The Dog Who Wouldn't Be (11 page)

The remainder of our journey through the prairies passed without undue excitement, and this was well, for it was a time of mounting fatigue, and of tempers strained by days of heat, by the long pall of dust, and by the yellowed desert of the drying plains. The poplar bluffs were few and far between, and their parched leaves rustled stiffly with the sound of death. The sloughs were dry, their white beds glittering in the destroying heat. Here and there a tiny puddle of muck still lingered in a roadside ditch, and these potholes had become death traps for innumerable little families of ducks. Botulism throve in the stagnant slime, and the
ducks died in their thousands, and their bodies did not rot, but dried as mummies dry.

It was a grim passage, and we drove Eardlie hard, heedless of his steadily boiling radiator and his laboring engine. And then one morning there was a change. The sky that had been dust hazed for so long grew clear and sweet. Ahead of us, hung between land and air, we saw the first blue shadows of the distant mountains.

We camped early that night and we were in high spirits at our escape from drought and desert. When the little gasoline stove had hissed into life and Mother was preparing supper, Mutt and I went off to explore this new and living land. Magpies rose ahead of us, their long tails iridescent in the setting sun. Pipits climbed the crests of the high clouds and sang their intense little songs. Prairie chickens rose chuckling out of a green pasture that lay behind a trim white farmhouse. We walked back to the tent through a poplar bluff whose leaves flickered and whispered as live leaves should.

We crossed through most of Alberta the next day, and by evening were climbing the foothills. It had been a day for Mutt to remember. Never had he suspected that cows existed anywhere in such vast numbers. The size of the herds bewildered him
so much that he lost all heart for the chase. He was so overwhelmed (and so greatly outnumbered) that he stayed in the car even when we stopped for lunch. In the evening we made our camp near a little roadside stand that sold gasoline and soda pop, and here Mutt tried to recover his self-respect by pursuing a very small, very lonely little cow that lived behind the garage. His cup of woe was filled to overflowing when the little cow turned out to be a billy goat – Mutt's first – and retaliated by chasing him back to the tent, and then attempting to follow him inside.

We began the passage of the mountains in the morning, and we chose the northern route, which at that time was no easy path even for a Model A. The roads were narrow, precipitous, and gravel surfaced. There were no guard rails, and periodically we would find ourselves staring over the edge of a great gorge while Eardlie's wheels kicked gravel down into the echoing abyss.

We seemed to undergo a strange shrinking process as the mountains grew higher and more massive. I felt that we were no more than four microorganisms, dwarfed almost to the vanishing point. The mountains frightened me, because I knew them as the last of the Terrible Things – the
immutable survivors that alone remained unaltered by the human termites who have scarred the face of half a world.

Mutt too was humbled at first, and he showed his awe of the mountains in an odd way. He refused to use them for mundane purposes, and since there was nowhere else to cock a leg, except against a mountain, he was in agony for a time. Fortunately for him his awe was transitory. It was eventually replaced by the urge to climb, for the desire to seek high places had always been his, and it had taken him first to the top of fences, then up ladders, and finally high into the trees. Now he saw that it could take him to the clouds, and he was no dog to miss an opportunity.

We lost Mutt, and two days from our itinerary, when he set out on his own to reach the peaks of the Three Sisters. We never knew for certain if he achieved his goal, but when he arrived back at our impatient camp, his paw pads were worn almost to the flesh and he had a cocky air about him as of one who has stood upon a pinnacle and gazed across the world.

This mountain-climbing passion was an infernal nuisance to the rest of us, for he would sneak away whenever we stopped, and would appear high on
the face of some sheer cliff, working his way steadily upward, and deaf to our commands that he return at once.

One day we paused for a drink of spring water near the face of a forbidding cliff, and of course Mutt was unable to resist the challenge. We did not notice that he was gone until a large American limousine drew up alongside us and from it four handsome women and two well-fed men emerged. They were all equipped with movie cameras and binoculars, and some of them began staring at the cliff with their glasses, while the rest leveled their cameras. The whirr of the machines brought me over to see what this was all about. I asked one of the women.

“Hush, sonny,” she replied in a heavy whisper, “there's a real live mountain goat up there!” And with that she too raised her camera and pressed the button.

