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Title: White Fang
Author: Jack London
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<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—THE TRAIL OF THE MEAT</h3>
<div class="GutenbergBlankLines2"><br /><br /></div>
<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—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—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,—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.</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>“They’re after us, Bill,” said the man at the front.</p>
<p>His voice sounded hoarse and unreal, and he had spoken with apparent
effort.</p>
<p>“Meat is scarce,” answered his comrade. “I
ain’t seen a rabbit sign for days.”</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>“Seems to me, Henry, they’re stayin’ remarkable
close to camp,” 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>“They know where their hides is safe,” he said.
“They’d sooner eat grub than be grub. They’re
pretty wise, them dogs.”</p>
<p>Bill shook his head. “Oh, I don’t know.”</p>
<p>His comrade looked at him curiously. “First time I ever
heard you say anything about their not bein’ wise.”</p>
<p>“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?”</p>
<p>“They did cut up more’n usual,” Henry acknowledged.</p>
<p>“How many dogs ’ve we got, Henry?”</p>
<p>“Six.”</p>
<p>“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.”</p>
<p>“You counted wrong.”</p>
<p>“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.”</p>
<p>“We’ve only got six dogs,” Henry said.</p>
<p>“Henry,” Bill went on. “I won’t say
they was all dogs, but there was seven of ’m that got fish.”</p>
<p>Henry stopped eating to glance across the fire and count the dogs.</p>
<p>“There’s only six now,” he said.</p>
<p>“I saw the other one run off across the snow,” Bill announced
with cool positiveness. “I saw seven.”</p>
<p>Henry looked at him commiseratingly, and said, “I’ll
be almighty glad when this trip’s over.”</p>
<p>“What d’ye mean by that?” Bill demanded.</p>
<p>“I mean that this load of ourn is gettin’ on your nerves,
an’ that you’re beginnin’ to see things.”</p>
<p>“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.”</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. He wiped his mouth
with the back of his hand and said:</p>
<p>“Then you’re thinkin’ as it was—”</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, “—one
of them?”</p>
<p>Bill nodded. “I’d a blame sight sooner think that
than anything else. You noticed yourself the row the dogs made.”</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>“I’m thinking you’re down in the mouth some,”
Henry said.</p>
<p>“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.”</p>
<p>He indicated the third person by a downward thrust of the thumb to
the box on which they sat.</p>
<p>“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.”</p>
<p>“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.”</p>
<p>“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.”</p>
<p>“He might have lived to a ripe old age if he’d stayed
at home,” 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>“Henry, it’s a blame misfortune to be out of ammunition.”</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 mocassins.</p>
<p>“How many cartridges did you say you had left?” he asked.</p>
<p>“Three,” came the answer. “An’ I wisht
’twas three hundred. Then I’d show ’em what
for, damn ’em!”</p>
<p>He shook his fist angrily at the gleaming eyes, and began securely
to prop his moccasins before the fire.</p>
<p>“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.”</p>
<p>Henry grunted and crawled into bed. As he dozed off he was
aroused by his comrade’s voice.</p>
<p>“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.”</p>
<p>“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.”</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>“Henry,” he said. “Oh, Henry.”</p>
<p>Henry groaned as he passed from sleep to waking, and demanded, “What’s
wrong now?”</p>
<p>“Nothin’,” came the answer; “only there’s
seven of ’em again. I just counted.”</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’clock; and in the darkness Henry went about preparing breakfast,
while Bill rolled the blankets and made the sled ready for lashing.</p>
<p>“Say, Henry,” he asked suddenly, “how many dogs
did you say we had?”</p>
<p>“Six.”</p>
<p>“Wrong,” Bill proclaimed triumphantly.</p>
<p>“Seven again?” Henry queried.</p>
<p>“No, five; one’s gone.”</p>
<p>“The hell!” Henry cried in wrath, leaving the cooking
to come and count the dogs.</p>
<p>“You’re right, Bill,” he concluded. “Fatty’s
gone.”</p>
<p>“An’ he went like greased lightnin’ once he got
started. Couldn’t ’ve seen ’m for smoke.”</p>
<p>“No chance at all,” Henry concluded. “They
jes’ swallowed ’m alive. I bet he was yelpin’
as he went down their throats, damn ’em!”</p>
<p>“He always was a fool dog,” said Bill.</p>
<p>“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.”</p>
<p>“Couldn’t drive ’em away from the fire with a club,”
Bill agreed. “I always did think there was somethin’
wrong with Fatty anyway.”</p>
<p>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.</p>
<div class="GutenbergBlankLines2"><br /><br /></div>
