Old Man's Boy Grows Up

by Robert Ruark

  That notion came into my head the other day when little Satchmo, just turned three (which is twenty-one the way humans count time), got all excited because it was the heat season around here, and Satch hasn’t met any girl dogs, formally or informally. Satchmo is a boxer who looks just like his namesake, one Louis Armstrong, who plays a trumpet and sings in graveled tones.

  This juvenile delinquent Satch got all excited about a bitch across the street being in season, and he took it out on his toothless father in a completely senseless but very fierce attack. I suddenly found myself in the midst of the fray, beating a three-year-old boxer on the back of the neck with my bare fist. The beating didn’t have much effect on the boxer, although I came out of the incident with jammed knuckles, a swollen hand, and two very decent accidental bites.

  But what did have an effect on the sap-risen little man was a session in the back room with a very heavy Texas-type belt. It has been a long time since I really walloped a dog. I had forgotten that dogs and children can use a tanning once in a while, when they get too big for their britches, and my own rear end tingled as it remembered a few unpleasant afternoons I had experienced on the receiving end of the strap in the woodhouse. “Spare the rod and spoil the child” was a phrase I heard quite often around my house when I was a young’un, and I can assure you I was not spoiled.

  Satch isn’t spoiled as of today, either, and I can practically promise you that he isn’t going ta be chewing on his toothless papa any more. But the strange thing is that one sound licking has made a new man out of what had been a shamefully pampered puppy. Satch has fresh dignity. He also responds to commands. He also doesn’t get on the wrong sofas or jump up on the guests. And he seems to look at the boss with a new, if rather puzzled, respect. I wonder if I wasn’t a couple of years late with the belt business.

  The two people who knew most about dog training—working dogs, I mean—that I ever met were the Old Man and a fine black gentleman named Ely Wilson. Wilson was better than the Old Man, if that’s possible, and I seem to remember now that he used to cut himself a whippy switch when a particularly headstrong puppy persisted in running up birds or failed to respect another dog’s point. Ely, a very kind man whose animals adored him, would take this limber switch, and in the words of the Carolinas simply “wear out” the youngster while saying, “Whoa!” with every lick.

  This was momentarily unpleasant to the puppy, but very shortly, when Ely hollered, “Whoa!” the dog associated the word with a limber stick and whoaed. His dogs still retained the high spirits that made them superb in their business, which was quail finding, but they now worked as executives instead of free-lance hot-rodders with strange haircuts.

  The Old Man had a trick about retrieving that was also a little hard on the animal at the time, but generally turned out feather-perfect retrievers. It was more or less a gradual process, such as teaching the Boy to be careful with a gun first, before he taught the Boy the business of ballistics and lead-off angles, by merely making the Boy try to hit a running cousin with a stream of water from a hose. (The Boy, I might say, grew up to be a gunnery officer in the Navy, and had remarkable success in teaching lead-off angles to green gun crews with the old hose technique of pointing ahead of what you want to hit, so that the target and the water merge at a logical time and place.)

  “This puppy”—Sam or Pete or Tom or Joe—”is a mortal cinch to chew up the first quail he ever lays mouth to,” the Old Man said. “So first you catch him in the act. You have already taught him to fetch a stick or a ball, even if you have to wind him in on a length of rope. Now you got to convince him that this bird you shot is not a stick or a ball, but somethin’ you want delivered intact when you holler, ‘Fetch!’”

  “Yes sir,” I seem to remember saying. I had been taught to say, yes sir and please and thank you, and I knew that little boys should be seen and not heard at the table. I had been taught this painfully, as I had been taught to fight a plaguing little monster named Wendell, who wouldn’t let me out of the yard. I would run and cry when Wendell fell upon me. The Old Man took a stick to me. “It’s just a matter of who hurts you the worst,” he said, “me with this stick or that little boy you run from. Because every time you run from Wendell I’m goin’ to lay this lath on your backside, until you go back and fight him.”

  Wendell and I have been friends now for about thirty-eight years, give or take a month. The battle could have been called a draw. The Old Man broke the stick over his knee and gave both us battered kids a nickel to buy ice-cream cones.

