Now, with a tomahawk stuck in the saddle-cleat he had made to hold it, and a stock-whip dangling from one hand, the bushman ambled off on his roan-coloured mare in the direction of this same gully. Jess, full of suppressed excitement, circled about the horse's head for some few minutes, till bidden to "Sober up, there, Jess!" when she fell back and trotted beside Finn, a dozen yards from the horse. Arrived at the gully, Bill reined in to a very slow walk, and peered about him carefully upon the ground. He never walked a yard on his own feet if a horse was available. This was so much a matter of principle with Bill that he had been known to walk and run three miles in pursuit of a horse with which to ride across a paddock no more than a quarter of a mile from his original starting-place. It was Jess who found what her man was questing: the quite fresh tracks of a kangaroo; and Finn was keenly interested in the discovery. He noted carefully every scratch in the tracks as Jess nosed them, and noted also, as the result of long strong breaths drawn through his nostrils, the exact scent which hung about them. This scent alone proved the tracks quite fresh. Finn was puzzled by the long, scraping marks, which looked far more like the work of some garden tool than of the feet of any animal he knew of. For the time he had forgotten the fifteen-foot leap of the rock wallaby that he had witnessed on the day after his escape from the circus. The hind-foot pressure required to start a heavy animal upon such a leap as that is very considerable, and well calculated to leave evidence of itself in soft ground. In starting away from the gully, Bill rode at a walk, and with extreme care, Jess going in front, and Finn, not as yet so clever in tracking, following up the rear, and taking very careful observations, not alone of the trail, but also of fallen timber and likely places for snakes. They progressed in this way, in a curving line, for between two and three miles, when Jess came to a momentary halt, and gave one loud bark. Next instant they were all travelling at the gallop for a thick clump of scrub which stood alone in a comparatively clear patch. On the edge of this scrub Finn had a momentary glimpse of their quarry, a big red old-man kangaroo, sitting on his haunches, and delicately eating leaves.