THE LOVE-MASTER
As White Fang watched Weedon Scott approach, he bristled and snarled to
advertise that he would not submit to punishment. Twenty-four hours had
passed since he had slashed open the hand that was now bandaged and
held up by a sling to keep the blood out of it. In the past White Fang
had experienced delayed punishments, and he apprehended that such a one
was about to befall him. How could it be otherwise? He had committed
what was to him sacrilege, sunk his fangs into the holy flesh of a god,
and of a white-skinned superior god at that. In the nature of things,
and of intercourse with gods, something terrible awaited him.
The god sat down several feet away. White Fang could see nothing
dangerous in that. When the gods administered punishment they stood on
their legs. Besides, this god had no club, no whip, no firearm. And
furthermore, he himself was free. No chain nor stick bound him. He
could escape into safety while the god was scrambling to his feet. In
the meantime he would wait and see.
The god remained quiet, made no movement; and White Fang’s snarl slowly
dwindled to a growl that ebbed down in his throat and ceased. Then the
god spoke, and at the first sound of his voice, the hair rose on White
Fang’s neck and the growl rushed up in his throat. But the god made no
hostile movement, and went on calmly talking. For a time White Fang
growled in unison with him, a correspondence of rhythm being
established between growl and voice. But the god talked on
interminably. He talked to White Fang as White Fang had never been
talked to before. He talked softly and soothingly, with a gentleness
that somehow, somewhere, touched White Fang. In spite of himself and
all the pricking warnings of his instinct, White Fang began to have
confidence in this god. He had a feeling of security that was belied by
all his experience with men.
After a long time, the god got up and went into the cabin. White Fang
scanned him apprehensively when he came out. He had neither whip nor
club nor weapon. Nor was his uninjured hand behind his back hiding
something. He sat down as before, in the same spot, several feet away.
He held out a small piece of meat. White Fang pricked his ears and
investigated it suspiciously, managing to look at the same time both at
the meat and the god, alert for any overt act, his body tense and ready
to spring away at the first sign of hostility.
Still the punishment delayed. The god merely held near to his nose a
piece of meat. And about the meat there seemed nothing wrong. Still
White Fang suspected; and though the meat was proffered to him with
short inviting thrusts of the hand, he refused to touch it. The gods
were all-wise, and there was no telling what masterful treachery lurked
behind that apparently harmless piece of meat. In past experience,
especially in dealing with squaws, meat and punishment had often been
disastrously related.
In the end, the god tossed the meat on the snow at White Fang’s feet.
He smelled the meat carefully; but he did not look at it. While he
smelled it he kept his eyes on the god. Nothing happened. He took the
meat into his mouth and swallowed it. Still nothing happened. The god
was actually offering him another piece of meat. Again he refused to
take it from the hand, and again it was tossed to him. This was
repeated a number of times. But there came a time when the god refused
to toss it. He kept it in his hand and steadfastly proffered it.
The meat was good meat, and White Fang was hungry. Bit by bit,
infinitely cautious, he approached the hand. At last the time came that
he decided to eat the meat from the hand. He never took his eyes from
the god, thrusting his head forward with ears flattened back and hair
involuntarily rising and cresting on his neck. Also a low growl rumbled
in his throat as warning that he was not to be trifled with. He ate the
meat, and nothing happened. Piece by piece, he ate all the meat, and
nothing happened. Still the punishment delayed.
He licked his chops and waited. The god went on talking. In his voice
was kindness—something of which White Fang had no experience whatever.
And within him it aroused feelings which he had likewise never
experienced before. He was aware of a certain strange satisfaction, as
though some need were being gratified, as though some void in his being
were being filled. Then again came the prod of his instinct and the
warning of past experience. The gods were ever crafty, and they had
unguessed ways of attaining their ends.
Ah, he had thought so! There it came now, the god’s hand, cunning to
hurt, thrusting out at him, descending upon his head. But the god went
on talking. His voice was soft and soothing. In spite of the menacing
hand, the voice inspired confidence. And in spite of the assuring
voice, the hand inspired distrust. White Fang was torn by conflicting
feelings, impulses. It seemed he would fly to pieces, so terrible was
the control he was exerting, holding together by an unwonted indecision
the counter-forces that struggled within him for mastery.
He compromised. He snarled and bristled and flattened his ears. But he
neither snapped nor sprang away. The hand descended. Nearer and nearer
it came. It touched the ends of his upstanding hair. He shrank down
under it. It followed down after him, pressing more closely against
him. Shrinking, almost shivering, he still managed to hold himself
together. It was a torment, this hand that touched him and violated his
instinct. He could not forget in a day all the evil that had been
wrought him at the hands of men. But it was the will of the god, and he
strove to submit.
The hand lifted and descended again in a patting, caressing movement.
This continued, but every time the hand lifted, the hair lifted under
it. And every time the hand descended, the ears flattened down and a
cavernous growl surged in his throat. White Fang growled and growled
with insistent warning. By this means he announced that he was prepared
to retaliate for any hurt he might receive. There was no telling when
the god’s ulterior motive might be disclosed. At any moment that soft,
confidence-inspiring voice might break forth in a roar of wrath, that
gentle and caressing hand transform itself into a vice-like grip to
hold him helpless and administer punishment.
But the god talked on softly, and ever the hand rose and fell with
non-hostile pats. White Fang experienced dual feelings. It was
distasteful to his instinct. It restrained him, opposed the will of him
toward personal liberty. And yet it was not physically painful. On the
contrary, it was even pleasant, in a physical way. The patting movement
slowly and carefully changed to a rubbing of the ears about their
bases, and the physical pleasure even increased a little. Yet he
continued to fear, and he stood on guard, expectant of unguessed evil,
alternately suffering and enjoying as one feeling or the other came
uppermost and swayed him.
“Well, I’ll be gosh-swoggled!”
So spoke Matt, coming out of the cabin, his sleeves rolled up, a pan of
dirty dish-water in his hands, arrested in the act of emptying the pan
by the sight of Weedon Scott patting White Fang.
At the instant his voice broke the silence, White Fang leaped back,
snarling savagely at him.
Matt regarded his employer with grieved disapproval.
“If you don’t mind my expressin’ my feelin’s, Mr. Scott, I’ll make free
to say you’re seventeen kinds of a damn fool an’ all of ’em different,
an’ then some.”
Weedon Scott smiled with a superior air, gained his feet, and walked
over to White Fang. He talked soothingly to him, but not for long, then
slowly put out his hand, rested it on White Fang’s head, and resumed
the interrupted patting. White Fang endured it, keeping his eyes fixed
suspiciously, not upon the man that patted him, but upon the man that
stood in the doorway.
“You may be a number one, tip-top minin’ expert, all right all right,”
the dog-musher delivered himself oracularly, “but you missed the chance
of your life when you was a boy an’ didn’t run off an’ join a circus.”
White Fang snarled at the sound of his voice, but this time did not
leap away from under the hand that was caressing his head and the back
of his neck with long, soothing strokes.
It was the beginning of the end for White Fang—the ending of the old
life and the reign of hate. A new and incomprehensibly fairer life was
dawning. It required much thinking and endless patience on the part of
Weedon Scott to accomplish this. And on the part of White Fang it
required nothing less than a revolution. He had to ignore the urges and
promptings of instinct and reason, defy experience, give the lie to
life itself.
Life, as he had known it, not only had had no place in it for much that
he now did; but all the currents had gone counter to those to which he
now abandoned himself. In short, when all things were considered, he
had to achieve an orientation far vaster than the one he had achieved
at the time he came voluntarily in from the Wild and accepted Grey
Beaver as his lord. At that time he was a mere puppy, soft from the
making, without form, ready for the thumb of circumstance to begin its
work upon him. But now it was different. The thumb of circumstance had
done its work only too well. By it he had been formed and hardened into
the Fighting Wolf, fierce and implacable, unloving and unlovable. To
accomplish the change was like a reflux of being, and this when the
plasticity of youth was no longer his; when the fibre of him had become
tough and knotty; when the warp and the woof of him had made of him an
adamantine texture, harsh and unyielding; when the face of his spirit
had become iron and all his instincts and axioms had crystallised into
set rules, cautions, dislikes, and desires.
Yet again, in this new orientation, it was the thumb of circumstance
that pressed and prodded him, softening that which had become hard and
remoulding it into fairer form. Weedon Scott was in truth this thumb.
He had gone to the roots of White Fang’s nature, and with kindness
touched to life potencies that had languished and well-nigh perished.
One such potency was _love_. It took the place of _like_, which latter
had been the highest feeling that thrilled him in his intercourse with
the gods.
But this love did not come in a day. It began with _like_ and out of it
slowly developed. White Fang did not run away, though he was allowed to
remain loose, because he liked this new god. This was certainly better
than the life he had lived in the cage of Beauty Smith, and it was
necessary that he should have some god. The lordship of man was a need
of his nature. The seal of his dependence on man had been set upon him
in that early day when he turned his back on the Wild and crawled to
Grey Beaver’s feet to receive the expected beating. This seal had been
stamped upon him again, and ineradicably, on his second return from the
Wild, when the long famine was over and there was fish once more in the
village of Grey Beaver.
And so, because he needed a god and because he preferred Weedon Scott
to Beauty Smith, White Fang remained. In acknowledgment of fealty, he
proceeded to take upon himself the guardianship of his master’s
property. He prowled about the cabin while the sled-dogs slept, and the
first night-visitor to the cabin fought him off with a club until
Weedon Scott came to the rescue. But White Fang soon learned to
differentiate between thieves and honest men, to appraise the true
value of step and carriage. The man who travelled, loud-stepping, the
direct line to the cabin door, he let alone—though he watched him
vigilantly until the door opened and he received the endorsement of the
master. But the man who went softly, by circuitous ways, peering with
caution, seeking after secrecy—that was the man who received no
suspension of judgment from White Fang, and who went away abruptly,
hurriedly, and without dignity.
Weedon Scott had set himself the task of redeeming White Fang—or
rather, of redeeming mankind from the wrong it had done White Fang. It
was a matter of principle and conscience. He felt that the ill done
White Fang was a debt incurred by man and that it must be paid. So he
went out of his way to be especially kind to the Fighting Wolf. Each
day he made it a point to caress and pet White Fang, and to do it at
length.
