The Dog Who Wouldn't Be

by Farley Mowat

  It was all we could do to stay afloat in our little dinghy as we rowed out to where our ship lay at her moorings; but Mutt appeared to enjoy the experience and he was full of enthusiasm as he leaped up to Scotch Bonnet’s sturdy deck.

  We had no sooner run up the mizzen, preparatory to letting slip our moorings, when a police launch came pounding out toward us. It was a big power cruiser but, like all of its species, designed for millponds. I watched in awe as it wallowed and heaved across the protected waters, and I was more than half inclined to heed the warnings shouted to us over a loud-hailer when the launch came alongside.

  “Ahoy there,” bawled an authoritative voice. “You can’t go outside today. The gale warnings are up!”

  Father, who knows how to handle policemen, simply smiled and answered them in Gaelic. The policemen were game, and they made several attempts to get through to him, but finally they took a big wave broadside and came near enough to swamping to make them decide to leave us foreigners to our fate.

  Father caught sight of my face. “Buck up,” he shouted over the roar of the wind. “Scotch Bonnet’s sister ship crossed the Atlantic twice. This is only a light breeze for a redningsskoite. Now stand by to let slip the mooring when I get the jib up.”

  I stood by, but not very happily. A few moments later Bonnet was under way, and the water was whooshing beneath her forefoot like a mountain cascade.

  We went out through the gap into the open lake under mizzen and jib alone, and it was more than enough canvas in that wind. We had no sooner cleared Toronto Island than we saw a strange spectacle ahead. It looked at first as if a drunken forest was staggering toward us out of the storm darkness. We stared perplexed at this phenomenon until my father recognized its meaning.

  “Look,” he whooped joyfully. “That’s the cross-lake race from Rochester … the yachting boys … and they’re running for shelter under bare poles.”

  As we stood out toward them we could see that they were certainly a naked lot. There was hardly a stitch of canvas set on any of those two dozen vessels, not even on the big eight-meter boats. They were a frightening sight, too, for they were burying their noses until the water ran green the full length of their decks, and their cockpits were no more than private swimming pools.

  Father was not really a vindictive man, but I suppose he could not resist the impulse. “Take the tiller,” he yelled. And with that he began hoisting our great red mainsail.

  We drove through that battered fleet like another Flying Dutchman, and as we passed we sang “It’s Up Wi’ the Bonnets of Bonny Dundee” at the top of our lungs.

  It was an exhilarating moment, but when we had come about and were beating eastward down the coast, I remembered that I had not seen Mutt for half an hour. I went below to seek him.

  I found him on my bunk, up forward of the mainmast, where the motion was the worst. He was stretched at full length, his head on my pillow and his feet hanging limply over the side of the bunk. He looked as if he believed, and hoped, that he was already dead. He took no notice of my arrival except to roll his eyes until the sight of those bloodshot orbs made me think suddenly of my own stomach, and I hastened out on deck again.

  I told my father that Mutt was dying.

  “He’ll get over it,” my father said.

  And of course he did. By the next dawn he was up and around again; but in future when the storm warnings were flying he never showed quite the same enthusiasm for sailing that had been his on that first day we went to sea.

  The kind of cruising that really suited Mutt was when we lay at anchor in one or other of the many delightful little coves that hide under the high shores of Prince Edward County. He could then enjoy the best of two worlds. We used to tie the dinghy close alongside Scotch Bonnet and whenever Mutt felt like stretching his legs on land he had but to jump into the dinghy, lower himself over its side, and swim ashore. The coves where we chose to lie were usually remote and rather wild, and Mutt could indulge in one of his favorite sports – crawfish hunting – to his heart’s content.

