Old Man's Boy Grows Up

by Robert Ruark

  “Yes sir,” I said. “I been thinking the same thing for a long time. What I always say is—all right, you got me. Why is the trouble with dogs people?” I gave up without firing a shot.

  “The horse,” the Old Man said, “ennobled man, and when you debase a horse you debase mankind. The same thing applies to dogs. In a way the trouble with people is dogs.”

  And in a way he was right.

  Every time I see a bug-eyed, narrow-headed cocker spaniel today, all ears and hysteria, every time I see an Irish setter, nothing but red coat and stupidity, every time I see a collie, bred out of working into a mere mattress for ticks and other debris, I recall the dogs of my tenderest youth. And I think how the people have degenerated too.

  Every time somebody’s “tame” German shepherd snaps a chunk out of me from sheer nervous reflex, every time a dachshund disputes my right to sit down on the sofa, every time I meet a dumb French poodle I think about dogs in the days when I was not so old and you could kind of count on a dog by his brand name.

  I know I must sound like the Old Man in one of those things-ain’t-like-they-useter-be moods, but I swear to John I’m right. Cocker spaniels today, for instance, ain’t much better than bugs for any practical purpose. They yip and they yap and step on their own ears and they got these big stupid eyes and pinheads, and if a rabbit snarled at them they’d have a fit of high hysterics.

  The cocker has been ruined by mankind in exactly the same sense that the Irish setter has been turned into a kind of Liberace-type dog—all adornment. I am so old I can even remember when an Irish setter was used to find birds, and we didn’t care too much whether his tail was plumy or his fetlocks feathered. He would work for you, if you conquered his Irish arrogance with an occasional whack on the behind when he ran up a covey or failed to honor a point. Now he isn’t anything but the memory of Errol Flynn in a red jacket.

  We had a cocker named Mickey, who was the best all-round working dog I ever saw in my life. She was sort of sand-colored and wasn’t overlong in the ear department, but she had a head as square as a cigar box and brains inside it. Her muzzle was as heavy as a boxer’s. She would run a rabbit or course a deer. She was death on ducks, and she had a radar nose for quail. She would sit quiet if you were shooting doves, and she treed a real fine squirrel, possum, or coon. If there ever was an all-purpose bitch, old Mick was it.

  Mickey died an honorable death under the careless feet of a speeding motorcar at about the same time cockers got to be popular, and when fanciers started breeding them to type. Twenty years later they had wrecked a sturdy working dog and turned it into a kind of beetle that couldn’t find its way off its mistress’s lap, like a pug or a Peke. Except that the Peke did keep its lousy disposition; all that was left of the cocker was whine. And yip. And yap.

  We had Irish setters before they got to be stylish, and though they needed a touch of re-education after a long hot summer they were fancy in the field. They were prone to moodiness, perhaps, and not so day-in-day-out steady as a Llewellin or an English cousin, but they also had occasional flashes of genius that allowed them to find all the birds on a particular afternoon. Like most redheads they figured to be a touch temperamental.

  I would invite correspondence, all adverse, on this statement:

  “I don’t believe there’s a good, dependable Irish setter or an all-purpose field cocker at work these days. The springers seem to have resisted the new look and can be depended on to fetch you a duck or a grouse. But cockers—I didn’t even see one working last year around the grouse moors of Scotland or the partridge shoots in Spain. And I haven’t seen a dashing mick on anything but a leash in twenty years.”

  The French poodle was a spaniel by original intent, and was one of the finer hunting dogs. They came into France by way of Germany, and their fancy hedge-clipping dates back to hunt masters who cut their coats in various designs for identification purposes, much as you’d brand a cow-brute. The lion-mane trim evolved as a thumbed nose by France to the British lion, when the kids were having hard words across the Channel.

  Offhand I would hazard that the French poodle of twenty-some years ago was the smartest of all dogs, in the field and out of it. But association with people—too many trips to the beauty parlor, too much time waiting for Mama to finish girl lunches, and too much inbreeding to cut down their size—is really making a stupid dog of the poodle. The little ones are nasty yipping beasts, nervous as the well-known lady fox in a forest fire, and the larger ones seem to have forgotten that they got their working papers in a peat bog rustling up blackcock.

