Lad, A Dog/Chapter IV

Chapter IV. His Little Son Lad’s mate Lady was the only one of the Little People about The Place who refused to look on Lad with due reverence. In her frolic-moods she teased him unmercifully; in a prettily imperious way she bossed and bullied him—for all of which Lad adored her. He had other reasons, too, for loving Lady—not only because she was dainty and beautiful, and was caressingly fond of him, but because he had won her in fair mortal combat with the younger and showier Knave.

For a time after Knave’s routing, Lad was blissfully happy in Lady’s undivided comradeship. Together they ranged the forests beyond The Place in search of rabbits. Together they sprawled shoulder to shoulder on the disreputable old fur rug in front of the living-room fire. Together they did joyous homage to their gods, the Mistress and the Master.

Then in the late summer a new rival appeared—to be accurate, three rivals. And they took up all of Lady’s time and thought and love. Poor old Lad was made to feel terribly out in the cold. The trio of rivals that had so suddenly claimed Lady’s care were fuzzy and roly-poly, and about the size of month-old kittens. In brief, they were three thoroughbred collie puppies.

Two of them were tawny brown, with white forepaws and chests. The third was not like Lad in color, but like the mother—at least, all of him not white was of the indeterminate yellowish mouse-gray which, at three months or earlier, turns to pale gold.

When they were barely a fortnight old—almost as soon as their big mournful eyes opened—the two brown puppies died. There seemed no particular reason for their death, except the fact that a collie is always the easiest or else the most impossible breed of dog to raise.

The fuzzy grayish baby alone was left—the puppy which was soon to turn to white and gold. The Mistress named him “Wolf.”

Upon Baby Wolf the mother-dog lavished a ridiculous lot of attention—so much that Lad was miserably lonely. The great collie would try with pathetic eagerness, a dozen times a day, to lure his mate into a woodland ramble or into a romp on the lawn, but Lady met his wistful advances with absorbed indifference or with a snarl. Indeed when Lad ventured overnear the fuzzy baby, he was warned off by a querulous growl from the mother or by a slash of her shiny white teeth.

Lad could not at all understand it. He felt no particular interest—only a mild and disapproving curiosity in the shapeless little whimpering ball of fur that nestled so helplessly against his beloved mate’s side. He could not understand the mother-love that kept Lady with Wolf all day and all night. It was an impulse that meant nothing to Lad.

After a week or two of fruitless effort to win back Lady’s interest, Lad coldly and wretchedly gave up the attempt. He took long solitary walks by himself in the forest, retired for hours at a time to sad brooding in his favorite “cave” under the living-room piano, and tried to console himself by spending all the rest of his day in the company of the Mistress and the Master. And he came thoroughly to disapprove of Wolf. Recognizing the baby intruder as the cause of Lady’s estrangement from himself, he held aloof from the puppy.

The latter was beginning to emerge from his newborn shapelessness. His coat’s texture was changing from fuzz to silk. Its color was turning from gray into yellow. His blunt little nose was lengthening and growing thin and pointed. His butter-ball body was elongating, and his huge feet and legs were beginning to shape up. He looked more like a dog now, and less like an animated muff. Also within Wolf’s youthful heart awoke the devil of mischief, the keen urge of play. He found Lady a pleasant-enough playfellow up to a certain point. But a painfully sharp pinch from her teeth or a reproving and breath-taking slap from one of her forepaws was likely to break up every game that she thought had gone far enough; when Wolf’s clownish roughness at length got on her hair-trigger nerves.

So, in search of an additional playmate, the frolicsome puppy turned to Lad, only to find that Lad would not play with him at all. Lad made it very, very clear to everyone—except to the fool puppy himself—that he had no desire to romp or to associate in any way with this creature which had ousted him from Lady’s heart! Being cursed with a soul too big and gentle to let him harm anything so helpless as Wolf, he did not snap or growl, as did Lady, when the puppy teased. He merely walked away in hurt dignity.

Wolf had a positive genius for tormenting Lad. The huge collie, for instance, would be snoozing away a hot hour on the veranda or under the wistaria vines. Down upon him, from nowhere in particular, would pounce Wolf.

The puppy would seize his sleeping father by the ear, and drive his sharp little milk-teeth fiercely into the flesh. Then he would brace himself and pull backward, possibly with the idea of dragging Lad along the ground.

