THE TRAIL OF MAN
It was exactly a fortnight later when the pack turned despairingly
in its tracks, animated by a forlorn desire to reach again the high
ragged banks of that shingly river-bed, in which some trace of
moisture might be left still, where the muddy pools had been.
But in that fortnight much had happened, and the character and
constitution of the pack had undergone notable changes. The six
whelps had disappeared, old Tufter and the oldest of the mothers of
the pack were no more, and neither the carrion-crows nor the ants
had profited one atom by these deaths. The pack had not wittingly
hastened the end of these weaker ones, but it had left only their
bones behind upon the trail. And, now, when one or other of the
gaunt, dry-lipped survivors stumbled a dozen pairs of hungry eyes
glittered, a dozen pairs of lips were wrinkled backward from as
many sets of fangs, and consciousness of this had a sinister
meaning for the stumbler; a meaning which brought a savage snarl to
his throat as he regained his footing with quick, threatening looks
from side to side and hackles bristling.
The pack was starving. Many times during the past week the thought
of turning in his tracks and making back for the river-bed had come
to Finn, but he had pressed on, fearful of the arid stretch of
country which he had already placed between himself and that spot.
He had no means of knowing that he was in a country of vast and
waterless distances. But, acting without knowledge, Finn had turned
in his tracks at length, after a fortnight's travelling in which
food had been terribly scarce and water even more scarce. Such
liquid as they had found would never have been called water by
men-folk. Here and there had been a little liquid mud in old
water-holes and stream-beds, and in other places the pack had sucked
up moisture through hot sand, after burrowing with feet and nose to
a depth of as much as eighteen inches from the surface. Their food
had been almost entirely of the grub and insect kind, and Finn, for
the first time in his life, had spent long hours in trying to ease
the craving within him by gnawing at dry roots. The great Wolfhound
had more stamina than any of the dingoes; he had greater resources
within himself than they had, and was endowed, by Nature and
upbringing, with a superb constitution. But, as against that, he
needed far more food than was required by the others, and at a full
meal would have eaten twice as much as the biggest of them. Also,
he suffered, though his body was the stronger for it, for the fact
that he had never before known want.
In appearance, the members of the pack had suffered a wondrous
change in these two weeks. Even Warrigal's fine coat had lost every
trace of the gloss which had made it beautiful, and the iron-grey
hairs of Finn's dense, hard coat had taken on the character of dry
bristles, while his haunch-bones were two outstanding peaks, from
which his back fell away at an acute angle to the root of his tail,
where once a level pad of flesh had been. Now the tail seemed to
sprout from a kind of well in his body, and a bird might have
nested in the hollow between his shoulder-blades, which once had
been flat as the top of a table. His back, too, which had been
broad and flat, was like the ridge of a gunyah now, from one end of
which his neck rose gauntly, and appeared to be of prodigious
length. His ribs were plain to see on either side his hollow
barrel, and over them the loose skin rolled to and fro as he ran or
walked. The eyes of every member of the pack were deeply sunken and
ablaze with a dry light, half wistful and half fierce, and more
awe-inspiring than any form of full-fed rage could be. They ran in
open order now, and when one happened to run unusually close to
another, that other would snarl or growl, and, sometimes, even
snap, with bitter, furtive, half-fearful irritability.
To this rule there was one exception. Warrigal ran steadily in the
shadow cast by Finn's big, gaunt frame, her muzzle about level with
his elbow. Black-tip kept about the same level on Finn's other
side, but a good deal farther off, and the others straggled in
fan-shaped formation to the rear, scouting at times to one side or
the other in quest of insects and snakes, or any other living thing
that fangs could crush. As to digestion, the pack had no concern
regarding any such detail as this. Their one test of edibility was
swallowing. They even helped Finn to demolish a native porcupine,
than which one would have said no creature of a less edible sort
was ever created. Altogether, there was that about the survivors of
the Mount Desolation pack which would have made any single creature
sorry to cross their path, however powerful he might be. No animal
with flesh on its bones and blood in its veins would have been too
big or fierce for the pack to have attacked just now; for hunger
and thirst had made them quite desperate.
It was Black-tip, and not Finn, who, on the afternoon of the second
day of the pack's despairing return journey in quest of the
river-bank they had left a fortnight before, called a sudden halt.
(The dingo's sense of smell was always keener than the Wolfhound's.)
Black-tip sniffed hard and long at the ground between his fore-feet,
and then, raising his head, glared out into the afternoon sunlight
to the south-eastward of the track they were following--their own trail.
