o him with the club or the lash in their hands.
He was hated and feared, and yet because he could run down a
barren-land caribou and kill it within a mile, and would hold a big
white bear at bay until the hunters came, he was not sacrificed to this
hate and fear. A hundred whips and clubs and a hundred pairs of hands
were against him between Cape Perry and the crown of Franklin Bay--and
the fangs of twice as many dogs.

The dogs were responsible. Quick-tempered, clannish with the savage
brotherhood of the wolves, treacherous, jealous of leadership, and with
the older instincts of the dog dead within them, their merciless feud
with what they regarded as an interloper of another breed put the devil
heart in Wapi. In all the gray and desolate sweep of his world he had
no friend. The heritage of Tao, his forefather, had fallen upon him,
and he was an alien in a land of strangers. As the dogs and the men and
women and children hated him, so he hated them. He hated the sight and
smell of the round-faced, blear-eyed creatures who were his master, yet
he obeyed them, sullenly, watchfully, with his lips wrinkled warningly
over fangs which had twice torn out the life of white bears. Twenty
times he had killed other dogs. He had fought them singly, and in
pairs, and in packs. His giant body bore the scars of a hundred wounds.
He had been clubbed until a part of his body was deformed and he
traveled with a limp. He kept to himself even in the mating season. And
all this because Wapi, the Walrus, forty years removed from the Great
Dane of Vancouver, was a white man's dog.

Stirring restlessly within him, sometimes coming to him in dreams and
sometimes in a great and unfulfilled yearning, Wapi felt vaguely the
strange call of his forefathers. It was impossible for him to
understand. It was impossible for him to know what it meant. And yet he
did know that somewhere there was something for which he was seeking
and which he never found. The desire and the questing came to him most
compellingly in the long winter filled with its eternal starlight, when
the maddening yap, yap, yap of the little white foxes, the barking of
the dogs, and the Eskimo chatter oppressed him like the voices of
haunting ghosts. In these long months, filled with the horror of the
arctic night, the spirit of Tao whispered within him that somewhere
there was light and sun, that somewhere there was warmth and flowers,
and running streams, and voices he could unders