Finn the wolfhound

by A. J. Dawson

The Professor felt that this was a last attempt, and he did not greatly care whether the great hound lived or died. The Giant Wolf had defeated him as a trainer; but the Giant Wolf should never forget the price paid for the defeat. It was a cruel onslaught. The iron bit deep, and--it had been better for the Professor's character development, better for his record as man, if he had left Finn alone when he decided to make no further attempt at taming. But men, too, have fierce, brutal passions, with less than the simplicity of brutes, and more, far more, of the knowledge which makes cruelty leave a permanent stain upon them. The Professor himself was aching and sore when he flung passionately out from Finn's cage and slammed the iron gate to; and as for Finn, I have no words in which to explain how his poor body ached and was sore. If the iron had been stone cold, Finn would still have been a terribly badly beaten hound, when he staggered to his corner, after this last visit from the mad beast-man in the leathern coat--so he thought of the Professor, in that tumult of sinking flames which we may call his mind. He lay in his corner, quivering and shuddering, and did not even find the heart to lick his wounds till long hours afterwards, when silence ruled in the field where the circus was encamped that night.

This field was on the outskirts of a considerable township; the twenty-second that Finn had visited with the Southern Cross Circus. The authorities had refused to allow the boss to come closer in, and so one side of his camping-place was walled by virgin bush; a dense tract of blue-gum and iron-bark stretching, almost as far as the eye could reach, to the foot-hills of a gaunt mountain range. For a mile or so from the circus camp the trees had all been ring-barked a couple of seasons or more before this time, with the result that they were now the very haggard skeletons of mighty trees, naked for the most part, their white bones open to all the winds of heaven, but here and there sporting a ghastly kind of drapery, remnants of their grave-clothes as it might be, in the shape of long hanging streamers of dead bark, which moaned and rustled eerily in the night breezes. High above the tattered grave-clothes of their lifeless trunks, the knotted, tortured-looking arms and fingers of the trees groped painfully after the life that had fled their neighbourhood.

Finn could just see the ghostly extremities of these spectral trees over the top of the main tent as he lay crouched in his corner, after devoting an hour to the licking of his sores. Presently, an almost full moon rose among the trees' fleshless limbs, and painted their nakedness in more than ever ghostly guise. It was then that Finn rose, painfully and slowly, to his feet, and moved, like an old, old man, across the floor of his cage to the bars, the bars that were of an inky blackness in that silvery light. For almost an hour this great hound, this tortured prince of a kingly race, stood sadly there, staring out at the moonlight between the bars of his prison; and for almost an hour, big clear drops kept forming in his black eyes and trickling along his scarred muzzle, till they pattered down upon the floor of the cage. If he had ever heard of such a thing as suicide, it may be that his soul would have known the final humiliation of self-destruction that night. But there is something that strikes a balance, as well in a Wolfhound's life as a man's life.

Near as Finn was to the limit of his endurance, his brave spirit lived within him yet, and he did not forego the nightly habit he had formed long since of trying the bars that made him a prisoner. It is possible that there never was a much more pathetically forlorn hope than that which animated this sorely racked prisoner when he felt his bars. But if the iron of them had entered into his soul, then it had made for endurance. The process was not made easier by the existence of Finn's latest wounds. Both his fore-legs and his muzzle had suffered severely under the iron that day; and it was with these that he now tested his bars, slowly, conscientiously, and with painful thoroughness, from the bar nearest Killer's cage to that at the end of the gate of his own, which closed on to the partition of the native bears' division. It was the bottom of the bars that Finn always tried, where they entered the floor of the cage. He took each between his teeth and pushed and pulled; sometimes pushing or pulling with his paws as well. And the result, on this night of bright moonlight and great pain, was as it had always been. The iron did not change.

Was lost in the shadow of the main tent.

Having reached the end of his task, Finn sat erect on his haunches for it may have been a quarter of an hour, gazing out at the risen moon, which sailed serenely now, high above the praying hands of the skeleton trees. Certainly, Finn's spirit was near to breaking-point. He rose, meaning to seek his corner again, as after so many other futile testings of his bars; but something moved him first to look out as far as he could, over the tent-top, to the great world beyond. Sore though his body was, he rose erect upon his hind-feet, placed his fore-feet against the upper half of the gate, and only narrowly escaped falling forward through the gate to the ground beneath. In his passion the Professor had slammed the barred gate to as usual and, in flinging himself angrily off from the place, had omitted to slip the two thick bolts which normally held it secure. The gate fitted closely, and was rusty, besides; so that Finn's jaws, tugging at its extreme foot, and upon this particular occasion less strongly no doubt than usual, had not shifted it. But his weight pressing against the upper half was quite another matter; and now the gate stood wide open before him.

For an instant, Finn's heart swelled within him, so sharply, and so greatly, that a little whine burst from him, and it seemed he was unable to move. So the sight of the open gate, giving upon the silent open night, affected the Wolfhound. In the next instant he dropped quietly to the earth, and was lost in the inky shadow of the main tent.