by Dave Crehore
Holding him, I discovered a little more: male, no collar, maybe
twenty-five pounds, with generous ears that stuck up from his head like a terrier’s and then flopped down like a hound’s.
I cradled him in my arms and carried him through the rain to the back door. My plan was to sneak him into the kitchen before Rip
and Nip caught on, but they were way ahead of me. As soon as I
eased the door open and came inside, there was a clatter of claws as the beagles skidded through the kitchen and surged down the back hall.
They were flabbergasted to find someone new in their house.
They walked around stiff-legged and their back hair rose in ridges, but there was no dogfight. Instead, the newcomer initiated a sniffing ceremony. He allowed himself to be investigated and then examined the beagles. Tails wagged all around, and it appeared that they were going to get along.
I shut the beagles in the dining room so I could be alone in the kitchen with the little dog. I sat down on the linoleum floor and he climbed into my lap. He was brown and black, with a coat as dense and curly as steel wool. I guessed he was a cross between a hound of some kind and a wire-haired fox terrier, and probably not more than a year old. After a couple of minutes he hopped off my lap and sat in front of our Coldspot refrigerator, looking expectantly over his shoulder at me, then at the fridge, then at me again. It had taken months for Rip and Nip to learn what refrigerators were for, but this skinny character had guessed right the first time.
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I poured a bowl of milk and gave him a slice of leftover roast beef.
He disposed of the beef in four bites and was noisily lapping the milk when Mom came down from upstairs, tying the sash of her
faded red chenille bathrobe.
“What in the world?” she said. He looked up at her, his whiskers dripping milk, and turned on his flop-eared charm.
“Aww,” Mom said. “Dave, come down here and see what we’ve
got.”
Dad came into the kitchen, putting on a wool shirt over his pa-
jamas. As he sat down at the kitchen table and picked up his pipe, I explained what had happened to the beef.
“Oh, poor little thing,” Mom said. “Look at him, he’s still
hungry. I’ll make him a real supper.” She took a pan of chicken broth from the Coldspot and warmed it on the stove. When it steamed,
she poured it over a bowl of Gro-Pup and the stranger tore into
the hot, wet kibbles, crunching and slobbering. The beagles whined from the dining room. They never got broth on their Gro-Pup.
“God, listen to him eat,” Dad said. “It’s like feeding time at the zoo. Don’t give him any more, Charlotte—he’ll founder.”
“He was in the garage when I got home,” I said. “I suppose some-
body dumped him off.”
“Probably,” Dad said. Because our house in the woods was just
outside the Manitowoc city limits, several times a year we had to find homes for dogs and cats that people abandoned to fend for
themselves along the road.
The newcomer finished licking out his bowl, put his paws on
Dad’s knee, and wiped the last of the broth from his chin onto Dad’s pajama leg.
“Well,” Dad said, “we’ll have to put a ‘Found’ ad in the paper for a couple of weeks and see if anybody calls. So don’t go getting all attached to him.”
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“Yeah, right,” Mom said, with a knowing smile. When it came to
stray dogs, he was a bigger softy than she was; if it were solely up to him, we’d have a dozen.
“Anyway,” she said, “if we do keep him, I’ve got an idea. We
could call him Tuck. Listen to how it rolls off the tongue—Rip, Nip, and Tuck!”
Dad made a sour face. “I suppose. You’re the clever one. But it
sounds like a cheap law firm to me.”
By this time it was past midnight. Dad opened the back door and
let the dogs outside. “We should shut the new one in the kitchen tonight, just in case,” he said. “He might not be housebroken.”
About three o’clock I woke up and listened for whining or
scratching from downstairs. The house was so quiet I began to wonder, so I went down for a look. Tuck was sleeping on his side under the kitchen table; he opened an eye and swished his tail back and forth on the linoleum.
“Good night, little guy,” I said. Tuck replied with another swish.
He had moved in.
It didn’t take Tuck long to learn the ropes around our place. He answered to his name in two days, fit himself into the hierarchy below Rip and Nip, and became a retriever on his first tryout.
Some years earlier I had taught Nip to chase a ball and bring it back, but he was a hound by trade and fetched things strictly on a piecework basis; each retrieve had to be rewarded with an inch of hot dog. Tuck, on the other hand, played ball simply because he enjoyed it, or maybe because I enjoyed it. While the beagles slept on the lawn, I would hit a tennis ball to him with a softball bat, and he would field the ball and run to me with it, over and over.
As the days passed we lived in dread of a call from someone who
would claim him. Fear clutched at our hearts every time the phone rang. Finally the two weeks were up and we canceled the ad in the 175
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Manitowoc Herald-Times. After supper the next day, Dad slapped his thigh and Tuck jumped up into his lap.
“Well, young man, I guess you’re ours now,” he said. Tuck
grinned, extended several inches of tongue, and licked Dad’s face.
We had been his from the start, of course.
Rip and Nip were purebred hunting dogs who expected a restful
eight-month layoff between seasons. They were hidebound conser-
vatives, set in their ways, and happy with their quiet, comfortable lives. Tuck was something altogether different, a radical with his own way of doing everything.
