp;
+He did not love Grey Beaver, yet, even in the face of his will and his
+anger, he was faithful to him.&nbsp; He could not help it.&nbsp; This
+faithfulness was a quality of the clay that composed him.&nbsp; It was
+the quality that was peculiarly the possession of his kind; the quality
+that set apart his species from all other species; the quality that
+has enabled the wolf and the wild dog to come in from the open and be
+the companions of man.</p>
+<p>After the beating, White Fang was dragged back to the fort.&nbsp;
+But this time Beauty Smith left him tied with a stick.&nbsp; One does
+not give up a god easily, and so with White Fang.&nbsp; Grey Beaver
+was his own particular god, and, in spite of Grey Beaver&rsquo;s will,
+White Fang still clung to him and would not give him up.&nbsp; Grey
+Beaver had betrayed and forsaken him, but that had no effect upon him.&nbsp;
+Not for nothing had he surrendered himself body and soul to Grey Beaver.&nbsp;
+There had been no reservation on White Fang&rsquo;s part, and the bond
+was not to be broken easily.</p>
+<p>So, in the night, when the men in the fort were asleep, White Fang
+applied his teeth to the stick that held him.&nbsp; The wood was seasoned
+and dry, and it was tied so closely to his neck that he could scarcely
+get his teeth to it.&nbsp; It was only by the severest muscular exertion
+and neck-arching that he succeeded in getting the wood between his teeth,
+and barely between his teeth at that; and it was only by the exercise
+of an immense patience, extending through many hours, that he succeeded
+in gnawing through the stick.&nbsp; This was something that dogs were
+not supposed to do.&nbsp; It was unprecedented.&nbsp; But White Fang
+did it, trotting away from the fort in the early morning, with the end
+of the stick hanging to his neck.</p>
+<p>He was wise.&nbsp; But had he been merely wise he would not have
+gone back to Grey Beaver who had already twice betrayed him.&nbsp; But
+there was his faithfulness, and he went back to be betrayed yet a third
+time.&nbsp; Again he yielded to the tying of a thong around his neck
+by Grey Beaver, and again Beauty Smith came to claim him.&nbsp; And
+this time he was beaten even more severely than before.</p>
+<p>Grey Beaver looked on stolidly while the white man wielded the whip.&nbsp;
+He gave no protection.&nbsp; It was no longer his dog.&nbsp; When the
+beating was over White Fang was sick.&nbsp; A soft southland dog would
+have died under it, but not he.&nbsp; His school of life had been sterner,
+and he was himself of sterner stuff.&nbsp; He had too great vitality.&nbsp;
+His clutch on life was too strong.&nbsp; But he was very sick.&nbsp;
+At first he was unable to drag himself along, and Beauty Smith had to
+wait half-an-hour for him.&nbsp; And then, blind and reeling, he followed
+at Beauty Smith&rsquo;s heels back to the fort.</p>
+<p>But now he was tied with a chain that defied his teeth, and he strove
+in vain, by lunging, to draw the staple from the timber into which it
+was driven.&nbsp; After a few days, sober and bankrupt, Grey Beaver
+departed up the Porcupine on his long journey to the Mackenzie.&nbsp;
+White Fang remained on the Yukon, the property of a man more than half
+mad and all brute.&nbsp; But what is a dog to know in its consciousness
+of madness?&nbsp; To White Fang, Beauty Smith was a veritable, if terrible,
+god.&nbsp; He was a mad god at best, but White Fang knew nothing of
+madness; he knew only that he must submit to the will of this new master,
+obey his every whim and fancy.</p>
+<div class="GutenbergBlankLines2"><br /><br /></div>
+<h3>CHAPTER III&mdash;THE REIGN OF HATE</h3>
+<div class="GutenbergBlankLines2"><br /><br /></div>
+<p>Under the tutelage of the mad god, White Fang became a fiend.&nbsp;
+He was kept chained in a pen at the rear of the fort, and here Beauty
+Smith teased and irritated and drove him wild with petty torments.&nbsp;
+The man early discovered White Fang&rsquo;s susceptibility to laughter,
+and made it a point after painfully tricking him, to laugh at him.&nbsp;
+This laughter was uproarious and scornful, and at the same time the
+god pointed his finger derisively at White Fang.&nbsp; At such times
+reason fled from White Fang, and in his transports of rage he was even
+more mad than Beauty Smith.</p>
+<p>Formerly, White Fang had been merely the enemy of his kind, withal
+a ferocious enemy.&nbsp; He now became the enemy of all things, and
+more ferocious than ever.&nbsp; To such an extent was he tormented,
+that he hated blindly and without the faintest spark of reason.&nbsp;
+He hated the chain that bound him, the men who peered in at him through
+the slats of the pen, the dogs that accompanied the men and that snarled
+malignantly at him in his helplessness.&nbsp; He hated the very wood
+of the pen that confined him.&nbsp; And, first, last, and most of all,
+he hated Beauty Smith.</p>
+<p>But Beauty Smith had a purpose in all that he did to White Fang.&nbsp;
+One day a number of men gathered about the pen.&nbsp; Beauty Smith entered,
+club in hand, and took the chain off from White Fang&rsquo;s neck.&nbsp;
+When his master had gone out, White Fang turned loose and tore around
+the pen, trying to get at the men outside.&nbsp; He was magnificently
+terrible.&nbsp; Fully five feet in length, and standing two and one-half
+feet at the shoulder, he far outweighed a wolf of corresponding size.&nbsp;
+From his mother he had inherited the heavier proportions of the dog,
+so that he weighed, without any fat and without an ounce of superfluous
+flesh, over ninety pounds.&nbsp; It was all muscle, bone, and sinew-fighting
+flesh in the finest condition.</p>
+<p>The door of the pen was being opened again.&nbsp; White Fang paused.&nbsp;
+Something unusual was happening.&nbsp; He waited.&nbsp; The door was
+opened wider.&nbsp; Then a huge dog was thrust inside, and the door
+was slammed shut behind him.&nbsp; White Fang had never seen such a
+dog (it was a mastiff); but the size and fierce aspect of the intruder
+did not deter him.&nbsp; Here was some thing, not wood nor iron, upon
+which to wreak his hate.&nbsp; He leaped in with a flash of fangs that
+ripped down the side of the mastiff&rsquo;s neck.&nbsp; The mastiff
+shook his head, growled hoarsely, and plunged at White Fang.&nbsp; But
+White Fang was here, there, and everywhere, always evading and eluding,
+and always leaping in and slashing with his fangs and leaping out again
+in time to escape punishment.</p>
+<p>The men outside shouted and applauded, while Beauty Smith, in an
+ecstasy of delight, gloated over the rippling and manging performed
+by White Fang.&nbsp; There was no hope for the mastiff from the first.&nbsp;
+He was too ponderous and slow.&nbsp; In the end, while Beauty Smith
+beat White Fang back with a club, the mastiff was dragged out by its
+owner.&nbsp; Then there was a payment of bets, and money clinked in
+Beauty Smith&rsquo;s hand.</p>
+<p>White Fang came to look forward eagerly to the gathering of the men
+around his pen.&nbsp; It meant a fight; and this was the only way that
+was now vouchsafed him of expressing the life that was in him.&nbsp;
+Tormented, incited to hate, he was kept a prisoner so that there was
+no way of satisfying that hate except at the times his master saw fit
+to put another dog against him.&nbsp; Beauty Smith had estimated his
+powers well, for he was invariably the victor.&nbsp; One day, three
+dogs were turned in upon him in succession.&nbsp; Another day a full-grown
+wolf, fresh-caught from the Wild, was shoved in through the door of
+the pen.&nbsp; And on still another day two dogs were set against him
+at the same time.&nbsp; This was his severest fight, and though in the
+end he killed them both he was himself half killed in doing it.</p>
+<p>In the fall of the year, when the first snows were falling and mush-ice
+was running in the river, Beauty Smith took passage for himself and
+White Fang on a steamboat bound up the Yukon to Dawson.&nbsp; White
+Fang had now achieved a reputation in the land.&nbsp; As &ldquo;the
+Fighting Wolf&rdquo; he was known far and wide, and the cage in which
+he was kept on the steam-boat&rsquo;s deck was usually surrounded by
+curious men.&nbsp; He raged and snarled at them, or lay quietly and
+studied them with cold hatred.&nbsp; Why should he not hate them?&nbsp;
+He never asked himself the question.&nbsp; He knew only hate and lost
+himself in the passion of it.&nbsp; Life had become a hell to him.&nbsp;
+He had not been made for the close confinement wild beasts endure at
+the hands of men.&nbsp; And yet it was in precisely this way that he
+was treated.&nbsp; Men stared at him, poked sticks between the bars
+to make him snarl, and then laughed at him.</p>
+<p>They were his environment, these men, and they were moulding the
+clay of him into a more ferocious thing than had been intended by Nature.&nbsp;
+Nevertheless, Nature had given him plasticity.&nbsp; Where many another
+animal would have died or had its spirit broken, he adjusted himself
+and lived, and at no expense of the spirit.&nbsp; Possibly Beauty Smith,
+arch-fiend and tormentor, was capable of breaking White Fang&rsquo;s
+spirit, but as yet there were no signs of his succeeding.</p>
+<p>If Beauty Smith had in him a devil, White Fang had another; and the
+two of them raged against each other unceasingly.&nbsp; In the days
+before, White Fang had had the wisdom to cower down and submit to a
+man with a club in his hand; but this wisdom now left him.&nbsp; The
+mere sight of Beauty Smith was sufficient to send him into transports
+of fury.&nbsp; And when they came to close quarters, and he had been
+beaten back by the club, he went on growling and snarling, and showing
+his fangs.&nbsp; The last growl could never be extracted from him.&nbsp;
+No matter how terribly he was beaten, he had always another growl; and
+when Beauty Smith gave up and withdrew, the defiant growl followed after
+him, or White Fang sprang at the bars of the cage bellowing his hatred.</p>
+<p>When the steamboat arrived at Dawson, White Fang went ashore.&nbsp;
+But he still lived a public life, in a cage, surrounded by curious men.&nbsp;
+He was exhibited as &ldquo;the Fighting Wolf,&rdquo; and men paid fifty
+cents in gold dust to see him.&nbsp; He was given no rest.&nbsp; Did
+he lie down to sleep, he was stirred up by a sharp stick&mdash;so that
+the audience might get its money&rsquo;s worth.&nbsp; In order to make
+the exhibition interesting, he was kept in a rage most of the time.&nbsp;
+But worse than all this, was the atmosphere in which he lived.&nbsp;
+He was regarded as the most fearful of wild beasts, and this was borne
+in to him through the bars of the cage.&nbsp; Every word, every cautious
+action, on the part of the men, impressed upon him his own terrible
+ferocity.&nbsp; It was so much added fuel to the flame of his fierceness.&nbsp;
+There could be but one result, and that was that his ferocity fed upon
+itself and increased.&nbsp; It was another instance of the plasticity
+of his clay, of his capacity for being moulded by the pressure of environment.</p>
+<p>In addition to being exhibited he was a professional fighting animal.&nbsp;
+At irregular intervals, whenever a fight could be arranged, he was taken
+out of his cage and led off into the woods a few miles from town.&nbsp;
+Usually this occurred at night, so as to avoid interference from the
+mounted police of the Territory.&nbsp; After a few hours of waiting,
+when daylight had come, the audience and the dog with which he was to
+fight arrived.&nbsp; In this manner it came about that he fought all
+sizes and breeds of dogs.&nbsp; It was a savage land, the men were savage,
+and the fights were usually to the death.</p>
+<p>Since White Fang continued to fight, it is obvious that it was the
+other dogs that died.&nbsp; He never knew defeat.&nbsp; His early training,
+when he fought with Lip-lip and the whole puppy-pack, stood him in good
+stead.&nbsp; There was the tenacity with which he clung to the earth.&nbsp;
+No dog could make him lose his footing.&nbsp; This was the favourite
+trick of the wolf breeds&mdash;to rush in upon him, either directly
+or with an unexpected swerve, in the hope of striking his shoulder and
+overthrowing him.&nbsp; Mackenzie hounds, Eskimo and Labrador dogs,
+huskies and Malemutes&mdash;all tried it on him, and all failed.&nbsp;
+He was never known to lose his footing.&nbsp; Men told this to one another,
+and looked each time to see it happen; but White Fang always disappointed
+them.</p>
+<p>Then there was his lightning quickness.&nbsp; It gave him a tremendous
+advantage over his antagonists.&nbsp; No matter what their fighting
+experience, they had never encountered a dog that moved so swiftly as
+he.&nbsp; Also to be reckoned with, was the immediateness of his attack.&nbsp;
+The average dog was accustomed to the preliminaries of snarling and
+bristling and growling, and the average dog was knocked off his feet
+and finished before he had begun to fight or recovered from his surprise.&nbsp;
+So often did this happen, that it became the custom to hold White Fang
+until the other dog went through its preliminaries, was good and ready,
+and even made the first attack.</p>
+<p>But greatest of all the advantages in White Fang&rsquo;s favour,
+was his experience.&nbsp; He knew more about fighting than did any of
+the dogs that faced him.&nbsp; He had fought more fights, knew how to
+meet more tricks and methods, and had more tricks himself, while his
+own method was scarcely to be improved upon.</p>
+<p>As the time went by, he had fewer and fewer fights.&nbsp; Men despaired
+of matching him with an equal, and Beauty Smith was compelled to pit
+wolves against him.&nbsp; These were trapped by the Indians for the
+purpose, and a fight between White Fang and a wolf was always sure to
+draw a crowd.&nbsp; Once, a full-grown female lynx was secured, and
+this time White Fang fought for his life.&nbsp; Her quickness matched
+his; her ferocity equalled his; while he fought with his fangs alone,
+and she fought with her sharp-clawed feet as well.</p>
+<p>But after the lynx, all fighting ceased for White Fang.&nbsp; There
+were no more animals with which to fight&mdash;at least, there was none
+considered worthy of fighting with him.&nbsp; So he remained on exhibition
+until spring, when one Tim Keenan, a faro-dealer, arrived in the land.&nbsp;
+With him came the first bull-dog that had ever entered the Klondike.&nbsp;
+That this dog and White Fang should come together was inevitable, and
+for a week the anticipated fight was the mainspring of conversation
+in certain quarters of the town.</p>
+<div class="GutenbergBlankLines2"><br /><br /></div>
+<h3>CHAPTER IV&mdash;THE CLINGING DEATH</h3>
+<div class="GutenbergBlankLines2"><br /><br /></div>
+<p>Beauty Smith slipped the chain from his neck and stepped back.</p>
+<p>For once White Fang did not make an immediate attack.&nbsp; He stood
+still, ears pricked forward, alert and curious, surveying the strange
+animal that faced him.&nbsp; He had never seen such a dog before.&nbsp;
+Tim Keenan shoved the bull-dog forward with a muttered &ldquo;Go to
+it.&rdquo;&nbsp; The animal waddled toward the centre of the circle,
+short and squat and ungainly.&nbsp; He came to a stop and blinked across
+at White Fang.</p>
+<p>There were cries from the crowd of, &ldquo;Go to him, Cherokee!&nbsp;
+Sick &rsquo;m, Cherokee!&nbsp; Eat &rsquo;m up!&rdquo;</p>
+<p>But Cherokee did not seem anxious to fight.&nbsp; He turned his head
+and blinked at the men who shouted, at the same time wagging his stump
+of a tail good-naturedly.&nbsp; He was not afraid, but merely lazy.&nbsp;
+Besides, it did not seem to him that it was intended he should fight
+with the dog he saw before him.&nbsp; He was not used to fighting with
+that kind of dog, and he was waiting for them to bring on the real dog.</p>
+<p>Tim Keenan stepped in and bent over Cherokee, fondling him on both
+sides of the shoulders with hands that rubbed against the grain of the
+hair and that made slight, pushing-forward movements.&nbsp; These were
+so many suggestions.&nbsp; Also, their effect was irritating, for Cherokee
+began to growl, very softly, deep down in his throat.&nbsp; There was
+a correspondence in rhythm between the growls and the movements of the
+man&rsquo;s hands.&nbsp; The growl rose in the throat with the culmination
+of each forward-pushing movement, and ebbed down to start up afresh
+with the beginning of the next movement.&nbsp; The end of each movement
+was the accent of the rhythm, the movement ending abruptly and the growling
+rising with a jerk.</p>
+<p>This was not without its effect on White Fang.&nbsp; The hair began
+to rise on his neck and across the shoulders.&nbsp; Tim Keenan gave
+a final shove forward and stepped back again.&nbsp; As the impetus that
+carried Cherokee forward died down, he continued to go forward of his
+own volition, in a swift, bow-legged run.&nbsp; Then White Fang struck.&nbsp;
+A cry of startled admiration went up.&nbsp; He had covered the distance
+and gone in more like a cat than a dog; and with the same cat-like swiftness
+he had slashed with his fangs and leaped clear.</p>
+<p>The bull-dog was bleeding back of one ear from a rip in his thick
+neck.&nbsp; He gave no sign, did not even snarl, but turned and followed
+after White Fang.&nbsp; The display on both sides, the quickness of
+the one and the steadiness of the other, had excited the partisan spirit
+of the crowd, and the men were making new bets and increasing original
+bets.&nbsp; Again, and yet again, White Fang sprang in, slashed, and
+got away untouched, and still his strange foe followed after him, without
+too great haste, not slowly, but deliberately and determinedly, in a
+businesslike sort of way.&nbsp; There was purpose in his method&mdash;something
+for him to do that he was intent upon doing and from which nothing could
+distract him.</p>
+<p>His whole demeanour, every action, was stamped with this purpose.&nbsp;
+It puzzled White Fang.&nbsp; Never had he seen such a dog.&nbsp; It
+had no hair protection.&nbsp; It was soft, and bled easily.&nbsp; There
+was no thick mat of fur to baffle White Fang&rsquo;s teeth as they were
+often baffled by dogs of his own breed.&nbsp; Each time that his teeth
+struck they sank easily into the yielding flesh, while the animal did
+not seem able to defend itself.&nbsp; Another disconcerting thing was
+that it made no outcry, such as he had been accustomed to with the other
+dogs he had fought.&nbsp; Beyond a growl or a grunt, the dog took its
+punishment silently.&nbsp; And never did it flag in its pursuit of him.</p>
+<p>Not that Cherokee was slow.&nbsp; He could turn and whirl swiftly
+enough, but White Fang was never there.&nbsp; Cherokee was puzzled,
+too.&nbsp; He had never fought before with a dog with which he could
+not close.&nbsp; The desire to close had always been mutual.&nbsp; But
+here was a dog that kept at a distance, dancing and dodging here and
+there and all about.&nbsp; And when it did get its teeth into him, it
+did not hold on but let go instantly and darted away again.</p>
+<p>But White Fang could not get at the soft underside of the throat.&nbsp;
+The bull-dog stood too short, while its massive jaws were an added protection.&nbsp;
+White Fang darted in and out unscathed, while Cherokee&rsquo;s wounds
+increased.&nbsp; Both sides of his neck and head were ripped and slashed.&nbsp;
+He bled freely, but showed no signs of being disconcerted.&nbsp; He
+continued his plodding pursuit, though once, for the moment baffled,
+he came to a full stop and blinked at the men who looked on, at the
+same time wagging his stump of a tail as an expression of his willingness
+to fight.</p>
+<p>In that moment White Fang was in upon him and out, in passing ripping
+his trimmed remnant of an ear.&nbsp; With a slight manifestation of
+anger, Cherokee took up the pursuit again, running on the inside of
+the circle White Fang was making, and striving to fasten his deadly
+grip on White Fang&rsquo;s throat.&nbsp; The bull-dog missed by a hair&rsquo;s-breadth,
+and cries of praise went up as White Fang doubled suddenly out of danger
+in the opposite direction.</p>
+<p>The time went by.&nbsp; White Fang still danced on, dodging and doubling,
+leaping in and out, and ever inflicting damage.&nbsp; And still the
+bull-dog, with grim certitude, toiled after him.&nbsp; Sooner or later
+he would accomplish his purpose, get the grip that would win the battle.&nbsp;
+In the meantime, he accepted all the punishment the other could deal
+him.&nbsp; His tufts of ears had become tassels, his neck and shoulders
+were slashed in a score of places, and his very lips were cut and bleeding&mdash;all
+from these lightning snaps that were beyond his foreseeing and guarding.</p>
+<p>Time and again White Fang had attempted to knock Cherokee off his
+feet; but the difference in their height was too great.&nbsp; Cherokee
