White Fang

C
HAPTER 
5.
 
T
HE 
L
AW 
O
F 
M
EAT
 
The cub’s development was rapid. He rested for two days, and then 
ventured forth from the 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 and ranging a wider area. 
He 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 
lusts. 
He was always a little demon of fury when he 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-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 without exertion, yet sliding along with a 
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 weasel represented the sum of his 
killings. His desire to kill strengthened with the days, and he cherished 
hungry ambitions for the squirrel that chattered 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. 
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The cub entertained a great respect for his mother. She could get meat, and 
she never failed to bring 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 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 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 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 
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. 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 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 gone to satisfy her. Nor did he know the 
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desperateness of her deed. 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 
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 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 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 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, 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 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 fore-paw that ripped his shoulder open to the bone and sent him 
hurtling sidewise against the wall. Then was added to the uproar the 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. 
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The lynx was dead. But the she-wolf was very weak 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 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 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 in 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. 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 he saw much of 
the killing of meat and began to play his part in it. And in 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 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. He did not formulate the law in clear, set terms and 
moralise about it. He did not even think the law; he 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, when he had grown more formidable, he 
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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 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 epitomised life as a 
voracious appetite and the world as a place wherein ranged a multitude of 
appetites, 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 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 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 satisfactions. To have a full stomach, to 
doze lazily in the sunshine—such things were remuneration in full for his 
ardours and toils, while his ardours and tolls 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. 
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