The whimper which escaped Black-tip when he began to sniff, brought the
rest of the pack about him, full of hungry eagerness to know what thing
it was that had been found. There was something uncanny and extraordinary
about the way in which they glanced one at another, after, as it were,
taking one sip of the scent which had brought Black-tip to a standstill.
Had the scent been of kangaroo or wallaby, rabbit, rat, or any other
thing that moves upon four legs, those curious glances would never have
been exchanged. The pack would have been off hot-foot upon the trail,
without pause for discussion. And there was the scent of a four-footed
creature here, too; but it was merged in, and subordinate to, the scent
over which most wild creatures cry a halt: the scent of man.
Now in ordinary circumstances the pack would not have hesitated a
moment over such a trail as this. They would have turned in their
tracks and made off in the opposite direction, or gone straight
ahead on their own trail and without reference to the man-trail,
save to get away from it as quickly as possible. But these were
very far from being ordinary circumstances. The pack was nearer to
starving than it had ever been before, and at such a time the rules
which ordinarily guide life are of precisely no account at all. The
man-trail was the trail of living flesh, of warm, animal life; it
was the trail of food. Also, there was merged in it the trail of a
dog; and as each member of the pack acquired that fact, his lips
wrinkled backward and a little moisture found its way into his dry
mouth.
The pack desired food and drink so urgently that everything else in
the world became insignificant by comparison with food and drink in
their minds. The hatred and fear of man, as man, was blotted out of
sight by the craving for animal food in any shape whatsoever. Here
was a living trail, in the midst of a dead, burnt-up land of
starvation and emptiness. What Finn's thoughts on the subject may
have been I cannot say. But, of course, he had connected men with
food all his life long. And now he was starving. I do not think
Finn's thoughts could have been quite the same as those of the rest
of the pack; but they moved him in the same direction none the
less, and, without the smallest hesitation, the pack streamed after
him when he took up a new trail, and loped off to the south-east,
turning away diagonally from the old track.
As the new trail became fresher and warmer, the leader was
conscious of the warring within him of various conflicting feelings
and desires. In appearance Finn was now a gigantic wolf, and one
mastered by the fierce passion of hunger, at that. Apart from
appearance, there actually was more of the wolf than the dog in him
now. He belonged very completely to the wild kindred, and, over and
above the wild folk's natural inborn fear and mistrust of men-folk,
there was in Finn a resentment against man; a bitter memory of
torture endured, and of the humiliation of having been driven out
into the wild. But Finn's sense of smell was nothing like so acute
as that of the dingoes. Even a setter or a pointer cannot compare
with the wild folk in this respect, and Wolfhounds have nothing
like the educated sense of smell of the setters, or the pointers,
or the foxhounds. Their hunting from time immemorial has been done
by sight, and strength, and fleetness, not by tracking. Finn was
not so keenly conscious as his companions that he was on the trail
of man. He knew it; but it was not in his nostrils the assertive
fact that it was, for instance, in the nostrils of Warrigal and
Black-tip. There was in the trail for him a warm animal scent which
gave promise of food; of food near at hand, in that pitiless waste
which the pack had been traversing for a fortnight and more. But
every now and again, possibly in places at which the makers of the
trail had paused, Finn would get a distinct whiff of the man scent,
and that disturbed him a good deal. He wanted no dealings of any
kind with man. But there was nothing else in him just then which
was quite so strong or peremptory as the craving for food and
drink; and so, with ears pricked, and hackles uneasily lifting, he
padded along at the true wolf gait, which devours distance without
much suggestion of fleetness.
When night fell the trail was very warm and fresh, and a quarter of
an hour later a light breeze brought news to the pack of a fire not
far ahead. This, again, brought pictures to Finn's mind of the
encampment from which he had been driven with burning faggots. He
smelled again the singeing of his own coat, and that gave him
recollection of his time of torture and captivity in the circus.
The pack advanced at a foot-pace now, and with the extreme of
caution. A few minutes more brought them within full view of a
camp-fire, beside which there were stretched, in attitudes eloquent
of both dejection and fatigue, two men and a dog; the latter a
large, gaunt fox-terrier. For the last ten miles of their trailing
the pack had been passing through country which supported a certain
amount of timber, and of the curious Australian scrub which seems
to be capable of existence--a pale, bloodless sort of life, but yet
existence--in the most arid kind of soil, and where no moisture can
be discovered. The men had lighted their fire beneath a twisted,
tortured-looking tree, in which there certainly was no life, for
every vestige of its bark had gone from it, and its limbs were
naked as the bones of any skeleton.
