Though Hector wasn’t at all stick-minded, he did love to grab hold of Dan’s and try to pull it from his mouth. Innumerable contests of tug-of-war ensued in this way and it amused me to see the different reactions of the two dogs. To Hector, it was deadly serious as he hung on with terrier pertinacity, growling fiercely as he was swung around. All his attention was fixed desperately on the business in hand, but to Dan, the thing was a game, mere light relaxation, and he kept glancing at me with a ‘how’m I doing?’ expression as he gripped his stick.
He would carry his stick for many miles and the first sign of his deterioration in his fourteenth year was when he occasionally returned from a walk without it. I knew something was wrong then. Another sign was that, as he aged, he no longer insisted on very large sticks. In fact, his tastes gradually tended towards smaller and smaller ones.
There is a silhouetted photograph on the cover of James Herriot’s Yorkshire. It shows Dan looking up at me. He was an old dog then, a year after Hector had gone, and his eyes are fixed on something in my hand. It is a very small stick . . .
I have the same feeling about the wheel turning full circle when I look at my present dog, Bodie. He is a Border Terrier and I have always wanted one since I first arrived in Yorkshire nearly fifty years ago.
Siegfried had a partner in Leyburn called Frank Bingham. Leyburn stands at the gate of Wensleydale and I used to go up there several days a week to do Frank’s tuberculin testing. Every time I entered the house a little Border Terrier, Toby by name, trotted up to me, rolled on his back and looked up at me solemnly, waiting for me to scratch his chest. I have always liked little dogs who roll over like that – I think it is an unfailing sign of good nature – and I took a tremendous fancy to Toby. Besides, there was something greatly appealing in his whiskery face, topped by little black ears.
‘Some day I’ll have a Border,’ I said to Frank.
I said that to many people, especially to myself, over the years, but each time I lost one of my own dogs there was never one of the breed available. When Hector went and then Dan within a year, I must have been somewhat numbed because I did not follow my own precept of getting another dog immediately. Perhaps I felt that I could never replace those two. They had been such a wonderful combination in their contrasting ways, filling that side of my life to overflowing, and I was in my mid-sixties by then, less resilient, less willing to accept the possibility that I could feel for another dog as I felt for them.
I seemed to be in a state of limbo for several months – the only time in my life that I can remember being without a dog – and my walks would have lost their savour but for the fact that my daughter, Rosie, who lived next door, acquired a beautiful yellow Labrador puppy. She called her Polly and I found to my delight that I had another companion. But my car seemed very empty as I went on my rounds.
It was a Saturday lunch time when Rosie came in and said excitedly, ‘There’s an advertisement in the Darlington and Stockton Times about some Border puppies. It’s a Mrs Mason in Bedale.’
The announcement burst on me like a bombshell and I was all for immediate action, but my wife’s response surprised me.
‘It says here,’ she said, studying the newspaper, ‘that these pups are eight weeks old, so they’d be born around Christmas. Remember you said that after waiting all this time we’d be better with a spring puppy.’
‘Yes, that’s right,’ I replied. ‘But Helen, these are Borders! We might not get another chance for ages!’
She shrugged. ‘Oh, I’m sure we’ll find one at the right time if only we’re patient.’
‘But . . . but . . .’ I found I was talking to Helen’s back. She was bending over a pan of potatoes.
‘Lunch will be ready in ten minutes,’ she said. ‘You and Rosie can take Polly for a little walk.’
As we strolled along the lane outside our house, Rosie turned to me. ‘What a funny thing. I can’t understand it. Mum is as keen as you to get another dog and yet here is a litter of Borders – the very thing you’ve been waiting for. They’re so scarce. It seems such a pity to miss them.’
‘I don’t think we will miss them,’ I murmured.
‘What do you mean? You heard what she said.’
I smiled indulgently. ‘You’ve often heard your mother say that she knows me inside out. She can tell in advance every single thing I’m going to do?’
‘Yes but . . .’
‘Well, what she forgets is that I know her inside out, too. I’ll lay a small bet that when we get back to the house, she’ll have changed her mind.’
