White Fang
moment his nose was laid open, and he was staggering backward away from
the meat.
The situation was now reversed. White Fang stood over the shin-bone,
bristling and menacing, while Baseek stood a little way off, preparing
to retreat. He dared not risk a fight with this young lightning-flash,
and again he knew, and more bitterly, the enfeeblement of oncoming age.
His attempt to maintain his dignity was heroic. Calmly turning his back
upon young dog and shin-bone, as though both were beneath his notice
and unworthy of his consideration, he stalked grandly away. Nor, until
well out of sight, did he stop to lick his bleeding wounds.
The effect on White Fang was to give him a greater faith in himself,
and a greater pride. He walked less softly among the grown dogs; his
attitude toward them was less compromising. Not that he went out of his
way looking for trouble. Far from it. But upon his way he demanded
consideration. He stood upon his right to go his way unmolested and to
give trail to no dog. He had to be taken into account, that was all. He
was no longer to be disregarded and ignored, as was the lot of puppies,
and as continued to be the lot of the puppies that were his team-mates.
They got out of the way, gave trail to the grown dogs, and gave up meat
to them under compulsion. But White Fang, uncompanionable, solitary,
morose, scarcely looking to right or left, redoubtable, forbidding of
aspect, remote and alien, was accepted as an equal by his puzzled
elders. They quickly learned to leave him alone, neither venturing
hostile acts nor making overtures of friendliness. If they left him
alone, he left them alone—a state of affairs that they found, after a
few encounters, to be pre-eminently desirable.
In midsummer White Fang had an experience. Trotting along in his silent
way to investigate a new tepee which had been erected on the edge of
the village while he was away with the hunters after moose, he came
full upon Kiche. He paused and looked at her. He remembered her
vaguely, but he _remembered_ her, and that was more than could be said
for her. She lifted her lip at him in the old snarl of menace, and his
memory became clear. His forgotten cubhood, all that was associated
with that familiar snarl, rushed back to him. Before he had known the
gods, she had been to him the centre-pin of the universe. The old
familiar feelings of that time came back upon him, surged up within
him. He bounded towards her joyously, and she met him with shrewd fangs
that laid his cheek open to the bone. He did not understand. He backed
away, bewildered and puzzled.
But it was not Kiche’s fault. A wolf-mother was not made to remember
her cubs of a year or so before. So she did not remember White Fang. He
was a strange animal, an intruder; and her present litter of puppies
gave her the right to resent such intrusion.
One of the puppies sprawled up to White Fang. They were half-brothers,
only they did not know it. White Fang sniffed the puppy curiously,
whereupon Kiche rushed upon him, gashing his face a second time. He
backed farther away. All the old memories and associations died down
again and passed into the grave from which they had been resurrected.
He looked at Kiche licking her puppy and stopping now and then to snarl
at him. She was without value to him. He had learned to get along
without her. Her meaning was forgotten. There was no place for her in
his scheme of things, as there was no place for him in hers.
He was still standing, stupid and bewildered, the memories forgotten,
wondering what it was all about, when Kiche attacked him a third time,
intent on driving him away altogether from the vicinity. And White Fang
allowed himself to be driven away. This was a female of his kind, and
it was a law of his kind that the males must not fight the females. He
did not know anything about this law, for it was no generalisation of
the mind, not a something acquired by experience of the world. He knew
it as a secret prompting, as an urge of instinct—of the same instinct
that made him howl at the moon and stars of nights, and that made him
fear death and the unknown.
The months went by. White Fang grew stronger, heavier, and more
compact, while his character was developing along the lines laid down
by his heredity and his environment. His heredity was a life-stuff that
may be likened to clay. It possessed many possibilities, was capable of
being moulded into many different forms. Environment served to model
the clay, to give it a particular form. Thus, had White Fang never come
in to the fires of man, the Wild would have moulded him into a true
wolf. But the gods had given him a different environment, and he was
moulded into a dog that was rather wolfish, but that was a dog and not
a wolf.
And so, according to the clay of his nature and the pressure of his
surroundings, his character was being moulded into a certain particular
shape. There was no escaping it. He was becoming more morose, more
uncompanionable, more solitary, more ferocious; while the dogs were
learning more and more that it was better to be at peace with him than
at war, and Grey Beaver was coming to prize him more greatly with the
passage of each day.
White Fang, seeming to sum up strength in all his qualities,
nevertheless suffered from one besetting weakness. He could not stand
being laughed at. The laughter of men was a hateful thing. They might
laugh among themselves about anything they pleased except himself, and
he did not mind. But the moment laughter was turned upon him he would
fly into a most terrible rage. Grave, dignified, sombre, a laugh made
him frantic to ridiculousness. It so outraged him and upset him that
for hours he would behave like a demon. And woe to the dog that at such
times ran foul of him. He knew the law too well to take it out on Grey
Beaver; behind Grey Beaver were a club and godhead. But behind the dogs
there was nothing but space, and into this space they flew when White
Fang came on the scene, made mad by laughter.
