Brown Wolf and Other Jack London Stories | Page 3

telegram from Mendocino County. In
twenty hours he had made over a hundred miles to the north, and was
still going when captured.
He came back by Wells Fargo Express, was tied up three days, and was
loosed on the fourth and lost. This time he gained southern Oregon
before he was caught and returned. Always, as soon as he received his
liberty, he fled away, and always he fled north. He was possessed of an
obsession that drove him north. The homing instinct, Irvine called it,
after he had expended the selling price of a sonnet in getting the animal
back from northern Oregon.
Another time the brown wanderer succeeded in traversing half the
length of California, all of Oregon, and most of Washington, before he
was picked up and returned "Collect." A remarkable thing was the
speed with which he traveled. Fed up and rested, as soon as he was
loosed he devoted all his energy to getting over the ground. On the first
day's run he was known to cover as high as a hundred and fifty miles,
and after that he would average a hundred miles a day until caught. He
always arrived back lean and hungry and savage, and always departed
fresh and vigorous, cleaving his way northward in response to some
prompting of his being that no one could understand.
But at last, after a futile year of flight, he accepted the inevitable and
elected to remain at the cottage where first he had killed the rabbit and
slept by the spring. Even after that, a long time elapsed before the man
and woman succeeded in patting him. It was a great victory, for they
alone were allowed to put hands on him. He was fastidiously exclusive,
and no guest at the cottage ever succeeded in making up to him. A low
growl greeted such approach; if any one had the hardihood to come
nearer, the lips lifted, the naked fangs appeared, and the growl became
a snarl--a snarl so terrible and malignant that it awed the stoutest of
them, as it likewise awed the farmers' dogs that knew ordinary dog
snarling, but had never seen wolf snarling before.

He was without antecedents. His history began with Walt and Madge.
He had come up from the south, but never a clew did they get of the
owner from whom he had evidently fled. Mrs. Johnson, their nearest
neighbor and the one who supplied them with milk, proclaimed him a
Klondike dog. Her brother was burrowing for frozen pay-streaks in that
far country, and so she constituted herself an authority on the subject.
But they did not dispute her. There were the tips of Wolf's ears,
obviously so severely frozen at some time that they would never quite
heal again. Besides, he looked like the photographs of the Alaskan dogs
they saw published in magazines and newspapers. They often
speculated over his past, and tried to conjure up (from what they had
read and heard) what his northland life had been. That the northland
still drew him, they knew; for at night they sometimes heard him crying
softly; and when the north wind blew and the bite of frost was in the air,
a great restlessness would come upon him and he would lift a mournful
lament which they knew to be the long wolf-howl. Yet he never barked.
No provocation was great enough to draw from him that canine cry.
Long discussion they had, during the time of winning him, as to whose
dog he was. Each claimed him, and each proclaimed loudly any
expression of affection made by him. But the man had the better of it at
first, chiefly because he was a man. It was patent that Wolf had had no
experience with women. He did not understand women. Madge's skirts
were something he never quite accepted. The swish of them was
enough to set him a-bristle with suspicion, and on a windy day she
could not approach him at all.
On the other hand, it was Madge who fed him; also it was she who
ruled the kitchen, and it was by her favor, and her favor alone, that he
was permitted to come within that sacred precinct. It was because of
these things that she bade fair to overcome the handicap of her
garments. Then it was that Walt put forth special effort, making it a
practice to have Wolf lie at his feet while he wrote, and, between
petting and talking, losing much time from his work. Walt won in the
end, and his victory was most probably due to the fact that he was a
man, though Madge averred that they would have had another quarter
of a mile of gurgling brook, and at least two west winds