Chapter: 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.

They ran many miles that day.  They ran through the night.  And the next
day found them still running.  They were running over the surface of a
world frozen and dead.  No life stirred.  They alone moved through the
vast inertness.  They alone were alive, and they sought for other things
that were alive in order that they might devour them and continue to
live.

They crossed low divides and ranged a dozen small streams in a
lower-lying country before their quest was rewarded.  Then they came upon
moose.  It was a big bull they first found.  Here was meat and life, and
it was guarded by no mysterious fires nor flying missiles of flame.  Splay
hoofs and palmated antlers they knew, and they flung their customary
patience and caution to the wind.  It was a brief fight and fierce.  The
big bull was beset on every side.  He ripped them open or split their
skulls with shrewdly driven blows of his great hoofs.  He crushed them
and broke them on his large horns.  He stamped them into the snow under
him in the wallowing struggle.  But he was foredoomed, and he went down
with the she-wolf tearing savagely at his throat, and with other teeth
fixed everywhere upon him, devouring him alive, before ever his last
struggles ceased or his last damage had been wrought.

There was food in plenty.  The bull weighed over eight hundred
pounds--fully twenty pounds of meat per mouth for the forty-odd wolves of
the pack.  But if they could fast prodigiously, they could feed
prodigiously, and soon a few scattered bones were all that remained of
the splendid live brute that had faced the pack a few hours before.

There was now much resting and sleeping.  With full stomachs, bickering
and quarrelling began among the younger males, and this continued through
the few days that followed before the breaking-up of the pack.  The
famine was over.  The wolves were now in the country of game, and though
they still hunted in pack, they hunted more cautiously, cutting out heavy
cows or crippled old bulls from the small moose-herds they ran across.

There came a day, in this land of plenty, when the wolf-pack split in
half and went in different directions.  The she-wolf, the young leader on
her left, and the one-eyed elder on her right, led their half of the pack
down to the Mackenzie River and across into the lake country to the east.
Each day this remnant of the pack dwindled.  Two by two, male and female,
the wolves were deserting.  Occasionally a solitary male was driven out
by the sharp teeth of his rivals.  In the end there remained only four:
the she-wolf, the young leader, the one-eyed one, and the ambitious three-
year-old.

The she-wolf had by now developed a ferocious temper.  Her three suitors
all bore the marks of her teeth.  Yet they never replied in kind, never
defended themselves against her.  They turned their shoulders to her most
savage slashes, and with wagging tails and mincing steps strove to
placate her wrath.  But if they were all mildness toward her, they were
all fierceness toward one another.  The three-year-old grew too ambitious
in his fierceness.  He caught the one-eyed elder on his blind side and
ripped his ear into ribbons.  Though the grizzled old fellow could see
only on one side, against the youth and vigour of the other he brought
into play the wisdom of long years of experience.  His lost eye and his
scarred muzzle bore evidence to the nature of his experience.  He had
survived too many battles to be in doubt for a moment about what to do.

The battle began fairly, but it did not end fairly.  There was no telling
what the outcome would have been, for the third wolf joined the elder,
and together, old leader and young leader, they attacked the ambitious
three-year-old and proceeded to destroy him.  He was beset on either side
by the merciless fangs of his erstwhile comrades.  Forgotten were the
days they had hunted together, the game they had pulled down, the famine
they had suffered.  That business was a thing of the past.  The business
of love was at hand--ever a sterner and crueller business than that of
food-getting.

And in the meanwhile, the she-wolf, the cause of it all, sat down
contentedly on her haunches and watched.  She was even pleased.  This was
her day--and it came not often--when manes bristled, and fang smote fang
or ripped and tore the yielding flesh, all for the possession of her.

And in the business of love the three-year-old, who had made this his
first adventure upon it, yielded up his life.  On either side of his body
stood his two rivals.  They were gazing at the she-wolf, who sat smiling
in the snow.  But the elder leader was wise, very wise, in love even as
in battle.  The younger leader turned his head to lick a wound on his
shoulder.  The curve of his neck was turned toward his rival.  With his
one eye the elder saw the opportunity.  He darted in low and closed with
his fangs.  It was a long, ripping slash, and deep as well.  His teeth,
in passing, burst the wall of the great vein of the throat.  Then he
leaped clear.

The young leader snarled terribly, but his snarl broke midmost into a
tickling cough.  Bleeding and coughing, already stricken, he sprang at
the elder and fought while life faded from him, his legs going weak
beneath him, the light of day dulling on his eyes, his blows and springs
falling shorter and shorter.

And all the while the she-wolf sat on her haunches and smiled.  She was
made glad in vague ways by the battle, for this was the love-making of
the Wild, the sex-tragedy of the natural world that was tragedy only to
those that died.  To those that survived it was not tragedy, but
realisation and achievement.

When the young leader lay in the snow and moved no more, One Eye stalked
over to the she-wolf.  His carriage was one of mingled triumph and
caution.  He was plainly expectant of a rebuff, and he was just as
plainly surprised when her teeth did not flash out at him in anger.  For
the first time she met him with a kindly manner.  She sniffed noses with
him, and even condescended to leap about and frisk and play with him in
quite puppyish fashion.  And he, for all his grey years and sage
experience, behaved quite as puppyishly and even a little more foolishly.

Forgotten already were the vanquished rivals and the love-tale
red-written on the snow.  Forgotten, save once, when old One Eye stopped
for a moment to lick his stiffening wounds.  Then it was that his lips
half writhed into a snarl, and the hair of his neck and shoulders
involuntarily bristled, while he half crouched for a spring, his claws
spasmodically clutching into the snow-surface for firmer footing.  But it
was all forgotten the next moment, as he sprang after the she-wolf, who
was coyly leading him a chase through the woods.

