e from his day sleep it was to realization of the
uncomfortable fact that he was stark empty of food. (His first
ejection from the camp on the previous evening had occurred before
the evening kill, and, after the second ejection, Finn had been too
furious to think of eating.) The next thing he realized--and this
was before he had walked many hundred yards through the falling
light of late afternoon--was the solid atmosphere of hatred which
surrounded him in his own range of bush. He did not get the full
sting of it at first--that bit into him gradually during the night
but he was aware of its existence almost at once. And he found it
singularly daunting. True, he was the undisputed lord of that
range. No creature lived there that could think of meeting him in
single combat. But the concentrated and silent hatred of the entire
populace was none the less a thing to chill the heart even of a
giant Irish Wolfhound.

The silence of the ghostly bush, in that brief half-light which
preceded darkness, spoke loudly and eloquently of this hatred and
resentment. The empty run-ways of the little grass-eating animals
were full of it. The still trees thrust it upon Finn as he threaded
in and out among their hoary trunks. The sightless scrub glared
hatred at him till the skin twitched over his shoulders, and he
took to flinging swift glances to left and right as he
walked--glances but little in keeping with his character as hunter,
and more suggestive of the conduct of the lesser hunted peoples. When
a long streamer of hanging bark rustled suddenly behind Finn, he
wheeled upon it with a snarl; and the humiliation of his discovery
of what had startled him partook of the nature of fear, when his
gaze met the coldly glittering eyes of a bush-cat (whose body he
could not discern in that dim light) that glared down at him from
twenty feet above his head.

It was with a sense of genuine humility, and something like
gratitude, that Finn met Koala a few minutes later, passing
hurriedly--for him--between the trunks of the two trees in which he
made his home at that time. Koala stopped at once when Finn faced
him--not from any desire for conversation, but from fear to
move--and waved his queer little hands in an apparent ecstasy of
grief and perturbation, while protesting, as usual, what a lamentably
poor and wholly inoffensive person he was, and what a tragic and
dastardly act it would be if any one should hurt him. Finn
whispered through