  “Now,” the Old Man said, “in this business of training a puppy to bring you back the bird with its feathers nice and dry and the meat unchawed there ain’t no sense beating the dog for mouthing a bird. The dog is a young’un and the bird is still warm, maybe even still alive a little bit. If you beat the dog he’ll figger that you’re beating him for getting the bird for you. What do you do?”

  “I dunno, sir,” I said. One of the things you learned around the Old Man was that a confession of innocent ignorance was very often to be preferred to smart-aleck error or even to smart-aleck non-error. The Old Man was like a boy in a way: He didn’t want to be deprived of a chance to show off once in a while.

  “Well I’ll show you. Now, suppose you see if you can hit the next bird the dog points, and after you’ve shot hang onto old Frank with one hand and the puppy with the other, and let me be your bird dog.”

  Frank stood a covey, and I hit with the first and missed with the second. The first bird fell in a shower of feathers in an easy patch of ground peas. Frank was trained to hold a point until the fetch command came. I hollered, “Hold!” and made a dive for the puppy, managing to collar both dogs.

  The Old Man went over to where the drifting feathers had settled on the peanut stalks and bent over the dead bird. In a minute he said, “Now hang onto the old dog. Holler ‘Fetch!’ and let the little feller go!”

  Off bounded the puppy, looking for the bird, while the Old Man said steadily, “Dead, dead, dead.” And the puppy located the bird and pounced on it with a hard mouth, full of sharp puppy teeth. The puppy bit down on the dead bird and let out a horrified yelp. He dropped the bird, spat out some feathers, and stood looking at the bird with his ears cocked.

  “Now fetch dead,” the Old Man said. “Bring it here. Give it to me. That’s a good boy.” These were commands the puppy had learned in the back yard training sessions, over the tin pie plate of food. The puppy picked up the dead bird very gently now and brought it to the Old Man, as if he might be very happy to get rid of it.

  The Old Man handed me the bird and grinned. He had used one of the oldest dog-training tricks in the world, I guess. He had merely taken a broad rubber band, studded it with needle-pointed tacks, and slipped it around the dead quail’s body. When the puppy chomped down on the dead bird the bird more or less bit back. Puppy’s teeth are sharp, but half-inch tacks are sharper.

  “He might forget and mouth a bird again,” the Old Man said. “I doubt he will, but you keep this rubber band handy in your huntin’ coat, and if he does mouth a bird again give him another dose of the same treatment. About two doses is generally enough. Dogs ain’t generally as big fools as people.”

  The Old Man entertained some sort of premise that it was nice to try to reason with a dog or a boy, but if the dog or boy didn’t listen to reason then you had to find some way to impress him that wrong was wrong, good was good, and black was not white. He was all for the initial ounce of prevention, but he generally had a long ton of cure in reserve.

  I don’t know if he invented the choke collar or not. But we had a magnificent lemon-and-white English setter named Sandy that had a nasty habit of stealing other dogs’ points, breaking to shot, and occasionally running up coveys out of sheer jealous arrogance. The Old Man went to the local blacksmith shop and had a short consultation with the boss, and eventually, in a shower of sparks, emerged with a slip-noose collar that seemed to be constructed of sharp-nailed fingers.

&
nbsp; “Next time Frank points and Sandy starts to steal it I’m going to drape this thing around Mr. Sandy’s neck. When he bolts you’ll hear me holler, ‘Whoa!’ Don’t pay no attention. Just go ahead and shoot. I’ll be in command of the rest of the situation.”

  It was sort of difficult to work this mousetrap operation with coveys, because Sandy was a winder and a far-ranging, high-headed genius with a radar nose. Frank was the single-bird expert, and a lot of his careful, close work was wasted by the arrogant Sandy’s rushing around fool-headed in close cover. Sandy could generally manage to run up more birds out of shooting range than Frank could nail with his Swiss-watch accuracy in finding singles, after the flushed covey scattered in the broom or on the edge of the branch.

