by Peter Martin
She must have been disappointed not to find Cindy at home, but I told her we would meet her mistress at school in the afternoon. In the meantime, she ran everywhere, over house and garden and neighborhood, taking it all in. I wanted to take her to the ocean, but I thought we should wait for Cindy.
At three in the afternoon we drove to the school. I stayed in the car and watched while Perth sat waiting on the sidewalk outside the front entrance of the school, staring at the door for any sign of Cindy. Pupils streamed out, then teachers, but no sign of her. At last she appeared. In a moment Perth was in front of her, front paws on her skirt, her brown eyes riveted on her face. Cindy fell to the ground shouting, “Perth, Perth, Perth,” taking her in her arms rolling onto her back as Perth climbed all over her. There they were, the two of them, wrapped up in each other’s joy. Our family had been given a new lease of life. We piled into the car and sailed off home for tea. In a couple of hours we were by the ocean, walking on the beach with Perth racing along as in days past, sheer ecstasy in her lungs and the setting golden sun lighting up her body as she streaked along.
10
BY STUDYING THE TOPOGRAPHY of Vermont and talking to people there, I have been able to piece together what happened to Perth after that fateful day when she ran away from the farm boy with the leather gloves. She got off to a bad start from the first minute after we left her at the camp.
“Perth didn’t like it here,” Mrs. Roy told me coldly when I saw her at the camp a year later, wagging her finger at me reprovingly like a school headmistress. “You never should have left her here, knowing that she was so fiercely devoted to you. Your car was hardly out of sight when she snapped at a counselor who went toward her. Actually, I was surprised she didn’t run away, and we did give her a few days to try to settle in, but the girls got frightened of her. I was too busy running this camp to worry about her, too.” Forgetting she wrote in her letter that Perth had not bitten any of the girls, she added, “When she did bite a camper, she had to go. I’m sorry, Dr. Martin, but your dog is not everyone’s cup of tea, you know. You should never let her run loose. You’ll get sued one of these days.”
I felt like a naughty schoolboy after talking to her, as if I had been caught smuggling cookies from the cafeteria. But what we then knew was that my mistreating Perth did not work. She did not love me less because of it. She was even more unhappy being left behind and more determined not to spend the summer there. Thinking back, I could see that in her way she sensed why I treated her that way. She felt it as love. She was not fooled. But she was not sure how to follow us. After all, we had blindfolded her. So, she waited for us to be summoned back for her.
But then she was sentenced to the farm, which was even worse. Tied up all the time in a gloomy barn, seeing nobody except the sullen boy, was torture. She waited, but when she could not take any more she sprang loose, like a coiled spring, determined to track us down, not wait for us to come back for her. She sprinted frantically down the half-mile dirt track out of the farm that led to the forest and the foothills of the Green Mountains. All of Vermont was before her, but she had no idea which way to go. For a week or two she ran, never lost because there was no place she knew, no place called home. The important thing was to keep moving, night and day, not get caught.
She headed north. There were two ways to go. Either she stayed in the low country, along the noisy roads with their traffic, or dived into the forest, climbing up into the mountains where there would be less risk of danger. Knowing Perth, I have no doubt she made for the mountains, where she would have been lucky to find the Long Trail that winds its way north, constantly climbing up and down, skirting the Brandon Gap, pushing on by Gillespie Peak at 3,400 feet, and possibly taking refuge for brief periods at places like the Middlebury College Snow Bowl ski center. Then on north across the Middlebury River, down into the steep and deep Lincoln Gap, and up again the slopes of high peaks like Mt. Abraham. At night, when the glory of the mountains had turned to gloom, sleep would have come easily to her, if she was not too hungry.
The Long Trail twists all the way up to the Canadian border, but for some reason Perth stopped in Mt. Mansfield State Forest, at a scruffy camp called Campersville poised beautifully on Lake Mansfield among thousands of white birch trees. She had covered seventy miles as the crow flies, but through that terrain and with all her detours to find food it must have been more like two hundred. She stopped only forty miles short of the Canadian border. Some inner radar had told her not to go any farther. Perhaps the nights were getting too cool or she was just too hungry and tired. Or the reason might have been more primitive and instinctual, an unexplainable urge to pause, to wait.
