Part 4 (1/2)

While he yelped and ki-yi'd and scra one and disappear with it into the neighbouring thicket The cut of her teeth in his neck still hurt, but his feelings were hurt rievously, and he sat down and weakly whie He was yet to learn that for size and weight the weasel was the most ferocious, vindictive, and terrible of all the killers of the Wild But a portion of this knowledge was quickly to be his

He was still whi when the mother-weasel reappeared She did not rush hi one was safe She approached more cautiously, and the cub had full opportunity to observe her lean, snakelike body, and her head, erect, eager, and snake-like itself Her sharp,his back, and he snarled warningly at her She came closer and closer There was a leap, swifter than his unpractised sight, and the lean, yellow body disappeared for a moment out of the field of his vision The next moment she was at his throat, her teeth buried in his hair and flesh

At first he snarled and tried to fight; but he was very young, and this was only his first day in the world, and his snarl becale to escape The weasel never relaxed her hold She hung on, striving to press doith her teeth to the great vein where his life-blood bubbled The weasel was a drinker of blood, and it was ever her preference to drink frorey cub would have died, and there would have been no story to write about hih the bushes The weasel let go the cub and flashed at the she-wolf's throat,a hold on the jaw instead The she-wolf flirted her head like the snap of a whip, breaking the weasel's hold and flinging it high in the air And, still in the air, the she-wolf's jaws closed on the lean, yellow body, and the weasel knew death between the crunching teeth

The cub experienced another access of affection on the part of his reater than his joy at being found She nozzled him and caressed him and licked the cuts made in him by the weasel's teeth Then, between them, mother and cub, they ate the blood-drinker, and after that went back to the cave and slept

CHAPTER V

--THE LAW OF MEAT

The cub's development was rapid He rested for two days, and then ventured forth froain It was on this adventure that he found the young weasel whoseweasel went the way of its rew tired, he found his way back to the cave and slept And every day thereafter found hiet accurate th and his weakness, and to knohen to be bold and when to be cautious He found it expedient to be cautious all the time, except for the rare moments, when, assured of his own intrepidity, he abandoned hies and lusts

He was always a little dean Never did he fail to respond savagely to the chatter of the squirrel he had first ht of a es; for he never forgot the peck on the nose he had received from the first of that ilk he encountered

But there were times when even a moose-bird failed to affect hier froot the hawk, and itsinto the nearest thicket He no longer sprawled and straddled, and already he was developing the gait of hisand furtive, apparently without exertion, yet sliding along with a swiftness that was as deceptive as it was imperceptible

In theThe seven ptaran chicks and the baby weasel represented the suthened with the days, and he cherished hungry ambitions for the squirrel that chattered so volubly and always infor But as birds flew in the air, squirrels could climb trees, and the cub could only try to crawl unobserved upon the squirrel when it was on the ground

The cub entertained a great respect for hishis It did not occur to him that this fearlessness was founded upon experience and knowledge Its effect on him was that of an irew older he felt this power in the sharper adave place to the slash of her fangs For this, likewise, he respected his rew the shorter grew her teain, and the cub with clearer consciousness knew once er The she-wolf ran herself thin in the quest forit vainly This fa one, but it was severe while it lasted The cub found no et one mouthful of meat for himself

Before, he had hunted in play, for the sheer joyousness of it; now he hunted in deadly earnestness, and found nothing Yet the failure of it accelerated his developreater carefulness, and strove with greater craft to steal upon it and surprise it He studied the wood- them out of their burrows; and he learned much about the ways of moose-birds and woodpeckers And there ca into the bushes He had grown stronger and wiser, and more confident Also, he was desperate So he sat on his haunches, conspicuously in an open space, and challenged the han out of the sky For he knew that there, floating in the blue above him, was meat, the meat his stomach yearned after so insistently But the hawk refused to coive battle, and the cub crawled away into a thicket and whier

The fae ht before It was a lynx kitten, partly grown, like the cub, but not so large And it was all for hih he did not know that it was the rest of the lynx litter that had gone to satisfy her Nor did he know the desperateness of her deed He knew only that the velvet- furred kitten was meat, and he ate and waxed happier with every mouthful

A full stomach conduces to inaction, and the cub lay in the cave, sleeping against hisNever had he heard her snarl so terribly Possibly in her whole life it was the ave There was reason for it, and none knew it better than she A lynx's lair is not despoiled with i in the entrance of the cave, the cub saw the lynx-ht Here was fear, and it did not require his instinct to tell hiht alone were not sufficient, the cry of rage the intruder gave, beginning with a snarl and rushi+ng abruptly upward into a hoarse screech, was convincing enough in itself

The cub felt the prod of the life that was in him, and stood up and snarled valiantly by his nominiously away and behind her Because of the low-roofed entrance the lynx could not leap in, and when sheupon her and pinned her down The cub saw little of the battle There was a tre The two ani with her claws and using her teeth as well, while the she-wolf used her teeth alone

Once, the cub sprang in and sank his teeth into the hind leg of the lynx He clung on, growling savagely Though he did not know it, by the weight of his body he clogged the action of the leg and thereby saved his e in the battle crushed him under both their bodies and wrenched loose his hold The next ether again, the lynx lashed out at the cub with a huge fore-paw that ripped his shoulder open to the bone and sent hiainst the wall Then was added to the uproar the cub's shrill yelp of pain and fright But the fight lasted so long that he had time to cry hie; and the end of the battle found hi between his teeth