Rosie raised her eyebrows. ‘I very much doubt it. She seemed very definite to me.’
On our return I opened the front door and saw Helen speaking into the telephone.
She turned to me and spoke agitatedly. ‘I’ve got Mrs Mason on the line now. There’s only one pup left out of the litter and there are people coming from as far as eighty miles away to see it. We’ll have to hurry. What a long time you’ve been out there!’
We bolted our lunch and Helen, Rosie, granddaughter Emma and I drove out to Bedale. Mrs Mason led us into the kitchen and pointed to a tiny brindle creature twisting and writhing under the table.
‘That’s him,’ she said.
I reached down and lifted the puppy as he curled his little body round, apparently trying to touch his tail with his nose. But that tail wagged furiously and the pink tongue was busy at my hand. I knew he was ours before my quick examination for hernia and overshot jaw.
The deal was quickly struck and we went outside to inspect the puppy’s relations. His mother and grandmother were out there. They lived in little barrels which served as kennels and both of them darted out and stood up at our legs, tails lashing, mouths panting in delight. I felt vastly reassured. With happy, healthy ancestors like those I knew we had every chance of a first-rate dog.
As we drove home with the puppy in Emma’s arms, the warm thought came to me. The wheel had indeed turned. After nearly fifty years I had my Border Terrier.
The choice of a name exercised our minds for many days with arguments, suggestions and counter-suggestions. We finally decided on ‘Bodie’. Helen and I were great fans of the TV series, ‘The Professionals’, and our particular hero was Lewis Collins who took the part of Bodie. We have met Lewis a few times and were at first a little hesitant about telling him that we had named our dog after him, but he doesn’t mind, knowing us and understanding the honoured place a dog occupies in our household.
Helen and I settled down happily with Bodie. We had been lost without a dog in the house and it was a lovely relief to have filled that awful gap. It was extraordinary that the gap was filled by a grizzled, hairy-faced little creature about nine inches long, but Bodie effortlessly performed the miracle. Helen had a dog to feed again and see to his in-house care and bedding, and I had a companion in my car and on my bed-time walk even though he was almost invisible on the end of his lead.
His first meeting with Polly was a tremendous event. I mentioned the instant friendship between Hector and Dan. It was different with Bodie. He fell in love.
This is no exaggeration. Polly became and is to this day the most important living creature in his world. Since she lived next door he was able to watch her house from our sitting-room window and a wild yapping was always the sign that the adored one had appeared in her garden. Fortunately for his peace of mind, he had a walk with her every day and at the weekends several times a day and, as he grew up, it was clear that this routine was the most significant thing in his life.
It was when he was about a year old that I was walking down a lane with the two of them trotting ahead. Memories stirred in me as I watched them – the noble Labrador and the scruffy little terrier side by side. Suddenly Polly picked up a stick, Bodie seized one end of it, and in a flash a hectic tug-of-war was raging. The little Border grumbled and growled in fierce concentration, and as Polly glanced at me with amusement in her eyes, I had the uncanny impression that I had got Hector a
nd Dan back again.
As Bodie approached the adult stage, I was able to assess his various qualities. My Dog Encyclopaedia, describing the Border, uses words like ‘tough’, ‘honest’, ‘down to earth’. It does not say that it is pretty; in fact, it states that it has ‘not quite the elegance of the more fashionable members of the terrier group’. I would have to admit all that. Bodie’s shaggy, whiskered little face is almost comic, but it has certainly grown on me. When I look at it now, I can find great depths of character and expression.
The book also describes the breed as ‘intensely loyal and gentle with children’. Again, right on both counts, but Bodie obviously regards himself as a tough guy and, as such, seems a little embarrassed about showing his affection. If I am sitting on a sofa, he will flop down almost apologetically by my side as though doing so by accident, but lying very close all the same, and he has a particular habit of creeping unobtrusively between my feet at mealtimes or when I am writing. He is down there at this moment and since this is a swivel chair I have to be careful about sudden turns.