At first suspicious and hostile, White Fang grew to like this petting.
But there was one thing that he never outgrew—his growling. Growl he
would, from the moment the petting began till it ended. But it was a
growl with a new note in it. A stranger could not hear this note, and
to such a stranger the growling of White Fang was an exhibition of
primordial savagery, nerve-racking and blood-curdling. But White Fang’s
throat had become harsh-fibred from the making of ferocious sounds
through the many years since his first little rasp of anger in the lair
of his cubhood, and he could not soften the sounds of that throat now
to express the gentleness he felt. Nevertheless, Weedon Scott’s ear and
sympathy were fine enough to catch the new note all but drowned in the
fierceness—the note that was the faintest hint of a croon of content
and that none but he could hear.
As the days went by, the evolution of _like_ into _love_ was
accelerated. White Fang himself began to grow aware of it, though in
his consciousness he knew not what love was. It manifested itself to
him as a void in his being—a hungry, aching, yearning void that
clamoured to be filled. It was a pain and an unrest; and it received
easement only by the touch of the new god’s presence. At such times
love was joy to him, a wild, keen-thrilling satisfaction. But when away
from his god, the pain and the unrest returned; the void in him sprang
up and pressed against him with its emptiness, and the hunger gnawed
and gnawed unceasingly.
White Fang was in the process of finding himself. In spite of the
maturity of his years and of the savage rigidity of the mould that had
formed him, his nature was undergoing an expansion. There was a
burgeoning within him of strange feelings and unwonted impulses. His
old code of conduct was changing. In the past he had liked comfort and
surcease from pain, disliked discomfort and pain, and he had adjusted
his actions accordingly. But now it was different. Because of this new
feeling within him, he ofttimes elected discomfort and pain for the
sake of his god. Thus, in the early morning, instead of roaming and
foraging, or lying in a sheltered nook, he would wait for hours on the
cheerless cabin-stoop for a sight of the god’s face. At night, when the
god returned home, White Fang would leave the warm sleeping-place he
had burrowed in the snow in order to receive the friendly snap of
fingers and the word of greeting. Meat, even meat itself, he would
forego to be with his god, to receive a caress from him or to accompany
him down into the town.
_Like_ had been replaced by _love_. And love was the plummet dropped
down into the deeps of him where like had never gone. And responsive
out of his deeps had come the new thing—love. That which was given unto
him did he return. This was a god indeed, a love-god, a warm and
radiant god, in whose light White Fang’s nature expanded as a flower
expands under the sun.
But White Fang was not demonstrative. He was too old, too firmly
moulded, to become adept at expressing himself in new ways. He was too
self-possessed, too strongly poised in his own isolation. Too long had
he cultivated reticence, aloofness, and moroseness. He had never barked
in his life, and he could not now learn to bark a welcome when his god
approached. He was never in the way, never extravagant nor foolish in
the expression of his love. He never ran to meet his god. He waited at
a distance; but he always waited, was always there. His love partook of
the nature of worship, dumb, inarticulate, a silent adoration. Only by
the steady regard of his eyes did he express his love, and by the
unceasing following with his eyes of his god’s every movement. Also, at
times, when his god looked at him and spoke to him, he betrayed an
awkward self-consciousness, caused by the struggle of his love to
express itself and his physical inability to express it.
He learned to adjust himself in many ways to his new mode of life. It
was borne in upon him that he must let his master’s dogs alone. Yet his
dominant nature asserted itself, and he had first to thrash them into
an acknowledgment of his superiority and leadership. This accomplished,
he had little trouble with them. They gave trail to him when he came
and went or walked among them, and when he asserted his will they
obeyed.
In the same way, he came to tolerate Matt—as a possession of his
master. His master rarely fed him. Matt did that, it was his business;
yet White Fang divined that it was his master’s food he ate and that it
was his master who thus fed him vicariously. Matt it was who tried to
put him into the harness and make him haul sled with the other dogs.
But Matt failed. It was not until Weedon Scott put the harness on White
Fang and worked him, that he understood. He took it as his master’s
will that Matt should drive him and work him just as he drove and
worked his master’s other dogs.
Different from the Mackenzie toboggans were the Klondike sleds with
runners under them. And different was the method of driving the dogs.
There was no fan-formation of the team. The dogs worked in single file,
one behind another, hauling on double traces. And here, in the
Klondike, the leader was indeed the leader. The wisest as well as
strongest dog was the leader, and the team obeyed him and feared him.
That White Fang should quickly gain this post was inevitable. He could
not be satisfied with less, as Matt learned after much inconvenience
and trouble. White Fang picked out the post for himself, and Matt
backed his judgment with strong language after the experiment had been
tried. But, though he worked in the sled in the day, White Fang did not
forego the guarding of his master’s property in the night. Thus he was
on duty all the time, ever vigilant and faithful, the most valuable of
all the dogs.
“Makin’ free to spit out what’s in me,” Matt said one day, “I beg to
state that you was a wise guy all right when you paid the price you did
for that dog. You clean swindled Beauty Smith on top of pushin’ his
face in with your fist.”
A recrudescence of anger glinted in Weedon Scott’s grey eyes, and he
muttered savagely, “The beast!”
In the late spring a great trouble came to White Fang. Without warning,
the love-master disappeared. There had been warning, but White Fang was
unversed in such things and did not understand the packing of a grip.
He remembered afterwards that his packing had preceded the master’s
disappearance; but at the time he suspected nothing. That night he
waited for the master to return. At midnight the chill wind that blew
drove him to shelter at the rear of the cabin. There he drowsed, only
half asleep, his ears keyed for the first sound of the familiar step.
But, at two in the morning, his anxiety drove him out to the cold front
stoop, where he crouched, and waited.
But no master came. In the morning the door opened and Matt stepped
outside. White Fang gazed at him wistfully. There was no common speech
by which he might learn what he wanted to know. The days came and went,
but never the master. White Fang, who had never known sickness in his
life, became sick. He became very sick, so sick that Matt was finally
compelled to bring him inside the cabin. Also, in writing to his
employer, Matt devoted a postscript to White Fang.
Weedon Scott reading the letter down in Circle City, came upon the
following:
“That dam wolf won’t work. Won’t eat. Aint got no spunk left. All the
dogs is licking him. Wants to know what has become of you, and I don’t
know how to tell him. Mebbe he is going to die.”
It was as Matt had said. White Fang had ceased eating, lost heart, and
allowed every dog of the team to thrash him. In the cabin he lay on the
floor near the stove, without interest in food, in Matt, nor in life.
Matt might talk gently to him or swear at him, it was all the same; he
never did more than turn his dull eyes upon the man, then drop his head
back to its customary position on his fore-paws.
And then, one night, Matt, reading to himself with moving lips and
mumbled sounds, was startled by a low whine from White Fang. He had got
upon his feet, his ears cocked towards the door, and he was listening
intently. A moment later, Matt heard a footstep. The door opened, and
Weedon Scott stepped in. The two men shook hands. Then Scott looked
around the room.
“Where’s the wolf?” he asked.
Then he discovered him, standing where he had been lying, near to the
stove. He had not rushed forward after the manner of other dogs. He
stood, watching and waiting.
“Holy smoke!” Matt exclaimed. “Look at ’m wag his tail!”
Weedon Scott strode half across the room toward him, at the same time
calling him. White Fang came to him, not with a great bound, yet
quickly. He was awakened from self-consciousness, but as he drew near,
his eyes took on a strange expression. Something, an incommunicable
vastness of feeling, rose up into his eyes as a light and shone forth.
“He never looked at me that way all the time you was gone!” Matt
commented.
Weedon Scott did not hear. He was squatting down on his heels, face to
face with White Fang and petting him—rubbing at the roots of the ears,
making long caressing strokes down the neck to the shoulders, tapping
the spine gently with the balls of his fingers. And White Fang was
growling responsively, the crooning note of the growl more pronounced
than ever.
But that was not all. What of his joy, the great love in him, ever
surging and struggling to express itself, succeeded in finding a new
mode of expression. He suddenly thrust his head forward and nudged his
way in between the master’s arm and body. And here, confined, hidden
from view all except his ears, no longer growling, he continued to
nudge and snuggle.
The two men looked at each other. Scott’s eyes were shining.
“Gosh!” said Matt in an awe-stricken voice.
A moment later, when he had recovered himself, he said, “I always
insisted that wolf was a dog. Look at ’m!”
With the return of the love-master, White Fang’s recovery was rapid.
Two nights and a day he spent in the cabin. Then he sallied forth. The
sled-dogs had forgotten his prowess. They remembered only the latest,
which was his weakness and sickness. At the sight of him as he came out
of the cabin, they sprang upon him.
“Talk about your rough-houses,” Matt murmured gleefully, standing in
the doorway and looking on.
“Give ’m hell, you wolf! Give ’m hell!—an’ then some!”
White Fang did not need the encouragement. The return of the
love-master was enough. Life was flowing through him again, splendid
and indomitable. He fought from sheer joy, finding in it an expression
of much that he felt and that otherwise was without speech. There could
be but one ending. The team dispersed in ignominious defeat, and it was
not until after dark that the dogs came sneaking back, one by one, by
meekness and humility signifying their fealty to White Fang.
Having learned to snuggle, White Fang was guilty of it often. It was
the final word. He could not go beyond it. The one thing of which he
had always been particularly jealous was his head. He had always
disliked to have it touched. It was the Wild in him, the fear of hurt
and of the trap, that had given rise to the panicky impulses to avoid
contacts. It was the mandate of his instinct that that head must be
free. And now, with the love-master, his snuggling was the deliberate
act of putting himself into a position of hopeless helplessness. It was
an expression of perfect confidence, of absolute self-surrender, as
though he said: “I put myself into thy hands. Work thou thy will with
me.”
One night, not long after the return, Scott and Matt sat at a game of
cribbage preliminary to going to bed. “Fifteen-two, fifteen-four an’ a
pair makes six,” Mat was pegging up, when there was an outcry and sound
of snarling without. They looked at each other as they started to rise
to their feet.
“The wolf’s nailed somebody,” Matt said.
A wild scream of fear and anguish hastened them.
“Bring a light!” Scott shouted, as he sprang outside.