<h3>CHAPTER II—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. 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.</p>
<p>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.</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>“I wisht they’d strike game somewheres, an’ go
away an’ leave us alone.”</p>
<p>“They do get on the nerves horrible,” 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>“It got half of it,” he announced; “but I got a
whack at it jes’ the same. D’ye hear it squeal?”</p>
<p>“What’d it look like?” Henry asked.</p>
<p>“Couldn’t see. But it had four legs an’ a
mouth an’ hair an’ looked like any dog.”</p>
<p>“Must be a tame wolf, I reckon.”</p>
<p>“It’s damned tame, whatever it is, comin’ in here
at feedin’ time an’ gettin’ its whack of fish.”</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>“I wisht they’d spring up a bunch of moose or something,
an’ go away an’ leave us alone,” 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>“I wisht we was pullin’ into McGurry right now,”
he began again.</p>
<p>“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.”</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>“Hello!” Henry called. “What’s up now?”</p>
<p>“Frog’s gone,” came the answer.</p>
<p>“No.”</p>
<p>“I tell you yes.”</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>“Frog was the strongest dog of the bunch,” Bill pronounced
finally.</p>
<p>“An’ he was no fool dog neither,” 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>“There, that’ll fix you fool critters,” 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>“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.”</p>
<p>“You jes’ bet they will,” Bill affirmed.
“If one of em’ turns up missin’, I’ll go without
my coffee.”</p>
<p>“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?”</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’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>“Look at that, Bill,” 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>“That fool One Ear don’t seem scairt much,” Bill
said in a low tone.</p>
<p>“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.”</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>“Henry, I’m a-thinkin’,” Bill announced.</p>
<p>“Thinkin’ what?”</p>
<p>“I’m a-thinkin’ that was the one I lambasted with
the club.”</p>
<p>“Ain’t the slightest doubt in the world,” was Henry’s
response.</p>
<p>“An’ right here I want to remark,” Bill went on,
“that that animal’s familyarity with campfires is suspicious
an’ immoral.”</p>
<p>“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.”</p>
<p>“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.”</p>
<p>“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.”</p>
<p>“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.”</p>
<p>“But you’ve only got three cartridges,” Henry objected.</p>
<p>“I’ll wait for a dead sure shot,” was the reply.</p>
<p>In the morning Henry renewed the fire and cooked breakfast to the
accompaniment of his partner’s snoring.</p>
<p>“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.”</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’s
length and beside Henry.</p>
<p>“Say, Henry,” he chided gently, “ain’t you
forgot somethin’?”</p>
<p>Henry looked about with great carefulness and shook his head.
Bill held up the empty cup.</p>
<p>“You don’t get no coffee,” Henry announced.</p>
<p>“Ain’t run out?” Bill asked anxiously.</p>
<p>“Nope.”</p>
<p>“Ain’t thinkin’ it’ll hurt my digestion?”</p>
<p>“Nope.”</p>
<p>A flush of angry blood pervaded Bill’s face.</p>
<p>“Then it’s jes’ warm an’ anxious I am to
be hearin’ you explain yourself,” he said.</p>
<p>“Spanker’s gone,” 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>“How’d it happen?” he asked apathetically.</p>
<p>Henry shrugged his shoulders. “Don’t know.
Unless One Ear gnawed ’m loose. He couldn’t a-done
it himself, that’s sure.”</p>
<p>“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.”</p>
<p>“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.”</p>
<p>But Bill shook his head.</p>
<p>“Go on,” Henry pleaded, elevating the pot.</p>
<p>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.”</p>
<p>“It’s darn good coffee,” 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>“I’ll tie ’em up out of reach of each other to-night,”
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’s snowshoes.</p>
<p>“Mebbe you’ll need that in your business,” Henry
said.</p>
<p>Bill uttered an exclamation. It was all that was left of Spanker—the
stick with which he had been tied.</p>
<p>“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.”</p>
<p>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.”</p>
<p>“I don’t know, I don’t know,” Bill muttered
ominously.</p>
<p>“Well, you’ll know all right when we pull into McGurry.”</p>
<p>“I ain’t feelin’ special enthusiastic,” Bill
persisted.</p>
<p>“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.”</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’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.</p>
<p>It was just after the sun’s futile effort to appear, that Bill
slipped the rifle from under the sled-lashings and said:</p>
<p>“You keep right on, Henry, I’m goin’ to see what
I can see.”</p>
<p>“You’d better stick by the sled,” his partner protested.
