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Updated: June 21, 2025
I was sent to an out-station with 300 sheep, and a black boy to assist in driving them. At sundown I could see nothing of the hut. I had read that fires would keep off native dogs or dingoes. I tied my horse to a tree, and gathered wood, forming a ring of fires around the sheep. The black boy said something to me in his own language.
Our very first work, I should have said, was to make a pen for the sheep, where they would be secure from the natives or dingoes at night. In the daytime, when out feeding, they could be easily kept together, and they were so tame that they would follow us about like dogs.
It's like nothing else lying straight under the Southern Cross and watching its pointers, and, one by one, the stars coming up above the gum trees and the queer wild smell of the gums and the loneliness of it all not a sound until the birds begin at dawn but the HOP-HOP of the Wallabies, and the funny noises of opossums, and the crying of the curlews and native dogs dingoes we call 'em.... Well, there!
The mouth of the den was narrow and very low for one of Finn's stature, but he bent his aching body gladly and followed his mate in, to find that the den itself was comparatively roomy and capable of accommodating half a dozen dingoes. As a matter of fact, it had been the den of Warrigal's mother, but it was more than a year now since that mother had fallen to a boundary-rider's gun.
The man slept only in broken snatches during this night. While he slept, Warrigal and the others, except Finn, crept in a little closer; but when he turned, or waved one arm, or when sounds came from his lips, as they frequently did, then the dingoes would slink backward into the scrub, with lips updrawn, and silent snarls wrinkling their nostrils.
Peron spoke of savage peoples, not with less sympathy but with a sympathy grounded on knowledge; and he wasted no words about the "injustice" of occupying lands which the aboriginal only used in the sense that lands are "used" by rabbits and dingoes.
The manner in which Finn's will in this matter was recognized and respected was very striking indeed; it meant much, for, from the point of view of the three dingoes, Warrigal appeared at that time in the light of an exceedingly desirable mate, and one for whose favour the three of them would assuredly have fought to the last gasp that night but for the dominating presence of the great Wolfhound.
The dingoes ate where they made their kills that night, within a couple of miles of the camp, thereby spreading terror wide and deep throughout that range; for the little folk feared these fiercely cunning killers far more than they had learned to fear big ghostly Finn, who roamed their country more in student fashion than as a serious hunter of meat, so far.
In the early part of the year 1899 a settler named Hardy, residing at Glenowlan, in the Rylstone district of New South Wales, about 150 miles from Sydney, lost numbers of his lambs during the lambing season. Naturally enough, dingoes were suspected, but none were seen.
Finn even spent an hour in trifling with a pair of sister dingoes who generally hunted together, and ranged the trails with Black-tip, in more or less sportive mood, till long after midnight.
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