But for all the shortness of food, which was thinning the flesh over Finn's haunches now, it was another cause which led him to swerve from the north-westerly course in a south-westerly direction. He paid no particular heed to old Tufter's continuous growls about the direction taken by the pack under his leadership; but what he was forced to notice was the fact that for two whole days no water had been seen, and the lolling tongues of the young whelps were in consequence so swollen that they could not close their jaws. Throughout one weary night, the pack loped along in dogged silence in a south-westerly direction, their eyes blazing in the keen look out for game; dry, dust-encrusted foam caked upon their lips, and fierce anxiety in the heart of every one of them.
Then, in the brazen dawning of a day in which the sun seemed to thrust out great heat upon the baked earth even before it appeared above the horizon, the pack checked suddenly as Black-tip drew Finn's attention to a pair of Native Companions seen in the act of floating down to earth from the lower limbs of a shrivelled red-gum tree. The bigger of these two great cranes had a stature of something over five feet, and his fine blue-grey plumage covered an amount of flesh which would have made a meal for quite a number of dingoes. Yet it was not so much as food, but rather as a guide and indication, that Black-tip regarded the cranes. He knew that they would not be very far from water. The way in which the pack melted into cover in the dim, misty light of the coming day was very remarkable. For several miles now they had been travelling through a country less arid than the plains they had traversed during the previous two days, and now, while seeming to disappear into the earth itself--even as Echidna actually could and would, though the earth were baked hard--the members of the pack actually found cover by slinking low amongst a sort of wiry scrub growth with which the ground hereabouts was dotted.
It was thus that Finn saw for the first time the strange dance of the Native Companion. To and fro, and up and down beneath their scraggy gum-tree, the two great cranes footed it in a sort of grotesque minuet. There was a strange sort of angularity about all their movements, but, withal, a certain grace, bizarre and notable. And while the Native Companions solemnly paced through what was really a dance of death for them, Finn and Black-tip and Warrigal stalked them as imperceptibly as shadows lengthen across a lawn in evening time. The three hunters advanced through the scrub like snakes moving in their sleep, and never a leaf or twig made comment on their passage, as they slithered down the morning breeze, inch by inch, apparently a part of the shadowy earth itself. The prancing dance of the Native Companions--these birds mate for life and are deeply and devotedly attached one to another--was drawing to its close, when death came to them both like a bolt from the heavens; such a death as one would have chosen for them, since it left no time for fear or mourning, or grief at separation. Their necks were torn in sunder before they realized that they had been attacked, and within the minute their graceful feathered bodies shared the same fate, as the rest of the pack joined Finn and Warrigal and Black-tip. There was less of lordly generosity about Finn's feeding upon this occasion than he had always shown before. The great Wolfhound realized perhaps that his frame demanded more of nutriment than was necessary for the support of a dingo, and he ate with savage swiftness, growling angrily when any other muzzle than Warrigal's approached his own too nearly.
Less than half an hour later the pack was scrambling and sliding down the high banks of a river-bed, in the centre of which, surrounded upon both sides by a quarter of a mile and more of shingle and hard-baked mud, there was still a disconnected chain of small, yellow pools of water. The water was of something like the consistency of pea-soup, but no spring-fed mountain-rill ever tasted sweeter or more grateful to a thirsty traveller than this muddy fluid to the palates of the Mount Desolation pack. Finn chose a good-sized pool, and Warrigal tackled it with him; but when two youngsters of the pack ventured to approach the other side of that pool, Warrigal snarled at them so fiercely, backed by a low, gurgling growl from Finn, that the two slunk off, and tackled a lesser pool by themselves.
Scrambling and sliding down the high banks of a river-bed.
Where the pack drank they rested. As yet their great thirst was close to them, and the neighbourhood of water seemed too good to leave. But, in such matters, the memory of the wild folk is apt to be short. The banks of the river-bed ran due east and west here; and, though the pack gave no thought to the question, it was a matter of some importance to each one of them whether they should eventually leave those banks to the northward or to the southward; a matter of importance by reason of the difference in the country to the northward and to the southward. But it was chance at last that decided the question for them. They drank many times during the day, and towards nightfall a small mob of kangaroos was sighted to the northward, and that led the pack to head northward, a little westerly, from the river-bank that night.
[CHAPTER XXXI]
THE TRAIL OF MAN