Chapter: In the fall of the year, when the days were shortening and the bite of
the frost was coming into the air, White Fang got his chance for liberty.
For several days there had been a great hubbub in the village.  The
summer camp was being dismantled, and the tribe, bag and baggage, was
preparing to go off to the fall hunting.  White Fang watched it all with
eager eyes, and when the tepees began to come down and the canoes were
loading at the bank, he understood.  Already the canoes were departing,
and some had disappeared down the river.

Quite deliberately he determined to stay behind.  He waited his
opportunity to slink out of camp to the woods.  Here, in the running
stream where ice was beginning to form, he hid his trail.  Then he
crawled into the heart of a dense thicket and waited.  The time passed
by, and he slept intermittently for hours.  Then he was aroused by Grey
Beaver's voice calling him by name.  There were other voices.  White Fang
could hear Grey Beaver's squaw taking part in the search, and Mit-sah,
who was Grey Beaver's son.

White Fang trembled with fear, and though the impulse came to crawl out
of his hiding-place, he resisted it.  After a time the voices died away,
and some time after that he crept out to enjoy the success of his
undertaking.  Darkness was coming on, and for a while he played about
among the trees, pleasuring in his freedom.  Then, and quite suddenly, he
became aware of loneliness.  He sat down to consider, listening to the
silence of the forest and perturbed by it.  That nothing moved nor
sounded, seemed ominous.  He felt the lurking of danger, unseen and
unguessed.  He was suspicious of the looming bulks of the trees and of
the dark shadows that might conceal all manner of perilous things.

Then it was cold.  Here was no warm side of a tepee against which to
snuggle.  The frost was in his feet, and he kept lifting first one fore-
foot and then the other.  He curved his bushy tail around to cover them,
and at the same time he saw a vision.  There was nothing strange about
it.  Upon his inward sight was impressed a succession of memory-pictures.
He saw the camp again, the tepees, and the blaze of the fires.  He heard
the shrill voices of the women, the gruff basses of the men, and the
snarling of the dogs.  He was hungry, and he remembered pieces of meat
and fish that had been thrown him.  Here was no meat, nothing but a
threatening and inedible silence.

His bondage had softened him.  Irresponsibility had weakened him.  He had
forgotten how to shift for himself.  The night yawned about him.  His
senses, accustomed to the hum and bustle of the camp, used to the
continuous impact of sights and sounds, were now left idle.  There was
nothing to do, nothing to see nor hear.  They strained to catch some
interruption of the silence and immobility of nature.  They were appalled
by inaction and by the feel of something terrible impending.

He gave a great start of fright.  A colossal and formless something was
rushing across the field of his vision.  It was a tree-shadow flung by
the moon, from whose face the clouds had been brushed away.  Reassured,
he whimpered softly; then he suppressed the whimper for fear that it
might attract the attention of the lurking dangers.

A tree, contracting in the cool of the night, made a loud noise.  It was
directly above him.  He yelped in his fright.  A panic seized him, and he
ran madly toward the village.  He knew an overpowering desire for the
protection and companionship of man.  In his nostrils was the smell of
the camp-smoke.  In his ears the camp-sounds and cries were ringing loud.
He passed out of the forest and into the moonlit open where were no
shadows nor darknesses.  But no village greeted his eyes.  He had
forgotten.  The village had gone away.

His wild flight ceased abruptly.  There was no place to which to flee.  He
slunk forlornly through the deserted camp, smelling the rubbish-heaps and
the discarded rags and tags of the gods.  He would have been glad for the
rattle of stones about him, flung by an angry squaw, glad for the hand of
Grey Beaver descending upon him in wrath; while he would have welcomed
with delight Lip-lip and the whole snarling, cowardly pack.

He came to where Grey Beaver's tepee had stood.  In the centre of the
space it had occupied, he sat down.  He pointed his nose at the moon.  His
throat was afflicted by rigid spasms, his mouth opened, and in a heart-
broken cry bubbled up his loneliness and fear, his grief for Kiche, all
his past sorrows and miseries as well as his apprehension of sufferings
and dangers to come.  It was the long wolf-howl, full-throated and
mournful, the first howl he had ever uttered.

The coming of daylight dispelled his fears but increased his loneliness.
The naked earth, which so shortly before had been so populous, thrust his
loneliness more forcibly upon him.  It did not take him long to make up
his mind.  He plunged into the forest and followed the river bank down
the stream.  All day he ran.  He did not rest.  He seemed made to run on
forever.  His iron-like body ignored fatigue.  And even after fatigue
came, his heritage of endurance braced him to endless endeavour and
enabled him to drive his complaining body onward.

Where the river swung in against precipitous bluffs, he climbed the high
mountains behind.  Rivers and streams that entered the main river he
forded or swam.  Often he took to the rim-ice that was beginning to form,
and more than once he crashed through and struggled for life in the icy
current.  Always he was on the lookout for the trail of the gods where it
might leave the river and proceed inland.

