Chapter 20. The Sunday Hunt

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_ CHAPTER XX. THE SUNDAY HUNT

Finn's new friends were distinctly an odd couple. The type to which Wallaby Bill belonged is not a very rare one in Australia. He was one of those men of whom storekeepers and publicans, and country-folk generally, say that they are nobody's enemies but their own. Bill had been a small farmer, a "cockatoo," at one time, with land of his own; but when he received a cheque for stock or for a crop, it was his wont to leave the farm for days together while he "blew in his cheque" in the township. After that, he would have to buy flour on credit, eat kangaroo flesh and rabbit--even the despised and accursed rabbit--and his stock would have to live upon what they could pick up for themselves in the bush. So an end had come to Bill's farming, naturally.

His present life could only be described as nomadic; and it seemed to be the only life he cared for. He was an excellent boundary-rider, shrewd, capable, and far-seeing. As such he would work for weeks, and even, occasionally, for months at a stretch, utterly alone, save for his dog, and apparently quite content. Then, without apparent reason, and certainly without any kind of warning, he would make tracks for the nearest township, and be seen no more outside its "hotel" till every penny he could lay hands upon was transferred to the publican's till. Then, if his employer cared to allow him to resume work, he would go back to his boundary-riding as contented and efficient as ever. If the employer had so much as a word of criticism for his conduct, Bill would be off into the bush like a wild creature, and that particular boss would see him no more. He never argued. He simply fled. His life was as purely nomadic as that of any Bedouin, and he had not spoken to a woman for years. Outside public-houses, he never thought of drinking anything but water and tea, generally tea, of which beverage he consumed several quarts every day of his life. He was a keen hunter, and at his worst had never been known to sell his horse or his dog, both good of their kind; though there had been occasions upon which he had sold everything else he possessed, and then knocked a man down for refusing to purchase the ragged coat he was wearing.

This man had reared Jess by hand, with the aid of a cracked tea-pot; and the kangaroo-hound bitch knew him better than any one else did. For her, he was the only human being who counted, seriously; and it was said that she had come near to killing a certain publican who had attempted to "go through" Bill's pockets when he was drunk. She accompanied Bill everywhere, and, whatever his occupation or condition, was never far from his side. She was a big strong hound, and her flanks bore many honourable scars attesting to her experience of the marsupial at bay.

Bill had probably never been guilty of wilful meanness or cruelty in his life; though, upon occasion, he could display a certain rough brutality. His normal attitude of mind was one of careless, kindly good-humour. From Finn's point of view, he was an extremely good sort of fellow, of a type new and strange to the Wolfhound; one of whom nothing could be predicted with any certainty. Six months before, Bill's obvious good nature would have been ample passport to Finn's confidence and friendship. But all that had been changed, and everything and everybody strange was now suspect to Finn.

The Wolfhound was the first to wake in the very early morning of the day following that of his arrival at the boundary-rider's gunyah. His movement waked Jess, and together they stretched and walked round the camp. Then Finn trotted off towards the denser bush which lay some hundreds of yards eastward of the camp. Jess ran with him for perhaps a score of yards, and then, determined not to lose sight of her man's abode, she turned and trotted back to camp. This surprised Finn, but did not affect his plans. He noted a warm little ridge some distance ahead, which looked as though it contained rabbit earths. This spot he approached by means of a flanking movement which enabled him to reach it from the rear, moving with the care and delicacy of a great cat. As he peered over the edge of the little ridge, he saw three rabbits performing their morning toilet, perhaps a score of paces beyond the bank. He eyed the bunnies with interest for about a minute, and then, having decided that the middle one carried the most flesh, he pursed himself together and leaped. As he landed, ten or a dozen paces from the rabbits, they separated, two flying diagonally for the bank, and the middle one leaping off ahead, meaning to describe a considerable curve before reaching its earth. But Finn was something of an expert in the pursuit of rabbits and, besides being very fleet, had learned to wheel swiftly, and to cut off corners. Two seconds later that rabbit was dead and, holding it firmly between his great jaws, Finn had started off at a leisurely trot for the camp.

As Finn arrived beside the gunyah, Bill appeared at its entrance, yawning and stretching his muscular arms.

"Hullo there, Wolf," he said lazily; "early bird catches the worm, hey? Good on ye, my son."

