White Fang
the number of rocks he encountered.
Below the rapid was a second pool, and here, captured by the eddy, he
was gently borne to the bank, and as gently deposited on a bed of
gravel. He crawled frantically clear of the water and lay down. He had
learned some more about the world. Water was not alive. Yet it moved.
Also, it looked as solid as the earth, but was without any solidity at
all. His conclusion was that things were not always what they appeared
to be. The cub’s fear of the unknown was an inherited distrust, and it
had now been strengthened by experience. Thenceforth, in the nature of
things, he would possess an abiding distrust of appearances. He would
have to learn the reality of a thing before he could put his faith into
it.
One other adventure was destined for him that day. He had recollected
that there was such a thing in the world as his mother. And then there
came to him a feeling that he wanted her more than all the rest of the
things in the world. Not only was his body tired with the adventures it
had undergone, but his little brain was equally tired. In all the days
he had lived it had not worked so hard as on this one day. Furthermore,
he was sleepy. So he started out to look for the cave and his mother,
feeling at the same time an overwhelming rush of loneliness and
helplessness.
He was sprawling along between some bushes, when he heard a sharp
intimidating cry. There was a flash of yellow before his eyes. He saw a
weasel leaping swiftly away from him. It was a small live thing, and he
had no fear. Then, before him, at his feet, he saw an extremely small
live thing, only several inches long, a young weasel, that, like
himself, had disobediently gone out adventuring. It tried to retreat
before him. He turned it over with his paw. It made a queer, grating
noise. The next moment the flash of yellow reappeared before his eyes.
He heard again the intimidating cry, and at the same instant received a
sharp blow on the side of the neck and felt the sharp teeth of the
mother-weasel cut into his flesh.
While he yelped and ki-yi’d and scrambled backward, he saw the
mother-weasel leap upon her young one and disappear with it into the
neighbouring thicket. The cut of her teeth in his neck still hurt, but
his feelings were hurt more grievously, and he sat down and weakly
whimpered. This mother-weasel was so small and so savage. He was yet to
learn that for size and weight the weasel was the most ferocious,
vindictive, and terrible of all the killers of the Wild. But a portion
of this knowledge was quickly to be his.
He was still whimpering when the mother-weasel reappeared. She did not
rush him, now that her young one was safe. She approached more
cautiously, and the cub had full opportunity to observe her lean,
snakelike body, and her head, erect, eager, and snake-like itself. Her
sharp, menacing cry sent the hair bristling along his back, and he
snarled warningly at her. She came closer and closer. There was a leap,
swifter than his unpractised sight, and the lean, yellow body
disappeared for a moment out of the field of his vision. The next
moment she was at his throat, her teeth buried in his hair and flesh.
At first he snarled and tried to fight; but he was very young, and this
was only his first day in the world, and his snarl became a whimper,
his fight a struggle to escape. The weasel never relaxed her hold. She
hung on, striving to press down with her teeth to the great vein where
his life-blood bubbled. The weasel was a drinker of blood, and it was
ever her preference to drink from the throat of life itself.
The grey cub would have died, and there would have been no story to
write about him, had not the she-wolf come bounding through the bushes.
The weasel let go the cub and flashed at the she-wolf’s throat,
missing, but getting a hold on the jaw instead. The she-wolf flirted
her head like the snap of a whip, breaking the weasel’s hold and
flinging it high in the air. And, still in the air, the she-wolf’s jaws
closed on the lean, yellow body, and the weasel knew death between the
crunching teeth.
The cub experienced another access of affection on the part of his
mother. Her joy at finding him seemed even greater than his joy at
being found. She nozzled him and caressed him and licked the cuts made
in him by the weasel’s teeth. Then, between them, mother and cub, they
ate the blood-drinker, and after that went back to the cave and slept.
CHAPTER V
THE LAW OF MEAT
The cub’s development was rapid. He rested for two days, and then
ventured forth from the cave again. It was on this adventure that he
found the young weasel whose mother he had helped eat, and he saw to it
that the young weasel went the way of its mother. But on this trip he
did not get lost. When he grew tired, he found his way back to the cave
and slept. And every day thereafter found him out and ranging a wider
area.
He began to get accurate measurement of his strength and his weakness,
and to know when to be bold and when to be cautious. He found it
expedient to be cautious all the time, except for the rare moments,
when, assured of his own intrepidity, he abandoned himself to petty
rages and lusts.
He was always a little demon of fury when he chanced upon a stray
ptarmigan. Never did he fail to respond savagely to the chatter of the
squirrel he had first met on the blasted pine. While the sight of a
moose-bird almost invariably put him into the wildest of rages; for he
never forgot the peck on the nose he had received from the first of
that ilk he encountered.
But there were times when even a moose-bird failed to affect him, and
those were times when he felt himself to be in danger from some other
prowling meat hunter. He never forgot the hawk, and its moving shadow
always sent him crouching into the nearest thicket. He no longer
sprawled and straddled, and already he was developing the gait of his
mother, slinking and furtive, apparently without exertion, yet sliding
along with a swiftness that was as deceptive as it was imperceptible.
