as
swallowing. They even helped Finn to demolish a native porcupine,
than which one would have said no creature of a less edible sort
was ever created. Altogether, there was that about the survivors of
the Mount Desolation pack which would have made any single creature
sorry to cross their path, however powerful he might be. No animal
with flesh on its bones and blood in its veins would have been too
big or fierce for the pack to have attacked just now; for hunger
and thirst had made them quite desperate.

It was Black-tip, and not Finn, who, on the afternoon of the second
day of the pack's despairing return journey in quest of the
river-bank they had left a fortnight before, called a sudden halt.
(The dingo's sense of smell was always keener than the Wolfhound's.)
Black-tip sniffed hard and long at the ground between his fore-feet,
and then, raising his head, glared out into the afternoon sunlight
to the south-eastward of the track they were following--their own trail.
The whimper which escaped Black-tip when he began to sniff, brought the
rest of the pack about him, full of hungry eagerness to know what thing
it was that had been found. There was something uncanny and extraordinary
about the way in which they glanced one at another, after, as it were,
taking one sip of the scent which had brought Black-tip to a standstill.
Had the scent been of kangaroo or wallaby, rabbit, rat, or any other
thing that moves upon four legs, those curious glances would never have
been exchanged. The pack would have been off hot-foot upon the trail,
without pause for discussion. And there was the scent of a four-footed
creature here, too; but it was merged in, and subordinate to, the scent
over which most wild creatures cry a halt: the scent of man.

Now in ordinary circumstances the pack would not have hesitated a
moment over such a trail as this. They would have turned in their
tracks and made off in the opposite direction, or gone straight
ahead on their own trail and without reference to the man-trail,
save to get away from it as quickly as possible. But these were
very far from being ordinary circumstances. The pack was nearer to
starving than it had ever been before, and at such a time the rules
which ordinarily guide life are of precisely no account at all. The
man-trail was the trail of living flesh, of warm, animal life; it
was the trail of food. Also, there was merged in it the trail of a
dog; and as each member of the pack a