White Fang

C
HAPTER 
6.
 
T
HE 
L
OVE
-M
ASTER
 
As White Fang watched Weedon Scott approach, he bristled and snarled to 
advertise that he would not submit to punishment. Twenty-four hours had 
passed since he had slashed open the hand that was now bandaged and 
held up by a sling to keep the blood out of it. In the past White Fang had 
experienced delayed punishments, and he apprehended that such a one was 
about to befall him. How could it be otherwise? He had committed what 
was to him sacrilege, sunk his fangs into the holy flesh of a god, and of a 
white-skinned superior god at that. In the nature of things, and of 
intercourse with gods, something terrible awaited him. 
The god sat down several feet away. White Fang could see nothing 
dangerous in that. When the gods administered punishment they stood on 
their legs. Besides, this god had no club, no whip, no firearm. And 
furthermore, he himself was free. No chain nor stick bound him. He could 
escape into safety while the god was scrambling to his feet. In the 
meantime he would wait and see. 
The god remained quiet, made no movement; and White Fang’s snarl slowly 
dwindled to a growl that ebbed down in his throat and ceased. Then the 
god spoke, and at the first sound of his voice, the hair rose on White Fang’s 
neck and the growl rushed up in his throat. But the god made no hostile 
movement, and went on calmly talking. For a time White Fang growled in 
unison with him, a correspondence of rhythm being established between 
growl and voice. But the god talked on interminably. He talked to White 
Fang as White Fang had never been talked to before. He talked softly and 
soothingly, with a gentleness that somehow, somewhere, touched White 
Fang. In spite of himself and all the pricking warnings of his instinct, White 
Fang began to have confidence in this god. He had a feeling of security that 
was belied by all his experience with men. 
After a long time, the god got up and went into the cabin. White Fang 
scanned him apprehensively when he came out. He had neither whip nor 
club nor weapon. Nor was his uninjured hand behind his back hiding 
something. He sat down as before, in the same spot, several feet away. He 
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held out a small piece of meat. White Fang pricked his ears and investigated 
it suspiciously, managing to look at the same time both at the meat and the 
god, alert for any overt act, his body tense and ready to spring away at the 
first sign of hostility. 
Still the punishment delayed. The god merely held near to his nose a piece 
of meat. And about the meat there seemed nothing wrong. Still White Fang 
suspected; and though the meat was proffered to him with short inviting 
thrusts of the hand, he refused to touch it. The gods were all-wise, and 
there was no telling what masterful treachery lurked behind that apparently 
harmless piece of meat. In past experience, especially in dealing with 
squaws, meat and punishment had often been disastrously related. 
In the end, the god tossed the meat on the snow at White Fang’s feet. He 
smelled the meat carefully; but he did not look at it. While he smelled it he 
kept his eyes on the god. Nothing happened. He took the meat into his 
mouth and swallowed it. Still nothing happened. The god was actually 
offering him another piece of meat. Again he refused to take it from the 
hand, and again it was tossed to him. This was repeated a number of 
times. But there came a time when the god refused to toss it. He kept it in 
his hand and steadfastly proffered it. 
The meat was good meat, and White Fang was hungry. Bit by bit, infinitely 
cautious, he approached the hand. At last the time came that he decided to 
eat the meat from the hand. He never took his eyes from the god, thrusting 
his head forward with ears flattened back and hair involuntarily rising and 
cresting on his neck. Also a low growl rumbled in his throat as warning that 
he was not to be trifled with. He ate the meat, and nothing 
happened. Piece by piece, he ate all the meat, and nothing happened. Still 
the punishment delayed. 
He licked his chops and waited. The god went on talking. In his voice was 
kindness—something of which White Fang had no experience 
whatever. And within him it aroused feelings which he had likewise never 
experienced before. He was aware of a certain strange satisfaction, as 
though some need were being gratified, as though some void in his being 
were being filled. Then again came the prod of his instinct and the warning 
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of past experience. The gods were ever crafty, and they had unguessed 
ways of attaining their ends. 
Ah, he had thought so! There it came now, the god’s hand, cunning to hurt, 
thrusting out at him, descending upon his head. But the god went on 
talking. His voice was soft and soothing. In spite of the menacing hand, the 
voice inspired confidence. And in spite of the assuring voice, the hand 
inspired distrust. White Fang was torn by conflicting feelings, impulses. It 
seemed he would fly to pieces, so terrible was the control he was exerting, 
holding together by an unwonted indecision the counter-forces that 
struggled within him for mastery. 
