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Updated: June 6, 2025
The rain too, very much impeded the drying of the beef, for which, as usual, a bark gunyah had to be erected. Everything, however, was got well forward for the important business of crossing the next morning. 'February' 24. The horses, saddles, and rations were all crossed in safety to-day, though not without difficulty.
But Jess was of a tough, bush-bred stock; she had lived in the open all her life, and the air she breathed now, in her shelter beside the gunyah, was aromatic with the scent of that useful antiseptic which in every part of the world has done good service in the prevention of fever eucalyptus.
Another thing was that the two lesser dingoes between them produced a yelp of pure terror, and, wheeling like lightning, streaked across the clear patch to the scrub, bellies to earth, and tails flying in a straight line from their spines. And the third thing that happened in that instant was the arrival at the end of the gunyah of Finn. The arrival of the Wolfhound was really a great event.
He had recently struck up a more than bowing acquaintance with the koala that he had once dragged through a quarter of a mile of scrub to the gunyah, and was now in the habit of meeting this quaint little bear nearly every day.
As the snout of the foremost dingo, the largest of the three, showed under the eave of Jess's shelter, she managed to hunch her wounded body a little farther back against the side of the gunyah, meaning thereby to draw the dingo a little farther in, and give herself a better chance of catching some part of him between her jaws.
A quarter of an hour after that, Finn lay down beside the ashes of the fire before the gunyah, his kill between his fore-legs. He rested there for a few minutes, and then, tearing off its furry skin in strips, devoured the greater part of the bandicoot before settling down for the night; as much, that is, as he ever did settle down, these days.
Where the wretched bark 'gunyah' of the native stood, is now found the well-finished house of the planter; and where the savage pastimes of the 'bora' ground once obtained, and the smoke from cannibal fires curled slowly upwards to the blue vault of heaven, is heard the cheerful ring of the blacksmith's hammer, the crack of the bullock-whip, as the team moves slowly onward beneath the weight of seven-feet canes, and the measured throb of machinery from the factory, where the crushed plant is yielding up its sweets between the inexorable iron crushers.
There was no sign of Jess that nose or eye or ear could detect, but Finn told himself as he moved away from the gunyah that this was doubtless Bill, and that Jess would be likely to follow. As his custom was, where Bill was concerned, Finn took up his stand about five-and-twenty paces from the humpy, prepared gravely to observe the boundary-rider's evening tasks: the fire-lighting, and so forth.
They moved as noiselessly as shadows, and poured in and out among the scrub like liquid vegetation of some sort; a part of their environment, but volatile. When the three dingoes from the hills reached the edge of the clear patch in which the gunyah stood, they saw the almost black, smouldering remains of a camp-fire, and, stretched within a couple of yards of the ashes, Finn.
Five miles from Bill's gunyah, in a direct southerly line, stood the big, rambling station homestead, where Bill's bachelor employer had lived for many years. He did not live there now, because six months before this time he had died, and his station had reverted to distant relatives in other countries.
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