Matt followed with the lamp, and by its light they saw a man lying on
his back in the snow. His arms were folded, one above the other, across
his face and throat. Thus he was trying to shield himself from White
Fang’s teeth. And there was need for it. White Fang was in a rage,
wickedly making his attack on the most vulnerable spot. From shoulder
to wrist of the crossed arms, the coat-sleeve, blue flannel shirt and
undershirt were ripped in rags, while the arms themselves were terribly
slashed and streaming blood.
All this the two men saw in the first instant. The next instant Weedon
Scott had White Fang by the throat and was dragging him clear. White
Fang struggled and snarled, but made no attempt to bite, while he
quickly quieted down at a sharp word from the master.
Matt helped the man to his feet. As he arose he lowered his crossed
arms, exposing the bestial face of Beauty Smith. The dog-musher let go
of him precipitately, with action similar to that of a man who has
picked up live fire. Beauty Smith blinked in the lamplight and looked
about him. He caught sight of White Fang and terror rushed into his
face.
At the same moment Matt noticed two objects lying in the snow. He held
the lamp close to them, indicating them with his toe for his employer’s
benefit—a steel dog-chain and a stout club.
Weedon Scott saw and nodded. Not a word was spoken. The dog-musher laid
his hand on Beauty Smith’s shoulder and faced him to the right about.
No word needed to be spoken. Beauty Smith started.
In the meantime the love-master was patting White Fang and talking to
him.
“Tried to steal you, eh? And you wouldn’t have it! Well, well, he made
a mistake, didn’t he?”
“Must ‘a’ thought he had hold of seventeen devils,” the dog-musher
sniggered.
White Fang, still wrought up and bristling, growled and growled, the
hair slowly lying down, the crooning note remote and dim, but growing
in his throat.
PART V
CHAPTER I
THE LONG TRAIL
It was in the air. White Fang sensed the coming calamity, even before
there was tangible evidence of it. In vague ways it was borne in upon
him that a change was impending. He knew not how nor why, yet he got
his feel of the oncoming event from the gods themselves. In ways
subtler than they knew, they betrayed their intentions to the wolf-dog
that haunted the cabin-stoop, and that, though he never came inside the
cabin, knew what went on inside their brains.
“Listen to that, will you!” the dog-musher exclaimed at supper one
night.
Weedon Scott listened. Through the door came a low, anxious whine, like
a sobbing under the breath that had just grown audible. Then came the
long sniff, as White Fang reassured himself that his god was still
inside and had not yet taken himself off in mysterious and solitary
flight.
“I do believe that wolf’s on to you,” the dog-musher said.
Weedon Scott looked across at his companion with eyes that almost
pleaded, though this was given the lie by his words.
“What the devil can I do with a wolf in California?” he demanded.
“That’s what I say,” Matt answered. “What the devil can you do with a
wolf in California?”
But this did not satisfy Weedon Scott. The other seemed to be judging
him in a non-committal sort of way.
“White man’s dogs would have no show against him,” Scott went on. “He’d
kill them on sight. If he didn’t bankrupt me with damaged suits, the
authorities would take him away from me and electrocute him.”
“He’s a downright murderer, I know,” was the dog-musher’s comment.
Weedon Scott looked at him suspiciously.
“It would never do,” he said decisively.
“It would never do!” Matt concurred. “Why you’d have to hire a man
’specially to take care of ’m.”
The other’s suspicion was allayed. He nodded cheerfully. In the silence
that followed, the low, half-sobbing whine was heard at the door and
then the long, questing sniff.
“There’s no denyin’ he thinks a hell of a lot of you,” Matt said.
The other glared at him in sudden wrath. “Damn it all, man! I know my
own mind and what’s best!”
“I’m agreein’ with you, only . . . ”
“Only what?” Scott snapped out.
“Only . . . ” the dog-musher began softly, then changed his mind and
betrayed a rising anger of his own. “Well, you needn’t get so all-fired
het up about it. Judgin’ by your actions one’d think you didn’t know
your own mind.”
Weedon Scott debated with himself for a while, and then said more
gently: “You are right, Matt. I don’t know my own mind, and that’s
what’s the trouble.”
“Why, it would be rank ridiculousness for me to take that dog along,”
he broke out after another pause.
“I’m agreein’ with you,” was Matt’s answer, and again his employer was
not quite satisfied with him.
“But how in the name of the great Sardanapolis he knows you’re goin’ is
what gets me,” the dog-musher continued innocently.
“It’s beyond me, Matt,” Scott answered, with a mournful shake of the
head.
Then came the day when, through the open cabin door, White Fang saw the
fatal grip on the floor and the love-master packing things into it.
Also, there were comings and goings, and the erstwhile placid
atmosphere of the cabin was vexed with strange perturbations and
unrest. Here was indubitable evidence. White Fang had already scented
it. He now reasoned it. His god was preparing for another flight. And
since he had not taken him with him before, so, now, he could look to
be left behind.
That night he lifted the long wolf-howl. As he had howled, in his puppy
days, when he fled back from the Wild to the village to find it
vanished and naught but a rubbish-heap to mark the site of Grey
Beaver’s tepee, so now he pointed his muzzle to the cold stars and told
to them his woe.
Inside the cabin the two men had just gone to bed.
“He’s gone off his food again,” Matt remarked from his bunk.
There was a grunt from Weedon Scott’s bunk, and a stir of blankets.
“From the way he cut up the other time you went away, I wouldn’t wonder
this time but what he died.”
The blankets in the other bunk stirred irritably.
“Oh, shut up!” Scott cried out through the darkness. “You nag worse
than a woman.”
“I’m agreein’ with you,” the dog-musher answered, and Weedon Scott was
not quite sure whether or not the other had snickered.
The next day White Fang’s anxiety and restlessness were even more
pronounced. He dogged his master’s heels whenever he left the cabin,
and haunted the front stoop when he remained inside. Through the open
door he could catch glimpses of the luggage on the floor. The grip had
been joined by two large canvas bags and a box. Matt was rolling the
master’s blankets and fur robe inside a small tarpaulin. White Fang
whined as he watched the operation.
Later on two Indians arrived. He watched them closely as they
shouldered the luggage and were led off down the hill by Matt, who
carried the bedding and the grip. But White Fang did not follow them.
The master was still in the cabin. After a time, Matt returned. The
master came to the door and called White Fang inside.
“You poor devil,” he said gently, rubbing White Fang’s ears and tapping
his spine. “I’m hitting the long trail, old man, where you cannot
follow. Now give me a growl—the last, good, good-bye growl.”
But White Fang refused to growl. Instead, and after a wistful,
searching look, he snuggled in, burrowing his head out of sight between
the master’s arm and body.
“There she blows!” Matt cried. From the Yukon arose the hoarse
bellowing of a river steamboat. “You’ve got to cut it short. Be sure
and lock the front door. I’ll go out the back. Get a move on!”
The two doors slammed at the same moment, and Weedon Scott waited for
Matt to come around to the front. From inside the door came a low
whining and sobbing. Then there were long, deep-drawn sniffs.
“You must take good care of him, Matt,” Scott said, as they started
down the hill. “Write and let me know how he gets along.”
“Sure,” the dog-musher answered. “But listen to that, will you!”
Both men stopped. White Fang was howling as dogs howl when their
masters lie dead. He was voicing an utter woe, his cry bursting upward
in great heart-breaking rushes, dying down into quavering misery, and
bursting upward again with a rush upon rush of grief.
The _Aurora_ was the first steamboat of the year for the Outside, and
her decks were jammed with prosperous adventurers and broken gold
seekers, all equally as mad to get to the Outside as they had been
originally to get to the Inside. Near the gang-plank, Scott was shaking
hands with Matt, who was preparing to go ashore. But Matt’s hand went
limp in the other’s grasp as his gaze shot past and remained fixed on
something behind him. Scott turned to see. Sitting on the deck several
feet away and watching wistfully was White Fang.
The dog-musher swore softly, in awe-stricken accents. Scott could only
look in wonder.
“Did you lock the front door?” Matt demanded. The other nodded, and
asked, “How about the back?”
“You just bet I did,” was the fervent reply.
White Fang flattened his ears ingratiatingly, but remained where he
was, making no attempt to approach.
“I’ll have to take ’m ashore with me.”
Matt made a couple of steps toward White Fang, but the latter slid away
from him. The dog-musher made a rush of it, and White Fang dodged
between the legs of a group of men. Ducking, turning, doubling, he slid
about the deck, eluding the other’s efforts to capture him.
But when the love-master spoke, White Fang came to him with prompt
obedience.
“Won’t come to the hand that’s fed ’m all these months,” the dog-musher
muttered resentfully. “And you—you ain’t never fed ’m after them first
days of gettin’ acquainted. I’m blamed if I can see how he works it out
that you’re the boss.”
Scott, who had been patting White Fang, suddenly bent closer and
pointed out fresh-made cuts on his muzzle, and a gash between the eyes.
Matt bent over and passed his hand along White Fang’s belly.
“We plump forgot the window. He’s all cut an’ gouged underneath. Must
‘a’ butted clean through it, b’gosh!”
But Weedon Scott was not listening. He was thinking rapidly. The
_Aurora’s_ whistle hooted a final announcement of departure. Men were
scurrying down the gang-plank to the shore. Matt loosened the bandana
from his own neck and started to put it around White Fang’s. Scott
grasped the dog-musher’s hand.
“Good-bye, Matt, old man. About the wolf—you needn’t write. You see,
I’ve . . . !”
“What!” the dog-musher exploded. “You don’t mean to say . . .?”
“The very thing I mean. Here’s your bandana. I’ll write to you about
him.”
Matt paused halfway down the gang-plank.
“He’ll never stand the climate!” he shouted back. “Unless you clip ’m
in warm weather!”
The gang-plank was hauled in, and the _Aurora_ swung out from the bank.
Weedon Scott waved a last good-bye. Then he turned and bent over White
Fang, standing by his side.
“Now growl, damn you, growl,” he said, as he patted the responsive head
and rubbed the flattening ears.
CHAPTER II
THE SOUTHLAND
White Fang landed from the steamer in San Francisco. He was appalled.
