FREEDOM
Very wonderful and wolf-like, cat-like, too, in some respects, was
Finn's progress through the circus encampment on that bright
moonlight night. The field was full of silvery moonlight you would
have said; but never a glint of all that liquid silver touched
Finn's outline for a moment. Just so, beside the northern mountains
of another continent, one has watched a leopard--mountain lions we
call them there--braving the strange terrible smells and dangers of
a man's camp, to stalk a sleeping fox-terrier; in absolute
ignorance of the rifle barrel that covered it, yet miraculously
successful in never giving the man behind the rifle the chance of a
moonlight shot. Finn was sore and aching from many wounds, and
stiff from long confinement. He knew that every one connected with
the circus was sleeping; but on this occasion he gave no hostages
to fortune, he took no risks. The stakes at issue, as he saw it,
were, upon the one side, life and freedom, freedom which was almost
unbearably sweet to think of, after the long-drawn agony of the
past couple of months; and upon the other side, slow death under
the torture of confinement, the iron, the lash, and the mad
man-beast in the leathern coat.
It is the greatest mistake in the world to suppose that an animal
like Finn has no imagination. Indeed, the animals which have no
imagination are comparatively few; while such an Irish Wolfhound as
Finn has, at the least, as much of it as some men the writer has
known.
A fiery picture of the issues at stake was floating in Finn's mind
as he crept in and out among the tents and wagons of the enclosure:
and he was conscious neither of wounds, or weakness, or stiffness;
but only of his great resolve, based upon the wonderful chance that
had come to him. Once he came to a place where ten feet of
brilliant moonlight lay between the black shadow he occupied and
the next. He paused for a moment or two, looking about him upon
every side with all the cunning of the truly wild kindred; and
then, with a very good imitation of the lightness and elasticity of
other, happier days, he sprang clear from the one shadow to the
other, landing as delicately and silently as a cat, though the
impact jarred all his stiffened joints, and touched, as with living
fire, every one of his almost innumerable wounds.
Then he came to the outer canvas wall of the big enclosure. It was
too high to jump, a good twelve feet. An attempt to jump and
scramble over it might have led to noise. Finn approached it in the
deep shadow cast by a caravan wagon, and, thrusting his muzzle
underneath the canvas, midway between two stakes, easily forced it
up, and crawled under it into the open. When he was half-way out,
the boss's fox-terrier gave one sleepy half-bark, too languid and
indifferent a sound to be taken as a warning; and for the rest,
complete silence paid tribute to the extreme deftness of Finn's
passage through the sleeping camp. But that low, sleepy bark from
the fox-terrier who slept beside the boss's own caravan, served to
stop the beating of Finn's heart for one long moment. In the next
moment, almost as silently as a passing cloud shadow, the great
Wolfhound streaked across the thirty yards of moonlit paddock which
divided the camp from the ring-barked bush, and melted away among
that crowded assembly of tree ghosts. The barbed wire fence of the
paddock was no more than four feet high, and this Finn took in his
stride, without appreciable pause.
The ring-barking of trees admits sunlight and air to the earth, and
this means rich "feed" and a sturdy undergrowth. On the other hand,
the death of the trees introduces a kind of nakedness and publicity
to the bush which naturally is not favoured by wild folk during
daylight. But this does not detract from the merits of ring-barked
country as a night feeding-ground; and Finn was amazed by the
wealth and variety of wild life which he saw as he loped swiftly
through the few miles of bush lying between the circus camp and the
foothills of the mountains beyond. His immediate purpose, of
putting a considerable distance between himself and the place of
his captivity, was too urgent to admit of delays, no matter what
the temptation; and, accordingly, Finn made no pauses. But it added
greatly to the joy of his escape to find himself surrounded by so
great an abundance of creatures which instinct made him regard as
game for him. Upon every hand there were rustlings and whisperings,
tiny footfalls and scufflings among dead leaves and twigs; and here
and there, as the great grey, shadowy Wolfhound swept along between
the white tree-trunks, he had glimpses of rabbits, bandicoots,
kangaroo-rats, and many of the lesser marsupials, all busy about
their different night affairs, all half-paralysed by amazement at
his passage through their midst. Once he heard a venomous spitting
overhead and, as he hurried on, caught a flying glimpse of a native
cat, who had pinned an adventurous young 'possum on the lower limb
of a giant black-butt. Once, too, he was startled into momentary
horror of some human trap of the Professor's invention; and his
speed approached that of flying, under the spur of a laughing
jackass's raucous cachinnation.
