Had there been in White Fang's nature any possibility, no matter howremote, of his ever coming to fraternise with his kind, such possibility wasirretrievably destroyed when he was made leader of the sled-team. Fornow the dogs hated him - hated him for the extra meat bestowed upon himby Mit-sah; hated him for all the real and fancied favours he received;hated him for that he fled always at the head of the team, his waving brushof a tail and his perpetually retreating hind-quarters for ever maddeningtheir eyes.
And White Fang just as bitterly hated them back. Being sled-leaderwas anything but gratifying to him. To be compelled to run away beforethe yelling pack, every dog of which, for three years, he had thrashed andmastered, was almost more than he could endure. But endure it he must, orperish, and the life that was in him had no desire to perish out. Themoment Mit-sah gave his order for the start, that moment the whole team,with eager, savage cries, sprang forward at White Fang.
There was no defence for him. If he turned upon them, Mit-sah wouldthrow the stinging lash of the whip into his face. Only remained to him torun away. He could not encounter that howling horde with his tail andhind-quarters. These were scarcely fit weapons with which to meet themany merciless fangs. So run away he did, violating his own nature andpride with every leap he made, and leaping all day long.
One cannot violate the promptings of one's nature without having thatnature recoil upon itself. Such a recoil is like that of a hair, made to growout from the body, turning unnaturally upon the direction of its growth andgrowing into the body - a rankling, festering thing of hurt. And so withWhite Fang. Every urge of his being impelled him to spring upon the packthat cried at his heels, but it was the will of the gods that this should not be;and behind the will, to enforce it, was the whip of cariboo-gut with itsbiting thirty-foot lash. So White Fang could only eat his heart in bitternessand develop a hatred and malice commensurate with the ferocity andindomitability of his nature.
If ever a creature was the enemy of its kind, White Fang was thatcreature. He asked no quarter, gave none. He was continually marred andscarred by the teeth of the pack, and as continually he left his own marksupon the pack. Unlike most leaders, who, when camp was made and thedogs were unhitched, huddled near to the gods for protection, White Fangdisdained such protection. He walked boldly about the camp, inflictingpunishment in the night for what he had suffered in the day. In the timebefore he was made leader of the team, the pack had learned to get out ofhis way. But now it was different. Excited by the day-long pursuit of him,swayed subconsciously by the insistent iteration on their brains of thesight of him fleeing away, mastered by the feeling of mastery enjoyed allday, the dogs could not bring themselves to give way to him. When heappeared amongst them, there was always a squabble. His progress wasmarked by snarl and snap and growl. The very atmosphere he breathedwas surcharged with hatred and malice, and this but served to increase thehatred and malice within him.
When Mit-sah cried out his command for the team to stop, White Fangobeyed. At first this caused trouble for the other dogs. All of them wouldspring upon the hated leader only to find the tables turned. Behind himwould be Mit-sah, the great whip singing in his hand. So the dogs came tounderstand that when the team stopped by order, White Fang was to be letalone. But when White Fang stopped without orders, then it was allowedthem to spring upon him and destroy him if they could. After severalexperiences, White Fang never stopped without orders. He learned quickly.
It was in the nature of things, that he must learn quickly if he were tosurvive 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 theprevious night was erased, and that night would have to be learned overagain, to be as immediately forgotten. Besides, there was a greaterconsistence in their dislike of him. They sensed between themselves andhim a difference of kind - cause sufficient in itself for hostility. Like him,they were domesticated wolves. But they had been domesticated forgenerations. Much of the Wild had been lost, so that to them the Wild wasthe unknown, the terrible, the ever-menacing and ever warring. But to him,in appearance and action and impulse, still clung the Wild. He symbolisedit, was its personification: so that when they showed their teeth to him theywere defending themselves against the powers of destruction that lurked inthe shadows of the forest and in the dark beyond the camp-fire.
But there was one lesson the dogs did learn, and that was to keeptogether. White Fang was too terrible for any of them to face single-handed. They met him with the mass-formation, otherwise he would havekilled them, one by one, in a night. As it was, he never had a chance to killthem. He might roll a dog off its feet, but the pack would be upon himbefore he could follow up and deliver the deadly throat-stroke. At the firsthint of conflict, the whole team drew together and faced him. The dogshad quarrels among themselves, but these were forgotten when troublewas 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 tightplaces 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 themcapable of doing the trick. His feet clung to the earth with the sametenacity that he clung to life. For that matter, life and footing weresynonymous in this unending warfare with the pack, and none knew itbetter than White Fang.
So he became the enemy of his kind, domesticated wolves that theywere, softened by the fires of man, weakened in the sheltering shadow ofman's strength. White Fang was bitter and implacable. The clay of himwas so moulded. He declared a vendetta against all dogs. And so terriblydid he live this vendetta that Grey Beaver, fierce savage himself, could notbut marvel at White Fang's ferocity. Never, he swore, had there been thelike of this animal; and the Indians in strange villages swore likewisewhen they considered the tale of his killings amongst their dogs.