Deep in him, below any reasoning process or act of consciousness, he
had associated power with godhead. And never had the white men seemed
such marvellous gods as now, when he trod the slimy pavement of San
Francisco. The log cabins he had known were replaced by towering
buildings. The streets were crowded with perils—waggons, carts,
automobiles; great, straining horses pulling huge trucks; and monstrous
cable and electric cars hooting and clanging through the midst,
screeching their insistent menace after the manner of the lynxes he had
known in the northern woods.
All this was the manifestation of power. Through it all, behind it all,
was man, governing and controlling, expressing himself, as of old, by
his mastery over matter. It was colossal, stunning. White Fang was
awed. Fear sat upon him. As in his cubhood he had been made to feel his
smallness and puniness on the day he first came in from the Wild to the
village of Grey Beaver, so now, in his full-grown stature and pride of
strength, he was made to feel small and puny. And there were so many
gods! He was made dizzy by the swarming of them. The thunder of the
streets smote upon his ears. He was bewildered by the tremendous and
endless rush and movement of things. As never before, he felt his
dependence on the love-master, close at whose heels he followed, no
matter what happened never losing sight of him.
But White Fang was to have no more than a nightmare vision of the
city—an experience that was like a bad dream, unreal and terrible, that
haunted him for long after in his dreams. He was put into a baggage-car
by the master, chained in a corner in the midst of heaped trunks and
valises. Here a squat and brawny god held sway, with much noise,
hurling trunks and boxes about, dragging them in through the door and
tossing them into the piles, or flinging them out of the door, smashing
and crashing, to other gods who awaited them.
And here, in this inferno of luggage, was White Fang deserted by the
master. Or at least White Fang thought he was deserted, until he
smelled out the master’s canvas clothes-bags alongside of him, and
proceeded to mount guard over them.
“’Bout time you come,” growled the god of the car, an hour later, when
Weedon Scott appeared at the door. “That dog of yourn won’t let me lay
a finger on your stuff.”
White Fang emerged from the car. He was astonished. The nightmare city
was gone. The car had been to him no more than a room in a house, and
when he had entered it the city had been all around him. In the
interval the city had disappeared. The roar of it no longer dinned upon
his ears. Before him was smiling country, streaming with sunshine, lazy
with quietude. But he had little time to marvel at the transformation.
He accepted it as he accepted all the unaccountable doings and
manifestations of the gods. It was their way.
There was a carriage waiting. A man and a woman approached the master.
The woman’s arms went out and clutched the master around the neck—a
hostile act! The next moment Weedon Scott had torn loose from the
embrace and closed with White Fang, who had become a snarling, raging
demon.
“It’s all right, mother,” Scott was saying as he kept tight hold of
White Fang and placated him. “He thought you were going to injure me,
and he wouldn’t stand for it. It’s all right. It’s all right. He’ll
learn soon enough.”
“And in the meantime I may be permitted to love my son when his dog is
not around,” she laughed, though she was pale and weak from the fright.
She looked at White Fang, who snarled and bristled and glared
malevolently.
“He’ll have to learn, and he shall, without postponement,” Scott said.
He spoke softly to White Fang until he had quieted him, then his voice
became firm.
“Down, sir! Down with you!”
This had been one of the things taught him by the master, and White
Fang obeyed, though he lay down reluctantly and sullenly.
“Now, mother.”
Scott opened his arms to her, but kept his eyes on White Fang.
“Down!” he warned. “Down!”
White Fang, bristling silently, half-crouching as he rose, sank back
and watched the hostile act repeated. But no harm came of it, nor of
the embrace from the strange man-god that followed. Then the
clothes-bags were taken into the carriage, the strange gods and the
love-master followed, and White Fang pursued, now running vigilantly
behind, now bristling up to the running horses and warning them that he
was there to see that no harm befell the god they dragged so swiftly
across the earth.
At the end of fifteen minutes, the carriage swung in through a stone
gateway and on between a double row of arched and interlacing walnut
trees. On either side stretched lawns, their broad sweep broken here
and there by great sturdy-limbed oaks. In the near distance, in
contrast with the young-green of the tended grass, sunburnt hay-fields
showed tan and gold; while beyond were the tawny hills and upland
pastures. From the head of the lawn, on the first soft swell from the
valley-level, looked down the deep-porched, many-windowed house.
Little opportunity was given White Fang to see all this. Hardly had the
carriage entered the grounds, when he was set upon by a sheep-dog,
bright-eyed, sharp-muzzled, righteously indignant and angry. It was
between him and the master, cutting him off. White Fang snarled no
warning, but his hair bristled as he made his silent and deadly rush.
This rush was never completed. He halted with awkward abruptness, with
stiff fore-legs bracing himself against his momentum, almost sitting
down on his haunches, so desirous was he of avoiding contact with the
dog he was in the act of attacking. It was a female, and the law of his
kind thrust a barrier between. For him to attack her would require
nothing less than a violation of his instinct.
But with the sheep-dog it was otherwise. Being a female, she possessed
no such instinct. On the other hand, being a sheep-dog, her instinctive
fear of the Wild, and especially of the wolf, was unusually keen. White
Fang was to her a wolf, the hereditary marauder who had preyed upon her
flocks from the time sheep were first herded and guarded by some dim
ancestor of hers. And so, as he abandoned his rush at her and braced
himself to avoid the contact, she sprang upon him. He snarled
involuntarily as he felt her teeth in his shoulder, but beyond this
made no offer to hurt her. He backed away, stiff-legged with
self-consciousness, and tried to go around her. He dodged this way and
that, and curved and turned, but to no purpose. She remained always
between him and the way he wanted to go.
“Here, Collie!” called the strange man in the carriage.
Weedon Scott laughed.
“Never mind, father. It is good discipline. White Fang will have to
learn many things, and it’s just as well that he begins now. He’ll
adjust himself all right.”
The carriage drove on, and still Collie blocked White Fang’s way. He
tried to outrun her by leaving the drive and circling across the lawn
but she ran on the inner and smaller circle, and was always there,
facing him with her two rows of gleaming teeth. Back he circled, across
the drive to the other lawn, and again she headed him off.
The carriage was bearing the master away. White Fang caught glimpses of
it disappearing amongst the trees. The situation was desperate. He
essayed another circle. She followed, running swiftly. And then,
suddenly, he turned upon her. It was his old fighting trick. Shoulder
to shoulder, he struck her squarely. Not only was she overthrown. So
fast had she been running that she rolled along, now on her back, now
on her side, as she struggled to stop, clawing gravel with her feet and
crying shrilly her hurt pride and indignation.
White Fang did not wait. The way was clear, and that was all he had
wanted. She took after him, never ceasing her outcry. It was the
straightaway now, and when it came to real running, White Fang could
teach her things. She ran frantically, hysterically, straining to the
utmost, advertising the effort she was making with every leap: and all
the time White Fang slid smoothly away from her silently, without
effort, gliding like a ghost over the ground.
As he rounded the house to the _porte-cochère_, he came upon the
carriage. It had stopped, and the master was alighting. At this moment,
still running at top speed, White Fang became suddenly aware of an
attack from the side. It was a deer-hound rushing upon him. White Fang
tried to face it. But he was going too fast, and the hound was too
close. It struck him on the side; and such was his forward momentum and
the unexpectedness of it, White Fang was hurled to the ground and
rolled clear over. He came out of the tangle a spectacle of malignancy,
ears flattened back, lips writhing, nose wrinkling, his teeth clipping
together as the fangs barely missed the hound’s soft throat.
The master was running up, but was too far away; and it was Collie that
saved the hound’s life. Before White Fang could spring in and deliver
the fatal stroke, and just as he was in the act of springing in, Collie
arrived. She had been out-manoeuvred and out-run, to say nothing of her
having been unceremoniously tumbled in the gravel, and her arrival was
like that of a tornado—made up of offended dignity, justifiable wrath,
and instinctive hatred for this marauder from the Wild. She struck
White Fang at right angles in the midst of his spring, and again he was
knocked off his feet and rolled over.
The next moment the master arrived, and with one hand held White Fang,
while the father called off the dogs.
“I say, this is a pretty warm reception for a poor lone wolf from the
Arctic,” the master said, while White Fang calmed down under his
caressing hand. “In all his life he’s only been known once to go off
his feet, and here he’s been rolled twice in thirty seconds.”
The carriage had driven away, and other strange gods had appeared from
out the house. Some of these stood respectfully at a distance; but two
of them, women, perpetrated the hostile act of clutching the master
around the neck. White Fang, however, was beginning to tolerate this
act. No harm seemed to come of it, while the noises the gods made were
certainly not threatening. These gods also made overtures to White
Fang, but he warned them off with a snarl, and the master did likewise
with word of mouth. At such times White Fang leaned in close against
the master’s legs and received reassuring pats on the head.
The hound, under the command, “Dick! Lie down, sir!” had gone up the
steps and lain down to one side of the porch, still growling and
keeping a sullen watch on the intruder. Collie had been taken in charge
by one of the woman-gods, who held arms around her neck and petted and
caressed her; but Collie was very much perplexed and worried, whining
and restless, outraged by the permitted presence of this wolf and
confident that the gods were making a mistake.
All the gods started up the steps to enter the house. White Fang
followed closely at the master’s heels. Dick, on the porch, growled,
and White Fang, on the steps, bristled and growled back.
“Take Collie inside and leave the two of them to fight it out,”
suggested Scott’s father. “After that they’ll be friends.”
“Then White Fang, to show his friendship, will have to be chief mourner
at the funeral,” laughed the master.
The elder Scott looked incredulously, first at White Fang, then at
Dick, and finally at his son.
“You mean . . .?”
Weedon nodded his head. “I mean just that. You’d have a dead Dick
inside one minute—two minutes at the farthest.”
He turned to White Fang. “Come on, you wolf. It’s you that’ll have to
come inside.”
White Fang walked stiff-legged up the steps and across the porch, with
tail rigidly erect, keeping his eyes on Dick to guard against a flank
attack, and at the same time prepared for whatever fierce manifestation
of the unknown that might pounce out upon him from the interior of the
house. But no thing of fear pounced out, and when he had gained the
inside he scouted carefully around, looking at it and finding it not.
