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Finn The Wolfhound, a novel by Alec John Dawson |
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Chapter 21. Three Dingoes Went A-Walking |
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_ CHAPTER XXI. THREE DINGOES WENT A-WALKING Wallaby Bill showed himself a kind and shrewd nurse where Jess, his one intimate friend, was concerned. He had no milk to give the sorely wounded hound, but the thin broth he made for her that Sunday night formed almost as suitable a food for her; and before leaving her for the night the man was very careful to see that her lacerated body was well covered. For her part, Jess was too weak and ill to be likely to interfere with the wound; even the slight lifting of her head to lap a little broth seemed to tax her strength to the utmost. All night Finn lay within a couple of yards of the kangaroo-hound; and in the morning, soon after dawn, he brought her a fresh-killed rabbit and laid it at her feet. Finn meant well, but Jess did not even lick the kill, and as soon as Bill appeared he looked in a friendly way at Finn, and then removed the rabbit. But he afterwards skinned and boiled it for Finn's own delectation, and at the time he said-- "You're a mighty good sort, Wolf, and you can say I said so." After making the black hound as comfortable as he could, Bill rode off for his day's work. He had rigged a good shelter over Jess with the help of a couple of sheets of stringy-bark and a few stakes. He gave her a breakfast of broth, and left a dish of water within an inch of her nose, where she could reach it without moving her body. Lastly, as a precaution against the possibility of movement on Jess's part, he stitched the old blanket behind her in such a way as to prevent its leaving her wound exposed. He looked over his shoulder several times after riding away, thinking that Finn would be likely to follow him. But the Wolfhound remained standing, some twenty paces from Jess's shelter, and, when the man was almost out of sight, stepped forward and lay down within a yard or two of the kangaroo-hound. "Queer card, that Wolf!" muttered Bill, as he rode away. "But he's pretty white, too; whiter'n some men, I reckon, for all he's so mighty suspicious." In some climates any dog would have succumbed to the injuries Jess had sustained; and even in the beautiful air of the Tinnaburra, a town-bred dog would probably have gone under. But Jess was of a tough, bush-bred stock; she had lived in the open all her life, and the air she breathed now, in her shelter beside the gunyah, was aromatic with the scent of that useful antiseptic which in every part of the world has done good service in the prevention of fever--eucalyptus. Blue gum, red gum, grey gum, stringy-bark, iron-bark, and black-butt; the trees which surrounded Jess for fifty miles on every side were practically all of the eucalyptus family. Insects bothered her a good deal it is true, but Finn did much in the way of warding off their attacks, and the wound itself was well protected. It was an odd and very interesting and pleasant life that Finn led now, his time divided pretty evenly between bearing the wounded kangaroo-hound company and foraging on his own account in the bush within a radius of two or three miles of the gunyah. He found that countryside wonderfully full of different forms of wild life, and wonderfully interesting to a born hunter and carnivorous creature like himself. He did not know then that the country he traversed, all within four miles of the camp, was but the fringe of a vastly more interesting tract of bush; and in the meantime the range he did learn to know thoroughly proved sufficiently absorbing and various. Five miles from Bill's gunyah, in a direct southerly line, stood the big, rambling station homestead, where Bill's bachelor employer had lived for many years. He did not live there now, because six months before this time he had died, and his station had reverted to distant relatives in other countries. This was the man who was to have met the Master and the Mistress of the Kennels on their arrival in Australia. His executors had seen no reason to dispense with Bill's services as yet; and, truth to tell, they had never seen the man, nor heard of his doings. It was only during the last few months that a manager had been placed in charge of the station, and during his time Wallaby Bill had stuck closely to his work. Jacob Wilton Hall, the man who had made Warrimoo station, had all his life long been something of an eccentric; and yet, withal, a man who generally accomplished what he had set out to do, and one who had converted a modest competence into a handsome fortune. He had been an indiscriminate admirer of animals, and an interested student of the manners and customs of all the creatures of the wild. When the rabbit pest first began to be severely felt in the neighbourhood of his home-station, he had tried a variety of methods of coping with it, and in the execution of some of these methods he had met with a good deal of opposition and ridicule from his neighbours. He