ere not suddenly and for the first time arisen in him another encounter 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 lured 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.  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 sea's hold of him.  The hand, poised like doom above him, hesitated, and the man spoke laughing, Wabamabiskiyipata! 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, they 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 cahyied, 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 cahyied 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 the 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.  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 eye so prodigious was her snarl. Then it was that a cry went up from one of the men, K'iche! was what he uttered. It was an exclamation of surprise. The cub felt his mother wilting at the sound. K'iche! The man cried again, and 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 threatened 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. These noises were not indication 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 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 K'iche a wolf. It is a year, Graybeaver, since she ran away, spoke a second Indian. It is not strange, Samantang, Graybeaver 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, Graybeaver 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, Graybeaver went on. It is plain that his mother is K'iche, but this 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 K'iche 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 men animals continued to make their mouth noises. Then Graybeaver 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 K'iche. Then he led her to a small pine, around which he tied the other string. White fang followed and lay down beside her. Sam and Tong's hand reached out to him and rolled him over on his back. K'iche 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 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 to 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 dealing 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 Keche as she fought for him, and he could hear the cries of the man-animals, the sounds 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.  Dead things did their bidding. Thus sticks and stones, directed by these strange creatures, leaped through the air like living things, inflicting grievous hurts upon the dogs. To his mind this was power unusual, power inconceivable and beyond the natural, power that was godlike. White Fang in the very nature of him could never know anything about gods. At the best he could know only things that were beyond knowing. But the wonder and awe that he had of these man-animals in ways resembled what would be the wonder and awe of man at sight of some celestial creature on a mountaintop hurling thunderbolts from either hand at an astonished world. The last dog had been driven back. The hubbub died down. And White Fang licked his hurts and meditated upon this, his first taste of pack-cruelty and his introduction to the pack. He had never dreamed that his own kind consisted of more than one eye, his mother, and himself. They had constituted a kind apart, and here abruptly he had discovered many more creatures apparently of his own kind. And there was a subconscious resentment that these his kind, at first sight, had pitched upon him and tried to destroy him. In the same way he resented his mother being tied with a stick, even though it was done by the superior man-animals. It savored of the trap, of bondage. Yet of the trap and of bondage he knew nothing. Freedom to roam and run and lie down at will had been his heritage, and here it was being infringed upon. His mother's movements were restricted to the length of a stick, and by the length of that same stick was he restricted, for he had not yet got beyond the need of his mother's side. He did not like it. Nor did he like it when the man-animals arose and went on with their march, for a tiny man-animal took the other end of the stick and led Quiche captive behind him, and behind Quiche followed White Fang, greatly perturbed and worried by this new adventure he had entered upon. They went down the valley of the stream, far beyond White Fang's widest ranging, until they came to the end of the valley, where the stream ran into the Mackenzie River. Here, where canoes were cashed on poles high in the air, and where stood fish-racks for the drying of fish, camp was made, and White Fang looked on with wondering eyes. The superiority of these man-animals increased with every moment. There was their mastery over all these sharp Fang dogs. It breathed of power. But greater than that, to the Wolf Cub, was their mastery over things not alive, their capacity to communicate motion to unmoving things, their capacity to change the very face of the world. It was this last that especially affected him. The elevation of the frames of poles caught his eye. Yet this in itself was not so remarkable. Being done by the same creatures that flung sticks and stones to great distances. But when the frames of poles were made into tepees by being covered with cloth and skins, White Fang was astounded. It was the colossal bulk of them that impressed him. They arose around him on every side like some monstrous quick-growing form of life. They occupied nearly the whole circumference of his field of vision. He was afraid of them. They loomed ominously above him, and when the breeze stirred them into huge movements he cowered down in fear, keeping his eyes warily upon them, and prepared to spring away if they attempted to precipitate themselves upon him. But in a short while his fear of the tepees passed away. He saw the women and children passing in and out of them without harm, and he saw the dogs trying often to get into them and being driven away with sharp words and flying stones. After a time he left Kiche's side and crawled cautiously toward the wall of the nearest tepee. It was the curiosity of growth that urged him on. The necessity of learning and living and doing that brings experience. The last few inches to the wall of the tepee were crawled with painful slowness and precaution. The day's events had prepared him for the unknown to manifest itself in most stupendous and unthinkable ways. At last his nose touched the canvas. He waited. Nothing happened. Then he smelled the strange fabric saturated with the man's smell. He closed on the canvas with his teeth and gave a gentle tug. Nothing happened, though the adjacent portions of the tepee moved. He tugged harder. There was a greater movement. It was delightful. He'd tug still harder and repeatedly until the whole tepee was in motion. Then the sharp cry of a squaw inside sent him scampering back to Kiche, and after that he was afraid no more of the looming bulks of the tepees. A moment later he was straying away again from his mother. Her stick was tied to a peg in the ground and she could not follow him. A part-grown puppy, somewhat larger and older than he, came toward him slowly, with ostentatious and belligerent importance. The puppy's name, as White Fang was afterward to hear him called, was Lip Lip. He had had experience in puppy fights and was already something of a bully. Lip Lip was White Fang's own kind, and being only a puppy did not seem dangerous, so White Fang prepared to meet him in a friendly spirit. But when the stranger's walk became stiff-legged and his lips lifted clear of his teeth, White Fang stiffened too and answered with lifted lips. They half-circled about each other, candidly, snarling and bristling. This lasted several minutes, and White Fang was beginning to enjoy it as a sort of game. But suddenly, with remarkable swiftness, Lip Lip leaped in, delivering a slashing snap and leaped away again. The snap had taken effect on the shoulder that had been hurt by the links and that was still sore deep down near the bone. The surprise and hurt of it brought a yelp out of White Fang, but the next moment, in a rush of anger, he was upon Lip Lip and snapping viciously. But Lip Lip had lived his life in camp and had fought many puppy fights.  It was the first of the many fights he was to have with Lip Lip, for they were enemies from the start, born so, with nature's destined perpetually to clash. Keche licked White Fang soothingly with her tongue and tried to prevail upon him to remain with her. But his curiosity was rampant and several minutes later he was venturing forth on a new quest. He came upon one of the man-animals, Gray Beaver, who was squatting on his hams and doing something with sticks and dry moss spread before him on the ground. White Fang came near to him and watched. Gray Beaver made mouth noises which White Fang interpreted as not hostile, so he came still nearer. Women and children were carrying more sticks and branches to Gray Beaver. It was evidently an affair of moment. White Fang came in until he touched Gray Beaver's knee, so curious was he, and already forgetful that this was a terrible man-animal. Suddenly he saw a strange thing like mist beginning to arise from the sticks and moss beneath Gray Beaver's hands. Then amongst the sticks themselves appeared a live thing, twisting and turning, of a color like the color of the sun in the sky. White Fang knew nothing about fire. It drew him as the light in the mouth of the cave had drawn him in his early puppyhood. He crawled the several steps toward the flame. He heard Gray Beaver chuckle above him and he knew the sound was not hostile. Then his nose touched the flame and at the same instant his little tongue went out to it. For a moment he was paralyzed. The unknown lurking in the midst of the sticks and moss was savagely clutching him by the nose. He scrambled backward, bursting out in an astonished explosion of kaiyais. At the sound Keche leaps snarling to the end of her stick, and there raged terribly because she could not come to his aid. But Gray Beaver laughed loudly and slapped his thighs, and told the happening to all the rest of the camp till everybody was laughing uproariously. But White Fang sat on his haunches and kaiied and kaiied, a forlorn impitiable little figure in the midst of the man-animals. It was the worst hurt he had ever known. Both nose and tongue had been scorched by the live thing, sun-colored, that had grown up under Gray Beaver's hands. He cried and cried interminably, and every fresh whale was greeted by bursts of laughter on the part of the man-animals. He tried to soothe his nose with his tongue, but the tongue was burnt too, and the two hurts coming together produced greater hurt, whereupon he cried more hopelessly and helplessly than ever. And then shame came to him. He knew laughter and the meaning of it. It has not given us to know how some animals know laughter, and know when they are being laughed at. But it was this way that White Fang knew it. And he felt shame that the man-animals should be laughing at him. He turned and fled away, not from the hurt of the fire, but from the laughter that sank even deeper, and hurt in the spirit of him. And he fled to Kiche, raging at the end of her stick like an animal gone mad, to Kiche, the one creature in the world who was not laughing at him. White drew down and Night came on, and White Fang lay by his mother's side. His nose and tongue still hurt, but he was perplexed by a greater trouble. He was homesick. He felt a vacancy in him. A need for the hush and quietude of the stream and the cave in the cliff. Life had become too populous. There were so many of the man-animals, men, women, and children, all making noises and irritations. And there were the dogs ever squabbling and bickering, bursting into uproars and creating confusions. The restful loneliness of the only life he had known was gone. Here the very air was palpitant with life. It hummed and buzzed unceasingly. Continually changing its intensity and abruptly variant in pitch, it impinged on his nerves and senses, made him nervous and restless, and worried him with a perpetual eminence of happening. He watched the man-animals coming and going and moving about the camp. In fashion distantly resembling the way men look upon the gods they create, so looked White Fang upon the man-animals before him. They were superior creatures of a verity, gods. To his dim comprehension they were as much wonder-workers as gods are to men. They were creatures of mastery, possessing all manner of unknown and impossible potencies, overlords of the alive and the not alive, making obey that which moved, imparting movement to that which did not move, and making life sun-colored