Buff: A Collie, and Other Dog-Stories

by Albert Payson Terhune

  "SOMETHING"

  A dog is only a dog. But a collie is--a collie. Says the Scotchproverb:

  "_A collie has the brain of a man, and the ways of a woman!_"

  This is the story of Dick Snowden's collie, Jock--and of--Something.You can believe the tale or not, as you choose. But if you knowcollies, you will think twice before you pooh-pooh it as ranklyimpossible. Moreover, in its chief--and strangest--happenings, itchances to be true.

  It began when Dick Snowden's pretty girl-wife was lying in the centreof a huge white bed, and when she was watching the world glide pasther and not much caring how soon it might glide altogether away fromher.

  Cuddled close to her in the enormous bed was a white-swathed bundle oftiny humanity that smelled of talcum powder and of sachet and was aweek old.

  The coming of Baby Marise into the ken of mankind had well-nigh costthe life of Klyda Snowden, her girl-mother. There were nocomplications; there was nothing the learned doctors could put a nameto. But Klyda had suffered much and had been through much. She wasvery, very tired. So tired was she that it did not seem worth while topick up the bulky burden of life again.

  It was much easier to lie still, with half-shut eyes, and feel herselfdrifting lazily out of life. Dully, she knew the baby was hers, thatit was the precious little daughter for whose advent she and Dick hadfor months been planning so happily. She knew, too, that the lean andbronzed man who spent so many miserable hours at her bedside was herworshipped husband, Dick.

  Yes, she was quite sane. But she was so tired that none of thereal-life things, in which usually she revelled, were worth livingfor. Mentally, she knew that the future was bright for her and forDick and for their baby. Physically, she was not interested inanything but drowsing.

  It was on the afternoon of the eighth day of Baby Marise's life thatDick came into the room carrying a covered wicker basket. Klyda had nointerest in him or in what he was carrying--even when he set down thebasket on the edge of the bed and lifted its cover. Sleepily shelooked at him, ready to drop into another doze.

  Into the opened basket went Dick Snowden's hand, to take out thecontents. But the contents saved him the effort.

  Out from the depths of the basket sprang a fluffy gold-and-white ballof dynamic energy. It wavered dizzily on the wicker edge, thencatapulted clumsily to the counterpane, where it caught sight ofKlyda's colourless little face set in a halo of tumbled sunlit hair.

  With the awkward canter of a badly made patent toy, the ball of fluffdanced sidewise up the counterpane until it reached the white littleface, which it proceeded to lick ecstatically with a very small andvery pink tongue.

  By this time Klyda's weary brain had registered the fact that the newarrival was a two-months-old collie pup--also that it was doubtlessthe same collie pup which Dick had promised, a month ago, to buy forher.

  The gift was one on which Klyda had set her heart; from the day sheand her husband had chanced to pass by some neighbouring colliekennels and had seen a litter of month-old puppies playing with theirdam in one of the wire runs. Instantly, she had taken a violent fancyto this particular pup. It was then too young to leave its mother, butDick had secured the owner's promise to sell it to him, as soon as theyoungster should be weaned.

  The promise had delighted Klyda. She had named the puppy Jock and haddecreed that he should be Baby's guardian and chum.

  Yet, since then, so many things had happened! And now the arrival ofthe once-coveted pup meant nothing to Klyda at all--except that shedid not like to have her wan face licked, nor to be patted at by a setof clumsy and shapeless white forepaws.

  She frowned slightly and hoped Dick would take the obstreperous puppyaway. But at sight of her frown the puppy evidently mistook the slightfacial contortion for an invitation to play, for he braced himself onall four shapeless legs and made threatening little rushes at thefrowning face, accenting his attacks with ferocious baby barks.

  In spite of herself Klyda felt a vague amusement at the pup's sillyantics. She reached out a weak white hand to pet him. At the touch,Jock forgot he was a lion or whatever other furious wild beast he waspretending to be. He remembered only that he was very young and veryfar from home and mother, and that the caress of the tired hand wassweet. With a cluck of contentment, he cuddled close to Klyda's faceand curled up for a nap.

