White Fang
benumbed and drowsy senses no longer took note of changing pitch and
intensity. He awoke with a start. The she-wolf was less than a yard
from him. Mechanically, at short range, without letting go of it, he
thrust a brand full into her open and snarling mouth. She sprang away,
yelling with pain, and while he took delight in the smell of burning
flesh and hair, he watched her shaking her head and growling wrathfully
a score of feet away.
But this time, before he dozed again, he tied a burning pine-knot to
his right hand. His eyes were closed but few minutes when the burn of
the flame on his flesh awakened him. For several hours he adhered to
this programme. Every time he was thus awakened he drove back the
wolves with flying brands, replenished the fire, and rearranged the
pine-knot on his hand. All worked well, but there came a time when he
fastened the pine-knot insecurely. As his eyes closed it fell away from
his hand.
He dreamed. It seemed to him that he was in Fort McGurry. It was warm
and comfortable, and he was playing cribbage with the Factor. Also, it
seemed to him that the fort was besieged by wolves. They were howling
at the very gates, and sometimes he and the Factor paused from the game
to listen and laugh at the futile efforts of the wolves to get in. And
then, so strange was the dream, there was a crash. The door was burst
open. He could see the wolves flooding into the big living-room of the
fort. They were leaping straight for him and the Factor. With the
bursting open of the door, the noise of their howling had increased
tremendously. This howling now bothered him. His dream was merging into
something else—he knew not what; but through it all, following him,
persisted the howling.
And then he awoke to find the howling real. There was a great snarling
and yelping. The wolves were rushing him. They were all about him and
upon him. The teeth of one had closed upon his arm. Instinctively he
leaped into the fire, and as he leaped, he felt the sharp slash of
teeth that tore through the flesh of his leg. Then began a fire fight.
His stout mittens temporarily protected his hands, and he scooped live
coals into the air in all directions, until the campfire took on the
semblance of a volcano.
But it could not last long. His face was blistering in the heat, his
eyebrows and lashes were singed off, and the heat was becoming
unbearable to his feet. With a flaming brand in each hand, he sprang to
the edge of the fire. The wolves had been driven back. On every side,
wherever the live coals had fallen, the snow was sizzling, and every
little while a retiring wolf, with wild leap and snort and snarl,
announced that one such live coal had been stepped upon.
Flinging his brands at the nearest of his enemies, the man thrust his
smouldering mittens into the snow and stamped about to cool his feet.
His two dogs were missing, and he well knew that they had served as a
course in the protracted meal which had begun days before with Fatty,
the last course of which would likely be himself in the days to follow.
“You ain’t got me yet!” he cried, savagely shaking his fist at the
hungry beasts; and at the sound of his voice the whole circle was
agitated, there was a general snarl, and the she-wolf slid up close to
him across the snow and watched him with hungry wistfulness.
He set to work to carry out a new idea that had come to him. He
extended the fire into a large circle. Inside this circle he crouched,
his sleeping outfit under him as a protection against the melting snow.
When he had thus disappeared within his shelter of flame, the whole
pack came curiously to the rim of the fire to see what had become of
him. Hitherto they had been denied access to the fire, and they now
settled down in a close-drawn circle, like so many dogs, blinking and
yawning and stretching their lean bodies in the unaccustomed warmth.
Then the she-wolf sat down, pointed her nose at a star, and began to
howl. One by one the wolves joined her, till the whole pack, on
haunches, with noses pointed skyward, was howling its hunger cry.
Dawn came, and daylight. The fire was burning low. The fuel had run
out, and there was need to get more. The man attempted to step out of
his circle of flame, but the wolves surged to meet him. Burning brands
made them spring aside, but they no longer sprang back. In vain he
strove to drive them back. As he gave up and stumbled inside his
circle, a wolf leaped for him, missed, and landed with all four feet in
the coals. It cried out with terror, at the same time snarling, and
scrambled back to cool its paws in the snow.
The man sat down on his blankets in a crouching position. His body
leaned forward from the hips. His shoulders, relaxed and drooping, and
his head on his knees advertised that he had given up the struggle. Now
and again he raised his head to note the dying down of the fire. The
circle of flame and coals was breaking into segments with openings in
between. These openings grew in size, the segments diminished.
“I guess you can come an’ get me any time,” he mumbled. “Anyway, I’m
goin’ to sleep.”
Once he awakened, and in an opening in the circle, directly in front of
him, he saw the she-wolf gazing at him.
Again he awakened, a little later, though it seemed hours to him. A
mysterious change had taken place—so mysterious a change that he was
shocked wider awake. Something had happened. He could not understand at
first. Then he discovered it. The wolves were gone. Remained only the
trampled snow to show how closely they had pressed him. Sleep was
welling up and gripping him again, his head was sinking down upon his
knees, when he roused with a sudden start.
There were cries of men, and churn of sleds, the creaking of harnesses,
and the eager whimpering of straining dogs. Four sleds pulled in from
the river bed to the camp among the trees. Half a dozen men were about
the man who crouched in the centre of the dying fire. They were shaking
and prodding him into consciousness. He looked at them like a drunken
man and maundered in strange, sleepy speech.