Then he lay down with a contented grunt at the master’s feet, observing
all that went on, ever ready to spring to his feet and fight for life
with the terrors he felt must lurk under the trap-roof of the dwelling.
CHAPTER III
THE GOD’S DOMAIN
Not only was White Fang adaptable by nature, but he had travelled much,
and knew the meaning and necessity of adjustment. Here, in Sierra
Vista, which was the name of Judge Scott’s place, White Fang quickly
began to make himself at home. He had no further serious trouble with
the dogs. They knew more about the ways of the Southland gods than did
he, and in their eyes he had qualified when he accompanied the gods
inside the house. Wolf that he was, and unprecedented as it was, the
gods had sanctioned his presence, and they, the dogs of the gods, could
only recognise this sanction.
Dick, perforce, had to go through a few stiff formalities at first,
after which he calmly accepted White Fang as an addition to the
premises. Had Dick had his way, they would have been good friends;
but White Fang was averse to friendship. All he asked of other dogs was
to be let alone. His whole life he had kept aloof from his kind, and he
still desired to keep aloof. Dick’s overtures bothered him, so he
snarled Dick away. In the north he had learned the lesson that he must
let the master’s dogs alone, and he did not forget that lesson now. But
he insisted on his own privacy and self-seclusion, and so thoroughly
ignored Dick that that good-natured creature finally gave him up and
scarcely took as much interest in him as in the hitching-post near the
stable.
Not so with Collie. While she accepted him because it was the mandate
of the gods, that was no reason that she should leave him in peace.
Woven into her being was the memory of countless crimes he and his had
perpetrated against her ancestry. Not in a day nor a generation were
the ravaged sheepfolds to be forgotten. All this was a spur to her,
pricking her to retaliation. She could not fly in the face of the gods
who permitted him, but that did not prevent her from making life
miserable for him in petty ways. A feud, ages old, was between them,
and she, for one, would see to it that he was reminded.
So Collie took advantage of her sex to pick upon White Fang and
maltreat him. His instinct would not permit him to attack her, while
her persistence would not permit him to ignore her. When she rushed at
him he turned his fur-protected shoulder to her sharp teeth and walked
away stiff-legged and stately. When she forced him too hard, he was
compelled to go about in a circle, his shoulder presented to her, his
head turned from her, and on his face and in his eyes a patient and
bored expression. Sometimes, however, a nip on his hind-quarters
hastened his retreat and made it anything but stately. But as a rule he
managed to maintain a dignity that was almost solemnity. He ignored her
existence whenever it was possible, and made it a point to keep out of
her way. When he saw or heard her coming, he got up and walked off.
There was much in other matters for White Fang to learn. Life in the
Northland was simplicity itself when compared with the complicated
affairs of Sierra Vista. First of all, he had to learn the family of
the master. In a way he was prepared to do this. As Mit-sah and
Kloo-kooch had belonged to Grey Beaver, sharing his food, his fire, and
his blankets, so now, at Sierra Vista, belonged to the love-master all
the denizens of the house.
But in this matter there was a difference, and many differences. Sierra
Vista was a far vaster affair than the tepee of Grey Beaver. There were
many persons to be considered. There was Judge Scott, and there was his
wife. There were the master’s two sisters, Beth and Mary. There was his
wife, Alice, and then there were his children, Weedon and Maud,
toddlers of four and six. There was no way for anybody to tell him
about all these people, and of blood-ties and relationship he knew
nothing whatever and never would be capable of knowing. Yet he quickly
worked it out that all of them belonged to the master. Then, by
observation, whenever opportunity offered, by study of action, speech,
and the very intonations of the voice, he slowly learned the intimacy
and the degree of favour they enjoyed with the master. And by this
ascertained standard, White Fang treated them accordingly. What was of
value to the master he valued; what was dear to the master was to be
cherished by White Fang and guarded carefully.
Thus it was with the two children. All his life he had disliked
children. He hated and feared their hands. The lessons were not tender
that he had learned of their tyranny and cruelty in the days of the
Indian villages. When Weedon and Maud had first approached him, he
growled warningly and looked malignant. A cuff from the master and a
sharp word had then compelled him to permit their caresses, though he
growled and growled under their tiny hands, and in the growl there was
no crooning note. Later, he observed that the boy and girl were of
great value in the master’s eyes. Then it was that no cuff nor sharp
word was necessary before they could pat him.
Yet White Fang was never effusively affectionate. He yielded to the
master’s children with an ill but honest grace, and endured their
fooling as one would endure a painful operation. When he could no
longer endure, he would get up and stalk determinedly away from them.
But after a time, he grew even to like the children. Still he was not
demonstrative. He would not go up to them. On the other hand, instead
of walking away at sight of them, he waited for them to come to him.
And still later, it was noticed that a pleased light came into his eyes
when he saw them approaching, and that he looked after them with an
appearance of curious regret when they left him for other amusements.
All this was a matter of development, and took time. Next in his
regard, after the children, was Judge Scott. There were two reasons,
possibly, for this. First, he was evidently a valuable possession of
the master’s, and next, he was undemonstrative. White Fang liked to lie
at his feet on the wide porch when he read the newspaper, from time to
time favouring White Fang with a look or a word—untroublesome tokens
that he recognised White Fang’s presence and existence. But this was
only when the master was not around. When the master appeared, all
other beings ceased to exist so far as White Fang was concerned.
White Fang allowed all the members of the family to pet him and make
much of him; but he never gave to them what he gave to the master. No
caress of theirs could put the love-croon into his throat, and, try as
they would, they could never persuade him into snuggling against them.
This expression of abandon and surrender, of absolute trust, he
reserved for the master alone. In fact, he never regarded the members
of the family in any other light than possessions of the love-master.
Also White Fang had early come to differentiate between the family and
the servants of the household. The latter were afraid of him, while he
merely refrained from attacking them. This because he considered that
they were likewise possessions of the master. Between White Fang and
them existed a neutrality and no more. They cooked for the master and
washed the dishes and did other things just as Matt had done up in the
Klondike. They were, in short, appurtenances of the household.
Outside the household there was even more for White Fang to learn. The
master’s domain was wide and complex, yet it had its metes and bounds.
The land itself ceased at the county road. Outside was the common
domain of all gods—the roads and streets. Then inside other fences were
the particular domains of other gods. A myriad laws governed all these
things and determined conduct; yet he did not know the speech of the
gods, nor was there any way for him to learn save by experience. He
obeyed his natural impulses until they ran him counter to some law.
When this had been done a few times, he learned the law and after that
observed it.
But most potent in his education was the cuff of the master’s hand, the
censure of the master’s voice. Because of White Fang’s very great love,
a cuff from the master hurt him far more than any beating Grey Beaver
or Beauty Smith had ever given him. They had hurt only the flesh of
him; beneath the flesh the spirit had still raged, splendid and
invincible. But with the master the cuff was always too light to hurt
the flesh. Yet it went deeper. It was an expression of the master’s
disapproval, and White Fang’s spirit wilted under it.
In point of fact, the cuff was rarely administered. The master’s voice
was sufficient. By it White Fang knew whether he did right or not. By
it he trimmed his conduct and adjusted his actions. It was the compass
by which he steered and learned to chart the manners of a new land and
life.
In the Northland, the only domesticated animal was the dog. All other
animals lived in the Wild, and were, when not too formidable, lawful
spoil for any dog. All his days White Fang had foraged among the live
things for food. It did not enter his head that in the Southland it was
otherwise. But this he was to learn early in his residence in Santa
Clara Valley. Sauntering around the corner of the house in the early
morning, he came upon a chicken that had escaped from the chicken-yard.
White Fang’s natural impulse was to eat it. A couple of bounds, a flash
of teeth and a frightened squawk, and he had scooped in the adventurous
fowl. It was farm-bred and fat and tender; and White Fang licked his
chops and decided that such fare was good.
Later in the day, he chanced upon another stray chicken near the
stables. One of the grooms ran to the rescue. He did not know White
Fang’s breed, so for weapon he took a light buggy-whip. At the first
cut of the whip, White Fang left the chicken for the man. A club might
have stopped White Fang, but not a whip. Silently, without flinching,
he took a second cut in his forward rush, and as he leaped for the
throat the groom cried out, “My God!” and staggered backward. He
dropped the whip and shielded his throat with his arms. In consequence,
his forearm was ripped open to the bone.
The man was badly frightened. It was not so much White Fang’s ferocity
as it was his silence that unnerved the groom. Still protecting his
throat and face with his torn and bleeding arm, he tried to retreat to
the barn. And it would have gone hard with him had not Collie appeared
on the scene. As she had saved Dick’s life, she now saved the groom’s.
She rushed upon White Fang in frenzied wrath. She had been right. She
had known better than the blundering gods. All her suspicions were
justified. Here was the ancient marauder up to his old tricks again.
The groom escaped into the stables, and White Fang backed away before
Collie’s wicked teeth, or presented his shoulder to them and circled
round and round. But Collie did not give over, as was her wont, after a
decent interval of chastisement. On the contrary, she grew more excited
and angry every moment, until, in the end, White Fang flung dignity to
the winds and frankly fled away from her across the fields.
“He’ll learn to leave chickens alone,” the master said. “But I can’t
give him the lesson until I catch him in the act.”
Two nights later came the act, but on a more generous scale than the
master had anticipated. White Fang had observed closely the
chicken-yards and the habits of the chickens. In the night-time, after
they had gone to roost, he climbed to the top of a pile of newly hauled
lumber. From there he gained the roof of a chicken-house, passed over
the ridgepole and dropped to the ground inside. A moment later he was
inside the house, and the slaughter began.
In the morning, when the master came out on to the porch, fifty white
Leghorn hens, laid out in a row by the groom, greeted his eyes. He
whistled to himself, softly, first with surprise, and then, at the end,
with admiration. His eyes were likewise greeted by White Fang, but
about the latter there were no signs of shame nor guilt. He carried
himself with pride, as though, forsooth, he had achieved a deed
praiseworthy and meritorious. There was about him no consciousness of
sin. The master’s lips tightened as he faced the disagreeable task.
Then he talked harshly to the unwitting culprit, and in his voice there
was nothing but godlike wrath. Also, he held White Fang’s nose down to
the slain hens, and at the same time cuffed him soundly.
