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 wrecked 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. Grey 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.And during all this time free licence had been theirs, from their masters,to kill the things of the Wild. In doing this they had protected both themselves and the gods whose companionship they shared.
And so, fresh from the soft southern world, these dogs,trotting down the gang-plank 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 doglike 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 moulded until he became what he was,morose and lonely, unloving and ferocious, the enemy of all his kind.
CHAPTER II THE MAD GOD
A small number of white men lived in Fort Yukon. These men had been long in the country.They called themselves Sour-doughs, and took great pride in so classifying themselves.For other men, new in the land, they felt nothing but disdain.The men who came ashore from the steamers were newcomers. They were known as _chechaquos_,and they always wilted at the application of the name. They made their bread with baking-powder.This was the invidious distinction between them and the Sour-doughs, who, forsooth,made their bread from sour-dough because they had no baking-powder.
All of which is neither here nor there. The men in the fort disdained the newcomers and enjoyed seeing them come to grief.Especially did they enjoy the havoc worked amongst the newcomers’ dogs by White Fang and his disreputable gang.When a steamer arrived, the men 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 pre-eminently unbeautiful.Nature had been niggardly with him. He was a small man to begin with;and upon his meagre frame was deposited an even more strikingly meagre head.Its apex might be likened to a point. In fact, in his boyhood,before he had been named Beauty by his fellows, he had been called “Pinhead.”
Backward, from the apex, his head slanted down to his neck and forward it slanted uncompromisingly to meet a low and remarkably wide forehead.Beginning here, as though regretting her parsimony,Nature had spread his features with a lavish hand. His eyes were large,and between them was the distance of two eyes. His face, in relation to the rest of him,was prodigious. In order to discover the necessary area,Nature had given him an enormous prognathous jaw. It was wide and heavy,and protruded outward and down until it seemed to rest on his chest.Possibly this appearance was due to the weariness of the slender neck,unable properly to support so great a burden.
This jaw gave the impression of ferocious determination. But something lacked.Perhaps it was from excess. Perhaps the jaw was too large. At any rate, it was a lie.Beauty Smith was known far and wide as the weakest of weak-kneed and snivelling 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.It was the same with his hair, sparse and irregular of growth, muddy-yellow and dirty-yellow,rising on his head and sprouting out of his face in unexpected tufts and bunches,in appearance like clumped and wind-blown grain.
In short, Beauty Smith was a monstrosity, and the blame of it lay elsewhere. He was not responsible.The clay of him had been so moulded in the making.He did the cooking for the other men in the fort, the dish-washing and the drudgery.They did not despise him. Rather did they tolerate him in a broad human way,as one tolerates any creature evilly treated in the making. Also, they feared him.His cowardly rages made them dread a shot in the back or poison in their coffee.But somebody had to do the cooking, and whatever else his shortcomings, Beauty Smith could cook.
This was the man that looked at White Fang, delighted in his ferocious prowess,and desired to possess him. He made overtures to White Fang from the first.White Fang began by ignoring him. Later on, when the overtures became more insistent,White Fang bristled and bared his teeth and backed away. He did not like the man.The feel of him was bad. He sensed the evil in him,and feared the extended hand and the attempts at soft-spoken speech. Because of all this, he hated the man.
With the simpler creatures, good and bad are things simply understood.The good stands for all things that bring easement and satisfaction and surcease from pain.Therefore, the good is liked. The bad stands for all things that are fraught with discomfort,menace, and hurt, and is hated accordingly. White Fang’s feel of Beauty Smith was bad.From the man’s distorted body and twisted mind, in occult ways,like mists rising from malarial marshes, came emanations of the unhealth within. Not by reasoning,not by the five senses alone, but by other and remoter and uncharted senses,came the feeling to White Fang that the man was ominous with evil, pregnant with hurtfulness,and therefore a thing bad, and wisely to be hated.
White Fang was in 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 and 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 whisky is the breeding of thirst. Grey Beaver got the thirst.His fevered membranes and burnt stomach began to clamour for more and more of the scorching fluid;while his brain, thrust all awry by the unwonted stimulant,permitted him to go any length to obtain it.The money he had received for his furs and mittens and moccasins began to go.It went faster and faster, and the shorter his money-sack grew, the shorter grew his temper.
In the end his money and goods and temper were all gone. Nothing remained to him but his thirst,a prodigious possession in itself that grew more prodigious with every sober breath he drew.Then it was that Beauty Smith had talk with him again about the sale of White Fang;but this time the price offered was in bottles, not dollars,and Grey Beaver’s ears were more eager to hear.
“You ketch um dog you take um all right,” was his last word.
The bottles were delivered, but after two days. “You ketch um dog,” were Beauty Smith’s words to 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 passed, when the vibrations of feet in 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 clouted 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 clouted 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 in to 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 a 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.Club and whip were both used upon him, and he experienced the worst beating he had ever received in his life.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.Cringing and snivelling himself before the blows or angry speech of a man, he revenged himself,in turn, upon creatures weaker than he. 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 moulded 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 has 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 on stolidly 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 southland 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 REIGN 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.
Formerly, White Fang had been merely the enemy of his kind, withal a ferocious enemy.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 one-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. Then a huge dog was thrust inside,and the door was slammed shut behind him. 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 some thing,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 eluding,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 steam-boat’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 wild beasts endure at the hands of men.And yet it was in precisely 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 moulding 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 Smith was sufficient to send him into transports of fury.And when they came to close quarters, and he had been beaten back by the club,he went on growling and snarling, and showing his fangs.The last growl could never be extracted from him. No matter how terribly he was beaten,he had always another growl; and when Beauty Smith gave up and withdrew,the defiant growl followed after him, or White Fang sprang at the bars of the cage bellowing his hatred.
When the steamboat arrived at Dawson, White Fang went ashore. But he still lived a public life,in a cage, surrounded by curious men. He was exhibited as “the Fighting Wolf,” and men paid fifty cents in gold dust to see him. He was given no rest. Did he lie down to sleep,he was stirred up by a sharp stick—so that the audience might get its money’s worth.In order to make the exhibition interesting, he was kept in a rage most of the time.But worse than all this, was the atmosphere in which he lived.He was regarded as the most fearful of wild beasts,and this was borne in to him through the bars of the cage. Every word, every cautious action,on the part of the men, impressed upon him his own terrible ferocity.It was so much added fuel to the flame of his fierceness. There could be but one result,and that was that his ferocity fed upon itself and increased.It was another instance of the plasticity of his clay,of his capacity for being moulded by the pressure of environment.
In addition to being exhibited he was a professional fighting animal. At irregular intervals,whenever a fight could be arranged, he was taken out of his cage and led off into the woods a few miles from town.Usually this occurred at night, so as to avoid interference from the mounted police of the Territory.After a few hours of waiting, when daylight had come,the audience and the dog with which he was to fight arrived.In this manner it came about that he fought all sizes and breeds of dogs. It was a savage land,the men were savage, and the fights were usually to the death.