Campersville is a backwater, a cheap place to pitch a tent or hook up an RV for a weekend. The nearest town, where the owner of the camp lives, is six miles away. There was one simple house in the camp, lived in by Emile Desmond, the manager, a semi-literate French Canadian. His job was to collect the trash, take the money, cut the grass and plow the snow from the road in the winter. He and his wife lived there with their ten-year-old son, Robert. They were very poor. It was there with these people, next to this lake, that Perth decided to cast her bread upon the waters.
She was fortunate. Emile Desmond was a simple man with an uncomplicated heart. He had little to occupy him except his job and he took to Perth right away. She had the run of the house, camp, lake and acres of forest, as well as an endless amount to eat, especially off the grills of unsuspecting campers. He also had a natural way with dogs and knew enough not to force her to do anything she disliked. He neither smothered her with affection nor neglected her. There was no fussing over her, which suited Perth perfectly. He was amazed at how many tricks she could perform and concluded that she was a supremely intelligent dog. When he drove off in his pickup truck to perform his daily duties around the camp, she quickly got in the habit of hopping in to go with him. As the autumn with its gorgeous riot of color came and passed and winter drew on, they became faithful friends. They were seen everywhere together.
Mr. Desmond’s son, Robert, also fell in love with Perth. It was a lonely life at home for the boy with nobody his age to play with, so Perth was his early Christmas present. They slept together at night, explored the lake by day and hiked for miles up into the hills. In the early November snows, Robert hooked up a ragged donkey to a ramshackle sleigh and glided through woodland trails with Perth on the wooden seat next to him staring wide-eyed in all directions.
The family quickly discovered Perth’s idiosyncrasies—her vigorous shaking when she dreamed in her sleep, her partiality for the inside of Robert’s bed at night, her repertoire of tricks, her adeptness at helping herself to steaks on grills, her love of garbage and her howling when excited, not so much a bark as a long, continuous baying, full of alarm, a siren of emergency. When she did that, her hair rose up along her spine and her muscles tightened like the string on a bow about to be released. The one thing that puzzled them was the strange mark in her ear. At first Mr. Desmond thought it was a scar from a wound received in some fight or other; then he made out the letters. But he read them wrongly, as “PEG,” so he al-ways called her that.
The most remarkable thing is that Perth never once snapped at any member of that family. She seemed to understand that this now was her home, her safety. Robert had no fear of her. Still, this had not stopped her from snapping at the campers from time to time. She never bit anyone, but after a month or so complaints began to come in that she trotted through the campsite at will and, if approached by campers, returned the compliment with a little baring of her teeth and some mild snapping that sent the message, “keep away.” There was no trouble while the campers complained only to Mr. Desmond. He simply warned new campers not to try to touch Perth, and otherwise he ignored the complaints. But sooner or later a camper mentioned this troublesome dog to the red-faced owner, who had little liking for dogs of any kind and warned Mr. Desmond to control her. When the complaints kept coming in, the owner threat
ened angrily to have Perth taken by the police and killed. He came extremely close to doing that. Emile Desmond had little choice but to stop Perth running freely, except on the other side of the lake from the camp and in the high country. Often he just stuck her in his truck, where she was content. The owner grumbled and dropped the matter.
And so the weeks passed and Thanksgiving approached. All we can do is wonder whether Perth ever gave a thought to Cindy and me, whether she had given up hope of ever seeing us again. Did she dream of us? Northern Vermont, a wilderness around her, warmth and enough food, and love—were they enough to erase the memory of her first six years with us? Or was she waiting, still hoping, for the sound of our voices, our sharp yell in the air, “Here, Perth!,” with the cutting accent on “here”? How many times had she imagined she heard that? When she went into town with Mr. Desmond, did her eyes dart around longingly and expectantly, trying to spot us? Would a female voice resembling Cindy’s suddenly light her up? Would a tall figure like mine make her look up hopefully at a stranger’s head to see if it could be me?
One mid-November day in town, an older friend of Mr. Desmond’s shuffled up to him, pipe in mouth.
