THE OUTCAST
For nine consecutive days and nights Finn continued to regard the
empty gunyah in the clear patch as his home, to eat there, and to
rest there, beside the ashes of the fire, or in the shadow of the
shanty itself. And still Jess and her man came not, and the
Wolfhound was left in solitary possession. Once, when the heat of
the day was past, Finn trotted down the trail to the township, and
peered long and earnestly through the dog-leg fence in the
direction of the "First Nugget." But he saw no trace of Jess or her
man; and, for his part, he was glad to get back to the clear patch
again, and to take his ease beside the gunyah.
He had recently struck up a more than bowing acquaintance with the
koala that he had once dragged through a quarter of a mile of scrub
to the gunyah, and was now in the habit of meeting this quaint
little bear nearly every day. For his part, Koala never presumed to
make the slightest advance in Finn's direction, but he had come to
realize that the great Wolfhound wished him no harm, and, though
his conversation seldom went beyond plaintive complainings and
lugubrious assertions of his own complete in offensiveness, Finn
liked to sit near the little beast occasionally, and watch his
fubsy antics and listen to his plaint. Koala was rather like the
Mad Hatter that Alice met in Wonderland; he was "a very poor man,"
by his way of it; and, though in reality rather a contented
creature, seemed generally to be upon the extreme verge of shedding
tears.
Another of the wild folk that Finn met for the first time in his
life during these nine days, and continued to meet on a friendly
footing, was a large native porcupine, or echidna. Finn was
sniffing one afternoon at what he took to be the opening to a
rabbit's burrow, when, greatly to his surprise, Echidna showed up,
some three or four yards away, from one of the exits of the same
earth. The creature's shock of fretful quills was not inviting, and
Finn discovered no inclination to risk touching it with his nose;
but, having jumped forward in such a way as to shut Echidna off
from his home, they were left perforce face to face for a few
moments. During those moments, Finn decided that he had no wish to
slay the ant-eating porcupine, and Echidna, for his part, made up
his exceedingly rudimentary little mind that Finn was a fairly
harmless person. So they sat up looking at one another, and Finn
marvelled that the world should contain so curious a creature as
his new acquaintance; while Echidna doubtless wondered, in his
primitive, prickly fashion, how much larger dogs were likely to
grow in that part of the country. Then the flying tail of a
bandicoot caught Finn's attention, and the passing that way of an
unusually fat bull-dog ant drew Echidna from reflection to
business, and the oddly ill-matched couple parted after their first
meeting. After this, they frequently exchanged civil greeting when
their paths happened to cross in the bush.
But, unlike the large majority of Australia's wild folk, Finn was
exclusively a carnivorous animal, and this fact rather placed him
out of court in the matter of striking up acquaintances in the
bush, since meetings with the Wolfhound were apt, as a general
thing, to end in that very close form of intimacy which involves
the complete absorption of the lesser personality into the greater,
not merely figuratively, but physically. Finn might, and frequently
did, ask a stray bandicoot, or rabbit, or kangaroo-rat to dinner;
but by the time the meal was ended, the guest was no more; and so
the acquaintance could never be pursued further. Finn would have
been delighted, really, to make friends with creatures like the
bandicoot people, and to enjoy their society at intervals--when he
was well fed. But the bandicoots and their kind could never forget
that they were, after all, food in the Wolfhound's eyes, and it was
not possible to know for certain exactly when his appetite was
likely to rise within him and claim attention--and bandicoots.
Therefore, full or empty, hunting or lounging, Finn was a scourge
and an enemy in the eyes of these small folk, and, as such, a
person to be avoided at all cost, and at all seasons.
[Illustration: Spurring his horse forward.]
The hunting in the neighbourhood of the gunyah was still amply
sufficient for Finn's needs; and, as he continually expected the
return of Bill and Jess, he did not forage very far from the clear
patch. He generally dozed and rested beside the humpy during the
afternoon, preparatory to hunting in the dusk for the kill that
represented his night meal. It was on the evening of his tenth day
of solitude, and rather later than his usual hour for the evening
prowl, that Finn woke with a start in his place beside the gunyah
to hear the sound of horse's feet entering the clear patch from the
direction of the station homestead. There was no sign of Jess that
nose or eye or ear could detect, but Finn told himself as he moved
away from the gunyah that this was doubtless Bill, and that Jess
would be likely to follow. As his custom was, where Bill was
concerned, Finn took up his stand about five-and-twenty paces from
the humpy, prepared gravely to observe the boundary-rider's evening
tasks: the fire-lighting, and so forth. As the new-comer began to
dismount, or rather, as he began to think of dismounting, he caught
a dim glimpse of Finn's figure through the growing darkness. It was
only a dim glimpse the man caught, and he took Finn for a dingo,
made wondrous large in appearance, somehow, by the darkness. He was
both astonished and exceedingly indignant that a dingo should have
the brazen impudence to stand and stare at him, within thirty yards
of camp, too. In his hand he carried a stock-whip, with its
fifteen-foot fall neatly coiled about its taper end. Swinging this
by the head of its fall, he flung it with all his might at Finn, at
the same time rising erect in the saddle and spurring his horse
forward at the gallop to ride the supposed dingo down.