One unfortunate result of his infatuation with Polly is that he has become insanely jealous. His possessiveness is such that he will hurl himself unhesitatingly at any male dog, however large, who might be a possible suitor, and this invariably leads to an embarrassing fracas followed by profuse apologies to the irate owner.
Such behaviour is very unwise in one so small because he usually comes off second best. Yet he never surrenders. Only last week I removed the stitches from his shoulder after an encounter with an enormous cross-bred Alsatian. By the time I dived in after Bodie’s attack, this dog was waving him round in the air by one leg, but the Border, his mouth full of hair, was still looking for more trouble.
He may be foolish, but he is also very brave. My encyclopaedia points out that these little terriers have been used for centuries in the Border country between Scotland and England to hunt and destroy foxes, and maybe that accounts for his total lack of fear. But, be that as it may, I have to scan the horizon carefully every time I am out with him and Polly.
However, he is by no means entirely aggressive. With lady dogs he is all charm, swaggering round them, tail high, smirking through his whiskers. And if they will consent to play with him, he behaves with the utmost gallantry as they roll him over in happy rough-and-tumbles. They can knock him down and jump on him at will, but he submits cheerfully, a silly half-smile on his face.
The strange twisting of his body which I observed when I first saw him has remained with him. Whenever he is pleased to see anybody, he sidles up to them almost crabwise, his tail almost touching his nose. I have never seen this characteristic in any other dog.
Since Dan was his immediate predecessor, the difference in obedience was acutely evident. The big Labrador, like most of his breed, was born with the desire to obey. He watched me anxiously all the time, longing to do my bidding, and even little things like getting out of the car or moving from one room to another had to wait for my gesture. Not so with Bodie. After prolonged effort, I have managed to get him to respond to such simple commands as ‘stay’ or ‘here’ and even then he does so in his own good time, but if he is really engrossed in something which interests him, he pays very little attention to me. After hearing me bawl at him about ten times he may look up at me with an expression of mild enquiry and I find this disconcerting because people expect vets to have well-trained dogs. Recently, a little five-year-old boy, a near neighbour, informed me solemnly, ‘You’re always shouting “Bodie! Bodie! Bodie!” ’ so I fear it is part of the local pattern to hear my despairing cries echoing round our village.
And yet . . . and yet . . . the little fellow has a charisma all of his own, a scruffy appeal which seems to get under the skin of all Border owners. There aren’t all that many of the breed around and I find myself staring with the keenest interest whenever I see one in the street. I know I am not alone in this, because other owners seem to be similarly fascinated with Bodie. There is certainly a bond between us all.
Last summer I was walking Bodie outside a motel half way between here and Glasgow when a man pushed his head out of his car window as he drew out of the park.
‘That’s a nice little Border!’ he cried.
I swelled with unimaginable pride. ‘Yes, have you got one?’ I called back.
‘We have indeed!’ He waved and was gone, but the feeling of comradeship remained.
There was another warming encounter during our spring holiday this year. I had just parked my car in the vehicle deck of the ferry which plies between Oban and the Isle of Barra in the Outer Hebrides when I noticed a silver-haired American gentleman gazing at Bodie who was stretched out in his favourite position on the back shelf.
He was another devotee and told me about his own Border. It seems they are even scarcer on the other side of the Atlantic and he said he knew of only three kennels of the breed in that vast country. Before he left he took another long look into my car.
‘Magnificent little dogs,’ he murmured reverently.
He was voicing my own feelings, but when I think of Bodie I am not concerned with the merits of his breed. The thing which warms and fills me with gratitude is that he has completely taken the place of the loved animals which have gone before him. It is a reaffirmation of the truth which must console all dog owners; that those short lives do not mean unending emptiness; that the void can be filled while the good memories remain.
That is how it is with our family and Bodie. He is just as dear to us as all the others.
It is here that I will finish my introduction. I started with the intention of explaining how a cow doctor came to bring out a book of dog stories, but it reads rather like the many letters which come to me from my readers all over the world. They tell me about their dogs, about their funny ways, the things they do which bring joy into their homes. They tell me, too, about their troubles and sorrows, in fact about the whole range of experiences which go into the keeping of a dog.