Lad would wake in pain, would rise in dignified unhappiness to his feet and start to walk off—the puppy still hanging to his ear. As Wolf was a collie and not a bulldog, he would lose his grip as his fat little body left the ground. Then, at a clumsy gallop, he would pursue Lad, throwing himself against his father’s forelegs and nipping the slender ankles. All this was torture to Lad, and dire mortification too—especially if humans chanced to witness the scene. Yet never did he retaliate; he simply got out of the way.

Lad, nowadays, used to leave half his dinner uneaten, and he took to moping in a way that is not good for dog or man. For the moping had in it no ill-temper—nothing but heartache at his mate’s desertion, and a weary distaste for the puppy’s annoying antics. It was bad enough for Wolf to have supplanted him in Lady’s affection, without also making his life a burden and humiliating him in the eyes of his gods.

Therefore Lad moped. Lady remained nervously fussy over her one child. And Wolf continued to be a lovable, but unmitigated, pest. The Mistress and the Master tried in every way to make up to Lad for the positive and negative afflictions he was enduring, but the sorrowing dog’s unhappiness grew with the days.

Then one November morning Lady met Wolf’s capering playfulness with a yell of rage so savage as to send the puppy scampering away in mortal terror, and to bring the Master out from his study on a run. For no normal dog gives that hideous yell except in racking pain or in illness; and mere pain could not wring such a sound from a thoroughbred.

The Master called Lady over to him. Sullenly she obeyed, slinking up to him in surly unwillingness. Her nose was hot and dry; her soft brown eyes were glazed, their whites a dull red. Her dense coat was tumbled.

After a quick examination, the Master shut her into a kennel-room and telephoned for a veterinary.

“She is sickening for the worst form of distemper,” reported the vet’ an hour later, “perhaps for something worse. Dogs seldom get distemper after they’re a year old, but when they do it’s dangerous. Better let me take her over to my hospital and isolate her there. Distemper runs through a kennel faster than cholera through a plague-district. I may be able to cure her in a month or two—or I may not. Anyhow, there’s no use in risking your other dogs’ lives by leaving her here.”

So it was that Lad saw his dear mate borne away from him in the tonneau of a strange man’s car.

Lady hated to go. She whimpered and hung back as the vet’ lifted her aboard. At sound of her whimper Lad started forward, head low, lips writhing back from his clenched teeth, his shaggy throat vibrant with growls. At a sharp word of command from the Master, he checked his onset and stood uncertain. He looked at his departing mate, his dark eyes abrim with sorrow, then glanced at the Master in an agony of appeal.

“It’s all right, Laddie,” the Master tried to console him, stroking the dog’s magnificent head as he spoke. “It’s all right. It’s the only chance of saving her.”

Lad did not grasp the words, but their tone was reassuring. It told him, at least, that this kidnaping was legal and must not be prevented. Sorrowfully he watched the chugging car out of sight, up the drive. Then with a sigh he walked heavily back to his “cave” beneath the piano.

Lad, alone of The Place’s dogs, was allowed to sleep in the house at night, and even had free access to that dog-forbidden spot, the dining-room. Next morning, as soon as the doors were opened, he dashed out in search of Lady. With some faint hope that she might have been brought back in the night, he ransacked every corner of The Place for her.

He did not find Lady. But Wolf very promptly found Lad. Wolf was lonely, too—terribly lonely. He had just spent the first solitary night of his three-month life. He missed the furry warm body into whose shelter he had always cuddled for sleep. He missed his playmate—the pretty mother who had been his fond companion.

There are few things so mournful as the eyes of even the happiest collie pup; this morning, loneliness had intensified the melancholy expression in Wolf’s eyes. But at sight of Lad, the puppy gamboled forward with a falsetto bark of joy. The world was not quite empty, after all. Though his mother had cruelly absented herself, here was a playfellow that was better than nothing. And up to Lad frisked the optimistic little chap.

Lad saw him coming. The older dog halted and instinctively turned aside to avoid the lively little nuisance. Then, halfway around, he stopped and turned back to face the puppy.

Lady was gone—gone, perhaps, forever. And all that was left to remind Lad of her was this bumptious and sharp-toothed little son of hers. Lady had loved the youngster—Lady, whom Lad so loved. Wolf alone was left; and Wolf was in some mysterious way a part of Lady.

