The Dog Who Wouldn't Be (15 page)

She was handing Father his plate of oatmeal, and with it she volunteered the information that:

“Them ghosts is et half all them apples up.”

Father toyed delicately with the phrase for a little while, then dropped his eyes to his plate with a slight shudder. I was made of sterner stuff. “What ghosts?” I asked.

Hannah looked at me with placid condescension. “Them apple ghosts,” she explained patiently. “He's et about most of them apples you got from Prince Henry's house and just kind of lays the cores around.”

After this we were driven to make a full investigation, and Hannah was relieved, yet at the same time disappointed, when I was able to tell her that we had no ghosts – only a skunk.

He was a mild-mannered fellow who must have led an unexceptional life up until the time he got himself locked up for the winter in our cellar, for there was no odor clinging to his fur. He was under the preserve cabinet when the beam of my flashlight found him. He showed no resentment, but only blinked his eyes and ducked his head in an apologetic sort of way, neither frightened nor aggressive. He must have long since assumed that we meant him no harm.

For a few days we were foolish enough to consider ways and means of removing him. Mutt, apprised of the skunk's presence, had a plan of his own and he was so anxious to put it into effect that he almost scratched a hole through the cellar door. We did not trust his discretion.

We soon recovered our reason and concluded an armistice. We had far more apples than we needed, anyway, and since the skunk was obviously amicable, we decided to live and let live.

Things worked out very well. The skunk stayed in the vegetable room, ate such apples as he required,
and bothered no one. We came to accept his presence tranquilly, and it was no uncommon thing for one of us to be rummaging in the potato bin, while a few feet away the skunk munched on an apple.

This harmonious state of affairs would probably have continued until spring, when the skunk could have gone voluntarily on his way, had it not been for a man whom none of us has ever met. I do not even recall his name, but I know that he lives in one of the southern states of the Union. He is of the expert genus who write books and articles about birds and animals with such assurance that the reader is convinced the author must be privy to the thoughts of the beasts. Shortly before Christmas this man published an article about skunks in one of the more famous sporting magazines.

I read the article, and was deeply impressed. The author had developed a foolproof principle for handling skunks, and he was generous enough to share his secret with the world. The essence of his method was a garden hose. He had discovered that a jet of water directed a few inches behind a skunk, and in such a way that the stream was deflected slightly upwards after contact with the ground, would safely move any skunk that ever lived. Reasoning skunk-fashion, the author explained
why the method was so effective. “The skunk,” he wrote, “under the impression that his discomfort stems from a natural source, will move briskly away without attempting retaliation.”

Christmas holidays were due to begin in a week's time, and I was bored and disgruntled by the last days of school. Hannah and I were alone in the house, for my parents were in Oakville on a three-day state visit to my father's family. I put down the magazine and went downstairs.

In my own defense I can plead that I was least systematic. My first move was to pry open the outer cellar doors, and only then did I enter the basement and attach the garden hose to the laundry tap. When the hose was spluttering satisfactorily, I moved into the vegetable room and, having located the skunk, I brought the stream to bear upon the hard ground immediately to his rear.

There was a startled scurrying and the skunk shot out of the vegetable room, and sought sanctuary behind the old-fashioned hot-air furnace. I pursued him with the jet, chivying him slowly toward the cellarway and the open doors. He went, unhappily, but, even as my author had foretold, without attempt at retaliation. Victory was nearly mine, when I glanced up at the cellarway to assure
myself that there was no obstacle in the skunk's way – and behold Mutt's face framed in that square of cold blue sky.

I realized that he was poised to leap, and my reason was momentarily paralyzed by a vision of the certain consequences which must follow. Acting instinctively, I raised the hose in order to bring it to bear on Mutt, but I forgot that the skunk was in the way, and the lifting stream caught him fair amidships and bowled him over. I hit Mutt too, but by then it was too late to matter much.

Tears of rage and agony were blinding me, but I no longer cared. While Mutt and the skunk skirmished around the perimeter of the basement I followed them, brandishing my hose indiscriminately. Sometimes a ricochet blast from the skunk would send me staggering back toward the cellar doors. Raging, I returned each time to the fray. Back and forth we went, into the vegetable room, behind the furnace, under the cellar stairs. The air grew murky and the single electric light bulb shone dimly through a rich and yellow haze.

Mutt was the first to call it quits, and to leave by the outside entrance. The skunk, exhausted and suffering from its own potency, followed close behind. I was left alone, the hose still spurting in my hand.

The silence was intense, until from somewhere far above me I heard Hannah's stentorian tones.