had, for instance, imported fifty ferrets and weasels of both sexes and turned them loose in pairs, in rabbit-earths situated in different outlying portions of his land. These fierce little creatures were a scourge to the countryside by reason of their attacks upon poultry; but it was freely stated that they adopted the curious attitude of nearly all the native-born animals in ignoring the rabbits they had been expected to prey upon. Jacob Hall had then imported two pairs of wild cats, and turned these loose in the back-blocks of his land, besides encouraging a number of cats of the domesticated variety to take to the bush life and become wild, as they have been doing all over Australia for many years. With great difficulty and considerable expenditure of money, the eccentric squatter had succeeded in securing a pair of Tasmanian Wolves and a pair of Tasmanian Devils, and, having successfully evaded the customs and quarantine authorities, he turned these exceptionally fierce and bloodthirsty creatures loose in the wildest part of his land. Indeed, he took up an extra few thousand acres of quite unprofitable "Church and School land," hilly, rocky, and heavily timbered on the flats, largely, it was said, for the purpose of turning his Tasmanian importations into it. The Wolves and the Tasmanian Devils killed a number of his sheep; and it was stated among the neighbours that if Jacob Hall had lived he would eventually have imported Bengal tigers and African lions before trying the commonplace virtues of rabbit-proof fencing. It was supposed that the persistent efforts of hunters and boundary-riders had resulted in these wild creatures being driven well into the back country; and it is certain that, despite an occasional strange story from bushmen regarding the animals whose tracks they had come upon in the back-blocks, nothing was ever actually seen of Jacob Hall's more fantastic importations. It was said, however, that there were already notable modifications in certain of the wild kindred of that countryside. There was talk of wild cats of hitherto unheard-of size and fierceness, and of dingoes having suggestions about them of the untameably fierce marsupial wolf of Tasmania. But such talk did not amount to much in this district, for the rocky ranges of the Tinnaburra country, its densely wooded gullies, and wild scrub-dotted flats, was almost entirely in the hands of a few big squatters, who had long since pre-empted the back-blocks in the hinterland of their stations for very many miles up country. Naturally, Finn and Jess knew nothing of these things. To the one the native denizens of such small portions of the bush of that neighbourhood as he had ranged were quite sufficiently numerous and interesting to keep his mind occupied; while Jess, for her part, was fully engaged in the task of regaining her hold upon mere life. They lived for themselves, these two; but Jess was deeply interested in the return of her man to the camp each night, and Finn was equally keen and interested in his daily foragings and explorations in the bush of that particular quarter. They neither of them knew that they themselves were objects of the greatest interest to a very large circle of the wild folk. But they were. Within twenty-four hours of the fight with the old-man kangaroo in the blind gully, the news had gone abroad among all the wild folk in that strip of bush which surrounded the camp that a redoubtable hunter had been laid low, and was lying near to death and quite helpless beside the gunyah. Jess, having always been well fed by her man, had never been a great hunter of small game; but she had accounted for a goodly number of wallabies, and had played her part in the pulling down of a respectable number of kangaroos. And, though she had seldom troubled to run down the smaller fry, she was as greatly feared by them as though she lived only for their destruction; and innumerable small marsupials, from the tiny, delicate little kangaroo-mouse, up to the fleet and muscular wallaby-hare, with bandicoots, kangaroo-rats (bushy-tailed and desperately furtive), 'possums, native cats, and even a couple of amiable and sleepy-headed native bears, and a surly, solitary wombat, all took an opportunity of peering out from the nearest point of dense covert for the sake of having a glimpse of the helpless kangaroo-hound. To the wild folk, an animal that cannot rise and fend for itself is regarded as an animal practically dead, and but one remove from carrion; which, of course, Jess would have been, lacking the friendly attentions of her man, and, it may be, lacking the protection of the great Wolfhound. Be that as it may, it is a fact that news reached the rocky hills behind Warrimoo of Jess's condition, and during the second night of her helplessness three dingoes left their hunting range to come and look into this matter for themselves. A dying hound might prove well worth investigating, they thought. The movements of these dingoes, once they reached within a couple of miles of Bill's gunyah, would have interested any student of the wild. The caution with