ssage through the scrub
beside the mountain's foot of a party of half a dozen mounted men
with guns and dogs. This occurred in the late afternoon of a
scorching hot day, when most of the pack were sleeping; and if the
dogs of the men-folk had not been incredibly stupid in the matter
of sticking closely to the trail, and making no attempt to range
the scrub on either side of it, the dingoes would actually have
been hunted like hares, and some of them, no doubt, would have
been killed. As it was, Finn felt as strongly, and perhaps more
strongly than any of the elders of the pack, that this event had
rendered the range finally uninhabitable. His nostrils twitched and
wrinkled for hours after the men had gone; and, as soon as darkness
fell, he rose in a determined manner, thrust his muzzle meaningly
against Warrigal's neck and took to the open trail. With
extraordinary unanimity the other members of the pack began to
gather behind Finn. It seemed to be clearly understood that this
was no ordinary hunting expedition, and the two mothers of the
pack, with their half-grown whelps, whined plaintively as they
gathered their small families about them for journeying. The
whelps, always eager for a new move of any kind, gambolled joyously
around their parents, but the mothers snarled at them, bidding them
go soberly, lest weariness and worse should overtake them before
their time.

One very old dog, who had always looked with grudging sullenness
upon the great Wolfhound and his doings, refused point-blank to be
a party to the exodus, and croakingly warned the others against
following a new-comer and an outlier such as Finn. He gave them to
understand that he had been born in the shadow of Mount Desolation,
like his sire and dam before him, and that he would live alone
rather than forsake that range at the bidding of a great grey
foreigner. The pack paid little heed to the old dingo, and he sat
erect on his haunches beside the trail, watching them file along
the flank of the mountain. When they were nearly a mile away, the
old dingo began to howl dismally; and when Finn made his first
kill, seven miles to the north-west of Mount Desolation, old
Tufter--he had a sort of mop at the end of a rather scraggy
tail--was on hand, and yowling eagerly for scraps. The kill was a
half-starved brush-tailed wallaby, and nobody got much out of it but
Warrigal and Finn, both of whom growled fiercely while they ate, in
a manner which said plainly