White Fang - Jack London (most inspirational books of all time .TXT) 📗

her paw, the hunger unappeased of several famines, had borne in upon him that all was not freedom in the world, that to life there was limitations and restraints.  These limitations and restraints were laws.  To be obedient to them was to escape hurt and make for happiness.

He did not reason the question out in this man fashion.  He merely classified the things that hurt and the things that did not hurt.  And after such classification he avoided the things that hurt, the restrictions and restraints, in order to enjoy the satisfactions and the remunerations of life.

Thus it was that in obedience to the law laid down by his mother, and in obedience to the law of that unknown and nameless thing, fear, he kept away from the mouth of the cave.  It remained to him a white wall of light.  When his mother was absent, he slept most of the time, while during the intervals that he was awake he kept very quiet, suppressing the whimpering cries that tickled in his throat and strove for noise.

Once, lying awake, he heard a strange sound in the white wall.  He did not know that it was a wolverine, standing outside, all a-trembling with its own daring, and cautiously scenting out the contents of the cave.  The cub knew only that the sniff was strange, a something unclassified, therefore unknown and terrible—for the unknown was one of the chief elements that went into the making of fear.

The hair bristled upon the grey cub’s back, but it bristled silently.  How was he to know that this thing that sniffed was a thing at which to bristle?  It was not born of any knowledge of his, yet it was the visible expression of the fear that was in him, and for which, in his own life, there was no accounting.  But fear was accompanied by another instinct—that of concealment.  The cub was in a frenzy of terror, yet he lay without movement or sound, frozen, petrified into immobility, to all appearances dead.  His mother, coming home, growled as she smelt the wolverine’s track, and bounded into the cave and licked and nozzled him with undue vehemence of affection.  And the cub felt that somehow he had escaped a great hurt.

But there were other forces at work in the cub, the greatest of which was growth.  Instinct and law demanded of him obedience.  But growth demanded disobedience.  His mother and fear impelled him to keep away from the white wall.  Growth is life, and life is for ever destined to make for light.  So there was no damming up the tide of life that was rising within him—rising with every mouthful of meat he swallowed, with every breath he drew.  In the end, one day, fear and obedience were swept away by the rush of life, and the cub straddled and sprawled toward the entrance.

Unlike any other wall with which he had had experience, this wall seemed to recede from him as he approached.  No hard surface collided with the tender little nose he thrust out tentatively before him.  The substance of the wall seemed as permeable and yielding as light.  And as condition, in his eyes, had the seeming of form, so he entered into what had been wall to him and bathed in the substance that composed it.

It was bewildering.  He was sprawling through solidity.  And ever the light grew brighter.  Fear urged him to go back, but growth drove him on.  Suddenly he found himself at the mouth of the cave.  The wall, inside which he had thought himself, as suddenly leaped back before him to an immeasurable distance.  The light had become painfully bright.  He was dazzled by it.  Likewise he was made dizzy by this abrupt and tremendous extension of space.  Automatically, his eyes were adjusting themselves to the brightness, focusing themselves to meet the increased distance of objects.  At first, the wall had leaped beyond his vision.  He now saw it again; but it had taken upon itself a remarkable remoteness.  Also, its appearance had changed.  It was now a variegated wall, composed of the trees that fringed the stream, the opposing mountain that towered above the trees, and the sky that out-towered the mountain.

A great fear came upon him.  This was more of the terrible unknown.  He crouched down on the lip of the cave and gazed out on the world.  He was very much afraid.  Because it was unknown, it was hostile to him.  Therefore the hair stood up on end along his back and his lips wrinkled weakly in an attempt at a ferocious and intimidating snarl.  Out of his puniness and fright he challenged and menaced the whole wide world.

Nothing happened.  He continued to gaze, and in his interest he forgot to snarl.  Also, he forgot to be afraid.  For the time, fear had been routed by growth, while growth had assumed the guise of curiosity.  He began to notice near objects—an open portion of the stream that flashed in the sun, the blasted pine-tree that stood at the base of the slope, and the slope itself, that ran right up to him and ceased two feet beneath the lip of the cave on which he crouched.

Now the grey cub had lived all his days on a level floor.  He had never experienced the hurt of a fall.  He did not know what a fall was.  So he stepped boldly out upon the air.  His hind-legs still rested on the cave-lip, so he fell forward head downward.  The earth struck him a harsh blow on the nose that made him yelp.  Then he began rolling down the slope, over and over.  He was in a panic of terror.  The unknown had caught him at last.  It had gripped savagely hold of him and was about to wreak upon him some terrific hurt.  Growth was now routed by fear, and he ki-yi’d like any frightened puppy.

