[Previous page]...lows grew wise, in their own way; and in this White
Fang grew wise with them. They learned that it was when a steamer
first tied to the bank that they had their fun. After the first two or
three strange dogs had been downed and destroyed, the white men
hustled their own animals back on board and wreaked savage vengeance
on the offenders. One white man, having seen his dog, a setter, torn
to pieces before his eyes, drew a revolver. He fired rapidly, six
times, and six of the pack lay dead or dying- another manifestation of
power that sank deep into White Fang's consciousness.
White Fang enjoyed it all. He did not love his kind, and he was
shrewd enough to escape hurt himself. At first, the killing of the
white men's dogs had been a diversion. After a time it became his
occupation. There was no work for him to do. Gray Beaver was busy
trading and getting wealthy. So White Fang hung around the landing
with the disreputable gang of Indian dogs, waiting for steamers.
With the arrival of a steamer the fun began. After a few minutes, by
the time the white men had got over their surprise, the gang
scattered. The fun was over until the next steamer should arrive.
But it can scarcely be said that White Fang was a member of the
gang. He did not mingle with it, but remained aloof, always himself,
and was even feared by it. It is true, he worked with it. He picked
the quarrel with the strange dog while the gang waited. And when he
had overthrown the strange dog the gang went to finish it. But it is
equally true that he then withdrew, leaving the gang to receive the
punishment of the outraged gods.
It did not require much exertion to pick these quarrels. All he
had to do, when the strange dogs came ashore, was to show himself.
When they saw him they rushed for him. It was their instinct. He was
the Wild- the unknown, the terrible, the ever menacing, the thing that
prowled in the darkness around the fires of the primeval world when
they, cowering close to the fires, were reshaping their instincts,
learning to fear the Wild out of which they had come, and which they
had deserted and betrayed. Generation by generation, down all the
generations, had this fear of the Wild been stamped into their
natures. For centuries the Wild had stood for terror and
destruction. And during all this time free license had been theirs,
from their masters, to kill the things of the Wild. In doing this they
had protected both themselves and the gods whose companionship they
shared.
And so fresh from the soft southern world, these dogs, trotting down
the gangplank and out upon the Yukon shore, had but to see White
Fang to experience the irresistible impulse to rush upon him and
destroy him. They might be town-reared dogs, but the instinctive
fear of the Wild was theirs just the same. Not alone with their own
eyes did they see the wolfish creature in the clear light of the
day, standing before them. They saw him with the eyes of their
ancestors, and by their inherited memory they knew White Fang for
the wolf, and they remembered the ancient feud.
All of which served to make White Fang's days enjoyable. If the
sight of him drove these strange dogs upon him, so much the better for
him, so much the worse for them. They looked upon him as legitimate
prey, and as legitimate prey he looked upon them.
Not for nothing had he first seen the light of day in a lonely
lair and fought his first fights with the ptarmigan, the weasel, and
the lynx. And not for nothing had his puppyhood been made bitter by
the persecution of Lip-lip and the whole puppy-pack. It might have
been otherwise, and he would then have been otherwise. Had Lip-lip not
existed, he would have passed his puppyhood with the other puppies and
grown up more doglike and with more liking for dogs. Had Gray Beaver
possessed the plummet of affection and love, he might have sounded the
deeps of White Fang's nature and brought up to the surface all
manner of kindly qualities. But these things had not been so. The clay
of White Fang had been moulded until he became what he was, morose and
lonely, unloving and ferocious, the enemy of all his kind.
CHAPTER TWO.
The Mad God.
A SMALL NUMBER OF white men lived in Fort Yukon. These men had
been long in the country. They called themselves Sour-doughs, and took
great pride in so classifying themselves. For other men, new in the
land, they felt nothing but disdain. The men who came ashore from
the steamers were newcomers. They were known as chechaquos, and they
always wilted at the application of the name. They made their bread
with baking-powder. This was the invidious distinction between them
and the Sour-doughs, who, forsooth, made their bread from sour-dough
because they had no baking-powder.
All of which is neither here nor there. The men in the fort
disdained the newcomers and enjoyed seeing them come to grief.
Especially did they enjoy the havoc worked amongst the newcomers' dogs
by White Fang and his disreputable gang. When a steamer arrived, the
men at the fort made it a point always to come down to the bank and
see the fun. They looked forward to it with as much anticipation as
did the Indian dogs, while they were not slow to appreciate the savage
and crafty part played by White Fang.
But there was one man amongst them who particularly enjoyed the
sport. He would come running at the first sound of a steamboat's
whistle; and when the last fight was over and White Fang and the
pack had scattered, he would return slowly to the fort, his face heavy
with regret. Sometimes, when a soft Southland dog went down, shrieking
its death-cry under the fangs of the pack, this man would be unable to
contain himself, and would leap into the air and cry out with delight.
And always he had a sharp and covetous eye for White Fang.
This man was called 'Beauty' by the other men of the fort. No one
knew his first name, and in general he was known in the country as
Beauty Smith. But he was anything save a beauty. To antithesis was due
his naming. He was preeminently unbeautiful. Nature had been niggardly
with him. He was a small man to begin with; and upon his meager
frame was deposited an even more strikingly meager head. Its apex
might be likened to a point. In fact, in his boyhood, before he had
been named Beauty by his fellows, he had been called 'Pinhead.'
