Lad: A Dog Part 9

Paternity, among dogs, is, from the very first, no tie at all. Lad, probably, had no idea of his relationship to his new ward. His adoption of Wolf was due solely to his own love for Lady and to the big heart and soul that stirred him into pity for anything helpless.

Lad took his new duties very seriously indeed. He not only accepted the annoyance of Wolf's undivided teasing, but he a.s.sumed charge of the puppy's education as well--this to the amus.e.m.e.nt of everyone on The Place. But everyone's amus.e.m.e.nt was kept from Lad. The sensitive dog would rather have been whipped than laughed at. So both the Mistress and Master watched the educational process with outwardly straight faces.

A puppy needs an unbelievable amount of educating. It is a task to wear threadbare the teacher's patience and to do all kinds of things to the temper. Small wonder that many humans lose patience and temper during the process and idiotically resort to the whip, to the boot-toe and to bellowing--in which case the puppy is never decently educated, but emerges from the process with a cowed and broken spirit or with an incurable streak of meanness that renders him worthless.

Time, patience, firmness, wisdom, temper-control, gentleness--these be the six absolute essentials for training a puppy. Happy the human who is blessed with any three of these qualities. Lad, being only a dog, was abundantly possessed of all six. And he had need of them.

To begin with, Wolf had a joyous yearning to tear up or bury every portable thing that could be buried or torn. He had a craze for destruction. A dropped lace handkerchief, a cushion left on the gra.s.s, a book or a hat lying on a veranda-chair--these and a thousand other things he looked on as treasure-trove, to be destroyed as quickly and as delightedly as possible.

He also enjoyed taking a flying leap onto the face or body of any hammock-sleeper. He would howl long and lamentably, nearly every night, at the moon. If the night were moonless, he howled on general principles. He thrilled with bliss at a chance to harry and terrify the chickens or peac.o.c.ks or pigeons or any others of The Place's Little People that were safe prey for him. He tried this form of bullying once--only once--on the Mistress' temperamental gray cat, Peter Grimm. For the rest of the day Wolf nursed a scratched nose and a torn ear--which, for nearly a week, taught him to give all cats a wide berth; or, at most, to bark harrowingly at them from a safe distance.

Again, Wolf had an insatiable craving to find out for himself whether or not everything on earth was good to eat. Kipling writes of puppies'

experiments in trying to eat soap and blacking. Wolf added to this limited fare a hundred articles, from clothespins to cigars. The climax came when he found on the veranda-table a two-pound box of chocolates, from which the wrapping-paper and gilt cord had not yet been removed. Wolf ate not only all the candy, but the entire box and the paper and the string--after which he was tumultuously and horribly ill.

The foregoing were but a small percentage of his gay sins. And on respectable, middle-aged Lad fell the burden of making him into a decent canine citizen. Lad himself had been one of those rare puppies to whom the Law is taught with bewildering ease. A single command or prohibition had ever been enough to fix a rule in his almost uncannily human brain. Perhaps if the two little brown pups had lived, one or both of them might have taken after their sire in character. But Wolf was the true son of temperamental, wilful Lady, and Lad had his job cut out for him in educating the puppy.

It was a slow, tedious process. Lad went at it, as he went at everything--with a gallant dash, behind which was an endless supply of resource and endurance. Once, for instance, Wolf leaped barkingly upon a filmy square of handkerchief that had just fallen from the Mistress'

belt. Before the destructive little teeth could rip the fine cambric into rags, the puppy found himself, to his amazement, lifted gently from earth by the scruff of his neck and held thus, in midair, until he dropped the handkerchief.

Lad then deposited him on the gra.s.s--whereupon Wolf pounced once more upon the handkerchief, only to be lifted a second time, painlessly but terrifyingly, above earth. After this was repeated five times, a gleam of sense entered the puppy's fluff-brain, and he trotted sulkily away, leaving the handkerchief untouched.

Again, when he made a wild rush at the friendly covey of peac.o.c.k chicks, he found he had hurled himself against an object as immobile as a stone wall. Lad had darted in between the pup and the chicks, opposing his own big body to the charge. Wolf was bowled clean over by the force of the impact, and lay for a minute on his back, the breath knocked clean out of his bruised body.

It was a longer but easier task to teach him at whom to bark and at whom not to bark. By a sharp growl or a menacing curl of the lips, Lad silenced the youngster's clamorous salvo when a guest or tradesman entered The Place, whether on foot or in a car. By his own thunderously menacing bark he incited Wolf to a like outburst when some peddler or tramp sought to slouch down the drive toward the house.

