White Fang by Jack London - Part 2, Chapter 5 - The Law of Meat

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Part two, Chapter five of White Fang, presented by Dream
Audio Books. White Fang by Jack London, Part two, Chapter five,
The Law of Meat. The cub's development was rapid. He
rested for two days and then ventured forth from the

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cave again. It was on this adventure that he found
the young weasel, whose mother he had helped eat, and
he saw to it that the young weasel went the
way of its mother. But on this trip he did
not get lost. When he grew tired, he found his
way back to the cave and slept, and every day
thereafter found him out in ranging a wider area. He

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began to get accurate measurement of his strength and his weakness,
and to know when to be bold and when to
be cautious. He found it expedient to be cautious all
the time, except for the rare moments when assured of
his own intrepidity, he abandoned himself to petty rages and lust.
He was always a little demon of fury. When he

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chanced upon a stray ptarmigan. Never did he fail to
respond savagely to the chatter of the squirrel he had
first met on the blasted pine. While the sight of
a moose bird almost invariably put him into the wildest
of rages, for he never forgot the peck on the
nose he had received from the first of that ilk
he encountered. But there were times when even a moose

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bird failed to affect him, and those were times when
he felt himself to be in danger from some other
prowling meat hunter. He never forgot the hawk, and its
moving shadow always sent him crouching into the nearest thicket.
He no longer sprawled and straddled, and already he was
developing the gait of his mother, slinking and furtive, apparently

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without exertion, yet sliding along with the swiftness that was
as deceptive as it was imperceptible. In the matter of meat.
His luck had been all in the beginning. The seven
ptarmigan chicks and the baby whel Haesel represented the sum
of his killings. His desire to kill strengthened with the days,
and he cherished hungry ambitions for the squirrel that chattered

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so volubly and always informed all wild creatures that the
wolf cub was approaching. But as birds flew in the air,
squirrels could climb trees, and the cub could only try
to crawl unobserved, upon the squirrel when it was on
the ground. The cub entertained a great respect for his mother.
She could get meat, and she never failed to bring

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him his share. Further, she was unafraid of things. It
did not occur to him that this fearlessness was founded
upon experience and knowledge. Its effect on him was that
of an impression of power. His mother represented power, and
as he grew older, he felt this power in the
sharper admonishment of her paw, while the reproving nudge of

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her nose gave place to the slash of her fangs.
For this, likewise, he respected his mother. She compelled obedience
from him, and the older he grew, the shorter grew
her temper. Famine came again, and the cub, with clearer consciousness,
knew once more the bite of hunger. The she wolf

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ran herself thin in the quest for meat. She rarely
slept any more in the cave, spending most of her
time on the meat trail and spending it vainly. This
famine was not a long one, but it was severe.
While it lasted, the cub found no more milk in
his mother's breast, nor did he get one mouthful of
meat for himself. Before he had hunted in play for

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the sheer joyousness of it. Now he hunted in deadly
earnestness and found nothing. Yet the failure of it accelerated
his development. He studied the habits of the squirrel with
greater carefulness, and strove with greater craft to steal upon
it and surprise it. He studied the wood mice and
tried to dig them out of their burrows, and he

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learned much about the ways of moose, birds and woodpeckers.
And there came a day when the hawk's shadow did
not drive him crouching into the bushes. He had grown
stronger and wiser, and more confident. Also he was desperate,
so he sat on his haunches conspicuously in an open
space and challenged the hawk down out of the sky,

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for he knew that there floating in the blue above
him was meat, the meat his stomach yearned after so insistently.
But the hawk refused to come down and give battle,
and the cub crawled away into a thicket and whimpered
his disappointment and hunger. The famine broke the she wolf
brought home meat. It was strange meat, different from any

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she had ever brought before. It was a Lynx kitten,
partly grown like the cub, but not so large, and
it was all for him. His mother had satisfied her
hunger elsewhere, though he did not know that it was
the rest of the Lynx litter that had gon to
satisfy her, nor did he know the desperateness of her deed.

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He knew only that the velvet furred kitten was meat,
and he ate and waxed, happier with every mouthful. A
full stomach conduces to inaction. And the cub lay in
the cave, sleeping against his mother's side. He was aroused
by her snarling. Never had he heard her snarl so terribly,
possibly in her whole life. It was the most terrible

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snarl she ever gave. There was reason for it, and
none knew it better than she. A Lynx's lair is
not despoiled with impunity. In the full glare of the
afternoon light, crouching in the entrance of the cave, the
cub saw the Lynx mother. The hair rippled up along
his back at the sight. Here was fear, and it

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did not require his instinct to tell him of it,
and if sight alone were not sufficient, the cry of
rage the intruder gave, beginning with a snarl and rushing
of abruptly upward into a hoarse screech, was convincing enough in itself.
The cub felt the prod of the life that was
in him, and stood up and snarled valiantly by his