Finn had stopped dead at sight of the man, and now Jess bounded towards him, full of interest. Finn dropped the rabbit before her, quite prepared to share his breakfast with the kangaroo-hound. That had been his intention, in fact, in bringing his kill back to camp. But to his surprise Jess snatched up the rabbit and wheeled away from him.

"Come in here, Jess! Come in!" growled the man sharply. "Come in here, an' drop it."

Whereupon, Jess trotted docilely up to the humpy, and laid her stolen prize at Bill's feet. Bill whipped out his sheath-knife and, with one or two deft cuts and tugs, skinned the rabbit. The pelt he placed on a log beside the gunyah, and the carcase he cut in half across the backbone. Then he tossed the head half to Jess, and the other, and slightly larger portion, to Finn.

"Fair doos," he said explanatorily. "Wolf's the biggest; and it was his kill, anyway; so he gets the quarters."

So the hounds fed, while Bill washed and prepared his own breakfast. Jess ate beside the bark hut, but Finn withdrew to a more respectful distance, and lay down with his portion of the rabbit some twenty yards from the camp.

After breakfast, the man took a bridle in his hand and set out to find his horse, who carried a bell but was never hobbled. Jess walked sedately one yard behind her man's heels; Finn strolled after them at a distance of fifteen or twenty yards. Occasionally Jess would turn and trot back to the Wolfhound for a friendly sniff; but, while receiving her advances amiably, Finn never responded to her invitations to join her in close attendance upon the man. Once Bill was mounted, Jess seemed satisfied to leave twenty or thirty yards, or even more, between herself and her man; and, this being so, the two hounds ran together and shared all their little discoveries and interests. Bill rode a good many miles that day, always beside a wire fence; and occasionally he would stop, dismount, and busy himself in some small repair, where a fence-post had sagged down, or the wire become twisted or slack.

At such times, while Bill was busy, Finn and Jess would cover quite a good deal of ground, always within a half-mile radius of the man; and in these small excursions Finn began to learn a good deal in the way of bush-craft from the wily Jess. Once she snapped at his shoulder suddenly, and thrust him aside from a log he was just about to clamber upon. "'Ware! 'Ware!" said her short bark, with unmistakable vehemence. As Finn drew back, wonderingly, a short black snake rose between him and the log, hissed angrily at the hounds once, and then darted away round the log's butt end. Jess made some gruff remarks in her throat which could not well be translated into our tongue; but they sufficed to teach Finn a good deal. He had now seen a death-adder, the snake whose bite kills inside of fifteen minutes; and, so much more apt are the dog kind in some matters than ourselves, that Finn would never again require reminding or instructing about this particular form of danger. Jess had bitten his shoulder pretty hardly, by the way. Finn may or may not have given this particularly deadly reptile a name in his own mind; or Jess may have supplied him with one for it. The point is, he knew it now for a deadly creature; he knew something of the sort of resting-places it chooses for itself; and he would never, never forget the knowledge thus acquired, nor the significance it had for him and his like.

On the other hand, when a sudden pungent scent and a rustle among the twigs set Finn leaping forward after the strangest-looking beast his eyes had ever seen, Jess joined with him, in a good-humoured, rather indifferent manner, and between them they just missed a big "goanner," as Bill called the iguana, or Gould Monitor. This particular 'guana had a tail rather more than twice its own length, and the last foot of this paid forfeit in Finn's jaws for the animal's lack of agility. Though, when one says lack of agility, it is fair to add that only a very swiftly moving creature could have escaped the two hounds at all; and, once it reached a tree-trunk, this reptile showed simply wonderful cleverness in climbing, running up fifty feet of iron-bark trunk as quickly as it could cover the level ground, and keeping always on the far side of the tree from the dogs, its long, ugly, wedge-shaped head constantly turning from side to side, in keen, listening observation. From Jess's contemptuous, half-hearted bark, Finn gathered that this singularly ugly creature was not one of the deadly people, but also, on the other hand, that it was not game worthy of a hound's serious attention.