"G-r-r-r, you thieving swine! I'll teach ye!"
The voice was strange to Finn, and very hoarse and harsh. The
Wolfhound cantered lightly off, and the rider followed him right
into the scrub before wheeling his horse and turning back toward
the camp. Before he moved Finn gave one snarling growl; and the
reason of that was that the heavy butt-end of the stock-whip handle
had caught him fairly in the ribs and almost taken his breath away.
From the shelter of the bush, Finn peered for a long while at the
camp from which he had been driven; and as he peered his mind held
a tumult of conflicting emotions. He saw the man gather twigs and
light a fire, just as Bill had been wont to do. But he knew now
that the man was not Bill. He heard the man growling and swearing
to himself, just as a creature of the wild does sometimes over its
meals. As a matter of fact, this particular man had been removed
from a post that he liked and sent to this place, because Bill had
left the district; and he was irritable and annoyed about it.
Otherwise he probably would not have been so savage in driving Finn
off. But the Wolfhound had no means of knowing these things.
All his life long, up till the time of his separation from the
Master, Finn had been treated with uniform kindness and
consideration, save during one very brief interval in Sussex. Then,
for months, he had been treated with what seemed to him utterly
purposeless and reasonless cruelty and ferocity. From that
long-drawn-out martyrdom had sprung his deep-rooted mistrust of man.
But it had been reserved for Wallaby Bill's successor to implant in
Finn's mind the true spirit of the wild creature, by the simple
process of driving him forth from the neighbourhood of
civilization--such as it was--into the bush. Finn had been cruelly
beaten; he had been tortured in the past. He had never until this
evening been driven away from the haunts of men.
The writer of these lines remembers having once been driven
himself, under a shower of sticks and stones, from a village of
mountain-bred Moors who saw through his disguise. This being
driven, hunted, shooed out into the open with blows and curses and
scornful maledictions, is a singularly cowing sensation, at once
humiliating and embittering. It is unlike any other kind of hostile
treatment. It affected Finn more deeply and powerfully than any
punishment could have affected him. Though infinitely less painful
and terrible than the sort of interviews he had had with the
Professor in his circus prison, it yet bit deeper into his soul, in
a way; it produced an impression at least equally profound. He
desired none of man's society, and during all the time that he had
regarded the camp in that clearing as his home, he had never sought
anything at man's hands, nor approached man more nearly than a
distance of a dozen paces or so. But now he was savagely given to
understand that even the neighbourhood of the camp was no place for
him; that it was forbidden ground for him. He was driven out into
the wild with contumely, and with the contemptuous sting of the
blow of something flung at him. It was no longer a case of man
courting him, while he carefully maintained an attitude of reserve
and kept his distance. Man had set the distance, and definitely
pronounced him an alien; driven him off. Man was actively hostile
to him, would fling something at him on sight. Man declared war on
him, and drove him out into the wild. Well, and what of the wild?
The wild yielded him unlimited food and unlimited interest. The
wild was clean and free; it hampered him in no way; it had offered
no sort of hostile demonstration against him. Nay, in a sense, the
wild had paid court to him, shown him great deference, bowed down
before him, and granted him instant lordship. (If Finn thought at
all just now of the snake people, it was of the large non-venomous
kind, of which he had slain several.) Altogether, it was with a
curiously disturbed and divided mind, in which bitterness and
resentment were uppermost, that the Wolfhound gazed now at the man
sitting in the firelight by Bill's gunyah. And then, while he
gazed, there rose up in him kindly thoughts and feelings regarding
Jess, when she had played with him beside that fire; regarding
Bill, when he had talked at Finn in his own friendly admiring way,
and tossed the Wolfhound food, food which Finn had always eaten
with an appearance of zest and gratitude (even when not in the
least need of food) from an instinctive sense of _noblesse oblige_,
and of the courtesy which came to him with the blood of a long line
of kingly ancestors. Vague thoughts, too, of the Master drifted
through Finn's mind as he watched the stranger at his supper; and,
somehow, the circle of firelit grass attracted. Forgiveness came
natural to the Wolfhound and, for the moment, he forgot the
humiliation and the bitterness of being driven out as a creature of
the wild, having no right to trespass upon the human environment.
