The Dog Who Wouldn't Be. Farley Mowat
must have been lucky that evening. Perhaps it was an old and infirm rabbit he was chasing, or perhaps the rabbit slipped and fell. At any rate Mutt closed with it, and instantly the living room reverberated to a horrendous conflict.
Father, blasted so violently from his creative mood, was enraged. He roared at Mutt, who, awakened harshly in the very moment of victory, was inclined to be surly about the interruption.
“Get out, you insufferable beast!” Father yelled at him.
Mutt curled his lip and prepared to argue.
Father was now almost beside himself. “I said out—you animated threshing machine!”
Mutt’s argumentative mutters immediately rose in volume. Mother and I shivered slightly and stared at each other with dreadful surmise.
Our apprehensions were justified by the sound of shattering glass, as a volume of Everyman’s Encyclopedia banged against the dining-room wall, on the wrong side of the French doors. Mutt appeared in the kitchen at almost the same instant. Without so much as a look at us, he thumped down the basement stairs—his whole attitude radiating outrage.
Father was immediately contrite. He followed Mutt down into the cellar, and we could hear him apologizing—but it did no good. Mutt would not deign to notice him for three days. Physical violence in lieu of argument was, to Mutt, a cardinal sin.
He had another exasperating habit that he developed very early in life, and never forgot. When it was manifestly impossible for him to avoid some unpleasant duty by means of argument, he would feign deafness. On occasions I lost my temper and, bending down so that I could lift one of his long ears, would scream my orders at him in the voice of a Valkyrie. But Mutt would simply turn his face toward me with a bland and interrogative look that seemed to say with insufferable mildness, “I’m sorry—did you speak?”
We could not take really effective steps to cure him of this irritating habit, for it was one he shared with my paternal grandfather, who sometimes visited us. Grandfather was stone deaf to anything that involved effort on his part, yet he could hear, and respond to, the word “whiskey” if it was whispered inside a locked bedroom three floors above the chair in which he habitually sat.
It will be clear by now that Mutt was not an easy dog to live with. Yet the intransigence which made it so difficult to cope with him made it even more difficult—and at times well-nigh impossible—for him to cope with the world in general. His stubbornness marked him out for a tragicomic role throughout his life. But Mutt’s struggles with a perverse fate were not, unfortunately, his alone. He involved those about him, inevitably and often catastrophically, in his confused battle with life.
Wherever he went he left deep-etched memories that were alternately vivid with the screaming hues of outrage, or cloudy with the muddy colors of near dementia. He carried with him the aura of a Don Quixote and it was in that atmosphere that my family and I lived for more than a decade.
3
The Blues
PROBABLY THE greatest indignity which Mutt ever experienced at our hands came about as a result of my father’s feeling for the English language. As a librarian, an author, and as a well-read man, he was a militant defender of the sanctity of the written and the spoken word, and when he encountered words that were being ill used, his anger knew no bounds.
North Americans being what they are, my father was often roused to fury. I have seen him turn his back upon one of the new nobles of our times—a prominent man of business—simply because the poor fellow remarked that he was about to immediatize the crafting of a new product. Father believed that this sort of jabberwocky was inexcusable, but what really irritated him beyond measure was the jargon of the advertising writers.
He felt so strongly about this that popular magazines were seldom allowed to enter our home. This was something of a hardship for Mother, but it was as nothing to the hardships both she and I suffered if, by mischance, my father found a copy of the Woman’s Boon Companion hidden under the cushions of the living-room couch. With the offending magazine in his hand, my father would take the floor and subject his captive audience to concentrated and vitriolic comment on the future facing a world that allowed such sabotage of all that he held dear.
These incidents were fortunately rare, yet they occurred from time to time when one of us grew careless. It was as the result of one such incident that Mutt came to suffer the blues.
It began on a spring evening in the second year of Mutt’s life. Mother had had visitors for tea that afternoon, and one of the ladies had brought with her a copy of a famous woman’s magazine which she neglected to take away again.
My father was restless that evening. He had forgotten to bring the usual armful of books home from the library. The mosquitoes were too avid to allow him to indulge in his favorite evening pastime of stalking dandelions in the back yard. He stayed in the house, pacing aimlessly about the living room until my mother could stand it no longer.
“For Heaven’s sake, stop prowling,” she said at last. “Sit down and read a magazine—there’s one behind my chair.”
She must have been completely preoccupied with her knitting when she spoke. It was seldom that my mother was so obtuse.
In my bedroom, where I was writing an essay on Champlain, I vaguely heard but did not heed her words. Mutt, asleep and dreaming at my feet, heard nothing. Neither of us was prepared for the anguished cry that rang through the house a few moments later. My father’s voice was noted for its parade-ground quality even when, as in this case, the words themselves seemed quite inscrutable.
“What the devil do the neighbors say when they see your dirty underwear?” he thundered.
Mutt woke so suddenly that he banged his head painfully against my desk. Champlain vanished from my thoughts, and I wracked my mind frantically for memories of guilty deeds connected with underwear. Then we heard mother’s voice, soothing and quiet, dispelling the echoes of the blast. My heartbeat returned to normal and my curiosity led me out into the hall to peer through the living-room door.
My father was pacing again, with a sergeant major’s tread. He was waving an open magazine in front of him and I caught a glimpse of a full-color, full-page advertisement which depicted an unspeakably dirty pair of drawers swinging like a flag of ill fame from a clothes-line. Running across the page in broad crimson letters was the mortifying accusation:
THESE MAY BE YOURS!
Mother was sitting quietly in her chair, but her lips were pursed. “Really, Angus!” she was saying. “Control yourself! After all, everyone has to live, and if that company can’t sell its bluing, how can it live?”
My father replied with a pungent, and what I took to be an appropriate, suggestion, but Mother ignored him.
“Perhaps it is a trifle vulgar,” she continued, “but it’s just intended to catch the reader’s attention; and it does, doesn’t it?”
There could be no doubt that it had caught my father’s attention.
“Well, then,” Mother concluded triumphantly, “you see?” It was the phrase with which she always clinched her arguments.
The magazine was quietly consigned to the incinerator the next morning, and Mother and I assumed that this particular storm had blown over. We were in error, but neither of us had much knowledge of the working of the subconscious. We never guessed that the incident was still festering in some deep and hidden recess of my father’s mind.
Summer drew on and the sloughs again grew dry and white; the young grain wizened and burned, and another season of drought was upon us. A film of dust hung continuously in the scorching air and we were never free of the gritty touch of it, except when we stripped off our clothing and went to soak in the bathtub. For Mutt there was no such relief. His long coat caught and trapped the dust until the hair became matted and discolored, assuming a jaundiced saffron hue, but he would not, in those early days, voluntarily turn to water to escape his