The pack was starving. Many times during the past week the thought of turning in his tracks and making back for the river-bed had come to Finn, but he had pressed on, fearful of the arid stretch of country which he had already placed between himself and that spot. He had no means of knowing that he was in a country of vast and waterless distances. But, acting without knowledge, Finn had turned in his tracks at length, after a fortnight's travelling in which food had been terribly scarce and water even more scarce. Such liquid as they had found would never have been called water by men-folk. Here and there had been a little liquid mud in old water-holes and stream-beds, and in other places the pack had sucked up moisture through hot sand, after burrowing with feet and nose to a depth of as much as eighteen inches from the surface. Their food had been almost entirely of the grub and insect kind, and Finn, for the first time in his life, had spent long hours in trying to ease the craving within him by gnawing at dry roots. The great Wolfhound had more stamina than any of the dingoes; he had greater resources within himself than they had, and was endowed, by Nature and upbringing, with a superb constitution. But, as against that, he needed far more food than was required by the others, and at a full meal would have eaten twice as much as the biggest of them. Also, he suffered, though his body was the stronger for it, for the fact that he had never before known want. In appearance, the members of the pack had suffered a wondrous change in these two weeks. Even Warrigal's fine coat had lost every trace of the gloss which had made it beautiful, and the iron-grey hairs of Finn's dense, hard coat had taken on the character of dry bristles, while his haunch-bones were two outstanding peaks, from which his back fell away at an acute angle to the root of his tail, where once a level pad of flesh had been. Now the tail seemed to sprout from a kind of well in his body, and a bird might have nested in the hollow between his shoulder-blades, which once had been flat as the top of a table. His back, too, which had been broad and flat, was like the ridge of a gunyah now, from one end of which his neck rose gauntly, and appeared to be of prodigious length. His ribs were plain to see on either side his hollow barrel, and over them the loose skin rolled to and fro as he ran or walked. The eyes of every member of the pack were deeply sunken and ablaze with a dry light, half wistful and half fierce, and more awe-inspiring than any form of full-fed rage could be. They ran in open order now, and when one happened to run unusually close to another, that other would snarl or growl, and, sometimes, even snap, with bitter, furtive, half-fearful irritability.