He was too quick for the others.
They were slashed open and bleeding before they knew what had happened, were whipped almost before they had begun to fight.
As rigid as the sled-discipline of the gods, was the discipline maintained by White Fang amongst his fellows.
He never allowed them any latitude. He compelled them to an unremitting respect for him.
They might do as they pleased amongst themselves.
That was no concern of his.
But it was his concern that they leave him alone in his isolation, get out of his way when he elected to walk among them, and at all times acknowledge his mastery over them.
A hint of stiff-leggedness on their part, a lifted lip or a bristle of hair, and he would be upon them, merciless and cruel, swiftly convincing them of the error of their way.
He was a monstrous tyrant. His mastery was rigid as steel.
He oppressed the weak with a vengeance.
Not for nothing had he been exposed to the pitiless struggles for life in the day of his cubhood, when his mother and he, alone and unaided, held their own and survived in the ferocious environment of the Wild.
And not for nothing had he learned to walk softly when superior strength went by.
He oppressed the weak, but he respected the strong.
And in the course of the long journey with Grey Beaver he walked softly indeed amongst the full-grown dogs in the camps of the strange man-animals they encountered.
The months passed by. Still continued the journey of Grey Beaver.
White Fang’s strength was developed by the long hours on trail and the steady toil at the sled; and it would have seemed that his mental development was well-nigh complete.
He had come to know quite thoroughly the world in which he lived.
His outlook was bleak and materialistic.
The world as he saw it was a fierce and brutal world, a world without warmth, a world in which caresses and affection and the bright sweetnesses of the spirit did not exist.
He had no affection for Grey Beaver.
True, he was a god, but a most savage god.
White Fang was glad to acknowledge his lordship, but it was a lordship based upon superior intelligence and brute strength.
There was something in the fibre of White Fang’s being that made his lordship a thing to be desired, else he would not have come back from the Wild when he did to tender his allegiance.
There were deeps in his nature which had never been sounded.
A kind word, a caressing touch of the hand, on the part of Grey Beaver, might have sounded these deeps; but Grey Beaver did not caress, nor speak kind words.
It was not his way.
His primacy was savage, and savagely he ruled, administering justice with a club, punishing transgression with the pain of a blow, and rewarding merit, not by kindness, but by withholding a blow.
So White Fang knew nothing of the heaven a man’s hand might contain for him.
Besides, he did not like the hands of the man-animals. He was suspicious of them.
It was true that they sometimes gave meat, but more often they gave hurt.
Hands were things to keep away from. They hurled stones, wielded sticks and clubs and whips, administered slaps and clouts, and, when they touched him, were cunning to hurt with pinch and twist and wrench.
In strange villages he had encountered the hands of the children and learned that they were cruel to hurt.
Also, he had once nearly had an eye poked out by a toddling papoose.
From these experiences he became suspicious of all children.
He could not tolerate them.
When they came near with their ominous hands, he got up.
It was in a village at the Great Slave Lake, that, in the course of resenting the evil of the hands of the man-animals, he came to modify the law that he had learned from Grey Beaver: namely, that the unpardonable crime was to bite one of the gods.
In this village, after the custom of all dogs in all villages, White Fang went foraging, for food.
A boy was chopping frozen moose-meat with an axe, and the chips were flying in the snow.
White Fang, sliding by in quest of meat, stopped and began to eat the chips.
He observed the boy lay down the axe and take up a stout club.
White Fang sprang clear, just in time to escape the descending blow.
The boy pursued him, and he, a stranger in the village, fled between two tepees to find himself cornered against a high earth bank.
There was no escape for White Fang.
The only way out was between the two tepees, and this the boy guarded.
Holding his club prepared to strike, he drew in on his cornered quarry.
White Fang was furious.
He faced the boy, bristling and snarling, his sense of justice outraged.
He knew the law of forage. All the wastage of meat, such as the frozen chips, belonged to the dog that found it. He had done no wrong, broken no law, yet here was this boy preparing to give him a beating.
White Fang scarcely knew what happened.