White Fang was intelligent beyond the average of his kind; yet his mental
vision was not wide enough to embrace the other bank of the Mackenzie.
What if the trail of the gods led out on that side?  It never entered his
head.  Later on, when he had travelled more and grown older and wiser and
come to know more of trails and rivers, it might be that he could grasp
and apprehend such a possibility.  But that mental power was yet in the
future.  Just now he ran blindly, his own bank of the Mackenzie alone
entering into his calculations.

All night he ran, blundering in the darkness into mishaps and obstacles
that delayed but did not daunt.  By the middle of the second day he had
been running continuously for thirty hours, and the iron of his flesh was
giving out.  It was the endurance of his mind that kept him going.  He
had not eaten in forty hours, and he was weak with hunger.  The repeated
drenchings in the icy water had likewise had their effect on him.  His
handsome coat was draggled.  The broad pads of his feet were bruised and
bleeding.  He had begun to limp, and this limp increased with the hours.
To make it worse, the light of the sky was obscured and snow began to
fall--a raw, moist, melting, clinging snow, slippery under foot, that hid
from him the landscape he traversed, and that covered over the
inequalities of the ground so that the way of his feet was more difficult
and painful.

Grey Beaver had intended camping that night on the far bank of the
Mackenzie, for it was in that direction that the hunting lay.  But on the
near bank, shortly before dark, a moose coming down to drink, had been
espied by Kloo-kooch, who was Grey Beaver's squaw.  Now, had not the
moose come down to drink, had not Mit-sah been steering out of the course
because of the snow, had not Kloo-kooch sighted the moose, and had not
Grey Beaver killed it with a lucky shot from his rifle, all subsequent
things would have happened differently.  Grey Beaver would not have
camped on the near side of the Mackenzie, and White Fang would have
passed by and gone on, either to die or to find his way to his wild
brothers and become one of them--a wolf to the end of his days.

Night had fallen.  The snow was flying more thickly, and White Fang,
whimpering softly to himself as he stumbled and limped along, came upon a
fresh trail in the snow.  So fresh was it that he knew it immediately for
what it was.  Whining with eagerness, he followed back from the river
bank and in among the trees.  The camp-sounds came to his ears.  He saw
the blaze of the fire, Kloo-kooch cooking, and Grey Beaver squatting on
his hams and mumbling a chunk of raw tallow.  There was fresh meat in
camp!

White Fang expected a beating.  He crouched and bristled a little at the
thought of it.  Then he went forward again.  He feared and disliked the
beating he knew to be waiting for him.  But he knew, further, that the
comfort of the fire would be his, the protection of the gods, the
companionship of the dogs--the last, a companionship of enmity, but none
the less a companionship and satisfying to his gregarious needs.

He came cringing and crawling into the firelight.  Grey Beaver saw him,
and stopped munching the tallow.  White Fang crawled slowly, cringing and
grovelling in the abjectness of his abasement and submission.  He crawled
straight toward Grey Beaver, every inch of his progress becoming slower
and more painful.  At last he lay at the master's feet, into whose
possession he now surrendered himself, voluntarily, body and soul.  Of
his own choice, he came in to sit by man's fire and to be ruled by him.
White Fang trembled, waiting for the punishment to fall upon him.  There
was a movement of the hand above him.  He cringed involuntarily under the
expected blow.  It did not fall.  He stole a glance upward.  Grey Beaver
was breaking the lump of tallow in half!  Grey Beaver was offering him
one piece of the tallow!  Very gently and somewhat suspiciously, he first
smelled the tallow and then proceeded to eat it.  Grey Beaver ordered
meat to be brought to him, and guarded him from the other dogs while he
ate.  After that, grateful and content, White Fang lay at Grey Beaver's
feet, gazing at the fire that warmed him, blinking and dozing, secure in
the knowledge that the morrow would find him, not wandering forlorn
through bleak forest-stretches, but in the camp of the man-animals, with
the gods to whom he had given himself and upon whom he was now dependent.




When December was well along, Grey Beaver went on a journey up the
Mackenzie.  Mit-sah and Kloo-kooch went with him.  One sled he drove
himself, drawn by dogs he had traded for or borrowed.  A second and
smaller sled was driven by Mit-sah, and to this was harnessed a team of
puppies.  It was more of a toy affair than anything else, yet it was the
delight of Mit-sah, who felt that he was beginning to do a man's work in
the world.  Also, he was learning to drive dogs and to train dogs; while
the puppies themselves were being broken in to the harness.  Furthermore,
the sled was of some service, for it carried nearly two hundred pounds of
outfit and food.

White Fang had seen the camp-dogs toiling in the harness, so that he did
not resent overmuch the first placing of the harness upon himself.  About
his neck was put a moss-stuffed collar, which was connected by two
pulling-traces to a strap that passed around his chest and over his back.
It was to this that was fastened the long rope by which he pulled at the
sled.

