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

by the other men of the fort.  No one knew his first name, and in general he was known in the country as Beauty Smith.  But he was anything save a beauty.  To antithesis was due his naming.  He was pre-eminently unbeautiful.  Nature had been niggardly with him.  He was a small man to begin with; and upon his meagre frame was deposited an even more strikingly meagre head.  Its apex might be likened to a point.  In fact, in his boyhood, before he had been named Beauty by his fellows, he had been called “Pinhead.”

Backward, from the apex, his head slanted down to his neck and forward it slanted uncompromisingly to meet a low and remarkably wide forehead.  Beginning here, as though regretting her parsimony, Nature had spread his features with a lavish hand.  His eyes were large, and between them was the distance of two eyes.  His face, in relation to the rest of him, was prodigious.  In order to discover the necessary area, Nature had given him an enormous prognathous jaw.  It was wide and heavy, and protruded outward and down until it seemed to rest on his chest.  Possibly this appearance was due to the weariness of the slender neck, unable properly to support so great a burden.

This jaw gave the impression of ferocious determination.  But something lacked.  Perhaps it was from excess.  Perhaps the jaw was too large.  At any rate, it was a lie.  Beauty Smith was known far and wide as the weakest of weak-kneed and snivelling cowards.  To complete his description, his teeth were large and yellow, while the two eye-teeth, larger than their fellows, showed under his lean lips like fangs.  His eyes were yellow and muddy, as though Nature had run short on pigments and squeezed together the dregs of all her tubes.  It was the same with his hair, sparse and irregular of growth, muddy-yellow and dirty-yellow, rising on his head and sprouting out of his face in unexpected tufts and bunches, in appearance like clumped and wind-blown grain.

In short, Beauty Smith was a monstrosity, and the blame of it lay elsewhere.  He was not responsible.  The clay of him had been so moulded in the making.  He did the cooking for the other men in the fort, the dish-washing and the drudgery.  They did not despise him.  Rather did they tolerate him in a broad human way, as one tolerates any creature evilly treated in the making.  Also, they feared him.  His cowardly rages made them dread a shot in the back or poison in their coffee.  But somebody had to do the cooking, and whatever else his shortcomings, Beauty Smith could cook.

This was the man that looked at White Fang, delighted in his ferocious prowess, and desired to possess him.  He made overtures to White Fang from the first.  White Fang began by ignoring him.  Later on, when the overtures became more insistent, White Fang bristled and bared his teeth and backed away.  He did not like the man.  The feel of him was bad.  He sensed the evil in him, and feared the extended hand and the attempts at soft-spoken speech.  Because of all this, he hated the man.

With the simpler creatures, good and bad are things simply understood.  The good stands for all things that bring easement and satisfaction and surcease from pain.  Therefore, the good is liked.  The bad stands for all things that are fraught with discomfort, menace, and hurt, and is hated accordingly.  White Fang’s feel of Beauty Smith was bad.  From the man’s distorted body and twisted mind, in occult ways, like mists rising from malarial marshes, came emanations of the unhealth within.  Not by reasoning, not by the five senses alone, but by other and remoter and uncharted senses, came the feeling to White Fang that the man was ominous with evil, pregnant with hurtfulness, and therefore a thing bad, and wisely to be hated.

White Fang was in Grey Beaver’s camp when Beauty Smith first visited it.  At the faint sound of his distant feet, before he came in sight, White Fang knew who was coming and began to bristle.  He had been lying down in an abandon of comfort, but he arose quickly, and, as the man arrived, slid away in true wolf-fashion to the edge of the camp.  He did not know what they said, but he could see the man and Grey Beaver talking together.  Once, the man pointed at him, and White Fang snarled back as though the hand were just descending upon him instead of being, as it was, fifty feet away.  The man laughed at this; and White Fang slunk away to the sheltering woods, his head turned to observe as he glided softly over the ground.

Grey Beaver refused to sell the dog.  He had grown rich with his trading and stood in need of nothing.  Besides, White Fang was a valuable animal, the strongest sled-dog he had ever owned, and the best leader.  Furthermore, there was no dog like him on the Mackenzie nor the Yukon.  He could fight.  He killed other dogs as easily as men killed mosquitoes.  (Beauty Smith’s eyes lighted up at this, and he licked his thin lips with an eager tongue).  No, White Fang was not for sale at any price.

But Beauty Smith knew the ways of Indians.  He visited Grey Beaver’s camp often, and hidden under his coat was always a black bottle or so.  One of the potencies of whisky is the breeding of thirst.  Grey Beaver got the thirst.  His fevered membranes and burnt stomach began to clamour for more and more of the scorching fluid; while his brain, thrust all awry by the unwonted stimulant, permitted him to go any length to obtain it.  The money he had received for his furs and mittens and moccasins began to go.  It went faster and faster, and the shorter his money-sack grew, the shorter grew his temper.

