The Dog Who Wouldn't Be. Farley Mowat
alley showed that he was departing in haste.
Mother shrugged her shoulders, and began carrying the dishes out to the kitchen. At that moment Mutt scratched on the screen door. She went to let him in.
Mutt scurried into the house, with his head held low and a look of abject misery about him. He must have had a singularly bad time of it on the crowded street. He fled directly to my room, and vanished under the bed.
Father was not yet at his office when Mother phoned the library. She left an agitated message that he was to return home at once, and then she called the veterinary.
Unfortunately it was the same one who had been called in when Mutt ate the naphtha soap. He came again—but with a hard glint of suspicion in his eye.
Mother met him at the door and rushed him into the bedroom. The two of them tried to persuade Mutt to come out from under the bed. Mutt refused. Eventually the veterinary had to crawl under the bed after him—but he did this with a very poor grace.
When he emerged he was momentarily beyond speech. Mother misinterpreted his silence as a measure of the gravity of Mutt’s condition. She pressed the doctor for his diagnosis. She was not prepared for the tirade he loosed upon her. He forgot all professional standards. When he left the house he was bitterly vowing that he would give up medicine and return to the wheat farm that had spawned him. He was so angry that he quite forgot the bill.
Mother had by now put up with quite enough for one morning, and she was in no condition to be further trifled with when, a few minutes later, Father came cautiously through the back door. He was almost as abject as Mutt had been. He saw the look in my mother’s eye and tried to forestall her.
“I swear I didn’t even guess it would do that,” he explained hastily. “Surely it will wash out?” There was a pleading note in his voice.
The light of a belated understanding began to dawn on Mother. She fixed her husband with her most baleful glare.
“Will what wash out?” she demanded, leaving Father with no room for further evasion.
“The bluing,” said my father humbly.
It was little wonder that Mother was distressed by the time I returned from my holiday. The telephone had rung almost incessantly for three days. Some of the callers were jovial—and these were undoubtedly the hardest to bear. Others were vindictive. Fortunately the reporters from the Saskatoon Star-Phoenix were friends of my father’s and, with a notable restraint, they denied themselves the opportunity for a journalistic field day. Nevertheless, there were not many people in Saskatoon who did not know of, and who did not have opinions about, the Mowats and their bright blue dog.
By the time I arrived home Father had become very touchy about the whole affair, and it was dangerous to question him too closely. Nevertheless, I finally dared to ask him how much bluing he had actually used.
“Just a smidgen,” he replied shortly. “Just enough to take that damned yellow tint out of his fur!”
I do not know exactly how much a “smidgen” is, but I do know that when Mother asked me to clean the clogged basement drain a few days later, I removed from it a wad of paper wrappers from at least ten cubes of bluing. Some of them may, of course, have been there for some time.
4
A Flock of Ducks
IN THE FALL of the year Father and I began making preparations for our first hunting season in the west. The weeks before the season opened were full of intense excitement and anticipation for me, and the ordeal of school was almost unendurable. The nights grew colder and in the hours before the dawn I would waken and lie with a fast-beating heart listening to the majestic chanting of the first flocks of south-bound geese. I kept my gun—a little twenty-gauge (the first shotgun I had ever owned)—on the bed beside me. In the sounding darkness I would lift it to my shoulder and the room and ceiling would dissolve as the gun muzzle swung on the track of the great voyagers.
Father was even more excited than I. Each evening he would get out his own gun, carefully polish the glowing walnut stock, and pack and repack the cartridges in their containers. Mother would sit and watch him with that infuriating attitude of tolerance that women can turn into a devastating weapon against their mates. Mutt, on the other hand, paid no attention to our preparations and, in fact, he grew so bored by them that he took to spending his evenings away from home. His complete lack of interest in guns and decoys and shells and hunting clothes disgusted Father, but at the same time righteously confirmed his original estimate of Mutt.
“We’ll have to hunt without a dog, Farley,” he said gloomily to me one evening.
Mother, for whom this remark was actually intended, rose to the bait.
“Nonsense,” she replied. “You’ve got Mutt—all you have to do is train him.”
Father snorted derisively. “Mutt, indeed! We need a bird dog, not a bird brain.”
I was stung by this reflection on Mutt’s intelligence. “I think he must have bird dog in him somewhere,” I said. “Look at all his ‘feathers’—like a real English setter.”
Father fixed me with a stern glance and beckoned me to follow him out to the garage. When we were safely in that sanctuary he shut the door.
“You’ve been listening to your mother again,” he accused me in a tone that emphasized the gravity of this breach of masculine loyalty.
“Not really listening,” I apologized. “She only said we ought to try him out, and maybe he might be some good.”
Father gave me a pitying look. “You’ve missed the point,” he explained. “Surely you’re old enough by now to realize that it never pays to let a woman prove she’s right. It doesn’t even pay to give her a chance to prove it. Mutt stays home.”
My father’s logic seemed confusing, but I did not argue. And so that first season we went out to the fields and sloughs without a dog. In the event, it was probably just as well. Both my father and I had a great deal to learn about hunting, and the process would have been impossibly complicated had we been attempting to train a dog at the same time.
On opening day Father and I were up long before dawn (we never really went to bed that night) and, having loaded the gun cases and all our paraphernalia into Eardlie’s rumble seat, we drove through the grave desolation of the sleeping city into the open plains beyond. We drove in the making of the dawn along the straight-ruled country roads, and the dust boiled and heaved in Eardlie’s wake, glowing bloody in the diffused reflection of the taillight. Occasional jack rabbits made gargantuan leaps in the cones of the headlights, or raced beside us in the ditches as ghostly outriders to the speeding little car.
The fields on either side had long since been reaped, and the grain threshed. Now the stubble was pallid and unliving, as gray as an old man’s beard, in the breaking dawn. The tenuous, almost invisible lines of barbed-wire fences drew to a horizon that was unbroken except for the blunt outlines of grain elevators in unseen villages at the world’s edge. Occasionally we passed a poplar bluff, already naked save for a few doomed clusters of yellowed leaves. Rarely, there was a farmhouse, slab-sided, gray, and worn by driven dust and winter gales.
I suppose it was a bleak landscape and yet it evoked in me a feeling of infinite freedom and of release that must be incomprehensible to those who dwell in the well-tamed confines of the east. We saw no ugliness, and felt no weight of desolation. In a mood of exaltation we watched the sun leap to the horizon while the haze of fading dust clouds flared in a splendid and untrammeled flow of flame.
Many times since that morning I have seen the dawn sun on the prairie, but the hunger to see it yet again remains unsatisfied.
We turned eastward at last and drove with the sun in our eyes, and little Eardlie scattered the dust under his prancing wheels, and it was morning. My impatience could no longer be contained.
“Where do we find the birds?” I asked.
Father