+was too squat, too close to the ground.&nbsp; White Fang tried the trick
+once too often.&nbsp; The chance came in one of his quick doublings
+and counter-circlings.&nbsp; He caught Cherokee with head turned away
+as he whirled more slowly.&nbsp; His shoulder was exposed.&nbsp; White
+Fang drove in upon it: but his own shoulder was high above, while he
+struck with such force that his momentum carried him on across over
+the other&rsquo;s body.&nbsp; For the first time in his fighting history,
+men saw White Fang lose his footing.&nbsp; His body turned a half-somersault
+in the air, and he would have landed on his back had he not twisted,
+catlike, still in the air, in the effort to bring his feet to the earth.&nbsp;
+As it was, he struck heavily on his side.&nbsp; The next instant he
+was on his feet, but in that instant Cherokee&rsquo;s teeth closed on
+his throat.</p>
+<p>It was not a good grip, being too low down toward the chest; but
+Cherokee held on.&nbsp; White Fang sprang to his feet and tore wildly
+around, trying to shake off the bull-dog&rsquo;s body.&nbsp; It made
+him frantic, this clinging, dragging weight.&nbsp; It bound his movements,
+restricted his freedom.&nbsp; It was like the trap, and all his instinct
+resented it and revolted against it.&nbsp; It was a mad revolt.&nbsp;
+For several minutes he was to all intents insane.&nbsp; The basic life
+that was in him took charge of him.&nbsp; The will to exist of his body
+surged over him.&nbsp; He was dominated by this mere flesh-love of life.&nbsp;
+All intelligence was gone.&nbsp; It was as though he had no brain.&nbsp;
+His reason was unseated by the blind yearning of the flesh to exist
+and move, at all hazards to move, to continue to move, for movement
+was the expression of its existence.</p>
+<p>Round and round he went, whirling and turning and reversing, trying
+to shake off the fifty-pound weight that dragged at his throat.&nbsp;
+The bull-dog did little but keep his grip.&nbsp; Sometimes, and rarely,
+he managed to get his feet to the earth and for a moment to brace himself
+against White Fang.&nbsp; But the next moment his footing would be lost
+and he would be dragging around in the whirl of one of White Fang&rsquo;s
+mad gyrations.&nbsp; Cherokee identified himself with his instinct.&nbsp;
+He knew that he was doing the right thing by holding on, and there came
+to him certain blissful thrills of satisfaction.&nbsp; At such moments
+he even closed his eyes and allowed his body to be hurled hither and
+thither, willy-nilly, careless of any hurt that might thereby come to
+it.&nbsp; That did not count.&nbsp; The grip was the thing, and the
+grip he kept.</p>
+<p>White Fang ceased only when he had tired himself out.&nbsp; He could
+do nothing, and he could not understand.&nbsp; Never, in all his fighting,
+had this thing happened.&nbsp; The dogs he had fought with did not fight
+that way.&nbsp; With them it was snap and slash and get away, snap and
+slash and get away.&nbsp; He lay partly on his side, panting for breath.&nbsp;
+Cherokee still holding his grip, urged against him, trying to get him
+over entirely on his side.&nbsp; White Fang resisted, and he could feel
+the jaws shifting their grip, slightly relaxing and coming together
+again in a chewing movement.&nbsp; Each shift brought the grip closer
+to his throat.&nbsp; The bull-dog&rsquo;s method was to hold what he
+had, and when opportunity favoured to work in for more.&nbsp; Opportunity
+favoured when White Fang remained quiet.&nbsp; When White Fang struggled,
+Cherokee was content merely to hold on.</p>
+<p>The bulging back of Cherokee&rsquo;s neck was the only portion of
+his body that White Fang&rsquo;s teeth could reach.&nbsp; He got hold
+toward the base where the neck comes out from the shoulders; but he
+did not know the chewing method of fighting, nor were his jaws adapted
+to it.&nbsp; He spasmodically ripped and tore with his fangs for a space.&nbsp;
+Then a change in their position diverted him.&nbsp; The bull-dog had
+managed to roll him over on his back, and still hanging on to his throat,
+was on top of him.&nbsp; Like a cat, White Fang bowed his hind-quarters
+in, and, with the feet digging into his enemy&rsquo;s abdomen above
+him, he began to claw with long tearing-strokes.&nbsp; Cherokee might
+well have been disembowelled had he not quickly pivoted on his grip
+and got his body off of White Fang&rsquo;s and at right angles to it.</p>
+<p>There was no escaping that grip.&nbsp; It was like Fate itself, and
+as inexorable.&nbsp; Slowly it shifted up along the jugular.&nbsp; All
+that saved White Fang from death was the loose skin of his neck and
+the thick fur that covered it.&nbsp; This served to form a large roll
+in Cherokee&rsquo;s mouth, the fur of which well-nigh defied his teeth.&nbsp;
+But bit by bit, whenever the chance offered, he was getting more of
+the loose skin and fur in his mouth.&nbsp; The result was that he was
+slowly throttling White Fang.&nbsp; The latter&rsquo;s breath was drawn
+with greater and greater difficulty as the moments went by.</p>
+<p>It began to look as though the battle were over.&nbsp; The backers
+of Cherokee waxed jubilant and offered ridiculous odds.&nbsp; White
+Fang&rsquo;s backers were correspondingly depressed, and refused bets
+of ten to one and twenty to one, though one man was rash enough to close
+a wager of fifty to one.&nbsp; This man was Beauty Smith.&nbsp; He took
+a step into the ring and pointed his finger at White Fang.&nbsp; Then
+he began to laugh derisively and scornfully.&nbsp; This produced the
+desired effect.&nbsp; White Fang went wild with rage.&nbsp; He called
+up his reserves of strength, and gained his feet.&nbsp; As he struggled
+around the ring, the fifty pounds of his foe ever dragging on his throat,
+his anger passed on into panic.&nbsp; The basic life of him dominated
+him again, and his intelligence fled before the will of his flesh to
+live.&nbsp; Round and round and back again, stumbling and falling and
+rising, even uprearing at times on his hind-legs and lifting his foe
+clear of the earth, he struggled vainly to shake off the clinging death.</p>
+<p>At last he fell, toppling backward, exhausted; and the bull-dog promptly
+shifted his grip, getting in closer, mangling more and more of the fur-folded
+flesh, throttling White Fang more severely than ever.&nbsp; Shouts of
+applause went up for the victor, and there were many cries of &ldquo;Cherokee!&rdquo;
+&ldquo;Cherokee!&rdquo;&nbsp; To this Cherokee responded by vigorous
+wagging of the stump of his tail.&nbsp; But the clamour of approval
+did not distract him.&nbsp; There was no sympathetic relation between
+his tail and his massive jaws.&nbsp; The one might wag, but the others
+held their terrible grip on White Fang&rsquo;s throat.</p>
+<p>It was at this time that a diversion came to the spectators.&nbsp;
+There was a jingle of bells.&nbsp; Dog-mushers&rsquo; cries were heard.&nbsp;
+Everybody, save Beauty Smith, looked apprehensively, the fear of the
+police strong upon them.&nbsp; But they saw, up the trail, and not down,
+two men running with sled and dogs.&nbsp; They were evidently coming
+down the creek from some prospecting trip.&nbsp; At sight of the crowd
+they stopped their dogs and came over and joined it, curious to see
+the cause of the excitement.&nbsp; The dog-musher wore a moustache,
+but the other, a taller and younger man, was smooth-shaven, his skin
+rosy from the pounding of his blood and the running in the frosty air.</p>
+<p>White Fang had practically ceased struggling.&nbsp; Now and again
+he resisted spasmodically and to no purpose.&nbsp; He could get little
+air, and that little grew less and less under the merciless grip that
+ever tightened.&nbsp; In spite of his armour of fur, the great vein
+of his throat would have long since been torn open, had not the first
+grip of the bull-dog been so low down as to be practically on the chest.&nbsp;
+It had taken Cherokee a long time to shift that grip upward, and this
+had also tended further to clog his jaws with fur and skin-fold.</p>
+<p>In the meantime, the abysmal brute in Beauty Smith had been rising
+into his brain and mastering the small bit of sanity that he possessed
+at best.&nbsp; When he saw White Fang&rsquo;s eyes beginning to glaze,
+he knew beyond doubt that the fight was lost.&nbsp; Then he broke loose.&nbsp;
+He sprang upon White Fang and began savagely to kick him.&nbsp; There
+were hisses from the crowd and cries of protest, but that was all.&nbsp;
+While this went on, and Beauty Smith continued to kick White Fang, there
+was a commotion in the crowd.&nbsp; The tall young newcomer was forcing
+his way through, shouldering men right and left without ceremony or
+gentleness.&nbsp; When he broke through into the ring, Beauty Smith
+was just in the act of delivering another kick.&nbsp; All his weight
+was on one loot, and he was in a state of unstable equilibrium.&nbsp;
+At that moment the newcomer&rsquo;s fist landed a smashing blow full
+in his face.&nbsp; Beauty Smith&rsquo;s remaining leg left the ground,
+and his whole body seemed to lift into the air as he turned over backward
+and struck the snow.&nbsp; The newcomer turned upon the crowd.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;You cowards!&rdquo; he cried.&nbsp; &ldquo;You beasts!&rdquo;</p>
+<p>He was in a rage himself&mdash;a sane rage.&nbsp; His grey eyes seemed
+metallic and steel-like as they flashed upon the crowd.&nbsp; Beauty
+Smith regained his feet and came toward him, sniffling and cowardly.&nbsp;
+The new-comer did not understand.&nbsp; He did not know how abject a
+coward the other was, and thought he was coming back intent on fighting.&nbsp;
+So, with a &ldquo;You beast!&rdquo; he smashed Beauty Smith over backward
+with a second blow in the face.&nbsp; Beauty Smith decided that the
+snow was the safest place for him, and lay where he had fallen, making
+no effort to get up.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Come on, Matt, lend a hand,&rdquo; the newcomer called the
+dog-musher, who had followed him into the ring.</p>
+<p>Both men bent over the dogs.&nbsp; Matt took hold of White Fang,
+ready to pull when Cherokee&rsquo;s jaws should be loosened.&nbsp; This
+the younger man endeavoured to accomplish by clutching the bulldog&rsquo;s
+jaws in his hands and trying to spread them.&nbsp; It was a vain undertaking.&nbsp;
+As he pulled and tugged and wrenched, he kept exclaiming with every
+expulsion of breath, &ldquo;Beasts!&rdquo;</p>
+<p>The crowd began to grow unruly, and some of the men were protesting
+against the spoiling of the sport; but they were silenced when the newcomer
+lifted his head from his work for a moment and glared at them.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;You damn beasts!&rdquo; he finally exploded, and went back
+to his task.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;It&rsquo;s no use, Mr. Scott, you can&rsquo;t break &rsquo;m
+apart that way,&rdquo; Matt said at last.</p>
+<p>The pair paused and surveyed the locked dogs.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Ain&rsquo;t bleedin&rsquo; much,&rdquo; Matt announced.&nbsp;
+&ldquo;Ain&rsquo;t got all the way in yet.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;But he&rsquo;s liable to any moment,&rdquo; Scott answered.&nbsp;
+&ldquo;There, did you see that!&nbsp; He shifted his grip in a bit.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>The younger man&rsquo;s excitement and apprehension for White Fang
+was growing.&nbsp; He struck Cherokee about the head savagely again
+and again.&nbsp; But that did not loosen the jaws.&nbsp; Cherokee wagged
+the stump of his tail in advertisement that he understood the meaning
+of the blows, but that he knew he was himself in the right and only
+doing his duty by keeping his grip.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Won&rsquo;t some of you help?&rdquo; Scott cried desperately
+at the crowd.</p>
+<p>But no help was offered.&nbsp; Instead, the crowd began sarcastically
+to cheer him on and showered him with facetious advice.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;You&rsquo;ll have to get a pry,&rdquo; Matt counselled.</p>
+<p>The other reached into the holster at his hip, drew his revolver,
+and tried to thrust its muzzle between the bull-dog&rsquo;s jaws.&nbsp;
+He shoved, and shoved hard, till the grating of the steel against the
+locked teeth could be distinctly heard.&nbsp; Both men were on their
+knees, bending over the dogs.&nbsp; Tim Keenan strode into the ring.&nbsp;
+He paused beside Scott and touched him on the shoulder, saying ominously:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Don&rsquo;t break them teeth, stranger.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Then I&rsquo;ll break his neck,&rdquo; Scott retorted, continuing
+his shoving and wedging with the revolver muzzle.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I said don&rsquo;t break them teeth,&rdquo; the faro-dealer
+repeated more ominously than before.</p>
+<p>But if it was a bluff he intended, it did not work.&nbsp; Scott never
+desisted from his efforts, though he looked up coolly and asked:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Your dog?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>The faro-dealer grunted.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Then get in here and break this grip.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Well, stranger,&rdquo; the other drawled irritatingly, &ldquo;I
+don&rsquo;t mind telling you that&rsquo;s something I ain&rsquo;t worked
+out for myself.&nbsp; I don&rsquo;t know how to turn the trick.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Then get out of the way,&rdquo; was the reply, &ldquo;and
+don&rsquo;t bother me.&nbsp; I&rsquo;m busy.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Tim Keenan continued standing over him, but Scott took no further
+notice of his presence.&nbsp; He had managed to get the muzzle in between
+the jaws on one side, and was trying to get it out between the jaws
+on the other side.&nbsp; This accomplished, he pried gently and carefully,
+loosening the jaws a bit at a time, while Matt, a bit at a time, extricated
+White Fang&rsquo;s mangled neck.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Stand by to receive your dog,&rdquo; was Scott&rsquo;s peremptory
+order to Cherokee&rsquo;s owner.</p>
+<p>The faro-dealer stooped down obediently and got a firm hold on Cherokee.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Now!&rdquo; Scott warned, giving the final pry.</p>
+<p>The dogs were drawn apart, the bull-dog struggling vigorously.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Take him away,&rdquo; Scott commanded, and Tim Keenan dragged
+Cherokee back into the crowd.</p>
+<p>White Fang made several ineffectual efforts to get up.&nbsp; Once
+he gained his feet, but his legs were too weak to sustain him, and he
+slowly wilted and sank back into the snow.&nbsp; His eyes were half
+closed, and the surface of them was glassy.&nbsp; His jaws were apart,
+and through them the tongue protruded, draggled and limp.&nbsp; To all
+appearances he looked like a dog that had been strangled to death.&nbsp;
+Matt examined him.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Just about all in,&rdquo; he announced; &ldquo;but he&rsquo;s
+breathin&rsquo; all right.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Beauty Smith had regained his feet and come over to look at White
+Fang.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Matt, how much is a good sled-dog worth?&rdquo; Scott asked.</p>
+<p>The dog-musher, still on his knees and stooped over White Fang, calculated
+for a moment.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Three hundred dollars,&rdquo; he answered.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;And how much for one that&rsquo;s all chewed up like this
+one?&rdquo; Scott asked, nudging White Fang with his foot.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Half of that,&rdquo; was the dog-musher&rsquo;s judgment.&nbsp;
+Scott turned upon Beauty Smith.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Did you hear, Mr. Beast?&nbsp; I&rsquo;m going to take your
+dog from you, and I&rsquo;m going to give you a hundred and fifty for
+him.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>He opened his pocket-book and counted out the bills.</p>
+<p>Beauty Smith put his hands behind his back, refusing to touch the
+proffered money.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I ain&rsquo;t a-sellin&rsquo;,&rdquo; he said.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Oh, yes you are,&rdquo; the other assured him.&nbsp; &ldquo;Because
+I&rsquo;m buying.&nbsp; Here&rsquo;s your money.&nbsp; The dog&rsquo;s
+mine.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Beauty Smith, his hands still behind him, began to back away.</p>
+<p>Scott sprang toward him, drawing his fist back to strike.&nbsp; Beauty
+Smith cowered down in anticipation of the blow.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I&rsquo;ve got my rights,&rdquo; he whimpered.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;You&rsquo;ve forfeited your rights to own that dog,&rdquo;
+was the rejoinder.&nbsp; &ldquo;Are you going to take the money? or
+do I have to hit you again?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;All right,&rdquo; Beauty Smith spoke up with the alacrity
+of fear.&nbsp; &ldquo;But I take the money under protest,&rdquo; he
+added.&nbsp; &ldquo;The dog&rsquo;s a mint.&nbsp; I ain&rsquo;t a-goin&rsquo;
+to be robbed.&nbsp; A man&rsquo;s got his rights.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Correct,&rdquo; Scott answered, passing the money over to
+him.&nbsp; &ldquo;A man&rsquo;s got his rights.&nbsp; But you&rsquo;re
+not a man.&nbsp; You&rsquo;re a beast.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Wait till I get back to Dawson,&rdquo; Beauty Smith threatened.&nbsp;
+&ldquo;I&rsquo;ll have the law on you.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;If you open your mouth when you get back to Dawson, I&rsquo;ll
+have you run out of town.&nbsp; Understand?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Beauty Smith replied with a grunt.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Understand?&rdquo; the other thundered with abrupt fierceness.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Yes,&rdquo; Beauty Smith grunted, shrinking away.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Yes what?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Yes, sir,&rdquo; Beauty Smith snarled.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Look out!&nbsp; He&rsquo;ll bite!&rdquo; some one shouted,
+and a guffaw of laughter went up.</p>
+<p>Scott turned his back on him, and returned to help the dog-musher,
+who was working over White Fang.</p>
+<p>Some of the men were already departing; others stood in groups, looking
+on and talking.&nbsp; Tim Keenan joined one of the groups.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Who&rsquo;s that mug?&rdquo; he asked.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Weedon Scott,&rdquo; some one answered.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;And who in hell is Weedon Scott?&rdquo; the faro-dealer demanded.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Oh, one of them crackerjack minin&rsquo; experts.&nbsp; He&rsquo;s
+in with all the big bugs.&nbsp; If you want to keep out of trouble,
+you&rsquo;ll steer clear of him, that&rsquo;s my talk.&nbsp; He&rsquo;s
+all hunky with the officials.&nbsp; The Gold Commissioner&rsquo;s a
+special pal of his.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I thought he must be somebody,&rdquo; was the faro-dealer&rsquo;s
+comment.&nbsp; &ldquo;That&rsquo;s why I kept my hands offen him at
+the start.&rdquo;</p>
+<div class="GutenbergBlankLines2"><br /><br /></div>
+<h3>CHAPTER V&mdash;THE INDOMITABLE</h3>
+<div class="GutenbergBlankLines2"><br /><br /></div>
+<p>&ldquo;It&rsquo;s hopeless,&rdquo; Weedon Scott confessed.</p>
+<p>He sat on the step of his cabin and stared at the dog-musher, who
+responded with a shrug that was equally hopeless.</p>
+<p>Together they looked at White Fang at the end of his stretched chain,
+bristling, snarling, ferocious, straining to get at the sled-dogs.&nbsp;
+Having received sundry lessons from Matt, said lessons being imparted
+by means of a club, the sled-dogs had learned to leave White Fang alone;
+and even then they were lying down at a distance, apparently oblivious
+of his existence.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;It&rsquo;s a wolf and there&rsquo;s no taming it,&rdquo; Weedon
+Scott announced.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Oh, I don&rsquo;t know about that,&rdquo; Matt objected.&nbsp;
+&ldquo;Might be a lot of dog in &rsquo;m, for all you can tell.&nbsp;
