CHAPTER IV - THE CALL OF KIND
The months came and went. There was plenty of food and no work in
the Southland, and White Fang lived fat and prosperous and happy. Not
alone was he in the geographical Southland, for he was in the Southland of
life. Human kindness was like a sun shining upon him, and he flourished
like a flower planted in good soil.
And yet he remained somehow different from other dogs. He knew the
law even better than did the dogs that had known no other life, and he
observed the law more punctiliously; but still there was about him a
suggestion of lurking ferocity, as though the Wild still lingered in him and
the wolf in him merely slept.
He never chummed with other dogs. Lonely he had lived, so far as his
kind was concerned, and lonely he would continue to live. In his
puppyhood, under the persecution of Lip-lip and the puppy-pack, and in
his fighting days with Beauty Smith, he had acquired a fixed aversion for
dogs. The natural course of his life had been diverted, and, recoiling from
his kind, he had clung to the human.
Besides, all Southland dogs looked upon him with suspicion. He
aroused in them their instinctive fear of the Wild, and they greeted him
always with snarl and growl and belligerent hatred. He, on the other hand,
learned that it was not necessary to use his teeth upon them. His naked
fangs and writhing lips were uniformly efficacious, rarely failing to send a
bellowing on-rushing dog back on its haunches.
But there was one trial in White Fang's life - Collie. She never gave
him a moment's peace. She was not so amenable to the law as he. She
defied all efforts of the master to make her become friends with White
Fang. Ever in his ears was sounding her sharp and nervous snarl. She had
never forgiven him the chicken-killing episode, and persistently held to
the belief that his intentions were bad. She found him guilty before the act,
and treated him accordingly. She became a pest to him, like a policeman
following him around the stable and the hounds, and, if he even so much
as glanced curiously at a pigeon or chicken, bursting into an outcry of
indignation and wrath. His favourite way of ignoring her was to lie down,
with his head on his fore-paws, and pretend sleep. This always
dumfounded and silenced her.
With the exception of Collie, all things went well with White Fang. He
had learned control and poise, and he knew the law. He achieved a
staidness, and calmness, and philosophic tolerance. He no longer lived in a
hostile environment. Danger and hurt and death did not lurk everywhere
about him. In time, the unknown, as a thing of terror and menace ever
impending, faded away. Life was soft and easy. It flowed along smoothly,
and neither fear nor foe lurked by the way.
He missed the snow without being aware of it. "An unduly long
summer," would have been his thought had he thought about it; as it was,
he merely missed the snow in a vague, subconscious way. In the same
fashion, especially in the heat of summer when he suffered from the sun,
he experienced faint longings for the Northland. Their only effect upon
him, however, was to make him uneasy and restless without his knowing
what was the matter.
White Fang had never been very demonstrative. Beyond his snuggling
and the throwing of a crooning note into his love-growl, he had no way of
expressing his love. Yet it was given him to discover a third way. He had
always been susceptible to the laughter of the gods. Laughter had affected
him with madness, made him frantic with rage. But he did not have it in
him to be angry with the love-master, and when that god elected to laugh
at him in a good- natured, bantering way, he was nonplussed. He could
feel the pricking and stinging of the old anger as it strove to rise up in him,
but it strove against love. He could not be angry; yet he had to do
something. At first he was dignified, and the master laughed the harder.
Then he tried to be more dignified, and the master laughed harder than
before. In the end, the master laughed him out of his dignity. His jaws
slightly parted, his lips lifted a little, and a quizzical expression that was
more love than humour came into his eyes. He had learned to laugh.
Likewise he learned to romp with the master, to be tumbled down and
rolled over, and be the victim of innumerable rough tricks. In return he
feigned anger, bristling and growling ferociously, and clipping his teeth
together in snaps that had all the seeming of deadly intention. But he never
forgot himself. Those snaps were always delivered on the empty air. At the
end of such a romp, when blow and cuff and snap and snarl were last and
furious, they would break off suddenly and stand several feet apart,
glaring at each other. And then, just as suddenly, like the sun rising on a
stormy sea, they would begin to laugh. This would always culminate with
the master's arms going around White Fang's neck and shoulders while the
latter crooned and growled his love-song.
But nobody else ever romped with White Fang. He did not permit it.
He stood on his dignity, and when they attempted it, his warning snarl and
bristling mane were anything but playful. That he allowed the master these
liberties was no reason that he should be a common dog, loving here and
loving there, everybody's property for a romp and good time. He loved
with single heart and refused to cheapen himself or his love.
The master went out on horseback a great deal, and to accompany him
was one of White Fang's chief duties in life. In the Northland he had
evidenced his fealty by toiling in the harness; but there were no sleds in
the Southland, nor did dogs pack burdens on their backs. So he rendered
fealty in the new way, by running with the master's horse. The longest day
never played White Fang out. His was the gait of the wolf, smooth, tireless
and effortless, and at the end of fifty miles he would come in jauntily
ahead of the horse.