When White Fang was nearly five years old, Grey Beaver took him onanother great journey, and long remembered was the havoc he workedamongst the dogs of the many villages along the Mackenzie, across theRockies, and down the Porcupine to the Yukon. He revelled in thevengeance he wreaked upon his kind. They were ordinary, unsuspectingdogs. They were not prepared for his swiftness and directness, for hisattack without warning. They did not know him for what he was, alightning-flash of slaughter. They bristled up to him, stiff-legged andchallenging, while he, wasting no time on elaborate preliminaries,snapping into action like a steel spring, was at their throats and destroyingthem before they knew what was happening and while they were yet in thethroes of surprise.
He became an adept at fighting. He economised. He never wasted hisstrength, 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 washis to an unusual degree. He could not endure a prolonged contact withanother body. It smacked of danger. It made him frantic. He must be away,free, on his own legs, touching no living thing. It was the Wild stillclinging to him, asserting itself through him. This feeling had beenaccentuated by the Ishmaelite life he had led from his puppyhood. Dangerlurked in contacts. It was the trap, ever the trap, the fear of it lurking deepin the life of him, woven into the fibre of himIn consequence, the strange dogs he encountered had no chanceagainst him. He eluded their fangs. He got them, or got away, himselfuntouched in either event. In the natural course of things there wereexceptions to this. There were times when several dogs, pitching on to him,punished him before he could get away; and there were times when asingle dog scored deeply on him. But these were accidents. In the main, soefficient a fighter had he become, he went his way unscathed.
Another advantage he possessed was that of correctly judging time anddistance. Not that he did this consciously, however. He did not calculatesuch things. It was all automatic. His eyes saw correctly, and the nervescarried the vision correctly to his brain. The parts of him were betteradjusted than those of the average dog. They worked together moresmoothly and steadily. His was a better, far better, nervous, mental, andmuscular co- ordination. When his eyes conveyed to his brain the movingimage of an action, his brain without conscious effort, knew the space thatlimited that action and the time required for its completion. Thus, he couldavoid the leap of another dog, or the drive of its fangs, and at the samemoment could seize the infinitesimal fraction of time in which to deliverhis own attack. Body and brain, his was a more perfected mechanism. Notthat he was to be praised for it. Nature had been more generous to himthan to the average animal, that was all.
It was in the summer that White Fang arrived at Fort Yukon. GreyBeaver had crossed the great watershed between Mackenzie and theYukon in the late winter, and spent the spring in hunting among thewestern outlying spurs of the Rockies. Then, after the break-up of the iceon the Porcupine, he had built a canoe and paddled down that stream towhere it effected its junction with the Yukon just under the Artic circle.
Here stood the old Hudson's Bay Company fort; and here were manyIndians, much food, and unprecedented excitement. It was the summer of1898, and thousands of gold- hunters were going up the Yukon to Dawsonand the Klondike. Still hundreds of miles from their goal, neverthelessmany of them had been on the way for a year, and the least any of themhad travelled to get that far was five thousand miles, while some had comefrom the other side of the world.
Here Grey Beaver stopped. A whisper of the gold-rush had reached hisears, and he had come with several bales of furs, and another of gut-sewnmittens and moccasins. He would not have ventured so long a trip had henot expected generous profits. But what he had expected was nothing towhat he realised. His wildest dreams had not exceeded a hundred per cent.
profit; he made a thousand per cent. And like a true Indian, he settleddown to trade carefully and slowly, even if it took all summer and the restof the winter to dispose of his goods.
It was at Fort Yukon that White Fang saw his first white men. Ascompared with the Indians he had known, they were to him another race ofbeings, a race of superior gods. They impressed him as possessingsuperior power, and it is on power that godhead rests. White Fang did notreason it out, did not in his mind make the sharp generalisation that thewhite gods were more powerful. It was a feeling, nothing more, and yetnone the less potent. As, in his puppyhood, the looming bulks of the tepees,man-reared, had affected him as manifestations of power, so was heaffected now by the houses and the huge fort all of massive logs. Here waspower.
Those white gods were strong. They possessed greater masteryover matter than the gods he had known, most powerful among which wasGrey Beaver. And yet Grey Beaver was as a child-god among these white-skinned ones.