+But there&rsquo;s one thing I know sure, an&rsquo; that there&rsquo;s
+no gettin&rsquo; away from.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>The dog-musher paused and nodded his head confidentially at Moosehide
+Mountain.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Well, don&rsquo;t be a miser with what you know,&rdquo; Scott
+said sharply, after waiting a suitable length of time.&nbsp; &ldquo;Spit
+it out.&nbsp; What is it?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>The dog-musher indicated White Fang with a backward thrust of his
+thumb.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Wolf or dog, it&rsquo;s all the same&mdash;he&rsquo;s ben
+tamed &rsquo;ready.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;No!&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I tell you yes, an&rsquo; broke to harness.&nbsp; Look close
+there.&nbsp; D&rsquo;ye see them marks across the chest?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;You&rsquo;re right, Matt.&nbsp; He was a sled-dog before Beauty
+Smith got hold of him.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;And there&rsquo;s not much reason against his bein&rsquo;
+a sled-dog again.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;What d&rsquo;ye think?&rdquo; Scott queried eagerly.&nbsp;
+Then the hope died down as he added, shaking his head, &ldquo;We&rsquo;ve
+had him two weeks now, and if anything he&rsquo;s wilder than ever at
+the present moment.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Give &rsquo;m a chance,&rdquo; Matt counselled.&nbsp; &ldquo;Turn
+&rsquo;m loose for a spell.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>The other looked at him incredulously.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Yes,&rdquo; Matt went on, &ldquo;I know you&rsquo;ve tried
+to, but you didn&rsquo;t take a club.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;You try it then.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>The dog-musher secured a club and went over to the chained animal.&nbsp;
+White Fang watched the club after the manner of a caged lion watching
+the whip of its trainer.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;See &rsquo;m keep his eye on that club,&rdquo; Matt said.&nbsp;
+&ldquo;That&rsquo;s a good sign.&nbsp; He&rsquo;s no fool.&nbsp; Don&rsquo;t
+dast tackle me so long as I got that club handy.&nbsp; He&rsquo;s not
+clean crazy, sure.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>As the man&rsquo;s hand approached his neck, White Fang bristled
+and snarled and crouched down.&nbsp; But while he eyed the approaching
+hand, he at the same time contrived to keep track of the club in the
+other hand, suspended threateningly above him.&nbsp; Matt unsnapped
+the chain from the collar and stepped back.</p>
+<p>White Fang could scarcely realise that he was free.&nbsp; Many months
+had gone by since he passed into the possession of Beauty Smith, and
+in all that period he had never known a moment of freedom except at
+the times he had been loosed to fight with other dogs.&nbsp; Immediately
+after such fights he had always been imprisoned again.</p>
+<p>He did not know what to make of it.&nbsp; Perhaps some new devilry
+of the gods was about to be perpetrated on him.&nbsp; He walked slowly
+and cautiously, prepared to be assailed at any moment.&nbsp; He did
+not know what to do, it was all so unprecedented.&nbsp; He took the
+precaution to sheer off from the two watching gods, and walked carefully
+to the corner of the cabin.&nbsp; Nothing happened.&nbsp; He was plainly
+perplexed, and he came back again, pausing a dozen feet away and regarding
+the two men intently.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Won&rsquo;t he run away?&rdquo; his new owner asked.</p>
+<p>Matt shrugged his shoulders.&nbsp; &ldquo;Got to take a gamble.&nbsp;
+Only way to find out is to find out.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Poor devil,&rdquo; Scott murmured pityingly.&nbsp; &ldquo;What
+he needs is some show of human kindness,&rdquo; he added, turning and
+going into the cabin.</p>
+<p>He came out with a piece of meat, which he tossed to White Fang.&nbsp;
+He sprang away from it, and from a distance studied it suspiciously.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Hi-yu, Major!&rdquo; Matt shouted warningly, but too late.</p>
+<p>Major had made a spring for the meat.&nbsp; At the instant his jaws
+closed on it, White Fang struck him.&nbsp; He was overthrown.&nbsp;
+Matt rushed in, but quicker than he was White Fang.&nbsp; Major staggered
+to his feet, but the blood spouting from his throat reddened the snow
+in a widening path.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;It&rsquo;s too bad, but it served him right,&rdquo; Scott
+said hastily.</p>
+<p>But Matt&rsquo;s foot had already started on its way to kick White
+Fang.&nbsp; There was a leap, a flash of teeth, a sharp exclamation.&nbsp;
+White Fang, snarling fiercely, scrambled backward for several yards,
+while Matt stooped and investigated his leg.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;He got me all right,&rdquo; he announced, pointing to the
+torn trousers and undercloths, and the growing stain of red.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I told you it was hopeless, Matt,&rdquo; Scott said in a discouraged
+voice.&nbsp; &ldquo;I&rsquo;ve thought about it off and on, while not
+wanting to think of it.&nbsp; But we&rsquo;ve come to it now.&nbsp;
+It&rsquo;s the only thing to do.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>As he talked, with reluctant movements he drew his revolver, threw
+open the cylinder, and assured himself of its contents.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Look here, Mr. Scott,&rdquo; Matt objected; &ldquo;that dog&rsquo;s
+ben through hell.&nbsp; You can&rsquo;t expect &rsquo;m to come out
+a white an&rsquo; shinin&rsquo; angel.&nbsp; Give &rsquo;m time.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Look at Major,&rdquo; the other rejoined.</p>
+<p>The dog-musher surveyed the stricken dog.&nbsp; He had sunk down
+on the snow in the circle of his blood and was plainly in the last gasp.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Served &rsquo;m right.&nbsp; You said so yourself, Mr. Scott.&nbsp;
+He tried to take White Fang&rsquo;s meat, an&rsquo; he&rsquo;s dead-O.&nbsp;
+That was to be expected.&nbsp; I wouldn&rsquo;t give two whoops in hell
+for a dog that wouldn&rsquo;t fight for his own meat.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;But look at yourself, Matt.&nbsp; It&rsquo;s all right about
+the dogs, but we must draw the line somewhere.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Served me right,&rdquo; Matt argued stubbornly.&nbsp; &ldquo;What&rsquo;d
+I want to kick &rsquo;m for?&nbsp; You said yourself that he&rsquo;d
+done right.&nbsp; Then I had no right to kick &rsquo;m.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;It would be a mercy to kill him,&rdquo; Scott insisted.&nbsp;
+&ldquo;He&rsquo;s untamable.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Now look here, Mr. Scott, give the poor devil a fightin&rsquo;
+chance.&nbsp; He ain&rsquo;t had no chance yet.&nbsp; He&rsquo;s just
+come through hell, an&rsquo; this is the first time he&rsquo;s ben loose.&nbsp;
+Give &rsquo;m a fair chance, an&rsquo; if he don&rsquo;t deliver the
+goods, I&rsquo;ll kill &rsquo;m myself.&nbsp; There!&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;God knows I don&rsquo;t want to kill him or have him killed,&rdquo;
+Scott answered, putting away the revolver.&nbsp; &ldquo;We&rsquo;ll
+let him run loose and see what kindness can do for him.&nbsp; And here&rsquo;s
+a try at it.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>He walked over to White Fang and began talking to him gently and
+soothingly.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Better have a club handy,&rdquo; Matt warned.</p>
+<p>Scott shook his head and went on trying to win White Fang&rsquo;s
+confidence.</p>
+<p>White Fang was suspicious.&nbsp; Something was impending.&nbsp; He
+had killed this god&rsquo;s dog, bitten his companion god, and what
+else was to be expected than some terrible punishment?&nbsp; But in
+the face of it he was indomitable.&nbsp; He bristled and showed his
+teeth, his eyes vigilant, his whole body wary and prepared for anything.&nbsp;
+The god had no club, so he suffered him to approach quite near.&nbsp;
+The god&rsquo;s hand had come out and was descending upon his head.&nbsp;
+White Fang shrank together and grew tense as he crouched under it.&nbsp;
+Here was danger, some treachery or something.&nbsp; He knew the hands
+of the gods, their proved mastery, their cunning to hurt.&nbsp; Besides,
+there was his old antipathy to being touched.&nbsp; He snarled more
+menacingly, crouched still lower, and still the hand descended.&nbsp;
+He did not want to bite the hand, and he endured the peril of it until
+his instinct surged up in him, mastering him with its insatiable yearning
+for life.</p>
+<p>Weedon Scott had believed that he was quick enough to avoid any snap
+or slash.&nbsp; But he had yet to learn the remarkable quickness of
+White Fang, who struck with the certainty and swiftness of a coiled
+snake.</p>
+<p>Scott cried out sharply with surprise, catching his torn hand and
+holding it tightly in his other hand.&nbsp; Matt uttered a great oath
+and sprang to his side.&nbsp; White Fang crouched down, and backed away,
+bristling, showing his fangs, his eyes malignant with menace.&nbsp;
+Now he could expect a beating as fearful as any he had received from
+Beauty Smith.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Here!&nbsp; What are you doing?&rdquo; Scott cried suddenly.</p>
+<p>Matt had dashed into the cabin and come out with a rifle.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Nothin&rsquo;,&rdquo; he said slowly, with a careless calmness
+that was assumed, &ldquo;only goin&rsquo; to keep that promise I made.&nbsp;
+I reckon it&rsquo;s up to me to kill &rsquo;m as I said I&rsquo;d do.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;No you don&rsquo;t!&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Yes I do.&nbsp; Watch me.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>As Matt had pleaded for White Fang when he had been bitten, it was
+now Weedon Scott&rsquo;s turn to plead.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;You said to give him a chance.&nbsp; Well, give it to him.&nbsp;
+We&rsquo;ve only just started, and we can&rsquo;t quit at the beginning.&nbsp;
+It served me right, this time.&nbsp; And&mdash;look at him!&rdquo;</p>
+<p>White Fang, near the corner of the cabin and forty feet away, was
+snarling with blood-curdling viciousness, not at Scott, but at the dog-musher.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Well, I&rsquo;ll be everlastingly gosh-swoggled!&rdquo; was
+the dog-musher&rsquo;s expression of astonishment.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Look at the intelligence of him,&rdquo; Scott went on hastily.&nbsp;
+&ldquo;He knows the meaning of firearms as well as you do.&nbsp; He&rsquo;s
+got intelligence and we&rsquo;ve got to give that intelligence a chance.&nbsp;
+Put up the gun.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;All right, I&rsquo;m willin&rsquo;,&rdquo; Matt agreed, leaning
+the rifle against the woodpile</p>
+<p>&ldquo;But will you look at that!&rdquo; he exclaimed the next moment.</p>
+<p>White Fang had quieted down and ceased snarling.&nbsp; &ldquo;This
+is worth investigatin&rsquo;.&nbsp; Watch.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Matt, reached for the rifle, and at the same moment White Fang snarled.&nbsp;
+He stepped away from the rifle, and White Fang&rsquo;s lifted lips descended,
+covering his teeth.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Now, just for fun.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Matt took the rifle and began slowly to raise it to his shoulder.&nbsp;
+White Fang&rsquo;s snarling began with the movement, and increased as
+the movement approached its culmination.&nbsp; But the moment before
+the rifle came to a level on him, he leaped sidewise behind the corner
+of the cabin.&nbsp; Matt stood staring along the sights at the empty
+space of snow which had been occupied by White Fang.</p>
+<p>The dog-musher put the rifle down solemnly, then turned and looked
+at his employer.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I agree with you, Mr. Scott.&nbsp; That dog&rsquo;s too intelligent
+to kill.&rdquo;</p>
+<div class="GutenbergBlankLines2"><br /><br /></div>
+<h3>CHAPTER VI&mdash;THE LOVE-MASTER</h3>
+<div class="GutenbergBlankLines2"><br /><br /></div>
+<p>As White Fang watched Weedon Scott approach, he bristled and snarled
+to advertise that he would not submit to punishment.&nbsp; Twenty-four
+hours had passed since he had slashed open the hand that was now bandaged
+and held up by a sling to keep the blood out of it.&nbsp; In the past
+White Fang had experienced delayed punishments, and he apprehended that
+such a one was about to befall him.&nbsp; How could it be otherwise?&nbsp;
+He had committed what was to him sacrilege, sunk his fangs into the
+holy flesh of a god, and of a white-skinned superior god at that.&nbsp;
+In the nature of things, and of intercourse with gods, something terrible
+awaited him.</p>
+<p>The god sat down several feet away.&nbsp; White Fang could see nothing
+dangerous in that.&nbsp; When the gods administered punishment they
+stood on their legs.&nbsp; Besides, this god had no club, no whip, no
+firearm.&nbsp; And furthermore, he himself was free.&nbsp; No chain
+nor stick bound him.&nbsp; He could escape into safety while the god
+was scrambling to his feet.&nbsp; In the meantime he would wait and
+see.</p>
+<p>The god remained quiet, made no movement; and White Fang&rsquo;s
+snarl slowly dwindled to a growl that ebbed down in his throat and ceased.&nbsp;
+Then the god spoke, and at the first sound of his voice, the hair rose
+on White Fang&rsquo;s neck and the growl rushed up in his throat.&nbsp;
+But the god made no hostile movement, and went on calmly talking.&nbsp;
+For a time White Fang growled in unison with him, a correspondence of
+rhythm being established between growl and voice.&nbsp; But the god
+talked on interminably.&nbsp; He talked to White Fang as White Fang
+had never been talked to before.&nbsp; He talked softly and soothingly,
+with a gentleness that somehow, somewhere, touched White Fang.&nbsp;
+In spite of himself and all the pricking warnings of his instinct, White
+Fang began to have confidence in this god.&nbsp; He had a feeling of
+security that was belied by all his experience with men.</p>
+<p>After a long time, the god got up and went into the cabin.&nbsp;
+White Fang scanned him apprehensively when he came out.&nbsp; He had
+neither whip nor club nor weapon.&nbsp; Nor was his uninjured hand behind
+his back hiding something.&nbsp; He sat down as before, in the same
+spot, several feet away.&nbsp; He held out a small piece of meat.&nbsp;
+White Fang pricked his ears and investigated it suspiciously, managing
+to look at the same time both at the meat and the god, alert for any
+overt act, his body tense and ready to spring away at the first sign
+of hostility.</p>
+<p>Still the punishment delayed.&nbsp; The god merely held near to his
+nose a piece of meat.&nbsp; And about the meat there seemed nothing
+wrong.&nbsp; Still White Fang suspected; and though the meat was proffered
+to him with short inviting thrusts of the hand, he refused to touch
+it.&nbsp; The gods were all-wise, and there was no telling what masterful
+treachery lurked behind that apparently harmless piece of meat.&nbsp;
+In past experience, especially in dealing with squaws, meat and punishment
+had often been disastrously related.</p>
+<p>In the end, the god tossed the meat on the snow at White Fang&rsquo;s
+feet.&nbsp; He smelled the meat carefully; but he did not look at it.&nbsp;
+While he smelled it he kept his eyes on the god.&nbsp; Nothing happened.&nbsp;
+He took the meat into his mouth and swallowed it.&nbsp; Still nothing
+happened.&nbsp; The god was actually offering him another piece of meat.&nbsp;
+Again he refused to take it from the hand, and again it was tossed to
+him.&nbsp; This was repeated a number of times.&nbsp; But there came
+a time when the god refused to toss it.&nbsp; He kept it in his hand
+and steadfastly proffered it.</p>
+<p>The meat was good meat, and White Fang was hungry.&nbsp; Bit by bit,
+infinitely cautious, he approached the hand.&nbsp; At last the time
+came that he decided to eat the meat from the hand.&nbsp; He never took
+his eyes from the god, thrusting his head forward with ears flattened
+back and hair involuntarily rising and cresting on his neck.&nbsp; Also
+a low growl rumbled in his throat as warning that he was not to be trifled
+with.&nbsp; He ate the meat, and nothing happened.&nbsp; Piece by piece,
+he ate all the meat, and nothing happened.&nbsp; Still the punishment
+delayed.</p>
+<p>He licked his chops and waited.&nbsp; The god went on talking.&nbsp;
+In his voice was kindness&mdash;something of which White Fang had no
+experience whatever.&nbsp; And within him it aroused feelings which
+he had likewise never experienced before.&nbsp; He was aware of a certain
+strange satisfaction, as though some need were being gratified, as though
+some void in his being were being filled.&nbsp; Then again came the
+prod of his instinct and the warning of past experience.&nbsp; The gods
+were ever crafty, and they had unguessed ways of attaining their ends.</p>
+<p>Ah, he had thought so!&nbsp; There it came now, the god&rsquo;s hand,
+cunning to hurt, thrusting out at him, descending upon his head.&nbsp;
+But the god went on talking.&nbsp; His voice was soft and soothing.&nbsp;
+In spite of the menacing hand, the voice inspired confidence.&nbsp;
+And in spite of the assuring voice, the hand inspired distrust.&nbsp;
+White Fang was torn by conflicting feelings, impulses.&nbsp; It seemed
+he would fly to pieces, so terrible was the control he was exerting,
+holding together by an unwonted indecision the counter-forces that struggled
+within him for mastery.</p>
+<p>He compromised.&nbsp; He snarled and bristled and flattened his ears.&nbsp;
+But he neither snapped nor sprang away.&nbsp; The hand descended.&nbsp;
+Nearer and nearer it came.&nbsp; It touched the ends of his upstanding
+hair.&nbsp; He shrank down under it.&nbsp; It followed down after him,
+pressing more closely against him.&nbsp; Shrinking, almost shivering,
+he still managed to hold himself together.&nbsp; It was a torment, this
+hand that touched him and violated his instinct.&nbsp; He could not
+forget in a day all the evil that had been wrought him at the hands
+of men.&nbsp; But it was the will of the god, and he strove to submit.</p>
+<p>The hand lifted and descended again in a patting, caressing movement.&nbsp;
+This continued, but every time the hand lifted, the hair lifted under
+it.&nbsp; And every time the hand descended, the ears flattened down
+and a cavernous growl surged in his throat.&nbsp; White Fang growled
+and growled with insistent warning.&nbsp; By this means he announced
+that he was prepared to retaliate for any hurt he might receive.&nbsp;
+There was no telling when the god&rsquo;s ulterior motive might be disclosed.&nbsp;
+At any moment that soft, confidence-inspiring voice might break forth
+in a roar of wrath, that gentle and caressing hand transform itself
+into a vice-like grip to hold him helpless and administer punishment.</p>
+<p>But the god talked on softly, and ever the hand rose and fell with
+non-hostile pats.&nbsp; White Fang experienced dual feelings.&nbsp;
+It was distasteful to his instinct.&nbsp; It restrained him, opposed
+the will of him toward personal liberty.&nbsp; And yet it was not physically
+painful.&nbsp; On the contrary, it was even pleasant, in a physical
+way.&nbsp; The patting movement slowly and carefully changed to a rubbing
+of the ears about their bases, and the physical pleasure even increased
+a little.&nbsp; Yet he continued to fear, and he stood on guard, expectant
+of unguessed evil, alternately suffering and enjoying as one feeling
+or the other came uppermost and swayed him.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Well, I&rsquo;ll be gosh-swoggled!&rdquo;</p>
+<p>So spoke Matt, coming out of the cabin, his sleeves rolled up, a
+pan of dirty dish-water in his hands, arrested in the act of emptying
+the pan by the sight of Weedon Scott patting White Fang.</p>
+<p>At the instant his voice broke the silence, White Fang leaped back,
+snarling savagely at him.</p>
+<p>Matt regarded his employer with grieved disapproval.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;If you don&rsquo;t mind my expressin&rsquo; my feelin&rsquo;s,
