The Dog Who Wouldn't Be (16 page)

Mutt found long passages trying. We were never able to convince him that it was all right with us if he made use of the masts, in lieu of telephone poles. While he remained at sea he steadfastly refused to let nature take her course, either because he felt that
Scotch Bonnet
was, in effect, a house – and he was so well housebroken that he could not forget it – or because the motion of the ship made it awkward, if not impossible, for him to balance on three legs.

Consequently, when we approached our landfall after a long period at sea, Mutt would be extremely
anxious to make contact. He could smell the land long before we could see it, and when he began to fidget and whine and stare longingly at the horizon, we knew that the shore would soon appear.

One summer our whole family sailed down the lake from Niagara, with Kingston as our destination, and, because of light airs, we were at sea for almost thirty-six hours. When Kingston finally hove in sight, Mutt could hardly contain himself.

Kingston was built in the earliest days of Upper Canada, and it retains much of the staid Victorianism of its heyday. Its rows upon rows of gray-stone houses reflect a kind of gray-stone mentality.

We came into the harbor, and even before we had got our lines ashore, Mutt had spanned the gap between
Scotch Bonnet
and the dock with a prodigious leap, and was away. There were no trees immediately at hand, so he raced up the old cobbled street toward the town proper.

A seedy gentleman took our lines, and after we were fast he invited himself aboard, saying that he was an old sailor – a gambit that always works on my father.

We gave him a drink, and after a while he said:

“Allow you got a dog.”

We allowed that we had indeed.

“Best keep him tight aboard then,” the old fellow continued. “Hear some turrible things about them young medical students up to the university. They be awful hard on dogs.”

“What do they do to them?” I asked in my innocence.

The old man spat, and helped himself to another drink. “Turrible things, they do,” was all that he would say.

I asked where they got the dogs and he replied that most of them came from the city pound. “I shoulda had that job – dog catcher–” he explained in an aggrieved tone, “only I'm a Liberal, and this here's a Conservative sort of place. Would have kept me good, too. Ten dollars for a dog, and five for a cat – that's what them students pay.”

Father cast a slightly anxious look up the dock, but there was no sign of Mutt. “I don't suppose,” he asked the old man somewhat apprehensively, “that there's any law against dogs running loose in Kingston?”

The old man snorted. “Law! Sure there's a law. Not that the feller who's dog catcher now needs no damn law. He'll snitch 'em right outa the back yard, chain and all.”

Grumbling to himself, the old man left us, but
before he was off the dock, we had passed him. We were in a hurry.

I went up the dock road while Father went east along the water front and Mother went west. None of the people I accosted had seen anything that answered Mutt's description, nor could I find any trace of him myself. When I returned to the dock an hour later, it was to discover that neither Father nor Mother had had any better luck.

My father began to seethe. The thought of Mutt in the toils of the local dog catcher, and perhaps already on his way to the dissection table, was enlarging his adrenal glands.

“You borrow a bicycle from the boatyard and go on looking,” he told me. “I'm going to the pound.”

By the time he reached the pound he had worked himself into a towering rage; but the dog catcher was not there. In his stead was an emaciated and gum-chewing youth sprawled in an old chair, reading a racing form. He listened without emotion to Father's request that Mutt be released upon the instant.

Eventually he waved a languid hand toward the wire enclosure at the rear of the building. “If your dog's there, you can have him for two bucks, mister,” he said. “Say you think Red Apple has a chance in the King's Plate?”

Not trusting himself to reply, Father hurried to the enclosure, only to be confronted by an ominous lack of dogs. There was not one in the whole pound. He returned to the youth and, in a voice that raised the languid one out of his chair, demanded the dog catcher himself.

The youth grew impertinent.

“Try making like a dog then, mister,” he advised. “Run out by the university. He'll pick you somewhere along the way.”

If the lad had guessed how close he was to annihilation in that instant, he would have discarded the racing form forever in favor of the New Testament. It was only the fact that my father could not afford time for a diversion that saved his skin.

Outside the pound Father caught a taxi and went straight to the city hall. He tried the mayor's office first, but that gentleman was out of town attending a conference on sewage disposal.

However, the office of the chief of police was close at hand, and Father stormed it as he might have stormed an enemy redoubt. He found no one there except a large fat constable who was unsympathetic, and inclined to quick hostility.