Perhaps this is a good way of replying to them all. Because these are the things which happened to me.
1. Tricki Woo
As autumn wore into winter and the high tops were streaked with the first snows, the discomforts of practice in the Dales began to make themselves felt.
Driving for hours with frozen feet, climbing to the high barns in biting winds which seared and flattened the wiry hill grass; the interminable stripping off in draughty buildings and the washing of hands and chest in buckets of cold water, using scrubbing soap and often a piece of sacking for a towel.
I really found out the meaning of chapped hands. When there was a rush of work, my hands were never quite dry, and the little red fissures crept up almost to my elbows.
This was when some small animal work came as a blessed relief. To step out of the rough, hard routine for a while; to walk into a warm drawing-room instead of a cow house and tackle something less, formidable than a horse or a bull. And among all those comfortable drawing-rooms there was none so beguiling as Mrs Pumphrey’s.
Mrs Pumphrey was an elderly widow. Her late husband, a beer baron whose breweries and pubs were scattered widely over the broad bosom of Yorkshire, had left her a vast fortune and a beautiful house on the outskirts of Darrowby. Here she lived with a large staff of servants, a gardener, a chauffeur, and Tricki Woo. Tricki Woo was a Pekingese and the apple of his mistress’s eye.
Standing now in the magnificent doorway, I furtively rubbed the toes of my shoes on the backs of my trousers and blew on my cold hands. I could almost see the deep armchair drawn close to the leaping flames, the tray of cocktail biscuits, the bottle of excellent sherry. Because of the sherry, I was always careful to time my visits for half an hour before lunch.
A maid answered my ring, beaming on me as an honoured guest, and led me to the room, crammed with expensive furniture and littered with glossy magazines and the latest novels. Mrs Pumphrey, in the high-backed chair by the fire, put down her book with a cry of delight. ‘Trick!
Tricki! Here is your uncle Herriot.’ I had been made an uncle very early and, sensing the advantages of the relationship, had made no objection.
Tricki, as always, bounded from his cushion, leaped on to the back of a sofa and put his paws on my shoulders. He then licked my face thoroughly before retiring, exhausted. He was soon exhausted because he was given roughly twice the amount of food needed for a dog of his size. And it was the wrong kind of food.
‘Oh, Mr Herriot,’ Mrs Pumphrey said, looking at her pet anxiously, ‘I’m so glad you’ve come. Tricki has gone flop-bott again.’
This ailment, not to be found in any text book, was her way of describing the symptoms of Tricki’s impacted anal glands. When the glands filled up, he showed discomfort by sitting down suddenly in mid-walk and his mistress would rush to the phone in great agitation.
‘Mr Herriot! Please come, he’s going flop-bott again!’
I hoisted the little dog on to a table and, by pressure on the anus with a pad of cotton wool, I evacuated the glands.
It baffled me that the Peke was always so pleased to see me. Any dog who could still like a man who grabbed him and squeezed his bottom hard every time they met had to have an incredibly forgiving nature. But Tricki never showed any resentment; in fact he was an outstandingly equable little animal, bursting with intelligence, and I was genuinely attached to him. It was a pleasure to be his personal physician.
The squeezing over, I lifted my patient from the table, noticing the increased weight, the padding of extra flesh over the ribs. ‘You know, Mrs Pumphrey, you’re overfeeding him again. Didn’t I tell you to cut out all those pieces of cake and give him more protein?’
‘Oh yes, Mr Herriot,’ Mrs Pumphrey wailed. ‘But what can I do? He’s so tired of chicken.’
I shrugged; it was hopeless. I allowed the maid to lead me to the palatial bathroom where I always performed a ritual handwashing after the operation. It was a huge room with a fully stocked dressing table, massive green ware and rows of glass shelves laden with toilet preparations. My private guest towel was laid out next to the slab of expensive soap.
James Herriot's Dog Stories Page 3