White Fang never raided a chicken-roost again. It was against the law,
and he had learned it. Then the master took him into the chicken-yards.
White Fang’s natural impulse, when he saw the live food fluttering
about him and under his very nose, was to spring upon it. He obeyed the
impulse, but was checked by the master’s voice. They continued in the
yards for half an hour. Time and again the impulse surged over White
Fang, and each time, as he yielded to it, he was checked by the
master’s voice. Thus it was he learned the law, and ere he left the
domain of the chickens, he had learned to ignore their existence.
“You can never cure a chicken-killer.” Judge Scott shook his head sadly
at luncheon table, when his son narrated the lesson he had given White
Fang. “Once they’ve got the habit and the taste of blood . . .” Again
he shook his head sadly.
But Weedon Scott did not agree with his father. “I’ll tell you what
I’ll do,” he challenged finally. “I’ll lock White Fang in with the
chickens all afternoon.”
“But think of the chickens,” objected the judge.
“And furthermore,” the son went on, “for every chicken he kills, I’ll
pay you one dollar gold coin of the realm.”
“But you should penalise father, too,” interposed Beth.
Her sister seconded her, and a chorus of approval arose from around the
table. Judge Scott nodded his head in agreement.
“All right.” Weedon Scott pondered for a moment. “And if, at the end of
the afternoon White Fang hasn’t harmed a chicken, for every ten minutes
of the time he has spent in the yard, you will have to say to him,
gravely and with deliberation, just as if you were sitting on the bench
and solemnly passing judgment, ‘White Fang, you are smarter than I
thought.’”
From hidden points of vantage the family watched the performance. But
it was a fizzle. Locked in the yard and there deserted by the master,
White Fang lay down and went to sleep. Once he got up and walked over
to the trough for a drink of water. The chickens he calmly ignored. So
far as he was concerned they did not exist. At four o’clock he executed
a running jump, gained the roof of the chicken-house and leaped to the
ground outside, whence he sauntered gravely to the house. He had
learned the law. And on the porch, before the delighted family, Judge
Scott, face to face with White Fang, said slowly and solemnly, sixteen
times, “White Fang, you are smarter than I thought.”
But it was the multiplicity of laws that befuddled White Fang and often
brought him into disgrace. He had to learn that he must not touch the
chickens that belonged to other gods. Then there were cats, and
rabbits, and turkeys; all these he must let alone. In fact, when he had
but partly learned the law, his impression was that he must leave all
live things alone. Out in the back-pasture, a quail could flutter up
under his nose unharmed. All tense and trembling with eagerness and
desire, he mastered his instinct and stood still. He was obeying the
will of the gods.
And then, one day, again out in the back-pasture, he saw Dick start a
jackrabbit and run it. The master himself was looking on and did not
interfere. Nay, he encouraged White Fang to join in the chase. And thus
he learned that there was no taboo on jackrabbits. In the end he worked
out the complete law. Between him and all domestic animals there must
be no hostilities. If not amity, at least neutrality must obtain. But
the other animals—the squirrels, and quail, and cottontails, were
creatures of the Wild who had never yielded allegiance to man. They
were the lawful prey of any dog. It was only the tame that the gods
protected, and between the tame deadly strife was not permitted. The
gods held the power of life and death over their subjects, and the gods
were jealous of their power.
Life was complex in the Santa Clara Valley after the simplicities of
the Northland. And the chief thing demanded by these intricacies of
civilisation was control, restraint—a poise of self that was as
delicate as the fluttering of gossamer wings and at the same time as
rigid as steel. Life had a thousand faces, and White Fang found he must
meet them all—thus, when he went to town, in to San Jose, running
behind the carriage or loafing about the streets when the carriage
stopped. Life flowed past him, deep and wide and varied, continually
impinging upon his senses, demanding of him instant and endless
adjustments and correspondences, and compelling him, almost always, to
suppress his natural impulses.
There were butcher-shops where meat hung within reach. This meat he
must not touch. There were cats at the houses the master visited that
must be let alone. And there were dogs everywhere that snarled at him
and that he must not attack. And then, on the crowded sidewalks there
were persons innumerable whose attention he attracted. They would stop
and look at him, point him out to one another, examine him, talk of
him, and, worst of all, pat him. And these perilous contacts from all
these strange hands he must endure. Yet this endurance he achieved.
Furthermore, he got over being awkward and self-conscious. In a lofty
way he received the attentions of the multitudes of strange gods. With
condescension he accepted their condescension. On the other hand, there
was something about him that prevented great familiarity. They patted
him on the head and passed on, contented and pleased with their own
daring.
But it was not all easy for White Fang. Running behind the carriage in
the outskirts of San Jose, he encountered certain small boys who made a
practice of flinging stones at him. Yet he knew that it was not
permitted him to pursue and drag them down. Here he was compelled to
violate his instinct of self-preservation, and violate it he did, for
he was becoming tame and qualifying himself for civilisation.
Nevertheless, White Fang was not quite satisfied with the arrangement.
He had no abstract ideas about justice and fair play. But there is a
certain sense of equity that resides in life, and it was this sense in
him that resented the unfairness of his being permitted no defence
against the stone-throwers. He forgot that in the covenant entered into
between him and the gods they were pledged to care for him and defend
him. But one day the master sprang from the carriage, whip in hand, and
gave the stone-throwers a thrashing. After that they threw stones no
more, and White Fang understood and was satisfied.
One other experience of similar nature was his. On the way to town,
hanging around the saloon at the cross-roads, were three dogs that made
a practice of rushing out upon him when he went by. Knowing his deadly
method of fighting, the master had never ceased impressing upon White
Fang the law that he must not fight. As a result, having learned the
lesson well, White Fang was hard put whenever he passed the cross-roads
saloon. After the first rush, each time, his snarl kept the three dogs
at a distance but they trailed along behind, yelping and bickering and
insulting him. This endured for some time. The men at the saloon even
urged the dogs on to attack White Fang. One day they openly sicked the
dogs on him. The master stopped the carriage.
“Go to it,” he said to White Fang.
But White Fang could not believe. He looked at the master, and he
looked at the dogs. Then he looked back eagerly and questioningly at
the master.
The master nodded his head. “Go to them, old fellow. Eat them up.”
White Fang no longer hesitated. He turned and leaped silently among his
enemies. All three faced him. There was a great snarling and growling,
a clashing of teeth and a flurry of bodies. The dust of the road arose
in a cloud and screened the battle. But at the end of several minutes
two dogs were struggling in the dirt and the third was in full flight.
He leaped a ditch, went through a rail fence, and fled across a field.
White Fang followed, sliding over the ground in wolf fashion and with
wolf speed, swiftly and without noise, and in the centre of the field
he dragged down and slew the dog.
With this triple killing his main troubles with dogs ceased. The word
went up and down the valley, and men saw to it that their dogs did not
molest the Fighting Wolf.
CHAPTER IV
THE CALL OF KIND
The months came and went. There was plenty of food and no work in the
Southland, and White Fang lived fat and prosperous and happy. Not alone
was he in the geographical Southland, for he was in the Southland of
life. Human kindness was like a sun shining upon him, and he flourished
like a flower planted in good soil.
And yet he remained somehow different from other dogs. He knew the law
even better than did the dogs that had known no other life, and he
observed the law more punctiliously; but still there was about him a
suggestion of lurking ferocity, as though the Wild still lingered in
him and the wolf in him merely slept.
He never chummed with other dogs. Lonely he had lived, so far as his
kind was concerned, and lonely he would continue to live. In his
puppyhood, under the persecution of Lip-lip and the puppy-pack, and in
his fighting days with Beauty Smith, he had acquired a fixed aversion
for dogs. The natural course of his life had been diverted, and,
recoiling from his kind, he had clung to the human.
Besides, all Southland dogs looked upon him with suspicion. He aroused
in them their instinctive fear of the Wild, and they greeted him always
with snarl and growl and belligerent hatred. He, on the other hand,
learned that it was not necessary to use his teeth upon them. His naked
fangs and writhing lips were uniformly efficacious, rarely failing to
send a bellowing on-rushing dog back on its haunches.
But there was one trial in White Fang’s life—Collie. She never gave him
a moment’s peace. She was not so amenable to the law as he. She defied
all efforts of the master to make her become friends with White Fang.
Ever in his ears was sounding her sharp and nervous snarl. She had
never forgiven him the chicken-killing episode, and persistently held
to the belief that his intentions were bad. She found him guilty before
the act, and treated him accordingly. She became a pest to him, like a
policeman following him around the stable and the hounds, and, if he
even so much as glanced curiously at a pigeon or chicken, bursting into
an outcry of indignation and wrath. His favourite way of ignoring her
was to lie down, with his head on his fore-paws, and pretend sleep.
This always dumfounded and silenced her.
With the exception of Collie, all things went well with White Fang. He
had learned control and poise, and he knew the law. He achieved a
staidness, and calmness, and philosophic tolerance. He no longer lived
in a hostile environment. Danger and hurt and death did not lurk
everywhere about him. In time, the unknown, as a thing of terror and
menace ever impending, faded away. Life was soft and easy. It flowed
along smoothly, and neither fear nor foe lurked by the way.
He missed the snow without being aware of it. “An unduly long summer,”
would have been his thought had he thought about it; as it was, he
merely missed the snow in a vague, subconscious way. In the same
fashion, especially in the heat of summer when he suffered from the
sun, he experienced faint longings for the Northland. Their only effect
upon him, however, was to make him uneasy and restless without his
knowing what was the matter.
White Fang had never been very demonstrative. Beyond his snuggling and
the throwing of a crooning note into his love-growl, he had no way of
expressing his love. Yet it was given him to discover a third way. He
had always been susceptible to the laughter of the gods. Laughter had
affected him with madness, made him frantic with rage. But he did not
have it in him to be angry with the love-master, and when that god
elected to laugh at him in a good-natured, bantering way, he was
nonplussed. He could feel the pricking and stinging of the old anger as
it strove to rise up in him, but it strove against love. He could not
be angry; yet he had to do something. At first he was dignified, and
the master laughed the harder. Then he tried to be more dignified, and
the master laughed harder than before. In the end, the master laughed
him out of his dignity. His jaws slightly parted, his lips lifted a
little, and a quizzical expression that was more love than humour came
into his eyes. He had learned to laugh.
