CHAPTER IV--THE TRAIL OF THE GODS

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.