Very much on his dignity the constable pointed out that he did not run the “bejasusly” dog pound,
and that, in any case, Father was committing a felony by allowing his dog to “run large.” The librarian in my father came to the surface automatically.

“Run
at
large,” he snapped.

The constable was no grammarian.

“
You
better run outside!” he shouted. “Or, by Hades, I'll run you in!”

Abandoning any hope of help from the civil power, Father now sought a telephone booth, and dialed the medical building at the university.

The phone rang and rang with that mechanical insistence which indicates either that no one is home or, if they are, that they are too busy to bother answering. Father suspected that they were too busy. Ghastly visions of a trussed-up Mutt being set upon by white-clad figures assailed him. He did not even wait to get his nickel back, but slammed out of the booth, for he had remembered that there was one place in Kingston where he might find aid and friends – the military barracks.

When he burst into the officers' mess he found it deserted save for the orderly officer of the day, who, by a singular coincidence, had served with Father in the Fourth Battalion during the First World War.

This officer was delighted to see an old friend; particularly so since there is nothing duller than
orderly duty in a peacetime barracks. He listened with sympathy, and with a quickening gleam in his eye, as Father, having downed a quick one, poured out his story.

When the tale was told, the officer slapped Father affectionately on the shoulder, exclaiming:

“Trust the damned civilians to pull a black, eh? This is an emergency, old boy. Tell you what – we'll call out the guard and stage a proper rescue.”

He was as good as his word, too, and, five minutes later, a picket of armed men was marching briskly through the city streets toward the university.

It was a lucky thing for him that the patrol did not meet the dog catcher en route, for soldiers are very fond of dogs, and they do not like the civil authority in any guise. But it was an even luckier thing that the patrol met me. Had it not done so, there might have been memorable deeds done in Kingston on that day.

I cannot believe that the students would have stood idly by while the medical building was put to the torch, and it is almost certain that the chief of police would have flung his forces into the fray on the students' side. Reinforcements would then have been required from the fort, and these might even have included the two light fieldpieces (relics of the
Boer War, but still capable of making dangerous noises) which stand in front of the officers' mess.

In a sense I am sorry that I interfered, but interfere I did. Astride my borrowed bicycle, I caught up with Father and the squad when they were still about a quarter of a mile from the university gates, and informed them that Mutt had been found.

As for Mutt, when we dragged him out from under the dock where he had been closeted with a dead whitefish for two hours past, he could not for the life of him understand my father's attitude. Mutt never did like being shouted at. He sulked for days.

t was raining when I woke, a warm and gentle rain that did not beat harshly on the window glass, but melted into the unresisting air so that the smell of the morning was as heavy and sweet as the breath of ruminating cows.

By the time I came down to breakfast the rain was done and the brown clouds were passing, leaving behind them a blue mesh of sky with the last cloud tendrils swaying dimly over it. I went to the back door and stood there for a moment, listening to the roundelay of horned larks on the distant fields.

It had been a dour and ugly winter, prolonging its intemperance almost until this hour, and giving way to spring with a sullen reluctance. The days
had been cold and leaden and the wet winds of March had smacked of the charnel house. Now they were past. I stood on the doorstep and felt the remembered sun, heard the gibbering of the freshet, watched little deltas of yellow mud form along the gutters, and smelled the sensual essence rising from the warming soil.

Mutt came to the door behind me. I turned and looked at him and time jumped suddenly and I saw that he was old. I put my hand on his grizzled muzzle and shook it gently.

“Spring's here, old-timer,” I told him. “And who knows – perhaps the ducks have come back to the pond.”

He wagged his tail once and then moved stiffly by me, his nostrils wrinkling as he tested the fleeting breeze.

The winter past had been the longest he had known. Through the short-clipped days of it he had lain dreaming by the fire. Little half-heard whimpers had stirred his drawn lips as he journeyed into time in the sole direction that remained open to him. He had dreamed the bitter days away, content to sleep.

As I sat down to breakfast I glanced out the kitchen window and I could see him moving slowly
down the road toward the pond. I knew that he had gone to see about those ducks, and when the meal was done I put on my rubber boots, picked up my field glasses, and followed after.

The country road was silver with runnels of thaw water, and bronzed by the sliding ridges of the melting ruts. There was no other wanderer on that road, yet I was not alone, for his tracks went with me, each pawprint as familiar as the print of my own hand. I followed them, and I knew each thing that he had done, each move that he had made, each thought that had been his; for so it is with two who live one life together.

