cquired that fact, his lips
wrinkled backward and a little moisture found its way into his dry
mouth.

The pack desired food and drink so urgently that everything else in
the world became insignificant by comparison with food and drink in
their minds. The hatred and fear of man, as man, was blotted out of
sight by the craving for animal food in any shape whatsoever. Here
was a living trail, in the midst of a dead, burnt-up land of
starvation and emptiness. What Finn's thoughts on the subject may
have been I cannot say. But, of course, he had connected men with
food all his life long. And now he was starving. I do not think
Finn's thoughts could have been quite the same as those of the rest
of the pack; but they moved him in the same direction none the
less, and, without the smallest hesitation, the pack streamed after
him when he took up a new trail, and loped off to the south-east,
turning away diagonally from the old track.

As the new trail became fresher and warmer, the leader was
conscious of the warring within him of various conflicting feelings
and desires. In appearance Finn was now a gigantic wolf, and one
mastered by the fierce passion of hunger, at that. Apart from
appearance, there actually was more of the wolf than the dog in him
now. He belonged very completely to the wild kindred, and, over and
above the wild folk's natural inborn fear and mistrust of men-folk,
there was in Finn a resentment against man; a bitter memory of
torture endured, and of the humiliation of having been driven out
into the wild. But Finn's sense of smell was nothing like so acute
as that of the dingoes. Even a setter or a pointer cannot compare
with the wild folk in this respect, and Wolfhounds have nothing
like the educated sense of smell of the setters, or the pointers,
or the foxhounds. Their hunting from time immemorial has been done
by sight, and strength, and fleetness, not by tracking. Finn was
not so keenly conscious as his companions that he was on the trail
of man. He knew it; but it was not in his nostrils the assertive
fact that it was, for instance, in the nostrils of Warrigal and
Black-tip. There was in the trail for him a warm animal scent which
gave promise of food; of food near at hand, in that pitiless waste
which the pack had been traversing for a fortnight and more. But
every now and again, possibly in places at which the makers of the
trail had paused, Finn would get a distinct whiff of the man scent,
and t