Finn the wolfhound

by A. J. Dawson

It was an odd and very interesting and pleasant life that Finn led now, his time divided pretty evenly between bearing the wounded kangaroo-hound company and foraging on his own account in the bush within a radius of two or three miles of the gunyah. He found that countryside wonderfully full of different forms of wild life, and wonderfully interesting to a born hunter and carnivorous creature like himself. He did not know then that the country he traversed, all within four miles of the camp, was but the fringe of a vastly more interesting tract of bush; and in the meantime the range he did learn to know thoroughly proved sufficiently absorbing and various.

Five miles from Bill's gunyah, in a direct southerly line, stood the big, rambling station homestead, where Bill's bachelor employer had lived for many years. He did not live there now, because six months before this time he had died, and his station had reverted to distant relatives in other countries. This was the man who was to have met the Master and the Mistress of the Kennels on their arrival in Australia. His executors had seen no reason to dispense with Bill's services as yet; and, truth to tell, they had never seen the man, nor heard of his doings. It was only during the last few months that a manager had been placed in charge of the station, and during his time Wallaby Bill had stuck closely to his work.

Jacob Wilton Hall, the man who had made Warrimoo station, had all his life long been something of an eccentric; and yet, withal, a man who generally accomplished what he had set out to do, and one who had converted a modest competence into a handsome fortune. He had been an indiscriminate admirer of animals, and an interested student of the manners and customs of all the creatures of the wild. When the rabbit pest first began to be severely felt in the neighbourhood of his home-station, he had tried a variety of methods of coping with it, and in the execution of some of these methods he had met with a good deal of opposition and ridicule from his neighbours. He had, for instance, imported fifty ferrets and weasels of both sexes and turned them loose in pairs, in rabbit-earths situated in different outlying portions of his land. These fierce little creatures were a scourge to the countryside by reason of their attacks upon poultry; but it was freely stated that they adopted the curious attitude of nearly all the native-born animals in ignoring the rabbits they had been expected to prey upon.

Jacob Hall had then imported two pairs of wild cats, and turned these loose in the back-blocks of his land, besides encouraging a number of cats of the domesticated variety to take to the bush life and become wild, as they have been doing all over Australia for many years. With great difficulty and considerable expenditure of money, the eccentric squatter had succeeded in securing a pair of Tasmanian Wolves and a pair of Tasmanian Devils, and, having successfully evaded the customs and quarantine authorities, he turned these exceptionally fierce and bloodthirsty creatures loose in the wildest part of his land. Indeed, he took up an extra few thousand acres of quite unprofitable "Church and School land," hilly, rocky, and heavily timbered on the flats, largely, it was said, for the purpose of turning his Tasmanian importations into it. The Wolves and the Tasmanian Devils killed a number of his sheep; and it was stated among the neighbours that if Jacob Hall had lived he would eventually have imported Bengal tigers and African lions before trying the commonplace virtues of rabbit-proof fencing. It was supposed that the persistent efforts of hunters and boundary-riders had resulted in these wild creatures being driven well into the back country; and it is certain that, despite an occasional strange story from bushmen regarding the animals whose tracks they had come upon in the back-blocks, nothing was ever actually seen of Jacob Hall's more fantastic importations. It was said, however, that there were already notable modifications in certain of the wild kindred of that countryside. There was talk of wild cats of hitherto unheard-of size and fierceness, and of dingoes having suggestions about them of the untameably fierce marsupial wolf of Tasmania. But such talk did not amount to much in this district, for the rocky ranges of the Tinnaburra country, its densely wooded gullies, and wild scrub-dotted flats, was almost entirely in the hands of a few big squatters, who had long since pre-empted the back-blocks in the hinterland of their stations for very many miles up country.

Naturally, Finn and Jess knew nothing of these things. To the one the native denizens of such small portions of the bush of that neighbourhood as he had ranged were quite sufficiently numerous and interesting to keep his mind occupied; while Jess, for her part, was fully engaged in the task of regaining her hold upon mere life. They lived for themselves, these two; but Jess was deeply interested in the return of her man to the camp each night, and Finn was equally keen and interested in his daily foragings and explorations in the bush of that particular quarter. They neither of them knew that they themselves were objects of the greatest interest to a very large circle of the wild folk. But they were.