The tracks meandered crabwise to and fro across the road. I saw where he had come to the old
TRESPASSERS FORBIDDEN
sign, which had leaned against the flank of a supporting snowdrift all the winter through, but now was heeled over to a crazy angle, one jagged end tipped accusingly to the sky, where flocks of juncos bounded cleanly over and ignored its weary threat. The tracks stopped here, and I knew that he had stood for a long time, his old nose working as he untangled the identities of the many foxes, the farm dogs, and the hounds which had come this way during the winter months.

We went on then, the tracks and I, over the old corduroy and across the log bridge, to pause for a moment where a torpid garter snake had undulated slowly through the softening mud.

There Mutt had left the road and turned into the fallow fields, pausing here and there to sniff at an old cow flap, or at the collapsing burrows left by the field mice underneath the vanished snow.

So we came at last to the beech woods and passed under the red tracery of budding branches where a squirrel jabbered its defiance at the unheeding back of a horned owl, brooding somberly over her white eggs.

The pond lay near at hand. I stopped and sat on an upturned stump and let the sun beat down on me while I swept the surface of the water with my glasses. I could see no ducks, yet I knew they were there. Back in the yellow cattails old greenhead and his mate were waiting patiently for me to go so that they could resume their ponderous courtship. I smiled, knowing that they would not long be left in peace, even in their secluded place.

I waited and the first bee flew by, and little drifting whorls of mist rose from the remaining banks of snow deep in the woods. Then suddenly there was the familiar voice raised in wild yelping somewhere
among the dead cattails. And then a frantic surge of wings and old greenhead lifted out of the reeds, his mate behind him. They circled heavily while, unseen beneath them, Mutt plunged among the tangled reeds and knew a fragment of the ecstasy that had been his when guns had spoken over other ponds in other years.

I rose and ambled on until I found his tracks again, beyond the reeds. The trail led to the tamarack swamp and I saw where he had stopped a moment to snuffle at the still-unopened door of a chipmunk's burrow. Nearby there was a cedar tangle and the tracks went round and round beneath the boughs where a ruffed grouse had spent the night.

We crossed the clearing, Mutt and I, and here the soft black mold was churned and tossed as if by a herd of rutting deer; yet all the tracks were his. For an instant I was baffled, and then a butterfly came through the clearing on unsteady wings, and I remembered. So many times I had watched him leap, and hop, and circle after such a one, forever led and mocked by the first spring butterflies. I thought of the dignified old gentleman of yesterday who had frowned at puppies in their play.

Now the tracks led me beyond the swamp to the edge of a broad field and here they hesitated by a
groundhog's hole, unused these two years past. But there was still some faint remaining odor, enough to make Mutt's bulbous muzzle wrinkle with interest, and enough to set his blunt old claws to scratching in the matted grass.

He did not tarry long. A rabbit passed and the morning breeze carried its scent. Mutt's trail veered off abruptly, careening recklessly across the soft and yielding furrows of October's plow, slipping and sliding in the frost-slimed troughs. I followed more sedately until the tracks halted abruptly against a bramble patch. He had not stopped in time. The thorns still held a tuft or two of his proud plumes.

And then there must have been a new scent on the wind. His tracks moved off in a straight line toward the country road, and the farms which lie beyond it. There was a new mood on him, the ultimate spring mood. I knew it. I even knew the name of the little collie bitch who lived in the first farm. I wished him luck.

I returned directly to the road, and my boots were sucking in the mud when a truck came howling along toward me, and passed in a shower of muddy water. I glanced angrily after it, for the driver had almost hit me in his blind rush. As I
watched, it swerved sharply to make the bend in the road and vanished from my view. I heard the sudden shrilling of brakes, then the roar of an accelerating motor – and it was gone.

I did not know that, in its passing, it had made an end to the best years that I had lived.

In the evening of that day I drove out along the road in company with a silent farmer who had come to fetch me. We stopped beyond the bend, and found him in the roadside ditch. The tracks that I had followed ended here, nor would they ever lead my heart again.

It rained that night and by the next dawn even the tracks were gone, save by the cedar swamp where a few little puddles dried quickly in the rising sun. There was nothing else, save that from a tangle of rustling brambles some tufts of fine white hair shredded quietly away in the early breeze and drifted down to lie among the leaves.

The pact of timelessness between the two of us was ended, and I went from him into the darkening tunnel of the years.