After four days of this sort of life, during practically every hour of which Finn was learning bush-craft from Jess, and learning at a great rate for the reason that his intelligence was of a higher order than that of the kangaroo-hound, while his hunting instincts came to him from an older and more direct line of inheritance, the Wolfhound began to feel almost as thoroughly at home in the bush as he had felt on his own hunting-ground in Sussex. But, rather curiously perhaps, he advanced hardly at all in the intimacy of his relations with Bill. In a sense, outwardly at all events, Bill was more closely allied to Sam and the Professor, and to other people of the Southern Cross Circus, than to the Master, or to humans Finn had known at all intimately before. The Wolfhound was conscious that the boundary-rider was friendly; but, on the other hand, he had points in common with the circus people, whose doings had burned right into Finn's very soul; and, in any case, Finn saw no particular reason for taking further risks where this man was concerned. It was extremely pleasant to lie near the camp-fire with Jess of a night, and to run with Jess in the bush by day; but nothing would induce Finn to approach the gunyah more nearly, or to allow Bill's hand to come within a yard of him. The possibility, however remote, of confinement, of torture behind iron bars, was something he could not bring himself to trifle with.

As for Bill, he seemed content. Finn brought rabbits to the camp every day, with occasional bandicoots, and in the evening, sometimes, a kangaroo-rat. And, more than once, Bill took these kills from him, through Jess, and boiled them before giving them to the hounds to eat. In this he was doubtless moved by friendly thought for the dogs' welfare, since these little creatures, and more especially the rabbits, are often inhabited by parasites of a kind most harmful to dogs. Bill never thought of making any use of the over-plentiful supply of rabbits for the replenishment of his own larder. He regarded rabbits as English people regard rats, and would never have eaten them while any other kind of meat was available. And, as Finn found later, the same pronounced distaste for rabbit's flesh holds good, not alone among the men-folk of the country, but with practically all its wild folk, also; even the highly carnivorous and fierce native cat paying no heed to bunnies as game.

The fifth day of Finn's acquaintance with Bill and Jess was a Sunday, and the boundary-rider was a strict observer of the Sabbath. His observation of it might not have particularly commended itself to orthodox Sabbatarians, but, such as it was, Bill never departed from it. Directly after breakfast he washed the shirt and vest he had been wearing during the previous week, and hung them out to dry. Then he brought in his horse and trifled with it a while, examining its feet, and rubbing its ears, and giving it a few handfuls of bread. Then he took a very early lunch and went off hunting. He had no gun, but he had a formidable sheath-knife, his horse, and Jess. And now, in a way, he had Finn as well. He had been wondering all the week about Finn's quality as a hunter, and looking forward to the opportunity of testing the Wolfhound. As for Jess, she knew perfectly well when a Sunday had arrived. For her, Sunday was quite the festival day of the week; and, indeed, by reason of her anticipatory bustle, Finn himself was early given to understand that this was a special day of some kind.

On the previous day, Bill had paid particular attention to some tracks he had seen on the far side of a gully some three or four miles from the gunyah; and Jess had shown herself amazingly anxious to make further investigations at the time, until brought sternly to heel by Bill, with the suggestion that--

"You've got mixed up in your almanack, old lady. This is Saturday."

Now, with a tomahawk stuck in the saddle-cleat he had made to hold it, and a stock-whip dangling from one hand, the bushman ambled off on his roan-coloured mare in the direction of this same gully. Jess, full of suppressed excitement, circled about the horse's head for some few minutes, till bidden to "Sober up, there, Jess!" when she fell back and trotted beside Finn, a dozen yards from the horse. Arrived at the gully, Bill reined in to a very slow walk, and peered about him carefully upon the ground. He never walked a yard on his own feet if a horse was available. This was so much a matter of principle with Bill that he had been known to walk and run three miles in pursuit of a horse with which to ride across a paddock no more than a quarter of a mile from his original starting-place. It was Jess who found what her man was questing: the quite fresh tracks of a kangaroo; and Finn was keenly interested in the discovery. He noted carefully every scratch in the tracks as Jess nosed them, and noted also, as the result of long strong breaths drawn through his nostrils, the exact scent which hung about them. This scent alone proved the tracks quite fresh. Finn was puzzled by the long, scraping marks, which looked far more like the work of some garden tool than of the feet of any animal he knew of. For the time he had forgotten the fifteen-foot leap of the rock wallaby that he had witnessed on the day after his escape from the circus. The hind-foot pressure required to start a heavy animal upon such a leap as that is very considerable, and well calculated to leave evidence of itself in soft ground.

In starting away from the gully, Bill rode at a walk, and with extreme care, Jess going in front, and Finn, not as yet so clever in tracking, following up the rear, and taking very careful observations, not alone of the trail, but also of fallen timber and likely places for snakes. They progressed in this way, in a curving line, for between two and three miles, when Jess came to a momentary halt, and gave one loud bark. Next instant they were all travelling at the gallop for a thick clump of scrub which stood alone in a comparatively clear patch. On the edge of this scrub Finn had a momentary glimpse of their quarry, a big red old-man kangaroo, sitting on his haunches, and delicately eating leaves.