So, instead of making his escape as the pest cantered toward him, Lad stood where he was. Wolf bounded upward and as usual nipped merrily at one of Lad’s ears. Lad did not shake off his tormentor and stalk away. In spite of the pain to the sensitive flesh, he remained quiet, looking down at the joyful puppy with a sort of sorrowing friendliness. He seemed to realize that Wolf, too, was lonely and that the little dog was helpless.

Tired of biting an unprotesting ear, Wolf dived for Lad’s white forelegs, gnawing happily at them with a playfully unconscious throwback to his wolf ancestors who sought thus to disable an enemy by breaking the foreleg bone. For all seemingly aimless puppy-play had its origin in some ancestral custom.

Lad bore this new bother unflinchingly. Presently Wolf left off the sport. Lad crossed to the veranda and lay down. The puppy trotted over to him and stood for a moment with ears cocked and head on one side as if planning a new attack on his supine victim; then with a little satisfied whimper, he curled up close against his father’s shaggy side and went to sleep.

Lad gazed down at the slumberer in some perplexity. He seemed even inclined to resent the familiarity of being used for a pillow. Then, noting that the fur on the top of the puppy’s sleepy head was rumpled, Lad bent over and began softly to lick back the tousled hair into shape with his curving tongue—his raspberry-pink tongue with the single queer blue-black blot midway on its surface. The puppy mumbled drowsily in his sleep and nestled more snugly to his new protector.

And thus Lad assumed formal guardianship of his obstreperous little son. It was a guardianship more staunch by far than Lady’s had been of late. For animal mothers early wear out their zealously self-sacrificing love for their young. By the time the latter are able to shift for themselves, the maternal care ceases. And, later on, the once-inseparable relationship drops completely out of mind.

Paternity, among dogs, is, from the very first, no tie at all. Lad, probably, had no idea of his relationship to his new ward. His adoption of Wolf was due solely to his own love for Lady and to the big heart and soul that stirred him into pity for anything helpless.

Lad took his new duties very seriously indeed. He not only accepted the annoyance of Wolf’s undivided teasing, but he assumed charge of the puppy’s education as well—this to the amusement of everyone on The Place. But everyone’s amusement was kept from Lad. The sensitive dog would rather have been whipped than laughed at. So both the Mistress and Master watched the educational process with outwardly straight faces.

A puppy needs an unbelievable amount of educating. It is a task to wear threadbare the teacher’s patience and to do all kinds of things to the temper. Small wonder that many humans lose patience and temper during the process and idiotically resort to the whip, to the boot-toe and to bellowing—in which case the puppy is never decently educated, but emerges from the process with a cowed and broken spirit or with an incurable streak of meanness that renders him worthless.

Time, patience, firmness, wisdom, temper-control, gentleness—these be the six absolute essentials for training a puppy. Happy the human who is blessed with any three of these qualities. Lad, being only a dog, was abundantly possessed of all six. And he had need of them.

To begin with, Wolf had a joyous yearning to tear up or bury every portable thing that could be buried or torn. He had a craze for destruction. A dropped lace handkerchief, a cushion left on the grass, a book or a hat lying on a veranda-chair—these and a thousand other things he looked on as treasure-trove, to be destroyed as quickly and as delightedly as possible.

He also enjoyed taking a flying leap onto the face or body of any hammock-sleeper. He would howl long and lamentably, nearly every night, at the moon. If the night were moonless, he howled on general principles. He thrilled with bliss at a chance to harry and terrify the chickens or peacocks or pigeons or any others of The Place’s Little People that were safe prey for him. He tried this form of bullying once—only once—on the Mistress’ temperamental gray cat, Peter Grimm. For the rest of the day Wolf nursed a scratched nose and a torn ear—which, for nearly a week, taught him to give all cats a wide berth; or, at most, to bark harrowingly at them from a safe distance.

Again, Wolf had an insatiable craving to find out for himself whether or not everything on earth was good to eat. Kipling writes of puppies’ experiments in trying to eat soap and blacking. Wolf added to this limited fare a hundred articles, from clothespins to cigars. The climax came when he found on the veranda-table a two-pound box of chocolates, from which the wrapping-paper and gilt cord had not yet been removed. Wolf ate not only all the candy, but the entire box and the paper and the string—after which he was tumultuously and horribly ill.

