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.
[Illustration]