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 fast 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.