  Dick, glad to have aroused his apathetic wife's interest to even somild an extent, stooped to pick up the puppy and carry him away. ButJock was in no hurry to go. So piteously did he look to Klyda forrescue that she bade her husband leave him there for the time.Whereat, by way of showing his thanks, Jock began again to play withher hand as it lay idle on the quilt.

  Up to this time everybody had moved on tiptoe about the sick-room, andhad talked in undertones. But Jock was no respecter of silence. Hegambolled and barked to his heart's content. Partly amused and partlyannoyed by his bumptiousness, Klyda found herself for the first timeunable to sink at will into that dreamy apathy of hers. It is hard todream, when a tiny furry whirlwind is charging at one or is professingto believe that one's white fingers are a mortal foe to be nibbled andthreatened.

  Thus it was, against her own will, that Klyda Snowden was shaken fromher semi-coma. After that, youth and nature combined to keep her fromsinking back into it. Probably she would have gotten well, anyhow. Andcertainly a noisy collie pup is not to be prescribed as a temporaryroommate for a sick girl. But the fact remained that Klyda "turned thecorner," that very day, and forthwith grew better.

  She had not discovered a new zest in life. Her husband and hernew-born child furnished that. But she had been deprived of the luxuryof drifting away. Action and annoyance and clownish gambols hadchanced to supply the needed impetus to bring her back to normality.

  Yet Dick and she always attributed her rally to the arrival of Jock.And they loved him accordingly. Instead of living in the green-paintedkennel in the garden and seeing his owners for only a casual hour orso each day, he was brought up in the house and with hourly humancompanionship.

  That sort of thing has a queerly humanising influence on a dog,especially if the dog be a thoroughbred collie.

  From earliest puppyhood Jock learned to know the human voice in allits phases, and to read from experience its many shades of meaning. Helearned, too, from constant hearing, the meanings of many simple wordsand phrases. He learned still more of human nature--all of which waswholly natural and has occurred to hundreds of house-bred collies.

  From the first, Jock adopted Baby Marise as his particular deity. Hewould lie for hours at the foot of her crib, or would walk in sedateslowness at the side of her perambulator, in preference to a woodlandrace or even a romp with Dick or Klyda.

  Yet between him and Dick there was a strange bond of sympathy. Dearlyas the dog loved Klyda and Marise, he was closer to Dick than toeither of them. He would lie with his eyes on the man's face, watchingits every change; and seemed to be studying him to the very soul.Even as a puppy, Jock used to do this.

  A scowl on Dick's brow would bring him forward with a rush, to offercanine sympathy or to rub his nose consolingly against his master'shand. He would go into ecstasies of joyous excitement when Dicklaughed or smiled. And, as the dog grew older, he seemed able to seepast mere facial expression and to read Dick's varying moods, evenwhen those moods gave no visible sign of expression.

  All of this seemed nothing short of magic to the Snowdens, though itis a common enough phenomenon to anyone who has been much withcollies.

  It was when Baby Marise was a harum-scarum girl of four, and when Jockwas a stately giant in his early maturity, that something happenedwhich the Snowdens never tired of talking about.

  Dick started at sunrise for a day's trout-fishing along a brook whichran through a wild tract of meadow and forest, some three miles abovethe Snowden place. Jock, as his master set forth, gallopedenthusiastically ahead, eager for the prospective walk. But Dickwhistled him back. The man did not desire to have wary trout scaredaway by the occasional plunges of a seventy-p
ound collie into thebrook.

  "No," he said, as if talking to a fellow-human. "Not to-day, old man!Stay here and look after the place."

  Crestfallen yet philosophical, Jock trotted back to the veranda andlay down, his deep brown eyes following pathetically the recedingfigure of his master, hoping against hope that Dick might relent andsummon him to follow. Then Marise came down to breakfast with Klyda,and Jock proceeded to devote himself to their society.