The kangaroo covered over twenty feet of ground in his first leap, and that with a suddenness which must have strained the tendons of his wonderful hind-quarters pretty severely. But, by the time the hunters had reached the scrub, the quarry was between two and three hundred yards distant, travelling at a great rate in fairly open country. Bill had urged his horse to the top of its gallop, and Finn was close behind them. He could have passed them, but was not as yet sufficiently familiar with the man to do so. He felt safer with Bill in full view; and, in any case, the roan mare was a very fast traveller and kept as close to Jess's flying feet as was safe. The old-man seemed confident of his power to outrun his pursuers, for he made no attempt at dodging, taking a straight-ahead course over ground which left him clearly visible almost all the time. That his confidence in his superior speed was misplaced became quite evident at the end of the first mile, for by that time there was not much more than a hundred yards between Jess and himself, in spite of the enormous bounds he took, which made his progress resemble flying. He could take a fallen log in his jump easily enough, but whenever the course rose at all sharply the old-man lost ground; his jumps appearing to fall very short then.

At the end of the third mile Jess, who was galloping in greyhound style, was within twenty feet of the kangaroo; Bill and the roan mare were twelve or fifteen feet behind her, and Finn, running a little wide of the trail, was abreast of the mare's flanks with a fierce, killing light in his eyes. In that order they entered a steep gully which, if the old-man had been on thoroughly familiar ground, he would have avoided. But, as to that, if he had been on familiar ground, he would not have been alone, but the leader of a mob, for which position his commanding size fitted him. Be this as it may, the red old-man plunged straight down the steep gully, and then, fearing to attempt the comparatively slow process of mounting the other side, turned at a tangent and bounded along the bottom of the gully. With a gasping bark, as of triumph, Jess wheeled after him, and the roan mare, unable to turn quite so swiftly, left Finn to shoot ahead for the first time, perhaps fifteen paces behind Jess.

But, unfortunately for the kangaroo, this was a blind gully, and Jess knew it. Two minutes later the old-man found himself facing a quite precipitous rocky ascent at the gully's end, and so, there being no alternative that he could see, he turned at bay to face his pursuers. Jess was tremendously excited by the three-mile chase, and it may be that the sound of Finn's powerful strides behind her gave the black hound more than ordinary recklessness. At all events, with practically no perceptible slackening of speed, she flew straight for the old-man's throat, and received the cruel stroke of his hind-leg fairly upon her chest, being flung backwards fully five yards, with blood spouting from her.

Now, although Finn had never seen a kangaroo before, and never hunted bigger game than the fox he killed in Sussex, yet he had a full view of poor Jess's terrible reception, and with him, as with all his kind, action follows thought with electrical swiftness. Finn saw in that instant exactly the old-man's method of defence: the cow-like kick, with a leg strong enough to propel its weighty owner five-and-twenty feet in a bound, and armed at its extremity with claws like chisels. Seeing this, and acting upon the hint it conveyed, were a single process with Finn. He swerved sharply from his course, and then leaped with all his strength for the old-man's throat from the slightly higher level of the gully's bank.

Now, the old-man weighed two hundred and forty pounds, and measured nine feet from the tip of his snout to the tip of his long tail. But, as against that, he was sitting still, while Finn came at him with the tremendous momentum of a powerful spring from higher ground than that occupied by the kangaroo. And Finn weighed one hundred and forty pounds odd--not of fat and loose skin, but of muscle and bone, without a pound of superfluous flesh. He lived almost entirely on meat. The impact of Finn's landing on the old-man was terrific; but, be it noted, the kangaroo was not bowled over, though he did sway for a moment on his haunches. But it was a terribly punishing hold upon his neck that Finn's jaws had taken, and Finn's great claws were planted firmly in the old-man's side and back. The kangaroo made a desperate effort to free one hind-leg sufficiently from Finn's clinging weight to be able to take a raking thrust at the Wolfhound, by shaking him sideways; and if he had succeeded in this, the result for Finn would have been very severe. Meantime, however, the whole strength of Finn's muscular neck and jaws was concentrated upon dragging the kangaroo's head back, upon breaking his neck, in fact. An old-man kangaroo, such as this one, is generally able to give a pretty good account of himself in the face of four or five hounds; but the hounds he meets are of Jess's type and weight, and not of Finn's sort.