To be sure, White Fang only felt these things. He was not conscious ofthem. Yet it is upon feeling, more often than thinking, that animals act; andevery act White Fang now performed was based upon the feeling that thewhite men were the superior gods. In the first place he was very suspiciousof them. There was no telling what unknown terrors were theirs, whatunknown hurts they could administer. He was curious to observe them,fearful of being noticed by them. For the first few hours he was contentwith slinking around and watching them from a safe distance. Then he sawthat 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 wolfishappearance caught their eyes at once, and they pointed him out to oneanother. This act of pointing put White Fang on his guard, and when theytried to approach him he showed his teeth and backed away. Not onesucceeded 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 adozen - lived at this place. Every two or three days a steamer (another andcolossal manifestation of power) came into the bank and stopped forseveral hours. The white men came from off these steamers and wentaway on them again. There seemed untold numbers of these white men. Inthe first day or so, he saw more of them than he had seen Indians in all hislife; and as the days went by they continued to come up the river, stop, andthen go on up the river out of sight.
But if the white gods were all-powerful, their dogs did not amount tomuch. This White Fang quickly discovered by mixing with those thatcame ashore with their masters. They were 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. Andnone of them knew how to fight.
As an enemy of his kind, it was in White Fang's province to fight withthem. This he did, and he quickly achieved for them a mighty contempt.
They were soft and helpless, made much noise, and floundered aroundclumsily trying to accomplish by main strength what he accomplished bydexterity and cunning. They rushed bellowing at him. He sprang to theside. They did not know what had become of him; and in that moment hestruck them on the shoulder, rolling them off their feet and delivering hisstroke at the throat.
Sometimes this stroke was successful, and a stricken dog rolled in thedirt, to be pounced upon and torn to pieces by the pack of Indian dogs thatwaited. White Fang was wise. He had long since learned that the godswere made angry when their dogs were killed. The white men were noexception to this. So he was content, when he had overthrown and slashedwide the throat of one of their dogs, to drop back and let the pack go inand 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. Hewould 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 fellows grew wise in their own way; and in this White Fanggrew wise with them. They learned that it was when a steamer first tied tothe bank that they had their fun. After the first two or three strange dogshad been downed and destroyed, the white men hustled their own animalsback on board and wrecked savage vengeance on the offenders. One whiteman, having seen his dog, a setter, torn to pieces before his eyes, drew arevolver. He fired rapidly, six times, and six of the pack lay dead or dying- another manifestation of power that sank deep into White Fang'sconsciousness.
White Fang enjoyed it all. He did not love his kind, and he was shrewdenough to escape hurt himself. At first, the killing of the white men's dogshad been a diversion. After a time it became his occupation. There was nowork for him to do. Grey Beaver was busy trading and getting wealthy. SoWhite Fang hung around the landing with the disreputable gang of Indiandogs, 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 waseven feared by it. It is true, he worked with it. He picked the quarrel withthe strange dog while the gang waited. And when he had overthrown thestrange dog the gang went into finish it. But it is equally true that he thenwithdrew, leaving the gang to receive the punishment of the outragedgods.
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 sawhim they rushed for him. It was their instinct. He was the Wild - theunknown, the terrible, the ever-menacing, the thing that prowled in thedarkness around the fires of the primeval world when they, cowering closeto the fires, were reshaping their instincts, learning to fear the Wild out ofwhich they had come, and which they had deserted and betrayed.
Generation by generation, down all the generations, had this fear of theWild been stamped into their natures. For centuries the Wild had stood forterror and destruction. And during all this time free licence had been theirs,from their masters, to kill the things of the Wild. In doing this they hadprotected both themselves and the gods whose companionship they sharedAnd so, fresh from the soft southern world, these dogs, trotting downthe gang-plank and out upon the Yukon shore had but to see White Fang toexperience the irresistible impulse to rush upon him and destroy him. Theymight be town-reared dogs, but the instinctive fear of the Wild was theirsjust the same. Not alone with their own eyes did they see the wolfishcreature in the clear light of day, standing before them. They saw him withthe eyes of their ancestors, and by their inherited memory they knewWhite Fang for the wolf, and they remembered the ancient feud.
All of which served to make White Fang's days enjoyable. If the sightof him drove these strange dogs upon him, so much the better for him, somuch the worse for them. They looked upon him as legitimate prey, and aslegitimate prey he looked upon them.
Not for nothing had he first seen the light of day in a lonely lair andfought his first fights with the ptarmigan, the weasel, and the lynx. Andnot for nothing had his puppyhood been made bitter by the persecution ofLip-lip and the whole puppy pack. It might have been otherwise, and hewould then have been otherwise. Had Lip-lip not existed, he would havepassed his puppyhood with the other puppies and grown up more doglikeand with more liking for dogs. Had Grey Beaver possessed the plummet ofaffection and love, he might have sounded the deeps of White Fang'snature and brought up to the surface all manner of kindly qualities. Butthese things had not been so. The clay of White Fang had been mouldeduntil he became what he was, morose and lonely, unloving and ferocious,the enemy of all his kind.
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