In the third year of his life there came a great famine to the
Mackenzie Indians. In the summer the fish failed. In the winter the
cariboo forsook their accustomed track. Moose were scarce, the rabbits
almost disappeared, hunting and preying animals perished. Denied their
usual food-supply, weakened by hunger, they fell upon and devoured one
another. Only the strong survived. White Fang’s gods were always
hunting animals. The old and the weak of them died of hunger. There was
wailing in the village, where the women and children went without in
order that what little they had might go into the bellies of the lean
and hollow-eyed hunters who trod the forest in the vain pursuit of
meat.
To such extremity were the gods driven that they ate the soft-tanned
leather of their mocassins and mittens, while the dogs ate the
harnesses off their backs and the very whip-lashes. Also, the dogs ate
one another, and also the gods ate the dogs. The weakest and the more
worthless were eaten first. The dogs that still lived, looked on and
understood. A few of the boldest and wisest forsook the fires of the
gods, which had now become a shambles, and fled into the forest, where,
in the end, they starved to death or were eaten by wolves.
In this time of misery, White Fang, too, stole away into the woods. He
was better fitted for the life than the other dogs, for he had the
training of his cubhood to guide him. Especially adept did he become in
stalking small living things. He would lie concealed for hours,
following every movement of a cautious tree-squirrel, waiting, with a
patience as huge as the hunger he suffered from, until the squirrel
ventured out upon the ground. Even then, White Fang was not premature.
He waited until he was sure of striking before the squirrel could gain
a tree-refuge. Then, and not until then, would he flash from his
hiding-place, a grey projectile, incredibly swift, never failing its
mark—the fleeing squirrel that fled not fast enough.
Successful as he was with squirrels, there was one difficulty that
prevented him from living and growing fat on them. There were not
enough squirrels. So he was driven to hunt still smaller things. So
acute did his hunger become at times that he was not above rooting out
wood-mice from their burrows in the ground. Nor did he scorn to do
battle with a weasel as hungry as himself and many times more
ferocious.
In the worst pinches of the famine he stole back to the fires of the
gods. But he did not go into the fires. He lurked in the forest,
avoiding discovery and robbing the snares at the rare intervals when
game was caught. He even robbed Grey Beaver’s snare of a rabbit at a
time when Grey Beaver staggered and tottered through the forest,
sitting down often to rest, what of weakness and of shortness of
breath.
One day White Fang encountered a young wolf, gaunt and scrawny,
loose-jointed with famine. Had he not been hungry himself, White Fang
might have gone with him and eventually found his way into the pack
amongst his wild brethren. As it was, he ran the young wolf down and
killed and ate him.
Fortune seemed to favour him. Always, when hardest pressed for food, he
found something to kill. Again, when he was weak, it was his luck that
none of the larger preying animals chanced upon him. Thus, he was
strong from the two days’ eating a lynx had afforded him when the
hungry wolf-pack ran full tilt upon him. It was a long, cruel chase,
but he was better nourished than they, and in the end outran them. And
not only did he outrun them, but, circling widely back on his track, he
gathered in one of his exhausted pursuers.
After that he left that part of the country and journeyed over to the
valley wherein he had been born. Here, in the old lair, he encountered
Kiche. Up to her old tricks, she, too, had fled the inhospitable fires
of the gods and gone back to her old refuge to give birth to her young.
Of this litter but one remained alive when White Fang came upon the
scene, and this one was not destined to live long. Young life had
little chance in such a famine.
Kiche’s greeting of her grown son was anything but affectionate. But
White Fang did not mind. He had outgrown his mother. So he turned tail
philosophically and trotted on up the stream. At the forks he took the
turning to the left, where he found the lair of the lynx with whom his
mother and he had fought long before. Here, in the abandoned lair, he
settled down and rested for a day.
During the early summer, in the last days of the famine, he met
Lip-lip, who had likewise taken to the woods, where he had eked out a
miserable existence.
White Fang came upon him unexpectedly. Trotting in opposite directions
along the base of a high bluff, they rounded a corner of rock and found
themselves face to face. They paused with instant alarm, and looked at
each other suspiciously.
White Fang was in splendid condition. His hunting had been good, and
for a week he had eaten his fill. He was even gorged from his latest
kill. But in the moment he looked at Lip-lip his hair rose on end all
along his back. It was an involuntary bristling on his part, the
physical state that in the past had always accompanied the mental state
produced in him by Lip-lip’s bullying and persecution. As in the past
he had bristled and snarled at sight of Lip-lip, so now, and
automatically, he bristled and snarled. He did not waste any time. The
thing was done thoroughly and with despatch. Lip-lip essayed to back
away, but White Fang struck him hard, shoulder to shoulder. Lip-lip was
overthrown and rolled upon his back. White Fang’s teeth drove into the
scrawny throat. There was a death-struggle, during which White Fang
walked around, stiff-legged and observant. Then he resumed his course