There were seven puppies in the team.  The others had been born earlier
in the year and were nine and ten months old, while White Fang was only
eight months old.  Each dog was fastened to the sled by a single rope.  No
two ropes were of the same length, while the difference in length between
any two ropes was at least that of a dog's body.  Every rope was brought
to a ring at the front end of the sled.  The sled itself was without
runners, being a birch-bark toboggan, with upturned forward end to keep
it from ploughing under the snow.  This construction enabled the weight
of the sled and load to be distributed over the largest snow-surface; for
the snow was crystal-powder and very soft.  Observing the same principle
of widest distribution of weight, the dogs at the ends of their ropes
radiated fan-fashion from the nose of the sled, so that no dog trod in
another's footsteps.

There was, furthermore, another virtue in the fan-formation.  The ropes
of varying length prevented the dogs attacking from the rear those that
ran in front of them.  For a dog to attack another, it would have to turn
upon one at a shorter rope.  In which case it would find itself face to
face with the dog attacked, and also it would find itself facing the whip
of the driver.  But the most peculiar virtue of all lay in the fact that
the dog that strove to attack one in front of him must pull the sled
faster, and that the faster the sled travelled, the faster could the dog
attacked run away.  Thus, the dog behind could never catch up with the
one in front.  The faster he ran, the faster ran the one he was after,
and the faster ran all the dogs.  Incidentally, the sled went faster, and
thus, by cunning indirection, did man increase his mastery over the
beasts.

Mit-sah resembled his father, much of whose grey wisdom he possessed.  In
the past he had observed Lip-lip's persecution of White Fang; but at that
time Lip-lip was another man's dog, and Mit-sah had never dared more than
to shy an occasional stone at him.  But now Lip-lip was his dog, and he
proceeded to wreak his vengeance on him by putting him at the end of the
longest rope.  This made Lip-lip the leader, and was apparently an
honour! but in reality it took away from him all honour, and instead of
being bully and master of the pack, he now found himself hated and
persecuted by the pack.

Because he ran at the end of the longest rope, the dogs had always the
view of him running away before them.  All that they saw of him was his
bushy tail and fleeing hind legs--a view far less ferocious and
intimidating than his bristling mane and gleaming fangs.  Also, dogs
being so constituted in their mental ways, the sight of him running away
gave desire to run after him and a feeling that he ran away from them.

The moment the sled started, the team took after Lip-lip in a chase that
extended throughout the day.  At first he had been prone to turn upon his
pursuers, jealous of his dignity and wrathful; but at such times Mit-sah
would throw the stinging lash of the thirty-foot cariboo-gut whip into
his face and compel him to turn tail and run on.  Lip-lip might face the
pack, but he could not face that whip, and all that was left him to do
was to keep his long rope taut and his flanks ahead of the teeth of his
mates.

But a still greater cunning lurked in the recesses of the Indian mind.  To
give point to unending pursuit of the leader, Mit-sah favoured him over
the other dogs.  These favours aroused in them jealousy and hatred.  In
their presence Mit-sah would give him meat and would give it to him only.
This was maddening to them.  They would rage around just outside the
throwing-distance of the whip, while Lip-lip devoured the meat and Mit-
sah protected him.  And when there was no meat to give, Mit-sah would
keep the team at a distance and make believe to give meat to Lip-lip.

White Fang took kindly to the work.  He had travelled a greater distance
than the other dogs in the yielding of himself to the rule of the gods,
and he had learned more thoroughly the futility of opposing their will.
In addition, the persecution he had suffered from the pack had made the
pack less to him in the scheme of things, and man more.  He had not
learned to be dependent on his kind for companionship.  Besides, Kiche
was well-nigh forgotten; and the chief outlet of expression that remained
to him was in the allegiance he tendered the gods he had accepted as
masters.  So he worked hard, learned discipline, and was obedient.
Faithfulness and willingness characterised his toil.  These are essential
traits of the wolf and the wild-dog when they have become domesticated,
and these traits White Fang possessed in unusual measure.

A companionship did exist between White Fang and the other dogs, but it
was one of warfare and enmity.  He had never learned to play with them.
He knew only how to fight, and fight with them he did, returning to them
a hundred-fold the snaps and slashes they had given him in the days when
Lip-lip was leader of the pack.  But Lip-lip was no longer leader--except
when he fled away before his mates at the end of his rope, the sled
bounding along behind.  In camp he kept close to Mit-sah or Grey Beaver
or Kloo-kooch.  He did not dare venture away from the gods, for now the
fangs of all dogs were against him, and he tasted to the dregs the
persecution that had been White Fang's.

With the overthrow of Lip-lip, White Fang could have become leader of the
pack.  But he was too morose and solitary for that.  He merely thrashed
his team-mates.  Otherwise he ignored them.  They got out of his way when
he came along; nor did the boldest of them ever dare to rob him of his
meat.  On the contrary, they devoured their own meat hurriedly, for fear
that he would take it away from them.  White Fang knew the law well: _to
oppress the weak and obey the strong_.  He ate his share of meat as
rapidly as he could.  And then woe the dog that had not yet finished!  A
snarl and a flash of fangs, and that dog would wail his indignation to
the uncomforting stars while White Fang finished his portion for him.