The pack drew in as closely as their cover in the scrub permitted,
and crouched, watching the camp-fire. Suddenly, a movement on the
part of one of them attracted the attention of the fox-terrier, and
he flew out into the scrub, barking furiously. The pack, in
crescent formation, retreated perhaps a dozen paces, saliva
trickling from their curling lips. The terrier plunged valiantly
forward, hopping the first low bushes, as a terrier will when
rabbiting or ratting. It was Black-tip who pinned him to the earth,
and Warrigal whose fangs next closed upon his body. But Finn
smashed the terrier's body in half; and, in an instant, the
snarling pack surged over the remains. By the time one of the men
had risen and moved forward towards the line of scrub, there
positively was not a hair of the dog uneaten. His collar lay there
on the ground, between two bushes. For the rest, every particle of
him, including bones, had been swallowed, and was in process of
digestion. From beginning to end the whole operation occupied less
than four minutes.
One of the men had not troubled to rise at all. The pack withdrew
to a safe distance while the other man rummaged about among the
bushes for the better part of a quarter of an hour. The pack,
meanwhile, were hidden among the trees a quarter of a mile away.
Then the man found the terrier's collar, and walked back to his
fire with it. He walked slowly and stiffly. When he announced to
his companion that there were dingoes about, and that they had
carried Jock off, the other man only grunted wearily, and turned
over on his side. So the first man threw some more wood on the
fire, and lowered himself slowly to the ground, moving painfully,
and stretching himself out for sleep.
During the night the pack scoured every inch of the scrub within a
radius of one mile from the camp of the two men; and for their
reward they obtained precisely nothing at all, beyond a few, a very
few, grubs and insects, the eating of which served to temper as
with fire the keen edge of their hunger. The hours immediately
preceding daylight found most of them sitting on their haunches, in
a scattered semicircular line, in the scrub, glaring through the
darkness at the two sleeping men, and their now expiring fire. I
should like to be able to say exactly what they looked for, what
they hoped for, in connection with the men; but that is not
possible. In addition to connecting men-folk with guns and traps,
and fear of an instinctive and indescribable kind, most of the pack
also connected men with food, with sheep, and other domesticated
animals which dingoes can eat. Finn, more than any of them,
connected men-folk with food. But, as against that, Finn also
connected them with torture and suffering, with hostility and
abuse. Finn sat farther from the camp-fire than any of the others.
To your truly carnivorous animal, like the dingo, all things that
live, and have flesh on their bones and blood in their veins, are a
form of food, food at its best, living food. Therefore, the two men
must have appealed to the pack as food. But, for their kind, man is
generally speaking forbidden food, and unobtainable; so long, at
all events, as he can maintain his queer, erect attitude. But men
have lain down in the bush to die before to-day, again and again;
and of these the dingoes, as well as the crows, have given a sure
account. Further, there is no other such reckless law-breaker as
hunger. Rules and the teaching of experience--even inherited
experience--are as nothing at all to hunger. Also, these two men
beside the dying fire were not erect. But they moved uneasily in
their sleep now and again. The man-life was clearly astir in them
still; and so even the nearest and most venturesome among the
dingoes sat a good hundred yards distant from the camp. And when
daylight came, and one of the men stirred on his elbow, and looked
up at the sky, the pack retreated slowly, backward through the
scrub, till more than double that distance separated them from the
living food at which they had been wistfully glaring. There was no
anger, no savagery, no vestige of cruelty in their minds and
hearts. Finn, it is true, cherished some soreness and resentment
where men were concerned; but even in his case this brought only
the desire to keep out of man's way; while the rest of the pack
felt only instinctive dread and fear of man. But now the feeling
which ruled the whole pack, the light which shone in their eyes,
the eagerness which brought moisture continually to their
half-uncovered fangs while they watched--this was simply physical
desire for food, simply hunger.
The man who had been the first to stir, rose slowly, and stretched
his arms as though his frame ached, as indeed it did, from a
variety of causes. When the first slanting rays of the new-risen
sun reached him, they shed their light upon a man on whom physical
hardship had laid its searing fingers heavily. His face had a ten
days' growth of hair upon it, and was gaunt and haggard, like the
rest of him. His clothes hung about him loosely, and were torn and
soiled and ragged. Under the bronze tan of sunburn on his face and
neck there was the sort of pallor which comes from lack of food; in
his eyes--deep sunk in dark-rimmed hollows--was a curious glitter
which was not at all unlike the glitter in the eyes of the wild
folk who had been watching him during the night. This glitter was
of eagerness and want; the expression was wistful, longing, and
full of a desire which had become a pain. It was the same
expression that shone out from the eyes of the starved Mount
Desolation pack. And the causes behind it were the same.
Presently this man woke his companion, who growled at him, as
though he resented the attention.
"Time we were on the move, old chap," said the first man. "We can't
afford to wait."
