Finn the wolfhound

by A. J. Dawson

It was exactly a fortnight later when the pack turned despairingly in its tracks, animated by a forlorn desire to reach again the high ragged banks of that shingly river-bed, in which some trace of moisture might be left still, where the muddy pools had been.

But in that fortnight much had happened, and the character and constitution of the pack had undergone notable changes. The six whelps had disappeared, old Tufter and the oldest of the mothers of the pack were no more, and neither the carrion-crows nor the ants had profited one atom by these deaths. The pack had not wittingly hastened the end of these weaker ones, but it had left only their bones behind upon the trail. And, now, when one or other of the gaunt, dry-lipped survivors stumbled a dozen pairs of hungry eyes glittered, a dozen pairs of lips were wrinkled backward from as many sets of fangs, and consciousness of this had a sinister meaning for the stumbler; a meaning which brought a savage snarl to his throat as he regained his footing with quick, threatening looks from side to side and hackles bristling.

The pack was starving. Many times during the past week the thought of turning in his tracks and making back for the river-bed had come to Finn, but he had pressed on, fearful of the arid stretch of country which he had already placed between himself and that spot. He had no means of knowing that he was in a country of vast and waterless distances. But, acting without knowledge, Finn had turned in his tracks at length, after a fortnight's travelling in which food had been terribly scarce and water even more scarce. Such liquid as they had found would never have been called water by men-folk. Here and there had been a little liquid mud in old water-holes and stream-beds, and in other places the pack had sucked up moisture through hot sand, after burrowing with feet and nose to a depth of as much as eighteen inches from the surface. Their food had been almost entirely of the grub and insect kind, and Finn, for the first time in his life, had spent long hours in trying to ease the craving within him by gnawing at dry roots. The great Wolfhound had more stamina than any of the dingoes; he had greater resources within himself than they had, and was endowed, by Nature and upbringing, with a superb constitution. But, as against that, he needed far more food than was required by the others, and at a full meal would have eaten twice as much as the biggest of them. Also, he suffered, though his body was the stronger for it, for the fact that he had never before known want.

In appearance, the members of the pack had suffered a wondrous change in these two weeks. Even Warrigal's fine coat had lost every trace of the gloss which had made it beautiful, and the iron-grey hairs of Finn's dense, hard coat had taken on the character of dry bristles, while his haunch-bones were two outstanding peaks, from which his back fell away at an acute angle to the root of his tail, where once a level pad of flesh had been. Now the tail seemed to sprout from a kind of well in his body, and a bird might have nested in the hollow between his shoulder-blades, which once had been flat as the top of a table. His back, too, which had been broad and flat, was like the ridge of a gunyah now, from one end of which his neck rose gauntly, and appeared to be of prodigious length. His ribs were plain to see on either side his hollow barrel, and over them the loose skin rolled to and fro as he ran or walked. The eyes of every member of the pack were deeply sunken and ablaze with a dry light, half wistful and half fierce, and more awe-inspiring than any form of full-fed rage could be. They ran in open order now, and when one happened to run unusually close to another, that other would snarl or growl, and, sometimes, even snap, with bitter, furtive, half-fearful irritability.

To this rule there was one exception. Warrigal ran steadily in the shadow cast by Finn's big, gaunt frame, her muzzle about level with his elbow. Black-tip kept about the same level on Finn's other side, but a good deal farther off, and the others straggled in fan-shaped formation to the rear, scouting at times to one side or the other in quest of insects and snakes, or any other living thing that fangs could crush. As to digestion, the pack had no concern regarding any such detail as this. Their one test of edibility was swallowing. They even helped Finn to demolish a native porcupine, than which one would have said no creature of a less edible sort was ever created. Altogether, there was that about the survivors of the Mount Desolation pack which would have made any single creature sorry to cross their path, however powerful he might be. No animal with flesh on its bones and blood in its veins would have been too big or fierce for the pack to have attacked just now; for hunger and thirst had made them quite desperate.

