CHAPTER II THE SHE-WOLF
CHAPTER III THE HUNGER CRY
PART II
CHAPTER I THE BATTLE OF THE FANGS
CHAPTER II THE LAIR
CHAPTER III THE GREY CUB
CHAPTER IV THE WALL OF THE WORLD
CHAPTER V THE LAW OF MEAT
PART III
CHAPTER I THE MAKERS OF FIRE
CHAPTER II THE BONDAGE
CHAPTER III THE OUTCAST
CHAPTER IV THE TRAIL OF THE GODS
CHAPTER V THE COVENANT
CHAPTER VI THE FAMINE
PART IV
CHAPTER I THE ENEMY OF HIS KIND
CHAPTER II THE MAD GOD
CHAPTER III THE REIGN OF HATE
CHAPTER IV THE CLINGING DEATH
CHAPTER V THE INDOMITABLE
CHAPTER VI THE LOVE-MASTER
PART V
CHAPTER I THE LONG TRAIL
CHAPTER II THE SOUTHLAND
CHAPTER III THE GOD’S DOMAIN
CHAPTER IV THE CALL OF KIND
CHAPTER V THE SLEEPING WOLF
PART I
CHAPTER I
THE TRAIL OF THE MEAT
Dark spruce forest frowned on either side the frozen waterway. The
trees had been stripped by a recent wind of their white covering of
frost, and they seemed to lean towards each other, black and ominous,
in the fading light. A vast silence reigned over the land. The land
itself was a desolation, lifeless, without movement, so lone and cold
that the spirit of it was not even that of sadness. There was a hint in
it of laughter, but of a laughter more terrible than any sadness—a
laughter that was mirthless as the smile of the sphinx, a laughter cold
as the frost and partaking of the grimness of infallibility. It was the
masterful and incommunicable wisdom of eternity laughing at the
futility of life and the effort of life. It was the Wild, the savage,
frozen-hearted Northland Wild.
But there _was_ life, abroad in the land and defiant. Down the frozen
waterway toiled a string of wolfish dogs. Their bristly fur was rimed
with frost. Their breath froze in the air as it left their mouths,
spouting forth in spumes of vapour that settled upon the hair of their
bodies and formed into crystals of frost. Leather harness was on the
dogs, and leather traces attached them to a sled which dragged along
behind. The sled was without runners. It was made of stout birch-bark,
and its full surface rested on the snow. The front end of the sled was
turned up, like a scroll, in order to force down and under the bore of
soft snow that surged like a wave before it. On the sled, securely
lashed, was a long and narrow oblong box. There were other things on
the sled—blankets, an axe, and a coffee-pot and frying-pan; but
prominent, occupying most of the space, was the long and narrow oblong
box.
In advance of the dogs, on wide snowshoes, toiled a man. At the rear of
the sled toiled a second man. On the sled, in the box, lay a third man
whose toil was over,—a man whom the Wild had conquered and beaten down
until he would never move nor struggle again. It is not the way of the
Wild to like movement. Life is an offence to it, for life is movement;
and the Wild aims always to destroy movement. It freezes the water to
prevent it running to the sea; it drives the sap out of the trees till
they are frozen to their mighty hearts; and most ferociously and
terribly of all does the Wild harry and crush into submission man—man
who is the most restless of life, ever in revolt against the dictum
that all movement must in the end come to the cessation of movement.
But at front and rear, unawed and indomitable, toiled the two men who
were not yet dead. Their bodies were covered with fur and soft-tanned
leather. Eyelashes and cheeks and lips were so coated with the crystals
from their frozen breath that their faces were not discernible. This
gave them the seeming of ghostly masques, undertakers in a spectral
world at the funeral of some ghost. But under it all they were men,
penetrating the land of desolation and mockery and silence, puny
adventurers bent on colossal adventure, pitting themselves against the
might of a world as remote and alien and pulseless as the abysses of
space.
They travelled on without speech, saving their breath for the work of
their bodies. On every side was the silence, pressing upon them with a
tangible presence. It affected their minds as the many atmospheres of
deep water affect the body of the diver. It crushed them with the
weight of unending vastness and unalterable decree. It crushed them
into the remotest recesses of their own minds, pressing out of them,
like juices from the grape, all the false ardours and exaltations and
undue self-values of the human soul, until they perceived themselves
finite and small, specks and motes, moving with weak cunning and little
wisdom amidst the play and inter-play of the great blind elements and
forces.
An hour went by, and a second hour. The pale light of the short sunless
day was beginning to fade, when a faint far cry arose on the still air.
It soared upward with a swift rush, till it reached its topmost note,
where it persisted, palpitant and tense, and then slowly died away. It
might have been a lost soul wailing, had it not been invested with a
certain sad fierceness and hungry eagerness. The front man turned his
head until his eyes met the eyes of the man behind. And then, across
the narrow oblong box, each nodded to the other.
A second cry arose, piercing the silence with needle-like shrillness.
Both men located the sound. It was to the rear, somewhere in the snow
expanse they had just traversed. A third and answering cry arose, also
to the rear and to the left of the second cry.
“They’re after us, Bill,” said the man at the front.
His voice sounded hoarse and unreal, and he had spoken with apparent
effort.
“Meat is scarce,” answered his comrade. “I ain’t seen a rabbit sign for
days.”
Thereafter they spoke no more, though their ears were keen for the
hunting-cries that continued to rise behind them.
At the fall of darkness they swung the dogs into a cluster of spruce
trees on the edge of the waterway and made a camp. The coffin, at the
side of the fire, served for seat and table. The wolf-dogs, clustered
on the far side of the fire, snarled and bickered among themselves, but
evinced no inclination to stray off into the darkness.
“Seems to me, Henry, they’re stayin’ remarkable close to camp,” Bill
commented.
Henry, squatting over the fire and settling the pot of coffee with a
piece of ice, nodded. Nor did he speak till he had taken his seat on
the coffin and begun to eat.
“They know where their hides is safe,” he said. “They’d sooner eat grub
than be grub. They’re pretty wise, them dogs.”
Bill shook his head. “Oh, I don’t know.”
His comrade looked at him curiously. “First time I ever heard you say
anything about their not bein’ wise.”
“Henry,” said the other, munching with deliberation the beans he was
eating, “did you happen to notice the way them dogs kicked up when I
was a-feedin’ ’em?”
“They did cut up more’n usual,” Henry acknowledged.
“How many dogs ’ve we got, Henry?”
“Six.”
“Well, Henry . . . ” Bill stopped for a moment, in order that his words
might gain greater significance. “As I was sayin’, Henry, we’ve got six
dogs. I took six fish out of the bag. I gave one fish to each dog, an’,
Henry, I was one fish short.”
“You counted wrong.”
“We’ve got six dogs,” the other reiterated dispassionately. “I took out
six fish. One Ear didn’t get no fish. I came back to the bag afterward
an’ got ’m his fish.”
“We’ve only got six dogs,” Henry said.
“Henry,” Bill went on. “I won’t say they was all dogs, but there was
seven of ’m that got fish.”
Henry stopped eating to glance across the fire and count the dogs.
“There’s only six now,” he said.
“I saw the other one run off across the snow,” Bill announced with cool
positiveness. “I saw seven.”
Henry looked at him commiseratingly, and said, “I’ll be almighty glad
when this trip’s over.”
“What d’ye mean by that?” Bill demanded.
“I mean that this load of ourn is gettin’ on your nerves, an’ that
you’re beginnin’ to see things.”
“I thought of that,” Bill answered gravely. “An’ so, when I saw it run
off across the snow, I looked in the snow an’ saw its tracks. Then I
counted the dogs an’ there was still six of ’em. The tracks is there in
the snow now. D’ye want to look at ’em? I’ll show ’em to you.”
Henry did not reply, but munched on in silence, until, the meal
finished, he topped it with a final cup of coffee. He wiped his mouth
with the back of his hand and said:
“Then you’re thinkin’ as it was—”
A long wailing cry, fiercely sad, from somewhere in the darkness, had
interrupted him. He stopped to listen to it, then he finished his
sentence with a wave of his hand toward the sound of the cry, “—one of
them?”
Bill nodded. “I’d a blame sight sooner think that than anything else.
You noticed yourself the row the dogs made.”
Cry after cry, and answering cries, were turning the silence into a
bedlam. From every side the cries arose, and the dogs betrayed their
fear by huddling together and so close to the fire that their hair was
scorched by the heat. Bill threw on more wood, before lighting his
pipe.
“I’m thinking you’re down in the mouth some,” Henry said.
“Henry . . . ” He sucked meditatively at his pipe for some time before
he went on. “Henry, I was a-thinkin’ what a blame sight luckier he is
than you an’ me’ll ever be.”
He indicated the third person by a downward thrust of the thumb to the
box on which they sat.
“You an’ me, Henry, when we die, we’ll be lucky if we get enough stones
over our carcases to keep the dogs off of us.”
“But we ain’t got people an’ money an’ all the rest, like him,” Henry
rejoined. “Long-distance funerals is somethin’ you an’ me can’t exactly
afford.”
“What gets me, Henry, is what a chap like this, that’s a lord or
something in his own country, and that’s never had to bother about grub
nor blankets; why he comes a-buttin’ round the Godforsaken ends of the
earth—that’s what I can’t exactly see.”
“He might have lived to a ripe old age if he’d stayed at home,” Henry
agreed.
Bill opened his mouth to speak, but changed his mind. Instead, he
pointed towards the wall of darkness that pressed about them from every
side. There was no suggestion of form in the utter blackness; only
could be seen a pair of eyes gleaming like live coals. Henry indicated
with his head a second pair, and a third. A circle of the gleaming eyes
had drawn about their camp. Now and again a pair of eyes moved, or
disappeared to appear again a moment later.
The unrest of the dogs had been increasing, and they stampeded, in a
surge of sudden fear, to the near side of the fire, cringing and
crawling about the legs of the men. In the scramble one of the dogs had
been overturned on the edge of the fire, and it had yelped with pain
and fright as the smell of its singed coat possessed the air. The
commotion caused the circle of eyes to shift restlessly for a moment
and even to withdraw a bit, but it settled down again as the dogs
became quiet.
“Henry, it’s a blame misfortune to be out of ammunition.”
Bill had finished his pipe and was helping his companion to spread the
bed of fur and blanket upon the spruce boughs which he had laid over
the snow before supper. Henry grunted, and began unlacing his
moccasins.
“How many cartridges did you say you had left?” he asked.
“Three,” came the answer. “An’ I wisht ’twas three hundred. Then I’d
show ’em what for, damn ’em!”
He shook his fist angrily at the gleaming eyes, and began securely to
prop his moccasins before the fire.
“An’ I wisht this cold snap’d break,” he went on. “It’s ben fifty below
for two weeks now. An’ I wisht I’d never started on this trip, Henry. I
don’t like the looks of it. I don’t feel right, somehow. An’ while I’m
wishin’, I wisht the trip was over an’ done with, an’ you an’ me
a-sittin’ by the fire in Fort McGurry just about now an’ playing
cribbage—that’s what I wisht.”
Henry grunted and crawled into bed. As he dozed off he was aroused by
his comrade’s voice.
“Say, Henry, that other one that come in an’ got a fish—why didn’t the
dogs pitch into it? That’s what’s botherin’ me.”
“You’re botherin’ too much, Bill,” came the sleepy response. “You was
never like this before. You jes’ shut up now, an’ go to sleep, an’
you’ll be all hunkydory in the mornin’. Your stomach’s sour, that’s
what’s botherin’ you.”
The men slept, breathing heavily, side by side, under the one covering.
The fire died down, and the gleaming eyes drew closer the circle they
had flung about the camp. The dogs clustered together in fear, now and
again snarling menacingly as a pair of eyes drew close. Once their
uproar became so loud that Bill woke up. He got out of bed carefully,
so as not to disturb the sleep of his comrade, and threw more wood on
the fire. As it began to flame up, the circle of eyes drew farther
back. He glanced casually at the huddling dogs. He rubbed his eyes and
looked at them more sharply. Then he crawled back into the blankets.
“Henry,” he said. “Oh, Henry.”
Henry groaned as he passed from sleep to waking, and demanded, “What’s
wrong now?”
“Nothin’,” came the answer; “only there’s seven of ’em again. I just
counted.”
Henry acknowledged receipt of the information with a grunt that slid
into a snore as he drifted back into sleep.
In the morning it was Henry who awoke first and routed his companion
out of bed. Daylight was yet three hours away, though it was already
six o’clock; and in the darkness Henry went about preparing breakfast,
while Bill rolled the blankets and made the sled ready for lashing.
“Say, Henry,” he asked suddenly, “how many dogs did you say we had?”
“Six.”
“Wrong,” Bill proclaimed triumphantly.
“Seven again?” Henry queried.
“No, five; one’s gone.”
“The hell!” Henry cried in wrath, leaving the cooking to come and count
the dogs.
“You’re right, Bill,” he concluded. “Fatty’s gone.”
“An’ he went like greased lightnin’ once he got started. Couldn’t ’ve
seen ’m for smoke.”
“No chance at all,” Henry concluded. “They jes’ swallowed ’m alive. I
bet he was yelpin’ as he went down their throats, damn ’em!”
“He always was a fool dog,” said Bill.
“But no fool dog ought to be fool enough to go off an’ commit suicide
that way.” He looked over the remainder of the team with a speculative
eye that summed up instantly the salient traits of each animal. “I bet
none of the others would do it.”
“Couldn’t drive ’em away from the fire with a club,” Bill agreed. “I
always did think there was somethin’ wrong with Fatty anyway.”
And this was the epitaph of a dead dog on the Northland trail—less
scant than the epitaph of many another dog, of many a man.
CHAPTER II
THE SHE-WOLF
Breakfast eaten and the slim camp-outfit lashed to the sled, the men
turned their backs on the cheery fire and launched out into the
darkness. At once began to rise the cries that were fiercely sad—cries
that called through the darkness and cold to one another and answered
back. Conversation ceased. Daylight came at nine o’clock. At midday the
sky to the south warmed to rose-colour, and marked where the bulge of
the earth intervened between the meridian sun and the northern world.
But the rose-colour swiftly faded. The grey light of day that remained
lasted until three o’clock, when it, too, faded, and the pall of the
Arctic night descended upon the lone and silent land.
As darkness came on, the hunting-cries to right and left and rear drew
closer—so close that more than once they sent surges of fear through
the toiling dogs, throwing them into short-lived panics.
At the conclusion of one such panic, when he and Henry had got the dogs
back in the traces, Bill said:
“I wisht they’d strike game somewheres, an’ go away an’ leave us
alone.”
“They do get on the nerves horrible,” Henry sympathised.
They spoke no more until camp was made.
Henry was bending over and adding ice to the babbling pot of beans when
he was startled by the sound of a blow, an exclamation from Bill, and a
sharp snarling cry of pain from among the dogs. He straightened up in
time to see a dim form disappearing across the snow into the shelter of
the dark. Then he saw Bill, standing amid the dogs, half triumphant,
half crestfallen, in one hand a stout club, in the other the tail and
part of the body of a sun-cured salmon.
“It got half of it,” he announced; “but I got a whack at it jes’ the
same. D’ye hear it squeal?”
“What’d it look like?” Henry asked.
“Couldn’t see. But it had four legs an’ a mouth an’ hair an’ looked
like any dog.”
“Must be a tame wolf, I reckon.”
“It’s damned tame, whatever it is, comin’ in here at feedin’ time an’
gettin’ its whack of fish.”
That night, when supper was finished and they sat on the oblong box and
pulled at their pipes, the circle of gleaming eyes drew in even closer
than before.
“I wisht they’d spring up a bunch of moose or something, an’ go away
an’ leave us alone,” Bill said.
Henry grunted with an intonation that was not all sympathy, and for a
quarter of an hour they sat on in silence, Henry staring at the fire,
and Bill at the circle of eyes that burned in the darkness just beyond
the firelight.
“I wisht we was pullin’ into McGurry right now,” he began again.
“Shut up your wishin’ and your croakin’,” Henry burst out angrily.
“Your stomach’s sour. That’s what’s ailin’ you. Swallow a spoonful of
sody, an’ you’ll sweeten up wonderful an’ be more pleasant company.”
In the morning Henry was aroused by fervid blasphemy that proceeded
from the mouth of Bill. Henry propped himself up on an elbow and looked
to see his comrade standing among the dogs beside the replenished fire,
his arms raised in objurgation, his face distorted with passion.
“Hello!” Henry called. “What’s up now?”
“Frog’s gone,” came the answer.
“No.”
“I tell you yes.”
Henry leaped out of the blankets and to the dogs. He counted them with
care, and then joined his partner in cursing the power of the Wild that
had robbed them of another dog.
“Frog was the strongest dog of the bunch,” Bill pronounced finally.
“An’ he was no fool dog neither,” Henry added.
And so was recorded the second epitaph in two days.
A gloomy breakfast was eaten, and the four remaining dogs were
harnessed to the sled. The day was a repetition of the days that had
gone before. The men toiled without speech across the face of the
frozen world. The silence was unbroken save by the cries of their
pursuers, that, unseen, hung upon their rear. With the coming of night
in the mid-afternoon, the cries sounded closer as the pursuers drew in
according to their custom; and the dogs grew excited and frightened,
and were guilty of panics that tangled the traces and further depressed
the two men.
“There, that’ll fix you fool critters,” Bill said with satisfaction
that night, standing erect at completion of his task.
Henry left the cooking to come and see. Not only had his partner tied
the dogs up, but he had tied them, after the Indian fashion, with
sticks. About the neck of each dog he had fastened a leather thong. To
this, and so close to the neck that the dog could not get his teeth to
it, he had tied a stout stick four or five feet in length. The other
end of the stick, in turn, was made fast to a stake in the ground by
means of a leather thong. The dog was unable to gnaw through the
leather at his own end of the stick. The stick prevented him from
getting at the leather that fastened the other end.
Henry nodded his head approvingly.
“It’s the only contraption that’ll ever hold One Ear,” he said. “He can
gnaw through leather as clean as a knife an’ jes’ about half as quick.
They all’ll be here in the mornin’ hunkydory.”
“You jes’ bet they will,” Bill affirmed. “If one of em’ turns up
missin’, I’ll go without my coffee.”
“They jes’ know we ain’t loaded to kill,” Henry remarked at bed-time,
indicating the gleaming circle that hemmed them in. “If we could put a
couple of shots into ’em, they’d be more respectful. They come closer
every night. Get the firelight out of your eyes an’ look hard—there!
Did you see that one?”
For some time the two men amused themselves with watching the movement
of vague forms on the edge of the firelight. By looking closely and
steadily at where a pair of eyes burned in the darkness, the form of
the animal would slowly take shape. They could even see these forms
move at times.
A sound among the dogs attracted the men’s attention. One Ear was
uttering quick, eager whines, lunging at the length of his stick toward
the darkness, and desisting now and again in order to make frantic
attacks on the stick with his teeth.
“Look at that, Bill,” Henry whispered.
Full into the firelight, with a stealthy, sidelong movement, glided a
doglike animal. It moved with commingled mistrust and daring,
cautiously observing the men, its attention fixed on the dogs. One Ear
strained the full length of the stick toward the intruder and whined
with eagerness.
“That fool One Ear don’t seem scairt much,” Bill said in a low tone.
“It’s a she-wolf,” Henry whispered back, “an’ that accounts for Fatty
an’ Frog. She’s the decoy for the pack. She draws out the dog an’ then
all the rest pitches in an’ eats ’m up.”
The fire crackled. A log fell apart with a loud spluttering noise. At
the sound of it the strange animal leaped back into the darkness.
“Henry, I’m a-thinkin’,” Bill announced.
“Thinkin’ what?”
“I’m a-thinkin’ that was the one I lambasted with the club.”
“Ain’t the slightest doubt in the world,” was Henry’s response.
“An’ right here I want to remark,” Bill went on, “that that animal’s
familyarity with campfires is suspicious an’ immoral.”
“It knows for certain more’n a self-respectin’ wolf ought to know,”
Henry agreed. “A wolf that knows enough to come in with the dogs at
feedin’ time has had experiences.”
“Ol’ Villan had a dog once that run away with the wolves,” Bill
cogitates aloud. “I ought to know. I shot it out of the pack in a moose
pasture over ‘on Little Stick. An’ Ol’ Villan cried like a baby. Hadn’t
seen it for three years, he said. Ben with the wolves all that time.”
“I reckon you’ve called the turn, Bill. That wolf’s a dog, an’ it’s
eaten fish many’s the time from the hand of man.”
“An if I get a chance at it, that wolf that’s a dog’ll be jes’ meat,”
Bill declared. “We can’t afford to lose no more animals.”
“But you’ve only got three cartridges,” Henry objected.
“I’ll wait for a dead sure shot,” was the reply.
In the morning Henry renewed the fire and cooked breakfast to the
accompaniment of his partner’s snoring.
“You was sleepin’ jes’ too comfortable for anything,” Henry told him,
as he routed him out for breakfast. “I hadn’t the heart to rouse you.”
Bill began to eat sleepily. He noticed that his cup was empty and
started to reach for the pot. But the pot was beyond arm’s length and
beside Henry.
“Say, Henry,” he chided gently, “ain’t you forgot somethin’?”
Henry looked about with great carefulness and shook his head. Bill held
up the empty cup.
“You don’t get no coffee,” Henry announced.
“Ain’t run out?” Bill asked anxiously.
“Nope.”
“Ain’t thinkin’ it’ll hurt my digestion?”
“Nope.”
A flush of angry blood pervaded Bill’s face.
“Then it’s jes’ warm an’ anxious I am to be hearin’ you explain
yourself,” he said.
“Spanker’s gone,” Henry answered.
Without haste, with the air of one resigned to misfortune Bill turned
his head, and from where he sat counted the dogs.
“How’d it happen?” he asked apathetically.
Henry shrugged his shoulders. “Don’t know. Unless One Ear gnawed ’m
loose. He couldn’t a-done it himself, that’s sure.”
“The darned cuss.” Bill spoke gravely and slowly, with no hint of the
anger that was raging within. “Jes’ because he couldn’t chew himself
loose, he chews Spanker loose.”
“Well, Spanker’s troubles is over anyway; I guess he’s digested by this
time an’ cavortin’ over the landscape in the bellies of twenty
different wolves,” was Henry’s epitaph on this, the latest lost dog.
“Have some coffee, Bill.”
But Bill shook his head.
“Go on,” Henry pleaded, elevating the pot.
Bill shoved his cup aside. “I’ll be ding-dong-danged if I do. I said I
wouldn’t if ary dog turned up missin’, an’ I won’t.”
“It’s darn good coffee,” Henry said enticingly.
But Bill was stubborn, and he ate a dry breakfast washed down with
mumbled curses at One Ear for the trick he had played.
“I’ll tie ’em up out of reach of each other to-night,” Bill said, as
they took the trail.
They had travelled little more than a hundred yards, when Henry, who
was in front, bent down and picked up something with which his snowshoe
had collided. It was dark, and he could not see it, but he recognised
it by the touch. He flung it back, so that it struck the sled and
bounced along until it fetched up on Bill’s snowshoes.
“Mebbe you’ll need that in your business,” Henry said.
Bill uttered an exclamation. It was all that was left of Spanker—the
stick with which he had been tied.
“They ate ’m hide an’ all,” Bill announced. “The stick’s as clean as a
whistle. They’ve ate the leather offen both ends. They’re damn hungry,
Henry, an’ they’ll have you an’ me guessin’ before this trip’s over.”
Henry laughed defiantly. “I ain’t been trailed this way by wolves
before, but I’ve gone through a whole lot worse an’ kept my health.
Takes more’n a handful of them pesky critters to do for yours truly,
Bill, my son.”
“I don’t know, I don’t know,” Bill muttered ominously.
“Well, you’ll know all right when we pull into McGurry.”
“I ain’t feelin’ special enthusiastic,” Bill persisted.
“You’re off colour, that’s what’s the matter with you,” Henry
dogmatised. “What you need is quinine, an’ I’m goin’ to dose you up
stiff as soon as we make McGurry.”
Bill grunted his disagreement with the diagnosis, and lapsed into
silence. The day was like all the days. Light came at nine o’clock. At
twelve o’clock the southern horizon was warmed by the unseen sun; and
then began the cold grey of afternoon that would merge, three hours
later, into night.
It was just after the sun’s futile effort to appear, that Bill slipped
the rifle from under the sled-lashings and said:
“You keep right on, Henry, I’m goin’ to see what I can see.”
“You’d better stick by the sled,” his partner protested. “You’ve only
got three cartridges, an’ there’s no tellin’ what might happen.”
“Who’s croaking now?” Bill demanded triumphantly.
Henry made no reply, and plodded on alone, though often he cast anxious
glances back into the grey solitude where his partner had disappeared.
An hour later, taking advantage of the cut-offs around which the sled
had to go, Bill arrived.
“They’re scattered an’ rangin’ along wide,” he said: “keeping up with
us an’ lookin’ for game at the same time. You see, they’re sure of us,
only they know they’ve got to wait to get us. In the meantime they’re
willin’ to pick up anything eatable that comes handy.”
“You mean they _think_ they’re sure of us,” Henry objected pointedly.
But Bill ignored him. “I seen some of them. They’re pretty thin. They
ain’t had a bite in weeks I reckon, outside of Fatty an’ Frog an’
Spanker; an’ there’s so many of ’em that that didn’t go far. They’re
remarkable thin. Their ribs is like wash-boards, an’ their stomachs is
right up against their backbones. They’re pretty desperate, I can tell
you. They’ll be goin’ mad, yet, an’ then watch out.”
