[Previous page]...d 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 was
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, lent 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 ardors and toils, while his ardors and toils 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 THREE.
CHAPTER ONE.
The Makers of Fire.
THE CUB CAME UPON IT suddenly. It was his own fault. He had been
careless. He had left the cave and run down to the stream to drink. It
might have been that he took no notice because he was heavy with
sleep. (He had been out all night on the meat-trail, and had but
just then awakened.) And his carelessness might have been due to the
familiarity of the trail to the pool. He had traveled it often, and
nothing had ever happened on it.
He went down past the blasted pine, crossed the open space, and
trotted in amongst the trees. Then, at the same instant, he saw and
smelt. Before him, sitting silently on their haunches, were five
live things, the like of which he had never seen before. It was his
first glimpse of mankind. But at the sight of him the five men did not
spring to their feet, nor show their teeth, nor snarl. They did not
move, but sat there, silent and ominous.
Nor did the cub move. Every instinct of his nature would have
impelled him to dash wildly away, had there not suddenly and for the
first time arisen in him another and counter instinct. A great awe
descended upon him. He was beaten down to movelessness by an
overwhelming sense of his own weakness and littleness. Here was
mastery and power, something far and away beyond him.
The cub had never seen man, yet the instinct concerning man was his.
In dim ways he recognized in man the animal that had fought itself
to primacy over the other animals of the Wild. Not alone out of his
own eyes, but out of the eyes of all his ancestors was the cub now
looking upon man- out of eyes that had circled in the darkness
around countless winter campfires, that had peered from safe distances
and from the hearts of thickets at the strange, two-legged animal that
was lord over living things. The spell of the cub's heritage was
upon him, the fear and the respect born of the centuries of struggle
and the accumulated experience of the generations. The heritage was
too compelling for a wolf that was only a cub. Had he been full-grown,
he would have run away. As it was, he cowered down in a paralysis of
fear, already half proffering the submission that his kind had
proffered from the first time a wolf came in to sit by man's fire
and be made warm.
One of the Indians arose and walked over to him and stooped above
him. The cub cowered closer to the ground. It was the unknown,
objectified at last, in concrete flesh and blood, bending over him and
reaching down to seize hold of him. His hair bristled involuntarily;
his lips writhed back and his little fangs were bared. The hand,
poised like doom above him, hesitated, and the man spoke, laughing,
'Wabam wabisca ip pit tah.' ('Look! The white fangs!')
The other Indians laughed loudly, and urged the man on to pick up
the cub. As the hand descended closer and closer, there raged within
the cub a battle of the instincts. He experienced two great
impulsions- to yield and to fight. The resulting action was a
compromise. He did both. He yielded till the hand almost touched
him. Then he fought, his teeth flashing in a snap that sank them
into the hand. The next moment he received a clout alongside the
head that knocked him over on his side. Then all fight fled out of
him. His puppyhood and the instinct of submission took charge of
him. He sat up on his haunches and ki-yi'd. But the man whose hand
he had bitten was angry. The cub received a clout on the other side of
his head. Whereupon he sat up and ki-yi'd louder than ever.
The four Indians laughed more loudly, while even the man who had
been bitten began to laugh. They surrounded the cub and laughed at
him, while he wailed out his terror and his hurt. In the midst of
it, he heard something. The Indians heard it, too. But the cub knew
what it was, and with a last, long wail that had in it more of triumph
than grief, he ceased his noise and waited for the coming of his
mother, of his ferocious and indomitable mother who fought and
killed all things and was never afraid. She was snarling as she ran.
She had heard the cry of her cub and was dashing to save him.
She bounded in amongst them, her anxious and militant motherhood
making her anything but a pretty sight. But to the cub the spectacle
of her protective rage was pleasing. He uttered a glad little cry
and bounded to meet her, while the man-animals went back hastily
several steps. The she-wolf stood over against her cub, facing the
men, with bristling hair, a snarl rumbling deep in her throat. Her
face was distorted and malignant with menace, even the bridge of the
nose wrinkling from tip to eyes so prodigious was her snarl.
Then it was that a cry went up from one of the men. 'Kiche!' was
what he uttered. It was an exclamation of surprise. The cub felt his
mother wilting at the sound.
'Kiche!' the man cried again, this time with sharpness and
authority.
And then the cub saw his mother, the she-wolf, the fearless one,
crouching down till her belly touched the ground, whimpering,
wagging her tail, making peace signs. The cub could not understand. He
was appalled. The awe of man rushed over him again. His instinct had
been true. His mother verified it. She, too, rendered submission to
the man-animals.
