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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 understand, and things he could love. And
then Wapi would whine, and perhaps the whine would bring him the
blow of a club, or the lash of a whip, or an Eskimo threat, or the
menace of an Eskimo dog's snarl. Of the latter Wapi was unafraid. With
a snap of his jaws, he could break the back of any other dog on
Franklin Bay.
Such was Wapi, the Walrus, when for two sacks of flour, some tobacco,
and a bale of cloth he became the property of Blake, the
uta-wawe-yinew, the trader in seals, whalebone--and women. On this
day Wapi's soul took its flight back through the space of forty years.
For Blake was white, which is to say that at one time or another he had

been white. His skin and his appearance did not betray how black he
had turned inside and Wapi's brute soul cried out to him, telling him
how he had waited and watched for this master he knew would come,
how he would fight for him, how he wanted to lie down and put his
great head on the white man's feet in token of his fealty. But Wapi's
bloodshot eyes and battle-scarred face failed to reveal what was in him,
and Blake--following the instructions of those who should know--ruled
him from the beginning with a club that was more brutal than the club
of the Eskimo.
For three months Wapi had been the property of Blake, and it was now
the dead of a long and sunless arctic night. Blake's cabin, built of ship
timber and veneered with blocks of ice, was built in the face of a deep
pit that sheltered it from wind and storm. To this cabin came the
Nanatalmutes from the east, and the Kogmollocks from the west,
bartering their furs and whalebone and seal-oil for the things Blake
gave in exchange, and adding women to their wares whenever Blake
announced a demand. The demand had been excellent this winter. Over
in Darnley Bay, thirty miles across the headland, was the whaler
Harpoon frozen up for the winter with a crew of thirty men, and
straight out from the face of his igloo cabin, less than a mile away, was
the Flying Moon with a crew of twenty more. It was Blake's business to
wait and watch like a hawk for such opportunities as there, and
tonight--his watch pointed to the hour of twelve, midnight--he was
sitting in the light of a sputtering seal-oil lamp adding up figures which
told him that his winter, only half gone, had already been an
enormously profitable one.
"If