  At least I can say one thing without stirring up an argument: For ten years I have owned a beautifully bred standard French poodle bitch, who is unqualifiedly the dumbest dog I ever saw in my life. And before you start in to write I offer this for free: It is undoubtedly from long association with her master.

  Hewing to the Old Man’s thoughts about dogs being spoiled by people, I know one kind-of collie whose life has been wrecked by being named Lassie. The fact that this Lassie is male and does not want to be called Lassie has inverted him to a point where he is a mass of jangled nerves. Don’t tell me dogs aren’t subject to psychic pressure. I once had a male pointer named Tom, whose voice never changed, and the girls hated him, and, so help me, he committed suicide.

  The only dogs I know who have successfully resisted people are the half-breeds, the nondescripts. The best deerhound I ever saw was half bulldog. The best quail dog, for finding, stanch pointing, and gentle but ardent retrieving was a dropper—half pointer and maybe half setter, with possibly a slight infusion of cur.

  The only people I ever knew who successfully resisted the blandishment of dogs were people I did not choose to know much better. There is, to me, something distastefully peculiar about people who are afraid of dogs, who dislike dogs. And the dogs know it right back.

  The dogs I miss most today—and seldom seem to see around—are the true Huckleberry Finns; the part Airedale, part fox terrier, part plain fice, with shoebrush coats and back-curled tails. The old-fashioned cur seems to have vanished from the land. For sheer street-gamin intelligence, good disposition, and proficiency in any kind of field work the mixed-salad pariah was the most. I got more hunting mileage out of a yellow semi-jackal named Jackie than all the purebreds I ever associated with.

  The Old Man was right. The trouble with people is dogs, and the trouble with dogs is people. But somehow, one breed can’t seem to get along without the other and still call it a life.

  Which brings us to Sam, an animal whose very uselessness has made him an all-purpose paragon of necessity around the house. Sam is the property of a godson of mine, and he has been named Samuanensis Horribilis by the father of the godson, and I resent it. He is not horrible at all. Sam is one part cocker and one part dachshund, and he inherits the decadent qualities of each. He has long hair like a cocker’s, is colored black and russet, and has a cocker’s ears, a dachshund’s snout, a cocker’s plumy tail, and a dachshund’s undercarriage.

  Sam is the best all-purpose, useless dog I’ve ever met. He is small enough not to knock the glasses off a coffee table with a swishing tail, but not so small so that you are always stepping on him. He is an inveterate hunter of lizards in the flower beds, but is not large enough to wreck the posies.

  Sam loves cats—he has three large playfellows named Simba (lion), Chui (leopard), and Somali, which is coal black. They are all as big as Sam or bigger. Sam hates strangers and loves friends. From time to time he will absorb a snifter of gin (which makes him sneeze), but steadfastly refuses whisky or beer.

  As mentioned, I don’t care much for either dachshunds or cockers today, but in the case of Sam the twain have met and produced something delightfully impractical, as in the case of H. Allen Smith’s dream of an all-purpose animal called a bouncing pussy-pup.

  Under the influence of a late night on beer (the United Press was not paying much in salaries in those days, certainly not enough to afford whisky for its ser
fs), Author Smith dreamed of a charming creature that was half cat and half dog. You bounced the cat once on the floor, and it became a puppy. You bounced the puppy, and it turned back into a kitten.

  Smith was inordinately proud of his dream. He made the mistake of confiding its basic ingredients to a colleague, Henry McLemore, also a slave of the U.P. salt mines, and Henry promptly claimed the dream as his own, and went around promulgating the idea of a bouncing pussy-pup as the solution to all pet problems. This caused an estrangement between Messrs. Smith and McLemore, since there is no way to copyright a dream. Result was that the two didn’t speak for a year or so, since both stanchly protested that the bouncing pussy-pup was his own personal dream property.