He compromised. He snarled and bristled and flattened his ears. But he 
neither snapped nor sprang away. The hand descended. Nearer and nearer 
it came. It touched the ends of his upstanding hair. He shrank down under 
it. It followed down after him, pressing more closely against him. Shrinking, 
almost shivering, he still managed to hold himself together. It was a 
torment, this hand that touched him and violated his instinct. He could not 
forget in a day all the evil that had been wrought him at the hands of 
men. But it was the will of the god, and he strove to submit. 
The hand lifted and descended again in a patting, caressing movement. This 
continued, but every time the hand lifted, the hair lifted under it. And every 
time the hand descended, the ears flattened down and a cavernous growl 
surged in his throat. White Fang growled and growled with insistent 
warning. By this means he announced that he was prepared to retaliate for 
any hurt he might receive. There was no telling when the god’s ulterior 
motive might be disclosed. At any moment that soft, confidence-inspiring 
voice might break forth in a roar of wrath, that gentle and caressing hand 
transform itself into a vice-like grip to hold him helpless and administer 
punishment. 
But the god talked on softly, and ever the hand rose and fell with non-
hostile pats. White Fang experienced dual feelings. It was distasteful to his 
instinct. It restrained him, opposed the will of him toward personal 
liberty. And yet it was not physically painful. On the contrary, it was even 
pleasant, in a physical way. The patting movement slowly and carefully 
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changed to a rubbing of the ears about their bases, and the physical 
pleasure even increased a little. Yet he continued to fear, and he stood on 
guard, expectant of unguessed evil, alternately suffering and enjoying as 
one feeling or the other came uppermost and swayed him. 
“Well, I’ll be gosh-swoggled!” 
So spoke Matt, coming out of the cabin, his sleeves rolled up, a pan of dirty 
dish-water in his hands, arrested in the act of emptying the pan by the sight 
of Weedon Scott patting White Fang. 
At the instant his voice broke the silence, White Fang leaped back, snarling 
savagely at him. 
Matt regarded his employer with grieved disapproval. 
“If you don’t mind my expressin’ my feelin’s, Mr. Scott, I’ll make free to say 
you’re seventeen kinds of a damn fool an’ all of ’em different, an’ then 
some.” 
Weedon Scott smiled with a superior air, gained his feet, and walked over to 
White Fang. He talked soothingly to him, but not for long, then slowly put 
out his hand, rested it on White Fang’s head, and resumed the interrupted 
patting. White Fang endured it, keeping his eyes fixed suspiciously, not 
upon the man that patted him, but upon the man that stood in the doorway. 
“You may be a number one, tip-top minin’ expert, all right all right,” the dog-
musher delivered himself oracularly, “but you missed the chance of your life 
when you was a boy an’ didn’t run off an’ join a circus.” 
White Fang snarled at the sound of his voice, but this time did not leap away 
from under the hand that was caressing his head and the back of his neck 
with long, soothing strokes. 
It was the beginning of the end for White Fang—the ending of the old life 
and the reign of hate. A new and incomprehensibly fairer life was 
dawning. It required much thinking and endless patience on the part of 
Weedon Scott to accomplish this. And on the part of White Fang it required 
nothing less than a revolution. He had to ignore the urges and promptings 
of instinct and reason, defy experience, give the lie to life itself. 
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Life, as he had known it, not only had had no place in it for much that he 
now did; but all the currents had gone counter to those to which he now 
abandoned himself. In short, when all things were considered, he had to 
achieve an orientation far vaster than the one he had achieved at the time 
he came voluntarily in from the Wild and accepted Grey Beaver as his 
lord. At that time he was a mere puppy, soft from the making, without 
form, ready for the thumb of circumstance to begin its work upon him. But 
now it was different. The thumb of circumstance had done its work only too 
well. By it he had been formed and hardened into the Fighting Wolf, fierce 
and implacable, unloving and unlovable. To accomplish the change was like 
a reflux of being, and this when the plasticity of youth was no longer his; 
when the fibre of him had become tough and knotty; when the warp and 
the woof of him had made of him an adamantine texture, harsh and 
unyielding; when the face of his spirit had become iron and all his instincts 
and axioms had crystallised into set rules, cautions, dislikes, and desires. 
Yet again, in this new orientation, it was the thumb of circumstance that 
pressed and prodded him, softening that which had become hard and 
remoulding it into fairer form. Weedon Scott was in truth this thumb. He 
had gone to the roots of White Fang’s nature, and with kindness touched to 
life potencies that had languished and well-nigh perished. One such potency 
was