“You’ve only got three cartridges, an’ there’s
no tellin’ what might happen.”</p>
<p>“Who’s croaking now?” 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>“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.”</p>
<p>“You mean they <i>think</i> they’re sure of us,”
Henry objected pointedly.</p>
<p>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.”</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>“It’s the she-wolf,” Bill answered.</p>
<p>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.</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>“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.”</p>
<p>“Kind of strange colour for a wolf,” was Bill’s
criticism. “I never seen a red wolf before. Looks
almost cinnamon to me.”</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—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>“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.”</p>
<p>“Hello, you husky!” he called. “Come here,
you whatever-your-name-is.”</p>
<p>“Ain’t a bit scairt of you,” 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>“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?”</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>“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.”</p>
<p>“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.”</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>“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.”</p>
<p>“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.”</p>
<p>“They’ve got away with better men than you an’
me,” Bill answered.</p>
<p>“Oh, shet up your croakin’. You make me all-fired
tired.”</p>
<p>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.”</p>
<div class="GutenbergBlankLines2"><br /><br /></div>
<h3>CHAPTER III—THE HUNGER CRY</h3>
<div class="GutenbergBlankLines2"><br /><br /></div>
<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>“Here, you, One Ear!” 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’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>“Where are you goin’?” Henry suddenly demanded,
laying his hand on his partner’s arm.</p>
<p>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.”</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>“Say, Bill!” Henry called after him. “Be
careful! Don’t take no chances!”</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’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.</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 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.
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.</p>
<p>“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.</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 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.</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—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>“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.</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>“I guess you can come an’ get me any time,” he
mumbled. “Anyway, I’m goin’ to sleep.”</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—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>“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. . . . ”</p>
<p>“Where’s Lord Alfred?” one of the men bellowed
in his ear, shaking him roughly.</p>
<p>He shook his head slowly. “No, she didn’t eat him.
. . . He’s roostin’ in a tree at the last camp.”</p>
<p>“Dead?” the man shouted.</p>
<p>“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.”</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 class="GutenbergBlankLines3"><br /><br /><br /></div>
<h2>PART II</h2>
<div class="GutenbergBlankLines3"><br /><br /><br /></div>
<h3>CHAPTER I—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’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—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.</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—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 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.</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—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—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—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.</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’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.</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’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—a knowledge destined to stand him in good stead
in the days to come.</p>
<div class="GutenbergBlankLines2"><br /><br /></div>
<h3>CHAPTER II—THE LAIR</h3>
<div class="GutenbergBlankLines2"><br /><br /></div>
<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’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—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.</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—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 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.</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—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’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—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 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.</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—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.</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’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 class="GutenbergBlankLines2"><br /><br /></div>
<h3>CHAPTER III—THE GREY CUB</h3>
<div class="GutenbergBlankLines2"><br /><br /></div>
<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—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.</p>
<p>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.</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—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’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.</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)—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—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’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’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’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.</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’s sake, would venture
the left fork, and the lair in the rocks, and the lynx’s wrath.</p>
<div class="GutenbergBlankLines2"><br /><br /></div>
<h3>CHAPTER IV—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.
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.</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’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—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’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.</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—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—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’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’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’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—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’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.</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—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,</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—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’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’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
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.</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’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.</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’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 class="GutenbergBlankLines2"><br /><br /></div>
<h3>CHAPTER V—THE LAW OF MEAT</h3>
<div class="GutenbergBlankLines2"><br /><br /></div>
<p>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.</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’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’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’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.</p>
<p>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.</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’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’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.</p>
<p>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.</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—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—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 class="GutenbergBlankLines3"><br /><br /><br /></div>
<h2>PART III</h2>
<div class="GutenbergBlankLines3"><br /><br /><br /></div>
<h3>CHAPTER I—THE MAKERS OF FIRE</h3>
<div class="GutenbergBlankLines2"><br /><br /></div>
<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—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.</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, “<i>Wabam
wabisca ip pit tah</i>.” (“Look! The white fangs!”)</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—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.</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. “Kiche!”
was what he uttered. It was an exclamation of surprise.
