White Fang
under his nose unharmed. All tense and trembling with eagerness and
desire, he mastered his instinct and stood still. He was obeying the
will of the gods.
And then, one day, again out in the back-pasture, he saw Dick start a
jackrabbit and run it. The master himself was looking on and did not
interfere. Nay, he encouraged White Fang to join in the chase. And thus
he learned that there was no taboo on jackrabbits. In the end he worked
out the complete law. Between him and all domestic animals there must
be no hostilities. If not amity, at least neutrality must obtain. But
the other animals—the squirrels, and quail, and cottontails, were
creatures of the Wild who had never yielded allegiance to man. They
were the lawful prey of any dog. It was only the tame that the gods
protected, and between the tame deadly strife was not permitted. The
gods held the power of life and death over their subjects, and the gods
were jealous of their power.
Life was complex in the Santa Clara Valley after the simplicities of
the Northland. And the chief thing demanded by these intricacies of
civilisation was control, restraint—a poise of self that was as
delicate as the fluttering of gossamer wings and at the same time as
rigid as steel. Life had a thousand faces, and White Fang found he must
meet them all—thus, when he went to town, in to San Jose, running
behind the carriage or loafing about the streets when the carriage
stopped. Life flowed past him, deep and wide and varied, continually
impinging upon his senses, demanding of him instant and endless
adjustments and correspondences, and compelling him, almost always, to
suppress his natural impulses.
There were butcher-shops where meat hung within reach. This meat he
must not touch. There were cats at the houses the master visited that
must be let alone. And there were dogs everywhere that snarled at him
and that he must not attack. And then, on the crowded sidewalks there
were persons innumerable whose attention he attracted. They would stop
and look at him, point him out to one another, examine him, talk of
him, and, worst of all, pat him. And these perilous contacts from all
these strange hands he must endure. Yet this endurance he achieved.
Furthermore, he got over being awkward and self-conscious. In a lofty
way he received the attentions of the multitudes of strange gods. With
condescension he accepted their condescension. On the other hand, there
was something about him that prevented great familiarity. They patted
him on the head and passed on, contented and pleased with their own
daring.
But it was not all easy for White Fang. Running behind the carriage in
the outskirts of San Jose, he encountered certain small boys who made a
practice of flinging stones at him. Yet he knew that it was not
permitted him to pursue and drag them down. Here he was compelled to
violate his instinct of self-preservation, and violate it he did, for
he was becoming tame and qualifying himself for civilisation.
Nevertheless, White Fang was not quite satisfied with the arrangement.
He had no abstract ideas about justice and fair play. But there is a
certain sense of equity that resides in life, and it was this sense in
him that resented the unfairness of his being permitted no defence
against the stone-throwers. He forgot that in the covenant entered into
between him and the gods they were pledged to care for him and defend
him. But one day the master sprang from the carriage, whip in hand, and
gave the stone-throwers a thrashing. After that they threw stones no
more, and White Fang understood and was satisfied.
One other experience of similar nature was his. On the way to town,
hanging around the saloon at the cross-roads, were three dogs that made
a practice of rushing out upon him when he went by. Knowing his deadly
method of fighting, the master had never ceased impressing upon White
Fang the law that he must not fight. As a result, having learned the
lesson well, White Fang was hard put whenever he passed the cross-roads
saloon. After the first rush, each time, his snarl kept the three dogs
at a distance but they trailed along behind, yelping and bickering and
insulting him. This endured for some time. The men at the saloon even
urged the dogs on to attack White Fang. One day they openly sicked the
dogs on him. The master stopped the carriage.
“Go to it,” he said to White Fang.
But White Fang could not believe. He looked at the master, and he
looked at the dogs. Then he looked back eagerly and questioningly at
the master.
The master nodded his head. “Go to them, old fellow. Eat them up.”
White Fang no longer hesitated. He turned and leaped silently among his
enemies. All three faced him. There was a great snarling and growling,
a clashing of teeth and a flurry of bodies. The dust of the road arose
in a cloud and screened the battle. But at the end of several minutes
two dogs were struggling in the dirt and the third was in full flight.
He leaped a ditch, went through a rail fence, and fled across a field.
White Fang followed, sliding over the ground in wolf fashion and with
wolf speed, swiftly and without noise, and in the centre of the field
he dragged down and slew the dog.
With this triple killing his main troubles with dogs ceased. The word
went up and down the valley, and men saw to it that their dogs did not
molest the Fighting Wolf.
CHAPTER IV
THE CALL OF KIND
The months came and went. There was plenty of food and no work in the
Southland, and White Fang lived fat and prosperous and happy. Not alone
was he in the geographical Southland, for he was in the Southland of
life. Human kindness was like a sun shining upon him, and he flourished
like a flower planted in good soil.
