The Dog Who Wouldn't Be (2 page)

My father's reaction was of a different kind.

He arrived home at six o'clock that night and he was hardly in the door before he began singing the praises of a springer-spaniel bitch he had just seen. He seemed hardly even to hear at first when Mother interrupted to remark that we already had a dog, and that two would be too many.

When he beheld the pup he was outraged; but the ambush had been well and truly laid and before he could recover himself, Mother unmasked her guns.

“Isn't he
lovely
, darling?” she asked sweetly. “And so
cheap
. Do you know, I've actually saved you a hundred and ninety-nine dollars and ninety-six cents? Enough to pay for all your ammunition and for that
expensive
new gun you bought.”

My father was game, and he rallied quickly. He pointed scornfully at the pup, and in a voice sharp with exasperation he replied:

“But, damn it all – that – that ‘thing' isn't a
hunting
dog!”

Mother was ready for him. “How do you
know
, dear,” she asked mildly, “until you've tried him out?”

There could be no adequate reply to this. It was as impossible to predict what the pup might grow up to be, as it was to deduce what his ancestry might have been. Father turned to me for support, but I would not meet his eye, and he knew then that he had been outmaneuvered.

He accepted defeat with his usual good grace. I can clearly remember, and with awe, what he had to say to some friends who dropped in for a drink not three evenings later. The pup, relatively clean, and already beginning to fatten out a little, was presented to the guests.

“He's imported,” Father explained in a modest tone of voice. “I understand he's the only one of his
kind in the west. A Prince Albert retriever, you know. Marvelous breed for upland shooting.”

Unwilling to confess their ignorance, the guests looked vaguely knowing. “What do you call him?” one of them asked.

I put my foot in it then. Before my father could reply, I forestalled him.

“
I
call him Mutt,” I said. And I was appalled by the look my father gave me.

He turned his back on me and smiled confidentially at the guests.

“You have to be rather careful with these highly bred specimens,” he explained, “it doesn't always do to let them know their kennel names. Better to give them a simple bourgeois name like Sport, or Nipper, or –” and here he gagged a trifle – “or even Mutt.”

uring his first few weeks with us Mutt astonished us all by his maturity of outlook. He never really was a puppy, at least not after he came to us. Perhaps the ordeal with the ducks had aged him prematurely; perhaps he was simply born adult in mind. In any case he resolutely eschewed the usual antics of puppyhood. He left behind him no mangled slippers, no torn upholstery, and no stains upon the rugs. He did not wage mock warfare with people's bare feet, nor did he make the night hideous when he was left to spend the dark hours alone in the kitchen. There was about him, from the first day he came to us, an aura of resolution and restraint, and dignity. He took life seriously, and he expected us to do likewise.

Nor was he malleable. His character was immutably resolved before we ever knew him and, throughout his life, it did not change.

I suspect that at some early moment of his existence he concluded there was no future in being a dog. And so, with the tenacity which marked his every act, he set himself to become something else. Subconsciously he no longer believed that he was a dog at all, yet he did not feel, as so many foolish canines appear to do, that he was human. He was tolerant of both species, but he claimed kin to neither.

If he was unique in attitude, he was also unique in his appearance. In size he was not far from a setter, but in all other respects he was very far from any known breed. His hindquarters were elevated several inches higher than his forequarters; and at the same time he was distinctly canted from left to right. The result was that, when he was approaching, he appeared to be drifting off about three points to starboard, while simultaneously giving an eerie impression of a submarine starting on a crash dive. It was impossible to tell, unless you knew him very well indeed, exactly where he was heading, or what his immediate objective might be. His eyes gave no clue, for they were so close-set
that he looked to be, and may have been, somewhat cross-eyed. The total illusion had its practical advantages, for gophers and cats pursued by Mutt could seldom decide where he was aiming until they discovered, too late, that he was actually on a collision course with them.

An even more disquieting physical characteristic was the fact that his hind legs moved at a slower speed than did his front ones. This was theoretically explicable on the grounds that his hind legs were much longer than his forelegs – but an understanding of this explanation could not dispel the unsettling impression that Mutt's forward section was slowly and relentlessly pulling away from the tardy after-end.

