C
HAPTER
4.
T
HE
T
RAIL
O
F
T
HE
G
ODS
In the fall of the year, when the days were shortening and the bite of the
frost was coming into the air, White Fang got his chance for liberty. For
several days there had been a great hubbub in the village. The summer
camp was being dismantled, and the tribe, bag and baggage, was preparing
to go off to the fall hunting. White Fang watched it all with eager eyes, and
when the tepees began to come down and the canoes were loading at the
bank, he understood. Already the canoes were departing, and some had
disappeared down the river.
Quite deliberately he determined to stay behind. He waited his opportunity
to slink out of camp to the woods. Here, in the running stream where ice
was beginning to form, he hid his trail. Then he crawled into the heart of a
dense thicket and waited. The time passed by, and he slept intermittently
for hours. Then he was aroused by Grey Beaver’s voice calling him by
name. There were other voices. White Fang could hear Grey Beaver’s
squaw taking part in the search, and Mit-sah, who was Grey Beaver’s son.
White Fang trembled with fear, and though the impulse came to crawl out
of his hiding-place, he resisted it. After a time the voices died away, and
some time after that he crept out to enjoy the success of his
undertaking. Darkness was coming on, and for a while he played about
among the trees, pleasuring in his freedom. Then, and quite suddenly, he
became aware of loneliness. He sat down to consider, listening to the
silence of the forest and perturbed by it. That nothing moved nor sounded,
seemed ominous. He felt the lurking of danger, unseen and unguessed. He
was suspicious of the looming bulks of the trees and of the dark shadows
that might conceal all manner of perilous things.
Then it was cold. Here was no warm side of a tepee against which to
snuggle. The frost was in his feet, and he kept lifting first one fore-foot and
then the other. He curved his bushy tail around to cover them, and at the
same time he saw a vision. There was nothing strange about it. Upon his
inward sight was impressed a succession of memory-pictures. He saw the
camp again, the tepees, and the blaze of the fires. He heard the shrill voices
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of the women, the gruff basses of the men, and the snarling of the dogs. He
was hungry, and he remembered pieces of meat and fish that had been
thrown him. Here was no meat, nothing but a threatening and inedible
silence.
His bondage had softened him. Irresponsibility had weakened him. He had
forgotten how to shift for himself. The night yawned about him. His senses,
accustomed to the hum and bustle of the camp, used to the continuous
impact of sights and sounds, were now left idle. There was nothing to do,
nothing to see nor hear. They strained to catch some interruption of the
silence and immobility of nature. They were appalled by inaction and by the
feel of something terrible impending.
He gave a great start of fright. A colossal and formless something was
rushing across the field of his vision. It was a tree-shadow flung by the
moon, from whose face the clouds had been brushed away. Reassured, he
whimpered softly; then he suppressed the whimper for fear that it might
attract the attention of the lurking dangers.
A tree, contracting in the cool of the night, made a loud noise. It was
directly above him. He yelped in his fright. A panic seized him, and he ran
madly toward the village. He knew an overpowering desire for the
protection and companionship of man. In his nostrils was the smell of the
camp-smoke. In his ears the camp-sounds and cries were ringing loud. He
passed out of the forest and into the moonlit open where were no shadows
nor darknesses. But no village greeted his eyes. He had forgotten. The
village had gone away.
His wild flight ceased abruptly. There was no place to which to flee. He
slunk forlornly through the deserted camp, smelling the rubbish-heaps and
the discarded rags and tags of the gods. He would have been glad for the
rattle of stones about him, flung by an angry squaw, glad for the hand of
Grey Beaver descending upon him in wrath; while he would have welcomed
with delight Lip-lip and the whole snarling, cowardly pack.
He came to where Grey Beaver’s tepee had stood. In the centre of the
space it had occupied, he sat down. He pointed his nose at the moon. His
throat was afflicted by rigid spasms, his mouth opened, and in a heart-
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broken cry bubbled up his loneliness and fear, his grief for Kiche, all his past
sorrows and miseries as well as his apprehension of sufferings and dangers
to come. It was the long wolf-howl, full-throated and mournful, the first
howl he had ever uttered.
The coming of daylight dispelled his fears but increased his loneliness. The
naked earth, which so shortly before had been so populous; thrust his
loneliness more forcibly upon him. It did not take him long to make up his
mind. He plunged into the forest and followed the river bank down the
stream. All day he ran. He did not rest. He seemed made to run on for
ever. His iron-like body ignored fatigue. And even after fatigue came, his
heritage of endurance braced him to endless endeavour and enabled him to
drive his complaining body onward.
