A LONE BACHELOR
If Finn had deliberately thought out a bad way of beginning his
life as one of the wild folk, who have no concern at all with
humans, he could have devised nothing much worse, or more
disadvantageous to himself, than the indulgence of his wild burst
of Berserker-like fury, after being driven out of the clear patch.
And of this he was made aware when he set forth the next morning in
quest of a breakfast. Every one of his hunting trails in the
neighbourhood of the encampment he ranged with growing thoroughness
and care, without finding so much as a mouse with which to satisfy
his appetite. Even Koala and Echidna were nowhere to be found. It
was as though a blight had descended upon the countryside, and the
only living thing Finn saw that morning, besides the crows, was a
laughing jackass on the stump of a blasted stringy-bark tree, who
jeered at him hoarsely as he passed. Disconsolate and rather sore,
as the result of his frenzied exertions of the night, Finn curled
himself up in the sandy bed of a little gully and slept again,
without food. The many small scavengers of the bush had already
made away with the remains of the different creatures he had slain
during his madness.
Finn did not know it, but hundreds of small bright eyes had watched
him as he ranged the trails that morning; and the most of these
eyes had in them the light of resentment, as well as fear. Finn had
been guilty of real crime according to the standards of the wild;
and, had he been a lesser creature, swift punishment would have
descended upon him. As it was, he was left to work out his own
punishment by finding that his hunting was ruined. These wild folk,
who were judging Finn now, tacitly admitted the right of all
flesh-eating creatures to kill for food. But wilful slaughter,
particularly when accompanied by all the evidences of reckless
fury, was a crime not readily to be forgiven, for it struck at the
very roots of the wild folk's social system. It was not merely a
cruel affliction for those needlessly slain, and their relatives
(some of whom depended for life upon their exertions); but it was
an affliction for all the rest, in that it spoiled hunting for the
carnivorous, rendered feeding extremely difficult for the
non-carnivorous, and generally upset the ordered balance of things
which made life worth living for the wild people of that range. It
was as disturbing to them, and more lastingly so, by reason of the
comparative slenderness of their resources, as the passage through
a town of an armed giant, who was also a thief and a murderer,
would be to humans. Finn had been feared and respected in that
corner of the Tinnaburra; while, by some of the wild folk who, from
one cause or another, were able to afford the indulgence in such an
emotion, he had been admired. He was now feared and hated.
Now the hatred of some thousands of living creatures, even though
they may all of them be lesser creatures than oneself, is a
fearsome thing. Just as the wild people's methods of direct
communication are more limited than ours, so their indirect methods
are more perfect, more impressive, and swifter than ours. A
drawing-room full of men and women have before now shown themselves
tolerably capable in the matter of conveying a sense of their
dislike for some one person. But humans waste a lot of their
telepathic power in speech, and their most offensive method of
conveying unspoken hatred to its object and making him feel an
outcast, is as nothing by comparison with the wild folk's
achievements in this direction. If you have ever studied the life
of a kennel of hounds, for example, when the pack has made up its
corporate mind that one of its members is for some reason unworthy
of its traditions, you will remember what a masterly exposition you
saw of the art of freezing out. The offending animal, unless
removed in time, will positively wilt away and die under the
withering blast of unspoken hatred and scorn with which it is
encompassed. And hounds, from their long intercourse with talkative
humans, have lost half their skill in this respect. The wild
kindred have a way of making hatred tangible, perceptible in the
air, and in inanimate nature. They can almost bewitch the flesh
from off the hated creature's bones without ever looking at him, if
a sufficient number of them are in agreement in their hating.
When Finn rose from his day sleep it was to realization of the
uncomfortable fact that he was stark empty of food. (His first
ejection from the camp on the previous evening had occurred before
the evening kill, and, after the second ejection, Finn had been too
furious to think of eating.) The next thing he realized--and this
was before he had walked many hundred yards through the falling
light of late afternoon--was the solid atmosphere of hatred which
surrounded him in his own range of bush. He did not get the full
sting of it at first--that bit into him gradually during the night
but he was aware of its existence almost at once. And he found it
singularly daunting. True, he was the undisputed lord of that
range. No creature lived there that could think of meeting him in
single combat. But the concentrated and silent hatred of the entire
populace was none the less a thing to chill the heart even of a
giant Irish Wolfhound.