  Crawfish hunting is an aquatic sport. To play it Mutt would wade out from shore until he stood shoulder deep. Then he would lower his head below the surface and, with his eyes wide open, would search for the flat stones under which crawfish like to hide. He used his nose to overturn the stones, and the water was so clear that he could plainly see his quarry scuttling away in search of a new haven. Being members of the lobster family, crawfish have formidable claws, but these availed them nothing against Mutt, who would snap at them with his front teeth until they were disarmed. Once they had been rendered harmless, he would take them in his mouth, raise his head out of the water, and eat them with evident relish.

  Mutt, at his crawfishing, was quite a sight to see and I have known a Bay of Quinte farmer to stand and watch for a solid hour, while the plow team pawed restively at the furrowed ground behind him.

  If crawfish were not abundant, or if the cove happened to be marshy, Mutt would hunt frogs instead. He did this purely for fun, since he never ate the frogs he caught. Nor would he catch a frog while it was on dry land. The trick was to chivy it into, and under, the water, and try to locate it as it huddled on the bottom. Then Mutt’s head would dart down with a speed and precision equal to that of his chief competitor, the great blue heron; and generally he would emerge with the frog held gently in his jaws. He would carry it to land, release it, and then chase it back into the water, for another round.

  If he grew tired of the land, or if he fell foul of a farmer as a result of his old passion for cattle chasing, Mutt had only to plunge into the cove and swim out to the dinghy again. It was a life that suited him ideally.

  It was ideal for me as well, but I preferred Scotch Bonnet under sail, making her way in fine weather among the islands and channels of the bay. I held a bird-banding permit at the time, and the myriad islets and sand bars around Prince Edward County were densely occupied by breeding colonies of gulls and terns. Scotch Bonnet eventually carried me to almost all these breeding places, and I banded well over a thousand fledglings in the course of two summer cruises.

  The most memorable of those banding excursions was the one we made to Scotch Bonnet’s namesake.

  Scotch Bonnet Rock lies nine miles off the Prince Edward shore, and the lighthouse that stands upon it is no longer tended by a keeper. The rock is visited only once or twice each season, when the gas cylinders of the automatic light need replenishing. Free from human interference, vast flocks of gulls and cormorants now make the rock their home and breeding place.

  We came to the island from seaward on a boisterous June day, with a stiff breeze filling our sails, and a brilliant sun beating down upon the rising waves. Because of the heavy seas and the strengthening breeze, Father was forced to lie off and on under sail, beating back and forth, while I rowed ashore in the dinghy. Mutt insisted on coming with me, for we had been some time from land, and he was suffering from a lack of trees.

  It was a hard pull. The sea was steep and choppy, and the little dinghy rose and fell, so that often I could see neither the island nor the vessel. But I could see the cormorants, black and heavy, in slow flight from their fishing grounds to their nests upon the island.

  I landed on the lee side and hauled the dinghy clear of the swell. All about me gulls rose in angry protest, and since the wind was sweeping across the island full into my face, I was doubly aware that the place was heavily populated. Mutt dashed off to seek a tree, but there was none, and after some indecision he finally betook himself to the lighthouse, which must surely have been the most grandiose post ever to greet the eye of a hard-pressed dog.

  Banding young cormorants is no job for those with weak stomachs. The fledglings are naked until they are more than half grown, and their long necks and ungainly bellies do not make for much aesthetic charm. The nests are sketchy constructions littered with fish offal and guano. When approached by one whom they suspect, the young cormorants fix the intruder with a reproachful gaze and, a
fter letting him come within easy range, suddenly convulse themselves, regurgitating their dinners of partially digested fish at him.

  Knowing of this deplorable habit, I approached my victims cautiously. Mutt, on the other hand, had no foreknowledge.

  Having finished his business at the lighthouse, he began picking his way through the nesting area toward me. At first he avoided the young cormorants, but his curiosity got the better of him, and at length he approached one of them with nose outstretched in a tentative gesture of friendship. The cormorant promptly convulsed itself and caught Mutt squarely in the face.

  I was roused from my work by his cry of outrage, and I stood up in time to see him come dashing blindly through the center of the colony, recklessly steering a direct course, and presenting an irresistible target to every young cormorant along the way.