The cub felt his mother wilting at the sound.</p>
<p>“Kiche!” 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>“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.”</p>
<p>“It is a year, Grey Beaver, since she ran away,” spoke
a second Indian.</p>
<p>“It is not strange, Salmon Tongue,” Grey Beaver answered.
“It was the time of the famine, and there was no meat for the
dogs.”</p>
<p>“She has lived with the wolves,” said a third Indian.</p>
<p>“So it would seem, Three Eagles,” Grey Beaver answered,
lying his hand on the cub; “and this be the sign of it.”</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>“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?”</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’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.</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—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—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’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.</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’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’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.</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’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’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-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.</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’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.</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’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.</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’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—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’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—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 class="GutenbergBlankLines2"><br /><br /></div>
<h3>CHAPTER II—THE BONDAGE</h3>
<div class="GutenbergBlankLines2"><br /><br /></div>
<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’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.</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’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’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.
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.</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’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’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’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—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’ 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’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’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.</p>
<p>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.</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’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 class="GutenbergBlankLines2"><br /><br /></div>
<h3>CHAPTER III—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. 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’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—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.</p>
<p>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.</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—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.</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’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.</p>
<p>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.</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’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’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—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 class="GutenbergBlankLines2"><br /><br /></div>
<h3>CHAPTER IV—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. 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’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.</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’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—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’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.</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—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’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.</p>
<div class="GutenbergBlankLines2"><br /><br /></div>
<h3>CHAPTER V—THE COVENANT</h3>
<div class="GutenbergBlankLines2"><br /><br /></div>
<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’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’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.</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’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.</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—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—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.</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</i> <i>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’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’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’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’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’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’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’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.</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’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’s
property, defended his body, worked for him, and obeyed him.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<div class="GutenbergBlankLines2"><br /><br /></div>
<h3>CHAPTER VI—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. 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—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.</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’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’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—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’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 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.</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—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’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—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’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’ 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’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’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.</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’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.</p>
<div class="GutenbergBlankLines3"><br /><br /><br /></div>
<h2>PART IV</h2>
<div class="GutenbergBlankLines3"><br /><br /><br /></div>
<h3>CHAPTER I—THE ENEMY OF HIS KIND</h3>
<div class="GutenbergBlankLines2"><br /><br /></div>
<p>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.</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’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.</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—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’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.</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’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—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.</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—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.</p>
<p>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.</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—another manifestation
of power that sank deep into White Fang’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’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—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’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’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 class="GutenbergBlankLines2"><br /><br /></div>
<h3>CHAPTER II—THE MAD GOD</h3>
<div class="GutenbergBlankLines2"><br /><br /></div>
<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’
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’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 “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.”</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’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.</p>
<p>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.</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’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’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’s ears were more eager to hear.</p>
<p>“You ketch um dog you take um all right,” was his last
word.</p>
<p>The bottles were delivered, but after two days. “You
ketch um dog,” were Beauty Smith’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’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’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’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’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—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’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’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.</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’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.</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’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 class="GutenbergBlankLines2"><br /><br /></div>
<h3>CHAPTER III—THE REIGN OF HATE</h3>
<div class="GutenbergBlankLines2"><br /><br /></div>
<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’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’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’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 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.</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 “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.</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’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 “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.</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—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.</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’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—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 class="GutenbergBlankLines2"><br /><br /></div>
<h3>CHAPTER IV—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. 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.</p>
<p>There were cries from the crowd of, “Go to him, Cherokee!
Sick ’m, Cherokee! Eat ’m up!”</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’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—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’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’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’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.</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—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’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.</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’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’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’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’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.</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’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.</p>
<p>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.</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 “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.</p>
<p>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.</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’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.</p>
<p>“You cowards!” he cried. “You beasts!”</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>“Come on, Matt, lend a hand,” 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’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!”</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>“You damn beasts!” he finally exploded, and went back
to his task.</p>
<p>“It’s no use, Mr. Scott, you can’t break ’m
apart that way,” Matt said at last.</p>
<p>The pair paused and surveyed the locked dogs.</p>
<p>“Ain’t bleedin’ much,” Matt announced.
