by Farley Mowat
I was already on my way.
Mutt’s grotto under the garage was his private sanctuary, and it could be reached only through a narrow burrow. I got down on my hands and knees and peered into the gloom. As my eyes became accustomed to the darkness, I could discern a vague but Muttlike shape. He was curled up in the farthest recess, his head half hidden by his tail, but with one eye exposed and glaring balefully out of the murk. He did not seem to be seriously damaged and I ordered him to emerge.
He did not move.
In the end I had to crawl into the burrow, grasp him firmly by the tail, and drag him out by brute force. And then I was so startled by his appearance that I released my grip and he scuttled back to cover.
Mutt was no longer a black and white dog, or even a black and yellow one. He was a vivid black and blue. Those sections of his coat that had once been white were now of an unearthly ultramarine shade. The effect was ghastly, particularly about the head, for even his nose and muzzle were bright blue.
Mutt’s transformation had taken place the day I left for Manitou. He was indignant and annoyed that he had been left behind, and for the rest of that day he sulked. When no one gave him the sympathy he felt was due him, he left the house, and he did not return home until evening. His return was notable.
Somewhere out on the broad prairie to the east of town he found the means with which to revenge himself upon humanity. He found a dead horse in that most satisfactory state of decomposition which best lends itself to being rolled upon. Mutt rolled with diligence.
He arrived home at a little after nine o’clock, and no doubt he trusted to the dusk to conceal him until he could reach his grotto. He was caught unawares when father leaped upon him from ambush. He made a frantic effort to escape and succeeded briefly, only to be trapped in the back yard. Squalling bitterly, he was at last dragged into the basement. The doors were closed and locked and the laundry tubs were filled.
Father has never been willing to describe in any detail the events that followed, but Mother – although she did not actually descend into the basement herself – was able to give me a reasonably circumstantial account. It must have been an epic struggle. It lasted almost three hours and the sounds and smells of battle reached Mother, via the hot-air registers, without appreciable diminution. She told me that both my father and Mutt had become hoarse and silent by the end of the second hour, but that the sounds of water sluicing violently back and forth over the basement floor testified clearly that the struggle was not yet at an end.
It was nearly midnight before Father appeared alone at the head of the cellar stairs. He was stripped to the buff, and close to exhaustion. After a stiff drink and a bath of his own, he went to bed without so much as hinting to Mother of the dreadful things that had happened on the dank battleground downstairs.
Mutt spent the balance of the night outside, under the front porch. He was evidently too fatigued even to give vent to his vexation by an immediate return to the dead horse – although he probably had this in mind for the morrow.
But when dawn came, not even the lure of the horse was sufficient to make him forgo his usual morning routine.
It had long been his unvarying habit to spend the hours between dawn and breakfast time going his rounds through the back alleys in the neighborhood. He had a regular route, and he seldom deviated from it. There were certain garbage cans that he never missed, and there were, of course, a number of important telephone poles that had to be attended to. His path used to take him down the alleyway between Ninth and Tenth Avenues, thence to the head of the New Bridge, and finally to the rear premises of the restaurants and grocery stores in the neighborhood of the Five Corners. Returning home, he would proceed along the main thoroughfare, inspecting fireplugs en route. By the time he started home, there would usually be a good number of people on the streets, bound across the river to their places of work. Mutt had no intimation of disaster on this particular morning until he joined the throng of south-bound workers.
Mother had no warning either until, at a quarter to eight, the telephone rang. Mother answered it and an irate female voice shouted in her ear, “You people should be put in jail! You’ll see if it’s so funny when I put the law onto you!” The receiver at the other end went down with a crash, and Mother went back to making breakfast. She was always phlegmatic in the early hours, and she assumed that this threatening tirade was simply the result of a wrong number. She actually smiled as she told Father about it over the breakfast table. She was still smiling when the police arrived.
There were two constables, and they were pleasant and polite when Mother answered the door. One of them explained that some “crank” had telephoned the station to report that the Mowats had painted their dog. The policemen were embarrassed, and they hastened to explain that it was the law that all such complaints had to be investigated, no matter how ridiculous they might seem. If Mother would assure them, simply for form’s sake, they said, that her dog was still his natural color, they would gladly depart. Mother at once gave them the requisite assurance, but, feeling somewhat puzzled, she hastened to the dining room to tell my father about it.