  He saw me and altered course in my direction, but friendship and brotherly love have their limits, and I climbed hurriedly up on a rock outcropping where I was beyond his reach. He paused briefly at the foot of the rock, fixed me with a terrible look of reproach, and then, turning to the island shore, he incontinently flung himself into the lake.

  I had a hard time launching the dinghy, and by the time I was clear of the shore breakers, I could see no sign of Mutt. As the little boat clung momentarily to the top of each swell I scanned the waters. At last I caught a glimpse of his black head, and I could see that he was making directly for the mainland shore, nine miles away.

  He vanished immediately from my view, but some of his erstwhile enemies from the island now came to his assistance. A bevy of gulls swooped screaming down above him, giving me an aiming mark.

  Father had seen me leave the island, and he realized that all was not well. He brought the vessel about and bore down on me. I waved toward the gulls, and he understood at once, for he could see that Mutt was missing from the dinghy.

  Mutt had to be dragged aboard the ship, and he showed no signs of gratitude for his rescue. The swim had cleansed his body, but the memory of the indignity he had suffered remained upon him. He crawled into a cubbyhole under the cockpit seat, and there he stayed throughout the remainder of the day and emerged – tentatively – only when we docked in the Murray Canal that evening. Even then he did not hurry ashore as was his wont, but stood on deck for a long time, suspiciously eying the green meadows and the inviting trees.

  Mutt found long passages trying. We were never able to convince him that it was all right with us if he made use of the masts, in lieu of telephone poles. While he remained at sea he steadfastly refused to let nature take her course, either because he felt that Scotch Bonnet was, in effect, a house – and he was so well housebroken that he could not forget it – or because the motion of the ship made it awkward, if not impossible, for him to balance on three legs.

  Consequently, when we approached our landfall after a long period at sea, Mutt would be extremely anxious to make contact. He could smell the land long before we could see it, and when he began to fidget and whine and stare longingly at the horizon, we knew that the shore would soon appear.

  One summer our whole family sailed down the lake from Niagara, with Kingston as our destination, and, because of light airs, we were at sea for almost thirty-six hours. When Kingston finally hove in sight, Mutt could hardly contain himself.

  Kingston was built in the earliest days of Upper Canada, and it retains much of the staid Victorianism of its heyday. Its rows upon rows of gray-stone houses reflect a kind of gray-stone mentality.

  We came into the harbor, and even before we had got our lines ashore, Mutt had spanned the gap between Scotch Bonnet and the dock with a prodigious leap, and was away. There were no trees immediately at hand, so he raced up the old cobbled street toward the town proper.

  A seedy gentleman took our lines, and after we were fast he invited himself aboard, saying that he was an old sailor – a gambit that always works on my father.

  We gave him a drink, and after a while he said:

  “Allow you got a dog.”

  We allowed that we had indeed.

  “Best keep him tight aboard then,” the old fellow continued. “Hear some turrible things about them young medical students up to the university. They be awful hard on dogs.”

  “What do they do to them?” I asked in my innocence.

  The old man spat, and helped himself to another drink. “Turrible things, they do,” was all that he would say.

  I asked where they got the dogs and he replied that most of them came from the city pound. “I shoulda had that job – dog catcher–” he explained in an aggrieved tone, “only I’m a Liberal, and this here’s a Conservative sort of place. Would have kept me good, too. Ten dollars for a dog, and five for a cat – that’s what them students pay.”

  Father cast a slightly anxious look up the dock, but there was no sign of Mutt. “I don’t suppose,” he asked the old man somewhat apprehensively, “that there’s any law against dogs running loose in Kingston?”

  The old man snorted. “Law! Sure there’s a law. Not that the feller who’s dog catcher now needs no damn law. He’ll snitch ’em right outa the back yard, chain and all.”

  Grumbling to himself, the old man left us, but before he was off the dock, we had passed him. We were in a hurry.