A few minutes later, Henry, who was now travelling behind the sled,
emitted a low, warning whistle. Bill turned and looked, then quietly
stopped the dogs. To the rear, from around the last bend and plainly
into view, on the very trail they had just covered, trotted a furry,
slinking form. Its nose was to the trail, and it trotted with a
peculiar, sliding, effortless gait. When they halted, it halted,
throwing up its head and regarding them steadily with nostrils that
twitched as it caught and studied the scent of them.
“It’s the she-wolf,” Bill answered.
The dogs had lain down in the snow, and he walked past them to join his
partner in the sled. Together they watched the strange animal that had
pursued them for days and that had already accomplished the destruction
of half their dog-team.
After a searching scrutiny, the animal trotted forward a few steps.
This it repeated several times, till it was a short hundred yards away.
It paused, head up, close by a clump of spruce trees, and with sight
and scent studied the outfit of the watching men. It looked at them in
a strangely wistful way, after the manner of a dog; but in its
wistfulness there was none of the dog affection. It was a wistfulness
bred of hunger, as cruel as its own fangs, as merciless as the frost
itself.
It was large for a wolf, its gaunt frame advertising the lines of an
animal that was among the largest of its kind.
“Stands pretty close to two feet an’ a half at the shoulders,” Henry
commented. “An’ I’ll bet it ain’t far from five feet long.”
“Kind of strange colour for a wolf,” was Bill’s criticism. “I never
seen a red wolf before. Looks almost cinnamon to me.”
The animal was certainly not cinnamon-coloured. Its coat was the true
wolf-coat. The dominant colour was grey, and yet there was to it a
faint reddish hue—a hue that was baffling, that appeared and
disappeared, that was more like an illusion of the vision, now grey,
distinctly grey, and again giving hints and glints of a vague redness
of colour not classifiable in terms of ordinary experience.
“Looks for all the world like a big husky sled-dog,” Bill said. “I
wouldn’t be s’prised to see it wag its tail.”
“Hello, you husky!” he called. “Come here, you whatever-your-name-is.”
“Ain’t a bit scairt of you,” Henry laughed.
Bill waved his hand at it threateningly and shouted loudly; but the
animal betrayed no fear. The only change in it that they could notice
was an accession of alertness. It still regarded them with the
merciless wistfulness of hunger. They were meat, and it was hungry; and
it would like to go in and eat them if it dared.
“Look here, Henry,” Bill said, unconsciously lowering his voice to a
whisper because of what he imitated. “We’ve got three cartridges. But
it’s a dead shot. Couldn’t miss it. It’s got away with three of our
dogs, an’ we oughter put a stop to it. What d’ye say?”
Henry nodded his consent. Bill cautiously slipped the gun from under
the sled-lashing. The gun was on the way to his shoulder, but it never
got there. For in that instant the she-wolf leaped sidewise from the
trail into the clump of spruce trees and disappeared.
The two men looked at each other. Henry whistled long and
comprehendingly.
“I might have knowed it,” Bill chided himself aloud as he replaced the
gun. “Of course a wolf that knows enough to come in with the dogs at
feedin’ time, ’d know all about shooting-irons. I tell you right now,
Henry, that critter’s the cause of all our trouble. We’d have six dogs
at the present time, ’stead of three, if it wasn’t for her. An’ I tell
you right now, Henry, I’m goin’ to get her. She’s too smart to be shot
in the open. But I’m goin’ to lay for her. I’ll bushwhack her as sure
as my name is Bill.”
“You needn’t stray off too far in doin’ it,” his partner admonished.
“If that pack ever starts to jump you, them three cartridges’d be wuth
no more’n three whoops in hell. Them animals is damn hungry, an’ once
they start in, they’ll sure get you, Bill.”
They camped early that night. Three dogs could not drag the sled so
fast nor for so long hours as could six, and they were showing
unmistakable signs of playing out. And the men went early to bed, Bill
first seeing to it that the dogs were tied out of gnawing-reach of one
another.
But the wolves were growing bolder, and the men were aroused more than
once from their sleep. So near did the wolves approach, that the dogs
became frantic with terror, and it was necessary to replenish the fire
from time to time in order to keep the adventurous marauders at safer
distance.
“I’ve hearn sailors talk of sharks followin’ a ship,” Bill remarked, as
he crawled back into the blankets after one such replenishing of the
fire. “Well, them wolves is land sharks. They know their business
better’n we do, an’ they ain’t a-holdin’ our trail this way for their
health. They’re goin’ to get us. They’re sure goin’ to get us, Henry.”
“They’ve half got you a’ready, a-talkin’ like that,” Henry retorted
sharply. “A man’s half licked when he says he is. An’ you’re half eaten
from the way you’re goin’ on about it.”
“They’ve got away with better men than you an’ me,” Bill answered.
“Oh, shet up your croakin’. You make me all-fired tired.”
Henry rolled over angrily on his side, but was surprised that Bill made
no similar display of temper. This was not Bill’s way, for he was
easily angered by sharp words. Henry thought long over it before he
went to sleep, and as his eyelids fluttered down and he dozed off, the
thought in his mind was: “There’s no mistakin’ it, Bill’s almighty
blue. I’ll have to cheer him up to-morrow.”
CHAPTER III
THE HUNGER CRY
The day began auspiciously. They had lost no dogs during the night, and
they swung out upon the trail and into the silence, the darkness, and
the cold with spirits that were fairly light. Bill seemed to have
forgotten his forebodings of the previous night, and even waxed
facetious with the dogs when, at midday, they overturned the sled on a
bad piece of trail.
It was an awkward mix-up. The sled was upside down and jammed between a
tree-trunk and a huge rock, and they were forced to unharness the dogs
in order to straighten out the tangle. The two men were bent over the
sled and trying to right it, when Henry observed One Ear sidling away.
“Here, you, One Ear!” he cried, straightening up and turning around on
the dog.
But One Ear broke into a run across the snow, his traces trailing
behind him. And there, out in the snow of their back track, was the
she-wolf waiting for him. As he neared her, he became suddenly
cautious. He slowed down to an alert and mincing walk and then stopped.
He regarded her carefully and dubiously, yet desirefully. She seemed to
smile at him, showing her teeth in an ingratiating rather than a
menacing way. She moved toward him a few steps, playfully, and then
halted. One Ear drew near to her, still alert and cautious, his tail
and ears in the air, his head held high.
He tried to sniff noses with her, but she retreated playfully and
coyly. Every advance on his part was accompanied by a corresponding
retreat on her part. Step by step she was luring him away from the
security of his human companionship. Once, as though a warning had in
vague ways flitted through his intelligence, he turned his head and
looked back at the overturned sled, at his team-mates, and at the two
men who were calling to him.
But whatever idea was forming in his mind, was dissipated by the
she-wolf, who advanced upon him, sniffed noses with him for a fleeting
instant, and then resumed her coy retreat before his renewed advances.
In the meantime, Bill had bethought himself of the rifle. But it was
jammed beneath the overturned sled, and by the time Henry had helped
him to right the load, One Ear and the she-wolf were too close together
and the distance too great to risk a shot.
Too late One Ear learned his mistake. Before they saw the cause, the
two men saw him turn and start to run back toward them. Then,
approaching at right angles to the trail and cutting off his retreat
they saw a dozen wolves, lean and grey, bounding across the snow. On
the instant, the she-wolf’s coyness and playfulness disappeared. With a
snarl she sprang upon One Ear. He thrust her off with his shoulder,
and, his retreat cut off and still intent on regaining the sled, he
altered his course in an attempt to circle around to it. More wolves
were appearing every moment and joining in the chase. The she-wolf was
one leap behind One Ear and holding her own.
“Where are you goin’?” Henry suddenly demanded, laying his hand on his
partner’s arm.
Bill shook it off. “I won’t stand it,” he said. “They ain’t a-goin’ to
get any more of our dogs if I can help it.”
Gun in hand, he plunged into the underbrush that lined the side of the
trail. His intention was apparent enough. Taking the sled as the centre
of the circle that One Ear was making, Bill planned to tap that circle
at a point in advance of the pursuit. With his rifle, in the broad
daylight, it might be possible for him to awe the wolves and save the
dog.
“Say, Bill!” Henry called after him. “Be careful! Don’t take no
chances!”
Henry sat down on the sled and watched. There was nothing else for him
to do. Bill had already gone from sight; but now and again, appearing
and disappearing amongst the underbrush and the scattered clumps of
spruce, could be seen One Ear. Henry judged his case to be hopeless.
The dog was thoroughly alive to its danger, but it was running on the
outer circle while the wolf-pack was running on the inner and shorter
circle. It was vain to think of One Ear so outdistancing his pursuers
as to be able to cut across their circle in advance of them and to
regain the sled.
The different lines were rapidly approaching a point. Somewhere out
there in the snow, screened from his sight by trees and thickets, Henry
knew that the wolf-pack, One Ear, and Bill were coming together. All
too quickly, far more quickly than he had expected, it happened. He
heard a shot, then two shots, in rapid succession, and he knew that
Bill’s ammunition was gone. Then he heard a great outcry of snarls and
yelps. He recognised One Ear’s yell of pain and terror, and he heard a
wolf-cry that bespoke a stricken animal. And that was all. The snarls
ceased. The yelping died away. Silence settled down again over the
lonely land.
He sat for a long while upon the sled. There was no need for him to go
and see what had happened. He knew it as though it had taken place
before his eyes. Once, he roused with a start and hastily got the axe
out from underneath the lashings. But for some time longer he sat and
brooded, the two remaining dogs crouching and trembling at his feet.
At last he arose in a weary manner, as though all the resilience had
gone out of his body, and proceeded to fasten the dogs to the sled. He
passed a rope over his shoulder, a man-trace, and pulled with the dogs.
He did not go far. At the first hint of darkness he hastened to make a
camp, and he saw to it that he had a generous supply of firewood. He
fed the dogs, cooked and ate his supper, and made his bed close to the
fire.
But he was not destined to enjoy that bed. Before his eyes closed the
wolves had drawn too near for safety. It no longer required an effort
of the vision to see them. They were all about him and the fire, in a
narrow circle, and he could see them plainly in the firelight lying
down, sitting up, crawling forward on their bellies, or slinking back
and forth. They even slept. Here and there he could see one curled up
in the snow like a dog, taking the sleep that was now denied himself.
He kept the fire brightly blazing, for he knew that it alone intervened
between the flesh of his body and their hungry fangs. His two dogs
stayed close by him, one on either side, leaning against him for
protection, crying and whimpering, and at times snarling desperately
when a wolf approached a little closer than usual. At such moments,
when his dogs snarled, the whole circle would be agitated, the wolves
coming to their feet and pressing tentatively forward, a chorus of
snarls and eager yelps rising about him. Then the circle would lie down
again, and here and there a wolf would resume its broken nap.
But this circle had a continuous tendency to draw in upon him. Bit by
bit, an inch at a time, with here a wolf bellying forward, and there a
wolf bellying forward, the circle would narrow until the brutes were
almost within springing distance. Then he would seize brands from the
fire and hurl them into the pack. A hasty drawing back always resulted,
accompanied by angry yelps and frightened snarls when a well-aimed
brand struck and scorched a too daring animal.
Morning found the man haggard and worn, wide-eyed from want of sleep.
He cooked breakfast in the darkness, and at nine o’clock, when, with
the coming of daylight, the wolf-pack drew back, he set about the task
he had planned through the long hours of the night. Chopping down young
saplings, he made them cross-bars of a scaffold by lashing them high up
to the trunks of standing trees. Using the sled-lashing for a heaving
rope, and with the aid of the dogs, he hoisted the coffin to the top of
the scaffold.
“They got Bill, an’ they may get me, but they’ll sure never get you,
young man,” he said, addressing the dead body in its tree-sepulchre.
Then he took the trail, the lightened sled bounding along behind the
willing dogs; for they, too, knew that safety lay open in the gaining
of Fort McGurry. The wolves were now more open in their pursuit,
trotting sedately behind and ranging along on either side, their red
tongues lolling out, their lean sides showing the undulating ribs with
every movement. They were very lean, mere skin-bags stretched over bony
frames, with strings for muscles—so lean that Henry found it in his
mind to marvel that they still kept their feet and did not collapse
forthright in the snow.
He did not dare travel until dark. At midday, not only did the sun warm
the southern horizon, but it even thrust its upper rim, pale and
golden, above the sky-line. He received it as a sign. The days were
growing longer. The sun was returning. But scarcely had the cheer of
its light departed, than he went into camp. There were still several
hours of grey daylight and sombre twilight, and he utilised them in
chopping an enormous supply of fire-wood.
With night came horror. Not only were the starving wolves growing
bolder, but lack of sleep was telling upon Henry. He dozed despite
himself, crouching by the fire, the blankets about his shoulders, the
axe between his knees, and on either side a dog pressing close against
him. He awoke once and saw in front of him, not a dozen feet away, a
big grey wolf, one of the largest of the pack. And even as he looked,
the brute deliberately stretched himself after the manner of a lazy
dog, yawning full in his face and looking upon him with a possessive
eye, as if, in truth, he were merely a delayed meal that was soon to be
eaten.
This certitude was shown by the whole pack. Fully a score he could
count, staring hungrily at him or calmly sleeping in the snow. They
reminded him of children gathered about a spread table and awaiting
permission to begin to eat. And he was the food they were to eat! He
wondered how and when the meal would begin.
As he piled wood on the fire he discovered an appreciation of his own
body which he had never felt before. He watched his moving muscles and
was interested in the cunning mechanism of his fingers. By the light of
the fire he crooked his fingers slowly and repeatedly now one at a
time, now all together, spreading them wide or making quick gripping
movements. He studied the nail-formation, and prodded the finger-tips,
now sharply, and again softly, gauging the while the nerve-sensations
produced. It fascinated him, and he grew suddenly fond of this subtle
flesh of his that worked so beautifully and smoothly and delicately.
Then he would cast a glance of fear at the wolf-circle drawn
expectantly about him, and like a blow the realisation would strike him
that this wonderful body of his, this living flesh, was no more than so
much meat, a quest of ravenous animals, to be torn and slashed by their
hungry fangs, to be sustenance to them as the moose and the rabbit had
often been sustenance to him.
He came out of a doze that was half nightmare, to see the red-hued
she-wolf before him. She was not more than half a dozen feet away
sitting in the snow and wistfully regarding him. The two dogs were
whimpering and snarling at his feet, but she took no notice of them.
She was looking at the man, and for some time he returned her look.
There was nothing threatening about her. She looked at him merely with
a great wistfulness, but he knew it to be the wistfulness of an equally
great hunger. He was the food, and the sight of him excited in her the
gustatory sensations. Her mouth opened, the saliva drooled forth, and
she licked her chops with the pleasure of anticipation.
A spasm of fear went through him. He reached hastily for a brand to
throw at her. But even as he reached, and before his fingers had closed
on the missile, she sprang back into safety; and he knew that she was
used to having things thrown at her. She had snarled as she sprang
away, baring her white fangs to their roots, all her wistfulness
vanishing, being replaced by a carnivorous malignity that made him
shudder. He glanced at the hand that held the brand, noticing the
cunning delicacy of the fingers that gripped it, how they adjusted
themselves to all the inequalities of the surface, curling over and
under and about the rough wood, and one little finger, too close to the
burning portion of the brand, sensitively and automatically writhing
back from the hurtful heat to a cooler gripping-place; and in the same
instant he seemed to see a vision of those same sensitive and delicate
fingers being crushed and torn by the white teeth of the she-wolf.
Never had he been so fond of this body of his as now when his tenure of
it was so precarious.
All night, with burning brands, he fought off the hungry pack. When he
dozed despite himself, the whimpering and snarling of the dogs aroused
him. Morning came, but for the first time the light of day failed to
scatter the wolves. The man waited in vain for them to go. They
remained in a circle about him and his fire, displaying an arrogance of
possession that shook his courage born of the morning light.
He made one desperate attempt to pull out on the trail. But the moment
he left the protection of the fire, the boldest wolf leaped for him,
but leaped short. He saved himself by springing back, the jaws snapping
together a scant six inches from his thigh. The rest of the pack was
now up and surging upon him, and a throwing of firebrands right and
left was necessary to drive them back to a respectful distance.
Even in the daylight he did not dare leave the fire to chop fresh wood.
Twenty feet away towered a huge dead spruce. He spent half the day
extending his campfire to the tree, at any moment a half dozen burning
faggots ready at hand to fling at his enemies. Once at the tree, he
studied the surrounding forest in order to fell the tree in the
direction of the most firewood.
The night was a repetition of the night before, save that the need for
sleep was becoming overpowering. The snarling of his dogs was losing
its efficacy. Besides, they were snarling all the time, and his
benumbed and drowsy senses no longer took note of changing pitch and
intensity. He awoke with a start. The she-wolf was less than a yard
from him. Mechanically, at short range, without letting go of it, he
thrust a brand full into her open and snarling mouth. She sprang away,
yelling with pain, and while he took delight in the smell of burning
flesh and hair, he watched her shaking her head and growling wrathfully
a score of feet away.
But this time, before he dozed again, he tied a burning pine-knot to
his right hand. His eyes were closed but few minutes when the burn of
the flame on his flesh awakened him. For several hours he adhered to
this programme. Every time he was thus awakened he drove back the
wolves with flying brands, replenished the fire, and rearranged the
pine-knot on his hand. All worked well, but there came a time when he
fastened the pine-knot insecurely. As his eyes closed it fell away from
his hand.
He dreamed. It seemed to him that he was in Fort McGurry. It was warm
and comfortable, and he was playing cribbage with the Factor. Also, it
seemed to him that the fort was besieged by wolves. They were howling
at the very gates, and sometimes he and the Factor paused from the game
to listen and laugh at the futile efforts of the wolves to get in. And
then, so strange was the dream, there was a crash. The door was burst
open. He could see the wolves flooding into the big living-room of the
fort. They were leaping straight for him and the Factor. With the
bursting open of the door, the noise of their howling had increased
tremendously. This howling now bothered him. His dream was merging into
something else—he knew not what; but through it all, following him,
persisted the howling.
And then he awoke to find the howling real. There was a great snarling
and yelping. The wolves were rushing him. They were all about him and
upon him. The teeth of one had closed upon his arm. Instinctively he
leaped into the fire, and as he leaped, he felt the sharp slash of
teeth that tore through the flesh of his leg. Then began a fire fight.
His stout mittens temporarily protected his hands, and he scooped live
coals into the air in all directions, until the campfire took on the
semblance of a volcano.
But it could not last long. His face was blistering in the heat, his
eyebrows and lashes were singed off, and the heat was becoming
unbearable to his feet. With a flaming brand in each hand, he sprang to
the edge of the fire. The wolves had been driven back. On every side,
wherever the live coals had fallen, the snow was sizzling, and every
little while a retiring wolf, with wild leap and snort and snarl,
announced that one such live coal had been stepped upon.
Flinging his brands at the nearest of his enemies, the man thrust his
smouldering mittens into the snow and stamped about to cool his feet.
His two dogs were missing, and he well knew that they had served as a
course in the protracted meal which had begun days before with Fatty,
the last course of which would likely be himself in the days to follow.
“You ain’t got me yet!” he cried, savagely shaking his fist at the
hungry beasts; and at the sound of his voice the whole circle was
agitated, there was a general snarl, and the she-wolf slid up close to
him across the snow and watched him with hungry wistfulness.
He set to work to carry out a new idea that had come to him. He
extended the fire into a large circle. Inside this circle he crouched,
his sleeping outfit under him as a protection against the melting snow.
When he had thus disappeared within his shelter of flame, the whole
pack came curiously to the rim of the fire to see what had become of
him. Hitherto they had been denied access to the fire, and they now
settled down in a close-drawn circle, like so many dogs, blinking and
yawning and stretching their lean bodies in the unaccustomed warmth.
Then the she-wolf sat down, pointed her nose at a star, and began to
howl. One by one the wolves joined her, till the whole pack, on
haunches, with noses pointed skyward, was howling its hunger cry.
Dawn came, and daylight. The fire was burning low. The fuel had run
out, and there was need to get more. The man attempted to step out of
his circle of flame, but the wolves surged to meet him. Burning brands
made them spring aside, but they no longer sprang back. In vain he
strove to drive them back. As he gave up and stumbled inside his
circle, a wolf leaped for him, missed, and landed with all four feet in
the coals. It cried out with terror, at the same time snarling, and
scrambled back to cool its paws in the snow.
The man sat down on his blankets in a crouching position. His body
leaned forward from the hips. His shoulders, relaxed and drooping, and
his head on his knees advertised that he had given up the struggle. Now
and again he raised his head to note the dying down of the fire. The
circle of flame and coals was breaking into segments with openings in
between. These openings grew in size, the segments diminished.
“I guess you can come an’ get me any time,” he mumbled. “Anyway, I’m
goin’ to sleep.”
Once he awakened, and in an opening in the circle, directly in front of
him, he saw the she-wolf gazing at him.
Again he awakened, a little later, though it seemed hours to him. A
mysterious change had taken place—so mysterious a change that he was
shocked wider awake. Something had happened. He could not understand at
first. Then he discovered it. The wolves were gone. Remained only the
trampled snow to show how closely they had pressed him. Sleep was
welling up and gripping him again, his head was sinking down upon his
knees, when he roused with a sudden start.
There were cries of men, and churn of sleds, the creaking of harnesses,
and the eager whimpering of straining dogs. Four sleds pulled in from
the river bed to the camp among the trees. Half a dozen men were about
the man who crouched in the centre of the dying fire. They were shaking
and prodding him into consciousness. He looked at them like a drunken
man and maundered in strange, sleepy speech.
“Red she-wolf. . . . Come in with the dogs at feedin’ time. . . . First
she ate the dog-food. . . . Then she ate the dogs. . . . An’ after that
she ate Bill. . . . ”
“Where’s Lord Alfred?” one of the men bellowed in his ear, shaking him
roughly.
He shook his head slowly. “No, she didn’t eat him. . . . He’s roostin’
in a tree at the last camp.”
“Dead?” the man shouted.
“An’ in a box,” Henry answered. He jerked his shoulder petulantly away
from the grip of his questioner. “Say, you lemme alone. . . . I’m jes’
plump tuckered out. . . . Goo’ night, everybody.”
His eyes fluttered and went shut. His chin fell forward on his chest.
And even as they eased him down upon the blankets his snores were
rising on the frosty air.
But there was another sound. Far and faint it was, in the remote
distance, the cry of the hungry wolf-pack as it took the trail of other
meat than the man it had just missed.
PART II
CHAPTER I
THE BATTLE OF THE FANGS
It was the she-wolf who had first caught the sound of men’s voices and
the whining of the sled-dogs; and it was the she-wolf who was first to
spring away from the cornered man in his circle of dying flame. The
pack had been loath to forego the kill it had hunted down, and it
lingered for several minutes, making sure of the sounds, and then it,
too, sprang away on the trail made by the she-wolf.
Running at the forefront of the pack was a large grey wolf—one of its
several leaders. It was he who directed the pack’s course on the heels
of the she-wolf. It was he who snarled warningly at the younger members
of the pack or slashed at them with his fangs when they ambitiously
tried to pass him. And it was he who increased the pace when he sighted
the she-wolf, now trotting slowly across the snow.
She dropped in alongside by him, as though it were her appointed
position, and took the pace of the pack. He did not snarl at her, nor
show his teeth, when any leap of hers chanced to put her in advance of
him. On the contrary, he seemed kindly disposed toward her—too kindly
to suit her, for he was prone to run near to her, and when he ran too
near it was she who snarled and showed her teeth. Nor was she above
slashing his shoulder sharply on occasion. At such times he betrayed no
anger. He merely sprang to the side and ran stiffly ahead for several
awkward leaps, in carriage and conduct resembling an abashed country
swain.
This was his one trouble in the running of the pack; but she had other
troubles. On her other side ran a gaunt old wolf, grizzled and marked
with the scars of many battles. He ran always on her right side. The
fact that he had but one eye, and that the left eye, might account for
this. He, also, was addicted to crowding her, to veering toward her
till his scarred muzzle touched her body, or shoulder, or neck. As with
the running mate on the left, she repelled these attentions with her
teeth; but when both bestowed their attentions at the same time she was
roughly jostled, being compelled, with quick snaps to either side, to
drive both lovers away and at the same time to maintain her forward
leap with the pack and see the way of her feet before her. At such
times her running mates flashed their teeth and growled threateningly
across at each other. They might have fought, but even wooing and its
rivalry waited upon the more pressing hunger-need of the pack.
After each repulse, when the old wolf sheered abruptly away from the
sharp-toothed object of his desire, he shouldered against a young
three-year-old that ran on his blind right side. This young wolf had
attained his full size; and, considering the weak and famished
condition of the pack, he possessed more than the average vigour and
spirit. Nevertheless, he ran with his head even with the shoulder of
his one-eyed elder. When he ventured to run abreast of the older wolf
(which was seldom), a snarl and a snap sent him back even with the
shoulder again. Sometimes, however, he dropped cautiously and slowly
behind and edged in between the old leader and the she-wolf. This was
doubly resented, even triply resented. When she snarled her
displeasure, the old leader would whirl on the three-year-old.
Sometimes she whirled with him. And sometimes the young leader on the
left whirled, too.
