White Fang
motionless ball, and trotted on. He had waited too often and futilely
in the past for porcupines to unroll, to waste any more time. He
continued up the right fork. The day wore along, and nothing rewarded
his hunt.
The urge of his awakened instinct of fatherhood was strong upon him. He
must find meat. In the afternoon he blundered upon a ptarmigan. He came
out of a thicket and found himself face to face with the slow-witted
bird. It was sitting on a log, not a foot beyond the end of his nose.
Each saw the other. The bird made a startled rise, but he struck it
with his paw, and smashed it down to earth, then pounced upon it, and
caught it in his teeth as it scuttled across the snow trying to rise in
the air again. As his teeth crunched through the tender flesh and
fragile bones, he began naturally to eat. Then he remembered, and,
turning on the back-track, started for home, carrying the ptarmigan in
his mouth.
A mile above the forks, running velvet-footed as was his custom, a
gliding shadow that cautiously prospected each new vista of the trail,
he came upon later imprints of the large tracks he had discovered in
the early morning. As the track led his way, he followed, prepared to
meet the maker of it at every turn of the stream.
He slid his head around a corner of rock, where began an unusually
large bend in the stream, and his quick eyes made out something that
sent him crouching swiftly down. It was the maker of the track, a large
female lynx. She was crouching as he had crouched once that day, in
front of her the tight-rolled ball of quills. If he had been a gliding
shadow before, he now became the ghost of such a shadow, as he crept
and circled around, and came up well to leeward of the silent,
motionless pair.
He lay down in the snow, depositing the ptarmigan beside him, and with
eyes peering through the needles of a low-growing spruce he watched the
play of life before him—the waiting lynx and the waiting porcupine,
each intent on life; and, such was the curiousness of the game, the way
of life for one lay in the eating of the other, and the way of life for
the other lay in being not eaten. While old One Eye, the wolf crouching
in the covert, played his part, too, in the game, waiting for some
strange freak of Chance, that might help him on the meat-trail which
was his way of life.
Half an hour passed, an hour; and nothing happened. The ball of quills
might have been a stone for all it moved; the lynx might have been
frozen to marble; and old One Eye might have been dead. Yet all three
animals were keyed to a tenseness of living that was almost painful,
and scarcely ever would it come to them to be more alive than they were
then in their seeming petrifaction.
One Eye moved slightly and peered forth with increased eagerness.
Something was happening. The porcupine had at last decided that its
enemy had gone away. Slowly, cautiously, it was unrolling its ball of
impregnable armour. It was agitated by no tremor of anticipation.
Slowly, slowly, the bristling ball straightened out and lengthened. One
Eye watching, felt a sudden moistness in his mouth and a drooling of
saliva, involuntary, excited by the living meat that was spreading
itself like a repast before him.
Not quite entirely had the porcupine unrolled when it discovered its
enemy. In that instant the lynx struck. The blow was like a flash of
light. The paw, with rigid claws curving like talons, shot under the
tender belly and came back with a swift ripping movement. Had the
porcupine been entirely unrolled, or had it not discovered its enemy a
fraction of a second before the blow was struck, the paw would have
escaped unscathed; but a side-flick of the tail sank sharp quills into
it as it was withdrawn.
Everything had happened at once—the blow, the counter-blow, the squeal
of agony from the porcupine, the big cat’s squall of sudden hurt and
astonishment. One Eye half arose in his excitement, his ears up, his
tail straight out and quivering behind him. The lynx’s bad temper got
the best of her. She sprang savagely at the thing that had hurt her.
But the porcupine, squealing and grunting, with disrupted anatomy
trying feebly to roll up into its ball-protection, flicked out its tail
again, and again the big cat squalled with hurt and astonishment. Then
she fell to backing away and sneezing, her nose bristling with quills
like a monstrous pin-cushion. She brushed her nose with her paws,
trying to dislodge the fiery darts, thrust it into the snow, and rubbed
it against twigs and branches, and all the time leaping about, ahead,
sidewise, up and down, in a frenzy of pain and fright.
She sneezed continually, and her stub of a tail was doing its best
toward lashing about by giving quick, violent jerks. She quit her
antics, and quieted down for a long minute. One Eye watched. And even
he could not repress a start and an involuntary bristling of hair along
his back when she suddenly leaped, without warning, straight up in the
air, at the same time emitting a long and most terrible squall. Then
she sprang away, up the trail, squalling with every leap she made.
It was not until her racket had faded away in the distance and died out
that One Eye ventured forth. He walked as delicately as though all the
snow were carpeted with porcupine quills, erect and ready to pierce the
soft pads of his feet. The porcupine met his approach with a furious
squealing and a clashing of its long teeth. It had managed to roll up
in a ball again, but it was not quite the old compact ball; its muscles
were too much torn for that. It had been ripped almost in half, and was
still bleeding profusely.