and biting life to grow out of dead moss and wood. They were fire-makers. They were gods. CHAPTER II The days were thronged with experience for White Fang. During the time that Keche was tied by the stick, he ran about over all the camp, inquiring, investigating, learning. He quickly came to know much of the ways of the man-animals, but familiarity did not breed contempt. The more he came to know them, the more they vindicated their superiority, the more they displayed their mysterious powers, the greater loom their godlikeness. To man has been given the grief, often, of seeing his gods overthrown and his altars crumbling, but to the wolf and the wild dog that have come in to crouch at man's feet, this grief has never come. Unlike man, whose gods are of the unseen and the over-guest, vapors and mists of fancy, eluding the garmenture of reality, wandering wraiths of desired goodness and power, intangible outcroppings of self into the realm of spirit. Unlike man, the wolf and the wild dog that have come into the fire find their gods in the living flesh, solid to the touch, occupying earth-space and requiring time for the accomplishment of their ends and their existence. No effort of faith is necessary to believe in such a god. No effort of will can possibly induce disbelief in such a god. There is no getting away from it. There it stands, on its two hind legs, club in hand, immensely potential, passionate and wrathful and loving. God and mystery and power all wrapped up and around by flesh that bleeds when it is torn and that is good to eat like any flesh. And so it was with white fang. The man-animals were God's unmistakable and unescapable. As his mother, Kiche, had rendered her allegiance to them at the first cry of her name, so he was beginning to render his allegiance. He gave them the trail as a privilege indubitably theirs. When they walked he got out of their way. When they called he came. When they threatened he cowered down. When they commanded him to go he went away hurriedly, for behind any wish of theirs was power to enforce that wish, power that hurt, power that expressed itself in clouts and clubs, in flying stones and stinging lashes of whips. He belonged to them as all dogs belonged to them. His actions were theirs to command. His body was theirs to maul, to stamp upon, to tolerate. Such was the lesson that was quickly borne in upon him. It came hard, going as it did, counter to much that was strong and dominant in his own nature. And while he disliked it in the learning of it, unknown to himself, he was learning to like it. It was a placing of his destiny in another's hands, a shifting of the responsibilities of existence. This in itself was compensation, for it is always easier to lean upon another than to stand alone. But it did not all happen in a day, this giving over of himself, body and soul, to the man-animals. He could not immediately forego his wild heritage and his memories of the wild. There were days when he crept to the edge of the forest and stood and listened to something calling him far and away.  White Fang learned rapidly the ways of the camp. He knew the injustice and greediness of the older dogs when meat or fish was thrown out to be eaten. He came to know that men were more just, children more cruel, and women more kindly and more likely to toss them a bit of meat or bone. After two or three painful adventures with the mothers of part-grown puppies, he came into the knowledge that it was always good policy to let such mothers alone, to keep away from them as far as possible and to avoid them when he saw them coming. The bane of his life was Lip Lip. Larger, older, and stronger, Lip Lip had selected White Fang for his special object of persecution. White Fang fought willingly enough, but he was outclassed. His enemy was too big. Lip Lip became a nightmare to him. Whenever he ventured away from his mother the bully was sure to appear, trailing at his heels, snarling at him, picking upon him, and watchful of an opportunity when no man-animal was near to spring upon him and force a fight. As Lip Lip invariably won, he enjoyed it hugely. It became his chief delight in life as it became White Fang's chief torment. But the effect upon White Fang was not to cow him. Though he suffered most of the damage and was always defeated, his spirit remained unsubdued. Yet a bad effect was produced. He became malignant and morose. His temper had been savage by birth, but it became more savage under this unending persecution. The genial, playful, puppyish side of him found little expression. He never played and gambled about with the other puppies of the camp. Lip Lip would not permit it. The moment White Fang appeared near them, Lip Lip was upon him, bullying and hectoring him, or fighting with him until he had driven him away. The effect of all this was to rob White Fang of much of his puppyhood and to make him in his comportment older than his age.  He became cunning. He had idle time in which to devote himself to thoughts of trickery. Prevented from obtaining his share of meat and fish when a general feed was given to the camp dogs, he became a clever thief. He had to forage for himself, and he foraged well, though he was off times a plague to the squaws in consequence. He learned to sneak about camp, to be crafty, to know what was going on everywhere, to see and to hear everything and to reason accordingly, and successfully to devise ways and means of avoiding his implacable persecutor. It was early in the days of his persecution that he played his first really big, crafty game, and got there his first taste of revenge. As Keche, when with the wolves, had lured out to destruction dogs from the camps of men, so White Fang, in manner somewhat similar, lured Lip Lip into Keche's avenging jaws. Retreating before Lip Lip, White Fang made an indirect flight that led in and out and around the various TPs of the camp. He was a good runner, swifter than any puppy of his size, and swifter than Lip Lip. But he did not run his best in this chase. He barely held his own, one leap ahead of his pursuer. Lip Lip, excited by the chase and by the persistent nearness of his victim, forgot caution and locality. When he remembered locality, it was too late. Dashing at top speed around a TP, he ran full tilt into Keche lying at the end of her stick. He gave one yelp of consternation, and then her punishing jaws closed upon him. She was tied, but he could not get away from her easily. She rolled him off his legs so that he could not run, while she repeatedly ripped and slashed him with her fangs. When at last he succeeded in rolling clear of her, he crawled to his feet, badly disheveled, hurt both in body and in spirit.  He stood where he had arisen, opened his mouth, and broke out the long, heartbroken, puppy whale. But even this he was not allowed to complete. In the middle of it, White Fang, rushing in, sank his teeth into Lip Lip's hind leg. There was no fight left in Lip Lip, and he ran away shamelessly, his victim hot on his heels and whirring him all the way back to his own TP. Here the squaws came to his aid, and White Fang, transformed into a raging demon, was finally driven off only by a fusillade of stones. Came the day when Gray Beaver, deciding that the liability of her running away was passed, released Kiche. White Fang was delighted with his mother's freedom. He accompanied her joyfully about the camp, and so long as he remained close by her side, Lip Lip kept a respectful distance. White Fang even bristled up to him and walked stiff-legged, but Lip Lip ignored the challenge. He was no fool himself, and whatever vengeance he desired to wreak, he could wait until he caught White Fang alone. Later on that day, Kiche and White Fang strayed into the edge of the woods next to the camp. He had led his mother there, step by step, and now when she stopped, he tried to inveigle her father. The stream, the lair, and the quiet woods were calling to him, and he wanted her to come. He ran on a few steps, stopped, and looked back. She had not moved. He wind pleadingly, and scurried playfully in and out of the underbrush. He ran back to her, licked her face, and ran on again. And still she did not move.  There was something calling to him out there in the open. His mother heard it too, but she heard also that other and louder call, the call of the fire and of man, the call which has been given alone of all animals to the wolf to answer, to the wolf and the wild dog who are brothers. Kiche turned and slowly trotted back toward camp. Stronger than the physical restraint of the stick was the clutch of the camp upon her. Unseen and occultly, the gods still gripped with their power and would not let her go. White Fang sat down in the shadow of a birch and whimpered softly. There was a strong smell of pine, and subtle wood fragrances filled the air, reminding him of his old life of freedom before the days of his bondage. But he was still only a part-grown puppy, and stronger than the call either of man or of the wild was the call of his mother. All the hours of his short life he had depended upon her. The time was yet to come for independence. So he arose and trotted forlornly back to camp, pausing once, and twice, to sit down in whimper and to listen to the call that still sounded in the depths of the forest. In the wild the time of a mother with her young is short, but under the dominion of man it is sometimes even shorter. Thus it was with White Fang. Grey Beaver was in the dead of three eagles. Three eagles was going away on a trip up the Mackenzie to the Great Slave Lake. A strip of scarlet cloth, a bearskin, twenty cartridges, and quiche went to pay the debt. White Fang saw his mother taken aboard three eagles' canoe, and tried to follow her. A blow from three eagles knocked him backward to the land. The canoe shoved off. He sprang into the water and swam after it, deaf to the sharp cries of Grey Beaver to return. Even a man-animal, a god, White Fang ignored, such was the terror he was in of losing his mother. But gods are accustomed to being obeyed, and Grey Beaver wrathfully launched a canoe in pursuit. When he overtook White Fang he reached down and by the nape of the neck lifted him clear of the water. He did not deposit him at once in the bottom of the canoe. Holding him suspended with one hand, with the other hand he proceeded to give him a beating. And it was a beating. His hand was heavy.  Impel by the blows that rained upon him, now from this side, now from that, White Fang swung back and forth like an erratic and jerky pendulum. Varying were the emotions that surged through him, at first he had known surprise. Then came a momentary fear when he yelped several times to the impact of the hand. But this was quickly followed by anger. His free nature asserted itself, and he showed his teeth and snarled fearlessly in the face of the wrathful god. This but served to make the god more wrathful. The blows came faster, heavier, more shrewd to hurt. May bever continued to beat, White Fang continued to snarl. But this could not last for ever. One of the other must give over, and that one was White Fang. Fear surged through him again. For the first time he was really being manhandled. The occasional blows of sticks and stones he had previously experienced were as caresses compared with this. He broke down and began to cry and yelp. For a time each blow brought a yelp from him. But fear passed into terror until finally his yelps were voiced in unbroken succession, unconnected with the rhythm of the punishment. At last Gray Beaver withheld his hand. White Fang hanging limply continued to cry. This seemed to satisfy his master, who flung him down roughly in the bottom of the canoe. In the meantime the canoe had drifted down the stream. Gray Beaver picked up the paddle. White Fang was in his way. He spurned him savagely with his foot. In that moment White Fang's free nature flashed forth again and he sank his teeth into the moccasin foot. The beating that had gone before was as nothing compared with the beating he now received. Gray Beaver's wrath was terrible, likewise was White Fang's fright. Not only the hand, but the hard wooden paddle was used upon him and he was bruised and sore in all his small body when he was again flung down in the canoe. Again and this time with purpose did Gray Beaver kick him. White Fang did not repeat his attack on the foot. He had learned another lesson of his bondage. Never, no matter what the circumstance, must he dare to bite the God who was Lord and Master over him. The body of the Lord and Master was sacred, not to be defiled by the teeth of such as he. That was evidently the crime