Chapter: 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

 One of the pups is stronger than the others, a little gray cub. He yearns for the light, and learns to find his mother's nose and paw and tongue. He drinks lots of milk and bits of half-digested food that his mother regurgitates for him. He is the fiercest of the litter, with a little rasping growl. The pup looks throughout the cave and decides that in the front of the cave there is a wall of light. He notices that his father can pass in and out of the wall , but doesn't wonder why his father can, and he cannot, he is simply content with what happens. There are famines, and One Eye has trouble finding food. One by one, his brothers and sisters die, until only he is left. Soon, only he and his mother are left, for One Eye gets in a fight with the lynx and is killed. When his mother starts to leave the cub in the cave while she goes and hunts, he at first does not approach the entrance because he is afraid. He knows he must be obedient to his mother, and also fears the unknown. However, as he grows older, the urge to explore becomes stronger and stronger, and he finally leaves the cave and tumbles down a little slope, scared. He kills a ptarmigan chick and is attacked by the mother, nearly misses being swooped up by a hawk, and falls in a stream. Finally he climbs out, only to be attacked by a weasel and just barely in time, is rescued by his mother. She kills the weasel, and they eat it. The cub ventures out again after two days, determined to learn more about the world, perhaps to get a squirrel or have another go at the ptarmigan. He learns to slink, he learns to stalk. When a famine comes again, he hunts alongside his mother. He even stands out in the open, daring the hawk to come down so he can attack it. The famine is broken when his mother brings home a lynx kitten. The cub feasts. The lynx, after discovering that her kits have been eaten, comes to the lair to attack the wolves. The cub watches while his mother and the lynx fight, and he leaps up and digs his teeth into the lynx a few times. Finally, the two wolves bring the lynx down. They are quite torn by the cat's claws, and stay in the lair and eat the lynx as they heal. The cub realizes the law of nature: EAT OR BE EATEN.

