CHAPTER VI

THE FAMINE



The spring of the year was at hand when Grey Beaver finished his

long journey. It was April, and White Fang was a year old when he

pulled into the home villages and was loosed from the harness by

Mit-sah. Though a long way from his full growth, White Fang, next

to Lip-lip, was the largest yearling in the village. Both from his

father, the wolf, and from Kiche, he had inherited stature and

strength, and already he was measuring up alongside the full-grown

dogs. But he had not yet grown compact. His body was slender and

rangy, and his strength more stringy than massive, His coat was the

true wolf-grey, and to all appearances he was true wolf himself.

The quarter-strain of dog he had inherited from Kiche had left no

mark on him physically, though it had played its part in his mental

make-up.



He wandered through the village, recognising with staid

satisfaction the various gods he had known before the long journey.

Then there were the dogs, puppies growing up like himself, and

grown dogs that did not look so large and formidable as the memory

pictures he retained of them. Also, he stood less in fear of them

than formerly, stalking among them with a certain careless ease

that was as new to him as it was enjoyable.



There was Baseek, a grizzled old fellow that in his younger days

had but to uncover his fangs to send White Fang cringing and

crouching to the right about. From him White Fang had learned much

of his own insignificance; and from him he was now to learn much of

the change and development that had taken place in himself. While

Baseek had been growing weaker with age, White Fang had been

growing stronger with youth.



It was at the cutting-up of a moose, fresh-killed, that White Fang

learned of the changed relations in which he stood to the dog-

world. He had got for himself a hoof and part of the shin-bone, to

which quite a bit of meat was attached. Withdrawn from the

immediate scramble of the other dogs - in fact out of sight behind

a thicket - he was devouring his prize, when Baseek rushed in upon

him. Before he knew what he was doing, he had slashed the intruder

twice and sprung clear. Baseek was surprised by the other's

temerity and swiftness of attack. He stood, gazing stupidly across

at White Fang, the raw, red shin-bone between them.



Baseek was old, and already he had come to know the increasing

valour of the dogs it had been his wont to bully. Bitter

experiences these, which, perforce, he swallowed, calling upon all

his wisdom to cope with them. In the old days he would have sprung

upon White Fang in a fury of righteous wrath. But now his waning

powers would not permit such a course. He bristled fiercely and

looked ominously across the shin-bone at White Fang. And White

Fang, resurrecting quite a deal of the old awe, seemed to wilt and

to shrink in upon himself and grow small, as he cast about in his

mind for a way to beat a retreat not too inglorious.



And right here Baseek erred. Had he contented himself with looking

fierce and ominous, all would have been well. White Fang, on the

verge of retreat, would have retreated, leaving the meat to him.

But Baseek did not wait. He considered the victory already his and

stepped forward to the meat. As he bent his head carelessly to

smell it, White Fang bristled slightly. Even then it was not too

late for Baseek to retrieve the situation. Had he merely stood

over the meat, head up and glowering, White Fang would ultimately

have slunk away. But the fresh meat was strong in Baseek's

nostrils, and greed urged him to take a bite of it.



This was too much for White Fang. Fresh upon his months of mastery

over his own team-mates, it was beyond his self-control to stand

idly by while another devoured the meat that belonged to him. He

struck, after his custom, without warning. With the first slash,

Baseek's right ear was ripped into ribbons. He was astounded at

the suddenness of it. But more things, and most grievous ones,

were happening with equal suddenness. He was knocked off his feet.

His throat was bitten. While he was struggling to his feet the

young dog sank teeth twice into his shoulder. The swiftness of it

was bewildering. He made a futile rush at White Fang, clipping the

empty air with an outraged snap. The next moment his nose was laid

open, and he was staggering backward away from the meat.



The situation was now reversed. White Fang stood over the shin-

bone, bristling and menacing, while Baseek stood a little way off,

preparing to retreat. He dared not risk a fight with this young

lightning-flash, and again he knew, and more bitterly, the

enfeeblement of oncoming age. His attempt to maintain his dignity

was heroic. Calmly turning his back upon young dog and shin-bone,

as though both were beneath his notice and unworthy of his

consideration, he stalked grandly away. Nor, until well out of

sight, did he stop to lick his bleeding wounds.



The effect on White Fang was to give him a greater faith in

himself, and a greater pride. He walked less softly among the

grown dogs; his attitude toward them was less compromising. Not

that he went out of his way looking for trouble. Far from it. But

upon his way he demanded consideration. He stood upon his right to

go his way unmolested and to give trail to no dog. He had to be

taken into account, that was all. He was no longer to be

disregarded and ignored, as was the lot of puppies, and as

continued to be the lot of the puppies that were his team-mates.