  I feel more or less that way about Sam, as if I’d invented him myself. I didn’t, but I would answer for trouble if someone attempted to take him away from me—in a purely vicarious sense, that is.

  Having been owned by many dogs, I have a memory that’s always pleasurable and nearly always on the semi-disreputable side. We had the usual number of pure-blooded setters and pointers when I was a kid, but whenever possible I hung out in the back alleys with the waifs and the strays and the odd amalgams.

  For downright street-urchin intelligence, such as is seen among Arab children and young Parisiens, there was never a peer of Jackie, a cross between a fox terrier, a jackal, a raccoon, and a skunk, judging from the smell of him. He was colored a dingy yellow. His tail curled so far over his back it almost touched his neck. His specialty was squirrels, but he would bravely bay a bear if called on and would run a deer if there wasn’t a hound handy. He would retrieve a duck, hating the coldness of the water all the time, and find, if not point, a covey of quail.

  He was entirely a professional dog. You could not get him inside the house, and apart from coldly and balefully accepting his tin plate of scraps he had no time for the human race. Jackie was completely without racial prejudice: He hated people, black or white, and bit them indiscriminately. He only associated with people in the field, and his allegiance was to the gun.

  Jackie was one. A boyhood friend of mine named E. G. Goodman had another mongrel, which defied description. It seemed to be part hound and part bull, with heaven knows what else cranked into his chromosomes. I can’t remember the name of this beast, but I can remember that one day, in Goodman’s precinct, we shot quail, dove, rabbit, coon, one possum, and buck deer over the noble efforts of this large assortment of nothing that owned a hound’s bugle, a bulldog’s tenacity, a retriever’s sense of where it dropped, and an over-all sense of what-the-hell-boys-hunting-is-fun. This character is long gone to his fathers, but he was a power of dog.

  Perhaps the greatest mongrel of them all was a dog that became named, late in life, Bonzo. This dog was basically bull terrier, with one red eye and one black eye. He had lived all his life on his own, until one day he pitched up on the veranda of the Norfolk Hotel in Nairobi, in Kenya, where a sign plainly declared that all dogs were forbidden.

  He was scarred and flea-bitten and hungry. His ribs wash-boarded, and he had more than a touch of mange. The manager of the hotel wasn’t feeling so well himself that day, and just as a big porter was about to kick the dog back into the streets the manager said a loud no, and carried the animal off to his cottage.

  Some days later Bonzo emerged looking considerably better. His mange was gone (burnt crankcase oil and sulphur), and he had filled out the wrinkles in his belly. And he took over the hotel. The service, which had been drooping, improved, because Bonzo bit the waiters if they were tardy in feeding him. Bonzo improved public relations, because he had an unerring instinct for sorting out the poor types, to a point where he sometimes stood on the register and refused to let a suspicious character sign in. He treed a couple of Mau Mau in the back compound.

  As Bonzo increased in power so did the manager. The manager found a better tailor and ran a better hotel, and soon became general manager of the entire chain.

  Bonzo had only one failing. He was dame-happy. He would take off occasionally and come home full of battle scars, as a result of love’s labors lost. His interest in the other sex finally got him gored to a point where, in his boss’s absence, the assistant manager had him destroyed. It is interesting to note that the assistant manager shortly thereafter took off with all the available funds, a weakness that Bonzo must have suspected.

  But Bonzo’s picture hangs today in the head receptionist’s office a few feet away from a sign that says “All Dogs Strictly Forbidden,” because there will never be another Bonzo in anybody’s time or heart.

  The theme of the boy and his dog has been badly overworked and I do not propose to thrash it to bits, but I have observed my young godson with Sam, and am prepared to propound the idea that a youngster is better off with a mongrel in his early formative years than with a haughty something with Ch. in front of his lofty handle.

  There is a curious communion between a runny-nosed tad and an animal out of the back drawer, a sort of Tom Sawyer-Huck Finn relationship, where the urchins share a small world of their own. My young man is learning to clean and maintain a weapon, to shoot a BB gun, and to absorb something about the fields and streams. Somehow Sam fits the apprentice pattern better as an intrepid lizard-courser and toad-nagger than if he were the best of show in any category at the Westminster Kennel Club show.

