We made our way to the extreme end of the island, measured our distances carefully, and then began to advance.  None of us spoke.  Sangree and I, with cocked guns, watched the shore lines, and all within easy touch and speaking distance.  It was a slow and blundering drive, and there were many false alarms, but after the best part of half an hour we stood on the farther end, having made the complete tour, and without putting up so much as a squirrel.  Certainly there was no living creature on that island but ourselves.

“I know what it is!” cried Maloney, looking out over the dim expanse of grey sea, and speaking with the air of a man making a discovery; “it’s a dog from one of the farms on the larger islands”—­he pointed seawards where the archipelago thickened—­“and it’s escaped and turned wild.  Our fires and voices attracted it, and it’s probably half starved as well as savage, poor brute!”

No one said anything in reply, and he began to sing again very low to himself.

The point where we stood—­a huddled, shivering group—­faced the wider channels that led to the open sea and Finland.  The grey dawn had broken in earnest at last, and we could see the racing waves with their angry crests of white.  The surrounding islands showed up as dark masses in the distance, and in the east, almost as Maloney spoke, the sun came up with a rush in a stormy and magnificent sky of red and gold.  Against this splashed and gorgeous background black clouds, shaped like fantastic and legendary animals, filed past swiftly in a tearing stream, and to this day I have only to close my eyes to see again that vivid and hurrying procession in the air.  All about us the pines made black splashes against the sky.  It was an angry sunrise.  Rain, indeed, had already begun to fall in big drops.

We turned, as by a common instinct, and, without speech, made our way back slowly to the stockade, Maloney humming snatches of his songs, Sangree in front with his gun, prepared to shoot at a moment’s notice, and the women floundering in the rear with myself and the extinguished lanterns.

Yet it was only a dog!

Really, it was most singular when one came to reflect soberly upon it all.  Events, say the occultists, have souls, or at least that agglomerate life due to the emotions and thoughts of all concerned in them, so that cities, and even whole countries, have great astral shapes which may become visible to the eye of vision; and certainly here, the soul of this drive—­this vain, blundering, futile drive—­stood somewhere between ourselves and—­laughed.

All of us heard that laugh, and all of us tried hard to smother the sound, or at least to ignore it.  Every one talked at once, loudly, and with exaggerated decision, obviously trying to say something plausible against heavy odds, striving to explain naturally that an animal might so easily conceal itself from us, or swim away before we had time to light upon its trail.  For we all spoke of that “trail” as though it really existed, and we had more to go upon than the mere marks of paws about the tents of Joan and the Canadian.  Indeed, but for these, and the torn tent, I think it would, of course, have been possible to ignore the existence of this beast intruder altogether.