The ring-barked country was soon left behind, and then Finn found
himself among dense living bush, climbing a steep ascent. Here his
speed was necessarily a great deal slower. There was a good deal of
undergrowth upon the mountain side, besides much heavy timber; and
hidden among this lush undergrowth were occasional boulders and
innumerable fallen tree-trunks, over which Finn stumbled heavily
again and again, he being without that curious bush-lore which
enables men-folk born in the bush, no less than its own wild folk,
to steer clear of these obstructions by means of a sort of sixth
sense, which tells them when they must leap, and helps them to know
when the leap must be an extra cautious one, because of the danger
of disturbing the deadly people of the wild. The Australian bush
has many varieties of snakes, and quite a good number of them are
deadly; though some of those most formidable in appearance are not.
Finn had never even seen a snake; so that, though his ignorance
made him run many risks that night, he was at least spared all
anxiety regarding the deadly folk, their quick tempers and swift
methods of attack.
Dawn was not far off when Finn emerged, with heaving flank and
lolling tongue, into the green but stony glade which formed the
ridge and crest of the Tinnaburra range. The last hundred yards of
his progress had been a good deal of a scramble, through thick
scrub and over lichen-covered boulders, on a very steep rise. And
now that he had reached the cool glade of topmost Tinnaburra, he
found that his arrival had caused considerable perturbation among a
small mob of brumbies, or wild horses, consisting of some seven or
eight mares and foals, led by a flea-bitten old grey stallion, who
snorted angrily as he saw Finn, and minced forward toward the
Wolfhound, his long chisel teeth bared, his four-foot tail
billowing out behind him like a flag, and his black hoofs (the feet
of mountain-bred brumbies are prodigiously hard and punishing in
the attack) rising and falling from the dewy earth like spring
hammers.
Finn devoted the little breath he could spare to the rather whining
note of explanation which means: "Don't fear me! I pursue my own
affairs only, and they are harmless for you!" But the old stallion
was taking no chances. Age made him fussy, and his family included
two very recent additions. Also, Finn brought a baffling mixture of
scents with him, including those of men and of wild creatures such
as the stallion had never seen and did not wish to see. So he
continued his threateningly mincing progress toward Finn, and
whinnied out a declaration to the effect that this could be no
resting-place for dingoes, however huge and diversified in their
smells. Finn was not in the least like a dingo; but, on the other
hand, he was not like a kangaroo-hound. He was twice the size of a
dingo, very nearly, and a good seven inches taller than the biggest
kangaroo-hound the stallion had seen. Also, his coat was shaggy and
long, instead of close and short like that of a greyhound, or
kangaroo-hound. As against that, he carried with him more
suggestion of the fellowship of the wild kindred than of the tribe
of renegades who are men-folk's adherents; and therefore, for the
moment, dingo was a good enough name for him, so far as the old
stallion was concerned, the dingo being the only creature of the
wolf kind which he knew.
Finn was in no mood for disputes of any sort, and so, though
exceedingly weary now, he made a wide detour to satisfy the
nervousness of the flea-bitten grey stallion, and began a diagonal
descent upon the south side of Tinnaburra. Just as the sun cleared
the horizon over his right shoulder, Finn dropped wearily down from
a clump of wattle upon a broad, flat ledge of many-coloured rock
which caught the sun's first glinting rays upon its queer enamel of
red and brown and yellow lichen. From this point Finn looked down a
densely-wooded mountain side, and out across a tolerably
well-timbered plain to hills which stood nearly forty miles away. It
would have made an eyrie for a king eagle. Finn had already slaked
his thirst hurriedly a mile back, in a chattering, rock-bedded
mountain streamlet. And now he was weary beyond all further
endurance. He had been sick, and sore, and stiff, and sadly out of
condition when he started; and he had been travelling now for six
hours. A feeling of security had stolen over him since he reached
the topmost ridge of Tinnaburra. The very fragrance of the air told
him, as he drew it in through his nostrils, that he was far from
the works of men. Food he could not think of while every bone and
muscle in his great body ached from weariness. By the edge of the
rock was a sandy hollow, over which a feathery shrub drooped three
or four of its graceful branches at a height of three feet from the
ground. Finn eyed this inviting spot steadily for two or three
minutes, while his aching sides continued to heave, and his long
tongue to sway from one side of his jaws. Then he stepped
cautiously into the sheltered nook, turned completely round in it
three or four times, and finally sank to rest there in a compact
coil, and with a little grunt of contentment and relief.
