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

shoulder of his one-eyed elder.  When he ventured to run abreast of the older wolf (which was seldom), a snarl and a snap sent him back even with the shoulder again.  Sometimes, however, he dropped cautiously and slowly behind and edged in between the old leader and the she-wolf.  This was doubly resented, even triply resented.  When she snarled her displeasure, the old leader would whirl on the three-year-old.  Sometimes she whirled with him.  And sometimes the young leader on the left whirled, too.

At such times, confronted by three sets of savage teeth, the young wolf stopped precipitately, throwing himself back on his haunches, with fore-legs stiff, mouth menacing, and mane bristling.  This confusion in the front of the moving pack always caused confusion in the rear.  The wolves behind collided with the young wolf and expressed their displeasure by administering sharp nips on his hind-legs and flanks.  He was laying up trouble for himself, for lack of food and short tempers went together; but with the boundless faith of youth he persisted in repeating the manoeuvre every little while, though it never succeeded in gaining anything for him but discomfiture.

Had there been food, love-making and fighting would have gone on apace, and the pack-formation would have been broken up.  But the situation of the pack was desperate.  It was lean with long-standing hunger.  It ran below its ordinary speed.  At the rear limped the weak members, the very young and the very old.  At the front were the strongest.  Yet all were more like skeletons than full-bodied wolves.  Nevertheless, with the exception of the ones that limped, the movements of the animals were effortless and tireless.  Their stringy muscles seemed founts of inexhaustible energy.  Behind every steel-like contraction of a muscle, lay another steel-like contraction, and another, and another, apparently without end.

They ran many miles that day.  They ran through the night.  And the next day found them still running.  They were running over the surface of a world frozen and dead.  No life stirred.  They alone moved through the vast inertness.  They alone were alive, and they sought for other things that were alive in order that they might devour them and continue to live.

They crossed low divides and ranged a dozen small streams in a lower-lying country before their quest was rewarded.  Then they came upon moose.  It was a big bull they first found.  Here was meat and life, and it was guarded by no mysterious fires nor flying missiles of flame.  Splay hoofs and palmated antlers they knew, and they flung their customary patience and caution to the wind.  It was a brief fight and fierce.  The big bull was beset on every side.  He ripped them open or split their skulls with shrewdly driven blows of his great hoofs.  He crushed them and broke them on his large horns.  He stamped them into the snow under him in the wallowing struggle.  But he was foredoomed, and he went down with the she-wolf tearing savagely at his throat, and with other teeth fixed everywhere upon him, devouring him alive, before ever his last struggles ceased or his last damage had been wrought.

There was food in plenty.  The bull weighed over eight hundred pounds—fully twenty pounds of meat per mouth for the forty-odd wolves of the pack.  But if they could fast prodigiously, they could feed prodigiously, and soon a few scattered bones were all that remained of the splendid live brute that had faced the pack a few hours before.

There was now much resting and sleeping.  With full stomachs, bickering and quarrelling began among the younger males, and this continued through the few days that followed before the breaking-up of the pack.  The famine was over.  The wolves were now in the country of game, and though they still hunted in pack, they hunted more cautiously, cutting out heavy cows or crippled old bulls from the small moose-herds they ran across.

There came a day, in this land of plenty, when the wolf-pack split in half and went in different directions.  The she-wolf, the young leader on her left, and the one-eyed elder on her right, led their half of the pack down to the Mackenzie River and across into the lake country to the east.  Each day this remnant of the pack dwindled.  Two by two, male and female, the wolves were deserting.  Occasionally a solitary male was driven out by the sharp teeth of his rivals.  In the end there remained only four: the she-wolf, the young leader, the one-eyed one, and the ambitious three-year-old.

The she-wolf had by now developed a ferocious temper.  Her three suitors all bore the marks of her teeth.  Yet they never replied in kind, never defended themselves against her.  They turned their shoulders to her most savage slashes, and with wagging tails and mincing steps strove to placate her wrath.  But if they were all mildness toward her, they were all fierceness toward one another.  The three-year-old grew too ambitious in his fierceness.  He caught the one-eyed elder on his blind side and ripped his ear into ribbons.  Though the grizzled old fellow could see only on one side, against the youth and vigour of the other he brought into play the wisdom of long years of experience.  His lost eye and his scarred muzzle bore evidence to the nature of his experience.  He had survived too many battles to be in doubt for a moment about what to do.

The battle began fairly, but it did not end fairly.  There was no telling what the outcome would have been, for the third wolf joined the elder, and together, old leader and young leader, they attacked the ambitious three-year-old and proceeded to destroy him.  He was beset on either side by the merciless fangs of his erstwhile comrades.  Forgotten were the days they had hunted together, the game they had pulled down, the famine they had suffered.  That business was a thing of the past.  The business of love was at hand—ever a sterner and crueller business than that of food-getting.

