Once, in the farthest of his gallops, he reached the fringe of the wild, rocky hill country which lies behind this belt; and there, as luck would have it, he met in full flight one of the two dingoes that had escaped him on the day of the attack upon wounded Jess. It was an evil chance for that dingo. A fanged whirlwind smote him, and rended him limb from limb before he realized that the devastating thing had come, scattering his vital parts among the scrub and tearing wildly at his mangled remains. A mother kangaroo was surprised by the ghostly grey fury, at some distance from the rest of her small mob, and, though she fought with the fury of ten males of her species (bitterly conscious of the young thing glued to the teat in her pouch), she was left a torn and trampled mass of scarcely recognizable fur and flesh, crushed among scrub-roots. Lesser creatures succumbed under the blinding stabs of Finn's feet; and once he leaped, like a cat, clear into the lower branches of a bastard oak tree, and pinned a 'possum into instant death before swinging back to earth on the limb's far side. He killed that night from fury, and not to eat; and when he laid him down to rest at length, on the rocky edge of a gully fully four miles from the camp, there was not a living thing in that district but felt the terror of his presence, and cowered from sight or sound of his flying feet and rending, blood-stained fangs. It was as the night of an earthquake or a bush fire to the wild folk of that range; and the cause and meaning of it all was that Finn, the Irish Wolfhound, had been hunted out of the men-folk's world into the world of the wild people. [Illustration] CHAPTER XXIV A LONE BACHELOR If Finn had deliberately thought out a bad way of beginning his life as one of the wild folk, who have no concern at all with humans, he could have devised nothing much worse, or more disadvantageous to himself, than the indulgence of his wild burst of Berserker-like fury, after being driven out of the clear patch. And of this he was made aware when he set forth the next morning in quest of a breakfast. Every one of his hunting trails in the neighbourhood of the encampment he ranged with growing thoroughness and care, without finding so much as a mouse with which to satisfy his appetite. Even Koala and Echidna were nowhere to be found. It was as though a blight had descended upon the countryside, and the only living thing Finn saw that morning, besides the crows, was a laughing jackass on the stump of a blasted stringy-bark tree, who jeered at him hoarsely as he passed. Disconsolate and rather sore, as the result of his frenzied exertions of the night, Finn curled himself up in the sandy bed of a little gully and slept again, without food. The many small scavengers of the bush had already made away with the remains of the different creatures he had slain during his madness.