The foregoing were but a small percentage of his gay sins. And on respectable, middle-aged Lad fell the burden of making him into a decent canine citizen. Lad himself had been one of those rare puppies to whom the Law is taught with bewildering ease. A single command or prohibition had ever been enough to fix a rule in his almost uncannily human brain. Perhaps if the two little brown pups had lived, one or both of them might have taken after their sire in character. But Wolf was the true son of temperamental, wilful Lady, and Lad had his job cut out for him in educating the puppy.

It was a slow, tedious process. Lad went at it, as he went at everything—with a gallant dash, behind which was an endless supply of resource and endurance. Once, for instance, Wolf leaped barkingly upon a filmy square of handkerchief that had just fallen from the Mistress’ belt. Before the destructive little teeth could rip the fine cambric into rags, the puppy found himself, to his amazement, lifted gently from earth by the scruff of his neck and held thus, in midair, until he dropped the handkerchief.

Lad then deposited him on the grass—whereupon Wolf pounced once more upon the handkerchief, only to be lifted a second time, painlessly but terrifyingly, above earth. After this was repeated five times, a gleam of sense entered the puppy’s fluff-brain, and he trotted sulkily away, leaving the handkerchief untouched.

Again, when he made a wild rush at the friendly covey of peacock chicks, he found he had hurled himself against an object as immobile as a stone wall. Lad had darted in between the pup and the chicks, opposing his own big body to the charge. Wolf was bowled clean over by the force of the impact, and lay for a minute on his back, the breath knocked clean out of his bruised body.

It was a longer but easier task to teach him at whom to bark and at whom not to bark. By a sharp growl or a menacing curl of the lips, Lad silenced the youngster’s clamorous salvo when a guest or tradesman entered The Place, whether on foot or in a car. By his own thunderously menacing bark he incited Wolf to a like outburst when some peddler or tramp sought to slouch down the drive toward the house.

The full tale of Wolf’s education would require many profitless pages in the telling. At times the Mistress and the Master, watching from the sidelines, would wonder at Lad’s persistency and would despair of his success. Yet bit by bit—and in a surprisingly short time for so vast an undertaking—Wolf’s character was rounded into form. True, he had the ever-goading spirits of a true puppy. And these spirits sometimes led him to smash even such sections of the law as he fully understood. But he was a thoroughbred, and the son of clever parents. So he learned, on the whole, with gratifying speed—far more quickly than he could have been taught by the wisest human.

Nor was his education a matter of constant drudgery. Lad varied it by taking the puppy for long runs in the December woods and relaxed to the extent of romping laboriously with him at times.

Wolf grew to love his sire as he had never loved Lady. For the discipline and the firm kindliness of Lad were having their effect on his heart as well as on his manners. They struck a far deeper note within him than ever had Lady’s alternating affection and crossness.

In truth, Wolf seemed to have forgotten Lady. But Lad had not. Every morning, the moment he was released from the house, Lad would trot over to Lady’s empty kennel to see if by any chance she had come back to him during the night. There was eager hope in his big dark eyes as he hurried over to the vacant kennel. There was dejection in every line of his body as he turned away from his hopeless quest.

Late gray autumn had emerged overnight into white early winter. The ground of The Place lay blanketed in snow. The lake at the foot of the lawn was frozen solid from shore to shore. The trees crouched away from the whirling north wind as if in shame at their own black nakedness. Nature, like the birds, had flown south, leaving the northern world as dead and as empty and as cheerless as a deserted bird’s-nest.

The puppy reveled in the snow. He would roll in it and bite it, barking all the while in an ecstasy of excitement. His gold-and-white coat was thicker and shaggier now, to ward off the stinging cold. And the snow and the roaring winds were his playfellows rather than his foes.

Most of all, the hard-frozen lake fascinated him. Earlier, when Lad had taught him to swim, Wolf had at first shrunk back from the chilly black water. Now, to his astonishment, he could run on that water as easily—if somewhat sprawlingly—as on land. It was a miracle he never tired of testing. He spent half his time on the ice, despite an occasional hard tumble or involuntary slide.

