CHAPTER V--THE LAW OF MEAT

CHAPTER V--THE LAW OF MEAT


The cub's development was rapid. He rested for two days, and then
ventured forth from the cave again. It was on this adventure that he
found the young weasel whose mother he had helped eat, and he saw to it
that the young weasel went the way of its mother. But on this trip he
did not get lost. When he grew tired, he found his way back to the cave
and slept. And every day thereafter found him out and ranging a wider
area.

He began to get accurate measurement of his strength and his weakness,
and to know when to be bold and when to be cautious. He found it
expedient to be cautious all the time, except for the rare moments, when,
assured of his own intrepidity, he abandoned himself to petty rages and
lusts.

He was always a little demon of fury when he chanced upon a stray
ptarmigan. Never did he fail to respond savagely to the chatter of the
squirrel he had first met on the blasted pine. While the sight of a
moose-bird almost invariably put him into the wildest of rages; for he
never forgot the peck on the nose he had received from the first of that
ilk he encountered.

But there were times when even a moose-bird failed to affect him, and
those were times when he felt himself to be in danger from some other
prowling meat hunter. He never forgot the hawk, and its moving shadow
always sent him crouching into the nearest thicket. He no longer
sprawled and straddled, and already he was developing the gait of his
mother, slinking and furtive, apparently without exertion, yet sliding
along with a swiftness that was as deceptive as it was imperceptible.

In the matter of meat, his luck had been all in the beginning. The seven
ptarmigan chicks and the baby weasel represented the sum of his killings.
His desire to kill strengthened with the days, and he cherished hungry
ambitions for the squirrel that chattered so volubly and always informed
all wild creatures that the wolf-cub was approaching. But as birds flew
in the air, squirrels could climb trees, and the cub could only try to
crawl unobserved upon the squirrel when it was on the ground.

The cub entertained a great respect for his mother. She could get meat,
and she never failed to bring him his share. Further, she was unafraid
of things. It did not occur to him that this fearlessness was founded
upon experience and knowledge. Its effect on him was that of an
impression of power. His mother represented power; and as he grew older
he felt this power in the sharper admonishment of her paw; while the
reproving nudge of her nose gave place to the slash of her fangs. For
this, likewise, he respected his mother. She compelled obedience from
him, and the older he grew the shorter grew her temper.

Famine came again, and the cub with clearer consciousness knew once more
the bite of hunger. The she-wolf ran herself thin in the quest for meat.
She rarely slept any more in the cave, spending most of her time on the
meat-trail, and spending it vainly. This famine was not a long one, but
it was severe while it lasted. The cub found no more milk in his
mother's breast, nor did he get one mouthful of meat for himself.

Before, he had hunted in play, for the sheer joyousness of it; now he
hunted in deadly earnestness, and found nothing. Yet the failure of it
accelerated his development. He studied the habits of the squirrel with
greater carefulness, and strove with greater craft to steal upon it and
surprise it. He studied the wood-mice and tried to dig them out of their
burrows; and he learned much about the ways of moose-birds and
woodpeckers. And there came a day when the hawk's shadow did not drive
him crouching into the bushes. He had grown stronger and wiser, and more
confident. Also, he was desperate. So he sat on his haunches,
conspicuously in an open space, and challenged the hawk down out of the
sky. For he knew that there, floating in the blue above him, was meat,
the meat his stomach yearned after so insistently. But the hawk refused
to come down and give battle, and the cub crawled away into a thicket and
whimpered his disappointment and hunger.

The famine broke. The she-wolf brought home meat. It was strange meat,
different from any she had ever brought before. It was a lynx kitten,
partly grown, like the cub, but not so large. And it was all for him.
His mother had satisfied her hunger elsewhere; though he did not know
that it was the rest of the lynx litter that had gone to satisfy her. Nor
did he know the desperateness of her deed. He knew only that the velvet-
furred kitten was meat, and he ate and waxed happier with every mouthful.

A full stomach conduces to inaction, and the cub lay in the cave,
sleeping against his mother's side. He was aroused by her snarling.
Never had he heard her snarl so terribly. Possibly in her whole life it
was the most terrible snarl she ever gave. There was reason for it, and
none knew it better than she. A lynx's lair is not despoiled with
impunity. In the full glare of the afternoon light, crouching in the
entrance of the cave, the cub saw the lynx-mother. The hair rippled up
along his back at the sight. Here was fear, and it did not require his
instinct to tell him of it. And if sight alone were not sufficient, the
cry of rage the intruder gave, beginning with a snarl and rushing
abruptly upward into a hoarse screech, was convincing enough in itself.