The full tale of Wolf's education would require many profitless pages in the telling. At times the Mistress and the Master, watching from the sidelines, would wonder at Lad's persistency and would despair of his success. Yet bit by bit--and in a surprisingly short time for so vast an undertaking--Wolf's character was rounded into form. True, he had the ever-goading spirits of a true puppy. And these spirits sometimes led him to smash even such sections of the law as he fully understood. But he was a thoroughbred, and the son of clever parents. So he learned, on the whole, with gratifying speed--far more quickly than he could have been taught by the wisest human.

Nor was his education a matter of constant drudgery. Lad varied it by taking the puppy for long runs in the December woods and relaxed to the extent of romping laboriously with him at times.

Wolf grew to love his sire as he had never loved Lady. For the discipline and the firm kindliness of Lad were having their effect on his heart as well as on his manners. They struck a far deeper note within him than ever had Lady's alternating affection and crossness.

In truth, Wolf seemed to have forgotten Lady. But Lad had not. Every morning, the moment he was released from the house, Lad would trot over to Lady's empty kennel to see if by any chance she had come back to him during the night. There was eager hope in his big dark eyes as he hurried over to the vacant kennel. There was dejection in every line of his body as he turned away from his hopeless quest.

Late gray autumn had emerged overnight into white early winter. The ground of The Place lay blanketed in snow. The lake at the foot of the lawn was frozen solid from sh.o.r.e to sh.o.r.e. The trees crouched away from the whirling north wind as if in shame at their own black nakedness. Nature, like the birds, had flown south, leaving the northern world as dead and as empty and as cheerless as a deserted bird's-nest.

The puppy reveled in the snow. He would roll in it and bite it, barking all the while in an ecstasy of excitement. His gold-and-white coat was thicker and s.h.a.ggier now, to ward off the stinging cold. And the snow and the roaring winds were his playfellows rather than his foes.

Most of all, the hard-frozen lake fascinated him. Earlier, when Lad had taught him to swim, Wolf had at first shrunk back from the chilly black water. Now, to his astonishment, he could run on that water as easily--if somewhat sprawlingly--as on land. It was a miracle he never tired of testing. He spent half his time on the ice, despite an occasional hard tumble or involuntary slide.

Once and once only--in all her six-week absence and in his own six-week loneliness--had Lad discovered anything to remind him of his lost mate; and that discovery caused him for the first time in his blameless life to break the most sacred of The Place's simple Laws--the inviolable Guest-Law.

It was on a day in late November. A runabout came down the drive to the front door of the house. In it rode the vet' who had taken Lady away. He had stopped for a moment on his way to Paterson, to report as to Lady's progress at his dog-hospital.

Lad was in the living-room at the time. As a maid answered the summons at the door, he walked hospitably forward to greet the unknown guest.

The vet' stepped into the room by one door as the Master entered it by the other--which was lucky for the vet'.

Lad took one look at the man who had stolen Lady. Then, without a sound or other sign of warning, he launched his mighty bulk straight at the vet's throat.

Accustomed though he was to the ways of dogs, the vet' had barely time to brace himself and to throw one arm in front of his throat. And then Lad's eighty pounds smote him on the chest, and Lad's powerful jaws closed viselike on the forearm that guarded the man's throat. Deep into the thick ulster the white teeth clove their way--through ulster-sleeve and undercoat sleeve and the sleeves of a linen shirt and of flannels--clear through to the flesh of the forearm.

"_Lad!_" shouted the Master, springing forward.

In obedience to the sharp command, Lad loosed his grip and dropped to the floor--where he stood quivering with leashed fury.

Through the rage-mists that swirled over his brain, he knew he had broken the Law. He had never merited punishment. He did not fear it.

But the Master's tone of fierce disapproval cut the sensitive dog soul more painfully than any scourge could have cut his body.

"Lad!" cried the Master again, in rebuking amazement.

The dog turned, walked slowly over to the Master and lay down at his feet. The Master, without another word, opened the front door and pointed outward. Lad rose and slunk out. He had been ordered from the house, and in a stranger's presence!

"He thinks I'm responsible for his losing Lady," said the vet', looking ruefully at his torn sleeve. "That's why he went for me. I don't blame the dog. Don't lick him."

"I'm not going to lick him," growled the Master. "I'd as soon thrash a woman. Besides, I've just punished him worse than if I'd taken an ax-handle to him. Send me a bill for your coat."

In late December came a thaw--a freak thaw that changed the white ground to brown mud and rotted the smooth surface of the lake-ice to gray slush. All day and all night the trees and the eaves sent forth a dreary _drip-drip-drip_. It was the traditional January Thaw--set forward a month.

