CHAPTER IV--THE TRAIL OF THE GODS
In the fall of the year, when the days were shortening and the bite ofthe 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. Thesummer camp was being dismantled, and the tribe, bag and baggage, waspreparing to go off to the fall hunting. White Fang watched it all witheager eyes, and when the tepees began to come down and the canoes wereloading 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 hisopportunity to slink out of camp to the woods. Here, in the runningstream where ice was beginning to form, he hid his trail. Then hecrawled into the heart of a dense thicket and waited. The time passedby, and he slept intermittently for hours. Then he was aroused by GreyBeaver's voice calling him by name. There were other voices. White Fangcould 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 outof 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 hisundertaking. Darkness was coming on, and for a while he played aboutamong the trees, pleasuring in his freedom. Then, and quite suddenly, hebecame aware of loneliness. He sat down to consider, listening to thesilence of the forest and perturbed by it. That nothing moved norsounded, seemed ominous. He felt the lurking of danger, unseen andunguessed. He was suspicious of the looming bulks of the trees and ofthe dark shadows that might conceal all manner of perilous things.
Then it was cold. Here was no warm side of a tepee against which tosnuggle. 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 aboutit. 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 heardthe shrill voices of the women, the gruff basses of the men, and thesnarling of the dogs. He was hungry, and he remembered pieces of meatand fish that had been thrown him. Here was no meat, nothing but athreatening and inedible silence.
His bondage had softened him. Irresponsibility had weakened him. He hadforgotten how to shift for himself. The night yawned about him. Hissenses, accustomed to the hum and bustle of the camp, used to thecontinuous impact of sights and sounds, were now left idle. There wasnothing to do, nothing to see nor hear. They strained to catch someinterruption of the silence and immobility of nature. They were appalledby inaction and by the feel of something terrible impending.
He gave a great start of fright. A colossal and formless something wasrushing across the field of his vision. It was a tree-shadow flung bythe moon, from whose face the clouds had been brushed away. Reassured,he whimpered softly; then he suppressed the whimper for fear that itmight attract the attention of the lurking dangers.
A tree, contracting in the cool of the night, made a loud noise. It wasdirectly above him. He yelped in his fright. A panic seized him, and heran madly toward the village. He knew an overpowering desire for theprotection and companionship of man. In his nostrils was the smell ofthe 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 noshadows nor darknesses. But no village greeted his eyes. He hadforgotten. The village had gone away.
His wild flight ceased abruptly. There was no place to which to flee. Heslunk forlornly through the deserted camp, smelling the rubbish-heaps andthe discarded rags and tags of the gods. He would have been glad for therattle of stones about him, flung by an angry squaw, glad for the hand ofGrey Beaver descending upon him in wrath; while he would have welcomedwith delight Lip-lip and the whole snarling, cowardly pack.
He came to where Grey Beaver's tepee had stood. In the centre of thespace it had occupied, he sat down. He pointed his nose at the moon. Histhroat was afflicted by rigid spasms, his mouth opened, and in a heart-broken cry bubbled up his loneliness and fear, his grief for Kiche, allhis past sorrows and miseries as well as his apprehension of sufferingsand dangers to come. It was the long wolf-howl, full-throated andmournful, 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 hisloneliness more forcibly upon him. It did not take him long to make uphis mind. He plunged into the forest and followed the river bank downthe stream. All day he ran. He did not rest. He seemed made to run onforever. His iron-like body ignored fatigue. And even after fatiguecame, his heritage of endurance braced him to endless endeavour andenabled him to drive his complaining body onward.
Where the river swung in against precipitous bluffs, he climbed the highmountains behind. Rivers and streams that entered the main river heforded 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 icycurrent. Always he was on the lookout for the trail of the gods where itmight leave the river and proceed inland.
White Fang was intelligent beyond the average of his kind; yet his mentalvision 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 hishead. Later on, when he had travelled more and grown older and wiser andcome to know more of trails and rivers, it might be that he could graspand apprehend such a possibility. But that mental power was yet in thefuture. Just now he ran blindly, his own bank of the Mackenzie aloneentering into his calculations.
All night he ran, blundering in the darkness into mishaps and obstaclesthat delayed but did not daunt. By the middle of the second day he hadbeen running continuously for thirty hours, and the iron of his flesh wasgiving out. It was the endurance of his mind that kept him going. Hehad not eaten in forty hours, and he was weak with hunger. The repeateddrenchings in the icy water had likewise had their effect on him. Hishandsome coat was draggled. The broad pads of his feet were bruised andbleeding. 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 tofall--a raw, moist, melting, clinging snow, slippery under foot, that hidfrom him the landscape he traversed, and that covered over theinequalities of the ground so that the way of his feet was more difficultand painful.
Grey Beaver had intended camping that night on the far bank of theMackenzie, for it was in that direction that the hunting lay. But on thenear bank, shortly before dark, a moose coming down to drink, had beenespied by Kloo-kooch, who was Grey Beaver's squaw. Now, had not themoose come down to drink, had not Mit-sah been steering out of the coursebecause of the snow, had not Kloo-kooch sighted the moose, and had notGrey Beaver killed it with a lucky shot from his rifle, all subsequentthings would have happened differently. Grey Beaver would not havecamped on the near side of the Mackenzie, and White Fang would havepassed by and gone on, either to die or to find his way to his wildbrothers 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 afresh trail in the snow. So fresh was it that he knew it immediately forwhat it was. Whining with eagerness, he followed back from the riverbank and in among the trees. The camp-sounds came to his ears. He sawthe blaze of the fire, Kloo-kooch cooking, and Grey Beaver squatting onhis hams and mumbling a chunk of raw tallow. There was fresh meat incamp!
White Fang expected a beating. He crouched and bristled a little at thethought of it. Then he went forward again. He feared and disliked thebeating he knew to be waiting for him. But he knew, further, that thecomfort of the fire would be his, the protection of the gods, thecompanionship of the dogs--the last, a companionship of enmity, but nonethe 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 andgrovelling in the abjectness of his abasement and submission. He crawledstraight toward Grey Beaver, every inch of his progress becoming slowerand more painful. At last he lay at the master's feet, into whosepossession he now surrendered himself, voluntarily, body and soul. Ofhis 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. Therewas a movement of the hand above him. He cringed involuntarily under theexpected blow. It did not fall. He stole a glance upward. Grey Beaverwas breaking the lump of tallow in half! Grey Beaver was offering himone piece of the tallow! Very gently and somewhat suspiciously, he firstsmelled the tallow and then proceeded to eat it. Grey Beaver orderedmeat to be brought to him, and guarded him from the other dogs while heate. After that, grateful and content, White Fang lay at Grey Beaver'sfeet, gazing at the fire that warmed him, blinking and dozing, secure inthe knowledge that the morrow would find him, not wandering forlornthrough bleak forest-stretches, but in the camp of the man-animals, withthe gods to whom he had given himself and upon whom he was now dependent.