The Dog Who Wouldn't Be. Farley Mowat
of sleeping out, and on this chill night there was no pleasure for him in the frosty fields or in that shining sky. He was suspicious of the dubious comforts of our cave, suspecting perhaps that it was some kind of trap, and he had refused to budge from the warm seat of the car.
An hour or so after I had dozed off I was abruptly awakened when, from somewhere near at hand, a coyote lifted his penetrating quaver into the chill air. Before the coyote’s song had reached the halfway mark, Mutt shot into the cave, ricocheted over Father, and came to a quivering halt upon my stomach. I grunted under the impact, and angrily heaved him off. There followed a good deal of confused shoving and pushing in the darkness, while Father muttered scathing words about “hunting dogs” that were frightened of a coyote’s wail. Mutt did not reply, but, having pulled down a large portion of the straw roof upon our heads, curled up across my chest and feigned sleep.
I was awakened again before dawn by a trickle of straw being dislodged upon me by exploring mice, and by the chatter of juncos in the stubble outside the cave. I nudged my father and sleepily we began the battle with greasy boots and moisture-laden clothing. Mutt was in the way. He steadfastly refused to rise at such an ungodly hour, and in the end had to be dragged out of the warm shelter. Whatever hunting instincts he had inherited seemed to have atrophied overnight. We were not sanguine about his potential value to us as we cooked our breakfast over the hissing blue flame of a little gasoline stove.
When at length we finished our coffee and set off across the frost-brittle stubble toward the slough, Mutt grudgingly agreed to accompany us only because he did not wish to be left behind with the coyotes.
It was still dark, but there was a faint suggestion of a gray luminosity in the east as we felt our way through the bordering poplar bluffs to the slough and to a reed duck-blind that the farmer had built for us. The silence seemed absolute and the cold had a rare intensity that knifed through my clothes and left me shivering at its touch. Wedged firmly between my knees, as we squatted behind the blind, Mutt also shivered, muttering gloomily the while about the foolishness of men and boys who would deliberately expose themselves and their dependents to such chill discomfort.
I paid little heed to his complaints, for I was watching for the dawn. Shaken by excitement as much as by the cold, I waited with straining eyes and ears while an aeon passed. Then, with the abruptness of summer lightning, the dawn was on us. Through the blurred screen of leafless trees I beheld the living silver of the slough, miraculously conjured out of the dark mists. The shimmering surface was rippled by the slow, waking movements of two green-winged teal, and at the sight of them my heart thudded with a wild beat. My gloved hand tightened on Mutt’s collar until he squirmed, and I glanced down at him and saw, to my surprise, that his attitude of sullen discontent had been replaced by one of acute, if somewhat puzzled, interest. Perhaps something of what I myself was feeling had been communicated to him, or perhaps Mother had been right about his inheritance. I had no time to think upon it, for the flight was coming in.
We heard it first—a low and distant vibration that was felt as much as heard, but that soon grew to a crescendo of deep-pitched sound, as if innumerable artillery shells were rushing upon us through the resisting air. I heard Father’s wordless exclamation and, peering over the lip of the blind, I saw the yellow sky go dark as a living cloud obscured it. And then the massed wings enveloped us and the sound was the roar of a great ocean beating into the caves of the sea.
As I turned my face up in wonderment to that incredible vision, I heard Father whisper urgently, “They’ll circle once at least. Hold your fire till they start pitching in.”
Now the whole sky was throbbing with their wings. Five—ten thousand of them perhaps, they banked away and the roar receded, swelled and renewed itself, and the moment was almost at hand. I let go of Mutt’s collar in order to release the safety catch on my shotgun.
Mutt went insane.
That, anyway, is the most lenient explanation I can give for what he did. From a sitting start he leaped straight up into the air high enough to go clear over the front of the blind, and when he hit the ground again he was running at a speed that he had never before attained, and never would again. And he was vocal. Screaming and yelping with hysterical abandon, he looked, and sounded, like a score of dogs.
Father and I fired at the now rapidly receding flocks, but that was no more than a gesture—a release for our raging spirits. Then we dropped the useless guns and hurled terrible words after our bird dog.
We might as well have saved our breath. I do not think he even heard us. Straight over the shining fields he flew, seemingly almost air-borne himself, while the high flight of frightened ducks cast its shadow over him. He became a steadily diminishing dot in an illimitable distance, and then he vanished and the world grew silent.
The words we might have used, one to the other, as we sat down against the duck blind, would all have been inadequate. We said nothing. We simply waited. The sun rose high and red and the light grew until it was certain that there would be no more ducks that morning, and then we went back to the car and brewed some coffee. And then we waited.
He came back two hours later. He came so circumspectly (hugging the angles of the fences) that I did not see him until he was fifty yards away from the car. He was a sad spectacle. Dejection showed in every line from the dragging tail to the abject flop of his ears. He had evidently failed to catch a duck.
For Father that first experience with Mutt was bitter-sweet. True enough we had lost the ducks—but as a result my father was in a fair way to regain the initiative against Mother on the home front. This first skirmish had gone his way. But he was not one to rest on victory. Consequently, during the first week of the season we shot no birds at all, while Mutt demonstrated with what seemed to be an absolute certainty that he was not, and never would be, a bird dog.
It is true that Mutt, still smarting from the failure of his first effort, tried hard to please us, yet it seemed to be impossible for him to grasp the real point of our excursions into the autumnal plains.
On the second day out he decided that we must be after gophers and he spent most of that day digging energetically into their deep burrows. He got nothing for his trouble save an attack of asthma from too much dust in his nasal passages.
The third time out he concluded that we were hunting cows.
That was a day that will live long in memory. Mutt threw himself into cow chasing with a frenzy that was almost fanatical. He became, in a matter of hours, a dedicated dog. It was a ghastly day, yet it had its compensations for Father. When we returned home that night, very tired, very dusty—and sans birds—he was able to report gloatingly to Mother that her “hunting dog” had attempted to retrieve forty-three heifers, two bulls, seventy-two steers, and an aged ox belonging to a Dukhobor family.
It must have seemed to my father that his early judgment of Mutt was now unassailable. But he should have been warned by the tranquility with which Mother received his account of the day’s events.
Mother’s leap from the quaking bog to rock-firm ground was so spectacular that it left me breathless; and it left Father so stunned that he could not even find a reply.
Mother smiled complacently at him.
“Poor, dear Mutt,” she said. “He knows the dreadful price of beef these days.”
5
Mallard-Pool-Mutt
I HAD supposed that after the fiascos of that first week of hunting, Mutt would be banned from all further expeditions. It seemed a logical supposition, even though logic was often the stranger in our home. Consequently I was thoroughly startled one morning to find the relative positions of the antagonists in our family’s battle of the sexes reversed. At breakfast Mother elaborated on her new theme that Mutt was far too sensible to waste his time hunting game birds; and Father replied with the surprising statement that he could train any dog to do anything, and that Mutt could, and would, become the “best damn bird dog in the west!” I thought that my father was being more than usually rash, but he thought otherwise, and so throughout the rest of that season Mutt accompanied us on every shooting trip, and he and Father