Had there been in White Fang's nature any possibility, no matter howremote, of his ever coming to fraternise with his kind, such possibility wasirretrievably destroyed when he was made leader of the sled-team. Fornow the dogs hated him - hated him for the extra meat bestowed upon himby Mit-sah; hated him for all the real and fancied favours he received;hated him for that he fled always at the head of the team, his waving brushof a tail and his perpetually retreating hind-quarters for ever maddeningtheir eyes.
And White Fang just as bitterly hated them back. Being sled-leaderwas anything but gratifying to him. To be compelled to run away beforethe yelling pack, every dog of which, for three years, he had thrashed andmastered, was almost more than he could endure. But endure it he must, orperish, and the life that was in him had no desire to perish out. Themoment Mit-sah gave his order for the start, that moment the whole team,with eager, savage cries, sprang forward at White Fang.
There was no defence for him. If he turned upon them, Mit-sah wouldthrow the stinging lash of the whip into his face. Only remained to him torun away. He could not encounter that howling horde with his tail andhind-quarters. These were scarcely fit weapons with which to meet themany merciless fangs. So run away he did, violating his own nature andpride with every leap he made, and leaping all day long.
One cannot violate the promptings of one's nature without having thatnature recoil upon itself. Such a recoil is like that of a hair, made to growout from the body, turning unnaturally upon the direction of its growth andgrowing into the body - a rankling, festering thing of hurt. And so withWhite Fang. Every urge of his being impelled him to spring upon the packthat 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 cariboo-gut with itsbiting thirty-foot lash. So White Fang could only eat his heart in bitternessand develop a hatred and malice commensurate with the ferocity andindomitability of his nature.
If ever a creature was the enemy of its kind, White Fang was thatcreature. He asked no quarter, gave none. He was continually marred andscarred by the teeth of the pack, and as continually he left his own marksupon the pack. Unlike most leaders, who, when camp was made and thedogs were unhitched, huddled near to the gods for protection, White Fangdisdained such protection. He walked boldly about the camp, inflictingpunishment in the night for what he had suffered in the day. In the timebefore he was made leader of the team, the pack had learned to get out ofhis way. But now it was different. Excited by the day-long pursuit of him,swayed subconsciously by the insistent iteration on their brains of thesight of him fleeing away, mastered by the feeling of mastery enjoyed allday, the dogs could not bring themselves to give way to him. When heappeared amongst them, there was always a squabble. His progress wasmarked by snarl and snap and growl. The very atmosphere he breathedwas surcharged with hatred and malice, and this but served to increase thehatred and malice within him.
When Mit-sah cried out his command for the team to stop, White Fangobeyed. At first this caused trouble for the other dogs. All of them wouldspring upon the hated leader only to find the tables turned. Behind himwould be Mit-sah, the great whip singing in his hand. So the dogs came tounderstand that when the team stopped by order, White Fang was to be letalone. But when White Fang stopped without orders, then it was allowedthem to spring upon him and destroy him if they could. After severalexperiences, White Fang never stopped without orders. He learned quickly.
It was in the nature of things, that he must learn quickly if he were tosurvive the unusually severe conditions under which life was vouchsafed 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 theprevious night was erased, and that night would have to be learned overagain, to be as immediately forgotten. Besides, there was a greaterconsistence in their dislike of him. They sensed between themselves andhim a difference of kind - cause sufficient in itself for hostility. Like him,they were domesticated wolves. But they had been domesticated forgenerations. Much of the Wild had been lost, so that to them the Wild wasthe unknown, the terrible, the ever-menacing and ever warring. But to him,in appearance and action and impulse, still clung the Wild. He symbolisedit, was its personification: so that when they showed their teeth to him theywere defending themselves against the powers of destruction that lurked inthe shadows of the forest and in the dark beyond the camp-fire.
But there was one lesson the dogs did learn, and that was to keeptogether. White Fang was too terrible for any of them to face single-handed. They met him with the mass-formation, otherwise he would havekilled them, one by one, in a night. As it was, he never had a chance to killthem. He might roll a dog off its feet, but the pack would be upon himbefore he could follow up and deliver the deadly throat-stroke. At the firsthint of conflict, the whole team drew together and faced him. The dogshad quarrels among themselves, but these were forgotten when troublewas 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 tightplaces and always backed out of it when they bade fair to surround him.
While, as for getting him off his feet, there was no dog among themcapable of doing the trick. His feet clung to the earth with the sametenacity that he clung to life. For that matter, life and footing weresynonymous in this unending warfare with the pack, and none knew itbetter than White Fang.
So he became the enemy of his kind, domesticated wolves that theywere, softened by the fires of man, weakened in the sheltering shadow ofman's strength. White Fang was bitter and implacable. The clay of himwas so moulded. He declared a vendetta against all dogs. And so terriblydid he live this vendetta that Grey Beaver, fierce savage himself, could notbut marvel at White Fang's ferocity. Never, he swore, had there been thelike of this animal; and the Indians in strange villages swore likewisewhen they considered the tale of his killings amongst their dogs.
When White Fang was nearly five years old, Grey Beaver took him onanother great journey, and long remembered was the havoc he workedamongst the dogs of the many villages along the Mackenzie, across theRockies, and down the Porcupine to the Yukon. He revelled in thevengeance he wreaked upon his kind. They were ordinary, unsuspectingdogs. They were not prepared for his swiftness and directness, for hisattack without warning. They did not know him for what he was, alightning-flash of slaughter. They bristled up to him, stiff-legged andchallenging, while he, wasting no time on elaborate preliminaries,snapping into action like a steel spring, was at their throats and destroyingthem before they knew what was happening and while they were yet in thethroes of surprise.
He became an adept at fighting. He economised. He never wasted hisstrength, 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 washis to an unusual degree. He could not endure a prolonged contact withanother 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 stillclinging to him, asserting itself through him. This feeling had beenaccentuated by the Ishmaelite life he had led from his puppyhood. Dangerlurked in contacts. It was the trap, ever the trap, the fear of it lurking deepin the life of him, woven into the fibre of himIn consequence, the strange dogs he encountered had no chanceagainst him. He eluded their fangs. He got them, or got away, himselfuntouched in either event. In the natural course of things there wereexceptions to this. There were times when several dogs, pitching on to him,punished him before he could get away; and there were times when asingle dog scored deeply on him. But these were accidents. In the main, soefficient a fighter had he become, he went his way unscathed.
Another advantage he possessed was that of correctly judging time anddistance. Not that he did this consciously, however. He did not calculatesuch things. It was all automatic. His eyes saw correctly, and the nervescarried the vision correctly to his brain. The parts of him were betteradjusted than those of the average dog. They worked together moresmoothly and steadily. His was a better, far better, nervous, mental, andmuscular co- ordination. When his eyes conveyed to his brain the movingimage of an action, his brain without conscious effort, knew the space thatlimited that action and the time required for its completion. Thus, he couldavoid the leap of another dog, or the drive of its fangs, and at the samemoment could seize the infinitesimal fraction of time in which to deliverhis own attack. Body and brain, his was a more perfected mechanism. Notthat he was to be praised for it. Nature had been more generous to himthan to the average animal, that was all.
It was in the summer that White Fang arrived at Fort Yukon. GreyBeaver had crossed the grea............