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 toward 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 his 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 generalization of the mind, not a something acquired by experience in 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 Gray 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 on Gray Beaver; behind Gray Beaver were a club and god-head.But behind the dogs there was nothing but space, and into this space they fled 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 also 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 moccasins 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.