At such times, confronted by three sets of savage teeth, the young wolf
stopped precipitately, throwing himself back on his haunches, with
fore-legs stiff, mouth menacing, and mane bristling. This confusion in
the front of the moving pack always caused confusion in the rear. The
wolves behind collided with the young wolf and expressed their
displeasure by administering sharp nips on his hind-legs and flanks. He
was laying up trouble for himself, for lack of food and short tempers
went together; but with the boundless faith of youth he persisted in
repeating the manoeuvre every little while, though it never succeeded
in gaining anything for him but discomfiture.
Had there been food, love-making and fighting would have gone on apace,
and the pack-formation would have been broken up. But the situation of
the pack was desperate. It was lean with long-standing hunger. It ran
below its ordinary speed. At the rear limped the weak members, the very
young and the very old. At the front were the strongest. Yet all were
more like skeletons than full-bodied wolves. Nevertheless, with the
exception of the ones that limped, the movements of the animals were
effortless and tireless. Their stringy muscles seemed founts of
inexhaustible energy. Behind every steel-like contraction of a muscle,
lay another steel-like contraction, and another, and another,
apparently without end.
They ran many miles that day. They ran through the night. And the next
day found them still running. They were running over the surface of a
world frozen and dead. No life stirred. They alone moved through the
vast inertness. They alone were alive, and they sought for other things
that were alive in order that they might devour them and continue to
live.
They crossed low divides and ranged a dozen small streams in a
lower-lying country before their quest was rewarded. Then they came
upon moose. It was a big bull they first found. Here was meat and life,
and it was guarded by no mysterious fires nor flying missiles of flame.
Splay hoofs and palmated antlers they knew, and they flung their
customary patience and caution to the wind. It was a brief fight and
fierce. The big bull was beset on every side. He ripped them open or
split their skulls with shrewdly driven blows of his great hoofs. He
crushed them and broke them on his large horns. He stamped them into
the snow under him in the wallowing struggle. But he was foredoomed,
and he went down with the she-wolf tearing savagely at his throat, and
with other teeth fixed everywhere upon him, devouring him alive, before
ever his last struggles ceased or his last damage had been wrought.
There was food in plenty. The bull weighed over eight hundred
pounds—fully twenty pounds of meat per mouth for the forty-odd wolves
of the pack. But if they could fast prodigiously, they could feed
prodigiously, and soon a few scattered bones were all that remained of
the splendid live brute that had faced the pack a few hours before.
There was now much resting and sleeping. With full stomachs, bickering
and quarrelling began among the younger males, and this continued
through the few days that followed before the breaking-up of the pack.
The famine was over. The wolves were now in the country of game, and
though they still hunted in pack, they hunted more cautiously, cutting
out heavy cows or crippled old bulls from the small moose-herds they
ran across.
There came a day, in this land of plenty, when the wolf-pack split in
half and went in different directions. The she-wolf, the young leader
on her left, and the one-eyed elder on her right, led their half of the
pack down to the Mackenzie River and across into the lake country to
the east. Each day this remnant of the pack dwindled. Two by two, male
and female, the wolves were deserting. Occasionally a solitary male was
driven out by the sharp teeth of his rivals. In the end there remained
only four: the she-wolf, the young leader, the one-eyed one, and the
ambitious three-year-old.
The she-wolf had by now developed a ferocious temper. Her three suitors
all bore the marks of her teeth. Yet they never replied in kind, never
defended themselves against her. They turned their shoulders to her
most savage slashes, and with wagging tails and mincing steps strove to
placate her wrath. But if they were all mildness toward her, they were
all fierceness toward one another. The three-year-old grew too
ambitious in his fierceness. He caught the one-eyed elder on his blind
side and ripped his ear into ribbons. Though the grizzled old fellow
could see only on one side, against the youth and vigour of the other
he brought into play the wisdom of long years of experience. His lost
eye and his scarred muzzle bore evidence to the nature of his
experience. He had survived too many battles to be in doubt for a
moment about what to do.
The battle began fairly, but it did not end fairly. There was no
telling what the outcome would have been, for the third wolf joined the
elder, and together, old leader and young leader, they attacked the
ambitious three-year-old and proceeded to destroy him. He was beset on
either side by the merciless fangs of his erstwhile comrades. Forgotten
were the days they had hunted together, the game they had pulled down,
the famine they had suffered. That business was a thing of the past.
The business of love was at hand—ever a sterner and crueller business
than that of food-getting.
And in the meanwhile, the she-wolf, the cause of it all, sat down
contentedly on her haunches and watched. She was even pleased. This was
her day—and it came not often—when manes bristled, and fang smote fang
or ripped and tore the yielding flesh, all for the possession of her.
And in the business of love the three-year-old, who had made this his
first adventure upon it, yielded up his life. On either side of his
body stood his two rivals. They were gazing at the she-wolf, who sat
smiling in the snow. But the elder leader was wise, very wise, in love
even as in battle. The younger leader turned his head to lick a wound
on his shoulder. The curve of his neck was turned toward his rival.
With his one eye the elder saw the opportunity. He darted in low and
closed with his fangs. It was a long, ripping slash, and deep as well.
His teeth, in passing, burst the wall of the great vein of the throat.
Then he leaped clear.
The young leader snarled terribly, but his snarl broke midmost into a
tickling cough. Bleeding and coughing, already stricken, he sprang at
the elder and fought while life faded from him, his legs going weak
beneath him, the light of day dulling on his eyes, his blows and
springs falling shorter and shorter.
And all the while the she-wolf sat on her haunches and smiled. She was
made glad in vague ways by the battle, for this was the love-making of
the Wild, the sex-tragedy of the natural world that was tragedy only to
those that died. To those that survived it was not tragedy, but
realisation and achievement.
When the young leader lay in the snow and moved no more, One Eye
stalked over to the she-wolf. His carriage was one of mingled triumph
and caution. He was plainly expectant of a rebuff, and he was just as
plainly surprised when her teeth did not flash out at him in anger. For
the first time she met him with a kindly manner. She sniffed noses with
him, and even condescended to leap about and frisk and play with him in
quite puppyish fashion. And he, for all his grey years and sage
experience, behaved quite as puppyishly and even a little more
foolishly.
Forgotten already were the vanquished rivals and the love-tale
red-written on the snow. Forgotten, save once, when old One Eye stopped
for a moment to lick his stiffening wounds. Then it was that his lips
half writhed into a snarl, and the hair of his neck and shoulders
involuntarily bristled, while he half crouched for a spring, his claws
spasmodically clutching into the snow-surface for firmer footing. But
it was all forgotten the next moment, as he sprang after the she-wolf,
who was coyly leading him a chase through the woods.
After that they ran side by side, like good friends who have come to an
understanding. The days passed by, and they kept together, hunting
their meat and killing and eating it in common. After a time the
she-wolf began to grow restless. She seemed to be searching for
something that she could not find. The hollows under fallen trees
seemed to attract her, and she spent much time nosing about among the
larger snow-piled crevices in the rocks and in the caves of overhanging
banks. Old One Eye was not interested at all, but he followed her
good-naturedly in her quest, and when her investigations in particular
places were unusually protracted, he would lie down and wait until she
was ready to go on.
They did not remain in one place, but travelled across country until
they regained the Mackenzie River, down which they slowly went, leaving
it often to hunt game along the small streams that entered it, but
always returning to it again. Sometimes they chanced upon other wolves,
usually in pairs; but there was no friendliness of intercourse
displayed on either side, no gladness at meeting, no desire to return
to the pack-formation. Several times they encountered solitary wolves.
These were always males, and they were pressingly insistent on joining
with One Eye and his mate. This he resented, and when she stood
shoulder to shoulder with him, bristling and showing her teeth, the
aspiring solitary ones would back off, turn-tail, and continue on their
lonely way.
One moonlight night, running through the quiet forest, One Eye suddenly
halted. His muzzle went up, his tail stiffened, and his nostrils
dilated as he scented the air. One foot also he held up, after the
manner of a dog. He was not satisfied, and he continued to smell the
air, striving to understand the message borne upon it to him. One
careless sniff had satisfied his mate, and she trotted on to reassure
him. Though he followed her, he was still dubious, and he could not
forbear an occasional halt in order more carefully to study the
warning.
She crept out cautiously on the edge of a large open space in the midst
of the trees. For some time she stood alone. Then One Eye, creeping and
crawling, every sense on the alert, every hair radiating infinite
suspicion, joined her. They stood side by side, watching and listening
and smelling.
To their ears came the sounds of dogs wrangling and scuffling, the
guttural cries of men, the sharper voices of scolding women, and once
the shrill and plaintive cry of a child. With the exception of the huge
bulks of the skin-lodges, little could be seen save the flames of the
fire, broken by the movements of intervening bodies, and the smoke
rising slowly on the quiet air. But to their nostrils came the myriad
smells of an Indian camp, carrying a story that was largely
incomprehensible to One Eye, but every detail of which the she-wolf
knew.
She was strangely stirred, and sniffed and sniffed with an increasing
delight. But old One Eye was doubtful. He betrayed his apprehension,
and started tentatively to go. She turned and touched his neck with her
muzzle in a reassuring way, then regarded the camp again. A new
wistfulness was in her face, but it was not the wistfulness of hunger.
She was thrilling to a desire that urged her to go forward, to be in
closer to that fire, to be squabbling with the dogs, and to be avoiding
and dodging the stumbling feet of men.
One Eye moved impatiently beside her; her unrest came back upon her,
and she knew again her pressing need to find the thing for which she
searched. She turned and trotted back into the forest, to the great
relief of One Eye, who trotted a little to the fore until they were
well within the shelter of the trees.
As they slid along, noiseless as shadows, in the moonlight, they came
upon a run-way. Both noses went down to the footprints in the snow.
These footprints were very fresh. One Eye ran ahead cautiously, his
mate at his heels. The broad pads of their feet were spread wide and in
contact with the snow were like velvet. One Eye caught sight of a dim
movement of white in the midst of the white. His sliding gait had been
deceptively swift, but it was as nothing to the speed at which he now
ran. Before him was bounding the faint patch of white he had
discovered.
They were running along a narrow alley flanked on either side by a
growth of young spruce. Through the trees the mouth of the alley could
be seen, opening out on a moonlit glade. Old One Eye was rapidly
overhauling the fleeing shape of white. Bound by bound he gained. Now
he was upon it. One leap more and his teeth would be sinking into it.
But that leap was never made. High in the air, and straight up, soared
the shape of white, now a struggling snowshoe rabbit that leaped and
bounded, executing a fantastic dance there above him in the air and
never once returning to earth.
One Eye sprang back with a snort of sudden fright, then shrank down to
the snow and crouched, snarling threats at this thing of fear he did
not understand. But the she-wolf coolly thrust past him. She poised for
a moment, then sprang for the dancing rabbit. She, too, soared high,
but not so high as the quarry, and her teeth clipped emptily together
with a metallic snap. She made another leap, and another.
Her mate had slowly relaxed from his crouch and was watching her. He
now evinced displeasure at her repeated failures, and himself made a
mighty spring upward. His teeth closed upon the rabbit, and he bore it
back to earth with him. But at the same time there was a suspicious
crackling movement beside him, and his astonished eye saw a young
spruce sapling bending down above him to strike him. His jaws let go
their grip, and he leaped backward to escape this strange danger, his
lips drawn back from his fangs, his throat snarling, every hair
bristling with rage and fright. And in that moment the sapling reared
its slender length upright and the rabbit soared dancing in the air
again.
The she-wolf was angry. She sank her fangs into her mate’s shoulder in
reproof; and he, frightened, unaware of what constituted this new
onslaught, struck back ferociously and in still greater fright, ripping
down the side of the she-wolf’s muzzle. For him to resent such reproof
was equally unexpected to her, and she sprang upon him in snarling
indignation. Then he discovered his mistake and tried to placate her.
But she proceeded to punish him roundly, until he gave over all
attempts at placation, and whirled in a circle, his head away from her,
his shoulders receiving the punishment of her teeth.
In the meantime the rabbit danced above them in the air. The she-wolf
sat down in the snow, and old One Eye, now more in fear of his mate
than of the mysterious sapling, again sprang for the rabbit. As he sank
back with it between his teeth, he kept his eye on the sapling. As
before, it followed him back to earth. He crouched down under the
impending blow, his hair bristling, but his teeth still keeping tight
hold of the rabbit. But the blow did not fall. The sapling remained
bent above him. When he moved it moved, and he growled at it through
his clenched jaws; when he remained still, it remained still, and he
concluded it was safer to continue remaining still. Yet the warm blood
of the rabbit tasted good in his mouth.
It was his mate who relieved him from the quandary in which he found
himself. She took the rabbit from him, and while the sapling swayed and
teetered threateningly above her she calmly gnawed off the rabbit’s
head. At once the sapling shot up, and after that gave no more trouble,
remaining in the decorous and perpendicular position in which nature
had intended it to grow. Then, between them, the she-wolf and One Eye
devoured the game which the mysterious sapling had caught for them.
There were other run-ways and alleys where rabbits were hanging in the
air, and the wolf-pair prospected them all, the she-wolf leading the
way, old One Eye following and observant, learning the method of
robbing snares—a knowledge destined to stand him in good stead in the
days to come.
CHAPTER II
THE LAIR
For two days the she-wolf and One Eye hung about the Indian camp. He
was worried and apprehensive, yet the camp lured his mate and she was
loath to depart. But when, one morning, the air was rent with the
report of a rifle close at hand, and a bullet smashed against a tree
trunk several inches from One Eye’s head, they hesitated no more, but
went off on a long, swinging lope that put quick miles between them and
the danger.
They did not go far—a couple of days’ journey. The she-wolf’s need to
find the thing for which she searched had now become imperative. She
was getting very heavy, and could run but slowly. Once, in the pursuit
of a rabbit, which she ordinarily would have caught with ease, she gave
over and lay down and rested. One Eye came to her; but when he touched
her neck gently with his muzzle she snapped at him with such quick
fierceness that he tumbled over backward and cut a ridiculous figure in
his effort to escape her teeth. Her temper was now shorter than ever;
but he had become more patient than ever and more solicitous.
And then she found the thing for which she sought. It was a few miles
up a small stream that in the summer time flowed into the Mackenzie,
but that then was frozen over and frozen down to its rocky bottom—a
dead stream of solid white from source to mouth. The she-wolf was
trotting wearily along, her mate well in advance, when she came upon
the overhanging, high clay-bank. She turned aside and trotted over to
it. The wear and tear of spring storms and melting snows had
underwashed the bank and in one place had made a small cave out of a
narrow fissure.
She paused at the mouth of the cave and looked the wall over carefully.
Then, on one side and the other, she ran along the base of the wall to
where its abrupt bulk merged from the softer-lined landscape. Returning
to the cave, she entered its narrow mouth. For a short three feet she
was compelled to crouch, then the walls widened and rose higher in a
little round chamber nearly six feet in diameter. The roof barely
cleared her head. It was dry and cosey. She inspected it with
painstaking care, while One Eye, who had returned, stood in the
entrance and patiently watched her. She dropped her head, with her nose
to the ground and directed toward a point near to her closely bunched
feet, and around this point she circled several times; then, with a
tired sigh that was almost a grunt, she curled her body in, relaxed her
legs, and dropped down, her head toward the entrance. One Eye, with
pointed, interested ears, laughed at her, and beyond, outlined against
the white light, she could see the brush of his tail waving
good-naturedly. Her own ears, with a snuggling movement, laid their
sharp points backward and down against the head for a moment, while her
mouth opened and her tongue lolled peaceably out, and in this way she
expressed that she was pleased and satisfied.
One Eye was hungry. Though he lay down in the entrance and slept, his
sleep was fitful. He kept awaking and cocking his ears at the bright
world without, where the April sun was blazing across the snow. When he
dozed, upon his ears would steal the faint whispers of hidden trickles
of running water, and he would rouse and listen intently. The sun had
come back, and all the awakening Northland world was calling to him.
Life was stirring. The feel of spring was in the air, the feel of
growing life under the snow, of sap ascending in the trees, of buds
bursting the shackles of the frost.
He cast anxious glances at his mate, but she showed no desire to get
up. He looked outside, and half a dozen snow-birds fluttered across his
field of vision. He started to get up, then looked back to his mate
again, and settled down and dozed. A shrill and minute singing stole
upon his hearing. Once, and twice, he sleepily brushed his nose with
his paw. Then he woke up. There, buzzing in the air at the tip of his
nose, was a lone mosquito. It was a full-grown mosquito, one that had
lain frozen in a dry log all winter and that had now been thawed out by
the sun. He could resist the call of the world no longer. Besides, he
was hungry.
He crawled over to his mate and tried to persuade her to get up. But
she only snarled at him, and he walked out alone into the bright
sunshine to find the snow-surface soft under foot and the travelling
difficult. He went up the frozen bed of the stream, where the snow,
shaded by the trees, was yet hard and crystalline. He was gone eight
hours, and he came back through the darkness hungrier than when he had
started. He had found game, but he had not caught it. He had broken
through the melting snow crust, and wallowed, while the snowshoe
rabbits had skimmed along on top lightly as ever.
He paused at the mouth of the cave with a sudden shock of suspicion.
Faint, strange sounds came from within. They were sounds not made by
his mate, and yet they were remotely familiar. He bellied cautiously
inside and was met by a warning snarl from the she-wolf. This he
received without perturbation, though he obeyed it by keeping his
distance; but he remained interested in the other sounds—faint, muffled
sobbings and slubberings.
His mate warned him irritably away, and he curled up and slept in the
entrance. When morning came and a dim light pervaded the lair, he again
sought after the source of the remotely familiar sounds. There was a
new note in his mate’s warning snarl. It was a jealous note, and he was
very careful in keeping a respectful distance. Nevertheless, he made
out, sheltering between her legs against the length of her body, five
strange little bundles of life, very feeble, very helpless, making tiny
whimpering noises, with eyes that did not open to the light. He was
surprised. It was not the first time in his long and successful life
that this thing had happened. It had happened many times, yet each time
it was as fresh a surprise as ever to him.
His mate looked at him anxiously. Every little while she emitted a low
growl, and at times, when it seemed to her he approached too near, the
growl shot up in her throat to a sharp snarl. Of her own experience she
had no memory of the thing happening; but in her instinct, which was
the experience of all the mothers of wolves, there lurked a memory of
fathers that had eaten their new-born and helpless progeny. It
manifested itself as a fear strong within her, that made her prevent
One Eye from more closely inspecting the cubs he had fathered.
But there was no danger. Old One Eye was feeling the urge of an
impulse, that was, in turn, an instinct that had come down to him from
all the fathers of wolves. He did not question it, nor puzzle over it.
It was there, in the fibre of his being; and it was the most natural
thing in the world that he should obey it by turning his back on his
new-born family and by trotting out and away on the meat-trail whereby
he lived.
Five or six miles from the lair, the stream divided, its forks going
off among the mountains at a right angle. Here, leading up the left
fork, he came upon a fresh track. He smelled it and found it so recent
that he crouched swiftly, and looked in the direction in which it
disappeared. Then he turned deliberately and took the right fork. The
footprint was much larger than the one his own feet made, and he knew
that in the wake of such a trail there was little meat for him.
Half a mile up the right fork, his quick ears caught the sound of
gnawing teeth. He stalked the quarry and found it to be a porcupine,
standing upright against a tree and trying his teeth on the bark. One
Eye approached carefully but hopelessly. He knew the breed, though he
had never met it so far north before; and never in his long life had
porcupine served him for a meal. But he had long since learned that
there was such a thing as Chance, or Opportunity, and he continued to
draw near. There was never any telling what might happen, for with live
things events were somehow always happening differently.
The porcupine rolled itself into a ball, radiating long, sharp needles
in all directions that defied attack. In his youth One Eye had once
sniffed too near a similar, apparently inert ball of quills, and had
the tail flick out suddenly in his face. One quill he had carried away
in his muzzle, where it had remained for weeks, a rankling flame, until
it finally worked out. So he lay down, in a comfortable crouching
position, his nose fully a foot away, and out of the line of the tail.
Thus he waited, keeping perfectly quiet. There was no telling.
Something might happen. The porcupine might unroll. There might be
opportunity for a deft and ripping thrust of paw into the tender,
unguarded belly.
But at the end of half an hour he arose, growled wrathfully at the
motionless ball, and trotted on. He had waited too often and futilely
in the past for porcupines to unroll, to waste any more time. He
continued up the right fork. The day wore along, and nothing rewarded
his hunt.
The urge of his awakened instinct of fatherhood was strong upon him. He
must find meat. In the afternoon he blundered upon a ptarmigan. He came
out of a thicket and found himself face to face with the slow-witted
bird. It was sitting on a log, not a foot beyond the end of his nose.
Each saw the other. The bird made a startled rise, but he struck it
with his paw, and smashed it down to earth, then pounced upon it, and
caught it in his teeth as it scuttled across the snow trying to rise in
the air again. As his teeth crunched through the tender flesh and
fragile bones, he began naturally to eat. Then he remembered, and,
turning on the back-track, started for home, carrying the ptarmigan in
his mouth.
A mile above the forks, running velvet-footed as was his custom, a
gliding shadow that cautiously prospected each new vista of the trail,
he came upon later imprints of the large tracks he had discovered in
the early morning. As the track led his way, he followed, prepared to
meet the maker of it at every turn of the stream.
He slid his head around a corner of rock, where began an unusually
large bend in the stream, and his quick eyes made out something that
sent him crouching swiftly down. It was the maker of the track, a large
female lynx. She was crouching as he had crouched once that day, in
front of her the tight-rolled ball of quills. If he had been a gliding
shadow before, he now became the ghost of such a shadow, as he crept
and circled around, and came up well to leeward of the silent,
motionless pair.
He lay down in the snow, depositing the ptarmigan beside him, and with
eyes peering through the needles of a low-growing spruce he watched the
play of life before him—the waiting lynx and the waiting porcupine,
each intent on life; and, such was the curiousness of the game, the way
of life for one lay in the eating of the other, and the way of life for
the other lay in being not eaten. While old One Eye, the wolf crouching
in the covert, played his part, too, in the game, waiting for some
strange freak of Chance, that might help him on the meat-trail which
was his way of life.
Half an hour passed, an hour; and nothing happened. The ball of quills
might have been a stone for all it moved; the lynx might have been
frozen to marble; and old One Eye might have been dead. Yet all three
animals were keyed to a tenseness of living that was almost painful,
and scarcely ever would it come to them to be more alive than they were
then in their seeming petrifaction.
One Eye moved slightly and peered forth with increased eagerness.
Something was happening. The porcupine had at last decided that its
enemy had gone away. Slowly, cautiously, it was unrolling its ball of
impregnable armour. It was agitated by no tremor of anticipation.
Slowly, slowly, the bristling ball straightened out and lengthened. One
Eye watching, felt a sudden moistness in his mouth and a drooling of
saliva, involuntary, excited by the living meat that was spreading
itself like a repast before him.
Not quite entirely had the porcupine unrolled when it discovered its
enemy. In that instant the lynx struck. The blow was like a flash of
light. The paw, with rigid claws curving like talons, shot under the
tender belly and came back with a swift ripping movement. Had the
porcupine been entirely unrolled, or had it not discovered its enemy a
fraction of a second before the blow was struck, the paw would have
escaped unscathed; but a side-flick of the tail sank sharp quills into
it as it was withdrawn.
Everything had happened at once—the blow, the counter-blow, the squeal
of agony from the porcupine, the big cat’s squall of sudden hurt and
astonishment. One Eye half arose in his excitement, his ears up, his
tail straight out and quivering behind him. The lynx’s bad temper got
the best of her. She sprang savagely at the thing that had hurt her.
But the porcupine, squealing and grunting, with disrupted anatomy
trying feebly to roll up into its ball-protection, flicked out its tail
again, and again the big cat squalled with hurt and astonishment. Then
she fell to backing away and sneezing, her nose bristling with quills
like a monstrous pin-cushion. She brushed her nose with her paws,
trying to dislodge the fiery darts, thrust it into the snow, and rubbed
it against twigs and branches, and all the time leaping about, ahead,
sidewise, up and down, in a frenzy of pain and fright.
She sneezed continually, and her stub of a tail was doing its best
toward lashing about by giving quick, violent jerks. She quit her
antics, and quieted down for a long minute. One Eye watched. And even
he could not repress a start and an involuntary bristling of hair along
his back when she suddenly leaped, without warning, straight up in the
air, at the same time emitting a long and most terrible squall. Then
she sprang away, up the trail, squalling with every leap she made.
It was not until her racket had faded away in the distance and died out
that One Eye ventured forth. He walked as delicately as though all the
snow were carpeted with porcupine quills, erect and ready to pierce the
soft pads of his feet. The porcupine met his approach with a furious
squealing and a clashing of its long teeth. It had managed to roll up
in a ball again, but it was not quite the old compact ball; its muscles
were too much torn for that. It had been ripped almost in half, and was
still bleeding profusely.
One Eye scooped out mouthfuls of the blood-soaked snow, and chewed and
tasted and swallowed. This served as a relish, and his hunger increased
mightily; but he was too old in the world to forget his caution. He
waited. He lay down and waited, while the porcupine grated its teeth
and uttered grunts and sobs and occasional sharp little squeals. In a
little while, One Eye noticed that the quills were drooping and that a
great quivering had set up. The quivering came to an end suddenly.
