One morning when Muggs bit me slightly, more or less in passing, I reached down and grabbed his short stumpy tail and hoisted him into the air. It was a foolhardy thing to do and the last time I saw my mother, about six months ago, she said she didn’t know what possessed me. I don’t either, except that I was pretty mad. As long as I held the dog off the floor by his tail he couldn’t get at me, but he twisted and jerked so, snarling all the time, that I realized I couldn’t hold him that way very long. I carried him to the kitchen and flung him on to the floor and shut the door on him just as he crashed against it. But I forgot about the backstairs. Muggs went up the backstairs and down the frontstairs and had me cornered in the living-room. I managed to get up on to the mantel-piece above the fireplace, but it gave way and came down with a tremendous crash throwing a large marble clock, several vases, and myself heavily to the floor. Muggs was so alarmed by the racket that when I picked myself up he had disappeared. We couldn’t find him anywhere, although we whistled and shouted, until old Mrs Detweiler called after dinner that night. Muggs had bitten her once, in the leg, and she came into the living-room only after we assured her that Muggs had run away. She had just seated herself when, with a great growling and scratching of claws, Muggs emerged from under a davenport where he had been quietly hiding all the time, and bit her again. Mother examined the bite and put arnica on it and told Mrs Detweiler that it was only a bruise. ‘He just bumped you,’ she said. But Mrs Detweiler left the house in a nasty state of mind.
Lots of people reported our Airedale to the police but my father held a municipal office at the time and was on friendly terms with the police. Even so, the cops, had been out a couple of times – once when Muggs bit Mrs Rufus Sturtevant and again when he bit Lieutenant-Governor Malloy – but mother told them that it hadn’t been Muggs’ fault but the fault of the people who were bitten. ‘When he starts for them, they scream,’ she explained, ‘and that excites him.’ The cops suggested that it might be a good idea to tie the dog up, but mother said that it mortified him to be tied up and that he wouldn’t eat when he was tied up.
Lots of People Reported Our Dog to the Police
Muggs at his meals was an unusual sight. Because of the fact that if you reached toward the floor he would bite you, we usually put his food plate on top of an old kitchen table with a bench alongside the table. Muggs would stand on the bench and eat. I remember that my mother’s Uncle Horatio, who boasted that he was the third man up Missionary Ridge, was splutteringly indignant when he found out that we fed the dog on a table because we were afraid to put his plate on the floor. He said he wasn’t afraid of any dog that ever lived and that he would put the dog’s plate on the floor if we would give it to him. Roy said that if Uncle Horatio had fed Muggs on the ground just before the battle he would have been the first man up Missionary Ridge. Uncle Horatio was furious. ‘Bring him in! Bring him in now!’ he shouted. ‘I’ll feed the—on the floor!’ Roy was all for giving him a chance, but my father wouldn’t hear of it. He said that Muggs had already been fed. ‘I’ll feed him again!’ bawled Uncle Horatio. We had quite a time quieting him.
Muggs at His Meals Was an Unusual Sight
In his last year Muggs used to spend practically all of his time outdoors. He didn’t like to stay in the house for some reason or other – perhaps it held too many unpleasant memories for him. Anyway, it was hard to get him to come in and as a result the garbage man, the iceman, and the laundryman wouldn’t come near the house. We had to haul the garbage down to the corner, take the laundry out and bring it back, and meet the iceman a block from home. After this had gone on for some time we hit on an ingenious arrangement for getting the dog in the house so that we could lock him up while the gas meter was read, and so on. Muggs was afraid of only one thing, an electrical storm. Thunder and lightning frightened him out of his senses (I think he thought a storm had broken the day the mantelpiece fell). He would rush into the house and hide under a bed or in a clothes closet. So we fixed up a thunder machine out of a long narrow piece of sheet iron with a wooden handle on one end. Mother would shake this vigorously when she wanted to get Muggs into the house. It made an excellent imitation of thunder, but I suppose it was the most roundabout system for running a household that was ever devised. It took a lot out of mother.
A few months before Muggs died, he got to ‘seeing things’. He would rise slowly from the floor, growling low, and stalk stiff-legged and menacing toward nothing at all. Sometimes the Thing would be just a little to the right or left of a visitor. Once a Fuller Brush salesman got hysterics. Muggs came wandering into the room like Hamlet following his father’s ghost. His eyes were fixed on a spot just to the left of the Fuller Brush man, who stood it until Muggs was about three slow, creeping paces from him. Then he shouted. Muggs wavered on past him into the hallway grumbling to himself but the Fuller man went on shouting. I think mother had to throw a pan of cold water on him before he stopped. That was the way she used to stop us boys when we got into fights.
Muggs died quite suddenly one night. Mother wanted to bury him in the family lot under a marble stone with some such inscription as ‘Flights of angels sing thee to thy rest’ but we persuaded her it was against the law. In the end we just put up a smooth board above his grave along a lonely road. On the board I wrote with an indelible pencil ‘Cave Canem’. Mother was quite pleased with the simple classic dignity of the old Latin epitaph.
THE BEGINNING
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First published as The Thurber Carnival 1945
This selection taken from The Thurber Carnival first published in Penguin Classics 2013
This edition published 2016
Copyright 1945 by James Thurber
All rights reserved
Cover: Illustration from the poster advertising the 6th fair at Saint Etienne (France), 1954 (Photo: DaTo Images/Bridgeman Images)
ISBN: 978-0-141-39567-8
The Secret Life of Walter Mitty Page 13