[Previous page]... by snarl and snap and growl. The very atmosphere he breathed
was surcharged with hatred and malice, and this but served to increase
the hatred and malice without him.
When Mit-sah cried out his command for the team to stop, White
Fang obeyed. At first this caused trouble for the other dogs. All of
them would spring upon the hated leader, only to find the tables
turned. Behind him would be Mit-sah, the great whip singing in his
hand. So the dogs came to understand that when the team stopped by
order, White Fang was to be let alone. But when White Fang stopped
without orders, then it was allowed them to spring upon him and
destroy him if they could. After several experiences, White Fang never
stopped without orders. He learned quickly. It was in the nature of
things that he must learn quickly, if he were to survive the unusually
severe conditions under which life was vouchsafed him.
But the dogs could never learn the lesson to leave him alone in
camp. Each day, pursuing him and crying defiance at him, the lesson of
the previous night was erased, and that night would have to be learned
over again, to be as immediately forgotten. Besides, there was a
greater consistence in their dislike of him. They sensed between
themselves and him a difference of kind- cause sufficient in itself
for hostility. Like him, they were domesticated wolves. But they had
been domesticated for generations. Much of the Wild has been lost,
so that to them the Wild was the unknown, the terrible, the ever
menacing and ever warring. But to him, in appearance and action and
impulse, still clung the Wild. He symbolized it, was its
personification; so that when they showed their teeth to him they were
defending themselves against the powers of destruction that lurked
in the shadows of the forest and in the dark beyond the campfire.
But there was one lesson the dogs did learn, and that was to keep
together. White Fang was too terrible for any of them to face
single-handed. They met him with the mass-formation, otherwise he
would have killed them, one by one, in a night. As it was he never had
a chance to kill them. He might roll a dog off its feet, but the
pack would be upon him before he could follow up and deliver the
deadly throat-stroke. At the first hint of conflict, the whole team
drew together and faced him. The dogs had quarrels among themselves,
but these were forgotten when trouble was brewing with White Fang.
On the other hand, try as they would, they could not kill White
Fang. He was too quick for them, too formidable, too wise. He
avoided tight places and always backed out of it when they bade fair
to surround him. While, as for getting him off his feet, there was
no dog among them capable of doing the trick. His feet clung to the
earth with the same tenacity that he clung to life. For that matter,
life and footing were synonymous in this unending warfare with the
pack, and none knew it better than White Fang.
So he became the enemy of his kind, domesticated wolves that they
were, softened by the fires of man, weakened in the sheltering
shadow of man's strength. White Fang was bitter and implacable. The
clay of him was so moulded. He declared a vendetta against all dogs.
And so terribly did he live this vendetta that Gray Beaver, fierce
savage himself, could not but marvel at White Fang's ferocity.
Never, he swore, had there been the like of this animal; and the
Indians in strange villages swore likewise when they considered the
tale of his killings amongst their dogs.
When White Fang was nearly five years old, Gray Beaver took him on
another great journey, and long remembered was the havoc he worked
amongst the dogs of the many villages along the Mackenzie, across
the Rockies, and down the Porcupine to the Yukon. He revelled in the
vengeance he wreaked upon his kind. They were ordinary, unsuspecting
dogs. They were not prepared for his swiftness and directness, for his
attack without warning. They did not know him for what he was, a
lightning-flash of slaughter. They bristled up to him, stiff-legged
and challenging, while he, wasting no time on elaborate preliminaries,
snapping into action like a steel spring, was at their throats and
destroying them before they knew what was happening and while they
were yet in the throes of surprise.
He became an adept at fighting. He economized. He never wasted his
strength, never tussled. He was in too quickly for that, and, if he
missed, was out again too quickly. The dislike of the wolf for close
quarters was his to an unusual degree. He could not endure a prolonged
contact with another body. It smacked of danger. It made him
frantic. He must be away, free, on his own legs, touching no living
things. It was the Wild still clinging to him, asserting itself
through him. This feeling had been accentuated by the Ishmaelite
life he had led from his puppyhood. Danger lurked in contacts. It
was the trap, ever the trap, the fear of it lurking deep in the life
of him, woven in the fibre of him.
In consequence, the strange dogs he encountered had no chance
against him. He eluded their fangs. He got them, or got away,
himself untouched in either event. In the natural course of things
there were exceptions to this. There were times when several dogs,
pitching onto him, punished him before he could get away; and there
were times when a single dog scored deeply on him. But these were
accidents. In the main, so efficient a fighter had he become, he
went his way unscathed.
Another advantage he possessed was that of correctly judging time
and distance. Not that he did this consciously, however. He did not
calculate such things. It was all automatic. His eyes saw correctly,
and the nerves carried the vision correctly to his brain. The parts of
him were better adjusted than those of the average dog. They worked
together more smoothly and steadily. His was a better, far better,
nervous, mental, and muscular coordination. When his eyes conveyed
to his brain the moving image of an action, his brain, without
conscious effort, knew the space that limited that action and the time
required for its completion. Thus, he could avoid the leap of
another dog, or the drive of its fangs, and at the same moment could
seize the infinitesimal fraction of time in which to deliver his own
attack. Body and brain, his was a more perfected mechanism. Not that
he was to be praised for it. Nature had been more generous to him than
to the average animal, that was all.
