Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 17.djvu/374

360 the river, and two English pointers were adopted by a venatorial ruralist in the eastern part of Ohio. The puppies submitted to exile, but one of the pointers, like the black friar in the halls of Amundeville, declined to be driven away. He returned, by ways and means known to himself alone, once from Portsmouth and twice from Lucasville in Scioto County, the last time in a blinding snow-storm and under circumstances which led his owner to believe that he must have steered by memory rather than by scent. But how had he managed it the first time? The matter was discussed at a reunion of sportsmen and amateur naturalists, and one opponent of the doctor's theory proposed as a crucial test that the dog be chloroformed, and sent by a night-train to a certain farm near Somerset, Kentucky (one hundred and sixty miles from Cincinnati): if he found his way back, he could not have done it by memory.

The doctor objected to chloroform, remembering that dogs and cats often forget to awake from anæsthetic slumbers; but finally Hector was drugged with a dose of Becker's elixir (an alcoholic solution of morphine), and sent to Somerset in charge of a freight-train conductor. The conductor reports that his passenger groaned in his stupor "like a Christian in a whisky-fit"; at length relieved himself by retching, and went to sleep again. But in the twilight of the next morning, while the train was taking in wood at King's Mountain, eighteen miles north of Somerset, the dog escaped from the caboose and staggered toward the depot in a dazed sort of way. Two brakemen started in pursuit, but, seeing them come, the dog gathered himself up, bolted across a pasture, and disappeared in the morning mist. At 10 on the following day he turned up in Cincinnati, having run a distance of one hundred and forty-two miles in about twenty-eight hours.

Still the test was not decisive. The dog might have recovered from his lethargy in time to ascertain the general direction of his journey, and returned to the northern terminus by simply following the railroad-track backward. The projector of the experiment, therefore, proposed a new test with different amendments, to be tried on his next hunting-trip to central Kentucky. On the last day of January the dog was sent across the river, and, ''nem. con.,'' the experimenter fuddled him with ether, and put him in a wicker basket, after bandaging his nose with a rag that had been scented with a musky perfume. Starting with an evening train of the Cincinnati Southern Railroad, he took his patient southwest to Danville Junction, thence east to Crab Orchard, and finally northeast to a hunting rendezvous near Berea in Madison County. Here the much-traveled quadruped was treated to a handsome supper, but had to pass the night in a dark tool-shed. The next morning they lugged him out to a clearing behind the farm, and slipped his leash on top of a grassy knob, at some distance from the next larger wood. The dog cringed and fawned at the feet of his