  It was about four o'clock that afternoon when Klyda was awakened froma nap on the porch by the sudden rising of the collie from hisresting-place on the mat near her. Jock had been asleep; yet somethinghad startled him in an instant from his repose and had changed asedately slumbering collie into a creature of puppylike excitability.Every hair on the dog's shaggy ruff was abristle. His eyes wereglinting as with pain. He burst into a salvo of frantic barking anddashed across to where Klyda lay.

  Catching the hem of the astonished woman's skirt in his teeth, hetugged at her dress, backing away with a suddenness that all but threwher to the floor.

  "Jock!" expostulated Klyda, recovering her balance and trying toextricate the skirt from his grip. "Jock, have you gone crazy?"

  Jock's answer was to release his hold on the skirt-hem, and to gallopoff the porch and out onto the drive which led to the highway. Therehe halted, barked in imperious summons and darted back to Klyda.Catching her skirt again between his jaws, he sought to draw her outonto the driveway with him.

  Laughing at her pet's odd behaviour, Klyda went down the steps to thedrive. Instantly Jock let go of her skirt and ran fifty feet towardsthe main road. There, halting again, he turned and barked. As thewoman still did not follow, he ran back, seized her skirt in his teethagain and tried to draw her onward.

  This time Klyda did not refuse to follow. A queer notion had possessedher--a notion that Jock was not doing these unaccountable things for amere lark or to lure her into a romp. It was not at all like thedignified collie to behave this way. Calling to her brother--who wasreading, indoors--to join her, she set forth in the wake of the dog.

  The moment the two humans started toward him, Jock ceased to bark inthat frantic and panic-urged fashion. He wheeled and galloped off,straight across country. Every few hundred yards he would pause tomake sure the others were still following, and to let them comenearer. Then he would be off again.

  A wearisome walk he led the puzzled Klyda and her grumbling brother.In a precise line he travelled, turning aside for no hillock or rockor tangle of undergrowth.

  "For goodness' sake!" panted the brother, once, as he looked ruefullydown at his buckskin shoes which had just plodded through a corner ofswamp-land. "For goodness' sake, Klyda, let's stop this fool ramble!The idiot of a dog will probably halt in front of some oak where he'streed a cat, and he'll want us to dislodge his quarry for him. On ared-hot day like this, what's the earthly sense of following a----"

  "He hasn't treed a cat," was Klyda's reply. "He hasn't treed anything.He's been with me, all day. I don't know why he is acting like this.But I know Jock, and I know he's got some good reason for being soeager for me to follow him. If you're tired----"

  "Oh, I'll trail along, if you're going to!" grunted her brother."Only, if he leads us over into the next county and then turns aroundand leads us back, just for fun--well, I warn you I'll guy you for therest of your days for being so silly as to--Hello!" he broke off."Here's where we'll have to wade!"

  They had come out of the woods at the verge of a wide brook. Klydagave a little start as she saw it, and lost her colour.

  "Why, this is Snake Brook!" she cried. "Dick and I have been here adozen times. But we've always come by way of the road. I didn't knowit was in this direction. I----"

  "Well?" queried her brother. "Even at that, what's the excitement?There's nothing so very dramatic, is there, in coming upon SnakeBrook? It's----"

  "It's where Dick came to fish to-day," said Klyda, her pallorincreasing. "Jock has led us here, and----"

  "And that's the thrilling end of our quest?" interrupted her brotherwith a growl of disgust. "Jock got lonely for his master, and he'sdragged us through marsh and brambles, all this way, just for a sweetfamily reunion! Lord!"

  "No," contradicted Klyda, her voice not quite steady, "no! See, hehasn't crossed the brook. He's running along it, on this side. And nowhe's stopped again for us to follow him. Come!"

  She set off at a run along the pebbly and winding margin of the brook.Jock, as she started, wheeled again and vanished into a copse ofshrubbery which ran down from a steep bank to the edge of the water.

  Ten seconds later the two heard the collie's voice upraised once more,this time in a quavering wolf-howl of anguish. And no longer did theundergrowth crackle at his charging progress. He had come to a haltsomewhere.

  "The cur's stumbled into a hornets' nest," guyed the brother, laughingloudly to subdue a prickly feeling that ran along his spine at soundof that eerie cry.

