THE EXODUS
It was rather an odd thing, this fact that neither Finn or his mate
ever again entered the lair which had been such a happy home for
them since the day of their first meeting. But so it was, and one
is bound to assume, I think, that the reason of it was grief for
the loss of their children. In the early dawning of a blistering
hot day they paced slowly down the hill and into the rocky strip of
scrub which divided Mount Desolation from the bush itself.
Hereabouts it was that the rest of the pack lived; and, though Finn
and Warrigal conveyed no definite news of what had happened during
the night, the news must have spread somehow, because before the
sun had properly risen every single member of the pack had climbed
the spur and investigated for himself or herself the scattered
carrion which had been Tasman. Whether they looked into the den or
not, as well, I do not know; but I should say that some of the
adventurous youngsters did, while their elders and parents probably
refrained.
These same elders and parents were beginning to feel considerable
distress over the absence of rain, the scarcity of water, and the
poor results which attended their hunting. The wild folk of the
Australian bush are, upon the whole, less dependent upon water than
the animals of most countries, and such people as Koala, the native
bear, seem to get along quite happily without ever drinking
anything at all. Even kangaroos and wallabies can go for a long
while without drinking, but there is a limit to the endurance of
most of the bush animals in the matter of thirst, while, as for the
dingoes, they want their water every day as much as they need their
food. There was no longer any disguising the fact that a very large
number of the wild folk, in whom Finn and Warrigal and the rest of
the pack were interested, had recently migrated in quest of homes
that should be better supplied with water than the Tinnaburra or
the Mount Desolation range. It was not that the pack felt the
absence of these folk as companions, but as food. They were also
beginning to feel keenly the burnt-up dryness of that whole
countryside and the extreme heat of the season.
Even Finn's prowess as a hunter and a killer was of no avail in the
absence of game to hunt, and during the few days which he and
Warrigal spent among the scrub at the mountain's foot, after
leaving their den, the Wolfhound sometimes travelled from thirty to
forty miles without a single kill, being reduced then, like the
rest of the pack, to eat rabbit flesh, and mice, and grubs.
Already some of the younger members of the pack had begun to prey
upon the flocks of squatters in the Tinnaburra, and this had
brought speedy retribution in the shape of one young female of
their kindred shot through the head, and two promising males
trapped and slain, so that the pack now consisted of no more than
fourteen adults and six whelps, who were hardly capable as yet of
fending for themselves. Men with guns had actually been seen within
a mile of Mount Desolation itself; and, owing to the attacks upon
their bark of half-starved small fry, the trees of the bush were
dying by hundreds, and thereby opening up in the most uncomfortable
manner ranges which had previously been excellent hunting-grounds.
The report about the men-folk with guns was most disturbing to
Finn, and he was conscious, in sitting down, of a degree of
boniness about his haunches such as he had never known since the
horrible period of his captivity in the circus. A Wolfhound whose
fighting weight is a hundred and fifty pounds requires a good deal
more food than a dingo, whose weight rarely exceeds half that
amount. Grubs and mice were not of much use to Finn; and when he
drank, his long tongue had been wont to scoop up more than twice
the amount of water which had served to satisfy any other member of
the pack.
The growing restlessness and discontent which had been mastering
the Mount Desolation pack for weeks now received an immense
addition, so far as Finn and Warrigal were concerned, in the events
which led them to forsake their den on the first spur. It
culminated, in Finn's eyes, in the actual passage through the scrub
beside the mountain's foot of a party of half a dozen mounted men
with guns and dogs. This occurred in the late afternoon of a
scorching hot day, when most of the pack were sleeping; and if the
dogs of the men-folk had not been incredibly stupid in the matter
of sticking closely to the trail, and making no attempt to range
the scrub on either side of it, the dingoes would actually have
been hunted like hares, and some of them, no doubt, would have
been killed. As it was, Finn felt as strongly, and perhaps more
strongly than any of the elders of the pack, that this event had
rendered the range finally uninhabitable. His nostrils twitched and
wrinkled for hours after the men had gone; and, as soon as darkness
fell, he rose in a determined manner, thrust his muzzle meaningly
against Warrigal's neck and took to the open trail. With
extraordinary unanimity the other members of the pack began to
gather behind Finn. It seemed to be clearly understood that this
was no ordinary hunting expedition, and the two mothers of the
pack, with their half-grown whelps, whined plaintively as they
gathered their small families about them for journeying. The
whelps, always eager for a new move of any kind, gambolled joyously
around their parents, but the mothers snarled at them, bidding them
go soberly, lest weariness and worse should overtake them before
their time.