I spent a long time looking for that goat. I could see Mutt clearly enough, some three hundred feet up the cliffside; but no goat. I supposed that Mutt was on the goat's trail, and it irked me that I was blind while these strangers were possessed of such keen eyes.

After some ten minutes of intent photography
the Americans loaded themselves back into the limousine and drove away, engaging in much congratulatory backslapping at their good luck as they went.

I had caught on by then. That night we discussed the anomaly of a piebald mountain goat with long black ears, and I am afraid we laughed outrageously. Yet in point of fact no genuine mountain goat could have given a more inspired demonstration of mountaineering techniques than could Mutt.

Leaving the mountains temporarily, we descended into the Okanagan valley, where we hoped to see a fabulous monster called the Ogo Pogo that dwells in Lake Okanagan. The monster proved reluctant, so we solaced ourselves by gorging on the magnificent fruits for which the valley is famous, and for which we had often yearned during the prairie years. To our surprise – for he could still surprise us on occasion – Mutt shared our appetites, and for three days he ate nothing at all but fruit.

He preferred peaches, muskmelon, and cherries, but cherries were his undoubted favorites. At first he had trouble with the pits, but he soon perfected a rather disgusting trick of squirting them out between his front teeth, and as a result we had to
insist that he point himself away from us and the car whenever he was eating cherries.

I shall never forget the baleful quality of the look directed at Mutt by a passenger on the little ferry in which we crossed the Okanagan River. Perhaps the look was justified. Certainly Mutt was a quaint spectacle as he sat in the rumble seat, his goggles pushed far up on his forehead, eating cherries out of a six-quart basket.

After each cherry he would raise his muzzle, point it overside, and nonchalantly spit the pit into the green waters of the river.

hortly after I fell under the influence of my Great-uncle Frank I began to be something of a trial to my parents. Frank laid his hand upon me when I was five years old, and I have not completely evaded his shadowy grip even to this day.

He was a naturalist and collector, of the old school, who believed that everything in nature from eagles' eggs to dinosaur bones deserved house room. He also insisted that the only way to know animals was to live with them. He impressed upon me that, if it was impossible actually to live among them in the woods and fields, then the next best thing was to bring the wild folk home to live with me. I proceeded to follow his advice and on my first
expedition as a budding scientist I collected, and brought home, a cow's skull and two black snakes, for which I found quarters underneath my bed.

Mother said that snakes were not fit companions for a five-year-old, but Frank – who had a good deal of authority in the family – took my side and the snakes remained with us for some weeks, until the landlord of our apartment heard about them.

Those snakes were only the first of an interminable procession of beasts, furred, feathered, and finned, which I inflicted upon my parents. It is to their eternal credit that they managed somehow to bear with most of my house guests, nor did they attempt to discourage my bent toward practical zoology. I think Mother had some hope that I would become another Thoreau; or it may be that she simply preferred to have me declare my pets openly, rather than have me secrete them against the inevitable, and startling, moment of discovery.

There were a few such moments anyway. There was the time I kept rattlesnakes in a bookcase – but that incident passed off harmlessly enough. Then there was the time when I was six years old and was staying for a week with my paternal grandmother. One afternoon I went fishing with another lad and we caught half a dozen mud pouts,
or catfish, as some people call them. I brought the fish home so that I could live with them.

Grandmother Mowat was an immensely dignified and rather terrifying old lady who did not easily tolerate the pranks of youth. Yet it was with no intention of playing a practical joke on anyone that I placed my mud pouts in the toilet bowl. I had no other choice, since there were no laundry tubs in the house, and the bathtub drain leaked so badly that you had to keep the tap running when you took a bath.

I was honestly and tearfully penitent when the mud pouts were discovered – and penitence was needed. Grandmother made the discovery herself, at a late hour when the rest of the household was fast asleep.

She forgave me, for she had a knowing heart. But I doubt that she ever fully forgave my parents.

All through the early years before we moved to Saskatoon, our rented homes and apartments housed not only us three, but a wide variety of other beasts as well. In Trenton I had a Blanding's tortoise – a rare terrestrial turtle of which I was immensely proud, and which one day distinguished itself beyond all other turtles by talking. True, it spoke but once, and then under unusual circumstances. Nevertheless, it actually did speak.

