White Fang by Jack London - Part 3, Chapter 4 - The Trail of the Gods

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Part three, Chapter four of White Fang, presented by Dream
Audio Books. White Fang by Jack London, Part three, Chapter four,
The Trail of the Gods. In the fall of the year,
when the days were shortening and the bite of the
frost was coming into the air, White Fang got his

(00:23):
chance for liberty. For several days there had been a
great hubbub in the village. The summer camp was being dismantled,
and the tribe bag and baggage was preparing to go
off to the fall hunting. White Fang watched it all
with eager eyes, and when the teepees began to come
down and the canoes were loading at the bank, he
understood already the canoes were departing, and some had disappeared

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down the river quite deliberately. He determined to stay behind.
He waited his opportunity to slink out of camp to
the woods. Here in the running stream, where ice was
beginning to form, he hid his trail. Then he crawled
into the heart of a dense thicket and waited. The
time passed by, and he slept intermittently for hours. Then

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he was aroused by Gray Beaver's voice, calling him by name.
There were other voices. White Fang could hear gray Beaver's
squaw taking part in the search Amtsah, who was gray
Beaver's son. White Fang trembled with fear, and though the
impulse came to crawl out of his hiding place, he
resisted it. After a time, the voices died away, and

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some time after that he crept out to enjoy the
success of his undertaking. Darkness was coming on, and for
a while he played about among the trees, pleasuring in
his freedom. Then and quite suddenly, he became aware of loneliness.
He sat down to consider, listening to the silence of
the forest, and perturbed by it that nothing moved nor

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sounded seemed ominous, the lurking of danger unseen and unguessed.
He was suspicious of the looming bulks of the trees,
and of the dark shadows that might conceal all manner
of perilous things. Then it was cold. Here was no
warm side of a teepee against which to snuggle. The

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frost was in his feet, and he kept lifting first
one fore foot and then the other. He curved his
bushy tail around to cover them, and at the same
time he saw a vision. There was nothing strange about it.
Upon his inward sight was impressed a succession of memory pictures.
He saw the camp again, the teepees and the blaze

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of the fires. He heard the shrill voices of the women,
the gruff bases of the men, and the snarling of
the dogs. He was hungry, and he remembered pieces of
meat and fish that had been thrown him. Here was
no meat, nothing but a threatening and inetable silence. His
bondage had soft, irresponsibility had weakened him. He had forgotten

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how to shift for himself. The night yawned about him.
His senses, accustomed to the hum and bustle of the camp,
used to the continuous impact of sights and sounds, were
now left idle. There was nothing to do, nothing to
see or hear. They strained to catch some interruption of
the silence and immobility of nature. They were appalled by inaction,

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and by the feeling of something terrible impending. He gave
a great start of fright. A colossal and formless something
was rushing across the field of his vision. It was
a tree shadow flung by the moon, from whose face
the clouds had been brushed away. Reassured he whimpered softly.
Then he suppressed the whimper for fear that it might

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attract the attention of the lurking dangers. A tree contracting
in the cool of the night made a loud noise.
It was directly above him. He yelped in his fright.
A panic seized him, and he ran madly toward the village.
He knew an overpowering desire for the protection and companionship
of man. In his nostrils was the smell of the

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camp smoke in his ears. The camp sounds and cries
were ringing loud. He passed out of the forest and
into the moonlit open, where there were no shadows nor darknesses,
but no village greeted his eyes. He had forgotten the
village had gone away. His wild flight ceased abruptly. There

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was no place to which to flee. He slunk forlornly
through the deserted camp, smelling the rubbish heaps and the
discarded rags and tags of the gods. He would have
been glad for the rattle of stones about him, flung
by an angry squaw, glad for the hand of graveaver
descending upon him in wrath, While he would have welcomed

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with delight, Lip Lip, and the whole snarling, cowardly pack
came to where Gray Beaver's teep he had stood, in
the center of the space it had occupied. He sat down.
He pointed his nose at the moon. His throat was
afflicted by rigid spasms. His mouth opened, and in a
heart broken cry, bubbled up his loneliness and fear, His

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grief for quirt che all his past sorrows and miseries,
as well as his apprehension of sufferings and dangers to come.
It was the long wolf howl, full throated and mournful,
the first howl he had ever uttered. The coming of
daylight dispelled his fears, but increased his loneliness. The naked earth,

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which so shortly before had been so populous, thrust his
loneliness more forcibly upon him. It did not take him
long to make up his mind. He plunged into the
forest and followed the river bank down the stream. All
day he ran. He did not rest. He seemed made
to run on forever. His iron like body ignored fatigue,