There was a final defiant clash of the long teeth. Then all the quills
drooped quite down, and the body relaxed and moved no more.
With a nervous, shrinking paw, One Eye stretched out the porcupine to
its full length and turned it over on its back. Nothing had happened.
It was surely dead. He studied it intently for a moment, then took a
careful grip with his teeth and started off down the stream, partly
carrying, partly dragging the porcupine, with head turned to the side
so as to avoid stepping on the prickly mass. He recollected something,
dropped the burden, and trotted back to where he had left the
ptarmigan. He did not hesitate a moment. He knew clearly what was to be
done, and this he did by promptly eating the ptarmigan. Then he
returned and took up his burden.
When he dragged the result of his day’s hunt into the cave, the
she-wolf inspected it, turned her muzzle to him, and lightly licked him
on the neck. But the next instant she was warning him away from the
cubs with a snarl that was less harsh than usual and that was more
apologetic than menacing. Her instinctive fear of the father of her
progeny was toning down. He was behaving as a wolf-father should, and
manifesting no unholy desire to devour the young lives she had brought
into the world.
CHAPTER III
THE GREY CUB
He was different from his brothers and sisters. Their hair already
betrayed the reddish hue inherited from their mother, the she-wolf;
while he alone, in this particular, took after his father. He was the
one little grey cub of the litter. He had bred true to the straight
wolf-stock—in fact, he had bred true to old One Eye himself,
physically, with but a single exception, and that was he had two eyes
to his father’s one.
The grey cub’s eyes had not been open long, yet already he could see
with steady clearness. And while his eyes were still closed, he had
felt, tasted, and smelled. He knew his two brothers and his two sisters
very well. He had begun to romp with them in a feeble, awkward way, and
even to squabble, his little throat vibrating with a queer rasping
noise (the forerunner of the growl), as he worked himself into a
passion. And long before his eyes had opened he had learned by touch,
taste, and smell to know his mother—a fount of warmth and liquid food
and tenderness. She possessed a gentle, caressing tongue that soothed
him when it passed over his soft little body, and that impelled him to
snuggle close against her and to doze off to sleep.
Most of the first month of his life had been passed thus in sleeping;
but now he could see quite well, and he stayed awake for longer periods
of time, and he was coming to learn his world quite well. His world was
gloomy; but he did not know that, for he knew no other world. It was
dim-lighted; but his eyes had never had to adjust themselves to any
other light. His world was very small. Its limits were the walls of the
lair; but as he had no knowledge of the wide world outside, he was
never oppressed by the narrow confines of his existence.
But he had early discovered that one wall of his world was different
from the rest. This was the mouth of the cave and the source of light.
He had discovered that it was different from the other walls long
before he had any thoughts of his own, any conscious volitions. It had
been an irresistible attraction before ever his eyes opened and looked
upon it. The light from it had beat upon his sealed lids, and the eyes
and the optic nerves had pulsated to little, sparklike flashes,
warm-coloured and strangely pleasing. The life of his body, and of
every fibre of his body, the life that was the very substance of his
body and that was apart from his own personal life, had yearned toward
this light and urged his body toward it in the same way that the
cunning chemistry of a plant urges it toward the sun.
Always, in the beginning, before his conscious life dawned, he had
crawled toward the mouth of the cave. And in this his brothers and
sisters were one with him. Never, in that period, did any of them crawl
toward the dark corners of the back-wall. The light drew them as if
they were plants; the chemistry of the life that composed them demanded
the light as a necessity of being; and their little puppet-bodies
crawled blindly and chemically, like the tendrils of a vine. Later on,
when each developed individuality and became personally conscious of
impulsions and desires, the attraction of the light increased. They
were always crawling and sprawling toward it, and being driven back
from it by their mother.
It was in this way that the grey cub learned other attributes of his
mother than the soft, soothing, tongue. In his insistent crawling
toward the light, he discovered in her a nose that with a sharp nudge
administered rebuke, and later, a paw, that crushed him down and rolled
him over and over with swift, calculating stroke. Thus he learned hurt;
and on top of it he learned to avoid hurt, first, by not incurring the
risk of it; and second, when he had incurred the risk, by dodging and
by retreating. These were conscious actions, and were the results of
his first generalisations upon the world. Before that he had recoiled
automatically from hurt, as he had crawled automatically toward the
light. After that he recoiled from hurt because he _knew_ that it was
hurt.
He was a fierce little cub. So were his brothers and sisters. It was to
be expected. He was a carnivorous animal. He came of a breed of
meat-killers and meat-eaters. His father and mother lived wholly upon
meat. The milk he had sucked with his first flickering life, was milk
transformed directly from meat, and now, at a month old, when his eyes
had been open for but a week, he was beginning himself to eat meat—meat
half-digested by the she-wolf and disgorged for the five growing cubs
that already made too great demand upon her breast.
But he was, further, the fiercest of the litter. He could make a louder
rasping growl than any of them. His tiny rages were much more terrible
than theirs. It was he that first learned the trick of rolling a
fellow-cub over with a cunning paw-stroke. And it was he that first
gripped another cub by the ear and pulled and tugged and growled
through jaws tight-clenched. And certainly it was he that caused the
mother the most trouble in keeping her litter from the mouth of the
cave.
The fascination of the light for the grey cub increased from day to
day. He was perpetually departing on yard-long adventures toward the
cave’s entrance, and as perpetually being driven back. Only he did not
know it for an entrance. He did not know anything about
entrances—passages whereby one goes from one place to another place. He
did not know any other place, much less of a way to get there. So to
him the entrance of the cave was a wall—a wall of light. As the sun was
to the outside dweller, this wall was to him the sun of his world. It
attracted him as a candle attracts a moth. He was always striving to
attain it. The life that was so swiftly expanding within him, urged him
continually toward the wall of light. The life that was within him knew
that it was the one way out, the way he was predestined to tread. But
he himself did not know anything about it. He did not know there was
any outside at all.
There was one strange thing about this wall of light. His father (he
had already come to recognise his father as the one other dweller in
the world, a creature like his mother, who slept near the light and was
a bringer of meat)—his father had a way of walking right into the white
far wall and disappearing. The grey cub could not understand this.
Though never permitted by his mother to approach that wall, he had
approached the other walls, and encountered hard obstruction on the end
of his tender nose. This hurt. And after several such adventures, he
left the walls alone. Without thinking about it, he accepted this
disappearing into the wall as a peculiarity of his father, as milk and
half-digested meat were peculiarities of his mother.
In fact, the grey cub was not given to thinking—at least, to the kind
of thinking customary of men. His brain worked in dim ways. Yet his
conclusions were as sharp and distinct as those achieved by men. He had
a method of accepting things, without questioning the why and
wherefore. In reality, this was the act of classification. He was never
disturbed over why a thing happened. How it happened was sufficient for
him. Thus, when he had bumped his nose on the back-wall a few times, he
accepted that he would not disappear into walls. In the same way he
accepted that his father could disappear into walls. But he was not in
the least disturbed by desire to find out the reason for the difference
between his father and himself. Logic and physics were no part of his
mental make-up.
Like most creatures of the Wild, he early experienced famine. There
came a time when not only did the meat-supply cease, but the milk no
longer came from his mother’s breast. At first, the cubs whimpered and
cried, but for the most part they slept. It was not long before they
were reduced to a coma of hunger. There were no more spats and
squabbles, no more tiny rages nor attempts at growling; while the
adventures toward the far white wall ceased altogether. The cubs slept,
while the life that was in them flickered and died down.
One Eye was desperate. He ranged far and wide, and slept but little in
the lair that had now become cheerless and miserable. The she-wolf,
too, left her litter and went out in search of meat. In the first days
after the birth of the cubs, One Eye had journeyed several times back
to the Indian camp and robbed the rabbit snares; but, with the melting
of the snow and the opening of the streams, the Indian camp had moved
away, and that source of supply was closed to him.
When the grey cub came back to life and again took interest in the far
white wall, he found that the population of his world had been reduced.
Only one sister remained to him. The rest were gone. As he grew
stronger, he found himself compelled to play alone, for the sister no
longer lifted her head nor moved about. His little body rounded out
with the meat he now ate; but the food had come too late for her. She
slept continuously, a tiny skeleton flung round with skin in which the
flame flickered lower and lower and at last went out.
Then there came a time when the grey cub no longer saw his father
appearing and disappearing in the wall nor lying down asleep in the
entrance. This had happened at the end of a second and less severe
famine. The she-wolf knew why One Eye never came back, but there was no
way by which she could tell what she had seen to the grey cub. Hunting
herself for meat, up the left fork of the stream where lived the lynx,
she had followed a day-old trail of One Eye. And she had found him, or
what remained of him, at the end of the trail. There were many signs of
the battle that had been fought, and of the lynx’s withdrawal to her
lair after having won the victory. Before she went away, the she-wolf
had found this lair, but the signs told her that the lynx was inside,
and she had not dared to venture in.
After that, the she-wolf in her hunting avoided the left fork. For she
knew that in the lynx’s lair was a litter of kittens, and she knew the
lynx for a fierce, bad-tempered creature and a terrible fighter. It was
all very well for half a dozen wolves to drive a lynx, spitting and
bristling, up a tree; but it was quite a different matter for a lone
wolf to encounter a lynx—especially when the lynx was known to have a
litter of hungry kittens at her back.
But the Wild is the Wild, and motherhood is motherhood, at all times
fiercely protective whether in the Wild or out of it; and the time was
to come when the she-wolf, for her grey cub’s sake, would venture the
left fork, and the lair in the rocks, and the lynx’s wrath.
CHAPTER IV
THE WALL OF THE WORLD
By the time his mother began leaving the cave on hunting expeditions,
the cub had learned well the law that forbade his approaching the
entrance. Not only had this law been forcibly and many times impressed
on him by his mother’s nose and paw, but in him the instinct of fear
was developing. Never, in his brief cave-life, had he encountered
anything of which to be afraid. Yet fear was in him. It had come down
to him from a remote ancestry through a thousand thousand lives. It was
a heritage he had received directly from One Eye and the she-wolf; but
to them, in turn, it had been passed down through all the generations
of wolves that had gone before. Fear!—that legacy of the Wild which no
animal may escape nor exchange for pottage.
So the grey cub knew fear, though he knew not the stuff of which fear
was made. Possibly he accepted it as one of the restrictions of life.
For he had already learned that there were such restrictions. Hunger he
had known; and when he could not appease his hunger he had felt
restriction. The hard obstruction of the cave-wall, the sharp nudge of
his mother’s nose, the smashing stroke of her paw, the hunger
unappeased of several famines, had borne in upon him that all was not
freedom in the world, that to life there was limitations and
restraints. These limitations and restraints were laws. To be obedient
to them was to escape hurt and make for happiness.
He did not reason the question out in this man fashion. He merely
classified the things that hurt and the things that did not hurt. And
after such classification he avoided the things that hurt, the
restrictions and restraints, in order to enjoy the satisfactions and
the remunerations of life.
Thus it was that in obedience to the law laid down by his mother, and
in obedience to the law of that unknown and nameless thing, fear, he
kept away from the mouth of the cave. It remained to him a white wall
of light. When his mother was absent, he slept most of the time, while
during the intervals that he was awake he kept very quiet, suppressing
the whimpering cries that tickled in his throat and strove for noise.
Once, lying awake, he heard a strange sound in the white wall. He did
not know that it was a wolverine, standing outside, all a-trembling
with its own daring, and cautiously scenting out the contents of the
cave. The cub knew only that the sniff was strange, a something
unclassified, therefore unknown and terrible—for the unknown was one of
the chief elements that went into the making of fear.
The hair bristled upon the grey cub’s back, but it bristled silently.
How was he to know that this thing that sniffed was a thing at which to
bristle? It was not born of any knowledge of his, yet it was the
visible expression of the fear that was in him, and for which, in his
own life, there was no accounting. But fear was accompanied by another
instinct—that of concealment. The cub was in a frenzy of terror, yet he
lay without movement or sound, frozen, petrified into immobility, to
all appearances dead. His mother, coming home, growled as she smelt the
wolverine’s track, and bounded into the cave and licked and nozzled him
with undue vehemence of affection. And the cub felt that somehow he had
escaped a great hurt.
But there were other forces at work in the cub, the greatest of which
was growth. Instinct and law demanded of him obedience. But growth
demanded disobedience. His mother and fear impelled him to keep away
from the white wall. Growth is life, and life is for ever destined to
make for light. So there was no damming up the tide of life that was
rising within him—rising with every mouthful of meat he swallowed, with
every breath he drew. In the end, one day, fear and obedience were
swept away by the rush of life, and the cub straddled and sprawled
toward the entrance.
Unlike any other wall with which he had had experience, this wall
seemed to recede from him as he approached. No hard surface collided
with the tender little nose he thrust out tentatively before him. The
substance of the wall seemed as permeable and yielding as light. And as
condition, in his eyes, had the seeming of form, so he entered into
what had been wall to him and bathed in the substance that composed it.
It was bewildering. He was sprawling through solidity. And ever the
light grew brighter. Fear urged him to go back, but growth drove him
on. Suddenly he found himself at the mouth of the cave. The wall,
inside which he had thought himself, as suddenly leaped back before him
to an immeasurable distance. The light had become painfully bright. He
was dazzled by it. Likewise he was made dizzy by this abrupt and
tremendous extension of space. Automatically, his eyes were adjusting
themselves to the brightness, focusing themselves to meet the increased
distance of objects. At first, the wall had leaped beyond his vision.
He now saw it again; but it had taken upon itself a remarkable
remoteness. Also, its appearance had changed. It was now a variegated
wall, composed of the trees that fringed the stream, the opposing
mountain that towered above the trees, and the sky that out-towered the
mountain.
A great fear came upon him. This was more of the terrible unknown. He
crouched down on the lip of the cave and gazed out on the world. He was
very much afraid. Because it was unknown, it was hostile to him.
Therefore the hair stood up on end along his back and his lips wrinkled
weakly in an attempt at a ferocious and intimidating snarl. Out of his
puniness and fright he challenged and menaced the whole wide world.
Nothing happened. He continued to gaze, and in his interest he forgot
to snarl. Also, he forgot to be afraid. For the time, fear had been
routed by growth, while growth had assumed the guise of curiosity. He
began to notice near objects—an open portion of the stream that flashed
in the sun, the blasted pine-tree that stood at the base of the slope,
and the slope itself, that ran right up to him and ceased two feet
beneath the lip of the cave on which he crouched.
Now the grey cub had lived all his days on a level floor. He had never
experienced the hurt of a fall. He did not know what a fall was. So he
stepped boldly out upon the air. His hind-legs still rested on the
cave-lip, so he fell forward head downward. The earth struck him a
harsh blow on the nose that made him yelp. Then he began rolling down
the slope, over and over. He was in a panic of terror. The unknown had
caught him at last. It had gripped savagely hold of him and was about
to wreak upon him some terrific hurt. Growth was now routed by fear,
and he ki-yi’d like any frightened puppy.
The unknown bore him on he knew not to what frightful hurt, and he
yelped and ki-yi’d unceasingly. This was a different proposition from
crouching in frozen fear while the unknown lurked just alongside. Now
the unknown had caught tight hold of him. Silence would do no good.
Besides, it was not fear, but terror, that convulsed him.
But the slope grew more gradual, and its base was grass-covered. Here
the cub lost momentum. When at last he came to a stop, he gave one last
agonised yell and then a long, whimpering wail. Also, and quite as a
matter of course, as though in his life he had already made a thousand
toilets, he proceeded to lick away the dry clay that soiled him.
After that he sat up and gazed about him, as might the first man of the
earth who landed upon Mars. The cub had broken through the wall of the
world, the unknown had let go its hold of him, and here he was without
hurt. But the first man on Mars would have experienced less
unfamiliarity than did he. Without any antecedent knowledge, without
any warning whatever that such existed, he found himself an explorer in
a totally new world.
Now that the terrible unknown had let go of him, he forgot that the
unknown had any terrors. He was aware only of curiosity in all the
things about him. He inspected the grass beneath him, the moss-berry
plant just beyond, and the dead trunk of the blasted pine that stood on
the edge of an open space among the trees. A squirrel, running around
the base of the trunk, came full upon him, and gave him a great fright.
He cowered down and snarled. But the squirrel was as badly scared. It
ran up the tree, and from a point of safety chattered back savagely.
This helped the cub’s courage, and though the woodpecker he next
encountered gave him a start, he proceeded confidently on his way. Such
was his confidence, that when a moose-bird impudently hopped up to him,
he reached out at it with a playful paw. The result was a sharp peck on
the end of his nose that made him cower down and ki-yi. The noise he
made was too much for the moose-bird, who sought safety in flight.
But the cub was learning. His misty little mind had already made an
unconscious classification. There were live things and things not
alive. Also, he must watch out for the live things. The things not
alive remained always in one place, but the live things moved about,
and there was no telling what they might do. The thing to expect of
them was the unexpected, and for this he must be prepared.
He travelled very clumsily. He ran into sticks and things. A twig that
he thought a long way off, would the next instant hit him on the nose
or rake along his ribs. There were inequalities of surface. Sometimes
he overstepped and stubbed his nose. Quite as often he understepped and
stubbed his feet. Then there were the pebbles and stones that turned
under him when he trod upon them; and from them he came to know that
the things not alive were not all in the same state of stable
equilibrium as was his cave—also, that small things not alive were more
liable than large things to fall down or turn over. But with every
mishap he was learning. The longer he walked, the better he walked. He
was adjusting himself. He was learning to calculate his own muscular
movements, to know his physical limitations, to measure distances
between objects, and between objects and himself.
His was the luck of the beginner. Born to be a hunter of meat (though
he did not know it), he blundered upon meat just outside his own
cave-door on his first foray into the world. It was by sheer blundering
that he chanced upon the shrewdly hidden ptarmigan nest. He fell into
it. He had essayed to walk along the trunk of a fallen pine. The rotten
bark gave way under his feet, and with a despairing yelp he pitched
down the rounded crescent, smashed through the leafage and stalks of a
small bush, and in the heart of the bush, on the ground, fetched up in
the midst of seven ptarmigan chicks.
They made noises, and at first he was frightened at them. Then he
perceived that they were very little, and he became bolder. They moved.
He placed his paw on one, and its movements were accelerated. This was
a source of enjoyment to him. He smelled it. He picked it up in his
mouth. It struggled and tickled his tongue. At the same time he was
made aware of a sensation of hunger. His jaws closed together. There
was a crunching of fragile bones, and warm blood ran in his mouth. The
taste of it was good. This was meat, the same as his mother gave him,
only it was alive between his teeth and therefore better. So he ate the
ptarmigan. Nor did he stop till he had devoured the whole brood. Then
he licked his chops in quite the same way his mother did, and began to
crawl out of the bush.
He encountered a feathered whirlwind. He was confused and blinded by
the rush of it and the beat of angry wings. He hid his head between his
paws and yelped. The blows increased. The mother ptarmigan was in a
fury. Then he became angry. He rose up, snarling, striking out with his
paws. He sank his tiny teeth into one of the wings and pulled and
tugged sturdily. The ptarmigan struggled against him, showering blows
upon him with her free wing. It was his first battle. He was elated. He
forgot all about the unknown. He no longer was afraid of anything. He
was fighting, tearing at a live thing that was striking at him. Also,
this live thing was meat. The lust to kill was on him. He had just
destroyed little live things. He would now destroy a big live thing. He
was too busy and happy to know that he was happy. He was thrilling and
exulting in ways new to him and greater to him than any he had known
before.
He held on to the wing and growled between his tight-clenched teeth.
The ptarmigan dragged him out of the bush. When she turned and tried to
drag him back into the bush’s shelter, he pulled her away from it and
on into the open. And all the time she was making outcry and striking
with her free wing, while feathers were flying like a snow-fall. The
pitch to which he was aroused was tremendous. All the fighting blood of
his breed was up in him and surging through him. This was living,
though he did not know it. He was realising his own meaning in the
world; he was doing that for which he was made—killing meat and
battling to kill it. He was justifying his existence, than which life
can do no greater; for life achieves its summit when it does to the
uttermost that which it was equipped to do.
After a time, the ptarmigan ceased her struggling. He still held her by
the wing, and they lay on the ground and looked at each other. He tried
to growl threateningly, ferociously. She pecked on his nose, which by
now, what of previous adventures was sore. He winced but held on. She
pecked him again and again. From wincing he went to whimpering. He
tried to back away from her, oblivious to the fact that by his hold on
her he dragged her after him. A rain of pecks fell on his ill-used
nose. The flood of fight ebbed down in him, and, releasing his prey, he
turned tail and scampered on across the open in inglorious retreat.
He lay down to rest on the other side of the open, near the edge of the
bushes, his tongue lolling out, his chest heaving and panting, his nose
still hurting him and causing him to continue his whimper. But as he
lay there, suddenly there came to him a feeling as of something
terrible impending. The unknown with all its terrors rushed upon him,
and he shrank back instinctively into the shelter of the bush. As he
did so, a draught of air fanned him, and a large, winged body swept
ominously and silently past. A hawk, driving down out of the blue, had
barely missed him.
While he lay in the bush, recovering from his fright and peering
fearfully out, the mother-ptarmigan on the other side of the open space
fluttered out of the ravaged nest. It was because of her loss that she
paid no attention to the winged bolt of the sky. But the cub saw, and
it was a warning and a lesson to him—the swift downward swoop of the
hawk, the short skim of its body just above the ground, the strike of
its talons in the body of the ptarmigan, the ptarmigan’s squawk of
agony and fright, and the hawk’s rush upward into the blue, carrying
the ptarmigan away with it.
It was a long time before the cub left its shelter. He had learned
much. Live things were meat. They were good to eat. Also, live things
when they were large enough, could give hurt. It was better to eat
small live things like ptarmigan chicks, and to let alone large live
things like ptarmigan hens. Nevertheless he felt a little prick of
ambition, a sneaking desire to have another battle with that ptarmigan
hen—only the hawk had carried her away. May be there were other
ptarmigan hens. He would go and see.
He came down a shelving bank to the stream. He had never seen water
before. The footing looked good. There were no inequalities of surface.
He stepped boldly out on it; and went down, crying with fear, into the
embrace of the unknown. It was cold, and he gasped, breathing quickly.
The water rushed into his lungs instead of the air that had always
accompanied his act of breathing. The suffocation he experienced was
like the pang of death. To him it signified death. He had no conscious
knowledge of death, but like every animal of the Wild, he possessed the
instinct of death. To him it stood as the greatest of hurts. It was the
very essence of the unknown; it was the sum of the terrors of the
unknown, the one culminating and unthinkable catastrophe that could
happen to him, about which he knew nothing and about which he feared
everything.
He came to the surface, and the sweet air rushed into his open mouth.
He did not go down again. Quite as though it had been a
long-established custom of his he struck out with all his legs and
began to swim. The near bank was a yard away; but he had come up with
his back to it, and the first thing his eyes rested upon was the
opposite bank, toward which he immediately began to swim. The stream
was a small one, but in the pool it widened out to a score of feet.
Midway in the passage, the current picked up the cub and swept him
downstream. He was caught in the miniature rapid at the bottom of the
pool. Here was little chance for swimming. The quiet water had become
suddenly angry. Sometimes he was under, sometimes on top. At all times
he was in violent motion, now being turned over or around, and again,
being smashed against a rock. And with every rock he struck, he yelped.
His progress was a series of yelps, from which might have been adduced
the number of rocks he encountered.
Below the rapid was a second pool, and here, captured by the eddy, he
was gently borne to the bank, and as gently deposited on a bed of
gravel. He crawled frantically clear of the water and lay down. He had
learned some more about the world. Water was not alive. Yet it moved.
Also, it looked as solid as the earth, but was without any solidity at
all. His conclusion was that things were not always what they appeared
to be. The cub’s fear of the unknown was an inherited distrust, and it
had now been strengthened by experience. Thenceforth, in the nature of
things, he would possess an abiding distrust of appearances. He would
have to learn the reality of a thing before he could put his faith into
it.
One other adventure was destined for him that day. He had recollected
that there was such a thing in the world as his mother. And then there
came to him a feeling that he wanted her more than all the rest of the
things in the world. Not only was his body tired with the adventures it
had undergone, but his little brain was equally tired. In all the days
he had lived it had not worked so hard as on this one day. Furthermore,
he was sleepy. So he started out to look for the cave and his mother,
feeling at the same time an overwhelming rush of loneliness and
helplessness.
He was sprawling along between some bushes, when he heard a sharp
intimidating cry. There was a flash of yellow before his eyes. He saw a
weasel leaping swiftly away from him. It was a small live thing, and he
had no fear. Then, before him, at his feet, he saw an extremely small
live thing, only several inches long, a young weasel, that, like
himself, had disobediently gone out adventuring. It tried to retreat
before him. He turned it over with his paw. It made a queer, grating
noise. The next moment the flash of yellow reappeared before his eyes.
He heard again the intimidating cry, and at the same instant received a
sharp blow on the side of the neck and felt the sharp teeth of the
mother-weasel cut into his flesh.
While he yelped and ki-yi’d and scrambled backward, he saw the
mother-weasel leap upon her young one and disappear with it into the
neighbouring thicket. The cut of her teeth in his neck still hurt, but
his feelings were hurt more grievously, and he sat down and weakly
whimpered. This mother-weasel was so small and so savage. He was yet to
learn that for size and weight the weasel was the most ferocious,
vindictive, and terrible of all the killers of the Wild. But a portion
of this knowledge was quickly to be his.