Some of my parents' friends were visiting our house, and they were kind enough to humor me and ask to see my turtle. Proudly I got it out of the box of sand where it normally lived, and released it on the dining-room table. I was chagrined when it refused to poke so much as a leg out of its shell. In exasperation I prodded it with a pencil.

Slowly it protruded its head, peered sadly up at us out of its old-woman's face, and then in the clearest, but most despondent, tones imaginable it spoke a single word.

“Yalk!” it said – as distinctly as that – and without further preamble laid an egg upon the tabletop.

I kept that jelly-bean-shaped leathery object on top of the stove for seven months, but it never hatched. I suppose my turtle must have been a virgin.

We left Trenton not long afterwards and moved to Windsor. Point Pelee National Park was only thirty miles away, and we used to drive to it on week ends so that I could do field work in natural history. One day I spied what looked like a crow's nest in a tall pine, and I climbed up to investigate. It turned out to be a black squirrel's nest containing three young squirrels.

Naturally I brought one of them home with me, carrying it inside my shirt. Without really meaning to I rather overdid Great-uncle Frank's precept, for I spent the next few days living very close to a band of several hundred fleas.

The little squirrel took readily to captivity. We called him Jitters, and Father built a cage for him that hung over the kitchen sink. It had a door that he could open and shut by himself, and he had the run of the house, and later of the neighborhood. He was an ingratiating little beast and one of his favorite diversions was boxing. He would sit on the back of a chair and box with us, using his front paws against our forefingers.

Jitters liked people, but he hated cats and he waged a bitter vendetta against them. Our own cat, whose name was Miss Stella (after our landlady of the moment), became incurably neurotic as a result of the torment inflicted on her by the squirrel, and eventually she left home forever. The cats of our neighbors suffered severely too.

It was Jitters's delight to seek out an unwary cat sunning itself beneath a tree, or under the lee of a house wall. Jitters would then quietly climb high above his victim and launch himself into space like a diving sparrow hawk. Since these leaps were often
made from twenty or thirty feet up, the impact when he struck was sufficient to leave the poor cat breathless. By the time it recovered, Jitters would have scampered to a safe vantage point from which he could taunt his enemy.

We had Jitters for over a year, and in the end it was his cat baiting that killed him. He died rather horribly. One afternoon he launched himself from halfway up the wall of our three-story apartment building and landed, not on what he had supposed was a sleeping cat, but upon a foxskin neckpiece laid to air on a concrete balustrade.

By the time we moved to Saskatoon my parents tended to take my interest in natural history for granted. Yet even they were startled one night shortly after we arrived in Saskatoon.

Mother was having a dinner party that evening for a number of local people whom we had only recently met. When dinner was ready she called to me up the back stairs, and I came down to join the party, a little dreamily, for my mind was filled with the thrill of a great discovery.

I had just begun to practice dissections, and that day I had found a dead gopher that proved to be an ideal subject for experiment. When Mother called me I had just completed my preliminary
work. I had removed most of the internal organs and placed them in a saucer of formaldehyde solution. The problem of identifying all these parts was a nice one, and I was so preoccupied with it that I brought the saucer with me to the dinner table.

It was a candle-lit dinner, and no one noticed my saucer until after soup had been served. I finished my soup before anyone else and decided to employ the waiting moments by continuing with my investigations. I was so lost in them that I was not aware of the peculiar dying away of conversation on either side, until my father's voice aroused me.

“What in heaven's name have you got there, Farley?” he demanded sharply.

I answered eagerly – for I had just that instant made a momentous discovery and one that I was anxious to share.

“Dad,” I cried, “you'll never guess. I've got the uterus of a gopher
and she was pregnant!
”

Hector MacCrimmon was among the guests that night, but he survived the experience to become one of our best friends. The thirty bachelor years that he had spent in Canada since leaving Caithness in northern Scotland had not altered either his accent nor his Presbyterian sense of rectitude. For twenty years his home had been a room
in one of Saskatoon's hotels, and if ever a man was immovably settled into a habitual pattern of life, it was surely Hector.

Nevertheless, when we moved our caravan out to the Saskatoon Country Club for the summer months, we pressed Hector to join us for a bucolic week end.

