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We hurried back to the fire, Maloney talking boisterously about his proposed hunt. “There’s nothing like prompt action to dispel alarm,” he whispered in my ear; and then turned to the rest of us.

“We’ll hunt the island from end to end at once,” he said, with excitement; “that’s what we’ll do. The beast can’t be far away. And the Bo’sun’s Mate and Joan must come too, because they can’t be left alone. Hubbard, you take the right shore, and you, Sangree, the left, and I’ll go in the middle with the women. In this way we can stretch clean across the ridge, and nothing bigger than a rabbit can possibly escape us.” He was extraordinarily excited, I thought. Anything affecting Joan, of course, stirred him prodigiously. “Get your guns and we’ll start the drive at once,” he cried. He lit another lantern and handed one each to his wife and Joan, and while I ran to fetch my gun I heard him singing to himself with the excitement of it all.

Meanwhile the dawn had come on quickly. It made the flickering lanterns look pale. The wind, too, was rising, and I heard the trees moaning overhead and the waves breaking with increasing clamour on the shore. In the lagoon the boat dipped and splashed, and the sparks from the fire were carried aloft in a stream and scattered far and wide.

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.