And yet he remained somehow different from other dogs. He knew the law
even better than did the dogs that had known no other life, and he
observed the law more punctiliously; but still there was about him a
suggestion of lurking ferocity, as though the Wild still lingered in
him and the wolf in him merely slept.
He never chummed with other dogs. Lonely he had lived, so far as his
kind was concerned, and lonely he would continue to live. In his
puppyhood, under the persecution of Lip-lip and the puppy-pack, and in
his fighting days with Beauty Smith, he had acquired a fixed aversion
for dogs. The natural course of his life had been diverted, and,
recoiling from his kind, he had clung to the human.
Besides, all Southland dogs looked upon him with suspicion. He aroused
in them their instinctive fear of the Wild, and they greeted him always
with snarl and growl and belligerent hatred. He, on the other hand,
learned that it was not necessary to use his teeth upon them. His naked
fangs and writhing lips were uniformly efficacious, rarely failing to
send a bellowing on-rushing dog back on its haunches.
But there was one trial in White Fang’s life—Collie. She never gave him
a moment’s peace. She was not so amenable to the law as he. She defied
all efforts of the master to make her become friends with White Fang.
Ever in his ears was sounding her sharp and nervous snarl. She had
never forgiven him the chicken-killing episode, and persistently held
to the belief that his intentions were bad. She found him guilty before
the act, and treated him accordingly. She became a pest to him, like a
policeman following him around the stable and the hounds, and, if he
even so much as glanced curiously at a pigeon or chicken, bursting into
an outcry of indignation and wrath. His favourite way of ignoring her
was to lie down, with his head on his fore-paws, and pretend sleep.
This always dumfounded and silenced her.
With the exception of Collie, all things went well with White Fang. He
had learned control and poise, and he knew the law. He achieved a
staidness, and calmness, and philosophic tolerance. He no longer lived
in a hostile environment. Danger and hurt and death did not lurk
everywhere about him. In time, the unknown, as a thing of terror and
menace ever impending, faded away. Life was soft and easy. It flowed
along smoothly, and neither fear nor foe lurked by the way.
He missed the snow without being aware of it. “An unduly long summer,”
would have been his thought had he thought about it; as it was, he
merely missed the snow in a vague, subconscious way. In the same
fashion, especially in the heat of summer when he suffered from the
sun, he experienced faint longings for the Northland. Their only effect
upon him, however, was to make him uneasy and restless without his
knowing what was the matter.
White Fang had never been very demonstrative. Beyond his snuggling and
the throwing of a crooning note into his love-growl, he had no way of
expressing his love. Yet it was given him to discover a third way. He
had always been susceptible to the laughter of the gods. Laughter had
affected him with madness, made him frantic with rage. But he did not
have it in him to be angry with the love-master, and when that god
elected to laugh at him in a good-natured, bantering way, he was
nonplussed. He could feel the pricking and stinging of the old anger as
it strove to rise up in him, but it strove against love. He could not
be angry; yet he had to do something. At first he was dignified, and
the master laughed the harder. Then he tried to be more dignified, and
the master laughed harder than before. In the end, the master laughed
him out of his dignity. His jaws slightly parted, his lips lifted a
little, and a quizzical expression that was more love than humour came
into his eyes. He had learned to laugh.
Likewise he learned to romp with the master, to be tumbled down and
rolled over, and be the victim of innumerable rough tricks. In return
he feigned anger, bristling and growling ferociously, and clipping his
teeth together in snaps that had all the seeming of deadly intention.
But he never forgot himself. Those snaps were always delivered on the
empty air. At the end of such a romp, when blow and cuff and snap and
snarl were fast and furious, they would break off suddenly and stand
several feet apart, glaring at each other. And then, just as suddenly,
like the sun rising on a stormy sea, they would begin to laugh. This
would always culminate with the master’s arms going around White Fang’s
neck and shoulders while the latter crooned and growled his love-song.
But nobody else ever romped with White Fang. He did not permit it. He
stood on his dignity, and when they attempted it, his warning snarl and
bristling mane were anything but playful. That he allowed the master
these liberties was no reason that he should be a common dog, loving
here and loving there, everybody’s property for a romp and good time.
He loved with single heart and refused to cheapen himself or his love.
The master went out on horseback a great deal, and to accompany him was
one of White Fang’s chief duties in life. In the Northland he had
evidenced his fealty by toiling in the harness; but there were no sleds
in the Southland, nor did dogs pack burdens on their backs. So he
rendered fealty in the new way, by running with the master’s horse. The
longest day never played White Fang out. His was the gait of the wolf,
smooth, tireless and effortless, and at the end of fifty miles he would
come in jauntily ahead of the horse.
It was in connection with the riding, that White Fang achieved one
other mode of expression—remarkable in that he did it but twice in all
his life. The first time occurred when the master was trying to teach a
spirited thoroughbred the method of opening and closing gates without
the rider’s dismounting. Time and again and many times he ranged the
horse up to the gate in the effort to close it and each time the horse