+Mr. Scott, I&rsquo;ll make free to say you&rsquo;re seventeen kinds
+of a damn fool an&rsquo; all of &rsquo;em different, an&rsquo; then
+some.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Weedon Scott smiled with a superior air, gained his feet, and walked
+over to White Fang.&nbsp; He talked soothingly to him, but not for long,
+then slowly put out his hand, rested it on White Fang&rsquo;s head,
+and resumed the interrupted patting.&nbsp; White Fang endured it, keeping
+his eyes fixed suspiciously, not upon the man that patted him, but upon
+the man that stood in the doorway.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;You may be a number one, tip-top minin&rsquo; expert, all
+right all right,&rdquo; the dog-musher delivered himself oracularly,
+&ldquo;but you missed the chance of your life when you was a boy an&rsquo;
+didn&rsquo;t run off an&rsquo; join a circus.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>White Fang snarled at the sound of his voice, but this time did not
+leap away from under the hand that was caressing his head and the back
+of his neck with long, soothing strokes.</p>
+<p>It was the beginning of the end for White Fang&mdash;the ending of
+the old life and the reign of hate.&nbsp; A new and incomprehensibly
+fairer life was dawning.&nbsp; It required much thinking and endless
+patience on the part of Weedon Scott to accomplish this.&nbsp; And on
+the part of White Fang it required nothing less than a revolution.&nbsp;
+He had to ignore the urges and promptings of instinct and reason, defy
+experience, give the lie to life itself.</p>
+<p>Life, as he had known it, not only had had no place in it for much
+that he now did; but all the currents had gone counter to those to which
+he now abandoned himself.&nbsp; In short, when all things were considered,
+he had to achieve an orientation far vaster than the one he had achieved
+at the time he came voluntarily in from the Wild and accepted Grey Beaver
+as his lord.&nbsp; At that time he was a mere puppy, soft from the making,
+without form, ready for the thumb of circumstance to begin its work
+upon him.&nbsp; But now it was different.&nbsp; The thumb of circumstance
+had done its work only too well.&nbsp; By it he had been formed and
+hardened into the Fighting Wolf, fierce and implacable, unloving and
+unlovable.&nbsp; To accomplish the change was like a reflux of being,
+and this when the plasticity of youth was no longer his; when the fibre
+of him had become tough and knotty; when the warp and the woof of him
+had made of him an adamantine texture, harsh and unyielding; when the
+face of his spirit had become iron and all his instincts and axioms
+had crystallised into set rules, cautions, dislikes, and desires.</p>
+<p>Yet again, in this new orientation, it was the thumb of circumstance
+that pressed and prodded him, softening that which had become hard and
+remoulding it into fairer form.&nbsp; Weedon Scott was in truth this
+thumb.&nbsp; He had gone to the roots of White Fang&rsquo;s nature,
+and with kindness touched to life potencies that had languished and
+well-nigh perished.&nbsp; One such potency was <i>love</i>.&nbsp; It
+took the place of <i>like</i>, which latter had been the highest feeling
+that thrilled him in his intercourse with the gods.</p>
+<p>But this love did not come in a day.&nbsp; It began with <i>like</i>
+and out of it slowly developed.&nbsp; White Fang did not run away, though
+he was allowed to remain loose, because he liked this new god.&nbsp;
+This was certainly better than the life he had lived in the cage of
+Beauty Smith, and it was necessary that he should have some god.&nbsp;
+The lordship of man was a need of his nature.&nbsp; The seal of his
+dependence on man had been set upon him in that early day when he turned
+his back on the Wild and crawled to Grey Beaver&rsquo;s feet to receive
+the expected beating.&nbsp; This seal had been stamped upon him again,
+and ineradicably, on his second return from the Wild, when the long
+famine was over and there was fish once more in the village of Grey
+Beaver.</p>
+<p>And so, because he needed a god and because he preferred Weedon Scott
+to Beauty Smith, White Fang remained.&nbsp; In acknowledgment of fealty,
+he proceeded to take upon himself the guardianship of his master&rsquo;s
+property.&nbsp; He prowled about the cabin while the sled-dogs slept,
+and the first night-visitor to the cabin fought him off with a club
+until Weedon Scott came to the rescue.&nbsp; But White Fang soon learned
+to differentiate between thieves and honest men, to appraise the true
+value of step and carriage.&nbsp; The man who travelled, loud-stepping,
+the direct line to the cabin door, he let alone&mdash;though he watched
+him vigilantly until the door opened and he received the endorsement
+of the master.&nbsp; But the man who went softly, by circuitous ways,
+peering with caution, seeking after secrecy&mdash;that was the man who
+received no suspension of judgment from White Fang, and who went away
+abruptly, hurriedly, and without dignity.</p>
+<p>Weedon Scott had set himself the task of redeeming White Fang&mdash;or
+rather, of redeeming mankind from the wrong it had done White Fang.&nbsp;
+It was a matter of principle and conscience.&nbsp; He felt that the
+ill done White Fang was a debt incurred by man and that it must be paid.&nbsp;
+So he went out of his way to be especially kind to the Fighting Wolf.&nbsp;
+Each day he made it a point to caress and pet White Fang, and to do
+it at length.</p>
+<p>At first suspicious and hostile, White Fang grew to like this petting.&nbsp;
+But there was one thing that he never outgrew&mdash;his growling.&nbsp;
+Growl he would, from the moment the petting began till it ended.&nbsp;
+But it was a growl with a new note in it.&nbsp; A stranger could not
+hear this note, and to such a stranger the growling of White Fang was
+an exhibition of primordial savagery, nerve-racking and blood-curdling.&nbsp;
+But White Fang&rsquo;s throat had become harsh-fibred from the making
+of ferocious sounds through the many years since his first little rasp
+of anger in the lair of his cubhood, and he could not soften the sounds
+of that throat now to express the gentleness he felt.&nbsp; Nevertheless,
+Weedon Scott&rsquo;s ear and sympathy were fine enough to catch the
+new note all but drowned in the fierceness&mdash;the note that was the
+faintest hint of a croon of content and that none but he could hear.</p>
+<p>As the days went by, the evolution of <i>like</i> into <i>love</i>
+was accelerated.&nbsp; White Fang himself began to grow aware of it,
+though in his consciousness he knew not what love was.&nbsp; It manifested
+itself to him as a void in his being&mdash;a hungry, aching, yearning
+void that clamoured to be filled.&nbsp; It was a pain and an unrest;
+and it received easement only by the touch of the new god&rsquo;s presence.&nbsp;
+At such times love was joy to him, a wild, keen-thrilling satisfaction.&nbsp;
+But when away from his god, the pain and the unrest returned; the void
+in him sprang up and pressed against him with its emptiness, and the
+hunger gnawed and gnawed unceasingly.</p>
+<p>White Fang was in the process of finding himself.&nbsp; In spite
+of the maturity of his years and of the savage rigidity of the mould
+that had formed him, his nature was undergoing an expansion.&nbsp; There
+was a burgeoning within him of strange feelings and unwonted impulses.&nbsp;
+His old code of conduct was changing.&nbsp; In the past he had liked
+comfort and surcease from pain, disliked discomfort and pain, and he
+had adjusted his actions accordingly.&nbsp; But now it was different.&nbsp;
+Because of this new feeling within him, he ofttimes elected discomfort
+and pain for the sake of his god.&nbsp; Thus, in the early morning,
+instead of roaming and foraging, or lying in a sheltered nook, he would
+wait for hours on the cheerless cabin-stoop for a sight of the god&rsquo;s
+face.&nbsp; At night, when the god returned home, White Fang would leave
+the warm sleeping-place he had burrowed in the snow in order to receive
+the friendly snap of fingers and the word of greeting.&nbsp; Meat, even
+meat itself, he would forego to be with his god, to receive a caress
+from him or to accompany him down into the town.</p>
+<p><i>Like</i> had been replaced by <i>love</i>.&nbsp; And love was
+the plummet dropped down into the deeps of him where like had never
+gone.&nbsp; And responsive out of his deeps had come the new thing&mdash;love.&nbsp;
+That which was given unto him did he return.&nbsp; This was a god indeed,
+a love-god, a warm and radiant god, in whose light White Fang&rsquo;s
+nature expanded as a flower expands under the sun.</p>
+<p>But White Fang was not demonstrative.&nbsp; He was too old, too firmly
+moulded, to become adept at expressing himself in new ways.&nbsp; He
+was too self-possessed, too strongly poised in his own isolation.&nbsp;
+Too long had he cultivated reticence, aloofness, and moroseness.&nbsp;
+He had never barked in his life, and he could not now learn to bark
+a welcome when his god approached.&nbsp; He was never in the way, never
+extravagant nor foolish in the expression of his love.&nbsp; He never
+ran to meet his god.&nbsp; He waited at a distance; but he always waited,
+was always there.&nbsp; His love partook of the nature of worship, dumb,
+inarticulate, a silent adoration.&nbsp; Only by the steady regard of
+his eyes did he express his love, and by the unceasing following with
+his eyes of his god&rsquo;s every movement.&nbsp; Also, at times, when
+his god looked at him and spoke to him, he betrayed an awkward self-consciousness,
+caused by the struggle of his love to express itself and his physical
+inability to express it.</p>
+<p>He learned to adjust himself in many ways to his new mode of life.&nbsp;
+It was borne in upon him that he must let his master&rsquo;s dogs alone.&nbsp;
+Yet his dominant nature asserted itself, and he had first to thrash
+them into an acknowledgment of his superiority and leadership.&nbsp;
+This accomplished, he had little trouble with them.&nbsp; They gave
+trail to him when he came and went or walked among them, and when he
+asserted his will they obeyed.</p>
+<p>In the same way, he came to tolerate Matt&mdash;as a possession of
+his master.&nbsp; His master rarely fed him.&nbsp; Matt did that, it
+was his business; yet White Fang divined that it was his master&rsquo;s
+food he ate and that it was his master who thus led him vicariously.&nbsp;
+Matt it was who tried to put him into the harness and make him haul
+sled with the other dogs.&nbsp; But Matt failed.&nbsp; It was not until
+Weedon Scott put the harness on White Fang and worked him, that he understood.&nbsp;
+He took it as his master&rsquo;s will that Matt should drive him and
+work him just as he drove and worked his master&rsquo;s other dogs.</p>
+<p>Different from the Mackenzie toboggans were the Klondike sleds with
+runners under them.&nbsp; And different was the method of driving the
+dogs.&nbsp; There was no fan-formation of the team.&nbsp; The dogs worked
+in single file, one behind another, hauling on double traces.&nbsp;
+And here, in the Klondike, the leader was indeed the leader.&nbsp; The
+wisest as well as strongest dog was the leader, and the team obeyed
+him and feared him.&nbsp; That White Fang should quickly gain this post
+was inevitable.&nbsp; He could not be satisfied with less, as Matt learned
+after much inconvenience and trouble.&nbsp; White Fang picked out the
+post for himself, and Matt backed his judgment with strong language
+after the experiment had been tried.&nbsp; But, though he worked in
+the sled in the day, White Fang did not forego the guarding of his master&rsquo;s
+property in the night.&nbsp; Thus he was on duty all the time, ever
+vigilant and faithful, the most valuable of all the dogs.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Makin&rsquo; free to spit out what&rsquo;s in me,&rdquo; Matt
+said one day, &ldquo;I beg to state that you was a wise guy all right
+when you paid the price you did for that dog.&nbsp; You clean swindled
+Beauty Smith on top of pushin&rsquo; his face in with your fist.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>A recrudescence of anger glinted in Weedon Scott&rsquo;s grey eyes,
+and he muttered savagely, &ldquo;The beast!&rdquo;</p>
+<p>In the late spring a great trouble came to White Fang.&nbsp; Without
+warning, the love-master disappeared.&nbsp; There had been warning,
+but White Fang was unversed in such things and did not understand the
+packing of a grip.&nbsp; He remembered afterwards that his packing had
+preceded the master&rsquo;s disappearance; but at the time he suspected
+nothing.&nbsp; That night he waited for the master to return.&nbsp;
+At midnight the chill wind that blew drove him to shelter at the rear
+of the cabin.&nbsp; There he drowsed, only half asleep, his ears keyed
+for the first sound of the familiar step.&nbsp; But, at two in the morning,
+his anxiety drove him out to the cold front stoop, where he crouched,
+and waited.</p>
+<p>But no master came.&nbsp; In the morning the door opened and Matt
+stepped outside.&nbsp; White Fang gazed at him wistfully.&nbsp; There
+was no common speech by which he might learn what he wanted to know.&nbsp;
+The days came and went, but never the master.&nbsp; White Fang, who
+had never known sickness in his life, became sick.&nbsp; He became very
+sick, so sick that Matt was finally compelled to bring him inside the
+cabin.&nbsp; Also, in writing to his employer, Matt devoted a postscript
+to White Fang.</p>
+<p>Weedon Scott reading the letter down in Circle City, came upon the
+following:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;That dam wolf won&rsquo;t work.&nbsp; Won&rsquo;t eat.&nbsp;
+Aint got no spunk left.&nbsp; All the dogs is licking him.&nbsp; Wants
+to know what has become of you, and I don&rsquo;t know how to tell him.&nbsp;
+Mebbe he is going to die.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>It was as Matt had said.&nbsp; White Fang had ceased eating, lost
+heart, and allowed every dog of the team to thrash him.&nbsp; In the
+cabin he lay on the floor near the stove, without interest in food,
+in Matt, nor in life.&nbsp; Matt might talk gently to him or swear at
+him, it was all the same; he never did more than turn his dull eyes
+upon the man, then drop his head back to its customary position on his
+fore-paws.</p>
+<p>And then, one night, Matt, reading to himself with moving lips and
+mumbled sounds, was startled by a low whine from White Fang.&nbsp; He
+had got upon his feet, his ears cocked towards the door, and he was
+listening intently.&nbsp; A moment later, Matt heard a footstep.&nbsp;
+The door opened, and Weedon Scott stepped in.&nbsp; The two men shook
+hands.&nbsp; Then Scott looked around the room.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Where&rsquo;s the wolf?&rdquo; he asked.</p>
+<p>Then he discovered him, standing where he had been lying, near to
+the stove.&nbsp; He had not rushed forward after the manner of other
+dogs.&nbsp; He stood, watching and waiting.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Holy smoke!&rdquo; Matt exclaimed.&nbsp; &ldquo;Look at &rsquo;m
+wag his tail!&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Weedon Scott strode half across the room toward him, at the same
+time calling him.&nbsp; White Fang came to him, not with a great bound,
+yet quickly.&nbsp; He was awakened from self-consciousness, but as he
+drew near, his eyes took on a strange expression.&nbsp; Something, an
+incommunicable vastness of feeling, rose up into his eyes as a light
+and shone forth.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;He never looked at me that way all the time you was gone!&rdquo;
+Matt commented.</p>
+<p>Weedon Scott did not hear.&nbsp; He was squatting down on his heels,
+face to face with White Fang and petting him&mdash;rubbing at the roots
+of the ears, making long caressing strokes down the neck to the shoulders,
+tapping the spine gently with the balls of his fingers.&nbsp; And White
+Fang was growling responsively, the crooning note of the growl more
+pronounced than ever.</p>
+<p>But that was not all.&nbsp; What of his joy, the great love in him,
+ever surging and struggling to express itself, succeeding in finding
+a new mode of expression.&nbsp; He suddenly thrust his head forward
+and nudged his way in between the master&rsquo;s arm and body.&nbsp;
+And here, confined, hidden from view all except his ears, no longer
+growling, he continued to nudge and snuggle.</p>
+<p>The two men looked at each other.&nbsp; Scott&rsquo;s eyes were shining.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Gosh!&rdquo; said Matt in an awe-stricken voice.</p>
+<p>A moment later, when he had recovered himself, he said, &ldquo;I
+always insisted that wolf was a dog.&nbsp; Look at &rsquo;m!&rdquo;</p>
+<p>With the return of the love-master, White Fang&rsquo;s recovery was
+rapid.&nbsp; Two nights and a day he spent in the cabin.&nbsp; Then
+he sallied forth.&nbsp; The sled-dogs had forgotten his prowess.&nbsp;
+They remembered only the latest, which was his weakness and sickness.&nbsp;
+At the sight of him as he came out of the cabin, they sprang upon him.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Talk about your rough-houses,&rdquo; Matt murmured gleefully,
+standing in the doorway and looking on.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Give &rsquo;m hell, you wolf!&nbsp; Give &rsquo;m hell!&mdash;an&rsquo;
+then some!&rdquo;</p>
+<p>White Fang did not need the encouragement.&nbsp; The return of the
+love-master was enough.&nbsp; Life was flowing through him again, splendid
+and indomitable.&nbsp; He fought from sheer joy, finding in it an expression
+of much that he felt and that otherwise was without speech.&nbsp; There
+could be but one ending.&nbsp; The team dispersed in ignominious defeat,
+and it was not until after dark that the dogs came sneaking back, one
+by one, by meekness and humility signifying their fealty to White Fang.</p>
+<p>Having learned to snuggle, White Fang was guilty of it often.&nbsp;
+It was the final word.&nbsp; He could not go beyond it.&nbsp; The one
+thing of which he had always been particularly jealous was his head.&nbsp;
+He had always disliked to have it touched.&nbsp; It was the Wild in
+him, the fear of hurt and of the trap, that had given rise to the panicky
+impulses to avoid contacts.&nbsp; It was the mandate of his instinct
+that that head must be free.&nbsp; And now, with the love-master, his
+snuggling was the deliberate act of putting himself into a position
+of hopeless helplessness.&nbsp; It was an expression of perfect confidence,
+of absolute self-surrender, as though he said: &ldquo;I put myself into
+thy hands.&nbsp; Work thou thy will with me.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>One night, not long after the return, Scott and Matt sat at a game
+of cribbage preliminary to going to bed.&nbsp; &ldquo;Fifteen-two, fifteen-four
+an&rsquo; a pair makes six,&rdquo; Mat was pegging up, when there was
+an outcry and sound of snarling without.&nbsp; They looked at each other
+as they started to rise to their feet.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;The wolf&rsquo;s nailed somebody,&rdquo; Matt said.</p>
+<p>A wild scream of fear and anguish hastened them.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Bring a light!&rdquo; Scott shouted, as he sprang outside.</p>
+<p>Matt followed with the lamp, and by its light they saw a man lying
+on his back in the snow.&nbsp; His arms were folded, one above the other,
+across his face and throat.&nbsp; Thus he was trying to shield himself
+from White Fang&rsquo;s teeth.&nbsp; And there was need for it.&nbsp;
+White Fang was in a rage, wickedly making his attack on the most vulnerable
+spot.&nbsp; From shoulder to wrist of the crossed arms, the coat-sleeve,
+blue flannel shirt and undershirt were ripped in rags, while the arms
+themselves were terribly slashed and streaming blood.</p>
+<p>All this the two men saw in the first instant.&nbsp; The next instant
+Weedon Scott had White Fang by the throat and was dragging him clear.&nbsp;
+White Fang struggled and snarled, but made no attempt to bite, while
+he quickly quieted down at a sharp word from the master.</p>
+<p>Matt helped the man to his feet.&nbsp; As he arose he lowered his
+crossed arms, exposing the bestial face of Beauty Smith.&nbsp; The dog-musher
+let go of him precipitately, with action similar to that of a man who
+has picked up live fire.&nbsp; Beauty Smith blinked in the lamplight
+and looked about him.&nbsp; He caught sight of White Fang and terror
+rushed into his face.</p>
+<p>At the same moment Matt noticed two objects lying in the snow.&nbsp;
+He held the lamp close to them, indicating them with his toe for his
+employer&rsquo;s benefit&mdash;a steel dog-chain and a stout club.</p>
