White Fang
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