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1906 white fang jack london - pinkmonke - Pink Monkey

1906 white fang jack london - pinkmonke - Pink Monkey

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94<br />

stalked grandly away. Nor, until well out of sight, did he stop to<br />

lick his bleeding wounds.<br />

The effect on White Fang was to give him a greater faith in himself,<br />

and a greater pride. He walked less softly among the grown dogs;<br />

his attitude toward them was less compromising. Not that he went<br />

out of his way looking for trouble.<br />

Far from it. But upon his way he demanded consideration. He<br />

stood upon his right to go his way unmolested and to give trail to<br />

no dog. He had to be taken into account, that was all. He was no<br />

longer to be disregarded and ignored, as was the lot of the puppies<br />

that were his teammates. They got out of the way, gave trail to the<br />

grown dogs, and gave up meat to them under compulsion. But<br />

White Fang, uncompanionable, solitary, morose, scarcely looking<br />

to right or left, redoubtable, forbidding of aspect, remote and alien,<br />

was accepted as an equal by his puzzled elders. They quickly<br />

learned to leave him alone, neither venturing hostile acts nor<br />

making overtures of friendliness. If they left him alone, he left<br />

them alone- a state of affairs that they found, after a few<br />

encounters, to be preeminently desirable.<br />

In midsummer White Fang had an experience. Trotting along in his<br />

silent way to investigate a new tepee which had been erected on<br />

the edge of the village while he was away with the hunters after<br />

moose, he came full upon Kiche. He paused and looked at her. He<br />

remembered her vaguely, but he remembered her, and that was<br />

more than could be said for her. She lifted her lip at him in the old<br />

snarl of menace, and his memory became clear. His forgotten<br />

cubhood, all that was associated with that familiar snarl, rushed<br />

back to him. Before he had known the gods, she had been to him<br />

the centre-pin of the universe. The old familiar feelings of that time<br />

came back upon him, surged up within him. He bounded toward<br />

her joyously, and she met him with shrewd <strong>fang</strong>s that laid his<br />

cheek open to the bone. He did not understand. He backed away,<br />

bewildered and puzzled.<br />

But it was not Kiche’s fault. A wolf-mother was not made to<br />

remember her cubs of a year or so before. So she did not remember<br />

White Fang. He was a strange animal, an intruder; and her present<br />

litter of puppies gave her the right to resent such intrusions.<br />

One of the puppies sprawled up to White Fang. They were halfbrothers,<br />

only they did not know it. White Fang sniffed the puppy<br />

curiously, whereupon Kiche rushed upon him, gashing his face a<br />

second time. He backed farther away. All the old memories and<br />

associations died down again and passed into the grave from<br />

which they had been resurrected. He had learned to get along

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