And yet, despite all this, Mutt was not unprepossessing in general appearance. He had a handsome black and white coat of fine, almost silky hair, with exceptionally long “feathers” on his legs. His tail was long, limber, and expressive. Although his ears were rather large and limp, his head was broad and high-domed. A black mask covered all of his face except for his bulbous nose, which was pure white. He was not really handsome, yet he possessed the same sort of dignified grotesquerie which so distinguished Abraham Lincoln and the Duke of Wellington.

He also possessed a peculiar
savoir-faire
that had a disconcerting effect upon strangers. So strong was Mutt's belief that he was not simply “dog” that he was somehow able to convey this conviction to human onlookers.

One bitterly cold day in January Mother went downtown to do some post-Christmas shopping and Mutt accompanied her. She parted from him outside the Hudson Bay Department Store, for Mutt had strong antipathies, even in those early months, and one of these was directed against the famous Company of Gentleman Adventurers. Mother was inside the store for almost an hour, while Mutt was left to shiver on the wind-swept pavement.

When Mother emerged at last, Mutt had forgotten that he had voluntarily elected to remain outside. Instead he was nursing a grievance at what seemed to him to be a calculated indifference to his comfort on my mother's part. He had decided to sulk, and when he sulked he became intractable. Nothing that Mother would say could persuade him to get up off the frigid concrete and accompany her home. Mother pleaded. Mutt ignored her and fixed his gaze upon the steamed-up windows of the Star Café across the street.

Neither of them was aware of the small audience
which had formed around them. There were three Dukhobors in their quaint winter costumes, a policeman enveloped in a buffalo-skin coat, and a dentist from the nearby Medical Arts Building. Despite the cold, these strangers stood and watched with growing fascination as Mother ordered and Mutt, with slightly lifted lip and
sotto-voce
mutters, adamantly refused to heed. Both of them were becoming exasperated, and the tone of their utterances grew increasingly vehement.

It was at this point that the dentist lost touch with reality. He stepped forward and addressed Mutt in man-to-man tones.

“Oh, I say, old boy, be reasonable!” he said reproachfully.

Mutt replied with a murmur of guttural disdain, and this was too much for the policeman.

“What seems to be the matter here?” he asked.

Mother explained. “He won't go home. He just won't go!”

The policeman was a man of action. He wagged his mittened paw under Mutt's nose. “Can't you see the lady's cold?” he asked sternly.

Mutt rolled his eyes and yawned and the policeman lost his temper. “Now, see here,” he cried, “you just move along or, by the gods, I'll run you in!”

It was fortunate that my father and Eardlie came by at this moment. Father had seen Mutt and Mother in arguments before, and he acted with dispatch, picking them both up almost bodily and pushing them into Eardlie's front seat. He did not linger, for he had no desire to be a witness to the reactions of the big policeman and of the dentist when they became aware of the fact that they had been arguing with a dog upon a public street.

Arguments with Mutt were almost invariably fruitless. As he grew older he became more vocal and more argumentative. When he was asked to do something which did not please him he would begin to mutter. If he was pressed, the muttering would grow in volume, rising and falling in pitch. It was not a growl nor was it in the least threatening. It was a stubborn bumbling sound, quite indescribable.

It happened that Father was writing a novel that first winter in the west, and he was extremely touchy about being disturbed while working on it.

One evening he was hunched over his portable typewriter in the living room, his face drawn and haggard with concentration, but he was getting very little actually down on paper. Mother and I, recognizing the symptoms, had discreetly retired
to the kitchen, but Mutt had remained in the living room, asleep before the open fire.

Mutt was not a silent sleeper. He snored with a peculiar penetrating sound and, being a dog who dreamed actively, his snores were often punctuated by high-pitched yelps as he galloped across the dream prairie in pursuit of a rabbit.

He must have been lucky that evening. Perhaps it was an old and infirm rabbit he was chasing, or perhaps the rabbit slipped and fell. At any rate Mutt closed with it, and instantly the living room reverberated to a horrendous conflict.

Father, blasted so violently from his creative mood, was enraged. He roared at Mutt, who, awakened harshly in the very moment of victory, was inclined to be surly about the interruption.

“Get out, you insufferable beast!” Father yelled at him.

Mutt curled his lip and prepared to argue.

Father was now almost beside himself. “I said
out
– you animated threshing machine!”