The silence of the ghostly bush, in that brief half-light which
preceded darkness, spoke loudly and eloquently of this hatred and
resentment. The empty run-ways of the little grass-eating animals
were full of it. The still trees thrust it upon Finn as he threaded
in and out among their hoary trunks. The sightless scrub glared
hatred at him till the skin twitched over his shoulders, and he
took to flinging swift glances to left and right as he
walked--glances but little in keeping with his character as hunter,
and more suggestive of the conduct of the lesser hunted peoples. When
a long streamer of hanging bark rustled suddenly behind Finn, he
wheeled upon it with a snarl; and the humiliation of his discovery
of what had startled him partook of the nature of fear, when his
gaze met the coldly glittering eyes of a bush-cat (whose body he
could not discern in that dim light) that glared down at him from
twenty feet above his head.
It was with a sense of genuine humility, and something like
gratitude, that Finn met Koala a few minutes later, passing
hurriedly--for him--between the trunks of the two trees in which he
made his home at that time. Koala stopped at once when Finn faced
him--not from any desire for conversation, but from fear to
move--and waved his queer little hands in an apparent ecstasy of
grief and perturbation, while protesting, as usual, what a lamentably
poor and wholly inoffensive person he was, and what a tragic and
dastardly act it would be if any one should hurt him. Finn
whispered through his nose a most friendly assurance that he had
too much respect and affection for Koala to think of harming him,
and the little bear sat up on his haunches to acknowledge this
condescension, tearfully, while reiterating the time-honoured
assertion that there was no more inoffensive or helpless creature
living than himself. With a view to establishing more confidence
Finn lay down on his chest, with fore-legs outstretched, and began
to pump Koala regarding the chilling attitude of all the people of
that range towards himself. In his own dolorous fashion Koala
succeeded in conveying to Finn what the Wolfhound already knew
quite well in his heart of hearts, that the attitude he complained
of was simply the penalty of his running amuck on the previous
night. Finn gathered that the native-born wild people would never
forgive him or relax their attitude of silently watchful hatred;
but that there were some rabbits who were feeding in the open a
little farther on, in the neighbourhood of the clear patch.
Finn thanked Koala for his information, with a little forward
movement of the muzzle, and walked off in a rather cheerless mood,
while the bear wrung his little hands and moaned, preparatory to
ascending the trunk of the giant red-gum upon whose younger leaves
he meant to sup before retiring for the night in one of its hollow
limbs. It was not for any pleasure in hunting, but because he was
very empty, that Finn proceeded in the direction indicated by the
bear. He had already developed the Australian taste in the matter
of rabbits, and regarded their flesh with the sort of cold
disfavour which humans reserve for cold mutton on its second
appearance at table. Still, he was hungry now, and when he had
stalked and killed the fattest of the bunch of rabbits he found
furtively grazing a quarter of a mile from the clear patch, he
carried it well away into the bush and devoured it steadily, from
the hind-quarters to the head, after the fashion of his kind, who
always begin at the tail-end of their meals. It was noticeable, by
the way, that Finn approached the neighbourhood of the clear patch
with reluctance, and got right away from it as quickly as possible.
During a good part of that night Finn strolled about the familiar
tract of bush, which he had ranged now for many weeks, observing
and taking note of all the many signs which, though plain reading
enough for him, would have been quite illegible to the average man.
And he decided that what he saw was not good, that it boded ill for
his future comfort and well-being. The simple fact was that he had
outraged all the proprieties of the wild in that quarter, and was
being severely ostracised in consequence. The lesser creatures were
still sharper of scent and hearing than he was, and their senses
all made more acute by their fear and indignation, they succeeded
in keeping absolutely out of the Wolfhound's sight. It was
shortly after midnight when a crow and a flying-fox saw Finn curl
down to sleep in his sandy gully, and, by making use of the curious
system of animal telepathy, of which even such ingenious humans as
Mr. Marconi know nothing, they soon had the news spread all over
the range. The lesser marsupials and other groundlings were glad to
have this intelligence, and the approach of dawn found them all
busily feeding, watchful only with regard to the ordinary enemies
among their own kind, the small carnivorous animals and the snake
people. Indeed, they fed so busily that a pair of wedge-tailed
eagles who descended among them with the first dim approach of the
new day, obtained fat breakfasts almost without looking for them, a
fact which, unreasonably enough, earned new hatred for Finn among
the circle upon which the eagles swooped.
"If that great brute had not obliged us to feed so hurriedly,
_this_ wouldn't have happened!" a mother bandicoot thought, as she
gazed out tremulously from her den under a rotten log upon the
specks of hair and blood which marked the spot where, a few moments
before, that fine strapping young fellow, her only son, had been
busily chewing grubs.