Every little while, however, one dog or another would flame up in revolt
and be promptly subdued.  Thus White Fang was kept in training.  He was
jealous of the isolation in which he kept himself in the midst of the
pack, and he fought often to maintain it.  But such fights were of brief
duration.  He was too quick for the others.  They were slashed open and
bleeding before they knew what had happened, were whipped almost before
they had begun to fight.

As rigid as the sled-discipline of the gods, was the discipline
maintained by White Fang amongst his fellows.  He never allowed them any
latitude.  He compelled them to an unremitting respect for him.  They
might do as they pleased amongst themselves.  That was no concern of his.
But it _was_ his concern that they leave him alone in his isolation, get
out of his way when he elected to walk among them, and at all times
acknowledge his mastery over them.  A hint of stiff-leggedness on their
part, a lifted lip or a bristle of hair, and he would be upon them,
merciless and cruel, swiftly convincing them of the error of their way.

He was a monstrous tyrant.  His mastery was rigid as steel.  He oppressed
the weak with a vengeance.  Not for nothing had he been exposed to the
pitiless struggles for life in the day of his cubhood, when his mother
and he, alone and unaided, held their own and survived in the ferocious
environment of the Wild.  And not for nothing had he learned to walk
softly when superior strength went by.  He oppressed the weak, but he
respected the strong.  And in the course of the long journey with Grey
Beaver he walked softly indeed amongst the full-grown dogs in the camps
of the strange man-animals they encountered.

The months passed by.  Still continued the journey of Grey Beaver.  White
Fang's strength was developed by the long hours on trail and the steady
toil at the sled; and it would have seemed that his mental development
was well-nigh complete.  He had come to know quite thoroughly the world
in which he lived.  His outlook was bleak and materialistic.  The world
as he saw it was a fierce and brutal world, a world without warmth, a
world in which caresses and affection and the bright sweetnesses of the
spirit did not exist.

He had no affection for Grey Beaver.  True, he was a god, but a most
savage god.  White Fang was glad to acknowledge his lordship, but it was
a lordship based upon superior intelligence and brute strength.  There
was something in the fibre of White Fang's being that made his lordship a
thing to be desired, else he would not have come back from the Wild when
he did to tender his allegiance.  There were deeps in his nature which
had never been sounded.  A kind word, a caressing touch of the hand, on
the part of Grey Beaver, might have sounded these deeps; but Grey Beaver
did not caress, nor speak kind words.  It was not his way.  His primacy
was savage, and savagely he ruled, administering justice with a club,
punishing transgression with the pain of a blow, and rewarding merit, not
by kindness, but by withholding a blow.

So White Fang knew nothing of the heaven a man's hand might contain for
him.  Besides, he did not like the hands of the man-animals.  He was
suspicious of them.  It was true that they sometimes gave meat, but more
often they gave hurt.  Hands were things to keep away from.  They hurled
stones, wielded sticks and clubs and whips, administered slaps and
clouts, and, when they touched him, were cunning to hurt with pinch and
twist and wrench.  In strange villages he had encountered the hands of
the children and learned that they were cruel to hurt.  Also, he had once
nearly had an eye poked out by a toddling papoose.  From these
experiences he became suspicious of all children.  He could not tolerate
them.  When they came near with their ominous hands, he got up.

It was in a village at the Great Slave Lake, that, in the course of
resenting the evil of the hands of the man-animals, he came to modify the
law that he had learned from Grey Beaver: namely, that the unpardonable
crime was to bite one of the gods.  In this village, after the custom of
all dogs in all villages, White Fang went foraging, for food.  A boy was
chopping frozen moose-meat with an axe, and the chips were flying in the
snow.  White Fang, sliding by in quest of meat, stopped and began to eat
the chips.  He observed the boy lay down the axe and take up a stout
club.  White Fang sprang clear, just in time to escape the descending
blow.  The boy pursued him, and he, a stranger in the village, fled
between two tepees to find himself cornered against a high earth bank.

There was no escape for White Fang.  The only way out was between the two
tepees, and this the boy guarded.  Holding his club prepared to strike,
he drew in on his cornered quarry.  White Fang was furious.  He faced the
boy, bristling and snarling, his sense of justice outraged.  He knew the
law of forage.  All the wastage of meat, such as the frozen chips,
belonged to the dog that found it.  He had done no wrong, broken no law,
yet here was this boy preparing to give him a beating.  White Fang
scarcely knew what happened.  He did it in a surge of rage.  And he did
it so quickly that the boy did not know either.  All the boy knew was
that he had in some unaccountable way been overturned into the snow, and
that his club-hand had been ripped wide open by White Fang's teeth.

But White Fang knew that he had broken the law of the gods.  He had
driven his teeth into the sacred flesh of one of them, and could expect
nothing but a most terrible punishment.  He fled away to Grey Beaver,
behind whose protecting legs he crouched when the bitten boy and the
boy's family came, demanding vengeance.  But they went away with
vengeance unsatisfied.  Grey Beaver defended White Fang.  So did Mit-sah
and Kloo-kooch.  White Fang, listening to the wordy war and watching the
angry gestures, knew that his act was justified.  And so it came that he
learned there were gods and gods.  There were his gods, and there were
other gods, and between them there was a difference.  Justice or
injustice, it was all the same, he must take all things from the hands of
his own gods.  But he was not compelled to take injustice from the other
gods.  It was his privilege to resent it with his teeth.  And this also
was a law of the gods.