In the matter of meat, his luck had been all in the beginning. The
seven ptarmigan chicks and the baby weasel represented the sum of his
killings. His desire to kill strengthened with the days, and he
cherished hungry ambitions for the squirrel that chattered so volubly
and always informed all wild creatures that the wolf-cub was
approaching. But as birds flew in the air, squirrels could climb trees,
and the cub could only try to crawl unobserved upon the squirrel when
it was on the ground.
The cub entertained a great respect for his mother. She could get meat,
and she never failed to bring him his share. Further, she was unafraid
of things. It did not occur to him that this fearlessness was founded
upon experience and knowledge. Its effect on him was that of an
impression of power. His mother represented power; and as he grew older
he felt this power in the sharper admonishment of her paw; while the
reproving nudge of her nose gave place to the slash of her fangs. For
this, likewise, he respected his mother. She compelled obedience from
him, and the older he grew the shorter grew her temper.
Famine came again, and the cub with clearer consciousness knew once
more the bite of hunger. The she-wolf ran herself thin in the quest for
meat. She rarely slept any more in the cave, spending most of her time
on the meat-trail, and spending it vainly. This famine was not a long
one, but it was severe while it lasted. The cub found no more milk in
his mother’s breast, nor did he get one mouthful of meat for himself.
Before, he had hunted in play, for the sheer joyousness of it; now he
hunted in deadly earnestness, and found nothing. Yet the failure of it
accelerated his development. He studied the habits of the squirrel with
greater carefulness, and strove with greater craft to steal upon it and
surprise it. He studied the wood-mice and tried to dig them out of
their burrows; and he learned much about the ways of moose-birds and
woodpeckers. And there came a day when the hawk’s shadow did not drive
him crouching into the bushes. He had grown stronger and wiser, and
more confident. Also, he was desperate. So he sat on his haunches,
conspicuously in an open space, and challenged the hawk down out of the
sky. For he knew that there, floating in the blue above him, was meat,
the meat his stomach yearned after so insistently. But the hawk refused
to come down and give battle, and the cub crawled away into a thicket
and whimpered his disappointment and hunger.
The famine broke. The she-wolf brought home meat. It was strange meat,
different from any she had ever brought before. It was a lynx kitten,
partly grown, like the cub, but not so large. And it was all for him.
His mother had satisfied her hunger elsewhere; though he did not know
that it was the rest of the lynx litter that had gone to satisfy her.
Nor did he know the desperateness of her deed. He knew only that the
velvet-furred kitten was meat, and he ate and waxed happier with every
mouthful.
A full stomach conduces to inaction, and the cub lay in the cave,
sleeping against his mother’s side. He was aroused by her snarling.
Never had he heard her snarl so terribly. Possibly in her whole life it
was the most terrible snarl she ever gave. There was reason for it, and
none knew it better than she. A lynx’s lair is not despoiled with
impunity. In the full glare of the afternoon light, crouching in the
entrance of the cave, the cub saw the lynx-mother. The hair rippled up
along his back at the sight. Here was fear, and it did not require his
instinct to tell him of it. And if sight alone were not sufficient, the
cry of rage the intruder gave, beginning with a snarl and rushing
abruptly upward into a hoarse screech, was convincing enough in itself.
The cub felt the prod of the life that was in him, and stood up and
snarled valiantly by his mother’s side. But she thrust him
ignominiously away and behind her. Because of the low-roofed entrance
the lynx could not leap in, and when she made a crawling rush of it the
she-wolf sprang upon her and pinned her down. The cub saw little of the
battle. There was a tremendous snarling and spitting and screeching.
The two animals threshed about, the lynx ripping and tearing with her
claws and using her teeth as well, while the she-wolf used her teeth
alone.
Once, the cub sprang in and sank his teeth into the hind leg of the
lynx. He clung on, growling savagely. Though he did not know it, by the
weight of his body he clogged the action of the leg and thereby saved
his mother much damage. A change in the battle crushed him under both
their bodies and wrenched loose his hold. The next moment the two
mothers separated, and, before they rushed together again, the lynx
lashed out at the cub with a huge fore-paw that ripped his shoulder
open to the bone and sent him hurtling sidewise against the wall. Then
was added to the uproar the cub’s shrill yelp of pain and fright. But
the fight lasted so long that he had time to cry himself out and to
experience a second burst of courage; and the end of the battle found
him again clinging to a hind-leg and furiously growling between his
teeth.
The lynx was dead. But the she-wolf was very weak and sick. At first
she caressed the cub and licked his wounded shoulder; but the blood she
had lost had taken with it her strength, and for all of a day and a
night she lay by her dead foe’s side, without movement, scarcely
breathing. For a week she never left the cave, except for water, and
then her movements were slow and painful. At the end of that time the
lynx was devoured, while the she-wolf’s wounds had healed sufficiently
to permit her to take the meat-trail again.