There was no mistaking this for anything but what it was. This was
being driven out of the human world into the world of the wild with
a vengeance. The burning sapling made a most profound impression
upon Finn, and roused bitter hostility and resentment in him. The
stock-whip and the stone were as nothing beside this thing--this
fire that had been flung at him. From time immemorial men have
frightened and chased wolves from their chosen neighbourhood with
burning faggots. The thing is being done to-day in the world's far
places; it was being done thousands of years before our era began.
Finn had never before experienced it, and yet, in some vague way,
it seemed he had known of such a thing. His ancestors for fifteen
hundred years had been the admired companions and champions of the
leaders among men. But a thousand years before that--who knows? Our
domestic pet dogs of to-day adhere still to a few of the practices
(having no bearing upon their present lives) of their forbears of
many, many centuries back. Certain it is that nothing else in his
life had been quite so full of hostile significance for Finn as
this fact of his having been driven out from the camp in the clear
patch with a faggot of burning wood. This was man's message to him;
thus, then, he was sent to his place, and his place was the wild.
Well!
The wild folk of that particular section of the Tinnaburra country,
though they live to be older than the most aged cockatoo in all
Australia, will never, never forget the strange happenings of that
night, which they will always remember as the night of the madness
of the Giant Wolf--only they thought of him as the Giant Dingo. For
four mortal hours the Irish Wolfhound, who had been driven out from
the haunts of men, raged furiously up and down a five-mile belt of
Tinnaburra country, slaying and maiming wantonly, and implanting
desperate fear in the hearts of every living thing in that
countryside.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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