White Fang
and trotted on along the base of the bluff.
One day, not long after, he came to the edge of the forest, where a
narrow stretch of open land sloped down to the Mackenzie. He had been
over this ground before, when it was bare, but now a village occupied
it. Still hidden amongst the trees, he paused to study the situation.
Sights and sounds and scents were familiar to him. It was the old
village changed to a new place. But sights and sounds and smells were
different from those he had last had when he fled away from it. There
was no whimpering nor wailing. Contented sounds saluted his ear, and
when he heard the angry voice of a woman he knew it to be the anger
that proceeds from a full stomach. And there was a smell in the air of
fish. There was food. The famine was gone. He came out boldly from the
forest and trotted into camp straight to Grey Beaver’s tepee. Grey
Beaver was not there; but Kloo-kooch welcomed him with glad cries and
the whole of a fresh-caught fish, and he lay down to wait Grey Beaver’s
coming.
PART IV
CHAPTER I
THE ENEMY OF HIS KIND
Had there been in White Fang’s nature any possibility, no matter how
remote, of his ever coming to fraternise with his kind, such
possibility was irretrievably destroyed when he was made leader of the
sled-team. For now the dogs hated him—hated him for the extra meat
bestowed upon him by Mit-sah; hated him for all the real and fancied
favours he received; hated him for that he fled always at the head of
the team, his waving brush of a tail and his perpetually retreating
hind-quarters for ever maddening their eyes.
And White Fang just as bitterly hated them back. Being sled-leader was
anything but gratifying to him. To be compelled to run away before the
yelling pack, every dog of which, for three years, he had thrashed and
mastered, was almost more than he could endure. But endure it he must,
or perish, and the life that was in him had no desire to perish out.
The moment Mit-sah gave his order for the start, that moment the whole
team, with eager, savage cries, sprang forward at White Fang.
There was no defence for him. If he turned upon them, Mit-sah would
throw the stinging lash of the whip into his face. Only remained to him
to run away. He could not encounter that howling horde with his tail
and hind-quarters. These were scarcely fit weapons with which to meet
the many merciless fangs. So run away he did, violating his own nature
and pride with every leap he made, and leaping all day long.
One cannot violate the promptings of one’s nature without having that
nature recoil upon itself. Such a recoil is like that of a hair, made
to grow out from the body, turning unnaturally upon the direction of
its growth and growing into the body—a rankling, festering thing of
hurt. And so with White Fang. Every urge of his being impelled him to
spring upon the pack that cried at his heels, but it was the will of
the gods that this should not be; and behind the will, to enforce it,
was the whip of cariboo-gut with its biting thirty-foot lash. So White
Fang could only eat his heart in bitterness and develop a hatred and
malice commensurate with the ferocity and indomitability of his nature.
If ever a creature was the enemy of its kind, White Fang was that
creature. He asked no quarter, gave none. He was continually marred and
scarred by the teeth of the pack, and as continually he left his own
marks upon the pack. Unlike most leaders, who, when camp was made and
the dogs were unhitched, huddled near to the gods for protection, White
Fang disdained such protection. He walked boldly about the camp,
inflicting punishment in the night for what he had suffered in the day.
In the time before he was made leader of the team, the pack had learned
to get out of his way. But now it was different. Excited by the
day-long pursuit of him, swayed subconsciously by the insistent
iteration on their brains of the sight of him fleeing away, mastered by
the feeling of mastery enjoyed all day, the dogs could not bring
themselves to give way to him. When he appeared amongst them, there was
always a squabble. His progress was marked by snarl and snap and growl.
The very atmosphere he breathed was surcharged with hatred and malice,
and this but served to increase the hatred and malice within him.
When Mit-sah cried out his command for the team to stop, White Fang
obeyed. At first this caused trouble for the other dogs. All of them
would spring upon the hated leader only to find the tables turned.
Behind him would be Mit-sah, the great whip singing in his hand. So the
dogs came to understand that when the team stopped by order, White Fang
was to be let alone. But when White Fang stopped without orders, then
it was allowed them to spring upon him and destroy him if they could.
After several experiences, White Fang never stopped without orders. He
learned quickly. It was in the nature of things, that he must learn
quickly if he were to survive the unusually severe conditions under
which life was vouchsafed him.
But the dogs could never learn the lesson to leave him alone in camp.
Each day, pursuing him and crying defiance at him, the lesson of the
previous night was erased, and that night would have to be learned over
again, to be as immediately forgotten. Besides, there was a greater
consistence in their dislike of him. They sensed between themselves and
him a difference of kind—cause sufficient in itself for hostility. Like
him, they were domesticated wolves. But they had been domesticated for
generations. Much of the Wild had been lost, so that to them the Wild
was the unknown, the terrible, the ever-menacing and ever warring. But
to him, in appearance and action and impulse, still clung the Wild. He
symbolised it, was its personification: so that when they showed their
teeth to him they were defending themselves against the powers of
destruction that lurked in the shadows of the forest and in the dark
beyond the camp-fire.