  But Klyda did not answer. She was plunging headlong through thebushes, panting and gasping with her own violent efforts to reach thespot where Jock awaited her.

  Out in a little clearing, beside the brook, and at the base of aten-foot cliff-bank, she came upon the dog. He was standing guard overa body that sprawled inertly, half in the water at the cliff-foot, asplintered fishing rod at its side.

  There lay Dick Snowden, his leg broken in two places by his tumblefrom the bank. In falling, his head had struck against a water-edgeboulder. The impact had caused concussion of the brain. Nor did thevictim recover consciousness until an hour after they had gotten himhome.

  People who did not understand collies used to smile politely and lifttheir brows when the Snowdens told how Jock had brought aid to thestricken master, of whose plight the dog could not possibly have knownthrough any explainable channels.

  Some of these people agreed with Klyda's brother, who always insistedthere was nothing mysterious or occult about the matter. Theyexplained that Jock had waxed lonely for his absent master and hadtried to coax Klyda into going with him to meet the returningfisherman,--and that the accident to Dick had been a mere coincidence,quite outside the dog's calculations.

  They did not explain how Jock knew the precise direction in which Dickhad gone that day, nor why, during Snowden's previous and succeedingabsences from home, the collie made no such effort to follow him.

  Klyda and Dick did not bother to argue with these sceptics. They knewJock; other people did not.

  "It wasn't coincidence," was all Klyda would say when outsiders soughtto convince her. "It was--_Something_."

  And so the years went on at the Snowden home, pleasantly anduneventfully. Baby Marise was a leggy and big-eyed girl of nine, andJock was in the full hale prime of latter middle age. Dick and Klydawere sweethearts, as ever. They and their child and their hugegold-and-white dog formed a close corporation that made home life verybeautiful for all four of them.

  Then, over the smugly complacent land, rang a bugle-call. Half theworld was sick unto death with the Hun pestilence, and America alonecould stay the hideous disease's assault on humanity. America alonecould cure a dying world. To achieve this Heaven-sent miracle, thelives of thousands of brave men were needed. And at the terrible blastof the bugle-call these men responded in millions.

  Dick Snowden was one of them.

  There were tears at the Snowden home when Dick first went thence tothe officers' training-camp. There was dire loneliness after he hadgone.

  But there were no tears when, at the end of his last furlough, CaptainRichard Snowden said good-bye to his family and embarked for France.

  There were no tears, then. There was a hero-smile on Klyda's drawnlips. Baby Marise tried to smile, too. And at least she did notcry--which was very brave indeed. Jock looked long and gravely up intoSnowden's forcedly gay face; and laid his splendid head against hismaster's khaki knee as Dick said to him:

  "Good-bye, old chap! Take care of them till I come back. You're theman of the house, remember, while I'm gone
."

  No, there were no tears when Captain Dick Snowden sailed gallantlyaway to fight the grey-clad pests which were engulfing the world. Butthere was a deadly and bitter loneliness that swooped down on theonce-merry little household and gripped it by the throat--aloneliness that deepened and grew more cruelly hard to bear as thedreary weeks sagged on.

  Jock, with his queer collie sixth sense, felt acutely the changedatmosphere of the place. He sought, in a thousand unobtrusive ways, toconsole and cheer his mistress and Marise. And he seemed to haveunderstood Dick's parting charge to him to assume the responsibilitiesof "the man of the house." Always Jock had been a fiery guardian ofthe home in the matter of warding off intruders. Nowadays his jealousguardianship became an obsession.

  Voluntarily abandoning his lifelong nightly resting-place on the rugoutside the door of Klyda's room, he took to sleeping on the veranda.Nor was his sleep heavy. A dozen times a night the wakeful Klyda couldhear the big dog get to his feet and start off on a thorough patrol ofthe grounds.

  This sentry-go accomplished, he would circle the porch and return tohis doormat bed for another fitful snooze. But the very slightestsound was enough to awaken him and to bring him at once to fiercealertness. The step of a belated wayfarer on the highroad beyond,--thefaintest stir of one of the sleepers within the house,--any of ahundred negligible noises of the night,--sufficed to rouse him to hisduty.

