some vague way,
it seemed he had known of such a thing. His ancestors for fifteen
hundred years had been the admired companions and champions of the
leaders among men. But a thousand years before that--who knows? Our
domestic pet dogs of to-day adhere still to a few of the practices
(having no bearing upon their present lives) of their forbears of
many, many centuries back. Certain it is that nothing else in his
life had been quite so full of hostile significance for Finn as
this fact of his having been driven out from the camp in the clear
patch with a faggot of burning wood. This was man's message to him;
thus, then, he was sent to his place, and his place was the wild.
Well!

The wild folk of that particular section of the Tinnaburra country,
though they live to be older than the most aged cockatoo in all
Australia, will never, never forget the strange happenings of that
night, which they will always remember as the night of the madness
of the Giant Wolf--only they thought of him as the Giant Dingo. For
four mortal hours the Irish Wolfhound, who had been driven out from
the haunts of men, raged furiously up and down a five-mile belt of
Tinnaburra country, slaying and maiming wantonly, and implanting
desperate fear in the hearts of every living thing in that
countryside.

Once, in the farthest of his gallops, he reached the fringe of the
wild, rocky hill country which lies behind this belt; and there, as
luck would have it, he met in full flight one of the two dingoes
that had escaped him on the day of the attack upon wounded Jess. It
was an evil chance for that dingo. A fanged whirlwind smote him,
and rended him limb from limb before he realized that the
devastating thing had come, scattering his vital parts among the
scrub and tearing wildly at his mangled remains. A mother kangaroo
was surprised by the ghostly grey fury, at some distance from the
rest of her small mob, and, though she fought with the fury of ten
males of her species (bitterly conscious of the young thing glued
to the teat in her pouch), she was left a torn and trampled mass of
scarcely recognizable fur and flesh, crushed among scrub-roots.
Lesser creatures succumbed under the blinding stabs of Finn's feet;
and once he leaped, like a cat, clear into the lower branches of a
bastard oak tree, and pinned a 'possum into instant death before
swinging back to earth on the limb's far side. He killed that night
from fury, and not to eat; and when he la