The cub felt the prod of the life that was in him, and stood up and
snarled valiantly by his mother's side. But she thrust him ignominiously
away and behind her. Because of the low-roofed entrance the lynx could
not leap in, and when she made a crawling rush of it the she-wolf sprang
upon her and pinned her down. The cub saw little of the battle. There
was a tremendous snarling and spitting and screeching. The two animals
threshed about, the lynx ripping and tearing with her claws and using her
teeth as well, while the she-wolf used her teeth alone.

Once, the cub sprang in and sank his teeth into the hind leg of the lynx.
He clung on, growling savagely. Though he did not know it, by the weight
of his body he clogged the action of the leg and thereby saved his mother
much damage. A change in the battle crushed him under both their bodies
and wrenched loose his hold. The next moment the two mothers separated,
and, before they rushed together again, the lynx lashed out at the cub
with a huge fore-paw that ripped his shoulder open to the bone and sent
him hurtling sidewise against the wall. Then was added to the uproar the
cub's shrill yelp of pain and fright. But the fight lasted so long that
he had time to cry himself out and to experience a second burst of
courage; and the end of the battle found him again clinging to a hind-leg
and furiously growling between his teeth.

The lynx was dead. But the she-wolf was very weak and sick. At first
she caressed the cub and licked his wounded shoulder; but the blood she
had lost had taken with it her strength, and for all of a day and a night
she lay by her dead foe's side, without movement, scarcely breathing. For
a week she never left the cave, except for water, and then her movements
were slow and painful. At the end of that time the lynx was devoured,
while the she-wolf's wounds had healed sufficiently to permit her to take
the meat-trail again.

The cub's shoulder was stiff and sore, and for some time he limped from
the terrible slash he had received. But the world now seemed changed. He
went about in it with greater confidence, with a feeling of prowess that
had not been his in the days before the battle with the lynx. He had
looked upon life in a more ferocious aspect; he had fought; he had buried
his teeth in the flesh of a foe; and he had survived. And because of all
this, he carried himself more boldly, with a touch of defiance that was
new in him. He was no longer afraid of minor things, and much of his
timidity had vanished, though the unknown never ceased to press upon him
with its mysteries and terrors, intangible and ever-menacing.

He began to accompany his mother on the meat-trail, and he saw much of
the killing of meat and began to play his part in it. And in his own dim
way he learned the law of meat. There were two kinds of life--his own
kind and the other kind. His own kind included his mother and himself.
The other kind included all live things that moved. But the other kind
was divided. One portion was what his own kind killed and ate. This
portion was composed of the non-killers and the small killers. The other
portion killed and ate his own kind, or was killed and eaten by his own
kind. And out of this classification arose the law. The aim of life was
meat. Life itself was meat. Life lived on life. There were the eaters
and the eaten. The law was: EAT OR BE EATEN. He did not formulate the
law in clear, set terms and moralise about it. He did not even think the
law; he merely lived the law without thinking about it at all.

He saw the law operating around him on every side. He had eaten the
ptarmigan chicks. The hawk had eaten the ptarmigan-mother. The hawk
would also have eaten him. Later, when he had grown more formidable, he
wanted to eat the hawk. He had eaten the lynx kitten. The lynx-mother
would have eaten him had she not herself been killed and eaten. And so
it went. The law was being lived about him by all live things, and he
himself was part and parcel of the law. He was a killer. His only food
was meat, live meat, that ran away swiftly before him, or flew into the
air, or climbed trees, or hid in the ground, or faced him and fought with
him, or turned the tables and ran after him.

Had the cub thought in man-fashion, he might have epitomised life as a
voracious appetite and the world as a place wherein ranged a multitude of
appetites, pursuing and being pursued, hunting and being hunted, eating
and being eaten, all in blindness and confusion, with violence and
disorder, a chaos of gluttony and slaughter, ruled over by chance,
merciless, planless, endless.

But the cub did not think in man-fashion. He did not look at things with
wide vision. He was single-purposed, and entertained but one thought or
desire at a time. Besides the law of meat, there were a myriad other and
lesser laws for him to learn and obey. The world was filled with
surprise. The stir of the life that was in him, the play of his muscles,
was an unending happiness. To run down meat was to experience thrills
and elations. His rages and battles were pleasures. Terror itself, and
the mystery of the unknown, led to his living.

And there were easements and satisfactions. To have a full stomach, to
doze lazily in the sunshine--such things were remuneration in full for
his ardours and toils, while his ardours and tolls were in themselves
self-remunerative. They were expressions of life, and life is always
happy when it is expressing itself. So the cub had no quarrel with his
hostile environment. He was very much alive, very happy, and very proud
of himself.