“Red she-wolf. . . . Come in with the dogs at feedin’ time. . . . First
she ate the dog-food. . . . Then she ate the dogs. . . . An’ after that
she ate Bill. . . . ”
“Where’s Lord Alfred?” one of the men bellowed in his ear, shaking him
roughly.
He shook his head slowly. “No, she didn’t eat him. . . . He’s roostin’
in a tree at the last camp.”
“Dead?” the man shouted.
“An’ in a box,” Henry answered. He jerked his shoulder petulantly away
from the grip of his questioner. “Say, you lemme alone. . . . I’m jes’
plump tuckered out. . . . Goo’ night, everybody.”
His eyes fluttered and went shut. His chin fell forward on his chest.
And even as they eased him down upon the blankets his snores were
rising on the frosty air.
But there was another sound. Far and faint it was, in the remote
distance, the cry of the hungry wolf-pack as it took the trail of other
meat than the man it had just missed.
PART II
CHAPTER I
THE BATTLE OF THE FANGS
It was the she-wolf who had first caught the sound of men’s voices and
the whining of the sled-dogs; and it was the she-wolf who was first to
spring away from the cornered man in his circle of dying flame. The
pack had been loath to forego the kill it had hunted down, and it
lingered for several minutes, making sure of the sounds, and then it,
too, sprang away on the trail made by the she-wolf.
Running at the forefront of the pack was a large grey wolf—one of its
several leaders. It was he who directed the pack’s course on the heels
of the she-wolf. It was he who snarled warningly at the younger members
of the pack or slashed at them with his fangs when they ambitiously
tried to pass him. And it was he who increased the pace when he sighted
the she-wolf, now trotting slowly across the snow.
She dropped in alongside by him, as though it were her appointed
position, and took the pace of the pack. He did not snarl at her, nor
show his teeth, when any leap of hers chanced to put her in advance of
him. On the contrary, he seemed kindly disposed toward her—too kindly
to suit her, for he was prone to run near to her, and when he ran too
near it was she who snarled and showed her teeth. Nor was she above
slashing his shoulder sharply on occasion. At such times he betrayed no
anger. He merely sprang to the side and ran stiffly ahead for several
awkward leaps, in carriage and conduct resembling an abashed country
swain.
This was his one trouble in the running of the pack; but she had other
troubles. On her other side ran a gaunt old wolf, grizzled and marked
with the scars of many battles. He ran always on her right side. The
fact that he had but one eye, and that the left eye, might account for
this. He, also, was addicted to crowding her, to veering toward her
till his scarred muzzle touched her body, or shoulder, or neck. As with
the running mate on the left, she repelled these attentions with her
teeth; but when both bestowed their attentions at the same time she was
roughly jostled, being compelled, with quick snaps to either side, to
drive both lovers away and at the same time to maintain her forward
leap with the pack and see the way of her feet before her. At such
times her running mates flashed their teeth and growled threateningly
across at each other. They might have fought, but even wooing and its
rivalry waited upon the more pressing hunger-need of the pack.
After each repulse, when the old wolf sheered abruptly away from the
sharp-toothed object of his desire, he shouldered against a young
three-year-old that ran on his blind right side. This young wolf had
attained his full size; and, considering the weak and famished
condition of the pack, he possessed more than the average vigour and
spirit. Nevertheless, he ran with his head even with the shoulder of
his one-eyed elder. When he ventured to run abreast of the older wolf
(which was seldom), a snarl and a snap sent him back even with the
shoulder again. Sometimes, however, he dropped cautiously and slowly
behind and edged in between the old leader and the she-wolf. This was
doubly resented, even triply resented. When she snarled her
displeasure, the old leader would whirl on the three-year-old.
Sometimes she whirled with him. And sometimes the young leader on the
left whirled, too.
At such times, confronted by three sets of savage teeth, the young wolf
stopped precipitately, throwing himself back on his haunches, with
fore-legs stiff, mouth menacing, and mane bristling. This confusion in
the front of the moving pack always caused confusion in the rear. The
wolves behind collided with the young wolf and expressed their
displeasure by administering sharp nips on his hind-legs and flanks. He
was laying up trouble for himself, for lack of food and short tempers
went together; but with the boundless faith of youth he persisted in
repeating the manoeuvre every little while, though it never succeeded
in gaining anything for him but discomfiture.
Had there been food, love-making and fighting would have gone on apace,
and the pack-formation would have been broken up. But the situation of
the pack was desperate. It was lean with long-standing hunger. It ran
below its ordinary speed. At the rear limped the weak members, the very
young and the very old. At the front were the strongest. Yet all were
more like skeletons than full-bodied wolves. Nevertheless, with the
exception of the ones that limped, the movements of the animals were
effortless and tireless. Their stringy muscles seemed founts of
inexhaustible energy. Behind every steel-like contraction of a muscle,
lay another steel-like contraction, and another, and another,
apparently without end.