which they advanced was extraordinary. Not a dry leaf nor a dead twig on the trail but they scanned it shrewdly with an eye for possible traps or pitfalls. They moved as noiselessly as shadows, and poured in and out among the scrub like liquid vegetation of some sort; a part of their environment, but volatile. When the three dingoes from the hills reached the edge of the clear patch in which the gunyah stood, they saw the almost black, smouldering remains of a camp-fire, and, stretched within a couple of yards of the ashes, Finn. His shaggy coat was not that of a kangaroo-hound, and his place beside the man-made fire seemed to forbid the possibility of his being a monster dingo. Vaguely, the dingoes told themselves that Finn must be some kind of giant among wolves who was connected in some mysterious way with men-folk. They had learned something during the past few years with regard to the possibilities of Nature in the matter of strange beasts; and they remembered that the new-comers in their country had arrived with a strange and persistent taint of man about them; were even brought there by man, some said. In the meantime, it was quite evident to the dingoes' sensitive nostrils that man inhabited the gunyah at that moment; and that, therefore, quite apart from the presence of the huge strange beast near the fire, it would never do to investigate the shelter at the gunyah's side just then. The dingoes ate where they made their kills that night, within a couple of miles of the camp, thereby spreading terror wide and deep throughout that range; for the little folk feared these fiercely cunning killers far more than they had learned to fear big ghostly Finn, who roamed their country more in student fashion than as a serious hunter of meat, so far. When the dawn came, the three dingoes were crouched in a favourable watching-place opposite the gunyah, and saw Finn rise, stretch his great length, and stroll off leisurely in the direction of the bush on the shanty's far side. They looked meaningly one at the other, with lips drawn back, as they noted Finn's massive bulk, great height, long jaws, and springy tread. They decided that the Wolfhound might, after all, be of the wild kindred, since he evidently had no mind to face the owner of the gunyah by daylight. Then, with hackles raised, and bodies shrinking backward among the leaves, they saw Bill come out, and yawn, and stretch his arms, and go to look at Jess, under her shelter. Now as it happened, Finn stumbled upon a fresh wallaby trail that morning, a trail not many minutes old; and he followed it with growing excitement for a number of miles. To his nose it was more or less the same scent as that of the old-man kangaroo; and there was hot desire in his heart to pit his strength against such an one, without the sport-spoiling assistance of Bill's knife. Finn's hunting of the wallaby took him a good deal farther from the humpy than he had been before, since his first arrival there; and so it fell out that Bill left upon his day's round without having seen the Wolfhound that morning. "I guess he's after an extra special breakfast of his own," muttered Bill, before he left; "but I'll leave him this half a rabbit, in case." And he left the hinder part of a boiled rabbit on the big log beside the fire, and rode away. The patient dingoes watched the whole performance closely, licking their chops while Bill ate his breakfast, and again when he placed the cooked half-rabbit on the log. The whole proceeding was also watched by several crows. It was largely as a protection against these, rather than against the elements, that Bill had given Jess her substantial bark shelter, under which the crows would be afraid to pass. Otherwise, as Bill well knew, Jess would have been like to lose her eyes before she had lain there very long. After Bill's departure, the crows were the first to descend upon the camp; and they soon had the meat left for Finn torn to shreds and swallowed. Then they swaggered impudently about the fire, picking up crumbs, a process they were in the habit of attending to daily during Finn's absence. The presence of these wicked black marauders gave courage to the waiting dingoes, and they determined to proceed at once with the business in hand: the examination of the dying kangaroo-hound of which they had heard. As for the huge spectral wolf, it was evident that he had no real connection with the camp. Indeed, the bigger of the three dingoes told himself, with a regretful sigh, that this great grey wolf had in all probability dispatched the kangaroo-hound at an early stage of the night, and had been sleeping off the first effects of his orgy, when they first saw him lying near the camp-fire. At all events, the wolf had disappeared. The three dingoes advanced, still exhibiting caution in every step, but marching abreast, because neither would give any advantage to the others in a case of this sort. When they got to within five-and-twenty paces of the shelter, poor Jess winded them, and it was borne in upon her that the hour of her last fight had arrived. She knew herself unable to