Old Yeller (10 page)

D
ays went by, and I couldn’t seem to get over it. I couldn’t eat. I couldn’t sleep. I couldn’t cry. I was all empty inside, but hurting. Hurting worse than I’d ever hurt in my life. Hurting with a sickness there didn’t seem to be any cure for. Thinking every minute of my big yeller dog, how we’d worked together and romped together, how he’d fought the she bear off Little Arliss, how he’d saved me from the killer hogs, how he’d fought the mad wolf off Mama and Lisbeth. Thinking that after all this, I’d had to shoot him the same as I’d done the roan bull and the Spot heifer.

Mama tried to talk to me about it, and I let her. But while everything she said made sense, it didn’t do a thing to that dead feeling I had.

Lisbeth talked to me. She didn’t say much; she was too shy. But she pointed out that I had another dog, the speckled pup.

“He’s part Old Yeller,” she said. “And he was the best one of the bunch.”

But that didn’t help any either. The speckled pup might be part Old Yeller, but he wasn’t Old Yeller. He hadn’t saved all our lives and then been shot down like he was nothing.

Then one night it clouded up and rained till daylight. That seemed to wash away the hydrophobia plague. At least, pretty soon afterward, it died out completely.

But we didn’t know that then. What seemed important to us about the rain was that the next morning after it fell, Papa came riding home through the mud.

The long ride to Kansas and back had Papa drawn down till he was as thin and knotty as a fence rail. But he had money in his pockets, a big shouting laugh for everybody, and a saddle horse for me.

The horse was a cat-stepping blue roan with a black mane and tail. Papa put me on him the first thing and made me gallop him in the clearing around the house. The roan had all the pride and fire any grown man would want in his best horse, yet was as gentle as a pet.

“Now, isn’t he a dandy?” Papa asked.

I said “Yessir!” and knew that Papa was right and that I ought to be proud and thankful. But I wasn’t. I didn’t feel one way or another about the horse.

Papa saw something was wrong. I saw him look a question at Mama and saw Mama shake her head. Then late that evening, just before supper, he called me off down to the spring, where we sat and he talked.

“Your mama told me about the dog,” he said.

I said “Yessir,” but didn’t add anything.

“That was rough,” he said. “That was as rough a thing as I ever heard tell of happening to a boy. And I’m mighty proud to learn how my boy stood up to it. You couldn’t ask any more of a grown man.”

He stopped for a minute. He picked up some little pebbles and thumped them into the water,
scattering a bunch of hairy-legged water bugs. The bugs darted across the water in all directions.

“Now the thing to do,” he went on, “is to try to forget it and go on being a man.”

“How?” I asked. “How can you forget a thing like that?”

He studied me for a moment, then shook his head. “I guess I don’t quite mean that,” he said. “It’s not a thing you can forget. I don’t guess it’s a thing that you ought to forget. What I mean is, things like that happen. They may seem mighty cruel and unfair, but that’s how life is a part of the time.

“But that isn’t the only way life is. A part of the time, it’s mighty good. And a man can’t afford to waste all the good part, worrying about the bad parts. That makes it all bad…. You understand?”

“Yessir,” I said. And I did understand. Only, it still didn’t do me any good. I still felt just as dead and empty.

That went on for a week or better, I guess, before a thing happened that brought me alive again.

It was right at dinnertime. Papa had sent me out to the lot to feed Jumper and the horses. I’d just started back when I heard a commotion in the house. I heard Mama’s voice lifted high and sharp. “Why, you thieving little whelp!” she cried out. Then I heard a shrieking yelp, and out the kitchen door came the speckled pup with a big chunk of cornbread clutched in his mouth. He raced around the house, running with his tail clamped. He was yelling and squawling like somebody was beating him to death. But that still didn’t keep him from hanging onto that piece of cornbread that he’d stolen from Mama.

Inside the house, I heard Little Arliss. He was fighting and screaming his head off at Mama for hitting his dog. And above it all, I could hear Papa’s roaring laughter.

Right then, I began to feel better. Sight of that little old pup, tearing out for the brush with that piece of cornbread seemed to loosen something inside me.

I felt better all day. I went back and rode my horse and enjoyed it. I rode way off out in the brush, not going anywhere especially, just riding and looking and beginning to feel proud of
owning a real horse of my own.

Then along about sundown, I rode down into Birdsong Creek, headed for the house. Up at the spring, I heard a splashing and hollering. I looked ahead. Sure enough, it was Little Arliss. He was stripped naked and romping in our drinking water again. And right in there, romping with him, was that bread-stealing speckled pup.

I started to holler at them. I started to say: “
Arliss!
You get that nasty old pup out of our drinking water.”

Then I didn’t. Instead, I went to laughing. I sat there and laughed till I cried. When all the time I knew that I ought to go beat them to a frazzle for messing up our drinking water.

When finally I couldn’t laugh and cry another bit, I rode on up to the lot and turned my horse in. Tomorrow, I thought, I’ll take Arliss and that pup out for a squirrel hunt. The pup was still mighty little. But the way I figured it, if he was big enough to act like Old Yeller, he was big enough to start learning to earn his keep.

Cover art © 2004 by Gary Isaacs

Cover design by Amy Ryan

Cover © 2004 by HarperCollins Publishers Inc.