ould venture the left
fork, and the lair in the rocks, and the lynx's wrath.

CHAPTER IV--THE WALL OF THE WORLD

By the time his mother began leaving the cave on hunting expeditions, the
cub had learned well the law that forbade his approaching the entrance.
Not only had this law been forcibly and many times impressed on him by
his mother's nose and paw, but in him the instinct of fear was
developing. Never, in his brief cave-life, had he encountered anything
of which to be afraid. Yet fear was in him. It had come down to him
from a remote ancestry through a thousand thousand lives. It was a
heritage he had received directly from One Eye and the she-wolf; but to
them, in turn, it had been passed down through all the generations of
wolves that had gone before. Fear!--that legacy of the Wild which no
animal may escape nor exchange for pottage.

So the grey cub knew fear, though he knew not the stuff of which fear was
made. Possibly he accepted it as one of the restrictions of life. For
he had already learned that there were such restrictions. Hunger he had
known; and when he could not appease his hunger he had felt restriction.
The hard obstruction of the cave-wall, the sharp nudge of his mother's
nose, the smashing stroke of her paw, the hunger unappeased of several
famines, had borne in upon him that all was not freedom in the world,
that to life there was limitations and restraints. These limitations and
restraints were laws. To be obedient to them was to escape hurt and make
for happiness.

He did not reason the question out in this man fashion. He merely
classified the things that hurt and the things that did not hurt. And
after such classification he avoided the things that hurt, the
restrictions and restraints, in order to enjoy the satisfactions and the
remunerations of life.

Thus it was that in obedience to the law laid down by his mother, and in
obedience to the law of that unknown and nameless thing, fear, he kept
away from the mouth of the cave. It remained to him a white wall of
light. When his mother was absent, he slept most of the time, while
during the intervals that he was awake he kept very quiet, suppressing
the whimpering cries that tickled in his throat and strove for noise.

Once, lying awake, he heard a strange sound in the white wall. He did
not know that it was a wolverine, standing outside, all a-trembling with
its own daring, and cautiously scenting out the contents