Forty years, more or less, after Shan Tung lost his life and his cue at Copper Creek Camp, there was born on a firth of Coronation Gulf a dog who was named Wapi, which means “the Walrus.”  Wapi, at full growth, was a throwback of more than forty dog generations.  He was nearly as large as his forefather, Tao.  His fangs were an inch in length, his great jaws 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.

Stirring restlessly within him, sometimes coming to him in dreams and sometimes in a great and unfulfilled yearning, Wapi felt vaguely the strange call of his forefathers.  It was impossible for him to understand.  It was impossible for him to know what it meant.  And yet he did know that somewhere there was something for which he was seeking and which he never found.  The desire and the questing came to him most compellingly in the long winter filled with its eternal starlight, when the maddening yap, yap, yap of the little white foxes, the barking of the dogs, and the Eskimo chatter