However, it was never known exactly whether or not Finn would have succeeded in his task of breaking this old-man's neck; for, with a suddenness which surprised the Wolfhound into suffering momentary contact with Bill's arm, the boundary-rider slipped into the fight, having first picked up the old-man's tail so that he could not kick (a kangaroo knows that if he attempts a kick while his very serviceable tail is being held up he always topples over on his side, and is thus made helpless), and then leaned across Finn from behind, and slit the marsupial's throat with his sheath-knife. Finn growled fiercely as he felt the weight of the man's arm pressed across his shoulders, and sprang clear at the same moment that the kangaroo toppled over dead, Bill's practised hand having severed its jugular vein. And so the fight ended, without a scratch for Finn; which, seeing that this was his first kangaroo, and an old-man, and that many an old-man has stretched as many as four and five hounds bleeding on the ground before him in less than as many minutes, must be regarded as a piece of exceptionally good fortune for the Wolfhound.

With Jess, now, matters were far otherwise; the black hound could do no more hunting for some time to come. Finn was already sympathetically licking Jess when Bill turned away from the dead kangaroo; but, as the man came forward, Finn retreated, his lips lifted slightly, and his hackles rising. He was not quite sure of Bill's intentions, and had been greatly disturbed by the pressure of the boundary-rider's arm across his shoulders. It had brought with it an instant flashlight picture of an iron-barred cage, and other matters connected therewith. He did not realize that Bill, and not he himself, had killed the old-man. However, Bill was not paying any particular heed to Finn just now, though he had greatly admired the Wolfhound's handling of the kangaroo, as showing more strength than any other hound's attack that he had ever seen.

With a single blow the kangaroo had practically laid open the whole of one side of Jess's body. The gash his terrible foot had made extended from the front of the breast down to the inside of the flank; and it was far from being simply a skin wound. Down the chest it had reached the bone; in the belly it had carved a furrow which suggested the wound of an axe. Bill sighed as he told himself that poor Jess's chances were problematical. An Englishman in Bill's position would almost certainly have put a bullet through the black hound's heart or head, if he had had a gun. But Bill had done a good deal of kangaroo hunting in his time, and had seen many and many a hound ripped open, and even then preserved to hunt again.

A surgeon would have been vastly interested by Bill's operations now. First, he walked along the gully to where he had seen a little water and, bringing this back in his felt hat, proceeded carefully to cleanse parts of the torn flesh as well as he could. Then he unbuckled a big belt that he wore, and opening a pouch on it drew out two or three needles and some strong white thread. Having threaded one of the needles he began now, in as matter-of-course a manner as though he were mending a shirt, to stitch up the whole great wound so as to draw its sides together. During the whole lengthy operation the black hound only moved her head twice, in a faint, undecided manner, and almost as though from an intelligent desire to watch Bill's progress; certainly with no hint of any wish to interfere with it. It was far from being an easy or simple operation, and doubtless Bill's performance of it differed a good deal in detail from what a surgeon would have called the best method; but the thing was done, and done thoroughly.

Then Bill filled a pipe and smoked it for a time, while watching the filmy eyes of his hound. Presently he rose and brought more water in his hat. This he held under Jess's muzzle in such a position as to enable her to loll her tongue in it, and lap a little. The gratitude which shone in her eyes was very touching and unmistakable. Bill waited for another quarter of an hour, and then he stooped over the black hound and raised her bodily in his arms with great care, and much as a German nurse carries a baby. In this position, and stopping occasionally for short rests, Bill carried Jess the whole way back to the camp, a distance of about three and a half miles. (The course taken by the kangaroo had been a curve which ended rather nearer to the gunyah than it began.) Finn followed, twenty paces behind the man, with head and tail carried low. He was conscious that Jess was sorely smitten.

Arrived at the camp, Bill made a bed of leaves for Jess beside the gunyah, and placed her down upon it very gently, with an old blanket of his own folded round her body in such a way that she could not reach the wound with her mouth. Then he mounted the horse which he had driven before him, and galloped back to the blind gully armed with a small coil of line.

When Bill returned with the old-man lashed on his horse's back, he found Finn affectionately licking the black hound's muzzle. Jess had not moved an inch. _

Read next: Chapter 21. Three Dingoes Went A-Walking

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