The other man sat up, and blinked wearily at the daylight, showing
a face to the full as haggard and gaunt as that of his friend.
"By God, I don't know!" he said bitterly. "I don't know whether we
can afford to do anything else. Afford! And us carrying a fortune!
I said out there that I'd never had good luck before, and--it was
right, too. Good luck's not for the likes o' me."
"Oh, yes, it is," said the other man, with an obvious effort at
cheerfulness. "You wait till we get our legs under a dinner-table,
my boy; then you'll tell another tale about luck. And it will be a
dinner-table, too, mark you; no tin pannikins, but silver and glass
and linen and flowers, and food----Man, think of the juicy fillet,
done to a turn; the crisp _pomme rissole_, and--yes, a little
spinach, I think, done delicately in the English way; none of your
Neapolitan messes. I'm not certain about the bread--whether little
crusty white rolls or toast. What? Oh, well, it's no use going the
other way, old man; cursing and growsing won't help us any. Come
on! Let's have breakfast and get on. I think you're perfectly right
about parting this morning. We can take that to be east, where the
scrub gets thick, and that to be south. We'll toss who takes which,
and one or other of us will strike something before nightfall, you
mark my words; and after that it will be easy to pick up the
other's trail. Better make the trail as plain as possible as we go
along. Come; buck up, Jeff, old man; this will be our last day
hungry. I'm going to take my breakfast now."
Imitating his companion, and with an attempt to look a little more
cheery over it, Jeff stood up now and carefully uncorked a
canvas-covered water-bottle. Each man filled his mouth full from
the gurgling contents of his water-bottle, and stood, swishing the
water in his mouth slowly, and allowing it to trickle little by
little down his parched throat. In this way several minutes were
devoted to the swallowing of a single mouthful of water, and that
was breakfast.
"If we hadn't have chucked the guns away we might have got a chance
at something to-day," growled Jeff, when his breakfast was done. "I
could make a roast dingo look foolish this morning, and I'm none so
sure I couldn't eat the brute raw if I got him. You said it was
dingoes got Jock last night, didn't you?"
"I suppose it must have been," said the other man. "I don't see
what else it could have been. And as to the guns; well, you know,
it was that or the stuff. We couldn't carry any more."
"I know. And I'm not sure it's much good carrying that any longer.
I reckon I'll dump mine somewhere to-day, before it dumps me.
Sixty-six pounds don't seem to ride very easy on an empty belly.
Sixty-six pounds--sixty-six solid pounds o' best pin-fire--and us
dyin' for want of a crust. Come on, then! One more try!"
"You've got your revolver still, haven't you?" asked Jeff, as he
fitted the straps of a big, heavy swag (which had served him for a
pillow) about his shoulders, while his companion did the same with
his swag.
"Yes," said the other man. "And I tell you what, Jeff; you shall
take it to-day. I've got a jolly good stick here, and I've no use
for the revolver, anyhow; couldn't hit a house at a dozen yards,
even if I was likely to see one. Yes, you take the shooting-iron,
my dear fellow; you might manage to pot something. I hope you
will."
They gravely tossed a twig to decide the question of who should
head south and who east; and then as gravely shook hands and
parted, Jeff heading south and the other man due east.
"Well, if we've got a chance at all, I guess this ought to double
it, anyway," said Jeff.
"Why, yes; and one of us'll strike pay dirt to-day all right,
you'll find. So good-bye till then, Jeff," said the other man.
"So long, mate; so long!"
Away in the scrub to the northward of the two men a dozen pair of
eyes more hungry than their own were watching them; or, to be
exact, eleven pairs were watching them. Finn lay stretched still at
full length, beside a bush, at Warrigal's feet, while Warrigal
peered eagerly through the scrub. Black-tip, followed by three
strong young dogs and a bitch, loped off at once, without comment
or communication with the rest of the pack, in the direction of the
trail of the south-bound Jeff. Warrigal's eyes, as it happened,
were fixed upon the shoulders of the other man, and it was his
trail that she made for now, after rousing Finn with a touch of her
muzzle. And so the wild-folk divided, even as the men-folk had
done, five going south after Jeff, and five others, besides Finn
and Warrigal, going east after the other man. But it was broad
daylight, and none of them made any attempt to draw near the makers
of the trails they followed. They merely followed, muzzles carried
low, and nostrils and eager eyes questing as they went for any sign
of life in the scrub--anything, from an ant to an emu, that by any
possibility could represent food. Meanwhile the warm trail of the
man ahead kept hope and excitement alive in them, though that man
would have said that he was about as poor a source of hopefulness
as any creature in Australia. To be sure, he had never thought of
himself in the light of food. The dingoes had.
[Illustration]