atter was not to be censured for his misjudgment. All his life he
had tended and operated on the soft humans of civilisation, who lived
sheltered lives and had descended out of many sheltered generations.
Compared with White Fang, they were frail and flabby, and clutched life
without any strength in their grip. White Fang had come straight from
the Wild, where the weak perish early and shelter is vouchsafed to none.
In neither his father nor his mother was there any weakness, nor in the
generations before them. A constitution of iron and the vitality of the
Wild were White Fang's inheritance, and he clung to life, the whole of
him and every part of him, in spirit and in flesh, with the tenacity that
of old belonged to all creatures.

Bound down a prisoner, denied even movement by the plaster casts and
bandages, White Fang lingered out the weeks. He slept long hours and
dreamed much, and through his mind passed an unending pageant of
Northland visions. All the ghosts of the past arose and were with him.
Once again he lived in the lair with Kiche, crept trembling to the knees
of Grey Beaver to tender his allegiance, ran for his life before Lip-lip
and all the howling bedlam of the puppy-pack.

He ran again through the silence, hunting his living food through the
months of famine; and again he ran at the head of the team, the gut-whips
of Mit-sah and Grey Beaver snapping behind, their voices crying "Ra!
Raa!" when they came to a narrow passage and the team closed together
like a fan to go through. He lived again all his days with Beauty Smith
and the fights he had fought. At such times he whimpered and snarled in
his sleep, and they that looked on said that his dreams were bad.

But there was one particular nightmare from which he suffered--the
clanking, clanging monsters of electric cars that were to him colossal
screaming lynxes. He would lie in a screen of bushes, watching for a
squirrel to venture far enough out on the ground from its tree-refuge.
Then, when he sprang out upon it, it would transform itself into an
electric car, menacing and terrible, towering over him like a mountain,
screaming and clanging and spitting fire at him. It was the same when he
challenged the hawk down out of the sky. Down out of the blue it would
rush, as it dropped upon him changing itself into the ubiquitous electric
car. Or again, he would be in the pen of Beauty Smith. Outside the pen,
men would be gathering, and he knew t