Likewise he learned to romp with the master, to be tumbled down and
rolled over, and be the victim of innumerable rough tricks. In return
he feigned anger, bristling and growling ferociously, and clipping his
teeth together in snaps that had all the seeming of deadly intention.
But he never forgot himself. Those snaps were always delivered on the
empty air. At the end of such a romp, when blow and cuff and snap and
snarl were fast and furious, they would break off suddenly and stand
several feet apart, glaring at each other. And then, just as suddenly,
like the sun rising on a stormy sea, they would begin to laugh. This
would always culminate with the master’s arms going around White Fang’s
neck and shoulders while the latter crooned and growled his love-song.
But nobody else ever romped with White Fang. He did not permit it. He
stood on his dignity, and when they attempted it, his warning snarl and
bristling mane were anything but playful. That he allowed the master
these liberties was no reason that he should be a common dog, loving
here and loving there, everybody’s property for a romp and good time.
He loved with single heart and refused to cheapen himself or his love.
The master went out on horseback a great deal, and to accompany him was
one of White Fang’s chief duties in life. In the Northland he had
evidenced his fealty by toiling in the harness; but there were no sleds
in the Southland, nor did dogs pack burdens on their backs. So he
rendered fealty in the new way, by running with the master’s horse. The
longest day never played White Fang out. His was the gait of the wolf,
smooth, tireless and effortless, and at the end of fifty miles he would
come in jauntily ahead of the horse.
It was in connection with the riding, that White Fang achieved one
other mode of expression—remarkable in that he did it but twice in all
his life. The first time occurred when the master was trying to teach a
spirited thoroughbred the method of opening and closing gates without
the rider’s dismounting. Time and again and many times he ranged the
horse up to the gate in the effort to close it and each time the horse
became frightened and backed and plunged away. It grew more nervous and
excited every moment. When it reared, the master put the spurs to it
and made it drop its fore-legs back to earth, whereupon it would begin
kicking with its hind-legs. White Fang watched the performance with
increasing anxiety until he could contain himself no longer, when he
sprang in front of the horse and barked savagely and warningly.
Though he often tried to bark thereafter, and the master encouraged
him, he succeeded only once, and then it was not in the master’s
presence. A scamper across the pasture, a jackrabbit rising suddenly
under the horse’s feet, a violent sheer, a stumble, a fall to earth,
and a broken leg for the master, was the cause of it. White Fang sprang
in a rage at the throat of the offending horse, but was checked by the
master’s voice.
“Home! Go home!” the master commanded when he had ascertained his
injury.
White Fang was disinclined to desert him. The master thought of writing
a note, but searched his pockets vainly for pencil and paper. Again he
commanded White Fang to go home.
The latter regarded him wistfully, started away, then returned and
whined softly. The master talked to him gently but seriously, and he
cocked his ears, and listened with painful intentness.
“That’s all right, old fellow, you just run along home,” ran the talk.
“Go on home and tell them what’s happened to me. Home with you, you
wolf. Get along home!”
White Fang knew the meaning of “home,” and though he did not understand
the remainder of the master’s language, he knew it was his will that he
should go home. He turned and trotted reluctantly away. Then he
stopped, undecided, and looked back over his shoulder.
“Go home!” came the sharp command, and this time he obeyed.
The family was on the porch, taking the cool of the afternoon, when
White Fang arrived. He came in among them, panting, covered with dust.
“Weedon’s back,” Weedon’s mother announced.
The children welcomed White Fang with glad cries and ran to meet him.
He avoided them and passed down the porch, but they cornered him
against a rocking-chair and the railing. He growled and tried to push
by them. Their mother looked apprehensively in their direction.
“I confess, he makes me nervous around the children,” she said. “I have
a dread that he will turn upon them unexpectedly some day.”
Growling savagely, White Fang sprang out of the corner, overturning the
boy and the girl. The mother called them to her and comforted them,
telling them not to bother White Fang.
“A wolf is a wolf!” commented Judge Scott. “There is no trusting one.”
“But he is not all wolf,” interposed Beth, standing for her brother in
his absence.
“You have only Weedon’s opinion for that,” rejoined the judge. “He
merely surmises that there is some strain of dog in White Fang; but as
he will tell you himself, he knows nothing about it. As for his
appearance—”
He did not finish his sentence. White Fang stood before him, growling
fiercely.
“Go away! Lie down, sir!” Judge Scott commanded.
White Fang turned to the love-master’s wife. She screamed with fright
as he seized her dress in his teeth and dragged on it till the frail
fabric tore away. By this time he had become the centre of interest.
He had ceased from his growling and stood, head up, looking into their
faces. His throat worked spasmodically, but made no sound, while he
struggled with all his body, convulsed with the effort to rid himself
of the incommunicable something that strained for utterance.
“I hope he is not going mad,” said Weedon’s mother. “I told Weedon that
I was afraid the warm climate would not agree with an Arctic animal.”
“He’s trying to speak, I do believe,” Beth announced.
At this moment speech came to White Fang, rushing up in a great burst
of barking.
“Something has happened to Weedon,” his wife said decisively.
They were all on their feet now, and White Fang ran down the steps,
looking back for them to follow. For the second and last time in his
life he had barked and made himself understood.
After this event he found a warmer place in the hearts of the Sierra
Vista people, and even the groom whose arm he had slashed admitted that
he was a wise dog even if he was a wolf. Judge Scott still held to the
same opinion, and proved it to everybody’s dissatisfaction by
measurements and descriptions taken from the encyclopaedia and various
works on natural history.
The days came and went, streaming their unbroken sunshine over the
Santa Clara Valley. But as they grew shorter and White Fang’s second
winter in the Southland came on, he made a strange discovery. Collie’s
teeth were no longer sharp. There was a playfulness about her nips and
a gentleness that prevented them from really hurting him. He forgot
that she had made life a burden to him, and when she disported herself
around him he responded solemnly, striving to be playful and becoming
no more than ridiculous.
One day she led him off on a long chase through the back-pasture land
into the woods. It was the afternoon that the master was to ride, and
White Fang knew it. The horse stood saddled and waiting at the door.
White Fang hesitated. But there was that in him deeper than all the law
he had learned, than the customs that had moulded him, than his love
for the master, than the very will to live of himself; and when, in the
moment of his indecision, Collie nipped him and scampered off, he
turned and followed after. The master rode alone that day; and in the
woods, side by side, White Fang ran with Collie, as his mother, Kiche,
and old One Eye had run long years before in the silent Northland
forest.
CHAPTER V
THE SLEEPING WOLF
It was about this time that the newspapers were full of the daring
escape of a convict from San Quentin prison. He was a ferocious man. He
had been ill-made in the making. He had not been born right, and he had
not been helped any by the moulding he had received at the hands of
society. The hands of society are harsh, and this man was a striking
sample of its handiwork. He was a beast—a human beast, it is true, but
nevertheless so terrible a beast that he can best be characterised as
carnivorous.
In San Quentin prison he had proved incorrigible. Punishment failed to
break his spirit. He could die dumb-mad and fighting to the last, but
he could not live and be beaten. The more fiercely he fought, the more
harshly society handled him, and the only effect of harshness was to
make him fiercer. Strait-jackets, starvation, and beatings and
clubbings were the wrong treatment for Jim Hall; but it was the
treatment he received. It was the treatment he had received from the
time he was a little pulpy boy in a San Francisco slum—soft clay in the
hands of society and ready to be formed into something.
It was during Jim Hall’s third term in prison that he encountered a
guard that was almost as great a beast as he. The guard treated him
unfairly, lied about him to the warden, lost his credits, persecuted
him. The difference between them was that the guard carried a bunch of
keys and a revolver. Jim Hall had only his naked hands and his teeth.
But he sprang upon the guard one day and used his teeth on the other’s
throat just like any jungle animal.
After this, Jim Hall went to live in the incorrigible cell. He lived
there three years. The cell was of iron, the floor, the walls, the
roof. He never left this cell. He never saw the sky nor the sunshine.
Day was a twilight and night was a black silence. He was in an iron
tomb, buried alive. He saw no human face, spoke to no human thing. When
his food was shoved in to him, he growled like a wild animal. He hated
all things. For days and nights he bellowed his rage at the universe.
For weeks and months he never made a sound, in the black silence eating
his very soul. He was a man and a monstrosity, as fearful a thing of
fear as ever gibbered in the visions of a maddened brain.
And then, one night, he escaped. The warders said it was impossible,
but nevertheless the cell was empty, and half in half out of it lay the
body of a dead guard. Two other dead guards marked his trail through
the prison to the outer walls, and he had killed with his hands to
avoid noise.
He was armed with the weapons of the slain guards—a live arsenal that
fled through the hills pursued by the organised might of society. A
heavy price of gold was upon his head. Avaricious farmers hunted him
with shot-guns. His blood might pay off a mortgage or send a son to
college. Public-spirited citizens took down their rifles and went out
after him. A pack of bloodhounds followed the way of his bleeding feet.
And the sleuth-hounds of the law, the paid fighting animals of society,
with telephone, and telegraph, and special train, clung to his trail
night and day.
Sometimes they came upon him, and men faced him like heroes, or
stampeded through barbed-wire fences to the delight of the commonwealth
reading the account at the breakfast table. It was after such
encounters that the dead and wounded were carted back to the towns, and
their places filled by men eager for the man-hunt.
And then Jim Hall disappeared. The bloodhounds vainly quested on the
lost trail. Inoffensive ranchers in remote valleys were held up by
armed men and compelled to identify themselves; while the remains of
Jim Hall were discovered on a dozen mountain-sides by greedy claimants
for blood-money.
In the meantime the newspapers were read at Sierra Vista, not so much
with interest as with anxiety. The women were afraid. Judge Scott
pooh-poohed and laughed, but not with reason, for it was in his last
days on the bench that Jim Hall had stood before him and received
sentence. And in open court-room, before all men, Jim Hall had
proclaimed that the day would come when he would wreak vengeance on the
Judge that sentenced him.
For once, Jim Hall was right. He was innocent of the crime for which he
was sentenced. It was a case, in the parlance of thieves and police, of
“rail-roading.” Jim Hall was being “rail-roaded” to prison for a crime
he had not committed. Because of the two prior convictions against him,
Judge Scott imposed upon him a sentence of fifty years.