Mutt's argumentative mutters immediately rose in volume. Mother and I shivered slightly and stared at each other with dreadful surmise.

Our apprehensions were justified by the sound of shattering glass, as a volume of
Everyman's Encyclopedia

banged against the dining-room wall, on the wrong side of the French doors. Mutt appeared in the kitchen at almost the same instant. Without so much as a look at us, he thumped down the basement stairs – his whole attitude radiating outrage.

Father was immediately contrite. He followed Mutt down into the cellar, and we could hear him apologizing – but it did no good. Mutt would not deign to notice him for three long days. Physical violence in lieu of argument was, to Mutt, a cardinal sin.

He had another exasperating habit that he developed very early in life, and never forgot. When it was manifestly impossible for him to avoid some unpleasant duty by means of argument, he would feign deafness. On occasions I lost my temper and, bending down so that I could lift one of his long ears, would scream my orders at him in the voice of a Valkyrie. But Mutt would simply turn his face toward me with a bland and interrogative look that seemed to say with insufferable mildness, “I'm sorry – did you speak?”

We could not take really effective steps to cure him of this irritating habit, for it was one he shared with my paternal grandfather, who sometimes visited us. Grandfather was stone deaf to anything
that involved effort on his part, yet he could hear, and respond to, the word “whiskey” if it was whispered inside a locked bedroom three floors above the chair in which he habitually sat.

It will be clear by now that Mutt was not an easy dog to live with. Yet the intransigence which made it so difficult to cope with him made it even more difficult – and at times well-nigh impossible – for him to cope with the world in general. His stubbornness marked him out for a tragicomic role throughout his life. But Mutt's struggles with a perverse fate were not, unfortunately, his alone. He involved those about him, inevitably and often catastrophically, in his confused battle with life.

Wherever he went he left deep-etched memories that were alternately vivid with the screaming hues of outrage, or cloudy with the muddy colors of near dementia. He carried with him the aura of a Don Quixote and it was in that atmosphere that my family and I lived for more than a decade.

robably the greatest indignity which Mutt ever experienced at our hands came about as a result of my father's feeling for the English language. As a librarian, an author, and a well-read man, he was a militant defender of the sanctity of the written and the spoken word, and when he encountered words that were being ill used, his anger knew no bounds.

North Americans being what they are, my father was often roused to fury. I have seen him turn his back upon one of the new nobles of our times – a prominent man of business – simply because the poor fellow remarked that he was about to immediatize the crafting of a new product. Father believed that this sort of jabberwocky was inexcusable, but
what really irritated him beyond measure was the jargon of the advertising writers.

He felt so strongly about this that popular magazines were seldom allowed to enter our home. This was something of a hardship for Mother, but it was as nothing to the hardships both she and I suffered if, by mischance, my father found a copy of the
Woman's Boon Companion
hidden under the cushions of the living-room couch. With the offending magazine in his hand, my father would take the floor and subject his captive audience to concentrated and vitriolic comment on the future facing a world that allowed such sabotage of all that he held dear.

These incidents were fortunately rare, yet they occurred from time to time when one of us grew careless. It was as the result of one such incident that Mutt came to suffer the blues.

It began on a spring evening in the second year of Mutt's life. Mother had had visitors for tea that afternoon, and one of the ladies had brought with her a copy of a famous woman's magazine which she neglected to take away again.

My father was restless that evening. He had forgotten to bring the usual armful of books home from the library. The mosquitoes were too avid to allow him to indulge in his favorite evening pastime of
stalking dandelions in the back yard. He stayed in the house, pacing aimlessly about the living room until my mother could stand it no longer.

“For Heaven's sake, stop prowling,” she said at last. “Sit down and read a magazine – there's one behind my chair.”

She must have been completely preoccupied with her knitting when she spoke. It was seldom that my mother was so obtuse.

In my bedroom, where I was writing an essay on Champlain, I vaguely heard but did not heed her words. Mutt, asleep and dreaming at my feet, heard nothing. Neither of us was prepared for the anguished cry that rang through the house a few moments later. My father's voice was noted for its parade-ground quality even when, as in this case, the words themselves seemed quite inscrutable.

“What the devil
do
the neighbors say when they see your dirty underwear?” he thundered.

