Finn the wolfhound

by A. J. Dawson

Finn was in no mood for disputes of any sort, and so, though exceedingly weary now, he made a wide detour to satisfy the nervousness of the flea-bitten grey stallion, and began a diagonal descent upon the south side of Tinnaburra. Just as the sun cleared the horizon over his right shoulder, Finn dropped wearily down from a clump of wattle upon a broad, flat ledge of many-coloured rock which caught the sun's first glinting rays upon its queer enamel of red and brown and yellow lichen. From this point Finn looked down a densely-wooded mountain side, and out across a tolerably well-timbered plain to hills which stood nearly forty miles away. It would have made an eyrie for a king eagle. Finn had already slaked his thirst hurriedly a mile back, in a chattering, rock-bedded mountain streamlet. And now he was weary beyond all further endurance. He had been sick, and sore, and stiff, and sadly out of condition when he started; and he had been travelling now for six hours. A feeling of security had stolen over him since he reached the topmost ridge of Tinnaburra. The very fragrance of the air told him, as he drew it in through his nostrils, that he was far from the works of men. Food he could not think of while every bone and muscle in his great body ached from weariness. By the edge of the rock was a sandy hollow, over which a feathery shrub drooped three or four of its graceful branches at a height of three feet from the ground. Finn eyed this inviting spot steadily for two or three minutes, while his aching sides continued to heave, and his long tongue to sway from one side of his jaws. Then he stepped cautiously into the sheltered nook, turned completely round in it three or four times, and finally sank to rest there in a compact coil, and with a little grunt of contentment and relief.

Finn opened his eyes, and half-opened them, many times during the day; once, to his utter amazement, when a huge wedge-tailed eagle swept gloriously past with a lamb in its talons no more than ten feet from his nose; but the day was practically done, and nightfall approaching, when the Wolfhound finally rose from his sandy bed and stretched his seven-foot length from nose to tail. The long stretch drew a sharp whine from him towards its end, when the stiffness and soreness of his limbs, and of some of his more recent burns and bruises, found him out. But even in the pain there was a sense of luxury and gladness for Finn. His sleep had not been devoid of sudden starts, of shudderings and twitches, born of fearful dreaming; but now that he was broad awake, and in the hushed grey twilight looked out across forty miles of wild open land, with never a sign of tent or house, or other work of man, his heart swelled within him with satisfaction and content, and he drew deep breaths of grateful pleasure and relief before setting out upon the descent of Tinnaburra, and, if it might be, the capture of a supper.

Before Finn had travelled half a mile along the hill-side, he made his first acquaintance with the snake people. In descending at a sharp angle from the side of a fallen tree, his fore-feet just scraped the end of the tail of a nine-foot carpet snake, whose colouring was vivid and fresh. Before Finn knew what had happened, one coil of the sinuous reptile's body was about his left hind-leg, and, as the startled Wolfhound wheeled in his tracks, the big snake's head rose at him with a forbidding, long-drawn "Ps-s-s-s-t!" of defiance. The rapidly tightening pressure about his muscular lower thigh produced something like panic in Finn's breast; but, luckily enough, his panic resulted in speeding him toward precisely the right course of action. He feinted in the direction of his hind-leg, and then, as the snake plunged for his neck, his jaws flashed back and caught the reptile just behind the head. A single bite was sufficient, for it smashed the snake's vertebrae and almost divided it. A moment later Finn's teeth were at the coil about his hind-leg, and in another instant he was free. But he was too greatly shocked to make a meal upon the remains of his enemy, which is what he should have done, and, after taking a good look at its long, brilliantly-coloured body, he was glad to make off down the hill, travelling now with a good deal more caution than he had shown before. It was a merciful thing for Finn that his first contact with the snake people should have brought him in touch only with the powerful and courageous carpet snake, and not with one of the many deadly venomous members of his tribe.

This experience rather shook Finn by reason of its utter strangeness to him. He recalled the spitting venom of the native cat, of whose kill he had caught a fleeting glimpse on the previous night. That again was rather strange and outside his experience. This great open wild world was certainly quite unlike the mild, half-domesticated and cared-for little patch of wild that Finn had claimed as his hunting-ground beside the Sussex Downs. Just then a laughing jackass started a hoarse chuckle above Finn's head, and a big white cockatoo, startled by the jackass, flew screaming out from the branches of a grey gum, with the agonized note in its cry which these birds seem to favour at all seasons, and quite irrespective of the nature of their occupations at the moment. The loose skin on Finn's shoulders moved uneasily, as he trotted along, using the most extreme care.

