White Fang
transformed directly from meat, and now, at a month old, when his eyes
had been open for but a week, he was beginning himself to eat meat—meat
half-digested by the she-wolf and disgorged for the five growing cubs
that already made too great demand upon her breast.
But he was, further, the fiercest of the litter. He could make a louder
rasping growl than any of them. His tiny rages were much more terrible
than theirs. It was he that first learned the trick of rolling a
fellow-cub over with a cunning paw-stroke. And it was he that first
gripped another cub by the ear and pulled and tugged and growled
through jaws tight-clenched. And certainly it was he that caused the
mother the most trouble in keeping her litter from the mouth of the
cave.
The fascination of the light for the grey cub increased from day to
day. He was perpetually departing on yard-long adventures toward the
cave’s entrance, and as perpetually being driven back. Only he did not
know it for an entrance. He did not know anything about
entrances—passages whereby one goes from one place to another place. He
did not know any other place, much less of a way to get there. So to
him the entrance of the cave was a wall—a wall of light. As the sun was
to the outside dweller, this wall was to him the sun of his world. It
attracted him as a candle attracts a moth. He was always striving to
attain it. The life that was so swiftly expanding within him, urged him
continually toward the wall of light. The life that was within him knew
that it was the one way out, the way he was predestined to tread. But
he himself did not know anything about it. He did not know there was
any outside at all.
There was one strange thing about this wall of light. His father (he
had already come to recognise his father as the one other dweller in
the world, a creature like his mother, who slept near the light and was
a bringer of meat)—his father had a way of walking right into the white
far wall and disappearing. The grey cub could not understand this.
Though never permitted by his mother to approach that wall, he had
approached the other walls, and encountered hard obstruction on the end
of his tender nose. This hurt. And after several such adventures, he
left the walls alone. Without thinking about it, he accepted this
disappearing into the wall as a peculiarity of his father, as milk and
half-digested meat were peculiarities of his mother.
In fact, the grey cub was not given to thinking—at least, to the kind
of thinking customary of men. His brain worked in dim ways. Yet his
conclusions were as sharp and distinct as those achieved by men. He had
a method of accepting things, without questioning the why and
wherefore. In reality, this was the act of classification. He was never
disturbed over why a thing happened. How it happened was sufficient for
him. Thus, when he had bumped his nose on the back-wall a few times, he
accepted that he would not disappear into walls. In the same way he
accepted that his father could disappear into walls. But he was not in
the least disturbed by desire to find out the reason for the difference
between his father and himself. Logic and physics were no part of his
mental make-up.
Like most creatures of the Wild, he early experienced famine. There
came a time when not only did the meat-supply cease, but the milk no
longer came from his mother’s breast. At first, the cubs whimpered and
cried, but for the most part they slept. It was not long before they
were reduced to a coma of hunger. There were no more spats and
squabbles, no more tiny rages nor attempts at growling; while the
adventures toward the far white wall ceased altogether. The cubs slept,
while the life that was in them flickered and died down.
One Eye was desperate. He ranged far and wide, and slept but little in
the lair that had now become cheerless and miserable. The she-wolf,
too, left her litter and went out in search of meat. In the first days
after the birth of the cubs, One Eye had journeyed several times back
to the Indian camp and robbed the rabbit snares; but, with the melting
of the snow and the opening of the streams, the Indian camp had moved
away, and that source of supply was closed to him.
When the grey cub came back to life and again took interest in the far
white wall, he found that the population of his world had been reduced.
Only one sister remained to him. The rest were gone. As he grew
stronger, he found himself compelled to play alone, for the sister no
longer lifted her head nor moved about. His little body rounded out
with the meat he now ate; but the food had come too late for her. She
slept continuously, a tiny skeleton flung round with skin in which the
flame flickered lower and lower and at last went out.
Then there came a time when the grey cub no longer saw his father
appearing and disappearing in the wall nor lying down asleep in the
entrance. This had happened at the end of a second and less severe
famine. The she-wolf knew why One Eye never came back, but there was no
way by which she could tell what she had seen to the grey cub. Hunting
herself for meat, up the left fork of the stream where lived the lynx,
she had followed a day-old trail of One Eye. And she had found him, or
what remained of him, at the end of the trail. There were many signs of
the battle that had been fought, and of the lynx’s withdrawal to her
lair after having won the victory. Before she went away, the she-wolf
had found this lair, but the signs told her that the lynx was inside,
and she had not dared to venture in.
After that, the she-wolf in her hunting avoided the left fork. For she
knew that in the lynx’s lair was a litter of kittens, and she knew the
lynx for a fierce, bad-tempered creature and a terrible fighter. It was
all very well for half a dozen wolves to drive a lynx, spitting and
bristling, up a tree; but it was quite a different matter for a lone
wolf to encounter a lynx—especially when the lynx was known to have a
litter of hungry kittens at her back.