On the third and last morning of the thaw Wolf galloped down to the lake as usual. Lad jogged along at his side. As they reached the margin, Lad sniffed and drew back. His weird sixth sense somehow told him--as it tells an elephant--that there was danger ahead.

Wolf, however, was at the stage of extreme youth when neither dogs nor humans are bothered by premonitions. Ahead of him stretched the huge sheet of ice whereon he loved to gambol. Straightway he frisked out upon it.

A rough growl of warning from Lad made him look back, but the lure of the ice was stronger than the call of duty.

The current, at this point of the lake, twisted sharply landward in a half-circle. Thus, for a few yards out, the rotting ice was still thick, but where the current ran, it was thin, and as soggy as wet blotting-paper--as Wolf speedily discovered.

He bounded on the thinner ice driving his hind claws into the slushy surface for his second leap. He was dismayed to find that the ice collapsed under the pounding feet. There was a dull, sloppy sound. A ten-foot ice-cake broke off from the main sheet; breaking at once into a dozen smaller cakes; and Wolf disappeared, tail first, into the swift-running water beneath.

To the surface he came, at the outer edge of the hole. He was mad, clear through, at the prank his beloved lake had played on him. He struck out for sh.o.r.e. On the landward side of the opening his forefeet clawed helplessly at the unbroken ledge of ice. He had not the strength or the wit to crawl upon it and make his way to land. The bitter chill of the water was already paralyzing him. The strong current was tugging at his hindquarters. Anger gave way to panic. The puppy wasted much of his remaining strength by lifting up his voice in ear-splitting howls.

The Mistress and the Master, motoring into the drive from the highway nearly a quarter-mile distant, heard the racket. The lake was plainly visible to them through the bare trees, even at that distance, and they took in the impending tragedy at a glance. They jumped out of the car and set off at a run to the water-edge. The way was long and the ground was heavy with mud. They could not hope to reach the lake before the puppy's strength should fail.

But Lad was already there. At Wolf's first cry, Lad sprang out on the ice that heaved and chucked and cracked under his greater weight. His rush carried him to the very edge of the hole, and there, leaning forward and bracing all four of his absurdly tiny white paws, he sought to catch the puppy by the neck and lift him to safety. But before his rescuing jaws could close on Wolf's fur, the decayed ice gave way beneath his weight, and the ten-foot hole was widened by another twenty feet of water.

Down went Lad with a crash, and up he came, in almost no time, a few feet away from where Wolf floundered helplessly among the chunks of drifting ice. The breaking off of the sh.o.r.eward ma.s.s of ice, under Lad's pressure, had left the puppy with no foothold at all. It had ducked him and had robbed him even of the chance to howl.

His mouth and throat full of water, Wolf strangled and splashed in a delirium of terror. Lad struck out for him, b.u.t.ting aside the impending ice-chunks with his great shoulders, and swimming with a rush that lifted a third of his tawny body out of water. His jaws gripped Wolf by the middle of the back, and he swam thus with him toward sh.o.r.e. At the edge of the sh.o.r.eward ice he gave a heave which called on every numbing muscle of the huge frame, and which--in spite of the burden he held--again lifted his head and shoulders high above water.

He thus flung Wolf's body halfway up on the ledge of ice. The puppy's flying forepaws chanced to strike the ice-surface. His sharp claws bit into its soft upper crust. With a frantic wriggle he was out of the water and on top of this thicker stratum of sh.o.r.e-ice, and in a second he had regained sh.o.r.e and was careering wildly up the lawn toward the greater safety of his kennel.

Yet, halfway in his flight, courage returned to the sopping-wet baby. He halted, turned about and, with a volley of falsetto barks, challenged the offending water to come ash.o.r.e and fight fair.

As Wolf's forepaws had gripped the ice, he had further aided his climb to safety by thrusting downward with his hind legs. Both his hind paws had struck Lad's head, their thrust had driven Lad clean under water. There the current caught him.

When Lad came up, it was not to the surface but under the ice, some yards below. The top of his head struck stunningly against the underpart of the ice-sheet.

A lesser dog would then and there have given up the struggle, or else would have thrashed about futilely until he drowned. Lad, perhaps on instinct, perhaps on reason, struck out toward the light--the spot where the great hole had let in sunshine through the gray ice-sheet.

The average dog is not trained to swim under water. To this day, it is a mystery how Lad had the sense to hold his breath. He fought his way on, inch by inch, against the current, beneath the scratching rough under-surface of the ice--always toward the light. And just as his lungs must have been ready to burst, he reached the open s.p.a.ce.