For another three days Finn continued in his old hunting-ground,
and during the whole of that time he had to content himself with a
diet consisting exclusively of rabbit meat. Indeed, during the last
couple of days he found that even the despised rabbit required a
good deal of careful stalking, so deeply had the fear and hatred of
the Wolfhound penetrated into the minds and hearts of that
particular wild community. If it had not been for the rabbits'
incorrigible habit of forgetting caution during the hours of
twilight and daybreak, Finn might have gone hungry altogether.
Apart from their hatred and resentment, the wild people of that
range felt that the giant's madness might return to him at any
moment, and that for this reason alone it would be unsafe to permit
of any relaxation in their attitude towards him.
On the fourth evening, with a rather sad heart, Finn turned his
back on the familiar trails, and hunted west and by south from the
little gully in which he slept, heading toward the back ranges and
the stony foot of Mount Desolation, that is. For a mile or more,
even in this direction, he found that his evil fame preceded him,
and no good hunting came his way. But presently a flanking movement
to the eastward was rewarded by a glimpse of a fat wallaby-hare,
which Finn stalked with the most exquisite patience, till he was
able to spring upon it with a snap of his great jaws that gave
instantaneous and everlasting sleep. Finn carried this fat kill
back to his den, and feasted right royally that night for the first
time since he was expelled from the purlieus of the gunyah and the
easy-going old life. These few days had changed the Wolfhound a
good deal. He walked the trails now with far less of gracious pride
and dignity, and more of eager, watchful stealth than he had been
wont to use. He walked more silently, he stalked more carefully,
and sprang more swiftly, and bit more fiercely. He was no longer
the amateur of the wild life, but an actual part of it, and subject
to all its laws and customs.
Thus it was that, in the afternoon of the day following that of his
first hunt outside his own range, he leaped in a single instant
from full sleep to fullest wakefulness in response to the sound of
a tiny twig rolling down the side of his little gully. There,
facing him from the western lip of the gully, with a rather eager,
curious, inviting sort of look upon her intelligent face, stood a
fine, upstanding, red-brown female dingo, or warrigal. The stranger
stood fully twenty-three inches high at the shoulder, and was
unusually long in the body for such a height--thirteen inches less
than Finn's shoulder height it is true, but yet about the same
measurement as a big foxhound and of greater proportionate length.
Her ruddy brown tail was bushy and handsome, and at this moment she
was carrying it high and flirtatiously curled. Also, she wagged it
encouragingly when Finn's eyes met her own, which were of a pale
greenish hue. Her hind feet were planted well apart; she stood
almost as a show cob stands, her tail twitching slightly, and her
nostrils contracting and expanding in eloquent inquiry. She had
heard of Finn some time since, this belle of the back ranges, but
it was only on that day, when Nature recommended her to find a
mate, that she had thought of coming in quest of the great
Wolfhound. Now she eyed him, from her vantage-point, fearlessly,
and with invitation in every line of her lissom form.
Finn sniffed hard, and began a conciliatory whine which terminated
in a friendly bark, as he scrambled up the gully side, his own
thirty-inch tail waving high above the level of his haunches.
Warrigal fled--for ten paces, wheeling round then, in kittenish
fashion, and stooping till her muzzle touched the ground between
her fore feet. But no sooner had Finn's nose touched hers than the
wild coquette was off again, and this time a little farther into
the bush. To and fro and back and forth the shining bushy-coated
dingo played the great Wolfhound with even more of coquettishness
than is ever displayed in human circles; and twilight had darkened
into night when, at length, she yielded herself utterly to his
masterful charms, and nominally surrendered to the suit she had
actually won. As is always the case with the wild folk, the
courtship was fiery and brief, but one would not say that it was
the less passionately earnest for that; and, at the time, Warrigal
seemed to Finn the most gloriously handsome and eminently desirable
of all her sex.
When their relations had grown temperately fond and familiar they
took to the western trail together, and presently Warrigal
"pointed" a big bandicoot for Finn, and Finn, delighted to exhibit
his prowess, stalked and slew the creature with a good deal of
style. Then the two fed together, Finn politely yielding the
hind-quarters to his inamorata. And then they lay and licked and
nosed, and chatted amicably for an hour. After this, Warrigal rose and
stretched her handsome figure to its full length--there was not a
white hair about her, nor any other trace of cross-breeding--her
nose pointing west and by south a little, for the back ranges,
whence she came. When she trotted sedately off in that direction
Finn followed her as a matter of course, though he had never been
this way before. There were no longer any ties which bound him to
his old hunting-ground. It was not in nature to spare a thought for
lugubrious Koala or prickly Echidna, when Warrigal waved her bushy
tail and trotted on before. Finn had never before been appealed to
by the scent of any of the wild people, but there was a subtle
atmosphere about Warrigal's thick red-brown coat which drew him to
her strongly.
[Illustration]