It was in connection with the riding, that White Fang achieved one
other mode of expression - remarkable in that he did it but twice in all his
life. The first time occurred when the master was trying to teach a spirited
thoroughbred the method of opening and closing gates without the rider's
dismounting. Time and again and many times he ranged the horse up to
the gate in the effort to close it and each time the horse became frightened
and backed and plunged away. It grew more nervous and excited every
moment. When it reared, the master put the spurs to it and made it drop its
fore-legs back to earth, whereupon it would begin kicking with its hind-
legs. White Fang watched the performance with increasing anxiety until
he could contain himself no longer, when he sprang in front of the horse
and barked savagely and warningly.
Though he often tried to bark thereafter, and the master encouraged
him, he succeeded only once, and then it was not in the master's presence.
A scamper across the pasture, a jackrabbit rising suddenly under the
horse's feet, a violent sheer, a stumble, a fall to earth, and a broken leg for
the master, was the cause of it. White Fang sprang in a rage at the throat of
the offending horse, but was checked by the master's voice.
"Home! Go home!" the master commanded when he had ascertained his injury.
White Fang was disinclined to desert him. The master thought of
writing a note, but searched his pockets vainly for pencil and paper. Again
he commanded White Fang to go home.
The latter regarded him wistfully, started away, then returned and
whined softly. The master talked to him gently but seriously, and he
cocked his ears, and listened with painful intentness.
"That's all right, old fellow, you just run along home," ran the talk. "Go
on home and tell them what's happened to me. Home with you, you wolf.
Get along home!"
White Fang knew the meaning of "home," and though he did not
understand the remainder of the master's language, he knew it was his will
that he should go home. He turned and trotted reluctantly away. Then he
stopped, undecided, and looked back over his shoulder.
"Go home!" came the sharp command, and this time he obeyed.
The family was on the porch, taking the cool of the afternoon, when
White Fang arrived. He came in among them, panting, covered with dust.
"Weedon's back," Weedon's mother announced.
The children welcomed White Fang with glad cries and ran to meet
him. He avoided them and passed down the porch, but they cornered him against a rocking-chair and the railing. He growled and tried to push by
them. Their mother looked apprehensively in their direction.
"I confess, he makes me nervous around the children," she said. "I
have a dread that he will turn upon them unexpectedly some day."
Growling savagely, White Fang sprang out of the corner, overturning
the boy and the girl. The mother called them to her and comforted them,
telling them not to bother White Fang.
"A wolf is a wolf!" commented Judge Scott. "There is no trusting one."
"But he is not all wolf," interposed Beth, standing for her brother in his absence.
"You have only Weedon's opinion for that," rejoined the judge. "He
merely surmises that there is some strain of dog in White Fang; but as he
will tell you himself, he knows nothing about it. As for his appearance - "
He did not finish his sentence. White Fang stood before him, growling fiercely.
"Go away! Lie down, sir!" Judge Scott commanded.
White Fang turned to the love-master's wife. She screamed with fright
as he seized her dress in his teeth and dragged on it till the frail fabric tore
away. By this time he had become the centre of interest.
He had ceased from his growling and stood, head up, looking into their
faces. His throat worked spasmodically, but made no sound, while he
struggled with all his body, convulsed with the effort to rid himself of the
incommunicable something that strained for utterance.
"I hope he is not going mad," said Weedon's mother. "I told Weedon
that I was afraid the warm climate would not agree with an Arctic animal."
"He's trying to speak, I do believe," Beth announced.
At this moment speech came to White Fang, rushing up in a great burst of barking.
"Something has happened to Weedon," his wife said decisively.
They were all on their feet now, and White Fang ran down the steps,
looking back for them to follow. For the second and last time in his life he
had barked and made himself understood.
After this event he found a warmer place in the hearts of the Sierra
Vista people, and even the groom whose arm he had slashed admitted that
he was a wise dog even if he was a wolf. Judge Scott still held to the same
opinion, and proved it to everybody's dissatisfaction by measurements and
descriptions taken from the encyclopaedia and various works on natural history.
The days came and went, streaming their unbroken sunshine over the
Santa Clara Valley. But as they grew shorter and White Fang's second
winter in the Southland came on, he made a strange discovery. Collie's
teeth were no longer sharp. There was a playfulness about her nips and a
gentleness that prevented them from really hurting him. He forgot that she
had made life a burden to him, and when she disported herself around him
he responded solemnly, striving to be playful and becoming no more than
ridiculous.
One day she led him off on a long chase through the back-pasture land
into the woods. It was the afternoon that the master was to ride, and White
Fang knew it. The horse stood saddled and waiting at the door. White Fang
hesitated. But there was that in him deeper than all the law he had learned,
than the customs that had moulded him, than his love for the master, than
the very will to live of himself; and when, in the moment of his indecision,
Collie nipped him and scampered off, he turned and followed after. The
master rode alone that day; and in the woods, side by side, White Fang ran
with Collie, as his mother, Kiche, and old One Eye had run long years
before in the silent Northland forest. |
