WHITE FANG

by Jack London

Contents

PART I

• Chapter I: The Trail of the Meat
• Chapter II: The She-Wolf
• Chapter III: The Hunger Cry

PART II

• Chapter I: The Battle of the Fangs
• Chapter II: The Lair
• Chapter III: The Grey Cub
• Chapter IV: The Wall of the World
• Chapter V: The Law of Meat

PART III

• Chapter I: The Makers of Fire
• Chapter II: The Bondage
• Chapter III: The Outcast
• Chapter IV: The Trail of the Gods
• Chapter V: The Covenant
• Chapter VI: The Famine

PART IV

• Chapter I: The Enemy of His Kind
• Chapter II: The Mad God
• Chapter III: The Reign of Hate
• Chapter IV: The Clinging Death
• Chapter V: The Indomitable
• Chapter VI: The Love-Master

PART V

• Chapter I: The Long Trail
• Chapter II: The Southland
• Chapter III: The God's Domain
• Chapter IV: The Call of Kind
• Chapter V: The Sleeping Wolf

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PART I

CHAPTER I

THE TRAIL OF THE MEAT

Dark spruce trees frowned on both sides of the frozen waterway. A recent wind had stripped the white frost from their branches, and now they leaned toward each other—black and threatening—in the fading light. A huge silence hung over the land. The land itself seemed dead: lifeless, still, and so cold and lonely that its mood wasn't even sadness. Instead, there was something like laughter in it—but a laughter more terrible than any sadness. It was cold and humorless, like the smile of the sphinx (an ancient stone statue with a mysterious, unreadable expression). This was the proud, unknowable wisdom of endless time itself, laughing at how pointless it was for anything to try to live. This was the Wild—the savage, frozen heart of the North.

But there was life here, moving forward and refusing to give up. Down the frozen waterway trudged a line of wolf-like sled dogs. Frost coated their bristly fur. Their breath froze the instant it left their mouths, forming clouds of vapor that settled on their fur and turned to ice crystals. Leather harnesses connected the dogs to a sled dragging behind them. This sled had no runners (the metal or wood strips that usually help a sled glide). Instead, it was built from tough birch bark, and its whole flat bottom rested on the snow. The front of the sled curled upward, like a scroll, so it could push down and cut through the soft snow that rose like a wave in front of it. Tied securely to the sled was a long, narrow box. Other supplies rode on the sled too—blankets, an axe, a coffee pot, and a frying pan—but the long narrow box took up most of the space and stood out above everything else.

Ahead of the dogs, walking on wide snowshoes, trudged one man. Behind the sled walked a second man. Inside the box on the sled lay a third man, whose struggles were finished forever—a man the Wild had defeated and crushed until he would never move or fight again. The Wild does not like movement. To the Wild, life itself is an insult, because life means movement, and the Wild always tries to destroy movement. It freezes rivers so they can't flow to the sea. It drains the sap from trees until their very core turns to ice. And most fiercely of all, the Wild attacks and tries to conquer man—the most restless of all living things, always fighting back against the truth that everything that moves must eventually stop.

But at the front and back of the sled, unafraid and unbeatable, walked the two men who were still alive. Fur and soft leather covered their bodies. Frost from their frozen breath coated their eyelashes, cheeks, and lips so thickly that you couldn't make out their faces. This made them look like ghostly masked figures—like undertakers attending a funeral in some spirit world. But underneath it all, they were simply men. They were pushing through a land of emptiness, mockery, and silence—small adventurers attempting an enormous adventure, testing themselves against a world as distant, foreign, and lifeless as outer space.

They traveled without talking, saving their breath for the hard work their bodies demanded. Silence surrounded them on every side, pressing down with a weight you could almost feel. It affected their minds the way deep ocean water presses on a diver's body. It crushed them under its endless size and unbreakable rules. It pushed into the deepest corners of their minds, squeezing out—like juice from a grape—all the false pride and self-importance that humans usually carry. It made them see themselves as tiny and unimportant: mere specks moving with limited skill and little wisdom, caught up in the vast, blind forces of nature.

An hour passed, then a second. The pale light of the short, sunless day was beginning to fade when a faint, distant cry rose through the still air. The sound climbed quickly upward until it reached its highest note, held there—trembling and tense—and then slowly faded away. It might have sounded like a lost, wailing spirit, except it carried a certain sad fierceness and hungry eagerness. The man in front turned his head until his eyes met the eyes of the man behind him. Across the narrow box between them, each man nodded to the other.

A second cry pierced the silence, sharp as a needle. Both men could tell where it came from—somewhere behind them, in the snowy land they had just crossed. A third cry answered it, coming from behind and to the left of the second cry.

"They're after us, Bill," said the man in front.

His voice sounded hoarse and strange, as if speaking took real effort.

"Meat is scarce," his companion answered. "I haven't seen a rabbit track in days."

After that, neither man spoke, though they kept listening carefully to the hunting cries that continued to rise up behind them.