After that they ran side by side, like good friends who have come to an
understanding.  The days passed by, and they kept together, hunting their
meat and killing and eating it in common.  After a time the she-wolf
began to grow restless.  She seemed to be searching for something that
she could not find.  The hollows under fallen trees seemed to attract
her, and she spent much time nosing about among the larger snow-piled
crevices in the rocks and in the caves of overhanging banks.  Old One Eye
was not interested at all, but he followed her good-naturedly in her
quest, and when her investigations in particular places were unusually
protracted, he would lie down and wait until she was ready to go on.

They did not remain in one place, but travelled across country until they
regained the Mackenzie River, down which they slowly went, leaving it
often to hunt game along the small streams that entered it, but always
returning to it again.  Sometimes they chanced upon other wolves, usually
in pairs; but there was no friendliness of intercourse displayed on
either side, no gladness at meeting, no desire to return to the
pack-formation.  Several times they encountered solitary wolves.  These
were always males, and they were pressingly insistent on joining with One
Eye and his mate.  This he resented, and when she stood shoulder to
shoulder with him, bristling and showing her teeth, the aspiring solitary
ones would back off, turn-tail, and continue on their lonely way.

One moonlight night, running through the quiet forest, One Eye suddenly
halted.  His muzzle went up, his tail stiffened, and his nostrils dilated
as he scented the air.  One foot also he held up, after the manner of a
dog.  He was not satisfied, and he continued to smell the air, striving
to understand the message borne upon it to him.  One careless sniff had
satisfied his mate, and she trotted on to reassure him.  Though he
followed her, he was still dubious, and he could not forbear an
occasional halt in order more carefully to study the warning.

She crept out cautiously on the edge of a large open space in the midst
of the trees.  For some time she stood alone.  Then One Eye, creeping and
crawling, every sense on the alert, every hair radiating infinite
suspicion, joined her.  They stood side by side, watching and listening
and smelling.

To their ears came the sounds of dogs wrangling and scuffling, the
guttural cries of men, the sharper voices of scolding women, and once the
shrill and plaintive cry of a child.  With the exception of the huge
bulks of the skin-lodges, little could be seen save the flames of the
fire, broken by the movements of intervening bodies, and the smoke rising
slowly on the quiet air.  But to their nostrils came the myriad smells of
an Indian camp, carrying a story that was largely incomprehensible to One
Eye, but every detail of which the she-wolf knew.

She was strangely stirred, and sniffed and sniffed with an increasing
delight.  But old One Eye was doubtful.  He betrayed his apprehension,
and started tentatively to go.  She turned and touched his neck with her
muzzle in a reassuring way, then regarded the camp again.  A new
wistfulness was in her face, but it was not the wistfulness of hunger.
She was thrilling to a desire that urged her to go forward, to be in
closer to that fire, to be squabbling with the dogs, and to be avoiding
and dodging the stumbling feet of men.

One Eye moved impatiently beside her; her unrest came back upon her, and
she knew again her pressing need to find the thing for which she
searched.  She turned and trotted back into the forest, to the great
relief of One Eye, who trotted a little to the fore until they were well
within the shelter of the trees.

As they slid along, noiseless as shadows, in the moonlight, they came
upon a run-way.  Both noses went down to the footprints in the snow.
These footprints were very fresh.  One Eye ran ahead cautiously, his mate
at his heels.  The broad pads of their feet were spread wide and in
contact with the snow were like velvet.  One Eye caught sight of a dim
movement of white in the midst of the white.  His sliding gait had been
deceptively swift, but it was as nothing to the speed at which he now
ran.  Before him was bounding the faint patch of white he had discovered.

They were running along a narrow alley flanked on either side by a growth
of young spruce.  Through the trees the mouth of the alley could be seen,
opening out on a moonlit glade.  Old One Eye was rapidly overhauling the
fleeing shape of white.  Bound by bound he gained.  Now he was upon it.
One leap more and his teeth would be sinking into it.  But that leap was
never made.  High in the air, and straight up, soared the shape of white,
now a struggling snowshoe rabbit that leaped and bounded, executing a
fantastic dance there above him in the air and never once returning to
earth.

One Eye sprang back with a snort of sudden fright, then shrank down to
the snow and crouched, snarling threats at this thing of fear he did not
understand.  But the she-wolf coolly thrust past him.  She poised for a
moment, then sprang for the dancing rabbit.  She, too, soared high, but
not so high as the quarry, and her teeth clipped emptily together with a
metallic snap.  She made another leap, and another.

Her mate had slowly relaxed from his crouch and was watching her.  He now
evinced displeasure at her repeated failures, and himself made a mighty
spring upward.  His teeth closed upon the rabbit, and he bore it back to
earth with him.  But at the same time there was a suspicious crackling
movement beside him, and his astonished eye saw a young spruce sapling
bending down above him to strike him.  His jaws let go their grip, and he
leaped backward to escape this strange danger, his lips drawn back from
his fangs, his throat snarling, every hair bristling with rage and
fright.  And in that moment the sapling reared its slender length upright
and the rabbit soared dancing in the air again.

The she-wolf was angry.  She sank her fangs into her mate's shoulder in
reproof; and he, frightened, unaware of what constituted this new
onslaught, struck back ferociously and in still greater fright, ripping
down the side of the she-wolf's muzzle.  For him to resent such reproof
was equally unexpected to her, and she sprang upon him in snarling
indignation.  Then he discovered his mistake and tried to placate her.
But she proceeded to punish him roundly, until he gave over all attempts
at placation, and whirled in a circle, his head away from her, his
shoulders receiving the punishment of her teeth.

In the meantime the rabbit danced above them in the air.  The she-wolf
sat down in the snow, and old One Eye, now more in fear of his mate than
of the mysterious sapling, again sprang for the rabbit.  As he sank back
with it between his teeth, he kept his eye on the sapling.  As before, it
followed him back to earth.  He crouched down under the impending blow,
his hair bristling, but his teeth still keeping tight hold of the rabbit.
But the blow did not fall.  The sapling remained bent above him.  When he
moved it moved, and he growled at it through his clenched jaws; when he
remained still, it remained still, and he concluded it was safer to
continue remaining still.  Yet the warm blood of the rabbit tasted good
in his mouth.