One very old dog, who had always looked with grudging sullenness
upon the great Wolfhound and his doings, refused point-blank to be
a party to the exodus, and croakingly warned the others against
following a new-comer and an outlier such as Finn. He gave them to
understand that he had been born in the shadow of Mount Desolation,
like his sire and dam before him, and that he would live alone
rather than forsake that range at the bidding of a great grey
foreigner. The pack paid little heed to the old dingo, and he sat
erect on his haunches beside the trail, watching them file along
the flank of the mountain. When they were nearly a mile away, the
old dingo began to howl dismally; and when Finn made his first
kill, seven miles to the north-west of Mount Desolation, old
Tufter--he had a sort of mop at the end of a rather scraggy
tail--was on hand, and yowling eagerly for scraps. The kill was a
half-starved brush-tailed wallaby, and nobody got much out of it but
Warrigal and Finn, both of whom growled fiercely while they ate, in
a manner which said plainly that they were not entertaining that
night, at all events before the edge had been taken off their own
appetites. So old Tufter got nothing more nutritious than a few
scraps of scrubby fur.
The poor old fellow took great pains to communicate his own
discomfort and mistrust to all the other members of the pack,
except Finn and Warrigal, whom he ignored, and pointed out with
vehemence that they were heading in the wrong direction. He was
right in a way, for they certainly were leaving the better country
behind them, in travelling to the north-west. South and east of
Mount Desolation lay the fatter and comparatively well-watered
lands. Even Finn knew this, of course; but that way also lay the
habitations of men, and the Wolfhound's face was set firmly away
from men and all their works. Men had tortured him in a cage, the
memory of which their hot irons had burned right into his very
soul. And, after that, men, in the person of a certain sulky
boundary-rider, had driven him out from their neighbourhood with
burning faggots, with curses, and with execrations. All this had
been brought vaguely to Finn's mind by the passage through the
scrub that day of horses and men, and the north-west trail was the
only possible trail for him because of that.
From this point on, the pack moved slowly in scattered formation,
each individual member hunting as he went along, with nose to earth
and eyes a-glitter for possible prey of any kind, from a grub to an
old-man kangaroo. Towards morning, when they were a good thirty
miles distant from Mount Desolation, they topped a ridge, upon the
farther slope of which a small mob of nine kangaroos were browsing
among the scrub. Finn was after them like a shot, and Warrigal was
at his heels, the rest of the pack streaming behind in a ragged
line, the tail of which was formed by old Tufter and the whelps.
There was a stiff chase of between three and four miles, and only
five dingoes were within sight when Finn pinned the rearmost
kangaroo by the neck, and Warrigal darted in cautiously upon one of
its flanks. In an attack of this kind two things about Finn made
his onslaught most deadly: his great weight, and the length and
power of his massive jaws.
Even Tufter got a good meal from this kill, for the kangaroo was a
big fellow of well over five feet from nose to haunch, without
mention of his huge muscular tail, the meaty root of which kept the
whelps busy for hours afterwards. The whole pack fed full, and in
the neighbourhood of that range they scattered and slept; for in
the gully on the other side of it there was a little muddy water,
and round about there was pleasant cover which had sheltered the
kangaroos for a week or more. Old Tufter forbore to growl, and the
young members of the pack were enthusiastic regarding the
advantages of migration in the trail of such a hunter as Finn. They
did not know that, in a leisurely way, the mob of kangaroos they
had flushed were also migrating, as the result of drought--but in
the opposite direction to that chosen by Finn, who was heading now
towards the part of the country which the kangaroos had forsaken as
being burned and eaten bare, and devoid even of such food as bark.
When the dingoes had finished with the little chain of small pools
in the gully on the afternoon of that day, there was little left
but mud; one might have called it a creek bed, but it certainly was
no longer a creek. However, that night's travel brought fairly good
hunting, and always among game moving in the opposite direction to
that taken by the pack. Finn and Warrigal and Black-tip shared a
wallaby between them, and spared some portions of it for the
whelps; though Warrigal snarled angrily when the young things came
near her; the memory of her own family being still fresh within
her. And the rest of the pack fared quite tolerably well, sharing
between them a kangaroo-rat, two bandicoots, a wallaby-hare, and
quite a considerable number of marsupial mice, besides about half
of a big carpet-snake which Finn killed.
For a week now the little pack travelled on in a north-westerly
direction, and every day old Tufter growled a little more bitterly
and with a little better cause. Game was certainly becoming
lamentably scarce, and the country traversed was one which did not
at all commend itself to dingoes, being arid, shadeless, and dry as
a bleached bone. It was the sort of country which, in Australia, is
frequently covered by beautiful flowers and scrub during the
winter, though perfectly bare in the summer. But the winter which
had preceded this summer had been too dry to bring any growth here,
so that it had not even the remains of a previous season's
vegetation, and offered no trace of cover. A long and most
exhausting chase did enable Finn to pull down a solitary emu, and
of this the pack left nothing but beak and feathers when they
passed on, still hungry, in quest of other game.
