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 hoa.r.s.e 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 s.n.a.t.c.hes 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 rec.u.mbent 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.

[Ill.u.s.tration: They settled within a dozen paces of his rec.u.mbent 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 c.o.c.ked 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 a.s.sertive 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 a.s.sailant 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 b.i.t.c.h 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 Suss.e.x. 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 pa.s.sage 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 pa.s.sage 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.

[Ill.u.s.tration]

CHAPTER x.x.xIII

BACK FROM THE WILD

Four men were riding together through the low, burnt-up scrub, and in front of them, holding their horses at a smart amble to be even with his jog trot, a naked aboriginal was leading the way on his own bare feet.

[Ill.u.s.tration: Four men were riding together through the low burnt-up scrub]

"Blurry big warrigal 'e bin run here!" said the black-fellow suddenly, as he stooped to examine a footprint in the trail they were following. He counted the different footprints, and announced to the hors.e.m.e.n that seven dingoes had followed the trail they were following at that moment. "Five and two," the black-fellow called it, ticking the number off on the fingers of one hand. He explained that these dingoes, led by the "blurry big warrigal" aforesaid, must have been terribly badly in want of food; and that he did not think much of the chances of the man they had followed.

One of the riders--it was Jeff--nodded his head dolefully over this.

"I reckon all the plaguy warrigals in this country must 'a' gone crazy," he said. "You know I told you there was half a dozen on my track. But we're goin' right; you can be dead sure o' that, for that was his swag we found all right, and you could see the dingoes had been at that. My oath! To think o' them brutes scratching up a fortune that way, an' leaving it there!"

"You wouldn't expect 'em to take it into town an' bank it, would you?" said one of the other men, with a grin. "Hurry on, Jacky!"--This to the black-fellow--"What time he make dem tracks, eh? He's fresh, you think?"

The black-fellow snorted contemptuously, as he explained over one shoulder that the tracks were of the previous day's making.

"Still," said the rider; "he may not have got far. He can't have got very far."

And again Jeff nodded, with sombre meaning. He was always a pessimistically inclined man; and, in his rough way, he had conceived a good deal of affection and respect for his prospecting mate.

Another three miles were covered, and then, suddenly, the black-fellow halted, with one hand raised over his head, which was turned sideways, in a listening att.i.tude. He explained, a moment later, that he could hear howling, such as a "blurry big warrigal"

might produce. The party pushed on, and two or three minutes later they were all able to make out the sound the black-fellow had heard.

But the black-fellow shook his head now, and informed them that no warrigal ever made a howl like that; that that must be "white feller dog."

"Well, that's queer," said Jeff; "for Jock was killed the night before we parted. But, say, whatever it is, that's a most unG.o.dly sort o' howl, sure enough!"

Five or six minutes later the black-fellow gave a whoop of astonishment as he topped a little ridge and came into view of the Master, lying p.r.o.ne upon the ground, with Finn sitting erect beside his head. One of the riders pulled out a revolver when he caught sight of Finn's s.h.a.ggy head.

"Well, may I be teetotally jiggered!" he growled. "What sort of a beast do ye call that?"

The riders galloped down the slope and flung themselves hurriedly from their horses. The leading man waved his whip at Finn to drive him off. And then it was seen that Finn's a.s.siduous licking had been sufficient to restore the man to consciousness. The Master raised his head feebly, and said--

"For G.o.d's sake don't hurt the dog! He saved my life. Killed six dingoes in front of me. G.o.d's sake don't touch the----"