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.
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