The man who had spoken came over to her. He put his hand upon her
head, and she only crouched closer. She did not snap, nor threaten
to snap. The other men came up, and surrounded her, and felt her,
and pawed her, which actions she made no attempt to resent. They
were greatly excited, and made many noises with their mouths. Their
noises were not indications of danger, the cub decided, as he crouched
near his mother, still bristling from time to time but doing his
best to submit.
'It is not strange,' an Indian was saying. 'Her father was a true
wolf. It is true, her mother was a dog; but did not my brother tie her
out in the woods all of three nights in the mating season? Therefore
was the father of Kiche a wolf.'
'It is a year, Gray Beaver, since she ran away,' spoke a second
Indian.
It is not strange, Salmon Tongue,' Gray Beaver answered. 'It was the
time of the famine, and there was no meat for the dogs.'
'She has lived with the wolves,' said a third Indian.
'So it would seem, Three Eagles,' Gray Beaver answered, laying his
hand on the cub; 'and this be the sign of it.'
The cub snarled a little at the touch of the hand, and the hand flew
back to administer a clout. Whereupon the cub covered its fangs and
sank down submissively, while the hand, returning, rubbed behind his
ears and up and down his back.
'This be the sign of it,' Gray Beaver went on. 'It is plain that his
mother is Kiche. But his father was a wolf. Wherefore is there in
him little dog and much wolf. His fangs be white, and White Fang shall
be his name. I have spoken. He is my dog. For was not Kiche my
brother's dog? And is not my brother dead?'
The cub, who had thus received a name in the world, lay and watched.
For a time the man-animals continued to make their mouth-noises.
Then Gray Beaver took a knife from a sheath that hung around his neck,
and went into the thicket and cut a stick. White Fang watched him.
He notched the stick at each end and in the notches fastened strings
of rawhide. One string he tied around the throat of Kiche. Then he led
her to a small pine, around which he tied the other string.
White Fang followed and lay down beside her. Salmon Tongue's hand
reached out to him and rolled him over on his back. Kiche looked on
anxiously. White Fang felt fear mounting in him again. He could not
quite suppress a snarl, but he made no offer to snap. The hand, with
fingers crooked and spread apart, rubbed his stomach in a playful
way and rolled him from side to side. It was ridiculous and
ungainly, lying there on his back with legs sprawling in the air.
Besides, it was a position of such utter helplessness that White
Fang's whole nature revolted against it. He could do nothing to defend
himself. If this man-animal intended harm, White Fang knew that he
could not escape it. How could he spring away with his four legs in
the air above him? Yet submission made him master of his fear, and
he only growled softly. This growl he could not suppress; nor did
the man-animal resent it by giving him a blow on the head. And
furthermore, such was the strangeness of it, White Fang experienced an
unaccountable sensation of pleasure as the hand rubbed back and forth.
When he was rolled on his side he ceased the growl; when the fingers
pressed and prodded at the base of his ears the pleasurable
sensation increased; and when, with a final rub and scratch, the man
left him alone and went away, all fear had died out of White Fang.
He was to know fear many times in his dealings with man; yet it was
a token of the fearless companionship with man that was ultimately
to be his.
After a time, White Fang heard strange noises approaching. He was
quick in his classification, for he knew them at once for man-animal
noises. A few minutes later the remainder of the tribe, strung out
as it was on the march, trailed in. There were more men and many women
and children, forty souls of them, and all heavily burdened with
camp equipage and outfit. Also there were many dogs; and these, with
the exception of the part-grown puppies, were likewise burdened with
camp outfit. On their backs, in bags that fastened tightly around
underneath, the dogs carried from twenty to thirty pounds of weight.
White Fang had never seen dogs before, but at sight of them he
felt that they were his own kind, only somehow different. But they
displayed little difference from the wolf when they discovered the cub
and his mother. There was a rush. White Fang bristled and snarled
and snapped in the face of the open-mouthed oncoming wave of dogs, and
went down and under them, feeling the sharp slash of teeth in his
body, himself biting and tearing at the legs and bellies above him.
There was a great uproar. He could hear the snarl of Kiche as she
fought for him; and he could hear the cries of the man-animals, the
sound of clubs striking upon bodies, and the yelps of pain from the
dogs so struck.
Only a few seconds elapsed before he was on his feet again. He could
now see the man-animals driving back the dogs with clubs and stones,
defending him, saving him from the savage teeth of his kind that
somehow was not his kind. And though there was no reason in his
brain for a clear conception of so abstract a thing as justice,
nevertheless, in his own way, he felt the justice of the
man-animals, and he knew them for what they were- makers of law and
executors of law. Also, he appreciated the power with which they
administered the law. Unlike any animals he had ever encountered, they
did not bite nor claw. They enforced their live strength with the
power of dead things. Dead things did their bidding. T...
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