In the end his money and goods and temper were all gone.  Nothing remained to him but his thirst, a prodigious possession in itself that grew more prodigious with every sober breath he drew.  Then it was that Beauty Smith had talk with him again about the sale of White Fang; but this time the price offered was in bottles, not dollars, and Grey Beaver’s ears were more eager to hear.

“You ketch um dog you take um all right,” was his last word.

The bottles were delivered, but after two days.  “You ketch um dog,” were Beauty Smith’s words to Grey Beaver.

White Fang slunk into camp one evening and dropped down with a sigh of content.  The dreaded white god was not there.  For days his manifestations of desire to lay hands on him had been growing more insistent, and during that time White Fang had been compelled to avoid the camp.  He did not know what evil was threatened by those insistent hands.  He knew only that they did threaten evil of some sort, and that it was best for him to keep out of their reach.

But scarcely had he lain down when Grey Beaver staggered over to him and tied a leather thong around his neck.  He sat down beside White Fang, holding the end of the thong in his hand.  In the other hand he held a bottle, which, from time to time, was inverted above his head to the accompaniment of gurgling noises.

An hour of this passed, when the vibrations of feet in contact with the ground foreran the one who approached.  White Fang heard it first, and he was bristling with recognition while Grey Beaver still nodded stupidly.  White Fang tried to draw the thong softly out of his master’s hand; but the relaxed fingers closed tightly and Grey Beaver roused himself.

Beauty Smith strode into camp and stood over White Fang.  He snarled softly up at the thing of fear, watching keenly the deportment of the hands.  One hand extended outward and began to descend upon his head.  His soft snarl grew tense and harsh.  The hand continued slowly to descend, while he crouched beneath it, eyeing it malignantly, his snarl growing shorter and shorter as, with quickening breath, it approached its culmination.  Suddenly he snapped, striking with his fangs like a snake.  The hand was jerked back, and the teeth came together emptily with a sharp click.  Beauty Smith was frightened and angry.  Grey Beaver clouted White Fang alongside the head, so that he cowered down close to the earth in respectful obedience.

White Fang’s suspicious eyes followed every movement.  He saw Beauty Smith go away and return with a stout club.  Then the end of the thong was given over to him by Grey Beaver.  Beauty Smith started to walk away.  The thong grew taut.  White Fang resisted it.  Grey Beaver clouted him right and left to make him get up and follow.  He obeyed, but with a rush, hurling himself upon the stranger who was dragging him away.  Beauty Smith did not jump away.  He had been waiting for this.  He swung the club smartly, stopping the rush midway and smashing White Fang down upon the ground.  Grey Beaver laughed and nodded approval.  Beauty Smith tightened the thong again, and White Fang crawled limply and dizzily to his feet.

He did not rush a second time.  One smash from the club was sufficient to convince him that the white god knew how to handle it, and he was too wise to fight the inevitable.  So he followed morosely at Beauty Smith’s heels, his tail between his legs, yet snarling softly under his breath.  But Beauty Smith kept a wary eye on him, and the club was held always ready to strike.

At the fort Beauty Smith left him securely tied and went in to bed.  White Fang waited an hour.  Then he applied his teeth to the thong, and in the space of ten seconds was free.  He had wasted no time with his teeth.  There had been no useless gnawing.  The thong was cut across, diagonally, almost as clean as though done by a knife.  White Fang looked up at the fort, at the same time bristling and growling.  Then he turned and trotted back to Grey Beaver’s camp.  He owed no allegiance to this strange and terrible god.  He had given himself to Grey Beaver, and to Grey Beaver he considered he still belonged.

But what had occurred before was repeated—with a difference.  Grey Beaver again made him fast with a thong, and in the morning turned him over to Beauty Smith.  And here was where the difference came in.  Beauty Smith gave him a beating.  Tied securely, White Fang could only rage futilely and endure the punishment.  Club and whip were both used upon him, and he experienced the worst beating he had ever received in his life.  Even the big beating given him in his puppyhood by Grey Beaver was mild compared with this.

Beauty Smith enjoyed the task.  He delighted in it.  He gloated over his victim, and his eyes flamed dully, as he swung the whip or club and listened to White Fang’s cries of pain and to his helpless bellows and snarls.  For Beauty Smith was cruel in the way that cowards are cruel.  Cringing and snivelling himself before the blows or angry speech of a man, he revenged himself, in turn, upon creatures weaker than he.  All life likes power, and Beauty Smith was no exception.  Denied the expression of power amongst his own kind, he fell back upon the lesser creatures and there vindicated the life that was in him.  But Beauty Smith had not created himself, and no blame was to be attached to him.  He had come into the world with a twisted body and a brute intelligence.  This had constituted the clay of him, and it had not been kindly moulded by the world.

White Fang knew why he was being beaten.  When Grey Beaver tied the thong around his neck, and passed the end of the