It was his mate who relieved him from the quandary in which he found
himself.  She took the rabbit from him, and while the sapling swayed and
teetered threateningly above her she calmly gnawed off the rabbit's head.
At once the sapling shot up, and after that gave no more trouble,
remaining in the decorous and perpendicular position in which nature had
intended it to grow.  Then, between them, the she-wolf and One Eye
devoured the game which the mysterious sapling had caught for them.

There were other run-ways and alleys where rabbits were hanging in the
air, and the wolf-pair prospected them all, the she-wolf leading the way,
old One Eye following and observant, learning the method of robbing
snares--a knowledge destined to stand him in good stead in the days to
come.




For two days the she-wolf and One Eye hung about the Indian camp.  He was
worried and apprehensive, yet the camp lured his mate and she was loath
to depart.  But when, one morning, the air was rent with the report of a
rifle close at hand, and a bullet smashed against a tree trunk several
inches from One Eye's head, they hesitated no more, but went off on a
long, swinging lope that put quick miles between them and the danger.

They did not go far--a couple of days' journey.  The she-wolf's need to
find the thing for which she searched had now become imperative.  She was
getting very heavy, and could run but slowly.  Once, in the pursuit of a
rabbit, which she ordinarily would have caught with ease, she gave over
and lay down and rested.  One Eye came to her; but when he touched her
neck gently with his muzzle she snapped at him with such quick fierceness
that he tumbled over backward and cut a ridiculous figure in his effort
to escape her teeth.  Her temper was now shorter than ever; but he had
become more patient than ever and more solicitous.

And then she found the thing for which she sought.  It was a few miles up
a small stream that in the summer time flowed into the Mackenzie, but
that then was frozen over and frozen down to its rocky bottom--a dead
stream of solid white from source to mouth.  The she-wolf was trotting
wearily along, her mate well in advance, when she came upon the
overhanging, high clay-bank.  She turned aside and trotted over to it.
The wear and tear of spring storms and melting snows had underwashed the
bank and in one place had made a small cave out of a narrow fissure.

She paused at the mouth of the cave and looked the wall over carefully.
Then, on one side and the other, she ran along the base of the wall to
where its abrupt bulk merged from the softer-lined landscape.  Returning
to the cave, she entered its narrow mouth.  For a short three feet she
was compelled to crouch, then the walls widened and rose higher in a
little round chamber nearly six feet in diameter.  The roof barely
cleared her head.  It was dry and cosey.  She inspected it with
painstaking care, while One Eye, who had returned, stood in the entrance
and patiently watched her.  She dropped her head, with her nose to the
ground and directed toward a point near to her closely bunched feet, and
around this point she circled several times; then, with a tired sigh that
was almost a grunt, she curled her body in, relaxed her legs, and dropped
down, her head toward the entrance.  One Eye, with pointed, interested
ears, laughed at her, and beyond, outlined against the white light, she
could see the brush of his tail waving good-naturedly.  Her own ears,
with a snuggling movement, laid their sharp points backward and down
against the head for a moment, while her mouth opened and her tongue
lolled peaceably out, and in this way she expressed that she was pleased
and satisfied.

One Eye was hungry.  Though he lay down in the entrance and slept, his
sleep was fitful.  He kept awaking and cocking his ears at the bright
world without, where the April sun was blazing across the snow.  When he
dozed, upon his ears would steal the faint whispers of hidden trickles of
running water, and he would rouse and listen intently.  The sun had come
back, and all the awakening Northland world was calling to him.  Life was
stirring.  The feel of spring was in the air, the feel of growing life
under the snow, of sap ascending in the trees, of buds bursting the
shackles of the frost.

He cast anxious glances at his mate, but she showed no desire to get up.
He looked outside, and half a dozen snow-birds fluttered across his field
of vision.  He started to get up, then looked back to his mate again, and
settled down and dozed.  A shrill and minute singing stole upon his
hearing.  Once, and twice, he sleepily brushed his nose with his paw.
Then he woke up.  There, buzzing in the air at the tip of his nose, was a
lone mosquito.  It was a full-grown mosquito, one that had lain frozen in
a dry log all winter and that had now been thawed out by the sun.  He
could resist the call of the world no longer.  Besides, he was hungry.

He crawled over to his mate and tried to persuade her to get up.  But she
only snarled at him, and he walked out alone into the bright sunshine to
find the snow-surface soft under foot and the travelling difficult.  He
went up the frozen bed of the stream, where the snow, shaded by the
trees, was yet hard and crystalline.  He was gone eight hours, and he
came back through the darkness hungrier than when he had started.  He had
found game, but he had not caught it.  He had broken through the melting
snow crust, and wallowed, while the snowshoe rabbits had skimmed along on
top lightly as ever.

He paused at the mouth of the cave with a sudden shock of suspicion.
Faint, strange sounds came from within.  They were sounds not made by his
mate, and yet they were remotely familiar.  He bellied cautiously inside
and was met by a warning snarl from the she-wolf.  This he received
without perturbation, though he obeyed it by keeping his distance; but he
remained interested in the other sounds--faint, muffled sobbings and
slubberings.

His mate warned him irritably away, and he curled up and slept in the
entrance.  When morning came and a dim light pervaded the lair, he again
sought after the source of the remotely familiar sounds.  There was a new
note in his mate's warning snarl.  It was a jealous note, and he was very
careful in keeping a respectful distance.  Nevertheless, he made out,
sheltering between her legs against the length of her body, five strange
little bundles of life, very feeble, very helpless, making tiny
whimpering noises, with eyes that did not open to the light.  He was
surprised.  It was not the first time in his long and successful life
that this thing had happened.  It had happened many times, yet each time
it was as fresh a surprise as ever to him.