“Ain’t got all the way in yet.”</p>
<p>“But he’s liable to any moment,” Scott answered.
“There, did you see that! He shifted his grip in a bit.”</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>“Won’t some of you help?” 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>“You’ll have to get a pry,” 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’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>“Don’t break them teeth, stranger.”</p>
<p>“Then I’ll break his neck,” Scott retorted, continuing
his shoving and wedging with the revolver muzzle.</p>
<p>“I said don’t break them teeth,” 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>“Your dog?”</p>
<p>The faro-dealer grunted.</p>
<p>“Then get in here and break this grip.”</p>
<p>“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.”</p>
<p>“Then get out of the way,” was the reply, “and
don’t bother me. I’m busy.”</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’s mangled neck.</p>
<p>“Stand by to receive your dog,” was Scott’s peremptory
order to Cherokee’s owner.</p>
<p>The faro-dealer stooped down obediently and got a firm hold on Cherokee.</p>
<p>“Now!” Scott warned, giving the final pry.</p>
<p>The dogs were drawn apart, the bull-dog struggling vigorously.</p>
<p>“Take him away,” 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>“Just about all in,” he announced; “but he’s
breathin’ all right.”</p>
<p>Beauty Smith had regained his feet and come over to look at White
Fang.</p>
<p>“Matt, how much is a good sled-dog worth?” Scott asked.</p>
<p>The dog-musher, still on his knees and stooped over White Fang, calculated
for a moment.</p>
<p>“Three hundred dollars,” he answered.</p>
<p>“And how much for one that’s all chewed up like this
one?” Scott asked, nudging White Fang with his foot.</p>
<p>“Half of that,” was the dog-musher’s judgment.
Scott turned upon Beauty Smith.</p>
<p>“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.”</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>“I ain’t a-sellin’,” he said.</p>
<p>“Oh, yes you are,” the other assured him. “Because
I’m buying. Here’s your money. The dog’s
mine.”</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>“I’ve got my rights,” he whimpered.</p>
<p>“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?”</p>
<p>“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.”</p>
<p>“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.”</p>
<p>“Wait till I get back to Dawson,” Beauty Smith threatened.
“I’ll have the law on you.”</p>
<p>“If you open your mouth when you get back to Dawson, I’ll
have you run out of town. Understand?”</p>
<p>Beauty Smith replied with a grunt.</p>
<p>“Understand?” the other thundered with abrupt fierceness.</p>
<p>“Yes,” Beauty Smith grunted, shrinking away.</p>
<p>“Yes what?”</p>
<p>“Yes, sir,” Beauty Smith snarled.</p>
<p>“Look out! He’ll bite!” 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>“Who’s that mug?” he asked.</p>
<p>“Weedon Scott,” some one answered.</p>
<p>“And who in hell is Weedon Scott?” the faro-dealer demanded.</p>
<p>“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.”</p>
<p>“I thought he must be somebody,” was the faro-dealer’s
comment. “That’s why I kept my hands offen him at
the start.”</p>
<div class="GutenbergBlankLines2"><br /><br /></div>
<h3>CHAPTER V—THE INDOMITABLE</h3>
<div class="GutenbergBlankLines2"><br /><br /></div>
<p>“It’s hopeless,” 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>“It’s a wolf and there’s no taming it,” Weedon
Scott announced.</p>
<p>“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.”</p>
<p>The dog-musher paused and nodded his head confidentially at Moosehide
Mountain.</p>
<p>“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?”</p>
<p>The dog-musher indicated White Fang with a backward thrust of his
thumb.</p>
<p>“Wolf or dog, it’s all the same—he’s ben
tamed ’ready.”</p>
<p>“No!”</p>
<p>“I tell you yes, an’ broke to harness. Look close
there. D’ye see them marks across the chest?”</p>
<p>“You’re right, Matt. He was a sled-dog before Beauty
Smith got hold of him.”</p>
<p>“And there’s not much reason against his bein’
a sled-dog again.”</p>
<p>“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.”</p>
<p>“Give ’m a chance,” Matt counselled. “Turn
’m loose for a spell.”</p>
<p>The other looked at him incredulously.</p>
<p>“Yes,” Matt went on, “I know you’ve tried
to, but you didn’t take a club.”</p>
<p>“You try it then.”</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>“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.”</p>
<p>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.</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>“Won’t he run away?” his new owner asked.</p>
<p>Matt shrugged his shoulders. “Got to take a gamble.