run a yard, probably unable to stand; and the dingo scent, as she understood it, had no hint of mercy in it. With an effort which racked her whole frame with burning pain, the helpless bitch turned upon her chest and raised her head so that she might see her doom approaching. She gave a little gulp when her eyes fell upon the stalwart forms of no fewer than three full-grown dingoes, stocky of build, massive in legs and shoulders, plentifully coated, and fanged for the killing of meat. Their eyes had the killing light in them too, Jess thought; and a snarl curled her writhen lips as she pictured her end, stretched helpless there under the bark shelter. Well she knew that even three such well-grown dingoes as these would never have dared to attack her if she had been in normal condition. Very slowly the three dingoes approached a little nearer in fan-shaped formation, and, with a brave effort, Jess succeeded in bringing forth a bark which ended in something between growl and howl, by reason of the cutting pain it caused her. The three dingoes leaped backward, each three paces, like clockwork machinery. Jess glared out at them from under her thatch of bark, her fangs uncovered, her nose wrinkled, and her short close hair on end. The dingoes watched her thoughtfully, pondering upon her probable reserves of strength. Then, too, there was her shelter; that was endowed with some of the mysterious atmosphere which surrounds man. But the biggest of the dingoes had once stolen half a sheep from a shepherd's humpy, and no disaster had overtaken him. He advanced three feet before his companions, and that spurred them to movement. Again Jess essayed a bark; and this time the predominant note in her cry was so clearly one of anguish that the three dingoes took it almost as an encouragement, for Nature had not endowed them with a sense of what we call pity for weakness or distress. They thought Jess's cry was an appeal for mercy, and mercy was foreign to their blood. As a fact, poor Jess would rather have died a dozen deaths than call once upon a dingo for mercy. It was the pain in her lacerated body, resulting from the attempt to bark, that had introduced that wailing note into her cry. And now, as the dingoes drew nearer, inch by inch, the black kangaroo-hound braced herself to die biting, and to sell her flesh as dearly as might be. As the snout of the foremost dingo, the largest of the three, showed under the eave of Jess's shelter, she managed to hunch her wounded body a little farther back against the side of the gunyah, meaning thereby to draw the dingo a little farther in, and give herself a better chance of catching some part of him between her jaws. With a desperate effort she drew back her fore-legs a little, raising herself almost into a sitting position against the side of the gunyah. The faint groans that the pain of moving forced from her were of real service to her in a way, for they made the foremost dingo think she was in her death agony, and gave a sort of recklessness to his plunge forward under the thatch. He meant to end the business at once and slake his blood thirst at the hound's throat. Well he knew that hounds do not groan before a dingo's onslaught unless their plight is very desperate. In the instant of the big dingo's plunge for Jess's throat, several things happened. First, Jess's powerful jaws came together about the thick part of the dingo's right fore-leg, and took firm hold there, while the snarling and now terrified dingo snapped at the back of her neck, the rough edge of the bark thatch on the middle of his back producing in him a horrible sense of being trapped. That was one thing that happened in that instant. Another thing was that the two lesser dingoes between them produced a yelp of pure terror, and, wheeling like lightning, streaked across the clear patch to the scrub, bellies to earth, and tails flying in a straight line from their spines. And the third thing that happened in that instant was the arrival at the end of the gunyah of Finn. The arrival of the Wolfhound was really a great event. There was something elemental about it, and something, too, suggestive of magic. The Wolfhound had caught his first glimpse of the two lesser dingoes as he reached the far side of the clear patch, and, for an instant he had stood still. He was dragging a young wallaby over one shoulder. Then it came over him that these were enemies attacking his crippled friend Jess. He made no sound, but, dropping his burden, flew across the clearing with deadly swiftness. As he reached the end of the gunyah, a kind of roar burst from his swelling chest and, in that instant, the two dingoes flung themselves forward in flight, Finn after them. Five huge strides he took in their rear; and then the power of thought, or telepathy, or something of the sort, stopped him dead in the middle of his stride, and he almost turned a somersault in wheeling round to Jess's assistance. As Finn plunged forward again toward Jess, the big dingo succeeded by means of a desperate wrench in freeing his leg from the kangaroo-hound's jaws, and with a swift