It was in the summer that White Fang arrived at Fort Yukon. Gray
Beaver had crossed the great water-shed between the Mackenzie and
the Yukon in the late winter, and spent the spring in hunting among
the western outlying spurs of the Rockies. Then, after the break-up of
the ice on the Porcupine, he had built a canoe and paddled down that
stream to where it effected its junction with the Yukon just under the
Arctic Circle. Here stood the old Hudson's Bay Company fort; and
here were many Indians, much food, and unprecedented excitement. It
was the summer of 1898, and thousands of gold-hunters were going up
the Yukon to Dawson and the Klondike. Still hundreds of miles from
their goal, nevertheless many of them had been on the way for a
year, and the least any of them had traveled to get that far was
five thousand miles, while some had come from the other side of the
world.
Here Gray Beaver stopped. A whisper of the gold-rush had reached his
ears, and he had come with several bales of furs, and another of
gut-sewn mittens and moccasins. He would not have ventured so long a
trip had he not expected generous profits. But what he had expected
was nothing to what he realized. His wildest dream had not exceeded
a hundred percent profit; he made a thousand percent. And like a
true Indian, he settled down to trade carefully and slowly, even if it
took all summer and the rest of the winter to dispose of his goods.
It was at Fort Yukon that White Fang saw his first white men. As
compared with the Indians he had known, they were to him another
race of beings, a race of superior gods. They impressed him as
possessing superior power, and it is on power that god-head rests.
White Fang did not reason it out, did not in his mind make the sharp
generalization that the white gods were more powerful. It was a
feeling, nothing more, and yet none the less potent. As, in his
puppyhood, the looming bulks of the tepees, man-reared, had affected
him as manifestations of power, so was he affected now by the houses
and the huge fort all of massive logs. Here was power. Those white
gods were strong. They possessed greater mastery over matter than
the gods he had known, most powerful among which was Gray Beaver.
And yet Gray Beaver was a child-god among these white-skinned ones.
To be sure, White Fang only felt these things. He was not
conscious of them. Yet it is upon feeling, more often than thinking,
that animals act; and every act White Fang now performed was based
upon the feeling that the white men were the superior gods. In the
first place he was very suspicious of them. There was no telling
what unknown terrors were theirs, what unknown hurts they could
administer. He was curious to observe them, fearful of being noticed
by them. For the first few hours he was content with slinking around
and watching them from a safe distance. Then he saw that no harm
befell the dogs that were near to them, and he came in closer.
In turn, he was an object of great curiosity to them. His wolfish
appearance caught their eyes at once, and they pointed him out to
one another. This act of pointing put White Fang on his guard, and
when they tried to approach him he showed his teeth and backed away.
Not one succeeded in laying a hand on him, and it was well that they
did not.
White Fang soon learned that very few of these gods- not more than a
dozen- lived at this place. Every two or three days a steamer (another
and colossal manifestation of power) came in to the bank and stopped
for several hours. The white men came from off these steamers and went
away on them again. There seemed untold numbers of these white men. In
the first day or so, he saw more of them than he had seen Indians in
all life; and as the days went by they continued to come up the river,
stop, and then go on up the river and out of sight.
But if the white gods were all-powerful, their dogs did not amount
to much. This White Fang quickly discovered by mixing with those
that came ashore with their masters. They were of irregular shapes and
sizes. Some were short-legged- too short; others were long-legged- too
long. They had hair instead of fur, and a few had very little hair
at that. And none of them knew how to fight.
As an enemy of his kind, it was in White Fang's province to fight
with them. This he did, and he quickly achieved for them a mighty
contempt. They were soft and helpless, made much noise, and floundered
around clumsily, trying to accomplish by main strength what he
accomplished by dexterity and cunning. They rushed bellowing at him.
He sprang to the side. They did not know what had become of him; and
in that moment he struck them on the shoulder; rolling them off
their feet and delivering his stroke at the throat.
Sometimes this stroke was successful, and a stricken dog rolled in
the dirt, to be pounced upon and torn to pieces by the pack of
Indian dogs that waited. White Fang was wise. He had long since
learned that the gods were made angry when their dogs were killed. The
white men were no exception to this. So he was content, when he had
overthrown and slashed wide the throat of one of their dogs, to drop
back and let the pack go in and do the cruel finishing work. It was
then that the white men rushed in, visiting their wrath heavily on the
pack, while White Fang went free. He would stand off at a little
distance and look on, while stones, clubs, axes, and all sorts of
weapons fell upon his fellows. White Fang was very wise.
But his fel...
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