“Mother of God!” she cried. “Mother of God – I go!”

In the event, Hannah did not go, but only because we were so far from Saskatchewan, and she had no idea which way her lost home lay. There was no escape for any of us.

There was misery in that house for a long time. Despite the bitterness of the weather, the furnace had to be turned off, since it sucked up tangible fumes from the basement and circulated them freely. Even with all windows and doors wide to the winter winds, the basement remained a haunted place. The skunk oil, mixed with water, had permeated the dirt floor so deeply that I doubt if even yet it has entirely passed away.

As for our neighbors, far from rallying to us in this time of need, they drew yet further off. One of them was overheard to express the opinions of them all.

“What else can you expect,” she said with smug complacency, “from people who would live in a place like that?” It was clear that skunks and culture were inextricably bound up together in her mind.

My parents did not punish me directly, but they insisted that I go back to school on the day after the
event. I pleaded for mercy, but to no avail. I went off very slowly, and with bowed head.

It was a frigid day, and the school was overheated. Before the opening exercises ended, there was not an occupied desk within five feet of me. I sat on, a self-conscious island of misery, until at last the teacher – Miss Leatherbottom was her name – called me forward and handed me a note. It was succinct. “Go home,” it said.

The humiliation of that experience was a heavy load to bear, yet it was as nothing to the spiritual torment inflicted on me a few years later by Mutt and his passion for skunks.

My maternal grandparents owned a cottage and a lake in the remote highlands of Quebec, and here the family was accustomed to forgather in the summer months. It was a place of pleasant memory on the whole, for it was free of the horrors of most summer resorts. There were no thundering outboard motors piloted by fat and foolish men, hell bent at fifty miles an hour for nowhere. There were no rows of shoddy matchbox cottages clustered cheek by jowl along the shores – the sylvan counterpart of city slums. Instead there was a single unobtrusive log house, an even more unobtrusive boathouse and sleeping cabin combined, and then
nothing but the ancient hills, black-shrouded in their forests, overlooking and solacing the waters of the lake.

For Mutt and me it was a blessed place after the horrors of Toronto, and the almost equal horrors of the Ontario village. It was also the scene of my first love.

The girl was the daughter of a wealthy doctor who owned a cottage on a nearby lake. She was not insensible to me, and she showed some taste for poetry, which, in those days, was my chief interest. I wrote verse of a somewhat melancholy vein, but she would listen patiently while I declaimed it. I recall one passage that seemed particularly to move her. It concerned the fate of an abandoned lover, and one verse went like this:

I thought it was effective, and so did the young lady. Great things might have resulted from our association had it not been cruelly terminated within a week.

Each Saturday there was a dance in the nearby village of Kazabazua (you will find the name on any reputable map) and I had arranged to take my girl to one of these affairs. The explosion of a summer thunderstorm on the Friday night before the dance did not distress me as I lay abed, dreaming my dreams. Yet that storm had a shattering effect upon my life.

In its first wild rush it uprooted and toppled a magnificent old pine that had stood for two hundred years not far from the house. In its fall the old tree uncovered a family of skunks who had their burrow beneath its roots. The skunks immediately sought other shelter, and found it under the floor of the cabin where a space had been left open for ventilation purposes. Unfortunately, Mutt, whose fear of thunderstorms was still pathogenic, had long since occupied this sanctuary, and there was hardly room for all the new arrivals.

My parents and grandparents were sitting by the open fire when the old tree came down. Grand mother, who always tended to take acts of God as personal affronts, was outraged. She began to pace up and down the room, peering out at the wreckage as she passed the window, and she made a little speech.

“I refuse,” she cried, “absolutely refuse to plant another tree. What point is there when they just blow down again?”

Grandfather wisely let this pass, but my parents were still trying to digest it when all four of them became aware of new sounds of natural discord. From below their feet came strange and muffled scuttling noises, some snorts, a muted growl or two, and a weird sort of chattering. Grandmother, who was seldom at a loss, was mystified. She pounded the floor with her foot and cried out:

“Now what's all that about?”

The floor boards were not tight. There was no subfloor, and Grandmother got her answer. With a callous indifference that I still find hard to forgive, my four elders promptly evacuated the house to seek shelter in the sleeping cabin by the lake. They left me to my fate.

I woke soon afterwards. The turmoil underfoot was mounting in intensity and the stench was breath-taking. Clutching an eiderdown, and burying my nose in its folds, I scuttled to the door and began slithering down the steep path to the lakeside. The thunder muttered overhead and rain drove down with a vicious intensity. A flash of lightning illuminated my path and I beheld the white and
frightened face of a skunk two or three paces ahead of me, and evidently in full flight from the Donnybrook under the house.