  It came about one day that Frank pinned a single in a patch of scrub pine, and Sandy came up behind and—as easily, as gently, as craftily as a cat burglar—began to encroach on the point. He was so intent on theft that he paid no attention when the Old Man more or less lassoed him with this strange, cruel-looking collar. All of a sudden he made his pounce, flashed by Frank, and flushed Frank’s private bird. I shot and killed the bird just after I heard the Old Man yell, “Whoa!”

  Then I turned and saw the Old Man hanging onto a lead, with a half-choked lemon-and-white English setter, his eyes bugged out, on its other end.

  “I believe that if there’s crime there ought to be punishment,” the Old Man said. “Sandy is a criminal. I have just taught him a lesson they used to teach highwaymen in England. If you steal you hang. Hanging is not pleasant, is it Sandy?” He slacked the line and took the choke collar off the dog’s neck. He patted Sandy on the head. “The next time I holler Whoa!’ you’ll whoa, all right. And,” he said to me, “the next batch of singles we hit we’ll slap this collar back on Mr. Sandy again, and see if we can’t restrain his high spirits by exerting just a gentle pressure on his neck with my tailor-made gallows rope. Just sort of play him out a little bit, like you’d play a fish.”

  I came up through several dynasties of dogs: pointers, setters, spaniels, just plain fice dogs with back-curled tails, and even one hybrid that seemed to be at least one part muskrat, judging from his appearance. They all worked well. They answered the whistle and brought the dead birds—even doves, which they hated because of the free-falling feathers—and they back-stood each other and slowed down on singles and watched where the ducks fell and responded to a waved hand when they were hunting very far out.

  Only one I remember as a natural. The rest learned it through the tough back-yard discipline: first the commands with food and the tossed ball; next the switch; and finally through such refinements as choke collars and tack-studded rubber bands. Mainly they were dogs to be proud of, and they seemed to be proud of themselves once they worked the orneriness out of their systems.

  “You can’t give a dog a nose,” the Old Man said. “Only God can teach him to smell. But by the Lord Harry, you can teach him decent manners, and you can teach him to use what nose he’s got to the best advantage of all of us.

  “You might remember,” the Old Man continued, “when you grow up and have some young’uns of your own, that the word whoa is a valuable word for a child as well as a puppy, since children ain’t nothin’ but puppies anyhow. And that a lecture accompanied by a sharp rap on the rear has more weight than a lecture without the sharp rap on the rear. I will ask you a question to prove it. What should little boys be at the table?”

  “Seen and not heard,” I replied. Man, I’d been through that one before, and I didn’t need a choke collar.

  A few years ago the first view halloo over the pooch the Russians sent winging into outer space in the sputnik aroused a strange reaction around the world. Possibly the Arabs were not concerned, since to the average Arab a dog is a miserable miskeen of a creature fit only for kicks and slow starvation.

  But the rest of the world, even the Russians themselves, suddenly got all upset over this poor Fido whirling around the globe in an ersatz satellite, eating when his Pavlov-developed reflexes answered a bell, and finally dying in his unearthly kennel. Now indeed, in human indignation, was science fiction married to fact. Somebody was mistreating a dog. The outcry was loudest in Britain, but most of the world’s journals abandoned scientific speculation for front-page evaluation of the pup’s chances of homing back to this globe.

  It was touching and shocking, in that it took a small bitch to bring the world face to face with reality, and all of a sudden the Old Man’s figure towered tremendously in my mind over Khrushchev, Einstein, and all the scientists and technicians everywhere, who dealt in armament larger than a twelve-bore shotgun.

  The Old Man would have been real mad about this mutt being perverted into a dog in the moon. He had very strong ideas about dogs, and none of them included putting a pooch in a pressure-proof kennel and shooting him out of a rocket into the stratosphere to die in loneliness with no fleas to scratch and no human hand upon his head.

  “Dogs,” the Old Man used to say, “are a cut better than people, and should be treated according to their station and their worth. Even a trash dog has got a certain nobility about him, and should be allowed to pursue happiness in his fashion.”

  A trash dog, by the Old Man’s definition, was any dog who had no real function by which he earned his food. A Dane, a Peke, a poodle, a pug, each was trash in the Old Man’s reckoning. A yaller cur that would run rabbits, a back-curl-tailed fice that would tree squirrels, any bastard brindle of bulldog-cum-hound that would run a deer, even a hearty cocker spaniel that would work in the woods were borderline between trash and quality.