And in the meanwhile, the she-wolf, the cause of it all, sat down contentedly on her haunches and watched.  She was even pleased.  This was her day—and it came not often—when manes bristled, and fang smote fang or ripped and tore the yielding flesh, all for the possession of her.

And in the business of love the three-year-old, who had made this his first adventure upon it, yielded up his life.  On either side of his body stood his two rivals.  They were gazing at the she-wolf, who sat smiling in the snow.  But the elder leader was wise, very wise, in love even as in battle.  The younger leader turned his head to lick a wound on his shoulder.  The curve of his neck was turned toward his rival.  With his one eye the elder saw the opportunity.  He darted in low and closed with his fangs.  It was a long, ripping slash, and deep as well.  His teeth, in passing, burst the wall of the great vein of the throat.  Then he leaped clear.

The young leader snarled terribly, but his snarl broke midmost into a tickling cough.  Bleeding and coughing, already stricken, he sprang at the elder and fought while life faded from him, his legs going weak beneath him, the light of day dulling on his eyes, his blows and springs falling shorter and shorter.

And all the while the she-wolf sat on her haunches and smiled.  She was made glad in vague ways by the battle, for this was the love-making of the Wild, the sex-tragedy of the natural world that was tragedy only to those that died.  To those that survived it was not tragedy, but realisation and achievement.

When the young leader lay in the snow and moved no more, One Eye stalked over to the she-wolf.  His carriage was one of mingled triumph and caution.  He was plainly expectant of a rebuff, and he was just as plainly surprised when her teeth did not flash out at him in anger.  For the first time she met him with a kindly manner.  She sniffed noses with him, and even condescended to leap about and frisk and play with him in quite puppyish fashion.  And he, for all his grey years and sage experience, behaved quite as puppyishly and even a little more foolishly.

Forgotten already were the vanquished rivals and the love-tale red-written on the snow.  Forgotten, save once, when old One Eye stopped for a moment to lick his stiffening wounds.  Then it was that his lips half writhed into a snarl, and the hair of his neck and shoulders involuntarily bristled, while he half crouched for a spring, his claws spasmodically clutching into the snow-surface for firmer footing.  But it was all forgotten the next moment, as he sprang after the she-wolf, who was coyly leading him a chase through the woods.

After that they ran side by side, like good friends who have come to an understanding.  The days passed by, and they kept together, hunting their meat and killing and eating it in common.  After a time the she-wolf began to grow restless.  She seemed to be searching for something that she could not find.  The hollows under fallen trees seemed to attract her, and she spent much time nosing about among the larger snow-piled crevices in the rocks and in the caves of overhanging banks.  Old One Eye was not interested at all, but he followed her good-naturedly in her quest, and when her investigations in particular places were unusually protracted, he would lie down and wait until she was ready to go on.

They did not remain in one place, but travelled across country until they regained the Mackenzie River, down which they slowly went, leaving it often to hunt game along the small streams that entered it, but always returning to it again.  Sometimes they chanced upon other wolves, usually in pairs; but there was no friendliness of intercourse displayed on either side, no gladness at meeting, no desire to return to the pack-formation.  Several times they encountered solitary wolves.  These were always males, and they were pressingly insistent on joining with One Eye and his mate.  This he resented, and when she stood shoulder to shoulder with him, bristling and showing her teeth, the aspiring solitary ones would back off, turn-tail, and continue on their lonely way.

One moonlight night, running through the quiet forest, One Eye suddenly halted.  His muzzle went up, his tail stiffened, and his nostrils dilated as he scented the air.  One foot also he held up, after the manner of a dog.  He was not satisfied, and he continued to smell the air, striving to understand the message borne upon it to him.  One careless sniff had satisfied his mate, and she trotted on to reassure him.  Though he followed her, he was still dubious, and he could not forbear an occasional halt in order more carefully to study the warning.

She crept out cautiously on the edge of a large open space in the midst of the trees.  For some time she stood alone.  Then One Eye, creeping and crawling, every sense on the alert, every hair radiating infinite suspicion, joined her.  They stood side by side, watching and listening and smelling.

To their ears came the sounds of dogs wrangling and scuffling, the guttural cries of men, the sharper voices of scolding women, and once the shrill and plaintive cry of a child.  With the exception of the huge bulks of the skin-lodges, little could be seen save the flames of the fire, broken by the movements of intervening bodies, and the smoke rising slowly on the quiet air.  But to their nostrils came the myriad smells of an Indian camp, carrying a story that was largely incomprehensible to One Eye, but every detail of which the she-wolf knew.

She was strangely stirred, and sniffed and sniffed with an increasing delight.  But old One Eye was doubtful.  He betrayed