Only way to find out is to find out.”</p>
<p>“Poor devil,” Scott murmured pityingly. “What
he needs is some show of human kindness,” 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>“Hi-yu, Major!” 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>“It’s too bad, but it served him right,” Scott
said hastily.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>“He got me all right,” he announced, pointing to the
torn trousers and undercloths, and the growing stain of red.</p>
<p>“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.”</p>
<p>As he talked, with reluctant movements he drew his revolver, threw
open the cylinder, and assured himself of its contents.</p>
<p>“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.”</p>
<p>“Look at Major,” 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>“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.”</p>
<p>“But look at yourself, Matt. It’s all right about
the dogs, but we must draw the line somewhere.”</p>
<p>“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.”</p>
<p>“It would be a mercy to kill him,” Scott insisted.
“He’s untamable.”</p>
<p>“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!”</p>
<p>“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.”</p>
<p>He walked over to White Fang and began talking to him gently and
soothingly.</p>
<p>“Better have a club handy,” Matt warned.</p>
<p>Scott shook his head and went on trying to win White Fang’s
confidence.</p>
<p>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.</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>“Here! What are you doing?” Scott cried suddenly.</p>
<p>Matt had dashed into the cabin and come out with a rifle.</p>
<p>“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.”</p>
<p>“No you don’t!”</p>
<p>“Yes I do. Watch me.”</p>
<p>As Matt had pleaded for White Fang when he had been bitten, it was
now Weedon Scott’s turn to plead.</p>
<p>“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!”</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>“Well, I’ll be everlastingly gosh-swoggled!” was
the dog-musher’s expression of astonishment.</p>
<p>“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.”</p>
<p>“All right, I’m willin’,” Matt agreed, leaning
the rifle against the woodpile</p>
<p>“But will you look at that!” he exclaimed the next moment.</p>
<p>White Fang had quieted down and ceased snarling. “This
is worth investigatin’. Watch.”</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>“Now, just for fun.”</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>The dog-musher put the rifle down solemnly, then turned and looked
at his employer.</p>
<p>“I agree with you, Mr. Scott. That dog’s too intelligent
to kill.”</p>
<div class="GutenbergBlankLines2"><br /><br /></div>
<h3>CHAPTER VI—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. 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’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.</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’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—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’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’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>“Well, I’ll be gosh-swoggled!”</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>“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.”</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’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>“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.”</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—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’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’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’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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</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—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.</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’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—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.</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’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’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—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.</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’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>“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.”</p>
<p>A recrudescence of anger glinted in Weedon Scott’s grey eyes,
and he muttered savagely, “The beast!”</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’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>“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.”</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>“Where’s the wolf?” 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>“Holy smoke!” Matt exclaimed. “Look at ’m
wag his tail!”</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>“He never looked at me that way all the time you was gone!”
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—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, 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.</p>
<p>The two men looked at each other. Scott’s eyes were shining.</p>
<p>“Gosh!” said Matt in an awe-stricken voice.</p>
<p>A moment later, when he had recovered himself, he said, “I
always insisted that wolf was a dog. Look at ’m!”</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>“Talk about your rough-houses,” Matt murmured gleefully,
standing in the doorway and looking on.</p>
<p>“Give ’m hell, you wolf! Give ’m hell!—an’
then some!”</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: “I put myself into
thy hands. Work thou thy will with me.”</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>“The wolf’s nailed somebody,” Matt said.</p>
<p>A wild scream of fear and anguish hastened them.</p>
<p>“Bring a light!” 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’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’s benefit—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’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>“Tried to steal you, eh? And you wouldn’t have
it! Well, well, he made a mistake, didn’t he?”</p>
<p>“Must ‘a’ thought he had hold of seventeen devils,”
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—THE LONG TRAIL</h3>
<div class="GutenbergBlankLines2"><br /><br /></div>
<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>“Listen to that, will you!” the dug-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>“I do believe that wolf’s on to you,” 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>“What the devil can I do with a wolf in California?”
