Finn the wolfhound

by A. J. Dawson

And in that same instant, too, recognition came to the Master, and he knew his huge assailant to be no creature of the wild, no giant wolf or dingo, but the beloved Wolfhound of his own breeding and most careful, loving rearing. It was from some central recess of his own personality that the Master's cry of "Finn, boy!" answered the strange cry with which the Wolfhound came to earth at his feet.

But behind them was the pack, and in the pack's eyes what had happened was that their leader had missed his kill; that fear had broken his spring off short, and that now he was at the mercy of the man who, a moment before, had been mere food. For a dingo, no other task, not even the gnawing off of a limb caught in a trap, could require quite so much sheer courage as the attacking of Man in the open--man erect and unafraid. But Warrigal had never in her life lacked courage, and now, behind her courage and her devotion to her mate, there was hunger, red-toothed and slavering in her ears; hunger burning like a live coal in her heart; hunger stretching her jaws for killing, with an eagerness and a ferocity which could not be denied. In the next instant Warrigal had flown at the man's right shoulder with a fierce snarl which called those of her kind who were not cowards to follow her or be for ever accursed.

Warrigal's white fangs slashed down the man's coat-sleeve, and left lines of skin and blood where the cloth gave. For one moment Finn hesitated. Warrigal was his good mate, the mother of his dead children, his loving companion by day and night, during long months past. She concentrated in her own person all the best of his kinship with the wild. There was mateship and comradeship between them. As against all this, Warrigal's fangs had fastened upon the sacred flesh of the Master, of the Man of all the world, who stood for everything that was best in Finn's two-thousand-years-old inheritance of intercourse with and devotion to human friends.

Next instant, and even as the biggest male dingo of the pack flew at the man's other side, Finn pinned his mate to earth, and, with one tremendous crunch of his huge jaws, severed her jugular vein, and set her life's blood running over the parched earth.

In that moment, the pack awoke to realization of the strange thing that had befallen them. They had been seven, pitted against a single man, and he apparently in the act of ceasing to be erect man, and becoming mere food. Now they were five--for Warrigal's life ebbed quickly from her--pitted against a man wakened to erectness and hostility, and their own great leader; the great Wolf, who had slain Lupus, their old fierce master, and even Tasman, his terrible sire. It is certain that at another time the pack would not have hesitated for one moment about turning tail and fleeing that place of strange, unnatural happenings. But this was no ordinary time. They were mad with hunger. Blood was flowing out upon the earth before them. One of them had the taste of man's blood on his foaming lips. This was not a tracking, or a killing in prospect, but a fight in progress. The pack would never turn tail alive from that fight.

The man had his back to the withered iron-bark now, and, besides the long stick in his right hand, he held an open knife in his left hand, as a long, fierce bitch found to her cost when she leaped for his throat, fell short, and felt cold steel bite deep in her flank as she sank to earth. And now the great Wolfhound warmed to his work, with a fire of zeal which mere hunger itself could not have lit within him. He was fighting now as never before since his fangs met in his first kill in far-away Sussex. He was fighting for the life of the Master, love of whom, long quiescent in him, welled up in him now; a warm tide of new blood which gave strength to his gaunt limbs and weight to his emaciated frame, such as they had never known when he fought, full fed, with Lupus, or with Tasman, on the rocky side of Mount Desolation. A tiger could hardly have evaded him. His onslaught was at once terrible, and swift as forked lightning. It seemed he slashed and tore in five separate directions at one and the same time. But that was only because his jaws flashed from one dingo's body to another with such rapidity that the passage between could not be followed by the eye. This meant that his fangs could not be driven deep enough for instant killing. There was not time. But they went deep, none the less; and blood streamed now from the necks and shoulders of the dingoes that succeeded one another in springing at the man and the Wolfhound.

Two of the dingoes owed their deaths to the long knife-blade of the man; but even as the second of them received the steel to the hilt below his chest-bones, the man sank, utterly exhausted and bleeding freely, on his knees, and from there to the ground itself. This drew the attention of the three surviving dingoes from the leader, who in some mysterious manner had become an enemy, to the fallen man who was now, clearly, a kill. Mere hunger, desperate hunger, was uppermost in the minds of the three. They quested flesh and blood from the kill that lay helpless before them.

It was then that Finn outdid himself; it was then that he called into sudden and violent action every particle of reserve strength that was left in him. It was then that his magnificent upbringing stood by him, and the gift of a thousand years of unstained lineage lent him more than a Wolfhound's strength and quickness; so that, almost within the passage of as many seconds, he slew three full-grown dingoes, precisely as a game terrier will slay three rats, with one crushing snap and one tremendous shake to each. Starved though they were, these dingoes weighed over forty pounds apiece; yet when they met with their death between Finn's mighty jaws, their bodies were flung from him, in the killing shake, to a distance of as much as five yards.

And then there fell a sudden and complete stillness in that desert spot, which had seen the end of six lives in as many minutes; besides the final falling of the Master, which implied, Finn knew not what.

Finn fell to licking the Master's white, blood-flecked face where it lay on the ground. And at that, the waiting crows settled down upon the bodies of the outlying dingoes; so that their dead, sightless eyes were made doubly sightless in a moment. After long licking, or licking which seemed to him long, Finn pointed his nose to the brazen sky, and lifted up his voice in the true Wolfhound howl, which is perhaps the most penetratingly saddening cry in Nature.