Читать книгу Белый Клык / White Fang - Джек Лондон, William Hootkins - Страница 10

The cub came upon it suddenly. It was his own fault. He had been careless. He had woken up, left the cave and run down to the stream to drink.

Before him, sitting silently on their haunches, were five live things. He had never seen such before. It was his first look at mankind. But at the sight of him the five men did not spring to their feet, nor show their teeth, nor snarl. They did not move.

Nor did the cub move. Every instinct of his nature told him to run away, but there was another instinct. He felt his own weakness. Here was mastery and power, something far and away beyond him.

The cub had never seen man, but he recognized in man the animal that had fought itself to primacy over the other animals of the Wild. With the eyes of all his ancestors was the cub now looking upon man. He felt the fear and the respect and the experience of the generations. Had he been full-grown, he would have run away. But now he lied down in a paralysis of fear.

One of the Indians walked over to him. The cub cowered closer to the ground. It was the unknown, in concrete flesh and blood, bending over him and reaching down to seize him. His hair bristled involuntarily; his lips wrinkled and his little fangs were bared. The man’s hand hesitated and he spoke laughing, “Wabam wabisca ip pit tah.” (“Look! The white fangs!”)

The other Indians laughed loudly, and asked the man on to pick up the cub. As the hand descended closer and closer, there was within the cub a battle of the instincts. He wanted to surrender and to fight. He did both. He surrendered till the hand almost touched him. Then he fought, and his teeth sank into the hand. The next moment he received a hit on the head. Then his puppyhood and the instinct of obedience mastered him. He sat up and cried. But the man whose hand he had bitten was angry. The cub received a hit on the other side of his head—and ‘ki-yi’d’ louder than ever.

The four Indians laughed more loudly, and even the man who had been bitten began to laugh. They surrounded the cub and laughed at him, while he cried with terror and his hurt. Then he heard something. The Indians heard it too. But the cub knew what it was. In his last, long cry there was more triumph than grief. He stopped crying and waited for the coming of his mother, of his ferocious and invincible mother who fought and killed all things and was never afraid. She had heard the cry of her cub and was running to save him.

The man-animals went back several steps. The she-wolf stood over against her cub, facing the men.

Then one of the men cried: “Kiche!”

It was an exclamation of surprise. The cub felt his mother wilting at the sound.

“Kiche!” the man cried again, this time with sharpness and authority.

And then the cub saw his mother, the she-wolf, the fearless one, crouching down till her belly touched the ground. The cub could not understand, but thought that his instinct had been true. His mother verified it. She, too, demonstrated obedience to the man-animals.

The man came over to her. He put his hand upon her head, and she only crouched closer. The other men came up, and surrounded her, and touched her, and she was glad. They were greatly excited, and made many noises with their mouths. These noises were not indication of danger, the cub decided.

“It is not strange,” an Indian was saying. “Her father was a wolf. It is true, her mother was a dog; but did not my brother tie her out in the woods all of three nights in the mating season[26]? The father of Kiche was a wolf.”

“It is a year, Grey Beaver, since she ran away,” spoke a second Indian.

“It is not strange, Salmon Tongue,” Grey Beaver answered. “It was the time of hunger, and there was no meat for the dogs.”

“She has lived with the wolves,” said a third Indian.

“So it seems, Three Eagles,” Grey Beaver answered, laying his hand on the cub; “and this is the sign of it. It is plain that his mother is Kiche. But his father was a wolf. In him there is little dog and much wolf. His fangs are white, and White Fang shall be his name. I have spoken. He is my dog. For was not Kiche my brother’s dog? And is not my brother dead?”

The cub, who had thus received a name in the world, lay and watched. Then Grey Beaver tied the she-wolf to the tree with a stick-bondage. White Fang followed and lied down beside her.

Salmon Tongue’s hand rolled him over on his back. Kiche looked on anxiously. The hand rubbed his stomach in a playful way. It was a position of such helplessness that White Fang’s whole nature protested against it. He could do nothing to defend himself. He was to know fear many times in his dealing with man; yet it was a sign of the fearless companionship with man.

After a time, White Fang heard strange noises. A few minutes later the remainder of the tribe came. There were more men and many women and children, forty of them. Also there were many dogs.

White Fang had never seen dogs before, but at sight of them he felt that they were his own kind, only somehow different. But they displayed little difference from the wolf when they discovered the cub and his mother. There was a rush. White Fang bristled and snarled in the face of the dogs, and went down and under them, feeling the sharp teeth in his body, himself biting and tearing at the legs and bellies above him. He could hear the snarl of Kiche as she fought for him; and he could hear the cries of the man-animals, the sound of clubs beating upon bodies, and the cries of pain from the dogs.