  In the daytime, Jock was seldom more than arm's-length from Klyda orMarise. With cold suspicion his melancholy dark eyes would follow themotions of each casual visitor or tradesman. Yes, Jock was taking hisjob seriously.

  On the rare occasions when a letter from France reached the place, heknew of its arrival before the mail was sorted. It would thrill himand set him to barking wildly and to scampering about the house like ajoy-crazed puppy. He seemed to know the occasion was one of rapturefor them all.

  "The minute the letters are handed in at the door," Klyda boasted toher brother, "even before any of us have time to look them over, Jockalways knows whether or not there's a letter from Dick."

  "Why shouldn't he?" demanded the sceptic. "A collie has a wolf's powerof scent. He can smell the touch of Dick's hand on the envelope. It'sperfectly normal."

  "No," denied Klyda, musingly, "it isn't normal. It's--_Something!_"

  Then, late of a September night, the household was jolted from slumberby a clangour of barking from the porch.

  To one who understands collies, there is as much difference in a dog'svarious modes of barking as in the inflections of a human voice. Forexample, there is the gay bark of greeting, there is the sharplyimperative bark of challenge, there is the noisily swaggering bark ofsheer excitement, and there is the acute and agonised bark that tellsof stark emotion.

  Jock's bark to-night had the timbre of that with which, long ago, hehad summoned Klyda to the aid of her injured husband at Snake Brook.And the sound went through the lonely wife's soul like a knife-thrust.

  She sprang out of bed and, in dressing-gown and slippers, ran out tothe porch. As on that earlier day, Jock was awaiting her in feveredexcitement. Catching the hem of her wrapper, he tugged. Then, droppingthe wrapper, he galloped up the driveway and wheeled about to face herwith a bark of summons.

  To-night Klyda needed no second invitation to follow him. Bewildered,trembling, yet trusting to the collie's intuition, she stumbled alongin the direction Jock led. And, leaving the driveway, he wastravelling due northeast.

  Well did Klyda know she was moving northeastward. For, by dint ofcompass and maps, she had long since figured out for herself theapproximate direction of France in relation to her home. And alwaysshe faced in that direction when she knelt to pray for Dick.

  For perhaps half a mile the dog continued his progress, at first inmad eagerness, but presently in growing indecision and irresolution.

  At last he stopped, sniffed the air through vertically liftednostrils, then trotted back to Klyda. Head a-droop, tail dragging,every line of his grand body expressing the utmost miserabledejection, he crept up to Klyda and crouched before her, his head onher foot. He shuddered, as if in pain; and then whimpered softly,lifting his head for a moment and peering to the northeast.

  He had failed. He had awakened with the sudden knowledge of hismaster's peril. He had followed the urge of the call. And all at oncehe had realised that for some reason he could not hope to lead hismistress to the man who so sorely needed her aid. Perplexed,heartsick, he had crawled back; helpless to do more.

  Again, Klyda's brother scoffed at his sister's certainty thatsomething was amiss with Snowden. So did all others to whom theunhappy woman told the tale. They still scoffed at the idea of anypremonition on the part of the dog--but there was an awed note behindtheir scoffing--when, a few weeks later, a shaky scrawl was receivedfrom the absentee; a scrawl written in a base hospital:

  "I am laid by the heels for a day or two by a handful of rather nasty little shrapnel-bites that Herr Fritz sprayed me with three nights ago during a reconnoitre. Nothing serious--so you're not to worry your dear self. I'll be as good as new in a week or two. The surgeon says so. He says I'll be lucky if I'm able to claim a wound-chevron on the strength of such a piker injury.

  "Here is a funny bit of mental delusion that may amuse you: When I toppled over and lay there in No Man's Land,--before my men could find me and bring me in,--there was an ungodly lot of racket from the Hun batteries. It almost deafened me. But through it all I believed I could hear--as distinctly as ever I heard anything--the wild barking of old Jock.