turning movement leaped clear of the shelter. Then the big dingo of the back ranges found himself facing Finn, and realized that he must fight for his life. The dingo has been called a skunk, and a cur, and a coward, and by most other names that are bad and contemptuous. But the dingo at bay is as brave as a weasel; and no lion in all Africa is braver than a weasel at bay. Finn had brought himself to a standstill with an effort, a towering figure of blazing wrath. He had made one good kill that morning, his blood was hot; the picture of these dogs of the wild kindred attacking his helpless friend had roused to fighting fury every last little drop of blood in his whole great body. Rage almost blinded him. He flung himself upon the big dingo as though he were a projectile of some sort. And then he learned that the creatures born in the wild are swifter than the swiftest of other creatures. He had learned it before, as a matter of fact; he had seen a striking illustration of it only a few days before, when the kangaroo stretched Jess helpless on the ground at a single stroke. Finn only grazed the dingo's haunch, while the dingo slashed a three-inch wound in his right shoulder as he passed. Even while Finn was in the act of turning, the wild dog's fangs clashed again about his flank, ripping his skin as though it were stretched silk. It may be imagined that Finn's wrath was not lessened, but his blind rage was, and he pulled himself together with a jerk, a cold determination to kill cooling his brain like water. This time he allowed the dingo to rush him, which the beast did with admirable dexterity, aiming low for the legs. Finn plunged for the back of the dingo's neck, and missed by the breadth of two hairs. Then he pivoted on his hind-legs and feinted low for the dingo's legs. The dingo flashed by him, aiming a cutting snap at his lower thigh--for the wild dog was a master of fighting, and worked deliberately to cripple his big opponent and not to kill him outright--and that gave Finn the chance for which he had played in his feint. Next moment his great fangs were buried in the thickly furred coat of the dingo's neck, and his whole weight was bearing the wild dog to earth. His legs lost to him, by reason of Finn's crushing weight, the frenzy of despair filled the dingo, and he fought like ten dogs, snarling, snapping, writhing, and scratching, all at the same time. Despite Finn's vice-like hold, the dingo did considerable execution with his razor-edged fangs in the lower part of the Wolfhound's fore-legs. But his race was run. Finn gradually shifted his hold, till his front teeth gripped the soft part of the dingo's throat, and then he bit with all the mighty strength of his great jaws, closer, closer, and closer, till the red blood poured out on the ground and the struggles of the wild dog grew fainter and fainter. Finally, Finn gave a great shake of his head, lifting the dingo clear of the ground, and flinging him back upon it, limp and still. For two whole minutes Finn glared down at the body of the dingo, while licking the blood from his own lips, and working the torn skin of his body backward and forward as though it tickled him. Then he turned to look to Jess. And then an extraordinary thing happened; the sort of thing which does not happen save in the life of a dingo; the thing, in short, that couldn't happen, but that just is, sometimes. That dingo's glazing eyes opened wide, and looked at Finn's back. Then the slain dingo (Finn had almost torn out its throat) dragged itself to its feet and staggered off like a drunken man toward the bush. A feeble snarl escaped from Jess, whose head faced this way. Finn, who had been licking her, wheeled like a cat, and in that amazing moment saw the dingo he supposed he had killed staggering towards the scrub thirty paces distant. Five seconds later the still living dingo was on its back, and its throat was being scattered over the surrounding ground. In his fury Finn did actually tear out the beast's jugular vein, practically severing the head from the trunk, smashing the vertebrae, and tearing open the chest of the dead creature as well. When Wallaby Bill came to look at that corpse some hours later he said-- "Well, by ghost! If I didn't tell that Wolf this very morning that he was a mighty good sort. Wolf, you can say I said that John L. Sullivan and Peter Jackson, and the Wild Man o' Borneo were suckin' infants in arms to you. My colonial oath, but that blessed dingo has been killed good an' plenty, and a steam-hammer couldn't kill him no more!" There was a wallaby lying beside the fire, Finn having been too busy licking his own wounds and comforting Jess to think of feeding, though common prudence had reminded him to bring in his kill from the edge of the clear patch. Bill gave a deal of time and attention to Jess that night, but Finn was fed royally on roughly cooked wallaby steaks and damper. But even upon this special occasion the Wolfhound, still mindful of his awful circus experience, refused to come within touch of the man. _ |
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