The months came and went.There was plenty of food and no work in the Southland, and White Fang lived fat and prosperous and happy.Not alone was he in the geographical Southland, for he was in the Southland of life.
Human kindness was like a sun shining upon him, and he flourished like a flower planted in good soil.
And yet he remained somehow different from other dogs.He knew the law even better than did the dogs that had known no other life, and he observed the law more punctiliously; but still there was about him a suggestion of lurking ferocity, as though the Wild still lingered in him and the wolf in him merely slept.
He never chummed with other dogs.Lonely he had lived, so far as his kind was concerned, and lonely he would continue to live.In his puppyhood, under the persecution of Lip-lip and the puppy-pack, and in his fighting days with Beauty Smith, he had acquired a fixed aversion for dogs.The natural course of his life had been diverted, and, recoiling from his kind, he had clung to the human.
Besides, all Southland dogs looked upon him with suspicion.He aroused in them their instinctive fear of the Wild, and they greeted him always with snarl and growl and belligerent hatred.He, on the other hand, learned that it was not necessary to use his teeth upon them.His naked fangs and writhing lips were uniformly efficacious, rarely failing to send a bellowing on-rushing dog back on its haunches.
But there was one trial in White Fang's life -- Collie.She never gave him a moment's peace.She was not so amenable to the law as he.She defied all efforts of the master to make her become friends with White Fang.Ever in his ears was sounding her sharp and nervous snarl.She had never forgiven him the chicken-killing episode, and persistently held to the belief that his intentions were bad.She found him guilty before the act, and treated him accordingly.She became a pest to him, like a policeman following him around the stable and the grounds, and, if he even so much as glanced curiously at a pigeon or chicken, bursting into an outcry of indignation and wrath.
His favorite way of ignoring her was to lie down, with his head on his fore-paws, and pretend sleep.This always dumfounded and silenced her.
With the exception of Collie, all things went well with White Fang.
He had learned control and poise, and he knew the law.He achieved a staidness, and calmness, and philosophical tolerance.He no longer lived in a hostile environment.Danger and hurt and death did not lurk everywhere about him.
In time, the unknown, as a thing of terror and menace ever impending, faded away.Life was soft and easy.It flowed along smoothly, and neither fear nor foe lurked by the way.
He missed the snow without being aware of it."An unduly long summer"would have been his thought had he thought about it; as it was, he merely missed the snow in a vague, subconscious way.In the same fashion, especially in the heat of summer when he suffered from the sun, he experienced faint longings for the Northland.Their only effect upon him, however, was to make him uneasy and restless without his knowing what was the matter.
White Fang had never been very demonstrative.Beyond his snuggling and the throwing of a crooning note into his love-growl, he had no way of expressing his love.Yet it was given him to discover a third way.He had always been susceptible to the laughter of the gods.Laughter had affected him with madness, made him frantic with rage.But he did not have it in him to be angry with the love-master, and when that god elected to laugh at him in a good-natured, bantering way, he was nonplussed.He could feel the pricking and stinging of the old anger as it strove to rise up in him, but it strove against love.He could not be angry; yet he had to do something.At first he was dignified, and the master laughed the harder.Then he tried to be more dignified, and the master laughed harder than before.In the end, the master laughed him out of his dignity.His jaws slightly parted, his lips lifted a little, and a quizzical expression that was more love than humor came into his eyes.He had learned to laugh.
Likewise he learned to romp with the master, to be tumbled down and rolled over, and be the victim of innumerable rough tricks.In return he feigned anger, bristling and growling ferociously, and clipping his teeth together in snaps that had all the seeming of deadly intention.But he never forgot himself.Those snaps were always delivered on the empty air.
At the end of such a romp, when blow and cuff and snap and snarl were fast and furious, they would break off suddenly and stand several feet apart, glaring at each other.And then, just as suddenly, like the sun rising on a stormy sea, they would begin to laugh.This would always culminate with the master's arms going around White Fang's neck and shoulders while the latter crooned and growled his love-song.
But nobody else ever romped with White Fang.He did not permit it.He stood on his dignity, and when they attempted it, his warning snarl and bristling mane were anything but playful.That he allowed the master these liberties was no reason that he should be a common dog, loving here and loving there, everybody's property for a romp and good time.He loved with single heart and refused to cheapen himself or his love.
The master went out on horseback a great deal, and to accompany him was one of White Fang's chief duties in life.In the Northland he had evidenced his fealty by toiling in the harness; but there were no sleds in the Southland, nor did dogs pack burdens on their backs.So he rendered fealty in the new way, by running with the master's horse.The longest day never played White Fang out.His was the gait of the wolf, smooth, tireless, and effortless, and at the end of fifty miles he would come in jauntily ahead of the horse.