He would have refused the invitation outright if he could have done so gracefully, for he had no love of the out-of-doors. His hotel life may have been dull and confining, but it was comfortable, and Hector was eminently a comfortable sort of man. He evaded the issue of the country week end with skill and perseverance, but in the end we were too much for him, and in mid-August he found himself committed to a three-day visit. It was in a mood of Christian resignation that he eventually arrived, for he put little faith in my father's glowing assurances that we lived in the very lap of luxury.

Our camp was on the riverbank, in a dense stand of poplar. The caravan stood in a little clearing, with the open-air fireplace before it and farther back toward the trees an umbrella tent, which was the private place where I lived and slept. My parents had decided that Hector should have my
unoccupied bunk in the caravan, but when Hector heard of this arrangement he was horrified.

“I'll nae do it!” he cried vehemently. “Wud ye have me sleep between a mon and his lawful spouse? Foosh and for shame! Come, Angus, sin ye have no place for me to lay my haid, I'll be away back to Saskatoon for the night.”

I don't know how much of that outburst was really due to his Presbyterian scruples, and how much of it was due to a last-minute, but canny, attempt to escape from country living. But if it was escape he had in mind, he was doomed to failure.

“Nonsense,” Father replied heartily. “You can sleep on the spare cot in Farley's tent. That should be decent enough even for an old Puritan like you, but” – and here my father's voice betrayed a trace of hesitation – “it may not be quite as peaceful there as in the caravan.”

Hector knew that he was beaten, but he would have the last word. “Peaceful!” he said bleakly. “Ther'll be little peace for me until I'm hame.”

It was a prophetic statement.

After supper my elders remained around the fire, drinking hot toddy and swatting at mosquitoes. I retired directly to my tent, for I had chores to do.

During that summer I had made a strenuous effort to obey the injunctions of Great-uncle Frank, and as a result the tent had become far more than a bedroom. It had become a place where I could live in really close contact with nature, for I shared the tenancy with a dozen chipmunks, a partially tamed long-eared owl, three bushy-tailed wood gophers, a least weasel, and a baker's dozen of garter snakes. Each species had its own quarters. The snakes lived in a cardboard carton under my bed; the weasel in a gallon-size tin can; the chipmunks in an orange crate faced with fly screening; the wood gophers in a wooden tub; while the owl was free to range at the end of a long piece of twine tied to the tent pole. The makeshift cages were not all they might have been, and whenever I went into the tent I could usually count on finding some of my comrades on the loose. However, on this particular evening Father had drawn me aside after dinner to warn me sternly that there must be no escapes that night.

Having made everything secure, I went to bed. I awakened briefly at Hector's belated arrival in the tent some hours later. He undressed in darkness, fearing perhaps that it would be indecent to do so by the light of the electric torch with which he was provided.

A number of mosquitoes had followed him into the tent, and although they did not bother me (for I buried my head under my sheet), they seemed to annoy Hector. He muttered and thrashed about for a long time.

Sometime well after midnight I was awakened again by the detonation of thunder overhead. Coincidental with the earth-shaking crash there was a disturbance at the tent door, and Mutt pushed his way inside. He was inordinately frightened of thunderstorms, and when this one burst, he abandoned his usual sleeping quarters under the caravan and fled to me for solace and protection.

I could see Hector, outlined against the flailing canvas by the flicker of the lightning, sitting up in his bed and thrusting one long leg, like a Masai spear, at something between the two cots.

“Whoosh!” he cried sharply. “What was that?”

“It's nothing, Mr. MacCrimmon,” I replied. “Only Mutt coming in to get out of the rain.”

“Mutt be dommed!” Hector yelled. “It's the deil himself!”

At that moment Mutt, who had crawled under my cot, gave a convulsive leap that almost overturned the bed. Immediately there was a scampering across my blankets that told me my chipmunks
were no longer in their little home. Hector was now lashing about with arms and legs and making such violent contact with the walls of the tent that I was afraid the whole thing would collapse. “It's all right; it's only chipmunks!” I called in an attempt to soothe him.

He did not waste his breath in a reply. He had found his flashlight, and suddenly its yellow beam flooded the tent. I saw at once that I had been wrong. It had been neither Mutt nor the chipmunks that had been bothering him. It was my owl, which was now crouching in a belligerent attitude on Hector's pillow, gripping the still-wriggling body of a wood gopher in its talons. There was a look in the owl's eye that boded no good for anyone who tried to interfere with it.