+<p>Weedon Scott saw and nodded.&nbsp; Not a word was spoken.&nbsp; The
+dog-musher laid his hand on Beauty Smith&rsquo;s shoulder and faced
+him to the right about.&nbsp; No word needed to be spoken.&nbsp; Beauty
+Smith started.</p>
+<p>In the meantime the love-master was patting White Fang and talking
+to him.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Tried to steal you, eh?&nbsp; And you wouldn&rsquo;t have
+it!&nbsp; Well, well, he made a mistake, didn&rsquo;t he?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Must &lsquo;a&rsquo; thought he had hold of seventeen devils,&rdquo;
+the dog-musher sniggered.</p>
+<p>White Fang, still wrought up and bristling, growled and growled,
+the hair slowly lying down, the crooning note remote and dim, but growing
+in his throat.</p>
+<div class="GutenbergBlankLines3"><br /><br /><br /></div>
+<h2>PART V</h2>
+<div class="GutenbergBlankLines3"><br /><br /><br /></div>
+<h3>CHAPTER I&mdash;THE LONG TRAIL</h3>
+<div class="GutenbergBlankLines2"><br /><br /></div>
+<p>It was in the air.&nbsp; White Fang sensed the coming calamity, even
+before there was tangible evidence of it.&nbsp; In vague ways it was
+borne in upon him that a change was impending.&nbsp; He knew not how
+nor why, yet he got his feel of the oncoming event from the gods themselves.&nbsp;
+In ways subtler than they knew, they betrayed their intentions to the
+wolf-dog that haunted the cabin-stoop, and that, though he never came
+inside the cabin, knew what went on inside their brains.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Listen to that, will you!&rdquo; the dug-musher exclaimed
+at supper one night.</p>
+<p>Weedon Scott listened.&nbsp; Through the door came a low, anxious
+whine, like a sobbing under the breath that had just grown audible.&nbsp;
+Then came the long sniff, as White Fang reassured himself that his god
+was still inside and had not yet taken himself off in mysterious and
+solitary flight.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I do believe that wolf&rsquo;s on to you,&rdquo; the dog-musher
+said.</p>
+<p>Weedon Scott looked across at his companion with eyes that almost
+pleaded, though this was given the lie by his words.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;What the devil can I do with a wolf in California?&rdquo;
+he demanded.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;That&rsquo;s what I say,&rdquo; Matt answered.&nbsp; &ldquo;What
+the devil can you do with a wolf in California?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>But this did not satisfy Weedon Scott.&nbsp; The other seemed to
+be judging him in a non-committal sort of way.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;White man&rsquo;s dogs would have no show against him,&rdquo;
+Scott went on.&nbsp; &ldquo;He&rsquo;d kill them on sight.&nbsp; If
+he didn&rsquo;t bankrupt me with damaged suits, the authorities would
+take him away from me and electrocute him.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;He&rsquo;s a downright murderer, I know,&rdquo; was the dog-musher&rsquo;s
+comment.</p>
+<p>Weedon Scott looked at him suspiciously.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;It would never do,&rdquo; he said decisively.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;It would never do!&rdquo; Matt concurred.&nbsp; &ldquo;Why
+you&rsquo;d have to hire a man &rsquo;specially to take care of &rsquo;m.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>The other suspicion was allayed.&nbsp; He nodded cheerfully.&nbsp;
+In the silence that followed, the low, half-sobbing whine was heard
+at the door and then the long, questing sniff.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;There&rsquo;s no denyin&rsquo; he thinks a hell of a lot of
+you,&rdquo; Matt said.</p>
+<p>The other glared at him in sudden wrath.&nbsp; &ldquo;Damn it all,
+man!&nbsp; I know my own mind and what&rsquo;s best!&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I&rsquo;m agreein&rsquo; with you, only . . . &rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Only what?&rdquo; Scott snapped out.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Only . . . &rdquo; the dog-musher began softly, then changed
+his mind and betrayed a rising anger of his own.&nbsp; &ldquo;Well,
+you needn&rsquo;t get so all-fired het up about it.&nbsp; Judgin&rsquo;
+by your actions one&rsquo;d think you didn&rsquo;t know your own mind.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Weedon Scott debated with himself for a while, and then said more
+gently: &ldquo;You are right, Matt.&nbsp; I don&rsquo;t know my own
+mind, and that&rsquo;s what&rsquo;s the trouble.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Why, it would be rank ridiculousness for me to take that dog
+along,&rdquo; he broke out after another pause.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I&rsquo;m agreein&rsquo; with you,&rdquo; was Matt&rsquo;s
+answer, and again his employer was not quite satisfied with him.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;But how in the name of the great Sardanapolis he knows you&rsquo;re
+goin&rsquo; is what gets me,&rdquo; the dog-musher continued innocently.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;It&rsquo;s beyond me, Matt,&rdquo; Scott answered, with a
+mournful shake of the head.</p>
+<p>Then came the day when, through the open cabin door, White Fang saw
+the fatal grip on the floor and the love-master packing things into
+it.&nbsp; Also, there were comings and goings, and the erstwhile placid
+atmosphere of the cabin was vexed with strange perturbations and unrest.&nbsp;
+Here was indubitable evidence.&nbsp; White Fang had already scented
+it.&nbsp; He now reasoned it.&nbsp; His god was preparing for another
+flight.&nbsp; And since he had not taken him with him before, so, now,
+he could look to be left behind.</p>
+<p>That night he lifted the long wolf-howl.&nbsp; As he had howled,
+in his puppy days, when he fled back from the Wild to the village to
+find it vanished and naught but a rubbish-heap to mark the site of Grey
+Beaver&rsquo;s tepee, so now he pointed his muzzle to the cold stars
+and told to them his woe.</p>
+<p>Inside the cabin the two men had just gone to bed.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;He&rsquo;s gone off his food again,&rdquo; Matt remarked from
+his bunk.</p>
+<p>There was a grunt from Weedon Scott&rsquo;s bunk, and a stir of blankets.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;From the way he cut up the other time you went away, I wouldn&rsquo;t
+wonder this time but what he died.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>The blankets in the other bunk stirred irritably.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Oh, shut up!&rdquo; Scott cried out through the darkness.&nbsp;
+&ldquo;You nag worse than a woman.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I&rsquo;m agreein&rsquo; with you,&rdquo; the dog-musher answered,
+and Weedon Scott was not quite sure whether or not the other had snickered.</p>
+<p>The next day White Fang&rsquo;s anxiety and restlessness were even
+more pronounced.&nbsp; He dogged his master&rsquo;s heels whenever he
+left the cabin, and haunted the front stoop when he remained inside.&nbsp;
+Through the open door he could catch glimpses of the luggage on the
+floor.&nbsp; The grip had been joined by two large canvas bags and a
+box.&nbsp; Matt was rolling the master&rsquo;s blankets and fur robe
+inside a small tarpaulin.&nbsp; White Fang whined as he watched the
+operation.</p>
+<p>Later on two Indians arrived.&nbsp; He watched them closely as they
+shouldered the luggage and were led off down the hill by Matt, who carried
+the bedding and the grip.&nbsp; But White Fang did not follow them.&nbsp;
+The master was still in the cabin.&nbsp; After a time, Matt returned.&nbsp;
+The master came to the door and called White Fang inside.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;You poor devil,&rdquo; he said gently, rubbing White Fang&rsquo;s
+ears and tapping his spine.&nbsp; &ldquo;I&rsquo;m hitting the long
+trail, old man, where you cannot follow.&nbsp; Now give me a growl&mdash;the
+last, good, good-bye growl.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>But White Fang refused to growl.&nbsp; Instead, and after a wistful,
+searching look, he snuggled in, burrowing his head out of sight between
+the master&rsquo;s arm and body.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;There she blows!&rdquo; Matt cried.&nbsp; From the Yukon arose
+the hoarse bellowing of a river steamboat.&nbsp; &ldquo;You&rsquo;ve
+got to cut it short.&nbsp; Be sure and lock the front door.&nbsp; I&rsquo;ll
+go out the back.&nbsp; Get a move on!&rdquo;</p>
+<p>The two doors slammed at the same moment, and Weedon Scott waited
+for Matt to come around to the front.&nbsp; From inside the door came
+a low whining and sobbing.&nbsp; Then there were long, deep-drawn sniffs.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;You must take good care of him, Matt,&rdquo; Scott said, as
+they started down the hill.&nbsp; &ldquo;Write and let me know how he
+gets along.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Sure,&rdquo; the dog-musher answered.&nbsp; &ldquo;But listen
+to that, will you!&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Both men stopped.&nbsp; White Fang was howling as dogs howl when
+their masters lie dead.&nbsp; He was voicing an utter woe, his cry bursting
+upward in great heart-breaking rushes, dying down into quavering misery,
+and bursting upward again with a rush upon rush of grief.</p>
+<p>The <i>Aurora</i> was the first steamboat of the year for the Outside,
+and her decks were jammed with prosperous adventurers and broken gold
+seekers, all equally as mad to get to the Outside as they had been originally
+to get to the Inside.&nbsp; Near the gang-plank, Scott was shaking hands
+with Matt, who was preparing to go ashore.&nbsp; But Matt&rsquo;s hand
+went limp in the other&rsquo;s grasp as his gaze shot past and remained
+fixed on something behind him.&nbsp; Scott turned to see.&nbsp; Sitting
+on the deck several feet away and watching wistfully was White Fang,</p>
+<p>The dog-musher swore softly, in awe-stricken accents.&nbsp; Scott
+could only look in wonder.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Did you lock the front door?&rdquo; Matt demanded.&nbsp; The
+other nodded, and asked, &ldquo;How about the back?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;You just bet I did,&rdquo; was the fervent reply.</p>
+<p>White Fang flattened his ears ingratiatingly, but remained where
+he was, making no attempt to approach.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I&rsquo;ll have to take &rsquo;m ashore with me.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Matt made a couple of steps toward White Fang, but the latter slid
+away from him.&nbsp; The dog-musher made a rush of it, and White Fang
+dodged between the legs of a group of men.&nbsp; Ducking, turning, doubling,
+he slid about the deck, eluding the other&rsquo;s efforts to capture
+him.</p>
+<p>But when the love-master spoke, White Fang came to him with prompt
+obedience.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Won&rsquo;t come to the hand that&rsquo;s fed &rsquo;m all
+these months,&rdquo; the dog-musher muttered resentfully.&nbsp; &ldquo;And
+you&mdash;you ain&rsquo;t never fed &rsquo;m after them first days of
+gettin&rsquo; acquainted.&nbsp; I&rsquo;m blamed if I can see how he
+works it out that you&rsquo;re the boss.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Scott, who had been patting White Fang, suddenly bent closer and
+pointed out fresh-made cuts on his muzzle, and a gash between the eyes.</p>
+<p>Matt bent over and passed his hand along White Fang&rsquo;s belly.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;We plump forgot the window.&nbsp; He&rsquo;s all cut an&rsquo;
+gouged underneath.&nbsp; Must &lsquo;a&rsquo; butted clean through it,
+b&rsquo;gosh!&rdquo;</p>
+<p>But Weedon Scott was not listening.&nbsp; He was thinking rapidly.&nbsp;
+The <i>Aurora&rsquo;s</i> whistle hooted a final announcement of departure.&nbsp;
+Men were scurrying down the gang-plank to the shore.&nbsp; Matt loosened
+the bandana from his own neck and started to put it around White Fang&rsquo;s.&nbsp;
+Scott grasped the dog-musher&rsquo;s hand.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Good-bye, Matt, old man.&nbsp; About the wolf-you needn&rsquo;t
+write.&nbsp; You see, I&rsquo;ve . . . !&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;What!&rdquo; the dog-musher exploded.&nbsp; &ldquo;You don&rsquo;t
+mean to say . . .?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;The very thing I mean.&nbsp; Here&rsquo;s your bandana.&nbsp;
+I&rsquo;ll write to you about him.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Matt paused halfway down the gang-plank.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;He&rsquo;ll never stand the climate!&rdquo; he shouted back.&nbsp;
+&ldquo;Unless you clip &rsquo;m in warm weather!&rdquo;</p>
+<p>The gang-plank was hauled in, and the <i>Aurora</i> swang out from
+the bank.&nbsp; Weedon Scott waved a last good-bye.&nbsp; Then he turned
+and bent over White Fang, standing by his side.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Now growl, damn you, growl,&rdquo; he said, as he patted the
+responsive head and rubbed the flattening ears.</p>
+<div class="GutenbergBlankLines2"><br /><br /></div>
+<h3>CHAPTER II&mdash;THE SOUTHLAND</h3>
+<div class="GutenbergBlankLines2"><br /><br /></div>
+<p>White Fang landed from the steamer in San Francisco.&nbsp; He was
+appalled.&nbsp; Deep in him, below any reasoning process or act of consciousness,
+he had associated power with godhead.&nbsp; And never had the white
+men seemed such marvellous gods as now, when he trod the slimy pavement
+of San Francisco.&nbsp; The log cabins he had known were replaced by
+towering buildings.&nbsp; The streets were crowded with perils&mdash;waggons,
+carts, automobiles; great, straining horses pulling huge trucks; and
+monstrous cable and electric ears hooting and clanging through the midst,
+screeching their insistent menace after the manner of the lynxes he
+had known in the northern woods.</p>
+<p>All this was the manifestation of power.&nbsp; Through it all, behind
+it all, was man, governing and controlling, expressing himself, as of
+old, by his mastery over matter.&nbsp; It was colossal, stunning.&nbsp;
+White Fang was awed.&nbsp; Fear sat upon him.&nbsp; As in his cubhood
+he had been made to feel his smallness and puniness on the day he first
+came in from the Wild to the village of Grey Beaver, so now, in his
+full-grown stature and pride of strength, he was made to feel small
+and puny.&nbsp; And there were so many gods!&nbsp; He was made dizzy
+by the swarming of them.&nbsp; The thunder of the streets smote upon
+his ears.&nbsp; He was bewildered by the tremendous and endless rush
+and movement of things.&nbsp; As never before, he felt his dependence
+on the love-master, close at whose heels he followed, no matter what
+happened never losing sight of him.</p>
+<p>But White Fang was to have no more than a nightmare vision of the
+city&mdash;an experience that was like a bad dream, unreal and terrible,
+that haunted him for long after in his dreams.&nbsp; He was put into
+a baggage-car by the master, chained in a corner in the midst of heaped
+trunks and valises.&nbsp; Here a squat and brawny god held sway, with
+much noise, hurling trunks and boxes about, dragging them in through
+the door and tossing them into the piles, or flinging them out of the
+door, smashing and crashing, to other gods who awaited them.</p>
+<p>And here, in this inferno of luggage, was White Fang deserted by
+the master.&nbsp; Or at least White Fang thought he was deserted, until
+he smelled out the master&rsquo;s canvas clothes-bags alongside of him,
+and proceeded to mount guard over them.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;&lsquo;Bout time you come,&rdquo; growled the god of the car,
+an hour later, when Weedon Scott appeared at the door.&nbsp; &ldquo;That
+dog of yourn won&rsquo;t let me lay a finger on your stuff.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>White Fang emerged from the car.&nbsp; He was astonished.&nbsp; The
+nightmare city was gone.&nbsp; The car had been to him no more than
+a room in a house, and when he had entered it the city had been all
+around him.&nbsp; In the interval the city had disappeared.&nbsp; The
+roar of it no longer dinned upon his ears.&nbsp; Before him was smiling
+country, streaming with sunshine, lazy with quietude.&nbsp; But he had
+little time to marvel at the transformation.&nbsp; He accepted it as
+he accepted all the unaccountable doings and manifestations of the gods.&nbsp;
+It was their way.</p>
+<p>There was a carriage waiting.&nbsp; A man and a woman approached
+the master.&nbsp; The woman&rsquo;s arms went out and clutched the master
+around the neck&mdash;a hostile act!&nbsp; The next moment Weedon Scott
+had torn loose from the embrace and closed with White Fang, who had
+become a snarling, raging demon.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;It&rsquo;s all right, mother,&rdquo; Scott was saving as he
+kept tight hold of White Fang and placated him.&nbsp; &ldquo;He thought
+you were going to injure me, and he wouldn&rsquo;t stand for it.&nbsp;
+It&rsquo;s all right.&nbsp; It&rsquo;s all right.&nbsp; He&rsquo;ll
+learn soon enough.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;And in the meantime I may be permitted to love my son when
+his dog is not around,&rdquo; she laughed, though she was pale and weak
+from the fright.</p>
+<p>She looked at White Fang, who snarled and bristled and glared malevolently.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;He&rsquo;ll have to learn, and he shall, without postponement,&rdquo;
+Scott said.</p>
+<p>He spoke softly to White Fang until he had quieted him, then his
+voice became firm.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Down, sir!&nbsp; Down with you!&rdquo;</p>
+<p>This had been one of the things taught him by the master, and White
+Fang obeyed, though he lay down reluctantly and sullenly.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Now, mother.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Scott opened his arms to her, but kept his eyes on White Fang.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Down!&rdquo; he warned.&nbsp; &ldquo;Down!&rdquo;</p>
+<p>White Fang, bristling silently, half-crouching as he rose, sank back
+and watched the hostile act repeated.&nbsp; But no harm came of it,
+nor of the embrace from the strange man-god that followed.&nbsp; Then
+the clothes-bags were taken into the carriage, the strange gods and
+the love-master followed, and White Fang pursued, now running vigilantly
+behind, now bristling up to the running horses and warning them that
+he was there to see that no harm befell the god they dragged so swiftly
+across the earth.</p>
+<p>At the end of fifteen minutes, the carriage swung in through a stone
+gateway and on between a double row of arched and interlacing walnut
+trees.&nbsp; On either side stretched lawns, their broad sweep broken
+here and there by great sturdy-limbed oaks.&nbsp; In the near distance,
+in contrast with the young-green of the tended grass, sunburnt hay-fields
+showed tan and gold; while beyond were the tawny hills and upland pastures.&nbsp;
+From the head of the lawn, on the first soft swell from the valley-level,
+looked down the deep-porched, many-windowed house.</p>
+<p>Little opportunity was given White Fang to see all this.&nbsp; Hardly
+had the carriage entered the grounds, when he was set upon by a sheep-dog,
+bright-eyed, sharp-muzzled, righteously indignant and angry.&nbsp; It
+was between him and the master, cutting him off.&nbsp; White Fang snarled
+no warning, but his hair bristled as he made his silent and deadly rush.&nbsp;
+This rush was never completed.&nbsp; He halted with awkward abruptness,
+with stiff fore-legs bracing himself against his momentum, almost sitting
+down on his haunches, so desirous was he of avoiding contact with the
+dog he was in the act of attacking.&nbsp; It was a female, and the law
+of his kind thrust a barrier between.&nbsp; For him to attack her would
+require nothing less than a violation of his instinct.</p>
+<p>But with the sheep-dog it was otherwise.&nbsp; Being a female, she
+possessed no such instinct.&nbsp; On the other hand, being a sheep-dog,
+her instinctive fear of the Wild, and especially of the wolf, was unusually
+keen.&nbsp; White Fang was to her a wolf, the hereditary marauder who
+had preyed upon her flocks from the time sheep were first herded and
+guarded by some dim ancestor of hers.&nbsp; And so, as he abandoned
+his rush at her and braced himself to avoid the contact, she sprang
