could crack the thigh-bone of a caribou, and from the beginning the hands
of men and the fangs of beasts were against him. Almost from the day of
his birth until this winter of his fourth year, life for Wapi had been an
unceasing fight for existence. He was maya-tisew--bad with the badness of
a devil. His reputation had gone from master to master and from igloo to
igloo; women and children were afraid of him, and men always spoke to him
with the club or the lash in their hands. He was hated and feared, and
yet because he could run down a barren-land caribou and kill it within a
mile, and would hold a big white bear at bay until the hunters came, he
was not sacrificed to this hate and fear. A hundred whips and clubs and a
hundred pairs of hands were against him between Cape Perry and the crown
of Franklin Bay--and the fangs of twice 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.