But the Wild is the Wild, and motherhood is motherhood, at all times
fiercely protective whether in the Wild or out of it; and the time was
to come when the she-wolf, for her grey cub’s sake, would venture the
left fork, and the lair in the rocks, and the lynx’s wrath.
CHAPTER IV
THE WALL OF THE WORLD
By the time his mother began leaving the cave on hunting expeditions,
the cub had learned well the law that forbade his approaching the
entrance. Not only had this law been forcibly and many times impressed
on him by his mother’s nose and paw, but in him the instinct of fear
was developing. Never, in his brief cave-life, had he encountered
anything of which to be afraid. Yet fear was in him. It had come down
to him from a remote ancestry through a thousand thousand lives. It was
a heritage he had received directly from One Eye and the she-wolf; but
to them, in turn, it had been passed down through all the generations
of wolves that had gone before. Fear!—that legacy of the Wild which no
animal may escape nor exchange for pottage.
So the grey cub knew fear, though he knew not the stuff of which fear
was made. Possibly he accepted it as one of the restrictions of life.
For he had already learned that there were such restrictions. Hunger he
had known; and when he could not appease his hunger he had felt
restriction. The hard obstruction of the cave-wall, the sharp nudge of
his mother’s nose, the smashing stroke of her paw, the hunger
unappeased of several famines, had borne in upon him that all was not
freedom in the world, that to life there was limitations and
restraints. These limitations and restraints were laws. To be obedient
to them was to escape hurt and make for happiness.
He did not reason the question out in this man fashion. He merely
classified the things that hurt and the things that did not hurt. And
after such classification he avoided the things that hurt, the
restrictions and restraints, in order to enjoy the satisfactions and
the remunerations of life.
Thus it was that in obedience to the law laid down by his mother, and
in obedience to the law of that unknown and nameless thing, fear, he
kept away from the mouth of the cave. It remained to him a white wall
of light. When his mother was absent, he slept most of the time, while
during the intervals that he was awake he kept very quiet, suppressing
the whimpering cries that tickled in his throat and strove for noise.
Once, lying awake, he heard a strange sound in the white wall. He did
not know that it was a wolverine, standing outside, all a-trembling
with its own daring, and cautiously scenting out the contents of the
cave. The cub knew only that the sniff was strange, a something
unclassified, therefore unknown and terrible—for the unknown was one of
the chief elements that went into the making of fear.
The hair bristled upon the grey cub’s back, but it bristled silently.
How was he to know that this thing that sniffed was a thing at which to
bristle? It was not born of any knowledge of his, yet it was the
visible expression of the fear that was in him, and for which, in his
own life, there was no accounting. But fear was accompanied by another
instinct—that of concealment. The cub was in a frenzy of terror, yet he
lay without movement or sound, frozen, petrified into immobility, to
all appearances dead. His mother, coming home, growled as she smelt the
wolverine’s track, and bounded into the cave and licked and nozzled him
with undue vehemence of affection. And the cub felt that somehow he had
escaped a great hurt.
But there were other forces at work in the cub, the greatest of which
was growth. Instinct and law demanded of him obedience. But growth
demanded disobedience. His mother and fear impelled him to keep away
from the white wall. Growth is life, and life is for ever destined to
make for light. So there was no damming up the tide of life that was
rising within him—rising with every mouthful of meat he swallowed, with
every breath he drew. In the end, one day, fear and obedience were
swept away by the rush of life, and the cub straddled and sprawled
toward the entrance.
Unlike any other wall with which he had had experience, this wall
seemed to recede from him as he approached. No hard surface collided
with the tender little nose he thrust out tentatively before him. The
substance of the wall seemed as permeable and yielding as light. And as
condition, in his eyes, had the seeming of form, so he entered into
what had been wall to him and bathed in the substance that composed it.
It was bewildering. He was sprawling through solidity. And ever the
light grew brighter. Fear urged him to go back, but growth drove him
on. Suddenly he found himself at the mouth of the cave. The wall,
inside which he had thought himself, as suddenly leaped back before him
to an immeasurable distance. The light had become painfully bright. He
was dazzled by it. Likewise he was made dizzy by this abrupt and
tremendous extension of space. Automatically, his eyes were adjusting
themselves to the brightness, focusing themselves to meet the increased
distance of objects. At first, the wall had leaped beyond his vision.
He now saw it again; but it had taken upon itself a remarkable
remoteness. Also, its appearance had changed. It was now a variegated
wall, composed of the trees that fringed the stream, the opposing
mountain that towered above the trees, and the sky that out-towered the
mountain.
A great fear came upon him. This was more of the terrible unknown. He
crouched down on the lip of the cave and gazed out on the world. He was
very much afraid. Because it was unknown, it was hostile to him.
Therefore the hair stood up on end along his back and his lips wrinkled