of crimes, the one offense there was no condoning nor overlooking. When the canoe touched the shore, White Fang lay whimpering and motionless, waiting the will of Gray Beaver. It was Gray Beaver's will that he should go ashore, for ashore he was flung, striking heavily on his side, and hurting his bruises afresh. He crawled tremblingly to his feet and stood whimpering. Lip Lip, who had watched the whole proceeding from the bank, now rushed upon him, knocking him over and sinking his teeth into him. White Fang was too helpless to defend himself, and it would have gone hard with him had not Gray Beaver's foot shot out, lifting Lip Lip into the air with its violence so that he smashed down to earth a dozen feet away. This was the man-animal's justice, and even then, in his own impitiable plight, White Fang experienced a little grateful thrill. At Gray Beaver's heels he limped obediently through the village to the teepee, and so it came that White Fang learned that the right to punish was something the gods reserved for themselves and denied to the lesser creatures under them. That night, when all was still, White Fang remembered his mother and sorrowed for her. He sorrowed too loudly and woke up Gray Beaver, who beat him. After that he mourned gently when the gods were around, but sometimes, straying off to the edge of the woods by himself, he gave vent to his grief, and cried it out with loud whimpering and wailings. It was during this period that he might have hearkened to the memories of the lair and the stream, and run back to the wild. But the memory of his mother held him, as the hunting man-animals went out and came back, so she would come back to the village some time. So he remained in his bondage, waiting for her. But it was not altogether an unhappy bondage. There was much to interest him. Something was always happening. There was no end to the strange things these gods did, and he was always curious to see. Besides, he was learning how to get along with Gray Beaver. Obedience, rigid, undeviating obedience, was what was exacted of him, and in return he escaped beatings and his existence was tolerated. Nay, Gray Beaver himself sometimes tossed him a piece of meat, and defended him against the other dogs in the eating of it. And such a piece of meat was of value. It was worth more, in some strange way, than a dozen pieces of meat from the hand of a squaw. Gray Beaver never petted nor caressed. Perhaps it was the weight of his hand, perhaps his justice, perhaps the sheer power of him, and perhaps it was all these things that influenced White Fang, for a certain tie of attachment was forming between him and his surly lord. Insidiously, and by remote ways, as well as by the power of stick and stone and clout of hand, were the shackles of White Fang's bondage being riveted upon him. The qualities in his kind that in the beginning made it possible for them to come into the fires of men were qualities capable of development. They were developing in him, and the camp life, replete with misery as it was, was secretly endearing itself to him all the time. But White Fang was unaware of it. He knew only grief for the loss of Keche, hope for her return, and a hungry yearning for the free life that had been his. White Fang became wickeder and more ferocious than it was his natural right to be. Savageness was a part of his makeup, but the savageness thus developed exceeded his makeup. He acquired a reputation for wickedness amongst the men-animals themselves. Whenever there was trouble and uproar in camp, fighting and squabbling, or the outcry of a squaw over a bit of stolen meat, they were sure to find White Fang mixed up in it, and usually at the bottom of it. They did not bother to look after the causes of his conduct. They saw only the effects, and the effects were bad. He was a sneak and a thief, a mischief-maker, a fomenter of trouble, and irate squaws told him to his face, the while he eyed them alert and ready to dodge any quick-flung missile, that he was a wolf and worthless, and bound to come to an evil end. He found himself an outcast in the midst of the populous camp. All the young dogs followed Lip-Lip's lead. There was a difference between White Fang and them. Perhaps they sensed his wildwood breed and instinctively felt for him the enmity that the domestic dog feels for the wolf. Be that as it may, they joined with Lip-Lip in the persecution. And, once declared against him, they found good reason to continue declared against him. One and all, from time to time, they felt his teeth. And to his credit he gave more than he received. Many of them he could whip in single-fight, but single-fight was denied him. The beginning of such a fight was a signal for all the young dogs in camp to come running and pitch upon him. Out of this packed persecution he learned two important things. How to take care of himself in a mass fight against him. And how, on a single dog, to inflict the greatest amount of damage in the briefest space of time. To keep one's feet in the midst of the hostile mass met life, and this he learned well. He became cat-like in his ability to stay on his feet. Even grown dogs might hurtle him backward or sideways with the impact of their heavy bodies, and backward or sideways he would go, in the air or sliding on the ground, but always with his legs under him and his feet downward to the mother earth. When dogs fight there are usually preliminaries to the actual combat, snarlings and bristlings and stiff-legged struttings. But White Fang learned to omit these preliminaries. Delay meant the coming against him of all the young dogs. He must do his work quickly and get away. So he learned to give no warning of his intention. He rushed in and snapped and slashed on the instant, without notice, before his foe could prepare to meet him. Thus he learned how to inflict quick and severe damage. Also he learned the value of surprise. A dog, taken off its guard, its shoulder, slashed open, or its ear ripped in ribbons before it knew what was happening, was a dog half whipped. Furthermore it was remarkably easy to overthrow a dog taken by surprise, while a dog, thus overthrown, invariably exposed for a moment the soft underside of its neck, the vulnerable point at which to strike for its life. White Fang knew this point. It was a knowledge bequeathed to him directly from the hunting generation of wolves. So it was that White Fang's method when he took the offensive was, first to find a young dog alone, second to surprise it and knock it off its feet, and third to drive him with his teeth at the soft throat. Being but partly grown his jaws had not yet become large enough nor strong enough to make his throat attack deadly, but many a young dog went around camp with a lacerated throat in token of White Fang's intention. And one day, catching one of his enemies alone on the edge of the woods, he managed, by repeatedly overthrowing him and attacking the throat, to cut the great vein and let out the life. There was a great row that night. He had been observed, the news had been carried to the dead dog's master, the squaws remembered all the instances of stolen meat, and Gray Beaver was beset by many angry voices. But he resolutely held the door of his teepee, inside which he had placed the culprit, and refused to permit the vengeance for which his tribespeople clamored. White Fang became hated by man and dog. During this period of his development he never knew a moment's security. The tooth of every dog was against him, the hand of every man. He was greeted with snarls by his kind, with curses and stones by his gods. He lived tensely. He was always keyed up, alert for attack, wary of being attacked, with an eye for sudden and unexpected missiles, prepared to act precipitately and coolly, to leap in with a flash of teeth or to leap away with a menacing snarl. As for snarling he could snarl more terribly than any dog, young or old, in camp. The intent of the snarl is to warn or frighten, and judgment is required to know when it should be used. White Fang knew how to make it, and when to make it. Into his snarl he incorporated all that was vicious, malignant and horrible.  He could compel a pause on the part of almost any assailant. A temporary pause, when taken off his guard, gave him the vital moment in which to think and determine his action. But often a pause so gained lengthened out until it evolved into a complete cessation from the attack, and before more than one of the grown dogs, White Fang's snarl enabled him to beat an honorable retreat. An outcast himself from the pack of the part-grown dogs, his sanguinary methods and remarkable efficiency made the pack pay for its persecution of him. Not permitted himself to run with the pack, the curious state of affairs obtained that no member of the pack could run outside the pack. White Fang would not permit it. What of his bushwhacking and way-laying tactics the young dogs were afraid to run by themselves. With the exception of lip-lip they were compelled to hunch together for mutual protection against the terrible enemy they had made. A puppy alone by the river-bank meant a puppy dead or a puppy that aroused the camp with its shrill pain and terror as it fled back from the wolf-cub that had way-lated. But White Fang's reprisals did not cease, even when the young dogs had learned thoroughly that they must stay together. He attacked them when he caught them alone, and they attacked him when they were bunched. The sight of him was sufficient to start them rushing after him, at which times his swiftness usually carried him into safety. But woe the dog that outran his fellows in such pursuit! White Fang had learned to turn suddenly upon the pursuer that was ahead of the pack and thoroughly to rip him up before the pack could arrive. This occurred with great frequency, for, once in full cry, the dogs were prone to forget themselves in the excitement of the chase, while White Fang never forgot himself. Stealing backward glances as he ran, he was always ready to whirl around and down the overzealous pursuer that outran his fellows. Young dogs are bound to play, and out of the exigencies of the situation they realized their play in this mimic warfare. Thus it was that the haunt of White Fang became their chief game, a deadly game with all, and at times a serious game. He, on the other hand, being the fastest-footed, was unafraid to venture anywhere. During the period that he waited vainly for his mother to come back, he led the pack many a while chased through the adjacent woods. But the pack invariably lost him. Its noise and outcry warned him of its presence, while he ran alone, velvet-footed, silently, a moving shadow among the trees after the manner of his father and mother before him. Further he was more directly connected with the wild than they, and he knew more of its secrets and stratagems. A favorite trick of his was to lose his trail in running water, and then lie quietly in a nearby thicket while their baffled cries rose around him. Hated by his kind and by mankind, indomitable, perpetually warred upon and himself waging perpetual war, his development was rapid and one-sided. This was no soil for kindness and affection to blossom in. Of such things he had not the faintest glimmering. The code he learned was to obey the strong and to oppress the weak. Gray beaver was a god and strong. Therefore White Fang obeyed him. But the dog younger or smaller than himself was weak, a thing to be destroyed. His development was in the direction of power. In order to face the constant danger of hurt and even of destruction, his predatory and protective faculties were unduly developed. He became quicker of movement than the other dogs, swifter of foot, craftier, deadlier, more lithe, more lean with iron-like muscle in sinew, more enduring, more cruel, more ferocious, and more intelligent. He had to become all these things else he would not have held his own nor survived the hostile environment in which he found himself. In the fall of the year, when the days were shortening and the bite of the frost was coming into the air, White Fang got his chance for liberty. For several days there had been a great hubbub in the village. The summer camp was being dismantled, and the tribe, bag and baggage, was preparing to go off to the fall hunting. White Fang watched it all with eager eyes, and when the TPs began to come down and the canoes were loading at the bank he understood. Already the canoes were departing, and some had disappeared down the river.  