They got out of the way, gave trail to the grown dogs, and gave up

meat to them under compulsion. But White Fang, uncompanionable,

solitary, morose, scarcely looking to right or left, redoubtable,

forbidding of aspect, remote and alien, was accepted as an equal by

his puzzled elders. They quickly learned to leave him alone,

neither venturing hostile acts nor making overtures of

friendliness. If they left him alone, he left them alone - a state

of affairs that they found, after a few encounters, to be pre-

eminently desirable.



In midsummer White Fang had an experience. Trotting along in his

silent way to investigate a new tepee which had been erected on the

edge of the village while he was away with the hunters after moose,

he came full upon Kiche. He paused and looked at her. He

remembered her vaguely, but he REMEMBERED her, and that was more

than could be said for her. She lifted her lip at him in the old

snarl of menace, and his memory became clear. His forgotten

cubhood, all that was associated with that familiar snarl, rushed

back to him. Before he had known the gods, she had been to him the

centre-pin of the universe. The old familiar feelings of that time

came back upon him, surged up within him. He bounded towards her

joyously, and she met him with shrewd fangs that laid his cheek

open to the bone. He did not understand. He backed away,

bewildered and puzzled.



But it was not Kiche's fault. A wolf-mother was not made to

remember her cubs of a year or so before. So she did not remember

White Fang. He was a strange animal, an intruder; and her present

litter of puppies gave her the right to resent such intrusion.



One of the puppies sprawled up to White Fang. They were half-

brothers, only they did not know it. White Fang sniffed the puppy

curiously, whereupon Kiche rushed upon him, gashing is face a

second time. He backed farther away. All the old memories and

associations died down again and passed into the grave from which

they had been resurrected. He looked at Kiche licking her puppy

and stopping now and then to snarl at him. She was without value

to him. He had learned to get along without her. Her meaning was

forgotten. There was no place for her in his scheme of things, as

there was no place for him in hers.



He was still standing, stupid and bewildered, the memories

forgotten, wondering what it was all about, when Kiche attacked him

a third time, intent on driving him away altogether from the

vicinity. And White Fang allowed himself to be driven away. This

was a female of his kind, and it was a law of his kind that the

males must not fight the females. He did not know anything about

this law, for it was no generalisation of the mind, not a something

acquired by experience of the world. He knew it as a secret

prompting, as an urge of instinct - of the same instinct that made

him howl at the moon and stars of nights, and that made him fear

death and the unknown.



The months went by. White Fang grew stronger, heavier, and more

compact, while his character was developing along the lines laid

down by his heredity and his environment. His heredity was a life-

stuff that may be likened to clay. It possessed many

possibilities, was capable of being moulded into many different

forms. Environment served to model the clay, to give it a

particular form. Thus, had White Fang never come in to the fires

of man, the Wild would have moulded him into a true wolf. But the

gods had given him a different environment, and he was moulded into

a dog that was rather wolfish, but that was a dog and not a wolf.



And so, according to the clay of his nature and the pressure of his

surroundings, his character was being moulded into a certain

particular shape. There was no escaping it. He was becoming more

morose, more uncompanionable, more solitary, more ferocious; while

the dogs were learning more and more that it was better to be at

peace with him than at war, and Grey Beaver was coming to prize him

more greatly with the passage of each day.



White Fang, seeming to sum up strength in all his qualities,

nevertheless suffered from one besetting weakness. He could not

stand being laughed at. The laughter of men was a hateful thing.

They might laugh among themselves about anything they pleased

except himself, and he did not mind. But the moment laughter was

turned upon him he would fly into a most terrible rage. Grave,

dignified, sombre, a laugh made him frantic to ridiculousness. It

so outraged him and upset him that for hours he would behave like a

demon. And woe to the dog that at such times ran foul of him. He

knew the law too well to take it out of Grey Beaver; behind Grey

Beaver were a club and godhead. But behind the dogs there was

nothing but space, and into this space they flew when White Fang

came on the scene, made mad by laughter.



In the third year of his life there came a great famine to the

Mackenzie Indians. In the summer the fish failed. In the winter

the cariboo forsook their accustomed track. Moose were scarce, the

rabbits almost disappeared, hunting and preying animals perished.

Denied their usual food-supply, weakened by hunger, they fell upon

and devoured one another. Only the strong survived. White Fang's

gods were always hunting animals. The old and the weak of them

died of hunger. There was wailing in the village, where the women

and children went without in order that what little they had might

go into the bellies of the lean and hollow-eyed hunters who trod

the forest in the vain pursuit of meat.



To such extremity were the gods driven that they ate the soft-

tanned leather of their mocassins and mittens, while the dogs ate

the harnesses off their backs and the very whip-lashes. Also, the

dogs ate one another, and also the gods ate the dogs. The weakest

and the more worthless were eaten first. The dogs that still

lived, looked on and understood. A few of the boldest and wisest

forsook the fires of the gods, which had now become a shambles, and

fled into the forest, where, in the end, they starved to death or

were eaten by wolves.