But for all the shortness of food, which was thinning the flesh
over Finn's haunches now, it was another cause which led him to
swerve from the north-westerly course in a south-westerly
direction. He paid no particular heed to old Tufter's continuous
growls about the direction taken by the pack under his leadership;
but what he was forced to notice was the fact that for two whole
days no water had been seen, and the lolling tongues of the young
whelps were in consequence so swollen that they could not close
their jaws. Throughout one weary night, the pack loped along in
dogged silence in a south-westerly direction, their eyes blazing in
the keen look out for game; dry, dust-encrusted foam caked upon
their lips, and fierce anxiety in the heart of every one of them.
Then, in the brazen dawning of a day in which the sun seemed to
thrust out great heat upon the baked earth even before it appeared
above the horizon, the pack checked suddenly as Black-tip drew
Finn's attention to a pair of Native Companions seen in the act of
floating down to earth from the lower limbs of a shrivelled red-gum
tree. The bigger of these two great cranes had a stature of
something over five feet, and his fine blue-grey plumage covered an
amount of flesh which would have made a meal for quite a number of
dingoes. Yet it was not so much as food, but rather as a guide and
indication, that Black-tip regarded the cranes. He knew that they
would not be very far from water. The way in which the pack melted
into cover in the dim, misty light of the coming day was very
remarkable. For several miles now they had been travelling through
a country less arid than the plains they had traversed during the
previous two days, and now, while seeming to disappear into the
earth itself--even as Echidna actually could and would, though the
earth were baked hard--the members of the pack actually found cover
by slinking low amongst a sort of wiry scrub growth with which the
ground hereabouts was dotted.
It was thus that Finn saw for the first time the strange dance of
the Native Companion. To and fro, and up and down beneath their
scraggy gum-tree, the two great cranes footed it in a sort of
grotesque minuet. There was a strange sort of angularity about all
their movements, but, withal, a certain grace, bizarre and notable.
And while the Native Companions solemnly paced through what was
really a dance of death for them, Finn and Black-tip and Warrigal
stalked them as imperceptibly as shadows lengthen across a lawn in
evening time. The three hunters advanced through the scrub like
snakes moving in their sleep, and never a leaf or twig made comment
on their passage, as they slithered down the morning breeze, inch
by inch, apparently a part of the shadowy earth itself. The
prancing dance of the Native Companions--these birds mate for life
and are deeply and devotedly attached one to another--was drawing
to its close, when death came to them both like a bolt from the
heavens; such a death as one would have chosen for them, since it
left no time for fear or mourning, or grief at separation. Their
necks were torn in sunder before they realized that they had been
attacked, and within the minute their graceful feathered bodies
shared the same fate, as the rest of the pack joined Finn and
Warrigal and Black-tip. There was less of lordly generosity about
Finn's feeding upon this occasion than he had always shown before.
The great Wolfhound realized perhaps that his frame demanded more
of nutriment than was necessary for the support of a dingo, and he
ate with savage swiftness, growling angrily when any other muzzle
than Warrigal's approached his own too nearly.
Less than half an hour later the pack was scrambling and sliding
down the high banks of a river-bed, in the centre of which,
surrounded upon both sides by a quarter of a mile and more of
shingle and hard-baked mud, there was still a disconnected chain of
small, yellow pools of water. The water was of something like the
consistency of pea-soup, but no spring-fed mountain-rill ever
tasted sweeter or more grateful to a thirsty traveller than this
muddy fluid to the palates of the Mount Desolation pack. Finn chose
a good-sized pool, and Warrigal tackled it with him; but when two
youngsters of the pack ventured to approach the other side of that
pool, Warrigal snarled at them so fiercely, backed by a low,
gurgling growl from Finn, that the two slunk off, and tackled a
lesser pool by themselves.
[Illustration: Scrambling and sliding down the high banks of a
river-bed.]
Where the pack drank they rested. As yet their great thirst was
close to them, and the neighbourhood of water seemed too good to
leave. But, in such matters, the memory of the wild folk is apt to
be short. The banks of the river-bed ran due east and west here;
and, though the pack gave no thought to the question, it was a
matter of some importance to each one of them whether they should
eventually leave those banks to the northward or to the southward;
a matter of importance by reason of the difference in the country
to the northward and to the southward. But it was chance at last
that decided the question for them. They drank many times during
the day, and towards nightfall a small mob of kangaroos was sighted
to the northward, and that led the pack to head northward, a little
westerly, from the river-bank that night.
[Illustration]