The lynx was dead But the she-as very weak and sick At first she caressed the cub and licked his wounded shoulder; but the blood she had lost had taken with it her strength, and for all of a day and a night she lay by her dead foe's side, withoutFor a week she never left the cave, except for water, and then her movements were slow and painful At the end of that time the lynx was devoured, while the she-wolf's wounds had healed sufficiently to perain

The cub's shoulder was stiff and sore, and for some time he limped from the terrible slash he had received But the world now seereater confidence, with a feeling of prowess that had not been his in the days before the battle with the lynx He had looked upon life in a ht; he had buried his teeth in the flesh of a foe; and he had survived And because of all this, he carried himself more boldly, with a touch of defiance that was new in his, and h the unknown never ceased to press upon hi

He began to accompany hisof an to play his part in it And in his own dim way he learned the law of meat There were two kinds of life--his own kind and the other kind His own kind included his s that moved But the other kind was divided One portion hat his own kind killed and ate This portion was composed of the non-killers and the small killers The other portion killed and ate his own kind, or was killed and eaten by his own kind And out of this classification arose the law The aim of life was meat Life itself was meat Life lived on life There were the eaters and the eaten The laas: EAT OR BE EATEN He did not formulate the law in clear, set terms and moralise about it He did not even think the law; heabout it at all

He saw the law operating around hian chicks The hawk had eaten the ptaran-mother The haould also have eaten hirown more formidable, he wanted to eat the hawk He had eaten the lynx kitten The lynx-mother would have eaten him had she not herself been killed and eaten And so it went The laas being lived about his, and he himself was part and parcel of the law He was a killer His only food was meat, live meat, that ran aiftly before hiround, or faced hiht with him, or turned the tables and ran after hiht have epitomised life as a voracious appetite and the world as a place wherein ranged apursued, hunting and being hunted, eating and being eaten, all in blindness and confusion, with violence and disorder, a chaos of gluttony and slaughter, ruled over by chance, merciless, planless, endless

But the cub did not think in s ide vision He was single-purposed, and entertained but one thought or desire at a time Besides the law of meat, there were a myriad other and lesser laws for him to learn and obey The world was filled with surprise The stir of the life that was in hi happiness To run down es and battles were pleasures Terror itself, and the

And there were easements and satisfactions To have a full stos were remuneration in full for his ardours and toils, while his ardours and tolls were in themselves self-remunerative They were expressions of life, and life is always happy when it is expressing itself So the cub had no quarrel with his hostile environment He was very much alive, very happy, and very proud of himself

PART III

CHAPTER I

--THE MAKERS OF FIRE

The cub came upon it suddenly It was his own fault He had been careless He had left the cave and run down to the streaht have been that he took no notice because he was heavy with sleep (He had been out all night on the meat-trail, and had but just then awakened) And his carelessness ht have been due to the familiarity of the trail to the pool He had travelled it often, and nothing had ever happened on it

He went down past the blasted pine, crossed the open space, and trotted in ast the trees Then, at the sa silently on their haunches, were five live things, the like of which he had never seen before It was his first gliht of hi to their feet, nor show their teeth, nor snarl They did not move, but sat there, silent and ominous

Nor did the cub move Every instinct of his nature would have impelled him to dash wildly away, had there not suddenly and for the first tireat awe descended upon hi sense of his oeakness and littleness Here wasfar and away beyond him

The cub had never seennised in ht itself to primacy over the other animals of the Wild Not alone out of his own eyes, but out of the eyes of all his ancestors was the cub now looking upon man--out of eyes that had circled in the darkness around countless winter camp-fires, that had peered froe, two-legged anis The spell of the cub's heritage was upon hile and the accue was too corown, he would have run away As it was, he cowered down in a paralysis of fear, already half proffering the submission that his kind had proffered from the first time a wolf came in to sit by man's fire and be made warm

One of the Indians arose and walked over to hiround It was the unknown, objectified at last, in concrete flesh and blood, bending over hi down to seize hold of him His hair bristled involuntarily; his lips writhed back and his little fangs were bared The hand, poised like doo, ”Wabas!”) The other Indians laughed loudly, and urged the man on to pick up the cub As the hand descended closer and closer, there raged within the cub a battle of the instincts He experienced two great i action was a compromise He did both He yielded till the hand al in a snap that sank theside the head that knocked hiht fled out of hie of him He sat up on his haunches and ki-yi'd But the ry The cub received a clout on the other side of his head Whereupon he sat up and ki-yi'd louder than ever

The four Indians laughed an to laugh They surrounded the cub and laughed at him, while he wailed out his terror and his hurt In theThe Indians heard it too But the cub knehat it was, and with a last, long wail that had in it rief, he ceased his noise and waited for the co of his ht and killed all things and was never afraid She was snarling as she ran She had heard the cry of her cub and was dashi+ng to save hist the but a pretty sight But to the cub the spectacle of her protective rage was pleasing He uttered a glad little cry and bounded to meet her, while the man-animals went back hastily several steps The she-wolf stood over against her cub, facing thedeep in her throat Her face was distorted andfroious was her snarl

Then it was that a cry went up from one of the men ”Kiche!” hat he uttered It was an excla at the sound

”Kiche!” the ain, this time with sharpness and authority

And then the cub saw hisdown till her belly touched the ground, whins The cub could not understand He was appalled The awe of ain His instinct had been true His mother verified it She, too, rendered submission to the man- animals

The man who had spoken came over to her He put his hand upon her head, and she only crouched closer She did not snap, nor threaten to snap The other men came up, and surrounded her, and felt her, and pawed her, which actions she reatly excited, and made many noises with their er, the cub decided, as he crouched near hishis best to sub ”Her father was a wolf It is true, her ; but did not hts in theseason? Therefore was the father of Kiche a wolf”