He waited his opportunity to slink out of camp to the woods. Here in the running stream where ice was beginning to form he hid his trail. Then he crawled into the heart of a dense thicket and waited. The time passed by, and he slept intermittently for hours. Then he was aroused by Graybeaver's voice calling him by name. There were other voices, White Fang could hear Graybeaver's squaw taking part in the search, and Mitza, who was Graybeaver's son. White Fang trembled with fear, and though the impulse came to crawl out of his hiding-place, he resisted it. After a time the voices died away, and some time after that he crept out to enjoy the success of his undertaking. Darkness was coming on and for a while he played about among the trees, pleasuring in his freedom. Then and quite suddenly he became aware of loneliness. He sat down to consider, listening to the silence of the forest and perturbed by it. That nothing moved nor sounded seemed ominous. He felt the lurking of danger, unseen and unguessed. He was suspicious of the looming bulks of the trees and of the dark shadows that might conceal all manner of perilous things. Then it was cold. Here was no warm side of a tepee against which to snuggle. The frost was in his feet, and he kept lifting first one forefoot and then the other. He curved his bushy tail around to cover them, and at the same time he saw a vision. It was nothing strange about it. Upon his inward sight was impressed a succession of memory pictures. He saw the camp again, the tepees, and the blaze of the fires. He heard the shrill voices of the women, the gruff bases of the men, and the snarling of the dogs. He was hungry, and he remembered pieces of meat and fish that had been thrown him. Here was no meat, nothing but a threatening and inedible silence. His bondage had softened him. Irresponsibility had weakened him. He had forgotten how to shift for himself. The night yawned about him. His senses, accustomed to the hum and bustle of the camp, used to the continuous impact of sights and sounds, were now left idle. There was nothing to do, nothing to see or hear. They strained to catch some interruption of the silence and immobility of nature. They were appalled by inaction and by the feeling of something terrible impending. He gave a great start of fright. A colossal and formless something was rushing across the field of his vision. It was a tree shadow flung by the moon, from whose face the clouds had been brushed away. Reassured he whimpered softly. Then he suppressed the whimper for fear that it might attract the attention of the lurking dangers. A tree, contracting in the cool of the night, made a loud noise. It was directly above him. He yelped in his fright. A panic seized him and he ran madly toward the village. He knew an overpowering desire for the protection and companionship of man. In his nostrils was the smell of the camp smoke. In his ears the camp sounds and cries were ringing loud. He passed out of the forest and into the moonlit open where there were no shadows nor darknesses. But no village greeted his eyes. He had forgotten. The village had gone away. His wild flight ceased abruptly. There was no place to which to flee. He slunk forlornly through the deserted camp, smelling the rubbish heaps and the discarded rags and tags of the gods. He would have been glad for the rattle of stones about him, flung by an angry squaw, glad for the hand of Greybeaver descending upon him in wrath, while he would have welcomed with delight, lip-lip, and the whole snarling, cowardly pack. He came to where Greybeaver's teepee had stood. In the center of the space it had occupied, he sat down. He pointed his nose at the moon. His throat was afflicted by rigid spasms. His mouth opened and in a heartbroken cry bubbled up his loneliness and fear, his grief for Quiche, all his past sorrows and miseries as well as his apprehension of sufferings and dangers to come. It was the long wolf-howl, full-throated and mournful, the first howl he had ever uttered. The coming of daylight dispelled his fears but increased his loneliness. The naked earth, which so shortly before had been so populous, thrust his loneliness more forcibly upon him. It did not take him long to make up his mind. He plunged into the forest and followed the river-bank down the stream. All day he ran. He did not rest. He seemed made to run on for ever. His iron-like body ignored fatigue, and even after fatigue came his heritage of endurance braced him to endless endeavor and enabled him to drive his complaining body onward. Where the river swung in against precipitous bluffs he climbed the high mountains behind. Rivers and streams that entered the main river he forded or swam. Often he took to the rim-ice that was beginning to form, and more than once he crashed through and struggled for life in the icy current. Always he was on the lookout for the trail of the gods where it might leave the river and proceed inland. White Fang was intelligent beyond the average of his kind, yet his mental vision was not wide enough to embrace the other bank of the Mackenzie. What of the trail of the gods let out on that side? It never entered his head. Later on, when he had traveled more and grown older and wiser and come to know more of trails and rivers, it might be that he could grasp and apprehend such a possibility. But that mental power was yet in the future. Just now he ran blindly, his own bank of the Mackenzie alone entering into his calculations. All night he ran, blundering in the darkness into mishaps and obstacles that delayed but did not dot. By the middle of the second day he had been running continuously for thirty hours, and the iron of his flesh was giving out. It was the endurance of his mind that kept him going. He had not eaten in forty hours, and he was weak with hunger. The repeated drenchings in the icy water had likewise had their effect on him. His handsome coat was draggled. The broad pads of his feet were bruised and bleeding. He had begun to limp, and this limp increased with the hours. To make it worse the light of the sky was obscured and snow began to fall. A raw, moist, melting, clinging snow, slippery underfoot, that hid from him the landscape he traversed, and that covered over the inequalities of the ground so that the way of his feet was more difficult and painful. Greybeaver had intended camping that night on the far bank of the Mackenzie, for it was in that direction that the hunting lay. But on the near bank, shortly before dark, a moose coming down to drink had been espied by Klu Kuch, who was Greybeaver's squaw. Now had not the moose come down to drink, had not Mitzah been steering out of the course because of the snow, had not Klu Kuch sited the moose, and had not Greybeaver killed it with a lucky shot from his rifle, all subsequent things would have happened differently. Greybeaver would not have camped on the near side of the Mackenzie, and White Fang would have passed by and gone on, either to die or to find his way to his wild brothers and become one of them, a wolf to the end of his days. Night had fallen. The snow was flying more thickly, and White Fang, whimpering softly to himself as he stumbled and limped along, came upon a fresh trail in the snow. So fresh was it that he knew it immediately for what it was. Wining with eagerness he followed back from the river bank and in among the trees. The camp sounds came to his ears. He saw the blaze of the fire, Klu Kuch cooking and Greybeaver squatting on his hams and munching a chunk of raw tallow. There was fresh meat in camp. White Fang expected a beating. He crouched and bristled a little at the thought of it. Then he went forward again. He feared and disliked the beating he knew to be waiting for him. But he knew, further, that the comfort of the fire would be his, the protection of the gods, the companionship of the dogs, the last a companionship of enmity, but nonetheless a companionship and satisfying to his gregarious needs. He came cringing and crawling into the firelight. Greybeaver saw him and stopped munching the tallow. White Fang crawled slowly, cringing and groveling in the abjectness of his abasement and submission. He crawled straight toward Greybeaver, every inch of his progress becoming slower and more painful. At last he lay at the master's feet, into whose possession he now surrendered himself, voluntarily, body and soul.  White Fang trembled, waiting for the punishment to fall upon him. There was a movement of the hand above him. He cringed involuntarily under the expected blow. It did not fall. He stole a glance upward. Greybeaver was breaking the lump of tallow in half. Greybeaver was offering him one piece of the tallow. Very gently and somewhat suspiciously, he first smelled the tallow and then proceeded to eat it. Greybeaver ordered meat to be brought to him and guarded him from the other dogs while he ate. After that, grateful and content, White Fang lay at Greybeaver's feet, gazing at the fire that warmed him, blinking and dozing, pure in the knowledge that the morrow would find him, not wandering forlorn through bleak forest stretches, but in the camp of the man-animals, with the gods, to whom he had given himself and upon whom he was now dependent. When December was well along, Greybeaver went on a journey up the Mackenzie. Mitza and Klu Kuch went with him. One sled he drove himself, drawn by dogs he had traded for or borrowed. A second and smaller set was driven by Mitza, and to this was harnessed a team of puppies. It was more of a toy affair than anything else, yet it was the delight of Mitza, who felt that he was beginning to do a man's work in the world. Also he was learning to drive dogs and to train dogs, while the puppies themselves were being broken into the harness. Furthermore the sled was of some service, for it carried nearly two hundred pounds of outfit and food. White Fang had seen the camp dogs toiling in the harness so that he did not resent over much the first placing of the harness upon himself. About his neck was put a moss-stuffed collar, which was connected by two pulling-traces to a strap that passed around his chest and over his back. It was to this that was fastened the long rope by which he pulled at the sled. There were seven puppies in the team. The others had been born earlier in the year, and were nine and ten months old, while White Fang was only eight months old. Each dog was fastened to the sled by a single rope. No two ropes were of the same length, while the difference in length between any two ropes was at least that of a dog's body. Every rope was brought to a ring at the front end of the sled. The sled itself was without runners, being a birch bark toboggan, with upturned forward end to keep it from plowing under the snow. This construction enabled the weight of the sled in load to be distributed over the largest snow surface, for the snow was crystal powder and very soft. Observing the same principle of widest distribution of weight, the dogs at the ends of their ropes radiated fan fashion from the nose of the sled, so that no dog trod at another's footsteps. There was, furthermore, another virtue in the fan formation. The ropes of varying length prevented the dogs attacking from the rear those that ran in front of them. For a dog to attack another, it would have to turn upon one at a shorter rope, in which case it would find itself face to face with the dog attacked, and also it would find itself facing the whip of the driver. But the most peculiar virtue of all lay in the fact that the dog that strove to attack one in front of him must pull the sled faster, and that the faster the sled traveled, the faster could the dog attack run away. Thus the dog behind could never catch up with the one in front. The faster he ran, the faster ran the one he was after, and the faster ran all the dogs. Incidentally, the sled went faster, and thus, by cunning indirection, did man increase his mastery over the beasts. Mitsa resembled his father, much of whose gray wisdom he possessed. In the past he had observed Lip Lip's persecution of White Fang, but at that time Lip Lip was another man's dog, and Mitsa had never dared more than to shy an occasional stone at him. But now Lip Lip was his dog, and he proceeded to wreak his vengeance on him by putting him at the end of the longest rope. This made Lip Lip the leader, and was apparently an honour. But in reality it took away from him all honour, and instead of being bully and master of the pack, he now found himself hated and persecuted by the pack. As he ran at the end of the longest rope, the dogs had always the view of him running away before them. All that they saw of him was his bushy tail in fleeing, high in legs, a view far less ferocious and intimidating than his bristling mane and gleaming fangs. Also, dogs