His mate looked at him anxiously.  Every little while she emitted a low
growl, and at times, when it seemed to her he approached too near, the
growl shot up in her throat to a sharp snarl.  Of her own experience she
had no memory of the thing happening; but in her instinct, which was the
experience of all the mothers of wolves, there lurked a memory of fathers
that had eaten their new-born and helpless progeny.  It manifested itself
as a fear strong within her, that made her prevent One Eye from more
closely inspecting the cubs he had fathered.

But there was no danger.  Old One Eye was feeling the urge of an impulse,
that was, in turn, an instinct that had come down to him from all the
fathers of wolves.  He did not question it, nor puzzle over it.  It was
there, in the fibre of his being; and it was the most natural thing in
the world that he should obey it by turning his back on his new-born
family and by trotting out and away on the meat-trail whereby he lived.

Five or six miles from the lair, the stream divided, its forks going off
among the mountains at a right angle.  Here, leading up the left fork, he
came upon a fresh track.  He smelled it and found it so recent that he
crouched swiftly, and looked in the direction in which it disappeared.
Then he turned deliberately and took the right fork.  The footprint was
much larger than the one his own feet made, and he knew that in the wake
of such a trail there was little meat for him.

Half a mile up the right fork, his quick ears caught the sound of gnawing
teeth.  He stalked the quarry and found it to be a porcupine, standing
upright against a tree and trying his teeth on the bark.  One Eye
approached carefully but hopelessly.  He knew the breed, though he had
never met it so far north before; and never in his long life had
porcupine served him for a meal.  But he had long since learned that
there was such a thing as Chance, or Opportunity, and he continued to
draw near.  There was never any telling what might happen, for with live
things events were somehow always happening differently.

The porcupine rolled itself into a ball, radiating long, sharp needles in
all directions that defied attack.  In his youth One Eye had once sniffed
too near a similar, apparently inert ball of quills, and had the tail
flick out suddenly in his face.  One quill he had carried away in his
muzzle, where it had remained for weeks, a rankling flame, until it
finally worked out.  So he lay down, in a comfortable crouching position,
his nose fully a foot away, and out of the line of the tail.  Thus he
waited, keeping perfectly quiet.  There was no telling.  Something might
happen.  The porcupine might unroll.  There might be opportunity for a
deft and ripping thrust of paw into the tender, unguarded belly.

But at the end of half an hour he arose, growled wrathfully at the
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.




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
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.




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 were 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
weakly in an attempt at a ferocious and intimidating snarl.  Out of his
puniness and fright he challenged and menaced the whole wide world.

Nothing happened.  He continued to gaze, and in his interest he forgot to
snarl.  Also, he forgot to be afraid.  For the time, fear had been routed
by growth, while growth had assumed the guise of curiosity.  He began to
notice near objects--an open portion of the stream that flashed in the
sun, the blasted pine-tree that stood at the base of the slope, and the
slope itself, that ran right up to him and ceased two feet beneath the
lip of the cave on which he crouched.

Now the grey cub had lived all his days on a level floor.  He had never
experienced the hurt of a fall.  He did not know what a fall was.  So he
stepped boldly out upon the air.  His hind-legs still rested on the cave-
lip, so he fell forward head downward.  The earth struck him a harsh blow
on the nose that made him yelp.  Then he began rolling down the slope,
over and over.  He was in a panic of terror.  The unknown had caught him
at last.  It had gripped savagely hold of him and was about to wreak upon
him some terrific hurt.  Growth was now routed by fear, and he ki-yi'd
like any frightened puppy.

The unknown bore him on he knew not to what frightful hurt, and he yelped
and ki-yi'd unceasingly.  This was a different proposition from crouching
in frozen fear while the unknown lurked just alongside.  Now the unknown
had caught tight hold of him.  Silence would do no good.  Besides, it was
not fear, but terror, that convulsed him.

But the slope grew more gradual, and its base was grass-covered.  Here
the cub lost momentum.  When at last he came to a stop, he gave one last
agonised yell and then a long, whimpering wail.  Also, and quite as a
matter of course, as though in his life he had already made a thousand
toilets, he proceeded to lick away the dry clay that soiled him.

After that he sat up and gazed about him, as might the first man of the
earth who landed upon Mars.  The cub had broken through the wall of the
world, the unknown had let go its hold of him, and here he was without
hurt.  But the first man on Mars would have experienced less
unfamiliarity than did he.  Without any antecedent knowledge, without any
warning whatever that such existed, he found himself an explorer in a
totally new world.

Now that the terrible unknown had let go of him, he forgot that the
unknown had any terrors.  He was aware only of curiosity in all the
things about him.  He inspected the grass beneath him, the moss-berry
plant just beyond, and the dead trunk of the blasted pine that stood on
the edge of an open space among the trees.  A squirrel, running around
the base of the trunk, came full upon him, and gave him a great fright.
He cowered down and snarled.  But the squirrel was as badly scared.  It
ran up the tree, and from a point of safety chattered back savagely.

This helped the cub's courage, and though the woodpecker he next
encountered gave him a start, he proceeded confidently on his way.  Such
was his confidence, that when a moose-bird impudently hopped up to him,
he reached out at it with a playful paw.  The result was a sharp peck on
the end of his nose that made him cower down and ki-yi.  The noise he
made was too much for the moose-bird, who sought safety in flight.

But the cub was learning.  His misty little mind had already made an
unconscious classification.  There were live things and things not alive.
Also, he must watch out for the live things.  The things not alive
remained always in one place, but the live things moved about, and there
was no telling what they might do.  The thing to expect of them was the
unexpected, and for this he must be prepared.

He travelled very clumsily.  He ran into sticks and things.  A twig that
he thought a long way off, would the next instant hit him on the nose or
rake along his ribs.  There were inequalities of surface.  Sometimes he
overstepped and stubbed his nose.  Quite as often he understepped and
stubbed his feet.  Then there were the pebbles and stones that turned
under him when he trod upon them; and from them he came to know that the
things not alive were not all in the same state of stable equilibrium as
was his cave--also, that small things not alive were more liable than
large things to fall down or turn over.  But with every mishap he was
learning.  The longer he walked, the better he walked.  He was adjusting
himself.  He was learning to calculate his own muscular movements, to
know his physical limitations, to measure distances between objects, and
between objects and himself.

