In midsummer White Fang had an experience.Trotting along in his silent way to investigate a new tepee which had been erected on the edge of the village while he was away with the hunters after moose, he came full upon Kiche.He paused and looked at her.He remembered her vaguely, but he remembered her, and that was more than could be said for her.She lifted her lip at him in the old snarl of menace, and his memory became clear.His forgotten cubhood, all that was associated with that familiar snarl, rushed back to him.Before he had known the gods, she had been to him the centre-pin of the universe.The old familiar feelings of that time came back upon him, surged up within him.He bounded toward her joyously, and she met him with shrewd fangs that laid his cheek open to the bone.He did not understand.He backed away, bewildered and puzzled.
But it was not Kiche's fault.A wolf-mother was not made to remember her cubs of a year or so before.So she did not remember White Fang.He was a strange animal, an intruder; and her present litter of puppies gave her the right to resent such intrusion.
One of the puppies sprawled up to White Fang.They were half-brothers, only they did not know it.White Fang sniffed the puppy curiously, whereupon Kiche rushed upon him, gashing his face a second time.He backed farther away.All the old memories and associations died down again and passed into the grave from which they had been resurrected.He looked at Kiche licking her puppy and stopping now and then to snarl at him.She was without value to him.He had learned to get along without her.Her meaning was forgotten.There was no place for her in his scheme of things, as there was no place for him in hers.
He was still standing, stupid and bewildered, the memories forgotten, wondering what it was all about, when Kiche attacked him a third time, intent on driving him away altogether from the vicinity.And White Fang allowed himself to be driven away.This was a female of his kind, and it was a law of his kind that the males must not fight the females.He did not know anything about this law, for it was no generalization of the mind, not a something acquired by experience in the world.He knew it as a secret prompting, as an urge of instinct -- of the same instinct that made him howl at the moon and stars of nights and that made him fear death and the unknown.