I could not stop. My bare feet scratched for traction on the steep and muddy path, but it was useless. Both the skunk and I were on a greased slide, and we fetched up at the bottom of the path almost inextricably entwined with one another in the eiderdown.

They would not have me in the sleeping cabin. Grandmother held the door shut. “He's your damned dog – go and sleep with
him
,” she said, and there was an unaccustomed bitterness in her tone.

As a matter of fact I slept under an upturned rowboat for the rest of the night.

At the crack of dawn on Saturday morning I was in the lake laboring with a cake of carbolic soap. At intervals during that awful day I experimented with tomato juice, kerosene, turpentine, and pumice stone, and although none of these was wholly effective, by evening I was relatively free of skunk. At least, I could no longer smell myself, and with this false assurance of purity I set out to escort my young lady to the dance.

We had no more than a few hundred yards to walk together, and there was a good evening breeze,
so that by dint of remaining downwind from her, I escaped immediate detection. But she was on the alert.

“Hurry up,” she said once. “I think there's a skunk somewhere about.” There was something close to panic in her voice, and I was surprised by it, for she had always seemed a singularly fearless sort of girl.

The dance was in a barn and it was well attended. Oil lamps supplied the illumination, and boosted the already volcanic temperature to an almost unbearable extreme. I knew before the first dance ended that I would not get away with it. Yet by dint of refusing to sit out any dances, and by moving very quickly through the press, I kept the finger of suspicion from pointing directly at me. I was considerably relieved when, after half an hour of it, my girl clutched me by the arm and in a strangled whisper implored me to take her home at once. She kept peering at the other dancers and there was a stricken look about her.

Once out of doors I felt that I should confess my guilt. My lady had a sense of humor, and I was sure that she would be amused by the affair. We paused on the path outside her cottage, and I told her all.

She gasped, turned from me, and ran as if pursued
by all the fiends of hell. And never to this day have I looked upon her face again.

It was her older brother who explained. I met him in the local general store one day and insisted that he tell me why his sister would no longer receive me.

He laughed heartily.

“You don't know?” he asked, and it was a stupid question, for how could I have known? “Oh, but this is rich! It's skunk stink,” he cried when he could master his mirth. “Jane's allergic to it – it makes her break out in hives – all over – and they last a month!”

ne of the first things my father did after we returned to Ontario to live was to give substance to a ten-year-old dream. He bought a ship. It was not a canoe this time. It was a real ship – a vessel to make any sailor proud.

She came from Montreal and she was a double-ender of a type designed originally in Norway for service on the North Atlantic, and called a
redningsskoite
. She was big, and black, and as strong and well developed as the “big-boned, deep-bosomed, buxom western women” that Father used to talk nostalgically about. She was ketch rigged. Her sails were made in Lunenburg and tanned a glowing red. Everything about her was solid and seagoing.

My father sailed her up from Montreal single-handed, and when she arrived among the varnish and mahogany yachts of Toronto (yachts that sometimes flew streamers of ticker tape from their spars instead of pennants) she seemed as out of place as an Aberdeen Angus among a herd of fallow deer. The natty lads in their cream flannels and yachtsmen's hats were inclined to sneer at her, and when they read her name they laughed out loud.

“
Scotch Bonnet!
” they cried. “What kind of a name is that for a boat? Why didn't you call her
RayMar
or
BillJean
or
Saucy Sue VIII
like the rest of us?”

But when they saw
our
yachting caps – Balmorals, imported direct from Caithness – they realized that we were beyond their ken entirely, and they ignored us from then on.

Scotch Bonnet
did not care. She knew where her name came from, and she was proud of it. For the black granite reef that rises out of Lake Ontario below Prince Edward County, and that bears the name Scotch Bonnet Rock, is a place that once loomed large in the minds of the real sailormen who manned the grain schooners that owned the Great Lakes in the days before steam drove them into limbo.

Scotch Bonnet
was – and is – a ship to inspire deep affection in her crew, and even Mutt was not
immune to her attractions. He did not come to her as a complete landlubber, for he had sailed before, in
Concepcion
. Nevertheless, his first sail aboard
Scotch Bonnet
might well have turned a lesser dog against the sea forever.

In the first week of September, my father announced that he and I and Mutt would take the vessel down the lake to the Bay of Quinte. We drove from our house to the anchorage inside Toronto's breakwater, and when we arrived there we found a gale to greet us. The storm warnings were flying, and the seas, running in across some forty miles of open water, were thundering against the concrete barriers along the shore.