  The quality started with purebred Walker hounds, big springers, Chesapeakes, and beagles, hovered momentarily over setters of all breeds except Irish (“You got to relearn the dod-limbed dogs every year, and they’re as flighty as a red-headed woman”), and wound up with pointers. The Old Man mightily fancied pointers, and was willing to argue that while the Carolina briers would leave a pointer’s tail bloody he was better fitted for hot bush work than a heavy-haired setter. He made only one exception: our big rangy Llewellin setter named Frank, a blue-ticked genius that knew integral calculus where quail were concerned, and was haired almost as thinly as a pointer.

  I reckon the old gentleman owned as austere a set of ideas about dogs as anybody I ever met. I do not say he was harsh, but he was powerful stern.

  For instance, he refused to pamper a working dog—a hound or a bird dog—by turning it into a house pet. He would compromise with a retriever, though—a spaniel or a Labrador—because the retriever’s work was actually fun and couldn’t be spoiled by steam heat or female coddling.

  “A hound dog or a bird dog belongs to live outside the house,” he said. “Bring him into the house except for an occasional visit, like Christmas, and yon lose a good workman and get yourself a dod-limbed lap dog that won’t hunt unless he feels like it, because he thinks he’s as good as you. A good hunting dog is kind of religious. You ought to mortify his flesh a little bit to keep him in line. You keep him penned so he won’t waste his energy ambling around aimless, and when you turn him loose he knows he’s in business. Also, you keep him a little bit thin when he ain’t working, so he won’t be wheezing when the season opens. Then you feed him strong, because he’ll ran off what extra vittles you shove into him.”

  I don’t know what the fashionable fare for hunting dogs is today, but we never had any cases of malnutrition on a more or less steady diet of table scraps, cold hominy, green vegetables, and corn bread. Old Galena and later Big Lil used to make enormous pans of corn bread for the animals, and to the best of my memory it tasted just as good as what we had on the table.

  They were fed once a day, at 5 P.M., and they were fed together but in separate plates. Mostly our dogs were males, but there was no fighting. The Old Man discouraged fighting from puppyhood, by rebuking the combatants personally with a stick and then removing their meal.

  “A greedy gut,” he used to say, “has got more sense
than a brain.”

  We gave them the cheapest butcher’s meat once or twice a week, and once a week a can of salmon, which at the time cost about fourteen cents. For a treat there was an occasional tin of prepared dog food, and oddly enough (for this was well over thirty years ago) the Old Man dosed most meals heavily with fish oil. This was easy to come by and cheap, too, because we lived in a community that produced a great deal of fish-scrap fertilizer from the enormous shoals of pogies, or menhaden, that provided the village with a major industry.

  It seems heretical now, but we also fed them whole fish and chicken bones. The Old Man’s justification was simple.

  “What is a dog?” he would ask himself rhetorically. “A dog is a descendant of a wolf. A fox is his cousin. What does a wolf eat? What does a fox eat? What he can catch: rabbits, birds, small game. In Alaska the huskies eat a steady diet of nothing but fish. All of this stuff has got bones. A dog’s got enough quicklime in his digestive apparatus to melt an iron bar. If he gets something stuck in his throat he just throws up. You let any one of these modern pampered critters loose, and he’ll eat or try to eat anything he comes across in the woods. He’ll eat it, dead and rotten—fur, feathers, bones, and all. I never knew of a dog dying of indigestion, and up to now I never heard of one choking to death on a chicken bone.”

  It is very possible that I learned my first lessons in general sanitation, apart from discipline, from the Old Man and the dogs. After I graduated from being Mammy Laura’s “do’ boy,” which meant that I was vice-president in charge of holding the kitchen door open for my ancient mammy, a former slave, I achieved the adult position at the age of about six of being the dog boy.

  The dog boy’s job was to see that the animals got fed promptly and to train the puppies not to attack their food until the command, “Hie on!” was given. Undue exercise of appetite was prevented by holding the puppies firmly by the rails and saying, “Whoa!” when they bolted for the food. In a week’s time they ate on command.