Before the day was out, White Fang was to learn more about this law.  Mit-
sah, alone, gathering firewood in the forest, encountered the boy that
had been bitten.  With him were other boys.  Hot words passed.  Then all
the boys attacked Mit-sah.  It was going hard with him.  Blows were
raining upon him from all sides.  White Fang looked on at first.  This
was an affair of the gods, and no concern of his.  Then he realised that
this was Mit-sah, one of his own particular gods, who was being
maltreated.  It was no reasoned impulse that made White Fang do what he
then did.  A mad rush of anger sent him leaping in amongst the
combatants.  Five minutes later the landscape was covered with fleeing
boys, many of whom dripped blood upon the snow in token that White Fang's
teeth had not been idle.  When Mit-sah told the story in camp, Grey
Beaver ordered meat to be given to White Fang.  He ordered much meat to
be given, and White Fang, gorged and sleepy by the fire, knew that the
law had received its verification.

It was in line with these experiences that White Fang came to learn the
law of property and the duty of the defence of property.  From the
protection of his god's body to the protection of his god's possessions
was a step, and this step he made.  What was his god's was to be defended
against all the world--even to the extent of biting other gods.  Not only
was such an act sacrilegious in its nature, but it was fraught with
peril.  The gods were all-powerful, and a dog was no match against them;
yet White Fang learned to face them, fiercely belligerent and unafraid.
Duty rose above fear, and thieving gods learned to leave Grey Beaver's
property alone.

One thing, in this connection, White Fang quickly learnt, and that was
that a thieving god was usually a cowardly god and prone to run away at
the sounding of the alarm.  Also, he learned that but brief time elapsed
between his sounding of the alarm and Grey Beaver coming to his aid.  He
came to know that it was not fear of him that drove the thief away, but
fear of Grey Beaver.  White Fang did not give the alarm by barking.  He
never barked.  His method was to drive straight at the intruder, and to
sink his teeth in if he could.  Because he was morose and solitary,
having nothing to do with the other dogs, he was unusually fitted to
guard his master's property; and in this he was encouraged and trained by
Grey Beaver.  One result of this was to make White Fang more ferocious
and indomitable, and more solitary.

The months went by, binding stronger and stronger the covenant between
dog and man.  This was the ancient covenant that the first wolf that came
in from the Wild entered into with man.  And, like all succeeding wolves
and wild dogs that had done likewise, White Fang worked the covenant out
for himself.  The terms were simple.  For the possession of a flesh-and-
blood god, he exchanged his own liberty.  Food and fire, protection and
companionship, were some of the things he received from the god.  In
return, he guarded the god's property, defended his body, worked for him,
and obeyed him.

The possession of a god implies service.  White Fang's was a service of
duty and awe, but not of love.  He did not know what love was.  He had no
experience of love.  Kiche was a remote memory.  Besides, not only had he
abandoned the Wild and his kind when he gave himself up to man, but the
terms of the covenant were such that if ever he met Kiche again he would
not desert his god to go with her.  His allegiance to man seemed somehow
a law of his being greater than the love of liberty, of kind and kin.




The spring of the year was at hand when Grey Beaver finished his long
journey.  It was April, and White Fang was a year old when he pulled into
the home villages and was loosed from the harness by Mit-sah.  Though a
long way from his full growth, White Fang, next to Lip-lip, was the
largest yearling in the village.  Both from his father, the wolf, and
from Kiche, he had inherited stature and strength, and already he was
measuring up alongside the full-grown dogs.  But he had not yet grown
compact.  His body was slender and rangy, and his strength more stringy
than massive. His coat was the true wolf-grey, and to all appearances he
was true wolf himself.  The quarter-strain of dog he had inherited from
Kiche had left no mark on him physically, though it had played its part
in his mental make-up.

He wandered through the village, recognising with staid satisfaction the
various gods he had known before the long journey.  Then there were the
dogs, puppies growing up like himself, and grown dogs that did not look
so large and formidable as the memory pictures he retained of them.  Also,
he stood less in fear of them than formerly, stalking among them with a
certain careless ease that was as new to him as it was enjoyable.

There was Baseek, a grizzled old fellow that in his younger days had but
to uncover his fangs to send White Fang cringing and crouching to the
right about.  From him White Fang had learned much of his own
insignificance; and from him he was now to learn much of the change and
development that had taken place in himself.  While Baseek had been
growing weaker with age, White Fang had been growing stronger with youth.

