IN THE LAST DITCH
It was in the midst of the pitiless heat which comes a couple of
hours after midday, and is harder to bear than the blaze of high
noon, that the man who was heading due east abandoned his swag. He
had rested for the better part of an hour directly after noon, and
had two mouthfuls from his water-bottle, one before and one after
his rest. While he rested, the half-pack, headed by Finn and
Warrigal, had rested also, and more completely, hidden away in the
scrub, a quarter of a mile and more from the man whose trail they
followed. Two of them, Warrigal and another, watched with a good
deal of interest the burial of the swag beneath a drought-seared
solitary iron-bark. No sooner was the man out of sight--he walked
slowly and with a somewhat staggering gait now--than the pack
unearthed his swag with quick, vicious strokes of their feet, and
laid it bare to the full blaze of the afternoon sunlight. In a few
moments they had its canvas cover torn to ribbons, and bitter was
their disappointment when they came to turn over its jagged mineral
contents between their muzzles, and discovered that even they could
eat none of this rubbish.
It is fair to suppose that within a couple of hours of this time
the man finally lost the brave remnant of hope with which he had
set out that day. The pack did not reason about this, but they felt
it as plainly as any human observer could have done, and the
realization brought great satisfaction to each one of them. It was
not that they bore the faintest sort of malice against the man, or
cherished any cruel feeling for him whatever. He was food; they
were starving; and his evident loss of mastery of himself brought
food nearer to the pack.
The man's course was erratic now; he tacked like a vessel sailing
in the wind's eye; and his trail was altered by the fact that his
feet were dragged over the ground instead of being planted firmly
upon it with each stride he took. The pack were not alone in their
recognition of the man's sorry plight. He was followed now by no
fewer than seven carrion-crows; big, black, evil-looking birds, who
circled in the air behind and above him, swooping sometimes to
within twenty or thirty feet of his head, and cawing at him in a
half-threatening, half-pleading manner, while their bright, hard
eyes watched his eyes avidly, and their shiny beaks opened and shut
continually to admit of hoarse cries. The pack resented the
presence of the crows, but were well aware that, when the time
came, these harbingers of death could be put to flight in a moment.
When darkness fell, the man lighted no fire this evening. But
neither did he lie down. He sat with his back against a tree-trunk
and his legs outstretched; and now and again sounds came from his
lips, which, while not threatening, were certainly not cries for
mercy, and therefore in the pack's eyes not signals for an attack.
The man-life was apparently strong in him yet; for he sometimes
flung his arms about, and struck at the earth with the long, tough
stick which he had carried all day. The pack, when they had
unsuccessfully scoured every inch of the ground within a mile of
the man for food, drew in closer for the night's watch than they
had ventured on the previous night, when there had been two men and
a fire. But Finn showed a kind of reserve in this. He lay behind a
bush, and farther from the man than any of the rest of the pack. He
wanted food; he needed it more bitterly perhaps than any of the
others; but all his instincts went against regarding man himself as
food, though man's neighbourhood suggested the presence of food,
and, instinct aside, Finn hated the proximity of humans.
The man slept only in broken snatches during this night. While he
slept, Warrigal and the others, except Finn, crept in a little
closer; but when he turned, or waved one arm, or when sounds came
from his lips, as they frequently did, then the dingoes would slink
backward into the scrub, with lips updrawn, and silent snarls
wrinkling their nostrils. Towards dawn Warrigal set up a long howl,
and at that the man woke with a great start, to sleep no more.
Presently, others of the pack followed Warrigal's lead, and,
staggering to his feet, the man moved forward three steps and flung
a piece of rotten wood in the direction from which the howls came.
Warrigal and her mates retreated for the better part of a hundred
yards, snarling aloud; not from fierceness, but in a kind of
wistful disappointment at finding the man still capable of so much
action, and by so much the farther from reaching them as food.