“Hey, bud, about that dog o’ yours,” he must have said, looking around for Perth, who was back at the camp. “You seen the poster in the supermarket? It’s about a lost dog. It’s been up there for a while now. The picture of the dog is a dead ringer for that beagle stray you got. Have you looked in the dog’s left ear? There’s supposed to be a tattoo of PEM there. Kinda weird. Anyway, the owners are giving away a hundred-dollar reward for her. You think maybe you got their dog? You oughta check out that ear. Christmas is coming. A hundred bucks ain’t no joke.”
“Nah, it couldn’t be. We had the dog a long time. Where is the poster, anyway?” They walked into the IGA supermarket to take a look.
“Well, will ya look at that,” Mr. Desmond whispered when he saw Perth’s picture on the poster. “It sure is a spittin’ image of her. But all beagles look like that, don’t they?”
“You’d be rich.”
“My dog has a tattoo, but it says PEG, not PEM. I don’t wanna get rid of the dog, anyway. My boy’d be sad.”
“All the same, better look in her ear again. A hundred bucks is a hundred bucks. You can’t turn yer nose up at that. Christmas is coming soon.”
When he got home, Mr. Desmond made straight for Perth and looked in her ear. The tattoo was faded but sure enough, it said PEM. His spirits sank. There were no two ways about it. Peg was actually called Pem and she belonged to someone else, someone who painfully missed her and was willing to give $100 for her return. But he was not going to part with her. He loved her, and so did his son. This dog was his now. If he had not saved her, she would be dead. Anyway, she was happy with them. He would say nothing to anyone but his wife.
But in the next few days he got to thinking about Christmas and how that $100 would come in useful for presents. The boy wanted so many things. His wife was also on to him to get rid of the dog and get the money. Then his conscience began to worry him. Peg was not his dog by rights. Her owners must be miserable without her. If a dear dog of his own were lost, he would be furious if the people who found her refused to return her to him even when they knew who he was and how to reach him. He was torn apart, not knowing what to do. If only Perth could tell him what she wanted.
He saw her lying in a patch of sunlight on the porch. It was one of those sumptuous Indian summer Vermont November days. She was warm and happy. Her eyes were half-closed in enjoyment. He sat by her on the porch floor and stroked her sun-warmed coat. She opened her eyes, raising her head slightly and looking at him.
“Peg, old hound, I wish you could understand me and tell me what you think. I know who yer owners are and they want you back with ‘em, but they don’t know you’re here. You wanna stay here, old girl, or you wanna go back? What d’ye think, eh?” He spoke softly. It was like talking to himself. Perth put her head back down on the floor. But she did not close her eyes. There was something in the tone of his voice perhaps that stirred her.
Mr. Desmond agonized about what to do and finally, after talking about it to his son, decided to give Perth up. He told his son it was the right thing to do. She was not really their dog. Also, they would have lots more money for Christmas. The boy cried and hugged Perth. That afternoon he and his father went into town to call the number of the SPCA in Rutland, which I had put on the poster. He spoke to Alice, the woman who had helped me so much to try to find Perth over the months. She was jubilant.
“Oh,” she shouted, “Mr. and Mrs. Martin will be dancing up and down the streets. They’ve been looking for Perth for months and months. What wonderful news. Thank you, Mr. Desmond, for calling.”
“Her name’s Peg, not Perth,” he said on the phone. “Or maybe Pem.”
“Peg? No, no, Mr. Desmond, it’s Perth. PEM are Mr. Martin’s initials. He tattooed them in her ear six years ago when he bought her.”
“Six years old! She don’t look like six, more like two. She’s a great dog. My son and I don’t want to give her away to nobody. But we sort o’ need the money.”
“Yes, of course, I understand. It must be very difficult for you. Now, tell me where you live and I’ll come over to see you in the morning.”
“No, I’ll come there.” He knew that if he gave her his address, there would be no turning back. He was still unsure he would give Perth up when it came down to it. He would see when he got there and spoke to the woman.
Early the next morning he drove the sixty miles down to Rutland with Perth on the seat next to him. Alice was waiting for him in her chaotic office. He left Perth in the truck and walked in.