His was the luck of the beginner.  Born to be a hunter of meat (though he
did not know it), he blundered upon meat just outside his own cave-door
on his first foray into the world.  It was by sheer blundering that he
chanced upon the shrewdly hidden ptarmigan nest.  He fell into it.  He
had essayed to walk along the trunk of a fallen pine.  The rotten bark
gave way under his feet, and with a despairing yelp he pitched down the
rounded crescent, smashed through the leafage and stalks of a small bush,
and in the heart of the bush, on the ground, fetched up in the midst of
seven ptarmigan chicks.

They made noises, and at first he was frightened at them.  Then he
perceived that they were very little, and he became bolder.  They moved.
He placed his paw on one, and its movements were accelerated.  This was a
source of enjoyment to him.  He smelled it.  He picked it up in his
mouth.  It struggled and tickled his tongue.  At the same time he was
made aware of a sensation of hunger.  His jaws closed together.  There
was a crunching of fragile bones, and warm blood ran in his mouth.  The
taste of it was good.  This was meat, the same as his mother gave him,
only it was alive between his teeth and therefore better.  So he ate the
ptarmigan.  Nor did he stop till he had devoured the whole brood.  Then
he licked his chops in quite the same way his mother did, and began to
crawl out of the bush.

He encountered a feathered whirlwind.  He was confused and blinded by the
rush of it and the beat of angry wings.  He hid his head between his paws
and yelped.  The blows increased.  The mother ptarmigan was in a fury.
Then he became angry.  He rose up, snarling, striking out with his paws.
He sank his tiny teeth into one of the wings and pulled and tugged
sturdily.  The ptarmigan struggled against him, showering blows upon him
with her free wing.  It was his first battle.  He was elated.  He forgot
all about the unknown.  He no longer was afraid of anything.  He was
fighting, tearing at a live thing that was striking at him.  Also, this
live thing was meat.  The lust to kill was on him.  He had just destroyed
little live things.  He would now destroy a big live thing.  He was too
busy and happy to know that he was happy.  He was thrilling and exulting
in ways new to him and greater to him than any he had known before.

He held on to the wing and growled between his tight-clenched teeth.  The
ptarmigan dragged him out of the bush.  When she turned and tried to drag
him back into the bush's shelter, he pulled her away from it and on into
the open.  And all the time she was making outcry and striking with her
free wing, while feathers were flying like a snow-fall.  The pitch to
which he was aroused was tremendous.  All the fighting blood of his breed
was up in him and surging through him.  This was living, though he did
not know it.  He was realising his own meaning in the world; he was doing
that for which he was made--killing meat and battling to kill it.  He was
justifying his existence, than which life can do no greater; for life
achieves its summit when it does to the uttermost that which it was
equipped to do.

After a time, the ptarmigan ceased her struggling.  He still held her by
the wing, and they lay on the ground and looked at each other.  He tried
to growl threateningly, ferociously.  She pecked on his nose, which by
now, what of previous adventures was sore.  He winced but held on.  She
pecked him again and again.  From wincing he went to whimpering.  He
tried to back away from her, oblivious to the fact that by his hold on
her he dragged her after him.  A rain of pecks fell on his ill-used nose.
The flood of fight ebbed down in him, and, releasing his prey, he turned
tail and scampered on across the open in inglorious retreat.

He lay down to rest on the other side of the open, near the edge of the
bushes, his tongue lolling out, his chest heaving and panting, his nose
still hurting him and causing him to continue his whimper.  But as he lay
there, suddenly there came to him a feeling as of something terrible
impending.  The unknown with all its terrors rushed upon him, and he
shrank back instinctively into the shelter of the bush.  As he did so, a
draught of air fanned him, and a large, winged body swept ominously and
silently past.  A hawk, driving down out of the blue, had barely missed
him.

While he lay in the bush, recovering from his fright and peering
fearfully out, the mother-ptarmigan on the other side of the open space
fluttered out of the ravaged nest.  It was because of her loss that she
paid no attention to the winged bolt of the sky.  But the cub saw, and it
was a warning and a lesson to him--the swift downward swoop of the hawk,
the short skim of its body just above the ground, the strike of its
talons in the body of the ptarmigan, the ptarmigan's squawk of agony and
fright, and the hawk's rush upward into the blue, carrying the ptarmigan
away with it

It was a long time before the cub left its shelter.  He had learned much.
Live things were meat.  They were good to eat.  Also, live things when
they were large enough, could give hurt.  It was better to eat small live
things like ptarmigan chicks, and to let alone large live things like
ptarmigan hens.  Nevertheless he felt a little prick of ambition, a
sneaking desire to have another battle with that ptarmigan hen--only the
hawk had carried her away.  Maybe there were other ptarmigan hens.  He
would go and see.

He came down a shelving bank to the stream.  He had never seen water
before.  The footing looked good.  There were no inequalities of surface.
He stepped boldly out on it; and went down, crying with fear, into the
embrace of the unknown.  It was cold, and he gasped, breathing quickly.
The water rushed into his lungs instead of the air that had always
accompanied his act of breathing.  The suffocation he experienced was
like the pang of death.  To him it signified death.  He had no conscious
knowledge of death, but like every animal of the Wild, he possessed the
instinct of death.  To him it stood as the greatest of hurts.  It was the
very essence of the unknown; it was the sum of the terrors of the
unknown, the one culminating and unthinkable catastrophe that could
happen to him, about which he knew nothing and about which he feared
everything.

He came to the surface, and the sweet air rushed into his open mouth.  He
did not go down again.  Quite as though it had been a long-established
custom of his he struck out with all his legs and began to swim.  The
near bank was a yard away; but he had come up with his back to it, and
the first thing his eyes rested upon was the opposite bank, toward which
he immediately began to swim.  The stream was a small one, but in the
pool it widened out to a score of feet.

