CHAPTER IV

THE TRAIL OF THE GODS

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 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-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 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 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.