being so constituted in their mental ways, the sight of him running away gave desire to run after him, and a feeling that he ran away from them. The moment the sled started, the team took after Lip Lip in a chase that extended throughout the day. At first he had been prone to turn upon his pursuers, jealous of his dignity and wrathful. But at such times Mitsa would throw the stinging lash of the thirty-foot caribou-gut whip into his face and compel him to turn tail and run on. Lip Lip might face the pack, but he could not face that whip, and all that was left him to do was to keep his long rope taught and his flanks ahead of the teeth of his mates. But a still greater cunning lurked in the recesses of the Indian mind. To give point to unending pursuit of the leader, Mitsa favored him over the other dogs. These favors aroused in them jealousy and hatred. In their presence Mitsa would give him meat and would give it to him only. This was maddening to them. They would rage around just outside the throwing distance of the whip, while Lip Lip devoured the meat and Mitsa protected him. And when there was no meat to give, Mitsa would keep the team at a distance and make believe to give meat to Lip Lip. White Fang took kindly to the work. He had traveled a greater distance than the other dogs in the yielding of himself to the rule of the gods, and he had learned more thoroughly the futility of opposing their will. In addition, the persecution he had suffered from the pack had made the pack less to him in the scheme of things and man more. He had not learned to be depended on his kind for companionship. Besides, Keche was well-knife-forgotten, and the chief outlet of expression that remained to him was in the allegiance he tendered the gods he had accepted as masters. So he worked hard, learned discipline, and was obedient. Faithfulness and willingness characterised his toil. These are essential traits of the wolf and the wild dog when they have become domesticated, and these traits White Fang possessed in unusual measure. A companionship did exist between White Fang and the other dogs, but it was one of warfare and enmity. He had never learned to play with them. He knew only how to fight, and fight with them he did, returning to them a hundredfold the snaps and slashes they had given him in the days when Lip Lip was leader of the pack. But Lip Lip was no longer leader, except when he fled away before his mates at the end of his rope, the sled bounding along behind. In camp he kept close to Mitza or Grey Beaver or Klu Kuch. He did not dare venture away from the gods, for now the fangs of all dogs were against him, and he tasted to the dregs the persecution that had been White Fangs. With the overthrow of Lip Lip White Fang could have become leader of the pack. But he was too morose and solitary for that. He merely thrashed his teammates. Otherwise he ignored them. They got out of his way when he came along, nor did the boldest of them ever dare to rob him of his meat. On the contrary, they devoured their own meat hurriedly, for fear that he would take it away from them. White Fang knew the law well, to oppress the weak and obey the strong. He ate his share of meat as rapidly as he could, and then wove the dog that had not yet finished. A snarl and a flash of fangs, and that dog would wail his indignation to the uncomforting stars while White Fang finished his portion for him. Every little while, however, one dog or another would flame up in revolt and be promptly subdued. Thus White Fang was kept in training. He was jealous of the isolation in which he kept himself in the midst of the pack, and he fought often to maintain it. But such fights were of brief duration. He was too quick for the others. They were slashed open in bleeding before they knew what had happened, were whipped almost before they had begun to fight. As rigid as the sled-discipline of the gods, was the discipline maintained by White Fang amongst his fellows. He never allowed them any latitude. He compelled them to an unremitting respect for him. They might do as they pleased amongst themselves. That was no concern of his. But it was his concern that they leave him alone in his isolation, get out of his way when he elected to walk among them, and at all times acknowledge his mastery over them. A hint of stiff leggedness on their part, a lifted lip or a bristle of hair, and he would be upon them, merciless and cruel, swiftly convincing them of the error of their way. He was a monstrous tyrant. His mastery was rigid as steel. He oppressed the weak with a vengeance. Not for nothing had he been exposed to the pitiless struggles for life in the day of his cubhood when his mother and he, alone and unaided, held their own and survived in the ferocious environment of the wild. And not for nothing had he learned to walk softly when superior strength went by. He oppressed the weak, but he respected the strong. And in the course of the long journey with Gray Beaver he walked softly indeed amongst the full-grown dogs in the camps of the strange man-animals they encountered. The months passed by. Still continued the journey of Gray Beaver. White Fang's strength was developed by the long hours on trail and the steady toil at the sled, and it would have seemed that his mental development was well nigh complete. He had come to know quite thoroughly the world in which he lived. His outlook was bleak and materialistic. The world, as he saw it, was a fierce and brutal world, a world without warmth, a world in which caresses an affection and the bright sweetnesses of the spirit did not exist. He had no affection for Gray Beaver. True he was a God, but a most savage God. White Fang was glad to acknowledge his lordship, but it was a lordship based upon superior intelligence and brute strength. There was something in the fiber of White Fang's being that made his lordship a thing to be desired, else he would not have come back from the wild when he did to tender his allegiance. There were deeps in his nature which had never been sounded. A kind word, a caressing touch of the hand, on the part of Gray Beaver, might have sounded these deeps, but Gray Beaver did not caress nor speak kind words. It was not his way. His primacy was savage, and savagely he ruled, administering justice with a club, punishing transgression with the pain of a blow, and rewarding merit not by kindness but by withholding a blow. So White Fang knew nothing of the heaven a man's hand might contain for him. Besides, he did not like the hands of the man-animals. He was suspicious of them. It was true that they sometimes gave meat, but more often they gave hurt. Hands were things to keep away from. They hurled stones, wielded sticks and clubs and whips, administered slaps and clouts, and, when they touched him, were cunning to hurt with pinch and twist and wrench. In strange villages he had encountered the hands of the children and learned that they were cruel to hurt. Also he had once nearly had an eye poked out by a toddling papoose. From these experiences he became suspicious of all children. He could not tolerate them. When they came near with their ominous hands, he got up. It was in a village at the Great Slave Lake that, in the course of resenting the evil of the hands of the man-animals, he came to modify the law that he had learned from Gray Beaver, namely, that the unpardonable crime was to bite one of the gods. In this village, after the custom of all dogs in all villages, White Fang went foraging for food. A boy was chopping frozen moose-meat with an axe, and the chips were flying in the snow. White Fang, sliding by in quest of meat, stopped and began to eat the chips. He observed the boy lay down the axe and take up a stout club. White Fang sprang clear just in time to escape the descending blow. The boy pursued him, and he a stranger in the village fled between two teepees to find himself cornered against a high earth bank. There was no escape for White Fang. The only way out was between the two teepees, and this the boy guarded. Holding his club prepared to strike, he drew in on his cornered quarry. White Fang was furious. He faced the boy, bristling and snarling, his sense of justice outraged. He knew the law of forage, all the wastage of meat, such as the frozen chips, belonged to the dog that found it. He had done no wrong, broken no law, yet here was this boy preparing to give him a beating. White Fang scarcely knew what happened. He did it in a surge of rage, and he did it so quickly that the boy did not know either. All the boy knew was that he had in some unaccountable way been overturned into the snow, and that his club hand had been ripped wide open by White Fang's teeth. But White Fang knew that he had broken the law of the gods. He had driven his teeth into the sacred flesh of one of them, and could expect nothing but a most terrible punishment. He fled away to Gray Beaver, behind whose protecting legs he crouched when the bitten boy and the boy's family came, demanding vengeance. But they went away with vengeance unsatisfied. Gray Beaver defended White Fang, so did Mitsa and Klu Kuch. White Fang, listening to the wordy war and watching the angry gestures, knew that his act was justified, and so it came that he learned there were gods and gods. There were his gods, and there were other gods, and between them there was a difference. Justice or injustice, it was all the same. He must take all things from the hands of his own gods. But he was not compelled to take injustice from the other gods. It was his privilege to resent it with his teeth, and this also was a law of the gods. Before the day was out, White Fang was to learn more about this law. Mitsa, alone, gathering firewood in the forest, encountered the boy that had been bitten. With him were other boys, hot words passed. Then all the boys attacked Mitsa, it was going hard with him. Blows were raining upon him from all sides. White Fang looked on at first. This was an affair of the gods, and no concern of his. Then he realized that this was Mitsa, one of his own particular gods, who was being maltreated. It was no reasoned impulse that made White Fang do what he then did. A mad rush of anger sent him leaping in amongst the combatants. Five minutes later the landscape was covered with fleeing boys, many of whom dripped blood upon the snow in token that White Fang's teeth had not been idle. When Mitsa told the story in camp, Grey Beaver ordered meat to be given to White Fang. He ordered much meat to be given, and White Fang, gorged and sleepy by the fire, knew that the law had received its verification. It was in line with these experiences that White Fang came to learn the law of property and the duty of the defense of property. From the protection of his God's body to the protection of his God's possessions was a step. And this step he made. What was his God's was to be defended against all the world, even to the extent of biting other gods. Not only was such an act sacrilegious in its nature, but it was fraught with peril. The gods were all powerful, and a dog was no match against them, yet White Fang learned to face them fiercely belligerent and unafraid. Duty rose above fear, and thieving gods learned to leave Grey Beaver's property alone. One thing in this connection White Fang quickly learnt, and that was that a thieving god was usually a cowardly god, and prone to run away at the sounding of the alarm. Also he learned that but brief time elapsed between his sounding of the alarm and Grey Beaver coming to his aid. He came to know that it was not fear of him that drove the thief away, but fear of Grey Beaver. White Fang did not give the alarm by barking. He never barked. His method was to drive straight at the intruder and to sink his teeth in if he could. Because he was morose and solitary, having nothing to do with the other dogs, he was unusually fitted to guard his master's property, and in this he was encouraged and trained by Grey Beaver. One result of this was to make White Fang more ferocious and indomitable and more solitary. The months went by, binding stronger and stronger the covenant between dog and man. This was the ancient covenant that the first wolf that came in from the wild entered into with man. And, like all succeeding wolves and wild dogs that had done likewise, White Fang worked the covenant out for himself. The terms were simple. For the possession of a flesh and blood god he exchanged his own liberty. Food and fire, protection and companionship were some of the things he received from the god. In return he guarded the god's property, defended his body, worked for him, and obeyed him. The possession of