+upon him.&nbsp; He snarled involuntarily as he felt her teeth in his
+shoulder, but beyond this made no offer to hurt her.&nbsp; He backed
+away, stiff-legged with self-consciousness, and tried to go around her.&nbsp;
+He dodged this way and that, and curved and turned, but to no purpose.&nbsp;
+She remained always between him and the way he wanted to go.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Here, Collie!&rdquo; called the strange man in the carriage.</p>
+<p>Weedon Scott laughed.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Never mind, father.&nbsp; It is good discipline.&nbsp; White
+Fang will have to learn many things, and it&rsquo;s just as well that
+he begins now.&nbsp; He&rsquo;ll adjust himself all right.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>The carriage drove on, and still Collie blocked White Fang&rsquo;s
+way.&nbsp; He tried to outrun her by leaving the drive and circling
+across the lawn but she ran on the inner and smaller circle, and was
+always there, facing him with her two rows of gleaming teeth.&nbsp;
+Back he circled, across the drive to the other lawn, and again she headed
+him off.</p>
+<p>The carriage was bearing the master away.&nbsp; White Fang caught
+glimpses of it disappearing amongst the trees.&nbsp; The situation was
+desperate.&nbsp; He essayed another circle.&nbsp; She followed, running
+swiftly.&nbsp; And then, suddenly, he turned upon her.&nbsp; It was
+his old fighting trick.&nbsp; Shoulder to shoulder, he struck her squarely.&nbsp;
+Not only was she overthrown.&nbsp; So fast had she been running that
+she rolled along, now on her back, now on her side, as she struggled
+to stop, clawing gravel with her feet and crying shrilly her hurt pride
+and indignation.</p>
+<p>White Fang did not wait.&nbsp; The way was clear, and that was all
+he had wanted.&nbsp; She took after him, never ceasing her outcry.&nbsp;
+It was the straightaway now, and when it came to real running, White
+Fang could teach her things.&nbsp; She ran frantically, hysterically,
+straining to the utmost, advertising the effort she was making with
+every leap: and all the time White Fang slid smoothly away from her
+silently, without effort, gliding like a ghost over the ground.</p>
+<p>As he rounded the house to the <i>porte-coch&egrave;re</i>, he came
+upon the carriage.&nbsp; It had stopped, and the master was alighting.&nbsp;
+At this moment, still running at top speed, White Fang became suddenly
+aware of an attack from the side.&nbsp; It was a deer-hound rushing
+upon him.&nbsp; White Fang tried to face it.&nbsp; But he was going
+too fast, and the hound was too close.&nbsp; It struck him on the side;
+and such was his forward momentum and the unexpectedness of it, White
+Fang was hurled to the ground and rolled clear over.&nbsp; He came out
+of the tangle a spectacle of malignancy, ears flattened back, lips writhing,
+nose wrinkling, his teeth clipping together as the fangs barely missed
+the hound&rsquo;s soft throat.</p>
+<p>The master was running up, but was too far away; and it was Collie
+that saved the hound&rsquo;s life.&nbsp; Before White Fang could spring
+in and deliver the fatal stroke, and just as he was in the act of springing
+in, Collie arrived.&nbsp; She had been out-manoeuvred and out-run, to
+say nothing of her having been unceremoniously tumbled in the gravel,
+and her arrival was like that of a tornado&mdash;made up of offended
+dignity, justifiable wrath, and instinctive hatred for this marauder
+from the Wild.&nbsp; She struck White Fang at right angles in the midst
+of his spring, and again he was knocked off his feet and rolled over.</p>
+<p>The next moment the master arrived, and with one hand held White
+Fang, while the father called off the dogs.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I say, this is a pretty warm reception for a poor lone wolf
+from the Arctic,&rdquo; the master said, while White Fang calmed down
+under his caressing hand.&nbsp; &ldquo;In all his life he&rsquo;s only
+been known once to go off his feet, and here he&rsquo;s been rolled
+twice in thirty seconds.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>The carriage had driven away, and other strange gods had appeared
+from out the house.&nbsp; Some of these stood respectfully at a distance;
+but two of them, women, perpetrated the hostile act of clutching the
+master around the neck.&nbsp; White Fang, however, was beginning to
+tolerate this act.&nbsp; No harm seemed to come of it, while the noises
+the gods made were certainly not threatening.&nbsp; These gods also
+made overtures to White Fang, but he warned them off with a snarl, and
+the master did likewise with word of mouth.&nbsp; At such times White
+Fang leaned in close against the master&rsquo;s legs and received reassuring
+pats on the head.</p>
+<p>The hound, under the command, &ldquo;Dick!&nbsp; Lie down, sir!&rdquo;
+had gone up the steps and lain down to one side of the porch, still
+growling and keeping a sullen watch on the intruder.&nbsp; Collie had
+been taken in charge by one of the woman-gods, who held arms around
+her neck and petted and caressed her; but Collie was very much perplexed
+and worried, whining and restless, outraged by the permitted presence
+of this wolf and confident that the gods were making a mistake.</p>
+<p>All the gods started up the steps to enter the house.&nbsp; White
+Fang followed closely at the master&rsquo;s heels.&nbsp; Dick, on the
+porch, growled, and White Fang, on the steps, bristled and growled back.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Take Collie inside and leave the two of them to fight it out,&rdquo;
+suggested Scott&rsquo;s father.&nbsp; &ldquo;After that they&rsquo;ll
+be friends.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Then White Fang, to show his friendship, will have to be chief
+mourner at the funeral,&rdquo; laughed the master.</p>
+<p>The elder Scott looked incredulously, first at White Fang, then at
+Dick, and finally at his son.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;You mean . . .?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Weedon nodded his head.&nbsp; &ldquo;I mean just that.&nbsp; You&rsquo;d
+have a dead Dick inside one minute&mdash;two minutes at the farthest.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>He turned to White Fang.&nbsp; &ldquo;Come on, you wolf.&nbsp; It&rsquo;s
+you that&rsquo;ll have to come inside.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>White Fang walked stiff-legged up the steps and across the porch,
+with tail rigidly erect, keeping his eyes on Dick to guard against a
+flank attack, and at the same time prepared for whatever fierce manifestation
+of the unknown that might pounce out upon him from the interior of the
+house.&nbsp; But no thing of fear pounced out, and when he had gained
+the inside he scouted carefully around, looking at it and finding it
+not.&nbsp; Then he lay down with a contented grunt at the master&rsquo;s
+feet, observing all that went on, ever ready to spring to his feet and
+fight for life with the terrors he felt must lurk under the trap-roof
+of the dwelling.</p>
+<div class="GutenbergBlankLines2"><br /><br /></div>
+<h3>CHAPTER III&mdash;THE GOD&rsquo;S DOMAIN</h3>
+<div class="GutenbergBlankLines2"><br /><br /></div>
+<p>Not only was White Fang adaptable by nature, but he had travelled
+much, and knew the meaning and necessity of adjustment.&nbsp; Here,
+in Sierra Vista, which was the name of Judge Scott&rsquo;s place, White
+Fang quickly began to make himself at home.&nbsp; He had no further
+serious trouble with the dogs.&nbsp; They knew more about the ways of
+the Southland gods than did he, and in their eyes he had qualified when
+he accompanied the gods inside the house.&nbsp; Wolf that he was, and
+unprecedented as it was, the gods had sanctioned his presence, and they,
+the dogs of the gods, could only recognise this sanction.</p>
+<p>Dick, perforce, had to go through a few stiff formalities at first,
+after which he calmly accepted White Fang as an addition to the premises.&nbsp;
+Had Dick had his way, they would have been good friends.&nbsp; All but
+White Fang was averse to friendship.&nbsp; All he asked of other dogs
+was to be let alone.&nbsp; His whole life he had kept aloof from his
+kind, and he still desired to keep aloof.&nbsp; Dick&rsquo;s overtures
+bothered him, so he snarled Dick away.&nbsp; In the north he had learned
+the lesson that he must let the master&rsquo;s dogs alone, and he did
+not forget that lesson now.&nbsp; But he insisted on his own privacy
+and self-seclusion, and so thoroughly ignored Dick that that good-natured
+creature finally gave him up and scarcely took as much interest in him
+as in the hitching-post near the stable.</p>
+<p>Not so with Collie.&nbsp; While she accepted him because it was the
+mandate of the gods, that was no reason that she should leave him in
+peace.&nbsp; Woven into her being was the memory of countless crimes
+he and his had perpetrated against her ancestry.&nbsp; Not in a day
+nor a generation were the ravaged sheepfolds to be forgotten.&nbsp;
+All this was a spur to her, pricking her to retaliation.&nbsp; She could
+not fly in the face of the gods who permitted him, but that did not
+prevent her from making life miserable for him in petty ways.&nbsp;
+A feud, ages old, was between them, and she, for one, would see to it
+that he was reminded.</p>
+<p>So Collie took advantage of her sex to pick upon White Fang and maltreat
+him.&nbsp; His instinct would not permit him to attack her, while her
+persistence would not permit him to ignore her.&nbsp; When she rushed
+at him he turned his fur-protected shoulder to her sharp teeth and walked
+away stiff-legged and stately.&nbsp; When she forced him too hard, he
+was compelled to go about in a circle, his shoulder presented to her,
+his head turned from her, and on his face and in his eyes a patient
+and bored expression.&nbsp; Sometimes, however, a nip on his hind-quarters
+hastened his retreat and made it anything but stately.&nbsp; But as
+a rule he managed to maintain a dignity that was almost solemnity.&nbsp;
+He ignored her existence whenever it was possible, and made it a point
+to keep out of her way.&nbsp; When he saw or heard her coming, he got
+up and walked off.</p>
+<p>There was much in other matters for White Fang to learn.&nbsp; Life
+in the Northland was simplicity itself when compared with the complicated
+affairs of Sierra Vista.&nbsp; First of all, he had to learn the family
+of the master.&nbsp; In a way he was prepared to do this.&nbsp; As Mit-sah
+and Kloo-kooch had belonged to Grey Beaver, sharing his food, his fire,
+and his blankets, so now, at Sierra Vista, belonged to the love-master
+all the denizens of the house.</p>
+<p>But in this matter there was a difference, and many differences.&nbsp;
+Sierra Vista was a far vaster affair than the tepee of Grey Beaver.&nbsp;
+There were many persons to be considered.&nbsp; There was Judge Scott,
+and there was his wife.&nbsp; There were the master&rsquo;s two sisters,
+Beth and Mary.&nbsp; There was his wife, Alice, and then there were
+his children, Weedon and Maud, toddlers of four and six.&nbsp; There
+was no way for anybody to tell him about all these people, and of blood-ties
+and relationship he knew nothing whatever and never would be capable
+of knowing.&nbsp; Yet he quickly worked it out that all of them belonged
+to the master.&nbsp; Then, by observation, whenever opportunity offered,
+by study of action, speech, and the very intonations of the voice, he
+slowly learned the intimacy and the degree of favour they enjoyed with
+the master.&nbsp; And by this ascertained standard, White Fang treated
+them accordingly.&nbsp; What was of value to the master he valued; what
+was dear to the master was to be cherished by White Fang and guarded
+carefully.</p>
+<p>Thus it was with the two children.&nbsp; All his life he had disliked
+children.&nbsp; He hated and feared their hands.&nbsp; The lessons were
+not tender that he had learned of their tyranny and cruelty in the days
+of the Indian villages.&nbsp; When Weedon and Maud had first approached
+him, he growled warningly and looked malignant.&nbsp; A cuff from the
+master and a sharp word had then compelled him to permit their caresses,
+though he growled and growled under their tiny hands, and in the growl
+there was no crooning note.&nbsp; Later, he observed that the boy and
+girl were of great value in the master&rsquo;s eyes.&nbsp; Then it was
+that no cuff nor sharp word was necessary before they could pat him.</p>
+<p>Yet White Fang was never effusively affectionate.&nbsp; He yielded
+to the master&rsquo;s children with an ill but honest grace, and endured
+their fooling as one would endure a painful operation.&nbsp; When he
+could no longer endure, he would get up and stalk determinedly away
+from them.&nbsp; But after a time, he grew even to like the children.&nbsp;
+Still he was not demonstrative.&nbsp; He would not go up to them.&nbsp;
+On the other hand, instead of walking away at sight of them, he waited
+for them to come to him.&nbsp; And still later, it was noticed that
+a pleased light came into his eyes when he saw them approaching, and
+that he looked after them with an appearance of curious regret when
+they left him for other amusements.</p>
+<p>All this was a matter of development, and took time.&nbsp; Next in
+his regard, after the children, was Judge Scott.&nbsp; There were two
+reasons, possibly, for this.&nbsp; First, he was evidently a valuable
+possession of the master&rsquo;s, and next, he was undemonstrative.&nbsp;
+White Fang liked to lie at his feet on the wide porch when he read the
+newspaper, from time to time favouring White Fang with a look or a word&mdash;untroublesome
+tokens that he recognised White Fang&rsquo;s presence and existence.&nbsp;
+But this was only when the master was not around.&nbsp; When the master
+appeared, all other beings ceased to exist so far as White Fang was
+concerned.</p>
+<p>White Fang allowed all the members of the family to pet him and make
+much of him; but he never gave to them what he gave to the master.&nbsp;
+No caress of theirs could put the love-croon into his throat, and, try
+as they would, they could never persuade him into snuggling against
+them.&nbsp; This expression of abandon and surrender, of absolute trust,
+he reserved for the master alone.&nbsp; In fact, he never regarded the
+members of the family in any other light than possessions of the love-master.</p>
+<p>Also White Fang had early come to differentiate between the family
+and the servants of the household.&nbsp; The latter were afraid of him,
+while he merely refrained from attacking them.&nbsp; This because he
+considered that they were likewise possessions of the master.&nbsp;
+Between White Fang and them existed a neutrality and no more.&nbsp;
+They cooked for the master and washed the dishes and did other things
+just as Matt had done up in the Klondike.&nbsp; They were, in short,
+appurtenances of the household.</p>
+<p>Outside the household there was even more for White Fang to learn.&nbsp;
+The master&rsquo;s domain was wide and complex, yet it had its metes
+and bounds.&nbsp; The land itself ceased at the county road.&nbsp; Outside
+was the common domain of all gods&mdash;the roads and streets.&nbsp;
+Then inside other fences were the particular domains of other gods.&nbsp;
+A myriad laws governed all these things and determined conduct; yet
+he did not know the speech of the gods, nor was there any way for him
+to learn save by experience.&nbsp; He obeyed his natural impulses until
+they ran him counter to some law.&nbsp; When this had been done a few
+times, he learned the law and after that observed it.</p>
+<p>But most potent in his education was the cuff of the master&rsquo;s
+hand, the censure of the master&rsquo;s voice.&nbsp; Because of White
+Fang&rsquo;s very great love, a cuff from the master hurt him far more
+than any beating Grey Beaver or Beauty Smith had ever given him.&nbsp;
+They had hurt only the flesh of him; beneath the flesh the spirit had
+still raged, splendid and invincible.&nbsp; But with the master the
+cuff was always too light to hurt the flesh.&nbsp; Yet it went deeper.&nbsp;
+It was an expression of the master&rsquo;s disapproval, and White Fang&rsquo;s
+spirit wilted under it.</p>
+<p>In point of fact, the cuff was rarely administered.&nbsp; The master&rsquo;s
+voice was sufficient.&nbsp; By it White Fang knew whether he did right
+or not.&nbsp; By it he trimmed his conduct and adjusted his actions.&nbsp;
+It was the compass by which he steered and learned to chart the manners
+of a new land and life.</p>
+<p>In the Northland, the only domesticated animal was the dog.&nbsp;
+All other animals lived in the Wild, and were, when not too formidable,
+lawful spoil for any dog.&nbsp; All his days White Fang had foraged
+among the live things for food.&nbsp; It did not enter his head that
+in the Southland it was otherwise.&nbsp; But this he was to learn early
+in his residence in Santa Clara Valley.&nbsp; Sauntering around the
+corner of the house in the early morning, he came upon a chicken that
+had escaped from the chicken-yard.&nbsp; White Fang&rsquo;s natural
+impulse was to eat it.&nbsp; A couple of bounds, a flash of teeth and
+a frightened squawk, and he had scooped in the adventurous fowl.&nbsp;
+It was farm-bred and fat and tender; and White Fang licked his chops
+and decided that such fare was good.</p>
+<p>Later in the day, he chanced upon another stray chicken near the
+stables.&nbsp; One of the grooms ran to the rescue.&nbsp; He did not
+know White Fang&rsquo;s breed, so for weapon he took a light buggy-whip.&nbsp;
+At the first cut of the whip, White Fang left the chicken for the man.&nbsp;
+A club might have stopped White Fang, but not a whip.&nbsp; Silently,
+without flinching, he took a second cut in his forward rush, and as
+he leaped for the throat the groom cried out, &ldquo;My God!&rdquo;
+and staggered backward.&nbsp; He dropped the whip and shielded his throat
+with his arms.&nbsp; In consequence, his forearm was ripped open to
+the bone.</p>
+<p>The man was badly frightened.&nbsp; It was not so much White Fang&rsquo;s
+ferocity as it was his silence that unnerved the groom.&nbsp; Still
+protecting his throat and face with his torn and bleeding arm, he tried
+to retreat to the barn.&nbsp; And it would have gone hard with him had
+not Collie appeared on the scene.&nbsp; As she had saved Dick&rsquo;s
+life, she now saved the groom&rsquo;s.&nbsp; She rushed upon White Fang
+in frenzied wrath.&nbsp; She had been right.&nbsp; She had known better
+than the blundering gods.&nbsp; All her suspicions were justified.&nbsp;
+Here was the ancient marauder up to his old tricks again.</p>
+<p>The groom escaped into the stables, and White Fang backed away before
+Collie&rsquo;s wicked teeth, or presented his shoulder to them and circled
+round and round.&nbsp; But Collie did not give over, as was her wont,
+after a decent interval of chastisement.&nbsp; On the contrary, she
+grew more excited and angry every moment, until, in the end, White Fang
+flung dignity to the winds and frankly fled away from her across the
+fields.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;He&rsquo;ll learn to leave chickens alone,&rdquo; the master
+said.&nbsp; &ldquo;But I can&rsquo;t give him the lesson until I catch
+him in the act.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Two nights later came the act, but on a more generous scale than
+the master had anticipated.&nbsp; White Fang had observed closely the
+chicken-yards and the habits of the chickens.&nbsp; In the night-time,
+after they had gone to roost, he climbed to the top of a pile of newly
+hauled lumber.&nbsp; From there he gained the roof of a chicken-house,
+passed over the ridgepole and dropped to the ground inside.&nbsp; A
+moment later he was inside the house, and the slaughter began.</p>
+<p>In the morning, when the master came out on to the porch, fifty white
+Leghorn hens, laid out in a row by the groom, greeted his eyes.&nbsp;
+He whistled to himself, softly, first with surprise, and then, at the
+end, with admiration.&nbsp; His eyes were likewise greeted by White
+Fang, but about the latter there were no signs of shame nor guilt.&nbsp;
+He carried himself with pride, as though, forsooth, he had achieved
+a deed praiseworthy and meritorious.&nbsp; There was about him no consciousness
+of sin.&nbsp; The master&rsquo;s lips tightened as he faced the disagreeable
+task.&nbsp; Then he talked harshly to the unwitting culprit, and in
+his voice there was nothing but godlike wrath.&nbsp; Also, he held White
+Fang&rsquo;s nose down to the slain hens, and at the same time cuffed
+him soundly.</p>
+<p>White Fang never raided a chicken-roost again.&nbsp; It was against
+the law, and he had learned it.&nbsp; Then the master took him into
+the chicken-yards.&nbsp; White Fang&rsquo;s natural impulse, when he
