White Fang, Jack London [classic romance novels .txt] 📗

ice on the Porcupine, he had built a canoe and paddled down that stream to where it effected its junction with the Yukon just under the Artic 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 travelled to get that far was five thousand miles, while some had come from the other side of the world.

Here Grey 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-sewn 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 realised.  His wildest dreams had not exceeded a hundred per cent. profit; he made a thousand per cent.  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 generalisation 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 that 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 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”