The man's shout of anger and defiance reached Finn's ears, and
thrilled the Wolfhound to the marrow. The voice of man in anger; he
had not heard it since the night of his being driven out from the
boundary-rider's camp. The memories which it aroused in him were
all, without exception, of man's tyranny and cruelty, and of his
own suffering at man's hands. He growled low in his throat, but
very fiercely. And yet, with it all, what thrilled him so was not
mere anger, or bitterness, or resentment. It was more than all
that. It was the warring within him of inherited respect for man's
authority with acquired wildness; with his acquired freedom of the
wild folk. The conflict of instinct and emotions in Finn was so
ardent as almost to overcome consciousness of the great hunger
which was his real master at this time; the furious hunger which
had made him chew savagely at the tough fibre of a dry root held
between his two fore-paws.
But the man had taken only three steps, and when he sank down to
the earth again it was not in the place he had occupied before. He
lay down where he had stood when he threw the billet of wood, and
there was that in the manner of his lying down which boded ill for
his future activity. It was observed most carefully by three of the
crows, who had followed him all day; and upon the strength of it,
they settled within a dozen paces of his recumbent figure, with an
air which seemed to say plainly that they could afford a little
more patience now, since they would not have long to wait.
[Illustration: They settled within a dozen paces of his recumbent
figure.]
When full daylight came, Warrigal and her mates were closer in than
ever; hidden in the scrub within forty paces of the man. Finn
retained his old place, some five-and-thirty yards farther back,
behind a bush. The crows preened their funereal plumage and waited,
full of bright-eyed expectancy. Finn gnawed bitterly at his dry
fragment of scrub root. The splendid pitiless sun climbed slowly
clear of its bed on the horizon, thrusting up long, keen blades of
heat and light to herald the coming of another blazing day in the
long drought.
Presently, a long spear of the new day's light thrust its point
between the man's curved arm and his face. He turned on his side so
that he faced the sun, and evidently its message to him was that he
must be up and doing; that he must proceed with his journey.
Slowly, and with painful effort, he rose as far as his knees; and
then, with a groan, drooped down to earth again on his side. The
crows cocked their heads sideways at him. They seemed full of
brightness and life. But the sun himself was not more pitiless than
the question they seemed to be putting to the man, as they perked
their heads from side to side while considering his last move.
Warrigal and her mates saw clearly the conclusion the crows had
arrived at. They, also, held that the man was down for good at
last. At length, it seemed to them, he was practically nothing else
than food; the man-mastery, whose emblem is man's erectness, or
power to stand erect, was gone for ever, they thought. The crows
were safe guides, and one of them was hopping gravely towards the
back of the man. Warrigal, followed by five of her mates, crept
slowly forward through the scrub; and saliva was hanging like
icicles from their parted jaws.
Finn saw Warrigal's movement, and knew precisely what it portended
with as much certainty as though his mate had explained it all to
him. And now Finn was possessed by two opposing inclinations, both
terribly strong. Upon the one hand, instinctive respect for man's
authority and acquired dislike of man and all his works bade the
great Wolfhound remain where he was. Upon the other hand, two
forces impelled him to rise and join his mate, and those two forces
were the greatest hunger he had ever known, and the assertive pride
of his leadership of the pack. There before his eyes his section of
the pack was advancing, preparing for a kill for food, there in
that bitter desert of starvation. And he, the unquestioned master
and leader of the pack, master of all the wild kindred that he
knew; he, Finn, was----Three seconds later, and the Wolfhound had
bounded forward, his great shoulders thrusting angrily between
Warrigal and the big male dingo who had dared to usurp his, Finn's,
place there as leader in concerted action.