Slowly, not with any particular caution, but with stately, gracious
step, Finn moved forward toward the firelight, intending to take up
his old resting-place, perhaps a score of paces from the fire. No
sooner had Finn entered the outermost ring of dim firelight than
the man looked up and saw, not the whole of him, but the light
flickering on his legs.
"Well, I'll be teetotally damned if that ain't the limit!" gasped
the man, as he sprang to his feet. He snatched a three-foot length
of burning sapling from the fire and, rushing forward, flung it so
truly after the retreating Wolfhound that it fell athwart his neck,
singeing his coat and enveloping him from nose to tail in a cloud
of glowing sparks. A stone followed the burning wood, and the man
himself, shouting and cursing, followed the stone. But he had no
need to run. The flying sparks, the smell of burned hair, the
horrible suggestion of the red-hot iron bar--these were amply
sufficient for Finn, without the added humiliation of the stone,
and the curses, and the man's loud, blundering footfalls. The
Wolfhound broke into a gallop, shocked, amazed, alarmed, and beyond
words embittered. He snarled as he ran, and he ran till the camp
was a mile behind him, beyond scent and hearing.
There was no mistaking this for anything but what it was. This was
being driven out of the human world into the world of the wild with
a vengeance. The burning sapling made a most profound impression
upon Finn, and roused bitter hostility and resentment in him. The
stock-whip and the stone were as nothing beside this thing--this
fire that had been flung at him. From time immemorial men have
frightened and chased wolves from their chosen neighbourhood with
burning faggots. The thing is being done to-day in the world's far
places; it was being done thousands of years before our era began.
Finn had never before experienced it, and yet, in some vague way,
it seemed he had known of such a thing. His ancestors for fifteen
hundred years had been the admired companions and champions of the
leaders among men. But a thousand years before that--who knows? Our
domestic pet dogs of to-day adhere still to a few of the practices
(having no bearing upon their present lives) of their forbears of
many, many centuries back. Certain it is that nothing else in his
life had been quite so full of hostile significance for Finn as
this fact of his having been driven out from the camp in the clear
patch with a faggot of burning wood. This was man's message to him;
thus, then, he was sent to his place, and his place was the wild.
Well!
The wild folk of that particular section of the Tinnaburra country,
though they live to be older than the most aged cockatoo in all
Australia, will never, never forget the strange happenings of that
night, which they will always remember as the night of the madness
of the Giant Wolf--only they thought of him as the Giant Dingo. For
four mortal hours the Irish Wolfhound, who had been driven out from
the haunts of men, raged furiously up and down a five-mile belt of
Tinnaburra country, slaying and maiming wantonly, and implanting
desperate fear in the hearts of every living thing in that
countryside.
Once, in the farthest of his gallops, he reached the fringe of the
wild, rocky hill country which lies behind this belt; and there, as
luck would have it, he met in full flight one of the two dingoes
that had escaped him on the day of the attack upon wounded Jess. It
was an evil chance for that dingo. A fanged whirlwind smote him,
and rended him limb from limb before he realized that the
devastating thing had come, scattering his vital parts among the
scrub and tearing wildly at his mangled remains. A mother kangaroo
was surprised by the ghostly grey fury, at some distance from the
rest of her small mob, and, though she fought with the fury of ten
males of her species (bitterly conscious of the young thing glued
to the teat in her pouch), she was left a torn and trampled mass of
scarcely recognizable fur and flesh, crushed among scrub-roots.
Lesser creatures succumbed under the blinding stabs of Finn's feet;
and once he leaped, like a cat, clear into the lower branches of a
bastard oak tree, and pinned a 'possum into instant death before
swinging back to earth on the limb's far side. He killed that night
from fury, and not to eat; and when he laid him down to rest at
length, on the rocky edge of a gully fully four miles from the
camp, there was not a living thing in that district but felt the
terror of his presence, and cowered from sight or sound of his
flying feet and rending, blood-stained fangs. It was as the night
of an earthquake or a bush fire to the wild folk of that range; and
the cause and meaning of it all was that Finn, the Irish Wolfhound,
had been hunted out of the men-folk's world into the world of the
wild people.
[Illustration]