a god implies service. White Fang's was a service of duty and awe, but not of love. He did not know what love was. He had no experience of love. Qiche was a remote memory. Besides, not only had he abandoned the wild and his kind when he gave himself up to man, but the terms of the covenant were such that if ever he met Qiche again he would not desert his god to go with her. His allegiance to man seemed somehow a law of his being greater than the love of liberty, of kind and kin. End of Chapter 5. Part 3. CHAPTER 6. THE FAMON The Spring of the Year was at hand when Greybeaver finished his long journey. It was April, and White Fang was a year old when he pulled into the home villages and was loosed from the harness by Mitsa. Though a long way from his full growth, White Fang, next to Lip Lip, was the largest yearling in the village. Both from his father, the wolf, and from Qiche, he had inherited stature and strength, and already he was measuring up alongside the full-grown dogs. But he had not yet grown compact. His body was slender and rangy, and his strength more stringy than massive. His coat was the true wolf-grey, and to all appearances he was true wolf himself. The quarter-strain of dog he had inherited from Qiche had left no mark on him physically, though it had played its part in his mental make-up. He wandered through the village, recognizing with staid satisfaction the various gods he had known before the long journey. Then there were the dogs, puppies growing up like himself, and grown dogs that did not look so large and formidable as the memory pictures he retained of them. Also, he stood less in fear of them than formerly, stalking among them with a certain careless ease that was as new to him as it was enjoyable. There was Basique, a grizzled old fellow that in his younger days had but to uncover his fangs to send White Fang cringing and crouching to the right about. From him White Fang had learned much of his own insignificance, and from him he was now to learn much of the change and development that had taken place in himself. While Basique had been growing weaker with age, White Fang had been growing stronger with youth. It was at the cutting up of a moose, fresh-killed, that White Fang learned of the changed relations in which he stood to the dog world. He had got for himself a hoof and part of the shin bone to which quite a bit of meat was attached. Withdrawn from the immediate scramble of the other dogs, in fact, out of sight behind a thicket, he was devouring his prize when Basique rushed in upon him. Before he knew what he was doing he had slashed the intruder twice and sprung clear. Basique was surprised by the other's temerity and swiftness of attack. He stood, gazing stupidly across at White Fang, the raw, red shin bone between them. Basique was old, and already he had come to know the increasing valor of the dogs it had been his want to bully. Bitter experiences these, which, perforce, he swallowed, calling upon all his wisdom to cope with them. In the old days he would have sprung upon White Fang in a fury of righteous wrath, but now his weaning powers would not permit such a chorus. He bristled fiercely, and looked ominously across the shin bone at White Fang. And White Fang, resurrecting quite a deal of the old awe, seemed to wilt and to shrink in upon himself and grow small, as he cast about in his mind for a way to beat a retreat not too inglorious. And right here Basique erred. Had he contended himself with looking fierce and ominous, all would have been well. White Fang, on the verge of retreat, would have retreated, leaving the meat to him. But Basique did not wait. He considered the victory already his, and stepped forward to the meat. As he bent his head carelessly to smell it, White Fang bristled slightly. Even then it was not too late for Basique to retrieve the situation. As he merely stood over the meat, head up and glowering, White Fang would ultimately have slunk away. But the fresh meat was strong in Basique's nostrils, and greed urged him to take a bite of it. This was too much for White Fang. Fresh upon his months of mastery over his own teammates, it was beyond his self-control to stand idly by while another devoured the meat that belonged to him. He struck after his custom without warning. With the first slash, Basique's right ear was ripped into ribbons. He was astounded at the suddenness of it. But more things, and most grievous ones, were happening with equal suddenness. He was knocked off his feet. His throat was bitten. While he was struggling to his feet the young dog sank teeth twice into his shoulder. The swiftness of it was bewildering. He made a futile rush at White Fang, clipping the empty air with an outraged snap. The next moment his nose was laid open, and he was staggering backward away from the meat. The situation was now reversed. White Fang stood over the shinbone, bristling and menacing, while Basique stood a little way off, preparing to retreat. He dared not risk a fight with this young lightning flash, and again he knew, and more bitterly, the enfeeblement of oncoming age. His attempt to maintain his dignity was heroic. Calmly turning his back upon young dog and shinbone, as though both were beneath his notice and unworthy of his consideration, he stalked grandly away. Nor until well out of sight did he stop to lick his bleeding wounds. The effect on White Fang was to give him a greater faith in himself, and a greater pride. He walked less softly among the grown dogs. His attitude toward them was less compromising. Not that he went out of his way looking for trouble. Far from it. But upon his way he demanded consideration. He stood upon his right to go his way, unmolested and to give trail to no dog. He had to be taken into account, that was all. He was no longer to be disregarded and ignored, as was the lot of puppies, and as continued to be the lot of the puppies that were his teammates. They got out of the way, gave trail to the grown dogs, and gave up meat to them under compulsion. But White Fang, uncompagnionable, solitary, morose, scarcely looking to right or left, redoubtable, forbidding of aspect, remote and alien, was accepted as an equal by his puzzled elders. They quickly learned to leave him alone, neither venturing hostile acts nor making overtures of friendliness. If they left him alone, he left them alone, a state of affairs that they found, after a few encounters, to be preeminently desirable. In mid-summer White Fang had an experience. Trotting along in his silent way to investigate a new teepee which had been erected on the edge of the village while he was away with the hunters after moose, he came full upon Keche. He paused and looked at her. He remembered her vaguely, but he remembered her, and that was more than could be said for her. She lifted her lip at him in the old snarl of menace, and his memory became clear. His forgotten cubhood, all that was associated with that familiar snarl, rushed back to him. Before he had known the gods, she had been to him the center pin of the universe. The old familiar feelings of that time came back upon him, surged up within him. He bounded towards her joyously, and she met him with shrewd fangs that laid his cheek open to the bone. He did not understand. He backed away, bewildered and puzzled. But it was not Keche's fault. A wolf-mother was not made to remember her cubs of a year or so before, so she did not remember White Fang. He was a strange animal, an intruder, and her present litter of puppies gave her the right to resent such intrusion. One of the puppies sprawled up to White Fang. They were half-brothers, only they did not know it. White Fang sniffed the puppy curiously, whereupon Keche rushed upon him, gashing his face a second time. He backed farther away. All the old memories and associations died down again, and passed into the grave from which they had been resurrected. He looked at Keche licking her puppy and stopping now and then to snarl at him. She was without value to him. He had learned to get along without her. Her meaning was forgotten. There was no place for her in his scheme of things, as there was no place for him in hers.  And White Fang allowed himself to be driven away. This was a female of his kind, and it was a law of his kind that the males must not fight the females. He did not know anything about this law, for it was no generalization of the mind, not as something acquired by experience of the world. He knew it as a secret prompting, as an urge of instinct, of the same instinct that made him howl at the moon and stars of nights, and that made him fear death and the unknown. The Months Went By White Fang grew stronger, heavier, and more compact, while his character was developing along the lines laid down by his heredity and his environment. His heredity was a life-stuff that may be likened to clay. It possessed many possibilities, was capable of being molded into many different forms. Environment served to model the clay, to give it a particular form. Thus, had White Fang never come into the fires of man, the wild would have molded him into a true wolf. But the gods had given him a different environment, and he was molded into a dog that was rather wolfish, but that was a dog and not a wolf. And so, according to the clay of his nature and the pressure of his surroundings, his character was being molded into a certain particular shape. There was no escaping it. He was becoming more morose, more uncompagnionable, more solitary, more ferocious. While the dogs were learning more and more that it was better to be at peace with him than at war, and Graybeaver was coming to prize him more greatly with the passage of each day. White Fang, seeming to sum up strength in all his qualities, nevertheless suffered from one besetting weakness. He could not stand being laughed at. The laughter of men was a hateful thing. They might laugh among themselves about anything they please, except himself. And he did not mind. But the moment laughter was turned upon him he would fly into a most terrible rage. Grave, dignified, somber, a laugh made him frantic to ridiculousness. It so outraged him and upset him that for hours he would behave like a demon, and woe to the dog that at such times ran foul of him. He knew the law too well to take it out of Graybeaver. Behind Graybeaver were a club and godhead. But behind the dogs there was nothing but space, and into this space they flew when White Fang came on the scene made mad by laughter. In the third year of his life there came a great famine to the Mackenzie Indians. In the summer the fish failed. In the winter the caribou forsook their accustomed track. Moose were scarce, the rabbits almost disappeared, hunting and praying animals perished. Denied their usual food supply, weakened by hunger, they fell upon and devoured one another. Only the strong survived. White Fang's gods were always hunting animals. The old and the weak of them died of hunger. There was wailing in the village where the women and children went without in order that what little they had might go into the bellies of the lean and hollow-eyed hunters who trod the forest in the vain pursuit of meat. To such extremity were the gods driven that they ate the soft-tanned leather of their moccasins and mittens, while the dogs ate the harnesses off their backs and the very whiplashes. Also the dogs ate one another, and also the gods ate the dogs. The weakest and the more worthless were eaten first. The dogs that still lived looked on and understood. A few of the boldest and wisest forsook the fires of the gods, which had now become shambles, and fled into the forest, where in the end they starved to death or were eaten by wolves. In this time of misery White Fang too stole away into the woods. He was better fitted for the life than the other dogs, for he had the training of his cubhood to guide him. Especially adept at he become in stalking small living things. He would lie concealed for hours, following every movement of a cautious tree squirrel, waiting with a patience as huge as the hunger he suffered from, until the squirrel ventured out upon the ground. Even then White Fang was not premature. He waited until he was sure of striking before the squirrel could gain a tree refuge. Then and not until then would he flash from his hiding-place a gray projectile, incredibly swift, never failing its mark, the fleeing squirrel that fled not fast enough. Successful as he was with squirrels there was one difficulty that prevented him from living and growing fat on them. There were not enough squirrels. So he was driven to hunt still smaller things. So acute did his hunger become at