Finn the wolfhound

by A. J. Dawson

Away in the scrub to the northward of the two men a dozen pair of eyes more hungry than their own were watching them; or, to be exact, eleven pairs were watching them. Finn lay stretched still at full length, beside a bush, at Warrigal's feet, while Warrigal peered eagerly through the scrub. Black-tip, followed by three strong young dogs and a bitch, loped off at once, without comment or communication with the rest of the pack, in the direction of the trail of the south-bound Jeff. Warrigal's eyes, as it happened, were fixed upon the shoulders of the other man, and it was his trail that she made for now, after rousing Finn with a touch of her muzzle. And so the wild-folk divided, even as the men-folk had done, five going south after Jeff, and five others, besides Finn and Warrigal, going east after the other man. But it was broad daylight, and none of them made any attempt to draw near the makers of the trails they followed. They merely followed, muzzles carried low, and nostrils and eager eyes questing as they went for any sign of life in the scrub--anything, from an ant to an emu, that by any possibility could represent food. Meanwhile the warm trail of the man ahead kept hope and excitement alive in them, though that man would have said that he was about as poor a source of hopefulness as any creature in Australia. To be sure, he had never thought of himself in the light of food. The dingoes had.

[CHAPTER XXXII]

IN THE LAST DITCH

It was in the midst of the pitiless heat which comes a couple of hours after midday, and is harder to bear than the blaze of high noon, that the man who was heading due east abandoned his swag. He had rested for the better part of an hour directly after noon, and had two mouthfuls from his water-bottle, one before and one after his rest. While he rested, the half-pack, headed by Finn and Warrigal, had rested also, and more completely, hidden away in the scrub, a quarter of a mile and more from the man whose trail they followed. Two of them, Warrigal and another, watched with a good deal of interest the burial of the swag beneath a drought-seared solitary iron-bark. No sooner was the man out of sight--he walked slowly and with a somewhat staggering gait now--than the pack unearthed his swag with quick, vicious strokes of their feet, and laid it bare to the full blaze of the afternoon sunlight. In a few moments they had its canvas cover torn to ribbons, and bitter was their disappointment when they came to turn over its jagged mineral contents between their muzzles, and discovered that even they could eat none of this rubbish.

It is fair to suppose that within a couple of hours of this time the man finally lost the brave remnant of hope with which he had set out that day. The pack did not reason about this, but they felt it as plainly as any human observer could have done, and the realization brought great satisfaction to each one of them. It was not that they bore the faintest sort of malice against the man, or cherished any cruel feeling for him whatever. He was food; they were starving; and his evident loss of mastery of himself brought food nearer to the pack.

The man's course was erratic now; he tacked like a vessel sailing in the wind's eye; and his trail was altered by the fact that his feet were dragged over the ground instead of being planted firmly upon it with each stride he took. The pack were not alone in their recognition of the man's sorry plight. He was followed now by no fewer than seven carrion-crows; big, black, evil-looking birds, who circled in the air behind and above him, swooping sometimes to within twenty or thirty feet of his head, and cawing at him in a half-threatening, half-pleading manner, while their bright, hard eyes watched his eyes avidly, and their shiny beaks opened and shut continually to admit of hoarse cries. The pack resented the presence of the crows, but were well aware that, when the time came, these harbingers of death could be put to flight in a moment.

When darkness fell, the man lighted no fire this evening. But neither did he lie down. He sat with his back against a tree-trunk and his legs outstretched; and now and again sounds came from his lips, which, while not threatening, were certainly not cries for mercy, and therefore in the pack's eyes not signals for an attack. The man-life was apparently strong in him yet; for he sometimes flung his arms about, and struck at the earth with the long, tough stick which he had carried all day. The pack, when they had unsuccessfully scoured every inch of the ground within a mile of the man for food, drew in closer for the night's watch than they had ventured on the previous night, when there had been two men and a fire. But Finn showed a kind of reserve in this. He lay behind a bush, and farther from the man than any of the rest of the pack. He wanted food; he needed it more bitterly perhaps than any of the others; but all his instincts went against regarding man himself as food, though man's neighbourhood suggested the presence of food, and, instinct aside, Finn hated the proximity of humans.

The man slept only in broken snatches during this night. While he slept, Warrigal and the others, except Finn, crept in a little closer; but when he turned, or waved one arm, or when sounds came from his lips, as they frequently did, then the dingoes would slink backward into the scrub, with lips updrawn, and silent snarls wrinkling their nostrils. Towards dawn Warrigal set up a long howl, and at that the man woke with a great start, to sleep no more. Presently, others of the pack followed Warrigal's lead, and, staggering to his feet, the man moved forward three steps and flung a piece of rotten wood in the direction from which the howls came. Warrigal and her mates retreated for the better part of a hundred yards, snarling aloud; not from fierceness, but in a kind of wistful disappointment at finding the man still capable of so much action, and by so much the farther from reaching them as food.

The man's shout of anger and defiance reached Finn's ears, and thrilled the Wolfhound to the marrow. The voice of man in anger; he had not heard it since the night of his being driven out from the boundary-rider's camp. The memories which it aroused in him were all, without exception, of man's tyranny and cruelty, and of his own suffering at man's hands. He growled low in his throat, but very fiercely. And yet, with it all, what thrilled him so was not mere anger, or bitterness, or resentment. It was more than all that. It was the warring within him of inherited respect for man's authority with acquired wildness; with his acquired freedom of the wild folk. The conflict of instinct and emotions in Finn was so ardent as almost to overcome consciousness of the great hunger which was his real master at this time; the furious hunger which had made him chew savagely at the tough fibre of a dry root held between his two fore-paws.