White Fang
A wolf cub born in the frozen North, sold to a cruel man, and saved by the one master who was ever kind to him
Page 1
Far in the north of Canada, in the dead of winter, two fur traders named Bill and Henry drove a sled of six dogs down a frozen river between walls of silent forest. It was so cold the spit cracked in the air before it hit the snow, and their dogs were the only meat for miles — which was why a pack of starving wolves had begun to follow them, keeping always just out of gunshot, slipping from shadow to shadow at the edge of the trail. Leading the pack, though the men never guessed it, ran a lean grey she-wolf named Kiche, who had once lived among men and had not forgotten their ways. Night after night the wolves drew their circle tighter around the little camp fire, and night after night Bill and Henry counted their dogs and found one fewer.
Page 2
Far up in the Mackenzie Mountains, in a small cave among the rocks, the she-wolf Kiche and the one-eyed wolf who was her mate raised a litter of cubs that spring. One by one the others died — of hunger, of sickness, of the hundred dangers of the Wild — until only one cub was left, a grey, sharp-eared little fellow with his mother's wildness and a strength all his own. He was the first of the litter brave enough to crawl to the mouth of the cave and look out at the bright world beyond, and the first to learn the great hard rule of that world: the Law of Meat, which says that all things which move are either food, or hunters of food, and a wolf cub is both at once. A snapping weasel gave him his first real fright, driving him back squealing into the cave, until Kiche came bounding in and chased the little hunter off into the rocks.
Page 3
When the salmon ran that summer, Kiche led her grown cub down out of the hills to a camp of skin lodges beside the river — for she remembered the smell of men's fires from her own puppyhood. An Indian named Grey Beaver recognized her at once: she had belonged to his dead brother, years before she ever ran wild. By the law of his people, Grey Beaver claimed her, and her cub along with her, and the old women of the camp looked at the young wolf's narrow head and sharp white teeth and gave him his name — White Fang. He grew up tied among Grey Beaver's sled dogs, fed on dried fish, and learned the camp's hard rules as he had learned the Wild's: men were masters, dogs obeyed, and the biggest of the pack-dogs, a vicious bully named Lip-lip, made every day of White Fang's puppyhood a battle, until White Fang grew strong enough, and fierce enough, that Lip-lip no longer dared to try him.
Page 4
Years later, when word of gold brought thousands of men north, Grey Beaver journeyed with White Fang to the rough mining camp of Fort Yukon to trade his furs. There, outside a saloon, a small misshapen man with a huge ugly head and a cringing manner watched White Fang with hungry interest — his name was Beauty Smith, and he had no use for furs, only for a dog fierce enough to fight other dogs for money. Beauty Smith could not buy White Fang outright, for Grey Beaver was fond of him in his rough way, so instead he brought bottle after bottle of whiskey to Grey Beaver's fire, until the Indian was too drunk to know what he was agreeing to, and signed White Fang away for a few dollars and empty promises. White Fang strained at his new chain and howled after Grey Beaver's retreating back, but Grey Beaver, ashamed and already half-forgetting, did not look round.
Page 5
Beauty Smith starved White Fang and goaded him until he had made him into the most savage, most hated fighting dog in the camp — men called him the Fighting Wolf, and bet on him against other dogs, and he had never yet lost. One cold afternoon, in the timber corral where the fights were held, Beauty Smith matched him against a short, heavy, immovable bulldog named Cherokee, owned by a man named Tim Keenan. Cherokee fought low and would not let go once he had a grip, and before long he had clamped onto White Fang's throat and hung on, dragging him down, until White Fang could no longer breathe or break free, no matter how he twisted. It was at that moment, as the crowd roared, that a young mining engineer named Weedon Scott shoved through the ring, forced Cherokee's jaws open with a stick, and stood over White Fang shouting that the fight was over — and that he meant to buy him, whatever Beauty Smith wanted for him.
Page 6
Weedon Scott took White Fang home to his own small cabin in the hills above the camp, and set about taming him the only way that had never been tried on him before — with patience, and a gentle voice, and no whip at all. At first White Fang snapped at any hand that came near him, certain that kindness was only a trick before a blow, for every man he had known, even Grey Beaver, had hurt him in the end. But Scott kept coming back, day after day, speaking low and moving slow, offering meat from his own hand and never once striking him, until one evening White Fang, for the first time in his life, let a man's hand rest on his head without flinching away. From then on something in him that had always been coiled tight began, very slowly, to loosen, and he began to follow Scott from room to room like a shadow that could not bear to be left behind.
Page 7
When the spring came, Weedon Scott's work in the North was finished, and he had to go home to California. He meant, at first, to leave White Fang behind with a trusted friend, telling himself a wild-bred wolf-dog could never be happy shut up on a gentleman's estate in the warm South. But as the steamboat pulled away from the dock, White Fang, chained in the friend's cabin, went nearly mad with grief, howling and tearing at the walls until he broke free, leapt from a cabin window, and plunged straight into the icy river, swimming with all his strength after the departing boat. The crew hauled him from the water half-drowned and laid him, shivering, on the deck at Scott's feet. Scott looked down at him for a long moment, then knelt and put both arms around the soaked wolf-dog's neck. He had meant to leave him behind. He did not have the heart to try it twice.
Page 8
White Fang stepped off the train into a world so warm and so bright it hardly seemed real after the North. Here, at Sierra Vista, his master's family's ranch in the sunny Santa Clara Valley of California, there was no snow at all, only green orchards, rolling gold hills, and a big friendly house full of people who all, to his astonishment, seemed to belong to Weedon Scott and therefore, somehow, to him as well. He did not trust it. Chickens wandered the yard unafraid of him, which puzzled him, since in the North anything small and unafraid was usually food; a sheepdog named Collie barked at him suspiciously and would not be friends at first. Little by little, guided always by Scott, White Fang learned the new, gentler rules of this Southland — that here, nothing needed killing to be safe, and a dog could simply lie in the sun. It took him a long while to believe it.
Page 9
Months later, in the deep quiet of one night at the ranch, an escaped convict named Jim Hall crept onto the grounds. Years before, Judge Scott, Weedon's father, had sentenced Jim Hall to prison on the bench, never knowing the man had been wrongly convicted, and Jim Hall had broken out of jail meaning to find the judge and make him pay for it. He slipped through a window into the dark house, not knowing that a certain grey wolf-dog slept loose in the hall outside the bedrooms, trusted now to guard the family he loved. White Fang woke at the stranger's step and sprang without a sound, bringing Jim Hall down before he ever reached the Judge's door. The struggle was short and terrible, and when the household came running with lanterns, they found the intruder stopped for good, and White Fang lying hurt and still beside him, his body placed between the convict and the stairs to the very end.
Page 10
White Fang was carried into the house that night more dead than alive, and for many weeks he lay still while the whole family nursed him back to health, calling him, in their relief, the Blessed Wolf. Slowly his strength returned, and by the time the next summer's sun had warmed the Santa Clara Valley, he was himself again — only quieter now, and gentler, a wolf who had chosen, in the end, to belong somewhere. He lay for long golden afternoons in the ranch yard with Collie the sheepdog, who was no longer wary of him at all, and beside them both lay a litter of their puppies, half wolf and half dog, tumbling in the warm dust. Weedon Scott would come out and sit near him in the sun, and White Fang, who had once known nothing in the world but the Wild's one hard law, now knew another: that a creature born to danger could still, in the end, simply rest.
About this story
- Audience: kids (ages 6–12)
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