terror filled her heart almost to bursting, as a
roaring grey cloud swept upon her from her right quarter, and she
felt the burning thrust of Finn's fangs in her neck. She sat up
valiantly to fight for her life and the young life in her pouch,
and her left hind-leg, with its chisel claws, sawed the air like a
pump-handle. The dingoes knew that it would be death, for one or
two of them, at all events, to face those out-thrust chisels. They
surrounded the big beast in a snarling, yowling circle, and gnashed
their white fangs together with a view to establishing the
paralysis of terror. But they did not advance as yet. Finn slipped
once, when he tried to take fresh hold, and in that instant the
kangaroo slashed him deeply in the groin. But the wound was her own
death warrant, for it filled the Wolfhound with fighting rage, and
in another instant there was a broken neck between his mighty jaws
and warm blood was running over the red-brown fur of the kangaroo,
as her body fell sideways, with Finn upon it.

The three other dingoes approached the kill with Warrigal, but she
snarled at them, and a swift turn of Finn's head told them to
beware. In the end Warrigal settled down to make a meal at one side
of the kangaroo's hind-quarters, Finn took the other side, and the
three dingoes were given their will of the fore part. There was
more than enough for all, and though, when they left the kill to
the lesser carnivora of that quarter, Finn carried a good meal with
him between his jaws, it was not that he needed it for himself, but
that he wished to place it in the den at Warrigal's disposal; a
little attention which earned for him various marks of his mate's
cordial approval. She was extremely pleased to have this evidence
of Finn's forethoughtfulness as a bread-winner. Instinct told her
the value and importance of this quality in a mate. And while she
carefully dressed the wound in her lord's groin that night,
Black-tip and his friends, with much chop-licking, spread abroad the
story of their glorious hunting and of Finn's might as a killer.
They vowed that a more terrible fighter and a greater master than
Lupus, or than his even more terrible sire, whom few of them had
seen, had come to Mount Desolation, and old dingoes shook their
grey heads, feeling that they lived in strange and troublous times.
But as for Lupus, he was ranging the trails at that moment on an
empty stomach in savage quest of no other than this same stranger