he demanded.</p>
<p>“That’s what I say,” Matt answered. “What
the devil can you do with a wolf in California?”</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>“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.”</p>
<p>“He’s a downright murderer, I know,” was the dog-musher’s
comment.</p>
<p>Weedon Scott looked at him suspiciously.</p>
<p>“It would never do,” he said decisively.</p>
<p>“It would never do!” Matt concurred. “Why
you’d have to hire a man ’specially to take care of ’m.”</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>“There’s no denyin’ he thinks a hell of a lot of
you,” Matt said.</p>
<p>The other glared at him in sudden wrath. “Damn it all,
man! I know my own mind and what’s best!”</p>
<p>“I’m agreein’ with you, only . . . ”</p>
<p>“Only what?” Scott snapped out.</p>
<p>“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.”</p>
<p>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.”</p>
<p>“Why, it would be rank ridiculousness for me to take that dog
along,” he broke out after another pause.</p>
<p>“I’m agreein’ with you,” was Matt’s
answer, and again his employer was not quite satisfied with him.</p>
<p>“But how in the name of the great Sardanapolis he knows you’re
goin’ is what gets me,” the dog-musher continued innocently.</p>
<p>“It’s beyond me, Matt,” 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’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>“He’s gone off his food again,” Matt remarked from
his bunk.</p>
<p>There was a grunt from Weedon Scott’s bunk, and a stir of blankets.</p>
<p>“From the way he cut up the other time you went away, I wouldn’t
wonder this time but what he died.”</p>
<p>The blankets in the other bunk stirred irritably.</p>
<p>“Oh, shut up!” Scott cried out through the darkness.
“You nag worse than a woman.”</p>
<p>“I’m agreein’ with you,” 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’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.</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>“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.”</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’s arm and body.</p>
<p>“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!”</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>“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.”</p>
<p>“Sure,” the dog-musher answered. “But listen
to that, will you!”</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’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,</p>
<p>The dog-musher swore softly, in awe-stricken accents. Scott
could only look in wonder.</p>
<p>“Did you lock the front door?” Matt demanded. The
other nodded, and asked, “How about the back?”</p>
<p>“You just bet I did,” was the fervent reply.</p>
<p>White Fang flattened his ears ingratiatingly, but remained where
he was, making no attempt to approach.</p>
<p>“I’ll have to take ’m ashore with me.”</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’s efforts to capture
him.</p>
<p>But when the love-master spoke, White Fang came to him with prompt
obedience.</p>
<p>“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.”</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’s belly.</p>
<p>“We plump forgot the window. He’s all cut an’
gouged underneath. Must ‘a’ butted clean through it,
b’gosh!”</p>
<p>But Weedon Scott was not listening. He was thinking rapidly.
The <i>Aurora’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’s.
Scott grasped the dog-musher’s hand.</p>
<p>“Good-bye, Matt, old man. About the wolf-you needn’t
write. You see, I’ve . . . !”</p>
<p>“What!” the dog-musher exploded. “You don’t
mean to say . . .?”</p>
<p>“The very thing I mean. Here’s your bandana.
I’ll write to you about him.”</p>
<p>Matt paused halfway down the gang-plank.</p>
<p>“He’ll never stand the climate!” he shouted back.
