changed. He now had greater confidence. He had fought; he had buried his teeth in the flesh of an enemy; and he had survived. And because of all this, he carried himself more boldly.
He began to accompany his mother on the meat-trail, and he saw much of the killing of meat and began to play his part in it. And he learned the law of meat. There were two kinds of life—his own kind and the other kind. His own kind included his mother and himself. The other kind included all live things that moved. But the other kind was divided. One portion was composed of the non-killers and the small killers. The other portion killed and ate his own kind, or was killed and eaten by his own kind. And out of this classification came the law. The aim of life was meat. Life itself was meat. Life lived on life. There were the eaters and those who were the eaten. The law was: EAT OR BE EATEN. He did not formulate the law; he merely lived the law without thinking about it at all.
He saw the law operating around him on every side. He had eaten the ptarmigan chicks. The hawk had eaten the ptarmigan-mother. The hawk would also have eaten him. Later, when he had grown, he wanted to eat the hawk. He had eaten the lynx kitten. The lynx-mother would have eaten him had she not herself been killed and eaten. And so it went.
The cub did not think in man-fashion. He was single-purposed, and had but one thought or desire at a time. Besides the law of meat, there were other and lesser laws for him to learn and obey. The world was filled with surprise. The life that was in him, the play of his muscles, was happiness. To run down[25] meat was to experience happiness. His battles were pleasures. Terror itself, and the mystery of the unknown, led to his living.
And there were satisfactions. To have a full stomach, to lay lazily in the sunshine—such things were remuneration. They were expressions of life, and life is always happy when it is expressing itself. So the cub had no quarrel with his hostile environment. He was very much alive, very happy, and very proud of himself.
Part III
Chapter I. THE MAKERS OF FIRE
The cub came upon it suddenly. It was his own fault. He had been careless. He had woken up, left the cave and run down to the stream to drink.
Before him, sitting silently on their haunches, were five live things. He had never seen such before. It was his first look at mankind. But at the sight of him the five men did not spring to their feet, nor show their teeth, nor snarl. They did not move.
Nor did the cub move. Every instinct of his nature told him to run away, but there was another instinct. He felt his own weakness. Here was mastery and power, something far and away beyond him.
The cub had never seen man, but he recognized in man the animal that had fought itself to primacy over the other animals of the Wild. With the eyes of all his ancestors was the cub now looking upon man. He felt the fear and the respect and the experience of the generations. Had he been full-grown, he would have run away. But now he lied down in a paralysis of fear.
One of the Indians walked over to him. The cub cowered closer to the ground. It was the unknown, in concrete flesh and blood, bending over him and reaching down to seize him. His hair bristled involuntarily; his lips wrinkled and his little fangs were bared. The man’s hand hesitated and he spoke laughing, “Wabam wabisca ip pit tah.” (“Look! The white fangs!”)
The other Indians laughed loudly, and asked the man on to pick up the cub. As the hand descended closer and closer, there was within the cub a battle of the instincts. He wanted to surrender and to fight. He did both. He surrendered till the hand almost touched him. Then he fought, and his teeth sank into the hand. The next moment he received a hit on the head. Then his puppyhood and the instinct of obedience mastered him. He sat up and cried. But the man whose hand he had bitten was angry. The cub received a hit on the other side of his head—and ‘ki-yi’d’ louder than ever.
The four Indians laughed more loudly, and even the man who had been bitten began to laugh. They surrounded the cub and laughed at him, while he cried with terror and his hurt. Then he heard something. The Indians heard it too. But the cub knew what it was. In his last, long cry there was more triumph than grief. He stopped crying and waited for the coming of his mother, of his ferocious and invincible mother who fought and killed all things and was never afraid. She had heard the cry of her cub and was running to save him.
The man-animals went back several steps. The she-wolf stood over against her cub, facing the men.
Then one of the men cried: “Kiche!”
It was an exclamation of surprise. The cub felt his mother wilting at the sound.
“Kiche!” the man cried again, this time with sharpness and authority.
And then the cub saw his mother, the she-wolf, the fearless one, crouching down till her belly touched the ground. The cub could not understand, but thought that his instinct had been true. His mother verified it. She, too, demonstrated obedience to the man-animals.
The man came over to her. He put his hand upon her head, and she only crouched closer. The other men came up, and surrounded her, and touched her, and she was glad. They were greatly excited, and made many noises with their mouths. These noises were not indication of danger, the cub decided.
“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[26]? The father of Kiche was a wolf.”
“It is a year, Grey Beaver, since she ran away,” spoke a second Indian.
“It is not strange, Salmon Tongue,” Grey Beaver answered. “It was the time of hunger, and there was no meat for the dogs.”
“She has lived with the wolves,” said a third Indian.
“So it seems, Three Eagles,” Grey Beaver answered, laying his hand on the cub; “and this is the sign of it. It is plain that his mother is Kiche. But his father was a wolf. In him there is little dog and much wolf. His fangs are white, and White Fang shall be his name. I have spoken. He is my dog. For was not Kiche my brother’s dog? And is not my brother dead?”
The cub, who had thus received a name in the world, lay and watched. Then Grey Beaver tied the she-wolf to the tree with a stick-bondage. White Fang followed and lied down beside her.
Salmon Tongue’s hand rolled him over on his back. Kiche looked on anxiously. The hand rubbed his stomach in a playful way. It was a position of such helplessness that White Fang’s whole nature protested against it. He could do nothing to defend himself. He was to know fear many times in his dealing with man; yet it was a sign of the fearless companionship with man.
After a time, White Fang heard strange noises. A few minutes later the remainder of the tribe came. There were more men and many women and children, forty of them. Also there were many dogs.
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 in the face of the dogs, and went down and under them, feeling the sharp teeth in his body, himself biting and tearing at the legs and bellies above him. He could hear the snarl of Kiche as she fought for him; and he could hear the cries of the man-animals, the sound of clubs beating upon bodies, and the cries of pain from the dogs.
The men drove the dogs back and saved him from the savage teeth of his kind that somehow was not his kind. He thought the men had some unusual, astonishing, unnatural, god-like power (though, of course, he didn’t know anything about gods).
And White Fang licked his hurts and meditated upon 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. Here he had discovered many more creatures apparently of his own kind.
Of the bondage he had known nothing before, too. And he didn’t like it when the man-animals went on; for a tiny man-animal took the other end of a stick the she-wolf had been tied to, and led her behind him, and