times that he was not above rooting out woodmice from their burrows and the ground. Nor did he scorn to do battle with a weasel as hungry as himself and many times more ferocious. In the worst pinches of the famine he stole back to the fires of the gods. But he did not go into the fires. He lurked in the forest, avoiding discovery and robbing the snares at the rare intervals when game was caught. He even robbed gray beaver's snare of a rabbit at a time when gray beavers staggered and tottered through the forest, sitting down often to rest, what of weakness and shortness of breath. One day White Fang encountered a young wolf, gaunt and scrawny, loose-jointed with famine. Had he not been hungry himself, White Fang might have gone with him and eventually found his way into the pack amongst his wild brethren. As it was, he ran the young wolf down and killed and ate him. Fortune seemed to favour him. Always, when hardest pressed for food, he found something to kill. Again, when he was weak, it was his luck that none of the larger praying animals chanced upon him. Thus he was strong from the two days eating a lynx had afforded him when the hungry wolf pack ran full tilt upon him. It was a long, cruel chase, but he was better nourished than they, and in the end outran them. And not only did he outrun them, but circling widely back on his track, he gathered in one of his exhausted pursuers. After that he left that part of the country and journeyed over to the valley wherein he had been born. Here, in the old lair, he encountered Qiche. Up to her old tricks she too had fled the inhospitable fires of the gods and gone back to her old refuge to give birth to her young. Of this litter but one remained alive when White Fang came upon the scene, and this one was not destined to live long. Young life had little chance in such a famine. Qiche's greeting of her grown son was anything but affectionate, but White Fang did not mind. He had outgrown his mother. So he turned tail philosophically, and trotted on up the stream. At the forks he took the turning to the left, where he found the lair of the lynx with whom his mother and he had fought long before. Here in the abandoned lair he settled down and rested for a day. During the early summer, in the last days of the famine, he met Lip Lip, who had likewise taken to the woods where he had eaked out a miserable existence. White Fang came upon him unexpectedly. Trotting in opposite directions along the base of a high bluff, they rounded a corner of rock and found themselves face to face. They paused with instant alarm and looked at each other suspiciously. White Fang was in splendid condition. His hunting had been good, and for a week he had eaten his fill. He was even gorged from his latest kill. But in the moment he looked at Lip Lip his hair rose on end all along his back. It was an involuntary bristling on his part. The physical state that in the past had always accompanied the mental state produced in him by Lip Lip's bullying and persecution. As in the past he had bristled and snarled at sight of Lip Lip, so now, and automatically, he bristled and snarled. He did not waste any time. The thing was done thoroughly and with dispatch. Lip Lip assayed to back away, but White Fang struck him hard, shoulder to shoulder. Lip Lip was overthrown and rolled upon his back. White Fang's teeth drove into the scrawny throat. There was a death struggle during which White Fang walked around stiff-legged and observant. Then he resumed his course and trotted on along the base of the bluff. One day, not long after, he came to the edge of the forest where a narrow stretch of open land sloped down to the McKenzie. He had been over this ground before when it was bare, but now a village occupied it. Still hidden amongst the trees he paused to study the situation. Sights and sounds and scents were familiar to him. It was the old village changed to a new place. But sights and sounds and smells were different from those he had last had when he fled away from it. There was no whimpering nor wailing.  And there was a smell in the air of fish. There was food. The famine was gone. He came out boldly from the forest and trotted into camp straight to Graybeaver's teepee. Graybeaver was not there, but Klu Kuch welcomed him with glad cries and the whole of a fresh-caught fish, and he lay down to wait Graybeaver's coming. End of Chapter 6 Part 4, Chapter 1 of White Fang. White Fang by Jack London. Part 4, Chapter 1. The Enemy of His Kind. Had there been in White Fang's nature any possibility, no matter how remote of his ever coming to fraternize with his kind, such possibility was irretrievably destroyed when he was made leader of the sled-team. For now the dogs hated him. Hated him for the extra meat bestowed upon him by Mitsa. Hated him for all the real infancy favors he received.  And White Fang just as bitterly hated them back. Being sled-leader was anything but gratifying to him, to be compelled to run away before the yelling-pack, every dog of which, for three years, he had thrashed and mastered, was almost more than he could endure. But endure it he must or perish, and the life that was in him had no desire to perish out. The moment Mitsa gave his order for the start, that moment the whole team, with eager savage cries, sprang forward at White Fang. There was no defense for him. If he turned upon them, Mitsa would throw the stinging lash of the whip into his face. Only remained to him to run away. He could not encounter that howling horde with his tail and hindquarters. These were scarcely fit weapons with which to meet the many merciless Fangs. So run away he did, violating his own nature and pride with every leap he made, and leaping all day long. One cannot violate the promptings of one's nature without having that nature recoil upon itself. Such a recoil is like that of a hair made to grow out from the body, turning unnaturally upon the direction of its growth and growing into the body, a rankling, festering thing of hurt. And so with White Fang, every urge of his being impelled him to spring upon the pack that 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 caribou gut with its biting thirty-foot lash. So White Fang could only eat his heart in bitterness and develop a hatred and malice commensurate with the ferocity and indomitability of his nature. If ever a creature was the enemy of its kind, White Fang was that creature. He asked no quarter, gave none. He was continually marred and scarred by the teeth of the pack, and as continually he left his own marks upon the pack. Unlike most leaders who, when camp was made and the dogs were unhitched, huddled near to the gods for protection, White Fang disdained such protection. He walked boldly about the camp, inflicting punishment in the night for what he had suffered in the day. In the time before he was made leader of the team, the pack had learned to get out of his way. But now it was different. Excited by the day-long pursuit of him, swayed subconsciously by the insistent iteration on their brains of the sight of him fleeing away, mastered by the feeling of mastery enjoyed all day, the dogs could not bring themselves to give way to him. When he appeared amongst them, there was always a squabble. His progress was marked by snarl and snap and growl. The very atmosphere he breathed was surcharge with hatred and malice, and this but served to increase the hatred and malice within him. When Mitza 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 Mitza, 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 to 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 consistency 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 have been domesticated for generations. Much of the wild had 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 forgetting 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 molded. 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 and 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 reveled 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 thing. 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 into the fiber 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 on to 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.  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. His 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 Watershed between Mackenzie and the Yukon in the late winter, and spent the spring and 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 affected 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-sone 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 dreams 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 Godhead 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 Grey 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 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 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 into 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 his life, and as the days went by they continued to come up the river, stop, and then go on up the river 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 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 fellows 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 in 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.  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 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 dog-like and with more liking for dogs. Had Grey 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 molded until he became what he was, morose and lonely, unloving and ferocious, the enemy of all his kind. CHAPTER II A small number of White Men lived in Fort Yukon. These men had been long in the country. They called themselves Sour-Does 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 Chechakwos, and they always wielded at the application of the name. They made their bread with baking powder. This was the invidious distinction between them and the Sour-Does, who, forsooth, made their bread from Sour-Do, because they had no baking powder. All of which is neither here nor there. The men in the Fort disdain the newcomers, and enjoying 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 of 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 head. 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 his 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 need in sniveling cowards. To complete his description, his teeth were large and yellow, while the two eye-teeth, 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.  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 molded in the making. He did the cooking for the other men in the fort, the dishwashing 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, came emanations of the unhealth within. Not by reasoning, not by the five senses alone, but by other and remotor 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 Grey 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 in Grey Beaver talking together. Once the man pointed at him, and White Fang snarled back as though the hand were 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. Grey 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 Grey 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. Grey 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 unwanted 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 talked with him again about the sale of White Fang, but this time the price offered was in bottles, not dollars, and Grey Beaver's ears were more eager to hear.  