+saw the live food fluttering about him and under his very nose, was
+to spring upon it.&nbsp; He obeyed the impulse, but was checked by the
+master&rsquo;s voice.&nbsp; They continued in the yards for half an
+hour.&nbsp; Time and again the impulse surged over White Fang, and each
+time, as he yielded to it, he was checked by the master&rsquo;s voice.&nbsp;
+Thus it was he learned the law, and ere he left the domain of the chickens,
+he had learned to ignore their existence.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;You can never cure a chicken-killer.&rdquo;&nbsp; Judge Scott
+shook his head sadly at luncheon table, when his son narrated the lesson
+he had given White Fang.&nbsp; &ldquo;Once they&rsquo;ve got the habit
+and the taste of blood . . .&rdquo;&nbsp; Again he shook his head sadly.</p>
+<p>But Weedon Scott did not agree with his father.&nbsp; &ldquo;I&rsquo;ll
+tell you what I&rsquo;ll do,&rdquo; he challenged finally.&nbsp; &ldquo;I&rsquo;ll
+lock White Fang in with the chickens all afternoon.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;But think of the chickens,&rdquo; objected the judge.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;And furthermore,&rdquo; the son went on, &ldquo;for every
+chicken he kills, I&rsquo;ll pay you one dollar gold coin of the realm.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;But you should penalise father, too,&rdquo; interpose Beth.</p>
+<p>Her sister seconded her, and a chorus of approval arose from around
+the table.&nbsp; Judge Scott nodded his head in agreement.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;All right.&rdquo; Weedon Scott pondered for a moment.&nbsp;
+&ldquo;And if, at the end of the afternoon White Fang hasn&rsquo;t harmed
+a chicken, for every ten minutes of the time he has spent in the yard,
+you will have to say to him, gravely and with deliberation, just as
+if you were sitting on the bench and solemnly passing judgment, &lsquo;White
+Fang, you are smarter than I thought.&rsquo;&rdquo;</p>
+<p>From hidden points of vantage the family watched the performance.&nbsp;
+But it was a fizzle.&nbsp; Locked in the yard and there deserted by
+the master, White Fang lay down and went to sleep.&nbsp; Once he got
+up and walked over to the trough for a drink of water.&nbsp; The chickens
+he calmly ignored.&nbsp; So far as he was concerned they did not exist.&nbsp;
+At four o&rsquo;clock he executed a running jump, gained the roof of
+the chicken-house and leaped to the ground outside, whence he sauntered
+gravely to the house.&nbsp; He had learned the law.&nbsp; And on the
+porch, before the delighted family, Judge Scott, face to face with White
+Fang, said slowly and solemnly, sixteen times, &ldquo;White Fang, you
+are smarter than I thought.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>But it was the multiplicity of laws that befuddled White Fang and
+often brought him into disgrace.&nbsp; He had to learn that he must
+not touch the chickens that belonged to other gods.&nbsp; Then there
+were cats, and rabbits, and turkeys; all these he must let alone.&nbsp;
+In fact, when he had but partly learned the law, his impression was
+that he must leave all live things alone.&nbsp; Out in the back-pasture,
+a quail could flutter up under his nose unharmed.&nbsp; All tense and
+trembling with eagerness and desire, he mastered his instinct and stood
+still.&nbsp; He was obeying the will of the gods.</p>
+<p>And then, one day, again out in the back-pasture, he saw Dick start
+a jackrabbit and run it.&nbsp; The master himself was looking on and
+did not interfere.&nbsp; Nay, he encouraged White Fang to join in the
+chase.&nbsp; And thus he learned that there was no taboo on jackrabbits.&nbsp;
+In the end he worked out the complete law.&nbsp; Between him and all
+domestic animals there must be no hostilities.&nbsp; If not amity, at
+least neutrality must obtain.&nbsp; But the other animals&mdash;the
+squirrels, and quail, and cottontails, were creatures of the Wild who
+had never yielded allegiance to man.&nbsp; They were the lawful prey
+of any dog.&nbsp; It was only the tame that the gods protected, and
+between the tame deadly strife was not permitted.&nbsp; The gods held
+the power of life and death over their subjects, and the gods were jealous
+of their power.</p>
+<p>Life was complex in the Santa Clara Valley after the simplicities
+of the Northland.&nbsp; And the chief thing demanded by these intricacies
+of civilisation was control, restraint&mdash;a poise of self that was
+as delicate as the fluttering of gossamer wings and at the same time
+as rigid as steel.&nbsp; Life had a thousand faces, and White Fang found
+he must meet them all&mdash;thus, when he went to town, in to San Jose,
+running behind the carriage or loafing about the streets when the carriage
+stopped.&nbsp; Life flowed past him, deep and wide and varied, continually
+impinging upon his senses, demanding of him instant and endless adjustments
+and correspondences, and compelling him, almost always, to suppress
+his natural impulses.</p>
+<p>There were butcher-shops where meat hung within reach.&nbsp; This
+meat he must not touch.&nbsp; There were cats at the houses the master
+visited that must be let alone.&nbsp; And there were dogs everywhere
+that snarled at him and that he must not attack.&nbsp; And then, on
+the crowded sidewalks there were persons innumerable whose attention
+he attracted.&nbsp; They would stop and look at him, point him out to
+one another, examine him, talk of him, and, worst of all, pat him.&nbsp;
+And these perilous contacts from all these strange hands he must endure.&nbsp;
+Yet this endurance he achieved.&nbsp; Furthermore, he got over being
+awkward and self-conscious.&nbsp; In a lofty way he received the attentions
+of the multitudes of strange gods.&nbsp; With condescension he accepted
+their condescension.&nbsp; On the other hand, there was something about
+him that prevented great familiarity.&nbsp; They patted him on the head
+and passed on, contented and pleased with their own daring.</p>
+<p>But it was not all easy for White Fang.&nbsp; Running behind the
+carriage in the outskirts of San Jose, he encountered certain small
+boys who made a practice of flinging stones at him.&nbsp; Yet he knew
+that it was not permitted him to pursue and drag them down.&nbsp; Here
+he was compelled to violate his instinct of self-preservation, and violate
+it he did, for he was becoming tame and qualifying himself for civilisation.</p>
+<p>Nevertheless, White Fang was not quite satisfied with the arrangement.&nbsp;
+He had no abstract ideas about justice and fair play.&nbsp; But there
+is a certain sense of equity that resides in life, and it was this sense
+in him that resented the unfairness of his being permitted no defence
+against the stone-throwers.&nbsp; He forgot that in the covenant entered
+into between him and the gods they were pledged to care for him and
+defend him.&nbsp; But one day the master sprang from the carriage, whip
+in hand, and gave the stone-throwers a thrashing.&nbsp; After that they
+threw stones no more, and White Fang understood and was satisfied.</p>
+<p>One other experience of similar nature was his.&nbsp; On the way
+to town, hanging around the saloon at the cross-roads, were three dogs
+that made a practice of rushing out upon him when he went by.&nbsp;
+Knowing his deadly method of fighting, the master had never ceased impressing
+upon White Fang the law that he must not fight.&nbsp; As a result, having
+learned the lesson well, White Fang was hard put whenever he passed
+the cross-roads saloon.&nbsp; After the first rush, each time, his snarl
+kept the three dogs at a distance but they trailed along behind, yelping
+and bickering and insulting him.&nbsp; This endured for some time.&nbsp;
+The men at the saloon even urged the dogs on to attack White Fang.&nbsp;
+One day they openly sicked the dogs on him.&nbsp; The master stopped
+the carriage.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Go to it,&rdquo; he said to White Fang.</p>
+<p>But White Fang could not believe.&nbsp; He looked at the master,
+and he looked at the dogs.&nbsp; Then he looked back eagerly and questioningly
+at the master.</p>
+<p>The master nodded his head.&nbsp; &ldquo;Go to them, old fellow.&nbsp;
+Eat them up.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>White Fang no longer hesitated.&nbsp; He turned and leaped silently
+among his enemies.&nbsp; All three faced him.&nbsp; There was a great
+snarling and growling, a clashing of teeth and a flurry of bodies.&nbsp;
+The dust of the road arose in a cloud and screened the battle.&nbsp;
+But at the end of several minutes two dogs were struggling in the dirt
+and the third was in full flight.&nbsp; He leaped a ditch, went through
+a rail fence, and fled across a field.&nbsp; White Fang followed, sliding
+over the ground in wolf fashion and with wolf speed, swiftly and without
+noise, and in the centre of the field he dragged down and slew the dog.</p>
+<p>With this triple killing his main troubles with dogs ceased.&nbsp;
+The word went up and down the valley, and men saw to it that their dogs
+did not molest the Fighting Wolf.</p>
+<div class="GutenbergBlankLines2"><br /><br /></div>
+<h3>CHAPTER IV&mdash;THE CALL OF KIND</h3>
+<div class="GutenbergBlankLines2"><br /><br /></div>
+<p>The months came and went.&nbsp; There was plenty of food and no work
+in the Southland, and White Fang lived fat and prosperous and happy.&nbsp;
+Not alone was he in the geographical Southland, for he was in the Southland
+of life.&nbsp; Human kindness was like a sun shining upon him, and he
+flourished like a flower planted in good soil.</p>
+<p>And yet he remained somehow different from other dogs.&nbsp; He knew
+the law even better than did the dogs that had known no other life,
+and he observed the law more punctiliously; but still there was about
+him a suggestion of lurking ferocity, as though the Wild still lingered
+in him and the wolf in him merely slept.</p>
+<p>He never chummed with other dogs.&nbsp; Lonely he had lived, so far
+as his kind was concerned, and lonely he would continue to live.&nbsp;
+In his puppyhood, under the persecution of Lip-lip and the puppy-pack,
+and in his fighting days with Beauty Smith, he had acquired a fixed
+aversion for dogs.&nbsp; The natural course of his life had been diverted,
+and, recoiling from his kind, he had clung to the human.</p>
+<p>Besides, all Southland dogs looked upon him with suspicion.&nbsp;
+He aroused in them their instinctive fear of the Wild, and they greeted
+him always with snarl and growl and belligerent hatred.&nbsp; He, on
+the other hand, learned that it was not necessary to use his teeth upon
+them.&nbsp; His naked fangs and writhing lips were uniformly efficacious,
+rarely failing to send a bellowing on-rushing dog back on its haunches.</p>
+<p>But there was one trial in White Fang&rsquo;s life&mdash;Collie.&nbsp;
+She never gave him a moment&rsquo;s peace.&nbsp; She was not so amenable
+to the law as he.&nbsp; She defied all efforts of the master to make
+her become friends with White Fang.&nbsp; Ever in his ears was sounding
+her sharp and nervous snarl.&nbsp; She had never forgiven him the chicken-killing
+episode, and persistently held to the belief that his intentions were
+bad.&nbsp; She found him guilty before the act, and treated him accordingly.&nbsp;
+She became a pest to him, like a policeman following him around the
+stable and the hounds, and, if he even so much as glanced curiously
+at a pigeon or chicken, bursting into an outcry of indignation and wrath.&nbsp;
+His favourite way of ignoring her was to lie down, with his head on
+his fore-paws, and pretend sleep.&nbsp; This always dumfounded and silenced
+her.</p>
+<p>With the exception of Collie, all things went well with White Fang.&nbsp;
+He had learned control and poise, and he knew the law.&nbsp; He achieved
+a staidness, and calmness, and philosophic tolerance.&nbsp; He no longer
+lived in a hostile environment.&nbsp; Danger and hurt and death did
+not lurk everywhere about him.&nbsp; In time, the unknown, as a thing
+of terror and menace ever impending, faded away.&nbsp; Life was soft
+and easy.&nbsp; It flowed along smoothly, and neither fear nor foe lurked
+by the way.</p>
+<p>He missed the snow without being aware of it.&nbsp; &ldquo;An unduly
+long summer,&rdquo; would have been his thought had he thought about
+it; as it was, he merely missed the snow in a vague, subconscious way.&nbsp;
+In the same fashion, especially in the heat of summer when he suffered
+from the sun, he experienced faint longings for the Northland.&nbsp;
+Their only effect upon him, however, was to make him uneasy and restless
+without his knowing what was the matter.</p>
+<p>White Fang had never been very demonstrative.&nbsp; Beyond his snuggling
+and the throwing of a crooning note into his love-growl, he had no way
+of expressing his love.&nbsp; Yet it was given him to discover a third
+way.&nbsp; He had always been susceptible to the laughter of the gods.&nbsp;
+Laughter had affected him with madness, made him frantic with rage.&nbsp;
+But he did not have it in him to be angry with the love-master, and
+when that god elected to laugh at him in a good-natured, bantering way,
+he was nonplussed.&nbsp; He could feel the pricking and stinging of
+the old anger as it strove to rise up in him, but it strove against
+love.&nbsp; He could not be angry; yet he had to do something.&nbsp;
+At first he was dignified, and the master laughed the harder.&nbsp;
+Then he tried to be more dignified, and the master laughed harder than
+before.&nbsp; In the end, the master laughed him out of his dignity.&nbsp;
+His jaws slightly parted, his lips lifted a little, and a quizzical
+expression that was more love than humour came into his eyes.&nbsp;
+He had learned to laugh.</p>
+<p>Likewise he learned to romp with the master, to be tumbled down and
+rolled over, and be the victim of innumerable rough tricks.&nbsp; In
+return he feigned anger, bristling and growling ferociously, and clipping
+his teeth together in snaps that had all the seeming of deadly intention.&nbsp;
+But he never forgot himself.&nbsp; Those snaps were always delivered
+on the empty air.&nbsp; At the end of such a romp, when blow and cuff
+and snap and snarl were last and furious, they would break off suddenly
+and stand several feet apart, glaring at each other.&nbsp; And then,
+just as suddenly, like the sun rising on a stormy sea, they would begin
+to laugh.&nbsp; This would always culminate with the master&rsquo;s
+arms going around White Fang&rsquo;s neck and shoulders while the latter
+crooned and growled his love-song.</p>
+<p>But nobody else ever romped with White Fang.&nbsp; He did not permit
+it.&nbsp; He stood on his dignity, and when they attempted it, his warning
+snarl and bristling mane were anything but playful.&nbsp; That he allowed
+the master these liberties was no reason that he should be a common
+dog, loving here and loving there, everybody&rsquo;s property for a
+romp and good time.&nbsp; He loved with single heart and refused to
+cheapen himself or his love.</p>
+<p>The master went out on horseback a great deal, and to accompany him
+was one of White Fang&rsquo;s chief duties in life.&nbsp; In the Northland
+he had evidenced his fealty by toiling in the harness; but there were
+no sleds in the Southland, nor did dogs pack burdens on their backs.&nbsp;
+So he rendered fealty in the new way, by running with the master&rsquo;s
+horse.&nbsp; The longest day never played White Fang out.&nbsp; His
+was the gait of the wolf, smooth, tireless and effortless, and at the
+end of fifty miles he would come in jauntily ahead of the horse.</p>
+<p>It was in connection with the riding, that White Fang achieved one
+other mode of expression&mdash;remarkable in that he did it but twice
+in all his life.&nbsp; The first time occurred when the master was trying
+to teach a spirited thoroughbred the method of opening and closing gates
+without the rider&rsquo;s dismounting.&nbsp; Time and again and many
+times he ranged the horse up to the gate in the effort to close it and
+each time the horse became frightened and backed and plunged away.&nbsp;
+It grew more nervous and excited every moment.&nbsp; When it reared,
+the master put the spurs to it and made it drop its fore-legs back to
+earth, whereupon it would begin kicking with its hind-legs.&nbsp; White
+Fang watched the performance with increasing anxiety until he could
+contain himself no longer, when he sprang in front of the horse and
+barked savagely and warningly.</p>
+<p>Though he often tried to bark thereafter, and the master encouraged
+him, he succeeded only once, and then it was not in the master&rsquo;s
+presence.&nbsp; A scamper across the pasture, a jackrabbit rising suddenly
+under the horse&rsquo;s feet, a violent sheer, a stumble, a fall to
+earth, and a broken leg for the master, was the cause of it.&nbsp; White
+Fang sprang in a rage at the throat of the offending horse, but was
+checked by the master&rsquo;s voice.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Home!&nbsp; Go home!&rdquo; the master commanded when he had
+ascertained his injury.</p>
+<p>White Fang was disinclined to desert him.&nbsp; The master thought
+of writing a note, but searched his pockets vainly for pencil and paper.&nbsp;
+Again he commanded White Fang to go home.</p>
+<p>The latter regarded him wistfully, started away, then returned and
+whined softly.&nbsp; The master talked to him gently but seriously,
+and he cocked his ears, and listened with painful intentness.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;That&rsquo;s all right, old fellow, you just run along home,&rdquo;
+ran the talk.&nbsp; &ldquo;Go on home and tell them what&rsquo;s happened
+to me.&nbsp; Home with you, you wolf.&nbsp; Get along home!&rdquo;</p>
+<p>White Fang knew the meaning of &ldquo;home,&rdquo; and though he
+did not understand the remainder of the master&rsquo;s language, he
+knew it was his will that he should go home.&nbsp; He turned and trotted
+reluctantly away.&nbsp; Then he stopped, undecided, and looked back
+over his shoulder.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Go home!&rdquo; came the sharp command, and this time he obeyed.</p>
+<p>The family was on the porch, taking the cool of the afternoon, when
+White Fang arrived.&nbsp; He came in among them, panting, covered with
+dust.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Weedon&rsquo;s back,&rdquo; Weedon&rsquo;s mother announced.</p>
+<p>The children welcomed White Fang with glad cries and ran to meet
+him.&nbsp; He avoided them and passed down the porch, but they cornered
+him against a rocking-chair and the railing.&nbsp; He growled and tried
+to push by them.&nbsp; Their mother looked apprehensively in their direction.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I confess, he makes me nervous around the children,&rdquo;
+she said.&nbsp; &ldquo;I have a dread that he will turn upon them unexpectedly
+some day.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Growling savagely, White Fang sprang out of the corner, overturning
+the boy and the girl.&nbsp; The mother called them to her and comforted
+them, telling them not to bother White Fang.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;A wolf is a wolf!&rdquo; commented Judge Scott.&nbsp; &ldquo;There
+is no trusting one.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;But he is not all wolf,&rdquo; interposed Beth, standing for
+her brother in his absence.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;You have only Weedon&rsquo;s opinion for that,&rdquo; rejoined
+the judge.&nbsp; &ldquo;He merely surmises that there is some strain
+of dog in White Fang; but as he will tell you himself, he knows nothing
+about it.&nbsp; As for his appearance&mdash;&rdquo;</p>
+<p>He did not finish his sentence.&nbsp; White Fang stood before him,
+growling fiercely.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Go away!&nbsp; Lie down, sir!&rdquo; Judge Scott commanded.</p>
+<p>White Fang turned to the love-master&rsquo;s wife.&nbsp; She screamed
+with fright as he seized her dress in his teeth and dragged on it till
+the frail fabric tore away.&nbsp; By this time he had become the centre
+of interest.</p>
+<p>He had ceased from his growling and stood, head up, looking into
+their faces.&nbsp; His throat worked spasmodically, but made no sound,
+while he struggled with all his body, convulsed with the effort to rid
+himself of the incommunicable something that strained for utterance.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I hope he is not going mad,&rdquo; said Weedon&rsquo;s mother.&nbsp;
+&ldquo;I told Weedon that I was afraid the warm climate would not agree
+with an Arctic animal.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;He&rsquo;s trying to speak, I do believe,&rdquo; Beth announced.</p>
