ses, made him nervous and
restless and worried him with a perpetual imminence of happening.

He watched the man-animals coming and going and moving about the camp. In
fashion distantly resembling the way men look upon the gods they create,
so looked White Fang upon the man-animals before him. They were superior
creatures, of a verity, gods. To his dim comprehension they were as much
wonder-workers as gods are to men. They were creatures of mastery,
possessing all manner of unknown and impossible potencies, overlords of
the alive and the not alive--making obey that which moved, imparting
movement to that which did not move, and making life, sun-coloured and
biting life, to grow out of dead moss and wood. They were fire-makers!
They were gods.

CHAPTER II--THE BONDAGE

The days were thronged with experience for White Fang. During the time
that Kiche was tied by the stick, he ran about over all the camp,
inquiring, investigating, learning. He quickly came to know much of the
ways of the man-animals, but familiarity did not breed contempt. The
more he came to know them, the more they vindicated their superiority,
the more they displayed their mysterious powers, the greater loomed their
god-likeness.

To man has been given the grief, often, of seeing his gods overthrown and
his altars crumbling; but to the wolf and the wild dog that have come in
to crouch at man's feet, this grief has never come. Unlike man, whose
gods are of the unseen and the overguessed, vapours and mists of fancy
eluding the garmenture of reality, wandering wraiths of desired goodness
and power, intangible out-croppings of self into the realm of
spirit--unlike man, the wolf and the wild dog that have come in to the
fire find their gods in the living flesh, solid to the touch, occupying
earth-space and requiring time for the accomplishment of their ends and
their existence. No effort of faith is necessary to believe in such a
god; no effort of will can possibly induce disbelief in such a god. There
is no getting away from it. There it stands, on its two hind-legs, club
in hand, immensely potential, passionate and wrathful and loving, god and
mystery and power all wrapped up and around by flesh that bleeds when it
is torn and that is good to eat like any flesh.

And so it was with White Fang. The man-animals were gods unmistakable
and unescapable. As his mother, Kiche, had rendered her allegiance to
them at the first cry of her nam