The dingo pack crawled along on their bellies, inching toward the flock of Merino sheep a hundred metres away from where they lay in the long grass.   Like the Huskies, which facially they resembled, the dingoes were distantly related to the wolf, and had a savage disposition.   However, they were tame compared to the vicious larger dog, which had recently taken control of the pack.

So, reluctantly the dingoes submitted to this cautious approach, which was alien to them.   Normally they would have charged down the slope and terrified the sheep into flight, making a cruel game of the hunt, since the yellow dogs knew they could easily run the sheep to ground.   But their new leader insisted on a more systematic method, forcing the dingoes to creep up on the flock, attacking them from all sides at once to ensure that not a single sheep escaped alive.

They had used this new approach without failure over the previous week.   Yet one of the dingoes became impatient and began to whine lightly from frustration, until seeing the bull terrier-like face of their new leader staring back at him.   The larger dog snarled silently, baring its lethal fangs, glaring with eyes that almost seemed to glow yellow in the dark.

Remembering the way he had taken control of the pack a week earlier, effortlessly tearing their old leader limb-from-limb in the battle for leadership, the dingo whispered its apology and turned over onto its back on the dewy grass.   The gesture was universally recognised by canines as an act of submission, which usually entailed the “victor” going across to gently nip at the “loser’s” soft underbelly.   However, the gesture seemed unknown to the large wild dog, which merely stared at the grovelling dingo with an almost human look of contempt.

After a moment the dingo rolled over again and began to wag its tail in the hope the leader would accept this act of submission instead.   The leader turned back toward the flock of sheep and the dingo accepted this as just another strange quirk of the wild dog’s nature.   In the week that he had led them, the larger dog had already imposed strange customs upon them, including forcing them to hunt around the Merridale-East Merridale area, thirty kilometres from their home base near Glen Hartwell.