But, with all his care, he was in strange surroundings, and his bush-lore was all to learn; and because of his strangeness his most careful gait seemed a noisy and clumsy one to the little wild folk of that mountain side, and Finn saw none of them. By chance he saw one of the larger kind, however, and the sight of it added to his sense of strangeness, for it was unlike any other beast he had ever seen. This was a large female rock wallaby, a big grey doe, with her young one. The youngster was at the awkward age, free of the teat, yet unable to travel alone. It was nibbling and playing some distance from its big mother when she had her first warning of Finn's approach, in the crackling of dead twigs under his powerful feet. The youngster showed awkwardness in getting to its snug retreat in the mother's pouch, and so, by these delays, Finn was given his glimpse of a big marsupial in the act of taking a fifteen-foot leap through the scrub. Finn almost sat down on his haunches from astonishment. But, unlike the snake, the wallaby inspired him with no sort of fear, possibly by reason of its evident fear of him. It was, however, another item in the strangeness, the complete unfamiliarity of Finn's present surroundings.

It seems absurd to suggest that the great Wolfhound may have been suffering from loneliness, seeing that he had never been so thankful for anything else in his whole life as he was for his escape from the circus, with its small army of men-folk and animals. But it is a fact that as Finn plodded along through the wild bush to the south of Tinnaburra, he began to be haunted by a sense of isolation and friendlessness. It was now thirty hours since he had tasted food, and it seemed that game shunned his trail, for he saw none of the many small animals he had passed on the previous night; and the sight he had had that day of the great wedge-tailed eagle, of the carpet snake, and of the grey rock wallaby, these only added to the uncanny strangeness of his surroundings. In one sense, persecution, witting and unwitting, had made a wild beast of him during his confinement in the circus; but, by reason of the close confinement which had accompanied these persecutions, increasing self-dependence and self-reliance had not come with the access of fierceness and wildness. Finn inherited fighting instincts and savage ferocity under persecution from a long and noble line of hunting and fighting ancestors. But he inherited few instincts which bore practically upon the matter of picking up his own living, of walking alone, of depending exclusively upon himself, and of leading the solitary life of the really wild carnivora. But this would have troubled him very little if the scene of his present wanderings had been, say, some part of Sussex. As it was, the big snake, the huge eagle, the screaming cockatoo, the nerve-shaking cachophony of the jackass, and the half-flying progress of the big wallaby, all combined with the huge wildness of the country and its vegetation to oppress Finn with the sense of being a lone outcast, an outlier in a foreign land which was full of sinister possibilities. The recollection of that hissing nine-foot worm, of a thickness as great and greater than that of his own legs, lingered unpleasantly with Finn. Also, he was getting very hungry.

While these impressions were sinking into the Wolfhound's mind, the country through which he was travelling was becoming more open, more like a long-neglected park, in which many of the trees were dead, and all had a gaunt and scraggy look, with their thin, pointed grey-green leaves, their curiously tortured-looking limbs, and their long, rustling streamers of decaying bark. But, however Finn might feel in the matter of loneliness, it was with a pang of something like horror that he came presently upon a barbed wire fence, exactly like the one he had leaped on the previous night, directly after leaving the circus. Could it be possible that the circus had been moved during the day to this place, and the barbed wire fence brought with it? Finn prowled cautiously up and down that fence for a couple of hundred yards in each direction, peering beyond it, and sniffing and listening with the extreme of suspiciousness, before he finally leaped the wire and continued his way in a south-easterly direction.

Five minutes later he saw a rabbit, and though he lost it, by reason of the fact that it was sitting within a foot of its burrow and disappeared with lightning-like rapidity at sight of Finn, yet he was cheered by this homely sight, and pursued his way with renewed hope in the matter of supper. A moment later and he stopped dead in his tracks as though shot, and then crawled softly aside to take cover behind a thicket of scrub.

In topping an abrupt little ridge, he had come suddenly into full view of a bark gunyah or shanty, in the triangular opening of which, beside a bright fire, sat a man and a big black hound. A billy-can swung over the fire on a tripod of stakes, and the man was engaged with his supper. Finn did not know, of course, that the man was a boundary-rider, and his dog a not very well-bred kangaroo-hound. The wind was north-west, or the kangaroo-hound would surely have scented Finn's approach and given tongue.

For a long time Finn lay under the cover of his thicket, peering through the darkness at the boundary-rider and his dog. And while Finn gazed his thoughts were very busy, both with matters of his own knowledge and experience, and with vague instinctive knowledge, dream knowledge and dream experiences, which came to him from his forbears of old, even as a setter's or a pointer's hunting knowledge comes to him in the vanguard of experience. The thing that most impressed Finn in the picture he saw was the figure of the black hound, stretched at ease beside the fire, steadily eyeing its master. Every once in a while the man would break a chunk from his damper, or cut a morsel from his meat and toss it to the kangaroo-hound, who opened and closed its jaws like a steel trap, and gulped the gift with portentous solemnity, and absolutely without visible sign of any emotion whatever. The hound showed only watchfulness. Finn heard its jaws snap, and could almost hear the gulp which disposed of each morsel. The sight and the sound gave an edge to the Wolfhound's already keen appetite, and, almost unconsciously, he drew nearer and yet nearer to the gunyah, crouching low to the ground as he moved, his hind-quarters gathered under him ready for springing, like a huge cat.