Father had vanished. He had not even finished his morning coffee. The sound of Eardlie grunting and snorting in the back 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. Then 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 became very touchy about the whole affair, and it was dangerous to question him too closely. Nevert
heless, 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
n 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 roof 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 met my question with studied nonchalance. For almost a year he had been imbibing the lore of upland hunting. He had read many books on the subject and he had talked to a score of old-time hunters and he believed that he had already achieved expert status.
“It depends what birds you’re after,” he explained. “Since the chicken season isn’t open yet, we’re looking for Huns” – he used these colloquial names for prairie chicken and Hungarian partridge with an easy familiarity – “and Huns like to come out to the roads at dawn to gravel-up. We’ll see them any time.”
I mulled this over. “There isn’t any gravel on these roads – only dust,” I said, with what seemed to me like cogent logic.
“Of course there isn’t any gravel,” Father replied shortly. “Gravel-up is just an expression. In this case it obviously means taking a dust bath. Now keep your eyes skinned, and don’t talk so much.”
There was no time to pursue the matter, for a moment later Father trod hard on the brakes and Eardlie squealed a little and jolted to a halt.
“There they are!” my father whispered fiercely. “You stay near the car. I’ll sneak up the ditch and flush them down the road toward you.”
The light was brilliant now, but though I strained my eyes, I caught no more than a glimpse of a few grayish forms scurrying into the roadside ditch some forty yards ahead of us. Nevertheless, I loaded my gun, leaped out of the car in a fury of excitement, and crouched down by the front fender. Father had already started up the ditch, shotgun cradled in one arm, and his face almost buried in the dry vegetation. He was soon out of my sight, and for some time nothing moved upon the scene except a solitary gopher that lifted its head near a fence post and whistled derisively.
I thought that it seemed to be taking Father an interminable time, but then I did not know that he was having his first experience with Russian thistles. These are frightful weeds whose dried and thorny carcasses roll for miles across the plains each autumn, to pile up in impenetrable thickets behind the fences or in the deep roadside ditches. There had been a bumper crop of Russian thistles that year and the ditch through which Father’s path lay was choked with them.
He suffered agonies, yet he persevered. Suddenly he burst out of the ditch, leveled his gun at a whirring cluster of rocketing birds, and accidentally fired both barrels at once. He disappeared again immediately, for the double recoil of a twelve-gauge shotgun is quite as formidable as a hard right to the jaw.
As Father had predicted they would, the Huns flew straight down the road toward me. I was too excited to remember to release the safety catch, but it did not matter. As the birds passed overhead I recognized them for as pretty a bevy of meadow larks as I have ever seen.
Father came back to the car after a while, and we drove on. He steered with one hand and picked thistles out of his face with the other. I did not speak, for I had a certain intuition that silence would be safer.
Nevertheless, our first day afield was not without some success. Toward evening we encountered a covey of birds and Father killed two of them with a magnificent crossing shot at thirty yards’ range. We were a proud pair of hunters as we drove homeward. As we were unloading the car in front of the house, Father observed the approach of one of our neighbors and with pride held up the brace of birds to be admired.
The neighbor, a hunter of many years’ experience, was impressed. He almost ran to the car and, snatching the birds out of my father’s hand, he muttered:
“For God’s sake, Mowat, hide those damn things quick! Don’t you know the prairie-chicken season doesn’t open for a week?”
Father and I learned a good deal that first autumn. We learned that the Hungarian partridge is the wiliest of birds – bullet-swift when on the wing, and approaching a gazelle in speed when running through dense cover on the ground. We became inured to the violent explosions of prairie chickens bursting out of the tall slough grass. We learned that there is only one duck that reputable western hunters deign to shoot – and that is the greenhead mallard. We learned this last lesson so well that it was almost our undoing. That was on an October day when we found ten greenheads feeding placidly in a slough a few rods from an apparently abandoned farmhouse. Although they seemed a little larger than the ones we had fruitlessly pursued all through the season, we never dreamed that they had an owner who was also a deputy game warden; or that any man could have such an inflated idea of the value of his livestock. At that, we escaped lightly, for the owner would undoubtedly have charged us with exceeding the bag limits – if there had been such a limit on domestic ducks.
That first season conclusively demonstrated that we really needed the services of a bird dog – if not a pointer, then at least a good retriever. We lost a number of partridge that were only winged and that ran for cover. On one occasion we came close to losing Father when he waded out into a quicksand slough to retrieve what later was identified as a double-crested cormorant. The memory of the lost birds and, in particular, of the quicksand sat heavily on Father through the following year and gave new weight to Mother’s arguments as a new hunting season approached. She had a sublime faith in Mutt. Or perhaps she was just being stubborn.