Mutt woke so suddenly that he banged his head painfully against my desk. Champlain vanished from my thoughts, and I wracked my mind frantically for memories of guilty deeds connected with underwear. Then we heard mother's voice, soothing and quiet, dispelling the echoes of the blast. My heartbeat returned to normal and my curiosity
led me out into the hall to peer through the living-room door.

My father was pacing again, with a sergeant major's tread. He was waving an open magazine in front of him and I caught a glimpse of a full-color, full-page advertisement which depicted an unspeakably dirty pair of drawers swinging like a flag of ill fame from a clothesline. Running across the page in broad crimson letters was the mortifying accusation:

Mother was sitting quietly in her chair, but her lips were pursed. “Really, Angus!” she was saying. “
Control
yourself! After all, everyone has to live, and if that company can't sell its bluing, how can
it
live?”

My father replied with a pungent, and what I took to be an appropriate, suggestion, but Mother ignored him.

“Perhaps it
is
a trifle vulgar,” she continued, “but it's just intended to catch the reader's attention; and it does, doesn't it?”

There could be no doubt that it had caught my father's attention.

“Well, then,” Mother concluded triumphantly, “you
see?
” It was the phrase with which she always clinched her arguments.

The magazine was quietly consigned to the incinerator the next morning, and Mother and I assumed that this particular storm had blown over. We were in error, but neither of us had much knowledge of the working of the subconscious. We never guessed that the incident was still festering in some deep and hidden recess of my father's mind.

Summer drew on and the sloughs again grew dry and white; the young grain wizened and burned, and another season of drought was upon us. A film of dust hung continuously in the scorching air and we were never free of the gritty touch of it, except when we stripped off our clothing and went to soak in the bathtub. For Mutt there was no such relief. His long coat caught and trapped the dust until the hair became matted and discolored, assuming a jaundiced saffron hue, but he would not, in those early days, voluntarily turn to water to escape his misery.

He was a true son of the drought. I suppose that he had seen so little water in his first months of life that he had a right to be suspicious of it. At any rate he shied away from water in any quantity, as a cayoose shies from a rattlesnake. When we decided
to force a bath upon him, he not only became argumentative and deaf, but if he could escape us, he would crawl under the garage floor, where he would remain without food or drink until we gave in and solemnly assured him that the bath was off.

Not the least difficult part of the bath was the devising of a plan whereby Mutt might be lured, all unsuspecting, into the basement where the laundry tubs stood waiting. This problem required a different solution each time, for Mutt had a long memory, and his bath suspicions were easily aroused. On one occasion we released a live gopher in the cellar and then, encountering it “unexpectedly,” called upon Mutt to slay it. This worked once.

The bath itself was a severe ordeal to all who were involved. During the earlier attempts we wore raincoats, sou'westers, and rubber boots, but we found these inadequate. Later we wore only simple breech-clouts. Mutt never gave up, and he would sometimes go to incredible lengths to cheat the tub. Once he snatched a piece of naphtha soap out of my hand and swallowed it, whether accidentally or not I do not know. He began frothing almost immediately, and we curtailed the bath and called the veterinary.

The veterinary was a middle-aged and unimaginative man whose practice was largely limited to
healing boils on horses and hard udders on cows. He refused to believe that Mutt had voluntarily swallowed soap, and he left in something of a huff. Mutt took advantage of the hullabaloo to vanish. He returned twenty-four hours later looking pale and emaciated – having proved the emetic efficacy of naphtha soap beyond all question.

The decision to bathe Mutt was never lightly made, and we tended to postpone it as long as possible. He was long overdue for a cleansing when, in late July, I went away to spend a few days at a friend's cottage on Lake Manitou.

I enjoyed myself at Manitou, which is one of the saltiest of the west's salt sloughs. My friend and I spent most of our days trying to swim, despite the fact that the saline content of the water was so high that it was impossible to sink deep enough to reach a point of balance. We slithered about on the surface, acquiring painful sunburns and bad cases of salt-water itch.

I was in a carefree and happy mood when, on Monday morning, I arrived back in Saskatoon. I came up the front walk of our house whistling for Mutt and bearing a present for him – a dead gopher that we had picked up on the road home. He did not respond to my whistle. A little uneasily
I pushed through the front door and found Mother sitting on the chesterfield, looking deeply distressed. She stood up when she saw me and clutched me to her bosom.