Once and once only—in all her six-week absence and in his own six-week loneliness—had Lad discovered anything to remind him of his lost mate; and that discovery caused him for the first time in his blameless life to break the most sacred of The Place’s simple Laws—the inviolable Guest-Law.

It was on a day in late November. A runabout came down the drive to the front door of the house. In it rode the vet’ who had taken Lady away. He had stopped for a moment on his way to Paterson, to report as to Lady’s progress at his dog-hospital.

Lad was in the living-room at the time. As a maid answered the summons at the door, he walked hospitably forward to greet the unknown guest. The vet’ stepped into the room by one door as the Master entered it by the other—which was lucky for the vet’.

Lad took one look at the man who had stolen Lady. Then, without a sound or other sign of warning, he launched his mighty bulk straight at the vet’s throat.

Accustomed though he was to the ways of dogs, the vet’ had barely time to brace himself and to throw one arm in front of his throat. And then Lad’s eighty pounds smote him on the chest, and Lad’s powerful jaws closed viselike on the forearm that guarded the man’s throat. Deep into the thick ulster the white teeth clove their way—through ulster-sleeve and undercoat sleeve and the sleeves of a linen shirt and of flannels—clear through to the flesh of the forearm.

“Lad!” shouted the Master, springing forward.

In obedience to the sharp command, Lad loosed his grip and dropped to the floor—where he stood quivering with leashed fury.

Through the rage-mists that swirled over his brain, he knew he had broken the Law. He had never merited punishment. He did not fear it. But the Master’s tone of fierce disapproval cut the sensitive dog soul more painfully than any scourge could have cut his body.

“Lad!” cried the Master again, in rebuking amazement.

The dog turned, walked slowly over to the Master and lay down at his feet. The Master, without another word, opened the front door and pointed outward. Lad rose and slunk out. He had been ordered from the house, and in a stranger’s presence!

“He thinks I’m responsible for his losing Lady,” said the vet’, looking ruefully at his torn sleeve. ‘That’s why he went for me. I don’t blame the dog. Don’t lick him.”

“I’m not going to lick him,” growled the Master. “I’d as soon thrash a woman. Besides, I’ve just punished him worse than if I’d taken an ax-handle to him. Send me a bill for your coat.”

In late December came a thaw—a freak thaw that changed the white ground to brown mud and rotted the smooth surface of the lake-ice to gray slush. All day and all night the trees and the eaves sent forth a dreary drip-drip-drip. It was the traditional January Thaw—set forward a month.

On the third and last morning of the thaw Wolf galloped down to the lake as usual. Lad jogged along at his side. As they reached the margin, Lad sniffed and drew back. His weird sixth sense somehow told him—as it tells an elephant—that there was danger ahead.

Wolf, however, was at the stage of extreme youth when neither dogs nor humans are bothered by premonitions. Ahead of him stretched the huge sheet of ice whereon he loved to gambol. Straightway he frisked out upon it.

A rough growl of warning from Lad made him look back, but the lure of the ice was stronger than the call of duty.

The current, at this point of the lake, twisted sharply landward in a half-circle. Thus, for a few yards out, the rotting ice was still thick, but where the current ran, it was thin, and as soggy as wet blotting-paper—as Wolf speedily discovered.

He bounded on the thinner ice driving his hind claws into the slushy surface for his second leap. He was dismayed to find that the ice collapsed under the pounding feet. There was a dull, sloppy sound. A ten-foot ice-cake broke off from the main sheet; breaking at once into a dozen smaller cakes; and Wolf disappeared, tail first, into the swift-running water beneath.

To the surface he came, at the outer edge of the hole. He was mad, clear through, at the prank his beloved lake had played on him. He struck out for shore. On the landward side of the opening his forefeet clawed helplessly at the unbroken ledge of ice. He had not the strength or the wit to crawl upon it and make his way to land. The bitter chill of the water was already paralyzing him. The strong current was tugging at his hindquarters. Anger gave way to panic. The puppy wasted much of his remaining strength by lifting up his voice in ear-splitting howls.

The Mistress and the Master, motoring into the drive from the highway nearly a quarter-mile distant, heard the racket. The lake was plainly visible to them through the bare trees, even at that distance, and they took in the impending tragedy at a glance. They jumped out of the car and set off at a run to the water-edge. The way was long and the ground was heavy with mud. They could not hope to reach the lake before the puppy’s strength should fail.

