White Fang
wishin’, I wisht the trip was over an’ done with, an’ you an’ me
a-sittin’ by the fire in Fort McGurry just about now an’ playing
cribbage—that’s what I wisht.”
Henry grunted and crawled into bed. As he dozed off he was aroused by
his comrade’s voice.
“Say, Henry, that other one that come in an’ got a fish—why didn’t the
dogs pitch into it? That’s what’s botherin’ me.”
“You’re botherin’ too much, Bill,” came the sleepy response. “You was
never like this before. You jes’ shut up now, an’ go to sleep, an’
you’ll be all hunkydory in the mornin’. Your stomach’s sour, that’s
what’s botherin’ you.”
The men slept, breathing heavily, side by side, under the one covering.
The fire died down, and the gleaming eyes drew closer the circle they
had flung about the camp. The dogs clustered together in fear, now and
again snarling menacingly as a pair of eyes drew close. Once their
uproar became so loud that Bill woke up. He got out of bed carefully,
so as not to disturb the sleep of his comrade, and threw more wood on
the fire. As it began to flame up, the circle of eyes drew farther
back. He glanced casually at the huddling dogs. He rubbed his eyes and
looked at them more sharply. Then he crawled back into the blankets.
“Henry,” he said. “Oh, Henry.”
Henry groaned as he passed from sleep to waking, and demanded, “What’s
wrong now?”
“Nothin’,” came the answer; “only there’s seven of ’em again. I just
counted.”
Henry acknowledged receipt of the information with a grunt that slid
into a snore as he drifted back into sleep.
In the morning it was Henry who awoke first and routed his companion
out of bed. Daylight was yet three hours away, though it was already
six o’clock; and in the darkness Henry went about preparing breakfast,
while Bill rolled the blankets and made the sled ready for lashing.
“Say, Henry,” he asked suddenly, “how many dogs did you say we had?”
“Six.”
“Wrong,” Bill proclaimed triumphantly.
“Seven again?” Henry queried.
“No, five; one’s gone.”
“The hell!” Henry cried in wrath, leaving the cooking to come and count
the dogs.
“You’re right, Bill,” he concluded. “Fatty’s gone.”
“An’ he went like greased lightnin’ once he got started. Couldn’t ’ve
seen ’m for smoke.”
“No chance at all,” Henry concluded. “They jes’ swallowed ’m alive. I
bet he was yelpin’ as he went down their throats, damn ’em!”
“He always was a fool dog,” said Bill.
“But no fool dog ought to be fool enough to go off an’ commit suicide
that way.” He looked over the remainder of the team with a speculative
eye that summed up instantly the salient traits of each animal. “I bet
none of the others would do it.”
“Couldn’t drive ’em away from the fire with a club,” Bill agreed. “I
always did think there was somethin’ wrong with Fatty anyway.”
And this was the epitaph of a dead dog on the Northland trail—less
scant than the epitaph of many another dog, of many a man.
CHAPTER II
THE SHE-WOLF
Breakfast eaten and the slim camp-outfit lashed to the sled, the men
turned their backs on the cheery fire and launched out into the
darkness. At once began to rise the cries that were fiercely sad—cries
that called through the darkness and cold to one another and answered
back. Conversation ceased. Daylight came at nine o’clock. At midday the
sky to the south warmed to rose-colour, and marked where the bulge of
the earth intervened between the meridian sun and the northern world.
But the rose-colour swiftly faded. The grey light of day that remained
lasted until three o’clock, when it, too, faded, and the pall of the
Arctic night descended upon the lone and silent land.
As darkness came on, the hunting-cries to right and left and rear drew
closer—so close that more than once they sent surges of fear through
the toiling dogs, throwing them into short-lived panics.
At the conclusion of one such panic, when he and Henry had got the dogs
back in the traces, Bill said:
“I wisht they’d strike game somewheres, an’ go away an’ leave us
alone.”
“They do get on the nerves horrible,” Henry sympathised.
They spoke no more until camp was made.
Henry was bending over and adding ice to the babbling pot of beans when
he was startled by the sound of a blow, an exclamation from Bill, and a
sharp snarling cry of pain from among the dogs. He straightened up in
time to see a dim form disappearing across the snow into the shelter of
the dark. Then he saw Bill, standing amid the dogs, half triumphant,
half crestfallen, in one hand a stout club, in the other the tail and
part of the body of a sun-cured salmon.
“It got half of it,” he announced; “but I got a whack at it jes’ the
same. D’ye hear it squeal?”
“What’d it look like?” Henry asked.
“Couldn’t see. But it had four legs an’ a mouth an’ hair an’ looked
like any dog.”
“Must be a tame wolf, I reckon.”
“It’s damned tame, whatever it is, comin’ in here at feedin’ time an’
gettin’ its whack of fish.”
That night, when supper was finished and they sat on the oblong box and
pulled at their pipes, the circle of gleaming eyes drew in even closer
than before.
“I wisht they’d spring up a bunch of moose or something, an’ go away
an’ leave us alone,” Bill said.
Henry grunted with an intonation that was not all sympathy, and for a
quarter of an hour they sat on in silence, Henry staring at the fire,
and Bill at the circle of eyes that burned in the darkness just beyond
the firelight.
“I wisht we was pullin’ into McGurry right now,” he began again.
“Shut up your wishin’ and your croakin’,” Henry burst out angrily.
“Your stomach’s sour. That’s what’s ailin’ you. Swallow a spoonful of
sody, an’ you’ll sweeten up wonderful an’ be more pleasant company.”
In the morning Henry was aroused by fervid blasphemy that proceeded
from the mouth of Bill. Henry propped himself up on an elbow and looked
to see his comrade standing among the dogs beside the replenished fire,
his arms raised in objurgation, his face distorted with passion.
