 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.
    The months went by. White Fang grew stronger, heavier, and more compact,
while his character was developing along the lines laid down by his heredity and
his environment. His heredity was a life-stuff that may be likened to clay. It
possessed many possibilities, was capable of being moulded into many different
forms. Environment served to model the clay, to give it a particular form. Thus,
had White Fang never come in to the fires of man, the Wild would have moulded
him into a true wolf. But the gods had given him a different environment, and he
was moulded into a dog that was rather wolfish, but that was a dog and not a
wolf.
    And so, according to the clay of his nature and the pressure of his
surroundings, his character was being moulded into a certain particular shape.
There was no escaping it. He was becoming more morose, more uncompanionable,
more solitary, more ferocious; while the dogs were learning more and more that
it was better to be at peace with him than at war, and Gray Beaver was coming to
prize him more greatly with the passage of each day.
    White Fang, seeming to sum up strength in all his qualities, nevertheless
suffered from one besetting weakness. He could not stand being laughed at. The
laughter of men was a hateful thing. They might laugh among themselves about
anything they pleased