  "Wasn't that a quaint trick for a wounded man's brain to play? Jock has a pretty thunderous bark, but its echo could hardly travel three thousand miles and reach me above the roar of the boche batteries. Yet I heard it. It wasn't his usual bark, either. It sounded the way it did the time Marise fell down the well, and as it sounded when the house caught fire in the night and he roused us barely in time to put out the blaze. I must have been a bit delirious, of course. But it gave me a queer homey feeling to hear the dear old fellow's voice--even if I didn't hear it."

  Klyda looked at the date on the letter. Then she subtracted three daystherefrom and computed the time difference between her home andnorthern France. Then she turned to the little desk-calendar on which,superstitiously, she had marked with a cross the date of her awakeningby Jock. After that she showed her brother the letter and thecalendar. As I have said, he still scoffed. But there was somethingof awe in his manner.

  It was a shock to Klyda to know her adored soldier was wounded. Yet itwas also a joy to know that he was not only in no danger from hiswound, but that he was kept, perforce, out of battle, for a time. Thisknowledge, and the relief from her weeks of foreboding, gave Klyda acurious sense of peace which had not been hers in many a day. Herspirits rebounded to a lightness which was almost hysterical. As theday wore on, her unnatural gaiety and her sense of nearness to Dickincreased.

  Early in the evening she left the house and strolled out into thewhite autumn moonlight. She was restless, and she wanted solitude andexercise. Jock rose from his bed on the doormat and ranged alongsideher for the anticipated walk.

  Crossing the stretch of moon-soaked turf, the two made their waytowards a rustic summer-house that stood on a knoll at the far end ofthe grounds. Here, with Dick, they had been wont to sit, daily, towatch the sunset. And to the old trysting-place, Klyda now strolled.

  Jock, like herself, had been gay all day; ever since the arrival ofthe pencil scrawl from Dick. It was with difficulty now that he curbedhis exuberant pace to keep time with hers.

  They reached the summer-house on the knoll. There, Klyda stood for aninstant in silence, to gaze dreamily over the moon-swept hills. Thenight was deathly still.

  Then, of a sudden, the silences were shattered by a sound that wailedforth in hideous cadences from hill to hill; re-echoing until theplacid night fairly screamed with it. Klyda gasped aloud at the horrorof the plangent di
n, and she spun about to locate its cause.

  There in the moonlight twenty feet away from her stood Jock. The dog'severy muscle was tense, as if with torture. His head was flung back.From his cavernous throat was issuing a series of long-drawn howls,slow, earsplitting, raucous,--howls of mortal anguish.

  "Jock!" panted Klyda in swift terror. "_Jock!_"

  (At the same moment, in a base hospital near Meran-en-Laye, a nursewas drawing the top of a cotton sheet over a face whose eyes would nolonger need the light of day. The nurse was saying to a fellow-worker,as she performed the grim duty:

  "Poor fellow! He was doing so nicely, too, till the blood poison setin.... Say, Nora, did I hear a dog howling, just then, or are mynerves going bad?")

  At the quick appeal in Klyda's voice Jock ceased his hideous lamentand stood trembling, with head bent almost to the ground. Then,through her moment of dread, that same strange sense of nearness toher husband came back upon the woman, but fiftyfold stronger than everbefore since his departure. Through no volition of her own, she heardherself whisper timidly:

  "_Dick?_"

  As she spoke, the collie raised his head, as in joyous greeting. Hecame swiftly over to where his mistress stood.

  But it was not towards her he was moving. Nor was it at her that hisrapturously welcoming gaze was turned.

  The dog was hurrying, with eyes aglint and plumy tail waving, toward aspot directly beside her. Thus had he advanced, many a time, to greethis master, when Dick had returned from brief absences and when Jockhad seen him standing there with his arm thrown protectingly about hiswife and his eyes smiling down into hers.

  To humans, the tensely waiting woman would have seemed to be standingthere in the moonlight, alone. But it was not into empty space thatthe advancing dog gazed so eagerly.

  No one, seeing the collie then, could have doubted for an instant thatJock was looking at--_Something!_