Midway in the passage, the current picked up the cub and swept him
downstream.  He was caught in the miniature rapid at the bottom of the
pool.  Here was little chance for swimming.  The quiet water had become
suddenly angry.  Sometimes he was under, sometimes on top.  At all times
he was in violent motion, now being turned over or around, and again,
being smashed against a rock.  And with every rock he struck, he yelped.
His progress was a series of yelps, from which might have been adduced
the number of rocks he encountered.

Below the rapid was a second pool, and here, captured by the eddy, he was
gently borne to the bank, and as gently deposited on a bed of gravel.  He
crawled frantically clear of the water and lay down.  He had learned some
more about the world.  Water was not alive.  Yet it moved.  Also, it
looked as solid as the earth, but was without any solidity at all.  His
conclusion was that things were not always what they appeared to be.  The
cub's fear of the unknown was an inherited distrust, and it had now been
strengthened by experience.  Thenceforth, in the nature of things, he
would possess an abiding distrust of appearances.  He would have to learn
the reality of a thing before he could put his faith into it.

One other adventure was destined for him that day.  He had recollected
that there was such a thing in the world as his mother.  And then there
came to him a feeling that he wanted her more than all the rest of the
things in the world.  Not only was his body tired with the adventures it
had undergone, but his little brain was equally tired.  In all the days
he had lived it had not worked so hard as on this one day.  Furthermore,
he was sleepy.  So he started out to look for the cave and his mother,
feeling at the same time an overwhelming rush of loneliness and
helplessness.

He was sprawling along between some bushes, when he heard a sharp
intimidating cry.  There was a flash of yellow before his eyes.  He saw a
weasel leaping swiftly away from him.  It was a small live thing, and he
had no fear.  Then, before him, at his feet, he saw an extremely small
live thing, only several inches long, a young weasel, that, like himself,
had disobediently gone out adventuring.  It tried to retreat before him.
He turned it over with his paw.  It made a queer, grating noise.  The
next moment the flash of yellow reappeared before his eyes.  He heard
again the intimidating cry, and at the same instant received a sharp blow
on the side of the neck and felt the sharp teeth of the mother-weasel cut
into his flesh.

While he yelped and ki-yi'd and scrambled backward, he saw the mother-
weasel leap upon her young one and disappear with it into the
neighbouring thicket.  The cut of her teeth in his neck still hurt, but
his feelings were hurt more grievously, and he sat down and weakly
whimpered.  This mother-weasel was so small and so savage.  He was yet to
learn that for size and weight the weasel was the most ferocious,
vindictive, and terrible of all the killers of the Wild.  But a portion
of this knowledge was quickly to be his.

He was still whimpering when the mother-weasel reappeared.  She did not
rush him, now that her young one was safe.  She approached more
cautiously, and the cub had full opportunity to observe her lean,
snakelike body, and her head, erect, eager, and snake-like itself.  Her
sharp, menacing cry sent the hair bristling along his back, and he
snarled warningly at her.  She came closer and closer.  There was a leap,
swifter than his unpractised sight, and the lean, yellow body disappeared
for a moment out of the field of his vision.  The next moment she was at
his throat, her teeth buried in his hair and flesh.

At first he snarled and tried to fight; but he was very young, and this
was only his first day in the world, and his snarl became a whimper, his
fight a struggle to escape.  The weasel never relaxed her hold.  She hung
on, striving to press down with her teeth to the great vein where his
life-blood bubbled.  The weasel was a drinker of blood, and it was ever
her preference to drink from the throat of life itself.

The grey cub would have died, and there would have been no story to write
about him, had not the she-wolf come bounding through the bushes.  The
weasel let go the cub and flashed at the she-wolf's throat, missing, but
getting a hold on the jaw instead.  The she-wolf flirted her head like
the snap of a whip, breaking the weasel's hold and flinging it high in
the air.  And, still in the air, the she-wolf's jaws closed on the lean,
yellow body, and the weasel knew death between the crunching teeth.

The cub experienced another access of affection on the part of his
mother.  Her joy at finding him seemed even greater than his joy at being
found.  She nozzled him and caressed him and licked the cuts made in him
by the weasel's teeth.  Then, between them, mother and cub, they ate the
blood-drinker, and after that went back to the cave and slept.




The cub's development was rapid.  He rested for two days, and then
ventured forth from the cave again.  It was on this adventure that he
found the young weasel whose mother he had helped eat, and he saw to it
that the young weasel went the way of its mother.  But on this trip he
did not get lost.  When he grew tired, he found his way back to the cave
and slept.  And every day thereafter found him out and ranging a wider
area.

He began to get accurate measurement of his strength and his weakness,
and to know when to be bold and when to be cautious.  He found it
expedient to be cautious all the time, except for the rare moments, when,
assured of his own intrepidity, he abandoned himself to petty rages and
lusts.

He was always a little demon of fury when he chanced upon a stray
ptarmigan.  Never did he fail to respond savagely to the chatter of the
squirrel he had first met on the blasted pine.  While the sight of a
moose-bird almost invariably put him into the wildest of rages; for he
never forgot the peck on the nose he had received from the first of that
ilk he encountered.

But there were times when even a moose-bird failed to affect him, and
those were times when he felt himself to be in danger from some other
prowling meat hunter.  He never forgot the hawk, and its moving shadow
always sent him crouching into the nearest thicket.  He no longer
sprawled and straddled, and already he was developing the gait of his
mother, slinking and furtive, apparently without exertion, yet sliding
along with a swiftness that was as deceptive as it was imperceptible.

In the matter of meat, his luck had been all in the beginning.  The seven
ptarmigan chicks and the baby weasel represented the sum of his killings.
His desire to kill strengthened with the days, and he cherished hungry
ambitions for the squirrel that chattered so volubly and always informed
all wild creatures that the wolf-cub was approaching.  But as birds flew
in the air, squirrels could climb trees, and the cub could only try to
crawl unobserved upon the squirrel when it was on the ground.