The men drove the dogs back and saved him from the savage teeth of his kind that somehow was not his kind. He thought the men had some unusual, astonishing, unnatural, god-like power (though, of course, he didn’t know anything about gods).

And White Fang licked his hurts and meditated upon his first taste of pack-cruelty and his introduction to the pack. He had never dreamed that his own kind consisted of more than One Eye, his mother, and himself. Here he had discovered many more creatures apparently of his own kind.

Of the bondage he had known nothing before, too. And he didn’t like it when the man-animals went on; for a tiny man-animal took the other end of a stick the she-wolf had been tied to, and led her behind him, and behind her followed White Fang, greatly worried by this new adventure.

They went down the valley of the stream, until they came to the end of the valley, where the stream ran into the Mackenzie River. Here a camp was made; and White Fang looked on with wondering eyes. The superiority of these man-an- imals increased with every moment. But greater than everything else seemed to the wolf-cub their power over things not alive. They made tepees, and canoes, and could dry fish.

At first tepees frightened him. He saw the women and children passing in and out of them without harm, and he saw the dogs trying often to get into them, and being driven away with sharp words and flying stones. After a time, he left Kiche’s side and crawled cautiously toward the wall of the nearest tepee. It was the curiosity of growth that made him move. At last his nose touched the canvas. He waited. Nothing happened. Then he smelled the strange fabric, saturated with the man-smell. He closed on the canvas with his teeth and gave a gentle tug. Nothing happened. He tugged harder. There was a greater movement. It was delightful. He tugged still harder, until the whole tepee was in motion. Then he heard a sharp woman’s cry from inside and ran back to Kiche. But after that he was afraid no more.

A moment later he was running away again from his mother. Her stick was tied to a stake in the ground and she could not follow him. A part-grown puppy, somewhat larger and older than he, came toward him slowly, with some importance. The puppy’s name, as White Fang afterward heard, was Lip-lip. He had lived his life in camp and had fought many puppy fights. Three times, four times, and half a dozen times, his sharp little teeth scored on the newcomer, until White Fang, crying shamelessly, fled to the protection of his mother. It was the first of the many fights he was to have with Lip-lip, for they were enemies from the start.

Kiche licked White Fang soothingly with her tongue, and tried to make him remain with her. But several minutes later he was looking for a new adventure. He came upon one of the man-animals, Grey Beaver, who was rubbing his hams and doing something with sticks and dry moss spread before him on the ground. White Fang came near to him and watched.

Women and children were carrying more sticks and branches to Grey Beaver. White Fang came in until he touched Grey Beaver’s knee, so curious was he. Suddenly he saw a strange thing like mist beginning to arise from the sticks and moss. Then there appeared a live moving thing, of the colour of the sun in the sky. White Fang knew nothing about fire. It drew him, as the light in the mouth of the cave had drawn him in his early puppyhood. Then his nose touched the flame, and at the same instant his little tongue went out to it.

For a moment he was paralysed. The unknown, lurking in the midst of the sticks and moss, was savagely holding him by the nose. He jumped backward, with an astonished explosion of ki-yi’s. At the sound, Kiche leaped snarling to the end of her stick, but could not come to his aid. But Grey Beaver laughed loudly, and then everybody was laughing. But White Fang sat on his haunches and ki-yi’d and ki-yi’d, a forgotten little figure among the man-animals.

It was the worst hurt he had ever known. Both nose and tongue had been hurt by the live thing, sun-coloured, that had grown up under Grey Beaver’s hands. He cried and cried, and every new squeal was met by bursts of laughter. He tried to soothe his nose with his tongue, but the tongue was burnt too, and the two hurts coming together produced greater hurt; so he cried more hopelessly and helplessly than ever.

And he felt shame that the man-animals were laughing at him. He turned and fled away, not from the hurt of the fire, but from the laughter that sank even deeper, and hurt in the spirit of him. And he fled to Kiche, the one creature in the world who was not laughing at him.

Night came on, and White Fang lay by his mother’s side. His nose and tongue still hurt, but there was a greater trouble. He was homesick. He felt a need for the stream and their cave. Life had become too populous. There were so many of the man-animals, men, women, and children. And there were the dogs. The calm loneliness of the only life he had known was gone.

He watched the man-animals coming and going and moving about the camp.

They were fire-makers! They were gods.