He was still whimpering when the mother-weasel reappeared. She did not
rush him, now that her young one was safe. She approached more
cautiously, and the cub had full opportunity to observe her lean,
snakelike body, and her head, erect, eager, and snake-like itself. Her
sharp, menacing cry sent the hair bristling along his back, and he
snarled warningly at her. She came closer and closer. There was a leap,
swifter than his unpractised sight, and the lean, yellow body
disappeared for a moment out of the field of his vision. The next
moment she was at his throat, her teeth buried in his hair and flesh.
At first he snarled and tried to fight; but he was very young, and this
was only his first day in the world, and his snarl became a whimper,
his fight a struggle to escape. The weasel never relaxed her hold. She
hung on, striving to press down with her teeth to the great vein where
his life-blood bubbled. The weasel was a drinker of blood, and it was
ever her preference to drink from the throat of life itself.
The grey cub would have died, and there would have been no story to
write about him, had not the she-wolf come bounding through the bushes.
The weasel let go the cub and flashed at the she-wolf’s throat,
missing, but getting a hold on the jaw instead. The she-wolf flirted
her head like the snap of a whip, breaking the weasel’s hold and
flinging it high in the air. And, still in the air, the she-wolf’s jaws
closed on the lean, yellow body, and the weasel knew death between the
crunching teeth.
The cub experienced another access of affection on the part of his
mother. Her joy at finding him seemed even greater than his joy at
being found. She nozzled him and caressed him and licked the cuts made
in him by the weasel’s teeth. Then, between them, mother and cub, they
ate the blood-drinker, and after that went back to the cave and slept.
CHAPTER V
THE LAW OF MEAT
The cub’s development was rapid. He rested for two days, and then
ventured forth from the cave again. It was on this adventure that he
found the young weasel whose mother he had helped eat, and he saw to it
that the young weasel went the way of its mother. But on this trip he
did not get lost. When he grew tired, he found his way back to the cave
and slept. And every day thereafter found him out and ranging a wider
area.
He began to get accurate measurement of his strength and his weakness,
and to know when to be bold and when to be cautious. He found it
expedient to be cautious all the time, except for the rare moments,
when, assured of his own intrepidity, he abandoned himself to petty
rages and lusts.
He was always a little demon of fury when he chanced upon a stray
ptarmigan. Never did he fail to respond savagely to the chatter of the
squirrel he had first met on the blasted pine. While the sight of a
moose-bird almost invariably put him into the wildest of rages; for he
never forgot the peck on the nose he had received from the first of
that ilk he encountered.
But there were times when even a moose-bird failed to affect him, and
those were times when he felt himself to be in danger from some other
prowling meat hunter. He never forgot the hawk, and its moving shadow
always sent him crouching into the nearest thicket. He no longer
sprawled and straddled, and already he was developing the gait of his
mother, slinking and furtive, apparently without exertion, yet sliding
along with a swiftness that was as deceptive as it was imperceptible.
In the matter of meat, his luck had been all in the beginning. The
seven ptarmigan chicks and the baby weasel represented the sum of his
killings. His desire to kill strengthened with the days, and he
cherished hungry ambitions for the squirrel that chattered so volubly
and always informed all wild creatures that the wolf-cub was
approaching. But as birds flew in the air, squirrels could climb trees,
and the cub could only try to crawl unobserved upon the squirrel when
it was on the ground.
The cub entertained a great respect for his mother. She could get meat,
and she never failed to bring him his share. Further, she was unafraid
of things. It did not occur to him that this fearlessness was founded
upon experience and knowledge. Its effect on him was that of an
impression of power. His mother represented power; and as he grew older
he felt this power in the sharper admonishment of her paw; while the
reproving nudge of her nose gave place to the slash of her fangs. For
this, likewise, he respected his mother. She compelled obedience from
him, and the older he grew the shorter grew her temper.
Famine came again, and the cub with clearer consciousness knew once
more the bite of hunger. The she-wolf ran herself thin in the quest for
meat. She rarely slept any more in the cave, spending most of her time
on the meat-trail, and spending it vainly. This famine was not a long
one, but it was severe while it lasted. The cub found no more milk in
his mother’s breast, nor did he get one mouthful of meat for himself.
Before, he had hunted in play, for the sheer joyousness of it; now he
hunted in deadly earnestness, and found nothing. Yet the failure of it
accelerated his development. He studied the habits of the squirrel with
greater carefulness, and strove with greater craft to steal upon it and
surprise it. He studied the wood-mice and tried to dig them out of
their burrows; and he learned much about the ways of moose-birds and
woodpeckers. And there came a day when the hawk’s shadow did not drive
him crouching into the bushes. He had grown stronger and wiser, and
more confident. Also, he was desperate. So he sat on his haunches,
conspicuously in an open space, and challenged the hawk down out of the
sky. For he knew that there, floating in the blue above him, was meat,
the meat his stomach yearned after so insistently. But the hawk refused
to come down and give battle, and the cub crawled away into a thicket
and whimpered his disappointment and hunger.
The famine broke. The she-wolf brought home meat. It was strange meat,
different from any she had ever brought before. It was a lynx kitten,
partly grown, like the cub, but not so large. And it was all for him.
His mother had satisfied her hunger elsewhere; though he did not know
that it was the rest of the lynx litter that had gone to satisfy her.
Nor did he know the desperateness of her deed. He knew only that the
velvet-furred kitten was meat, and he ate and waxed happier with every
mouthful.
A full stomach conduces to inaction, and the cub lay in the cave,
sleeping against his mother’s side. He was aroused by her snarling.
Never had he heard her snarl so terribly. Possibly in her whole life it
was the most terrible snarl she ever gave. There was reason for it, and
none knew it better than she. A lynx’s lair is not despoiled with
impunity. In the full glare of the afternoon light, crouching in the
entrance of the cave, the cub saw the lynx-mother. The hair rippled up
along his back at the sight. Here was fear, and it did not require his
instinct to tell him of it. And if sight alone were not sufficient, the
cry of rage the intruder gave, beginning with a snarl and rushing
abruptly upward into a hoarse screech, was convincing enough in itself.
The cub felt the prod of the life that was in him, and stood up and
snarled valiantly by his mother’s side. But she thrust him
ignominiously away and behind her. Because of the low-roofed entrance
the lynx could not leap in, and when she made a crawling rush of it the
she-wolf sprang upon her and pinned her down. The cub saw little of the
battle. There was a tremendous snarling and spitting and screeching.
The two animals threshed about, the lynx ripping and tearing with her
claws and using her teeth as well, while the she-wolf used her teeth
alone.
Once, the cub sprang in and sank his teeth into the hind leg of the
lynx. He clung on, growling savagely. Though he did not know it, by the
weight of his body he clogged the action of the leg and thereby saved
his mother much damage. A change in the battle crushed him under both
their bodies and wrenched loose his hold. The next moment the two
mothers separated, and, before they rushed together again, the lynx
lashed out at the cub with a huge fore-paw that ripped his shoulder
open to the bone and sent him hurtling sidewise against the wall. Then
was added to the uproar the cub’s shrill yelp of pain and fright. But
the fight lasted so long that he had time to cry himself out and to
experience a second burst of courage; and the end of the battle found
him again clinging to a hind-leg and furiously growling between his
teeth.
The lynx was dead. But the she-wolf was very weak and sick. At first
she caressed the cub and licked his wounded shoulder; but the blood she
had lost had taken with it her strength, and for all of a day and a
night she lay by her dead foe’s side, without movement, scarcely
breathing. For a week she never left the cave, except for water, and
then her movements were slow and painful. At the end of that time the
lynx was devoured, while the she-wolf’s wounds had healed sufficiently
to permit her to take the meat-trail again.
The cub’s shoulder was stiff and sore, and for some time he limped from
the terrible slash he had received. But the world now seemed changed.
He went about in it with greater confidence, with a feeling of prowess
that had not been his in the days before the battle with the lynx. He
had looked upon life in a more ferocious aspect; he had fought; he had
buried his teeth in the flesh of a foe; and he had survived. And
because of all this, he carried himself more boldly, with a touch of
defiance that was new in him. He was no longer afraid of minor things,
and much of his timidity had vanished, though the unknown never ceased
to press upon him with its mysteries and terrors, intangible and
ever-menacing.
He began to accompany his mother on the meat-trail, and he saw much of
the killing of meat and began to play his part in it. And in his own
dim way he learned the law of meat. There were two kinds of life—his
own kind and the other kind. His own kind included his mother and
himself. The other kind included all live things that moved. But the
other kind was divided. One portion was what his own kind killed and
ate. This portion was composed of the non-killers and the small
killers. The other portion killed and ate his own kind, or was killed
and eaten by his own kind. And out of this classification arose the
law. The aim of life was meat. Life itself was meat. Life lived on
life. There were the eaters and the eaten. The law was: EAT OR BE
EATEN. He did not formulate the law in clear, set terms and moralise
about it. He did not even think the law; he merely lived the law
without thinking about it at all.
He saw the law operating around him on every side. He had eaten the
ptarmigan chicks. The hawk had eaten the ptarmigan-mother. The hawk
would also have eaten him. Later, when he had grown more formidable, he
wanted to eat the hawk. He had eaten the lynx kitten. The lynx-mother
would have eaten him had she not herself been killed and eaten. And so
it went. The law was being lived about him by all live things, and he
himself was part and parcel of the law. He was a killer. His only food
was meat, live meat, that ran away swiftly before him, or flew into the
air, or climbed trees, or hid in the ground, or faced him and fought
with him, or turned the tables and ran after him.
Had the cub thought in man-fashion, he might have epitomised life as a
voracious appetite and the world as a place wherein ranged a multitude
of appetites, pursuing and being pursued, hunting and being hunted,
eating and being eaten, all in blindness and confusion, with violence
and disorder, a chaos of gluttony and slaughter, ruled over by chance,
merciless, planless, endless.
But the cub did not think in man-fashion. He did not look at things
with wide vision. He was single-purposed, and entertained but one
thought or desire at a time. Besides the law of meat, there were a
myriad other and lesser laws for him to learn and obey. The world was
filled with surprise. The stir of the life that was in him, the play of
his muscles, was an unending happiness. To run down meat was to
experience thrills and elations. His rages and battles were pleasures.
Terror itself, and the mystery of the unknown, led to his living.
And there were easements and satisfactions. To have a full stomach, to
doze lazily in the sunshine—such things were remuneration in full for
his ardours and toils, while his ardours and tolls were in themselves
self-remunerative. They were expressions of life, and life is always
happy when it is expressing itself. So the cub had no quarrel with his
hostile environment. He was very much alive, very happy, and very proud
of himself.
PART III
CHAPTER I
THE MAKERS OF FIRE
The cub came upon it suddenly. It was his own fault. He had been
careless. He had left the cave and run down to the stream to drink. It
might have been that he took no notice because he was heavy with sleep.
(He had been out all night on the meat-trail, and had but just then
awakened.) And his carelessness might have been due to the familiarity
of the trail to the pool. He had travelled it often, and nothing had
ever happened on it.
He went down past the blasted pine, crossed the open space, and trotted
in amongst the trees. Then, at the same instant, he saw and smelt.
Before him, sitting silently on their haunches, were five live things,
the like of which he had never seen before. It was his first glimpse of
mankind. But at the sight of him the five men did not spring to their
feet, nor show their teeth, nor snarl. They did not move, but sat
there, silent and ominous.
Nor did the cub move. Every instinct of his nature would have impelled
him to dash wildly away, had there not suddenly and for the first time
arisen in him another and counter instinct. A great awe descended upon
him. He was beaten down to movelessness by an overwhelming sense of his
own weakness and littleness. Here was mastery and power, something far
and away beyond him.
The cub had never seen man, yet the instinct concerning man was his. In
dim ways he recognised in man the animal that had fought itself to
primacy over the other animals of the Wild. Not alone out of his own
eyes, but out of the eyes of all his ancestors was the cub now looking
upon man—out of eyes that had circled in the darkness around countless
winter camp-fires, that had peered from safe distances and from the
hearts of thickets at the strange, two-legged animal that was lord over
living things. The spell of the cub’s heritage was upon him, the fear
and the respect born of the centuries of struggle and the accumulated
experience of the generations. The heritage was too compelling for a
wolf that was only a cub. Had he been full-grown, he would have run
away. As it was, he cowered down in a paralysis of fear, already half
proffering the submission that his kind had proffered from the first
time a wolf came in to sit by man’s fire and be made warm.
One of the Indians arose and walked over to him and stooped above him.
The cub cowered closer to the ground. It was the unknown, objectified
at last, in concrete flesh and blood, bending over him and reaching
down to seize hold of him. His hair bristled involuntarily; his lips
writhed back and his little fangs were bared. The hand, poised like
doom above him, hesitated, and the man spoke laughing, “_Wabam wabisca
ip pit tah_.” (“Look! The white fangs!”)
The other Indians laughed loudly, and urged the man on to pick up the
cub. As the hand descended closer and closer, there raged within the
cub a battle of the instincts. He experienced two great impulsions—to
yield and to fight. The resulting action was a compromise. He did both.
He yielded till the hand almost touched him. Then he fought, his teeth
flashing in a snap that sank them into the hand. The next moment he
received a clout alongside the head that knocked him over on his side.
Then all fight fled out of him. His puppyhood and the instinct of
submission took charge of him. He sat up on his haunches and ki-yi’d.
But the man whose hand he had bitten was angry. The cub received a
clout on the other side of his head. Whereupon he sat up and ki-yi’d
louder than ever.
The four Indians laughed more loudly, while even the man who had been
bitten began to laugh. They surrounded the cub and laughed at him,
while he wailed out his terror and his hurt. In the midst of it, he
heard something. The Indians heard it too. But the cub knew what it
was, and with a last, long wail that had in it more of triumph than
grief, he ceased his noise and waited for the coming of his mother, of
his ferocious and indomitable mother who fought and killed all things
and was never afraid. She was snarling as she ran. She had heard the
cry of her cub and was dashing to save him.
She bounded in amongst them, her anxious and militant motherhood making
her anything but a pretty sight. But to the cub the spectacle of her
protective rage was pleasing. He uttered a glad little cry and bounded
to meet her, while the man-animals went back hastily several steps. The
she-wolf stood over against her cub, facing the men, with bristling
hair, a snarl rumbling deep in her throat. Her face was distorted and
malignant with menace, even the bridge of the nose wrinkling from tip
to eyes so prodigious was her snarl.
Then it was that a cry went up from one of the men. “Kiche!” was what
he uttered. It was an exclamation of surprise. The cub felt his mother
wilting at the sound.
“Kiche!” the man cried again, this time with sharpness and authority.
And then the cub saw his mother, the she-wolf, the fearless one,
crouching down till her belly touched the ground, whimpering, wagging
her tail, making peace signs. The cub could not understand. He was
appalled. The awe of man rushed over him again. His instinct had been
true. His mother verified it. She, too, rendered submission to the
man-animals.
The man who had spoken came over to her. He put his hand upon her head,
and she only crouched closer. She did not snap, nor threaten to snap.
The other men came up, and surrounded her, and felt her, and pawed her,
which actions she made no attempt to resent. They were greatly excited,
and made many noises with their mouths. These noises were not
indication of danger, the cub decided, as he crouched near his mother
still bristling from time to time but doing his best to submit.
“It is not strange,” an Indian was saying. “Her father was a wolf. It
is true, her mother was a dog; but did not my brother tie her out in
the woods all of three nights in the mating season? Therefore was the
father of Kiche a wolf.”
“It is a year, Grey Beaver, since she ran away,” spoke a second Indian.
“It is not strange, Salmon Tongue,” Grey Beaver answered. “It was the
time of the famine, and there was no meat for the dogs.”
“She has lived with the wolves,” said a third Indian.
“So it would seem, Three Eagles,” Grey Beaver answered, laying his hand
on the cub; “and this be the sign of it.”
The cub snarled a little at the touch of the hand, and the hand flew
back to administer a clout. Whereupon the cub covered its fangs, and
sank down submissively, while the hand, returning, rubbed behind his
ears, and up and down his back.
“This be the sign of it,” Grey Beaver went on. “It is plain that his
mother is Kiche. But his father was a wolf. Wherefore is there in him
little dog and much wolf. His fangs be white, and White Fang shall be
his name. I have spoken. He is my dog. For was not Kiche my brother’s
dog? And is not my brother dead?”
The cub, who had thus received a name in the world, lay and watched.
For a time the man-animals continued to make their mouth-noises. Then
Grey Beaver took a knife from a sheath that hung around his neck, and
went into the thicket and cut a stick. White Fang watched him. He
notched the stick at each end and in the notches fastened strings of
raw-hide. One string he tied around the throat of Kiche. Then he led
her to a small pine, around which he tied the other string.
White Fang followed and lay down beside her. Salmon Tongue’s hand
reached out to him and rolled him over on his back. Kiche looked on
anxiously. White Fang felt fear mounting in him again. He could not
quite suppress a snarl, but he made no offer to snap. The hand, with
fingers crooked and spread apart, rubbed his stomach in a playful way
and rolled him from side to side. It was ridiculous and ungainly, lying
there on his back with legs sprawling in the air. Besides, it was a
position of such utter helplessness that White Fang’s whole nature
revolted against it. He could do nothing to defend himself. If this
man-animal intended harm, White Fang knew that he could not escape it.
How could he spring away with his four legs in the air above him? Yet
submission made him master his fear, and he only growled softly. This
growl he could not suppress; nor did the man-animal resent it by giving
him a blow on the head. And furthermore, such was the strangeness of
it, White Fang experienced an unaccountable sensation of pleasure as
the hand rubbed back and forth. When he was rolled on his side he
ceased to growl, when the fingers pressed and prodded at the base of
his ears the pleasurable sensation increased; and when, with a final
rub and scratch, the man left him alone and went away, all fear had
died out of White Fang. He was to know fear many times in his dealing
with man; yet it was a token of the fearless companionship with man
that was ultimately to be his.
After a time, White Fang heard strange noises approaching. He was quick
in his classification, for he knew them at once for man-animal noises.
A few minutes later the remainder of the tribe, strung out as it was on
the march, trailed in. There were more men and many women and children,
forty souls of them, and all heavily burdened with camp equipage and
outfit. Also there were many dogs; and these, with the exception of the
part-grown puppies, were likewise burdened with camp outfit. On their
backs, in bags that fastened tightly around underneath, the dogs
carried from twenty to thirty pounds of weight.
White Fang had never seen dogs before, but at sight of them he felt
that they were his own kind, only somehow different. But they displayed
little difference from the wolf when they discovered the cub and his
mother. There was a rush. White Fang bristled and snarled and snapped
in the face of the open-mouthed oncoming wave of dogs, and went down
and under them, feeling the sharp slash of teeth in his body, himself
biting and tearing at the legs and bellies above him. There was a great
uproar. He could hear the snarl of Kiche as she fought for him; and he
could hear the cries of the man-animals, the sound of clubs striking
upon bodies, and the yelps of pain from the dogs so struck.
Only a few seconds elapsed before he was on his feet again. He could
now see the man-animals driving back the dogs with clubs and stones,
defending him, saving him from the savage teeth of his kind that
somehow was not his kind. And though there was no reason in his brain
for a clear conception of so abstract a thing as justice, nevertheless,
in his own way, he felt the justice of the man-animals, and he knew
them for what they were—makers of law and executors of law. Also, he
appreciated the power with which they administered the law. Unlike any
animals he had ever encountered, they did not bite nor claw. They
enforced their live strength with the power of dead things. Dead things
did their bidding. Thus, sticks and stones, directed by these strange
creatures, leaped through the air like living things, inflicting
grievous hurts upon the dogs.
To his mind this was power unusual, power inconceivable and beyond the
natural, power that was godlike. White Fang, in the very nature of him,
could never know anything about gods; at the best he could know only
things that were beyond knowing—but the wonder and awe that he had of
these man-animals in ways resembled what would be the wonder and awe of
man at sight of some celestial creature, on a mountain top, hurling
thunderbolts from either hand at an astonished world.
The last dog had been driven back. The hubbub died down. And White Fang
licked his hurts and meditated upon this, his first taste of
pack-cruelty and his introduction to the pack. He had never dreamed
that his own kind consisted of more than One Eye, his mother, and
himself. They had constituted a kind apart, and here, abruptly, he had
discovered many more creatures apparently of his own kind. And there
was a subconscious resentment that these, his kind, at first sight had
pitched upon him and tried to destroy him. In the same way he resented
his mother being tied with a stick, even though it was done by the
superior man-animals. It savoured of the trap, of bondage. Yet of the
trap and of bondage he knew nothing. Freedom to roam and run and lie
down at will, had been his heritage; and here it was being infringed
upon. His mother’s movements were restricted to the length of a stick,
and by the length of that same stick was he restricted, for he had not
yet got beyond the need of his mother’s side.
He did not like it. Nor did he like it when the man-animals arose and
went on with their march; for a tiny man-animal took the other end of
the stick and led Kiche captive behind him, and behind Kiche followed
White Fang, greatly perturbed and worried by this new adventure he had
entered upon.
They went down the valley of the stream, far beyond White Fang’s widest
ranging, until they came to the end of the valley, where the stream ran
into the Mackenzie River. Here, where canoes were cached on poles high
in the air and where stood fish-racks for the drying of fish, camp was
made; and White Fang looked on with wondering eyes. The superiority of
these man-animals increased with every moment. There was their mastery
over all these sharp-fanged dogs. It breathed of power. But greater
than that, to the wolf-cub, was their mastery over things not alive;
their capacity to communicate motion to unmoving things; their capacity
to change the very face of the world.
It was this last that especially affected him. The elevation of frames
of poles caught his eye; yet this in itself was not so remarkable,
being done by the same creatures that flung sticks and stones to great
distances. But when the frames of poles were made into tepees by being
covered with cloth and skins, White Fang was astounded. It was the
colossal bulk of them that impressed him. They arose around him, on
every side, like some monstrous quick-growing form of life. They
occupied nearly the whole circumference of his field of vision. He was
afraid of them. They loomed ominously above him; and when the breeze
stirred them into huge movements, he cowered down in fear, keeping his
eyes warily upon them, and prepared to spring away if they attempted to
precipitate themselves upon him.
But in a short while his fear of the tepees passed away. He saw the
women and children passing in and out of them without harm, and he saw
the dogs trying often to get into them, and being driven away with
sharp words and flying stones. After a time, he left Kiche’s side and
crawled cautiously toward the wall of the nearest tepee. It was the
curiosity of growth that urged him on—the necessity of learning and
living and doing that brings experience. The last few inches to the
wall of the tepee were crawled with painful slowness and precaution.
The day’s events had prepared him for the unknown to manifest itself in
most stupendous and unthinkable ways. At last his nose touched the
canvas. He waited. Nothing happened. Then he smelled the strange
fabric, saturated with the man-smell. He closed on the canvas with his
teeth and gave a gentle tug. Nothing happened, though the adjacent
portions of the tepee moved. He tugged harder. There was a greater
movement. It was delightful. He tugged still harder, and repeatedly,
until the whole tepee was in motion. Then the sharp cry of a squaw
inside sent him scampering back to Kiche. But after that he was afraid
no more of the looming bulks of the tepees.
A moment later he was straying away again from his mother. Her stick
was tied to a peg in the ground and she could not follow him. A
part-grown puppy, somewhat larger and older than he, came toward him
slowly, with ostentatious and belligerent importance. The puppy’s name,
as White Fang was afterward to hear him called, was Lip-lip. He had had
experience in puppy fights and was already something of a bully.
Lip-lip was White Fang’s own kind, and, being only a puppy, did not
seem dangerous; so White Fang prepared to meet him in a friendly
spirit. But when the strangers walk became stiff-legged and his lips
lifted clear of his teeth, White Fang stiffened too, and answered with
lifted lips. They half circled about each other, tentatively, snarling
and bristling. This lasted several minutes, and White Fang was
beginning to enjoy it, as a sort of game. But suddenly, with remarkable
swiftness, Lip-lip leaped in, delivering a slashing snap, and leaped
away again. The snap had taken effect on the shoulder that had been
hurt by the lynx and that was still sore deep down near the bone. The
surprise and hurt of it brought a yelp out of White Fang; but the next
moment, in a rush of anger, he was upon Lip-lip and snapping viciously.
But Lip-lip had lived his life in camp and had fought many puppy
fights. Three times, four times, and half a dozen times, his sharp
little teeth scored on the newcomer, until White Fang, yelping
shamelessly, fled to the protection of his mother. It was the first of
the many fights he was to have with Lip-lip, for they were enemies from
the start, born so, with natures destined perpetually to clash.
Kiche licked White Fang soothingly with her tongue, and tried to
prevail upon him to remain with her. But his curiosity was rampant, and
several minutes later he was venturing forth on a new quest. He came
upon one of the man-animals, Grey Beaver, who was squatting on his hams
and doing something with sticks and dry moss spread before him on the
ground. White Fang came near to him and watched. Grey Beaver made
mouth-noises which White Fang interpreted as not hostile, so he came
still nearer.