  Small boys are little beasts at best, and need careful nurturing to introduce them to adult responsibility. The mongrel—the “Please, can I keep him, Mommy?” pup—fills in a gap between babyhood and boyhood, because a puppy is a puppy, whether it’s human or canine.

  The Old Man used to have a saying about that. “There ain’t much difference,” the Old Man said. “They both need worming at regular intervals. They both need to be housebroke, with a smack on the behind to teach ‘em manners. A combination of castor oil and birch tea will work wonders with any boy and any dog, because there comes a time when everybody has to learn the difference between running loose and walking to heel.”

  I observe my boy Mark and his dog Sam with great pleasure. Through keen parental perception and discipline both are learning the difference between running loose and walking to heel. And I think in the process, as a result of association with Sam, young Mark will grow up one day soon to deserve the companionship of a purebred.

  14—Cooties in the Knight Clothes

  I was reading a divorce story the other day in which the aggrieved husband called his wife’s boyfriend a “sugar daddy,” while the wife’s counsel hailed the other man as a “knight-errant who rushed to Ellen’s protection after her husband deserted her.”

  I laughed right out loud. The last time I got mixed up with knights-errant was via the Old Man. He had a salty way of disposing of popular error, and since that particular day I have never felt quite the same about chivalry.

  It was the kind of day you’ve got to expect sometime in May—cold, rainy. The Old Man was resigned to sitting it out, but I wasn’t.

  “I want to do something,” I complained. “It’s too late to hunt and it’s too cold and rainy to fish and it’s too late for football and too wet for baseball.”

  “You could try studyin’,” the Old Man said. “The last look I had at one of your report cards tells me you could do with a small bait of application. You want to grow up ignorant?”

  “I don’t care if I do,” I said, stubborn as a billy goat. “There ain’t anything for a boy to do today. You can’t run off and join the Indians or take up with a circus or be a cowboy or a knight in armor or anything that’s fun—and gets you out of the house.”

  “I think maybe you need a good sound worming,” the Old Man said. “You got the nervous twitches, like a hound dog with a tape. But it’s odd you mention bein’ a knight in armor. All along that’s just what I thought you was practicing up to be.”

  “How could I be a knight in armor?” I said, kind of cautious. “There ain’t much call for that kind of work these days.”

  “Oh I don�
�t know,” the Old Man said. “You just kind of strike me as a natural-born knight. Or a highwayman. They were about one and the same thing. Maybe bum would be as good a name as any. What would be your idea of a knight-errant, for example?”

  I was trapped, and well I knew it. There was going to be a moral hid out in this one, like a rattlesnake, and I knew who would get bit, and it wasn’t going to be the Old Man. I’d been there before, but it seems I was never going to learn to keep my mouth shut.

  “Well, a knight-errant was a kind of hero that practiced chivalry. He wore armor and rode horses and lived in castles with portcullises and a donjon keep and drawbridges and things. He had a sword and a lance and he rode around the country righting wrongs and saving maidens and killing the savage infidel and slaying dragons and giants and all like that.”

  “Somewhere between a Boy Scout and William S. Hart, I wouldn’t wonder,” the Old Man murmured. “Chunk another faggot on that fire, varlet, and I will see can I straighten you out a little bit on knighthood. The ignorance of young people these days is something fierce.

  “First place, chivalry and chevalier don’t mean exactly what you said. They came out of the French word for horse—cheval. You could apply chivalry to a hostler in a livery stable just as easy as to a knight. Chivalry just got mixed up to where it meant anything that wasn’t walkin’.

  “Knight started out to mean boy or manservant, and got graduated to mean a mounted man who had a shootin’ license, so to speak. He could tote arms when most of the other people couldn’t, and it give him a superiority complex, even though it might take half a dozen stout yeomen to raise him and his armor onto a horse’s back. Once he fell off chances are he’d just lay there and kick and cuss until somebody set him on his feet again. That cast-iron suit he wore weighed more than the man.”