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and even after fatigue came, his heritage of endurance braced
him to endless endeavor. And enabled him to drive his
complaining body onward. Where the river swung in against precipitous bluffs.
He climbed the high mountains. Behind rivers and streams that
entered the main river, he forded or swam. Often he

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took to the rim ice that was beginning to form,
and more than once he crashed through and struggled for
life in the icy current. Always he was on the
lookout for the trail of the Gods, where it might
leave the river and proceed inland. White Fang was intelligent
beyond the average of his kind, Yet his mental vision
was not wide enough to embrace the other bank of

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the Mackenzie. What if the trail of the Gods led
out on that side? It never entered his head. Later on,
when he had traveled more and grown older and wiser,
and come to know more of trails and rivers, it
might be that he could grasp and apprehend such a possibility.
But that mental power was yet in the future. Just now,

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he ran blindly his own bank of the Mackenzie, alone,
entering into his calculations. All night he ran, blundering in
the darkness into mishaps and obstacles that delayed but did
not daunt. By the middle of the second day, he
had been running continuously for thirty hours, and the iron
of his flesh was giving out. It was the endurance

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of his mind that kept him going. He had not
eaten in forty hours, and he was weak with hunger.
The repeated drenchings in the icy water had likewise had
their effect on him. His handsome coat was draggled, the
broad pads of his feet were bruised and bleeding. He
had begun to limp, and this limp increased with the

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hours to make it worse. The light of the sky
was obscured, and snow began to fall, a raw moist, melting,
clinging snow, slippery underfoot that hid from him the landscape
he traversed, and that covered over the inequalities of the ground,
so that the way of his feet was more difficult
and painful. Gray Beaver had intended camping that night on

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the far bank of the Mackenzie, for it was in
that direction that the hunting lay. But on the near
bank shortly before dark, a moose coming down to drink
had been espy by Klukouch, who was gray Beaver's squaw.
Now had not the moose come down to drink. Had
not Mitza been steering out of the course because of

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the snow, had not Kluekooch sighted the moose, and had
not Gray Beaver killed it with a lucky shot from
his rifle, all subsequent things would have happened differently. Gray
Beaver would not have camped on the near side of
the Mackenzie, and White Fang would have passed by and
gone on either to die or to find his way

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to his wild brothers and become one of them, a
wolf to the end of his days. Night had fallen,
the snow was flying more thickly, and White Fang, whimpering
softly to himself as he stumbled and limped along, came
upon a fresh trail in the snow. So fresh was
it that he knew it immediately for what it was.

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Whining with eagerness, he followed back from the river bank
and in among the trees the camp sounds came to
his ears. He saw the blaze of the fire, Kluecooch cooking,
and Gray Beaver squatting on his hands and munching a
chunk of raw tallow. There was fresh meeting camp. White
Fang expected a beating. He crouched and bristled a little

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at the thought of it. Then he went forward again.
He feared and disliked the beating he knew to be
waiting for him. But he knew further that the comfort
of the fire would be his, the protection of the gods,
the companionship of the dogs, the last a companionship of enmity,
but nonetheless a companionship and satisfying to his gregarious needs.

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He came, cringing and crawling into the firelight. Gray Beaver
saw him and stop munching the tallow White Fang crawled slowly,
cringing and groveling in the abjectness of his abasement and submission.
He crawled straight toward gray Beaver, every inch of his
progress becoming slower and more painful. At last he lay

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at the master's feet, into whose possession he now surrendered himself, voluntarily,
body and soul of his own choice. He came in
to sit by man's fire and to be ruled by him.
White Fang trembled, waiting for the punishment to fall upon him.
There was a movement of the hand above him. He
cringed involuntarily under the expected blow. It did not fall.

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He stole a glance upward. Gray Beaver was breaking the
lump of tallow in half. Gray Beaver was offering him
one piece of the tallow. Very gently and somewhat suspiciously.
He first smelled the tallow, and then proceeded to eat it.
Gray Beaver ordered meat to be brought to him, and
guarded him from the other dogs while he ate. After that,

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grateful and content, White Fang lay at gray Beaver's feet,
gazing at the fire that warmed him, blinking and dozing,
secure in the knowledge that the morrow would find him
not wandering forlorn through bleak forest stretches, but in the
camp of the man animals, with the gods to whom
he had given himself and upon whom he was now dependent.

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End of Chapter four