Finn opened his eyes, and half-opened them, many times during the
day; once, to his utter amazement, when a huge wedge-tailed eagle
swept gloriously past with a lamb in its talons no more than ten
feet from his nose; but the day was practically done, and nightfall
approaching, when the Wolfhound finally rose from his sandy bed and
stretched his seven-foot length from nose to tail. The long stretch
drew a sharp whine from him towards its end, when the stiffness and
soreness of his limbs, and of some of his more recent burns and
bruises, found him out. But even in the pain there was a sense of
luxury and gladness for Finn. His sleep had not been devoid of
sudden starts, of shudderings and twitches, born of fearful
dreaming; but now that he was broad awake, and in the hushed grey
twilight looked out across forty miles of wild open land, with
never a sign of tent or house, or other work of man, his heart
swelled within him with satisfaction and content, and he drew deep
breaths of grateful pleasure and relief before setting out upon the
descent of Tinnaburra, and, if it might be, the capture of a
supper.
Before Finn had travelled half a mile along the hill-side, he made
his first acquaintance with the snake people. In descending at a
sharp angle from the side of a fallen tree, his fore-feet just
scraped the end of the tail of a nine-foot carpet snake, whose
colouring was vivid and fresh. Before Finn knew what had happened,
one coil of the sinuous reptile's body was about his left hind-leg,
and, as the startled Wolfhound wheeled in his tracks, the big
snake's head rose at him with a forbidding, long-drawn "Ps-s-s-s-t!"
of defiance. The rapidly tightening pressure about his muscular
lower thigh produced something like panic in Finn's breast; but,
luckily enough, his panic resulted in speeding him toward precisely
the right course of action. He feinted in the direction of his
hind-leg, and then, as the snake plunged for his neck, his jaws
flashed back and caught the reptile just behind the head. A single
bite was sufficient, for it smashed the snake's vertebrae and
almost divided it. A moment later Finn's teeth were at the coil
about his hind-leg, and in another instant he was free. But he was
too greatly shocked to make a meal upon the remains of his enemy,
which is what he should have done, and, after taking a good look at
its long, brilliantly-coloured body, he was glad to make off down
the hill, travelling now with a good deal more caution than he had
shown before. It was a merciful thing for Finn that his first
contact with the snake people should have brought him in touch only
with the powerful and courageous carpet snake, and not with one of
the many deadly venomous members of his tribe.
This experience rather shook Finn by reason of its utter
strangeness to him. He recalled the spitting venom of the native
cat, of whose kill he had caught a fleeting glimpse on the previous
night. That again was rather strange and outside his experience.
This great open wild world was certainly quite unlike the mild,
half-domesticated and cared-for little patch of wild that Finn had
claimed as his hunting-ground beside the Sussex Downs. Just then a
laughing jackass started a hoarse chuckle above Finn's head, and a
big white cockatoo, startled by the jackass, flew screaming out
from the branches of a grey gum, with the agonized note in its cry
which these birds seem to favour at all seasons, and quite
irrespective of the nature of their occupations at the moment. The
loose skin on Finn's shoulders moved uneasily, as he trotted along,
using the most extreme care.
But, with all his care, he was in strange surroundings, and his
bush-lore was all to learn; and because of his strangeness his most
careful gait seemed a noisy and clumsy one to the little wild folk
of that mountain side, and Finn saw none of them. By chance he saw
one of the larger kind, however, and the sight of it added to his
sense of strangeness, for it was unlike any other beast he had ever
seen. This was a large female rock wallaby, a big grey doe, with
her young one. The youngster was at the awkward age, free of the
teat, yet unable to travel alone. It was nibbling and playing some
distance from its big mother when she had her first warning of
Finn's approach, in the crackling of dead twigs under his powerful
feet. The youngster showed awkwardness in getting to its snug
retreat in the mother's pouch, and so, by these delays, Finn was
given his glimpse of a big marsupial in the act of taking a
fifteen-foot leap through the scrub. Finn almost sat down on his
haunches from astonishment. But, unlike the snake, the wallaby
inspired him with no sort of fear, possibly by reason of its
evident fear of him. It was, however, another item in the
strangeness, the complete unfamiliarity of Finn's present
surroundings.