When darkness fell, they steered the dogs into a cluster of spruce trees at the edge of the waterway and set up camp. They used the coffin, set beside the fire, as both a seat and a table. The wolf-like dogs gathered on the far side of the fire, snapping and squabbling with each other, but they showed no interest in wandering off into the darkness.

"Seems to me, Henry, they're staying awfully close to camp," Bill said.

Henry, crouched over the fire and melting a piece of ice in the coffee pot, nodded. He didn't speak again until he had taken his seat on the coffin and started eating.

"They know where their skins are safe," he said. "They'd rather eat food than become food. Those dogs are pretty smart."

Bill shook his head. "I don't know about that."

His companion looked at him with curiosity. "That's the first time I've ever heard you say they weren't smart."

"Henry," said the other man, chewing his beans slowly and deliberately, "did you notice how the dogs acted up when I was feeding them?"

"They did make more fuss than usual," Henry admitted.

"How many dogs do we have, Henry?"

"Six."

"Well, Henry..." Bill paused for a moment to let his next words carry more weight. "Like I was saying, Henry, we've got six dogs. I took six fish out of the bag. I gave one fish to each dog, and Henry—I ended up one fish short."

"You counted wrong."

"We've got six dogs," Bill repeated, calm and certain. "I took out six fish. One Ear didn't get a fish. I had to go back to the bag afterward and get him his share."

"We only have six dogs," Henry said.

"Henry," Bill continued. "I won't say they were all dogs, but seven of them got fish."

Henry stopped eating to look across the fire and count the dogs.

"There's only six now," he said.

"I saw the seventh one run off across the snow," Bill announced, completely sure of himself. "I saw seven."

Henry looked at him with a mix of pity and concern. "I'll be mighty glad when this trip is over."

"What do you mean by that?" Bill demanded.

"I mean this cargo of ours is getting on your nerves, and you're starting to see things that aren't there."

"I thought about that," Bill answered seriously. "So when I saw it run off across the snow, I checked the snow and found its tracks. Then I counted the dogs again, and there were still only six. The tracks are still there in the snow right now. Want to see them? I'll show you."

Henry didn't answer, but kept chewing quietly until he finished his meal and topped it off with one last cup of coffee. He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand and said:

"So you're thinking it was—"

A long, wailing cry, wild and sorrowful, rose from somewhere in the darkness and cut him off. He paused to listen, then finished his sentence with a wave of his hand toward the sound, "—one of them?"

Bill nodded. "I'd sooner believe that than anything else. You saw yourself how the dogs reacted."

Cry after cry, calling and answering, turned the silence into chaos. The cries rose from every direction, and the dogs showed their fear by huddling together so close to the fire that it singed their fur. Bill threw more wood on the flames before lighting his pipe.

"Seems like you're feeling pretty low," Henry said.

"Henry..." He puffed thoughtfully on his pipe for a while before continuing. "Henry, I was just thinking about how much luckier he is than you or I will ever be."

He pointed with his thumb toward the box they were sitting on.

"You and me, Henry—when we die, we'll be lucky if we get enough rocks piled over our bodies to keep the dogs away."

"But we don't have family and money and everything else, like he did," Henry replied. "Fancy funerals shipped a long way aren't something you or I can afford."

"What gets me, Henry, is why a man like this—someone who's practically royalty back home, who's never had to worry about food or blankets—why does he come poking around these godforsaken corners of the earth? That's what I can't figure out."

"He might have lived to a ripe old age if he'd just stayed home," Henry agreed.

Bill opened his mouth to say something, then changed his mind. Instead, he pointed toward the wall of darkness pressing in around them from every side. The blackness held no clear shapes—only pairs of eyes glowing like hot coals could be seen. Henry nodded toward a second pair of eyes, then a third. A ring of glowing eyes had formed around their camp. Now and then, a pair of eyes would shift, or vanish only to reappear moments later.

The dogs' nervousness had been building, and suddenly they bolted in a wave of panic to the side of the fire closest to the men, cringing and crowding around their legs. In the scramble, one dog got knocked into the edge of the fire and yelped in pain and fear as the smell of its singed fur filled the air. The commotion made the ring of eyes shift back nervously for a moment, even pulling back slightly, but it settled back into place once the dogs calmed down.

"Henry, it's a real shame to be low on ammunition."

Bill had finished his pipe and was helping his partner spread out their bed of fur and blankets on the spruce branches he'd laid over the snow before supper. Henry grunted in response and began untying his moccasins (soft leather boots).

"How many bullets did you say we had left?" he asked.

"Three," came the answer. "And I wish it was three hundred. Then I'd show them a thing or two, damn them!"

He shook his fist angrily at the glowing eyes in the darkness, then carefully propped his moccasins up near the fire to dry.

"And I wish this cold spell would break," he went on. "It's been fifty degrees below zero for two weeks now. And I wish I'd never started this trip, Henry. I don't like how things look. Something doesn't feel right. And while I'm wishing, I wish this trip was over and done, and you and me were sitting by the fire back at Fort McGurry right now, playing cribbage—that's what I wish."

Henry grunted and climbed into bed. As he began drifting off to sleep, his partner's voice startled him aw