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mother's side, But she thrust him ignominiously away and behind her.
Because of the low roofed entrance, the lynx could not
leap in, and when she made a crawling rush of it,
the she wolf sprang upon her and pinned her down.
The cub saw little of the battle. There was a
tremendous snarling and spitting and screeching. The two animals threshed about,

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the lynx, ripping and tearing with her claws and using
her teeth as well, while the she wolf used her
teeth alone. Once the cub sprang in and sank his
teeth into the hind leg of the lynx. He clung on,
growling savagely, though he did not know it. By the
weight of his body, he clogged the action of the
leg and thereby saved his mother much damage. A change

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in the battle crushed him under both their bodies and
wrenched loose his hold. The next moment, the two mothers separated,
and before they rushed together again, the Lynx lashed out
at the cub with a huge forepaw that ripped his
shoulder open to the bone and sent him hurtling sidewise
against the wall. Then was added to the uproar the

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cub's shrill yelp of pain and fright. But the fight
lasted so long that he had time to cry himself
out and to experience a second burst of courage, and
the end of the battle found him again, clinging to
a hind leg and furiously growling between his teeth. The
Lynx was dead, but the she wolf was very weak

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and sick. At first, she caressed the cub and licked
his wounded shoulder, but the blood she had lost had
taken with it her strength, and for all of a
day and a night she lay by her dead foe's
side without movement, scarcely breathing. For a week, she never
left the cave except for water, and then her movements

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were slow and painful. At the end of that time,
the Lynx was devoured, while the she wolf's wounds had
healed sufficiently to permit her to take the meat trail again.
The cub's shoulder was stiff and sore, and for some
time he limped from the terrible slash he had received.
But the world now seemed changed. He went about in

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it with greater confidence, with a feeling of prowess that
had not been his in the days before the battle
with the lynx. He had looked upon life at a
more ferocious aspect. He had fought, he had buried his
teeth in the flesh of a foe, and he had survived.
And because of all this he carried himself more boldly,
with a touch of defiance that was new in him.

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He was no longer afraid of minor things, and much
of his timidity had vanished, though the unknown never ceased
to press upon him with its mysteries and terrors, intangible
and ever menacing. He began to accompany his mother on
the meat trail, and saw much of the killing of meat,
and began to play his part in it, And in

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his own dim way, he learned the law of meat.
There were two kinds of life, his own kind and
the other kind his own kind included his mother and himself.
The other kind included all live things that moved. But
the other kind was divided. One portion was what his
own kind killed and ate. This portion was composed of

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the non killers and the small killers. The other portion
killed and ate his own kind, or was killed and
eaten by his own kind. And out of this classification
arose the law. The aim of life was meat. Life
itself was meat. Life lived on life. There were the
eaters and the eaten. The law was eat or be eaten.

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He did not formulate the law in clear, set terms
and moralize about it. He did not even think the law.
Merely lived the law without thinking about it at all.
He saw the law operating around him on every side.
He had eaten the Ptarmigan chicks. The hawk had eaten
the Ptarmigan mother. The hawk would also have eaten him. Later,

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when he had grown more formidable, he wanted to eat
the hawk. He had eaten the Lynx kitten. The Lynx
mother would have eaten him, had she not herself been
killed and eaten. And so it went. The law was
being lived about him by all live things, and he
himself was part and parcel of the law. He was
a killer. His only food was meat, live meat that

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ran away swiftly before him, or flew into the air,
or climbed trees, or hid in the ground, or faced
him and fought with him, or turned the tables and
ran after him. Had the cub thought in man fashion,
he might have epitomized life as a voracious appetite. And
the world is a place wherein ranged a multitude of apples, tites,

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pursuing and being pursued, hunting and being hunted, eating and
being eaten, all in blindness and confusion, with violence and disorder,
a chaos of gluttony and slaughter, ruled over by chance, merciless, planless, endless.
But the cub did not think in man fashion. He

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did not look at things with wide vision. He was single, purposed,
and entertained. But one thought or desire at a time.
Besides the law of meat, there were a myriad other
and lesser laws for him to learn and obey. The
world was filled with surprise, the stir of the life
that was in him. The play of his muscles was

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an unending happiness. To run down meat was to experience
thrills and elations, his rages and battles were pleasures. Terror
itself and the mystery of the unknown led to his living,
and there were easements and factions to have a full stomach,
to doze lazily in the sunshine. Such things were remuneration

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in full for his ardors and toils. While his ardors
and toils were in themselves self remunerative. They were expressions
of life, and life is always happy when it is
expressing itself. So the cub had no quarrel with his
hostile environment. He was very much alive, very happy, and
very proud of himself. End of Chapter five