Women and children were carrying more sticks and branches to Grey
Beaver. It was evidently an affair of moment. White Fang came in until
he touched Grey Beaver’s knee, so curious was he, and already forgetful
that this was a terrible man-animal. Suddenly he saw a strange thing
like mist beginning to arise from the sticks and moss beneath Grey
Beaver’s hands. Then, amongst the sticks themselves, appeared a live
thing, twisting and turning, of a colour like the colour of the sun in
the sky. White Fang knew nothing about fire. It drew him as the light,
in the mouth of the cave had drawn him in his early puppyhood. He
crawled the several steps toward the flame. He heard Grey Beaver
chuckle above him, and he knew the sound was not hostile. Then his nose
touched the flame, and at the same instant his little tongue went out
to it.
For a moment he was paralysed. The unknown, lurking in the midst of the
sticks and moss, was savagely clutching him by the nose. He scrambled
backward, bursting out in an astonished explosion of ki-yi’s. At the
sound, Kiche leaped snarling to the end of her stick, and there raged
terribly because she could not come to his aid. But Grey Beaver laughed
loudly, and slapped his thighs, and told the happening to all the rest
of the camp, till everybody was laughing uproariously. But White Fang
sat on his haunches and ki-yi’d and ki-yi’d, a forlorn and pitiable
little figure in the midst of the man-animals.
It was the worst hurt he had ever known. Both nose and tongue had been
scorched by the live thing, sun-coloured, that had grown up under Grey
Beaver’s hands. He cried and cried interminably, and every fresh wail
was greeted by bursts of laughter on the part of the man-animals. He
tried to soothe his nose with his tongue, but the tongue was burnt too,
and the two hurts coming together produced greater hurt; whereupon he
cried more hopelessly and helplessly than ever.
And then shame came to him. He knew laughter and the meaning of it. It
is not given us to know how some animals know laughter, and know when
they are being laughed at; but it was this same way that White Fang
knew it. And he felt shame that the man-animals should be laughing at
him. He turned and fled away, not from the hurt of the fire, but from
the laughter that sank even deeper, and hurt in the spirit of him. And
he fled to Kiche, raging at the end of her stick like an animal gone
mad—to Kiche, the one creature in the world who was not laughing at
him.
Twilight drew down and night came on, and White Fang lay by his
mother’s side. His nose and tongue still hurt, but he was perplexed by
a greater trouble. He was homesick. He felt a vacancy in him, a need
for the hush and quietude of the stream and the cave in the cliff. Life
had become too populous. There were so many of the man-animals, men,
women, and children, all making noises and irritations. And there were
the dogs, ever squabbling and bickering, bursting into uproars and
creating confusions. The restful loneliness of the only life he had
known was gone. Here the very air was palpitant with life. It hummed
and buzzed unceasingly. Continually changing its intensity and abruptly
variant in pitch, it impinged on his nerves and senses, made him
nervous and restless and worried him with a perpetual imminence of
happening.
He watched the man-animals coming and going and moving about the camp.
In fashion distantly resembling the way men look upon the gods they
create, so looked White Fang upon the man-animals before him. They were
superior creatures, of a verity, gods. To his dim comprehension they
were as much wonder-workers as gods are to men. They were creatures of
mastery, possessing all manner of unknown and impossible potencies,
overlords of the alive and the not alive—making obey that which moved,
imparting movement to that which did not move, and making life,
sun-coloured and biting life, to grow out of dead moss and wood. They
were fire-makers! They were gods.
CHAPTER II
THE BONDAGE
The days were thronged with experience for White Fang. During the time
that Kiche was tied by the stick, he ran about over all the camp,
inquiring, investigating, learning. He quickly came to know much of the
ways of the man-animals, but familiarity did not breed contempt. The
more he came to know them, the more they vindicated their superiority,
the more they displayed their mysterious powers, the greater loomed
their god-likeness.
To man has been given the grief, often, of seeing his gods overthrown
and his altars crumbling; but to the wolf and the wild dog that have
come in to crouch at man’s feet, this grief has never come. Unlike man,
whose gods are of the unseen and the overguessed, vapours and mists of
fancy eluding the garmenture of reality, wandering wraiths of desired
goodness and power, intangible out-croppings of self into the realm of
spirit—unlike man, the wolf and the wild dog that have come in to the
fire find their gods in the living flesh, solid to the touch, occupying
earth-space and requiring time for the accomplishment of their ends and
their existence. No effort of faith is necessary to believe in such a
god; no effort of will can possibly induce disbelief in such a god.
There is no getting away from it. There it stands, on its two
hind-legs, club in hand, immensely potential, passionate and wrathful
and loving, god and mystery and power all wrapped up and around by
flesh that bleeds when it is torn and that is good to eat like any
flesh.
And so it was with White Fang. The man-animals were gods unmistakable
and unescapable. As his mother, Kiche, had rendered her allegiance to
them at the first cry of her name, so he was beginning to render his
allegiance. He gave them the trail as a privilege indubitably theirs.
When they walked, he got out of their way. When they called, he came.
When they threatened, he cowered down. When they commanded him to go,
he went away hurriedly. For behind any wish of theirs was power to
enforce that wish, power that hurt, power that expressed itself in
clouts and clubs, in flying stones and stinging lashes of whips.
He belonged to them as all dogs belonged to them. His actions were
theirs to command. His body was theirs to maul, to stamp upon, to
tolerate. Such was the lesson that was quickly borne in upon him. It
came hard, going as it did, counter to much that was strong and
dominant in his own nature; and, while he disliked it in the learning
of it, unknown to himself he was learning to like it. It was a placing
of his destiny in another’s hands, a shifting of the responsibilities
of existence. This in itself was compensation, for it is always easier
to lean upon another than to stand alone.
But it did not all happen in a day, this giving over of himself, body
and soul, to the man-animals. He could not immediately forego his wild
heritage and his memories of the Wild. There were days when he crept to
the edge of the forest and stood and listened to something calling him
far and away. And always he returned, restless and uncomfortable, to
whimper softly and wistfully at Kiche’s side and to lick her face with
eager, questioning tongue.
White Fang learned rapidly the ways of the camp. He knew the injustice
and greediness of the older dogs when meat or fish was thrown out to be
eaten. He came to know that men were more just, children more cruel,
and women more kindly and more likely to toss him a bit of meat or
bone. And after two or three painful adventures with the mothers of
part-grown puppies, he came into the knowledge that it was always good
policy to let such mothers alone, to keep away from them as far as
possible, and to avoid them when he saw them coming.
But the bane of his life was Lip-lip. Larger, older, and stronger,
Lip-lip had selected White Fang for his special object of persecution.
White Fang fought willingly enough, but he was outclassed. His enemy
was too big. Lip-lip became a nightmare to him. Whenever he ventured
away from his mother, the bully was sure to appear, trailing at his
heels, snarling at him, picking upon him, and watchful of an
opportunity, when no man-animal was near, to spring upon him and force
a fight. As Lip-lip invariably won, he enjoyed it hugely. It became his
chief delight in life, as it became White Fang’s chief torment.
But the effect upon White Fang was not to cow him. Though he suffered
most of the damage and was always defeated, his spirit remained
unsubdued. Yet a bad effect was produced. He became malignant and
morose. His temper had been savage by birth, but it became more savage
under this unending persecution. The genial, playful, puppyish side of
him found little expression. He never played and gambolled about with
the other puppies of the camp. Lip-lip would not permit it. The moment
White Fang appeared near them, Lip-lip was upon him, bullying and
hectoring him, or fighting with him until he had driven him away.
The effect of all this was to rob White Fang of much of his puppyhood
and to make him in his comportment older than his age. Denied the
outlet, through play, of his energies, he recoiled upon himself and
developed his mental processes. He became cunning; he had idle time in
which to devote himself to thoughts of trickery. Prevented from
obtaining his share of meat and fish when a general feed was given to
the camp-dogs, he became a clever thief. He had to forage for himself,
and he foraged well, though he was oft-times a plague to the squaws in
consequence. He learned to sneak about camp, to be crafty, to know what
was going on everywhere, to see and to hear everything and to reason
accordingly, and successfully to devise ways and means of avoiding his
implacable persecutor.
It was early in the days of his persecution that he played his first
really big crafty game and got therefrom his first taste of revenge.
As Kiche, when with the wolves, had lured out to destruction dogs from
the camps of men, so White Fang, in manner somewhat similar, lured
Lip-lip into Kiche’s avenging jaws. Retreating before Lip-lip, White
Fang made an indirect flight that led in and out and around the various
tepees of the camp. He was a good runner, swifter than any puppy of his
size, and swifter than Lip-lip. But he did not run his best in this
chase. He barely held his own, one leap ahead of his pursuer.
Lip-lip, excited by the chase and by the persistent nearness of his
victim, forgot caution and locality. When he remembered locality, it
was too late. Dashing at top speed around a tepee, he ran full tilt
into Kiche lying at the end of her stick. He gave one yelp of
consternation, and then her punishing jaws closed upon him. She was
tied, but he could not get away from her easily. She rolled him off his
legs so that he could not run, while she repeatedly ripped and slashed
him with her fangs.
When at last he succeeded in rolling clear of her, he crawled to his
feet, badly dishevelled, hurt both in body and in spirit. His hair was
standing out all over him in tufts where her teeth had mauled. He stood
where he had arisen, opened his mouth, and broke out the long,
heart-broken puppy wail. But even this he was not allowed to complete.
In the middle of it, White Fang, rushing in, sank his teeth into
Lip-lip’s hind leg. There was no fight left in Lip-lip, and he ran away
shamelessly, his victim hot on his heels and worrying him all the way
back to his own tepee. Here the squaws came to his aid, and White Fang,
transformed into a raging demon, was finally driven off only by a
fusillade of stones.
Came the day when Grey Beaver, deciding that the liability of her
running away was past, released Kiche. White Fang was delighted with
his mother’s freedom. He accompanied her joyfully about the camp; and,
so long as he remained close by her side, Lip-lip kept a respectful
distance. White-Fang even bristled up to him and walked stiff-legged,
but Lip-lip ignored the challenge. He was no fool himself, and whatever
vengeance he desired to wreak, he could wait until he caught White Fang
alone.
Later on that day, Kiche and White Fang strayed into the edge of the
woods next to the camp. He had led his mother there, step by step, and
now when she stopped, he tried to inveigle her farther. The stream, the
lair, and the quiet woods were calling to him, and he wanted her to
come. He ran on a few steps, stopped, and looked back. She had not
moved. He whined pleadingly, and scurried playfully in and out of the
underbrush. He ran back to her, licked her face, and ran on again. And
still she did not move. He stopped and regarded her, all of an
intentness and eagerness, physically expressed, that slowly faded out
of him as she turned her head and gazed back at the camp.
There was something calling to him out there in the open. His mother
heard it too. But she heard also that other and louder call, the call
of the fire and of man—the call which has been given alone of all
animals to the wolf to answer, to the wolf and the wild-dog, who are
brothers.
Kiche turned and slowly trotted back toward camp. Stronger than the
physical restraint of the stick was the clutch of the camp upon her.
Unseen and occultly, the gods still gripped with their power and would
not let her go. White Fang sat down in the shadow of a birch and
whimpered softly. There was a strong smell of pine, and subtle wood
fragrances filled the air, reminding him of his old life of freedom
before the days of his bondage. But he was still only a part-grown
puppy, and stronger than the call either of man or of the Wild was the
call of his mother. All the hours of his short life he had depended
upon her. The time was yet to come for independence. So he arose and
trotted forlornly back to camp, pausing once, and twice, to sit down
and whimper and to listen to the call that still sounded in the depths
of the forest.
In the Wild the time of a mother with her young is short; but under the
dominion of man it is sometimes even shorter. Thus it was with White
Fang. Grey Beaver was in the debt of Three Eagles. Three Eagles was
going away on a trip up the Mackenzie to the Great Slave Lake. A strip
of scarlet cloth, a bearskin, twenty cartridges, and Kiche, went to pay
the debt. White Fang saw his mother taken aboard Three Eagles’ canoe,
and tried to follow her. A blow from Three Eagles knocked him backward
to the land. The canoe shoved off. He sprang into the water and swam
after it, deaf to the sharp cries of Grey Beaver to return. Even a
man-animal, a god, White Fang ignored, such was the terror he was in of
losing his mother.
But gods are accustomed to being obeyed, and Grey Beaver wrathfully
launched a canoe in pursuit. When he overtook White Fang, he reached
down and by the nape of the neck lifted him clear of the water. He did
not deposit him at once in the bottom of the canoe. Holding him
suspended with one hand, with the other hand he proceeded to give him a
beating. And it _was_ a beating. His hand was heavy. Every blow was
shrewd to hurt; and he delivered a multitude of blows.
Impelled by the blows that rained upon him, now from this side, now
from that, White Fang swung back and forth like an erratic and jerky
pendulum. Varying were the emotions that surged through him. At first,
he had known surprise. Then came a momentary fear, when he yelped
several times to the impact of the hand. But this was quickly followed
by anger. His free nature asserted itself, and he showed his teeth and
snarled fearlessly in the face of the wrathful god. This but served to
make the god more wrathful. The blows came faster, heavier, more shrewd
to hurt.
Grey Beaver continued to beat, White Fang continued to snarl. But this
could not last for ever. One or the other must give over, and that one
was White Fang. Fear surged through him again. For the first time he
was being really man-handled. The occasional blows of sticks and stones
he had previously experienced were as caresses compared with this. He
broke down and began to cry and yelp. For a time each blow brought a
yelp from him; but fear passed into terror, until finally his yelps
were voiced in unbroken succession, unconnected with the rhythm of the
punishment.
At last Grey Beaver withheld his hand. White Fang, hanging limply,
continued to cry. This seemed to satisfy his master, who flung him down
roughly in the bottom of the canoe. In the meantime the canoe had
drifted down the stream. Grey Beaver picked up the paddle. White Fang
was in his way. He spurned him savagely with his foot. In that moment
White Fang’s free nature flashed forth again, and he sank his teeth
into the moccasined foot.
The beating that had gone before was as nothing compared with the
beating he now received. Grey Beaver’s wrath was terrible; likewise was
White Fang’s fright. Not only the hand, but the hard wooden paddle was
used upon him; and he was bruised and sore in all his small body when
he was again flung down in the canoe. Again, and this time with
purpose, did Grey Beaver kick him. White Fang did not repeat his attack
on the foot. He had learned another lesson of his bondage. Never, no
matter what the circumstance, must he dare to bite the god who was lord
and master over him; the body of the lord and master was sacred, not to
be defiled by the teeth of such as he. That was evidently the crime of
crimes, the one offence there was no condoning nor overlooking.
When the canoe touched the shore, White Fang lay whimpering and
motionless, waiting the will of Grey Beaver. It was Grey Beaver’s will
that he should go ashore, for ashore he was flung, striking heavily on
his side and hurting his bruises afresh. He crawled tremblingly to his
feet and stood whimpering. Lip-lip, who had watched the whole
proceeding from the bank, now rushed upon him, knocking him over and
sinking his teeth into him. White Fang was too helpless to defend
himself, and it would have gone hard with him had not Grey Beaver’s
foot shot out, lifting Lip-lip into the air with its violence so that
he smashed down to earth a dozen feet away. This was the man-animal’s
justice; and even then, in his own pitiable plight, White Fang
experienced a little grateful thrill. At Grey Beaver’s heels he limped
obediently through the village to the tepee. And so it came that White
Fang learned that the right to punish was something the gods reserved
for themselves and denied to the lesser creatures under them.
That night, when all was still, White Fang remembered his mother and
sorrowed for her. He sorrowed too loudly and woke up Grey Beaver, who
beat him. After that he mourned gently when the gods were around. But
sometimes, straying off to the edge of the woods by himself, he gave
vent to his grief, and cried it out with loud whimperings and wailings.
It was during this period that he might have harkened to the memories
of the lair and the stream and run back to the Wild. But the memory of
his mother held him. As the hunting man-animals went out and came back,
so she would come back to the village some time. So he remained in his
bondage waiting for her.
But it was not altogether an unhappy bondage. There was much to
interest him. Something was always happening. There was no end to the
strange things these gods did, and he was always curious to see.
Besides, he was learning how to get along with Grey Beaver. Obedience,
rigid, undeviating obedience, was what was exacted of him; and in
return he escaped beatings and his existence was tolerated.
Nay, Grey Beaver himself sometimes tossed him a piece of meat, and
defended him against the other dogs in the eating of it. And such a
piece of meat was of value. It was worth more, in some strange way,
then a dozen pieces of meat from the hand of a squaw. Grey Beaver never
petted nor caressed. Perhaps it was the weight of his hand, perhaps his
justice, perhaps the sheer power of him, and perhaps it was all these
things that influenced White Fang; for a certain tie of attachment was
forming between him and his surly lord.
Insidiously, and by remote ways, as well as by the power of stick and
stone and clout of hand, were the shackles of White Fang’s bondage
being riveted upon him. The qualities in his kind that in the beginning
made it possible for them to come in to the fires of men, were
qualities capable of development. They were developing in him, and the
camp-life, replete with misery as it was, was secretly endearing itself
to him all the time. But White Fang was unaware of it. He knew only
grief for the loss of Kiche, hope for her return, and a hungry yearning
for the free life that had been his.
CHAPTER III
THE OUTCAST
Lip-lip continued so to darken his days that White Fang became wickeder
and more ferocious than it was his natural right to be. Savageness was
a part of his make-up, but the savageness thus developed exceeded his
make-up. He acquired a reputation for wickedness amongst the
man-animals themselves. Wherever there was trouble and uproar in camp,
fighting and squabbling or the outcry of a squaw over a bit of stolen
meat, they were sure to find White Fang mixed up in it and usually at
the bottom of it. They did not bother to look after the causes of his
conduct. They saw only the effects, and the effects were bad. He was a
sneak and a thief, a mischief-maker, a fomenter of trouble; and irate
squaws told him to his face, the while he eyed them alert and ready to
dodge any quick-flung missile, that he was a wolf and worthless and
bound to come to an evil end.
He found himself an outcast in the midst of the populous camp. All the
young dogs followed Lip-lip’s lead. There was a difference between
White Fang and them. Perhaps they sensed his wild-wood breed, and
instinctively felt for him the enmity that the domestic dog feels for
the wolf. But be that as it may, they joined with Lip-lip in the
persecution. And, once declared against him, they found good reason to
continue declared against him. One and all, from time to time, they
felt his teeth; and to his credit, he gave more than he received. Many
of them he could whip in single fight; but single fight was denied him.
The beginning of such a fight was a signal for all the young dogs in
camp to come running and pitch upon him.
Out of this pack-persecution he learned two important things: how to
take care of himself in a mass-fight against him—and how, on a single
dog, to inflict the greatest amount of damage in the briefest space of
time. To keep one’s feet in the midst of the hostile mass meant life,
and this he learnt well. He became cat-like in his ability to stay on
his feet. Even grown dogs might hurtle him backward or sideways with
the impact of their heavy bodies; and backward or sideways he would go,
in the air or sliding on the ground, but always with his legs under him
and his feet downward to the mother earth.
When dogs fight, there are usually preliminaries to the actual
combat—snarlings and bristlings and stiff-legged struttings. But White
Fang learned to omit these preliminaries. Delay meant the coming
against him of all the young dogs. He must do his work quickly and get
away. So he learnt to give no warning of his intention. He rushed in
and snapped and slashed on the instant, without notice, before his foe
could prepare to meet him. Thus he learned how to inflict quick and
severe damage. Also he learned the value of surprise. A dog, taken off
its guard, its shoulder slashed open or its ear ripped in ribbons
before it knew what was happening, was a dog half whipped.
Furthermore, it was remarkably easy to overthrow a dog taken by
surprise; while a dog, thus overthrown, invariably exposed for a moment
the soft underside of its neck—the vulnerable point at which to strike
for its life. White Fang knew this point. It was a knowledge bequeathed
to him directly from the hunting generation of wolves. So it was that
White Fang’s method when he took the offensive, was: first to find a
young dog alone; second, to surprise it and knock it off its feet; and
third, to drive in with his teeth at the soft throat.
Being but partly grown his jaws had not yet become large enough nor
strong enough to make his throat-attack deadly; but many a young dog
went around camp with a lacerated throat in token of White Fang’s
intention. And one day, catching one of his enemies alone on the edge
of the woods, he managed, by repeatedly overthrowing him and attacking
the throat, to cut the great vein and let out the life. There was a
great row that night. He had been observed, the news had been carried
to the dead dog’s master, the squaws remembered all the instances of
stolen meat, and Grey Beaver was beset by many angry voices. But he
resolutely held the door of his tepee, inside which he had placed the
culprit, and refused to permit the vengeance for which his tribespeople
clamoured.
White Fang became hated by man and dog. During this period of his
development he never knew a moment’s security. The tooth of every dog
was against him, the hand of every man. He was greeted with snarls by
his kind, with curses and stones by his gods. He lived tensely. He was
always keyed up, alert for attack, wary of being attacked, with an eye
for sudden and unexpected missiles, prepared to act precipitately and
coolly, to leap in with a flash of teeth, or to leap away with a
menacing snarl.
As for snarling he could snarl more terribly than any dog, young or
old, in camp. The intent of the snarl is to warn or frighten, and
judgment is required to know when it should be used. White Fang knew
how to make it and when to make it. Into his snarl he incorporated all
that was vicious, malignant, and horrible. With nose serrulated by
continuous spasms, hair bristling in recurrent waves, tongue whipping
out like a red snake and whipping back again, ears flattened down, eyes
gleaming hatred, lips wrinkled back, and fangs exposed and dripping, he
could compel a pause on the part of almost any assailant. A temporary
pause, when taken off his guard, gave him the vital moment in which to
think and determine his action. But often a pause so gained lengthened
out until it evolved into a complete cessation from the attack. And
before more than one of the grown dogs White Fang’s snarl enabled him
to beat an honourable retreat.
An outcast himself from the pack of the part-grown dogs, his sanguinary
methods and remarkable efficiency made the pack pay for its persecution
of him. Not permitted himself to run with the pack, the curious state
of affairs obtained that no member of the pack could run outside the
pack. White Fang would not permit it. What of his bushwhacking and
waylaying tactics, the young dogs were afraid to run by themselves.
With the exception of Lip-lip, they were compelled to hunch together
for mutual protection against the terrible enemy they had made. A puppy
alone by the river bank meant a puppy dead or a puppy that aroused the
camp with its shrill pain and terror as it fled back from the wolf-cub
that had waylaid it.
But White Fang’s reprisals did not cease, even when the young dogs had
learned thoroughly that they must stay together. He attacked them when
he caught them alone, and they attacked him when they were bunched. The
sight of him was sufficient to start them rushing after him, at which
times his swiftness usually carried him into safety. But woe the dog
that outran his fellows in such pursuit! White Fang had learned to turn
suddenly upon the pursuer that was ahead of the pack and thoroughly to
rip him up before the pack could arrive. This occurred with great
frequency, for, once in full cry, the dogs were prone to forget
themselves in the excitement of the chase, while White Fang never
forgot himself. Stealing backward glances as he ran, he was always
ready to whirl around and down the overzealous pursuer that outran his
fellows.
Young dogs are bound to play, and out of the exigencies of the
situation they realised their play in this mimic warfare. Thus it was
that the hunt of White Fang became their chief game—a deadly game,
withal, and at all times a serious game. He, on the other hand, being
the fastest-footed, was unafraid to venture anywhere. During the period
that he waited vainly for his mother to come back, he led the pack many
a wild chase through the adjacent woods. But the pack invariably lost
him. Its noise and outcry warned him of its presence, while he ran
alone, velvet-footed, silently, a moving shadow among the trees after
the manner of his father and mother before him. Further he was more
directly connected with the Wild than they; and he knew more of its
secrets and stratagems. A favourite trick of his was to lose his trail
in running water and then lie quietly in a near-by thicket while their
baffled cries arose around him.
Hated by his kind and by mankind, indomitable, perpetually warred upon
and himself waging perpetual war, his development was rapid and
one-sided. This was no soil for kindliness and affection to blossom in.
Of such things he had not the faintest glimmering. The code he learned
was to obey the strong and to oppress the weak. Grey Beaver was a god,
and strong. Therefore White Fang obeyed him. But the dog younger or
smaller than himself was weak, a thing to be destroyed. His development
was in the direction of power. In order to face the constant danger of
hurt and even of destruction, his predatory and protective faculties
were unduly developed. He became quicker of movement than the other
dogs, swifter of foot, craftier, deadlier, more lithe, more lean with
ironlike muscle and sinew, more enduring, more cruel, more ferocious,
and more intelligent. He had to become all these things, else he would
not have held his own nor survive the hostile environment in which he
found himself.
CHAPTER IV
THE TRAIL OF THE GODS
In the fall of the year, when the days were shortening and the bite of
the frost was coming into the air, White Fang got his chance for
liberty. For several days there had been a great hubbub in the village.
The summer camp was being dismantled, and the tribe, bag and baggage,
was preparing to go off to the fall hunting. White Fang watched it all
with eager eyes, and when the tepees began to come down and the canoes
were loading at the bank, he understood. Already the canoes were
departing, and some had disappeared down the river.
Quite deliberately he determined to stay behind. He waited his
opportunity to slink out of camp to the woods. Here, in the running
stream where ice was beginning to form, he hid his trail. Then he
crawled into the heart of a dense thicket and waited. The time passed
by, and he slept intermittently for hours. Then he was aroused by Grey
Beaver’s voice calling him by name. There were other voices. White Fang
could hear Grey Beaver’s squaw taking part in the search, and Mit-sah,
who was Grey Beaver’s son.