+<p>At this moment speech came to White Fang, rushing up in a great burst
+of barking.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Something has happened to Weedon,&rdquo; his wife said decisively.</p>
+<p>They were all on their feet now, and White Fang ran down the steps,
+looking back for them to follow.&nbsp; For the second and last time
+in his life he had barked and made himself understood.</p>
+<p>After this event he found a warmer place in the hearts of the Sierra
+Vista people, and even the groom whose arm he had slashed admitted that
+he was a wise dog even if he was a wolf.&nbsp; Judge Scott still held
+to the same opinion, and proved it to everybody&rsquo;s dissatisfaction
+by measurements and descriptions taken from the encyclopaedia and various
+works on natural history.</p>
+<p>The days came and went, streaming their unbroken sunshine over the
+Santa Clara Valley.&nbsp; But as they grew shorter and White Fang&rsquo;s
+second winter in the Southland came on, he made a strange discovery.&nbsp;
+Collie&rsquo;s teeth were no longer sharp.&nbsp; There was a playfulness
+about her nips and a gentleness that prevented them from really hurting
+him.&nbsp; He forgot that she had made life a burden to him, and when
+she disported herself around him he responded solemnly, striving to
+be playful and becoming no more than ridiculous.</p>
+<p>One day she led him off on a long chase through the back-pasture
+land into the woods.&nbsp; It was the afternoon that the master was
+to ride, and White Fang knew it.&nbsp; The horse stood saddled and waiting
+at the door.&nbsp; White Fang hesitated.&nbsp; But there was that in
+him deeper than all the law he had learned, than the customs that had
+moulded him, than his love for the master, than the very will to live
+of himself; and when, in the moment of his indecision, Collie nipped
+him and scampered off, he turned and followed after.&nbsp; The master
+rode alone that day; and in the woods, side by side, White Fang ran
+with Collie, as his mother, Kiche, and old One Eye had run long years
+before in the silent Northland forest.</p>
+<div class="GutenbergBlankLines2"><br /><br /></div>
+<h3>CHAPTER V&mdash;THE SLEEPING WOLF</h3>
+<div class="GutenbergBlankLines2"><br /><br /></div>
+<p>It was about this time that the newspapers were full of the daring
+escape of a convict from San Quentin prison.&nbsp; He was a ferocious
+man.&nbsp; He had been ill-made in the making.&nbsp; He had not been
+born right, and he had not been helped any by the moulding he had received
+at the hands of society.&nbsp; The hands of society are harsh, and this
+man was a striking sample of its handiwork.&nbsp; He was a beast&mdash;a
+human beast, it is true, but nevertheless so terrible a beast that he
+can best be characterised as carnivorous.</p>
+<p>In San Quentin prison he had proved incorrigible.&nbsp; Punishment
+failed to break his spirit.&nbsp; He could die dumb-mad and fighting
+to the last, but he could not live and be beaten.&nbsp; The more fiercely
+he fought, the more harshly society handled him, and the only effect
+of harshness was to make him fiercer.&nbsp; Straight-jackets, starvation,
+and beatings and clubbings were the wrong treatment for Jim Hall; but
+it was the treatment he received.&nbsp; It was the treatment he had
+received from the time he was a little pulpy boy in a San Francisco
+slum&mdash;soft clay in the hands of society and ready to be formed
+into something.</p>
+<p>It was during Jim Hall&rsquo;s third term in prison that he encountered
+a guard that was almost as great a beast as he.&nbsp; The guard treated
+him unfairly, lied about him to the warden, lost his credits, persecuted
+him.&nbsp; The difference between them was that the guard carried a
+bunch of keys and a revolver.&nbsp; Jim Hall had only his naked hands
+and his teeth.&nbsp; But he sprang upon the guard one day and used his
+teeth on the other&rsquo;s throat just like any jungle animal.</p>
+<p>After this, Jim Hall went to live in the incorrigible cell.&nbsp;
+He lived there three years.&nbsp; The cell was of iron, the floor, the
+walls, the roof.&nbsp; He never left this cell.&nbsp; He never saw the
+sky nor the sunshine.&nbsp; Day was a twilight and night was a black
+silence.&nbsp; He was in an iron tomb, buried alive.&nbsp; He saw no
+human face, spoke to no human thing.&nbsp; When his food was shoved
+in to him, he growled like a wild animal.&nbsp; He hated all things.&nbsp;
+For days and nights he bellowed his rage at the universe.&nbsp; For
+weeks and months he never made a sound, in the black silence eating
+his very soul.&nbsp; He was a man and a monstrosity, as fearful a thing
+of fear as ever gibbered in the visions of a maddened brain.</p>
+<p>And then, one night, he escaped.&nbsp; The warders said it was impossible,
+but nevertheless the cell was empty, and half in half out of it lay
+the body of a dead guard.&nbsp; Two other dead guards marked his trail
+through the prison to the outer walls, and he had killed with his hands
+to avoid noise.</p>
+<p>He was armed with the weapons of the slain guards&mdash;a live arsenal
+that fled through the hills pursued by the organised might of society.&nbsp;
+A heavy price of gold was upon his head.&nbsp; Avaricious farmers hunted
+him with shot-guns.&nbsp; His blood might pay off a mortgage or send
+a son to college.&nbsp; Public-spirited citizens took down their rifles
+and went out after him.&nbsp; A pack of bloodhounds followed the way
+of his bleeding feet.&nbsp; And the sleuth-hounds of the law, the paid
+fighting animals of society, with telephone, and telegraph, and special
+train, clung to his trail night and day.</p>
+<p>Sometimes they came upon him, and men faced him like heroes, or stampeded
+through barbed-wire fences to the delight of the commonwealth reading
+the account at the breakfast table.&nbsp; It was after such encounters
+that the dead and wounded were carted back to the towns, and their places
+filled by men eager for the man-hunt.</p>
+<p>And then Jim Hall disappeared.&nbsp; The bloodhounds vainly quested
+on the lost trail.&nbsp; Inoffensive ranchers in remote valleys were
+held up by armed men and compelled to identify themselves.&nbsp; While
+the remains of Jim Hall were discovered on a dozen mountain-sides by
+greedy claimants for blood-money.</p>
+<p>In the meantime the newspapers were read at Sierra Vista, not so
+much with interest as with anxiety.&nbsp; The women were afraid.&nbsp;
+Judge Scott pooh-poohed and laughed, but not with reason, for it was
+in his last days on the bench that Jim Hall had stood before him and
+received sentence.&nbsp; And in open court-room, before all men, Jim
+Hall had proclaimed that the day would come when he would wreak vengeance
+on the Judge that sentenced him.</p>
+<p>For once, Jim Hall was right.&nbsp; He was innocent of the crime
+for which he was sentenced.&nbsp; It was a case, in the parlance of
+thieves and police, of &ldquo;rail-roading.&rdquo;&nbsp; Jim Hall was
+being &ldquo;rail-roaded&rdquo; to prison for a crime he had not committed.&nbsp;
+Because of the two prior convictions against him, Judge Scott imposed
+upon him a sentence of fifty years.</p>
+<p>Judge Scott did not know all things, and he did not know that he
+was party to a police conspiracy, that the evidence was hatched and
+perjured, that Jim Hall was guiltless of the crime charged.&nbsp; And
+Jim Hall, on the other hand, did not know that Judge Scott was merely
+ignorant.&nbsp; Jim Hall believed that the judge knew all about it and
+was hand in glove with the police in the perpetration of the monstrous
+injustice.&nbsp; So it was, when the doom of fifty years of living death
+was uttered by Judge Scott, that Jim Hall, hating all things in the
+society that misused him, rose up and raged in the court-room until
+dragged down by half a dozen of his blue-coated enemies.&nbsp; To him,
+Judge Scott was the keystone in the arch of injustice, and upon Judge
+Scott he emptied the vials of his wrath and hurled the threats of his
+revenge yet to come.&nbsp; Then Jim Hall went to his living death .
+. . and escaped.</p>
+<p>Of all this White Fang knew nothing.&nbsp; But between him and Alice,
+the master&rsquo;s wife, there existed a secret.&nbsp; Each night, after
+Sierra Vista had gone to bed, she rose and let in White Fang to sleep
+in the big hall.&nbsp; Now White Fang was not a house-dog, nor was he
+permitted to sleep in the house; so each morning, early, she slipped
+down and let him out before the family was awake.</p>
+<p>On one such night, while all the house slept, White Fang awoke and
+lay very quietly.&nbsp; And very quietly he smelled the air and read
+the message it bore of a strange god&rsquo;s presence.&nbsp; And to
+his ears came sounds of the strange god&rsquo;s movements.&nbsp; White
+Fang burst into no furious outcry.&nbsp; It was not his way.&nbsp; The
+strange god walked softly, but more softly walked White Fang, for he
+had no clothes to rub against the flesh of his body.&nbsp; He followed
+silently.&nbsp; In the Wild he had hunted live meat that was infinitely
+timid, and he knew the advantage of surprise.</p>
+<p>The strange god paused at the foot of the great staircase and listened,
+and White Fang was as dead, so without movement was he as he watched
+and waited.&nbsp; Up that staircase the way led to the love-master and
+to the love-master&rsquo;s dearest possessions.&nbsp; White Fang bristled,
+but waited.&nbsp; The strange god&rsquo;s foot lifted.&nbsp; He was
+beginning the ascent.</p>
+<p>Then it was that White Fang struck.&nbsp; He gave no warning, with
+no snarl anticipated his own action.&nbsp; Into the air he lifted his
+body in the spring that landed him on the strange god&rsquo;s back.&nbsp;
+White Fang clung with his fore-paws to the man&rsquo;s shoulders, at
+the same time burying his fangs into the back of the man&rsquo;s neck.&nbsp;
+He clung on for a moment, long enough to drag the god over backward.&nbsp;
+Together they crashed to the floor.&nbsp; White Fang leaped clear, and,
+as the man struggled to rise, was in again with the slashing fangs.</p>
+<p>Sierra Vista awoke in alarm.&nbsp; The noise from downstairs was
+as that of a score of battling fiends.&nbsp; There were revolver shots.&nbsp;
+A man&rsquo;s voice screamed once in horror and anguish.&nbsp; There
+was a great snarling and growling, and over all arose a smashing and
+crashing of furniture and glass.</p>
+<p>But almost as quickly as it had arisen, the commotion died away.&nbsp;
+The struggle had not lasted more than three minutes.&nbsp; The frightened
+household clustered at the top of the stairway.&nbsp; From below, as
+from out an abyss of blackness, came up a gurgling sound, as of air
+bubbling through water.&nbsp; Sometimes this gurgle became sibilant,
+almost a whistle.&nbsp; But this, too, quickly died down and ceased.&nbsp;
+Then naught came up out of the blackness save a heavy panting of some
+creature struggling sorely for air.</p>
+<p>Weedon Scott pressed a button, and the staircase and downstairs hall
+were flooded with light.&nbsp; Then he and Judge Scott, revolvers in
+hand, cautiously descended.&nbsp; There was no need for this caution.&nbsp;
+White Fang had done his work.&nbsp; In the midst of the wreckage of
+overthrown and smashed furniture, partly on his side, his face hidden
+by an arm, lay a man.&nbsp; Weedon Scott bent over, removed the arm
+and turned the man&rsquo;s face upward.&nbsp; A gaping throat explained
+the manner of his death.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Jim Hall,&rdquo; said Judge Scott, and father and son looked
+significantly at each other.</p>
+<p>Then they turned to White Fang.&nbsp; He, too, was lying on his side.&nbsp;
+His eyes were closed, but the lids slightly lifted in an effort to look
+at them as they bent over him, and the tail was perceptibly agitated
+in a vain effort to wag.&nbsp; Weedon Scott patted him, and his throat
+rumbled an acknowledging growl.&nbsp; But it was a weak growl at best,
+and it quickly ceased.&nbsp; His eyelids drooped and went shut, and
+his whole body seemed to relax and flatten out upon the floor.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;He&rsquo;s all in, poor devil,&rdquo; muttered the master.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;We&rsquo;ll see about that,&rdquo; asserted the Judge, as
+he started for the telephone.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Frankly, he has one chance in a thousand,&rdquo; announced
+the surgeon, after he had worked an hour and a half on White Fang.</p>
+<p>Dawn was breaking through the windows and dimming the electric lights.&nbsp;
+With the exception of the children, the whole family was gathered about
+the surgeon to hear his verdict.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;One broken hind-leg,&rdquo; he went on.&nbsp; &ldquo;Three
+broken ribs, one at least of which has pierced the lungs.&nbsp; He has
+lost nearly all the blood in his body.&nbsp; There is a large likelihood
+of internal injuries.&nbsp; He must have been jumped upon.&nbsp; To
+say nothing of three bullet holes clear through him.&nbsp; One chance
+in a thousand is really optimistic.&nbsp; He hasn&rsquo;t a chance in
+ten thousand.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;But he mustn&rsquo;t lose any chance that might be of help
+to him,&rdquo; Judge Scott exclaimed.&nbsp; &ldquo;Never mind expense.&nbsp;
+Put him under the X-ray&mdash;anything.&nbsp; Weedon, telegraph at once
+to San Francisco for Doctor Nichols.&nbsp; No reflection on you, doctor,
+you understand; but he must have the advantage of every chance.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>The surgeon smiled indulgently.&nbsp; &ldquo;Of course I understand.&nbsp;
+He deserves all that can be done for him.&nbsp; He must be nursed as
+you would nurse a human being, a sick child.&nbsp; And don&rsquo;t forget
+what I told you about temperature.&nbsp; I&rsquo;ll be back at ten o&rsquo;clock
+again.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>White Fang received the nursing.&nbsp; Judge Scott&rsquo;s suggestion
+of a trained nurse was indignantly clamoured down by the girls, who
+themselves undertook the task.&nbsp; And White Fang won out on the one
+chance in ten thousand denied him by the surgeon.</p>
+<p>The latter was not to be censured for his misjudgment.&nbsp; All
+his life he had tended and operated on the soft humans of civilisation,
+who lived sheltered lives and had descended out of many sheltered generations.&nbsp;
+Compared with White Fang, they were frail and flabby, and clutched life
+without any strength in their grip.&nbsp; White Fang had come straight
+from the Wild, where the weak perish early and shelter is vouchsafed
+to none.&nbsp; In neither his father nor his mother was there any weakness,
+nor in the generations before them.&nbsp; A constitution of iron and
+the vitality of the Wild were White Fang&rsquo;s inheritance, and he
+clung to life, the whole of him and every part of him, in spirit and
+in flesh, with the tenacity that of old belonged to all creatures.</p>
+<p>Bound down a prisoner, denied even movement by the plaster casts
+and bandages, White Fang lingered out the weeks.&nbsp; He slept long
+hours and dreamed much, and through his mind passed an unending pageant
+of Northland visions.&nbsp; All the ghosts of the past arose and were
+with him.&nbsp; Once again he lived in the lair with Kiche, crept trembling
+to the knees of Grey Beaver to tender his allegiance, ran for his life
+before Lip-lip and all the howling bedlam of the puppy-pack.</p>
+<p>He ran again through the silence, hunting his living food through
+the months of famine; and again he ran at the head of the team, the
+gut-whips of Mit-sah and Grey Beaver snapping behind, their voices crying
+&ldquo;Ra! Raa!&rdquo; when they came to a narrow passage and the team
+closed together like a fan to go through.&nbsp; He lived again all his
+days with Beauty Smith and the fights he had fought.&nbsp; At such times
+he whimpered and snarled in his sleep, and they that looked on said
+that his dreams were bad.</p>
+<p>But there was one particular nightmare from which he suffered&mdash;the
+clanking, clanging monsters of electric cars that were to him colossal
+screaming lynxes.&nbsp; He would lie in a screen of bushes, watching
+for a squirrel to venture far enough out on the ground from its tree-refuge.&nbsp;
+Then, when he sprang out upon it, it would transform itself into an
+electric car, menacing and terrible, towering over him like a mountain,
+screaming and clanging and spitting fire at him.&nbsp; It was the same
+when he challenged the hawk down out of the sky.&nbsp; Down out of the
+blue it would rush, as it dropped upon him changing itself into the
+ubiquitous electric car.&nbsp; Or again, he would be in the pen of Beauty
+Smith.&nbsp; Outside the pen, men would be gathering, and he knew that
+a fight was on.&nbsp; He watched the door for his antagonist to enter.&nbsp;
+The door would open, and thrust in upon him would come the awful electric
+car.&nbsp; A thousand times this occurred, and each time the terror
+it inspired was as vivid and great as ever.</p>
+<p>Then came the day when the last bandage and the last plaster cast
+were taken off.&nbsp; It was a gala day.&nbsp; All Sierra Vista was
+gathered around.&nbsp; The master rubbed his ears, and he crooned his
+love-growl.&nbsp; The master&rsquo;s wife called him the &ldquo;Blessed
+Wolf,&rdquo; which name was taken up with acclaim and all the women
+called him the Blessed Wolf.</p>
+<p>He tried to rise to his feet, and after several attempts fell down
+from weakness.&nbsp; He had lain so long that his muscles had lost their
+cunning, and all the strength had gone out of them.&nbsp; He felt a
+little shame because of his weakness, as though, forsooth, he were failing
+the gods in the service he owed them.&nbsp; Because of this he made
+heroic efforts to arise and at last he stood on his four legs, tottering
+and swaying back and forth.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;The Blessed Wolf!&rdquo; chorused the women.</p>
+<p>Judge Scott surveyed them triumphantly.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Out of your own mouths be it,&rdquo; he said.&nbsp; &ldquo;Just
+as I contended right along.&nbsp; No mere dog could have done what he
+did.&nbsp; He&rsquo;s a wolf.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;A Blessed Wolf,&rdquo; amended the Judge&rsquo;s wife.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Yes, Blessed Wolf,&rdquo; agreed the Judge.&nbsp; &ldquo;And
+henceforth that shall be my name for him.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;He&rsquo;ll have to learn to walk again,&rdquo; said the surgeon;
+&ldquo;so he might as well start in right now.&nbsp; It won&rsquo;t
+hurt him.&nbsp; Take him outside.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>And outside he went, like a king, with all Sierra Vista about him
+and tending on him.&nbsp; He was very weak, and when he reached the
+lawn he lay down and rested for a while.</p>
+<p>Then the procession started on, little spurts of strength coming
+into White Fang&rsquo;s muscles as he used them and the blood began
+to surge through them.&nbsp; The stables were reached, and there in
+the doorway, lay Collie, a half-dozen pudgy puppies playing about her
+in the sun.</p>
+<p>White Fang looked on with a wondering eye.&nbsp; Collie snarled warningly
+at him, and he was careful to keep his distance.&nbsp; The master with
+his toe helped one sprawling puppy toward him.&nbsp; He bristled suspiciously,
+but the master warned him that all was well.&nbsp; Collie, clasped in
+the arms of one of the women, watched him jealously and with a snarl
+warned him that all was not well.</p>
+<p>The puppy sprawled in front of him.&nbsp; He cocked his ears and
+watched it curiously.&nbsp; Then their noses touched, and he felt the
+warm little tongue of the puppy on his jowl.&nbsp; White Fang&rsquo;s
+tongue went out, he knew not why, and he licked the puppy&rsquo;s face.</p>
+<p>Hand-clapping and pleased cries from the gods greeted the performance.&nbsp;
+He was surprised, and looked at them in a puzzled way.&nbsp; Then his
+weakness asserted itself, and he lay down, his ears cocked, his head
+on one side, as he watched the puppy.&nbsp; The other puppies came sprawling
+toward him, to Collie&rsquo;s great disgust; and he gravely permitted
+them to clamber and tumble over him.&nbsp; At first, amid the applause
+of the gods, he betrayed a trifle of his old self-consciousness and
+awkwardness.&nbsp; This passed away as the puppies&rsquo; antics and
+mauling continued, and he lay with half-shut patient eyes, drowsing
+in the sun.</p>
+<div class="GutenbergBlankLines3"><br /><br /><br /></div>
+<p>*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK, WHITE FANG ***</p>
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