For an instant the pack paused, no more than a score of paces
distant from the man's shoulders, glaring uneasily. Then the man
moved, raising his body slightly upon one elbow. The dingoes drew
back a pace, even Warrigal moving back with them, though she
snarled savagely in doing so. Finn did not move. Warrigal's snarl
it was which told the man of his danger, and, with an effort, he
rose upon his knees, and grabbed at his long stick where it lay on
the ground. Again Warrigal snarled, less than a yard from Finn's
ears, and her snarl was the snarl which announces a kill. It was
not for others to kill where Finn led. And yet something--he could
not tell what, since he knew nothing of heredity--something held
the great Wolfhound's muscles relaxed; he could not take the leap
which was wont to precede killing with him. Again Warrigal snarled.
The man was rising to his feet. A great fear of being shamed was
upon Finn. With that snarl in his ears advance was a necessity. He
moved forward quickly, but without a spring. And in that instant
the man, having actually got upon his feet, swung round toward the
pack with his long stick uplifted, and Finn gathered his
hind-quarters under him for the leap which should end this
hunting--this long, strange hunting in a desert of starvation.
The Wolfhound actually did spring. His four feet left the ground.
But, with a shock which jarred every nerve and muscle in his great
frame, they returned to earth again, practically upon the exact
spots they had left. His sense of smell, never remarkable for its
acuteness in detail, had told Finn nothing, save that his quarry in
this strange hunting was man. But the Wolfhound's eyes could not
mislead him, and in the instant of his suddenly arrested
spring--the spring which it had taken every particle of strength in
his great body to check--he had known, with a sudden revulsion of
feeling which positively stopped the beating of his heart, that
this man the pack had trailed was none other than the Man of all
the world for him; the man whose person was as sacred as his will
to Finn; the Master, whose loss had been the beginning and the
cause of all the troubles the Wolfhound had ever known.
There had been the beginning of the killing snarl in Finn's throat
when he sprang, and as he came to earth again at the man's feet,
possessed and almost paralysed by his amazing discovery, that snarl
had ended in as curious a cry as ever left the throat of
four-footed folk since the world began. It was not a bark this cry,
still less a snarl or growl, and it could not have been called a
howl. It was more like human speech than that of the wild people;
and, human or animal, there was no mistaking it for anything less
than soul-speech. It welled up into the morning air from the very
centre of that in Finn which must be called his soul--the something
which differentiated him from every other living thing on earth,
and made him--Finn.
And in that same instant, too, recognition came to the Master, and
he knew his huge assailant to be no creature of the wild, no giant
wolf or dingo, but the beloved Wolfhound of his own breeding and
most careful, loving rearing. It was from some central recess of
his own personality that the Master's cry of "Finn, boy!" answered
the strange cry with which the Wolfhound came to earth at his feet.
But behind them was the pack, and in the pack's eyes what had
happened was that their leader had missed his kill; that fear had
broken his spring off short, and that now he was at the mercy of
the man who, a moment before, had been mere food. For a dingo, no
other task, not even the gnawing off of a limb caught in a trap,
could require quite so much sheer courage as the attacking of Man
in the open--man erect and unafraid. But Warrigal had never in her
life lacked courage, and now, behind her courage and her devotion
to her mate, there was hunger, red-toothed and slavering in her
ears; hunger burning like a live coal in her heart; hunger
stretching her jaws for killing, with an eagerness and a ferocity
which could not be denied. In the next instant Warrigal had flown
at the man's right shoulder with a fierce snarl which called those
of her kind who were not cowards to follow her or be for ever
accursed.
Warrigal's white fangs slashed down the man's coat-sleeve, and left
lines of skin and blood where the cloth gave. For one moment Finn
hesitated. Warrigal was his good mate, the mother of his dead
children, his loving companion by day and night, during long months
past. She concentrated in her own person all the best of his
kinship with the wild. There was mateship and comradeship between
them. As against all this, Warrigal's fangs had fastened upon the
sacred flesh of the Master, of the Man of all the world, who stood
for everything that was best in Finn's two-thousand-years-old
inheritance of intercourse with and devotion to human friends.