It was at the cutting-up of a moose, fresh-killed, that White Fang
learned of the changed relations in which he stood to the dog-world.  He
had got for himself a hoof and part of the shin-bone, to which quite a
bit of meat was attached.  Withdrawn from the immediate scramble of the
other dogs--in fact out of sight behind a thicket--he was devouring his
prize, when Baseek rushed in upon him.  Before he knew what he was doing,
he had slashed the intruder twice and sprung clear.  Baseek was surprised
by the other's temerity and swiftness of attack.  He stood, gazing
stupidly across at White Fang, the raw, red shin-bone between them.

Baseek was old, and already he had come to know the increasing valour of
the dogs it had been his wont to bully.  Bitter experiences these, which,
perforce, he swallowed, calling upon all his wisdom to cope with them.  In
the old days he would have sprung upon White Fang in a fury of righteous
wrath.  But now his waning powers would not permit such a course.  He
bristled fiercely and looked ominously across the shin-bone at White
Fang.  And White Fang, resurrecting quite a deal of the old awe, seemed
to wilt and to shrink in upon himself and grow small, as he cast about in
his mind for a way to beat a retreat not too inglorious.

And right here Baseek erred.  Had he contented himself with looking
fierce and ominous, all would have been well.  White Fang, on the verge
of retreat, would have retreated, leaving the meat to him.  But Baseek
did not wait.  He considered the victory already his and stepped forward
to the meat.  As he bent his head carelessly to smell it, White Fang
bristled slightly.  Even then it was not too late for Baseek to retrieve
the situation.  Had he merely stood over the meat, head up and glowering,
White Fang would ultimately have slunk away.  But the fresh meat was
strong in Baseek's nostrils, and greed urged him to take a bite of it.

This was too much for White Fang.  Fresh upon his months of mastery over
his own team-mates, it was beyond his self-control to stand idly by while
another devoured the meat that belonged to him.  He struck, after his
custom, without warning.  With the first slash, Baseek's right ear was
ripped into ribbons.  He was astounded at the suddenness of it.  But more
things, and most grievous ones, were happening with equal suddenness.  He
was knocked off his feet.  His throat was bitten.  While he was
struggling to his feet the young dog sank teeth twice into his shoulder.
The swiftness of it was bewildering.  He made a futile rush at White
Fang, clipping the empty air with an outraged snap.  The next moment his
nose was laid open, and he was staggering backward away from the meat.

The situation was now reversed.  White Fang stood over the shin-bone,
bristling and menacing, while Baseek stood a little way off, preparing to
retreat.  He dared not risk a fight with this young lightning-flash, and
again he knew, and more bitterly, the enfeeblement of oncoming age.  His
attempt to maintain his dignity was heroic.  Calmly turning his back upon
young dog and shin-bone, as though both were beneath his notice and
unworthy of his consideration, he stalked grandly away.  Nor, until well
out of sight, did he stop to lick his bleeding wounds.

The effect on White Fang was to give him a greater faith in himself, and
a greater pride.  He walked less softly among the grown dogs; his
attitude toward them was less compromising.  Not that he went out of his
way looking for trouble.  Far from it.  But upon his way he demanded
consideration.  He stood upon his right to go his way unmolested and to
give trail to no dog.  He had to be taken into account, that was all.  He
was no longer to be disregarded and ignored, as was the lot of puppies,
and as continued to be the lot of the puppies that were his team-mates.
They got out of the way, gave trail to the grown dogs, and gave up meat
to them under compulsion.  But White Fang, uncompanionable, solitary,
morose, scarcely looking to right or left, redoubtable, forbidding of
aspect, remote and alien, was accepted as an equal by his puzzled elders.
They quickly learned to leave him alone, neither venturing hostile acts
nor making overtures of friendliness.  If they left him alone, he left
them alone--a state of affairs that they found, after a few encounters,
to be pre-eminently desirable.

In midsummer White Fang had an experience.  Trotting along in his silent
way to investigate a new tepee which had been erected on the edge of the
village while he was away with the hunters after moose, he came full upon
Kiche.  He paused and looked at her.  He remembered her vaguely, but he
_remembered_ her, and that was more than could be said for her.  She
lifted her lip at him in the old snarl of menace, and his memory became
clear.  His forgotten cubhood, all that was associated with that familiar
snarl, rushed back to him.  Before he had known the gods, she had been to
him the centre-pin of the universe.  The old familiar feelings of that
time came back upon him, surged up within him.  He bounded towards her
joyously, and she met him with shrewd fangs that laid his cheek open to
the bone.  He did not understand.  He backed away, bewildered and
puzzled.

But it was not Kiche's fault.  A wolf-mother was not made to remember her
cubs of a year or so before.  So she did not remember White Fang.  He was
a strange animal, an intruder; and her present litter of puppies gave her
the right to resent such intrusion.

One of the puppies sprawled up to White Fang.  They were half-brothers,
only they did not know it.  White Fang sniffed the puppy curiously,
whereupon Kiche rushed upon him, gashing his face a second time.  He
backed farther away.  All the old memories and associations died down
again and passed into the grave from which they had been resurrected.  He
looked at Kiche licking her puppy and stopping now and then to snarl at
him.  She was without value to him.  He had learned to get along without
her.  Her meaning was forgotten.  There was no place for her in his
scheme of things, as there was no place for him in hers.

