Born in the Yukon wild during the gold rush, White Fang is three-quarters wolf and one-quarter dog. Taken in by the Native American man Grey Beaver, he learns the harsh law of the camp: obey, endure, and give no quarter. When Grey Beaver trades him away to the brutal Beauty Smith, White Fang is starved and goaded into a career as a pit fighter in the mining settlements of the North, until a fight with a bulldog nearly ends him.
He is rescued by Weedon Scott, a mining engineer who sets out to undo the damage with patience rather than the club. Scott takes him south to his family's estate in the Santa Clara Valley in California, where White Fang must learn an entirely new set of rules — sheep he must not kill, children he must not fear, and a loyalty that is given rather than beaten into him.
Told largely from White Fang's own point of view, Jack London's 1906 novel traces his transformation from a half-wild cub shaped by the harshest laws of nature into a domesticated animal capable of trust and love — a mirror image, in reverse, of London's earlier The Call of the Wild.