Judge Scott did not know all things, and he did not know that he was
party to a police conspiracy, that the evidence was hatched and
perjured, that Jim Hall was guiltless of the crime charged. And Jim
Hall, on the other hand, did not know that Judge Scott was merely
ignorant. Jim Hall believed that the judge knew all about it and was
hand in glove with the police in the perpetration of the monstrous
injustice. So it was, when the doom of fifty years of living death was
uttered by Judge Scott, that Jim Hall, hating all things in the society
that misused him, rose up and raged in the court-room until dragged
down by half a dozen of his blue-coated enemies. To him, Judge Scott
was the keystone in the arch of injustice, and upon Judge Scott he
emptied the vials of his wrath and hurled the threats of his revenge
yet to come. Then Jim Hall went to his living death . . . and escaped.
Of all this White Fang knew nothing. But between him and Alice, the
master’s wife, there existed a secret. Each night, after Sierra Vista
had gone to bed, she rose and let in White Fang to sleep in the big
hall. Now White Fang was not a house-dog, nor was he permitted to sleep
in the house; so each morning, early, she slipped down and let him out
before the family was awake.
On one such night, while all the house slept, White Fang awoke and lay
very quietly. And very quietly he smelled the air and read the message
it bore of a strange god’s presence. And to his ears came sounds of the
strange god’s movements. White Fang burst into no furious outcry. It
was not his way. The strange god walked softly, but more softly walked
White Fang, for he had no clothes to rub against the flesh of his body.
He followed silently. In the Wild he had hunted live meat that was
infinitely timid, and he knew the advantage of surprise.
The strange god paused at the foot of the great staircase and listened,
and White Fang was as dead, so without movement was he as he watched
and waited. Up that staircase the way led to the love-master and to the
love-master’s dearest possessions. White Fang bristled, but waited. The
strange god’s foot lifted. He was beginning the ascent.
Then it was that White Fang struck. He gave no warning, with no snarl
anticipated his own action. Into the air he lifted his body in the
spring that landed him on the strange god’s back. White Fang clung with
his fore-paws to the man’s shoulders, at the same time burying his
fangs into the back of the man’s neck. He clung on for a moment, long
enough to drag the god over backward. Together they crashed to the
floor. White Fang leaped clear, and, as the man struggled to rise, was
in again with the slashing fangs.
Sierra Vista awoke in alarm. The noise from downstairs was as that of a
score of battling fiends. There were revolver shots. A man’s voice
screamed once in horror and anguish. There was a great snarling and
growling, and over all arose a smashing and crashing of furniture and
glass.
But almost as quickly as it had arisen, the commotion died away. The
struggle had not lasted more than three minutes. The frightened
household clustered at the top of the stairway. From below, as from out
an abyss of blackness, came up a gurgling sound, as of air bubbling
through water. Sometimes this gurgle became sibilant, almost a whistle.
But this, too, quickly died down and ceased. Then naught came up out of
the blackness save a heavy panting of some creature struggling sorely
for air.
Weedon Scott pressed a button, and the staircase and downstairs hall
were flooded with light. Then he and Judge Scott, revolvers in hand,
cautiously descended. There was no need for this caution. White Fang
had done his work. In the midst of the wreckage of overthrown and
smashed furniture, partly on his side, his face hidden by an arm, lay a
man. Weedon Scott bent over, removed the arm and turned the man’s face
upward. A gaping throat explained the manner of his death.
“Jim Hall,” said Judge Scott, and father and son looked significantly
at each other.
Then they turned to White Fang. He, too, was lying on his side. His
eyes were closed, but the lids slightly lifted in an effort to look at
them as they bent over him, and the tail was perceptibly agitated in a
vain effort to wag. Weedon Scott patted him, and his throat rumbled an
acknowledging growl. But it was a weak growl at best, and it quickly
ceased. His eyelids drooped and went shut, and his whole body seemed to
relax and flatten out upon the floor.
“He’s all in, poor devil,” muttered the master.
“We’ll see about that,” asserted the Judge, as he started for the
telephone.
“Frankly, he has one chance in a thousand,” announced the surgeon,
after he had worked an hour and a half on White Fang.
Dawn was breaking through the windows and dimming the electric lights.
With the exception of the children, the whole family was gathered about
the surgeon to hear his verdict.
“One broken hind-leg,” he went on. “Three broken ribs, one at least of
which has pierced the lungs. He has lost nearly all the blood in his
body. There is a large likelihood of internal injuries. He must have
been jumped upon. To say nothing of three bullet holes clear through
him. One chance in a thousand is really optimistic. He hasn’t a chance
in ten thousand.”
“But he mustn’t lose any chance that might be of help to him,” Judge
Scott exclaimed. “Never mind expense. Put him under the X-ray—anything.
Weedon, telegraph at once to San Francisco for Doctor Nichols. No
reflection on you, doctor, you understand; but he must have the
advantage of every chance.”
The surgeon smiled indulgently. “Of course I understand. He deserves
all that can be done for him. He must be nursed as you would nurse a
human being, a sick child. And don’t forget what I told you about
temperature. I’ll be back at ten o’clock again.”
White Fang received the nursing. Judge Scott’s suggestion of a trained
nurse was indignantly clamoured down by the girls, who themselves
undertook the task. And White Fang won out on the one chance in ten
thousand denied him by the surgeon.
The latter was not to be censured for his misjudgment. All his life he
had tended and operated on the soft humans of civilisation, who lived
sheltered lives and had descended out of many sheltered generations.
Compared with White Fang, they were frail and flabby, and clutched life
without any strength in their grip. White Fang had come straight from
the Wild, where the weak perish early and shelter is vouchsafed to
none. In neither his father nor his mother was there any weakness, nor
in the generations before them. A constitution of iron and the vitality
of the Wild were White Fang’s inheritance, and he clung to life, the
whole of him and every part of him, in spirit and in flesh, with the
tenacity that of old belonged to all creatures.
Bound down a prisoner, denied even movement by the plaster casts and
bandages, White Fang lingered out the weeks. He slept long hours and
dreamed much, and through his mind passed an unending pageant of
Northland visions. All the ghosts of the past arose and were with him.
Once again he lived in the lair with Kiche, crept trembling to the
knees of Grey Beaver to tender his allegiance, ran for his life before
Lip-lip and all the howling bedlam of the puppy-pack.
He ran again through the silence, hunting his living food through the
months of famine; and again he ran at the head of the team, the
gut-whips of Mit-sah and Grey Beaver snapping behind, their voices
crying “Ra! Raa!” when they came to a narrow passage and the team
closed together like a fan to go through. He lived again all his days
with Beauty Smith and the fights he had fought. At such times he
whimpered and snarled in his sleep, and they that looked on said that
his dreams were bad.
But there was one particular nightmare from which he suffered—the
clanking, clanging monsters of electric cars that were to him colossal
screaming lynxes. He would lie in a screen of bushes, watching for a
squirrel to venture far enough out on the ground from its tree-refuge.
Then, when he sprang out upon it, it would transform itself into an
electric car, menacing and terrible, towering over him like a mountain,
screaming and clanging and spitting fire at him. It was the same when
he challenged the hawk down out of the sky. Down out of the blue it
would rush, as it dropped upon him changing itself into the ubiquitous
electric car. Or again, he would be in the pen of Beauty Smith. Outside
the pen, men would be gathering, and he knew that a fight was on. He
watched the door for his antagonist to enter. The door would open, and
thrust in upon him would come the awful electric car. A thousand times
this occurred, and each time the terror it inspired was as vivid and
great as ever.
Then came the day when the last bandage and the last plaster cast were
taken off. It was a gala day. All Sierra Vista was gathered around. The
master rubbed his ears, and he crooned his love-growl. The master’s
wife called him the “Blessed Wolf,” which name was taken up with
acclaim and all the women called him the Blessed Wolf.
He tried to rise to his feet, and after several attempts fell down from
weakness. He had lain so long that his muscles had lost their cunning,
and all the strength had gone out of them. He felt a little shame
because of his weakness, as though, forsooth, he were failing the gods
in the service he owed them. Because of this he made heroic efforts to
arise and at last he stood on his four legs, tottering and swaying back
and forth.
“The Blessed Wolf!” chorused the women.
Judge Scott surveyed them triumphantly.
“Out of your own mouths be it,” he said. “Just as I contended right
along. No mere dog could have done what he did. He’s a wolf.”
“A Blessed Wolf,” amended the Judge’s wife.
“Yes, Blessed Wolf,” agreed the Judge. “And henceforth that shall be my
name for him.”
“He’ll have to learn to walk again,” said the surgeon; “so he might as
well start in right now. It won’t hurt him. Take him outside.”
And outside he went, like a king, with all Sierra Vista about him and
tending on him. He was very weak, and when he reached the lawn he lay
down and rested for a while.
Then the procession started on, little spurts of strength coming into
White Fang’s muscles as he used them and the blood began to surge
through them. The stables were reached, and there in the doorway, lay
Collie, a half-dozen pudgy puppies playing about her in the sun.
White Fang looked on with a wondering eye. Collie snarled warningly at
him, and he was careful to keep his distance. The master with his toe
helped one sprawling puppy toward him. He bristled suspiciously, but
the master warned him that all was well. Collie, clasped in the arms of
one of the women, watched him jealously and with a snarl warned him
that all was not well.
The puppy sprawled in front of him. He cocked his ears and watched it
curiously. Then their noses touched, and he felt the warm little tongue
of the puppy on his jowl. White Fang’s tongue went out, he knew not
why, and he licked the puppy’s face.
Hand-clapping and pleased cries from the gods greeted the performance.
He was surprised, and looked at them in a puzzled way. Then his
weakness asserted itself, and he lay down, his ears cocked, his head on
one side, as he watched the puppy. The other puppies came sprawling
toward him, to Collie’s great disgust; and he gravely permitted them to
clamber and tumble over him. At first, amid the applause of the gods,
he betrayed a trifle of his old self-consciousness and awkwardness.
This passed away as the puppies’ antics and mauling continued, and he
lay with half-shut patient eyes, drowsing in the sun.