“Oh, darling,” she cried, “your poor,
poor
dog! Oh, your
poor
, poor dog!”

A lethal apprehension overwhelmed me. I stiffened in her arms. “What's the matter with him?” I demanded.

Mother released me and looked into my eyes. “Be brave, darling,” she said. “You'd better see him for yourself. He's under the garage.”

I was already on my way.

Mutt's grotto under the garage was his private sanctuary, and it could be reached only through a narrow burrow. I got down on my hands and knees and peered into the gloom. As my eyes became accustomed to the darkness, I could discern a vague but Muttlike shape. He was curled up in the farthest recess, his head half hidden by his tail, but with one eye exposed and glaring balefully out of the murk. He did not seem to be seriously damaged and I ordered him to emerge.

He did not move.

In the end I had to crawl into the burrow, grasp him firmly by the tail, and drag him out by brute
force. And then I was so startled by his appearance that I released my grip and he scuttled back to cover.

Mutt was no longer a black and white dog, or even a black and yellow one. He was a vivid black and blue. Those sections of his coat that had once been white were now of an unearthly ultramarine shade. The effect was ghastly, particularly about the head, for even his nose and muzzle were bright blue.

Mutt's transformation had taken place the day I left for Manitou. He was indignant and annoyed that he had been left behind, and for the rest of that day he sulked. When no one gave him the sympathy he felt was due him, he left the house, and he did not return home until evening. His return was notable.

Somewhere out on the broad prairie to the east of town he found the means with which to revenge himself upon humanity. He found a dead horse in that most satisfactory state of decomposition which best lends itself to being rolled upon. Mutt rolled with diligence.

He arrived home at a little after nine o'clock, and no doubt he trusted to the dusk to conceal him until he could reach his grotto. He was caught unawares when father leaped upon him from ambush. He made a frantic effort to escape and succeeded
briefly, only to be trapped in the back yard. Squalling bitterly, he was at last dragged into the basement. The doors were closed and locked and the laundry tubs were filled.

Father has never been willing to describe in any detail the events that followed, but Mother – although she did not actually descend into the basement herself – was able to give me a reasonably circumstantial account. It must have been an epic struggle. It lasted almost three hours and the sounds and smells of battle reached Mother, via the hot-air registers, without appreciable diminution. She told me that both my father and Mutt had become hoarse and silent by the end of the second hour, but that the sounds of water sluicing violently back and forth over the basement floor testified clearly that the struggle was not yet at an end.

It was nearly midnight before Father appeared alone at the head of the cellar stairs. He was stripped to the buff, and close to exhaustion. After a stiff drink and a bath of his own, he went to bed without so much as hinting to Mother of the dreadful things that had happened on the dank battleground downstairs.

Mutt spent the balance of the night outside, under the front porch. He was evidently too
fatigued even to give vent to his vexation by an immediate return to the dead horse – although he probably had this in mind for the morrow.

But when dawn came, not even the lure of the horse was sufficient to make him forgo his usual morning routine.

It had long been his unvarying habit to spend the hours between dawn and breakfast time going his rounds through the back alleys in the neighborhood. He had a regular route, and he seldom deviated from it. There were certain garbage cans that he never missed, and there were, of course, a number of important telephone poles that had to be attended to. His path used to take him down the alleyway between Ninth and Tenth Avenues, thence to the head of the New Bridge, and finally to the rear premises of the restaurants and grocery stores in the neighborhood of the Five Corners. Returning home, he would proceed along the main thoroughfare, inspecting fireplugs en route. By the time he started home, there would usually be a good number of people on the streets, bound across the river to their places of work. Mutt had no intimation of disaster on this particular morning until he joined the throng of south-bound workers.

Mother had no warning either until, at a quarter
to eight, the telephone rang. Mother answered it and an irate female voice shouted in her ear, “You people should be put in jail! You'll see if it's so funny when I put the law onto you!” The receiver at the other end went down with a crash, and Mother went back to making breakfast. She was always phlegmatic in the early hours, and she assumed that this threatening tirade was simply the result of a wrong number. She actually smiled as she told Father about it over the breakfast table. She was still smiling when the police arrived.