But there was one lesson the dogs did learn, and that was to keep
together. White Fang was too terrible for any of them to face
single-handed. They met him with the mass-formation, otherwise he would
have killed them, one by one, in a night. As it was, he never had a
chance to kill them. He might roll a dog off its feet, but the pack
would be upon him before he could follow up and deliver the deadly
throat-stroke. At the first hint of conflict, the whole team drew
together and faced him. The dogs had quarrels among themselves, but
these were forgotten when trouble was brewing with White Fang.
On the other hand, try as they would, they could not kill White Fang.
He was too quick for them, too formidable, too wise. He avoided tight
places and always backed out of it when they bade fair to surround him.
While, as for getting him off his feet, there was no dog among them
capable of doing the trick. His feet clung to the earth with the same
tenacity that he clung to life. For that matter, life and footing were
synonymous in this unending warfare with the pack, and none knew it
better than White Fang.
So he became the enemy of his kind, domesticated wolves that they were,
softened by the fires of man, weakened in the sheltering shadow of
man’s strength. White Fang was bitter and implacable. The clay of him
was so moulded. He declared a vendetta against all dogs. And so
terribly did he live this vendetta that Grey Beaver, fierce savage
himself, could not but marvel at White Fang’s ferocity. Never, he
swore, had there been the like of this animal; and the Indians in
strange villages swore likewise when they considered the tale of his
killings amongst their dogs.
When White Fang was nearly five years old, Grey Beaver took him on
another great journey, and long remembered was the havoc he worked
amongst the dogs of the many villages along the Mackenzie, across the
Rockies, and down the Porcupine to the Yukon. He revelled in the
vengeance he wreaked upon his kind. They were ordinary, unsuspecting
dogs. They were not prepared for his swiftness and directness, for his
attack without warning. They did not know him for what he was, a
lightning-flash of slaughter. They bristled up to him, stiff-legged and
challenging, while he, wasting no time on elaborate preliminaries,
snapping into action like a steel spring, was at their throats and
destroying them before they knew what was happening and while they were
yet in the throes of surprise.
He became an adept at fighting. He economised. He never wasted his
strength, never tussled. He was in too quickly for that, and, if he
missed, was out again too quickly. The dislike of the wolf for close
quarters was his to an unusual degree. He could not endure a prolonged
contact with another body. It smacked of danger. It made him frantic.
He must be away, free, on his own legs, touching no living thing. It
was the Wild still clinging to him, asserting itself through him. This
feeling had been accentuated by the Ishmaelite life he had led from his
puppyhood. Danger lurked in contacts. It was the trap, ever the trap,
the fear of it lurking deep in the life of him, woven into the fibre of
him.
In consequence, the strange dogs he encountered had no chance against
him. He eluded their fangs. He got them, or got away, himself untouched
in either event. In the natural course of things there were exceptions
to this. There were times when several dogs, pitching on to him,
punished him before he could get away; and there were times when a
single dog scored deeply on him. But these were accidents. In the main,
so efficient a fighter had he become, he went his way unscathed.
Another advantage he possessed was that of correctly judging time and
distance. Not that he did this consciously, however. He did not
calculate such things. It was all automatic. His eyes saw correctly,
and the nerves carried the vision correctly to his brain. The parts of
him were better adjusted than those of the average dog. They worked
together more smoothly and steadily. His was a better, far better,
nervous, mental, and muscular co-ordination. When his eyes conveyed to
his brain the moving image of an action, his brain without conscious
effort, knew the space that limited that action and the time required
for its completion. Thus, he could avoid the leap of another dog, or
the drive of its fangs, and at the same moment could seize the
infinitesimal fraction of time in which to deliver his own attack. Body
and brain, his was a more perfected mechanism. Not that he was to be
praised for it. Nature had been more generous to him than to the
average animal, that was all.
It was in the summer that White Fang arrived at Fort Yukon. Grey Beaver
had crossed the great watershed between Mackenzie and the Yukon in the
late winter, and spent the spring in hunting among the western outlying
spurs of the Rockies. Then, after the break-up of the ice on the
Porcupine, he had built a canoe and paddled down that stream to where
it effected its junction with the Yukon just under the Artic circle.
Here stood the old Hudson’s Bay Company fort; and here were many
Indians, much food, and unprecedented excitement. It was the summer of
1898, and thousands of gold-hunters were going up the Yukon to Dawson
and the Klondike. Still hundreds of miles from their goal, nevertheless
many of them had been on the way for a year, and the least any of them
had travelled to get that far was five thousand miles, while some had
come from the other side of the world.
Here Grey Beaver stopped. A whisper of the gold-rush had reached his
ears, and he had come with several bales of furs, and another of
gut-sewn mittens and moccasins. He would not have ventured so long a
trip had he not expected generous profits. But what he had expected was