The cub entertained a great respect for his mother.  She could get meat,
and she never failed to bring him his share.  Further, she was unafraid
of things.  It did not occur to him that this fearlessness was founded
upon experience and knowledge.  Its effect on him was that of an
impression of power.  His mother represented power; and as he grew older
he felt this power in the sharper admonishment of her paw; while the
reproving nudge of her nose gave place to the slash of her fangs.  For
this, likewise, he respected his mother.  She compelled obedience from
him, and the older he grew the shorter grew her temper.

Famine came again, and the cub with clearer consciousness knew once more
the bite of hunger.  The she-wolf ran herself thin in the quest for meat.
She rarely slept any more in the cave, spending most of her time on the
meat-trail, and spending it vainly.  This famine was not a long one, but
it was severe while it lasted.  The cub found no more milk in his
mother's breast, nor did he get one mouthful of meat for himself.

Before, he had hunted in play, for the sheer joyousness of it; now he
hunted in deadly earnestness, and found nothing.  Yet the failure of it
accelerated his development.  He studied the habits of the squirrel with
greater carefulness, and strove with greater craft to steal upon it and
surprise it.  He studied the wood-mice and tried to dig them out of their
burrows; and he learned much about the ways of moose-birds and
woodpeckers.  And there came a day when the hawk's shadow did not drive
him crouching into the bushes.  He had grown stronger and wiser, and more
confident.  Also, he was desperate.  So he sat on his haunches,
conspicuously in an open space, and challenged the hawk down out of the
sky.  For he knew that there, floating in the blue above him, was meat,
the meat his stomach yearned after so insistently.  But the hawk refused
to come down and give battle, and the cub crawled away into a thicket and
whimpered his disappointment and hunger.

The famine broke.  The she-wolf brought home meat.  It was strange meat,
different from any she had ever brought before.  It was a lynx kitten,
partly grown, like the cub, but not so large.  And it was all for him.
His mother had satisfied her hunger elsewhere; though he did not know
that it was the rest of the lynx litter that had gone to satisfy her.  Nor
did he know the desperateness of her deed.  He knew only that the velvet-
furred kitten was meat, and he ate and waxed happier with every mouthful.

A full stomach conduces to inaction, and the cub lay in the cave,
sleeping against his mother's side.  He was aroused by her snarling.
Never had he heard her snarl so terribly.  Possibly in her whole life it
was the most terrible snarl she ever gave.  There was reason for it, and
none knew it better than she.  A lynx's lair is not despoiled with
impunity.  In the full glare of the afternoon light, crouching in the
entrance of the cave, the cub saw the lynx-mother.  The hair rippled up
along his back at the sight.  Here was fear, and it did not require his
instinct to tell him of it.  And if sight alone were not sufficient, the
cry of rage the intruder gave, beginning with a snarl and rushing
abruptly upward into a hoarse screech, was convincing enough in itself.

The cub felt the prod of the life that was in him, and stood up and
snarled valiantly by his mother's side.  But she thrust him ignominiously
away and behind her.  Because of the low-roofed entrance the lynx could
not leap in, and when she made a crawling rush of it the she-wolf sprang
upon her and pinned her down.  The cub saw little of the battle.  There
was a tremendous snarling and spitting and screeching.  The two animals
threshed about, the lynx ripping and tearing with her claws and using her
teeth as well, while the she-wolf used her teeth alone.

Once, the cub sprang in and sank his teeth into the hind leg of the lynx.
He clung on, growling savagely.  Though he did not know it, by the weight
of his body he clogged the action of the leg and thereby saved his mother
much damage.  A change in the battle crushed him under both their bodies
and wrenched loose his hold.  The next moment the two mothers separated,
and, before they rushed together again, the lynx lashed out at the cub
with a huge fore-paw that ripped his shoulder open to the bone and sent
him hurtling sidewise against the wall.  Then was added to the uproar the
cub's shrill yelp of pain and fright.  But the fight lasted so long that
he had time to cry himself out and to experience a second burst of
courage; and the end of the battle found him again clinging to a hind-leg
and furiously growling between his teeth.

The lynx was dead.  But the she-wolf was very weak and sick.  At first
she caressed the cub and licked his wounded shoulder; but the blood she
had lost had taken with it her strength, and for all of a day and a night
she lay by her dead foe's side, without movement, scarcely breathing.  For
a week she never left the cave, except for water, and then her movements
were slow and painful.  At the end of that time the lynx was devoured,
while the she-wolf's wounds had healed sufficiently to permit her to take
the meat-trail again.

The cub's shoulder was stiff and sore, and for some time he limped from
the terrible slash he had received.  But the world now seemed changed.  He
went about in it with greater confidence, with a feeling of prowess that
had not been his in the days before the battle with the lynx.  He had
looked upon life in a more ferocious aspect; he had fought; he had buried
his teeth in the flesh of a foe; and he had survived.  And because of all
this, he carried himself more boldly, with a touch of defiance that was
new in him.  He was no longer afraid of minor things, and much of his
timidity had vanished, though the unknown never ceased to press upon him
with its mysteries and terrors, intangible and ever-menacing.

He began to accompany his mother on the meat-trail, and he saw much of
the killing of meat and began to play his part in it.  And in his own dim
way he learned the law of meat.  There were two kinds of life--his own
kind and the other kind.  His own kind included his mother and himself.
The other kind included all live things that moved.  But the other kind
was divided.  One portion was what his own kind killed and ate.  This
portion was composed of the non-killers and the small killers.  The other
portion killed and ate his own kind, or was killed and eaten by his own
kind.  And out of this classification arose the law.  The aim of life was
meat.  Life itself was meat.  Life lived on life.  There were the eaters
and the eaten.  The law was: EAT OR BE EATEN.  He did not formulate the
law in clear, set terms and moralise about it.  He did not even think the
law; he merely lived the law without thinking about it at all.