It was all we could do to stay afloat in our little dinghy as we rowed out to where our ship lay at her moorings; but Mutt appeared to enjoy the experience and he was full of enthusiasm as he leaped up to
Scotch Bonnet
's sturdy deck.

We had no sooner run up the mizzen, preparatory to letting slip our moorings, when a police launch came pounding out toward us. It was a big power cruiser but, like all of its species, designed for millponds. I watched in awe as it wallowed and heaved across the protected waters, and I was more than half inclined to heed the warnings
shouted to us over a loud-hailer when the launch came alongside.

“Ahoy there,” bawled an authoritative voice. “You can't go outside today. The gale warnings are up!”

Father, who knows how to handle policemen, simply smiled and answered them in Gaelic. The policemen were game, and they made several attempts to get through to him, but finally they took a big wave broadside and came near enough to swamping to make them decide to leave us foreigners to our fate.

Father caught sight of my face. “Buck up,” he shouted over the roar of the wind. “
Scotch Bonnet
's sister ship crossed the Atlantic twice. This is only a light breeze for a
redningsskoite
. Now stand by to let slip the mooring when I get the jib up.”

I stood by, but not very happily. A few moments later
Bonnet
was under way, and the water was whooshing beneath her forefoot like a mountain cascade.

We went out through the gap into the open lake under mizzen and jib alone, and it was more than enough canvas in that wind. We had no sooner cleared Toronto Island than we saw a strange spectacle ahead. It looked at first as if a drunken forest
was staggering toward us out of the storm darkness. We stared perplexed at this phenomenon until my father recognized its meaning.

“Look,” he whooped joyfully. “That's the cross-lake race from Rochester … the yachting boys … and they're running for shelter under bare poles.”

As we stood out toward them we could see that they were certainly a naked lot. There was hardly a stitch of canvas set on any of those two dozen vessels, not even on the big eight-meter boats. They were a frightening sight, too, for they were burying their noses until the water ran green the full length of their decks, and their cockpits were no more than private swimming pools.

Father was not really a vindictive man, but I suppose he could not resist the impulse. “Take the tiller,” he yelled. And with that he began hoisting our great red mainsail.

We drove through that battered fleet like another
Flying Dutchman
, and as we passed we sang “It's Up Wi' the Bonnets of Bonny Dundee” at the top of our lungs.

It was an exhilarating moment, but when we had come about and were beating eastward down the coast, I remembered that I had not seen Mutt for half an hour. I went below to seek him.

I found him on my bunk, up forward of the mainmast, where the motion was the worst. He was stretched at full length, his head on my pillow and his feet hanging limply over the side of the bunk. He looked as if he believed, and hoped, that he was already dead. He took no notice of my arrival except to roll his eyes until the sight of those bloodshot orbs made me think suddenly of my own stomach, and I hastened out on deck again.

I told my father that Mutt was dying.

“He'll get over it,” my father said.

And of course he did. By the next dawn he was up and around again; but in future when the storm warnings were flying he never showed quite the same enthusiasm for sailing that had been his on that first day we went to sea.

The kind of cruising that really suited Mutt was when we lay at anchor in one or other of the many delightful little coves that hide under the high shores of Prince Edward County. He could then enjoy the best of two worlds. We used to tie the dinghy close alongside
Scotch Bonnet
and whenever Mutt felt like stretching his legs on land he had but to jump into the dinghy, lower himself over its side, and swim ashore. The coves where we chose to lie were usually remote and rather wild, and Mutt
could indulge in one of his favorite sports – crawfish hunting – to his heart's content.

Crawfish hunting is an aquatic sport. To play it Mutt would wade out from shore until he stood shoulder deep. Then he would lower his head below the surface and, with his eyes wide open, would search for the flat stones under which crawfish like to hide. He used his nose to overturn the stones, and the water was so clear that he could plainly see his quarry scuttling away in search of a new haven. Being members of the lobster family, crawfish have formidable claws, but these availed them nothing against Mutt, who would snap at them with his front teeth until they were disarmed. Once they had been rendered harmless, he would take them in his mouth, raise his head out of the water, and eat them with evident relish.

Mutt, at his crawfishing, was quite a sight to see and I have known a Bay of Quinte farmer to stand and watch for a solid hour, while the plow team pawed restively at the furrowed ground behind him.