Where the river swung in against precipitous bluffs, he climbed the high
mountains behind. Rivers and streams that entered the main river he forded
or swam. Often he took to the rim-ice that was beginning to form, and more
than once he crashed through and struggled for life in the icy
current. Always he was on the lookout for the trail of the gods where it
might leave the river and proceed inland.
White Fang was intelligent beyond the average of his kind; yet his mental
vision was not wide enough to embrace the other bank of the
Mackenzie. What if the trail of the gods led out on that side? It never
entered his head. Later on, when he had travelled more and grown older
and wiser and come to know more of trails and rivers, it might be that he
could grasp and apprehend such a possibility. But that mental power was
yet in the future. Just now he ran blindly, his own bank of the Mackenzie
alone entering into his calculations.
All night he ran, blundering in the darkness into mishaps and obstacles that
delayed but did not daunt. By the middle of the second day he had been
running continuously for thirty hours, and the iron of his flesh was giving
out. It was the endurance of his mind that kept him going. He had not
eaten in forty hours, and he was weak with hunger. The repeated
drenchings in the icy water had likewise had their effect on him. His
handsome coat was draggled. The broad pads of his feet were bruised and
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bleeding. He had begun to limp, and this limp increased with the hours. To
make it worse, the light of the sky was obscured and snow began to fall—a
raw, moist, melting, clinging snow, slippery under foot, that hid from him
the landscape he traversed, and that covered over the inequalities of the
ground so that the way of his feet was more difficult and painful.
Grey Beaver had intended camping that night on the far bank of the
Mackenzie, for it was in that direction that the hunting lay. But on the near
bank, shortly before dark, a moose coming down to drink, had been espied
by Kloo-kooch, who was Grey Beaver’s squaw. Now, had not the moose
come down to drink, had not Mit-sah been steering out of the course
because of the snow, had not Kloo-kooch sighted the moose, and had not
Grey Beaver killed it with a lucky shot from his rifle, all subsequent things
would have happened differently. Grey Beaver would not have camped on
the near side of the Mackenzie, and White Fang would have passed by and
gone on, either to die or to find his way to his wild brothers and become one
of them—a wolf to the end of his days.
Night had fallen. The snow was flying more thickly, and White Fang,
whimpering softly to himself as he stumbled and limped along, came upon a
fresh trail in the snow. So fresh was it that he knew it immediately for what
it was. Whining with eagerness, he followed back from the river bank and in
among the trees. The camp-sounds came to his ears. He saw the blaze of
the fire, Kloo-kooch cooking, and Grey Beaver squatting on his hams and
mumbling a chunk of raw tallow. There was fresh meat in camp!
White Fang expected a beating. He crouched and bristled a little at the
thought of it. Then he went forward again. He feared and disliked the
beating he knew to be waiting for him. But he knew, further, that the
comfort of the fire would be his, the protection of the gods, the
companionship of the dogs—the last, a companionship of enmity, but none
the less a companionship and satisfying to his gregarious needs.
He came cringing and crawling into the firelight. Grey Beaver saw him, and
stopped munching the tallow. White Fang crawled slowly, cringing and
grovelling in the abjectness of his abasement and submission. He crawled
straight toward Grey Beaver, every inch of his progress becoming slower
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and more painful. At last he lay at the master’s feet, into whose possession
he now surrendered himself, voluntarily, body and soul. Of his own choice,
he came in to sit by man’s fire and to be ruled by him. White Fang trembled,
waiting for the punishment to fall upon him. There was a movement of the
hand above him. He cringed involuntarily under the expected blow. It did
not fall. He stole a glance upward. Grey Beaver was breaking the lump of
tallow in half! Grey Beaver was offering him one piece of the tallow! Very
gently and somewhat suspiciously, he first smelled the tallow and then
proceeded to eat it. Grey Beaver ordered meat to be brought to him, and
guarded him from the other dogs while he ate. After that, grateful and
content, White Fang lay at Grey Beaver’s feet, gazing at the fire that
warmed him, blinking and dozing, secure in the knowledge that the morrow
would find him, not wandering forlorn through bleak forest-stretches, but in
the camp of the man-animals, with the gods to whom he had given himself
and upon whom he was now dependent.
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