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Updated: May 27, 2025
After four days of this sort of life, during practically every hour of which Finn was learning bush-craft from Jess, and learning at a great rate for the reason that his intelligence was of a higher order than that of the kangaroo-hound, while his hunting instincts came to him from an older and more direct line of inheritance, the Wolfhound began to feel almost as thoroughly at home in the bush as he had felt on his own hunting-ground in Sussex.
Although one does not want to harshly criticise these obvious errors in the very rudiments of bush-craft, they serve to indicate how likely he would have been, if entrapped in dry country, to commit a mistake that would sacrifice his men. And one cannot but believe that he relied quite as much on the chapter of accidents to pull him through as upon his own helpfulness or experience.
He was keen-eyed, and in some of his experiences in South America he had learnt a certain amount of bush-craft; and he had no difficulty in finding the exact spot in which he had lost sight, for a moment, of Heyton. With a feeling that was scarcely one of curiosity, he examined the ground in close proximity, and presently, he caught sight of a portion of the fringe of a bathing-towel.
With a portion of one of the "feelers" of creeping palm stripped of all the prickles save two, she probed the tunnel and, screwing the instrument triumphantly, withdrew a huge white grub, which she ate forthwith; and then, with a grimace, assumed an air of shame and contrition, for she had astonished herself as well as others by an exhibition of untaught bush-craft and ancestral appetite.
As he followed the track, bending down in his saddle to note the marks, he laughed aloud. The men were the veriest fools at bush-craft. There were instances by the dozen which revealed to him the fact that neither had had any experience in tracking, and so had failed to avail themselves of the chances the ground they had ridden over offered to render their track difficult to follow.
Meanwhile, the little fire Ted had lighted against a blackened tree-stump had grown into the sort of fiery furnace that was associated in my mind with certain passages in the Old Testament; and, suspended by a piece of fencing wire from a cross stake on two forked sticks, our billy was boiling vigorously. In all such bush-craft as this Ted was facile princeps, and he asked no better employment.
I was pleased to hear this, and have no doubt the poor creatures told the truth. They remained with myself and mate for a month, and proved of great assistance to us in fencing and other work, and I learnt much valuable bush-craft from these wandering savages, especially of their methods of hunting and fishing.
At such times, while Bill was busy, Finn and Jess would cover quite a good deal of ground, always within a half-mile radius of the man; and in these small excursions Finn began to learn a good deal in the way of bush-craft from the wily Jess. Once she snapped at his shoulder suddenly, and thrust him aside from a log he was just about to clamber upon. "'Ware!
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