He was still standing, stupid and bewildered, the memories forgotten,
wondering what it was all about, when Kiche attacked him a third time,
intent on driving him away altogether from the vicinity.  And White Fang
allowed himself to be driven away.  This was a female of his kind, and it
was a law of his kind that the males must not fight the females.  He did
not know anything about this law, for it was no generalisation of the
mind, not a something acquired by experience of the world.  He knew it as
a secret prompting, as an urge of instinct--of the same instinct that
made him howl at the moon and stars of nights, and that made him fear
death and the unknown.

The months went by.  White Fang grew stronger, heavier, and more compact,
while his character was developing along the lines laid down by his
heredity and his environment.  His heredity was a life-stuff that may be
likened to clay.  It possessed many possibilities, was capable of being
moulded into many different forms.  Environment served to model the clay,
to give it a particular form.  Thus, had White Fang never come in to the
fires of man, the Wild would have moulded him into a true wolf.  But the
gods had given him a different environment, and he was moulded into a dog
that was rather wolfish, but that was a dog and not a wolf.

And so, according to the clay of his nature and the pressure of his
surroundings, his character was being moulded into a certain particular
shape.  There was no escaping it.  He was becoming more morose, more
uncompanionable, more solitary, more ferocious; while the dogs were
learning more and more that it was better to be at peace with him than at
war, and Grey Beaver was coming to prize him more greatly with the
passage of each day.

White Fang, seeming to sum up strength in all his qualities, nevertheless
suffered from one besetting weakness.  He could not stand being laughed
at.  The laughter of men was a hateful thing.  They might laugh among
themselves about anything they pleased except himself, and he did not
mind.  But the moment laughter was turned upon him he would fly into a
most terrible rage.  Grave, dignified, sombre, a laugh made him frantic
to ridiculousness.  It so outraged him and upset him that for hours he
would behave like a demon.  And woe to the dog that at such times ran
foul of him.  He knew the law too well to take it out of Grey Beaver;
behind Grey Beaver were a club and godhead.  But behind the dogs there
was nothing but space, and into this space they flew when White Fang came
on the scene, made mad by laughter.

In the third year of his life there came a great famine to the Mackenzie
Indians.  In the summer the fish failed.  In the winter the cariboo
forsook their accustomed track.  Moose were scarce, the rabbits almost
disappeared, hunting and preying animals perished.  Denied their usual
food-supply, weakened by hunger, they fell upon and devoured one another.
Only the strong survived.  White Fang's gods were always hunting animals.
The old and the weak of them died of hunger.  There was wailing in the
village, where the women and children went without in order that what
little they had might go into the bellies of the lean and hollow-eyed
hunters who trod the forest in the vain pursuit of meat.

To such extremity were the gods driven that they ate the soft-tanned
leather of their mocassins and mittens, while the dogs ate the harnesses
off their backs and the very whip-lashes.  Also, the dogs ate one
another, and also the gods ate the dogs.  The weakest and the more
worthless were eaten first.  The dogs that still lived, looked on and
understood.  A few of the boldest and wisest forsook the fires of the
gods, which had now become a shambles, and fled into the forest, where,
in the end, they starved to death or were eaten by wolves.

In this time of misery, White Fang, too, stole away into the woods.  He
was better fitted for the life than the other dogs, for he had the
training of his cubhood to guide him.  Especially adept did he become in
stalking small living things.  He would lie concealed for hours,
following every movement of a cautious tree-squirrel, waiting, with a
patience as huge as the hunger he suffered from, until the squirrel
ventured out upon the ground.  Even then, White Fang was not premature.
He waited until he was sure of striking before the squirrel could gain a
tree-refuge.  Then, and not until then, would he flash from his hiding-
place, a grey projectile, incredibly swift, never failing its mark--the
fleeing squirrel that fled not fast enough.

Successful as he was with squirrels, there was one difficulty that
prevented him from living and growing fat on them.  There were not enough
squirrels.  So he was driven to hunt still smaller things.  So acute did
his hunger become at times that he was not above rooting out wood-mice
from their burrows in the ground.  Nor did he scorn to do battle with a
weasel as hungry as himself and many times more ferocious.

In the worst pinches of the famine he stole back to the fires of the
gods.  But he did not go into the fires.  He lurked in the forest,
avoiding discovery and robbing the snares at the rare intervals when game
was caught.  He even robbed Grey Beaver's snare of a rabbit at a time
when Grey Beaver staggered and tottered through the forest, sitting down
often to rest, what of weakness and of shortness of breath.

One day White Fang encountered a young wolf, gaunt and scrawny, loose-
jointed with famine.  Had he not been hungry himself, White Fang might
have gone with him and eventually found his way into the pack amongst his
wild brethren.  As it was, he ran the young wolf down and killed and ate
him.