Backward, from the apex, his head slanted down to his neck; and
forward, it slanted uncompromisingly to meet a low and remarkably wide
forehead. Beginning here, as though, regretting her parsimony,
Nature had spread his features with a lavish hand. His eyes were
large, and between them was the distance of two eyes. His face, in
relation to the rest of him, was prodigious. In order to discover
the necessary area, Nature had given him an enormous prognathous
jaw. It was wide and heavy, and protruded outward and down until it
seemed to rest on his chest. Possibly this appearance was due to the
weariness of the slender neck, unable properly to support so great a
burden.
This jaw gave the impression of ferocious determination. But
something lacked. Perhaps it was from excess. Perhaps the jaw was
too large. At any rate, it was a lie. Beauty Smith was known far and
wide as the weakest of weak-kneed and sniveling cowards. To complete
his description, his teeth were large and yellow, while the two
eyeteeth, larger than their fellows, showed under his lean lips like
fangs. His eyes were yellow and muddy, as though Nature had run
short on pigments and squeezed together the dregs of all her tubes. It
was the same with his hair, sparse and irregular of growth,
muddy-yellow and dirty-yellow, rising on his head and sprouting out of
his face in unexpected tufts and bunches, in appearance like clumped
and wind-blown grain.
In short, Beauty Smith was a monstrosity, and the blame of it lay
elsewhere. He was not responsible. The clay of him had been so moulded
in the making. He did the cooking for the other men in the fort, the
dish-washing and the drudgery. They did not despise him. Rather did
they tolerate him in a broad human way, as one tolerates any
creature evilly treated in the making. Also, they feared him. His
cowardly rages made them dread a shot in the back or poison in their
coffee. But somebody had to do the cooking, and whatever else his
shortcomings, Beauty Smith could cook.
This was the man that looked at White Fang, delighted in his
ferocious prowess, and desired to possess him. He made overtures to
White Fang from the first. White Fang began by ignoring him. Later on,
when the overtures became more insistent, White Fang bristled and
bared his teeth and backed away. He did not like the man. The feel
of him was bad. He sensed the evil in him, and feared the extended
hand and the attempts at soft-spoken speech. Because of all this, he
hated the man.
With the simpler creatures, good and bad are things simply
understood. The good stands for all things that bring easement and
satisfaction and surcease from pain. Therefore, the good is liked. The
bad stands for all things that are fraught with discomfort, menace,
and hurt, and is hated accordingly. White Fang's feel of Beauty
Smith was bad. From the man's distorted body and twisted mind, in
occult ways, like mists rising from malarial marshes, come
emanations of the unhealth within. Not by reasoning, not by the five
senses alone, but by other and remoter and uncharted senses, came
the feeling to White Fang that the man was ominous with evil, pregnant
with hurtfulness, and therefore a thing bad, and wisely to be hated.
White Fang was in Gray Beaver's camp when Beauty Smith first visited
it. At the faint sound of his distant feet, before he came in sight,
White Fang knew who was coming and began to bristle. He had been lying
down in an abandon of comfort, but he arose quickly, and as the man
arrived, slid away in true wolf-fashion to the edge of the camp. He
did not know what they said, but he could see the man and Gray
Beaver talking together. Once, the man pointed at him, and White
Fang snarled back as though the hand was just descending upon him
instead of being, as it was, fifty feet away. The man laughed at this;
and White Fang slunk away to the sheltering woods, his head turned
to observe as he glided softly over the ground.
Gray Beaver refused to sell the dog. He had grown rich with his
trading and stood in need of nothing. Besides, White Fang was a
valuable animal, the strongest sled-dog he had ever owned, and the
best leader. Furthermore, there was no dog like him on the Mackenzie
nor the Yukon. He could fight. He killed other dogs as easily as men
killed mosquitoes. (Beauty Smith's eyes lighted up at this, and he
licked his thin lips with an eager tongue.) No, White Fang was not for
sale at any price.
But Beauty Smith knew the ways of Indians. He visited Gray
Beaver's camp often, and hidden under his coat was always a black
bottle or so. One of the potencies of whiskey is the breeding of
thirst. Gray Beaver got the thirst. His fevered membranes and burnt
stomach began to clamor for more and more of the scorching fluid;
while his brain, thrust all awry by the unwonted stimulant,
permitted him to go any length to obtain it. The money he had received
for his furs and mittens and moccasins began to go. It went faster and
faster, and the shorter his money-sack grew, the shorter grew his
temper.
In the end his money and goods and temper were all gone. Nothing
remained to him but his thirst, a prodigious possession in itself that
grew more prodigious with every sober breath he drew. Then it was that
Beauty Smith had talk with him again about the sale of White Fang; but
this time the price offered was in bottles, not dollars, and Gray
Beaver's ears were more eager to hear.
'You ketch um dog you take um all right,' was his last word.
The bottles were delivered, but after two days, 'You ketch um
dog,' were Beauty Smith's words to ...
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