The unknown bore him on he knew not to what frightful hurt, and he yelped and ki-yi’d unceasingly.  This was a different proposition from crouching in frozen fear while the unknown lurked just alongside.  Now the unknown had caught tight hold of him.  Silence would do no good.  Besides, it was not fear, but terror, that convulsed him.

But the slope grew more gradual, and its base was grass-covered.  Here the cub lost momentum.  When at last he came to a stop, he gave one last agonised yell and then a long, whimpering wail.  Also, and quite as a matter of course, as though in his life he had already made a thousand toilets, he proceeded to lick away the dry clay that soiled him.

After that he sat up and gazed about him, as might the first man of the earth who landed upon Mars.  The cub had broken through the wall of the world, the unknown had let go its hold of him, and here he was without hurt.  But the first man on Mars would have experienced less unfamiliarity than did he.  Without any antecedent knowledge, without any warning whatever that such existed, he found himself an explorer in a totally new world.

Now that the terrible unknown had let go of him, he forgot that the unknown had any terrors.  He was aware only of curiosity in all the things about him.  He inspected the grass beneath him, the moss-berry plant just beyond, and the dead trunk of the blasted pine that stood on the edge of an open space among the trees.  A squirrel, running around the base of the trunk, came full upon him, and gave him a great fright.  He cowered down and snarled.  But the squirrel was as badly scared.  It ran up the tree, and from a point of safety chattered back savagely.

This helped the cub’s courage, and though the woodpecker he next encountered gave him a start, he proceeded confidently on his way.  Such was his confidence, that when a moose-bird impudently hopped up to him, he reached out at it with a playful paw.  The result was a sharp peck on the end of his nose that made him cower down and ki-yi.  The noise he made was too much for the moose-bird, who sought safety in flight.

But the cub was learning.  His misty little mind had already made an unconscious classification.  There were live things and things not alive.  Also, he must watch out for the live things.  The things not alive remained always in one place, but the live things moved about, and there was no telling what they might do.  The thing to expect of them was the unexpected, and for this he must be prepared.

He travelled very clumsily.  He ran into sticks and things.  A twig that he thought a long way off, would the next instant hit him on the nose or rake along his ribs.  There were inequalities of surface.  Sometimes he overstepped and stubbed his nose.  Quite as often he understepped and stubbed his feet.  Then there were the pebbles and stones that turned under him when he trod upon them; and from them he came to know that the things not alive were not all in the same state of stable equilibrium as was his cave—also, that small things not alive were more liable than large things to fall down or turn over.  But with every mishap he was learning.  The longer he walked, the better he walked.  He was adjusting himself.  He was learning to calculate his own muscular movements, to know his physical limitations, to measure distances between objects, and between objects and himself.

His was the luck of the beginner.  Born to be a hunter of meat (though he did not know it), he blundered upon meat just outside his own cave-door on his first foray into the world.  It was by sheer blundering that he chanced upon the shrewdly hidden ptarmigan nest.  He fell into it.  He had essayed to walk along the trunk of a fallen pine.  The rotten bark gave way under his feet, and with a despairing yelp he pitched down the rounded crescent, smashed through the leafage and stalks of a small bush, and in the heart of the bush, on the ground, fetched up in the midst of seven ptarmigan chicks.

They made noises, and at first he was frightened at them.  Then he perceived that they were very little, and he became bolder.  They moved.  He placed his paw on one, and its movements were accelerated.  This was a source of enjoyment to him.  He smelled it.  He picked it up in his mouth.  It struggled and tickled his tongue.  At the same time he was made aware of a sensation of hunger.  His jaws closed together.  There was a crunching of fragile bones, and warm blood ran in his mouth.  The taste of it was good.  This was meat, the same as his mother gave him, only it was alive between his teeth and therefore better.  So he ate the ptarmigan.  Nor did he stop till he had devoured the whole brood.  Then he licked his chops in quite the same way his mother did, and began to crawl out of the bush.

He encountered a feathered whirlwind.  He was confused and blinded by the rush of it and the beat of angry wings.  He hid his head between his paws and yelped.  The blows increased.  The mother ptarmigan was in a fury.  Then he became angry.  He rose up, snarling, striking out with his paws.  He sank his tiny teeth into one of the wings and pulled and tugged sturdily.  The ptarmigan struggled against him, showering blows upon him with her free wing.  It was his first battle.  He was elated.  He forgot all about the unknown.  He no longer was afraid of anything.  He was fighting, tearing at a live thing that was striking at him.  Also, this live thing was meat.  The lust to kill was on him.  He had just destroyed little live