We discovered, for example, that unlike a lot of dogs Tuck lived in a world of three dimensions, up and down as well as back and
forth. My bedroom was upstairs, and if I called the beagles from one of my windows, they would slowly awake from their daylong nap
on the lawn and look around. If I called again they would sniff and whine and make short runs in search of me, north and south, east and west. They never thought of looking up.
But the first time I called Tuck from a bedroom window, he lifted his head, looked at me, and went to the back porch to be let in. As an experiment I blocked the back door open with a broom, went
back up to my bedroom, and tossed a tennis ball to Tuck from my
window.
He caught the ball on the first bounce, galloped to the back
door, and then ran through the kitchen and up the stairs. He dropped the ball on the landing and went back down to the yard, where he looked up and waited for me to throw the ball again. From then on he was a confirmed up-looker.
Another of Tuck’s peculiarities was his decision to ignore the
milkman. Our milkman’s name was Les, and he drove up in a big
white van about five thirty in the morning, three days a week. As soon as the beagles heard the van’s engine straining to climb our 176
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steep driveway, they would jump from the beds they had been sleeping on and begin a hue and cry, thundering down the stairs and
through the house to the front door.
We had a standing order for milk on Monday, Wednesday, and
Friday, supplemented with orange juice and half-and-half on Mon-
day and Friday. Les would open the door and put our bottles and
cartons inside while the dogs barked and wagged their tails.
“Hello, doggies,” he would say, and then call out, “Anything else today?” If Mom wanted whipping cream or butt
er she hollered her
order down the stairs. Sometimes Les left a pint of chocolate milk because he knew I liked it. He never charged us extra for chocolate milk.
On Tuck’s first Wednesday and Friday with us he ran to the front door with the beagles, just to see what was going on. But the following Monday he thought better of it. When the van pulled up the
driveway he jumped off my bed and put his paws on the windowsill to watch Les come and go. Then he hopped back on the bed and
went to sleep again. I could almost hear the wheels going around in his head:
The milkman does no harm.
No matter how much we bark, he always comes.
So why bother?
Tuck also upset the balance of power between the beagles and
the squirrels in our yard. We had a lot of big oak trees, and they provided acorns and habitat for a couple of dozen gray squirrels.
Over the years the beagles and squirrels had worked out a kind of entente; the dogs would disregard the squirrels if they kept their distance, and most of the time they tolerated each other.
But every now and then a careless or overconfident squirrel would wander too close, and there would be a brief and pointless chase. The beagles would join forces and run after the squirrel, falling steadily behind. The squirrel would climb the nearest oak, turn head-down, 177
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and chatter. Within a few minutes the beagles would be asleep again and the squirrel would continue hunting acorns.
Tuck watched a few of these squirrel chases without joining in.
He seemed to grasp that if the squirrels had a head start, dogs could not outrun them. So he introduced a new tactic: ambush.
Mom had planted a bed of day lilies in the lawn, and Tuck would
lie hidden in it, his nose between his forepaws, waiting for a squirrel to get within a couple of feet. When one did, he would burst from concealment and run after it in great leaps, snapping at its whipping tail. He never caught any of the squirrels he chased, but he got close and he seemed pleased with that.
By midsummer, however, he tired of the squirrels and shifted
his attention to our bantam chickens. We had eight hens and two
roosters, and they lived in a wooden coop surrounded by a high
fence in the backyard. On nice days we let them out to scratch in the yard and garden, and Tuck was fascinated with them.
Mom was washing the dishes one Saturday afternoon, occasion-
ally checking on the chickens through the big kitchen window over the sink. Suddenly she took a second look. “Dave, come here,” she said. “I think Tuck is after one of the chickens!”
Dad and I looked out the window. A hen had strayed close to the
steep wooded ravine on the east side of our yard. Half-wild cats sometimes lurked in the ravine, preying on young songbirds and
rabbits, and chickens too, if they had the chance. We suspected that cats had killed some of our hens in the past, but were never able to catch them in the act.
Tuck circled around the hen and got between it and the edge of
the ravine. Then he trotted toward the hen; it turned and ran back to the flock, where there was safety in numbers.
“He’s not trying to catch it, Charlotte, he’s herding it,” Dad said.
“I wouldn’t believe it if I hadn’t seen it with my own eyes.”
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A couple of nights later, when the dogs were let out at bedtime, Tuck took off into the backyard at a dead run. In the faint light from the porch we saw him chasing something away from the chicken
pen. We whistled up the beagles, but Tuck didn’t come back with
them. Dad and I sat up until midnight and finally Tuck appeared, strutting proudly but with some scratches on his muzzle and a
bloody ear.
“This dog is too smart to tangle with a raccoon, and if he was
after a skunk we’d know it,” Dad said. “I’ll bet he killed one of those stray cats, or gave it a hell of a scare, anyway.”