He saw the law operating around him on every side.  He had eaten the
ptarmigan chicks.  The hawk had eaten the ptarmigan-mother.  The hawk
would also have eaten him.  Later, when he had grown more formidable, he
wanted to eat the hawk.  He had eaten the lynx kitten.  The lynx-mother
would have eaten him had she not herself been killed and eaten.  And so
it went.  The law was being lived about him by all live things, and he
himself was part and parcel of the law.  He was a killer.  His only food
was meat, live meat, that ran away swiftly before him, or flew into the
air, or climbed trees, or hid in the ground, or faced him and fought with
him, or turned the tables and ran after him.

Had the cub thought in man-fashion, he might have epitomised life as a
voracious appetite and the world as a place wherein ranged a multitude of
appetites, pursuing and being pursued, hunting and being hunted, eating
and being eaten, all in blindness and confusion, with violence and
disorder, a chaos of gluttony and slaughter, ruled over by chance,
merciless, planless, endless.

But the cub did not think in man-fashion.  He did not look at things with
wide vision.  He was single-purposed, and entertained but one thought or
desire at a time.  Besides the law of meat, there were a myriad other and
lesser laws for him to learn and obey.  The world was filled with
surprise.  The stir of the life that was in him, the play of his muscles,
was an unending happiness.  To run down meat was to experience thrills
and elations.  His rages and battles were pleasures.  Terror itself, and
the mystery of the unknown, led to his living.

And there were easements and satisfactions.  To have a full stomach, to
doze lazily in the sunshine--such things were remuneration in full for
his ardours and toils, while his ardours and tolls were in themselves
self-remunerative.  They were expressions of life, and life is always
happy when it is expressing itself.  So the cub had no quarrel with his
hostile environment.  He was very much alive, very happy, and very proud
of himself.




PART III

 Part II begins as the wolves catch the sound of men's voices rescuing Henry. Here London makes a complete shift in the tone of the book as the narrative point of view is now that of the she-wolf. The wolves begin running over the "surface of a world frozen and dead," with a large gray wolf in the lead. The she-wolf stays with him and is joined by the one-eyed "guant old wolf, grizzled and marked with scars of many battles" and a young three-year-old wolf. All three male wolves many several advances on the she-wolf, all of which are rebuked with snarls or teeth. The wolf-pack travels for days before finding a big bull moose that provided a much needed meal. The pack now breaks in half and day by day, the group dwindles to only the three wolves and the she-wolf. Battles now begin for the female as she sits and watches quite contended. One-Eye emerges victorious and is met playfully the she-wolf. Now running side-by-side, they hunt, kill, and eat together. As they approach an Indian village the she-wolf becomes strangely stirred, almost wistful, but One-Eye is apprehensive, insisting they move on. The two wolves now run the countryside together; however the she-wolf is emotionally restless, searching for something she doesn't quite understand. Her body is becoming slower and she lacks stamina. At last they find what she has been looking for, a cave near a small river where the two wolves settle down. One-Eye goes out to look for food and upon returning hears "faint, strange sounds from within." Having experienced this many times in his life, One-Eye knows that the she-wolf has given birth to cubs. Nature takes over at this point and the mother becomes protective of the little ones, growling, snarling, and snapping at One-Eye, who instinctively goes on a hunt for food for his new family. "The urge of his awakened instinct of fatherhood was stirring upon him. He must find meat." Sensing danger from a porcupine, he is contented to capture a ptarmigin bird. However, fate was with him and on his return to the cave, he is able to reap the spoils of an encounter between a lynx and the porcupine. The food provided by One-Eye eases the fear the she-wolf has towards the father. The five wolf cubs begin to grow and develop but it is the gray cub who most closely resembles his father and their wolf heritage. He is also "the fiercest of the litter. The cubs major fascination is with the "wall of light," the way his father could disappear into the wall of light, and how his mother's slap with a paw kept him from it. This was also a time of famine and all the cubs died, with the exception of the gray cub stronger than the others, another example of London's recurring theme of survival of the fittest. His father no longer appears and disappears through the "wall of light." He had lost a fight with the lynx. The she-wolf is now forced to hunt for food for herself and her only remaining cub. The little cub, who has grown stronger and more adventuresome, is no longer content to stay in the lair alone and one day embarks out on his own. Outside the cave, he learns one of nature's most important lessons - fear - and returns gratefully to his cave. Each day he ventures a little further until at last his courage takes him to the edge of a small hill where he rolls and falls down the hill, beginning a great adventure. He is startled by a squirrel, a woodpecker and a moose bird. "Born to be a hunter of meat,' he quite serendipitously happens upon a nest of ptarmigan chicks. His first taste of blood, bones and meat is quite satisfying and he heads off to the banks of a small stream. This water is new to the cub and he cautiously wades through it until a current picks him up and takes him downstream. The last lesson the cub learns this day is that he wanted and needed his mother. "So he started to look for a cave and his mother, feeling at the same time an overwhelming rush of loneliness and helplessness." In the next instance, the cub finds his life jeopardized when he tangled with a mother weasel. He would have lost his life had his mother not appeared and is filled with overwhelming joy. Time passed and the cub grew in both stature and experience. But famine came again to the northland and both wolves became thin hunting for food. As a last resort, the mother wolf raids the lair of the lynx and feasts on the small lynx kittens. Not surprisingly, the mother lynx appears at the wolves' cave entrance. The she-wolf is no match for the lynx until the gray cub intervenes, grabbing the hind leg of the lynx between his teeth. Together, they subdue their adversary but the cost is high. The cub has a gash down to the bone on his shoulder and his mother is near death. For a week they are unable to leave their lair, but when they do the cub is now armed with knowledge of life. "Life itself is meat. Life lived on life. There were eaters and the eaten. The law was EAT OR BE EATEN."