Fortune seemed to favour him.  Always, when hardest pressed for food, he
found something to kill.  Again, when he was weak, it was his luck that
none of the larger preying animals chanced upon him.  Thus, he was strong
from the two days' eating a lynx had afforded him when the hungry wolf-
pack ran full tilt upon him.  It was a long, cruel chase, but he was
better nourished than they, and in the end outran them.  And not only did
he outrun them, but, circling widely back on his track, he gathered in
one of his exhausted pursuers.

After that he left that part of the country and journeyed over to the
valley wherein he had been born.  Here, in the old lair, he encountered
Kiche.  Up to her old tricks, she, too, had fled the inhospitable fires
of the gods and gone back to her old refuge to give birth to her young.
Of this litter but one remained alive when White Fang came upon the
scene, and this one was not destined to live long.  Young life had little
chance in such a famine.

Kiche's greeting of her grown son was anything but affectionate.  But
White Fang did not mind.  He had outgrown his mother.  So he turned tail
philosophically and trotted on up the stream.  At the forks he took the
turning to the left, where he found the lair of the lynx with whom his
mother and he had fought long before.  Here, in the abandoned lair, he
settled down and rested for a day.

During the early summer, in the last days of the famine, he met Lip-lip,
who had likewise taken to the woods, where he had eked out a miserable
existence.

White Fang came upon him unexpectedly.  Trotting in opposite directions
along the base of a high bluff, they rounded a corner of rock and found
themselves face to face.  They paused with instant alarm, and looked at
each other suspiciously.

White Fang was in splendid condition.  His hunting had been good, and for
a week he had eaten his fill.  He was even gorged from his latest kill.
But in the moment he looked at Lip-lip his hair rose on end all along his
back.  It was an involuntary bristling on his part, the physical state
that in the past had always accompanied the mental state produced in him
by Lip-lip's bullying and persecution.  As in the past he had bristled
and snarled at sight of Lip-lip, so now, and automatically, he bristled
and snarled.  He did not waste any time.  The thing was done thoroughly
and with despatch.  Lip-lip essayed to back away, but White Fang struck
him hard, shoulder to shoulder.  Lip-lip was overthrown and rolled upon
his back.  White Fang's teeth drove into the scrawny throat.  There was a
death-struggle, during which White Fang walked around, stiff-legged and
observant.  Then he resumed his course and trotted on along the base of
the bluff.

One day, not long after, he came to the edge of the forest, where a
narrow stretch of open land sloped down to the Mackenzie.  He had been
over this ground before, when it was bare, but now a village occupied it.
Still hidden amongst the trees, he paused to study the situation.  Sights
and sounds and scents were familiar to him.  It was the old village
changed to a new place.  But sights and sounds and smells were different
from those he had last had when he fled away from it.  There was no
whimpering nor wailing.  Contented sounds saluted his ear, and when he
heard the angry voice of a woman he knew it to be the anger that proceeds
from a full stomach.  And there was a smell in the air of fish.  There
was food.  The famine was gone.  He came out boldly from the forest and
trotted into camp straight to Grey Beaver's tepee.  Grey Beaver was not
there; but Kloo-kooch welcomed him with glad cries and the whole of a
fresh-caught fish, and he lay down to wait Grey Beaver's coming.




PART IV

 In the fall, the village packs up to go off for fall hunting. White Fang decides to stay behind and, quite deliberately, hides in the forest. That night he is cold, lonely, and afraid. In the morning, he goes and looks at the abandoned village and howls mournfully. He runs alongside the river, looking for his people. The second day, White Fang finds his people camped along the river, and White Fang surrenders himself to Gray Beaver. He is now, by his own choice, a dog. In December, Gray Beaver travels up the Mackenzie by sled. Mit-sah and Kloo-kooch go with him, and White Fang is fastened to Mit-sah's sled. The dogs are tied in fan formation, with each a whole body's length ahead of the next, but so that all of the dogs pursue the one in the front. Mit-sah puts Lip-lip at the front of the rope, so all the dogs pursue him and grow to hate him. Then Mit-sah favors Lip-lip the most of the dogs, in order to make all the dogs hate him. But even with their shared hatred of Lip-lip, White Fang and the other dogs still do not get along. White Fang could have become the leader, but he is too solitary, a tyrant rather than a leader. White Fang, while he knows that Gray Beaver is his master, has little affection for him. White Fang attacks a boy who attacks him for no reason, yet Gray Beaver is not angry. Then he attacks boys who are attacking Mit-sah, and he still is not angry. White Fang thus learns to defend property against other humans. In the spring, the three people and the dogs return to the village. White Fang is a year old now and already has reached the height of other dogs, although he hasn't compacted yet. He meets the dogs of the village with new confidence, and they respect him. In the summer, White Fang meets up with his mother again, but she has a new litter of puppies and drives him away with growls and bites. White Fang is confused, but leaves. As the days go on, White Fang is molded into a rather wolfish dog. He is full of strength with his one weakness being that he cannot stand hearing people laugh at him. In the third year of his life, another famine comes upon the people, and White Fang leaves to live in the woods. He meets his mother, then meets Lip-lip and kills him. After some time, he returns to the village and the famine is over.