It seems absurd to suggest that the great Wolfhound may have been
suffering from loneliness, seeing that he had never been so
thankful for anything else in his whole life as he was for his
escape from the circus, with its small army of men-folk and
animals. But it is a fact that as Finn plodded along through the
wild bush to the south of Tinnaburra, he began to be haunted by a
sense of isolation and friendlessness. It was now thirty hours
since he had tasted food, and it seemed that game shunned his
trail, for he saw none of the many small animals he had passed on
the previous night; and the sight he had had that day of the great
wedge-tailed eagle, of the carpet snake, and of the grey rock
wallaby, these only added to the uncanny strangeness of his
surroundings. In one sense, persecution, witting and unwitting, had
made a wild beast of him during his confinement in the circus; but,
by reason of the close confinement which had accompanied these
persecutions, increasing self-dependence and self-reliance had not
come with the access of fierceness and wildness. Finn inherited
fighting instincts and savage ferocity under persecution from a
long and noble line of hunting and fighting ancestors. But he
inherited few instincts which bore practically upon the matter of
picking up his own living, of walking alone, of depending
exclusively upon himself, and of leading the solitary life of the
really wild carnivora. But this would have troubled him very little
if the scene of his present wanderings had been, say, some part of
Sussex. As it was, the big snake, the huge eagle, the screaming
cockatoo, the nerve-shaking cachophony of the jackass, and the
half-flying progress of the big wallaby, all combined with the huge
wildness of the country and its vegetation to oppress Finn with the
sense of being a lone outcast, an outlier in a foreign land which
was full of sinister possibilities. The recollection of that
hissing nine-foot worm, of a thickness as great and greater than
that of his own legs, lingered unpleasantly with Finn. Also, he was
getting very hungry.
While these impressions were sinking into the Wolfhound's mind, the
country through which he was travelling was becoming more open,
more like a long-neglected park, in which many of the trees were
dead, and all had a gaunt and scraggy look, with their thin,
pointed grey-green leaves, their curiously tortured-looking limbs,
and their long, rustling streamers of decaying bark. But, however
Finn might feel in the matter of loneliness, it was with a pang of
something like horror that he came presently upon a barbed wire
fence, exactly like the one he had leaped on the previous night,
directly after leaving the circus. Could it be possible that the
circus had been moved during the day to this place, and the barbed
wire fence brought with it? Finn prowled cautiously up and down
that fence for a couple of hundred yards in each direction, peering
beyond it, and sniffing and listening with the extreme of
suspiciousness, before he finally leaped the wire and continued his
way in a south-easterly direction.
Five minutes later he saw a rabbit, and though he lost it, by
reason of the fact that it was sitting within a foot of its burrow
and disappeared with lightning-like rapidity at sight of Finn, yet
he was cheered by this homely sight, and pursued his way with
renewed hope in the matter of supper. A moment later and he stopped
dead in his tracks as though shot, and then crawled softly aside to
take cover behind a thicket of scrub.
In topping an abrupt little ridge, he had come suddenly into full
view of a bark gunyah or shanty, in the triangular opening of
which, beside a bright fire, sat a man and a big black hound. A
billy-can swung over the fire on a tripod of stakes, and the man
was engaged with his supper. Finn did not know, of course, that the
man was a boundary-rider, and his dog a not very well-bred
kangaroo-hound. The wind was north-west, or the kangaroo-hound
would surely have scented Finn's approach and given tongue.
For a long time Finn lay under the cover of his thicket, peering
through the darkness at the boundary-rider and his dog. And while
Finn gazed his thoughts were very busy, both with matters of his
own knowledge and experience, and with vague instinctive knowledge,
dream knowledge and dream experiences, which came to him from his
forbears of old, even as a setter's or a pointer's hunting
knowledge comes to him in the vanguard of experience. The thing
that most impressed Finn in the picture he saw was the figure of
the black hound, stretched at ease beside the fire, steadily eyeing
its master. Every once in a while the man would break a chunk from
his damper, or cut a morsel from his meat and toss it to the
kangaroo-hound, who opened and closed its jaws like a steel trap,
and gulped the gift with portentous solemnity, and absolutely
without visible sign of any emotion whatever. The hound showed only
watchfulness. Finn heard its jaws snap, and could almost hear the
gulp which disposed of each morsel. The sight and the sound gave an
edge to the Wolfhound's already keen appetite, and, almost
unconsciously, he drew nearer and yet nearer to the gunyah,
crouching low to the ground as he moved, his hind-quarters gathered
under him ready for springing, like a huge cat.
There was no suggestion of circuses, or cages, or cruelty about the
picture Finn saw; but his recent experiences had been far too
severe to admit of anything like the old simple trustfulness in his
attitude. That could never be again. Even hunger would never make
this Wolfhound trustful again. But for all that, there was
something in the picture of the camp-fire and the pair who sat
beside it which drew Finn strongly; tugging somehow at his
heart-strings; pulling at him strongly, softly; drawing him, as by
silken cords of instinct and immemorial association. So far as his own
life in the world went, this was the first camp-fire Finn had ever
seen. One could not say exactly how or why it should have been so,
but it is a fact that, while crouching Finn gazed upon and crept
closer to that camp-fire, his mind was full of affectionate
thoughts and memories of the Master, and of the old days of their
happy companionship. Up till this evening he had not thought of the
Master for many days.
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