Next instant, and even as the biggest male dingo of the pack flew
at the man's other side, Finn pinned his mate to earth, and, with
one tremendous crunch of his huge jaws, severed her jugular vein,
and set her life's blood running over the parched earth.
In that moment, the pack awoke to realization of the strange thing
that had befallen them. They had been seven, pitted against a
single man, and he apparently in the act of ceasing to be erect
man, and becoming mere food. Now they were five--for Warrigal's
life ebbed quickly from her--pitted against a man wakened to
erectness and hostility, and their own great leader; the great
Wolf, who had slain Lupus, their old fierce master, and even
Tasman, his terrible sire. It is certain that at another time the
pack would not have hesitated for one moment about turning tail and
fleeing that place of strange, unnatural happenings. But this was
no ordinary time. They were mad with hunger. Blood was flowing out
upon the earth before them. One of them had the taste of man's
blood on his foaming lips. This was not a tracking, or a killing in
prospect, but a fight in progress. The pack would never turn tail
alive from that fight.
The man had his back to the withered iron-bark now, and, besides
the long stick in his right hand, he held an open knife in his left
hand, as a long, fierce bitch found to her cost when she leaped for
his throat, fell short, and felt cold steel bite deep in her flank
as she sank to earth. And now the great Wolfhound warmed to his
work, with a fire of zeal which mere hunger itself could not have
lit within him. He was fighting now as never before since his fangs
met in his first kill in far-away Sussex. He was fighting for the
life of the Master, love of whom, long quiescent in him, welled up
in him now; a warm tide of new blood which gave strength to his
gaunt limbs and weight to his emaciated frame, such as they had
never known when he fought, full fed, with Lupus, or with Tasman,
on the rocky side of Mount Desolation. A tiger could hardly have
evaded him. His onslaught was at once terrible, and swift as
forked lightning. It seemed he slashed and tore in five separate
directions at one and the same time. But that was only because his
jaws flashed from one dingo's body to another with such rapidity
that the passage between could not be followed by the eye. This
meant that his fangs could not be driven deep enough for instant
killing. There was not time. But they went deep, none the less; and
blood streamed now from the necks and shoulders of the dingoes that
succeeded one another in springing at the man and the Wolfhound.
Two of the dingoes owed their deaths to the long knife-blade of the
man; but even as the second of them received the steel to the hilt
below his chest-bones, the man sank, utterly exhausted and bleeding
freely, on his knees, and from there to the ground itself. This
drew the attention of the three surviving dingoes from the leader,
who in some mysterious manner had become an enemy, to the fallen
man who was now, clearly, a kill. Mere hunger, desperate hunger,
was uppermost in the minds of the three. They quested flesh and
blood from the kill that lay helpless before them.
It was then that Finn outdid himself; it was then that he called
into sudden and violent action every particle of reserve strength
that was left in him. It was then that his magnificent upbringing
stood by him, and the gift of a thousand years of unstained lineage
lent him more than a Wolfhound's strength and quickness; so that,
almost within the passage of as many seconds, he slew three
full-grown dingoes, precisely as a game terrier will slay three rats,
with one crushing snap and one tremendous shake to each. Starved
though they were, these dingoes weighed over forty pounds apiece;
yet when they met with their death between Finn's mighty jaws,
their bodies were flung from him, in the killing shake, to a
distance of as much as five yards.
And then there fell a sudden and complete stillness in that desert
spot, which had seen the end of six lives in as many minutes;
besides the final falling of the Master, which implied, Finn knew
not what.
Finn fell to licking the Master's white, blood-flecked face where
it lay on the ground. And at that, the waiting crows settled down
upon the bodies of the outlying dingoes; so that their dead,
sightless eyes were made doubly sightless in a moment. After long
licking, or licking which seemed to him long, Finn pointed his nose
to the brazen sky, and lifted up his voice in the true Wolfhound
howl, which is perhaps the most penetratingly saddening cry in
Nature.
[Illustration]