I have known of this book as long as I can remember because my dad had a copy of it sitting amongst his Dennis Wheatleys and Alistair McLeans. When I was a wee girl I did ask him what it was about and he said it’s about a wolf – which indeed it is.

The story begins in Canada with a team of huskies pulling a sledge on which there is a coffin containing a young lord. There are two men with the dogteam and they are all being tracked by a pack of hungry wolves. The men have just a few bullets, so fire is used to keep the wolves at bay.

One of those wolves is going to turn out to be the father of White Fang, whose mother is half domestic dog and half wolf, and although White Fang was born in the wild, he ends up in an Indian ecampment, with Indians who had previously owned his mother. It’s a big change for White Fang who has a lot to learn about humans and dogs. He doesn’t fit in with the dogs and has a hard life there but things get worse for him when he is sold off to a man who puts him in a cage at a gold rush town and makes a fortune by making White Fang fight dogs, taking bets from gold prospectors.

Eventually things look up for White Fang, who is completely savage due to the ill treatment he has suffered at the hands of men but one man wins him over by kindness.

This was a very unusual read for me and I did wonder if my dad ever got to the end of the book as it was certainly different from what he usually read too, but he is long gone so I’ll never know. I did quite enjoy it and it was obviously written as a sort of moral tale, which you can’t argue with, but one of the reasons why I read White Fang was because Lord Redesdale the Mitford sisters’ father (in the guise of Uncle Matthew), famously read it and refused to read any other books on the grounds that no other book could possibly be as good a read as White Fang. He was a strange man indeed!

I read this on my Kindle and downloaded it from Project Gutenberg which you can do here if you so wish.