White Fang trembled with fear, and though the impulse came to crawl out
of his hiding-place, he resisted it. After a time the voices died away,
and some time after that he crept out to enjoy the success of his
undertaking. Darkness was coming on, and for a while he played about
among the trees, pleasuring in his freedom. Then, and quite suddenly,
he became aware of loneliness. He sat down to consider, listening to
the silence of the forest and perturbed by it. That nothing moved nor
sounded, seemed ominous. He felt the lurking of danger, unseen and
unguessed. He was suspicious of the looming bulks of the trees and of
the dark shadows that might conceal all manner of perilous things.
Then it was cold. Here was no warm side of a tepee against which to
snuggle. The frost was in his feet, and he kept lifting first one
fore-foot and then the other. He curved his bushy tail around to cover
them, and at the same time he saw a vision. There was nothing strange
about it. Upon his inward sight was impressed a succession of
memory-pictures. He saw the camp again, the tepees, and the blaze of
the fires. He heard the shrill voices of the women, the gruff basses of
the men, and the snarling of the dogs. He was hungry, and he remembered
pieces of meat and fish that had been thrown him. Here was no meat,
nothing but a threatening and inedible silence.
His bondage had softened him. Irresponsibility had weakened him. He had
forgotten how to shift for himself. The night yawned about him. His
senses, accustomed to the hum and bustle of the camp, used to the
continuous impact of sights and sounds, were now left idle. There was
nothing to do, nothing to see nor hear. They strained to catch some
interruption of the silence and immobility of nature. They were
appalled by inaction and by the feel of something terrible impending.
He gave a great start of fright. A colossal and formless something was
rushing across the field of his vision. It was a tree-shadow flung by
the moon, from whose face the clouds had been brushed away. Reassured,
he whimpered softly; then he suppressed the whimper for fear that it
might attract the attention of the lurking dangers.
A tree, contracting in the cool of the night, made a loud noise. It was
directly above him. He yelped in his fright. A panic seized him, and he
ran madly toward the village. He knew an overpowering desire for the
protection and companionship of man. In his nostrils was the smell of
the camp-smoke. In his ears the camp-sounds and cries were ringing
loud. He passed out of the forest and into the moonlit open where were
no shadows nor darknesses. But no village greeted his eyes. He had
forgotten. The village had gone away.
His wild flight ceased abruptly. There was no place to which to flee.
He slunk forlornly through the deserted camp, smelling the
rubbish-heaps and the discarded rags and tags of the gods. He would
have been glad for the rattle of stones about him, flung by an angry
squaw, glad for the hand of Grey Beaver descending upon him in wrath;
while he would have welcomed with delight Lip-lip and the whole
snarling, cowardly pack.
He came to where Grey Beaver’s tepee had stood. In the centre of the
space it had occupied, he sat down. He pointed his nose at the moon.
His throat was afflicted by rigid spasms, his mouth opened, and in a
heart-broken cry bubbled up his loneliness and fear, his grief for
Kiche, all his past sorrows and miseries as well as his apprehension of
sufferings and dangers to come. It was the long wolf-howl,
full-throated and mournful, the first howl he had ever uttered.
The coming of daylight dispelled his fears but increased his
loneliness. The naked earth, which so shortly before had been so
populous; thrust his loneliness more forcibly upon him. It did not take
him long to make up his mind. He plunged into the forest and followed
the river bank down the stream. All day he ran. He did not rest. He
seemed made to run on for ever. His iron-like body ignored fatigue. And
even after fatigue came, his heritage of endurance braced him to
endless endeavour and enabled him to drive his complaining body onward.
Where the river swung in against precipitous bluffs, he climbed the
high mountains behind. Rivers and streams that entered the main river
he forded or swam. Often he took to the rim-ice that was beginning to
form, and more than once he crashed through and struggled for life in
the icy current. Always he was on the lookout for the trail of the gods
where it might leave the river and proceed inland.
White Fang was intelligent beyond the average of his kind; yet his
mental vision was not wide enough to embrace the other bank of the
Mackenzie. What if the trail of the gods led out on that side? It never
entered his head. Later on, when he had travelled more and grown older
and wiser and come to know more of trails and rivers, it might be that
he could grasp and apprehend such a possibility. But that mental power
was yet in the future. Just now he ran blindly, his own bank of the
Mackenzie alone entering into his calculations.
All night he ran, blundering in the darkness into mishaps and obstacles
that delayed but did not daunt. By the middle of the second day he had
been running continuously for thirty hours, and the iron of his flesh
was giving out. It was the endurance of his mind that kept him going.
He had not eaten in forty hours, and he was weak with hunger. The
repeated drenchings in the icy water had likewise had their effect on
him. His handsome coat was draggled. The broad pads of his feet were
bruised and bleeding. He had begun to limp, and this limp increased
with the hours. To make it worse, the light of the sky was obscured and
snow began to fall—a raw, moist, melting, clinging snow, slippery under
foot, that hid from him the landscape he traversed, and that covered
over the inequalities of the ground so that the way of his feet was
more difficult and painful.
Grey Beaver had intended camping that night on the far bank of the
Mackenzie, for it was in that direction that the hunting lay. But on
the near bank, shortly before dark, a moose coming down to drink, had
been espied by Kloo-kooch, who was Grey Beaver’s squaw. Now, had not
the moose come down to drink, had not Mit-sah been steering out of the
course because of the snow, had not Kloo-kooch sighted the moose, and
had not Grey Beaver killed it with a lucky shot from his rifle, all
subsequent things would have happened differently. Grey Beaver would
not have camped on the near side of the Mackenzie, and White Fang would
have passed by and gone on, either to die or to find his way to his
wild brothers and become one of them—a wolf to the end of his days.
Night had fallen. The snow was flying more thickly, and White Fang,
whimpering softly to himself as he stumbled and limped along, came upon
a fresh trail in the snow. So fresh was it that he knew it immediately
for what it was. Whining with eagerness, he followed back from the
river bank and in among the trees. The camp-sounds came to his ears. He
saw the blaze of the fire, Kloo-kooch cooking, and Grey Beaver
squatting on his hams and mumbling a chunk of raw tallow. There was
fresh meat in camp!
White Fang expected a beating. He crouched and bristled a little at the
thought of it. Then he went forward again. He feared and disliked the
beating he knew to be waiting for him. But he knew, further, that the
comfort of the fire would be his, the protection of the gods, the
companionship of the dogs—the last, a companionship of enmity, but none
the less a companionship and satisfying to his gregarious needs.
He came cringing and crawling into the firelight. Grey Beaver saw him,
and stopped munching the tallow. White Fang crawled slowly, cringing
and grovelling in the abjectness of his abasement and submission. He
crawled straight toward Grey Beaver, every inch of his progress
becoming slower and more painful. At last he lay at the master’s feet,
into whose possession he now surrendered himself, voluntarily, body and
soul. Of his own choice, he came in to sit by man’s fire and to be
ruled by him. White Fang trembled, waiting for the punishment to fall
upon him. There was a movement of the hand above him. He cringed
involuntarily under the expected blow. It did not fall. He stole a
glance upward. Grey Beaver was breaking the lump of tallow in half!
Grey Beaver was offering him one piece of the tallow! Very gently and
somewhat suspiciously, he first smelled the tallow and then proceeded
to eat it. Grey Beaver ordered meat to be brought to him, and guarded
him from the other dogs while he ate. After that, grateful and content,
White Fang lay at Grey Beaver’s feet, gazing at the fire that warmed
him, blinking and dozing, secure in the knowledge that the morrow would
find him, not wandering forlorn through bleak forest-stretches, but in
the camp of the man-animals, with the gods to whom he had given himself
and upon whom he was now dependent.
CHAPTER V
THE COVENANT
When December was well along, Grey Beaver went on a journey up the
Mackenzie. Mit-sah and Kloo-kooch went with him. One sled he drove
himself, drawn by dogs he had traded for or borrowed. A second and
smaller sled was driven by Mit-sah, and to this was harnessed a team of
puppies. It was more of a toy affair than anything else, yet it was the
delight of Mit-sah, who felt that he was beginning to do a man’s work
in the world. Also, he was learning to drive dogs and to train dogs;
while the puppies themselves were being broken in to the harness.
Furthermore, the sled was of some service, for it carried nearly two
hundred pounds of outfit and food.
White Fang had seen the camp-dogs toiling in the harness, so that he
did not resent overmuch the first placing of the harness upon himself.
About his neck was put a moss-stuffed collar, which was connected by
two pulling-traces to a strap that passed around his chest and over his
back. It was to this that was fastened the long rope by which he pulled
at the sled.
There were seven puppies in the team. The others had been born earlier
in the year and were nine and ten months old, while White Fang was only
eight months old. Each dog was fastened to the sled by a single rope.
No two ropes were of the same length, while the difference in length
between any two ropes was at least that of a dog’s body. Every rope was
brought to a ring at the front end of the sled. The sled itself was
without runners, being a birch-bark toboggan, with upturned forward end
to keep it from ploughing under the snow. This construction enabled the
weight of the sled and load to be distributed over the largest
snow-surface; for the snow was crystal-powder and very soft. Observing
the same principle of widest distribution of weight, the dogs at the
ends of their ropes radiated fan-fashion from the nose of the sled, so
that no dog trod in another’s footsteps.
There was, furthermore, another virtue in the fan-formation. The ropes
of varying length prevented the dogs attacking from the rear those that
ran in front of them. For a dog to attack another, it would have to
turn upon one at a shorter rope. In which case it would find itself
face to face with the dog attacked, and also it would find itself
facing the whip of the driver. But the most peculiar virtue of all lay
in the fact that the dog that strove to attack one in front of him must
pull the sled faster, and that the faster the sled travelled, the
faster could the dog attacked run away. Thus, the dog behind could
never catch up with the one in front. The faster he ran, the faster ran
the one he was after, and the faster ran all the dogs. Incidentally,
the sled went faster, and thus, by cunning indirection, did man
increase his mastery over the beasts.
Mit-sah resembled his father, much of whose grey wisdom he possessed.
In the past he had observed Lip-lip’s persecution of White Fang; but at
that time Lip-lip was another man’s dog, and Mit-sah had never dared
more than to shy an occasional stone at him. But now Lip-lip was his
dog, and he proceeded to wreak his vengeance on him by putting him at
the end of the longest rope. This made Lip-lip the leader, and was
apparently an honour! but in reality it took away from him all honour,
and instead of being bully and master of the pack, he now found himself
hated and persecuted by the pack.
Because he ran at the end of the longest rope, the dogs had always the
view of him running away before them. All that they saw of him was his
bushy tail and fleeing hind legs—a view far less ferocious and
intimidating than his bristling mane and gleaming fangs. Also, dogs
being so constituted in their mental ways, the sight of him running
away gave desire to run after him and a feeling that he ran away from
them.
The moment the sled started, the team took after Lip-lip in a chase
that extended throughout the day. At first he had been prone to turn
upon his pursuers, jealous of his dignity and wrathful; but at such
times Mit-sah would throw the stinging lash of the thirty-foot
cariboo-gut whip into his face and compel him to turn tail and run on.
Lip-lip might face the pack, but he could not face that whip, and all
that was left him to do was to keep his long rope taut and his flanks
ahead of the teeth of his mates.
But a still greater cunning lurked in the recesses of the Indian mind.
To give point to unending pursuit of the leader, Mit-sah favoured him
over the other dogs. These favours aroused in them jealousy and hatred.
In their presence Mit-sah would give him meat and would give it to him
only. This was maddening to them. They would rage around just outside
the throwing-distance of the whip, while Lip-lip devoured the meat and
Mit-sah protected him. And when there was no meat to give, Mit-sah
would keep the team at a distance and make believe to give meat to
Lip-lip.
White Fang took kindly to the work. He had travelled a greater distance
than the other dogs in the yielding of himself to the rule of the gods,
and he had learned more thoroughly the futility of opposing their will.
In addition, the persecution he had suffered from the pack had made the
pack less to him in the scheme of things, and man more. He had not
learned to be dependent on his kind for companionship. Besides, Kiche
was well-nigh forgotten; and the chief outlet of expression that
remained to him was in the allegiance he tendered the gods he had
accepted as masters. So he worked hard, learned discipline, and was
obedient. Faithfulness and willingness characterised his toil. These
are essential traits of the wolf and the wild-dog when they have become
domesticated, and these traits White Fang possessed in unusual measure.
A companionship did exist between White Fang and the other dogs, but it
was one of warfare and enmity. He had never learned to play with them.
He knew only how to fight, and fight with them he did, returning to
them a hundred-fold the snaps and slashes they had given him in the
days when Lip-lip was leader of the pack. But Lip-lip was no longer
leader—except when he fled away before his mates at the end of his
rope, the sled bounding along behind. In camp he kept close to Mit-sah
or Grey Beaver or Kloo-kooch. He did not dare venture away from the
gods, for now the fangs of all dogs were against him, and he tasted to
the dregs the persecution that had been White Fang’s.
With the overthrow of Lip-lip, White Fang could have become leader of
the pack. But he was too morose and solitary for that. He merely
thrashed his team-mates. Otherwise he ignored them. They got out of his
way when he came along; nor did the boldest of them ever dare to rob
him of his meat. On the contrary, they devoured their own meat
hurriedly, for fear that he would take it away from them. White Fang
knew the law well: _to oppress the weak and obey the strong_. He ate
his share of meat as rapidly as he could. And then woe the dog that had
not yet finished! A snarl and a flash of fangs, and that dog would wail
his indignation to the uncomforting stars while White Fang finished his
portion for him.
Every little while, however, one dog or another would flame up in
revolt and be promptly subdued. Thus White Fang was kept in training.
He was jealous of the isolation in which he kept himself in the midst
of the pack, and he fought often to maintain it. But such fights were
of brief duration. He was too quick for the others. They were slashed
open and bleeding before they knew what had happened, were whipped
almost before they had begun to fight.
As rigid as the sled-discipline of the gods, was the discipline
maintained by White Fang amongst his fellows. He never allowed them any
latitude. He compelled them to an unremitting respect for him. They
might do as they pleased amongst themselves. That was no concern of
his. But it _was_ his concern that they leave him alone in his
isolation, get out of his way when he elected to walk among them, and
at all times acknowledge his mastery over them. A hint of
stiff-leggedness on their part, a lifted lip or a bristle of hair, and
he would be upon them, merciless and cruel, swiftly convincing them of
the error of their way.
He was a monstrous tyrant. His mastery was rigid as steel. He oppressed
the weak with a vengeance. Not for nothing had he been exposed to the
pitiless struggles for life in the day of his cubhood, when his mother
and he, alone and unaided, held their own and survived in the ferocious
environment of the Wild. And not for nothing had he learned to walk
softly when superior strength went by. He oppressed the weak, but he
respected the strong. And in the course of the long journey with Grey
Beaver he walked softly indeed amongst the full-grown dogs in the camps
of the strange man-animals they encountered.
The months passed by. Still continued the journey of Grey Beaver. White
Fang’s strength was developed by the long hours on trail and the steady
toil at the sled; and it would have seemed that his mental development
was well-nigh complete. He had come to know quite thoroughly the world
in which he lived. His outlook was bleak and materialistic. The world
as he saw it was a fierce and brutal world, a world without warmth, a
world in which caresses and affection and the bright sweetnesses of the
spirit did not exist.
He had no affection for Grey Beaver. True, he was a god, but a most
savage god. White Fang was glad to acknowledge his lordship, but it was
a lordship based upon superior intelligence and brute strength. There
was something in the fibre of White Fang’s being that made his lordship
a thing to be desired, else he would not have come back from the Wild
when he did to tender his allegiance. There were deeps in his nature
which had never been sounded. A kind word, a caressing touch of the
hand, on the part of Grey Beaver, might have sounded these deeps; but
Grey Beaver did not caress, nor speak kind words. It was not his way.
His primacy was savage, and savagely he ruled, administering justice
with a club, punishing transgression with the pain of a blow, and
rewarding merit, not by kindness, but by withholding a blow.
So White Fang knew nothing of the heaven a man’s hand might contain for
him. Besides, he did not like the hands of the man-animals. He was
suspicious of them. It was true that they sometimes gave meat, but more
often they gave hurt. Hands were things to keep away from. They hurled
stones, wielded sticks and clubs and whips, administered slaps and
clouts, and, when they touched him, were cunning to hurt with pinch and
twist and wrench. In strange villages he had encountered the hands of
the children and learned that they were cruel to hurt. Also, he had
once nearly had an eye poked out by a toddling papoose. From these
experiences he became suspicious of all children. He could not tolerate
them. When they came near with their ominous hands, he got up.
It was in a village at the Great Slave Lake, that, in the course of
resenting the evil of the hands of the man-animals, he came to modify
the law that he had learned from Grey Beaver: namely, that the
unpardonable crime was to bite one of the gods. In this village, after
the custom of all dogs in all villages, White Fang went foraging, for
food. A boy was chopping frozen moose-meat with an axe, and the chips
were flying in the snow. White Fang, sliding by in quest of meat,
stopped and began to eat the chips. He observed the boy lay down the
axe and take up a stout club. White Fang sprang clear, just in time to
escape the descending blow. The boy pursued him, and he, a stranger in
the village, fled between two tepees to find himself cornered against a
high earth bank.
There was no escape for White Fang. The only way out was between the
two tepees, and this the boy guarded. Holding his club prepared to
strike, he drew in on his cornered quarry. White Fang was furious. He
faced the boy, bristling and snarling, his sense of justice outraged.
He knew the law of forage. All the wastage of meat, such as the frozen
chips, belonged to the dog that found it. He had done no wrong, broken
no law, yet here was this boy preparing to give him a beating. White
Fang scarcely knew what happened. He did it in a surge of rage. And he
did it so quickly that the boy did not know either. All the boy knew
was that he had in some unaccountable way been overturned into the
snow, and that his club-hand had been ripped wide open by White Fang’s
teeth.
But White Fang knew that he had broken the law of the gods. He had
driven his teeth into the sacred flesh of one of them, and could expect
nothing but a most terrible punishment. He fled away to Grey Beaver,
behind whose protecting legs he crouched when the bitten boy and the
boy’s family came, demanding vengeance. But they went away with
vengeance unsatisfied. Grey Beaver defended White Fang. So did Mit-sah
and Kloo-kooch. White Fang, listening to the wordy war and watching the
angry gestures, knew that his act was justified. And so it came that he
learned there were gods and gods. There were his gods, and there were
other gods, and between them there was a difference. Justice or
injustice, it was all the same, he must take all things from the hands
of his own gods. But he was not compelled to take injustice from the
other gods. It was his privilege to resent it with his teeth. And this
also was a law of the gods.
Before the day was out, White Fang was to learn more about this law.
Mit-sah, alone, gathering firewood in the forest, encountered the boy
that had been bitten. With him were other boys. Hot words passed. Then
all the boys attacked Mit-sah. It was going hard with him. Blows were
raining upon him from all sides. White Fang looked on at first. This
was an affair of the gods, and no concern of his. Then he realised that
this was Mit-sah, one of his own particular gods, who was being
maltreated. It was no reasoned impulse that made White Fang do what he
then did. A mad rush of anger sent him leaping in amongst the
combatants. Five minutes later the landscape was covered with fleeing
boys, many of whom dripped blood upon the snow in token that White
Fang’s teeth had not been idle. When Mit-sah told the story in camp,
Grey Beaver ordered meat to be given to White Fang. He ordered much
meat to be given, and White Fang, gorged and sleepy by the fire, knew
that the law had received its verification.
It was in line with these experiences that White Fang came to learn the
law of property and the duty of the defence of property. From the
protection of his god’s body to the protection of his god’s possessions
was a step, and this step he made. What was his god’s was to be
defended against all the world—even to the extent of biting other gods.
Not only was such an act sacrilegious in its nature, but it was fraught
with peril. The gods were all-powerful, and a dog was no match against
them; yet White Fang learned to face them, fiercely belligerent and
unafraid. Duty rose above fear, and thieving gods learned to leave Grey
Beaver’s property alone.
One thing, in this connection, White Fang quickly learnt, and that was
that a thieving god was usually a cowardly god and prone to run away at
the sounding of the alarm. Also, he learned that but brief time elapsed
between his sounding of the alarm and Grey Beaver coming to his aid. He
came to know that it was not fear of him that drove the thief away, but
fear of Grey Beaver. White Fang did not give the alarm by barking. He
never barked. His method was to drive straight at the intruder, and to
sink his teeth in if he could. Because he was morose and solitary,
having nothing to do with the other dogs, he was unusually fitted to
guard his master’s property; and in this he was encouraged and trained
by Grey Beaver. One result of this was to make White Fang more
ferocious and indomitable, and more solitary.
The months went by, binding stronger and stronger the covenant between
dog and man. This was the ancient covenant that the first wolf that
came in from the Wild entered into with man. And, like all succeeding
wolves and wild dogs that had done likewise, White Fang worked the
covenant out for himself. The terms were simple. For the possession of
a flesh-and-blood god, he exchanged his own liberty. Food and fire,
protection and companionship, were some of the things he received from
the god. In return, he guarded the god’s property, defended his body,
worked for him, and obeyed him.
The possession of a god implies service. White Fang’s was a service of
duty and awe, but not of love. He did not know what love was. He had no
experience of love. Kiche was a remote memory. Besides, not only had he
abandoned the Wild and his kind when he gave himself up to man, but the
terms of the covenant were such that if ever he met Kiche again he
would not desert his god to go with her. His allegiance to man seemed
somehow a law of his being greater than the love of liberty, of kind
and kin.
CHAPTER VI
THE FAMINE
The spring of the year was at hand when Grey Beaver finished his long
journey. It was April, and White Fang was a year old when he pulled
into the home villages and was loosed from the harness by Mit-sah.
Though a long way from his full growth, White Fang, next to Lip-lip,
was the largest yearling in the village. Both from his father, the
wolf, and from Kiche, he had inherited stature and strength, and
already he was measuring up alongside the full-grown dogs. But he had
not yet grown compact. His body was slender and rangy, and his strength
more stringy than massive, His coat was the true wolf-grey, and to all
appearances he was true wolf himself. The quarter-strain of dog he had
inherited from Kiche had left no mark on him physically, though it had
played its part in his mental make-up.
He wandered through the village, recognising with staid satisfaction
the various gods he had known before the long journey. Then there were
the dogs, puppies growing up like himself, and grown dogs that did not
look so large and formidable as the memory pictures he retained of
them. Also, he stood less in fear of them than formerly, stalking among
them with a certain careless ease that was as new to him as it was
enjoyable.
There was Baseek, a grizzled old fellow that in his younger days had
but to uncover his fangs to send White Fang cringing and crouching to
the right about. From him White Fang had learned much of his own
insignificance; and from him he was now to learn much of the change and
development that had taken place in himself. While Baseek had been
growing weaker with age, White Fang had been growing stronger with
youth.
It was at the cutting-up of a moose, fresh-killed, that White Fang
learned of the changed relations in which he stood to the dog-world. He
had got for himself a hoof and part of the shin-bone, to which quite a
bit of meat was attached. Withdrawn from the immediate scramble of the
other dogs—in fact out of sight behind a thicket—he was devouring his
prize, when Baseek rushed in upon him. Before he knew what he was
doing, he had slashed the intruder twice and sprung clear. Baseek was
surprised by the other’s temerity and swiftness of attack. He stood,
gazing stupidly across at White Fang, the raw, red shin-bone between
them.
Baseek was old, and already he had come to know the increasing valour
of the dogs it had been his wont to bully. Bitter experiences these,
which, perforce, he swallowed, calling upon all his wisdom to cope with
them. In the old days he would have sprung upon White Fang in a fury of
righteous wrath. But now his waning powers would not permit such a
course. He bristled fiercely and looked ominously across the shin-bone
at White Fang. And White Fang, resurrecting quite a deal of the old
awe, seemed to wilt and to shrink in upon himself and grow small, as he
cast about in his mind for a way to beat a retreat not too inglorious.
And right here Baseek erred. Had he contented himself with looking
fierce and ominous, all would have been well. White Fang, on the verge
of retreat, would have retreated, leaving the meat to him. But Baseek
did not wait. He considered the victory already his and stepped forward
to the meat. As he bent his head carelessly to smell it, White Fang
bristled slightly. Even then it was not too late for Baseek to retrieve
the situation. Had he merely stood over the meat, head up and
glowering, White Fang would ultimately have slunk away. But the fresh
meat was strong in Baseek’s nostrils, and greed urged him to take a
bite of it.
This was too much for White Fang. Fresh upon his months of mastery over
his own team-mates, it was beyond his self-control to stand idly by
while another devoured the meat that belonged to him. He struck, after
his custom, without warning. With the first slash, Baseek’s right ear
was ripped into ribbons. He was astounded at the suddenness of it. But
more things, and most grievous ones, were happening with equal
suddenness. He was knocked off his feet. His throat was bitten. While
he was struggling to his feet the young dog sank teeth twice into his
shoulder. The swiftness of it was bewildering. He made a futile rush at
White Fang, clipping the empty air with an outraged snap. The next
moment his nose was laid open, and he was staggering backward away from
the meat.
The situation was now reversed. White Fang stood over the shin-bone,
bristling and menacing, while Baseek stood a little way off, preparing
to retreat. He dared not risk a fight with this young lightning-flash,
and again he knew, and more bitterly, the enfeeblement of oncoming age.
His attempt to maintain his dignity was heroic. Calmly turning his back
upon young dog and shin-bone, as though both were beneath his notice
and unworthy of his consideration, he stalked grandly away. Nor, until
well out of sight, did he stop to lick his bleeding wounds.