It was Black-tip, and not Finn, who, on the afternoon of the second day of the pack's despairing return journey in quest of the river-bank they had left a fortnight before, called a sudden halt. (The dingo's sense of smell was always keener than the Wolfhound's.) Black-tip sniffed hard and long at the ground between his fore-feet, and then, raising his head, glared out into the afternoon sunlight to the south-eastward of the track they were following--their own trail. The whimper which escaped Black-tip when he began to sniff, brought the rest of the pack about him, full of hungry eagerness to know what thing it was that had been found. There was something uncanny and extraordinary about the way in which they glanced one at another, after, as it were, taking one sip of the scent which had brought Black-tip to a standstill. Had the scent been of kangaroo or wallaby, rabbit, rat, or any other thing that moves upon four legs, those curious glances would never have been exchanged. The pack would have been off hot-foot upon the trail, without pause for discussion. And there was the scent of a four-footed creature here, too; but it was merged in, and subordinate to, the scent over which most wild creatures cry a halt: the scent of man.

Now in ordinary circumstances the pack would not have hesitated a moment over such a trail as this. They would have turned in their tracks and made off in the opposite direction, or gone straight ahead on their own trail and without reference to the man-trail, save to get away from it as quickly as possible. But these were very far from being ordinary circumstances. The pack was nearer to starving than it had ever been before, and at such a time the rules which ordinarily guide life are of precisely no account at all. The man-trail was the trail of living flesh, of warm, animal life; it was the trail of food. Also, there was merged in it the trail of a dog; and as each member of the pack acquired that fact, his lips wrinkled backward and a little moisture found its way into his dry mouth.

The pack desired food and drink so urgently that everything else in the world became insignificant by comparison with food and drink in their minds. The hatred and fear of man, as man, was blotted out of sight by the craving for animal food in any shape whatsoever. Here was a living trail, in the midst of a dead, burnt-up land of starvation and emptiness. What Finn's thoughts on the subject may have been I cannot say. But, of course, he had connected men with food all his life long. And now he was starving. I do not think Finn's thoughts could have been quite the same as those of the rest of the pack; but they moved him in the same direction none the less, and, without the smallest hesitation, the pack streamed after him when he took up a new trail, and loped off to the south-east, turning away diagonally from the old track.

As the new trail became fresher and warmer, the leader was conscious of the warring within him of various conflicting feelings and desires. In appearance Finn was now a gigantic wolf, and one mastered by the fierce passion of hunger, at that. Apart from appearance, there actually was more of the wolf than the dog in him now. He belonged very completely to the wild kindred, and, over and above the wild folk's natural inborn fear and mistrust of men-folk, there was in Finn a resentment against man; a bitter memory of torture endured, and of the humiliation of having been driven out into the wild. But Finn's sense of smell was nothing like so acute as that of the dingoes. Even a setter or a pointer cannot compare with the wild folk in this respect, and Wolfhounds have nothing like the educated sense of smell of the setters, or the pointers, or the foxhounds. Their hunting from time immemorial has been done by sight, and strength, and fleetness, not by tracking. Finn was not so keenly conscious as his companions that he was on the trail of man. He knew it; but it was not in his nostrils the assertive fact that it was, for instance, in the nostrils of Warrigal and Black-tip. There was in the trail for him a warm animal scent which gave promise of food; of food near at hand, in that pitiless waste which the pack had been traversing for a fortnight and more. But every now and again, possibly in places at which the makers of the trail had paused, Finn would get a distinct whiff of the man scent, and that disturbed him a good deal. He wanted no dealings of any kind with man. But there was nothing else in him just then which was quite so strong or peremptory as the craving for food and drink; and so, with ears pricked, and hackles uneasily lifting, he padded along at the true wolf gait, which devours distance without much suggestion of fleetness.

When night fell the trail was very warm and fresh, and a quarter of an hour later a light breeze brought news to the pack of a fire not far ahead. This, again, brought pictures to Finn's mind of the encampment from which he had been driven with burning faggots. He smelled again the singeing of his own coat, and that gave him recollection of his time of torture and captivity in the circus. The pack advanced at a foot-pace now, and with the extreme of caution. A few minutes more brought them within full view of a camp-fire, beside which there were stretched, in attitudes eloquent of both dejection and fatigue, two men and a dog; the latter a large, gaunt fox-terrier. For the last ten miles of their trailing the pack had been passing through country which supported a certain amount of timber, and of the curious Australian scrub which seems to be capable of existence--a pale, bloodless sort of life, but yet existence--in the most arid kind of soil, and where no moisture can be discovered. The men had lighted their fire beneath a twisted, tortured-looking tree, in which there certainly was no life, for every vestige of its bark had gone from it, and its limbs were naked as the bones of any skeleton.