From then on, Tuck had a mission in life. The chickens became
his responsibility, and whenever we let them out of their pen, he guarded them and intervened if they wandered near the ravine or the big open field beyond the garden.
Then, one rainy night in early August, we let the dogs out and
Tuck didn’t come back. We waited up until midnight again, but this time there was no sign of him. The next morning, when Les put the milk inside the front door Mom called down to him.
“Pound of butter, Les,” she said.
“OK,” Les replied. “By the way, I brought your dog back.”
“What?” Dad said. “Wait a minute!” He pulled on his pants
and went downstairs. Les was standing just inside the front door, surrounded by the beagles. Tuck sat unconcernedly a couple of feet away.
“He was by the Wernicke farm the other side of 151, headed this
way down the road,” Les said. “I opened the door and he jumped
right in.”
“Well, I’ll be damned,” Dad said. “Thanks, Les.”
“No trouble at all,” Les said. “Here’s your butter.”
Tuck seemed happy to be back with us, but in mid-August he
wandered off again. Three nights and days went by with no sign of 179
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him. After supper every night Mom, Dad, and I drove the back
roads, looking for him. About eleven on the fourth night, Dad
dropped Mom and me off at home but left the engine running.
“I’m not sleepy,” he said. “I’m going to drive around a little
more.” Within an hour he was back, with Tuck riding in the front seat and looking out the window.
“You’ll never guess where he was,” Dad said. “He was at the
floozy house.”
The floozy house was the local name for a decaying farmstead
five miles west of town. A woman of easy virtue lived there and was available at all hours.
“I pulled in the driveway to turn around,” Dad said, “and in the headlights I could see Tuck sitting on her porch. I gave a whistle and he came running.”
“Did she have any company?” Mom asked.
“She sure did,” Dad said. He bent over and whispered to Mom.
“Dave, it couldn’t be! Did you see him?”
“No, but who else around here drives a big black . . . ?” He whispered to Mom again and laughed. “It’s always the psalm-singers who can’t keep their pants on.”
Tuck settled back in, but after a week he disappeared for the
fourth time. The county fair was in progress, and the next day a policeman called. When he picked up the phone Dad could hear
merry-go-round music in the background.
“Mr. Crehore, I’ve got your dog here at the fairgrounds,” the
policeman said. “I found him begging for bratwurst. If you come
over and pick him up now I won’t take him to the pound.”
We jumped in the Studie and went to Tuck’s rescue. He rode
home on Mom’s lap. “I wonder why he keeps running away,” she
said. “Is he looking for something, or what?”
“Beats me,” Dad said. “I guess he’s just a wanderer. Maybe it’s the 180
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hound in him. Or maybe he ran off all the local cats and is hunting for more.”
From then on we were careful to keep Tuck indoors at night, and
he went back to his daytime routine, chasing the tennis ball, guard-ing the bantams, and wrestling gently with the beagles. But one
night in September he slipped away and never came back.
We put a “Lost” ad in the newspaper and drove the highways
and back roads for a week. This time we kept hoping for the phone to ring, but no one called. Tuck seemed to be gone for good. We
mourned him for a month, imagining his wiry little body lying dead along the roadside. The beagles seemed to miss him too. A week or so before Thanksgiving Dad spoke up.
“We’ve got to quit moping around about Tuck,” he said. “That
dog is smart as a whip, and he’s a survivor. He found us, and I’ll bet you anything he’s found himself another home by now.”
That made us feel a little better, but I kept Tuck’s tennis ball on the dresser in my bedroom. When I looked at it and remembered
him smiling up at me, panting and waiting for me to throw it, I had trouble swallowing.
A year went by, then two. One day in the fall of 1961, Dad
stopped at the camera store downtown and picked up a box of
Kodachrome slides that had come back from the processing lab in
Chicago. After supper Dad set up the projector and the screen in the living room, and we looked at the new slides he had taken. Then he pulled an older tray of slides from the cabinet by the fireplace and put it on the projector.
“Let’s see what these are,” he said. The first slide in the tray was of Tuck jumping high to catch a ball. None of us said anything, and after a few seconds Dad shut off the projector. The living room was pitch dark.
“What’s the matter, Dave?” Mom asked.
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“Nothing,” he said. “But I guess this is as good a time as any to tell you—I know what happened to Tuck.”
Dad took his pipe from his shirt pocket, filled it, and lit it. We could see his face in the light of the match as he drew the flame down into the tobacco.
“It was just dumb luck,” he explained. “Last Sunday I was driv-
ing around south of Cato looking for places to hunt. I found a pretty good-looking rabbit swamp so I pulled in to the nearest farm to ask permission. And while I was talking to the farmer Tuck came out of the house with two little girls.”
“I asked and the farmer said he just showed up one night in the
fall of ’59—it would have been a week or two after he left us. He was pretty ragged and the tags had come off his collar, the farmer said, so they patched him up and kept him.”
“I almost claimed him then and there,” Dad said, “but when I
saw him playing ball with the little girls I just couldn’t do it.”
“Cato is ten miles away,” Mom said. “Are you sure it was Tuck?”