Белый Клык / White Fang

Like most creatures of the Wild, he early experienced hunger. Hunger came unexpectedly. At first, the cubs cried, but for the most part they slept. It was not long before they were in a coma of hunger. The cubs slept, while the life that was in them was dying down.

One Eye was desperate. He ranged far and wide, and slept but little. The she-wolf, too, left her litter and went out in search of meat.

When the grey cub came back to life and again took interest in the far white wall, he found that only one sister remained to him.

Then there came a time when the grey cub no longer saw his father appearing and disappearing in the wall or lying down asleep in the entrance. The she-wolf knew why One Eye never came back, but there was no way by which she could tell what she had seen to the grey cub. Hunting herself for meat, she had followed a day-old trail of One Eye. And she had found him, or what remained of him. There were many signs of the battle, and of the lynx that came back to her lair after having won the victory.

After that, the she-wolf avoided hunting there. She knew that in the lynx’s lair there was a litter of kittens. It was quite a different matter for a lone wolf to fight a lynx—especially when the lynx had a litter of hungry kittens.

But the Wild is the Wild, and motherhood is motherhood, and the time was to come when the she-wolf, for her grey cub’s sake[21 - for smb’s sake – ради кого-либо], would dare to go there.

Chapter IV. THE WALL OF THE WORLD

By the time his mother began leaving the cave on hunting expeditions, the cub had learned well the law that forbade him to approach the entrance. Not only had this law been impressed on him by his mother’s nose and paw, but in him the instinct of fear was developing. Fear!—that legacy of the Wild which no animal may escape.

In fact, the cub merely classified the things that hurt and the things that did not hurt. And after such classification he avoided the things that hurt in order to enjoy the satisfactions and the remunerations of life.

When his mother was absent, he slept most of the time, while during the intervals that he was awake he kept very quiet. Once, lying awake, he heard a strange sound in the white wall. He did not know that it was a wolverine, standing outside.