“Hello!” Henry called. “What’s up now?”
“Frog’s gone,” came the answer.
“No.”
“I tell you yes.”
Henry leaped out of the blankets and to the dogs. He counted them with
care, and then joined his partner in cursing the power of the Wild that
had robbed them of another dog.
“Frog was the strongest dog of the bunch,” Bill pronounced finally.
“An’ he was no fool dog neither,” Henry added.
And so was recorded the second epitaph in two days.
A gloomy breakfast was eaten, and the four remaining dogs were
harnessed to the sled. The day was a repetition of the days that had
gone before. The men toiled without speech across the face of the
frozen world. The silence was unbroken save by the cries of their
pursuers, that, unseen, hung upon their rear. With the coming of night
in the mid-afternoon, the cries sounded closer as the pursuers drew in
according to their custom; and the dogs grew excited and frightened,
and were guilty of panics that tangled the traces and further depressed
the two men.
“There, that’ll fix you fool critters,” Bill said with satisfaction
that night, standing erect at completion of his task.
Henry left the cooking to come and see. Not only had his partner tied
the dogs up, but he had tied them, after the Indian fashion, with
sticks. About the neck of each dog he had fastened a leather thong. To
this, and so close to the neck that the dog could not get his teeth to
it, he had tied a stout stick four or five feet in length. The other
end of the stick, in turn, was made fast to a stake in the ground by
means of a leather thong. The dog was unable to gnaw through the
leather at his own end of the stick. The stick prevented him from
getting at the leather that fastened the other end.
Henry nodded his head approvingly.
“It’s the only contraption that’ll ever hold One Ear,” he said. “He can
gnaw through leather as clean as a knife an’ jes’ about half as quick.
They all’ll be here in the mornin’ hunkydory.”
“You jes’ bet they will,” Bill affirmed. “If one of em’ turns up
missin’, I’ll go without my coffee.”
“They jes’ know we ain’t loaded to kill,” Henry remarked at bed-time,
indicating the gleaming circle that hemmed them in. “If we could put a
couple of shots into ’em, they’d be more respectful. They come closer
every night. Get the firelight out of your eyes an’ look hard—there!
Did you see that one?”
For some time the two men amused themselves with watching the movement
of vague forms on the edge of the firelight. By looking closely and
steadily at where a pair of eyes burned in the darkness, the form of
the animal would slowly take shape. They could even see these forms
move at times.
A sound among the dogs attracted the men’s attention. One Ear was
uttering quick, eager whines, lunging at the length of his stick toward
the darkness, and desisting now and again in order to make frantic
attacks on the stick with his teeth.
“Look at that, Bill,” Henry whispered.
Full into the firelight, with a stealthy, sidelong movement, glided a
doglike animal. It moved with commingled mistrust and daring,
cautiously observing the men, its attention fixed on the dogs. One Ear
strained the full length of the stick toward the intruder and whined
with eagerness.
“That fool One Ear don’t seem scairt much,” Bill said in a low tone.
“It’s a she-wolf,” Henry whispered back, “an’ that accounts for Fatty
an’ Frog. She’s the decoy for the pack. She draws out the dog an’ then
all the rest pitches in an’ eats ’m up.”
The fire crackled. A log fell apart with a loud spluttering noise. At
the sound of it the strange animal leaped back into the darkness.
“Henry, I’m a-thinkin’,” Bill announced.
“Thinkin’ what?”
“I’m a-thinkin’ that was the one I lambasted with the club.”
“Ain’t the slightest doubt in the world,” was Henry’s response.
“An’ right here I want to remark,” Bill went on, “that that animal’s
familyarity with campfires is suspicious an’ immoral.”
“It knows for certain more’n a self-respectin’ wolf ought to know,”
Henry agreed. “A wolf that knows enough to come in with the dogs at
feedin’ time has had experiences.”
“Ol’ Villan had a dog once that run away with the wolves,” Bill
cogitates aloud. “I ought to know. I shot it out of the pack in a moose
pasture over ‘on Little Stick. An’ Ol’ Villan cried like a baby. Hadn’t
seen it for three years, he said. Ben with the wolves all that time.”
“I reckon you’ve called the turn, Bill. That wolf’s a dog, an’ it’s
eaten fish many’s the time from the hand of man.”
“An if I get a chance at it, that wolf that’s a dog’ll be jes’ meat,”
Bill declared. “We can’t afford to lose no more animals.”
“But you’ve only got three cartridges,” Henry objected.
“I’ll wait for a dead sure shot,” was the reply.
In the morning Henry renewed the fire and cooked breakfast to the
accompaniment of his partner’s snoring.
“You was sleepin’ jes’ too comfortable for anything,” Henry told him,
as he routed him out for breakfast. “I hadn’t the heart to rouse you.”
Bill began to eat sleepily. He noticed that his cup was empty and
started to reach for the pot. But the pot was beyond arm’s length and
beside Henry.
“Say, Henry,” he chided gently, “ain’t you forgot somethin’?”
Henry looked about with great carefulness and shook his head. Bill held
up the empty cup.
“You don’t get no coffee,” Henry announced.
“Ain’t run out?” Bill asked anxiously.
“Nope.”
“Ain’t thinkin’ it’ll hurt my digestion?”
“Nope.”
A flush of angry blood pervaded Bill’s face.
“Then it’s jes’ warm an’ anxious I am to be hearin’ you explain
yourself,” he said.
“Spanker’s gone,” Henry answered.
Without haste, with the air of one resigned to misfortune Bill turned
his head, and from where he sat counted the dogs.