But Lad was already there. At Wolf’s first cry, Lad sprang out on the ice that heaved and chucked and cracked under his greater weight. His rush carried him to the very edge of the hole, and there, leaning forward and bracing all four of his absurdly tiny white paws, he sought to catch the puppy by the neck and lift him to safety. But before his rescuing jaws could close on Wolf’s fur, the decayed ice gave way beneath his weight, and the ten-foot hole was widened by another twenty feet of water.

Down went Lad with a crash, and up he came, in almost no time, a few feet away from where Wolf floundered helplessly among the chunks of drifting ice. The breaking off of the shoreward mass of ice, under Lad’s pressure, had left the puppy with no foothold at all. It had ducked him and had robbed him even of the chance to howl.

His mouth and throat full of water, Wolf strangled and splashed in a delirium of terror. Lad struck out for him, butting aside the impending ice-chunks with his great shoulders, and swimming with a rush that lifted a third of his tawny body out of water. His jaws gripped Wolf by the middle of the back, and he swam thus with him toward shore. At the edge of the shoreward ice he gave a heave which called on every numbing muscle of the huge frame, and which—in spite of the burden he held—again lifted his head and shoulders high above water.

He thus flung Wolf’s body halfway up on the ledge of ice. The puppy’s flying forepaws chanced to strike the ice-surface. His sharp claws bit into its soft upper crust. With a frantic wriggle he was out of the water and on top of this thicker stratum of shore-ice, and in a second he had regained shore and was careering wildly up the lawn toward the greater safety of his kennel.

Yet, halfway in his flight, courage returned to the sopping-wet baby. He halted, turned about and, with a volley of falsetto barks, challenged the offending water to come ashore and fight fair.

As Wolf’s forepaws had gripped the ice, he had further aided his climb to safety by thrusting downward with his hind legs. Both his hind paws had struck Lad’s head, their thrust had driven Lad clean under water. There the current caught him.

When Lad came up, it was not to the surface but under the ice, some yards below. The top of his head struck stunningly against the underpart of the ice-sheet.

A lesser dog would then and there have given up the struggle, or else would have thrashed about futilely until he drowned. Lad, perhaps on instinct, perhaps on reason, struck out toward the light—the spot where the great hole had let in sunshine through the gray ice-sheet.

The average dog is not trained to swim under water. To this day, it is a mystery how Lad had the sense to hold his breath. He fought his way on, inch by inch, against the current, beneath the scratching rough under-surface of the ice—always toward the light. And just as his lungs must have been ready to burst, he reached the open space.

Sputtering and panting, Lad made for shore. Presently he reached the ice-ledge that lay between him and the bank. He reached it just as the Master, squirming along, face downward and at full length, began to work his way out over the swaying shore-ice toward him.

Twice the big dog raised himself almost to the top of the ledge. Once the ice broke under his weight, dousing him. The second time he got his fore-quarters well over the top of the ledge, and he was struggling upward with all his tired body when the Master’s hand gripped his soaked ruff.

With this new help, Lad made a final struggle—a struggle that laid him gasping but safe on the slushy surface of the thicker ice. Backward over the few yards that still separated them from land he and the Master crawled to the bank.

Lad was staggering as he started forward to greet the Mistress, and his eyes were still dim and bloodshot from his fearful ordeal. Midway in his progress toward the Mistress another dog barred his path—a dog that fell upon him in an ecstasy of delighted welcome.

Lad cleared his water-logged nostrils for a growl of protest. He had surely done quite enough for Wolf this day, without the puppy’s trying to rob him now of the Mistress’ caress. He was tired, and he was dizzy; and he wanted such petting and comfort and praise as only the worshipped Mistress could give.

Impatience at the puppy’s interference cleared the haze a little from Lad’s brain and eyes. He halted in his shaky walk and stared, dumfounded. This dog which greeted him so rapturously was not Wolf. It was—why, it was—Lady! Oh, it was Lady!

“We’ve just brought her back to you, old friend,” the Master was telling him. “We went over for her in the car this morning. She’s all well again, and—”

But Lad did not hear. All he realized—all he wanted to realize—was that his mate was ecstatically nipping one of his ears to make him romp with her.

It was a sharp nip; and it hurt like the very mischief.

Lad loved to have it hurt.