never again require
reminding or instructing about this particular form of danger. Jess
had bitten his shoulder pretty hardly, by the way. Finn may or may
not have given this particularly deadly reptile a name in his own
mind; or Jess may have supplied him with one for it. The point is,
he knew it now for a deadly creature; he knew something of the sort
of resting-places it chooses for itself; and he would never, never
forget the knowledge thus acquired, nor the significance it had for
him and his like.

On the other hand, when a sudden pungent scent and a rustle among
the twigs set Finn leaping forward after the strangest-looking
beast his eyes had ever seen, Jess joined with him, in a
good-humoured, rather indifferent manner, and between them they
just missed a big "goanner," as Bill called the iguana, or Gould
Monitor. This particular 'guana had a tail rather more than twice
its own length, and the last foot of this paid forfeit in Finn's
jaws for the animal's lack of agility. Though, when one says lack
of agility, it is fair to add that only a very swiftly moving
creature could have escaped the two hounds at all; and, once it
reached a tree-trunk, this reptile showed simply wonderful
cleverness in climbing, running up fifty feet of iron-bark trunk as
quickly as it could cover the level ground, and keeping always on
the far side of the tree from the dogs, its long, ugly,
wedge-shaped head constantly turning from side to side, in keen,
listening observation. From Jess's contemptuous, half-hearted bark,
Finn gathered that this singularly ugly creature was not one of the
deadly people, but also, on the other hand, that it was not game
worthy of a hound's serious attention.

After four days of this sort of life, during practically every hour
of which Finn was learning bush-craft from Jess, and learning at a
great rate for the reason that his intelligence was of a higher
order than that of the kangaroo-hound, while his hunting instincts
came to him from an older and more direct line of inheritance, the
Wolfhound began to feel almost as thoroughly at home in the bush as
he had felt on his own hunting-ground in Sussex. But, rather
curiously perhaps, he advanced hardly at all in the intimacy of his
relations with Bill. In a sense, outwardly at all events, Bill was
more closely allied to Sam and the Professor, and to other people
of the Southern Cross Circus, than to the Master, or to humans Finn
had known at all intimat