“Unless you clip ’m in warm weather!”</p>
<p>The gang-plank was hauled in, and the <i>Aurora</i> swang 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>“Now growl, damn you, growl,” he said, as he patted the
responsive head and rubbed the flattening ears.</p>
<div class="GutenbergBlankLines2"><br /><br /></div>
<h3>CHAPTER II—THE SOUTHLAND</h3>
<div class="GutenbergBlankLines2"><br /><br /></div>
<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—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. 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—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’s canvas clothes-bags alongside of him,
and proceeded to mount guard over them.</p>
<p>“‘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.”</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’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.</p>
<p>“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.”</p>
<p>“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.</p>
<p>She looked at White Fang, who snarled and bristled and glared malevolently.</p>
<p>“He’ll have to learn, and he shall, without postponement,”
Scott said.</p>
<p>He spoke softly to White Fang until he had quieted him, then his
voice became firm.</p>
<p>“Down, sir! Down with you!”</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>“Now, mother.”</p>
<p>Scott opened his arms to her, but kept his eyes on White Fang.</p>
<p>“Down!” he warned. “Down!”</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>“Here, Collie!” called the strange man in the carriage.</p>
<p>Weedon Scott laughed.</p>
<p>“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.”</p>
<p>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.</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’s soft throat.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>The next moment the master arrived, and with one hand held White
Fang, while the father called off the dogs.</p>
<p>“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.”</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’s legs and received reassuring
pats on the head.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>“Take Collie inside and leave the two of them to fight it out,”
suggested Scott’s father. “After that they’ll
be friends.”</p>
<p>“Then White Fang, to show his friendship, will have to be chief
mourner at the funeral,” laughed the master.</p>
<p>The elder Scott looked incredulously, first at White Fang, then at
Dick, and finally at his son.</p>
<p>“You mean . . .?”</p>
<p>Weedon nodded his head. “I mean just that. You’d
have a dead Dick inside one minute—two minutes at the farthest.”</p>
<p>He turned to White Fang. “Come on, you wolf. It’s
you that’ll have to come inside.”</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’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—THE GOD’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. 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.</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’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.</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’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’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’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’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.</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’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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</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’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’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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>“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.”</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’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.</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’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.</p>
<p>“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.</p>
<p>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.”</p>
<p>“But think of the chickens,” objected the judge.</p>
<p>“And furthermore,” the son went on, “for every
chicken he kills, I’ll pay you one dollar gold coin of the realm.”</p>
<p>“But you should penalise father, too,” 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>“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.’”</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’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.”</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—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—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.</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>“Go to it,” 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. “Go to them, old fellow.
Eat them up.”</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 class="GutenbergBlankLines2"><br /><br /></div>
<h3>CHAPTER IV—THE CALL OF KIND</h3>
<div class="GutenbergBlankLines2"><br /><br /></div>
<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’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.</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. “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.</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 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.</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’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’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.</p>
<p>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.</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’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.</p>
<p>“Home! Go home!” 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>“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!”</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>“Go home!” 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>“Weedon’s back,” Weedon’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>“I confess, he makes me nervous around the children,”
she said. “I have a dread that he will turn upon them unexpectedly
some day.”</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>“A wolf is a wolf!” commented Judge Scott. “There
is no trusting one.”</p>
<p>“But he is not all wolf,” interposed Beth, standing for
her brother in his absence.</p>
<p>“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—”</p>
<p>He did not finish his sentence. White Fang stood before him,
growling fiercely.</p>
<p>“Go away! Lie down, sir!” Judge Scott commanded.</p>
<p>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.</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>“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.”</p>
<p>“He’s trying to speak, I do believe,” Beth announced.</p>
<p>At this moment speech came to White Fang, rushing up in a great burst
of barking.</p>
<p>“Something has happened to Weedon,” 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’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’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.</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 class="GutenbergBlankLines2"><br /><br /></div>
<h3>CHAPTER V—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. 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.</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. 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.</p>
<p>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.</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—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 “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.</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’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’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.</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’s dearest possessions. White Fang bristled,
but waited. The strange god’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’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.</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’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’s face upward. A gaping throat explained
the manner of his death.</p>
<p>“Jim Hall,” 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>“He’s all in, poor devil,” muttered the master.</p>
<p>“We’ll see about that,” asserted the Judge, as
he started for the telephone.</p>
<p>“Frankly, he has one chance in a thousand,” 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>“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.”</p>
<p>“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.”</p>
<p>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.”</p>
<p>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.</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’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
“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.</p>
<p>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.</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’s wife called him the “Blessed
Wolf,” 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>“The Blessed Wolf!” chorused the women.</p>
<p>Judge Scott surveyed them triumphantly.</p>
<p>“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.”</p>
<p>“A Blessed Wolf,” amended the Judge’s wife.</p>
<p>“Yes, Blessed Wolf,” agreed the Judge. “And
henceforth that shall be my name for him.”</p>
<p>“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.”</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’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’s
tongue went out, he knew not why, and he licked the puppy’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’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.</p>
<div class="GutenbergBlankLines3"><br /><br /><br /></div>
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