The bottles were delivered, but after two days, you catch him, dog! were Beauty Smith's words to Grey Beaver. White Fang slunk into camp one evening and dropped down with a sigh of content. The dreaded White God was not there. For days his manifestations of desire to lay hands on him had been growing more insistent, and during that time White Fang had been compelled to avoid the camp. He did not know what evil was threatened by those insistent hands. He knew only that they did threaten evil of some sort, and that it was best for him to keep out of their reach. But scarcely had he lain down when Grey Beaver staggered over to him and tied a leather thong around his neck. He sat down beside White Fang, holding the end of the thong in his hand. In the other hand he held a bottle, which from time to time was inverted above his head to the accompaniment of gurgling noises. An hour of this past, when the vibrations of feet and contact with the ground foreran the one who approached. White Fang heard it first and he was bristling with recognition while Grey Beaver still nodded stupidly. White Fang tried to draw the thong softly out of his master's hand, but the relaxed fingers closed tightly and Grey Beaver roused himself. Beauty Smith strode into camp and stood over White Fang. He snarled softly up at the thing of fear, watching keenly the deportment of the hands. One hand extended outward and began to descend upon his head. His soft snarl grew tense and harsh. The hand continued slowly to descend, while he crouched beneath it, eyeing it malignantly. His snarl growing shorter and shorter as with quickening breath it approached its culmination. Suddenly he snapped, striking with his fangs like a snake. The hand was jerked back and the teeth came together emptily with a sharp click. Beauty Smith was frightened and angry. Grey Beaver clouded White Fang alongside the head so that he cowered down close to the earth in respectful obedience. White Fang's suspicious eyes followed every movement. He saw Beauty Smith go away and return with a stout club. Then the end of the thong was given over to him by Grey Beaver. Beauty Smith started to walk away. The thong grew taut. White Fang resisted it. Grey Beaver clouded him right and left to make him get up and follow. He obeyed, but with a rush hurling himself upon the stranger who was dragging him away. Beauty Smith did not jump away. He had been waiting for this. He swung the club smartly, stopping the rush midway and smashing White Fang down upon the ground. Grey Beaver laughed and nodded approval. Beauty Smith tightened the thong again and White Fang crawled limply and dizzily to his feet. He did not rush a second time. One smash from the club was sufficient to convince him that the White God knew how to handle it and he was too wise to fight the inevitable. So he followed morosely at Beauty Smith's heels, his tail between his legs, yet snarling softly under his breath. But Beauty Smith kept a wary eye on him and the club was held always ready to strike. At the fort Beauty Smith left him securely tied and went into bed. White Fang waited an hour. Then he applied his teeth to the thong and in the space of ten seconds was free. He had wasted no time with his teeth. There had been no useless gnawing. The thong was cut across diagonally, almost as clean as though done by a knife. White Fang looked up at the fort, at the same time bristling and growling. Then he turned and trotted back to Grey Beaver's camp. He owed no allegiance to this strange and terrible God. He had given himself to Grey Beaver, and to Grey Beaver he considered he still belonged. But what had occurred before was repeated, with a difference. Grey Beaver again made him fast with the thong, and in the morning turned him over to Beauty Smith. And here was where the difference came in. Beauty Smith gave him a beating. Tied securely, White Fang could only rage futilely and endure the punishment.  Even the big beating given him in his puppyhood by Grey Beaver was mild compared with this. Beauty Smith enjoyed the task. He delighted in it. He gloated over his victim and his eyes flamed dully as he swung the whip or club and listened to White Fang's cries of pain and to his helpless bellows and snarls. For Beauty Smith was cruel in the way that cowards are cruel.  All life likes power, and Beauty Smith was no exception. Denied the expression of power amongst his own kind, he fell back upon the lesser creatures, and there vindicated the life that was in him. But Beauty Smith had not created himself, and no blame was to be attached to him. He had come into the world with a twisted body and a brute intelligence. This had constituted the clay of him, and it had not been kindly molded by the world. White Fang knew why he was being beaten. When Grey Beaver tied the thong around his neck and passed the end of the thong into Beauty Smith's keeping, White Fang knew that it was his God's will for him to go with Beauty Smith, and when Beauty Smith left him tied outside the fort, he knew that it was Beauty Smith's will that he should remain there. Therefore he had disobeyed the will of both the gods and earned the consequent punishment. He had seen dogs change owners in the past, and he had seen the runaways beaten as he was being beaten. He was wise, and yet in the nature of him there were forces greater than wisdom. One of these was Fidelity. He did not love Grey Beaver, yet, even in the face of his will and his anger, he was faithful to him. He could not help it. This faithfulness was a quality of the clay that composed him. It was the quality that was peculiarly the possession of his kind, the quality that set apart his species from all other species, the quality that enabled the wolf and the wild dog to come in from the open and be the companions of man. After the beating, White Fang was dragged back to the fort. But this time Beauty Smith left him tied with a stick. One does not give up a god easily, and so with White Fang. Grey Beaver was his own particular god, and in spite of Grey Beaver's will White Fang still clung to him and would not give him up. Grey Beaver had betrayed and forsaken him, but that had no effect upon him. Not for nothing had he surrendered himself body and soul to Grey Beaver. There had been no reservation on White Fang's part, and the bond was not to be broken easily. So in the night, when the men in the fort were asleep, White Fang applied his teeth to the stick that held him. The wood was seasoned and dry, and it was tied so closely to his neck that he could scarcely get his teeth to it. It was only by the severest muscular exertion and neck arching that he succeeded in getting the wood between his teeth, and barely between his teeth at that. And it was only by the exercise of an immense patience extending through many hours that he succeeded in gnawing through the stick. This was something that dogs were not supposed to do. It was unprecedented, but White Fang did it trotting away from the fort in the early morning with the end of the stick hanging to his neck. He was wise, but had he been merely wise he would not have gone back to Grey Beaver who had already twice betrayed him. But there was his faithfulness, and he went back to be betrayed yet a third time. Again he yielded to the tying of a thong around his neck by Grey Beaver, and again Beauty Smith came to claim him, and this time he was beaten even more severely than before. Grey Beaver looked unstalledly while the White Man wielded the whip. He gave no protection. It was no longer his dog. When the beating was over White Fang was sick. A soft South Island dog would have died under it, but not he. His school of life had been sterner, and he was himself of sterner stuff. He had too great vitality. His clutch on life was too strong. But he was very sick. At first he was unable to drag himself along, and Beauty Smith had to wait half an hour for him. And then, blind and reeling, he followed at Beauty Smith's heels back to the fort. But now he was tied with a chain that defied his teeth, and he strove in vain by lunging to draw the staple from the timber into which it was driven. After a few days, sober and bankrupt, Grey Beaver departed up the porcupine on his long journey to the Mackenzie. White Fang remained on the Yukon, the property of a man more than half mad and all brute. But what is a dog to know in its consciousness of madness? To White Fang, Beauty Smith was a veritable, if terrible, God. He was a mad God at best. But White Fang knew nothing of madness. He knew only that he must submit to the will of this new master. Obey his every whim and fancy. CHAPTER III THE RAIN OF HATE Under the tutelage of the mad God White Fang became a fiend. He was kept chained in a pen at the rear of the fort, and here Beauty Smith teased and irritated and drove him wild with petty torments. The man early discovered White Fang's susceptibility to laughter, and made it a point after painfully tricking him to laugh at him. This laughter was uproarious and scornful, and at the same time the God pointed his finger derisively at White Fang. At such times reason fled from White Fang, and in his transports of rage he was even more mad than Beauty Smith.  He now became the enemy of all things and more ferocious than ever. To such an extent was he tormented that he hated blindly and without the faintest spark of reason. He hated the chain that bound him, the men who peered in at him through the slats of the pen, the dogs that accompanied the men and that snarled malignantly at him in his helplessness. He hated the very wood of the pen that confined him. And first, last, and most of all, he hated Beauty Smith. But Beauty Smith had a purpose in all that he did to White Fang. One day a number of men gathered about the pen. Beauty Smith entered, club in hand, and took the chain off from White Fang's neck. When his master had gone out, White Fang turned loose and tore around the pen, trying to get at the men outside. He was magnificently terrible. Fully five feet in length, and standing two and a half feet at the shoulder, he far outweighed a wolf of corresponding size. From his mother he had inherited the heavier proportions of the dog, so that he weighed, without any fat and without an ounce of superfluous flesh, over ninety pounds. It was all muscle, bone, and sinew fighting flesh in the finest condition. The door of the pen was being opened again. White Fang paused. Something unusual was happening. He waited. The door was opened wider.  White Fang had never seen such a dog. It was a Mastiff. But the size and fierce aspect of the intruder did not deter him. Here was something, not wood nor iron, upon which to wreak his hate. He leaped in with a flash of Fangs that ripped down the side of the Mastiff's neck. The Mastiff shook his head, growled hoarsely, and plunged at White Fang. But White Fang was here, there, and everywhere, always evading and alluding, and always leaping in and slashing with his Fangs, and leaping out again in time to escape punishment. The men outside shouted and applauded, while Beauty Smith, in an ecstasy of delight, gloated over the ripping and mangling performed by White Fang. There was no hope for the Mastiff from the first. He was too ponderous and slow. In the end, while Beauty Smith beat White Fang back with a club, the Mastiff was dragged out by its owner. Then there was a payment of bets, and money clinked in Beauty Smith's hand. White Fang came to look forward eagerly to the gathering of the men around his pen. It meant a fight, and this was the only way that was now vouchsafed him of expressing the life that was in him. Tormented, incited to hate, he was kept a prisoner so that there was no way of satisfying that hate, except at the times his master saw fit to put another dog against him. Beauty Smith had estimated his powers well, for he was invariably the victor. One day three dogs were turned in upon him in succession. Another day a full-grown wolf, fresh caught from the wild, was shoved in through the door of the pen. And on still another day two dogs were set against him at the same time. This was his severest fight, and though in the end he killed them both he was himself half killed in doing it. In the fall of the year, when the first snows were falling and mush ice was running in the river, Beauty Smith took passage for himself and White Fang on a steamboat bound up the Yukon to Dawson. White Fang had now achieved a reputation in the land. As the fighting wolf, he was known far and wide, and the cage in which he was kept on the steamboat's deck was usually surrounded by curious men. He raged and snarled at them, or lay quietly and studied them with cold hatred. Why should he not hate them? He never asked himself the question. He knew only hate, and lost himself in the passion of it. Life had become a hell to him. He had not been made for the close confinement while beasts endure at the hands of men. And yet it was imprecisely this way that he was treated. Men stared at him, poked sticks between the bars to make him snarl, and then laughed at him. They were his environment, these men, and they were molding the clay of him into a more ferocious thing than had been intended by nature. Nevertheless, nature had given him plasticity. Where many another animal would have died or had its spirit broken, he adjusted himself and lived, and at no expense of the spirit. Possibly Beauty Smith, arch-fiend and tormentor, was capable of breaking White Fang's spirit. But as yet, there were no signs of his succeeding. If Beauty Smith had in him a devil, White Fang had another, and the two of them raged against each other unceasingly. In the days before, White Fang had had the wisdom to cower down and submit to a man with a club in his hand. But this wisdom now left him. The mere sight of Beauty S