1906 white fang jack london - pinkmonke - Pink Monkey

135
But this love did not come in a day. It began with like and out of it
slowly developed. White Fang did not run away, though he was
allowed to remain loose, because he liked this new god. This was
certainly better than the life he had lived in the cage of Beauty
Smith, and it was necessary that he should have some god.
The lordship of man was a need of his nature. The seal of his
dependence on man had been set upon him in that early day when
he turned his back on the Wild and crawled to Gray Beaver’s feet
to receive the expected beating. This seal had been stamped upon
him again, and ineradicably, on his second return from the Wild,
when the long famine was over and there was fish once more in the
village of Gray Beaver.
And so, because he needed a god and because he preferred
Weedon Scott to Beauty Smith, White Fang remained. In
acknowledgment of fealty, he proceeded to take upon himself the
guardianship of his master’s property. He prowled about the cabin
while the sled-dogs slept, and the first night-visitor to the cabin
fought him off with a club until Weedon Scott came to the rescue.
But White Fang soon learned to differentiate between thieves and
honest men, to appraise the true value of step and carriage. The
man who traveled, loud-stepping, the direct line to the cabin door,
he let alone- though he watched him vigilantly until the door
opened and he received the indorsement of the master. But the
man who went softly, by circuitous ways, peering with caution,
seeking after secrecy- that was the man who received no
suspension of judgment from White Fang, and who went away
abruptly, hurriedly, and without dignity.
Weedon Scott had set himself the task of redeeming White Fang- or
rather, of redeeming mankind from the wrong it had done White
Fang. It was a matter of principle and conscience. He felt that the ill
done White Fang was a debt incurred by man and that it must be
paid. So he went out of his way to be especially kind to the
Fighting Wolf. Each day he made it a point to caress and pet White
Fang, and to do it at length.
At first suspicious and hostile, White Fang grew to like this petting.
But there was one thing that he never outgrew- his growling.
Growl he would, from the moment the petting began until it
ended. But it was a growl with a new note in it. A stranger could
not hear this note, and to such a stranger the growling of White
Fang was an exhibition of primordial savagery, nerve-racking and
blood-curdling. But White Fang’s throat had become harsh-fibred
from the making of ferocious sounds through the many years since
his first little rasp of anger in the lair of his cubhood, and he could
not soften the sounds of that throat now to express the gentleness