The effect on White Fang was to give him a greater faith in himself,
and a greater pride. He walked less softly among the grown dogs; his
attitude toward them was less compromising. Not that he went out of his
way looking for trouble. Far from it. But upon his way he demanded
consideration. He stood upon his right to go his way unmolested and to
give trail to no dog. He had to be taken into account, that was all. He
was no longer to be disregarded and ignored, as was the lot of puppies,
and as continued to be the lot of the puppies that were his team-mates.
They got out of the way, gave trail to the grown dogs, and gave up meat
to them under compulsion. But White Fang, uncompanionable, solitary,
morose, scarcely looking to right or left, redoubtable, forbidding of
aspect, remote and alien, was accepted as an equal by his puzzled
elders. They quickly learned to leave him alone, neither venturing
hostile acts nor making overtures of friendliness. If they left him
alone, he left them alone—a state of affairs that they found, after a
few encounters, to be pre-eminently desirable.
In midsummer White Fang had an experience. Trotting along in his silent
way to investigate a new tepee which had been erected on the edge of
the village while he was away with the hunters after moose, he came
full upon Kiche. He paused and looked at her. He remembered her
vaguely, but he _remembered_ her, and that was more than could be said
for her. She lifted her lip at him in the old snarl of menace, and his
memory became clear. His forgotten cubhood, all that was associated
with that familiar snarl, rushed back to him. Before he had known the
gods, she had been to him the centre-pin of the universe. The old
familiar feelings of that time came back upon him, surged up within
him. He bounded towards her joyously, and she met him with shrewd fangs
that laid his cheek open to the bone. He did not understand. He backed
away, bewildered and puzzled.
But it was not Kiche’s fault. A wolf-mother was not made to remember
her cubs of a year or so before. So she did not remember White Fang. He
was a strange animal, an intruder; and her present litter of puppies
gave her the right to resent such intrusion.
One of the puppies sprawled up to White Fang. They were half-brothers,
only they did not know it. White Fang sniffed the puppy curiously,
whereupon Kiche rushed upon him, gashing his face a second time. He
backed farther away. All the old memories and associations died down
again and passed into the grave from which they had been resurrected.
He looked at Kiche licking her puppy and stopping now and then to snarl
at him. She was without value to him. He had learned to get along
without her. Her meaning was forgotten. There was no place for her in
his scheme of things, as there was no place for him in hers.
He was still standing, stupid and bewildered, the memories forgotten,
wondering what it was all about, when Kiche attacked him a third time,
intent on driving him away altogether from the vicinity. And White Fang
allowed himself to be driven away. This was a female of his kind, and
it was a law of his kind that the males must not fight the females. He
did not know anything about this law, for it was no generalisation of
the mind, not a something acquired by experience of the world. He knew
it as a secret prompting, as an urge of instinct—of the same instinct
that made him howl at the moon and stars of nights, and that made him
fear death and the unknown.
The months went by. White Fang grew stronger, heavier, and more
compact, while his character was developing along the lines laid down
by his heredity and his environment. His heredity was a life-stuff that
may be likened to clay. It possessed many possibilities, was capable of
being moulded into many different forms. Environment served to model
the clay, to give it a particular form. Thus, had White Fang never come
in to the fires of man, the Wild would have moulded him into a true
wolf. But the gods had given him a different environment, and he was
moulded into a dog that was rather wolfish, but that was a dog and not
a wolf.
And so, according to the clay of his nature and the pressure of his
surroundings, his character was being moulded into a certain particular
shape. There was no escaping it. He was becoming more morose, more
uncompanionable, more solitary, more ferocious; while the dogs were
learning more and more that it was better to be at peace with him than
at war, and Grey Beaver was coming to prize him more greatly with the
passage of each day.
White Fang, seeming to sum up strength in all his qualities,
nevertheless suffered from one besetting weakness. He could not stand
being laughed at. The laughter of men was a hateful thing. They might
laugh among themselves about anything they pleased except himself, and
he did not mind. But the moment laughter was turned upon him he would
fly into a most terrible rage. Grave, dignified, sombre, a laugh made
him frantic to ridiculousness. It so outraged him and upset him that
for hours he would behave like a demon. And woe to the dog that at such
times ran foul of him. He knew the law too well to take it out on Grey
Beaver; behind Grey Beaver were a club and godhead. But behind the dogs
there was nothing but space, and into this space they flew when White
Fang came on the scene, made mad by laughter.
In the third year of his life there came a great famine to the
Mackenzie Indians. In the summer the fish failed. In the winter the
cariboo forsook their accustomed track. Moose were scarce, the rabbits
almost disappeared, hunting and preying animals perished. Denied their
usual food-supply, weakened by hunger, they fell upon and devoured one
another. Only the strong survived. White Fang’s gods were always
hunting animals. The old and the weak of them died of hunger. There was
wailing in the village, where the women and children went without in
order that what little they had might go into the bellies of the lean
and hollow-eyed hunters who trod the forest in the vain pursuit of
meat.
To such extremity were the gods driven that they ate the soft-tanned
leather of their mocassins and mittens, while the dogs ate the
harnesses off their backs and the very whip-lashes. Also, the dogs ate
one another, and also the gods ate the dogs. The weakest and the more
worthless were eaten first. The dogs that still lived, looked on and
understood. A few of the boldest and wisest forsook the fires of the
gods, which had now become a shambles, and fled into the forest, where,
in the end, they starved to death or were eaten by wolves.
In this time of misery, White Fang, too, stole away into the woods. He
was better fitted for the life than the other dogs, for he had the
training of his cubhood to guide him. Especially adept did he become in
stalking small living things. He would lie concealed for hours,
following every movement of a cautious tree-squirrel, waiting, with a
patience as huge as the hunger he suffered from, until the squirrel
ventured out upon the ground. Even then, White Fang was not premature.
He waited until he was sure of striking before the squirrel could gain
a tree-refuge. Then, and not until then, would he flash from his
hiding-place, a grey projectile, incredibly swift, never failing its
mark—the fleeing squirrel that fled not fast enough.
Successful as he was with squirrels, there was one difficulty that
prevented him from living and growing fat on them. There were not
enough squirrels. So he was driven to hunt still smaller things. So
acute did his hunger become at times that he was not above rooting out
wood-mice from their burrows in the ground. Nor did he scorn to do
battle with a weasel as hungry as himself and many times more
ferocious.
In the worst pinches of the famine he stole back to the fires of the
gods. But he did not go into the fires. He lurked in the forest,
avoiding discovery and robbing the snares at the rare intervals when
game was caught. He even robbed Grey Beaver’s snare of a rabbit at a
time when Grey Beaver staggered and tottered through the forest,
sitting down often to rest, what of weakness and of shortness of
breath.
One day White Fang encountered a young wolf, gaunt and scrawny,
loose-jointed with famine. Had he not been hungry himself, White Fang
might have gone with him and eventually found his way into the pack
amongst his wild brethren. As it was, he ran the young wolf down and
killed and ate him.
Fortune seemed to favour him. Always, when hardest pressed for food, he
found something to kill. Again, when he was weak, it was his luck that
none of the larger preying animals chanced upon him. Thus, he was
strong from the two days’ eating a lynx had afforded him when the
hungry wolf-pack ran full tilt upon him. It was a long, cruel chase,
but he was better nourished than they, and in the end outran them. And
not only did he outrun them, but, circling widely back on his track, he
gathered in one of his exhausted pursuers.
After that he left that part of the country and journeyed over to the
valley wherein he had been born. Here, in the old lair, he encountered
Kiche. Up to her old tricks, she, too, had fled the inhospitable fires
of the gods and gone back to her old refuge to give birth to her young.
Of this litter but one remained alive when White Fang came upon the
scene, and this one was not destined to live long. Young life had
little chance in such a famine.
Kiche’s greeting of her grown son was anything but affectionate. But
White Fang did not mind. He had outgrown his mother. So he turned tail
philosophically and trotted on up the stream. At the forks he took the
turning to the left, where he found the lair of the lynx with whom his
mother and he had fought long before. Here, in the abandoned lair, he
settled down and rested for a day.
During the early summer, in the last days of the famine, he met
Lip-lip, who had likewise taken to the woods, where he had eked out a
miserable existence.
White Fang came upon him unexpectedly. Trotting in opposite directions
along the base of a high bluff, they rounded a corner of rock and found
themselves face to face. They paused with instant alarm, and looked at
each other suspiciously.
White Fang was in splendid condition. His hunting had been good, and
for a week he had eaten his fill. He was even gorged from his latest
kill. But in the moment he looked at Lip-lip his hair rose on end all
along his back. It was an involuntary bristling on his part, the
physical state that in the past had always accompanied the mental state
produced in him by Lip-lip’s bullying and persecution. As in the past
he had bristled and snarled at sight of Lip-lip, so now, and
automatically, he bristled and snarled. He did not waste any time. The
thing was done thoroughly and with despatch. Lip-lip essayed to back
away, but White Fang struck him hard, shoulder to shoulder. Lip-lip was
overthrown and rolled upon his back. White Fang’s teeth drove into the
scrawny throat. There was a death-struggle, during which White Fang
walked around, stiff-legged and observant. Then he resumed his course
and trotted on along the base of the bluff.
One day, not long after, he came to the edge of the forest, where a
narrow stretch of open land sloped down to the Mackenzie. He had been
over this ground before, when it was bare, but now a village occupied
it. Still hidden amongst the trees, he paused to study the situation.
Sights and sounds and scents were familiar to him. It was the old
village changed to a new place. But sights and sounds and smells were
different from those he had last had when he fled away from it. There
was no whimpering nor wailing. Contented sounds saluted his ear, and
when he heard the angry voice of a woman he knew it to be the anger
that proceeds from a full stomach. And there was a smell in the air of
fish. There was food. The famine was gone. He came out boldly from the
forest and trotted into camp straight to Grey Beaver’s tepee. Grey
Beaver was not there; but Kloo-kooch welcomed him with glad cries and
the whole of a fresh-caught fish, and he lay down to wait Grey Beaver’s
coming.
PART IV
CHAPTER I
THE ENEMY OF HIS KIND
Had there been in White Fang’s nature any possibility, no matter how
remote, of his ever coming to fraternise with his kind, such
possibility was irretrievably destroyed when he was made leader of the
sled-team. For now the dogs hated him—hated him for the extra meat
bestowed upon him by Mit-sah; hated him for all the real and fancied
favours he received; hated him for that he fled always at the head of
the team, his waving brush of a tail and his perpetually retreating
hind-quarters for ever maddening their eyes.
And White Fang just as bitterly hated them back. Being sled-leader was
anything but gratifying to him. To be compelled to run away before the
yelling pack, every dog of which, for three years, he had thrashed and
mastered, was almost more than he could endure. But endure it he must,
or perish, and the life that was in him had no desire to perish out.
The moment Mit-sah gave his order for the start, that moment the whole
team, with eager, savage cries, sprang forward at White Fang.
There was no defence for him. If he turned upon them, Mit-sah would
throw the stinging lash of the whip into his face. Only remained to him
to run away. He could not encounter that howling horde with his tail
and hind-quarters. These were scarcely fit weapons with which to meet
the many merciless fangs. So run away he did, violating his own nature
and pride with every leap he made, and leaping all day long.
One cannot violate the promptings of one’s nature without having that
nature recoil upon itself. Such a recoil is like that of a hair, made
to grow out from the body, turning unnaturally upon the direction of
its growth and growing into the body—a rankling, festering thing of
hurt. And so with White Fang. Every urge of his being impelled him to
spring upon the pack that cried at his heels, but it was the will of
the gods that this should not be; and behind the will, to enforce it,
was the whip of cariboo-gut with its biting thirty-foot lash. So White
Fang could only eat his heart in bitterness and develop a hatred and
malice commensurate with the ferocity and indomitability of his nature.
If ever a creature was the enemy of its kind, White Fang was that
creature. He asked no quarter, gave none. He was continually marred and
scarred by the teeth of the pack, and as continually he left his own
marks upon the pack. Unlike most leaders, who, when camp was made and
the dogs were unhitched, huddled near to the gods for protection, White
Fang disdained such protection. He walked boldly about the camp,
inflicting punishment in the night for what he had suffered in the day.
In the time before he was made leader of the team, the pack had learned
to get out of his way. But now it was different. Excited by the
day-long pursuit of him, swayed subconsciously by the insistent
iteration on their brains of the sight of him fleeing away, mastered by
the feeling of mastery enjoyed all day, the dogs could not bring
themselves to give way to him. When he appeared amongst them, there was
always a squabble. His progress was marked by snarl and snap and growl.
The very atmosphere he breathed was surcharged with hatred and malice,
and this but served to increase the hatred and malice within him.
When Mit-sah cried out his command for the team to stop, White Fang
obeyed. At first this caused trouble for the other dogs. All of them
would spring upon the hated leader only to find the tables turned.
Behind him would be Mit-sah, the great whip singing in his hand. So the
dogs came to understand that when the team stopped by order, White Fang
was to be let alone. But when White Fang stopped without orders, then
it was allowed them to spring upon him and destroy him if they could.
After several experiences, White Fang never stopped without orders. He
learned quickly. It was in the nature of things, that he must learn
quickly if he were to survive the unusually severe conditions under
which life was vouchsafed him.
But the dogs could never learn the lesson to leave him alone in camp.
Each day, pursuing him and crying defiance at him, the lesson of the
previous night was erased, and that night would have to be learned over
again, to be as immediately forgotten. Besides, there was a greater
consistence in their dislike of him. They sensed between themselves and
him a difference of kind—cause sufficient in itself for hostility. Like
him, they were domesticated wolves. But they had been domesticated for
generations. Much of the Wild had been lost, so that to them the Wild
was the unknown, the terrible, the ever-menacing and ever warring. But
to him, in appearance and action and impulse, still clung the Wild. He
symbolised it, was its personification: so that when they showed their
teeth to him they were defending themselves against the powers of
destruction that lurked in the shadows of the forest and in the dark
beyond the camp-fire.
But there was one lesson the dogs did learn, and that was to keep
together. White Fang was too terrible for any of them to face
single-handed. They met him with the mass-formation, otherwise he would
have killed them, one by one, in a night. As it was, he never had a
chance to kill them. He might roll a dog off its feet, but the pack
would be upon him before he could follow up and deliver the deadly
throat-stroke. At the first hint of conflict, the whole team drew
together and faced him. The dogs had quarrels among themselves, but
these were forgotten when trouble was brewing with White Fang.
On the other hand, try as they would, they could not kill White Fang.
He was too quick for them, too formidable, too wise. He avoided tight
places and always backed out of it when they bade fair to surround him.
While, as for getting him off his feet, there was no dog among them
capable of doing the trick. His feet clung to the earth with the same
tenacity that he clung to life. For that matter, life and footing were
synonymous in this unending warfare with the pack, and none knew it
better than White Fang.
So he became the enemy of his kind, domesticated wolves that they were,
softened by the fires of man, weakened in the sheltering shadow of
man’s strength. White Fang was bitter and implacable. The clay of him
was so moulded. He declared a vendetta against all dogs. And so
terribly did he live this vendetta that Grey Beaver, fierce savage
himself, could not but marvel at White Fang’s ferocity. Never, he
swore, had there been the like of this animal; and the Indians in
strange villages swore likewise when they considered the tale of his
killings amongst their dogs.
When White Fang was nearly five years old, Grey Beaver took him on
another great journey, and long remembered was the havoc he worked
amongst the dogs of the many villages along the Mackenzie, across the
Rockies, and down the Porcupine to the Yukon. He revelled in the
vengeance he wreaked upon his kind. They were ordinary, unsuspecting
dogs. They were not prepared for his swiftness and directness, for his
attack without warning. They did not know him for what he was, a
lightning-flash of slaughter. They bristled up to him, stiff-legged and
challenging, while he, wasting no time on elaborate preliminaries,
snapping into action like a steel spring, was at their throats and
destroying them before they knew what was happening and while they were
yet in the throes of surprise.
He became an adept at fighting. He economised. He never wasted his
strength, never tussled. He was in too quickly for that, and, if he
missed, was out again too quickly. The dislike of the wolf for close
quarters was his to an unusual degree. He could not endure a prolonged
contact with another body. It smacked of danger. It made him frantic.
He must be away, free, on his own legs, touching no living thing. It
was the Wild still clinging to him, asserting itself through him. This
feeling had been accentuated by the Ishmaelite life he had led from his
puppyhood. Danger lurked in contacts. It was the trap, ever the trap,
the fear of it lurking deep in the life of him, woven into the fibre of
him.
In consequence, the strange dogs he encountered had no chance against
him. He eluded their fangs. He got them, or got away, himself untouched
in either event. In the natural course of things there were exceptions
to this. There were times when several dogs, pitching on to him,
punished him before he could get away; and there were times when a
single dog scored deeply on him. But these were accidents. In the main,
so efficient a fighter had he become, he went his way unscathed.
Another advantage he possessed was that of correctly judging time and
distance. Not that he did this consciously, however. He did not
calculate such things. It was all automatic. His eyes saw correctly,
and the nerves carried the vision correctly to his brain. The parts of
him were better adjusted than those of the average dog. They worked
together more smoothly and steadily. His was a better, far better,
nervous, mental, and muscular co-ordination. When his eyes conveyed to
his brain the moving image of an action, his brain without conscious
effort, knew the space that limited that action and the time required
for its completion. Thus, he could avoid the leap of another dog, or
the drive of its fangs, and at the same moment could seize the
infinitesimal fraction of time in which to deliver his own attack. Body
and brain, his was a more perfected mechanism. Not that he was to be
praised for it. Nature had been more generous to him than to the
average animal, that was all.
It was in the summer that White Fang arrived at Fort Yukon. Grey Beaver
had crossed the great watershed between Mackenzie and the Yukon in the
late winter, and spent the spring in hunting among the western outlying
spurs of the Rockies. Then, after the break-up of the ice on the
Porcupine, he had built a canoe and paddled down that stream to where
it effected its junction with the Yukon just under the Artic circle.
Here stood the old Hudson’s Bay Company fort; and here were many
Indians, much food, and unprecedented excitement. It was the summer of
1898, and thousands of gold-hunters were going up the Yukon to Dawson
and the Klondike. Still hundreds of miles from their goal, nevertheless
many of them had been on the way for a year, and the least any of them
had travelled to get that far was five thousand miles, while some had
come from the other side of the world.
Here Grey Beaver stopped. A whisper of the gold-rush had reached his
ears, and he had come with several bales of furs, and another of
gut-sewn mittens and moccasins. He would not have ventured so long a
trip had he not expected generous profits. But what he had expected was
nothing to what he realised. His wildest dreams had not exceeded a
hundred per cent. profit; he made a thousand per cent. And like a true
Indian, he settled down to trade carefully and slowly, even if it took
all summer and the rest of the winter to dispose of his goods.
It was at Fort Yukon that White Fang saw his first white men. As
compared with the Indians he had known, they were to him another race
of beings, a race of superior gods. They impressed him as possessing
superior power, and it is on power that godhead rests. White Fang did
not reason it out, did not in his mind make the sharp generalisation
that the white gods were more powerful. It was a feeling, nothing more,
and yet none the less potent. As, in his puppyhood, the looming bulks
of the tepees, man-reared, had affected him as manifestations of power,
so was he affected now by the houses and the huge fort all of massive
logs. Here was power. Those white gods were strong. They possessed
greater mastery over matter than the gods he had known, most powerful
among which was Grey Beaver. And yet Grey Beaver was as a child-god
among these white-skinned ones.
To be sure, White Fang only felt these things. He was not conscious of
them. Yet it is upon feeling, more often than thinking, that animals
act; and every act White Fang now performed was based upon the feeling
that the white men were the superior gods. In the first place he was
very suspicious of them. There was no telling what unknown terrors were
theirs, what unknown hurts they could administer. He was curious to
observe them, fearful of being noticed by them. For the first few hours
he was content with slinking around and watching them from a safe
distance. Then he saw that no harm befell the dogs that were near to
them, and he came in closer.
In turn he was an object of great curiosity to them. His wolfish
appearance caught their eyes at once, and they pointed him out to one
another. This act of pointing put White Fang on his guard, and when
they tried to approach him he showed his teeth and backed away. Not one
succeeded in laying a hand on him, and it was well that they did not.
White Fang soon learned that very few of these gods—not more than a
dozen—lived at this place. Every two or three days a steamer (another
and colossal manifestation of power) came into the bank and stopped for
several hours. The white men came from off these steamers and went away
on them again. There seemed untold numbers of these white men. In the
first day or so, he saw more of them than he had seen Indians in all
his life; and as the days went by they continued to come up the river,
stop, and then go on up the river out of sight.
But if the white gods were all-powerful, their dogs did not amount to
much. This White Fang quickly discovered by mixing with those that came
ashore with their masters. They were irregular shapes and sizes. Some
were short-legged—too short; others were long-legged—too long. They had
hair instead of fur, and a few had very little hair at that. And none
of them knew how to fight.
As an enemy of his kind, it was in White Fang’s province to fight with
them. This he did, and he quickly achieved for them a mighty contempt.
They were soft and helpless, made much noise, and floundered around
clumsily trying to accomplish by main strength what he accomplished by
dexterity and cunning. They rushed bellowing at him. He sprang to the
side. They did not know what had become of him; and in that moment he
struck them on the shoulder, rolling them off their feet and delivering
his stroke at the throat.
Sometimes this stroke was successful, and a stricken dog rolled in the
dirt, to be pounced upon and torn to pieces by the pack of Indian dogs
that waited. White Fang was wise. He had long since learned that the
gods were made angry when their dogs were killed. The white men were no
exception to this. So he was content, when he had overthrown and
slashed wide the throat of one of their dogs, to drop back and let the
pack go in and do the cruel finishing work. It was then that the white
men rushed in, visiting their wrath heavily on the pack, while White
Fang went free. He would stand off at a little distance and look on,
while stones, clubs, axes, and all sorts of weapons fell upon his
fellows. White Fang was very wise.
But his fellows grew wise in their own way; and in this White Fang grew
wise with them. They learned that it was when a steamer first tied to
the bank that they had their fun. After the first two or three strange
dogs had been downed and destroyed, the white men hustled their own
animals back on board and wrecked savage vengeance on the offenders.
One white man, having seen his dog, a setter, torn to pieces before his
eyes, drew a revolver. He fired rapidly, six times, and six of the pack
lay dead or dying—another manifestation of power that sank deep into
White Fang’s consciousness.
White Fang enjoyed it all. He did not love his kind, and he was shrewd
enough to escape hurt himself. At first, the killing of the white men’s
dogs had been a diversion. After a time it became his occupation. There
was no work for him to do. Grey Beaver was busy trading and getting
wealthy. So White Fang hung around the landing with the disreputable
gang of Indian dogs, waiting for steamers. With the arrival of a
steamer the fun began. After a few minutes, by the time the white men
had got over their surprise, the gang scattered. The fun was over until
the next steamer should arrive.
But it can scarcely be said that White Fang was a member of the gang.
He did not mingle with it, but remained aloof, always himself, and was
even feared by it. It is true, he worked with it. He picked the quarrel
with the strange dog while the gang waited. And when he had overthrown
the strange dog the gang went in to finish it. But it is equally true
that he then withdrew, leaving the gang to receive the punishment of
the outraged gods.
It did not require much exertion to pick these quarrels. All he had to
do, when the strange dogs came ashore, was to show himself. When they
saw him they rushed for him. It was their instinct. He was the Wild—the
unknown, the terrible, the ever-menacing, the thing that prowled in the
darkness around the fires of the primeval world when they, cowering
close to the fires, were reshaping their instincts, learning to fear
the Wild out of which they had come, and which they had deserted and
betrayed. Generation by generation, down all the generations, had this
fear of the Wild been stamped into their natures. For centuries the
Wild had stood for terror and destruction. And during all this time
free licence had been theirs, from their masters, to kill the things of
the Wild. In doing this they had protected both themselves and the gods
whose companionship they shared.
And so, fresh from the soft southern world, these dogs, trotting down
the gang-plank and out upon the Yukon shore had but to see White Fang
to experience the irresistible impulse to rush upon him and destroy
him. They might be town-reared dogs, but the instinctive fear of the
Wild was theirs just the same. Not alone with their own eyes did they
see the wolfish creature in the clear light of day, standing before
them. They saw him with the eyes of their ancestors, and by their
inherited memory they knew White Fang for the wolf, and they remembered
the ancient feud.
All of which served to make White Fang’s days enjoyable. If the sight
of him drove these strange dogs upon him, so much the better for him,
so much the worse for them. They looked upon him as legitimate prey,
and as legitimate prey he looked upon them.
Not for nothing had he first seen the light of day in a lonely lair and
fought his first fights with the ptarmigan, the weasel, and the lynx.
And not for nothing had his puppyhood been made bitter by the
persecution of Lip-lip and the whole puppy pack. It might have been
otherwise, and he would then have been otherwise. Had Lip-lip not
existed, he would have passed his puppyhood with the other puppies and
grown up more doglike and with more liking for dogs. Had Grey Beaver
possessed the plummet of affection and love, he might have sounded the
deeps of White Fang’s nature and brought up to the surface all manner
of kindly qualities. But these things had not been so. The clay of
White Fang had been moulded until he became what he was, morose and
lonely, unloving and ferocious, the enemy of all his kind.