If crawfish were not abundant, or if the cove happened to be marshy, Mutt would hunt frogs instead. He did this purely for fun, since he never ate the frogs he caught. Nor would he catch a frog while it was on dry land. The trick was to chivy it into, and
under, the water, and try to locate it as it huddled on the bottom. Then Mutt's head would dart down with a speed and precision equal to that of his chief competitor, the great blue heron; and generally he would emerge with the frog held gently in his jaws. He would carry it to land, release it, and then chase it back into the water, for another round.

If he grew tired of the land, or if he fell foul of a farmer as a result of his old passion for cattle chasing, Mutt had only to plunge into the cove and swim out to the dinghy again. It was a life that suited him ideally.

It was ideal for me as well, but I preferred
Scotch Bonnet
under sail, making her way in fine weather among the islands and channels of the bay. I held a bird-banding permit at the time, and the myriad islets and sand bars around Prince Edward County were densely occupied by breeding colonies of gulls and terns.
Scotch Bonnet
eventually carried me to almost all these breeding places, and I banded well over a thousand fledglings in the course of two summer cruises.

The most memorable of those banding excursions was the one we made to
Scotch Bonnet
's namesake.

Scotch Bonnet Rock lies nine miles off the Prince Edward shore, and the lighthouse that stands upon
it is no longer tended by a keeper. The rock is visited only once or twice each season, when the gas cylinders of the automatic light need replenishing. Free from human interference, vast flocks of gulls and cormorants now make the rock their home and breeding place.

We came to the island from seaward on a boisterous June day, with a stiff breeze filling our sails, and a brilliant sun beating down upon the rising waves. Because of the heavy seas and the strengthening breeze, Father was forced to lie off and on under sail, beating back and forth, while I rowed ashore in the dinghy. Mutt insisted on coming with me, for we had been some time from land, and he was suffering from a lack of trees.

It was a hard pull. The sea was steep and choppy, and the little dinghy rose and fell, so that often I could see neither the island nor the vessel. But I could see the cormorants, black and heavy, in slow flight from their fishing grounds to their nests upon the island.

I landed on the lee side and hauled the dinghy clear of the swell. All about me gulls rose in angry protest, and since the wind was sweeping across the island full into my face, I was doubly aware that the place was heavily populated. Mutt dashed off
to seek a tree, but there was none, and after some indecision he finally betook himself to the lighthouse, which must surely have been the most grandiose post ever to greet the eye of a hard-pressed dog.

Banding young cormorants is no job for those with weak stomachs. The fledglings are naked until they are more than half grown, and their long necks and ungainly bellies do not make for much aesthetic charm. The nests are sketchy constructions littered with fish offal and guano. When approached by one whom they suspect, the young cormorants fix the intruder with a reproachful gaze and, after letting him come within easy range, suddenly convulse themselves, regurgitating their dinners of partially digested fish at him.

Knowing of this deplorable habit, I approached my victims cautiously. Mutt, on the other hand, had no foreknowledge.

Having finished his business at the lighthouse, he began picking his way through the nesting area toward me. At first he avoided the young cormorants, but his curiosity got the better of him, and at length he approached one of them with nose outstretched in a tentative gesture of friendship. The cormorant promptly convulsed itself and caught Mutt squarely in the face.

I was roused from my work by his cry of outrage, and I stood up in time to see him come dashing blindly through the center of the colony, recklessly steering a direct course, and presenting an irresistible target to every young cormorant along the way.

He saw me and altered course in my direction, but friendship and brotherly love have their limits, and I climbed hurriedly up on a rock outcropping where I was beyond his reach. He paused briefly at the foot of the rock, fixed me with a terrible look of reproach, and then, turning to the island shore, he incontinently flung himself into the lake.

I had a hard time launching the dinghy, and by the time I was clear of the shore breakers, I could see no sign of Mutt. As the little boat clung momentarily to the top of each swell I scanned the waters. At last I caught a glimpse of his black head, and I could see that he was making directly for the mainland shore, nine miles away.

He vanished immediately from my view, but some of his erstwhile enemies from the island now came to his assistance. A bevy of gulls swooped screaming down above him, giving me an aiming mark.

Father had seen me leave the island, and he realized that all was not well. He brought the vessel about and bore down on me. I waved toward the
gulls, and he understood at once, for he could see that Mutt was missing from the dinghy.

Mutt had to be dragged aboard the ship, and he showed no signs of gratitude for his rescue. The swim had cleansed his body, but the memory of the indignity he had suffered remained upon him. He crawled into a cubbyhole under the cockpit seat, and there he stayed throughout the remainder of the day and emerged – tentatively – only when we docked in the Murray Canal that evening. Even then he did not hurry ashore as was his wont, but stood on deck for a long time, suspiciously eying the green meadows and the inviting trees.