“How do you do, Mr. Desmond? Thank you for coming all this way. This must be very difficult for you. Let me tell you, I’m so excited to see Perth. But where is she?” She was all smiles.
He was glum and careful. “She’s in the truck, but what I wanna know first is if the owners really do love her. I won’t give her up otherwise. Maybe they forgot about her by now.”
“Mr. Desmond, I’ve never known two people who love a dog as much as the Martins love Perth. You’ve got to believe me. They’ve never given up hope of finding her. They call me every week to see if there’s any news about her. Do you know, when they first lost her they came from England especially to look for her? Mr. Martin spent three weeks hunting for her, doing nothing else.”
“If they loved her that much, why they didn’t take her with ‘em?”
“It wasn’t practical for three months. They had to be in London.”
He seemed satisfied with the explanation. Reluctantly, he got up. “Well, I better get the dog, then.” In a minute he was back in the office, Perth standing beside him looking at Alice.
Alice stared at Perth as if she were seeing a legendary animal, scarcely able to believe she was real. So this was the little dog who had caused so much misery and trouble, who had run across the state of Vermont and survived for six months. This was the dog who had terrified a campful of girls in the Green Mountains and compelled a teenage farm boy to wear leather gloves, the dog who had been cruelly tied up in a barn. She was struck instantly by how beautiful this beagle was, how lean and fit.
“Hello, Perth,” she said softly. “I’m glad to finally meet you.”
Perth cocked her head slightly. She had not heard her name mentioned for six months. It was a sound from the past. She wagged her tail slowly. Alice approached her.
“Watch out,” said Mr. Desmond, “she might bite you.” Alice knew this about Perth, though, and was not about to take liberties with her.
“It’s okay, I’ll be careful.” Then she tried an experiment. “Where’s Peter, Perth, where’s Peter?”
At that, Perth burst into life. She wagged her tail vigorously, barking sharply and running around the office excitedly, sniffing everywhere for some sign of me. Here was a woman who knew both her master’s name and her own. Her master must be near. Where was
he?
“Oh, this is Perth, all right!” Alice shouted. “Peter’s coming, Peter’s coming, Perth,” she said. Alice crouched down and Perth walked right up to her, placing her legs on her arms and looking up eagerly at her face.
Watching this, Mr. Desmond knew he had to let the dog go. But he needed the money and would not give her up until he had it.
“Will you leave Perth here, Mr. Desmond? I’ll call the Martins and break the good news. They’ll send you the hundred dollars right away, I’m sure.”
“Oh, no, my boy’s gotta see her again. She’ll come back with me. You tell the owner to come pick her up at my place.”
“They live in Florida, so that might be difficult. You can trust them, Mr. Desmond. They’re honest folks. If they say they’ll give you the money, they will.”
“No, I’ve gotta take her back. I’ll tell you how to get to my camp and you can bring ‘em.”
“Okay, thanks. We’ll work something out. It was very nice of you to come.”
He gave her the directions. Alice hugged Perth before they walked out. “Don’t worry, Perth,” she said. “Peter’s coming.”
Alice had Cindy’s parents’ number in Boston and wasted no time calling them. We were in the Bahamas and could not be reached, they said, but without hesitation they said they would travel the two hundred miles up to Vermont on the weekend to pick Perth up and pay the reward. They would drive to Alice’s SPCA and then go on from there.
That week the Indian summer ended. A violent blizzard hit New England, covering most of the region with a foot of powdery snow, which was great for the big ski industry in that part of the world but awful for anyone trying to find a tiny camp in a backwater of Vermont reachable only by dirt roads. Few of these roads were marked on the map and scarcely any of them would be plowed that weekend. The Peters, nervous but thrilled to be playing a major part in the great drama of the Return of Perth, arrived at Alice’s early Saturday morning. They set off immediately to give themselves plenty of time, Alice in her truck, Cindy’s parents in their car. Once they arrived in the area of the mountain ski resorts and approached Mt. Mansfield State Forest, they hit a maze of snowy roads and got lost several times. It was treacherous driving. Miraculously, they found the camp before the sun had set.