Within twenty-four hours of the fight with the old-man kangaroo in the blind gully, the news had gone abroad among all the wild folk in that strip of bush which surrounded the camp that a redoubtable hunter had been laid low, and was lying near to death and quite helpless beside the gunyah. Jess, having always been well fed by her man, had never been a great hunter of small game; but she had accounted for a goodly number of wallabies, and had played her part in the pulling down of a respectable number of kangaroos. And, though she had seldom troubled to run down the smaller fry, she was as greatly feared by them as though she lived only for their destruction; and innumerable small marsupials, from the tiny, delicate little kangaroo-mouse, up to the fleet and muscular wallaby-hare, with bandicoots, kangaroo-rats (bushy-tailed and desperately furtive), 'possums, native cats, and even a couple of amiable and sleepy-headed native bears, and a surly, solitary wombat, all took an opportunity of peering out from the nearest point of dense covert for the sake of having a glimpse of the helpless kangaroo-hound. To the wild folk, an animal that cannot rise and fend for itself is regarded as an animal practically dead, and but one remove from carrion; which, of course, Jess would have been, lacking the friendly attentions of her man, and, it may be, lacking the protection of the great Wolfhound.

Be that as it may, it is a fact that news reached the rocky hills behind Warrimoo of Jess's condition, and during the second night of her helplessness three dingoes left their hunting range to come and look into this matter for themselves. A dying hound might prove well worth investigating, they thought. The movements of these dingoes, once they reached within a couple of miles of Bill's gunyah, would have interested any student of the wild. The caution with which they advanced was extraordinary. Not a dry leaf nor a dead twig on the trail but they scanned it shrewdly with an eye for possible traps or pitfalls. They moved as noiselessly as shadows, and poured in and out among the scrub like liquid vegetation of some sort; a part of their environment, but volatile. When the three dingoes from the hills reached the edge of the clear patch in which the gunyah stood, they saw the almost black, smouldering remains of a camp-fire, and, stretched within a couple of yards of the ashes, Finn. His shaggy coat was not that of a kangaroo-hound, and his place beside the man-made fire seemed to forbid the possibility of his being a monster dingo. Vaguely, the dingoes told themselves that Finn must be some kind of giant among wolves who was connected in some mysterious way with men-folk. They had learned something during the past few years with regard to the possibilities of Nature in the matter of strange beasts; and they remembered that the new-comers in their country had arrived with a strange and persistent taint of man about them; were even brought there by man, some said.

In the meantime, it was quite evident to the dingoes' sensitive nostrils that man inhabited the gunyah at that moment; and that, therefore, quite apart from the presence of the huge strange beast near the fire, it would never do to investigate the shelter at the gunyah's side just then. The dingoes ate where they made their kills that night, within a couple of miles of the camp, thereby spreading terror wide and deep throughout that range; for the little folk feared these fiercely cunning killers far more than they had learned to fear big ghostly Finn, who roamed their country more in student fashion than as a serious hunter of meat, so far.

When the dawn came, the three dingoes were crouched in a favourable watching-place opposite the gunyah, and saw Finn rise, stretch his great length, and stroll off leisurely in the direction of the bush on the shanty's far side. They looked meaningly one at the other, with lips drawn back, as they noted Finn's massive bulk, great height, long jaws, and springy tread. They decided that the Wolfhound might, after all, be of the wild kindred, since he evidently had no mind to face the owner of the gunyah by daylight. Then, with hackles raised, and bodies shrinking backward among the leaves, they saw Bill come out, and yawn, and stretch his arms, and go to look at Jess, under her shelter. Now as it happened, Finn stumbled upon a fresh wallaby trail that morning, a trail not many minutes old; and he followed it with growing excitement for a number of miles. To his nose it was more or less the same scent as that of the old-man kangaroo; and there was hot desire in his heart to pit his strength against such an one, without the sport-spoiling assistance of Bill's knife. Finn's hunting of the wallaby took him a good deal farther from the humpy than he had been before, since his first arrival there; and so it fell out that Bill left upon his day's round without having seen the Wolfhound that morning.

"I guess he's after an extra special breakfast of his own," muttered Bill, before he left; "but I'll leave him this half a rabbit, in case." And he left the hinder part of a boiled rabbit on the big log beside the fire, and rode away. The patient dingoes watched the whole performance closely, licking their chops while Bill ate his breakfast, and again when he placed the cooked half-rabbit on the log. The whole proceeding was also watched by several crows. It was largely as a protection against these, rather than against the elements, that Bill had given Jess her substantial bark shelter, under which the crows would be afraid to pass. Otherwise, as Bill well knew, Jess would have been like to lose her eyes before she had lain there very long.