In this time of misery, White Fang, too, stole away into the woods.

He was better fitted for the life than the other dogs, for he had

the training of his cubhood to guide him. Especially adept did he

become in stalking small living things. He would lie concealed for

hours, following every movement of a cautious tree-squirrel,

waiting, with a patience as huge as the hunger he suffered from,

until the squirrel ventured out upon the ground. Even then, White

Fang was not premature. He waited until he was sure of striking

before the squirrel could gain a tree-refuge. Then, and not until

then, would he flash from his hiding-place, a grey projectile,

incredibly swift, never failing its mark - the fleeing squirrel

that fled not fast enough.




Successful as he was with squirrels, there was one difficulty that

prevented him from living and growing fat on them. There were not

enough squirrels. So he was driven to hunt still smaller things.

So acute did his hunger become at times that he was not above

rooting out wood-mice from their burrows in the ground. Nor did he

scorn to do battle with a weasel as hungry as himself and many

times more ferocious.



In the worst pinches of the famine he stole back to the fires of

the gods. But he did not go into the fires. He lurked in the

forest, avoiding discovery and robbing the snares at the rare

intervals when game was caught. He even robbed Grey Beaver's snare

of a rabbit at a time when Grey Beaver staggered and tottered

through the forest, sitting down often to rest, what of weakness

and of shortness of breath.



One day While Fang encountered a young wolf, gaunt and scrawny,

loose-jointed with famine. Had he not been hungry himself, White

Fang might have gone with him and eventually found his way into the

pack amongst his wild brethren. As it was, he ran the young wolf

down and killed and ate him.



Fortune seemed to favour him. Always, when hardest pressed for

food, he found something to kill. Again, when he was weak, it was

his luck that none of the larger preying animals chanced upon him.

Thus, he was strong from the two days' eating a lynx had afforded

him when the hungry wolf-pack ran full tilt upon him. It was a

long, cruel chase, but he was better nourished than they, and in

the end outran them. And not only did he outrun them, but,

circling widely back on his track, he gathered in one of his

exhausted pursuers.



After that he left that part of the country and journeyed over to

the valley wherein he had been born. Here, in the old lair, he

encountered Kiche. Up to her old tricks, she, too, had fled the

inhospitable fires of the gods and gone back to her old refuge to

give birth to her young. Of this litter but one remained alive

when White Fang came upon the scene, and this one was not destined

to live long. Young life had little chance in such a famine.



Kiche's greeting of her grown son was anything but affectionate.

But White Fang did not mind. He had outgrown his mother. So he

turned tail philosophically and trotted on up the stream. At the

forks he took the turning to the left, where he found the lair of

the lynx with whom his mother and he had fought long before. Here,

in the abandoned lair, he settled down and rested for a day.



During the early summer, in the last days of the famine, he met

Lip-lip, who had likewise taken to the woods, where he had eked out

a miserable existence.



White Fang came upon him unexpectedly. Trotting in opposite

directions along the base of a high bluff, they rounded a corner of

rock and found themselves face to face. They paused with instant

alarm, and looked at each other suspiciously.



White Fang was in splendid condition. His hunting had been good,

and for a week he had eaten his fill. He was even gorged from his

latest kill. But in the moment he looked at Lip-lip his hair rose

on end all along his back. It was an involuntary bristling on his

part, the physical state that in the past had always accompanied

the mental state produced in him by Lip-lip's bullying and

persecution. As in the past he had bristled and snarled at sight

of Lip-lip, so now, and automatically, he bristled and snarled. He

did not waste any time. The thing was done thoroughly and with

despatch. Lip-lip essayed to back away, but White Fang struck him

hard, shoulder to shoulder. Lip-lip was overthrown and rolled upon

his back. White Fang's teeth drove into the scrawny throat. There

was a death-struggle, during which White Fang walked around, stiff-

legged and observant. Then he resumed his course and trotted on

along the base of the bluff.



One day, not long after, he came to the edge of the forest, where a

narrow stretch of open land sloped down to the Mackenzie. He had

been over this ground before, when it was bare, but now a village

occupied it. Still hidden amongst the trees, he paused to study

the situation. Sights and sounds and scents were familiar to him.

It was the old village changed to a new place. But sights and

sounds and smells were different from those he had last had when he

fled away from it. There was no whimpering nor wailing. Contented

sounds saluted his ear, and when he heard the angry voice of a

woman he knew it to be the anger that proceeds from a full stomach.

And there was a smell in the air of fish. There was food. The

famine was gone. He came out boldly from the forest and trotted

into camp straight to Grey Beaver's tepee. Grey Beaver was not

there; but Kloo-kooch welcomed him with glad cries and the whole of

a fresh-caught fish, and he lay down to wait Grey Beaver's coming.

****

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