  I went up the dock road while Father went east along the water front and Mother went west. None of the people I accosted had seen anything that answered Mutt’s description, nor could I find any trace of him myself. When I returned to the dock an hour later, it was to discover that neither Father nor Mother had had any better luck.

  My father began to seethe. The thought of Mutt in the toils of the local dog catcher, and perhaps already on his way to the dissection table, was enlarging his adrenal glands.

  “You borrow a bicycle from the boatyard and go on looking,” he told me. “I’m going to the pound.”

  By the time he reached the pound he had worked himself into a towering rage; but the dog catcher was not there. In his stead was an emaciated and gum-chewing youth sprawled in an old chair, reading a racing form. He listened without emotion to Father’s request that Mutt be released upon the instant.

  Eventually he waved a languid hand toward the wire enclosure at the rear of the building. “If your dog’s there, you can have him for two bucks, mister,” he said. “Say you think Red Apple has a chance in the King’s Plate?”

  Not trusting himself to reply, Father hurried to the enclosure, only to be confronted by an ominous lack of dogs. There was not one in the whole pound. He returned to the youth and, in a voice that raised the languid one out of his chair, demanded the dog catcher himself.

  The youth grew impertinent.

  “Try making like a dog then, mister,” he advised. “Run out by the university. He’ll pick you somewhere along the way.”

  If the lad had guessed how close he was to annihilation in that instant, he would have discarded the racing form forever in favor of the New Testament. It was only the fact that my father could not afford time for a diversion that saved his skin.

  Outside the pound Father caught a taxi and went straight to the city hall. He tried the mayor’s office first, but that gentleman was out of town attending a conference on sewage disposal.

  However, the office of the chief of police was close at hand, and Father stormed it as he might have stormed an enemy redoubt. He found no one there except a large fat constable who was unsympathetic, and inclined to quick hostility.

  Very much on his dignity the constable pointed out that he did not run the “bejasusly” dog pound, and that, in any case, Father was committing a felony by allowing his dog to “run large.” The librarian in my father came to the surface automatically.

  “Run at large,” he snapped.

  The constable was no grammarian.

  “You better run outside!” he shouted. “Or, by Hades, I’ll run you in!”

  Abandoning any hope of help from the civil power, Father now sought a telephone booth, and dialed
the medical building at the university.

  The phone rang and rang with that mechanical insistence which indicates either that no one is home or, if they are, that they are too busy to bother answering. Father suspected that they were too busy. Ghastly visions of a trussed-up Mutt being set upon by white-clad figures assailed him. He did not even wait to get his nickel back, but slammed out of the booth, for he had remembered that there was one place in Kingston where he might find aid and friends – the military barracks.

  When he burst into the officers’ mess he found it deserted save for the orderly officer of the day, who, by a singular coincidence, had served with Father in the Fourth Battalion during the First World War.

  This officer was delighted to see an old friend; particularly so since there is nothing duller than orderly duty in a peacetime barracks. He listened with sympathy, and with a quickening gleam in his eye, as Father, having downed a quick one, poured out his story.

  When the tale was told, the officer slapped Father affectionately on the shoulder, exclaiming:

  “Trust the damned civilians to pull a black, eh? This is an emergency, old boy. Tell you what – we’ll call out the guard and stage a proper rescue.”

  He was as good as his word, too, and, five minutes later, a picket of armed men was marching briskly through the city streets toward the university.

  It was a lucky thing for him that the patrol did not meet the dog catcher en route, for soldiers are very fond of dogs, and they do not like the civil authority in any guise. But it was an even luckier thing that the patrol met me. Had it not done so, there might have been memorable deeds done in Kingston on that day.

  I cannot believe that the students would have stood idly by while the medical building was put to the torch, and it is almost certain that the chief of police would have flung his forces into the fray on the students’ side. Reinforcements would then have been required from the fort, and these might even have included the two light fieldpieces (relics of the Boer War, but still capable of making dangerous noises) which stand in front of the officers’ mess.