, power that was godlike. White Fang, in the very nature of him,
could never know anything about gods; at the best he could know only
things that were beyond knowing--but the wonder and awe that he had of
these man-animals in ways resembled what would be the wonder and awe of
man at sight of some celestial creature, on a mountain top, hurling
thunderbolts from either hand at an astonished world.

The last dog had been driven back. The hubbub died down. And White Fang
licked his hurts and meditated upon this, 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. They had
constituted a kind apart, and here, abruptly, he had discovered many more
creatures apparently of his own kind. And there was a subconscious
resentment that these, his kind, at first sight had pitched upon him and
tried to destroy him. In the same way he resented his mother being tied
with a stick, even though it was done by the superior man-animals. It
savoured of the trap, of bondage. Yet of the trap and of bondage he knew
nothing. Freedom to roam and run and lie down at will, had been his
heritage; and here it was being infringed upon. His mother's movements
were restricted to the length of a stick, and by the length of that same
stick was he restricted, for he had not yet got beyond the need of his
mother's side.

He did not like it. Nor did he like it when the man-animals arose and
went on with their march; for a tiny man-animal took the other end of the
stick and led Kiche captive behind him, and behind Kiche followed White
Fang, greatly perturbed and worried by this new adventure he had entered
upon.

They went down the valley of the stream, far beyond White Fang's widest
ranging, until they came to the end of the valley, where the stream ran
into the Mackenzie River. Here, where canoes were cached on poles high
in the air and where stood fish-racks for the drying of fish, camp was
made; and White Fang looked on with wondering eyes. The superiority of
these man-animals increased with every moment. There was their mastery
over all these sharp-fanged dogs. It breathed of power. But greater
than that, to the wolf-cub, was their mastery over things not alive;
their capacity to communicate motion to unmoving things; their capacity
to change the very face of the world.

It was this last that especially affected him. The elevat