One Eye scooped out mouthfuls of the blood-soaked snow, and chewed and
tasted and swallowed. This served as a relish, and his hunger increased
mightily; but he was too old in the world to forget his caution. He
waited. He lay down and waited, while the porcupine grated its teeth
and uttered grunts and sobs and occasional sharp little squeals. In a
little while, One Eye noticed that the quills were drooping and that a
great quivering had set up. The quivering came to an end suddenly.
There was a final defiant clash of the long teeth. Then all the quills
drooped quite down, and the body relaxed and moved no more.
With a nervous, shrinking paw, One Eye stretched out the porcupine to
its full length and turned it over on its back. Nothing had happened.
It was surely dead. He studied it intently for a moment, then took a
careful grip with his teeth and started off down the stream, partly
carrying, partly dragging the porcupine, with head turned to the side
so as to avoid stepping on the prickly mass. He recollected something,
dropped the burden, and trotted back to where he had left the
ptarmigan. He did not hesitate a moment. He knew clearly what was to be
done, and this he did by promptly eating the ptarmigan. Then he
returned and took up his burden.
When he dragged the result of his day’s hunt into the cave, the
she-wolf inspected it, turned her muzzle to him, and lightly licked him
on the neck. But the next instant she was warning him away from the
cubs with a snarl that was less harsh than usual and that was more
apologetic than menacing. Her instinctive fear of the father of her
progeny was toning down. He was behaving as a wolf-father should, and
manifesting no unholy desire to devour the young lives she had brought
into the world.
CHAPTER III
THE GREY CUB
He was different from his brothers and sisters. Their hair already
betrayed the reddish hue inherited from their mother, the she-wolf;
while he alone, in this particular, took after his father. He was the
one little grey cub of the litter. He had bred true to the straight
wolf-stock—in fact, he had bred true to old One Eye himself,
physically, with but a single exception, and that was he had two eyes
to his father’s one.
The grey cub’s eyes had not been open long, yet already he could see
with steady clearness. And while his eyes were still closed, he had
felt, tasted, and smelled. He knew his two brothers and his two sisters
very well. He had begun to romp with them in a feeble, awkward way, and
even to squabble, his little throat vibrating with a queer rasping
noise (the forerunner of the growl), as he worked himself into a
passion. And long before his eyes had opened he had learned by touch,
taste, and smell to know his mother—a fount of warmth and liquid food
and tenderness. She possessed a gentle, caressing tongue that soothed
him when it passed over his soft little body, and that impelled him to
snuggle close against her and to doze off to sleep.
Most of the first month of his life had been passed thus in sleeping;
but now he could see quite well, and he stayed awake for longer periods
of time, and he was coming to learn his world quite well. His world was
gloomy; but he did not know that, for he knew no other world. It was
dim-lighted; but his eyes had never had to adjust themselves to any
other light. His world was very small. Its limits were the walls of the
lair; but as he had no knowledge of the wide world outside, he was
never oppressed by the narrow confines of his existence.
But he had early discovered that one wall of his world was different
from the rest. This was the mouth of the cave and the source of light.
He had discovered that it was different from the other walls long
before he had any thoughts of his own, any conscious volitions. It had
been an irresistible attraction before ever his eyes opened and looked
upon it. The light from it had beat upon his sealed lids, and the eyes
and the optic nerves had pulsated to little, sparklike flashes,
warm-coloured and strangely pleasing. The life of his body, and of
every fibre of his body, the life that was the very substance of his
body and that was apart from his own personal life, had yearned toward
this light and urged his body toward it in the same way that the
cunning chemistry of a plant urges it toward the sun.
Always, in the beginning, before his conscious life dawned, he had
crawled toward the mouth of the cave. And in this his brothers and
sisters were one with him. Never, in that period, did any of them crawl
toward the dark corners of the back-wall. The light drew them as if
they were plants; the chemistry of the life that composed them demanded
the light as a necessity of being; and their little puppet-bodies
crawled blindly and chemically, like the tendrils of a vine. Later on,
when each developed individuality and became personally conscious of
impulsions and desires, the attraction of the light increased. They
were always crawling and sprawling toward it, and being driven back
from it by their mother.
It was in this way that the grey cub learned other attributes of his
mother than the soft, soothing, tongue. In his insistent crawling
toward the light, he discovered in her a nose that with a sharp nudge
administered rebuke, and later, a paw, that crushed him down and rolled
him over and over with swift, calculating stroke. Thus he learned hurt;
and on top of it he learned to avoid hurt, first, by not incurring the
risk of it; and second, when he had incurred the risk, by dodging and
by retreating. These were conscious actions, and were the results of
his first generalisations upon the world. Before that he had recoiled
automatically from hurt, as he had crawled automatically toward the
light. After that he recoiled from hurt because he _knew_ that it was
hurt.
He was a fierce little cub. So were his brothers and sisters. It was to
be expected. He was a carnivorous animal. He came of a breed of
meat-killers and meat-eaters. His father and mother lived wholly upon
meat. The milk he had sucked with his first flickering life, was milk